SOURCE: Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. “‘Other Excellence’: Generic Multiplicity and Milton's Literary God.” In Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, pp. 110-39. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

[In this excerpt, Lewalski suggests that Milton made use of earlier epic types, merged with biblical allusions, to approximate divine models of heroism and power, and to convey the wonder of the Creation.]

It is a commonplace of criticism that the most difficult problem Milton faced in Paradise Lost involved the portrayal of God. Milton indeed undertook to “justify the ways of God to men,” but the problem for many readers—from his day to ours—has been to justify Milton's ways with God. Early to late, readers have questioned the theological appropriateness and literary success of Milton's anthropomorphic presentation of God as epic character. For Addison he is simply dull, a school divine delivering long sermons; for Shelley and Empson a cruel torturer and tyrant; for A. J. A. Waldock a divine egotist; for Douglas Bush an “almighty cat watching a human mouse.”¹

Recent theological approaches offer somewhat more positive interpretations: C. A. Patrides' examination of Milton's theology of Accommodation; Michael Lieb's attention to the poem's evocation of the numinous; Dennis Danielson's study of the poem as a literary theodicy; Georgia Christopher's analysis of Milton's God in Reformation terms, as a powerful dramatic and noetic voice challenging characters and readers alike.² And newer critical methods have redefined the problem in other terms. Stanley Fish emphasizes the fallen reader's inappropriate responses to a “determinedly non-affective” God; William Kerrigan analyzes the God of the poem in terms of the Oedipal psychic history of the poet; and Andrew Milner's Marxist analysis finds in Paradise Lost an unfortunate hybrid of the anthropomorphic God of Genesis and the God of Milton's true belief—the abstract principle of Reason.³

In my view, interpretation should start from the fact that God and the Son in Paradise Lost are literary portraits. As Bard, Milton had to imagine the divine beings poetically, and also to accommodate that apprehension to his readers in terms suited to his poetic and educative purposes. To these ends he employed generic multiplicity, calling upon an even wider range of literary forms than he used in presenting Satan. They include generic paradigms, conventions, and topoi from epic, romance, drama, dialogue, judicial oratory, and more; as well as models and analogues from Homer and Virgil, from Hesiod and Ovid, from Plato and Lucretius, from Genesis and Exodus, and other texts.

The several paradigms do not carry through the poem to be resolved in a scene of closure (as with Satan), but are provided as interpretative frames for particular scenes and episodes in which specific aspects of God are presented. Such complex layering and fusion of genres in individual scenes provide multiple perspectives upon God, suggesting the divine totality and transcendence, and at the same time pointing up how partial, inadequate, and incomplete is any single frame—even the biblical one. An analysis of the literary means by which both Bard and reader imagine the God of the poem may not dispel all our resistance to that figure, but it should indicate that Milton finds a more daring and more satisfactory resolution to his poetic problem than we have realized.

This poetic strategy is, moreover, entirely consonant with the theological principles Milton outlined in the De Doctrina Christiana as guidelines for all conceptions of or imaginations of God—and so by definition those of a poet intending to write a great and true epic of the human condition. The first principle, wholly commonplace, is that God “as he really is” is utterly beyond human conception or imagination.⁴ The second principle, also a commonplace among Protestants but potentially radical in its forthright repudiation of metaphysics, is that our idea or image of God should correspond precisely to the way he is presented in the Bible—not because the biblical image is literally true (it cannot be) but because that is how God wishes to be understood by us, the way in which he has accommodated himself to our capacities:

It is safest for us to form an image of God in our minds which corresponds to his representation and description of himself in the sacred writings. Admittedly, God is always described or outlined not as he really is but in such a way as will make him conceivable to us. Nevertheless, we ought to form just such a mental image of him as he, in bringing himself within the limits of our understanding, wishes us to form. Indeed he has brought himself down to our level expressly to prevent our being carried beyond the range of human comprehension, and outside the written authority of scripture, into vague subtleties of speculation. … We should form our ideas with scripture as a model, for that is the way in which he has offered himself to our contemplation.⁵

The third principle, yet more radical as Milton interprets it, is that all aspects of the biblical portrayal of God are intended by him to figure in our conception, so that we should not try to explain away passages that seem to us “unworthy” of God, or that present him anthropomorphically:

On the question of what is or what is not suitable for God, let us ask no more dependable authority than God himself. If Jehovah repented that he had created man, Gen. vi.6, and repented because of their groanings, Judges ii.18, let us believe that he did repent. … If it is said that God, after working for six days, rested and was refreshed, Exod. xxxi.17, and if he feared his enemy's displeasure, Deut. xxxii.27, let us believe that it is not beneath God to feel what grief he does feel, to be refreshed by what refreshes him, to fear what he does fear. … In short, God either is or is not really like he says he is. If he really is like this, why should we think otherwise? If he is not really like this, on what authority do we contradict God? If, at any rate, he wants us to imagine him in this way, why does our imagination go off on some other tack?⁶

One implication of this radically metaphoric but yet insistently biblical imagination of God is that it gives Milton full warrant as poet to portray God as an epic character who can and does feel a range of emotions (fear, wrath, scorn, dismay, love), who makes himself visible and audible to his creatures in various ways, who engages in dialogue with his Son, with the angels, and (through the Son) with man and woman. Moreover, though the portrayal of God and the Son in Paradise Lost draws heavily upon biblical language and imagery,⁷ the fact that, for Milton, the Bible itself offers only accommodated images of God evidently sanctions for him the use of other literary accommodations that accord with and help to expand the biblical images. In addition, since Milton sees that the biblical portrayal is by no means univocal, that God is variously conceived and represented by the various biblical writers through a panoply of literary forms—folk tale, history, law, prophecy, allegory, epic story, drama, psalm, and proverb, among others—he has warrant for his similar generic strategy in Paradise Lost.

Milton does not, then, attempt to make the incomprehensible God a unified, fully realized character in Paradise Lost, or, always, an attractive one by human standards. I think he would have considered such an undertaking presumptuous and absurd. Rather, following the biblical model, he employs a mix of generic patterns and references to suggest the manifold qualities and aspects associated with the Deity in the Old and New Testament, as well as in Christian theology and Western literature. The Son is presented often but by no means exclusively in terms of heroic patterns transformed. And the Father is presented at times with reference to various Old Testament theophanies, but also with reference to the activities of Zeus in Homer and Hesiod, and of Jove in Ovid. This method accommodates God and the Son to us as figures in a kaleidoscope, presenting different images as the generic perspective shifts,⁸ and requiring from us a strenuous process of comparison, contrast, and judgment. The analogues in themselves help to image the divine attributes and acts, but also to refine our conceptions as we recognize that they are exceeded in an infinite scale by the nature and deeds of God and the Son. The final effect is to suggest God's transcendence of any and all biblical or literary accommodations—including that offered in Paradise Lost.

THE DIALOGUE IN HEAVEN: LOVE DIVINE

The Dialogue in Heaven (3.56-343) offers the most complex layering and mixture of genres in the entire poem. Introducing the scene, the Miltonic Bard provides some guide to its interpretation. He portrays God “High Thron'd above all highth,” with his eye encompassing all time, past, present, and future, and regarding “His own works and their works at once”—the “Sanctities of Heaven,” the “radiant image of his Glory,” “Our two first Parents,” “Hell and the Gulf between, and Satan.” This striking description identifies God as the origin and final cause of all these creatures and their actions, while at the same time indicating that his creatures also shape themselves by their own choices and works.

Also, the inclusion of the Son among the “works” of God prepares us for Milton's presentation of him in the ensuing Dialogue and throughout the poem in a manner consistent with the antitrinitarianism of the De Doctrina. That tract argues that the Father is the supreme and only self-existent God; that he generated the Son “within the bounds of time” as the “firstborn of the creatures,” by an act of will (not natural necessity); and that he imparted to the Son only “as much as he wished of the divine nature and attributes.”⁹ As we will see, the poem also accords with the theology of the tract in portraying the Son as the Father's Image; as the agent or instrument of the Father's creation, vengeance, judgment, regeneration, and providential government; and as an independent moral agent, taking on these roles freely, in obedience and by choice.¹⁰

The Dialogue in Heaven scene emphasizes the aspect of divine love. The Father indicates the centrality of this issue as he poses his challenge to the heavenly assembly:

Say Heav'nly Powers, where shall we find such love,
Which of ye will be mortal to redeem
Man's mortal crime, and just th' unjust to save,
Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?

(3.213-16)

Later, the Father declares that the Son's voluntary offer to die for humankind proves him “By Merit more than Birthright Son of God,” because in him “Love hath abounded more than Glory abounds” (3.309-12). The suggestion is that heroic love, freely tendered, is the core of the Son's goodness and merit, and is the quality wherein he most closely resembles the Father as image of divine love.

Milton imagines and presents the Dialogue in Heaven through many generic frames and with reference to several specific models, developing true and transcendent norms to supplant Satan's debased or perverted ones. First of all, the scene is a species of epic Concilia Deorum.¹¹ The Father's self-justification is intended to remind us of the Council of the Gods in the Odyssey, in which Zeus and Athena discuss Zeus' ways toward Odysseus, and Zeus defends himself by pointing to humankind's own responsibility for the evils they suffer:

O for shame, how the mortals put the blame upon us
gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather,
who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given.(12)

Zeus applies this precept to the punishment of Aigisthos, who despite the gods' warnings persisted in his design to kill Agamemnon, and now has paid for it. Milton's God offers a more elaborate theological defense, but in much the same aggrieved tones and terms:

                              They therefore as to right belong'd,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate;
As if Predestination over-rul'd
Thir will, dispos'd by absolute Decree
Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed
Thir own revolt, not I.

(3.111-17)

This analogue intimates that the problem of God's justice is perennial and the particular solutions always partial. But further comparison underscores the profound difference between the two epics in the relation of God and man. In the Odyssey, Athena, goddess of wisdom, plays the suasory role in the Council of the Gods. Appealing to the same principles of justice that rightly condemned Aigisthos, she bespeaks pity and aid for beleaguered Odysseus, who is agreed to be wise and worthy. By contrast, the Son's pleas for fallen man (hardly wise and worthy) are appeals for mercy, not justice; and Athena's advice and assistance to Odysseus pale before the aid the Son provides to humankind at the cost of his own life.

The Son's offer to die for fallen man also recalls another generic topic from epic and romance—deeds of bravery and self-sacrifice inspired by erotic love and noble friendship. The specific frame is Nisus' offer (Aeneid 9.427-28) to exchange his life for that of his captured friend, Euryalus: “me, me, adsum, qui feci, in me convertite ferrum, / o Rutuli! mea fraus omnis.” (“On me—on me—here am I who did the deed—on me turn your steel, O Rutulians! Mine is all the guilt.”)¹³ The Son directly echoes Nisus: “Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life / I offer, on mee let thine anger fall” (3.236-37). Pursuing the indicated comparison, we recognize that, unlike Nisus, the Son had no share whatever in the guilt for which he offers to die, and that his love extends beyond the individual friend or beloved to all humankind.¹⁴

This comparison points up how the Son's heroic love transcends and transvalues the heroic virtues and actions central to epic and romance. By willingly embracing suffering and death for love of mankind, he provides the true pattern for the “better fortitude / Of Patience and heroic Martyrdom” which the Bard exalts and which Satan perverts in his brave but prideful endurance of loss and pain in hell. By saving, not a tribe or a country but an entire creation, he utterly transforms the concept of epic action. He also revises the paradigm of the romance quest as, like a knight at Arthur's court, he undertakes to win man's salvation, but projects for that quest an absolute closure foreign to the romance mode: the return of all creation to union with the Father, so that “God shall be All in All” (3.335-41).

Yet another analogue and reference point, indicated by broad structural patterns and specific allusions, is the dialogue between Apollo and Phaethon in Ovid's Metamorphoses (2.1-152). In both scenes a son undertakes, in colloquy with his father, an enterprise that causes his death. Milton's description of God on his throne echoes Ovid's description of Apollo on his radiant throne in the Palace of the Sun.¹⁵ Also, God's proclamation that the Son has shown himself “By Merit more than Birthright Son of God” (3.309) is a rather surprising echo of Apollo's declaration that Phaethon is indeed his son and worthy of the name: “nec tu meus esse negari / dignus es, et Clymene veros.” In Sandys' 1632 version this is rendered, “By merit, as by birth, to thee is due / That name.”¹⁶

These allusions point up how entirely the Father-Son dialogue in Milton reverses that in Ovid. In the Metamorphoses Phaethon initiates the dialogue with Apollo to seek confirmation of his sonship, and Apollo immediately testifies to that sonship and to Phaethon's merit; in Paradise Lost the Son's relation to the Father is never in doubt, but God testifies to the Son's merit only after that merit has been demonstrated in the dialogue itself. In Ovid Apollo rashly offers Phaethon any boon he wishes, and Phaethon (still seeking to prove his sonship) rashly asks to drive Apollo's chariot despite Apollo's lengthy and urgent efforts to dissuade him. In Paradise Lost the Son undertakes his passion and death after full and reasoned discussion, and with the high praise of the Father. Phaethon, a mortal who takes on through hubris a divine role he cannot perform, wreaks fiery havoc upon heaven, earth, and mankind and is himself destroyed. The Son, a God humbling himself to human estate to save mankind, succeeds in his undertaking and makes possible a re-creation after apocalyptic fire: “The World shall burn, and from her ashes spring / New Heav'n and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell” (3.334-35). By such reversals, and by the incarnation that links divine nature with human nature, the Son transcends the Ovidian metamorphic patterns and their Satanic perversions, promoting a divine metamorphosis:

Therefore thy Humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne;
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reign
Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man.

(3.313-16)

The Bard also imagines and presents this scene in relation to a dramatic model, the allegorical “Parliament of Heaven” scene which figured prominently in medieval mystery and morality plays and in Milton's own outline for a drama on the topic of the Fall.¹⁷ The basis of the episode was Psalm 85:10, a text prominent in the Christmas liturgy: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The “Parliament” usually took the form of a debate among these four qualities (called daughters) of God over the issue of Adam's or mankind's sin and its punishment, with Truth and Righteousness ranged against Mercy and Peace. The issue was ultimately resolved—often after a thorough search of heaven and earth for volunteers to substitute for man—by the offer of the Son of God (sometimes called Heavenly Love or Sapience).

Milton's Dialogue in Heaven alludes to this dramatic tradition by the issues raised in the theological discourse, by the Son's response to a call throughout heaven for a volunteer, and quite specifically by language in the four speeches focusing, in turn, upon the four qualities. Here, however, instead of allegorical personifications stating fixed and apparently exclusive positions, the two speakers are dramatic characters, each of whom responds to and incorporates the argument of the other.¹⁸

God's first speech (3.80-134) sets forth the truth of things—Satan's escape, his impending success in the temptation, man's Fall, the doctrines of free will, sufficient grace, and personal responsibility for choice—but concludes with an affirmation of other qualities: “In Mercy and Justice both, / Through Heav'n and Earth, so shall my glory excel, / But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine.” Responding to that statement, the Son (3.144-66) pleads the case for mercy to mankind, but appeals also to God's justice to prevent the triumph of Satanic evil: “That far be from thee, Father, who art Judge / Of all things made, and judgest only right.” The Father's next speech (3.168-216) pronounces the stern demands of justice—“Die hee or Justice must”—but it begins with a restatement of his purpose to renew and save mankind, and it ends with a call to all the heavenly powers for “charity.” The Son's response (3.227-65) emphasizes the “peace assured, / And reconcilement” he will achieve for man, but affirms as well that he will satisfy God's justice by his death and so allow the divine mercy to flow to man. The Father's concluding speech (3.274-343) celebrates the Son for reconciling all these elements in love: “So Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.”

In mode this scene is tragicomic: it begins in wrath, strife, and loss, and we are made aware throughout of the potential for a tragic outcome, but it ends in joyful resolution and celebration. God's words seem to proclaim the Fall an irreversible tragic event—until the Son elicits God's plan for redemptive grace. And the dilemma God poses in regard to man's guilt—“Die hee or Justice must”—seems an insoluble tragic dilemma until the Son breaks through that impasse by agreeing to “pay / The rigid satisfaction, death for death.” The love and patient endurance with which he offers to endure suffering and death so as to fulfill divine justice holds forth to us the paradigm and norm for Christian tragedy.¹⁹ It transcends the Promethean norm of defiant endurance of a divine tyrant's unjust tortures, and comments on the debased, Satanic parody of Promethean tragedy. In this scene we see the Son embrace the tragedy of the human fallen condition. But the scene as a whole provides an emblem of the final resolution of that human tragedy within God's all-embracing divine comedy.

Several discursive genres, chiefly varieties of dialogue, also provide frames of reference for this scene. Though the Father sometimes makes formal, solemn proclamations, as when he proclaims his Son Vice-gerent (5.600-15), his speech most often permits or invites an auditor to make a genuine verbal contribution to the interpretation or implementation of the divine purposes. Even as the Father's commission to Raphael and Michael allowed them great freedom to shape their discourse as they judged best, so here God's speech is designed to promote a dialogue that engages the Son to share in and assume responsibility for the full elaboration and realization of God's will.

God's first speech is not couched in the unrhetorical, passionless style of his proclamations.²⁰ Rather, it begins as informal dialogue—“Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage / Transports our adversary” (3.80-81)—and then takes on the character of a forensic or judicial oration before the heavenly court, accusing Satan and the human pair for the crime about to occur. It conforms closely to the norms laid down by Cicero and others for a prosecutor's speech of the equitable kind, concerned with “the nature of justice and the right or the reasonableness of reward and punishment”; and it presumes a defense based upon a remotio criminis issue, that is, an attempt to shift the guilt or responsibility from the accused to another.²¹ Remarkably, Milton presents God arguing his own case publicly and submitting it, as it were, to the bar of angelic and human judgment. (Satan's comparable speech on Mount Niphates, we will recall, fuses the judicial oration with the private genre of soliloquy, subverting both kinds.)

The opening lines serve as exordium, inviting abhorrence of Satan by showing him “transported” by rage and bent on desperate revenge. Then a brief narration describes the crime, and the motives and attitudes of those involved:²² Satan's “false guile” and “glozing lies”; man's faithless transgression of God's sole command. The confirmatio or argument proving the guilt of the accused follows Cicero's recommendation to begin this kind of case by defending the one to whom the responsibility might be shifted.²³ Accordingly, God offers a long and passionately reasoned defense of his ways—“Ingrate, he had of mee / All he could have; I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall”—concluding that fallen men and fallen angels alike must take full responsibility for their actions: “they themselves ordain'd thir fall” (3.96-128). At this point, however, he distinguishes between the accused parties: the angels fell “self-deprav'd” but Adam and Eve were deceived by Satan and so have some basis for a remotio criminis plea against him. The Father's conclusion is delivered not as prosecutor but as a judge, taking all this into account and pronouncing sentence in decisive if somewhat ambiguous terms: “Man therefore shall find grace, / The other none: in Mercy and Justice both, … shall my glory excel, / But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine” (3.131-34).

The Son's plea for mercy breaks through and transforms the rigid structure of forensic debate. As sentence has already been passed, this is not a speech for the defense, intended to answer charges, or mitigate guilt, or stir up pathos. Rather, the Son challenges his Father to explain the ambiguities of the sentence, calling attention to his own continued vulnerability before the court of opinion if his enemy should wreck his creation: “So should thy goodness and thy greatness both / Be question'd and blasphem'd without defense” (3.165-66). The exchange between God and the Son transforms the forensic debate of adversaries into a dialogue, during which the divine litigants agree to a unique remotio criminis, assigning full responsibility and guilt to Satan and humankind but shifting the punishment from man to his divine advocate.

The Father's final speech proclaims a new judgment revising the first sentence, as the harsh logic of judicial oratory gives way to gracious prophecy of mankind's salvation. Beginning with a fervent, loving apostrophe, this speech is formally a demonstrative oration praising the Son for his nature, his virtue, his worthy deeds and their glorious consequences:

O thou in Heav'n and Earth the only peace
Found out for mankind under wrath, O thou
My sole complacence!
.....Because thou hast, though Thron'd in highest bliss
Equal to God, and equally enjoying
God-like fruition, quitted all to save
A world from utter loss, and hast been found
By Merit more than Birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being Good,
Far more than Great or High; because in thee
Love hast abounded more than Glory abounds,
.....All knees to thee shall bow.

(3.274-322)

Another frame is provided by several Old Testament dialogues of mediation in which a prophet strives with God on behalf of his erring people. Verbal echoes recall Moses pleading for the rebellious Israelites who seek to return to bondage in Egypt, and Abraham begging God to save Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of even ten righteous who might be found in those cities. Abraham argues (Gen. 18:25), “That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”²⁴ The Son echoes this argument:

For should Man finally be lost, should Man
Thy creature late so lov'd, thy youngest Son
Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though join'd
With his own folly? that be from thee far,
That far be from thee, Father, who art Judge
Of all things made, and judgest only right.

(3.150-55)

But the Son cannot ground his plea for mankind on righteousness, until he himself agrees to become the one just man for whom humankind (unlike Sodom and Gomorrah) will be spared. By such associations we are led to recognize the Son as the original and antitype of all the Old Testament mediators, and the Dialogue in Heaven as the paradigm for all subsequent biblical dialogues of mediation.

Again, and especially in retrospect, we are led to view the exchanges between God and the Son as a species of Socratic dialogue. In them the Father deliberately refrains from revealing his providential plan for man's salvation, so as to challenge the Son to discover, through dialogue, how the divine goodness can overcome the evils of the Fall, how God's design for man can yet be realized, and just what a heroic love embracing both justice and mercy must be—and do. Like Socrates, whose judicial oration at his trial included an example of the dialectical method denounced as dangerous by his accusers, Milton's God justifies his ways in part by his use of dialogue, a genre which promotes in the Son the freedom of choice that is the very ground of the divine justification.²⁵

The later dialogue between God and Adam (8.357-450) also has a Socratic dimension. There, Adam prays to be given a mate and God seems to oppose his request, forcing Adam through dialogue to achieve and manifest self-knowledge. As he meets God's counterarguments, Adam is led to define for himself what it is to be human: that it is not to find company with beasts, or to be perfect in himself as God, but to seek completion, help, and solace in human companionship and human love.

On both occasions God uses dialogue to achieve the essential Socratic purpose, education in self-knowledge. However, he departs from Socrates' structured dialectical method of leading his interlocutors by a chain of successive questions to affirm or deny a series of propositions, or to choose between alternative statements. Instead, he promotes the growth of his divine and his human sons by a somewhat more open—and more gracious—method: he challenges them with an apparent dilemma, casts full responsibility upon them to work out its terms in dialogue with him, and then honors them highly for doing so. He commends Adam for knowing himself rightly and reasoning well, rewarding him with the mate he desires; and he commends the Son for having realized his own nature, showing himself in his abounding love to be “By Merit more than Birthright Son of God.”

EPIC OF WRATH, EPIC OF CREATION: POWER DIVINE

In the Battle in Heaven and the Creation the Bard emphasizes the divine power. These episodes have been discussed above as Raphael's “epics” but, of course, the encompassing narrative voice and purpose are those of the Miltonic Bard. In both sequences he employs a complex weave of epic and discursive genre patterns, less dense than in the Dialogue in Heaven episode but of great interpretative importance. The Son's victory in the Battle in Heaven as bearer of God's omnipotence transforms the Homeric epic of wrath and strife into a “brief epic” of divine power exercising divine vengeance. And God's creation of the world through the Son's agency transforms the classical or hexaemeral Creation poem into a second “brief epic” celebrating the power of God as exuberant vitality and creativity.

During the Battle in Heaven sequence God's speeches are transformations of various kinds of epic speech. God's decree proclaiming the Son vice-gerent and pronouncing doom to all who disobey him recalls Zeus' proclamation in the Iliad restraining the gods from battle and threatening assorted dire punishments to the recalcitrant.²⁶ But the tone of God's decree is profoundly different. A mélange of psalmic and biblical echoes, it is majestic, awesome, unconditional—the voice of Omnipotence declaring the divine will:

Hear all ye Angels, Progeny of Light,
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
Hear my Decree, which unrevok't shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My only Son, and on this holy Hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your Head I him appoint;
And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in Heav'n, and shall confess him Lord:
Under his great Vice-gerent Reign abide
United as one individual Soul
For ever happy: him who disobeys
Mee disobeys, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place
Ordain'd without redemption, without end.

(5.600-15)²⁷

At the other extreme in manner and tone, the dialogue between Father and Son at the first stirrings of the revolt (5.719-42) is an ironic council of war. The Father's irony—“Son … / Nearly it now concerns us to be sure / Of our Omnipotence / … and all imploy / In our defense, lest unawares we lose / This our high place, our Sanctuary, our Hill”—is correctly interpreted by the Son, who responds “with calm aspect and clear”: “Mighty Father, thou thy foes / Justly hast in derision, and secure / Laugh'st at thir vain designs and tumults vain.” The ostensible war council is here redefined in the light of Psalm 2:4: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.” And the divine irony—private, deft, appropriate to the circumstances—affords a standard by which to measure the utter degradation of irony in the cannon episode, as Satan and Belial deliver malicious battle taunts in the language of an ostensible peace parlay.²⁸

God delivers other speeches as an epic battle leader, the Lord of Hosts. He rouses his forces with an epic exhortation to battle, charging his generals (Michael and Gabriel) to “lead forth to Battle these my Sons / Invincible, lead forth my armed Saints” and drive the enemy forth “Into thir place of punishment” (6.29-55). However, God again transforms the kind. The speech begins with a formal praise of Abdiel, a passage of demonstrative rhetoric exalting that angel for winning a far better victory in a very different kind of battle from that which will now be fought:

Servant of God, well done, well hast thou fought
The better fight, who single hast maintain'd
Against revolted multitudes the Cause
Of Truth, in word mightier than they in Arms;
And for the testimony of Truth hast borne
Universal reproach, far worse to bear
Than violence.

Moreover, the stirring exhortation is not really designed to spur the angels on to victory, since God knows full well they cannot fulfill the charge given them. Rather, he challenges them to imitate Abdiel's loyalty and obedience in their own spheres of duty.

In another exhortation to battle, God invests the Son with his power and charges him to win the decisive victory (6.681-718). The speech recalls Achilles investing Patroklos with his armor and charging him to lead the Myrmidons into battle in his stead (Iliad 16.49-100). But while Achilles dwells on the glory of warfare the Father comments on its chaos and futility: “War wearied hath performed what War can do / And to disorder'd rage let loose the reins.”²⁹ Also, while Patroklos bears only the trappings of Achilles' power and is fated to meet death, the Son is invested with divine omnipotence itself³⁰ and so is able to win total victory:

                                        Into thee such Virtue and Grace
Immense I have transfus'd …
.....To manifest thee worthiest to be Heir
Of all things, to be Heir and to be King
.....Go then thou Mightiest in thy Father's might,
Ascend my Chariot, guide the rapid Wheels
That shake Heav'n's basis, bring forth all my War,
My Bow and Thunder, my Almighty Arms
Gird on.

(6.703-14)

This epic exhortation modulates to dialogue as the Son formally accepts the charge—“I … can put on / Thy terrors, as I put thy mildness on, / Image of thee in all things.” The dialogue concludes with further revision of the epic ethos as the Son anticipates his greater joy in resigning the scepter to his Father, “when in the end / Thou shalt be All in All” (6.723-45).

Finally, in his call to the angelic hosts to cease fighting (6.801-24) the Son revises the epic hero's conventional offer to decide a battle by single combat, alluding to the biblical precept, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”³¹ Accordingly, he issues no epic challenge but simply proclaims himself minister of God's vengeance: “Vengeance is his or whose he sole appoints; / … stand only and behold / God's indignation on these Godless pour'd / By mee” (6.808-12).

For the Battle in Heaven as a whole the Bard employs several generic frames, of which the Iliad is primary. Through that frame we see that the Son's heroic role is defined by, but wholly transcends, the Homeric ethos. He exhibits martial prowess and attains battle glory beyond anything imaginable in Achilles. If Achilles' strength was greater than that of all others, and his acts more violent, the Son is the bearer of omnipotence itself.³² If Achilles prevented the Achaians from casting their spears at Hector so that he might defeat him in single combat,³³ the Son restrains the angels from battle and engages the entire Satanic force in single combat. And if Achilles—like Hector, Diomedes, and many others—values above all things the winning of glory, the Son obtains surpassing glory when he rides in his mystic, triumphal chariot to and from the battle; when the angelic choirs celebrate his triumph by singing and waving palms; and when the Father receives him “into Glory.”

He does not, however, ascribe value to or seek glory from his martial deeds, observing ironically that he will engage the rebels on these terms “since by strength / They measure all, of other excellence, / Not emulous, nor care who them excels” (6.820-22).³⁴ And before he does so, his restoration of heaven's lovely pastoral landscape offers the multitudes on both sides the opportunity to recognize the truly glorious, creative uses of power:

Before him Power Divine his way prepar'd;
At his command the uprooted Hills retir'd
Each to his place, they heard his voice and went
Obsequious, Heav'n his wonted face renew'd,
And with fresh Flow'rets Hill and Valley smil'd.
This saw his hapless Foes, but stood obdur'd.

(6.780-85)

In the Battle in Heaven the Son bears God's power, exercises God's vengeance, and seeks God's glory, not his own, as hero of a transcendent epic of wrath.

Other generic frames draw our attention to God as source of the power and vengeance the Son images. When the angels turn to hill-hurling and the battle reaches an impasse in which heaven's destruction is threatened, the frame is clearly Hesiod's Theogony. In Hesiod, “wide Heaven was shaken and groaned, and high Olympus reeled from its foundation” when the giants, whom Zeus engaged as his allies in the war against the Titans, began hurling huge rocks.³⁵ At this point Zeus' heart was “filled with fury and he showed forth all his strength,” joining with the giants to hurl the Titans to Tartarus.³⁶ By contrast, in Paradise Lost the Son of God defeated the rebels without any assistance at all, even though he checked “his Thunder in mid-Volley” (6.855) and withheld half his divine power.³⁷ By such transformations of Hesiod, the Bard emphasizes the incalculable distance between Zeus, strongest of the gods, and divine omnipotence.

Yet another frame from the Old Testament Exodus “epic” overlays the Hesiodic pattern, presenting the divine omnipotence in terms of the awesome theophanies of God to his people, and the terrible destruction that “The Lord Mighty in Battle” wreaks on his and Israel's enemies.³⁸ As the Father dispatches the angels to battle, the imagery of clouds, flames, smoke, and sounding trumpets points us to the Sinai theophany before God delivered the Decalogue to Moses.³⁹ And a direct allusion establishes the Lord's destruction of Pharaoh and his forces as frame for the final rout of the rebel angels. Moses' charge to the Israelites on the shores of the Red Sea—“Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will shew to you to day” (Exod. 14:13)—echoes in the Son's command to the angels: “Stand still in bright array ye Saints, here stand / … stand only and behold / God's indignation on these Godless pour'd” (6.801-11).⁴⁰ Still other allusions frame this episode in terms of the “epic” visions of apocalyptic wrath and terror in the Book of Revelation.⁴¹

As the Son goes forth to battle, the remarkable fusion of classical and biblical images and emblems of power suggests the absolute difference between Satanic military might and divine omnipotence, which defeats the rebels by its awful manifestation more than by its exercise. Carrying the Jovian “Bow / And Quiver with three-bolted Thunder,” and clad in armor made of the “radiant Urim” of Aaron's breastplate of judgment, the Son rides with Winged Victory beside him, in a marvellous war chariot appropriated from Ezekiel's vision.⁴² The effect is wonderfully evocative:

                                                                                Full soon
Among them he arriv'd; in his right hand
Grasping ten thousand Thunders, which he sent
Before them, such as in thir Souls infix'd
Plagues.
.....Nor less on either side tempestuous fell
His arrows, from the fourfold-visag'd Four,
Distinct with eyes, and from the living Wheels,
Distinct alike with multitude of eyes;
One Spirit in them rul'd, and every eye
Glar'd lightning, and shot forth pernicious fire
Among th' accurst, that wither'd all thir strength,
And of thir wonted vigor left them drain'd,
Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fall'n.

(6.835-52)

The psychological effect upon the rebel angels recalls the Homeric scene in which Apollo “drove terror” upon the Greeks by shaking before them the aegis of Zeus: “the spirit inside them was mazed … they forgot their furious valour … [and] fled so in their weakness and terror” like a herd of sheep. It also recalls the Gadarene swine possessed by devils that Christ had expelled, who flung themselves from a steep precipice into the sea.⁴³ So the rebels, terrified of Chaos but yet more terrified of the divine power manifested to them, threw themselves “headlong … / Down from the verge of Heav'n” like a herd of goats. By such means, the Miltonic Bard approaches as close as literary accommodation can come to the apprehension of God's awesome power in the dimension of wrath and vengeance.

In a very different vein, the brief epic of Creation is designed to emphasize divine creativity as the primary manifestation of God's power. To end the Battle in Heaven the Father “transfus'd” his power into the Son, that he might demonstrate his worthiness “to be Heir and to be King” (6.704-708); by contrast, at the Creation the Son is portrayed as the instrument by which God creates.⁴⁴ As God's Creating Word the Son here images all the divine qualities: not only is he “Girt with Omnipotence” as in the Battle in Heaven, but also “with Radiance crown'd / Of Majesty Divine, Sapience and Love / Immense” (7.194-96). Also, the angels' hymns ascribe greatest glory to the act of creation: “Thee that day / Thy Thunders magnifi'd; but to create / Is greater than created to destroy” (7.606-608).

Divine speech in this episode is occasionally dialogue, but chiefly formal proclamation and fiat. The Creation episode begins with God's address to his Son (7.139-73), commenting on the rebels' defeat, the multitudes that remain faithful, and his purpose to fill up the places of those lost by creating a new race of men to dwell on earth, “till by degrees of merit rais'd / They open to themselves at length the way / Up hither, under long obedience tri'd.” As he sets these conditions and delegates the Son to speak the words of creation, his speech modulates from informal discourse to solemn proclamation:

And thou my Word, begotten Son, by thee
This I perform, speak thou, and be it done:
My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee
I send along, ride forth, and bid the Deep
Within appointed bounds be Heav'n and Earth,
Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill
Infinitude, nor vacuous the space.
Though I uncircumscrib'd myself retire,
And put not forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not, Necessity and Chance
Approach not mee, and what I will is Fate.

(7.163-73)

This proclamation and the narrator's comment (7.174-79) identifies God's “immediate” decree as the essential creating act, which the Son executes by speech and which is accommodated to human ears as a six-day “process.” However, the Bard finds warrant in Genesis 1:26 to portray man's creation by another method, as the direct and audible decree of the Father himself, spoken to rather than through the Son: “therefore th'Omnipotent / Eternal Father (For where is not hee / Present) thus to his Son audibly spake. / Let us make now Man in our image, Man / In our similitude” (7.516-20).

The actual creation decrees remain very close indeed to Genesis,⁴⁵ but the Creating Word also echoes other biblical language to convey other aspects of God's creativity. In calming the raging seas of Chaos he repeats the words Christ used to calm the Sea of Galilee—“Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39)—implying that omnipotence performs both acts with equal ease: “Silence, ye troubl'd waves, and thou Deep, peace” (7.216). Also, he marks off the boundaries of Creation from Chaos—“Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, / This be thy just Circumference, O World” (7.230-31)—with golden geometer's compasses from the Creation account in Proverbs 8:27,⁴⁶ emphasizing thereby the ordering aspect of divine creativity, the giving of form to the protean matter of Chaos.

Milton's Creation epic has Genesis paraphrase and hexaemeral epic as its primary generic frames. As we have seen, at one level Raphael “invents” the genre of hexaemeral epic, the prototype, as it were, of Du Bartas and Tasso,⁴⁷ to accommodate the Creation story to Adam and Eve even as the Miltonic Bard accommodates it to us. Comparison with those analogues reveals that the Bard's poem is governed by a unified and powerful conception of divine creativity as vitality and generative potency, and he expands upon all elements in the biblical text that afford some color for that imaginative vision. The Hebraic metaphor of the Spirit of God “brooding” upon the face of the deep (Gen. 1:1) is elaborated to present the divine creating power under the aspect of procreative, generative force, both male and female: “on the wat'ry calm / His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, / And vital virtue infus'd, and vital warmth / Throughout the fluid Mass” (7.234-37).⁴⁸ As the narrative proceeds, each day's work is introduced by a close paraphrase of the creating words ascribed to God in Genesis, but Milton renders the creatures' responses very freely, highlighting by vibrant descriptive terms and dynamic verbs the vitality evoked from all things by the source of that vitality, God. The creation of light is typical. God's fiat is quoted directly from Genesis: “Let there be Light, said God.” But the Bard then elaborates the biblical phrase, “And there was light,” into a vivid account of how light sprung from the deep, journeyed through the airy gloom, and sojourned in a tabernacle.⁴⁹

Another generic frame is supplied by a classical poem of origin, the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius.⁵⁰ Milton directs us to Lucretius by the terms of Adam's near-presumptuous query to Raphael broaching the creation topic: “what cause / Mov'd the Creator in his holy Rest / Through all Eternity so late to build / In Chaos” (7.90-94).⁵¹ Lucretius asks an analogous question, but ironically, intimating that the gods could have had nothing to do with Creation: “What novelty could so long after entice those [Immortal Gods] who were tranquil before to desire a change in their former life?”⁵²

The Bard lays Lucretius under contribution especially in presenting the work of the third, fifth, and sixth days, to develop the implications of the phrase in Genesis 1:12, “And the earth brought forth.” Lucretius portrays the earth as a marvelously fecund and prolific magna mater who gives birth to and nurtures all creatures: she is “our fostering mother earth” who receives liquid drops of water from heaven, “and then teeming brings forth bright corn and luxuriant trees and the races of mankind, [and] … all the generations of wild beasts.”⁵³ Milton heightens the metaphor, presenting earth first as an embryo brought to birth in the cosmic waters, and then herself the fertile womb within which the seeds of all life were conceived:

The Earth was form'd, but in the Womb as yet
Of Waters, Embryon immature involv'd,
Appear'd not: over all the face of Earth
Main Ocean flow'd, not idle, but with warm
Prolific humor soft'ning all her Globe,
Fermented the great Mother to conceive,
Satiate with genial moisture.

(7.276-82)

Milton also draws upon Lucretius' account of the flora of the earth springing to life:

With new birth-throes … the earth gave forth the different kinds of herbage and bright verdure about the hills and all over the plains, and the floweirng meadows shone with the colour of green; then to the various kinds of trees came a mighty struggle, as they raced at full speed to grow up into the air. As feathers and hair and bristles first grow on the frame of four-footed creatures or the body of strong-winged birds, so then the new-born earth pur forth herbage and saplings first …⁵⁴

Milton's representation of the analogous event is much more vigorous and sensuous:

He scarce had said, when the bare Earth, till then
Desert and bare, unsightly, unadorn'd,
Brought forth the tender Grass, whose verdure clad
Her Universal Face with pleasant green,
Then Herbs of every leaf, that sudden flow'r'd
Op'ning thir various colors, and made gay
Her bosom smelling sweet: and these scarce blown,
Forth flourish'd thick the clust'ring Vine, forth crept
The swelling Gourd, up stood the corny Reed
Embattl'd in her field: and th' humble Shrub,
And Bush with frizzl'd hair implicit: last
Rose as in Dance the stately Trees.

(7.313-24)

And while Lucretius' portrayal of the earth generating creatures and pouring them forth from several wombs⁵⁵ probably stands behind Milton's striking description of the animals emerging from the earth as at a birth, Milton's lines are, again, more graphic:

                                        The Earth obey'd, and straight
Op'ning her fertile Womb teem'd at a Birth
Innumerous living Creatures, perfet forms,
Limb'd and full grown: out of the ground up rose
As from his Lair the wild Beast …
.....The grassy Clods now Calv'd, now half appear'd
The Tawny Lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from Bonds,
And Rampant shakes his Brinded mane; the Ounce,
The Libbard, and the Tiger, as the Mole
Rising, the crumbl'd Earth above them threw
In Hillocks; the swift Stag from under ground
Bore up his branching head.

(7.453-70)

These several generic frames assist our apprehension of the divine creativity through a process of comparison and contrast. We are intended to see that the marvelous processes of creation in Lucretius are begun and continued by the random motion of atoms, whereas the yet more marvelous processes the Miltonic Bard describes emanate from the prodigious vitality of a divine Father, who makes his creatures vigorous, active, and potent, and sustains them in continuous processes of growth and generation. By his several generic frames and brilliantly evocative imagery, Milton presents the Creation to us as the epic act of God himself, the ground of all other action,⁵⁶ evoking from us the quintessential epic response, wonder.

Notes

1. Joseph Addison, Spectator #315, Criticisms on Paradise Lost, ed. Cook, pp. 61-62; Shelley, “On the Devil, and Devils,” in The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr. (Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 534-35; William Empson, Milton's God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961); A. J. A. Waldock, Paradise Lost and Its Critics (1947; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 103; Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. 381.

2. See, e.g., C. A. Patrides, “Paradise Lost and the Theory of Accommodation,” TSLL 5 (1963), 58-63, rpt. in Bright Essence [: Studies in Milton's Theology (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971)], pp. 159-63; Charles G. Shirley, Jr., “The Four Phases of the Creation: Milton's Use of Accommodation in Paradise Lost VII,” SAB 45 (1980), 51-61; Michael Lieb, Poetics of the Holy: A Reading of “Paradise Lost” (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981); Dennis R. Danielson, Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982); Georgia B. Christopher, Milton and the Science of the Saints (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 3-29, 89-133.

3. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin [: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967)], pp. 62-87; William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983); Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1981).

4. De Doctrina, 1.2, CPW, 6:133.

5. Ibid., pp. 133-34.

6. Ibid., pp. 134-35. For a review of the literature on Milton's anthropomorphic (or anthropopathic) God, see Sister Hilda Bonham, “The Anthropomorphic God of Paradise Lost,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 53 (1968), 329-35.

7. See Sims, The Bible in Milton's Epics [Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962], pp. 17-20, and his index of Bible references, pp. 259-78.

8. Michael Murrin in “The Language of Milton's Heaven,” MP 74 (1977), 350-65, points to Milton's fusion of biblical prophetic images in such a way as to prevent distinct visualization of God or heaven—ascribing this to Milton's iconoclasm. I suggest that the mix of genres performs a somewhat similar function, by preventing reductive or presumptuously comprehensive conceptions of God. But the generic patterns and paradigms also assist our understanding of God by directing us to clarify our perceptions through comparisons, contrasts, and emphases.

9. De Doctrina 1.5, CPW, 6:205-11, 227, 261-64.

10. Ibid., pp. 236-39, 267-70. This is substantially the position of Maurice Kelley in This Great Argument [: A Study of Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as a Gloss Upon Paradise Lost (London Oxford University Press, 1941)] and “Milton's Arianism Again Considered” [NTR 54 (1961): 195-205]; also, Christopher Hill in Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), pp. 285-305. For further consideration of Milton's antitrinitarianism with special application to Paradise Regained see Lewalski, Milton's Brief Epic [London: Methuen, 1966], pp. 133-63. For the counterargument see essays in Bright Essence.

11. For a study of this epic motif in reference to the Council in Hell see Mason Hammond, “Concilia Deorum from Homer through Virgil,” SP 30 (1933), 1-16; and O. H. Moore, “The Infernal Council,” MP 16 (1918), 169-93. For an argument that both councils are transformed by Milton's prophetic impulse, see Joseph Wittreich, “‘All Angelic Natures Joined in One’: Epic Convention and Prophetic Interiority in the Council Scenes of Paradise Lost,” in Composite Orders [Milton Studies 17, 1983], pp. 43-74.

12. Odyssey 1.32-34, Lattimore [New York: Harper and Row, 1967], p. 28.

13. Aeneid, trans. Fairclough [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934-35], 2:141. Several of Milton's editors, including Newton and Todd, have noted this allusion.

14. In the romances erotic love is central and occasionally heroic, as when Edward and Gildippes fight and die side by side in battle (Tasso, Gerusalemme, trans. Fairfax [London: Colonial Press, 1901], 20.32-43, 94-100), or Britomart rescues her spouse-to-be Artegall from enslavement by Radigund (FQ 5.5-8). For a discussion of Milton's revaluation of several heroic virtues see Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967].

15. Cf. PL 3.56-71, and Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.31-32: “Ipse loco medius rerum novitate paventem / Sol oculis juvenem, quibus adspicit omnia.”

16. Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.42-43; Sandys, ed. Hulley and Vandersall [Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1970], pp. 80-81.

17. Milton's sketch in the Trinity College manuscript for a drama on “Paradise Lost” (John Milton: Poems [facs. ed., Menston: Scolar Press, 1972], p. 35), has a version of the Parliament of Heaven, with Justice and Mercy “debating what should become of man if he fall.” The debate was evidently to be resolved by the next listed character, Wisdom. For a review of this motif in drama and in allegorical narratives, see Hope Traver, The Four Daughters of God: A Study of the Versions of this Allegory (Philadelphia: J. C. Winston, 1907). Studies of Milton's Dialogue in Heaven with some reference to this tradition include Merritt Y. Hughes, “The Filiations of Milton's Celestial Dialogue,” Ten Perspectives on Milton (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 104-35; and Irene Samuel, “The Dialogue in Heaven” [PMLA 72 (1957]

18. The thematic development of the speeches in Milton's Dialogue in Heaven resembles most closely the Conventry cycle Salutario and Conception, and the morality, The Castell of Perseverence, in which Truth (rather than Mercy as is more usual) opens the debate. See Traver, Four Daughters of God, pp. 138-40.

19. As Milton did in his Preface to Samson Agonistes, Renaissance critics found ancient precedent for Christian tragedy based on the Passion in the Christus Patiens, commonly though perhaps erroneously attributed to the fourth-century bishop Gregory Nazianzen. Hugo Grotius' neo-Latin play, Tragoedia Christus patiens (Monachii, 1627) provides a contemporary example.

20. On this point see also Anthony Low, “Milton's God: Authority in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 4 (1972), 19-38. For the counterargument, see Fish, Surprised by Sin, pp. 62-87.

21. Cicero, De Inventione 1.11.14-15, 2.28.86-87, Hubbell [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976], pp. 31, 253; Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.14.24-26, 2.17.26, Caplan [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981], pp. 43-49, 105.

22. Cicero, De Inventione 1.16.22, 1.19.27, Hubbell, pp. 45, 55; Ad Herennium 1.6.9-1.8.13, Caplan, pp. 17-25.

23. Cicero, De Inventione 2.29.88, Hubbell, p. 255; Ad Herennium 1.15.25, Caplan, pp. 47-49.

24. See also Moses' plea to God for the backsliding Israelites in Num. 14:15-16:

              Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying,
              Because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land which he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness.

    Compare PL 3.162-65:

                                            or wilt thou thyself
    Abolish thy Creation, and unmake
    For him, what for thy glory thou hast made?
    So should thy goodness and thy greatness both
    Be question'd and blasphem'd without defense.

25. Plato, Apology, Fowler [London: W. Heine mann, 1926-61], pp. 69-145. At his trial, Socrates held forth his speech of defense as a model for forensic rhetoric. See Chapter 4, n. 11. For discussion of some adaptations of Socratic dialectic in the Councils in Hell and Heaven, and in the AbdielSatan debate, see Safer, “The Use of Contraries” [Ariel 12,2 (1981), 55-69].

26. See esp. Iliad 8.5-27, Lattimore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], p. 182:

              Hear me, all you gods and all you goddesses: hear me
    while I speak forth what the heart within my breast urges.
    Now let no female divinity, nor male god either,
    presume to cut across the way of my word, but consent to it
    all of you, so that I can make an end in speed of these matters.
    And any one I perceive against the gods' will attempting
    to go among the Trojans and help them, or among the Danaans,
    he shall go whipped against his dignity back to Olympos;
    .....Then he will see how far I am strongest of all the immortals.

27. See, e.g.,

    Heb. 1:5: For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son?

    Ps. 2:6-7: Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

    I will declare the decree: The Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son: this day have I begotten thee.

    Ps. 110:1: The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.

    Coloss. 2:10: And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power.

    Gen. 22:16: By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord …

    Philip. 2:10-11: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;

    And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

28. See above, Chapter 4, pp. 83-84.

29. Iliad 16.49-100, Lattimore, pp. 332-33. Achilles urges Patroklos to “win, for me, great honour and glory,” but commands him not to attempt a definitive victory against the Trojans, lest the gods crush him. However, he relishes the idea of universal slaughter as glorious: “if only / not one of all the Trojans could escape destruction, not one / of the Argives, but you and I could emerge from the slaughter / so that we two alone could break Troy's hallowed coronal.”

30. The scene of investiture is presented as an infusion of divine power: The Father “on his Son with Rays direct / Shone full; hee all his Father full exprest / Ineffably into his face receiv'd” (6.719-21).

31. See Rom. 12:10; also Ps. 94:1, Deut. 32:35, and Heb. 10:30.

32. Iliad 21.214-15.

33. Iliad 22.205-207.

34. We are not to conclude from Milton's critique of war in Paradise Lost that he has repudiated the Civil War, or the Lord's battles in the Old Testament, or the very idea of war. What he had repudiated is the notion that war is in itself glorious—however necessary it may sometimes be as an instrument of God's judgment or providential design. For various views on the issue, see Jackie Di Salvo, “The Lord's Battles: Samson Agonistes and the Puritan Revolution,” Milton Studies 4 (1972), 39-62. See also Boyd M. Berry, Process of Speech: Puritan Religious Writing and Paradise Lost (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976).

35. Hesiod, Theogony, ll. 674-81, Evelyn-White [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977], pp. 128-29. For discussion of these and other Hesiodic elements, see Merritt Y. Hughes, “Milton's Celestial Battle and the Theogonies.” See also Philip J. Gallagher, “Paradise Lost and the Greek Theogony,” ELR 9 (1979), 121-48, for the questionable argument that Milton intends by these allusions to ridicule Hesiod's poem as a Satanic epic.

36. Theogony, ll. 687-712, Evelyn-White, pp. 128-31. Hesiod's description of Zeus' warfare is especially suggestive:

    From heaven and from Olympus he came forthwith, hurling his lightning: the bolts flew thick and fast from his strong hand together with thunder and lightning, whirling an awesome flame. The life-giving earth crashed around in burning, and the vast wood crackled loud with fire all about. All the land seethed, and Ocean's streams and the unfruitful sea. The hot vapour lapped round the earthborn Titans: flame unspeakable rose to the bright upper air: the flashing glare of the thunderstone and lightning blinded their eyes for all that they were strong.

    Other analogues in the two poems are the response of Chaos to the Battle, and the fall of the rebels to Tartarus. Compare Theogony, ll. 700-21, and PL 6.867-74.

37. The Miltonic God's omnipotence is further emphasized by the fact that in other Christian epics treating the Battle in Heaven, Michael and the loyal angels are able to defeat and cast out the Satanic forces. See, e.g., Erasmo di Valvasone, Angeleida (Venice, 1590). And see Revard, The War in Heaven [: Paradise Lost and the Tradition of Satan's Rebellion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980], pp. 235-63.

38. Ps. 24:8. For a discussion of Hebrew exegetical tradition treating the Exodus as an epiclike event, see Harold Fisch, “Hebraic Style and Motifs in Paradise Lost,” in Language and Style in Milton, ed. Emma and Shawcross [New York: F. Ungar, 1967), pp. 37-39; and Jason Rosenblatt, “Structural Unity and Temporal Concordance,” pp. 31-41. For discussion of Exodus motifs in other parts of the poem see Shawcross, “Paradise Lost and the Theme of Exodus” [Milton Studies 2 (1970): 3-26]

39. Cf. Exod. 19:16, 18, and PL 6.56-60:

    And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled.

    .....

    And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire.

    So spake the Sovran voice, and Clouds began
    To darken all the Hill, and smoke to roll
    In dusky wreaths, reluctant flames, the sign
    Of wrath awak't: nor with less dread the loud
    Ethereal Trumpet from on high gan blow.

    The analogue is noted by Murrin, “Language of Milton's Heaven,” [in The Allegorical Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)] pp. 252-53. See also Exod. 20:18.

40. For discussion of the parallels, see Rosenblatt, “Structural Unity and Temporal Concordance,” [PMLA 87, 1 (1972)] pp. 31-41. For the theory of the epiclike meter in Exodus 15, see Philo, De vita contemplativa, in Philo, trans. F. H. Colson (Loeb, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1929-1962), pp. 9:163-67; and Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Exordium: that is, a Sixfold Commentary upon the Second Book of Moses Called Exodus (London, 1608), pp. 210-11. We should also recall the simile (PL 1.339-46) in which Satan as a perverse Moses calls up the rebel angels from the burning lake of hell as a plague of locusts.

41. We are directed to the great epic battle and cataclysm at the Apocalypse by the rebel angels' wish that “the Mountains now might be again / Thrown on them as a shelter from his ire” (6.843-44), echoing the cry of the wicked at the Last Judgment “to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth upon the throne” (Rev. 6:16). For the argument that the three-day Battle in Heaven is primarily typological, looking forward to the Apocalyptic warfare of Christ and Antichrist, see William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton's Symbolism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 99-111; and for the argument that it foreshadows Christ's death and resurrection, see W. H. Hunter, “Milton on the Exaltation of the Son: The War in Heaven in Paradise Lost,” ELH 36 (1969), pp. 215-31. While the first victory of the Son clearly foreshadows those to come, I think we are intended to focus on this battle primarily as literal event, accommodated to us by reference to all other accounts of the Son's warfare against Satan throughout all time.

42. See Ezekiel 1:4-28. Kitty Cohen, The Throne and the Chariot: Studies in Milton's Hebraism (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 103-32, emphasizes Milton's strategies for portraying the divine power as essentially spiritual. The Chariot of Paternal Deity as war chariot may also owe something to Isaiah 66:15: “For, behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.”

43. See Iliad 15.320-27, Lattimore, pp. 317-18:

    But when he stared straight into the eyes of the fast-mounted Danaans
    and shook the aegis, and himself gave a great baying cry, the spirit
    inside them was mazed to hear it, they forgot their furious valour.
    And they, as when in the dim of the black night two wild beasts
    stampede a herd of cattle or big flock of sheep, falling
    suddenly upon them, when no herdsman is by, the Achaians
    fled so in their weakness and terror, since Apollo drove terror upon them.

    Cf. Matt. 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-13, Luke 8:26-33. Milton's substitution of goats for Homer's cattle or sheep and the Gadarene swine is no doubt dictated by the traditional image of the wicked as goats at the Last Judgment. His metaphor presents those goats rendered timorous as sheep by the manifestation of divine power.

44. The language of mission makes this distinction clear: “This I perform, speak thou, and be it done” (7.164).

45. See Sims, The Bible in Milton's Epics, pp. 33-35, 266-67; Ernst Häublein, “Milton's Paraphrase of Genesis: A Stylistic Reading of Paradise Lost, Book VII,” Milton Studies 7 (1975), 101-25.

46. “When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth.”

47. See above, Chapter 2, pp. 44-46. For specific parallels with Du Bartas and Sylvester's translation, see Taylor, Milton's Use of Du Bartas [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934], and the introduction to Snyder's edition of Sylvester's Du Bartas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], 1:72-95.

48. For discussion of this image and its implications see, e.g., Lieb, Dialectics of Creation [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970], pp. 56-68; Summers, Muse's Method [Birghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1981], pp. 137-46; Shirley, “Four Phases of the Creation,” pp. 51-61; Gardner, Reading of Paradise Lost [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945], pp. 70-75; O. B. Hardison, Jr., “Written Records and Truths of Spirit in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 1 (1969), 147-65.

49. PL 7.243-49:

    Let there be Light, said God, and forthwith Light
    Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure
    Sprung from the Deep, and from her Native East
    To journey through the airy gloom began,
    Spher'd in a radiant Cloud, for yet the Sun
    Was not; shee in a cloudy Tabernacle
    Sojourn'd the while. God saw the Light was good.

50. See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5.1-854 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982], See above, Chapter 2, pp. 40-41 and nn. 40-43. Milton also lays under contribution Ovid's stories of Creation and Flood, Metamorphoses 1.1-437.

51. For discussion of Adam's question and its significance, see below, Chapter 8, pp. 209-10, and Lewalski, “Innocence and Experience in Milton's Eden” [in New Essays on Paradise Lost, ed. Kranidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971].

52. De Rerum Natura, 5.168-69, Rouse, pp. 390-91:

    quidve novi potuit tanto post ante quietos
    inlicere, ut cuperent vitam mutare priorem?

53. De Rerum Natura 2.992-95, Rouse, pp. 172-73:

    omnibus ille idem pater est, unde alma liquentis
    umoris guttas mater cum terra recepit,
    feta parit nitidas fruges arbustaque laeta
    et genus humanum, parit omnia saecla ferarum.

    Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.417-21, Miller, 1:30-33:

                                            postquam vetus umor ab igne
    percaluit solis, caenumque udaeque paludes
    intumuere aestu, fecundaque semina rerum
    vivaci nutrita solo ceu matris in alvo
    creverunt faciemque aliquam cepere morando.

54. De Rerum Natura 5.781-91, Rouse, pp. 438-41:

                                                                                                        novo fetu …
    .....Principio genus herbarum viridemque nitorem
    terra dedit circum collis camposque per omnis,
    florida fulserunt viridanti prata colore,
    arboribusque datumst variis exinde per auras
    crescendi magnum inmissis certamen habenis.
    ut pluma atque pili primum saetaeque creantur
    quadripedum membris et corpore pennipotentum,
    sic nova tum tellus herbas virgultaque primum
    sustulit.

55. De Rerum Natura 5.795-924, Rouse, pp. 440-42, 450-51, esp. ll. 806-13, 916-17:

    multus enim calor atque umor superabat in arvis.
    hoc ubi quaeque loci regio opportuna dabatur,
    crescebant uteri terram radicibus apti;
    quos ubi tempore maturo patefecerat aetas
    infantum, fugiens umorem aurasque petessens,
    convertebat ibi natura foramina terrae
    et sucum venis cogebat fundere apertis
    consimilem lactis.
    .....nam quod multa fuere in terris semina rerum
    tempore quo primum tellus animalia fudit.

56. The structural centrality of the Creation was first argued by Arthur Barker, “Structural Pattern in Paradise Lost,” PQ 23 (1949), 16-30.