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of the Passion
Studies in the History of
Christian Traditions
General Editor
Robert J. Bast
Knoxville, Tennessee
In cooperation with
Henry Chadwick, Cambridge
Scott H. Hendrix, Princeton, New Jersey
Paul C. H. Lim, Nashville, Tennessee
Eric Saak, Indianapolis, Indiana
Brian Tierney, Ithaca, New York
Arjo Vanderjagt, Groningen
John Van Engen, Notre Dame, Indiana
Founding Editor
Heiko A. Oberman
VOLUME 145
Milton and the
Reformation Aesthetics
of the Passion
By
Erin Henriksen
LEIDEN BOSTON
2010
Cover illustration: Illustration of the Pillar of Fire. Bible. English. Geneva. STC 2093,
p. 30 verso. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Henriksen, Erin.
Milton and the reformation aesthetics of the passion / by Erin Henriksen.
p. cm. (Studies in the history of Christian traditions ; v. 145)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18032-1 (acid-free paper)
1. Milton, John, 16081674Criticism and interpretation. 2. Christian poetry,
EnglishEarly modern, 15001700History and criticism. 3. Devotional literature,
EnglishHistory and criticism. I. Title.
PR3588.H44 2010
821.4dc22
2009039903
ISSN 1573-5664
ISBN 978 90 04 18032 1
Over the course of writing these pages I have benefited from the assis-
tance and support of many wonderful colleagues and friends whom
I wish to acknowledge here. Much of the research for this project
was made possible by a grant from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
I thank the family of Bess and Philip Rosenblum for their generous
support and encouragement. My work at the Folger was facilitated by
its unmatched librarians and staff, particularly Georgianna Ziegler and
Carol Brobeck. I am also grateful to the other researchers in residence
at the Folger for their fellowship and for sharing with me their knowl-
edge and enthusiasm about the English Renaissance.
I would like to thank my colleagues and students in the Depart-
ment of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, who
have supported me and this project with unfailing devotion and kind-
ness. Thanks are also due to my teachers at Barnard College and
The City University of New York. I particularly wish to acknowledge
the long-standing mentorship of Joe Wittreich, under whose guidance
this project was originally begun and whose erudition and good will
continue to inspire me. I am grateful to Charles Durham and Kristin
Pruitt for their support of my work and for giving me the opportunity
to publish an earlier version of some of the material here in Miltons
Legacy (Susquehanna, 2005).
The publication of this book would not have been possible without
Paul Lim and Robert Bast, and Rosanna Woensdregt at Brill, to whom
I am deeply grateful.
Finally, my greatest debt of gratitude is to my family, to whom this
book is dedicated with love.
INTRODUCTION
1
James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1926), 115.
2 introduction
2
The Thirty-Nine Articles adopted in 1563 specifically repudiated a number of
these; see for example Diarmaid MacCalloch, The Reformation (New York: Penguin,
2005), 28691; and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in Eng-
land, c. 1400c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
3
Richard McCoy, Alterations of State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
See also Elizabeth Mazzola, The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and
Holy Ghosts (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
4
Christine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (University
of Chicago Press, 2000); Paul Dean, Nothing that is so is so: Twelfth Night and
Transubstantiation, Literature and Theology 17: 3 (2003): 28197; Stephen Greenblatt,
Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Mark Sweetnam,
Hamlet and the Reformation of the Eucharist, Literature and Theology 21:1 (March
2007): 1128; Elizabeth Watson, Old King, New King, Eclipsed Sons, and Aban-
doned Altars in Hamlet, Sixteenth Century Journal 35:2 (2004): 475491.
miltons poetics of absence and restoration 3
5
It has also been argued that the Renaissance theater replaces some of the spec-
tacle of the Roman Catholic church; see Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the
Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997).
6
Though the chapters that follow do not consider the Eucharist in detail, the shifts
in this doctrine are closely related to beliefs about the passion and its representation.
When the Real Presence declined as a category of religious experience, the flesh and
blood of Christ were naturally removedor relocatedwithin its visual culture as well.
4 introduction
7
Mazzola, 1.
8
See Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honor
(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006) and Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the English
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
9
To cite just one example, Lisa McClain relates how Catholic authors remade the
image of Mary Magdalen to focus on her discovery of the empty tomb of Christa
figuration of the Magdalen that had existed but was not emphasized in earlier por-
traitsbecause it mirrored English Catholic anxiety over losing the body of Christ as
contained in the Eucharist. See They have taken away my Lord: Mary Magdalene,
Christs Missing Body, and the Mass in Reformation England, Sixteenth Century Journal
38:1 (Spring 2007), 78.
miltons poetics of absence and restoration 5
10
Nathanael Richards, The Celestiall Publican. A Sacred Poem: Lively describing the Birth,
Progresse, Bloudy Passion, and glorious Resurrection of our Saviour (London, 1630), Sig. C6v.
Richards, unlike Milton, nevertheless insists on the cross, including two poems in the
shape of crossesone of which details the physical torments of the crucifixion in
graphic termsin his volume.
11
All references to Miltons prose works are to The Complete Prose Works of John
Milton, eds. Don Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19531982).
6 introduction
joy on the other: then to consider first, the foule and sudden corruption,
and then after many a tedious age, the long-deferrd, but much more
wonderfull and happy Reformation of the Church in these latter dayes.
(I: 519)
Milton characterizes the passion as the first and most important sub-
ject. It is the first of his texts not chronologically, but typologically. As
the editors remark in their notes to these lines, the passion provides
a basis for comparison with everything else Milton takes up in Of
Reformation and in his subsequent works. The manner in which the
Reformation appears analogous to the passion for Milton reveals the
terms of his ongoing engagement with the subject of Christs death
and its significance. First, it is always the key which unlocks meaning
in the subject at hand; we learn how to think about the Reformation,
Milton suggests, by remembering the passion. Further, the patterns
of deferral and of the translation from flesh to spirit always matter
in Miltons depictions of the passion and by extension his reading of
contemporary religious history. These patterns instruct us to read his
poetic uses of deferral, digression, delay, and dispersion not as acci-
dental effects of Miltons inability to write about the passion, as many
critics have suggested, but as aptly chosen tools for the new divine
poetics that he practices.
Milton makes a similar statement about his grounding in the passion
in the opening lines of Paradise Lost, which set out the parameters of
the poems material but are also universal enough to encompass every
subject: Of mans first disobedience . . . till one greater Man / Restore
us (I: 15).12 These lines hint at the ultimate shape of Christian doc-
trine for Miltona pattern of descent toward utter loss followed by
restoration. The same pattern governs his poems. Richard Ide claims
that in Paradise Lost Milton allows the reader to interpret the events
that follow the heavenly begetting of the Son in terms of Christs
life on eartha life that Milton reduces to its paradigmatic Christian
pattern of humiliation and exaltation.13 The later texts, especially
Paradise Regained, also belong to the Miltonic passion. That they do not
describe the crucifixion underscores Miltons point dramatically, that
the passion encompasses much more than Christs death on the cross.
12
References to Miltons poetry are to The Works of John Milton, eds. Frank Allen
Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 193140).
13
Richard Ide, On the Begetting of the Son in Paradise Lost, SEL 24 (1984), 151.
miltons poetics of absence and restoration 7
14
William Hunter, Bright Essence: Studies in Miltons Theology (Salt Lake City: Univer-
sity of Utah Press, 1971), 145. This point should be distinguished from the claim that
the Sons generation was from eternity, which Milton rejects in De Doctrina (VI: 210).
8 introduction
These include Matt. 26:39 and 27:46, and Luke 22:43 and 23:46.
15
John Miltons Complete Poetical Works Reproduced in Photographic Facsimile, ed. Harris
16
Fletcher (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1948), 2:28. We may also note
Miltons decision to portray the events that take place after the arrest by message &
chorus, a method he later used in Samson Agonistes.
miltons poetics of absence and restoration 9
17
Joseph Summers, The Crucifixion in Miltons English Poems, George Herbert
Journal 16:12 (Fall 1992Spring 1993), 114, 117118.
10 introduction
In what follows I take seriously the idea that Milton folds the passion
into all of his major works and many of the short poems. I further
propose that as he does so Milton in effect scripts an alternative pas-
sion, one that is in his view more theologically correct and aesthetically
appropriate than those familiar from late medieval Catholic culture. As
he rejects the paradigm of the suffering, broken Christ, Milton turns
to the visual culture and artistic philosophies of the early church as
a source of inspiration. Further, Milton is clear about how we should
not understand the passion. The brothers in A Mask, Adam in Paradise
Lost, and Simon and Andrew in Paradise Regained are all instructed not
to look for an event of physical suffering or prowess, such as a contest
of strength between the Son and the Adversary. Milton returns to
this negative characterization of the passion repeatedly (all of Samson
Agonistes may be read in this way, for example), using it to sketch out
an alternative to the gruesome physical assault on Jesus that was often
underscored in medieval Catholic treatments of the passion.
18
Neil Graves, Milton and the Theory of Accommodation, Studies in Philology
98:2 (Spring 2001), 251.
12 introduction
19
Roy Daniells, Milton, Mannerism and Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1963); Roland Frye, Miltons Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic
Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Marjorie Garber, Fallen Land-
scape: The Art of Milton and Poussin, ELR 5 (1975): 96124; Diane McColley,
Edenic Iconography: Paradise Lost and the Mosaics of San Marco, in Milton in Italy:
Contexts, Images and Contradictions, ed. Mario Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval &
Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991) and A Gust for Paradise: Miltons Eden and the Visual
Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and Mindele Anne Treip, Celestial
Patronage: Allegorical Ceiling Cycles of the 1630s and the Iconography of Miltons
Muse, in Milton in Italy.
miltons poetics of absence and restoration 13
20
Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1.
14 introduction
21
Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 17001820
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 6.
22
David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and
the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.
miltons poetics of absence and restoration 15
23
Stanley Fish, Why Milton Matters; or, Against Historicism, Milton Studies 44
(2005), 6.
16 introduction
24
Michael Clark, The Honeyed Knot of Puritan Aesthetics, in Puritan Poets and
Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, eds. Peter White and Har-
rison T. Meserole (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), 69.
25
Clark, 70.
miltons poetics of absence and restoration 17
26
Robin Jensen, Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2005), 133.
18 introduction
with the current debate over Miltons attitude toward religious violence
in the dramatic poem, by returning to the question of the typological
relationship between Samson and Christ. Samson Agonistes is another
Miltonic rewriting of the passion, one that draws together many of
the threads that are examined in the previous chapters. Miltons most
important instance of an omission that is marked as suchthe dozen
lines that appear under the heading Omissa at the end of the 1671
edition of the poemforms a key pillar of the Miltonic passion. The
omissa is also an addition, as it offers the possibility of Samsons res-
toration. By placing the omissa lines at the end of the volume we are
asked to review what we have read. This haunting of the reader with
an absence that must be reconciled illustrates the condition of post-
Reformation poetry when it approaches questions such as the incarna-
tion of God or the death of Jesus.
27
John Shawcross, The Temple of Janus and Milton Criticism in the New Millen-
nium, ANQ 15:4 (Fall 2002): 2029; see also Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate
of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
CHAPTER ONE
Questions about Miltons portraits of God the Father and the Son
have usually been addressed as questions about theology: what did
Milton believe and how are various Christian doctrines reflected in his
poems? With rare exceptions, scholars have not investigated the influ-
ence of the Christian visual tradition on Miltons representations of
the divine. This omission stems from the widely shared belief that no
such influence would have been likely in Miltons England. The cari-
cature of Puritanismthat it was iconophobic, aesthetically plain, and
rigidly inflexibledepends on a caricature of medieval Catholicism as
graphic, extravagant, luxurious and obsessed with death, including the
death of Christ. In fact, the visual tradition of the crucifixion associ-
ated with the late Middle Ages was not a long-standing, fixed mode of
Christian thought and art, but a departure from many earlier styles of
representing the passion. The Reformations revision of Christian art
returns to many of these earlier traditions. Milton and his contempo-
raries were artists working at a time of theological crisis, during which
representational as well as doctrinal questions were at stake, includ-
ing how to work around the culture of the Catholic church without
divesting Christian art of its subjects, styles and forms. The history of
Christian imagery and more specifically the range of possibilities for
representing Jesus are rarely acknowledged in studies of Milton and
his contemporaries, whose antipathy to images of all kinds is assumed
tacitly. My aim is to demonstrate that the visual arts made a set of
practices for approaching the ineffable available, and that this mate-
rial had a strong influence on Miltons reformation of English poetry.
The imagery of the crucifixion that we associate with traditional
Christianity is really a brief aberration from a long and varied tradi-
tion. As historians of Christian art have shown, the image of a dead
and tortured Christ is scarcely known outside of the fourteenth century:
Christians in the west have become so accustomed to assigning a central
place to the death of Christ in their theology, liturgy and art that it
is natural for them to assume that their tradition must always have
20 chapter one
1
E. J. Tinsley, The Coming of a Dead and Naked Christ, Religion 2:1 (Spring
1972), 24.
2
Robin Jensen, Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2005), 14647.
3
Jensen, 152. Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (Greenwich, CT: New
York Graphic Society, 1971), II: 6, 14.
for depicting the son in christian art 21
Middle Ages, and stresses that the earliest renderings of Jesus avoid
images of suffering and largely exclude scenes of the crucifixion, even
when other episodes from the passion sequence (such as the agony in
the garden) are portrayed.4
Further, pre-Constantinian Christian art had a special purpose suited
to the non-institutionalized nature of the early followers of Christ,
which was to record an identification between the owner or user of
the object and the actions and teachings of Jesus.5 Post-Reformation
Christian art had good reason to be interested in recuperating this
emphasis on Jesus as a personal model for the believerrather than
as king, judge or deityand on setting to the side the power of the
church as an institution. Beginning in the late fourth century,
those previously popular biblical narratives that showed the Old Testa-
ment heroes or the works of Jesus (for example, his healing or wonder-
working) were gradually supplanted by images of Jesus handing over the
law to his apostles or being judged by Pilate. The depiction of Jesus mis-
sion or divinity was thereby changed from an emphasis on the deeds of
his earthly ministry to an emphasis on the events of his passion, ascen-
sion and judgment. By the end of the fourth century, this development
went another step further, when explicitly devotional images of Christ
and portraits of the saints also began to appear.6
Even at this stage, however, the narrowing of emphasis to the events
of the passion does not produce an image of Christ suffering and
degraded in the crucifixion. Rather, the dominant model was that of
Christ Pantocrator, or universal ruler. The first known images of the
crucifixion appear in the fifth century and the earliest examples, such
as the Santa Sabina doors in Rome, seem to be experimental, hesitant
renderings of a new theme.7 Crosses become part of church decora-
tion only in the sixth century. Even once the crucifixion is established
as a common motif in the Middle Ages, there remain two distinct
types for Jesus appearance:
4
Schiller, I: 26.
5
See for example John Cook, What Is Christian about Christian Art? in Interpret-
ing Christian Art, eds. Heidi Hornik and Mikeal Parsons (Macon, GA: Mercer Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 187208.
6
Jensen, 22.
7
Alan Chong, The Art of the Cross: Medieval and Renaissance Piety (Boston: The Isabella
Steward Gardner Museum, 2001), 12.
22 chapter one
In the tenth through the twelfth centuries, Christ was often depicted
vigorously alive on the cross, triumphant over death. In these depictions,
Christ shows no trace of suffering, and he is often elegantly dressed in
royal robes and wearing a crown of glory. In the Carolingian period,
theology began to emphasize Christs humanity. As his pain and physical
death became important in Christian belief, representation of Christs
suffering and death on the cross became more common.8
The coexistence of competing models for portraying Jesus even within
the story of the crucifixion, the development of iconography along-
side changes in theology, and the possibility of portraying the passion
without depicting a dead Christ all resonate in Miltons artistic choices
as well.
Christian artists working from the third century to the middle ages
had a number of models at their disposal with which they could depict
Christ, each of which draws on a different element of Jesus as he is
described in the gospels and Pauline texts. These include Christ as a
younger version of God the Father (who is also depicted in human
form); Christ Pantocrator, in which he is shown as divine judge; Chris-
tus Victor; and Christ as king.9 We also find double representations, in
which we see within the same picture Christ incarnate and Christ as
consubstantiate with God the Father. This category includes works in
which the two aspects of the dual nature are split between two related
images, so that Jesus divinity and humanity are expressed sequentially
rather than simultaneously.10
In the passion, Jesus could be shown as a sacrifice, a second Adam,
the Man of Sorrows, or in the Christus Patiens (Christ suffering) mode.
Artists could depict Christ dead or alive, or to attempt to capture both
states. When icons depict Christ with his eyes closed, they offer an
argument in favor of his death, which he suffered by virtue of his
human nature, Hans Belting argues; such panels do not, therefore,
simply narrate an episode from the Passion of Christ but take up
the discussion of the God-man as the Crucified.11 Visual artists also
8
Chong, 1314.
9
See Schiller for examples of each of these types of Christ figure.
10
One example of this technique is the mosaic series at S. Apollinare Nuovo in
Ravenna; this sequence includes many scenes from the passion but omits any image
of the crucifixion. See also Andr Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), especially parts III and IV.
11
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 139.
for depicting the son in christian art 23
12
Herbert Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing Gods Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 5152.
13
Andreas Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and
Iconography (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2005), 74.
24 chapter one
Those who argued against icons felt that it was impossible to fashion
a true likeness of the perfect image of God, calling on the inexpress-
ibility topos. Jaroslav Pelikan explains that the opponents of images
insisted that Christ, as the True Image of God, was beyond descrip-
tion, beyond comprehension, beyond change, and beyond measure,
since such transcendence was characteristic of God. This was per-
haps especially true in relation to the passion because the body of
Christ is incorruptible, having inherited immortality, and that was
beyond the competence of any artistic representation.14 As a unique
case, the body of Jesus fits into no available representational schemes.
Hans Belting explains that, while gods require icons because they do
not have bodies, the ordinary dead require them because their bod-
ies are permanently lost. Neither condition applies to the body of
Christ. Therefore, Christs icon is a contradiction in itself, it is even
an impossibility.15
Artists needed to find a way to depict the dual nature that would
capture both the divine and the human aspects in one image. The
use of gold as background or giving Jesus a halo were simple ways of
indicating that he possessed a divine nature as well as a human form
and in some cases texts declaring the identity of Jesus as the Son of
God were incorporated into visual designs.16 Hans Belting argues that
painters may have chosen an iconographic style or mode, one that
appears to us as a mix of lifelike and abstract, to make visible the icons
reference to a reality otherwise invisible.17 For example, in illustrat-
ing the high theology of the Transfiguration, iconography was called
to represent what could not be put into wordsthat which words were
not capable of describing.18 Theophanous events such as the incarna-
tion, transfiguration, resurrection and ascension supplied the grounds
on which major decisions about representation were worked out. The
14
Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985), 87.
15
Belting, 2.
16
Jensen, 168. Another dispute, perhaps especially relevant for readers of Miltons
epics, involves the relationship of God the Father to the Son. Were they equal and
eternally co-existent, or was the Son begotten, created, and therefore lesser in hier-
archy? Visual artifacts of the fourth century, when a crisis over this point raged, often
try to express one point of view in this controversy (see Jensen, 168).
17
Belting, 129.
18
Andreopoulos, 7071.
for depicting the son in christian art 25
19
The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. William Shedd (New York: Harper
1868), 6:409; qtd. in J. B. Trapp, Iconography, in John Milton: Introductions, ed. J. B.
Broadbent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 162.
20
See G. Stanley Koehler, Milton and the Art of Landscape, Milton Studies 8
(1975): 340; Marjorie Garber, Fallen Landscape: The Art of Milton and Poussin,
ELR 5 (1975): 96124; and Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1955).
21
Roland Mushat Frye, Miltons Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the
Epic Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 7. See also Garber; Hannah
Disinger Demaray, Milton Perfect Paradise and the Landscapes of Italy, Milton
Quarterly 8 (1974): 3341; and Ida Langdon, Miltons Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (New
York: Russell & Russell, 1965).
26 chapter one
22
Frye, 8.
23
On Miltons interest in doctrinal controversy and heretical ideas see Milton and
Heresy, eds. Stephen Dobranski and John Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998); and C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1966).
24
Especially important are the Second Defense; the preface to Civil Power, where he
claims the early church provides the source of the ideas of the Reformation; and the
Apology for Smectynmuus. See Hanford.
25
Of Reformation, I: 541.
for depicting the son in christian art 27
(VI: 118). Parker attributes Miltons attitude toward the church fathers
to his Protestantism:
Reading as a Christian, he admired the holiness and personal excel-
lence of such early Fathers as Cyprian, and noticed in their testimony
the remaining sparks of original truth. Reading as a Protestant, how-
ever, he was more impressed by the evidence that those purer times
were corrupt, and their books corrupted soon after. In the ancientest
and most virgin times between Christ and Constantine, in the stories
of those Greek and Roman exploits, he found many things both nobly
done and worthily spoken; but he did not fail to mark how corruption
and apostasy crept in by degrees. (I: 14647)
These remarks must caution us against assuming that Milton borrowed
directly, without adaptation, from the artistic theory of the primitive
church. In fact they suggest that the guiding principle of Miltons reli-
gious and artistic philosophy was fidelity to the gospel accounts.
The early period of Christianity was not utterly without merit for
Milton, however. Its value as a model came from the gospel texts and
apostolic church, and not from subsequent ages. The church appears
inevitably to grow corrupt as it gains in worldly power and the writings
of the church fathersin places even the Scripturesare similarly
marred. The only remedy, and the sole source of truth to which Mil-
ton gestures, is poetry. Poetry is so powerful a tool that he even turns
to poetry produced in Roman Catholic contexts. To demonstrate that
it is not his opinion alone that the church became corrupt following
Constantine, Milton introduces evidence from Dante, Petrarch, and
Ariosto, whereby it may be concluded for a receivd opinion even
among men professing the Romish Faith, that Constantine marrd all in
the Church (Of Reformation I: 558). Extending his claim that textual
corruption follows doctrinal corruption, Milton avers that Petrarchs
Sonnet 108 has been wipt out by the Inquisitor in some Editions
(I: 559).
The examples of Dante, Ariosto and Petrarch that Milton cites give
him not only the rhetorical emphasis of irony, but allow him to imply
that poetry by its nature cannot abide what is false and dislodges it.
Sacred verse offers the ultimate consolation of the tract. In its last lines
Milton seeks a note of hope and finds it in the desire for Hymns, and
Halleluiahs offered up in new and lofty Measures to sing and celebrate
thy divine Mercies (I: 616). Whatever Milton learned in his examina-
tion of patristic literature about the competing alternatives for rep-
resenting divine subjects in art, he concluded that sacred songand
28 chapter one
26
Demaray, 33.
27
Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Malden, MA: Black-
well, 2002), 90.
28
Frye, 24.
29
Clare Haynes chapter on The Grand Tour provides an overview of the topic,
with examples from many eighteenth-century English travelers; see Pictures and Popery:
Art and Religion in England, 16601760 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 15.
for depicting the son in christian art 29
in these cities and been told what he ought to think of them. But how
did he react to what he was shown?30
OConnell stresses that the major obstacle to English travelers was
not the availability of visual art, but the habits of mind the traveler
brought with him.31 Indeed scholars typically assume that Miltons
religious outlook would have prevented any kind of active engage-
ment on his part with this visual culture. However, we know from the
records left by other contemporary travelers that English Protestant
visitors to Italy did viewat times favorably and with interestItalian
art. Frye points out that
even so staunch an Anglican as John Evelyn, and that staunch Protestant
Francis Mortoft, were impelled to go into the great Roman Catholic
churches and study their artistic and architectural treasures.32
Other travelers to Italy noted and even admired works of art, and it
is possible that the pictures and monuments they note were seen by
Milton as well. Balthazar Gerbier, writing in 1665, recommends that
English travelers see specific works of Italian painting and sculpture:
those of Perin del Vago in Castel St Angelo; the paintings of St. Peters,
including
the Pictures of the Cavalier Balioni, Pormarancio, Passignani, Del Castello.
The Piet (in Marble) of Michael Angelo, the day of Judgement by the
same Angelo, painted in the Popes Chappel, the Altar and Sepulcher of
St. Sicilia . . . in the Popes Chambers the matchles pictures of Raphael
dUrbin, thence make towards A Bel Vidor, there see the Lauconte, the
Apollo, Cleopatra, Lantino, and a Marble called el Toiso. Then making his
circuit to go out of the great St Spirito repaire to St Pietro Montouo, there
see the Picture on the great Altar painted by Raphael dUrbin, and the
Figure of Christ to the pillar drawn by Fra: Bastiano, a picture of Georgio
Vassari, in the Sacresti one of Michael Angelo.33
30
Michael OConnell, Milton and the Art of Italy: A Revisionist View, in Milton
in Italy: Contexts, Images and Contradictions, ed. Mario Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medi-
eval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 217.
31
OConnell, 221.
32
Frye, 2728. Fynes Moryson describes the exterior and interior decoration of
St. Marks in Venice, including its images of the crucifixion and the altarpiece show-
ing Christ enthroned and goes on to praise the religious art of many other Venetian
churches and chapels, taking special pleasure in images of the life and death of Christ;
see Itinerary (London: John Beale, 1617; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1971),
7879.
33
Balthazar Gerbier, Subsidium peregrinantibus Or An assistance to a traveler (Oxford:
R. Gascoigne, 1665), 9596.
30 chapter one
34
Paul A. Parrish, Milton and Crashaw: The Cambridge and Italian Years, in
Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance, eds. Margo Swiss and David
Kent (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 220.
35
James Howell, Instructions for Forreine Travell (London, 1642). Rpt. English Reprints,
ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869), 16.
36
Haynes, 35.
for depicting the son in christian art 31
37
William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), I: 181.
32 chapter one
38
See, for example, Lewis Bayly, The Practise of Pietie (London: John Hodgetts,
1617); Guillaume du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Joshua Sylvester (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979); George Withers Preparation to the Psalter (London: Nicholas
Okes, 1619); Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie (London: Henry Seile, 1652). The Tetragram-
maton appears at the top of nine of Withers Emblems as well (London: Robert Allott,
1635).
39
Hugo Grotius, True Religion Explained and Defended (London: R. Royston, 1632).
for depicting the son in christian art 33
40
Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour
(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006), 111.
41
Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 148.
34 chapter one
While he does not draw a direct connection between the works of art
that he saw and his poetic activity, Miltons works nevertheless suggest
powerfully that we consider the source of his counter-cultural repre-
sentations of the Son. As we have seen, there were various models for
depicting Jesus in Christian artistic traditions up to the Reformation.
I have not attempted to demonstrate that Milton alluded to specific
works of art or Christian representational theory; Miltons poetry does
not suggest this to be the case. Rather, I include these examples first to
suggest the great wealth of material available to Milton and his audi-
ence, which may recommend further investigation of individual works.
Most importantly, however, I argue that this material as a wholeeven
if it cannot be tied directly to Miltonprovides a set of analogues that
help readers of his poetry to discern more clearly the artistic decisions
that Milton made as he worked.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1.
2
See, for example, Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford
University Press, 2002).
36 chapter two
3
Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 2829.
4
See, for example, John Vicars, The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness, of Having or Making
the Picture of Christs Humanity (London: John Bartlet, 1641).
5
Certaine Sermons appointed by the Queenes Majesty, to be declared and read, by all Parsons,
Vicars, and Curates, every Sunday and Holy day in their Churches (London: John Charlewood
and Thomas East, 1587), B7v.
iconoclasm as an artistic strategy 37
on the issue of images makes clear that it was widely known in the
early modern church that images entered into Christian practice only
very late in the history of the church. It points out that it is certain
that by the space of three hundred yeeres and more, after the death of
our Saviour Christe, and before these godlie Emperours raigned, there
were no images publikelie in the Churches or Temples, and that in
the Churches of Asia and Greece, there were no Images publiquelie
by the space of almost seven hundred yeeres (D6r; E1v). The Homily
claims that
it appeareth that no image can be made of Christ, but a lying image (as
the scripture peculiarly calleth images lies) for Christ is God and man.
Seeing therefore that for ye Godhead, which is the most excellent part,
no images can bee made, it is falsly called the image of Christ: wherefore
images of Christe be not only defects, but also lyes. (F3r)
The homily assures readers
that the new Testament of our Saviour Jesus Christe, containing ye worde
of life, is a more lively, expresse, and true image of Saviour, then all
carved, graven, moulten, and painted images, in the worlde bee. (K3r)
These guidelines, though subject to debate and never universally
agreed upon among reformers, carried enough force in English cul-
ture to shape poetic representations of the Son. William Prynnes On
Popish Crucifixes, and Images of Christ, for example, takes up the
tenet that no images of the Son are allowable. He bases this position
in part on the claim that since no accurate likeness is possible, any
representation would be false, noting also that traditional depictions
of Christ can be proven inaccurate. These are
. . . lies and different
From Christs form which the Scriptures represent.
The Papists paint Christ very lovely, faire,
And like a Nazarite, with long compt haire,
And somewhat fleshy, when the text sayse, he
Should like a root with sprigs in dry ground be;
..............................................................................
He was no Nazarite, nor long haire wore,
(As some yet dreame, and many heretofore)
For he drank wine oft, toucht, nay raisd the dead
Which Nazarites might not, nor shavd his head
When he came near dead corps, as Nazarites
Were bound to do, nor usde ought of their rites;
He was not, could not be defiled at all
38 chapter two
6
Prynnes verse was published with John Vicars The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness, of
Having or Making the Picture of Christs Humanity (London, 1641), 7374.
iconoclasm as an artistic strategy 39
7
Cited in Margaret Aston, Englands Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988),
227. Reformers also used the term avoidance, which implies a similar approach to
problematic images.
8
Aston, 227.
9
Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 edition, s.v. delay.
40 chapter two
For Milton and his contemporaries, the Son is the agent of the
Fathers long-delayed redemption. In Paradise Regained Milton corrects
the Satanic view of the passion by literally removing the Son. Mary
cannot locate him after the baptism, asking
But where delays he now? some great intent
Conceals him . . .
. . . his absence now
Thus long to some great purpose he obscures. (2.95101)
The language accompanying delay in this passageof obscurity and
concealmentshows the affinity between this device and the icono-
clastic practices of removal, revision and defacement.
Another iconoclastic practice that migrates from the destruction
of physical images to the composition of written texts concerns the
re-emergence of the displaced or concealed icon. England witnessed
the large-scale return of secreted church movables during the Marian
revival, and in a different sense during the Laudianism of the 1640s.10
Such items have to be viewed not as lost or permanently removed,
but as displaced, relocated, hidden, even lying in wait. They were
simultaneously absent and present, although their presence was con-
veyed indirectly and accompanied by anxiety. The Marian revival also
brought about a project of restoring and repairing images.11 Repair of
damaged icons and images could even be prescribed as punishment
for private acts of iconoclasm that went beyond the approved statutes.
Like the device of delay, displacement and restitution have parallels
in written representations. These include metonymies that point to
absent elements of the image, textual emendations, and fragmentary
texts, which mark poems as places in which pieces of traditional Chris-
tian culture have been removed or buried, with some degree of atten-
tion given to their removal.
In these devices we can see iconoclasm as a method for reforming
images by revising them. For Milton, the most important subject for
this kind of iconoclastic remaking was the passion. In the chapters
that follow I examine Miltons revision of this tradition, using many of
the techniques described above, in his poetry, and his creation of an
alternative passion imagery. He also wrote in an explicitly iconoclastic
mode, of course, in Eikonoklastes. Looking closely at this text will show
10
See Aston, 28089.
11
See Aston, 315.
42 chapter two
how the act of iconoclasm not only redresses what are perceived as
incorrect images, but lays a foundation for the creation of appropri-
ate alternative renderings. In Eikonoklastes Milton challenges his con-
temporaries use of imagery of Christs suffering to characterize the
martyrdom of Charles I, and in doing so lays out some of the terms
of his alternative depictions of the Son. Miltons attack on the kings
book is not just a jeremiad against idolatry but a repudiation of certain
practices of representing Christs death. Milton could not abide the
cult of martyrdom around Charles and the often bold associations of
Charles with the crucified Jesus not only because they ran counter to
his views of Charles, but because they were antithetical to his view of
the crucifixion.
The Eikon Basilike draws explicit parallels between the kings execu-
tion and Christs death. Charles prays, if I am sold by them, I am
only sorry they should do it and that my price should be so much
above my Saviours; and that this bitter cup of a violent death may
pass from me.12 He asks,
O let not my blood be upon them and their children, whom the fraud
and faction of some, not the malice of all, have excited to crucify me.
But Thou, O Lord, canst and wilt (as Thou didst my Redeemer) both
exalt and perfect me by my sufferings, which have more in them of Thy
mercy than of mans cruelty or Thy own justice.13
Charles deployment of such images reveals his assumptions about the
passion. The king selects only the brutal and graphically violent epi-
sodes of the passion, omitting the surrounding contexts of Christs life
and ministry. These are precisely the elements that Milton consistently
avoids in his handling of the gospel narratives; not only is Charless
self-portrait as a Christ-like martyr inappropriate on its face, but for
Milton it also misreads the passions meaning.
It was not the Eikon Basilike alone that generated a cult of Charles
as a Christ-like martyr and briefly revived the Christus Patiens tradition.
Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson point out that the cult of Charles
as Christ was assisted by the coincidence of the gospel lesson for the
day of his execution. Having heard a reading of Matthew 27 from
the Bishop of London, Charles received of the Bishop the Holy Sac-
12
John Gauden, Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and
Sufferings, ed. Philip Knachel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 137, 176.
13
Eikon Basilike, 15758.
iconoclasm as an artistic strategy 43
14
J. Nalson, A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice, for the Trial of
K. Charles I (London, 1684), 112; qtd. in Daems and Nelson, eds., Eikon Basilike
(Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006), 15.
15
Edward Symmons, A Vindication of King Charles: Or, A Loyal Subjects Duty (London,
1648); cited in Daems and Nelson, 16 n. 1.
16
Daems and Nelson, 16.
17
Cited in Eikon Basilike, ed. Knachel, xiv.
18
Many of the poems on Charles martyrdom include particularly scathing con-
demnation of the Jews of Parliament who betrayed and executed their king, mock-
ing his royalty and reveling in his execution. Richard Watsons Regicidium Judaicum
(1649) reverses this pattern, concentrating on the Jewes crucifying Christ and sup-
plementing this subject with An Appendix . . . upon the late murder of Our Blessed
Soveraigne Charles the First. Watson calls Charles a second Christ, an anoynted of
God, that came as neare as ever King did to our Saviour in his life, and, I dare say
never any so neare in the similitude of his death (23).The most explicit (and bitterly
anti-Judaic) of these is the short poem (in English and French), by J. W., King Charles I
His Imitation of Christ (London: T.L., 1660). See also Thomas Warmstry, A hand-kirchife
for loyall mourners (London: [s.n.], 1649); and An elegie upon the death of our dread sovereign
Lord King Charls the martyr [London, 1649].
19
[ John Cleveland,] Monumentum Regale: Or A Tombe Erected for that incomparable and
Glorious Monarch, Charles the First ([London,] 1649). These collections share a great deal
with Justa Eduoardo King Naufrago; see chapter five below.
44 chapter two
20
See also A Deep Groan, Fetchd At the Funerall of that incomparable and glorious
Monarch (also included in the Monumentum Regale), in which Cleveland relocates the
scene and players of the passion to the scaffold on which Charles was executed. Owen
Fellthams An Epitaph to the Eternal Memory of Charles the First makes a similar
claim that Charles had copyd out in every Line, / Our Saviours Passion (2122);
Felltham also alleges that His Royal Bloud true miracles had wrought (39) and ends
his poem with the epitaph, Here CHARLES the First, and CHRIST the second lyes (46).
The Poems of Owen Felltham, eds. Ted-Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers (Univer-
sity Park, PA: Seventeenth-Century News Editions and Studies, 1973), 6566.
iconoclasm as an artistic strategy 45
In other cases the parallels drawn between Charles and Christ touch
specifically on questions of Jesus incarnation. Henry Leslies sermon
on The Martyrdome of King Charles, Or, His Conformity with Christ in his Suf-
ferings takes as its text I Corinthians 2:8Which none of the princes
of this world knew; for had they knowne it, they would not have cru-
cified the Lord of Glorie.21 This verse recommends itself to Leslies
purposes because it juxtaposes the fate of worldly princes with Christs
eternal glory, effected through his death. But it may also prompt read-
ers to return to the preceding verse in Corinthians to discover what it
is that the princes of this world do not know: we speake the wisdome
of God in a mysterie, even the hid wisdome, which God had determined
before the worlde, unto our glorie (2:7); the passage continues, But
as it is written, The things which eye hathe not sene, nether eare hathe
heard, nether came into mans heart, are, which God hathe prepared
for them that love him (2:9).22 The grounds on which Charles can be
compared to Christ, then, are based on the Christian mystery of the
incarnation. In expounding the lesson of the crucifixion, Leslie again
refers to the concept of Jesus dual nature:
how could the Lord of glory be crucified, seeing he is God, and God
is impassible, he cannot suffer. For answer, you shall understand, that
there is so strait an union and conjunction between the two natures of
Christ, in one person, that that which is proper onely to the one nature,
is vouched, not (as some foolishly imagine) of the other nature; but, it is
vouched of the person being denominated from the other nature . . . And
it is but a plaine Synecdoche, very usuall in speech, whereby that which
is proper onely to the part, is praedicated of the whole.23
As the passion revealed the true nature of God to Paul and the early
church, the death of Charles, Leslie implies, will instruct English Prot-
estants in the correct understanding of this doctrine.
Leslie, like Cleveland, sees the regicide as re-enacting the tragedy of
the crucifixion on an English stage,
and new actors entred upon it, other princes of this world, yea of the
darknesse of this world, Farre worse then Pilat, the high Priests, Scribes and
Pharises, who have lately murthered, (if not the Lord of glory, yet I am
21
Henry Leslie, The Martyrdome of King Charles, Or, His Conformity with Christ in his
Sufferings (The Hague and London, 1649), 3.
22
Leslie quotes these passages in the opening lines of his sermon, to demonstrate
the coherence of these words with that which goeth before (3).
23
Leslie, 78.
46 chapter two
sure, a glorious Lord: though not Christ the Lord, yet the Lords Christ, Gods
anointed.24
Leslie also works with a notion of divine monarchy (or at least a deep
political traditionalism) to justify the comparison. For God never gave
unto the people power over their King, he writes, as is evident by
Scripture, by the Law of Nature and Nations; by the known Lawes of
England and by the custom of the church; and
As he was a King, he did represent Gods Person here on Earth: and
as he was a good King, full of Grace, He was a most lively Image of
Christ, so lively an Image of him, that amongst all the Martyrs who
followed Christ unto Heaven, bearing his Crosse; never was there any,
who expressed so great conformity with our Saviour in His sufferings as
He did.25
Leslie also draws on the temptations of Christ:
As the Devil made great proffers unto Christ, of all the Kingdomes of
this world, saying, All these will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship
me. So, great proffers were made unto our Soveraigne, that they would
make Him a Glorious King, if He would humble Himself unto His
Parliament and worship the Idol which they had set up.26
Leslies yoking of the temptations with the passion offers an interest-
ing counterpoint to Miltons adoption of the temptations as a way to
express his view of the Son in Paradise Regained.
It is not certain whether Milton knew Leslies text, or the others
whose constellation of images he seems to combat, but the themes
they sound circulated widely after the regicide. To Milton, the com-
parison of Charles to this type of suffering Christ would be even more
objectionable than a general association between the king and Jesus.
He objects to Charles adoption of the crown of thorns (the most
obvious symbol of the passion deployed in the popular and incendi-
ary woodcut illustration to the Eikon Basilike). He chastises the kings
self-affiliation with Jesus:
He had rather wear a Crown of Thorns with our Saviour. Many would be
all oen with our Saviour, whom our Saviour will not know. They who
govern ill those Kingdoms which they had a right to, have to our Sav-
iours Crown of Thornes no right at all. Thornes they may find anow,
24
Leslie, 12.
25
Leslie, 14.
26
Leslie, 16.
iconoclasm as an artistic strategy 47
of thir own gathering, and thir own twisting: for Thornes and Snares,
saith Solomon, are in the way of the forward; but to weare them as our
Saviour wore them is not givn to them that suffer by their own demerits.
(III: 417418)
But even more than Charles adoption of one of the instruments of
the crucifixion, Milton seems dismayed by the metonymy the king sug-
gests. The crown of thorns, Milton implies, should not be venerated or
translated into other contexts. Rather, the instruments of the passion
served a particular and time-bound purpose, the meaning of which
lies beyond their physical properties. To attempt to wear thorns as
Jesus wore them, for Milton, is fundamentally to mistake the physical
implements of the crucifixion for its metaphysical significance and to
prioritize bodily suffering over eternal triumph.
Another aspect of Charles self-comparison was objectionable to
Milton on the same grounds. Milton parodies the claim of the Eikon
Basilike that Charles remains alive through his book by taking it as a
justification for refraining from the usual courtesy shown to the dead
(III: 341). The basis of the Charles cult was his death, and the kings
book suggested a life in death appropriate for Christ but not, Milton
implies, for the king. The worship of the king, rather than proving
his likeness to Christ, reveals the most repugnant idolatry: The
Divines also, thir wizzards, can be so brazn as to cry Hosanna to this
his book, which cries louder against them for no disciples of Christ,
but of Iscariot (III: 347).
Milton also rejects the Eikons use of the image of Christ on the
pinnacle:
His letting some men goe up to the Pinnacle of the Temple was a temptation to them
to cast him down headlong. In this Simily we have himself compard to Christ,
the Parlament to the Devill, and his giving them that Act of settling, to
his letting them goe up to the Pinnacle of the Temple. A tottring and giddy
Act rather then a settling. This was goodly use made of Scripture in his
Solitudes. But it was no Pinnacle of the Temple, it was a Pinnacle of
Nebuchadnezzars Palace, from whence hee and Monarchy fell headlong
together. (III: 405).
Miltons scathing response to the Eikon Basilike emanates, then, not just
from his republican objections to the cult of Charles, but also from his
theological and aesthetic qualms about the type of Christ that Charles
claims to emulate. His iconoclastic answer performs two functions, as
iconoclasm must. First, it shatters the image set up by the kings book,
breaking it precisely in those places that threaten to ensnare its audience
48 chapter two
1
Frank Kermode, John, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and
Frank Kermode (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987), 461.
50 chapter three
2
Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Pun-
ishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1998), 22.
3
Michael Schoenfeldt, That spectacle of too much weight: The Poetics of Sac-
rifice in Donne, Herbert, and Milton, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:3
(Fall 2001), 561.
the post-reformation passion 51
4
On the medieval tradition of passion texts, see J. A. W. Bennett, Poetry of the Pas-
sion: Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); and Thomas
Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
52 chapter three
5
For a discussion of representations of the Passion in the early church, see Gertrud
Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 2 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society,
1971).
6
Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Sym-
bols in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1954), 67.
7
The Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Francis Quarles, ed. Alexander Grosart (New
York: AMS Press, 1967), II: 10.
the post-reformation passion 53
8
John Donne, The Complete English Poems, edited by C. A. Patrides (London: Every-
man, 1994).
54 chapter three
9
On Donnes contribution to Reformation poetics, see also David K. Anderson,
Internal Images: John Donne and the English Iconoclast Controversy, Renaissance and
Reformation 26:2 (2002): 2342.
10
On the poem as a response to Puritan iconoclasm of the cross and controversies
over the use of the cross in the sacraments, see Theresa DiPasquale, Literature and Sacra-
ment: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999),
3057. DiPasquale points out that the cross is hidden in Donnes poem typographically
as well, in the repeated instances of the word cross as well as the letters x and t (40).
the post-reformation passion 55
11
These include Charles Herle, Contemplations and devotions on . . . our saviours death and
passion (London: H. Robinson, 1631) and John Hoddesdon, Sion and Parnassus (London:
G. Eversden, 1650).
56 chapter three
of Christ Jesus our Saviour, for example, begins with the scenes in the
garden and includes Jesus arrest and trials before Annas, Caiphas and
Pilate, Judas self-recrimination and suicide, and release of Barabas,
but never depicts the crucifixion.12 The scenes in the garden, which
Milton also identifies as central to his treatment of the passion, recom-
mend themselves to a Protestant approach for several reasons.13 First,
these episodes refer to the substitution model of atonement, in which
Gethsemane replaces Eden. The scenes at Gethsemane privilege spiri-
tual over physical suffering and provide a model of devotion and self-
examination appropriate to reformed culture. Most importantly, this
attention to the garden episode exemplifies the Protestant tendency
to avoid the crucifixion, particularly by deferring it to a constantly
delayed future event.14
The episodic nature of the passion is also exploited by poetic col-
lections that use the structural device of sequence. George Herberts
passion sequence in The Temple exemplifies this device.15 The great-
est structural principle of The Temple is, of course, the architectural
metaphor that organizes the volume. Within The Church, beginning
with The Altar, a subsequence approaches the crucifixion but uses
the divisions between poems to avoid depicting it. At the beginning of
the sequence, The Altar extols the substitution of the heart for the
stones of the altar. The poems preference for the interior, private and
conceptual over the outward, physical, and public is characteristic of
Protestant spirituality and aesthetics. These are also the terms in which
Herbert, Milton and other Protestant poets depict the passion.
There is a natural connection between The Altar and the poem
that follows, The Sacrifice, which continues Herberts use of the
episodic nature of the story of Christs life. It includes several key inci-
dents from the gospels narration of Jesus final days and hours: Judas
12
Gervase Markham, The teares of the beloved: or, The Lamentation of Saint John, Concern-
ing the death and passion of Christ Jesus our Saviour (London: Simon Stafford, 1600).
13
Trinity College Manuscript in John Miltons Complete Poetical Works Reproduced in
Photographic Facsimile, edited by Harris Fletcher (Urbana: The University of Illinois
Press, 1948).
14
See, for example, John Bullokar, A True Description of the Passion of Our Saviour Jesus
Christ (London: Samuel Rand, 1622), especially stanzas 101 and 113114.
15
Schoenfeld also discusses this sequence. For critical treatments of the form and
structure of The Temple, see Kathleen Lynch, The Temple: Three Parts Vied and
Multiplied SEL 29 (1989): 139155; Anne Ferry, Titles in George Herberts little
book ELR 23:2 (Spring 1993): 31444; John Bienz, Images and Ceremonial in The
Temple: Herberts Solution to a Reformation Controversy SEL 26 (1986): 7395.
the post-reformation passion 57
betrayal, the arrest and interrogation by Herod and Pilate, the release
of Barabas, some of the physical punishments (scourging, lashing, spit-
ting), the sentence of death, the crown of thorns, carrying the cross,
nailing to the cross, the cry (in Herberts words, O my god, my God!
why leavst thou me), the last breath, the vinegar and gall, the parting
of Jesus garments, and the piercing of his side (216).16 It is difficult to
tell the story with much less than this, and almost impossible to omit
the physical implements of the crucifixion; they must be dealt with,
even by those with a strong reformed orientation.
But it is worth noticing how Herbert handles the actual fact of
crucifixion as the means by which Jesus is executed and the moment
of death itself, as well as the conclusion of the story, the resurrection.
Herbert does not dramatize the crucifixion; rather he restricts us to
a series of brief references to the crossprimarily as it is carried by
Jesus and then by Simon, rather than in its role as an instrument of
torture and executionand to the nails, as well as to a few brief scenes
once Christ is upon the cross. The act of crucifixion in Herberts poem
is verbal rather than visual. It is a spoken text that appears twice:
Hark how they cry aloud still, Crucify (97) and Crucify him, cry with
one strong shout (186). The word crucify is set apart in these lines by
being spoken. It also limits the time frame of the poem to a moment
before Christs death, in effect deferring that event perpetually.
The event of death in the poem is further moderated by being
broken into several individual moments. This is an instance of the
iconoclastic device of fragmentation, which leads to dispersion and
multiplication, translated into textual form. As early as line six of The
Sacrifice, Christ explains that his people do wish me dead. The
scenes concentrating on Judas, the first in this sequence, note that he
did my death devise, and those that capture Jesus trial and condem-
nation juxtapose his life-giving breath Which I do give them daily,
with his death (17, 70). Twelve stanzas and 50 lines before They carry
me to my most bitter cross, Christ claims And now I am delivered
unto death (195, 145). These references are not actually instances of
death, but rather serve to remind readers of the central and defining
element of the broader story of which they form a part. By locat-
ing Jesus death in many parts of the sequence, they also render an
16
George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, edited by John Tobin (London: Pen-
guin, 2005).
58 chapter three
where the reader fits into the narrative and how he should view it, in
part through changes in the identity of the speaker from one poem to
another. Most importantly, the opening of gaps across the boundaries
of individual poems allows the crucifixion to drop out of its central
position in the story. In the case of Herbert, this happens subtly in the
omission of a poem that would have treated the crucifixion explicitly.
We move from Good Friday, which does not depict a scene on the
cross but rather considers how the spiritual meaning of the events is
written on the heart of the speaker, and Redemption,17 where the
allegory of the landlord and tenant concludes with the death of the
Lord, to Sepulchre, in which Jesus is already figured as dead, and
Easter, in which he is portrayed as risen. While all of these poems
deal with the death of Jesus, splitting that narrative up over a number
of poems allows Herbert to remove what was at its heart in traditional
representations. This sequence appears at the beginning of Herberts
collection and not, as we might expect for the culminating events of
Jesus life, at the end. In its relocation to the opening of the set of
poems, the series on the crucifixion thus instructs Herberts readers
to consider these events as a beginning, possibly the basis for their
own devotion. It thus also moves their present-day reading and wor-
ship into the center of Christian history, which only begins with the
gospels. Finally, it allows for the possibility that the poems that follow
also treat of the passion, a technique of order that becomes important
for Milton in the 1671 joint publication of Paradise Regained and Samson
Agonistes as well.
If early modern poetry on the passion typically omits the cruci-
fixion, this is due in part to its characterization of the passion as an
ineffable event.18 The indescribable nature of the passion takes several
17
It may be worth considering that Herbert changed the title of this poem from
The Passion (according to Ferry, 336). This type of mark, the erasure of the passion
or its removal to a place outside the poem, is characteristic of what I argue Milton
does throughout his poems. Another possible displacement of the crucifixion is raised
by John Bienz, who argues that Herberts The Sacrifice invokes the analogous
image of the Man of Sorrows as that image was used conventionally in the visual arts
to illustrate the legendary Mass of St. Gregory (77).
18
In the Catholic tradition as well, which tends to focus in much greater depth on
physical details, such as the precise number of Christs wounds, the trope of the pas-
sion as an unspeakable event sometimes appears. For instance, in his Sweete Thoughtes
of Jesus and Marie (Paris, 1658) Thomas Carre [Miles Pinkney] exclaims O God, I
have nothing to saie, but am lost in astonishment (278).
the post-reformation passion 61
forms. First, poems often suggest that these events exceed writing. For
Robert Holland,
. . . many other things there are,
That Jesus did also,
Which man with tong cannot declare,
Nor pen paint out: for lo
If written were his works and words,
The world could not containe
The bookes (so much the same affoords)
Unwritten that remaine.19
Holland takes his cue from John 21:25, which expresses the vastness of
Christs acts by claiming the incapacity of the written word to contain
them.20 For Samuel Walsall as well, there is no deeper booke than
Christs wounds.21 John Andrewes prefaces his Christ His Crosse with
an epistle To the Christian Reader in which Andrewes writes that
although there are already so many books, nothing is more suitable to
an authors first book than the passion. According to Andrewes, The
tongues of all men living (saith Marlorate) cannot declare Gods mercies
and love towardes us, nor the pennes of all the writers in the world,
can never sufficiently expresse the same.22
These writers value silence so highly because they identify it as
Christs own response to his accusers and mockers. Christs silence
and speech, which are noted by the evangelists as highly complex and
meaningful, provide a model for early modern authors. Samuel Wal-
sall takes Christs silence as a cue that his material warrants special
treatment: I will not talke of that, at which himselfe was silent, his
condemnation, whereby the Lord of life was delivered to the power of
death.23 And John Gaules Practique Theories suggests that the structure
of the gospels is based on omission because
19
Robert Holland, The Holie Historie of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christs nativitie,
life, actes, miracles doctrine, death, passion, resurrection and ascension (London: George Tobie,
1594), 334.
20
Frank Kermode notes that it is Johns remark on the endlessness of the narrative
possibilities that best expresses the Christian attitude to the testimonies concerning
Christ in The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 111.
21
Samuel Walsall, The Life and Death of Jesus Christ (London: T. Thorppe, 1607),
F3v.
22
John Andrewes, Christ his cross or the doctrine of Christ crucified (Oxford: J. Barnes,
1614), 36.
23
Walsall, D1r.
62 chapter three
many things did Christ, which are not written in his Booke: Yea, and
many Things he did, which are written, but not their Manner of doing:
Because (in many things) it sufficeth we know, and believe who did it, and
why; no matter when, or how. In this, and other pointes and places of holy
Scriptures, where the matter is uttered, and manner irrevealed; I cannot
be certaine, I would not be curious, I dare not be peremptorie.24
In this passage Gaule portrays his authorship as an activity limited and
shaped by his reading the Bible. His attitude toward scripturewhich
he emphasizes is not one of innovationallows him to legitimate his
writing.
This device of authorization often supersedes the narration of the
passion sequence, as many Protestant poems digress from rehearsing
the story of the crucifixion into a meditation on the act of writing
about it. In several cases authors approach the unspeakable nature of
the passion through metaphors of writing. In Charles Herle, Christs
blood is figured as a substitute for his words, for his lack of com-
plaint:
Sweat and blood are the two best emblemes of labour and Passion, of
doing and suffering, and so, the best epitomes, or (if you will) journals
of our Saviours life and death; for both made up the travayles of his soule;
the first he wrote in sweat, the other in blood.25
His sweat is compared to the law, and his blood, the gospel. Herles
discussion of the mocking and scorning of Christ draws on the notion
of the passion as an inexpressible subject, observing that for Christ to
be so treated is so farre beyond that of tongue, as indeed tongue can
no way reach it.26 And again, in the chapter on the crucifixion itself,
Herle calls the torture
a subject fitter for meditation then speech: such as fully to expresse,
would require both the eloquence and experience of him that felt it:
how should I write on, but that my teares should blot out what I write,
when tis no other then he that is thus usd, who hath blotted out that hand
writing of ordinances against me.27
24
John Gaule, Practique Theories: or, Votive Speculations upon Christs Prediction, Incarnation,
Passion, Resurrection (London: James Boler, 1629), 36465.
25
Herle, 12.
26
Herle, 112113.
27
Herle, 320.
the post-reformation passion 63
When he says that the subject is more suited to meditation than speech,
he transfers responsibility for the content to the reader. When he notes
that writing on the passion would require experiencing it, Herle fash-
ions Christ as the ultimate and only author of the passion.
In Gaule the metaphor is specific to the printed book. Christ is a
Booke, and written both of his Name and Pedagree: It is enough; He
need add no more, but amplifie: His verie Preface is the Summe of all
he can say: The Booke concludes the whole Contents in the Title; and
expresses that at first, which afterwards it doth but repeat. Oh that I
were able, or worthy to open but his one-Sealed Booke of his Genera-
tion; but to looke thereon, and read God the Word in the Word of God!
Lord, view me in thee; and let me know thee by thee: who (without thee)
am not worthy to unloose the Latchet of thy Shoo; lesse able to unfold
one Leafe of thy Booke, wherein is clasped the Word shod in Flesh.28
Herles Contemplations uses a book metaphor to compare himself in his
sins to those who mocked and wounded Christ: thus my life what is
it but a larger, though lesse printed, lesse studied commentary on their
broader text; and doth but descant their blunter, harsher plainesong
into more variety of abuse?29 Elizabeth Grymestons Miscelanea calls
on Christs wounds as the very instruments of her own composition.
Let the Mount Calvarie be our schoole, Grymeston instructs, his
wounds our letters, his lashes our commaes, his nailes our full-points,
his open side our booke.30 These images substitute the act of writing
for the crucifixion, a replacement that is consistent with the Protes-
tant preference for texts over images, and which models a meditative
response rather than veneration of the cross.
28
Gaule, 64.
29
Herle, 220.
30
Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea. Meditations. Memoratives (1604). Brown Women
Writers Project. www.wwp.brown.edu.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
E. J. Tinsley, The Coming of a Dead and Naked Christ, Religion 2:1 (Spring
1972), 27.
66 chapter four
sequence presents readers with the only true king, whose kingdom is
not of this world:
when Pilate heard once our Saviour Christ professing that his Kingdome
was not of this world, he thought the man could not stand much in Caesars
light, nor much indammage the Roman Empire: for if the life of Christ
be hid to this world, much more is his Scepter unoperative, but in spiri-
tuall things. (I: 576)
The selection of John 18:36 suits the needs of Miltons claim in the
tract, but it also isolates the kingship of Christ from the rest of the
passion drama, much of which carries other associations and sym-
bols. This quick flash on the passion scene, which is inevitable once
Pilates name is brought in to the sentence, is typical of how Milton
approaches the crucifixion in his poetry as well. It is worthwhile to
notice also that the true nature of Christ, the story of his life, and his
kingship are characterized as hidden.
As these comments imply, Miltons alternative passion focuses on the
Sons internal qualities and inner battle, not on any outward show of
force or physical violence, including even the crucifixion.
Milton may also draw on the early Christian practice of showing
Christ in several ways within a single work of art, a precedent that
may help to explain intriguing differences between Christ in Paradise
Lost and the Son in Paradise Regained:
Perhaps a polymorphous presentation of Christ was seen as truer than
a single static and consistent visual appearance. The texts, after all, sug-
gest that during his life Jesus may have taken on different manifestations,
projecting different exterior features, perhaps in response to need, expec-
tation, ability, or even requirements of different viewers.2
Charles Huttar claims that both the imagery of the living, victorious
Christ that was dominant before the twelfth century, as well as the
more personal, emotional pattern of response that began in the Mid-
dle Ages and continued into the seventeenth century were available
to Milton. His conclusion, however, that by accepting too readily the
convention that tears were the only proper response, he was prevented,
for the time, from tuning in with the more congenial view, that of the
2
Robin Jensen, Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2005), 145146.
miltons alternative passion 67
3
Charles Huttar, The Passion of Christ in Paradise Regained, English Language Notes
19 (1982), 245.
4
John Miltons Complete Poetical Works Reproduced in Photographic Facsimile, ed. Harris
Fletcher (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1948), vol. II p. 28. As I argue below,
this format mirrors Miltons dramatic rewriting of the passion in Samson Agonistes.
68 chapter four
include the image of the Sons kenosis, an image that Milton borrows
from the doctrine of the incarnation whenever he needs to describe the
crucifixion. The Nativity Ode speaks of the Sons voluntary submis-
sion to share with us a darksome House of mortal Clay (14). Milton
returns to this language in The Passion where the only description
he provides of Christs suffering is his entry into a Poor fleshly Taber-
nacle (17). In Paradise Lost, Adams astonishment at Raphaels appear-
ance echoes this phrase as well:
Inhabitant with God, now know I well
Thy favor, in this honor done to man,
Under whose lowly roof thou hast vouchsafed
To enter, and these earthly fruits to taste,
Food not of angels, yet accepted so,
As that more willingly thou couldst not seem
At heavns high feasts to have fed: yet what compare? (V: 461467)
Raphaels descent and willing participation in the debased things of
human life are a rewriting of the passion, in terms that echo Miltons
poetry on the crucifixion but with its violence, pain and death utterly
removed. Milton closes Paradise Regained with a final repetition of the
phrase: the Son is enshrind / In fleshly Tabernacle (IV: 598).5 These
images point to the importance of the incarnation for Milton and his
habit of substituting it for the crucifixion.
Another often repeated phrase is but first which occurs in the
Nativity Ode, Upon the Circumcision, and Paradise Lost to imply the
long delay between the early events of Christs life and the unfolding
of his death.6 Having descended into human form, the Son continues
the pattern of obedience and subservience to God which are crucial
elements of the Miltonic portrait of the Son. The sense of awaited
redemption accompanying these events reveals what is possibly the
most important aspect of Miltons passion, the image of the Son who
serves by standing and waiting. Sonnet 19 does not describe the Son
or the passion explicitly, but it lays out a pattern of service to God that
Miltons Son always fulfills:
5
This image of the dwelling of the Logos in man as in a temple, tabernacle, or
house is often used in the New Testament to convey the incarnation; Milton borrows
this metaphor. See William Hunter, Bright Essence: Studies in Miltons Theology (Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press, 1971), 138.
6
This connection is also made by Huttar, 250 n. 46.
miltons alternative passion 69
prayers to the Father, the Son fulfills the promise of atonement that
he made in book 3. This important observation underscores Miltons
habit of selecting events other than the crucifixion as those which
effect the atonement, indeed almost rendering the cross unnecessary.
Rogers notes the sometimes disorienting effect of these substitutions,
as they interrupt the readers expectations:
Perhaps we are to be forgiven for assuming, when reading the dialogue
in Heaven in book 3, that the satisfaction of divine justice anticipated
by both the Father and the Son would take place at the actual death
of the incarnate Son at the crucifixion. Milton, it should be noted, is
scrupulously careful throughout book 3 to avoid tying the satisfaction to
the specific event of crucifixion, eschewing any mention or even sugges-
tion of the cross . . . But it is nonetheless here, on the occasion of Adams
and Eves repentance, that the Son of God fulfills his priestly office,
that aspect of his mediatorial mission on earth that for all Christian
theologiansfrom Catholic, to mainstream Protestant, to Arminian and
radical Protestantatones for the Fall and effects the reconciliation of
God and man.7
Milton also delays the crucifixion through allusion. As Emory Elliott
notes in his discussion of Paradise Regained, Milton uses the very words
and phrases of Scripture to draw into the poem essential details of
the encircling framework of Christs total career and teaching.8 This
technique allows the passion to be present not through direct repre-
sentation but through allusion, citation, and the readers recollection
of the larger story of the passion, of which the crucifixion is but one
part. One of the ways Milton rewrites the passion is to characterize
the crucifixion as the midpoint between the incarnation and exalta-
tion, which for him are far more meaningful and given more attention.
James Johnston identifies the kenosis hymn of Philippians 2:611 as
Miltons biblical source for this view of the atonement and notes that
many of his passion texts borrow from its pattern:
The poetic structure of the hymn reflects the salvific career of Jesus:
three strophes of humiliation or progressive downward movement that
end with the ignominious death, even the death of the cross; from
this nadir the upward movement of the hymn begins as the last three
7
John Rogers, Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ, in Heresy, Literature,
and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, eds. David Loewenstein and John Marshall
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 207.
8
Emory Elliott, Miltons Biblical Style in Paradise Regained, Milton Studies 6 (1974),
228.
miltons alternative passion 71
9
James Johnston, Milton on the Doctrine of the Atonement, Renascence 38:1
(Fall 1985), 43.
10
I draw here on the ideas of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht as presented in his lecture,
How Can You Pinpoint What is Latent in a Text? at Eyewitness Narratives,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, November 26, 2007. His claim that the latent
has the quality of a stowaway, in that its exact place and identity cannot be known
but it nevertheless leaves traces of its existence that can be perceived, is suggestive for
considering how Milton handles the crucifixion.
72 chapter four
in the poetic text, but marked in the text.11 Shoptaw cites several
examples from Lycidas and Paradise Lost in his description of poetic
cryptography, as well as examples from works with passion themes.
The occurrence of such buried phrases stands to reason, as the term
crypt carries obvious resonances of death and burial, and his con-
cept of latency resonates with the idea of resurrection in the way that
crypt words need to be recuperated by readers. In both these senses
this manner of reading poetry can be especially relevant for material
on the passion. While not precisely cryptographic in Shoptaws pho-
nemic or graphemic senses (such as the buried blown out of propor-
tion and taken out of context that can be read around Ashberrys
blown out of context), Miltons poems often submerge just below the
surface a link running from the poetic text to the passion.
11
John Shoptaw, Lyric Cryptography, Poetics Today 21:1 (Spring 2000), 223.
12
Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic
Society, 1971), I: 69.
13
Schiller, I: 70.
miltons alternative passion 73
14
The Poems English Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1957). William Cartwrights On the Nativity (1651) also asserts that we
the Manger may thy Altar call; Plays and Poems, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Madison,
University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), line 20.
15
Schiller, I: 27.
16
Schiller, I: 29.
17
Schiller, I: 29.
74 chapter four
18
Arthur Barker argues that the contrast between light and dark acts as an orga-
nizing structural principle in the Ode. He describes a three-part form. First, in the
opening stanzas: The Nativity setting is described in a series of negatives whose effect
is to reduce light and sound to a minimum while subduing all discordant elements
as a prelude to the harmonious song of the angelic choir that erupts in the second
section of the poem (49). This vision is dissipated by the thought of the cross,
which creates a sense of disruption and dissonance in the third movement, with
light and order restored only by the infant in the final lines (50). Barker, The Pattern
of Miltons Nativity Ode, in Milton: Modern Judgements, ed. Alan Rudrum (London:
Macmillan, 1968).
miltons alternative passion 75
19
David Quint, Expectation and Prematurity in Miltons Nativity Ode, Modern
Philology 97:2 (November 1999), 212.
20
J. Martin Evans, A Poem of Absences in John Milton: Twentieth-Century Perspec-
tives, ed. Evans (New York: Routledge, 2003), II: 33.
76 chapter four
in a later event implies that it is the passion that will render the notes
expressible:
The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss. (15153)
This is of course a strange suggestion for Milton to make, since he
avoids depicting the crucifixion in this poem and in later texts. By
making this allusion, Milton limits the reader to a time before the pas-
sion, when its work remains foretold but unaccomplished. Restricting
the events depicted to those that occur before the crucifixion, thereby
forestalling it, is a typical gesture of the Miltonic passion.
Miltons choices regarding the depiction of the infant Christ also
show how the poem deviates from more traditional representations, as
we see by referring to early Christian painting. As is common in the
visual record, there are two altars in Miltons Nativity Ode, but the
first is the secret and hallowed altar belonging to heaven and
the second altar in the poem in fact belongs to pagan rites of the Lars
and Lemures (190195). Whereas many medieval images of the
child on an altar were designed to emphasize continuity between the
altar rituals of the Catholic Church and the heavenly realmwith
the incarnate Jesus as the seamless link holding the two planes in har-
monyMiltons altars can belong only to heaven or to the burning
idols of Moloch. There is no earthly altar on which to place the Christ
child, and therefore we must look elsewhere in the poem for an appro-
priate way of reading the incarnation.
The gesture at the altar, when removed from the context of heaven
or the Temple, becomes transgressive, an idolatrous rite at a pagan
altar. The exception to this dichotomy lies in a poetic alternative, and
this is how I believe we should understand the existence of the poem
despite the apparent emptying of all forms and prohibition against
anything but the music of the spheres. In the prophecy of Isaiah, a
fiery coal from the altar of the Temple produces prophetic speech
which is also specifically poetic. The passage opens with the prophets
vision of the Lord enthroned, surrounded by seraphim who call to
one another Holy, holy, holy. Isaiah sees a kind of image of God by
metonymy, as the hem of his robe filled the temple (6:1). The vision
prompts Isaiah to cry out that he is a man of unclean lips, and I live
among a people of unclean lips (6:5). His desire to purify himself and
his people is answered by the seraphim, who touch to the prophets lips
miltons alternative passion 77
a burning coal from the Temple altar. The voice of the Lord then peti-
tions for an advocateWhom shall I send, and who will go for us?
(6:8)a call which Isaiah answers and for which he is supplied in turn
with a prophecy, in verse, of the destruction of the land and the dull-
ness of the peoples minds. The typological aptness of the calling of
Isaiah for Christian readers is clear enough, and makes the reference
highly suitable for Miltons poem on the nativity. Beyond that, though,
the prophetic allusion also carries meaning for Miltons investigation
in the ode of the possibility of poetry that does not violate the purity
and silence invoked in its first lines.
The infant finally sleeps in stanza XXVII. The sleeping Christ child
is another trope from the repertory of Christian depictions, a selection
which orients Miltons poem toward an emphasis on the living Jesus.
One of the symbols deployed in early Christian art was the lion that
could sleep with open eyes, according to Tinsley a suggestive way of
treating the two natures of Christ.21 Belting says that images of the
Christ child sleeping also referred to the passion, in that Jesus death
was understood to be, like sleep, only temporary. But what Milton does
in Lycidas and in Paradise Regained (by providing a passion that does
not involve death) differs slightly. The simultaneity of death and life
in Miltons view does not mean that both conditions are equally true
or real. Rather, death is only apparent, while life is revealed to be the
true condition of the Son.
Though present in the heart of the poem, Miltons representation of
the crucifixion in On the Morning of Christs Nativity does not pro-
vide a complete image or discussion of it. Distilled into four words
bitter cross, redeem and lossthe passion remains abstracted.
That Milton should see the passion forecasted in the nativity is appro-
priate from a Christian theological perspective, but atypical of con-
temporary nativity narratives. Herberts Christmas and Crashaws
A Hymne of the Nativity, sung by the Shepheards, for instance, do
not anticipate the passion. While Vaughns The Incarnation, and Pas-
sion speaks of Christs birth as an act of death, it does not represent
any events of the passion.
Rather, like Miltons Nativity Ode, Charles Fitzgeoffreys The
Blessed Birth-Day (1636) soon departs from the scene of the Nativity
to consider the theology of the incarnation:
21
Tinsley, 29.
78 chapter four
22
Charles Fitz-Geffry, The Blessed Birth-Day, Celebrated in some religious meditations on
the Angels Anthem, Luke 2:14 (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1636); reprint, The Poems of
the Rev. Charles Fitzgeoffrey, edited by Alexander Grosart ([Blackburn, England: C. E.
Simms,] 1881), pt. 1, page 3.
miltons alternative passion 79
23
Barker, 46.
24
Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols
in Seventeenth Century Poetry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 191.
25
Ross, 221.
80 chapter four
On the contrary, the Nativity Ode lays out the model that Milton
would follow throughout his poetry in which the Son is indeed at the
center. If he does not appear to be, this is due to Miltons ideas about
who the Son is, what he represents, and how he ought to be drawn
in poetic portraits. Not only does Milton prefer the image of the Son
as upright and obedientas on the pinnacle in Paradise Regainedhe
also insists on an image of the Son that conveys his subordination to
God the Father. The fact that there can be an image of the Son at all
corroborates, for Milton, his distinction from the Father. In De Doctrina
Christiana Milton uses the Sons visibility as proof that he does not
share Gods essence: Now if Christ had been of the same essence as
God, he could no more have been seen or heard than could the Father
himself (VI: 237). It is through the lens of this early depiction that
we should draw the criteria for reading Miltons subsequent poems on
the passion.
26
Philip Gallagher calls the response of critics to The Passion virtually unani-
mous on the issue of its failure. See Miltons The Passion: Inspired Mediocrity,
Milton Quarterly 11:2 (May 1977): 4450.
27
William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), I: 72.
miltons alternative passion 81
28
Northrop Frye, Literature as Context: Miltons Lycidas, in Miltons Lycidas: The
Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A. Patrides (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983),
208. Similarly, Charles Huttar claims that Miltons subject is no longer Christs Pas-
sion butin a far lesser sensehis own (241).
29
Huttar, 241.
30
Marshall Grossman, In Pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatic fit: Milton
on the Passion, in A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton, eds.
Mary A. Maleski and Russell Peck (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts
and Studies, 1989), 205.
82 chapter four
31
Grossman, 207.
miltons alternative passion 83
in his conception of human destiny and his poetry.32 Two other possi-
ble explanations have been offered. James Holly Hanford suggests that
the crucifixion was never congenial to Milton because he preferred
the model of Jesus as pastor to that of Jesus as savior, and Cleanth
Brooks and John Hardy argue that the passion deprives Milton of the
living Christ, leaving him only with an abstract, disembodied and
invisible divinity.33 Both claims are important, but they do not address
an essential question: if Milton is working with a fundamentally differ-
ent view of Jesus and the meaning of the passion, what are the terms
in which he approaches this subject matter? Is it not likely that frag-
mentation and abstraction, suspension and delay, would be amenable
poetic tools for conveying Miltons understanding of the theology of
the death of Christ? More recently, the investigation has turned to
Miltons beliefs about the atonement. John Rogers writes that
Miltons avoidance of the Crucifixion, a silence audible in nearly every
work of prose or verse that he devoted to a religious subject, is also a
problem whose origin rests in the ideologically consequential sphere of
seventeenth-century theological speculation. Not simply a failing of great
personal significance, Miltons inability to write about the Passion reveals
an instinctive literary sympathy for the Arminian and Socinian reaction
to Calvinisms overvaluation of the death of Christ . . . The poem on the
Crucifixion that Milton left unfinished at age twenty-one is just our first
indication of the seriousness with which he would consider some of the
centurys most progressive theologies.34
It is precisely the audible silences of the passion in each of his works
that I argue need to be examined in greater detail.
Absent from all of these critical assessments is the possibility that the
failure of The Passion operates as a literary device. The conclud-
ing prose note that declares the poem unfinished is read as autobiog-
raphy rather than poetry. If we read the note as part of the poem,
or as a supplement to the poem, a greater range of interpretations
becomes available. Only Philip Gallagher acknowledges that every
32
Denis Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker (New York: Dial Press, 1925), 149.
33
James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook (New York: F.S. Crofts, 1926), 114;
Cleanth Brooks and John Hardy, eds. Poems of Mr. John Milton (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1952). John Vias Miltons The Passion: A Successful Failure, Milton Quarterly
5:2 (May 1971) points to the view of Brooks and Hardy.
34
John Rogers, Delivering Redemption, in Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson
Agonistes, eds. Mark Kelley and Joseph Wittreich (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2002), 76.
84 chapter four
35
Gallagher, 44.
36
Similarly, Frederic Tromly makes a case for reading The Passion as one of
Miltons companion poems: Like the Nativity Ode and Elegy V, The Passion
resonates most fully when read as a companion poem. Though Milton apparently
planned it as a sequel to the Ode, it has a deeper relationship with a poem which
follows and rewrites it, Lycidas (283). Reading these three poems in any combi-
nationas a diptych or triptychhas the potential to highlight Miltons investiga-
tion of the forms of art appropriate to the incarnation and passion, as discussed
above. Miltons Preposterous Exaction: The Significance of The Passion, ELH
47 (1980): 276286.
37
William Shullenberger, Doctrine as Deep Structure in Miltons Early Poetry, in
A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton, 189190.
38
Shullenberger, 196, 197.
39
Shullenberger, 196.
40
Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, 1972).
miltons alternative passion 85
The title of the poem, The Passion, is the most direct reference to
the passion in Miltons poems. Given that the poem that follows is frag-
mentary, indirect, and to many readers unsatisfying, the stark clarity of
the title is worth noting. Taken as the works label, it marks a troubling
disjuncture between the poems announced subject and what it actu-
ally offers. If we do not assume, though, that Milton began by writing
The Passion on a blank page and, only 56 lines later aborting the
41
R. Paul Yoder, Miltons The Passion, Milton Studies 27 (1991), 12.
42
Yoder, 13.
86 chapter four
attempt as a failure, but rather consider the title to have a more subtle
function, we might take it (retrospectively, having finished reading the
poem) as an instruction to pay attention to the distance between title
and text. In this retrospective reading, the title also becomes the final
word of the poem, the passion then appearing just where we would
expect it, at the end of the narrative. But that too will be unsatisfying
to readers not willing to enter into the loop of the whole poem again,
to continue reading past the title and thus to see it not as either the
beginning of the narrative or its end, but rather a point in the middle
that exerts a powerful centripetal pull and yet cannot ever be pinned
down. This cyclical shape corresponds to Miltons view of the passion
as an ongoing event rather than a linear sequence with a final conclu-
sion.
In addition to the title, The Passion offers a set of instructions
for how it should be read, even before we reach the final note. The
request to regard the poem as a companion or follow up to the Nativ-
ity Ode that appears in the opening stanza has been well remarked.
Entering further into the poem, a pattern of images of omission and
insufficiency also reveals itself. This quality, too, has been commented
on by other readers of the poem, but I think more remains to be said
about this pattern not as a reflection of the mental condition of the
author, which has been the dominant pattern of its interpretation, but
as a set of directions according to which the poem operates.
One of these instructions is about what is missing. In the prepa-
ratory opening stanza, the speaker remarks that joy is ever on the
wing and is Soon swallowd up by darkness. These images sound
the opening notes of the insufficiency trope, but we should notice that
they establish that trope specifically by way of the idea of omission.
Joy exists, and we are informed where it may be located outside this
poem, and while it has here been swallowed up, it is nevertheless the
subject of these lines and thus has some kind of continuing existence.
At the end of the second stanza Milton characterizes Christs labors
in the passion as hard, too hard for human wight (14). This line
closes the stanza, prematurely concluding the narrative sequence that
has barely begun to unfold and yet will begin again in the stanza that
follows, and thus serves to conceal the subject it engages. These early
lines of the poem train us to view the passion as an event that can be
seen only as it recedes, only in its absence. The speaker likewise tells
us that His Godlike acts and his temptations fierce, / And former
miltons alternative passion 87
sufferings other-where are found (2425). These lines, like the first
lines of the poem, establish the existence of the material that is not
to be found here.
Despite the speakers inability or unwillingness to conjure an image
of the crucifixion for readers, he nevertheless stresses that he does
see such a vision. Having said that he cannot describe the scene, the
speaker nevertheless urges us to See, see the Chariot and those rush-
ing wheels (36). In the midst of this attempt to fashion an image the
speaker experiences a holy vision and confirms that Mine eye hath
found that sad Sepulchral rock (41, 44). What do we make of the fact
that he does see, but that his vision is marked as holy, and is off limits
to the reader? The visual is not forbidden here, it has not ceased to
exist. But it is categorized as sacred, and therefore the products that
might be created from it, in this case the poem that the speaker should
be writing, the grave inscription he might make, or the characters he
might produce to mourn, are impossible. They must be partial, trans-
lated into another media, and clearly set apart. The poem ends not
because Milton the author is incapable of continuing it, but because
the speakers vision cannot be translated out of the medium of holy
vision and into any media that might be fully legible to us. This ges-
ture may draw on the meditative tradition, but it differs crucially in
that it prevents, rather than inspires, a vision and its attendant devo-
tion on the part of the audience.
43
This line, describing a scene of writing, was changed in the 1673 edition of the
Poems, with latest substituted for latter. While not a major revision, this change
again shows a certain concentration of attention on lines that describe writing.
88 chapter four
44
The anointing suggested by the first two lines of this stanza may also refer, as
Bush suggests in the Variorum Commentary, to the episode in Matthew 26:7 in which
Christ anoints himself before Passover. See Douglas Bush and A. S. P. Woodhouse,
eds., A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1972).
45
Frederic Tromly has also noted the use of conditional verbs in these passages.
Bush provides a brief discussion of the practice of white printing on black pages,
especially in association with elegies, in the Variorum commentary (159).
miltons alternative passion 89
46
See also Randall Ingram, The Writing Poet: The Descent from Song in The
Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645), Milton Studies 24 (1996), 189.
90 chapter four
47
The Geneva Bible, a Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1969).
48
I have argued elsewhere that the lack of a full description of the crucifixion can
be explained as a typical instance of the Protestant ineffability topos. See The Pas-
sion in the Poems: Miltons Poetics of Omission and Supplement, Miltons Legacy, eds.
Charles Durham and Kristin Pruitt (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press,
2005).
miltons alternative passion 91
49
Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 23.
92 chapter four
50
Caroline Bynum, Christian Materiality: Lectures on European Christianity in
the Late Middle Ages, presented at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, May 7,
2007.
51
Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renais-
sance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
52
Levinson, 10.
miltons alternative passion 93
53
Barkan, 124.
54
A later example offers instructive parallels. Linda Nochlins The Body in Pieces
argues that the iconography of destruction and dismemberment of the French Revo-
lution introduced the fragment as an important element of modern art. Her claim
that the fragment stands for a deliberate destruction of the repressive past, which
had to be consciously obliterated before a new culture could be created, offers a way
to read the Reformation fragment as well. Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as
a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 8.
94 chapter four
55
William Sherman, On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and Early Print
Culture, in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies and the Legacy of Eisenstein, eds. Sabrina
A. Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2007), 4. James Dougal Fleming poses a similar question about the Nativity Ode:
above this complex text, what does Composd 1629 do? Onto what interpretive side
does it tend to push the poem? See Composing 1629, Miltons Legacy, eds. Charles
Durham and Kristin Pruitt (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005),
156. Kathleen Lynch also quotes Stephenie Yearwoods note that in The Temple, Love
(III) is not the final poem in The Church. The sequence ends, following the Finis
after Love (III) with a Gloria in italics. As Yearwood says, these italics mark words
to be spoken communally and out loud (identical to the use of italics in the Prayer
Books). See Lynch, The Temple: Three Parts Vied and Multiplied, Studies in English
Literature 29:1 (Winter 1989), 150. Here is another case in which paratext functions
poetically as well as giving an instruction to the reader.
56
Barbara Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1968), 213.
miltons alternative passion 95
But I favor Smiths second category, the surprise ending, one which
forces and rewards a readjustment of the readers expectations.57
Though the fact that The Passion remains incomplete is hardly a
surprise by the time we reach the final line, this view is more suitable
to its function, which I believe is to ask Miltons audience in 1645 to
read differently than they have been conditioned to do. It invites them
to put the passion under a new kind of scrutiny and interrupts the
new certainties that have been established for dealing with divine sub-
ject matter. A surprise ending, writes Smith, provides a perspective
point from which the reader can now appreciate a significant pattern,
principle, or motive not grasped before.58 Since the insufficiency topos
was readily grasped before the final sentence of the poem, it encour-
ages us to look for other possible patterns. It is also possible for surpris-
ing conclusions to fulfill expectations suppressed to some degree by
the body of the poem but nevertheless present.59
One type of closural failure that Smith identifies occurs when
the last allusions are to beginnings or to unstable events.60 We have
seen above how the title of The Passion may be not its beginning
but its center point, and Smiths remark allows us to consider whether
the last line does close the poem or if it, too, contributes to a more
circular or open sense. Are the events of the passion, particularly as
understood by Protestant culture, not precisely the kind of unstable
events that might generate such a structure? And are they not, from a
theological point of view, more a beginning than an ending? And if
they constantly recur, whether in individual believers faith or in the
destruction of death and therefore of time, would that condition not
be well expressed by an unfinished and perhaps circular poetic struc-
ture? More broadly, in conceptions of poetry and art that value the
natural or the illusion of naturalness while disdaining the artful, the
obviously conventional or artificial poems may conclude in unsatisfy-
ing ways purposefully to express these values.61
The fragment form is apt for a poem that considers redemption and
resurrection, particularly for Renaissance readers who might associate
poetic fragments with ancient ruins. As Levinson says, to conceive
the fragment as that particle which survives the ravages of time is,
57
Smith, 213.
58
Smith, 213.
59
Smith, 217.
60
Smith, 210.
61
Smith, 238.
96 chapter four
62
Levinson, 30.
63
John Via notes this as well; see page 36.
miltons alternative passion 97
author left it unfinisht. Among the many poetic ends that might
be served by an unfinished poem, we must include, for Milton, the
way that its fragmentary nature echoes the as-yet-incomplete passion
and atonement, in the sense that the contract of the crucifixion is
complete only with the final judgment. But if Milton rejects the theo-
ries of atonement current in seventeenth-century religious thought, we
have even more reason to suspect that the noteand the form of the
poemconveys some of this resistance.
64
Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 11.
65
Smith, 258.
98 chapter four
Though Miltons poem does not provide the same level of satisfaction
that the picture has been completed in the minds eye of the speaker, if
we were to take Smiths instruction that, upon close examination, its
all there, we would find in the poem many of the features of Miltons
idea of the passion that return in later texts on the subject as well.
CHAPTER FIVE
One of the most important places to look for the continuation of the
Miltonic passion begun by The Passion is in his early elegies, espe-
cially Lycidas. We need to understand how Milton views death if
we hope to unravel his handling of the death of Jesus. There are of
course natural connections between elegies and passion poems:
Renaissance poems on the Passion embody many of the characteristic
features of funeral poetry. It might be said that they are constructed by
means of the same rhetorical formulae. However, it would be just as true
to say that they provide a kind of archetype, and that Christian elegies
are in some measure adaptations of this archetype . . . Because Christ is
the archetype and the good Christian only an imitation, Christ fulfills
in his historical life ideals which Christians can only approach distantly.
This results in a curious but typical feature of poems on the Passion.
Statements which are metaphorical in the conventional elegy become
literal truths when applied to Christ.1
In his early poems, Milton blurs the distinction between the conven-
tional features of elegy which imitate the actions and characteristics of
Christ, and the art of writing about the passion itself. Having seem-
ingly turned away from the latter, Milton brings it fully to life in his
performance of the former. In his early elegies, Milton develops the
representational strategies that became necessary after the Reforma-
tion to replace the medieval cult of death and its commemoration.
Milton attempts, in the short poems of the 1630s and 1640s, to remove
death from elegy, to perform an act of textual iconoclasm that shatters
the grave, and to develop a poetics of supplement, substitution, and
replacement. Like The Passion, Lycidas and the other short ele-
gies form an integral part of the alternative Miltonic passion.
1
O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance
Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962),
155.
100 chapter five
For Milton the challenge was to re-imagine the center of the Chris-
tian narrative, the passion, to reclaim it from what he saw as the artis-
tic and doctrinal errors of Catholicism. Milton rarely addresses the
crucifixion directly, but in his early portrayals of other deaths we find
Miltons poetics of the passion in development. The most unlawful
kind of image, from the iconoclast and Puritan perspective, was a
portrayal of God the Father, of whom representations are forbidden.
Depictions of the Son, however, were less universally subject to censure
and iconoclasm, and Miltons early texts on the passion provide him
with an opportunity to examine the problem of representation and its
limits, and specifically the challenge of the indescribable subject.
Milton takes up on the page what the iconoclasts of the 1540s
began in English churches. The commemoration of the dead was a
focal point of late medieval Catholicism, both liturgically and materi-
ally, and became a recurring target for iconoclasts. The desire to be
remembered and prayed for led to the creation not just of clerical
functions, like that of the chantry priest whose main responsibility was
to pray for the soul of his patron, but also of a wealth of material
objects marked with the names of the dead.2 Best of all, explains
Eamon Duffy, was the identification of ones own burial with the
mystical burial of Christs body in the Holy Week liturgy through the
placement of ones tomb within the church in such a way that it would
be identified visually with images and recreations of Christs tomb.3
The aim of a memorial in pre-Reformation England was to create a
close association with the death and burial of Jesus and with the belief
in an assurance of eternal life that was its consequence. The Reforma-
tion discomfort with these practices necessitated not just a rejection
of worship whose focus shifts away from the death of Christ to death
in general, but even further a rejection of death as the central mode
through which to experience Jesus.
As Pamela Sheingorn has shown, one tomb in particular was a
locus of iconoclastic activity. The Easter Sepulchre, which was in some
places a permanent element of the church furnishings and in oth-
2
Some medieval statues of saints contained their heads or other body parts, in
essence becoming tombs. Such objects illustrate how icons might be thought of in
close connection with the dead, and how their veneration might be seen as bordering
on a dangerous worship of the dead. See Margaret Aston, Englands Iconoclasts (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988).
3
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400c.
1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 331.
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 101
4
Pamela Sheingorn, No Sepulchre on Good Friday: The Impact of the Refor-
mation on the Easter Rites in England, in Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama, ed. Clifford
Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publica-
tions, 1988), 149.
5
I am not aware of any thorough study of the destruction of funeral monuments
specifically, though they are frequently mentioned in general studies of iconoclasm.
See, for example, Aston 15, 73, 78, 83.
6
The iconoclasm of death became especially urgent in the aftermath of Charles Is
execution, as his body became a source of relics and was believed to have the power to
heal (see Alex Garganigo, Mourning the Headless Body Politic: The Regicide Elegies
and Marvells Horatian Ode, Exemplaria 15:2 (Fall 2003): 509550).
7
See John Stow, The Survey of London (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1912) for
examples: I:131, 135, 195, 197, 212, 220, 229, 236, 243, 253, 257, 26061, 269, 274,
281, 284, 294, 322, 333; II: 56, 33, 75 (cited in Aston, 315 n. 75).
102 chapter five
8
Katharine Esdaile, English Church Monuments 15101840 (London: B. T. Batsford,
1946), 134.
9
Mary Catherine Wilheit, Virtuous Wives and Loving Mothers: Early Modern
English Womens Epitaphs, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 27:1 (2001): 108, n. 3.
10
Aston, 77.
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 103
11
The Author to the Reader (unsigned, unpaginated pages preceding Sig. A1).
John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London: W. J. Johnson, 1631; reprint, The
English Experience, no. 971. Amsterdam: Walter J. Johnson, Inc., 1979).
12
The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. William Turnball (Lon-
don: John Russell Smith, 1856), 335.
104 chapter five
13
Aston, 64.
14
Aston, 65.
15
Malcolm Norris cites an example of a tomb brass of the family of John Garneys,
which was closely copied in the early seventeenth century for Nicholas Garneys and
family, with the significant substitution of an achievement of arms for a crucifix
above the figures; Monumental Brasses (London: Phillips & Page, 1977), 103.
16
Donnes poem to Anne Drury is engraved on her monument at Hawstead, for
example; see Esdaile, 132.
17
Esdaile, 130.
18
Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London:
Croom Helm, 1984), 135. Cedric Brown writes that this custom is alluded to in
Lycidas; see Mending and Bending the Occasional Text: Collegiate Elegies and
the Case of Lycidas, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, edited by
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 105
Brown and Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997), 182. The custom is
also alluded to in Crashaws Elegy on the death of the Lady Parker: Whilst others
strive to hang a mounrfull verse, / Ile pinne my saddest thoughts upon thy hearse
(2526); see The Poems English Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1957).
19
Tottels Miscellany, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1965), I:113.
20
In Obitum Procancellarii Medici, trans. Merritt Hughes, John Milton: Complete
Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes (New York: Odysssey Press, 1957).
106 chapter five
21
See John Rogers, Delivering Redemption in Samson Agonistes in Altering Eyes:
New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes, eds. Mark Kelley and Joseph Wittreich (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2002).
22
Not only does Milton work with a different set of representations of death than
do his contemporaries, but he is also far more prone to mix his poems on death with
his representations of the passion than are other 17th century poets, such as Robert
Herrick.
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 107
places of elegy. At the same time, Milton makes room in the poem for
a parallel to emerge between this death and the death of Jesus. As will
happen in The Passion as well, in this poem the poem veers away
from a vision of the tomb. The tomb image in both poems evokes
the horror and incomprehensibility of death, but when placed in the
context of the passion the tomb also signals the potential for idolatrous
error that must be skirted by the speaker and his readers.
The end of On the Death of a Fair Infant introduces language
more appropriate to the context of the passion than to that of ordi-
nary human mourning:
But oh! why didst thou not stay here below
To bless us with thy heavn-lovd innocence,
To slake his wrath whom sin hath made our foe
To turn Swift-rushing black perdition hence,
Or drive away the slaughtering pestilence,
To stand twixt us and our deserved smart?
But thou canst best perform that office where thou art.
Then thou the mother of so sweet a child
Her false imagind loss cease to lament,
And wisely learn to curb thy sorrows wild;
Think what a present thou to God hast sent,
And render him with patience what he lent;
This if thou do, he will an offspring give
That till the worlds last end shall make thy name to live. (6477)
In the first passage, the poems tenth stanza, a substitution of Jesus
for the infant could easily be imagined. As Hugh Maclean points out,
the childs intercessory role requires more than what Milton demands
of other figures in his elegies, a part, which could be adequately
sustained, for a poet of Miltons persuasion, only by the God-man
Christ.23 Maclean suggests that something is missing from the poem:
23
Hugh Maclean, Miltons Fair Infant, ELH 24:4 (Winter 1957), 299. Jackson
Cope identifies not only the parallels between Miltons description of the fair infant
and the language that he uses for Christ in Book Three of Paradise Lost, but also a
structural pattern that is important for understanding Miltons pattern of omission
and supplement. In the elegy, Cope writes, If Christ as redeemer has been gradu-
ally rising toward the surface of the poem through the Satanic destruction of the
infant, through the instrumentality of his Apollonian prefiguration, and finally seems
to appear in his own person, he is immediately submerged again; see Fortunate Falls
as Form in Miltons Fair Infant, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 63 (1964),
66364. This pattern of absence, presence, and absence is one instance of Miltons
set of techniques for manipulating the appearance and disappearance of the passion
108 chapter five
in his works. It is an important instance, in that this pattern recreates the shape of
the passion narrative itself: the messiah is long awaited, his absence felt in the human
experience as a defining characteristic; he then appears and intervenes in human his-
tory, but only to disappear again. John Shawcross makes a similar claim and points
out that the image of a nectard head appears in Lycidas as well, nectar being
associated with Christian salvation in Rev. 22:12 and throughout Miltons works. See
Shawcross, Miltons Nectar, English Miscellany 16 (1965).
24
Maclean, 299.
25
William Riley Parker provides details of the other elegies on Paulet (Milton and
the Marchioness of Winchester, Modern Language Review 44 (1949), 548 n. 6).
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 109
I am almost a stone,
And ere I can ask more of her, shes gone!
Alas, I am all marble! write the rest
Thou wouldst have written, Fame, upon my breast:
It is a large fair table, and a true,
And the disposure will be something new,
When I, who would the poet have become,
At least may bear the inscription to her tomb. (1017)26
Going even beyond this, Miltons elegy on the Marchioness of Win-
chester is, outside of The Passion, his most direct consideration of
poetry as a substitution for funerary monuments. It is called An Epi-
taph and presents itself as an inscription for the rich marble that
inters the Marchioness (1). Jane Paulet becomes a tomb herself in the
course of Miltons description. Having died either in childbirth or just
prior to delivery, her
hapless Babe before his birth
Had burial, yet not laid in earth,
And the languisht Mothers Womb
Was not long a living Tomb. (3134)
Here again, by way of the circumstances of his subjects death, Milton
is able to place in the center of his poem a missing body, an empty
tomb. Milton may have even altered the sequence of events behind
the poem to create this image, as a contemporary report claims that
the child was delivered stillborn before Winchester died.27 His poem,
acting as the inscription for the monument that houses this living
Tomb, thus takes the place of that loss and staunches any tendency
toward idolizing the Babe, the Mothers Womb, the living Tomb.28
26
Ben Jonson, An Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet, Marchioness of Winton, Ben
Jonson, eds. C. H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947),
vol. III.
27
Parker quotes a letter written by Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham the day
after Paulets death in Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), vol. II, page
767.
28
The tomb of Catharine Thomason, the subject of Miltons Sonnet XIV, is also
characterized by emptiness: Thy Works and Alms and all thy good Endeavor / Stayd
not behind, nor in the grave were trod (lines 56). This is the second instance, after
On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough, of the rhyme pair womb-tomb.
The elegy Of the ladie wentworthes death in Tottels Miscellany, provides another
instance of this pair: Wherein with child delivering of her wombe, / Thuntimely
birth hath brought them both in tombe (1011).
110 chapter five
29
A summary of the critical record on this point is provided in A Variorum Com-
mentary on the Poems of John Milton, eds. Douglas Bush and A. S. P. Woodhouse (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1972), vol. II.
30
Variorum Commentary, vol. II, part I page 192.
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 111
31
Hugh Maclean writes, for instance, that it is clear that in a literal sense, the Fair
Infant is primarily an occasional poem, celebrating, in accordance with the conven-
tions of a tradition, a relatively unimportant event in terms designed to enhance and
magnify the significance of that occasion (297).
112 chapter five
32
Brian Duppa, et al. Jonsonus Virbius, or, The Memorie of Ben. Johnson Revived (Lon-
don: Henry Seile, 1638).
33
Justa Edovardo King: A Facsimile Edition of the Memorial Volume in which Miltons Lyci-
das First Appeared, ed. Edward LeComte (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1978), iii.
See also J. B. Leishman, Miltons Minor Poems (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 249.
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 113
with larger theological questions about eternal life and how it isor
may not bemade possible ironically through death. Read this way,
No Death! is a celebration, an opening note signaling the same sen-
timent as Miltons Weep no more, wofull shepherds, weep no more; /
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead (165166). This claim against
death, which the poems relocate from the death of Jesus to the death
of Edward King, is the first of many instances in the memorial poems
that liken King to Christ. This introductory note, like Miltons clos-
ing promise, opens the possibility of reading the volume as a passion
sequence.
In addition to the religious logic that is applied to explain Kings
death as being not really a death, the memorial poems make even
more explicit connections between King and Jesus, including the
description of King as Christ-like.34 Edward King was, in the words
of the opening poem, Free from all dregs of earth, that youd have
thought / His body were assumd, and did disguise / Some one of the
celestiall Hierarchies (1618). These lines are reminiscent of Miltons
description in The Passion of Jesus concentrated into a Poor fleshly
Tabernacle, on which Miltons speaker comments, O what a Mask
was there, what a disguise! (lines 16 and 18). J. Beaumonts poem
claims that Kings death was the result of his being summoned by
heaven to Some special business which did call / For present counsel
(114115). In another poem the author describes the drowned man
being crownd / A King in heaven, an image certainly justified by
the play on Edward Kings name, but nevertheless one that makes a
bold claim about the transformative power of this death (Whiles Phe-
bus shines 2526). The same author asserts Kings saintliness, thy
life and death being without taint, which according to the Protestant
view of original sin is impossible even for the elect; it is a quality that
belongs only to Christ (27).
In addition to the connection suggested between King and Jesus,
we find in the volume of memorial poems another important feature
of early modern writing on the passion. The poems in Justa Edouardo
express a frustration, even an inability, to depict the death that is
at their center. One of the elegies claims Thy death makes Poets
34
For some readers the comparison was too pronounced: true temerity comes
with W. Mores likening of Kings behavior in the storm to Jesus: a seventeenth-
century reader crossed out the offending lines and wrote Blasphemy in the margin
(Le Comte, v).
114 chapter five
(Whiles Phebus shines 9), but others lament their inability to write
in the face of Kings death. Samson Briggs, approaching the typol-
ogy between the Flood and the passion, warns against completing the
image: But back my Muse, from hence (38). A quarter of the way
through, the first poem in the collection breaks, its attempt to describe
King interrupted by a digression about the difficulty of the subject:
Hebut his flight is past my reach, and I
May wrong his worth with too much pietie:
I will not lessen then each single part
Of goodnesse, by commending; (for the art
Of several pens would soon be at a losse). (3841)
Both the sentimentthat the death and the life that it ended escape
descriptionand the techniques of digression, fragmentation, and par-
enthetical meta-textual commentary are similar to Miltons approach,
particularly in The Passion. J. Clevelands contribution protests
I am no Poet here; my pennes the spout
Where the rain-water of my eyes run out
In pitie of that name, whose fate we see
Thus copid out in griefs Hydrographie. (58)
These lines share with Miltons The Passion one of its most power-
ful images of composition shaped by the subject: The leaves should
all be black whereon I write, / And letters where my tears have wash,
a wannish white (3435).
W. Halls poem echoes the sentiment that Poetick measures have
not learnd to bound / Unruly sorrows and suggests that silence is
more appropriate to deepest griefs (78, 10). He goes on to make an
important connection between the nature of the elegy that is possible
in Kings case and one of the aspects of Kings death that proves most
troubling to the memorial writers, the lack of a grave.35 Drowned at
sea, his body not recovered, King could not be buried. And lest thy
35
Cedric Brown notices a similar impulse in Abraham Cowleys elegy for Anne
Whitfield: The aim is to make a monument in the heart: Thus in our hearts weel
bury her, and there / Weel write, Here lyes Whitfield the chast, and faire. See
Mending and Bending the Occasional Text: Collegiate Elegies and the Case of
Lycidas, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, eds. Brown and Arthur
Marotti (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997), 185. As we see in this example, other
elegies make the verse into the tomb and substitute the poetic epitaph for the funeral
monument. Miltons innovation is to apply this convention to the death and memo-
rialization of Christ.
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 115
difficulties of writing this subject, the author, Henry King (the drowned
mans brother), considers his own mortality in a surprising way.
Describing himself as poore, senselesse, dead, alone, he resolves to
Sit and expect my resurrection,
To follow him; two sorrows sure will do,
That he is dead, that I am not dead too.
Yet dead Im once already: for in him
I lost my best life . . . (6166)
It is to be expected that an elegy will examine the speakers life and the
inevitability of his eventual death, and the touching sentiment of death
in life that accompanies bereavement seems right in a brothers elegy.
Thomas Martin, commenting on Miltons Sonnet XIV (On the Reli-
gious Memory of Mrs. Catharine Thomason), notes that the idea
of life as death and death as life is a popular Christian paradox. . . .
life, since the Fall is a death, death, since the advent of a Savior, is
the door to life eternal.36 What allows this passage to work simulta-
neously on the plane of passion poetry, however, is its interest in the
terms of the death-resurrection contract that it suggests. The death of
Edward King, the drowned man, is also the death of Henry King, but
more than that, it is his resurrection. That is precisely the Christian
understanding of the atonement, that Jesus must die a physical death
to allow the death of each believer to have a meaning beyond death.
In other words we might say that through the passion, the very nature
of death is transformed. While it may be quite natural to refer to this
doctrine in an elegy, Henry Kings poem does more than that. It offers
Edward King as a Christ figure. Why should that be? What is it about
the narrative of Christs death as substitution that calls for repeated
poetic representations, so many of which are at the same time frag-
mentary or otherwise occluded renderings of this event? Death in life,
and life in death, is precisely the condition or status that makes Jesus
unique and sacred: his death (especially for Milton, who conceives
Christs sacrifice as voluntary in Paradise Lost) is undertaken prior to his
earthly life, and even when he is dead he continues to live as he did
before the incarnation.
Milton, like his fellow poets, used elegy as an opportunity for think-
ing about death, and beyond that for grappling with the troubling
theology of death that the theory of the atonement imposed on Prot-
36
Thomas Martin, Miltons Sonnet 14, Explicator 52:3 (Spring 1994), 148.
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 117
estant culture. In its visual and textual arts, Protestant culture had
to struggle not only with the theological ramifications of this central
Christian doctrine, but also with the narrowed representational scope
of a specifically reformed view of these events. In the absence of the
spectacle and catharsis of Catholic imagery of the passion, Milton and
his contemporaries turned to a new set of images and motifs, among
them the very failure of representation itself. The poems in Justa
Edouardo King Naufrago provided an opportunity for Milton to begin his
monumental work on the passion, which unfolds poem by poem across
his career. For readers of the Miltonic passion, the memorial collection
offers a chance to see in the works of Miltons close contemporaries
many of the materials from which it would be constructed.
37
For an overview of critical comments on the scriptural reference, see Matthew
Prineas, Yet once, it is a little while: Recovering the Book of Haggai in Lycidas,
Milton Quarterly 33:4 (1999): 114123. See also Joseph Wittreich, Milton and the Line of
Vision (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975): 117123.
38
One of the comparisons made in Hebrews is interesting in light of Miltons
repeated concern with idolatry and his references specifically to the idolatry of the
Israelites at Sinai. Hebrews 3:1219 explicitly compares the readers of the letter who
would fall back into their original ritual practices with those who heard and yet were
rebellious against Moses revelation, rewriting the sin of the Israelites not as a failure
to accept and adhere to the Law, but as that very adherence!
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 119
Lycidas that Hebrews proffers for its audience: the ultimate priest,
and therefore the only priest, is Jesus. As the letter explains, the true
priesthood is not one of ritual, but can only be accomplished with the
particular sacrifice of the crucifixion. Unlike the other high priests,
it claims, he has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his
own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once for all
when he offered himself (7:27). Miltons complaint against the clergy,
in the context of the Laudian controversies of the 1630s that sought
to return many traditional images and rituals to the English church,
is a charge of idolatry.
Did Milton perceive a parallel between the situation of those ancient
Hebrews who had abandoned their ritual observance and remained
uncertain, anxious and always on the point of returning to a religious
practice that had been deemed idolatrous, and his English contempo-
raries who might have felt a similar unrootedness as waves of reform
swept over them? The letter to the Hebrews heralds a new covenant
that abrogates ceremonial practice; Miltons poem echoes and reiter-
ates that message, and goes beyond the premise of the New Testa-
ment to suggest the establishment of yet another covenant that no
longer depends on the image of Christs suffering and death. Miltons
reference to contemporary ecclesiastical controversy builds into the
heart of the poem another articulation, again one that lies at a slight
remove from the text of the poem by way of an elaborate allusion, of
the theory of atonement. Milton begins by displacing the language of
blood, suffering and sacrifice from the text of his poem, while he uses
the letter to the Hebrews to call them to mind, and then removes the
language of death.
The image that follows Miltons invocation of Yet once more is
one of iconoclasm. The speaker authorizes his poem through the act
of breaking, crushing and destroying the myrtles and the ivies; these
are certainly representative of the young poet seizing the poetic laure-
ate, but given the instruction of the head note I think it is fair to read
the gesture within the context of religious iconoclasm as well.39 What
39
Marlin Blaine argues that, for Milton, the bookand its preservation of the
authoris also subject to iconoclastic anxiety: Milton repeatedly attempts to sub-
ordinate the iconicity of the physical book to the readers internally transforming
experience of the texts contained within it, yet he simultaneously exploits that very
iconicity to assert the timeless achievement of great poets such as Shakespeare and
himself. Miltons first printed English poem, An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke
Poet, W. Shakespeare, with its variation on the monument topos, registers just such
120 chapter five
conflicting attitudes toward the printed text and its monumentality, an ambivalence
which establishes a paradigm for his presentation of his own Poems in 1645. See
Milton and the Monument Topos: On Shakespeare, Ad Joannem Rousium, and
Poems (1645), The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99:2 (April 2000), 216.
40
See Joseph Wittreich, Miltons Destined Urn: The Art of Lycidas, PMLA 84:1
( January 1969): 6070.
41
Cedric Brown notes that these lines were much expanded in the Trinity Manu-
script (193).
rewriting the protestant elegy in miltons early poems 121
42
Wittreich has argued (quoting Michael Lloyd) that the poems in Justa Edouardo
seem to be part of a collaborative effort, to participate in a flexible comprehensive
design, with Lycidas having unique status in the volume: like the other poems, it par-
ticipates in an echoing process; but coming last in the volume it organizes not only
its own themes but those of the book as a whole. Equally important for Wittreich,
Lycidas dares to do what these other poems recoil from; see Milton and the Line of
Vision, 115.
122 chapter five
1
Stanley Fishs reading of Areopagitica points out how, in Miltons conception, even
the text of the Bible is an outward form subject to idolatry. See How Milton Works
(Cambridge: Belknap, 2001), 20506. Fishs claim that for Milton, truth will be reas-
sembled in forms that are necessarily disunified, insufficient, and incomplete, is instruc-
tive for the readings of Miltons texts on the passion below (213).
124 chapter six
2
See John Steadman, Heroic Virtue and the Divine Image in Paradise Lost, Jour-
nal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22:12 (1959): 88105. Steadman notes that
The scope of Paradise Lost enables Milton not merely to contrast the earthly man
and the heavenly man in Adam and Christ, but also to portray three phases of the
divine image in Adam himselfits original splendor, its obscuration through sin, and
its gradual restoration through spiritual regeneration (99).
3
Roland Frye, Miltons Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 152153.
4
Frye, 150.
130 chapter six
The passion drives Paradise Lost, but it does so more by its absence than
by its presence. The poem represents a choice to represent the fall
that is also a choice not to represent the crucifixion, perhaps a likelier
subject for a Christian poet with the ambition to write an epic that is
universal in its scope. Yet, characteristically, its subject is yoked with
that of the passion. The introduction of the poem shows how, as Jason
Rosenblatt writes, Milton finds room, in the long periodic sentence
that opens the poem, to amass coordinates to Adams Fall and the sec-
ond Adams redemption.5 Accordingly, the crucifixion flickers in and
out of focus in Paradise Lost. Despite the questions that can be raised
about where the passion might lie in Miltons longest poem, it is in
fact the work in Miltons canon that refers explicitly to the crucifixion
the most thoroughly: In the eight-line reference to the crucifixion in
Michaels narrative in Paradise Lost XII the word cross is used twice
(413, 415); the only other line of poetry in which Milton used the word
was in the early Nativity ode (152).6 When it appears, however, it does
so in an oblique manner, often as the projection of a future event.
As early as the Argument, Milton points to the incarnation, death,
resurrection, and ascension of the Seed of the Woman foretold to
Adam and Eve. The items included in this list of episodes make up
5
Jason Rosenblatt, Audacious Neighborhood: Idolatry in Paradise Lost, Book I,
Philological Quarterly 54:3 (Summer 1975), 553.
6
See also Cherrell Guilfoyle, If Shape It Might Be Calld That Shape Had
None: Aspects of Death in Milton, Milton Studies 13 (1979), 56 n. 39.
132 chapter six
7
See Neil Graves, Typological Aporias in Paradise Lost, Modern Philology 104:2
(November 2006): 173201.
the art of omission and supplement in PARADISE LOST 133
440); he is even fearful that another fallen angel may rise to the chal-
lenge, displacing him.
The scene of Christs voluntary substitution for man in Book III
echoes this passage in many respects:
Die he or justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Say heavnly Powers, where shall we find such love,
Which of ye will be mortal to redeem
Mans mortal crime, and just th unjust to save,
Dwells in all heaven charity so dear? (III: 210216)
The Sons acceptance of this challenge further distinguishes the two
models:
Behold me then, me for him, life for life
I offer, on me let thine anger fall;
Account me man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleased, on me let Death wreck all his rage;
Under his gloomy power I shall not long
Lie vanquished; thou hast givn me to possess
Life in myself forever, by thee I live,
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due
All that of me can die, yet that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul
Forever with corruption there to dwell;
But I shall rise victorious, and subdue
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil;
Death his deaths wound shall then receive. (III: 237252)
If these two portraits offer conflicting models of Sonship, where exactly
do the differences lie? First, the Son is willing while Satan is politic.
These differences cast into the background the similarities in Miltons
two protagonists (their call to deliverance, ability to perform a kind of
self contraction, and even the ringing praise and worship of the angels
that attend them both) and bring forward the qualities of the Son that
Milton wants to underscore in his portrait. The Son offers himself, and
asks to become human,8 freely putting off his divinity. Just as crucially,
8
Another reading of this line is presented in R. A. Shoaf s Our Names are
Debts: Messiahs Account of Himself in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario di
Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992).
134 chapter six
9
E. L. Marilla, Milton on the Crucifixion, Etudes Anglaises 22 (1969), 9.
the art of omission and supplement in PARADISE LOST 135
10
Richard Ide, On the Begetting of the Son in Paradise Lost, SEL 24 (1984),
141.
11
Ide, 147148.
136 chapter six
12
Stella Revard, The Renaissance Michael and the Son of God, in Milton and the
Art of Sacred Song, ed. J. Max Patrick and Roger H. Sundell (Madison: The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 124.
13
Revard, 133.
14
William Hunter, Bright Essence: Studies in Miltons Theology (Salt Lake City: Univer-
sity of Utah Press, 1971), 126.
the art of omission and supplement in PARADISE LOST 137
destruction not just of Death but of the grave as well. This addition
is consistent with Miltons tendency in all of his texts on the passion
to underscore the heroic, voluntary and philosophical Christ over the
suffering, dying and buried Christ, and to insist that the storys conclu-
sion be resurrection, not burial.
In Book XI, at the moment that God accepts the repentant prayers
of Adam and Eve, Christ signals to the bright minister to sound
the heavenly trumpet also heard on the occasion of the giving of the
law. This moment, more than the Sons submission to death for
the sins of mankind (reiterated just prior to this scene and rewritten
by it), constitutes the three key moments of the Miltonic passion. The
first aspect is the revelation of Gods visibility to human sight; Milton
conflates the episodes from the Hebrew Bible in which God becomes
perceptible with the incarnation of the Son and Adam and Eves pre-
lapsarian interaction with the Father and Son. The second element of
Miltons passion narrative is that it is always projected forward to the
end of time, a period of restoration and perfection. The events of the
human mission, trial and death of Jesus, which occupy the space in
between these poles, are not entirely omitted but are set in their proper
place, their true meaning brought forward, by being located between
the other two moments.
In Book XI Milton turns to another characteristic device of the
alternative passion. The use of typology in Miltons poetryincluding
its value for conveying ideas about the meaning of the Sonhas been
well documented. The last scenes of Paradise Lost bring to the surface
a series of figures traditionally read as patterns for Jesus, including
Abel, Enoch, and Noah. Milton builds up this set of exceptional fig-
ures, those whose obedience stands out the more brightly against their
corrupt settings, toward a portrait of the Son.15 Adam recognizes the
nature, if not the identity, of the patterns fulfillment:
Far less I now lament for one whole world
Of wicked sons destroyed, than I rejoice
For one man found so perfect and so just,
That God vouchsafes to raise another world
From him, and all his anger to forget. (874878)
15
See also C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon,
1966), 125128.
138 chapter six
The qualities of patience, faith, and silent obedience that these fig-
ures embody reach perfection in Christ. Milton marshals them as a
mosaic of approaches to understanding these qualities in the Son and
by doing so points to those elements of the passion narrative that he
consistently prefers.
The most explicit passion scenes in Paradise Lost, in Book XII, typify
many principles of Miltons alternative renderings. The scenes are
indeed introduced through a rubric of correction. Adam understands
the prophecy of the Seed of Eve who will bruise the Serpent, and
demands of Michael to say where and when / Their fight, what
stroke shall bruise the Victors heel, a vision of the passion as a strug-
gle that demands the physical suffering of the adversary and the vic-
tor (384385). The scene Adam conjures requires careful emendation.
Michael instructs him to
Dream not of their fight,
As of a duel, or the local wounds
Of head or heel: not therefore joins the Son
Manhood to Godhead, with more strength to foil
Thy enemy; nor so is overcome
Satan . . .
. . . nor can this be,
But by fulfilling that which thou didst want,
Obedience to the law of God, imposed
On penalty of death, and suffering death,
The penalty to thy transgression due,
And due to theirs which out of thine will grow:
So only can high justice rest apaid.
. . . thy punishment
He shall endure by coming in the flesh
To a reproachful life and cursed death,
Proclaiming life to all who shall believe
In his redemption, and that his obedience
Imputed becomes theirs by faith, his merits
To save them, not their own, though legal works.
For this he shall live hated, be blasphemed,
Seized on by force, judged, and to death condemned
A shameful and accursed, nailed to the Cross
By his own nation, slain for bringing life;
But to the Cross he nails thy enemies,
The law that is against thee, and the sins
Of all mankind, with him there crucified,
Never to hurt them more who rightly trust
In this his satisfaction; so he dies,
But soon revives, Death over him no power
Shall long usurp . . . (XII: 386421)
the art of omission and supplement in PARADISE LOST 139
to be drawn from this scene is that for Milton the story of the fall and
its fulfillment in the passion is the whole story, always present though
usually not directly. It is artistic mediation, rather than a priestly one,
that Milton sets out to understand in his poems. The success of the
system of mediation may be seen in Adams remark that now first I
find / Mine eyes true opning (274275).
After the fall, Adam and Eve are both diminished in their abil-
ity to perceive and interact with the divine, though they are granted
the experience of foreseeing all of human history. The reader knows
from the first lines of Book XI that their prayers have been accepted
and, through the Sons intercession, have won them the Fathers mercy.
Adam senses this state of grace (Methought I saw him placable and
mild, / Bending his ear [XI: 151152]), but it is worth noticing that
he no longer enjoys direct confirmation through exchange with God.
Even as Michael descends to expel the pair and grant Adam his view
of future events, Adams ability to perceive the angel is clouded and
dimmed, and Michael appears to him not in his fullness but as man /
Clad to meet man (XI: 239240). When Adam learns of their expul-
sion from paradise he specifically laments
that departing hence,
As from his face I shall be hid, deprived
His blessed countnance; here I could frequent,
With worship, place by place where he vouchsafed
Presence Divine, and to my sons relate:
On this mount he appeared, under this tree
Stood visible, among these pines his voice
I heard, here with him at this fountain talked: (XI: 315322)
It is curious that we learn the degree to which God had been physi-
cally present and visible to Adam only after it has been lost. Perhaps
this suggests that such unobstructed visibility can only be described
in human terms by its absence. It could not be dramatized in the
earlier books of the poem, when it presumably occurred, but in nega-
tive terms that cannot fully capture what it meant to see God. Adam
continues with a suggestion that establishes the now fleeting presence
of God to human sight and raises the prospect of a kind of idolatry:
So many grateful altars I would rear
Of grassy turf, and pile up every stone
Of luster from the brook, in memory,
Of monument to ages, and thereon
Offer sweet-smelling gums and fruits and flowrs:
the art of omission and supplement in PARADISE LOST 143
Creator was usually shown with the typical physiognomy and figure of
the young Christ-Logos, and only rarely as the Father. It was only in the
fourteenth century that the Creator was figured by an old man with a
crown.16
This choice draws the Son into the center of the poem, making the
stories of creation and original sin in effect very early episodes of
the gospels. By rendering these events Christological, Milton further
removes the crucifixion from the center of the passion, displacing it
with episodes that display the Sons divinity, eternity, and mercy rather
than his human suffering. The Christian reading of the passion always
related it directly to the Fall, but Milton goes further and insists that
his readers encounter the Son not secondary to the Fall, but prior to
it, and that they experience atonement as an ongoing state of Gods
relation to man rather than an event accomplished by Christs death
on the cross.
Something similar happens with the judgment of Adam and Eve,
which in Miltons epic is carried out by the Son. As Frye points out,
Miltons decision to depict the Son as judge deviates from written tra-
dition. This is another example of Milton perhaps turning rather to
the visual record, where such a substitution was common. Miltons
staging of the scene had long been made familiar by the visual arts,
Frye notes.17 He continues,
The means Milton took for the epic enhancement of the Sons role in
Paradise Lostsole victor over the rebel angels, creator of the universe,
friend and judge of Adam and Evehave been widely noted among
critics, and students of the hexameral and exegetical traditions have clas-
sified Miltons treatments on these counts either as unique or extremely
rare. When judged against the background of art, however, Milton is
seen within a continuum which embraced many representations parallel
to his own . . . But Milton would not have adopted these conceptions of
the role of the Son simply because of their ancient and once widespread
employment in art any more than he accepted theological doctrine sim-
ply because it was orthodox. Highly individual as he always was, Milton
chose what accorded with his own religious analysis and the require-
ments of his epic. In his poetic descriptions, furthermore, he chose just
those visual elements which had been demonstrated in the experience of
16
Frye, 159.
17
Frye, 163.
the art of omission and supplement in PARADISE LOST 145
18
Frye, 163164.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
See for example Arthur E. Barker, Calm Regained Through Passion Spent: The
Conclusions of the Milton Effort, in The Prison and the Pinnacle, ed. Balachandra Rajan
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 26. The question of whether the Sons
divinity is revealed during the poem, especially in the pinnacle sequence, remains a
matter of debate. Irene Samuel argues in The Regaining of Paradise that Miltons
Son remains in his human aspect even at the close of the final temptation and there-
fore remains a pattern for all to imitate; see The Regaining of Paradise in The Prison
and the Pinnacle, 111134.
148 chapter seven
2
The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).
3
Elizabeth Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1962), reviews the commentaries on this point and concludes that in the
poem Milton presents Christ almost exclusively in his human aspect, but does not
suggest that this represents a heretical or even unorthodox position on Miltons part;
see especially pages 1326.
4
Walter MacKellar, ed., Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), IV: 35.
5
John Rumrich, Miltons Theanthropos: The Body of Christ in Paradise Regained,
Milton Studies 42 (2002), 50.
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 149
6
Rumrich, 58. See also Samuel in The Regaining of Paradise.
7
James Pearce, The Theology of Representation: The Meta-Argument of Paradise
Regained Milton Studies 24 (1988), 28081.
150 chapter seven
8
The Annunciation and Nativity are repeated again at I.229255 and 45664.
9
William B. Hunter reviews some of the explanations that have been advanced in
The Obedience of Christ in Paradise Regained, in Calm of Mind, ed. Joseph Wittreich
(Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 68.
152 chapter seven
10
MacKellar, Variorum Commentary, IV: 18. On the temptations in Samson Agonistes,
see Michael Atkinson, The Structure of the Temptations in Miltons Samson Agonistes,
Modern Philology 69:4 (May 1972): 285291.
11
Elizabeth Pope discusses the triple equation in Paradise Regained: The Tradition and
the Poem (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 5169.
12
Barbara Lewalski, Miltons Brief Epic (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966), 27.
13
See Laura Knoppers, Historicizing Milton (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1994); and Florence Sandler, Icon and Iconoclast, in Achievements of the Left Hand:
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 153
but from Eikon Basilike rather than his own text. This rejection extends
to Paradise Regained as well. Florence Sander demonstrates that it was
not only Charles propaganda that drew a connection between his trial
and the suffering of Christ. She shows that the association between the
passion and kingship has ample textual support from the gospels, and
that Milton deliberately shuns this association in his portrayal of the
Son in Paradise Regained. Already in Paradise Lost, Sandler notes, Milton
had presented Christ as the Victor in Heaven (whose victory follows
not His Passion but his mere absence from the stage until the Third
Day and in the later poem his human Christ is one whose suffering
consists chiefly of endurance.14 Laura Knoppers argues that Paradise
Regained dissociates truth from kingship and stalls the contemporary
political discourse that linked both Stuart kings with Christ by pre-
ferring to call its hero the Son.15 For Milton, the events of Christs
human life, like those of his heavenly existence, always reflect on the
kingship of God the Father.
Similarly, by choosing the temptations, Milton was able to avoid the
Catholic reification of Christs body and wounds.16 In Charles Huttars
words, Paradise Regained can be read as a manifesto for a true Chris-
tianity purged of its fixation on the Cross.17 Huttars assertion that
although theologically central, the passion for Milton did not lend
itself to narrative poetry acknowledges some of the complexities of
Miltons representations of Christs death.18 While Huttar elucidates
certain obstacles to Miltons creation of passion narratives, he does
not consider the categorical problems of narrative presented by the
passion story itself, problems which Milton may have been pointing to
in his many indirect representations of these events. Another school
Essays on the Prose of John Milton, eds. Michael Lieb and John Shawcross (University of
Massachusetts Press, 1974), 172175.
14
Sandler, 183.
15
Knoppers, 39, 36.
16
His focus on the temptations also avoids another potential sequence, the har-
rowing of hell, which was anathema to reformed tradition. Northrop Frye notes that
the temptation is what becomes for Milton the scripturally authorized version of
the descent into hell, the passing into the domain of Satan, and the reconquest of
everything in it that is redeemable in The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Miltons Epics
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 121.
17
Charles Huttar, The Passion of Christ in Paradise Regained, English Language Notes
19 (1982), 237.
18
Huttar, 249.
154 chapter seven
19
Regina Schwartz, Redemption and Paradise Regained, Milton Studies 42 (2002),
27.
20
Dayton Haskin, Miltons Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1994), 149.
21
Haskin, 156.
156 chapter seven
As John Rogers has said, Milton would in Paradise Regained show him-
self capable of narrating an account of redemption that, in an almost
Socinian fashion, managed to overlook the Crucifixion altogether.22
Just as significant as these omissions are Miltons substitutions, the por-
trait of the Son that he supplies in their place.
As these comments suggest, there have been attempts to relate Para-
dise Regained to Miltons overall handling of the passion, but readers
have been reluctant to see the late poem as an epitome of Miltons
revision of this narrative. Charles Huttar sees no distinction, claiming
that Paradise Regained is the Passion poem which he failed to com-
plete at age twenty-one.23 Arthur Barker acknowledges that Paradise
Regained handles the temptations as dry run, in the wilderness, for the
Passion and that in its companion poem Samsons agony clearly
foreshadows the Passion, but concludes that
if it is said that Milton never wrote directly about the Passion, save in
one early poem justly regarded as execrable, that may be because it so
much concerned him and because he was so much concerned with the
difficulties in the way of a fully tuned response to it in his age.24
Carol Barton, also tying Paradise Regained to The Passion, argues that
the later poem is not a rewriting of the abortive early poem:
Miltons avoidance of resurrecting the Passion narrative he had attempted
in his youth out of season suggests, not that he was incapable of treating
the subject with all of the honour and decorum it deserved, but that it
was inconsistent with the limits of his inquiry as to what man (vs. God-in-
man) can do with the talents he is given to serve his Maker and thereby
prove himself to be a true servant and son of God.25
Barton overlooks the fact that the early poem records the same choice.
David Miller writes that had Milton wished to celebrate Christs
power, the Bible offers the resurrection, the ascension, and the last
judgment. Had he wished to demonstrate Christs obedience, he might
have chosen Gethsemane or the crucifixion; rather, he consistently
avoids dramatic elements even of the episode he selects, forcing our
22
Rogers, Delivering Redemption, 74.
23
Huttar, 239.
24
Barker, 47.
25
Carol Barton, To stand upright will ask thee skill: The Pinnacle and the Para-
digm, Early Modern Literary Studies 6:2 (September 2000), paragraph 19.
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 157
26
David Miller, John Milton: Poetry (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 161162; qtd. in Barton
To stand upright, paragraph 5.
27
Joseph Wittreich, William Blake: Illustrator-Interpreter of Paradise Regained, in
Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John
S. Diekhoff, edited by Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve
University, 1971), 118.
28
Wittreich, 113.
158 chapter seven
29
George McLoone relates the poems narrative and structural absences to a series
of images in the poemillusory panoramas and tableaux, mid air, the opening
of heaven at the Jordan, pathless wilderness, the uneasie station of the temple pin-
naclewhich sustain a sense of absence as somehow essential to the process of
recovering Paradise. See Composing the Uneasy Station: Confession and Absence
in Paradise Regaind, Milton Studies 45 (2006), 53.
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 159
30
Christ is mistaken for Elijah by some of the disciples: see Matt. 16:1314, Mark
8:28; and Luke 9:19. In Matt. 11:14 Jesus identifies John the Baptist as Elijah returned.
Milton considered writing about Elias in the Mount, alongside Christ Crucifid,
and Christus Patiens as the Trinity Manuscript shows (18: 238).
31
John Anthony McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition
(Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 100101.
32
McGuckin, 101.
160 chapter seven
self. In other words, there are aspects that we cannot perceive, the
secrecy of which Milton protects; indeed the question These God-
like Virtues wherefore dost thou hide? is a Satanic question (III: 21).
But the frailty of our human discernment and of the visible world
do not threaten to consume even the human Christ, as death does
not. Marys retrospective consideration of one of the first episodes
of Christs lifehis lingering with the teachers at the Temple (Luke
2:49)gives us license to consider a similar, but later, parallel. Andrew
and Simon also introduce the question of the Sons visibility to human
perception, but again through the device of his absence.33 They ask of
the Anointed, to us reveald, pointed at and shown, will he now
retire / After appearance? (5051, 4041). Their language of seeing
merits close attention. Even the verifiable physical presence of Jesus
among his family and disciples has a special cast of revelation; he is
not seen but shown. Christs visibility also seems to Miltons Andrew
and Simon to be coupled inevitably with his retirement. Once seen,
how can he return to a condition of invisibility, the poem seems to
ask. The temptation in the wilderness conveys the story of the Son
with such force because it folds into itself the narratives of his birth
and death as well, and instructs us to set aside the seeming heroism or
suffering of those events to focus solely on what the temptations make
most clear, his ability to stand obediently and wait. The central epi-
sode of the poem also provides a model for the much longer waiting
which is most germane to Miltons audience, the period between the
Sons incarnation and the end of time: his absence now / Thus long
to some great purpose he obscures. Concealment and obscurity, far
from suggesting a tangential or minor concern, mark the most conse-
quential events in Miltons Christian imagination.
Having begun with the Sons absence and the lesson it offers in meekly
waiting, Book II then shifts back to the Son in the desert, where, even
without human witness, his incarnation intensifies as he
33
Wittreich calls attention to Blakes use of Andrew and Simon in his illustrations
to Paradise Regained, noting how Blake underscores their importance by devoting an
illustration to them and by deviating from Miltons poem in his illustration of the
Sons return home at the close of the epic, in which they are present as well in Blakes
illustration.
162 chapter seven
34
See, for instance, On the Morning of Christs Nativity, 133140.
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 163
35
MacKellar points to Charles Dunsters acknowledgement of the parallel between
Marys soliloquy in Book II and Vidas portrait of her lament beneath the cross in
the Christiad in his edition of the poem. Variorum, IV: 108109.
36
Emory Elliott, Miltons Biblical Style, Milton Studies 6 (1974), 228.
37
Additional passages may be found in Huttar, 25160. Elliott also suggests the
following connections: IV.12829 and Hebrews 2:1415; III.5657 and Luke 6:226;
III.440 and Romans 5:68 (240 n. 9).
38
A similar forecast appears at IV: 38688.
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 165
39
Edward Cleveland, On the Identity Motive in Paradise Regained, Modern Language
Quarterly 16 (1955), 23536. Barbara Lewalski also finds the pinnacle scene suggestive
of the crucifixion and ascension; see Miltons Brief Epic, 309314; she cites commenta-
tors Hall and Knox who make this connection.
166 chapter seven
40
Pope, 8489.
41
Thomas Fuller, Pisgah-Sight of Palestine and the Confines thereof, with the History of the
Old and New Testament Acted Thereon (London: John Williams, 1650), 418, 423.
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 167
and upright.42 He puts his emphasis not on the death of the Sons
physical form, but its life, returning again to the incarnation as the
most important means through which atonement unfolds.
Substituting the pinnacle for the cross prepares the way for Miltons
rewriting of the passion in Paradise Regained. The events on the pinnacle
are unseen, whereas the crucifixions crowd of witnesses is one of the
hallmarks of its depiction in text and the visual arts. The most compel-
ling difference between the two scenes, though, is in their conclusion.
Both on the cross and on the pinnacle Christ is tempted to doubt and
is provoked to prove himself to be the messiah. But whereas Satan is
unsuccessful in getting Jesus to throw himself down from the tower, the
conclusion of the crucifixion involves the death, deposition, and burial
of Christ. This distinction also highlights the contrast between Christ
and Samson, whose final act results in his death; Samson may be said
to fall victim to the temptation that the Son faced on the pinnacle had
he thrown himself from it at Satans suggestion, or even to demon-
strate that he would be saved. In Paradise Regained the passion is com-
plete without death and burial. At the conclusion of Miltons pinnacle
sequence, ministering angels guide the Son back to earth, in effect
rewriting the ascension as well. Rather than an upward movement and
a re-divination of Christ, Milton again substitutes the incarnation, the
downward movement of the kenosis. In the early crucifixion imagery
of the living, upright Christ you could remove the cross and still have
a picture that makes sense, as you cannot do with the lifeless, s-shaped
body of the 14th century crucifixion; this is exactly what the pinnacle
scene in Paradise Regained does.
In its revision of the passion, Paradise Regained concentrates not on
dramatic, spectacular action, but on inaction. The poem emphasizes
waiting, both the uncomprehending yet faithful patience of Mary,
Andrew and Simon, and the Sons own obedience. Milton also returns
in Paradise Regained to another major theme of his passion poetics, his
attention to the time between the passion and the second coming,
42
Anthony Hornecks The Passion of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: Or, Cries
of the Son of God (London: S. Bates, 1700), also makes an association between Christs
body and the Temple (A6v). Hornecks repeated invitation to look at the crucified
Christ (even including a miniature of the crucifixion scene in his text), however, dif-
fers fundamentally from Miltons insistence on the eternal life of the Son. At the end
of Hornecks passion he looks up to heaven, where he sees Christ crucified. Milton
prefers to show even the incarnate Jesus alive.
168 chapter seven
43
Lewalski, 109.
44
Roy Flanagan comments that the Lady is an obvious ancestor of Jesus in Para-
dise Regained; see Comus, in The Cambridge Companion to John Milton, ed. Dennis
Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 28. Carol Barton says of
the Son in Paradise Regained that, like the Lady of Comus or his own altar-ego on the
Cross, he is neither motionless nor passive, no matter how inactive he may appear,
drawing out a parallel between two characters heroic qualities and the nature of their
success in their respective plots (paragraph 14). Rebekah Greene, on the other hand,
likens Sabrina to Christ for her healing powers; see Miltons Comus, Explicator 64:4
(Summer 2006): 210212. Maren-Sofie Rostvig also claims that the Lady should be
seen as a female Hercules, which draws the Mask into relationship with the Nativ-
ity Ode and The Passion, and that in her person Christ and Hercules meet and
merge in the approved Renaissance manner. See The Craftsmanship of God: Some
Structural Contexts for the Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), in Heirs of Fame: Milton
and the Writers of the English Renaissance, eds. Margo Swiss and David Kent (Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 106107. If we accept these claims, along with
Rostvigs outline of the structure of the 1645 volume, which underscores the appropri-
ateness of the Masks placement at the center of the book, we see a displaced, hidden,
and rewritten passion at the very heart of the 1645 Poems.
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 169
45
The phrasing recalls the language used in constructing the inexpressibility topos
that often appears in Protestant works on the passion as well.
46
The Spirit disguises himself not as an anonymous swain but, as the younger
brother says, my fathers Shepherd (493). When the Spirit characterizes his errand
in the woods not as the rescue of all the fleecy wealth of the fold from pilfering
Wolf, but as his special concern for the Lady, his lines recall Lycidas 113129,
which establish the special status of Lycidas, contributing to his development as a
Christ-figure in the poem.
47
Comus description of the brothers, that Their port was more than human . . . /. . . .
as I past, I worshipt, shows that he may be able to perceive the spiritual elevation of
the siblings, but his response will be inappropriate, even idolatrous (297302). That
the something holy hiding in the Lady is gendered male may evoke a Christ-like
quality that she conveys.
170 chapter seven
also provide another early site in which Milton explores the poetics of
the dual nature.
The Mask does not have an explicitly biblical subject, and Georgia
Christopher has taken up the project of trying to identify the sources
behind Miltons portrait of Comus, looking for an appropriate Chris-
tian reading of the figure. The clearest Christian allegory in the poem
emerges not from Comus, however, but from the Lady. Christopher
acknowledges that the poem attributes to the Lady an indwelling of
Christ when Comus recognizes that her breast is the hiddn resi-
dence of the holy (24648). Christopher identifies a possible pun that
further underscores the identification of the Lady with Christ:
At the climax of the seduction scene, the Lady breaks off in righteous
indignation that Comus dares Arm his profane tongue . . ./ Against the
Sun-clad power of Chastity (78182). If Milton intends the pun Son-
clad, we have one more verbal hint that chastity in the poem is to be
equated with the righteousness of Christ.48
Even beyond Christophers astute reading of the way the Lady embod-
ies Miltons ideal of faith, the poem offers the Lady as more than a
model for Christian virtue (who draws her power to enact such virtue
from her imitatio Christi). Her trials and her responses to those trials
ask us to read her not just as an exemplary Christian, but as a Christ
figure. It is not that Milton introduces the passion to the Mask by cre-
ating this parallel, but that the Mask and its Lady provide him with a
means of writing an alternative passion.
An echo of the crucifixion in the final scenes of the masque occurs
when the Lady speaks to Comus a truth through which
. . . dumb things would be movd to sympathize,
And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake,
Till all thy magick structures reard so high,
Were shatterd into heaps ore thy false head. (79598)
Her image recalls the supposed rending of the Temple veil at the
moment of the crucifixion, as well as Samsons pulling down the pil-
lars. Stanley Fish points to another similarity between the Lady and
Christ in his analysis of the brothers discussion of virtue. He sees
their exchange as
48
Georgia Christopher, The Virginity of Faith: Comus as a Reformation Con-
ceit, ELH 43:4 (Winter 1976): 48687.
PARADISE REGAINED and the art of the incarnation 171
49
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge: Belknap, 2001), 150.
172 chapter seven
does not die. There is no death in the poem, no sacrifice and little
suffering. If the Lady represents a rewriting of Christ in the passion,
Milton also underscores in this character the lesson that Raphael
teaches Adam, not to expect redemption through violence. The Elder
Brother understands that Virtue may be assaild but never hurt, /
Surprisd by unjust force but not enthralld, but must be corrected
by the Attendant Spirit when he proposes to subdue Comus with the
sword (589590). The Mask instructs us rather that it is the Ladys
steadfastness, her standing and waiting, in combination with Sabrinas
baptism,50 that send Comus falling like Satan from the pinnacle.
50
Sabrina, Goddess of the River, is associated with baptism, one of the most
important moments in Paradise Regained through which the dual nature is expressed and
revealed; see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature,
Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 171. The stage direction, Sabrina descends, and the Lady rises
out of her seat, also recalls both the descent of the dove during Christs baptism and
his elevation on the pinnacle (923). If we read Sabrina as a figure for John the Baptist,
it would mean that Milton has made two alterations to the gender of his characters,
perhaps further underscoring the loving, nurturing and healing characteristics of Jesus
and his disciples as a model for the significance of the passion.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1
John Miltons Complete Poetical Works Reproduced in Photographic Facsimile, ed. Harris
Fletcher (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1948), 2:28.
174 chapter eight
tion and his personal tragedies. The intersections between the passion
play hinted at in the Trinity manuscript and Samson Agonistes illustrate
the unfinished business of Miltons ongoing engagement with the pas-
sion. It is in this work that he comes to terms with some of the most
confounding aspects of the narrative of Christs life and death, and
completes his revision of the late medieval crucifixion imagery of the
plays ancestor texts.
As a dramatic poem, Samson Agonistes engages one of the major forms
of medieval passion literature.2 Milton acknowledges the importance
of the passion play for his work on Samson in the preface to Samson
Agonistes, referring to the eleventh- or twelfth-century Greek tragedy
Christ Suffering. By citing this work at the outset of his dramatic poem,
Milton relocates the Christus patiens of the Trinity manuscript to a text
prior to his own, with which he engages and which gives legitimacy to
his choice to write a Christian tragedy. Samson Agonistes is posited as an
alternative not just to a Miltonic Christus patiens, but to the tradition of
representing the passion as one of Christ suffering.3
In this defense of the form (Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem which
is Calld Tragedy), Milton carefully identifies the aspects of tragedy
which he approves and just as significantly those he excludes. Calling
tragedy the gravest, moralist, and most profitable of all other Poems
and noting its ability to raise pity and fear, or terror, to purge the
mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce
them to just measure, Milton rehearses a familiar definition of the
form. This purgative, moderating function has special significance for
Miltons subject. In the place of a passion poem that would stage a
graphic crucifixion scene designed to stir the audiences horror and
veneration, Miltons drama operates to soothe its readers passions and
to adjust their pity and fear. These are hardly the emotions appropri-
ate for the Miltonic passion, which always prefers steadfastness, humil-
ity, and adulation of the Father, a kind of delight rather than a
scene of horror. Milton also specifies his preference for ancient tragedy
2
Timothy Burbery has recently noted how Miltons first recorded comments on
how to create a passion play or poem reach fulfillment in Samson Agonistes; see Milton
the Dramatist (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007), 9192.
3
Joseph Wittreich notes too that Miltons reference to the Book of Revelation in
the preface refers to Christs role as judge in what, in The Reason of Church-Government,
Milton calls the high and stately tragedy of the Book of Revelation; see Shifting
Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002),
4546.
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 175
4
See Watson Kirkconnell, That Invincible Samson: the Theme of Samson Agonistes in
World Literature with Translations of the Major Analogues (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1964).
176 chapter eight
not with out some instance of that ever victorious selfe-armed majesty
of innocence.5
For Herle, Samson is a countertype of Christ because, while Christ
could have defeated any human enemy easily, he had to die in order
to fulfill the scriptures. Herle asks how much easier then Sampson,
could this Nazarite have broken your Philistine cords asunder.6 Again in his
description of the mocking and scorning of Christ, Herle demands
how easily could this Sampson, this Nazarite, how justly might hee have
pluckd downe the house about the eares of such scoffing Philistines, and
have made (as there) their Theater, their Grave, and turnd this their
comike folly into as tragike a funerall?7
By suggesting that Christ could have performed far greater physical
featsand vengeancethan Samson achieved, Herle reads Samsons
physical triumph as the antithesis of Christs moral victory. He also
subtly characterizes the Sons victory on the cross as entirely non-phys-
ical, non-tragic. It is in this tension between Samsons flaws and the
Sons perfection that Milton also locates his rewriting of the passion
through Samson.
This tension is highlighted by the pairing of the Son and Sam-
son in the joint publication of Paradise Regained to which is added Samson
Agonistes. Reading the two poems as a sequence can generate differ-
ent interpretations. The inclusion of Samson Agonistes following Paradise
Regained may imply a reverse typology in which Samson completes the
Sons redemptive mission, particularly since Paradise Regained does not
depict the crucifixion. Alternatively, Samson Agonistes can be read as a
Miltonic critique of the typology between Samson and Jesus, a way
of highlighting the contrast between them more than their similari-
ties. Finally, it may also be possible to read the pairing as suggesting
that the problematics of the Samson story also characterize the pas-
sion. In other words, it is also possible that Samsons imperfection and
ambiguity point in some way to the lingering anxieties and unresolved
violence of the passion, particularly the crucifixion. John Rogers com-
ments that
5
Charles Herle, Contemplations and devotions onour saviours death and passion (London:
H. Robinson, 1631), 5758.
6
Herle, 64.
7
Herle, 120121.
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 177
8
John Rogers, Delivering Redemption in Samson Agonistes, in Altering Eyes: New
Perspectives on Samson Agonistes, eds. Mark Kelley and Joseph Wittreich (Newark: Uni-
versity of Delaware Press, 2002), 90.
9
Francis Quarles, The Complete Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Alexander Grosart (New
York: AMS Press, 1967).
178 chapter eight
Miltons revision of the passion in Samson Agonistes differs from his por-
traits of the Son in Paradise Regained and his earlier poems. In those texts
he substitutes his alternative rendering of the Son, constantly deferring
the troublesome scenes of the crucifixion and concentrating rather on
the incarnation and its meaning. In his last long poem, on the other
hand, Milton gathers many of the elements of traditional passion nar-
10
Joseph Wittreich argues that the poems together form a totality, with the
individual poems themselves becoming like fragments; see Strange Text! Paradise
Regaind . . . To Which Is Added Samson Agonistes, in Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality
and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1986), 165.
11
Christopher Grose reminds us that the end of Samson Agonistes is also the end of
the volume and therefore, at least in part, a qualifying ending for Paradise Regained. See
Milton and the Sense of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 5.
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 179
ratives that he has thus far avoided, especially its violent conclusion
which generates the danger of idolatrous veneration of the cross and
Christs body. Samson Agonistes brings these elements together, however,
only to discount and discredit them. By being relocated from Jesus to
Samson, they are shown to fail to convey the significance behind the
Sons life and death. These elements include the veneration of Christs
body, particularly in pain and death; redressing Gods enemies through
violent confrontation; the model of sacrifice, especially within the con-
text of the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy; and the interpreta-
tion of the crucifixion as an event in historical time and context. As
Milton works out, through Samson, the aspects of the passion that he
seeks to remove from his portrait of the Son, he revisits many of the
concerns and devices through which he has constituted the more posi-
tive depictions of his earlier poems.
The first dangerous element of the traditional crucifixion imagery
that Milton addresses in Samson Agonistes is the veneration of Christs
wounded and suffering body. To understand his rewriting in the late
poem, we need to go back to his earliest consideration of the body of
Christ, its wounds, and their iconography. In Upon the Circumci-
sion Milton evokes an early fragmentation of Christs body as part
of his revision of the passion. In Samson Agonistes, circumcision operates
as a trap for mistaken ideas about the passion. As with the typology
between Samson and Christ, Milton worked with a longstanding tra-
dition associating the circumcision and death of Christ, a connection
often deployed in the visual arts as well. Gertrud Schiller explains that
in the Middle Ages the Circumcision of Jesus, the first occasion on
which his blood was shed, was regarded as the first station of the Pas-
sion, the circumcision knife being included among the Instruments of
the Passion.12 She notes that as the circumcision was depicted with
greater frequency in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was usu-
ally shown taking place in the Temple; Mary holds the Child over an
altar or a basin and the mohel or a priest performs the Circumcision.13
The choice to relate the circumcision to a temple sacrifice establishes
Jesus wounded body as a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, an
association Milton consistently avoids.
12
Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic
Society, 1971), I: 88.
13
Schiller, I: 89.
180 chapter eight
14
The Circumcision, Or New Years Day, Complete Poems of Christopher Harvey, ed.
Alexander Grosart (London: Robinson and Sons, 1874).
15
Reprinted in J. B. Broadbent, John Milton: Odes, Pastorals, Masques (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975), 55.
16
Miltons concern with Christs circumcision is, like his choices in Paradise Regained,
a privileging of Luke over the other gospel accounts, which do not mention it.
17
Similarly, Luke 2:21 reports only that when the eight daies were accomplished,
that they shulde circumcise the childe, his name was then called JESUS, which was
named of the Angel, before he was conceived in the wombe. Pauls letter to the
Ephesians, however, does provide a scriptural basis for an association between the
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 181
circumcision and the crucifixion, when he notes that the Ephesians who, because
uncircumcised, once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ
(Ephesians 2:12).
18
John Shawcross also notes the chiasmus in these lines in The Temple of Janus
and Milton Criticism in the New Millennium, ANQ 15:4 (Fall 2002), 25. On these
lines as a suggestion of the passion see also M. Thomas Hester, Typology and Parody
in Upon the Circumcision, Renaissance Papers (1985): 6171. Hester also shows that
Upon the Circumcision may participate in the dialectic of damage and repair to
holy texts. In the poem, Hester argues, the disfigurements of Christ are transfig-
ured as embodiments of the historical and transcendent text(s) of Gods Word (67).
Sanford Budicks suggestion that the chiasmus as a device articulates a desire that
we might return from (or repair) the condition of the fragment illustrates the deep
connections among brokenness, spiritual longing and restorationin this case in the
Christian context of the resurrectionforged in Miltons poem as well. See Of the
Fragment: in Memory of Yochanan, Common Knowledge 5 (1996), 132.
182 chapter eight
with God through the Son.19 Christ descends from above, where he
dwelt High-thrond in secret bliss, empties himself of this glory, and
satisfies that great Covnant (19, 21).
The act of circumcision also operates as a marker of covenant in
Samson Agonistes. The repeated concern with circumcision in Samson
Agonistes is related to Christs later bodily wounds and the manner in
which they fail to satisfy the covenant. The enemy in Samson is always
figured as the uncircumcised, most strikingly in Samsons description
of his vanquishing of a thousand foreskins with the jaw of the ass
(144). Milton borrows this language from the Book of Judges, though
he does so in the service of his tendency to differ from the way the
Samson story is told in Judges. These striking images remind us that
Samson Agonistes adopts a Jewish narrative into a Christian framework.
Feisal Mohamed has touched on this difference. From the first encoun-
ter with Manoa, he writes, we gain a sense of the insufficiency of
the Old Law. Manoas hope resides solely in the physical and legal.
Mohamed continues,
The remedies derived by Manoa from the Old Lawhis legalistic notion
of ransom and devotion through physical offeringmake no impact on
his sons spiritual condition, which requires, as the Chorus recognizes,
Some source of consolation from above (665).20
This view represents a fairly standard Christian reading of the Hebrew
Bible, but is insufficient not only because Milton often made such read-
ings problematic, but also because the story could not shed all of its
Jewish meaning as it moved from the Book of Judges to Samson Ago-
nistes. Mohamed claims that to make sense Miltons Samson must be
less like a hero of the Old Testament and more like the hero of the
gospels:
If we are to see Samsons final act as positive, it must transcend the
fleshly, legalistic terms of his previous heroics; it must show valuation
of internal illumination over physical sight and show recovery from the
hubris that led him to marry Dalila. If Miltons Samson is indeed the
19
John Rogers considers the important role that Upon the Circumcision plays in
the development of Miltons idea of atonement in Miltons Circumcision, in Milton
and the Grounds of Contention, eds. Mark Kelley, Michael Lieb and John Shawcross (Pitts-
burgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003).
20
Feisal Mohamed, Confronting Religious Violence: Miltons Samson Agonistes,
PMLA 120:2 (March 2005), 330.
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 183
hero of faith recorded in Hebrews 11, the final slaughter of the Philis-
tines must be different in kind from the three encounters of the tragedys
middle: he will be a hero under the terms of the gospel if and only if he
is not avenging the loss of eyesight, not succumbing to fleshly lust, and
not settling a tribal blood feud.21
Peter Herman takes up Mohameds claim of a certain symmetry
between Samsons rousing motions and the Sons strong motions
in Paradise Regained and makes an important and necessary distinction
between them: we know that the Sons strong motions have their
source in God because God speaks in the poem.22 Herman is cer-
tainly correct to point this out. God does not communicate directly
in Samson Agonistes as he does in Paradise Regained, though Milton might
as easily have added God to the second poem in the 1671 volume
as he made other changes to the Judges narrative of Samson and as
he added God to the story of the temptations in the wilderness,
whereas He is absent from the biblical version of this story. Rather
than provide such a confirmation of Samsons conversion to Christ-
like behavior, or his failure to achieve this, the poem stands aside, leav-
ing readers without a narrative voice to settle the question of Samsons
resemblance to Christ. Beyond this confusion, the absence of God the
Father from Samson Agonistes is most notable for the poems place in the
unfolding Miltonic passion. In his portraits of the Son, Milton always
insists on referring back to God the Father. By creating a portrait of
Samson that does not similarly reflect the Father, Milton underscores
the distinction between the Old Testament figure and the Son.
Borrowing a Jewish story to create a passion poem is a well-estab-
lished technique with many precedents in Christian art and litera-
ture before Milton. The references to circumcision in Samson Agonistes
deserve greater attention, however, because they remind us of a key
aspect of the passion that Milton consistently rejects. The circumcision
as a narrativeeven the circumcision of Christmust disappoint as
a site onto which to project the crucifixion if it highlights the physi-
cal suffering of Jesus as the primary component of the atonement. If,
however, the circumcision represents a covenant with God, it satisfies
the requirements for a Miltonic passion. The wounds of circumcision
21
Mohamed, 331.
22
Peter Herman, Letter to Forum on Milton and Religious Violence, PMLA
120:5 (October 2005), 1643.
184 chapter eight
and the passion, like Samsons uncut hair, represent Gods covenants,
but are paradoxically also signs of human weakness. In Samson, that
weakness triumphs and his death verges on idolatry. In contrast, the
Sons physical weakness becomes the means through which he accom-
plishes the ultimate divine covenant.
If Milton characterizes Samsons enemies as the uncircumcised,
those excluded from Gods covenant, he prevents a simple associa-
tion between Samsons wounds (of the circumcision and those of his
imprisonment) and those of the crucifixion. Samson laments
that torment should not be confind
To the bodys wounds and sores
With maladies innumerable
In heart, head, breast, and reins;
But must secret passage find
To th inmost mind,
There exercise all his fierce accidents,
And on her purest spirits prey,
As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense,
Though void of corporal sense. (606616)
Superficially, Samsons wounds seem to resemble closely those of
Christ on the cross in their locationheart, head, breast, and side.
Milton immediately introduces a significant distinction to correct this
association. Unlike the Son, Samson is altered by his experiences in
his inmost mind, the site of his true weakness. That Milton allows
the echo between Samsons bodily wounds and Christs shows how
he allows traditional crucifixion imagery into the poem in order to
nullify it.
23
Cited in Wittreich, Altering Eyes, 20. Barbara Lewalski takes the position that
Miltons iconoclasm is not that of the image-breakers but something more internal:
Samsons last speeches indicate that iconoclasm is not about external gestures but
about inner freedom. Even participation in an idolatrous ceremony can be sanctioned
for good reason, if the person acts not from idolatrous servility but as a free agent
whose only master is God. See Milton and Idolatry, SEL 43:1 (Winter 2003),
229.
186 chapter eight
24
Qtd. in Wittreich, Altering Eyes, 21.
25
On the discourse of idolatry as a human weakness for the external or incarnate,
see Margaret Aston, Englands Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1314.
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 187
into Act and Scene referring chiefly to the Stage (to which this work
never was intended) is here omitted. And at line 602, Manoa responds
to Samsons claim that he shall shortly be with them that rest by
insisting that, for his part, he Must not omit a Fathers timely care /
To prosecute the means of thy deliverance. Finally, the Chorus also
responds to Samsons petition for speedy death by asking God why
he degrades mankind, or remits them
To life obscurd, which were a fair dismission,
But throwst them lower then thou didst exalt them high,
Unseemly falls in human eie,
Too grievous for the trespass or omission. . . . (687694)
The words omit and omission, thus, appear in two thematically
significant places in Samson Agonistes: in Miltons paratextual discussion
of the generic nature of his poem, and in the erroneous interpreta-
tions of Samsons state offered by Manoa and the Chorus.26
This association between error and omission stands out because
error characterizes the tragedy; for instance, Samson famously mis-
understands his marriage to the woman of Timna as of God and
believes that God will dispense with the laws forbidding his appear-
ance at the temple of Dagon (223). Such erroneous interpretations are
highlighted by the textual apparatus of the 1671 volume because the
errata list in effect asks readers to return to certain passages, which
would mean that they read these places twice. The passages noted
in the errata list include (among others) the Chorus initial retelling
of Samsons history and Samsons estimation of Harapha. These
moments are both thematically and textually erroneous. Joseph Wit-
treich has described the way the volume sets up an interpretive stance
though the omissa lines, which
26
Stephen Dobranski has noted another instance of this phenomenon in the 1671
volume. In one of the temptations of the Son in Paradise Regained, he seems to allow
violence under certain circumstances, the stubborn only to destroy (1.226). Accord-
ing to Dobranski, this statement seems to validate unequivocally Samsons climactic
action: he pulls down the pillars, in the words of the Messenger, at once both to
destroy and be destroyd (O6v / 1587). Only after turning to the errata do we discover
that destroy in Paradise Regained is to be replaced with subduea change that sub-
stantially mitigates (without entirely eliminating) Jesus threat of violence. See Text
and Context for Paradise Regaind and Samson Agonistes, in Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on
Samson Agonistes, 44. See also Stephen Dobranski, Restoring Samson Agonistes in
Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 189
present views we are meant to entertain, not necessarily adopt, and are
printed in conjunction with an errata list as if to remind us that writ-
ing, like interpretation, is a continuous revisionary process such as that
described by Milton in Areopagitica.27
Christopher Grose notes that both figures in the 1671 volume, the
Son and Samson, engage in extensive review in their roles as the
heirs of the ideal poet as Milton had once described him.28 Through
the errata and the omissa, the reader is also forced into a position of
review, asked to return to a second reading of the tragedy with new
information that will change the way it is read.
This interpretation of course depends on the omissa being more
than an accidental press correction. John Shawcross, in his elegant
summary of the text of Samson Agonistes, has claimed that it is pos-
sible that the revision represented by the omissa is another example
of Miltons tinkering with his text as in the revision of some of the
short poems between 1645 and 1673.29 Stephen Dobranski argues that
the Omissa represents an important authorial addendum, rather than
simply an error in the process of producing the volume.30 Dobranski
has shown that
based on both the improbability of a simple oversight and the change in
punctuation, the Omissa does not suggest a mistake made in the printing
house, but rather an authorial addendum, written during some stage of
the texts creation. That the ten lines in the Omissa make a single point
and are clearly of a piece also decreases the likelihood that the composi-
tor would happen to overlook this particular block of text.31
Dobranskis suggestion that Milton supplied these lines late in the pro-
cess of producing the text would make them consistent with a habit
of Miltons other engagements with the passion, which as a set ask the
reader to revisit inherited ideas about the crucifixionhow it should
be imagined and what it means. These ten lines, Dobranski claims,
Threaten to alter the outcome of Samsons fate and, when read at the
back of the book, retroactively evoke the status of miracles in Paradise
Regained. Holding out the promise of Samsons restored sight and perfect
27
Witteich, Altering Eyes, 18.
28
Grose, 6.
29
John Shawcross, The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2001), 18 n. 2.
30
Dobranski, Text and Context, 31.
31
Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, 196.
190 chapter eight
32
Dobranski, Text and Context, 31.
33
Dobranski, Text and Context, 4041.
34
Dobranski, Text and Context, 46.
35
Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, 196197 n. 4.
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 191
this volume, amisso, and the ten lines of Samson Agonistes, Omissa. There
are dozens of examples of seventeenth-century printed books that
use the term Omissa; in some, such as John Rays Historia plantarum
generalis (1693), the word is used to describe the contents of the work
(obscura illustrantur, Omissa supplentur, superflue resecantur), while
in others Omissa function as a paratext as in Sancti Dionysii Areopagit
opera omnia qu extant (1615), which contains on the final page a list of
Comissa et Omissa.
One of the primary reasons that we must consider the omissa as
an addition (a supplement, replacement, or restoration) as well as an
omission is that it holds before us the possibility of Samsons resto-
ration, the regaining of his eye sight and strength. In other words,
Milton reminds us of what Samson has lost first by removing it from
the poem, and again by reinstating it. Samsons vision is in the end
not regained, but in a sense the vision of the readers is. By placing
the omissa at the end of the volume we are asked to review what we
have read. This haunting of the reader with an absence that must be
reconciled illustrates the condition of post-Reformation poetry when
it approaches questions such as the accessibility of Gods will.36 It is
my claim that the divine intervention that Milton has excised, sup-
plied, and distanced again from his reworking of the Samson story is
a traditional Christus Patiens model of the crucifixion. Its removal from
Samson Agonistes is the final aspect of Miltons revision of the passion
in the 1671 volume.
The lines of the omissa properly belong to a moment in Samson
Agonistes that may be read as an omitted passion narrative: the captive
Samson has been taken to the temple of Dagon to perform for the
Philistines. Samsons father Manoa and the chorus hear cries from the
temple and speculate about Samsons fate. The chorus asks,
What if his eye-sight (for to Israels God
Nothing is hard) by miracle restord,
He now be dealing dole among his foes,
And over heaps of slaughterd walk his way?
And Manoa replies,
36
The possibility of a miracle is raised in these lines; as Dobranski shows, this
term is largely foreign to Miltons writing, occurring in the 1671 volume more than
anywhere else, and thus a good example of a religious idea that has been largely lost
returning through a process of supplement (Readers and Authorship, 200).
192 chapter eight
37
These lines also recall Miltons parallel in Paradise Regained between the tempta-
tion on the pinnacle (Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God [IV.555]) and the
crucifixion.
38
The Geneva Bible, a Facsimile of the 1560 Edition. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1969.
39
Watson Kirkconnell shows some precedent for such a comparison, although he
dismisses the possibility of a direct parallel with Milton, in his discussion of Quarles
The Histoire of Sampson (1642), in which he argues that in describing the humiliations
the CHRISTUS PATIENS tradition in SAMSON AGONISTES 193
heaped upon Samson, Quarles is able to imply, by the mere overtones of language,
a comparison with the mockeries heaped upon the blind-folded Christ by Pilates
soldiery (173).
40
Thomas Scott-Craig, Concerning Miltons Samson, Renaissance News 5:3 (Fall
1952), 46.
41
Scott-Craig, 46. See also Wittreich and Rogers.
194 chapter eight
line echoes the prose note concluding The Passion: This Subject
the Author finding to be above the years he had, when he wrote it,
and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinisht. I have
argued above, in chapter four, that Milton characterizes The Passion
as unfinished (and not as a failure, as many critics have assumed) to
underscore its fragmentary nature and to imply that the work of salva-
tion it concerns is ongoing. By recalling this language in the preface
to Samson Agonistes, Milton ties the dramatic text to his earlier passion
poem, but also reminds readers again that the work of the passion
is eternal and that it certainly cannot be considered finished by the
crucifixion.
EPILOGUE
Both in the specific context of the passion and more broadly through-
out his works, one of the aspects of Miltons poetics that the foregoing
material may suggest is its interest in broken forms. In the post-Refor-
mation period a poetics of absence emerged to address what we may
term a theology of brokenness. Herberts broken altar, and perhaps
even Donnes battered heart, evince some awareness of the fact that
it is in the rupture between man and God (or the rupture in man that
he brings as an offering) that the deepest spiritual experience can be
1
Irene Samuel, The Development of Miltons Poetics, PMLA 92:2 (March,
1977), 231. See also Ida Langdon, Miltons Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1965).
196 epilogue: broken and whole
2
Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 135.
3
We see this trope at moments such as the expulsion from Eden and Moses shat-
tering of the first tablets of the Law at Sinai.
4
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 14.
epilogue: broken and whole 197
able for deciphering to all who have learned, at least at the mechanical
level, to read, and substitutes a writing that has receded from public
view
offers a helpful lens through which to see how what is missing in Milton
is at the same time that which is most central, and how the trope of the
omitted is essentially related to the Christian theology of the poems.5
His view that, for Milton, it is the inner spirit that must animate texts
for them to be legible, illustrates the deep connection between Miltons
belief and his mode of creating texts: The unwritten word is not
illegible; its just that reading it is a matter not of parsing the written
word but of hearing it within a certain spirit.6 If we accept these
instructions for reading the poems, we would expect the most impor-
tant words in them to be unwritten. Fish further claims that
The holy is hidden only to those whose perception is not answerable to
itto those, like the dull swain, who find its manifestations unattractive.
To those in whose breast it lodges, the holy is everywhere evident as the
first principle of both seeing and doing. If you regard the world as Gods
book before you ever take a particular look at it, any look you take will
reveal, even as it generates, traces of his presence.7
I agree with Fishs claim about how such traces operate, but I would
add that the traces are traces precisely because the holy is ineffable,
and therefore at some level always hidden. Another claim that Fish
makes about what is knowable in Milton is important here as well.
There is, he writes,
another difference between Milton and post-Enlightenment thought: he
does not privilege public knowledge. . . . because in both his epistemology
and his politics the circuit of communication goes from one regenerate
heart to another and the law that counts is written on the fleshly tablets
of those regenerate hearts and not on the tablets of others. What this
means is that typically in Miltons poetry the important thing is never
said or said in a manner addressed only to initiates (as when the Lady
declines to explain the sage and serious doctrine of virginity); the cli-
mactic act either occurs offstage (as in Samson Agonistes) or in silence (as
in all of the things the Son doesnt say in Paradise Regained) or in a declara-
tion that remains mysterious in relation to everything that precedes it (as
5
Fish, 70.
6
Fish, 72.
7
Fish, 28.
198 epilogue: broken and whole
when the speaker in Lycidas declares, Henceforth thou art the Genius
of the shore [183]).8
The dynamics of Miltons poetry that Fish articulates here are closely
related to the instances of a deferred, omitted, restored and broken
passion that I have explored in the preceding chapters.
By brokenness, however, I do not mean duality or ambiguity. My
study is concerned with a subject that is representationally hungry,
one that is re-attempted again and again by the same artist in repre-
sentations that, seen from one angle of vision, never succeed. Seen in
a different light, each representational attempt clarifies one element of
the subject while it may necessarily obscure others.
We must also remember that for Milton and his contemporaries,
writing about divine subject matter must always be partial, since our
perception and understanding of God are necessarily limited. In De
Doctrina Christiana, Milton cautions that because the dual nature of the
Son
is such a great mystery, let its very magnitude put us on our guard from
the outset, to prevent us from making any rash or hasty assertions or
depending upon the trivialities of mere philosophy. Let it prevent us
from adding anything of our own, or even from placing weight upon any
scriptural text which can be easily invalidated. . . . We should be afraid to
pry into things further than we were meant. (VI: 421)
Brokenness and incompletion of this kind, then, belong to all of Mil-
tons texts. The marker unfinisht is apt not only for the note fol-
lowing The Passion or the fragmentary nature of the alternative
Miltonic passion in general. It also expresses the temporal sense of
these events as they are conveyed in Miltons poems. Not only is the
death of Christ habitually delayed and postponed to a future moment,
but it remains an ongoing, unending act of the Son.
I have not tried to resolve the problem of why Milton did not write
a full passion poem. Rather, my argument is that the problem prop-
erly belongs to the poems; it is an essential element of them, not to
be removed but to be read, just as any other part of the poem would
be. More broadly, even beyond Milton and his uses of the problem of
the passion, I want to suggest that one of the functions of poems is to
contain problems, things that are unresolved, ambiguous or designed
to raise questions.
8
Fish, 59.
epilogue: broken and whole 199
9
See R. V. Young, Herbert and the Real Presence, REN 45:3 (Spring 1993):
179196. Similarly, John Bienz notes that Herberts poetry may well seem divided
on the question of the proper role of image and ceremony (Images and Ceremonial
in The Temple: Herberts Solution to a Reformation Controversy in SEL 26 (1986):
7394; page 73). On the role of visual art in early seventeenth-century England, espe-
cially within the Laudian and high church movements, see also Graham Parry, The
Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006), especially
chapter 5.
10
On this approach see also Arthur Marotti, Catholicism and Anti-catholicism in Early
Modern English Texts (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979) and R. V. Young, Doctrine and
Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000).
200 epilogue: broken and whole
a living, standing, teaching Jesus and its rejection of the suffering, dead
and buried Christ so typical of the late medieval passion. Perhaps most
importantly, Miltons revision of the passion always leads away from
the Son, however celebrated, and toward a recognition of the will of
God the Father.
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INDEX
Accommodation 11, 17, 71, 141, 149, Christian art 12, 13, 1925, 26, 50,
151 65, 66, 7273, 76, 77, 129, 131,
Adam 68, 69, 125126, 128, 152 143144
Altar 72, 7677 Christus Patiens 8, 14, 22, 49, 51, 67,
Andreopolous, Andreas 23 n. 13 173174, 191
Andrew 10, 69, 158161, 162, 167, Christus Victor 65, 139, 177
168 Clark, Michael 16
Andrewes, John 61 Cleveland, Edward 165
Ascension 20, 24, 129 Cleveland, John 43, 114
Aston, Margaret 39, 100 n. 2, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 25
101 n. 5, 102 n. 10, 104 nn. 1314, Concealment 16, 130, 135, 157161
186 n. 24 Cook, John 21 n. 5
Atkinson, Michael 152 n. 10 Crashaw, Richard 7273, 77, 105
Atonement 56, 69, 70, 83, 85, 97, 112, n. 18, 180
116117, 119, 139, 144, 155, 167 Cross 5455, 57, 70, 76, 104 n. 15,
131, 138139, 153, 160, 167
Baptism 4041, 129, 147, 150, 172 Crucifixion 3, 19, 40, 44, 5051,
Barkan, Leonard 92, 93 5354, 65, 66, 70, 74, 76, 77, 8081,
Barker, Arthur 74 n. 18, 79, 147 n. 1, 87, 88, 100, 108, 112, 118, 119, 121,
156 130131, 132, 134, 136, 139, 144,
Barton, Carol 156, 168 n. 44 148149, 151, 162, 163165, 170,
Belting, Hans 22 173, 174, 178
Bennett, J. A. W. 51 n. 4 Cummings, Brian 35 n. 2
Bestul, Thomas 51 n. 4
Bible illustrations 3132 Daniells, Roy 12
Bienz, John 56 n. 15, 60 n. 17 Death 99102, 112, 114115, 116,
Blaine, Martin 119 n. 39 171172
Broadbent, John 25 n. 19 Delay 6, 3940, 70, 75, 83, 85, 89,
Brokenness 79, 195200 93, 96
Brown, Cedric 104 n. 18, 114 n. 35, Demaray, Hannah 25 n. 21, 28
120 n. 41 Diodati, Charles 110111
Budick, Sanford 181 n. 17 Diptych 17, 84 n. 36, 131
Burbery, Timothy 174 n. 2 Dobranski, Stephen 15, 26 n. 23,
Burial 2, 100, 147148, 167, 171 188190
Bullokar, John 56 n. 14 Donne, John 51, 52, 5355, 104 n. 16,
Bynum, Caroline 92 111, 195
Drummond, William 103
Cartwright, William 73 n. 14, 180 Dual nature 1, 11, 17, 2224, 36, 38,
Catholic 2, 3, 10, 14, 15, 19, 27, 30, 45, 73, 77, 82, 89, 92, 131, 132, 147,
50 n. 18, 60, 76, 79, 93, 100101, 159, 162
110, 117, 135, 153 Duffy, Eamon 2 n. 2, 100
Charles I 36, 4148, 49, 101 n. 6, 152
Chastity 170171 Early church 10, 12, 26
Chiasmus 160, 181 Eikon Basilike 4243, 4648, 49, 152
Chong, Alan 21 n. 7, 22 n. 8 Elegy 16, 85, 99122
Christopher, Georgia 170 Elliot, Emory 70, 164
Christ Pantocrator 2122 Epitaph 97, 104105, 109
Christ Suffering 174 Esdaile, Katharine 101102, 104
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