SHCT 145 - Henriksen - Milton and The Reformation Aesthetics of The Passion PDF

Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics
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.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ..................................................................... vii
Introduction: Miltons Poetics of Absence and Restoration ...... 1
Chapter One Strategies for depicting the Son in

Christian Art ........................................................................... 19
Chapter Two Iconoclasm as an Artistic Strategy ................... 35
Chapter Three The Post-Reformation Passion ....................... 49
Chapter Four Miltons Alternative Passion ............................. 65
Chapter Five No Death!: Rewriting the Protestant Elegy

in Miltons Early Poems .......................................................... 99
Chapter Six The Art of Omission and Supplement in

Paradise Lost .............................................................................. 123
Chapter Seven Paradise Regained and the Art of the

Incarnation ............................................................................ 147
Chapter Eight Rewriting the Christus Patiens Tradition

in Samson Agonistes .................................................................... 173
Epilogue: Broken and Whole ..................................................... 195
Bibliography ................................................................................ 201
Index ........................................................................................... 211

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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
MILTONS POETICS OF ABSENCE AND RESTORATION
One of the most significant aspects of John Miltons poetry can be

found in a poem he left unfinished. Despite the centrality of the pas-
sion to Christian theology and art, Milton never wrote at length about
the crucifixion, and his short poem on the subject remained an incom-
plete fragment. The fragmentary nature of The Passion does not
indicate, however, that the poem is a failure. Rather, it expresses a
fundamental characteristic of Miltons poetry and points to his partici-
pation in a broader movement within post-Reformation Christian art.
In addition to The Passion, many other fragmentary representations
of the passion occur in Miltons poetry. Through these scattered but
frequent images Milton creates an alternative passion that begins with
The Passion and extends through Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and
Samson Agonistes. These texts exemplify a set of techniques developed by
Protestant poets to address the unique representational challenges of
portraying the life and death of Christ that had long troubled Chris-
tian artists and theologians.
The story of the passionfrom Judas betrayal of Jesus to his inter-
rogation, crucifixion, and finally burial and resurrectionstands at the
center of Christian theology and art. As the gospel accounts of these
events were canonized, controversies erupted over how to interpret
the central Christian doctrines of the incarnation and Christs dual
nature as both God and man. Milton cared deeply about the theol-
ogy and representation of the Son, devoting considerable attention
to these concerns in De Doctrina Christiana as well as in his poetry. But
the passion, and particularly the crucifixion, is never foremost in Mil-
tons poetry. The absence of an extended poem on the subject, and
the supposed failure of The Passion, have led critics to assume that
the crucifixion was not a congenial theme to him at any time.1 The
paradoxical status of the passion within Miltons poetrythe way it at
once drives his work and slips out of focus in individual poemsstill
needs to be explained. I see the place of the passion in Miltons works
1
James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1926), 115.
2 introduction
not as a curiosity but as a crucial aspect of his poetics, as well as a

sign of his participation in a larger project of remaking Christian art
after the Reformation.
Post-Reformation art, including poetry, responded to the loss of
many institutions, beliefs, practices, and imagesincluding the lit-
urgy and ritual of the mass; monasteries and pilgrimage shrines; the
doctrines of the real presence, purgatory, and intercession for the
dead; the intercession of saints and their miracles; altars, crucifixes,
decorated windows and church furnishings; and certain funeral and
burial traditions.2 Despite these massive changes to Christian prac-
tice following the break with Rome, the materials and practices of
traditional faith were never completely eradicated. Rather, they often
persisted in broken or altered forms, and returned to haunt late six-
teenth and seventeenth-century culture. The religious art of the period
records the continued influence of these ideas, as well as the attempt
to reform Christian imagery in a culture deeply mistrustful of images
and artifice.
Scholars of Reformation literature have recently begun to consider
how the forms, practices, and images that were lost in the Reforma-
tion returned, in a process that Richard McCoy calls a migration of
the holy.3 Many of these investigations center on Hamlet, revealing
the ghosts of traditional piety that haunt Shakespeares play.4 Elizabe-
than drama often records anxiety about whether the break with Rome
might have distanced subsequent generations from the religious prac-
tices that could save their souls. Hamlet also suggests the variety of reli-
gious attitudes and practices that continued to co-exist even after the
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
Elizabethan settlement.5 In their readings of Hamlet and other texts,

critics have focused primarily on the Eucharist and the doctrine of the
real presence as remnants of traditional piety that continued to exert
themselves within post-Reformation culture. The most stubborn and
consequential of the lost materials of traditional Christianity, however,
is the crucifixion.6 The metaphor of haunting is especially apt for the
figure of the dead Christ, and the crucifixion became a focal point
of the search for a new religious imagery. Late medieval representa-
tions of the crucifixion were untenable for reformers, but the doctrine
of the crucifixion could not be erased from Christianity, even at its
Puritan extremes. It had to be addressed, not just theologically, but
artistically as well. Milton took up this task.
If Hamlet records the sense of loss and dislocation that accompanied
the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century, Paradise Lost addresses
the need to remake English religious art explicitly in contrast to the
aesthetics of the Catholic church. A generation after Hamlet, Milton
and his contemporaries were largely free of the ghosts of traditional
piety and experienced less anxiety about what had been lost in the
Reformation. Protestant literature no longer sought to resolve the
losses of the first generations after the schism with Rome. Rather, it
looked to create something new out of the remnants, fragments and
absences that remained. Like its spiritual ancestors in the early years
of Christianity, this generation needed to break decisively with the
visual traditions of its predecessors and to inaugurate a new artistic
program suited to its religious ideals. The chapters that follow trace
what Elizabeth Mazzola has called the sacred remains of Catholic
culture. The removal of images of the passion in English literature
meant not that these images vanished but that they were sundered,
broken into fragments that were scattered, meaning that the religious
images were reduced but also multiplied. As Mazzola explains,
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
abandoned symbols or practices do not simply disappear from the men-

tal landscape; and sometimes, this discarded material takes up far more
space. . . . outworn symbols can find their powers increased by occupy-
ing the margins of accepted ideas, shadowing the background of the
imagination.7
The crucifixion exemplifies the process Mazzola describes, in Miltons
work and throughout Protestant English poetry on the passion.
Scholarship that acknowledges the wide spectrum of English reli-
gious life has recently turned its attention to the aesthetics of the
Reformationand counter-Reformationas well.8 Recusants, no less
than Puritans, required new images, strategies of representation, and
relationships between religious art and its audiences.9 The complex
new religious landscape gave rise to the need for new and reconceived
renderings of devotional texts and images on all sides. Reformers and
recusants alike revived earlier traditions of Christian artistic represen-
tation, turning to biblical and early Christian repositories of images
and representational theories. Alongside the many confessional stances
within English Renaissance culture, various aesthetic possibilities circu-
lated in response to ongoing religious controversies.
Much of Miltons theology and artistry are conventional and have
been well documented. His soteriology and treatment of the cruci-
fixion, however, remain the focus of debates among commentators.
The following chapters are concerned almost exclusively with Miltons
poetics rather than his theology. It is nevertheless important to under-
stand some essential principles of Miltons view of the passion. For
Milton the passion was not a topic but the fabric of universal history.
It provided a form, pattern, and environment for his poems, but not
a subject like the other biblical and historical episodes about which he
wrote. Unlike most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English works
on the passion, which rehearse the events of the gospels as the basis
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.
for reflection, devotion, and advice about Christian behavior, Miltons

poetry alludes to these events without narrating or dramatizing them.
For Milton, the crucifixion and its related episodes are not a topic,
but an underlying structure of Christian life. As a consequence of this
view, Milton selects the elements of these stories that emphasize the
spiritual meaning of incarnation and atonement, while avoiding their
more spectacular aspects. We get a sense of this approach to the pas-
sion in Nathanael Richards Celestiall Publican:
Christs whole Life was a Martyrdome, and Crosse,
Active, and Passive, and his deare bloods losse
The Tragicke Part, the bloody Sceane which none
But he himselfe must Act, and Act alone.10
Milton saw the Son in much these terms. His omission of the Tragicke
Part does not mean that he overlooks the passion, since any element
of Christs life conveys the meaning of incarnation and atonement
equally well. Milton learned from his study of the church fathers to
distinguish between spectacles or public shows and Christian truth.
Miltons Commonplace Book quotes Tertullians claim that what spec-
tacle, indeed, is anything like that of the advent of the Lord, now cer-
tain, now glorious, now triumphant (I: 489 n. 1).11 In his alternative
passion Milton follows the implication of Tertullians idea by prefer-
ring the incarnation to the crucifixion and by confining his interest in
the spectacular aspects of the passion not to the dramatic scenes on
the cross, but to Christs assumption of human form.
As a result of Miltons view of the passion, it is in a sense always
his matter. He situates the passion as prior to his occasional subject in
the opening lines of Of Reformation:
after the story of our Saviour Christ, suffering to the lowest bent of weak-
nesse, in the Flesh, and presently triumphing to the highest pitch of glory,
in the Spirit, which drew up his body also, till we in both be united to
him in the Revelation of his Kingdome: I do not know of any thing
more worthy to take up the whole passion of pitty, on the one side, and
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.
To remind the reader of the larger narrative of which each episode

is one part, and most importantly of its spiritual significance, Milton
employs a poetics of suggestion, elision, erasure and substitution.
Miltons view of the incarnation as an ongoing, indissoluble union
means that his depictions of the Son always show his life, never his
deathindeed Milton emphasizes the Sons heavenly pre-existence and
continuing, unchanging being beyond human time.14 Finally, Miltons
portraits of the Son are consistentand distinct from the dominant
pattern of previous centuries of Christian artin one other regard.
While Milton often takes up the Son as the central focus of his works,
he does so primarily as a way to direct our attention back to God the
Father. In De Doctrina Christiana, when Milton sets out to discover who
this one, true, supreme God is, he turns to the Gospels, which
should provide the clearest evidence, for here we find the plain and
exhaustive doctrine of the one God which Christ expounded to his
apostles and they to their followers. . . . So first of all let us consult the
Son on the subject of God. (VI: 213214).
The most important function of the gospel for Milton is not the intro-
duction of the Son, or the narrative of his human life and death, but
the explication through the Son of the doctrine of Gods unity. Not
only does this view of the gospel tradition reaffirm Miltons insistence
on the Sons subordination to the Father, but it underscores that what
Milton is doing in his alternative passion is to de-emphasize Christs
humanitynot to emphasize his divinity, but rather to emphasize the
divinity of the Father. Milton writes that the Son did not come to
make himself, but his Father, manifest (VI: 244).
His chapter in De Doctrina Christiana on the Son scarcely mentions
the passion, concentrating instead on Christs nature and divinity;
this is perhaps the clearest indication that Miltons interest in the Son
does not depend on the crucifixion. When Milton speaks of Christ
as savior in De Doctrina, it is not with reference to the crucifixion or
indeed to any event of the gospels. He rather cites Acts 31: God has
exalted him with his right hand and made him Prince and Savior
(VI: 268). He enumerates the many attributes of the Son, which include
omnipresence, omniscience, authority, omnipotence, the creation of the
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
world, remission of sins, preservation, renovation, judgment, baptism,

and divine glory. Among these attributes Milton includes a brief
discussion of the Sons mediation, which Milton identifies with the
passion. The gospel passages that Milton brings in support of his claim
for Christs mediation through death on the crosswhich convey not
bodily agony but voluntary sacrificeagain move uniformly in the
direction of praise for God the Father.15 Similarly, De Doctrina insists
that Mans Restoration is through redemption,
that act by which Christ, sent in the fulness of time, redeemed all believers
at the price of his own blood, which he paid voluntarily, in accordance
with the eternal plan and grace of God the Father. (VI: 415416)
The biblical passages Milton cites in reference to the payment of this
redemption voluntarily all come from Pauline books of the New Tes-
tament, which antecede the gospels and thereby skirt the crucifixion
(with the exception of Isaiah 53:1, which of course precedes them,
thereby working in a similar way to frame but not depict the events
of Christs death).
Miltons thinking about the passion is evident from the Trinity Col-
lege Manuscript notes as well. Among the nearly one hundred topics
for potential dramas recorded in the manuscript appears one with the
heading Christus patiens that reveals an early intention to compose
a tragedy about the passion. The note indicates the importance Milton
attached to the events surrounding the crucifixion. It reads:
Christus patiens / The Scene in ye garden beginning fr ye coming
thither till Judas betraies & ye officers lead him away ye rest by message
& chorus. his agony may receav noble expressions.16
Milton also considered the more specific Christ Crucifid. Not only
do these brief sketches confirm Miltons interest in writing about the
passion, they also provide a glimpse into several key aspects of the
Miltonic passion as it developed over his career. Both notes imply that
for Milton the crucifixion was a source of inspiration, not a final sub-
ject. Christ Crucified is suggestive, rather than descriptive, and, as
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.
the first note indicates, a beginning rather than a conclusion. Further,

it is a starting point that leads away from the scene of Christ suf-
fering on the cross, to other episodes from his life and other topics
entirely. In the first note, we also find an early intention on Miltons
part to work with abbreviation, fragmentation, and displacement, as
the rest is conveyed indirectly rather than dramatized. True to these
early comments, we do not find in Miltons poetry a whole, finished,
and freestanding representation of the passion. Rather, Miltons pas-
sion appears as a scattered, fragmented, even broken text, contained
not within the frame of one work, but distributed across many. The
crucifixion in particular takes the form of a fragment, elision, digres-
sion, supplement, trace or echo rather than a full image.
Given this evidence of Miltons plans to write about the passion, I
take his early fragment on the subject to be an important landmark in
his ongoing portraiture of the Son. This view departs from the standard
critical response to The Passion, which sees it as a curious failure.
Though critics have commented briefly on The Passion, a thorough
study of Miltons writing on the crucifixion has yet to be undertaken.
Many readers have noted the absence of the crucifixion in Miltons
poetry. I wish to suggest that this is not a flaw in the poems or a necessary
consequence of Puritan theology. Rather, the chapters that follow make
the case that there is a passion in Miltons poems. It remains important
to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of how he approaches it.
Joseph Summers acknowledges that the crucifixion is present and
important in most of his major poems to an extent that modern read-
ers may miss and points to several important instances:
Comus and Lycidas are focused so firmly on their immediate occa-
sions . . . that it would be unlikely for the crucifixion to have an obvious
place within them. Only in retrospect might a reader looking for evidence
of the cross in Miltons poems notice such possible analogies as that the
virtuous Lady is frozen in her goodness, uncorrupted but unable to act,
until a supernatural figure who suffered innocently and died is invoked
with Listen and save and comes to dissolve the evil charm with a watery
rite, or that the passionate description of the death of Orpheus (ll. 58
63) is related not only to Lycidas, sunk low, but mounted high (l. 172)
and the daily death and resurrection of the sun, but also, even more
closely, to the dear might of him that walkd the waves (l. 173).17
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.
To account for the specifics of Miltons alternative passion and its

place in post-Reformation Christian art, the chapters that follow are
organized in two parts. Part One discusses three contexts that are
central to Miltons poeticsthe competing models for depicting Jesus
in Christian art, the theory and practice of iconoclasm as a defining
influence in post-Reformation culture, and the changing nature of rep-
resentations of the passion during this period. Part Two turns to fuller
explorations of the development of these concerns in Miltons 1645
Poems, as well as Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.
Chapter one looks at Miltons poetry within the framework of
Christian representational traditions and dilemmas that stretch back
to the third century, a context for his work that has gone unexplored.
Approaching Milton from this point of view underscores the difficul-
ties he faced in portraying the divine. For an artist of faith, sacred rep-
resentations are always partial because God is ultimately inexpressible.
Milton adopts this doctrinal principle and translates it into aesthetic
terms, elevating incompleteness as a primary artistic tool. In De Doc-
trina Christiana Milton acknowledges that God, as he really is, is far
beyond mans imagination, and therefore
it is safest for us to form an image of God in our minds which cor-
responds to his representation and description of himself in the sacred
writings.
Admittedly, God is always described or outlined not as he really is but

in such a way as will make him conceivable to us. (VI: 133)
The metonymic representations of God which are common in the
Hebrew Bible provide Milton with one of his key sources of accommo-
dation. In the types of representation that God chooses for communi-
cation with humanitythe hand or eye of God, the burning bush, the
pillar of cloud, and so onMilton recognized a set of poetic devices.
Because these forms cannot completely represent God, they recom-
mend the unstable, incomplete, and impermanent as styles appropriate
to divine portraiture.
Furthermore, portraits of the divine must convey sacredness and
yet be legible to ordinary perception. The Christian tradition compli-
cates the question of Gods visibility by introducing the idea of the
Son, whose dual nature provides an image of God in human form.
Christian artists reflected the range of these biblical parametersfrom
the Jewish injunction against images to the incarnation of God in the
New Testamentand provided a rich field in which to consider both
representational and theological questions. If artists and poets turn to
the Bible to address the problem of portraying the ineffable,
the information concerning God in the Bible merely seems to complicate
the problem. On the one hand the Scriptures describe an omniscient,
omnipotent, and omnipresent deity, a spirit, indeed a being who is all
too often described via negativa in terms the opposite of which define
humanityimmutable, impassible, immaterial, immortal. On the other
hand, and simultaneously, the Bible depicts God as sitting on a throne,
raising his right hand, and striking down his enemies; he feels anger and
regret, love and pity and is known not only as divine creator, but also
as father.18
We must consider not just the problems this paradox creates for artists
but also the possibilities it generates; there are a number of represen-
tational strategies in the Bible designed to accommodate human per-
ception, which may be adopted by artists as well. Milton found in the
Bible a set of parameters to guide his work. Three aspects of divine
expression not mentioned abovegodly light; devices of concealment,
especially cloud and smoke; and Gods voiceare especially fruitful
for Milton. Finally, we need to recognize the role of the incarnate
18
Neil Graves, Milton and the Theory of Accommodation, Studies in Philology
98:2 (Spring 2001), 251.
12 introduction
Christ as a living vehicle of accommodation. If, as Graves argues, Mil-

ton allows for literalism in his reading of the human attributes of God,
we must look at his struggle to represent the Son as the centerpiece of
his approach to this problem.
Miltons awareness of the long tradition of Christian art supple-
mented his use of biblical devices for representing the divine. From
the early church through the Middle Ages, in the eastern and western
traditions, writers and visual artists developed a vocabulary of artistic
techniques for conveying the ineffability of God alongside the doctrine
of the incarnation. With the birth of Protestantism, the reformers
antipathy to iconographic abuses redirected Christian artistic impulses
toward the verbal. Poetry emerged as a major medium for Christian
art, particularly in England, which experienced a late Renaissance
characterized by poetic exuberance. In Protestant culture, artists as
much as theologians took up the task of recreating Christian practice,
doctrine, and art in reformed terms. At present very little of this mate-
rial informs scholarship on Milton, and the importance of the visual
arts for Miltons poetry remains a matter of debate. Roy Daniells,
Roland Frye, and Marjorie Garber have shown that Milton shares
important themes and styles with Renaissance painters.19 My aim is
rather to demonstrate that the visual arts made a set of practices for
approaching the ineffable available, and that this material influenced
Miltons reformation of English poetry.
In making the claim that Milton participated in the development of
a new era of Christian art we need to go beyond the commonplace
assumptions that Milton adopted the Protestant plain style and that
he repudiated medieval depictions of the crucifixion on the grounds
that they were overly graphic. In fact he did not avoid the corpo-
real, the violent, the graphic, or the off-putting; consider only Miltons
description of a wen in Of Reformation, the breaking apart of Truth in
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.
Areopagitica or the many disgusting aspects of the generation of Sin in

Paradise Lost. Nor did Milton did seek to avoid the visual in his poetry,
as the same instances and many others demonstrate. Another prem-
ise about Miltons work also requires adjustment. His is not simply a
return to the passion as it was depicted in early Christian art, but a
new rendering, borrowing from that earlier tradition but also invent-
ing. The aim of the chapters that follow is not, however, to identify the
visual aspects of his poetry, or to trace the influence of specific images
on his texts. Rather, it is to articulate the principles of representation,
drawn from the history of Christian art and art theory, which made
available to Milton a set of techniques through which he could create
an alternative representation of the passion, and to consider the results
of this influence on his poetry.
The second chapter takes up one of the most important of these
techniques, the use of iconoclasm as a device in seventeenth-century
poetry. Ernest Gilmans 1986 study Iconoclasm and Poetry in the Eng-
lish Reformation makes the claim that iconoclasm presented a crucial
dilemma for the literary imagination of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.20 Though he addresses Miltons use of iconoclasm as a
theme in Samson Agonistes, Gilmans interest remains in the way literary
texts reflect the dispute over images, whereas I show that iconoclasm
was also a creative tool through which authors labored to craft a new
poetics suitable for the period following the Reformation. Iconoclasm
offered not just a program for the destruction of images but a creative
force that could generate new forms.
The complex operations of iconoclasm yield insight into Miltons
poetics. As images were removed from English churches, cemeter-
ies and monasteries in the sixteenth century, they did not disappear
entirely. Iconoclasm, despite its seemingly totalizing nature, actually
requires evidence of its presence in a work of art to be effective. The
breaking of images endowed them with a new aesthetic and symbolic
power. Ronald Paulson describes how, when a representational tradi-
tion has been destroyed, it nevertheless remains as a ghost world:
If the first stage is breaking, the next is mourning the absence left behind,
or literally taking the form that was not iconoclasted, for example funer-
ary sculpture, and making it a model for a poetry and art of memory,
20
Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1.
14 introduction
a process that I argue is at work in Miltons poetry.21 After the English

Reformation, the materials of Catholic piety, especially the crucifixion
and the events surrounding the death of Christ, as well as the visual
culture of traditional faith, no longer occupied the center of English
belief and practice, leaving their remnants to be dealt with within a
new imaginary. David Loewenstein, writing about Miltons refashion-
ing of the kings image in Eikonoklastes, claims that Miltons literary
iconoclasm involves not only casting down the image but radically
refashioning it as well.22 I argue that both breaking and remaking are
involved, not just in Miltons iconoclasm, but in the post-Reformation
phase of Christian art generally.
Chapter Three considers the special case of the Protestant pas-
sion narrative, particularly as it unfolds in seventeenth-century Eng-
lish poetry, as a key site for the application of these new aesthetics.
Miltons passion poetry can be understood as a contribution to the
development of Christian art. Though perhaps the most familiar of
passion images, the Christus patiens or Christ suffering motif is only one
approach among many, and was dominant only during the late Middle
Ages. Having rejected much of the medieval visual tradition, Protes-
tants needed to develop a new approach to representing the death of
Christ. Chapter Four explores the characteristics of Miltons approach
to the passion. For Milton this meant scripting an alternative depiction
that avoided the suffering, death and burial of Jesus, replacing it with
an imagery of human patience, steadfastness and obedience.
To accomplish this, Miltons poetry often seems to remove the pas-
sion. Part two presents a theory of Miltons practices of omission,
beginning with an examination of Miltons use of the word omission
in his prose, a discussion that points to his awareness of absence as
a tool of artistic creation. Omission is a key term for this study but
one which is quite broad and encompasses many individual poetic
practices. A writer leaves out many things, in fact, most things. Most
of what is absent from a poem bears no relation to the poem at all.
But there is a small but significant category of omissions that ought to
be taken into account, which are the things that have been marked as
omissions; we might also consider the category of words and ideas left
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.
nearest to the poem itself, in its immediate environment and therefore

part of its context.
It is of course not simple to describe something that isnt there. In
choosing to focus on something that I find absent from Miltons poetry
I have been cognizant of the question of validity that this approach
raises. Stanley Fish has recently cautioned that
poems leave out many thingsindeed the vast majority of thingsbut
an account of what a poem leaves out cannot be an account of the
intention of the author (and of the poems meaning) unless it can be
shown that the author wanted the reader to notice the exclusion and to
make something of it.23
Despite Fishs critique of Stephen Dobranskis work on the publication
history of Miltons texts, Dobranskis account of Renaissance omis-
sions provides a model here, as he strives to elucidate the instructions
for recognizing and interpreting omissions that are embedded within
early modern poetry. In the chapters that follow I point out the markers
within the poems that point to absences, training the reader to sense
that something is missing and to seek out its reappearance, perhaps in
a changed form. I argue not that the crucifixion is totally absent from
Miltons poetry but that it is marked by a condition of removal and
restoration. The project of describing what is imperceptible but never-
theless present is precisely what I think Milton and his contemporaries
were trying to do, and in which they formed one moment in a long
tradition within Jewish and Christian culture of trying to depict the
ineffable while respecting its fundamental resistance to portrayal.
Just as the passion often seems to escape from Miltons works, it just
as frequently returns through various devices of supplement. My read-
ing of Miltons poetry considers omission and supplement to be the
most fitting means by which a poet may address the passion narrative.
Omission is a key term for the post-Reformation aesthetic, as a num-
ber of critical elements of Catholic practice were removed from the
devotional repertoire, and seemingly from the early modern aesthetic.
The chapters that follow argue that the sense of removaltraces of
what has been lost and instructions about how to recognize those
absencesare critical to the Protestant imagination. At a broader
level, I am interested in the question of how literature represents the
23
Stanley Fish, Why Milton Matters; or, Against Historicism, Milton Studies 44
(2005), 6.
16 introduction
hidden, what techniques are used in poems to indicate something

that is missing or obscured. We need to look, for instance, at the
instructions embedded within texts about how they should be read,
approaching them from a hermeneutic of suspicion, to dislodge those
readings we are being asked not to undertake, to consider secondary,
or to regard as counter-readings, concealed subtexts or resonances. We
may also look for verbal equivalents of erasure that mark the edges
around which something has been removed. Finally, it is important to
remember that concealment and revelation, omission and supplement,
are the only means by which we must perceive the divine. God is not
totally concealed, but must be revealed through forms of obscurity
that occasionally give way to clarity.
Closely related to the Renaissance concept of omission is the trope
of inexpressibility. Seventeenth-century readers were aware of an
irreducible difference between the visible and invisible worlds. The cre-
ation was Gods book, but the fall had rendered it illegible by disrupting
the human faculties and blinding man to the divine revelation that sur-
rounds him.24
For poets conscious of this fundamental gap between the invisible
aspects of Gods creation and the possibilities of human perception
and expression, the concept of inexpressibility supplies a structural
principle as well as a trope. Further, the hope of reconciling this gap
lay exclusively, for Protestant poets, in two keysthe scriptures and
Christ, the literal embodiment of that unity in his Incarnation.25
Because Christs incarnation operates as a bridging principle, his nativ-
ity and passion must remain central to Protestant art, even when they
do not appear as its explicit subject.
Chapter five offers detailed readings of places in Miltons short ele-
gies, especially Lycidas, which rewrite the representations of death,
resurrection, and atonement dominant in late medieval culture by bor-
rowing the tools of iconoclastic thought and practice. The poetics of
iconoclasm are especially relevant in elegies, and even more so when,
as is so often the case with Milton, elegy calls on tropes borrowed
from the imagery of the passion. To counter the idolatrous impulses
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.
often associated with funeral monuments, an alternative system of

representation was needed. In his early elegies, Milton develops rep-
resentational strategies to replace the medieval cult of death and its
commemoration. The written memorial, particularly in the early 1640s
as a new wave of iconoclasm struck against tomb inscriptions as well
as other religious icons, recommended itself to Milton as an alterna-
tive to traditional rites of burial and commemoration. His alternative
passion begins in these works.
In Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton took up the ultimate
challenge to reformed poeticsdepicting the divine, as both God and
man. In chapters six and seven I examine how Milton addresses the
representational challenges of Christs dual nature, a paradox well
captured by the art historian Robin Jensen, who writes that to show
only the human form was heretical; to attempt to portray the invis-
ible divine form was blasphemous.26 While creating artistic dilemmas,
the concept of the dual nature also produced a number of artistic
strategies for representing Jesus, such as double representations, which
show Christ incarnate and as consubstantiate with God the Father in
the same picture, and the device of showing Christ in several ways
within a single work of art. Such visual devices, when translated into
poetic terms, yield insight into Miltons choices about how to portray
the passion.
In Paradise Lost, Milton portrays God the Father and the Son in
heaven and in communication with pre-lapsarian Adam and Eve.
Beyond this, there are some indications of what it will mean for the
Son to become an incarnate man, but the poem primarily concen-
trates on descriptions of the unseen divine realm. In Paradise Regained,
the question changes: Milton asks not how to accommodate the inef-
fable to verbal description, but how to accommodate the divinity of
what is plain to human sight. Though he cautions against dissolving
the hypostatic union of Christs dual nature in De Doctrina Christiana, in
a sense Milton splits the dual nature across these two poems, so that
each avoids the most difficult aspect of the Son to portray in art, as in
a diptych (VI: 228).
The final chapter considers Samson Agonistes, the subject of some of
the most energetic recent criticism on Milton. My reading intersects
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.
John Shawcrosss image of Milton as a poet with a double vision

glancing back at the classical and biblical past and looking forward to
new artistic models that would be realized fully only in the following
centurieshas become an important paradigm for understanding his
contribution.27 The chapters that follow are concerned with Miltons
application of representational theories developed in the early church,
but it also speaks to the innovative nature of his concept of sacred
poetry. As Milton strove to answer the artistic demands of the Ref-
ormation, he opened new possibilities for English poetry that would
continue to resonate for his many literary heirs.
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
STRATEGIES FOR DEPICTING THE SON IN

CHRISTIAN ART
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
contained this emphasis . . . All the more surprising, then, is it to discover

that as far as Christian art is concerned the crucifixion of Christ did not
mean an indubitably dead corpse on the cross until about the beginning
of the tenth century, and that this realism was only reached after a long
theological struggle.1
The dominance of the passion in Christian iconography between the
twelfth century and the Reformation needs to be understood within a
broader context of Christian representational traditions, theories and
controversies. The art of earlier centuries of the church bears a much
closer resemblance to the work of Protestant artists, including poets.
The earliest surviving examples of Christian art, which date from
the third century, concentrate on the human rather than the divine
aspect of Christ. They tend to be symbolicdepicting a lamb, fish,
or anchor to refer to Jesusor narrative, drawing on stories from the
Hebrew Bible to refer to episodes from his life. According to Robin
Jensen,
The art of the early fourth century did not try overtly to display Jesus
divine nature, or to suggest that he showed forth the visible face of
God, but rather it concentrated on narrating the actions or the stories
that were told about him. For instance, the earliest representations of
Jesus display no haloes or even other signs of divinity that were already
in use for images of the gods or of the deified emperor, or even the
golden or purple robes associated with royalty or the supreme deities of
the Greco-Roman pantheon. The earliest images of Jesus showed him
dressed much like the other figures in a composition, in simple tunic and
pallium and sandaled feet. He is not shown larger than life but rather
as of the same stature as his disciples and followers. The only props he
holds or attributes associated with him usually are related to the narra-
tive itself . . . His posture is far from imposing.2
In addition to these visual cues, events from Jesus human life which
were associated with his divinity, such as the transfiguration, resur-
rection and ascension do not appear until the fifth century.3 Gertrud
Schillers survey of early Christian images records only rare represen-
tations of his birth and childhood from the fifth century up to the late
1
E. J. Tinsley, The Coming of a Dead and Naked Christ, Religion 2:1 (Spring
1972), 24.
2
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.
needed to decide whether to show Jesus alone, or with other figures,

such as Mary, who might instruct the viewer about how to respond.
In many early Christian representations of Jesus the emphasis is not
on death, but on conveying his dualdivine and humannature and
the mystery of incarnation. The belief that the Son was both man and
god also generated special problems for the visual arts. The laws of
the Hebrew Bible against the worship of images are deeply related to
the concept of the unity of God. Monotheism demands the corollary
proscription against images because it denies the possibility of God
having any form, certainly not a human form. For Christianity, on the
other hand, the incarnation in the person of Jesus results in a funda-
mentally different set of questions regarding representation, likeness,
and correspondence. Herbert Kessler explains that
images demonstrate that Christ fulfilled scriptural types and affirm his
incarnation. Indeed, precisely by violating the Second Commandment,
they remind the Christian faithful that a new covenant had superseded
the old and that the new Israel, which had seen God in the flesh, had
been promised redemption through Christs eternal sacrifice not obedi-
ence to the law. The incarnation made images possible, but this desire to
disengage Christianity from Jewish literalism made them necessary.12
Because Jesus human form was itself an image, the incarnation was
thought to validate the creation of ordinary portraits of Christ as well.
Controversy over the dual nature of Christ also characterized the
Byzantine image crisis of the eighth century:
One of the main arguments between iconoclasts and the defenders of
icons was whether an icon could represent the composite nature of
Christ. The iconoclastic argument was that it would be at least futile, if
not blasphemous, to attempt to portray the divine nature of Christ, and
if an icon tried to represent his human nature only, it would fall into a
version of Nestorianism, as it would be separating the two natures of
Christ. Most defenders of icons answered this problem by basing their
arguments on the Incarnation, which made it possible for human eyes to
see Christ without separating his two natures. If people could see Christ,
why could they not paint him?13
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.
concept of the dual nature generates these representational dilemmas;

we might say it generates Christian art and art theory.
What did Milton know about the history of Christian art, and how
did this knowledge contribute to shaping his divine poetry? To sug-
gest any such awareness or influence requires a reevaluation of the
longstanding assumption that Milton was antithetical to the visual arts.
Coleridge laid the foundations for this view when he asked,
what can we say about iconography in relation to a poet who was at least
indifferent if not hostile to man-made images? Milton nowhere mentions
any identifiable idol in stone, bronze or pigment, seen at home or on the
European travels . . . Unlike Spenser or Keats, he never made poetry or
prose of a specific work of art. The palace of Pandemonium is described
with epic vastness, not with exact detail; in this generalized visual mode
Milton largely operated.19
Even in modern criticism, Milton is linked to the visual arts mainly
in terms of his influence on eighteenth-century painting and illustra-
tion.20 Scholars have been less inclined to ask how he drew on the
visual traditions of his own and earlier eras. One exception to this
tendency is Roland Fryes study Miltons Imagery and the Visual Arts, a
valuable attempt to determine how the visual materials available to
Milton provided a source for his epic descriptions. In arguing that
the principal analogues to the subject matter he treats in the epics are
to be found in the visual arts rather than in nature, Frye articulates
an important theme of the present study.21 Similarly, his awareness
that generations of Christian art had sensitized readers to a wide
range of pictorial images which could be brought to mind by a few
deft phrases resonates with my claim that Miltons readers, and the
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
broader culture of Reformation England, were aware of the delibera-

tions that shaped Christian art.22
Though Miltons use of the Bible and interest in certain heretical
traditions (often those concerning the nature and divinity of Christ)
within the early church have been well established, his knowledge of
Christian art remains to be addressed.23 There are several important
sources through which Milton would have become familiar with Chris-
tian visual traditions. First, some knowledge of the visual practices
and theories of the early church could have come from his university
studies and his independent reading of early church histories during
the Horton period. Particularly valuable for Miltons development of
a vocabulary of representational approaches was his Italian journey,
especially his consequent exposure to visual culture. Finally, even within
mainstream Anglican culture of the seventeenth century, Milton would
have encountered an array of images, including representations of
the Son.
Since his approach to depicting Christ resembles most closely those
of the early church, it is worthwhile to consider briefly how this mate-
rial might have entered into Miltons intellectual development. The
writings of the church fathers do not dwell extensively on Christian
representation, but Miltons approach to the primitive church identi-
fies several principles that inform his artistry as well as his theology.
His attitude toward the early churchespecially after the conversion
of Constantine institutionalized Christianityis sharply critical.24 He
makes it clear that he does not advocate a straightforward return to
the primitive church or the adoption of its ecclesiastical policies. Mil-
ton criticizes those who privilege this moment in church history as
the votarists of Antiquity who would worsen the state of the Eng-
lish church by returning to a corrupt age.25 Indeed, Milton insists in
De Doctrina Christiana that a man of faith must establish his own creed
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.
(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
specifically in new aesthetic measuresis the most fitting endeavor for

a true Christian.
One of the most importantand certainly the least acknowledged

sources of influence on Miltons poetry was the art Milton might have
seen on his continental tour, especially in Italy. Milton does not discuss
the works of art that he saw, but as Hannah Demaray notes,
if in describing the Italian journey he fails to mention his meeting with
Galileo and Cardinal Barberini, as well as the death of Diodati, it comes
as little surprise that he but briefly mentions the art works of Rome.26
Milton visited the major capitals of Italian art (where he would have
seen both the new art of the seventeenth century and works dating
back through the Italian Renaissance and Middle Ages to the earliest
Christian visual artifacts): Pisa (including the Duomo and Baptistery),
Florence (where he went to the Palazzo Vecchio, Pitti Palace, Santa
Croce, San Lorenzo, and Fiesole), Rome (including the Vatican and
the English Jesuit College), Venice (including the Doges Palace, San
Marco mosaics, and the Church of Santa Maria della Salute) and oth-
ers. Barbara Lewalski notes in her biography that in addition to what
was in churches and other public places his friends could have given
him access to several great private collections.27 One such source was
that of the Gaddi family, which had a famous and rich collection
of art in their palazzo when Milton was there, including paintings
by Leonardo and Del Sarto, and Jacopo Sansovinos Descent from the
Cross.28
We know that it was commonpossibly even desirablefor English
travelers in Italy to see paintings, even those in Catholic churches.29
Michael OConnell acknowledges that Milton could hardly have
avoided seeing Italian art, noting that his many friends no doubt
escorted him to various collections of paintings and (if he was willing) to
churches, where much of the sacred art of the past two centuries was to
be found. Milton must have looked at paintings, frescoes, and sculpture
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.
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
Gerbier also mentions a sculpture of Christ by Michelangelo at the

Minerva church; the paintings of Raphael at the Palace of Guisi; the
works of Bronsino at Monte Giordano; the works of Holbein and
Michelangelo at Cardinal Cresentio; and many other individual works
and locations housing Italian paintings and sculptures. Though Gerbiers
royalism sets him at odds with Miltons point of view, his survey at the
least indicates the variety of works available, even unavoidable, for the
English traveler to Italy. Paul Parrish concludes that in the heart of
the Roman church, Milton responded, most evidence suggests, as one
interested in art and culture, not in opposition and controversy.34
James Howells Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642) advises a trav-
eler to bee well grounded and settled in his Religion and some-
what versed in the Controversies twixt us and the Church of Rome
to strengthen him when he encounters the sundry fond fantastique
forms of Catholic worship.35 Clare Haynes asks,
Just how should we think about an English Protestant walking into a
Catholic church in Rome to see and admire works of art? On what basis
did tourists engage with the art they had come to see?
She answers that Protestant travelers mediated what they saw by dis-
tinguishing between canonical works of art and images given over to
idolatrous attention. She explains that although painting, as a form,
was not cut free from the problem of idolatry completely, in English
accounts, extended discussions of idolatry and superstition were, on
the whole, kept separate from the discussion of canonical pictures.
Works deemed canonical were allowed to transcend the circum-
stances in which they were viewed, which in itself is an important
enough statement about the nature of art for us to take it seriously in
relation to questions about Miltons theory of representation.36 Milton
specifically addressed the problems of looking that travelers in Catho-
lic settings encountered:
Fifteen years later, remembering Geneva, he was proud to call upon
God to witness, that in all those places where there is so much licence,
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.
I lived pure and untouched of all defilement and profligate behaviour,

having it ever in mind that, if I could escape the eyes of men, I certainly
could not escape the eyes of God.37
Interestingly, Milton calls on the language of sight in this passage, not
to describe his own acts of looking, but to focus on those of God.
The final source of exposure to Christian artwhich, like the Ital-
ian tour, has been overlooked by scholarship on Miltons poeticsis
to be found much nearer at hand, in the visual record of seventeenth-
century England. Milton encountered a variety of images in his
seventeenth-century English surroundings. Despite the wide prohibi-
tions on images of God, especially of God the Father, in painting,
statuary, church windows, and other two and three-dimensional art
works, such images abound, especially in printed books of the late six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries. A brief survey of these images
illuminates the range of possibilities in Miltons visual culture. They
also show a variety of strategies within Protestantism for conveying the
nature of the divine.
English Bibles are major sources for such images, including depic-
tions of God the Father. Their pictorial programs give an indication
of the spectrum of reformed approaches to images and suggest some
of the possibilities at Miltons disposal. The 1535 Coverdale version,
for example, bears a richly illustrated title page. The page is divided
left and right and top to bottom, with the images on the top depicting
the heavenly realm and the perfection of Eden and the lower section
showing the Bible being presented to Henry VIII. The left side of the
page is devoted to two scenes from the Hebrew Bible, with correspond-
ing episodes from the New Testament on the right. God the Father
appears only through the Tetragrammaton, though Christ appears in
three scenes on the right: from Acts and Mark, and in the upper right,
in the Christus Triumphans mode. The first page of Genesis opens with
a six-panel rendition of the days of creation. Each panel prominently
features God in the act of creation. God is shown in human form,
but with several attributes conventionally deployed to reveal his divine
nature, including a halo, flowing robes, and raised arm, as the creation
unfolds at his command. With long hair and beard, there is also an
unmistakable affinity between this figuration of God and many images
37
William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), I: 181.
32 chapter one
of Christ, which is consistent with the Christian habit of conflating the

two persons of God that Milton also adopts.
The Geneva Bible, in contrast, employs only the most minimal
pictorial program and never renders an image of God or Christ in
human form, showing only the pillar of cloud accompanying the Isra-
elite exodus from Egypt in an illustration on the cover page of the
New Testament. By the time of the King James authorized version of
1611, the pictorial range has been further reduced. No human image
of Christ is given, and God is represented by the Tetragrammaton,
with a dove and lamb below presumably conveying the other persons
of the trinity and a pelican image in the center of the lower part of
the frame, which almost certainly also refers to Christ.
As images in English translations of the Bible wane, devotional works
continue to include a range of visual representations. The Tetragram-
maton predominates, often standing at the head of the title page com-
partment as it does in many Bibles of the period.38 In Hugo Grotius
True Religion Explained and Defended (1632), the Hebrew name of God
appears in the center of a cloud from which a pair of hands holding
the Old and New Testaments descends.39 In the lower tiers of the
compartment are illustrations of the Christian, the Jew (both of these
figures kneeling in prayer), and the Turk and the Pagan. In addition to
being distinguished by their attitudes of supplication from the others,
another aspect of the image of the Christian further sets him apart
from the Jew. Whereas the Jew prays before the two tables of the law,
the Christian kneels on a cross and prays toward heaven. His prayer
alone seems to be answered, as a broad ray of light emanates from a
cloud directly onto his face. None of this is unusual from a doctrinal
point of view, but the range of visual cues that are marshaled in the
compartment to convey Gods presence and approbationall of them
indirectis worth noticing.
Just at the time when Milton was thinking about how to create a
new representational approach, the Laudian movement sought to rein-
state some of the church furnishings and decorations that had been
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).
removed by reformers. Close attention to these restorations shows that,

while Milton forcefully opposed the doctrinal and ecclesiastical aspects
of Laudianism, their aesthetics exhibit a concern with many of the
same questions Milton faced. Graham Parry has recently explored the
artistic program of the Anglican Church, revealing that the center
of English Protestantism, no less than the more extreme Puritan and
Recusant ends of the spectrum, was also concerned with aesthetics
and not simply a neutral position. In his survey of Anglican design and
church furnishings, Parry reveals the coexistence of items returned
from traditional Christianity with those representing a compromise
position. In one example, he details the gifts of plate donated in the
1620s and 1630s, often graven with images . . . Many chalices bore
the sacred monogram IHS, a formula expressly to render Christ by
letters, rather than by a figure. Others had the instruments of the
Passion engraved on them.40 Such evidence reminds us, first, of the
continuing presence and value of traditional iconography, in this case
the instruments of the passion, and of a set of alternative devices, such
as the Holy Monogram, representing an Anglican contribution to the
English debate over images. As Susan Wabuda explains, the Name of
Jesus as a visual device (usually in one of several monogram forms)
developed as a cult in the period just before the Reformation. But,
according to Wabuda,
in a time of religious change, the inescapable Christocentrism of the
cult of the Holy Name ultimately made it an uneasy nexus between
the dynamism of the Catholic Church, and emerging Protestantism.
The use of the Holy Name is a paradigm of the religious bifurcation
of western Europe
and, because it served both the Jesuits and the English Protestants,
a symbol of the distinctive place of the English church in moder-
ate reform.41 Miltons scrupulous avoidance of the names Jesus and
Christ in his poetry suggests one of the many ways he was engaged
with the changing aesthetics of Christianity in the post-Reformation
period.
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
ICONOCLASM AS AN ARTISTIC STRATEGY
Christian history has witnessed several periods of debate about images,

in the process developing not only religious doctrines, but also theo-
ries of representation that offer useful contexts for understanding the
problems Milton and his contemporaries sought to address in creating
a new English poetry for the post-Reformation age. The theory and
practice of iconoclasm is one of the most important lenses through
which to examine English Protestant poetry. Iconoclasm created as
well as destroyed. Beyond defacing and dismantling images, Refor-
mation iconoclasm acted as a creative force, shaping English poetry
and the Christian theory of representation. The long-held view of
late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England as iconophobic
and utterly antagonistic to visual culture has been revised in recent
scholarship. The increasing sense among critics that iconoclasm posed
a crucial dilemma for the literary imagination of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and was productive for sacred art of all kinds
should be brought to readings Miltons poetry as well.1
This revision stems from an understanding of the Reformation as
an ongoing process, which actively engaged English men and women
from across the devotional spectrum, well into the seventeenth century,
and produced a variety of theological and artistic problems as well as a
myriad of compelling attempts to solve those problems.2 Milton wrote
in a second age of iconoclasm in Christian art, as part of a movement
that drew on earlier Christian models which laid out a program not
only for the destruction of images, but for the creation of religious
art. Reformation attitudes towards images have been extensively docu-
mented and analyzed; the influence of these positions on the visual
and verbal arts of the English Reformation has also been considered.
Less attention has been given to the deployment of iconoclasm as an
1
(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
artistic strategy. Iconoclasm may generate what Kenneth Gross has

called a complex dynamic of violence and substitution, in which
curative acts of iconoclasm may still entail a continuing, though more
ironic and dialectical process of imagemaking.3 In what follows I sug-
gest a number of specific gestures within the practice of iconoclasm
that have equivalents in the artistic process used by Milton and his
contemporaries. I then turn to the most explicit of Miltons statements
about iconoclasm, in Eikonoklastes, which lays out not just his antipa-
thy to the iconography of Charles I as a Christ-like martyr, but also
reveals many of the principles for Miltons alternative iconography of
the Son.
The doctrines of iconoclasm are well documented and do not need
to be rehearsed here. The most important aspect of Christian image
theory for a discussion of Miltons poemsand a key element of
Reformation-era iconoclasmis the hostility to depictions of the Son
as well as of God the Father. The Protestant view that images of
Christ are unlawful derives from the belief that such portraits can
render only the human and not the divine aspects of the Son.4 This
view departs from early and medieval concepts of Christian art, which
struggled formally to convey the dual nature, but developed a cata-
logue of strategies for doing so and believed it was possible. The main-
stream Protestant position against any representation of the divine is
expressed plainly in the Homily Against the Peril of Idolatry, which reveals
many of the dynamics at work in English poetic treatments of the
Son as well. As the Homily rehearses the injunctions of the Hebrew
Bible against idolatry, it calls attention to how they are framed by two
important contextsthe form in which God appears to the Israelites,
and the directive not to add to Scripture. It reminds its audience that
the Lorde spake unto you out of the middle of fire but you heard
the voice or sound of his words, but you did see no forme or shape at
all.5 The Homily also notes that God is present with the Israelites only
when they have no images or idols among them. The Homilys sum-
mary of ecclesiastical history and the writings of the church fathers
3
Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell
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
Like them, no sin in him was, nor could fall

Into him . . .6
Prynnes description of Christ celebrates verbal rendering as it warns
against the folly of visual representation. Most notably, though,
Prynnes assertion that Jesus was not a Nazirite reveals another prob-
lematic aspect of the dual nature. If Christ is fully human, yet free
from the potential corruption of sin, can his body be depicted like any
other? Prynne seems both to desire an accurate accountwhich for
him can only be scripturally based and verbaland to believe no full
rendering of the Son is possible. For many Protestant writers, the dif-
ficulty of representing Christs dual nature prompts a shift away from
the traditional focus on Christs bodily death. They emphasize instead
both the ordinary human life of the Son and his ongoing, unchanging
existence in heaven.
As new, primarily textual portraits of the Son emerge in sixteenth-

century England, the various doctrines and practices of iconoclasm
provide guidelines for divine poetry. They also prove valuable as cre-
ative tools. Iconoclasm is not a single action but a range of behaviors
toward images, including total destruction to a point at which the idol
no longer exists or is rendered completely unrecognizable; conversion
of an image to another purpose, especially the burning of crosses and
wooden statues; breaking into pieces, particularly the removal of heads
from statues and rendering in half (a process in which the maimed
statue in effect becomes a new image); defacements of other kinds; and
subjection to ridicule in pageants and other public spectacles, includ-
ing the revelation of the mechanical means by which icons thought to
have miraculous powers were manipulated. As this catalogue suggests,
iconoclasm may mean destroying an image outright, but it just as often
involves remaking icons, even creating new images. Written texts of
the English Reformation period, which are usually seen as a substi-
tution for the visual art of the medieval church, borrow from these
iconoclastic forms of breaking and remaking. Just as the persistence
of an iconoclasted image could be theologically desirable to reformers,
for whom the broken remains of a shattered icon conveyed a potent
warning against idolatry, English poetry also placed a value on broken
6
Prynnes verse was published with John Vicars The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness, of
Having or Making the Picture of Christs Humanity (London, 1641), 7374.
images, revisions of divine representations, and the reformation of

earlier Christian art forms.
Several techniques of iconoclasm became important tools for the
composition of Protestant poetry when it depicted God the Father and
the Son. The first concerns the device of deferral. While Jesus suffer-
ing and death in the crucifixion could not be removed entirely from
even the most reformed theology and art, its potential danger could be
managed through deferral. Thus many visual and textual representa-
tions allude to the crucifixion as a future event, thereby maintaining its
centrality without the need to depict it iconographically. The language
of deferral appears in the writings on iconoclasm beginning in the
1530s. Orders issued to clergy instructed
that such feigned images as ye know of in any of your cures to be so
abused with pilgrimages or offerings of anything made thereunto, ye
shall, for avoiding that most detestable sin of idolatry, forthwith take
down and delay. . . .7
Margaret Aston asks what exactly did this clause envisage being
done with abused images? Did the word delay (also spelled deley) mean
destruction, or merely the removal of the offending objects?8 Delay
seems to mean to prevent, but also to keep at a safe distance. In the
sixteenth century, to delay could also mean to dilute or weaken, to
soften or make thin.9 In this sense as well we can glimpse a technique
for mitigating the harmful potential of certain images by temper-
ing them with others designed to reinforce the correct message and
use of the image. The curious word choice underscores the fact that
iconoclasm often sought to revise images rather than totally annihilate
them. Absolute destruction was impractical if not impossible, opposi-
tion to iconoclasm was strong, and even zealous reformers differed on
what constituted an unlawful image. Reformers were left with ques-
tions about which images were allowed, where, and how they could
be used, and how to rehabilitate ineradicable images such as the cross
to conform to reformed thought. In this context the concept of delay
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
offers the possibility of leaving the potentially dangerous materials in

place by preventing representations from arriving at them.
Deferral is equally well suited to poetic representations of the cen-
tral images of Christian faith, as we often find instances of digression,
displacement and removal from the center of the text in Protestant
treatments of the passion. In many Protestant passion narratives, as
I discuss in greater detail in the next chapter, the crucifixion is fre-
quently evoked but never shown. It is deferred indefinitely, while other
episodes from the sequence leading up to it are substituted. The sense
of delay as dilution similarly characterizes Protestant poetics. In the
passion accounts, the events of Christs death are surrounded by scenes
from the nativity and figures of Christ as universal judge and ruler,
which act to delay and thereby correct a readers ability to venerate
the image of the dying Christ.
Reformed depictions also use delay to place the events of the passion
sequence in a broader context which underscores the will and grace of
God the Father over and above the role of the Son. Milton exempli-
fies this approach. In Paradise Regained, he establishes the framework in
which readers are asked to understand the temptations of Christ by
using the term delay. Satan witnesses the baptism of the Son, lament-
ing that the long promised arrival of his vanquisher has arrived:
Since Adam and his facile consort Eve
Lost Paradise deceivd by me, though since
With dread attending when that fatal wound
Shall be inflicted by the Seed of Eve
Upon my head. Long the decrees of Heavn
Delay, for longest time to him is short;
And now too soon for us the circling hours
This dreaded time have compast, wherein we
Must bide the stroke of that long threatnd wound. (I.5159)
Satan errs here, as he characteristically does, in two respects. First,
he assumes that he will be defeated by physical combat, a concept
of the passion that Milton always rejects. Satans understanding of
divine delay also misses the mark. Whereas he implies that the baptism
launches a sequence of events which will culminate in his defeat, in fact
the poem will not dramatize those events, keeping them at a comfort-
able distance. Rather, in keeping with the iconoclastic device of delay,
the baptism and temptations substitute for the crucifixion. This substi-
tution reinforces the importance of the eternal sovereignty of God the
Father, rather than a set of human events, to effect salvation.
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.
rament, and performed his Devotions in preparation to his Passion.14

They show how even before Charles death, Edward Symmons culti-
vated an image of Charles in Christs Robes, to show what a perfect
similitude there hath been and is, between our Saviour and our Sovereign
in the four last years of both their sufferings.15 After his death, the
Eikon Basilike served as an incarnational text, for it provided a revered,
material textual body for Charles I. Many early-modern readers expe-
rienced the volume as the sacred, authoritative Word.16 Early readers
of Eikon Basilike indeed viewed it as a substitute funeral monument for
the king, a monument of richer metal than all the tombs of brass or
marble, erected to the honor of his predecessors and went so far as
to suggest he was nearer the similitude of God then as he is either a
man or king on its basis.17 Given Miltons antipathy to the celebra-
tion of deathparticularly when it carried echoes of the passionthis
view of the kings book can only have deepened Miltons iconoclastic
response.
In the first years after the regicide, elegies and sermons poured
forth, many of which explicitly portray the king as a second Christ.18
There was a great deal in these elegies for Milton to dislike, if he
read them. John Clevelands Monumentum Regale: Or A Tombe Erected for
that incomparable and Glorious Monarch, Charles the First (1649) transfers
the funeral rites and monument that the king was denied into textual
form.19 The use of red ink to highlight Charles name and other key
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
words in the Chronosticon of his reign heightens the readers sense

of holding the bleeding body of the headless king. Charles Died
here to re-Baptize it [his kingdom] in His Bloud (A3r). Clevelands
Elegie calls Charles The Meekest of Men, / The most glorious
of Princes (A3v). In his Caroli Cleveland likens Charles death to
the crucifixion, writing that our Soveraigns, like our Saviours Passion, /
Becomes a kind of Doomsday to the Nation (21) and thus our Savior,
to inhance his grief, / Was hung betwixt and Murderer and a Thief
(26). He continues
Now Charles as King, and as a good King too,
Being Christs adopted self, was both to do
And Suffer like him; both to live and die
So much more humble, as he was more high
Then his own Subjects. He was thus to tread
In the same footsteps, and submit his Head
To the same thorns, when spit upon, and beat,
To make his Conscience serve for his retreat,
And overcome by suffering: To take up
His Saviours Crosse, and pledge him in his Cup
............................................................................
Posterity will say, he should have dyd
No other Death, then by being crucifid.
And their renownedst Epocha will be
Great Charles his Death, next Christs Nativity. (26)
In these lines Cleveland exceeds the common practice of comparing
a celebrated man to Christ; in effect he replaces Christ with Charles,
specifically substituting the kings death for the crucifixion. This may
be justified by his additional claim that Kings are Gods once removd,
a doctrine of monarchy that Milton contests, in part by rewriting the
image of the Son as king or rather by rewriting the doctrine so that
the Son is the only king (28).20
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.
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.
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
in idolatry. It goes further as well, to make from the broken pieces a

new work, an image that corrects the mistaken beliefs of the original
as it demonstrates the process of corrective breaking it has undergone.
Eikonoklastes illuminates not just the process of Miltons iconoclasm,
but also one of its main targets. His poems on the Son, especially
The Passion and Paradise Regained, characterize Miltons iconoclastic
approach to the passion because each of these works omits the dead
body of Christ. Where there is no body, there is no grave, so there is
no iconthe lack of a passion is the greatest iconoclastic gesture of all.
CHAPTER THREE
THE POST-REFORMATION PASSION
In Eikonoklastes, Milton rejects Charles Is appropriation of passion

imagery in the Eikon Basilike, in which he compared himself explicitly
to Christ on the cross. For Milton and his Protestant contemporaries,
the only valid sources on which to base a representation of the Son
were the scriptures. To understand how Milton created a passion that
departs from the late medieval Christus Patiens tradition, it is impor-
tant to recognize the contours of biblical precedent, the materials and
methods it provides for the Reformation rewriting of the passion image.
The gospels were, of course, the source for medieval renderings
of the crucifixion as well. But reformed artists and poets recognized
that, taken as a whole, the gospels present a picture of Jesus as Son
of God, teacher, pastor, and ethical exemplar. The biblical texts of
Jesus human life portray his suffering death and burial, but they frame
these events with a far more extensive treatment of his teachings and
conclude with scenes of his heavenly afterlife. The gospels make avail-
able to reformers a variety of alternatives to the crucifixion, many of
which were taken up by artists of the early church, and which could
be reclaimed for a new expression of Christian belief that did not
depend on iconography.
The variety of representations of Christ in the gospels derives from
a fundamental quality of these texts. As Frank Kermode has shown,
the gospels have a rich literary complexity:
Writers in this tradition of storytelling are privy to the plot of God
and to the thoughts of men and women. But omniscience, as Sternberg
remarks, does not entail omnicommunication. One can be omniscient
and reticent, as the Old Testament narrators are, and as Mark is; even
John, as we have seen, does not tell all. It is a natural consequence of
this traditional privilege that each teller may reveal and also withhold
whatever he chooses so long as he is faithful to the fundamental story,
which, in the case of the Passion, is a rigorous condition. But even here
information may be reserved or inventively expanded.1
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
The gospels operate through a dialectic of revelation and withholding,

a technique that many early modern renderings of the passion narra-
tive borrow. As Kermodes reading implies, the gospels also create the
possibility for additional retellings of the passion beyond the biblical
texts. The Gospel of Mark, believed to be the earliest and the basis
for the other gospels, presents the crucifixion in minimal detail. As
Matthew, Luke and John expand and develop the outline of events in
Mark, they establish a pattern that invites later writers to extend or
collapse their narratives of the crucifixion as well. This flexibility in
works derived from the gospels is also made possible by their episodic
nature; in retellings any single event from the sequence might stand in
metonymically for the whole. Finally, the gospels differ in
emotional pitch, and each bears a different theological import. Whereas
the earlier Gospel of Mark relates the agonized death cry of Jesus, My
God, why hast thou forsaken me? (15:34) and thereby emphasizes the
bitterness of His death, Luke rejects the implacable desolation of this
formula in favor of the confident utterance of the Jewish evening prayer,
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit (23:46), emphasizing that
the work of salvation has concluded.2
These qualities mean that a writer approaching the story of the passion
needed to make a number of aesthetic as well as doctrinal choices. No
single way of representing these events is prescribed by their scriptural
sources.
Awareness of the literary qualities of the gospelsas well as the
variety of artistic precedents in early Christian artallows for a fuller
understanding of the Protestant poetry of the passion. Rather than the
suffering and death of Jesus so highlighted in late medieval piety, Eng-
lish Renaissance portraits emphasized his Sonship and life. Michael
Schoenfeldt has asked why the passion shifted from being a site of
the deepest imaginative engagement for medieval Catholic writers to
a comparatively marginal subject among seventeenth-century Prot-
estants.3 His question assumes that because the crucifixion appears to
be largely absent from their work, the passion is not a site of artistic
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
development and production. Schoenfeldt bases his claim on a reading

of poems on the crucifixion by Herbert, Donne and Milton that dem-
onstrates these poets turning away from the scene of the crucifixion in
various ways. Their means of engagement indeed differ from those of
medieval artists, but this divergence of approach should not mislead
us into thinking that the passion is no longer a subject of theological
and artistic interest. Rather, the unique methods and materials of the
Protestant approach to the passion suggest that it is very much the site
of artistic invention.
Post-Reformation passion poems (along with prose narratives of
Jesus life and death) shift the focus away from the crucifixion to con-
centrate on other events in the passion sequence and the rather dif-
ferent idea of Jesus role that they put forward.4 In turning away from
the crucifixion as the primary scene of the passion, they remove many
features of late medieval representations, such as the arma Christi (the
nails, crown of thorns, and lance), the blood and water thought to
have flowed from Christs pierced side, and the iconography of the
Christus Patiens posture (drooping head and arms, closed eyes, bent
S-shaped body, bound legs joined with a single nail). In place of these
conventions of the late medieval passion, Protestant alternatives prefer
a living, upright, victorious and eternal Christ. Even when the Protes-
tant passion seeks to inspire an imitatio Christi, it offers a model not of
pain and humiliation, but of patience, obedience and sonship. This
process of removal and substitution receives its fullest expression in
Miltons poetry, which distills the Protestant passion tradition into a
set of representations, scattered across his short and long poems, that
constitute an absolutely reformed passion concerned not with Jesus
death but with his incarnation and its reflection of the will of God
the Father.
Miltons achievement depended on the work of previous genera-
tions of reformed passion narratives, just as it drew on representa-
tional strategies of the early church. In the earliest decades of the
English Reformation, from the 1540s to the Elizabethan settlement,
the passion appears primarily in sermons and devotional works. It is
not a subject to which the poets of the early Reformation turn. These
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
texts usually approach the crucifixion through an older tradition of

indirect representationoften through references to other scriptural
narratives (such as the binding of Isaac and Daniel slaying the dragon)
or to events of the passion sequence other than the crucifixion.5
Perhaps the most familiar trait of Protestant poetry in generalits

meditative, devotional naturecharacterizes many treatments of the
passion as well. The approach to representing the passion in the poetry
of meditation concentrates on interior, non-corporeal images. The
subject is rarely the crucified Jesus and more often the poetic speaker.
In these texts, the materials of traditional belief and worship, such as
the cross, undergo a conversion to new uses. Malcolm Mackenzie Ross
claims that
the traditional Christian symbols in Anglican poets like Donne or Her-
bert sometimes function in contradiction to the tradition which bore them
and that because of significant revision of central Christian dogma, the
actual aesthetic effect of such symbols must be searched and felt in terms
of a subtle contrapuntal tension between tradition and innovation within
dogma itself . . . The tension between Catholic and Protestant dogma at
the core of Anglican rhetoric must be considered as an aesthetic fact and
not just as an item in the history of ideas.6
The poetry of meditation plays an important role, then, in the formu-
lation of new artistic strategies for reformed treatments of the passion,
both by directing attention away from the crucifixion and its instru-
ments and by reworking these materials from a changed theological
standpoint.
Francis Quarles On our Saviours Passion, for example, focuses
exclusively on the moment of Jesus death but manages not to depict
it. The poem instead catalogues a series of responses to Jesus death.
First the world of nature reacts, with the trembling of the earth and
clouding of the skies; the Spheares / Forgat their harmony (34).7
Next Quarles shows us the raising of the dead, and the gaping of the
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.
tombs, which Quarles attributes to their desire to provide a grave for

Christ. He also refers to the rending of the Temple veil, which pro-
vides the ultimate model for the speakers own grief:
Shall senslesse things doe this, and shall not I
Melt one poore drop to see my Saviour dye?
Drill forth my Teares; and trickle one by one,
Till you have peircd this heart of mine, this Stone. (1314)
The speaker substitutes his own suffering for Christs, as he is pierced
and wounded, suffering and dropping his head. Yet Quarles poetic
persona dramatizes his inability to respond to the conventional trig-
gers of passion representations. Having established the omission of a
direct rendering of the crucifixion, the scene shifts over the course of
the poem from the cross to the heart of the believer, tracing a lacuna
from which the events of the crucifixion have been removed.
The poems articulation of the speakers distance from the scene of
the crucifixion and his flawed response typify the meditative style in
Protestant lyric poetry. But they also point to the loss of a system for
understanding and responding to the crucifixion. The speaker and his
audience know that the graphic depiction of Christs suffering and the
emotional response it was meant to evoke are no longer the focus of
Christian art. Yet the substitution of an internal dialogue about the
speakers salvation seems to falter here, when his heart is portrayed as
an unyielding stone. In Quarles devotional poem we see traces of the
removal of the crucifixion and some of the alternative terms accord-
ing to which Reformation poetry approached the Passion.
Similarly, Donnes Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward creates a
scenario in which the speaker does not look at the crucifixion and yet
supplies what has been omitted through description:
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once peircd with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, ragd, and torne? (2128)8
8
John Donne, The Complete English Poems, edited by C. A. Patrides (London: Every-
man, 1994).
54 chapter three
Donnes handling of the crucifixion images depends on a pattern of

omission and supplement that typifies reformed poetics on the inef-
fable, including the passion.9 Goodfriday suggests a desire for an as
yet unfound alternative means of approaching the crucifixion. These
poems seek a correction, often expressed as a repair made to the spiri-
tual life of the speaker.
Even when Donne considers the crucifixion explicitly, in Crucify-
ing and The Crosse, his poetry exemplifies post-Reformation imag-
ery. The title of Crucifying may suggest some of these dynamics.
The only poem in Donnes La Corona sonnet sequence with a title
in gerund form (the other poems express the events they concern more
traditionally as Annunciation, Nativitie, Temple, Resurrection,
and Ascention), Crucifying implies not a single, spectacular event
of violent death, but an ongoing process whose significance lies pri-
marily in the speakers experience of it. The poem acknowledges Jesus
pain and death, but converts the image of his blood to a meditative,
interior function: Moyst, with one drop of thy blood, my dry soule
(14). Typically, the poem also concludes not with this scene but with
the resurrection and ascension, concluding with an image of the Son
as Bright torch, which shinst, that I the way might see (11).
In The Crosse Donne explicitly confronts the problematic venera-

tion of the cross.10 Donne asks, Since Christ embracd the Crosse it
selfe, dare I / His image, thimage of his Crosse deny? (12) The
question points to the pain of losing traditional symbols, as well as the
spiritual danger of seeming to reject Christs sacrifice. The poem goes
on, however, to suggest a distinctly Protestant approach to the cross:
Who can blot out the Crosse, which thinstrument
Of God, dewd on mee in the Sacrament?
..................................................................................
Looke downe, thou spiest out Crosses in small things;
Looke up, thou seest birds raisd on crossed wings;
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).
All the Globes frame, and spheares, is nothing else

But all the Meridians crossing Parallels.
Materiall Crosses then, good physicke bee,
But yet spirituall have chiefe dignity. (2125)
Donnes claim that the natural and human world is composed of many
images of the cross reinforces the power attributed to this symbol while
relocating it from the scene of the crucifixion simultaneously diffuses
it and protects against dangerous forms of veneration. The end of
the passage shows again that the significance of the crucifixion lies in
its spiritual power in the heart of the believer. Donne has character-
istically discovered a powerful metaphor to accommodate the crosss
power within a reformed imaginative context.
While the crucifixion occupies the center of the passion narrative,
it rarely appeared alone in seventeenth-century English devotional
or literary works on the passion. Rather, the cluster of events both
preceding and following the crucifixion (such as the last supper, the
temptations, Pilates inscription on the cross, and the appearances of
the resurrected Christ to his followers) often receive far more atten-
tion from Protestant writers than does the moment of Christs death.
While each individual episode carried substantial potential meaning,
and could be deployed in a variety of ways and to a number of ends
by poets, a categorical distinction can be drawn around the death of
Christ. Before the crucifixion, there are many discreet episodes that
can be collected to form a passion narrative that does not need to
depict the crucifixion. Even within the sub-sequence of the crucifix-
ion there are separate events that are sometimes mobilized to call to
mind the full passion story without showing the actual moment of
Christs death. Post-Reformation treatments concentrate on the life
episodesprimarily those before the crucifixionpreferring the living
Jesus to the crucified Christ.
Many passion sequences from the seventeenth century begin with
the scenes in the garden of Gethsemane, taking little notice of Jesus
earlier experiences; many meditative works focus almost exclusively
on the agony in the garden.11 Gervase Markhams The teares of the
beloved: or, The Lamentation of Saint John, Concerning the death and passion
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.
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
elaborate, graphic description of the crucifixion less essential. Rather

than being denied completely or omitted, Christs death is multiplied,
softening its graphic elements and emptying its power of finality.
Herberts last stanza concludes the poem at the moment of death,
but again it is indirect:
But now I die; now all is finished.
My woe, mans weal: and now I bow my head.
Only let others say, when I am dead,
Never was grief like mine. (24952)
Since these words bring the poem to a close, they seem to leave the
resurrection outside of the scope of the poem. Herberts choice to
have Jesus function as the speaker of the poem, however, is only pos-
sible if the events of the crucifixion have not concluded in his utter
death. The voice of the poem operates as an enactment of the res-
urrection on a scale that supersedes the narrative level of the poem.
Thus the significance of the passion, Herbert implies, is not in Christs
death, but its impossibility.
The same emphasis on resurrection shapes the next poem in Her-
berts sequence, The Thanksgiving, in which Jesus appears as a king.
In an inverse of what Ive said about Christ as the speaker of The
Sacrifice, here we shift to the voice of a witness to the resurrected
glory of Jesus as king. The relocation of voice is just the first indicator
of how we are being asked to read the passion in these poems. It is ful-
filled by the full adoption by the speaker of the passion on himself:
O King of wounds! how shall I grieve for thee,
Who in all grief preventest me?
Shall I weep blood? why, thou hast wept such store
That all thy body was one door.
Shall I be scourged, flouted, boxed, sold?
Tis but to tell the tale is told. (38)
This imitatio Christi remains speculative: Shall I . . . It also remains
verbal rather than physical; it is a tale that has been told, and its
rehearsal generates a poetic text rather than the reenactment of Jesus
physical suffering by the speaker. Even that suffering is figured as an
act of writing, which for Herbert to imitate would require copying
thy fair, though bloody hand (16). Finally, even within this scheme
the narration of the passion is explicitly forestalled when the speaker
remarks, As for thy PassionBut of that anon, / When with the
other [the deeds of loving revenge the speaker pledges to undertake]

I have done (2930). Indeed the opening lines of the next poem,
The Reprisal, admit, I have considered it, and find / There is no
dealing with thy mighty passion (12).
In Good Friday, Herbert uses another important metaphor of
the Protestant tradition. Repeating the question that echoes the early
poems in this sequence, How shall I count what thee befell, Herbert
redirects the agency of writing to Jesus:
Since blood is fittest, Lord, to write
Thy sorrows in, and bloody fight;
My heart hath store, write there, wherein
One box doth lie both ink and sin:
That when sin spies so many foes,
Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes,
All come to lodge there, sin may say,
No room for me, and fly away.
Sin being gone, O fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sin take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn. (2132)
These lines explicitly associate the material implements of the cru-
cifixion (nails and whips) with instruments of writing, including the
common association drawn between blood and ink. Herbert also uti-
lizes the image of the new covenant being written on the heart of the
believer, in contrast to the tablets of stone written at the time of rev-
elation at Sinai. But rather than the image of frustrated, aborted writ-
ing that occurs in Miltons The Passion, Herberts Good Friday
solicits composition. The speakers urgent O fill the place displays
a horror of the empty page and an anxiety that what is written will
be destroyed.
All of Herberts poems on the death of Christ operate not only as
individual, freestanding texts, but also as part of a larger sequence,
like the episodes of the passion. The unfolding of the passion over the
course of several poems is a technique of reformed poetics modeled on
the gospels. This pattern makes possible a shift of emphasis to the act
of reading a story rather than seeing a picture. It forces the reader to
pause and in the case of the crucifixion, forestalls the violent momen-
tum of the narrative. Moving readers from one poem to another also
allows the poet to embed in the sequence an implicit instruction about
60 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).
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.
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
MILTONS ALTERNATIVE PASSION
While Milton draws on the techniques of the early modern Protestant

passion, the complexity and subtlety of his representations of the Son
set Milton apart from most of his contemporaries. From the range of
alternatives available in the gospels and in earlier Reformation treat-
ments of the passion, Milton consistently emphasizes the sonship of
Christ, always pointing back to the will of God the Father. To a lesser
degree, Milton draws on the traditions of Jesus as teacher or philoso-
pher. This image, which was especially important in early Christian
art and patristic literature, recommends itself to a reformed context
because it focuses on Jesus before his passion and death. Another alter-
native that Milton marshals is the Christus Victor theme. Many of the
early depictions of the crucifixion conform to this model, in which
Christs death on the cross is seen in the light of the resurrection as
a dramatic conquest of mortality.1 Miltons survey of Christs func-
tions in De Doctrina Christiana includes an image of Christ as king that
informs Miltons poetic renderings. His
kingly function means that Christ, having been made a king by God
the Father, rules and preserves, principally by internal law and spiritual
power, the church which he has bought for himself, and conquers and
crushes his enemies. (VI: 435)
Though Milton largely avoids the literal rendering of Christ in battle,
this comment supplies an important instruction about his portraits of
the Son: it is through an internal and spiritual power that he fulfills his
role. He is a ruler, according to Milton, not in a literal sense; rather
he rules the mind and the conscience. He does this, moreover, not by
force or by physical weapons, but by those things which, in the opinion
of the world, are the weakest of all. (VI: 436)
In Of Reformation Milton refutes the claim that episcopacy is necessary
for the health of the monarchy. A brief reference from the passion
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
miltons alternative passion 67
Cross as a trophy of victory, overlooks important choices that Milton

makes even in the early poems about how to depict the Son.3
Early in his poetic career, Milton considered writing several texts on
the passion, including Christ bound, Christ crucifid, and Christ
risen, and, most fully, Christus patiens as recorded in the Trinity Manu-
script. His brief notes on the subject are consistent with Miltons inter-
est in biblical drama and suggest an early intention to write about the
passion. That he does not develop these plans is sometimes taken to
indicate Miltons antipathy to the crucifixion. But it is worth noticing
that even in the brief sketch of the Christus patiens found in the Trinity
Manuscript, Milton organized the material in a way consistent with
his later approach to the passion. The noteThe Scene in ye garden
beginning fro ye comming thither till Judas betraies & ye officers lead
him away ye rest by message & chorus. his agony may receav noble
expressionsproposes a passion drama that does not include the cru-
cifixion, or that conveys it indirectly by messenger and chorus.4 Isolat-
ing the scenes in the garden, Jesus betrayal and arrest, puts Milton in
the tradition of many Protestant passion narratives and implies that
he shared in the artistic program of reformed treatments of this story.
The balance in the last two parts of the note, between Miltons inten-
tion to leave the suffering, death and burial of Christ off the stage and
his belief that Christs agony will receav noble expressions reflects
his belief that the passions message is best conveyed not through the
dramatic moment of Christs death. Miltons early outline for a pas-
sion poem or play may drastically contract the episodes on view, but it
does not lessen the dramatic power or theological import of the work.
It is also important to note how Milton began with Christs agony,
chose not to portray the crucifixion in the terms handed down by late
medieval renderings, and eventually replaced that portrait with many
alternative depictions focused on the humanity, sonship and incarna-
tion of Christ.
The basic terms of Miltons alternative passion are contained in cer-
tain key phrases which appear repeatedly throughout his work. These
3
Charles Huttar, The Passion of Christ in Paradise Regained, English Language Notes
19 (1982), 245.
4
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.
God doth not need

Either mans work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post oer Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait. (914)
Though part of Miltons message is that this portrait can and ought to
characterize any servant of God, it is especially revealing for this idea
of how to understand the Sons earthly mission. In these lines divine
service involves no dramatic action, physical violence or personality
cult. In place of these mistaken notions of the passion Milton prefers
silent service, the goal of which is to direct devotion back to God
the Father. In the figure of the Lady in A Mask as well, Milton offers
meekly composd waiting as his primary model of ideal Christian
behavior; it even characterizes the mode of life Adam and Eve should
have pursued in Paradise.
This model for depicting the Son reaches its peak in Paradise Regained.
The drama of the poem is in waitingboth for the Sons growing real-
ization of his identity and as obedient service to Godmaking Paradise
Regained the textbook of this approach. Mary, Andrew and Simon, and
of course most perfectly the Son, demonstrate how such waiting is to be
done. The Sons understanding of his task expresses the nature of the
atonement in terms that characterize the whole poem and perhaps the
ultimate rendering of the Miltonic portrait of Christ across all of his
poems. Before he can work Redemption for mankind, whose sins /
Full weight must be transferrd upon my head; he must be tried,
but this understanding does not alarm or grieve him, neither thus
disheartend or dismayd, / The time prefixt I waited (I: 26669).
Paradise Regained omits Jesus death and resurrection, stopping short of
the events most clearly associated with the passion; the same happens
in The Passion, which breaks off before the crucifixion scene can
be drawn. These examples of prolepsis are a hallmark of Miltons
passion, which redirects our attention to the incarnation and even the
pre-incarnate Christ, as in Book III of Paradise Lost.
Miltons interest in the pre-incarnate Christ allows him not only to
displace the crucifixion but to focus on aspects of Christs nature and
ministry that are more important for his portrait of the Son. John
Rogers points to the scene in Book XI of Paradise Lost as a key moment
that reveals Miltons negotiation of the doctrines of Arianism and
Socinianism, showing how in presenting Adams and Eves repentant
70 chapter four
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.
strophes speak of the exaltation of Jesus as a raising up of cosmic

proportions. In this exposition of the redemptive work of Christ in De
Doctrina Christiana Milton cites this hymn time after time. He wants to
emphasize the self-emptying or humiliating aspect of Christs gesture, its
voluntary nature, and the attitude of obedience that characterizes it.9
As the emphasis on the Sons kenosis suggests, it is not just an alterna-
tive rendering of the crucifixion that is at stake in Miltons poetry, but
a particular understanding of the nature of Christ and his sacrifice.
Miltons greatly contracted selection of gospel episodes yields a por-
trait of the Son that emphasizes specific qualities while omitting oth-
ers. His interest in the logic of contrariesrevealing what is true by its
contrast with what is false, articulated most fully in Areopagiticais also
relevant to the Miltonic passion. Applied to the problems of Chris-
tian representation, this hermeneutic of mixing truth and falsehood
may explain how Milton accommodated the necessity to represent the
ineffable. When we encounter Miltons representations of the incar-
nation and other Christian mysteries, we should be alert to the ways
that he marks out the good and cancels the necessary evil which may
accompany it.
At times the passion appears in Miltons poems as a crystallization
a momentary appearance that allows us briefly to perceive and sense,
if not to describe fully, something that until that moment has been
latent in the poem.10 In some cases this latency can be resolved only
by looking just outside the poem, in its immediate environment, a
sphere in which many things lie that cannot be said to be present in
the poem, but which at the same time may intervene to shape its form
and meaning. This category includes paratexts, especially titles and
notes. In Miltons works we often find that the passion has been relo-
cated from the poem to its paratexts, as I discuss below in the case of
The Passion. To displace the crucifixion from his poems, Milton also
sometimes calls on what John Shoptaw calls crypt words, which he
defines as verbal material recoverable from but not (wholly) present
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.
Given the centrality of the incarnation to his poetry on the passion,

his early poem On the Morning of Christs Nativity is an important
starting point for a consideration of Miltons influences and choices. In
Christian art and literature the Nativity is frequently paired with the
passion as bookends representing the span of Christs human life. In
the visual arts, changes in depictions of the Nativity were often related
to theological developments. Gertrud Schiller describes these changes.
Beginning in the 11th century the depiction of an enthroned Christ
child matches the emphatically Christological piety of the Ottonian
period.12 In the later Middle Ages, the artistic model shifted toward
an emphasis on the sacramental nature of the Nativity, expressed
through images of the infant Jesus on a raised altar in the manger.
According to Schiller, this is a new way of giving actuality to the
parallel between the Child in the manger and the bread on the altar.13
Glancing at a nativity poem by Richard Crashaw illuminates the con-
nection between the birth and death of Christ that Milton avoids: the
last word of the poem is Sacrifice, a reminder that the birth will be
followed by a death, and that death will be the source of both salvation
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.
and sacramentthis is in contrast to Miltons avoidance of the altar

and other devices that characterize the nativity as a sacrifice.14
For Milton, as in early Christian art, the birth of Jesus provided
an occasion through which to consider the dual nature of Christ.
Analogues from early Christian painting may help us see how Mil-
ton selected from among a variety of representational strategies in his
depiction of the Nativity. According to Schiller, in early visual culture
the story of Christs childhood is not told chronologically in the form
of a narrative sequence, rather those scenes are chosen which demon-
strate the divinity of the Child.15 Schiller demonstrates a precedent
in the early church for non-narrative presentations of the events of
the life of Christ, with events selected or omitted on the basis of doc-
trinal interests. Schiller also describes several examples of art works
in which a series of episodes from the nativity and ministry of Christ
surround a central scene of the passion or the temptations.16 There
is a visual precedent, then, for depicting other scenes from the life of
Christ (or from typologically related scenes from the Hebrew Bible)
as smaller, complementary panels surrounding an image of the pas-
sion; this allows viewers to read these episodes in the context of the
theology of Christs divinity. In an important regard Milton departs
from this tradition by omitting the image of the passion that should
appear in the center, shifting our attention to the surrounding epi-
sodes instead. Another model from visual culture may further explicate
Miltons approach. In an image from the Italian twelfth century, five
separate scenes of the Nativity and two of the Passion are added to the
figure of the exalted Christ, now the ruler of the world.17 This work
may come closer to what Milton wants to evoke, an image in which
the passion and the nativity flank a resplendent central Christ who is
not limited by either of the surrounding events.
Miltons poem on the nativity belongs more to the traditions of pre-
Carolingian art than to the nativities of the middle ages, which equate
the infant Christ with the Eucharistic sacrifice. Important features of
the poem may point to his theological and artistic preferences, such as
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
the issue of silence in the poem, especially the paradox of an unspeak-

ing child with the ability to silence the pagan oracles. Further, On
the Morning of Christs Nativity evokes the violence and doctrinal
meaning of the passion through typological analogies to other events
in Christs life. The passion is folded into the nativity throughout this
opening poem. It is mentioned three times in the first seven-line stanza
alone:
This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heavens eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy Sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace. (lines 17; my
emphasis)
In these lines the crucifixion is evoked without being shown, always as
a future event, and its peace-working is ultimately attributed not to the
Son, but to his Father.
The second stanza describes the kenosis, in which the Son lays
aside That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable, forsaking it for
a darksome House of mortal Clay. These descriptions attach the
poem to a mode of portraiture that underscores Jesus sonship. Here
the incarnation seems more a loss of form than the assumption of
an image. Jesus loses his true form, which though invisible to human
eyes is drawn here as a far-beaming blaze of light, and enters into
a covering structure (as distinct from a bodily image), which is por-
trayed as dark and opaque.18 At the same time, in the following stanza,
the speaker implores his muse for a song with which to celebrate the
birth, but in a manner that generates anxiety about whether the loss
of Jesus bright form also entails the loss of celebratory song. As early
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).
as the Nativity Ode, then, Milton characterizes writing on the life of

Christ as lost, missing, or insufficient: Hast thou no verse, no hymn,
or solemn strein, / To welcome him, he asks the Muse (1718). At
the start of the Hymn in the following lines, nature repeats this pat-
tern, shunning her gaudy trim and the light of the sun in favor
of speeches fair. The Nativity is accompanied by music such As
never was by mortal finger struck / Divinely-warbled voice (9596),
a song of unexpressive notes (116). These qualities are suggestive of
Miltons interest in later works on the Son in his secrecy, obscurity, and
inexpressibility. He reduces the potentially idolatrous elements of the
poem almost to the point of removing its subject entirely. As David
Quint notes, the Christ child is only briefly glimpsed in the hymn that
celebrates His coming into the world.19 The Nativity Ode is typical
of Miltons approach to the passion in this regard. It also reminds us
that the poetics of the incarnation and the crucifixion demand coming
very close to the destruction of all poetry. Miltons poetry of Christs
kenosisat the time of the incarnation as well as at the time of his
deathcarry a risk of total emptying.
J. Martin Evans has noticed that some of Miltons choices in the
poem reflect his awareness of competing modes of representing sacred
subject matter and are deliberate omissions:
The Nativity Ode is a poem of absences. Miltons strategy of erasure is too
consistent to be accidental. It reflects, I believe, the Puritan distaste for
alowing any intermediary to intrude between the individual soul and its
maker. By purging the scene of all the traditional witnesses of the Nativ-
ity, Milton forces us to respond to the Nativity not vicariously through
the experiences of the wise men and shepherds but directly.20
Even more than this meditative quality, Miltons poem displays his
creative use of absence as a poetic tool.
In the Nativity Ode absence also relates to the technique of deferral.
Milton characterizes divine song as perfectly harmonious and nearly
imperceptible, its merest traces opening to us only on an occasion
such as the birth of Christ. This song will cause time to run back to a
golden age. Milton forestalls that return in the center of his poem, but
the suggestion that the golden age and the holy Song are expressed
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
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
O God! O Man! O God and Man in one,

Theternall Fathers co-eternall sonne:
Who for mans sake, didst sonne of man become,
Disdaining not thine humble hand-maids wombe:
Nor of thy Creature to be made didst scorne,
Ere time begotten, in times fulnesse borne.
Who being in the forme of God wouldst take
The forme of man, and of a woman make
Thy selfe whom no man saw, now seene to bee,
By that Suns light, which is and shines by thee.22
Several stanzas later Fitzgeoffrey returns to the question of the rela-
tionship between Father and Son, explaining that
The sonne begotten naturall we know
But how begotten Nature cannot show
Yet that we might beleeve though not conceive,
God would in Nature some expressions leave.
So, of himselfe the glorious eye of heaven
Begets a beame which with himselfe is even
In time in being: for the beame begun
In the same instant with his fire, the Sunne:
So from the spring a springing streame doth flow:
Which in it is, and yet doth from it goe:
So yeelds the Incense a sweet smell, and this
Both of and with and in the Incense is:
So doth the pregnant Minde a Word beget
Twixt whom and it, time doth no distance set. (7)
The poet even addresses an apostrophe to Arius, condemning him for
the belief that the Father pre-existed the Son. Fitzgeoffrey concludes
his nativity poem with scenes from the passion, which he argues has
its inception at the moment of incarnation:
Thinke not that Christ did then begin to suffer
When Judas sold him, and the Jewes did offer
To apprehend him. He did then begin
To make his soule a sacrifice for sinne,
When he tooke body . . .
...............................................................
Thus was his Crosse before his Cradle made. (4445)
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.
In Ode on the Morning of Christs Nativity, Milton works out his

poetics of the incarnation and by extension the passion. Arthur Barker
gives central place in the development of Miltons poetics to the Ode,
in which the recognition of the significance of Christs incarnation
and sacrifice . . . was coupled with a recognition of the potentialities of
a peculiarly complex poetical symbol, creating a new unity of feel-
ing upon both Miltons thought and his art.23 I agree that the Ode
draws together the doctrines of nativity and crucifixion and represents
a search for an aesthetics that will appropriately convey and respond
to them. The Ode suggests for the first time in Miltons poetry that
imperfection, even brokenness, might characterize and therefore best
convey the finest human attempt to express the unexpressive song.
On the Morning of Christs Nativity stands at the head of the
Miltonic passion because it is likely his earliest poem on the Son and
because it concerns the incarnation, upon which all subsequent poetry
about Christ must rest. What, then, can we say about Miltons idea
of Jesus in this poem? Different ideas of Miltons portrait of Christ in
his poetry have been advanced. At one extreme are the comments of
Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, who believes that Milton brings Christian
art to an end, and who finds Miltons early poems to offer no meaning-
ful concept or depiction of Christ, who is
no longer, as in typical Catholic art, the all-inclusive and constant symbol
towards which the fractional and derivative symbols of Truth, Justice,
Order, are directed as to a source. Christ, rather, has become a variable
symbol dependent for meaning upon superior and controlling ideas. The
later poem on the Passion fails, obviously, because Milton has not, as in
the Nativity Ode, hit upon a controlling idea which Christ can be made
to serve. The Perfect Hero of The Passion becomes static and nominal
because Milton has not found for Him a fitting task to perform.24
Ross notes that
if Miltons Christ is never the Eucharistic Christ, neither is He the pallid
abstraction of the low puritanizing Anglicans. As early as The Nativ-
ity Ode, Christ has become a secondary and peripheral rather than a
primary and central symbol. But on the periphery this displaced Christ
symbol is manipulated with amazing artistic skill and power.25
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.
Miltons techniques for creating a new passion poetics have unfortu-

nately rendered his version of the passion difficult for modern readers
to discern. Critics on The Passion display remarkable agreement
on the poem and its supposed indication of Miltons utter disinter-
est in the crucifixion. The consensus that this poem is a curious fail-
ure stems from the assumption that Milton systematically avoided the
passion. Scholars are attentive to the poems absent depiction of its
stated subject, and read perhaps too literally the concluding note that
calls the poem unfinished. The dominant approach views the poem
as a casualty of Miltons early, overly ambitious, and self-conscious
attempts at divine poetry.26 William Riley Parker, for example, suggests
that Miltons
professed grief at thoughts of the Crucifixion turned out to be literary.
He was writing a poem about himself writing a poem; in every stanza except the
third he had described himself in the process of composition.27
And Northrop Frye calls The Passion Miltons one obvious failure
because it is the only poem of Miltons in which he is preoccupied
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.
with himself in the process of writing it.28 Readings of the poem

often suggest that its failure results inevitably from its ineffable subject
matter. According to this view, the poems value lies in its ability to
spotlight the difficulty of writing about the unspeakable, or the special
dedication and preparation necessary for the more mature Milton of
the later poems to realize his ambitions as a divine poet.
This wide agreement that the poem is a failure means that critics
consistently neglect the poems potential as a key for reading Miltons
systematic thinking about the passion and its implications as a narra-
tive for early modern poetics. Charles Huttar reflects a widely-held
belief when he argues that at the time of composing the poem in
1629 or 1630 grief is not yet natural to Milton.29 I argue rather
that Milton felt that grief is not natural to the passion. He saw it as
an incorrect mode in which to depict the events of Christs voluntary
sacrifice, earthly mission, death and resurrection. If grief is not the
appropriate emotion, it follows that the crucifixion may not be the best
subject for investigating the significance of the Sons work. The Pas-
sion introduces the crucifixion and its tone of grief only to break it
in order to comment on the inevitable failure of this approach.
Marshall Grossmans estimation of The Passion and its relation-
ship to Miltons general avoidance of the crucifixion reveals many
components of this critical approach:
Miltons early attempt at a poem commemorating the Passion breaks
off with a confession of failure; the crucifixion is alluded to but not
portrayed in Paradise Lost and is not, as one would expect it to be, the
central episode of Paradise Regained. Nevertheless, the Passion does have a
presence in Miltons poetry through its typological equivalents.30
Several of Grossmans terms warrant closer examination. He acknowl-
edges that the crucifixion is alluded to and has a presence in Mil-
tons poems, but draws the distinction that it is not portrayed. His
understanding of Miltons theological intentto commemorate the
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
passionand his assumption that readers would expect to find the

crucifixion in Paradise Regained square with Grossmans explanation for
what he calls the failure of The Passion. His claim is that Miltons
soteriology does not allow him to compose a portrait of the Son that
would reveal the nature of Christs union with God the Father, which
God chose to conceal: the poetic question that is raised and that
Milton forbears to answer is how one person possessed of two distinct
natures may be depicted as a coherent character.31 Because language
is temporal it cannot render the dual nature. In Grossmans view the
apparent preference for commemoration, allusion, and typologyall
of which we associate with Protestant culturethus conspire to pre-
vent a rendering of the passion.
I take issue with these last two points. Milton indeed faced a prob-
lem that is both artistic and theological in writing The Passion. But
as we see in the work of Miltons contemporaries, Protestant theology
never made portraits of Jesus impossible. Grossman seems to view
commemoration, allusion and typology as substitutes for artistic ren-
derings. Rather, these methods are the instruments through which
portraiture of Christ became possible for post-Reformation artists,
including poets. The poetic exuberance of the English seventeenth
century hardly allows us to claim that language is inadequate to the
task of divine subject matter. The main assumption that I reject is
the belief that Milton set out to write an Easter poem, discovered
himself unable to do so, and returned to the image of the Son in the
long poems through a different mode. While I agree with Grossmans
assertion that Miltons oblique approach to the crucifixion in the late
poems is related to his beliefs about the meaning of these events, I do
not share his conclusion that this represents a change in which Milton
learned to solve the problem he could not resolve in the short poem. I
take The Passion rather as an early statement of Miltons full poetics
of the passion. It announces the rules of writing about the crucifixion
which Milton follows in his later works as well. Even its apparent fail-
ure is one of these rules.
Other critics consider the poems failure a result of theological
confusion or restraint. Denis Saurat argues that Milton did not accept
vicarious salvation, that regeneration must take place in himself
through his own, and that is why the crucifixion plays so small a part
31
Grossman, 207.
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
element of the poem is purposeful, that it was probably not perceived

by its maker to be either unsatisfactory or unfinished, and that the
poem is a finely polished, carefully wrought, and thoroughly success-
ful artifact. Gallagher goes on to argue that the extant stanzas of the
poem ought to be read as the prologue-invocation to a poem about
the Passion, not as themselves a poem about the Passion.35 While I
do read The Passion as a complete and independent treatment of
the subject, Gallaghers suggestion is nevertheless apt in the reading
that follows, as I argue that The Passion introduces many of the
most important principles of Miltons poetics of the Son.36 William
Shullenberger similarly recognizes Miltons choices in The Passion
as an intentional artistic approach. He argues that Miltons descrip-
tion of Christ as a mutual hypostatic union of two natures also
characterizes the structure of figurative language and attempts a
subject that must destroy the very possibility of poetry: the loss of the
Word.37 Shullenberger calls the poem a self-consuming artifact and
a poem whose subject entails its disfiguration.38 For Milton, the Pas-
sion could be no topic for sacramental meditation or copious invention
because of the linguistic emptiness it opens.39 The concept of a poem
as a self-consuming object that Shullenberger uses, drawing on the
work of Stanley Fish, does not entirely capture the nature of Miltons
deployment of the figure of failure in The Passion.40 Miltons poem
does not use the language of failure, but of deferral, fragmentation
and satisfaction. Rather than a disintegration in the face of a funda-
mentally inexpressible subject, The Passion refuses one manner of
approaching its subject while articulating some of the terms of an
alternative approach. Further, Miltons poem evokes incompletion and
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).
delay to position its readers at the beginning of the process of atone-

ment, rather than at the crucifixion.
The closest that criticism of the poem comes to the claims that I
make for it is an essay by R. Paul Yoder that acknowledges a connec-
tion between the form of the poem and its subject matter. Yoder sees
the fragmenting of the poem as equivalent to the death of the poem,
a circumstance that results from the fact that no elegy of Christ can be
possible, as it is Jesus death which provides the consolation of elegy
and, when it is denied, the entire formula collapses. Yoder recognizes
that the ending of the poem is intentional and is in contrast with the
imagined attempts at images that would capture the death of Christ
earlier in the poem: Miltons dramatization of the self-interest that
had inspired the poem is exactly the image for which the person has
been searching.41 Further, he sees The Passion not as evidence that
Miltons gifts remained unrealized at the time of its composition, but
rather credits the poem with many of the same concerns and poetic
gestures that Milton would later take up. The breaking off of The
Passion, Yoder writes, is equivalent to one of Miltons most trium-
phant concluding recognitions, that They also serve who only stand
and wait. 42 Since the last line of Sonnet XIX could just as well
characterize the Sons conduct in Paradise Regained, we might draw a
line through it back to The Passion, and acknowledge that in each
poem, as in many others, there is a Miltonic approach to characteriz-
ing the passion. In what follows, I draw a map from The Passion to
the early elegies and then to the long poems, showing Milton engaged
in a massive project of rewriting the passion, and then to situate that
undertaking as part of a larger cultural attempt to remake Christian
art after the Reformation.
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
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.
The Passion displays the ability of poetry to contract and expand, to

let meanings multiply and also to forestall them. The poem acknowl-
edges how its shape and content are created by the events of the Pas-
sionthese later scenes confine my roving verse / To this horizon is
my Phoebus boundyet the poetics of fragmentation and limitation
remain largely unexplored by Milton criticism (lines 2223).43 At the
same time, Milton demonstrates the vast flexibility of the passion nar-
rativeits ability to take many shapes and encompass (or omit) many
different eventsby including a brief but complete passion narrative
in the third stanza of The Passion. The first five lines of the stanza
portray the incarnation:
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
He sovereign Priest, stooping his regal head

That dropt with odorous oil down his fair eyes,
Poor fleshly Tabernacle entered,
His starry front low-rooft beneath the skies;
O what a Mask was there, what a disguise!44
The last two lines of the stanza provide a highly concentrated version
of Christs death: Yet more; the stroke of death he must abide, /
Then lies him meekly down fast by his Brethrens side (1521). The
first words of line 20, Yet more, emphasize that the spectrum of
episodes connecting the incarnation with the crucifixion can be con-
tracted or expanded; they also emphasize that the sequence does not
end with Jesus death on the cross.
As has been often noted, the subject of the poem seems to shift
from the crucifixion to the problems of capturing this event in writing.
The Passion includes several scenes of writing, or rather, images that
promise writing. The fifth stanza presents the first conditional scene of
writing: The leaves should all be black whereon I write, / And letters
where my tears have washt, a wannish white (3435). The image of
writing in these lines is postponed (The leaves should ) and inverted,
so that the black and white of a printed page are reversed.45 The poem
goes on to describe the speaker witnessing the scene of the crucifixion,
but it is a scene emptied of the actual players and actions. His reaction
initiates a second instance of postponed writing, when
My eye hath found that sad and Sepulchral rock
That was the Casket of Heavns richest store,
And here though grief my feeble hands up-lock,
Yet on the softned Quarry would I score
My plainting verse as lively as before;
For sure so well instructed are my tears,
That they would fitly fall in orderd Characters. (4349)
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).
Several factors conspire to prevent writing in this passage. First, the

technology of writing has regressed from paper and ink to rock and
chisel (perhaps echoing the inscription on stone in Moses writing of
the law). The image of writing with tears reappears in these lines, cre-
ating a connection between the earlier instance of stalled writing and
this one. The phrase my plainting verse as lively as before may also
recall, as do the opening lines, the Nativity ode. If this intra-textual
link is brought to mind in addition to the inter-textual association,
then there is ambiguity about whether as before refers to an act of
writing or to an act of not writing. It is also notable that nearly all of
the verbs associated with writing in these two passages, especially should
and would, indicate hesitation or delay, another instance of Miltons use
of deferral to avoid the crucifixion scene.46
The middle lines of the poem articulate several theological concepts

about the meaning of Christs death, all of which point to Miltons
use of poetic figures to direct readers to his understanding of the Son.
The line, Dangers, and snares, and wrongs, and worse than so, /
Which he for us did freely undergo, emphasizes the voluntary nature
of Christs sacrifice, as well as the principle of substitution (1112).
We should note carefully that where we might expect a description of
the physical suffering of the crucifixion Milton instead concentrates
our attention on its dangers and snares, the suffering here being of an
existential rather than a physical nature. Another description, of the
Son as Most perfect Hero, tried in heaviest plight / Of labors huge
and hard, too hard for human wight, recalls the representation of
Christ as Hercules, his defeat of evil by Truth and an emphasis on
the divine element of the dual nature, since the physical feats were
too hard for the merely human (1314). Another model is of the Son
as priestHe sovereign Priest, stooping his regal head / That dropt
with odorous oil down his fair eyes (1516). The most important
idea of Jesus in Miltons poem, however, is a diversion away from the
crucifixion and back to the incarnation, when he imagines the Sons
death in the following words: Then lies him meekly down fast by his
Brethrens side (21).
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
In addition to the emphasis on voluntarism in his death, Jesus is

portrayed as a brother to mankind, as in the Letter to the Hebrews.
This is the model Milton chooses for Lycidas as well. We find when
we return to the full chapter from which this line has been drawn
a fuller picture of the meaning of the passion. The Epistle presents
Jesus as the Son, the ingraved form of the Father (1:3). Chapter 2,
to which Miltons line refers, is prefaced in the 1602 Geneva version
with the annotation,
Therefore he infereth that good heede must bee given to Christs doc-
trine: And he setteth him out unto us even as our brother in our flesh,
that wee may with a good will yeeld up our selves wholly unto him.47
This instruction about how to interpret the passion prioritizes the
human element of Jesus nature, but as a means for effecting both his
death and its power to save. Paul further writes, we see Jesus crowned
with glory and honour, which was made little inferiour to the Angels,
through the suffering of death, that by Gods grace hee might taste
death for all men (2:9). The Geneva gloss on these lines underscores
that Heerein consisteth the force of the argument: for we could not
at length be glorified with him, unlesse he had been abased for us.
By emphasizing brotherhood, the Sonship of Christ is highlighted.
What we do not find in these lines is a moment in which, as in the
poem, the Son lies him meekly down; in other words, recourse to
the biblical context draws us away from the specific events of the pas-
sion and toward the theological context in which Milton asks us to
understand them.
The poem ends without the speakers vision realized as text and
without a full description of the crucifixion. In a rhetorical sense the
poems abrupt ending is an example of aposiopesis, or interruption. This
device offers several possibilities to the poet. It can suggest speechless-
ness and indeed that is often the sense attributed to the missing conclu-
sion in Miltons poem. He is believed to have felt unequal to the task
because of his youth or his subject.48 Aposiopesis can also convey inten-
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).
tional omission, usually establishing a situation in which the reader

is understood to supply what the speaker cannot or will not say. In
Miltons poem the speaker need hardly go on to describe the scenes
on the cross, which Miltons readers had encountered in print and in
visual form innumerable times. The displacement of the passion from
the poem to the readers imagination would fulfill the principle of
prolepsis so often employed in Miltons rewritings of the passion.
Having considered the significance of Miltons silence, however, we
must remember that the last line of the poem is not Miltons final
word. The poem is followed by the note: 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. Scholars consider the
prose note at the end of The Passion to be its first critical assess-
ment, by the author himself, which acknowledges its failure and thus
instructs later readers to see it as such; and conclude that the note
therefore stands apart from the poem, in a different discursive mode.
If we read the note appended to The Passion not as recording a
straightforward biographical explanation, but as an instruction about
how to interpret the poem, we must consider the possibility that Mil-
ton intended The Passion as a fragment. This does not necessarily
suppose that he began writing it with that aim, but allows the possibil-
ity that he wanted it to be read as an incomplete form and that its frag-
mentary nature has some bearing on how the poem creates meaning.
Such interpretive parameters were conventional, according to Marjo-
rie Levinson, among Romantic readers, who were encouraged by the
many fragments published in anthologies to consider the fragment as
an intentionally unfinished (that is, formally achieved) work, or as a
work approved by the poet in and for its accidental unfinishedness.49
The great care that Milton evidently took in publishing the 1645 Poems
and his strong self-awareness as a poet may allow us to consider that
some of the habits of writing and reading fragments that Levinson
sees after Lyrical Ballads obtained for Milton as well.
In Miltons world, as for the Romantics, fragments had a special rel-
evance. The fragment is related to the relic, an object that the Refor-
mation both disparaged and, by breaking sacred objects, often created.
Relics are fragments of the bodies and objects from which they are
49
Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 23.
92 chapter four
derived. Their dispersal in late medieval Europe was central to Chris-

tian devotion and legible as a means of communicating two ideas:
contact with, or experience of a sacred object, and at the same time
awareness of its fragility, incompleteness and materiality. Their incom-
pleteness did not pose a problem of belief because of what Caroline
Bynum has called a habit of synecdochal thought, the tendency to
see the whole in the part. This allowed Christ to be wholly present in
each fragment related to his body, which could bi-locate, as Bynum
explains.50 It could be complete and present in heaven, while at the
same time have left behind certain contact relics, such as blood and
the crown of thorns, in which it is simultaneously completely whole
and present. This habit of thought did not vanish in the Reformation
period, but relocated to the poetic fragment. When a poem functions
as a relic, it asks readers to be aware of the whole from which it has
been broken off. In the case of a fragment on the passion, such a
poem also evokes the unique case of Christs body, both wholly human
and eternally divine. Along with the tendency to fragmentation came
an impulse to collect those fragments; we see this poetically in the
technique of supplement, which attempts to call together and reas-
semble the pieces that have been dispersed into the world by an act
of religious violence, without being troubled by the pastiche quality
that results.
The fragment is a form especially well suited to post-Reformation
poetics. The fragment appears and functions in various ways through-
out this culture. One of the forms of visual culture that we know
Milton encountered on his Italian tour (and which is known to have
been highly valued by other travelers) is the ancient ruins then being
recovered. Their defining characteristic, as Leonard Barkan shows,
is their fragmentary condition.51 In her study of the Romantic frag-
ment poem, Marjorie Levinson refers to Friedrich Schlegels remark
that the works of the ancients have become fragments; the works of
moderns are fragments at their inception.52 Milton occupies a middle
ground: his fragments were fragments at their inception (though many
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.
readers would dispute that The Passion was designed as a fragment),

but responded to a condition of fragmentation, ruin, loss, and the
dominance of broken forms that characterized not just the work of the
ancients, but also the remnants of traditional Christianity. In addition
to the classical past, the second lost, resurfacing culture available to the
seventeenth century was that of the Catholic Church.
The fragment has a metonymic function in poetry as it does in
sculpture and painting. Like the holy relic, which conveys the sacred-
ness of its subject without diminishment though it is incomplete, the
poetic fragment communicates a full message while creating awareness
on the part of the reader that something is unsaid. In fact, as Barkan
shows, the fragment may suggest more than a materially complete
form conveys, as the fragment, far from containing a diminished
immanence, points to a greater wholeness than would any complete
works.53 The broken object prompts its viewer to recreate the whole,
often enlarging the scale beyond its original proportions.
The recovered fragment is also an index of cultural difference. In its
partial illegibility, it points to the existence of an earlier culture, with
an aesthetic different from that of the viewer, which is lost but contin-
ues to exert its influence. This is the condition of the material objects
and artistic products of the traditional church in the post-Reforma-
tion period. Seventeenth-century English men and women would have
been able to see the remnants of this culture in their churches and
graveyards, giving them a visual literacy that could then be applied to
works of art, including poetry, that marshaled the power of the frag-
ment to convey a sense of a culture that had been lost and to com-
municate the different terms of their current artistic project.54
In addition to establishing the aesthetics of the fragment, the note

to The Passion creates a sense of delay that is also an instruction
about the nature of the passion and how it will unfold. One of the
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
characteristic gestures of Miltons passion is the celebration of the

servant of God who stands and waits. Designating these words as a
note and as one that has been appended to the poem, as readers
typically do, is already to draw conclusions and make assumptions
about them that may lead us in false interpretive directions. Rather
I propose that these lines are part of the poem, revealing at its con-
clusion an essential set of ideas about the passion as Milton saw it.
The note on the poem may be an example of what William Sherman
describes as cases in which it is by no means clear where the paratext
ends and the text begins, or where the paratext crosses the threshold
and interrupts or even undermines the text it is supposedly serving;
cases where the text is subordinate to the paratext rather than the
other way around.55
Barbara Smiths work on Poetic Closure also offers some assistance
here. Smith describes what she calls Failures of Closure or examples
of weak poetic closure, and she keeps open the possibility that a frus-
trated or unsatisfying conclusion is not necessarily a bad one, and may
in fact be an integral part of the poems meaning, structure, or literary
principles (as in much modernist poetry). Many modern readers of
The Passion view the final line as what Smith calls a disappointing
conclusion, which leaves the reader with residual expectations.56
Even this manner of reading the final line, nevertheless, opens up
intriguing possibilities. Even if we attribute its disappointment to
Miltons inadequacy as a writer, it reminds us of a world outside the
poem, and that the poem is characterized by something that has been
lost and is absent.
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.
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
perforce, to invest it with some saving virtue.62 Milton translates that

association into the discourse of atonement. The fragment is an effec-
tive means through which to convey the idea of time run back in
a Christian sense as wellit suggests a remnant of time past that
has been brought forward to the present and may even promise some
future completion, restoration or redemption.
The fragmentary Passion is often characterized as a failure on
Miltons part, whether because he was too young to succeed at such
a monumental task, or too deeply influenced by the Protestant repul-
sion for the graphic representations of the crucifixion in traditional
Christian iconography. Milton might in fact be said to be interested
in failure as a concept. In his autobiographical sonnets (A Book was
Writ and When I Consider), in the divorce tracts and anti-prelatical
tracts, even in Paradise Lost with its focus on the great failure of Adam
and Eve to obey, Milton seems to explore repeatedly the moment at
which a covenantwith readers, with a spouse, with a church or gov-
ernment, and ultimately with Godbreaks.
And yet Milton does not use the word failure to describe The
Passion.63 He chooses three other words worth remarking for the
somewhat different picture they give us of Miltons view of the poem
(that is, if we read the note as a straightforward authorial comment).
He first says that the subjectnot the poem itself but its subjectwas
above the years he had when he wrote it. This statement usually
supplies the main basis for the autobiographical explications of the
poems failure: Milton was simply too immature as a poet to complete
the masterpiece he began. But above is a spatial term as well and it
is worth considering whether Milton implies a gap in the hierarchical
order too wide to be bridged by his text. The idea of a young, inex-
perienced poet waiting for a subject to reach its fullness also recalls
the Miltonic technique of delay that we so often find in his works on
the passion.
Further, he does not suggest in the note that the poem is utterly
unworthy, or that he wishes to destroy it, or even that he intends to
complete it at a later time of more mature poetic and spiritual devel-
opment. He marks it instead with the very specific term unfinisht
and describes this state as the result of an authorial decisionthe
62
Levinson, 30.
63
John Via notes this as well; see page 36.
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.
The inclusion of The Passion in Miltons 1645 and 1673 volumes

speaks to the influence of iconoclasm on this poem. Like the crosses,
statues, windows and rood screens that were broken by iconoclasts yet
remained in place as part of the church architecture, Miltons poem
is a shattered fragment that nevertheless remains in the printed collec-
tions of his verse. To break an image is not necessarily to break away
from images, Kenneth Gross writes. His instruction to look closely
at the partial survivals of and substitutions for images, at the forms or
fragments left behind provides a fitting way to read The Passion.64
But Miltons epitaph is ultimately impossible by its very nature. There
can be no body in the tomb, and thus its veneration cannot be any-
thing more than idolatry. His epitaph breaks at the point at which it
would cross out of poetry and onto the grave, but in doing so, and in
printing The Passion in his 1645 and 1673 collections, Milton nev-
ertheless affirms the poem and its altered form of remembrance.
Barbara Smith describes William Carlos Williams brief Between
Walls in terms that might apply to The Passion. She argues that
reading Williams poem
is like watching someone in the process of sketching a landscape visible
only to him. We know it is finished because he stops, and at that point we
are invited to observe what we now understand to be a completed draw-
ing. What is most interesting about this form of closure is that little sup-
ports it aside from the grammatical resolution and the fact that nothing
follows. By stopping, however, the poem announces its own sufficiency,
and, in compelling the reader to accept that sufficiency, gives a retrospec-
tive emphasis more or less to every element in it. It is as if the poet were
saying, What? did you expect more? Look again, its all there.65
64
Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell
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
NO DEATH!: REWRITING THE PROTESTANT ELEGY IN

MILTONS EARLY POEMS
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
ers a temporary structure erected at Easter, was one of the fixtures

of Catholic ritual practice dismantled during the 1540s. It may have
been partly on the basis of a common association between this tomb
and other burials and monuments that they, too, came under attack.
As Sheingorn says,
Parishioners revealed their understanding that their own funerary ritual,
and also the hope that their souls would be received in heaven, were
intimately connected with the ritual burial and resurrection of Christ
conducted at the Easter Sepulchre.4
Graves carry with them a strong potential for idolatry. The aggression
against funeral monuments and the rituals of death and burial within
reformed thought may have been motivated by the deep relationship
between idolatry and death.5 Among the most classic statements against
idolatry in the Bible, Psalm 115 expresses this relationship clearly. Idols
have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see . . . Those who
make them are like them (58). Idols, in other words, are dead and
they bring only death to those who place their trust in them.
Reverence for the dead, or death itself always carries with it the
danger of idolatry. The iconoclastic violence visited on funerary mon-
uments is a double rejectionagainst the elevation of religious images
and against the cult of death.6 Tombs that were not used for inap-
propriate worship, mainly those of ordinary parishioners rather than
monuments associated with saints, were protected from iconoclasm by
a 1550 statute (and again in 1560), which was necessary in response
to several reported incidents of tomb defacement and destruction.7
Tombs with inscriptions asking for intercessory prayers were the tar-
get of iconoclasm even though they were not icons or images. Esdaile
records an example from 1646 of the grave of a nine-year old child,
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
charged with the fear of idolatry associated with funeral iconogra-

phy. The grave features a bust and an urn-crowned pyramid and
pleads:
To the courteous souldier
Noe crucifix you see, noe Frightful Brand
Of supersitions here. Pray let me stand.
Grassante bello civili.8
Esdaile implies, however, that there was some physical damage vis-
ited on the monument nevertheless. Mary Catherine Wilheit confirms
that Despite a 1643 Act of Parliament excluding funeral monuments
from destruction, the monuments of papists, opposition leaders, and
gentry suffered.9 Even in a proviso of May 9, 1644, in which funeral
monuments were singled out for protection against Puritan iconoclasts,
the connection between tombs and the adoration of saints is clearly
invoked. The Act of Parliament added the proviso defending the
immunity of funeral monuments (erected to any dead person which
hath not been commonly reputed or taken for a saint).10 The need
to defend funeral monuments and draw this distinction suggest the
strong inclination of some kinds of commemoration to cross the line
into idolatrous veneration.
In the years before this protection was issued, John Weevers Ancient
Funerall Monuments (1631) documents the interest in funeral monuments
and articulates some of the periods concerns with their use and abuse.
Weevers epistle to the reader introduces his subject within the context
of the destruction of graves and tombs. He undertook the collection
of epitaphs knowing
how barbarously within these his Maiesties Dominions, they are (to the
shame of our time) broken downe, and utterly almost all ruinated, their
brazen Inscriptions erased, torne away, and pilfered, by which inhumane,
deformidable act, the honourable memory of many virtuous and noble
persons deceased, is extinguished
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.
and valuable antiquarian information lost.11 Weever also notes that he

has transcribed the inscriptions as he has found them, including the
phrase God pardon his soule; which some may say might have beene
as well left out of my booke, as they are in many places scraped out of
the brasse (A2r). His chapter on the rooting up, taking away, erazing
and defacing of Funerall Monuments in the reignes of King Henry
the eighth, and Edward the sixth. Of the care Queene Elizabeth, of
famous memory, had, for the preservation of the same takes a gen-
erally dim view of early Protestant iconoclasm, which Weever sees
as having gone beyond its mandate due to the ignorant zeal of the
masses. The most egregious of these excesses, for Weever, the foulest
and most inhumane, was the destruction of funeral monuments. He
laments that
marbles which covered the dead were digged up, and put to other
uses . . . Tombes hackt and hewne apeeces; Images or representations of
the defunct, broken, erazed, cut, or dismembered, Inscriptions or Epi-
taphs; especially if they began with an orate pro anima, or concluded with
cuius animae propitietur Deus. For greedinesse of the brasse, or for that they
were thought to bee Antichristian, pulled out from the Sepulchres, and
purloined; dead carcases, for gaine of their stone or leaden coffins, cast
out of their graves. (51)
Weever, writing just as Milton composed many of his elegies, gives
voice to the sense of loss accompanying many acts of iconoclasm.
An epitaph by William Drummond, posthumously published,
expresses the opposite point of view, the fear that monuments would
be subject to iconoclasm, thereby suggesting the better chances of a
poem such as this to survive:
IF monuments were lasting, we would raise
A fairer frame to thy deserts and praise;
But avarice and misdevotions rage,
These tumbling down, or brought to nought by age,
Twice making man to die, this marble bears
An emblem of affection and our tears.12
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
In Peterborough in 1643, soldiers under Cromwells regiment pulled

down the communion table, altar rails, organs and screens. Funeral
monuments and inscriptions and stained glass went the same way,
including the tomb of Catherine of Aragon.13 The soldiers pulled
down the effigy of Sir Humphrey Orme with the inscription This
is an Altar not a Grave . . . And hearts made the Sacrifice.14 As these
records suggest, many brasses did have images that could be objec-
tionable, including depictions of Christ crucified.15 This attention to
the visual imagery of the grave has a corollary in Protestant (usually
Puritan) efforts to rewrite the literature of death, especially the funeral
elegy.
Strictly speaking, an epitaph is a poem used on a monument. This
doesnt mean that some of the printed epitaphs attributed to Shake-
speare, Dryden, and others are misnamed, as some of these began as
texts inscribed on monuments.16 But it is worth considering the inter-
section between texts written on physical monuments or tombsmany
of which were under attack by iconoclasts into the 1640sand the
printed texts that Milton and his contemporaries produced during this
period. A funeral monument could also have non-permanent epitaphs,
according to Katharine Esdaile:
One custom immortalized by Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing has
wholly passed away, the hanging up of epitaphs by admirers; these were
written on boards and placed on or near the tomb, as in the case of
Brighams poem upon Chaucer and that of Sir Philip Sidney.17
The practice was also associated with the universities: At the funerals
of Oxford and Cambridge academics, their bereaved colleagues would
pen verses which were pinned to the black hangings in the church and
to the pall.18
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
Miltons early poems participate in a culture of Protestant elegies

and epitaphs that substitute printed verse for physical monuments to
the dead. Nicholas Grimalds A funeral song, upon the decease of
Annes his mother, published in Tottels Miscellany, illustrates this prac-
tice. Grimald offers the poem as a more faithful monument to his grief
and to her fame:
Have, mother, monuments of our sore smart:
No costly tomb, areared with curious art:
Nor Mausolean masse, hoong in the ayre:
Nor loftie steeples, that will once appayre:
But waylful verse, and doolfull song accept. (8589)19
For Milton and his contemporaries the iconoclasm of death still mat-
tered, but it had become a poetic function rather than a physical
destruction. The poetics of iconoclasm are especially relevant in ele-
gies, and even more so when, as is so often the case with Milton, elegy
points in the direction of the passion. It would be the ultimate idola-
trous transgression for a dead monumentwhether textual or mate-
rialto substitute for the death of Christ, which promises, for Miltons
readers, the death of death.
Does Miltons early rendering of the death of the Vice Chancellor,

for example, contain in its images of the war against death by virtue
of deathBut Persephone broke the thread of your life, angered
because she saw you snatching away so many victims from the black
jaws of death by your arts and powerful potions (12)20the seeds
of a view of atonement that would later be expressed as Weep no
more, woeful Shepherds weep no more / For Lycidas your sorrow is
not dead (16566)? If we acknowledge a connection, what should
we make of the distinction in the two poems? In the first, Milton
eulogizes a figure of knowledge and authority, drawing on classical
myth to express the irony of death coming to one who cultivated life.
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
In Lycidas this impulse moves in a more significant way toward a

passion. The classical is mixed with the Christian and Lycidas death
does not submit to the same irony. His becomes not a life that has
resisted death, but, Christologically, a death that denies death. Lyci-
das is considered at greater length below, but it is worth noting here
not only that many of Miltons engagements with death can be read
within the broader context of his ongoing unfolding of the passion,
but that when we trace this line of Miltonic death imagery further, to
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, we notice that the refusal of death
in Lycidas is not the culmination of this mode of thinking about
death. In Paradise Regained, after all, the Son does not die. This gradual
development of Miltons approach to deaths that might echo Christs
death leads to a handling of the passion that, as Joseph Wittreich and
John Rogers have shown, emphasizes the doctrine of atonement and
radically de-emphasizes death.21
Many of Miltons early elegies overwrite the conventions of the
form with gestures toward its negation.22 In On the Death of a Fair
Infant Dying of a Cough, for instance, ambiguity opens the poem up
to contexts that go beyond the tropes of mourning and consolation.
Lines such as the fifth stanza
Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead
Or that thy corse corrupts in earths dark womb,
Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,
Hid from the world in a low delved tomb;
Could Heavn for pity thee so strictly doom?
Oh no! for something in thy face did shine
Above mortality that showd thou was divine
may belong to an ordinary human context of grief and loss (29
35). The mourner expresses disbelief, for example, an unwillingness to
accept that a child (no older than two years, depending on the identity
of the fair infant) could be lost to death. The accusation against
Heaven and the concluding note of consolation are also common-
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.
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
The fair infant, certainly, cannot satisfy the extravagant demands

made on her; so that the progression of image, in effect, lacks a suf-
ficiently significant central point of reference.24 The absent point of
reference may be the crucifixion. Even Miltons choice of the term
fair infant in place of the childs personal name allows the poem to
work simultaneously with the notion of Christs nativity as a precursor
of his death.
The nature of the mourning described in these lines, which derives
from the loss of the subject as an agent in the fight against black per-
dition, seems altogether more appropriate to Christ than to a small
child. The last stanzas imagery of the mourning mother who must
render her child unto God for the sake of human salvation also recalls
the passion narrative. Even this allusion is subject to one of Miltons
laws of passion representations, however, in that it calls to mind not
the crucifixion itself, but Marys grief in its aftermath and the promise
of resurrection and eternal life. It also instructs the mother of the dead
child to cease lamenting what Milton calls Her false imagind loss,
pointing clearly to the doctrine of the everlasting life of the saved,
but perhaps embedding within this early elegy the idea the death can
be false imagind. The ambiguity of this line means that it can be
read either as false and (only) imagined, or falsely imagined, that
is to say, incorrectly represented in the imagination. It is the effort to
reimagine the poetics of death and the passion in which Milton is
engaged in these poems.
Miltons elegy for Jane Paulet, the Marchioness of Winchester, pro-
vides an occasion for a certain kind of poetic transformation from
tomb to text, not only for Milton but for her other elegists as well.25
The speaker of Ben Jonsons elegy for Paulet becomes her funeral
monument. Seeing a vision of her ghostly beauty, he feels a horror
and turns to stone:
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).
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
Critics have questioned why Milton chose Winchester for a subject.29

No substantial connection between the poet and the deceased, or her
family, has been found, though it has been suggested that his poem
was part of a collection of memorial verse in her honor that has not
survived. An intriguing detail of her biography raises another possibil-
ity. Paulet was a Roman Catholic but was believed to be inclining to
become a Protestant.30 If we take this biographical fact as the motiva-
tion for Miltons poem, we have further reason to read his choice of
writing an epitaph as a gesture of iconoclasm. The Catholic living
Tomb, on the brink of birthing a Protestant, must be memorialized
in verse rather than stone.
The Epitaphium Damonis is another reminder that while there
are many deaths in Miltons early poems, there are no burials. Milton,
absent from England at the time of Charles Diodatis death, returned
to find him already buried. Yet the adjective buried in the poem
refers not to Diodati / Damon, but to Rome: Was it of such impor-
tance to have seen buried Rome . . . that I should suffer separation from
so sweet a friend? The question opens onto an imagined scenario of
the dying Damon. Ah! had I not gone, Thyrsis laments, surely I
might have touched his right hand at the last and closed his eyes as he
lay peacefully dying (Hughes 136). That the poem provides only an
unrealized narrative of Damons death is characteristic of the strongly
felt absence of funeral ritual in mid-seventeenth century English cul-
ture. The lack of satisfaction that results can also be glimpsed in Mil-
tons juxtaposition of his living sense of Diodati even after his death:
Ah! how often would I say, when already dark ashes possessed you,
Now Damon is singing or stretching his nets for the hare or weaving
osiers for his various objects (Hughes 136). The lack of his partici-
pation in a funeral rite means that, for Thyrsis, Damon remains alive.
Recollected, this disparity becomes one of the most painful notes in
the poem. The poem also notably lacks any Christian frame of refer-
ence, even the slightest hint of the passion and atonement having been
excluded. The reassurance that Damon is among the gods, for where
else should your sweet and holy simplicity have gone? reinforces the
sense of uncertainty and absence without providing a Christian nar-
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.
rative of the afterlife. The ambiguity of Damons death and burial

means that the poem can only offer as consolation the reassurance that
Damon dwells in the pure aether which he is pure enough to possess
(Hughes 138139).
There is a tendency in criticism on the early elegies to assume a
coldness on Miltons part toward the subjects of his elegies that is
utterly unlike what critics seem to feel are his deeply-felt religious
beliefs as they appear in these poems. In other words his broad theo-
logical ideas are credited with sincerity, while his relationships to the
subjectsespecially the fair infant and Edward Kingare consis-
tently viewed as merely instrumental.31 The explanations offered to
account for this state of affairs often turn to history, to the idea that
family feeling was not in Miltons time what it now is, or to beliefs
about Miltons self-presentation as a poet, particularly the idea that
he is always more interested in the poem than its subject. The missing
emotions of the early elegies may suggest rather that mourning is not
Miltons aim in composing the poems. Further, to draw a line from
the first elegies to his ongoing engagement with the passion, these
poems underscore the denial of individual, personal responses to loss,
an attempt to reform readers who might be tempted by the overly
passionate, mystical response, even the practice of imitatio Christi that
Milton finds in contemporary elegy (as we often see in Donne, for
instance).
Lycidas, the most fully developed of Miltons early elegies, is also an

important example of his alternative passion. The poem was first pub-
lished in 1638 as part of a memorial collection for Miltons Cambridge
classmate Edward King. This collection, Justa Edouardo King Naufrago,
is one of many post-Reformation memorial volumes of poetry that
testify to the importance of textual, rather than material, practices
of remembering the dead. Textual monuments to the dead flourished
in the post-Reformation period, in the form of sermons, biographies
focused on the good death, and collections of memorial verse. The
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
last category includes collections assembled for authorssuch as Jon-

sonus Virbiusand others with status.32
The twenty Latin, three Greek, and thirteen English poems in Justa
Edouardo King Naufrago are often dismissed in comparison with Lyci-
das, which closes the volume. In fact Miltons poem shares many of
its themes and images with the others in the collection. The scope
and ambition of some of the other poems in the volumeand their
attention to the connections between the death they lament and the
death of Christcan be seen as an early field in which some of Mil-
tons ideas about how to depict the passion were in formation. The
other poems on Edward King may have influenced some of Miltons
other early elegies as well as Lycidas. Edward Le Comte notes in
the introduction to his facsimile edition of Justa Edouardo King Naufrago
that Milton certainly read the Justa, may, indeedit has been con-
jecturedhave seen the other poems before, around November 1637,
he wrote his.33 Further, it may be possible to read the collection itself
as a sort of passion sequence, with Miltons poem consciously shaped
to draw together the threads of concern with atonement, sacrifice and
eternal life that are stirring in many of the shorter poems in the vol-
ume. I suggest that we read the English section of Justa Edouardo King
Naufrago as a passion poem in thirteen parts, with Lycidas occupying
the place of the (obscured) crucifixion and, more crucially for Milton,
resurrection.
The first English poem in Justa Edouardo opens with the stunning
apostrophe No Death! Ile not examine Gods decree, / Nor question
providence, in chiding thee. These lines already hint at a connection
to Lycidas, which similarly grapples with the temptation to anger
and doubt in the face of grief, a standard elegiac convention. If we
pause at the first phrase of the opening line, as the punctuation war-
rants, however, we can follow the ambiguity that the poem opens up
in another direction. No Death! can be read to mean just that: an
end to death, a refusal of death. An equally understandable reaction
to loss, this statement has another resonance as well if we take the
Obsequies to the memorie of Mr. Edward King to be concerned
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.
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.
body should corrupt by death, writes one of the unnamed poets, To

Thetis we our brinish tears bequeath (Whiles Phebus shines 1920).
Here Kings body is imagined as being preserved, untouched by the
ravishes of an ordinary death.
This element of his death also invites a reading of the poems within
the context of the passion, particularly as it offers the poets the oppor-
tunity to meditate on the problem of the body and the tomb in the
story of Jesus death. Hall, for instance, though his poem does not
evoke the crucifixion specifically, offers the intriguing explanation that
Kings drowning was specifically designed to prevent his mourners
from worshiping him. He asks,
did for us foreseeing heavn desire
To quench in waters thy celestiall fire,
Lest we adore his ashes in an urn
Who dazzled all while vitall fire did burn?
Should some enriched earthly tombe inherit
The empty casket of that parted spirit,
The easie world would idolize that shrine. (4955)
I think we must assume again that King himself has slipped out of this
poem, to be replaced in the readers imagination by Jesus. The image
of the empty casketwhile warranted by the nature of Kings death
at seaand the fear of idolatrous misunderstanding as a response to
the death are fitting Protestant gestures in the context of the burial
of Christ. The absent body is a significant trope in The Passion.
Miltons speaker turns from that sad Sepulchral rock / That was the
Casket of Heavns richest store and finds his hands locked, unable
to compose the epitaph and by extension the poem (4344). The miss-
ing epitaph-poem corresponds to the missing body. This death, finally,
is like no other death. Similarly, the absent corpse of Samson Agonistes
is one of that poems devices for calling to mind the problematics of
the passion. Lost among the rubble of the theatre and the bodies of
the Philistines, Samson is dead but cannot be buried. Manoas dream
of building a great monument to Samson occupies a parallel place in
the poem to the missing body, standing in for the epitaph that is not
written, the representation that must always remain incomplete, as in
The Passion. Samson, like Edward King and like Christ, is both
deadMyself my Sepulcher, Samson lamentsand not dead.
Curiously, death and life seem to change places in the center of
the first elegy in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago. Having moved from his
rejection of death to praise of King, and even to a discussion of the
116 chapter five
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.
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.
A number of distinctions between these elegies and Miltons contri-

bution to the volume can, nevertheless, be drawn. The first is that
while the rest of the poems refer directly to Edward King, even while
allegorizing or mythologizing him, Lycidas, as has often been noted,
displaces King as its subject entirely, turning instead to a story that is
parallel but which also unfolds on a more universal register. Lyci-
das completes the movement in the individual poems that precede
it towards reading Edward King as a Christ figure, but with a differ-
ence. At the same time that Miltons poem marks the apotheosis of
the passion narrative in the collection, it provides one of the earliest
instances in Miltons work of a refusal to depict the death of Christ.
Crucially, the Edward King figure in Lycidas becomes, at the end
of the poem, not Christ himself but a beneficiary of the dear might
of him that walkd the waves (173). As he will do repeatedly through
his poetry, most notably in Samson Agonistes, Milton provides a typology
with Jesus, not to show how King is Christ-like, but to show how he
cannot be. This comparison fails not because of Jesus divine nature
but because Lycidas goes even farther than the other poems in the
memorial volume in insisting that the passion cannot be represented.
The change at the end of Lycidas, in which we are instructed not
to mistake his death for the death of Christ, results not just from the
understandable failure of King to be divine, but more importantly
from the problem of failed representation that Milton encounters in
depicting the passion.
As we have seen from the other poems in the 1638 memorial vol-
ume for King, poetry on the death of a young man lends itself to some
allusions at least to the passion. Miltons poem takes up this opportunity
118 chapter five
as well, and the typological connections between Lycidas and Christ

operate from the very first words of the poem. The poem opens, as
critics have shown, with a citation of Hebrews 12:2627, Yet once
more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven. This phrase,
Yet once more, indicates the removal of what is shakenthat is,
created thingsso that what cannot be shaken may remain.37 This
chapter of the letter to the Hebrews begins with the instruction,
let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let
us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus
the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that
was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame. (12: 12)
Indirectly, by allusion, then, the first line of Lycidas calls up in the
minds of Miltons readers an image of Jesus suffering on the cross.
Of the many places in Christian scripture from which Milton might
have taken such an image, however, the choice of the letter to the
Hebrews is not an obvious one and should encourage us to look fur-
ther into the context of this crucifixion image. The task of the author
of Hebrews is to convince his audience of the logic of Christian sacri-
fice and redemption, specifically against this communitys foundational
set of beliefs. He does this by countering their faith in the prophets
of the Hebrew Bible, the role of Moses as the first authority on the
Law, and the traditions of the Temple priests and sacrifices. Milton
selects as the intertext, or pre-text, for Lycidas an essential document
in the Christian tradition of replacing Jewish faith and practice, one
that is grounded in the death and resurrection of Jesus as marking the
essential difference between the two faiths.38 The specific discussion
in Hebrews of Christ as the ultimate priest, surpassing the tradition
of the levitical priests, provides another useful parallel for Lycidas
and its concern with remaking the priesthood. Miltons poem provides
the same solution to the ruin of our corrupted clergy foretold in
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!
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
has come before has shattered, and must be physically broken as an

outward sign of its overthrow. There are other places in the poem
that unite artistic with religious concerns. The speech of the Galilean
Pilot, for instance, implies that the lean and flashy songs of the cor-
rupted clergy are a sign of their error. In other words, their artistic
acts correspond to and reveal the degree of their doctrinal correctness.
Milton thus sets out to overturn their religious errors through his rep-
resentational choices. The end of this speech, like the final passages
of the poem, is also joined to the opening lines, particularly to the
phrase Yet once more, by rhyme.40 We should not misinterpret Mil-
tons commentary on poetry and religious practice here to mean that
he takes a stand totally against representation, or even against poetic
expression that is not also divine. The speech of Peter is followed,
after all, by the flower passage. The variety of meanings attributed to
these lines is proof, in my view, of their relevance to the overall claim
of Lycidas in favor of representation, but with certain limits and
guidelines. We should also keep in mind that the flowers are to be
strewn on Lycidas laureate hearse.41
Ultimately, Lycidas is sunk low, but mounted high, and leaves no
body to bury, rendering him an apt figure through which to rewrite
the termsartistic and theologicalof the death of Christ (173). The
extraordinary claim at the close of the poem, that Lycidas your sor-
row is not dead is the peak of Miltons rewriting of the passion in
this text (166). Lycidas ceases to be a Christ-like figuredead ere his
prime, mourned by the pains of the physical universe, and the dear-
est pledge of the priesthoodand rather slips back into a human
context, to be contrasted with him that walkd the waves (173). It is
fitting and characteristic that Milton sets up a typology only to break
it, and that he insists finally on the singularity of Christ within the
context of refusing death.
Why, from the range of scriptural possibilities available to him, does
Milton select him that walkd the waves as an epithet for Jesus?
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).
Most obviously this image relates to Edward Kings death by drown-

ing and forms a pair in the poem with the description of Peter in the
same episode on the Sea of Galilee. But there may be more. Matthew
14, from which the story of Jesus walking on water is drawn, tells a
story similar to that told by Lycidas and the other memorial poems
for Edward King. In this episode Jesus learns of the death of John
the Baptist and withdraws in grief. The period before Jesus walks on
water is a moment characterized by silence, meditation and solitari-
ness. In the event itself, not only does Christ have the ability to walk
on water, but the disciple Peter does as well as long as he has faith, just
as Edward King is heralded as the Genius of the shore (183). This
is the Jesus not of the crucifixion but of the wilderness, not of death,
blood and sacrifice but of faith and silence. It is the Christ that Milton
consistently prefers, and his image in Lycidas of Edward King sunk
low, but mounted high, / Through the dear might of him that walkd
the waves is analogous to the image of the Son on the pinnacle in
Paradise Regained (172173). Most importantly, Milton has returned the
passion to his 1645 poems, but it is a qualitatively different passion
that he has inserted and he has supplied it through displacement and
substitution, changing not just the religious but the artistic terms of
the passion as well.
The placement of Lycidas as the final English poem in Justa
Edouardo King Naufrago contributes to its function as the incomplete
passion poem within the volume.42 It occupies the position at the end
of a building narrative of Kings life and death that the crucifixion
and, more crucially for Milton, the resurrection, occupy in the episodic
passion narratives. Standing in the place in which readers trained by
the gospel accounts and the tradition of passion sermons and poems
would expect to find the scenes of Jesus death and rebirth, Miltons
poem tellingly avoids those scenes and then replaces them with his
poetic substitute.
The Reformation generated a shift from intercession to commemo-
ration in attitudes toward the dead, and from monuments in marble
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
and brass to textual memorials. Milton brings this cultural conversion

to his rendering of the passion as the non-burial of Jesus. Like Edward
King, whose body is lost at sea, Jesus must not be buried by a poem
on the passion, but rather shown to live, the grave rejected in favor
of a life treasurd up on purpose to a life beyond life. However that
transaction occurs at the level of atonement theory, for Milton it also
takes place in print.
CHAPTER SIX
THE ART OF OMISSION AND SUPPLEMENT IN

PARADISE LOST
As we have seen, Puritan iconoclasm offered Milton a point of depar-

ture, not an end in itself. Milton did not adopt any single theory of
representing the sacred.1 Rather, he entered into an extended explora-
tion, across his prose and poetry and throughout his authorial career,
seeking to work out a difficult poetics of the passion. One of the central
guidelines for handling divine ideas and words that Milton discovered
is the dialectic of omission and supplement, a system of concealment
and revelation, presence and absence, which characterizes Protestant
art on divine subjects. Milton often calls upon a vocabulary of omission
and supplement to describe his process of composition and to portray
scenes of writing. This discourse, which appears in Miltons prose and
issues from his poetic narrators, promises a poetics of absence and res-
toration. For instance, the invocation at the beginning of Paradise Lost
characterizes the poems content as Things unattempted yet in Prose
or Rime (I: 16) and Paradise Regained promises a song of deeds /
Above Heroic, though in secret done, / And unrecorded left through
many an Age (I: 1416, my emphasis). Instances of the words omit
and omission in Miltons prose works often refer to his authorial deci-
sions. These terms indicate conscious choices rather than negligence.
Frequently, by pointing out an omission, Milton in fact supplies what
he purports to have excluded, as when in The Likeliest Means he claims
to omitt also the violent and irreligious exactions of the prelates:
thir seising of pots and pans from the poor, who have as good right
to tithes as they; from som, the very beds; thir sueing and imprisoning
(VII: 296). Similarly, in the History of Britain Milton clearly identifies
omission as a deliberate element of composition when he pledges that
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
if ought by diligence may bee added, or omitted, or by other dispos-

ing may be more explaind, or more expressd, I shall assay (V: 41).
The technique of omission allows Milton to identify himself as an
author with the rhetorical practices used by Christ in the gospels. In
Tetrachordon, for instance, Milton asserts that in his quotations from
Scripture, Christ himself sometimes omits because
He himselfe having to deale with treacherous assailants, useth brevity,
and lighting on the first place in Genesis that mentions any thing tending
to Marriage in the first chapter, joynes it immediately to the 24. verse
of the 2 chapter, omitting all the prime words between, which create the
institution. . . . (II: 648).
Christs omissions place the burden of interpreting Scripture on his
readers:
If heere then being tempted, hee desire to bee the shorter, and the darker
in his conference, and omitt to cite that from the second of Genesis, which
all Divines confesse is a commentary to what he cites out of the first,
the making them Male and Female; what are we to doe, but to search the
institution our selves. (II: 649)
These passages suggest that omissions represent choices made by the
author for the sake of brevity and clarity but also to signal negative
sources of meaning and to shift responsibility for that meaning to
readers.
Areopagitica contains Miltons most famous discussion of supplement,
a protest against pre-publication licensing based on the importance of
revision to the process of composition. Milton asks
And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancie, as to have
many things well worth the adding, come into his mind after licencing,
while the book is yet under the Presse, which not seldom happns to the
best and diligentest writers; and that perhaps a dozen times in one book.
The Printer dares not go beyond his licenct copy. (II: 532)
The characterization of addition as a literary tool is revealing. Mil-
ton uses terms for supplement (usually forms of the word add) in
much the same way that he uses terms for omission, to direct the
readers attention to his exertion of control over the text, as in his
claim in the conclusion of the second edition of The Readie and Easie
Way, that Many circumstances and particulars I could have added in
those things wherof I have spoken; but a few main matters now put
speedily in execution, will suffice to recover us, and set all right (VII:
462). Here, and in many similar passages, the supplement remains a
strictly writerly device.
the art of omission and supplement in PARADISE LOST 125
In other places, however, the supplement unleashes its more danger-

ous aspects. Two such instances merit brief discussion to illustrate the
interpretive potential of Miltons language of omission and supple-
ment. First, Milton often struggles to sort out the complex and poten-
tially perilous relations of the literary writer to Scripture. In both Of
True Religion and Tetrachordon Milton quotes Deuteronomy 4:2, in which
Moses teaches the Israelites, Ye shall not add to the word which I
command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it (VIII: 419
and Tetrachordon II: 653). In Of True Religion Milton follows this quota-
tion with the stern warning of Revelation 22:1819 against supple-
menting or removing words of Scripture:
For I protest unto everie man that heareth the wordes of the prophecie
of this boke, if any man shal adde unto these things, God shal adde
unto him the plagues, that are writen in this boke. And if any man shal
diminish of ye wordes of ye boke of this prophecie, God shal take away
his parte out of the Boke of life, and out of the holie citie, and fr those
things which are writen in this boke.
Twice in Of Prelatical Episcopacy Milton decries the practice of supple-
menting Scripture,
that which Saint Paul foretold of succeeding times [II Timothy 4:34],
when men began to have itching eares, then not contented with the
plentifull and wholsom fountaines of the Gospell, they began after their
owne lusts to heap to themselvs teachers, and as if the divine Scripture
wanted a supplement, and were to be eekt out, they cannot think any
doubt resolvd, and any doctrine confirmd, unlesse they run to that indi-
gested heap, and frie of Authors, which they call Antiquity. (I: 626)
In addition to his concern that Scripture not be altered, he also admon-
ishes that it ought not to be supplemented, because
if we have given our selves up to be taught by the pure, and living
precept of Gods word onely, which without more additions, nay with a
forbidding of them hath within it selfe the promise of eternall life, the
end of all our wearisome labours, and all our sustaining hopes. (I: 652)
Milton sees the uninterrupted wholeness of the Scriptures as offering
the reward of perfection. Even in Paradise Lost, Raphael admonishes
Adam
Yet what thou canst attain, which best may serve
To glorify the Maker, and infer
Thee also happier, shall not be withheld
Thy hearing, such commission from above
126 chapter six
I have received, to answer thy desire

Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain
To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope
Things not revealed, which th invisible King,
Only omniscient, hath suppressed in night,
To none communicable in earth or heaven. (VII: 115124)
Gods secrecy renders some knowledge likewise hidden.
Despite such grave injunctions, Milton recognizes that certain con-
ditions within Scripture necessitate supplement. For instance, the con-
dition of scattered truth in the gospels
gave reason to St. Paul of his own authority, as he professes, and without
command from the Lord, to enlarge the seeming construction of those
places in the Gospel, by adding a case wherin a person deserted which
is somthing lesse then divorct, may lawfully marry again. (Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce II: 338)
A textual condition thus begets a textual practice. But Paul is a bibli-
cal author; what may readers of the Bible do? One supplement to
Scripture that Milton warrants readers to provide is grammatical. In
Pauls discussion of marriage to infidels, Milton notes, if we shall sup-
ply the grammatical Ellipsis regularly, and as we must in the sam tense,
all will be then cleer (Tetrachordon II: 684). Readers may also provide
one passage to expound another; Thus while we reduce the brevity
of St. Paul to a plainer sense, by the needfull supply of that which was
granted between him and the Corinthians . . . we may understand the
passage (Tetrachordon II: 686). What the strict rules of supplementation
portend for the composition of literary works that require addition to
the events and words of the Bible will be addressed below.
The second dangerous supplement in Miltons works concerns not
the text of Scripture but two of its heroes, Adam and Samson. Dalila
speaks to Samson of loss and restoration, offering to
. . . ever tend about thee to old age
With all things grateful cheard, and so supplid,
That what by me thou hast lost thou least shalt miss. (92527)
In this speech Milton marshals the language of omission and supple-
ment to demonstrate Dalilas false perception of total control: she
believes that she has been both the cause of Samsons fall and his
restorer. Interestingly, Eve also uses this vocabulary as she determines,
immediately after eating the fruit, how to proceed:
. . . But to Adam in what sort

Shall I appeer? shall I to him make known
As yet my change, and give him to partake
Full happiness with me, or rather not,
But keep the odds of knowledge in my power
Without Copartner? so to add what wants
In Femal Sex, the more to draw his Love,
And render me more equal. . . . (IX: 81623, my emphasis)
Here Eve is herself supplied by forbidden knowledge, which changes
her own status to that of a kind of secret text (And I perhaps am
secret, she says at line 811) which, having been revised (my change),
has the power to change Adam as well.
In Book Five Adam treats Eves dream as a text that mimics the
reality of their experiences But with addition strange (116). He notes
however that Evil into the mind of God or Man / May come and
go, so unapprovd, and leave / No spot or blame behind (117119).
Eve has not yet been blotted or marred by the evil supplement of
her dream, but her later revision will of course transfer that blot to
Adam. While Milton allows some measure of flexibility in the text of
Scripture in his prose, he shows in his long poems that the practices
which create a divine text may also be vulnerable to dangerous misap-
plication.
The threat of idolatry underlies many of the proof texts that Mil-
ton chooses. He returns again and again to stories of those who fail
to uphold the oneness of God. But more than this Milton adopts the
moment at which the Israelites convert to monotheism and receive
their covenant at Sinai as the origin of his poetic parameters. He
points us to the commandment that the Israelites shall neither add to
nor subtract from the Torah they are given, a spectacular idea that
communicates its completeness, its totality, its emblematization of their
new covenant and its extraordinary scope. The command is also a
signal pointing in the other direction, in the direction of commentary.
It suggests that there is more, there is something to add, and that there
are things that have been left out. This scenario sets the terms for
Miltons engagements with the representation of the divine.
The epics are central texts for Miltons conception of the divine
image. Among the key concepts of Reformation art, especially as we
see it develop in Miltons epics, are the dynamics of visibility and
obscurity. As has often been noticed, the epic invocations of Para-
dise Lost and Paradise Regained make explicit that their speakers must
128 chapter six
transgress certain boundaries to translate what is normally invisible or

secret so that it can be grasped by human sense. Raphaels instructions
to Adam suggest that the maintenance of secrets characterizes the
relationship between man and the divine. The nature and meaning of
certain aspects of the world
From man or angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scanned by them who ought
Rather admire (VIII: 7275)
God to remove his ways from human sense,
Placed heavn from earth so far, that earthly sight,
If it presume, might err in things too high (119121)
Gods singularity, which in Book VIII is contrasted with mans imper-
fection, expressed as Adams need for a fit companion, is characterized
as secrecy, a term that underscores the necessary co-existence in the
Miltonic system of divine unity and obscurity (427). The question of
visibility is part of the system of omission and supplement: the divine
(both Father and Son) are described in Miltons poems as being per-
ceptible, but in a way that is constantly subject to concealment and
revelation, absence and restoration.
Milton borrows several devices for conveying the secrecy of God
from biblical imageryprincipally, the light of God, the cloud that
conceals him, and the divine voice, which substitutes for a visual
appearance and accommodates human perception. Notably, Miltons
deployment of these devices shows that they are not identical and that
the degree of Gods concealment or revelation varies depending on
the nature of his relationship to mankind as it unfolds over the course
of universal history. Adam and Eve can hear Gods voice directly until
their judgment by the Son; thereafter they do not appear able to com-
prehend direct communication from God. Gods voice differs from his
light in that it seems to represent a lower level of access, substitut-
ing for vision as Gods secrecy increases. One scene that suggests this
hierarchy of perceptibility comes at the beginning of Book X, as the
ethereal people of heaven run to learn of Gods reaction to the fall
of Adam and Eve. Milton describes Gods response,
when the Most High
Eternal Father from his secret cloud,
Amidst in thunder uttered thus his voice. (3133)
The thundering voice and secret cloud are introduced into the poems
vocabulary of divine description after the fall. While secrecy and
obscurity characterize human perception of the divine, Milton sug-

gests that these conditions may also be ameliorated by Christs incar-
nation. Openness and witness are key elements of the ascension as
he describes it: Jesus, rising from his Grave / . . . triumphd / In opn
shew, and with ascention bright (X: 185187). What was obscure
becomes open with the resurrection and brightness (not qualified as it
often is in descriptions of divine light elsewhere in the poem) illumi-
nates the meaning of the final mystery.
Paradise Lost allows Milton to investigate a scenario in which God
is visible. As the poem unfolds, we witness the loss of pre-lapsarian
human perception of the divine.2 We also see the Son, even prior to
his incarnation, substitute for God the Father, acquiring his qualities
and at the same time masking them before human vision. In Miltons
poem, as in much Christian art, the three aspects of the divine seem to
have different degrees of visibility: God the Father cannot be seen and
expresses his presence through speech; the Son is visible both before
and after his incarnation; and the Spirit sometimes appears (especially
in the form of the dove) to indicate the presence of the Father where
the son is already visible, as in the baptism. Roland Frye argues that
in his insistence upon the invisibility of the Father, Milton is closer to
the first millennium of Christian art than to the centuries which imme-
diately preceded him. Images of God the Father are exceedingly rare in
the early art of Christendom, and are almost always connected with the
creation of man, though even that scene is far more often shown with
the Christ-Logos as creator.3
None of the standard types for presenting God the Fatheras ancient
of days, papal majesty, and Christian Jupiterare deployed by Milton
in Paradise Lost. According to Frye, Milton followed the precedents of
his coreligionists and of the early Church in making the Son the only
visual and operative principal of deity.4
Milton suggests that God is invisible even within his heavenly
context:
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
Author of all being,

Fountain of light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sittst
Throned inaccessible, but when thou shadst
The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud
Drawn round about thee like a radiant shrine,
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,
Yet dazzle heavn, that brightest Seraphim
Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes. (III: 37482)
God cannot be seen directly, but his light can be appreciated when
through his own power he eclipses it, leaving only the contrast vis-
ible. This process of revelation through concealmentas well as the
model of viewing presented by the Seraphim, who see by veiling their
eyessuggests a pattern of approach and retreat that Milton follows
in his aesthetics of divine portraiture.
The Son is characterized by greater visibility:
Thee next they sang of all creation first,
Begotten Son, Divine Similitude,
In whose conspicuous countnance, without cloud
Made visible, th Almighty Father shines,
Whom else no creature can behold; on thee
Impressed th effulgence of his glory abides,
Transfused on thee his ample spirit rests. (III: 38389)
God is visible, but only to the Son, who conveys what he perceives
through his own appearancea sort of act of artistic creation! The
Sons embodiment does not require the same degree of concealment;
he is without cloud / Made visible. The poem implies that as a
result, the Son substitutes for God the Father as the subject of Miltons
verse, when twenty lines later the narrator hails the Son as the copi-
ous matter of my song (III: 412413). At the same time that the nar-
rator correctly understands how to read Gods divinity in Christ, and
how to represent the Father by reference to the Son, Milton supplies
a cautionary counter example. As Satan approaches the created world,
his perception is compared to that of pilgrims who strayed so far to
seek / In Golgotha him dead, who lives in heavn (III: 476477).
The poem thus establishes the crucifixion (here represented by Gol-
gotha) as an obstacle to correct perception of the divine. The passion
is largely absent from Paradise Lost. It is replacedrewrittenby the
incarnation. For Milton the incarnation again provides a preferable
alternative to the passion, better conveying the nature of the Son and
his sacrifice. Just as the crucifixion is avoided in early Christian art, it

is conspicuously absent in Miltons epics, which prefer a living Christ
whose embodiment of Gods image provides the means of conveying
divinity to human perception.
Paradise Regained draws out the implications of this question further.
It offers for comparison with the pre-incarnate Son of Paradise Lost the
Son of the later epic, who appears exclusively in human form and
only gradually comes to understand his divinity. Milton distributes the
dual nature across these two poems. By concentrating exclusively on
the pre-incarnate or incarnate Christ, each poem avoids the most dif-
ficult aspect of the Son to portray artistically. The pair instead make
up a diptych, suggesting that each element of the dual nature requires
a different type of portrait.
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
the barest minimum of elements for constituting a passion narrative. It

emphasizes the elements of the story that underscore the importance
of Christs dual nature, framing his death with the kenosis and resto-
ration. This pattern introduces the crucifixion into Paradise Lost and
suggests how we should read the other events of the passion sequence.
To look only at the crucifixion, Milton implies, is an error. Rather,
each episode should point toward, at one end of the sequence, Gods
ineffability and at the other, Christs heavenly kingship. By organizing
the chronology of the passion in this way Milton relocates the cross
from the center to a position just prior to the completion of the human
phase of the Sons history.
At the council of the fallen angels in Book II, Beelzebub sketches
out a portrait of the leader who will be sent to tempt man. It becomes
clear that his description bears an ironic resemblance to that of the
Son:
.whom shall we send
In search of this new world, whom shall we find
Sufficient?
..what art can then
Suffice, or what evasion bear him safe
Through the strict sentries and stations thick
Of angels watching round? Here he had need
All circumspection, and we now no less
Choice in our suffrage; for on whom we send,
The weight of all and our last hope relies. (II: 402416)
Satan must assume a form that is obscure, that will conceal his spiritual
essence, and he must prove sufficient for a nearly unbearable weight. It
may be that Milton employs this set of images with irony, or to remind
his readers how nearly evil can mimic good.7 Perhaps we should read
it as a negative portrait in a fuller sense, however. The qualities that
seem to be shared by the Adversary and the Son are not imperfect in
Satan and perfect in Christ, but altogether imperfect. They may be
attributed to the Son by false depictions, but in Miltons view they do
not convey the essence of the Son and his mission. Satan hesitates, fol-
lowing Beelzebubs speech, to take up the task of temptation, whereas
the Son does not. He is concerned that to pass over the gates of
burning adamant, to leave hell, is to risk utter loss of being (436,
7
See Neil Graves, Typological Aporias in Paradise Lost, Modern Philology 104:2
(November 2006): 173201.
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
the speech indicates that the substitution will result in no loathsome

grave, but rather will end with a victorious arising.
Milton emphasizes that the Sons incarnation will continue after
the resurrection: Here thou shalt sit incarnate, here shalt reign /
Both God and man and Then thou thy regal scepter shalt lay by,
/ For regal scepter then no more shall need (339340). The counter
possibility of a great reduction in glory occurs in Satan. Ithuriel and
Zephon tell Satan in Book IV that he has lost his beauty and bright-
ness. This is a perverse kenosis, in which Satan loses his participation
in heavenly brightness not as the Son will, by voluntary lowering into
flesh, but as a consequence of his disobedience. The angels equate
physical beauty with goodness. Milton conveys the Sons beauty not in
physical terms but according to the model articulated by early portraits
of Christ as philosopher and teacher.
In Book III, as the Father and Son discuss the redemption of man,
the terms of the Sons sacrifice are drawn around an absence. We
learn of the need for a substitute, and we glimpse the post-resurrection
glory of the Son, but the exact nature of his suffering remains unar-
ticulated. By comparison with the significance of his voluntary offering
and its accomplishment, it seems quite appropriate that the crucifixion
itself is absent. E. L. Marilla claims that in Book III of Paradise Lost
Milton devotes no fewer than 238 lines to the Crucifixion, but this is
somewhat inaccurate, as the poem does not depict the crucifixion as
such but rather meditates on the idea of Christs death.9 Ultimately
the poem omits the specific means and circumstances of the passion
in favor of a celebration of its principles and origin in the will of God
the Father.
Two important further representations of the passion occur in Book
Sixin Miltons substitution of Christ for Michael as the victor of the
battle in heavenand in Book Twelve, when Michael briefly narrates
the life and death of Christ to Adam, promising that
thy punishment
He shall endure by coming in the Flesh
To a reproachful life and cursed death. (40305)
The brevity of Michaels description, like Miltons choice of the temp-
tations rather than the crucifixion as the subject of Paradise Regained,
has been read as evidence of Miltons distaste for the veneration
9
E. L. Marilla, Milton on the Crucifixion, Etudes Anglaises 22 (1969), 9.
of Christs wounds in Catholic traditions of the passion, the local

wounds / Of head or heel (12: 38788). Milton substitutes the Son
for Michael as the victor of the battle in heaven, but also changes the
nature of their combat. Richard Ide remarks that the heavenly events
mirror Christian history on earth, from the begetting of the anointed
Messiah at the Incarnation to his triumph on the third day at the Res-
urrection.10 The events in both spheres are characterized by certain
hallmarks, such as the celebration of angelic choirs and declarations
by God the Father. As Ide explains,
Milton posits that in heavenly history the Son, who was literally begotten
of the Father by a secret generation before the creation of the angels, is
now metaphorically begotten or declared or revealed, as it were, before
the eyes of the angels11
and later, to human perception. If the generation of the Son is secret,
concealed even from heavenly witness, Milton must be faithful to this
principle in his poem. We ought also to note that even when hidden,
the Son is not absent, an important clarification of how the pattern
of concealment and revelation works in Miltons representation of the
Sons visibility.
The war in heaven shows that violence is not entirely excluded from
the Miltonic passion, but rather qualified. At the moment of the Sons
triumph, the narrator sounds a note of reserve:
Yet half his strength he put not forth, but checked
His thunder in mid-volley, for he meant
Not to destroy, but root them out of heavn:
The overthrown he raised, and as a herd
Of goats or timorous flock together thronged
Drove them before him thunderstruck. (VI: 853858)
This image of the Sons restraint belongs to Miltons pattern of empha-
sizing not the violent, physical aspects of his mission, butas the last
lines of this passage implyhis role as shepherd.
Stella Revard has shown how important Miltons departures from
Renaissance traditions regarding the battle in heaven are for under-
standing his portrait of the Son. In other Renaissance treatments of
Michael, he has
10
Richard Ide, On the Begetting of the Son in Paradise Lost, SEL 24 (1984),
141.
11
Ide, 147148.
136 chapter six
the physical presence of a leader: striking beauty, splendid arms, author-

ity. This charisma is a quality Miltons Michael has to some degree and
his Son of God has in abundance . . . The presence and authority which
in the Renaissance poems belong to Michael, in Paradise Lost belong to
the Son.12
Revard explains that the change deflates Satan as an epic adversary,
removing the possibility that the rebel angel could be seen as an equal
in combat. Further, the substitution changes the nature of the Sons
victory:
Milton waves no palms for military victory. He celebrates neither the
force of his warring Son, nor that of the angels who warred before him.
The palms waved for his returning Son do not look to a Roman victory,
but look beyond to the brief triumph he will enjoy as king incarnate
entering Jerusalem and the more joyous triumph as king victorious, res-
urrected and reentering Heaven.13
This change follows the pattern of Miltons other revisions of the pas-
sion. He first sets out some of the familiar motifs of traditional repre-
sentations, only to qualify or withdraw them and offer an alternative
model in their place. Here the battle in heaven first invokes the vio-
lence of the crucifixioneven the three days of the battle are parallel
to those of the passion14but shortly retreats from it to establish the
heavenly reign of the Son as the real triumph over the adversary.
A key hallmark of Miltons alternative passion, the absence of
the grave, is evident in Gods response to the fall of Adam and Eve.
Observing how it paves a way for the entrance of Sin and Death into
his new creation, God celebrates how
at one sling
Of thy victorious arm, well-pleasing Son,
Both Sin, and Death, and yawning grave at last
Through chaos hurled, obstruct the mouth of hell
For ever, and seal up his ravenous jaws. (X: 633637)
Gods vision of the renewal and purification of heaven and earth at
the moment of the Sons final victory specifically encompasses the
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.
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 passage is not only a rewriting of the crucifixion, but a set of

instructions about how the passion must be conveyed artistically. It is
most explicit about what it does not show, especially the local wounds
/ Of head or heel, which correspond to the wounds of the crucifix-
ion but on the level of veneration which Milton rejects. Death, even
suffering death, is there, but the crucifixion itself recedes from the
foreground. Characterizing the death as cursed instructs Adam and
Miltons readers not to linger over its details; once again we are asked
to take the broader lesson from Jesus death and to show little interest
in the events themselves. Christ is in this passage nailed to the Cross,
it is true, but this phrase is characteristically invertedcrossedin the
chiasmus that shortly follows, in which the Christus Victor image of Jesus
rewrites the scene of crucifixion. The alternative passion established
here depends, as always, on merit, obedience, and satisfaction, and
culminates not in deathwhich is deniedbut in exaltation. Rather
than a physical actor, Christ becomes a supplement, fulfilling that
which thou didst want.
Book Twelve portrays the passion in a series of brief, repeated
phrases, progressively expressing the major theories of the atonement.
Michael corrects Adams expectation of a battle between Christ and
Satan by noting that the destruction of Satan cannot be
But by fulfilling that which thou didst want,
Obedience to the Law of God, imposd
On penalty of death, and suffering death,
The penalty to thy transgression due. (39699)
The passion will supplement Adams lack, an image of atonement that
follows Pauls identification of Christ as the second Adam. Underscor-
ing the difficulty of his project, Michael seems to begin again five lines
later when he provides a slightly more elaborate version of the pas-
sion, in which Adams punishment He shall endure by coming in the
Flesh / To a reproachful life and cursed death, a view of Christ as a
substitute for sinful man (404405). The final narration of the passion
in this passage elaborates the narrative most fully. In Michaels final
account, he tells Adam that Christ
. . . shall live hated, be blasphemd,
Seizd on by force, judgd, and to death condemnd
A shameful and accurst, naild 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
140 chapter six
Of all mankind, with him there crucifid,

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; ere the third dawning light
Return, the Stars of Morn shall see him rise
Out of his grave. . . .
. . . Nor after resurrection shall he stay
Longer on Earth than certain times to appear
To his Disciples. . . . (41123; 43638)
Though the passage offers little in the way of direct representation
of the crucifixion, it does encompass several other major episodes of
the passion, including the arrest, questioning, and judgment, the tra-
ditional accusation of betrayal by the Jews, the instruments of the
crucifixion, the moment of death, the resurrection on the third day,
and the appearance before the disciples.
In addition to breaking up the crucifixion into these more abstract

elements, Book XII follows another key habit of Miltons passion nar-
ratives by substituting speech for vision. Michael chooses this mode as
the more suitable for the state of Adams perception and possibly for
the nature of the material that he will relate.
Thus thou hast seen one world begin and end;
And man as from a second stock proceed.
Much thou hast yet to see, but I perceive
Thy mortal sight to fail; objects divine
Must needs impair and weary human sense:
Henceforth what is to come I will relate . . . (611)
The shift from visual to verbal presentation resonates with the gen-
eral Protestant approach to art, but it also suggests something about
Miltons struggle to define an artistic mode suitable for description of
the passion.
As Michael continues his narration of human history, he adds that
God oft descends to visit men / Unseen (4849). Though many bib-
lical scenes of such interactions prompted Renaissance commentators
to assume any bodily apparition of God to man must have been con-
ducted not by God the Father but by the incarnate Christ, Michaels
comment does not suggest this. Rather, it establishes a pattern of pres-
ence and withdrawal that Milton uses to build up his portrait of the
divine, including the Son at all stagespre-incarnate, in his earthly
mission, and post-ascension. Gods unseen presence already embodies

the problematics of divine perception and representation. This piece
of information shows why Adam must hear and not see the events laid
out in Book XII; he could not see an unseen presence. If Gods visibil-
ity is already limited, the difficulties become greater as the world will
. . . tend from bad to worse, till God at last
Wearied with their iniquities, withdraw
His presence from among them, and avert
His holy eyes . . . (106109)
Michael seems to reinforce the troubling limitations of sight by remind-
ing Adam that he sees Abraham, though Adam does not (127). Not
only does he continue to see, but in the subsequent lines Michael fre-
quently refers to his visual perception and even implies that Adam
shares it, instructing him, each place behold / In prospect, as I point
them; and See where [the Nile] flows (14243, 158).
Michaels description of the giving of the law at Sinaia moment
that earlier in the poem represents the dynamics of Gods presence
and perceptionbegins to lay out some of the parameters of access
to the ineffable:
God from the mount of Sinai, whose gray top
Shall tremble, he descending, will himself
In thunder and lightning and loud trumpets sound
Ordain them laws . . .
. . . informing them, by types
And shadows, of that destined Seed to bruise
The Serpent, by what means he shall achieve
Mankinds deliverance. But the voice of God
To mortal ear is dreadful; they beseech
That Moses might report to them his will,
And terror cease; he grants what they besought
Instructed that to God is no access
Without mediator . . . (227240)
Gods descent, his physical presence, is both possible and untenable
in this passage; even the mediation of Gods voice proves unbearable.
This discrepancy between divine appearance and human perception
is another reason for the institution of shadowy types, the narrative
or artistic equivalent of the various transformations of Gods physical
presence that he undertakes to accommodate human limitations. By
the end of the passage Michael even suggests the seemingly un-Prot-
estant idea that mediation is required for access to God. One lesson
142 chapter six
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:
In yonder nether world where shall I seek

His bright appearances, or footstep trace?
For though I fled him angry, yet recalled
To life prolonged and promised race, I now
Gladly behold though but his utmost skirts
Of glory, and far off his steps adore. (XI: 323333)
Michaels response explains to Adam and to Miltons readers the con-
ditions of post-lapsarian vision, which in turn shape the parameters
of correct worship:
Adam, thou knowst heavn his, and all the earth,
Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills
Land, sea, and air, and every kind that lives,

...surmise not then
His presence to these narrow bounds confined
Of Paradise or Eden...

Yet doubt not but in valley and in plain
God is as here, and will be found alike
Present, and of his presence many a sign
Still following thee, still compassing thee round
With goodness and paternal love, his face
Express, and of his steps the track divine. (XI: 335354)
Michaels lesson is that Gods actual presence is in no way diminished
by Adams reduced ability to perceive it. What is alterable is entirely
within the realm of human sightthe footsteps are there to be per-
ceived, and behind them the unaltered presence of God. Obscurity,
hiddenness, removal and the possibility for a slight or fleeting visibil-
ity are the conditions of fallen perception of the divine. For Milton
these conditions obtain even for representations of the entirely human
events of the passion.
Roland Frye notes that Miltons choice of the Son as the agent of
divine creation marks a departure from standards of contemporary
practice:
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was almost universal prac-
tice to represent God the Father as the divine agent at Creation . . . In
choosing to have the Creation executed by the Son, Milton not only
broke with prevailing theological opinion but also with a visual conven-
tion which had been dominant for two hundred years in art. Miltons
reasons for doing so were of course literary and theological, but his
decision accorded with very early and widespread visual treatments of
the subject. For the first twelve centuries and more of Christian art, the
144 chapter six
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.
art as conveying most effectively the understanding of Christian heroism

which is fundamental throughout Paradise Lost.18
In Paradise Lost Miltons portrait of the pre-incarnate Son offers an
alternative to the image of Christ suffering primarily by concentrat-
ing on his eternal heavenly existence. To the degree that events from
Jesus human life and death enter into the epic, they too are rewritten
in terms that displace the crucifixion from the center of the passion
narrative. These impulses continue as Milton depicts the earthly career
of the Son in the companion portrait of Paradise Regained.
18
Frye, 163164.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PARADISE REGAINED AND THE ART OF THE INCARNATION
Paradise Regained is a poem of the dual nature: it returns repeatedly to

the incarnation and nativity; it considers Christ in the context of his
relationship to Mary as well as to God the Father, reminding us of the
heavenly and human aspects of the Son; it features the Sons baptism
prominently; and its momentum points toward his earthly ministry,
though it also grapples with the nature of his divinity. The main sub-
ject of the poem, the wilderness temptations, are directly relevant to
the question of the Sons dual nature, because they can act only on
his humanity, thereby revealing his divinity in a process of the absent
or invisible becoming present and discernable that is characteristic of
all of Miltons writing on the passion.1 Paradise Regained is the fullest
expression of Miltons substitution of the incarnation as a rewriting of
the passion. It is an alternative model of the passion, which for Milton
better conveys the nature of the Son and his sacrifice.
The association between Jesus taking on a human form and dying
on the cross was a natural one, as the first event was required to
explain the second. But that they could be interchangeable can be
seen in Henry Vaughans poem on The Incarnation and Passion,
which elides the difference between incarnation and burial:
Lord, when Thou didst Thyself undress,
Laying by Thy robes of glory,
To make us more, Thou wouldst be less,
And becamst a woful story.
To put on clouds instead of light,
And clothe the morning-star with dust,
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
Was a translation of such height

As, but in Thee, was neer expressd.
Brave worms and earth! that thus could have
A God enclosd within your cell,
Your maker pent up in a grave,
Life lockd in death, heavn in a shell! (112)2
The image of Christ divested of heavenly glory and enclosed in human
form immediately gives way in Vaughns poem to the image of Christ
buried. For Milton as well, the incarnation teaches the same lesson as
the passionthat of the Sons voluntary diminution and continuing
participation in godheadwithout, as in Vaughns poem, the need for
any great attention to the crucifixion.
Many critics have recognized that the choice to avoid the crucifix-
ion implies a great deal about how Milton asks us to read the Son.
They suggest that Milton omits the divine aspects of Christ, in part
by choosing an episode in which they are sometimes thought to be
dormant.3 Others disagree. Since Christ in his divine nature can-
not be tempted, Milton takes care to emphasize that these events
concern the human aspect; But this emphasis upon his humanity
must not be taken as a denial of his divine nature.4 John Rumrich
posits the question as follows: if God or a god became human and
mortal, what would such a hybrid be like?5 He claims that Milton
remains faithful to the Old Testament tradition of Gods unalterable
unity, and develops his own understanding of the incarnation, based
on the concept of the mutual hypostatic union. Rumrich reminds
us that Milton stops short of inquiring too far into how such a union
operates, observing the limits of Scripture carefully on these points,
but does consider in De Doctrina Christiana the question of the outward
form embodied by the union on divine and human, what Rumrich
calls the problematic physical form of the theanthropos. Though
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
he avoids the crucifixion, according to Rumrich, because he could

not bear the real physical cruelty it would entail, the body of Christ
plainly fascinates Milton.6
By seemingly not presenting readers with the crucifixion, therefore,
Paradise Regained may be said to represent one of the most important
instances of omission in Miltons poetry. The poem is also, of course,
a supplement to Paradise Lost. As I discuss below, it also has its own
supplement in Samson Agonistes. The nature of the supplementary rela-
tionships among the three poems is of special concern here. Readers
sometimes complain of the slightness or dryness of Paradise Regained
next to Paradise Lost. If we consider the later poem as a supplement to
Paradise Lost, rather than as its sequel, we can see more clearly how its
form and style suit Miltons rather different aims in Paradise Regained.
In Paradise Lost, Milton has greater artistic freedom because nothing he
describes can be perceived by his readers. In Paradise Regained, Milton
takes up the questions only hinted at in the longer epic concerning
not how to accommodate the ineffable to verbal description, but how
to accommodate the divinity of what is plain to human sight. If the
second poem is contracted in comparison with Paradise Lost, this can
be explained in part by the aesthetics of its subject.
While Miltons concern with the theology of the dual nature is fre-
quently referenced by readings of Paradise Regained, the artistic strate-
gies relevant to realizing this doctrine in poetry are usually neglected.
One important exception is James Pearce, who shows that Miltons
rhetorical models taught that celestial or divine objects can neither
be reproduced with a high degree of exactitude nor are they suscep-
tible to the same degree of criticism or scrutiny, and when Milton
depicts divinity in Paradise Lost he exploits to a remarkable degree the
immunity from exacting criticism which his subject admits.7 In Para-
dise Regained, according to Pearce, Milton must employ a technique
through which to reveal both elements of the theanthropos. He does
this with the help of a pattern of alternating views, in which the two
natures of Christ are highlighted in succession.
In his invocation, the narrator characterizes the poem as dealing
with events that have been missing, deeds
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
Above Heroic, though in secret done,

And unrecorded left through many an Age,
Worthy t have not remaind so long unsung. (I: 1417)
The Son is described in similar terms. The concept of kenosis, empty-
ing with the intention of filling at a later time, is another element of
the passion that is mirrored textually in the sequence of omission-sup-
plement. The first scene of the poem is the baptism, to which the Son
came as then obscure, / Unmarkt, unknown (I: 2425). The Son
himself recalls Job, Famous he was in Heaven, on Earth less known,
as a model of obedience who garners the only fame worth having but
who is somewhat obscure to humankind and Made famous in a Land
and times obscure (III: 68, 94). This obscurity, rather than diminish-
ing the Son or his divine nature, underscores the parallel between
baptism and incarnation. John recognizes the Sons divine nature and
the baptism reveals it to every other witness capable of discerning it.
Milton frames the event to show that the divine aspect of the dual
nature is not absent, but unmarked. This is a good example of how
Milton shows us that something essential can seem to be missing, but
is still indirectly present.
Milton works with two important symbols to depict the baptism of
the Son as the event that reveals what had been secret: the dove and
the voice of God the Father. The scene is characterized by opacity:
heaven opens, and the Fathers voice (reported through indirect speech)
proclaims a simple message of Sonship. As in the Nativity Ode, the
contrasting darkness quickly rushes in, in the form of the Adversarys
gloomy Consistory (I: 42). Satan recognizes that the moment of his
defeat has arrived, and though he cannot read the meaning of the
doves descent, he is the one who reports the words of God in more
detail, This is my Son belovd, in him am pleasd (I: 85). In Paradise
Regained Milton stresses that the puzzle of the Sons nature is Satans
business, not the narrators. Satan struggles with the fact that the Son
has a human mother and heavenly father, that man he seems / In
all his lineaments, though in his face / The glimpses of his Fathers
glory shine (I: 9193). The Adversary makes a significant error here,
in that he does not recognize that this Son is the same as His first-
begot, who drove the rebel angels out of heaven. Failure to recognize
the coherence between the pre-incarnate Son and the earthly, human
form he assumes is a satanic error.
The return to the imagery and meaning of the incarnation in the
baptism scene is underscored by Gods speech to Gabriel recalling the
annunciation.8 And, as in the 1645 poems on Christs birth and cir-

cumcision, these lines also foretell the crucifixion, bringing it into the
scope of the poem but excluding it from the center. Gods forecasting
of the Sons Humiliation and strong Sufferance allows the trial in
the wilderness to be read as a type for the crucifixion, but also as its
more meaningful substitute (I: 160). We are further instructed in the
nature of Christs sacrifice, when God describes it as an act of weak-
ness and merit:
His weakness shall oercome Satanic strength
.
This perfect Man, by merit calld my Son,
To earn Salvation for the Sons of men. (I: 161167)
All of the words Milton chooses hereweakness, perfect, merit, son,
and earnbelong to the artistic tradition from which he borrows to
create his portraits of Jesus in Paradise Regained and throughout his
works.
The Son shortly recapitulates the same formulation. Following
another iteration by Mary of the annunciation and nativity, the Son
expresses his understanding that my way must lie / Through many
a hard assay even to the death, drawing another soft reference to the
crucifixion into the poem (I: 26364). His explanation of the baptism
differs slightly from the first two. He adds the word alone to Gods
declaration (Mee his beloved Son, in whom alone / He was well
pleasd), but more strikingly adds the qualification that The Spirit
descended on me like a Dove (I: 28586; 283). In the addition of this
simile, Milton underscores that from the perspective of the Son, the
dove is not a visible, tangible presence, but a symbol or metaphor. The
difference between the divine perspective, which recognizes the device
of accommodation, and the human, which depends upon it to see at
all, are thus articulated by the figure who perfectly combines both.
Like the baptism, the temptations are well suited to convey the the-
ology and aesthetics of the Son. Various explanations for Miltons pref-
erence for the temptations over the crucifixion have been offered.9 The
temptations traditionally represent the antithesis and the corollary of
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
the temptation of Adam, as well as a parallel to the labors and temp-

tations of Samson, a choice of subject that links all of Miltons major
poems.10 The triple equation, in which Christs rejection of Satans
temptations cancels out Adams fall and provides a model for ordinary
human resistance to temptation, makes this episode of Christs life a
suitable one for an alternative imitatio Christi.11 Unlike the tradition
of imitatio Christi associated with the medieval passion, however, this
model emphasizes not suffering and martyrdom, but obedience, stead-
fastness, and wisdom. Barbara Lewalski has also shown how the choice
of the temptations links Miltons poem to the book of Job. Evoking Job
provides another means to bring the passion into Paradise Regained indi-
rectly. As Lewalski says, in virtually every aspect of his experience Job
is seen as foreshadowing Christ, including in his passion.12 Miltons
focus is not on the Old Testament figure, but by drawing him in to
the poem through several explicit references and through the poems
genre, he is able to call to mind those aspects of the crucifixion that
are most important for his sense of the atonement. Just as importantly,
the parallel of Job allows Milton to omit those elements of the cru-
cifixion he wishes to avoid. God allows Job to be tested; the Father is
clearly supreme and his son subordinate, though meritorious. The
relationship between Paradise Regained and the Book of Job provides
another rubric of Miltons rewriting of the passion. Milton chooses
a hero on whom to model his Son whom we may primarily associate
with suffering, suggesting that we have to unlearn these associations
with Christ as well. Jobs suffering is called to mind, but it is his right-
eousness, not his agony, that Milton takes as his model.
The temptations also allow Milton to move away from the associa-
tion between the passion and the execution of Charles I. As weve
seen above in chapter two, the Eikon Basilike adopted the language of
Christian martyrdom, establishing a strong parallel between Charles
and Christ.13 In Eikonoklastes Milton removes the crucifixion decisively,
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:
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
of interpretation on this question concentrates on the literary qualities

of Miltons preference for the temptations. For dramatic purposes, the
temptations are easier to depict and telescope into the complete narra-
tive that Miltons readers would have known intimately, culminating in
the passion. Finally, the temptations, as an episode in the life of Jesus,
may function as a kind of interior New Testament typology; like a
sequence from the Hebrew Bible brought in place of the crucifixion,
they bear a close enough resemblance to substitute for it but are dis-
tant enough to remind us that the experiences of the cross have been
elided. They also deploy the characteristically Miltonic technique of
temporal displacement. Since the temptations occur before the pas-
sion sequence, Paradise Regained positions readers chronologically at the
threshold of that sequence; the events of the poem can either telescope
into the whole narrative, which Miltons readers would know how to
complete, or they can resist the linear unfolding of time, instructing
readers that the real significance of the passion is not in the moment
of death or even resurrection, but in the time run back of the Nativ-
ity Ode. Any individual episode of Jesus human lifewhether cir-
cumcision, temptation, or crucifixionmatters less than the meaning
that the whole has. By selecting an unlikely set of episodes under the
banner of Paradise Regained, Milton asks his audience not to mis-
take even the most powerful events of Christs life for its larger mes-
sage of salvation.
Regina Schwartz argues that Miltons choice of the temptations
results from the fact that there is no real clarity in Christian dogma
about how the incarnation, suffering and resurrection of Christ
achieve salvation, leaving a range of possibilities open to interpret-
ers. She explains that the early church focused on Jesus life and min-
istry, but that by the Reformation,
the emphasis has shifted decisively to the suffering of Christ. And so, the
theological solutions Milton could invoke have turned to the Incarna-
tion, Passion, Resurrection, or the Second Coming of Christ . . . Instead,
Milton describes the foiled temptation of Jesus,
a subject which has not, in any theological tradition, been called
upon to suffice as the definition of the redemption of mankind. In
contrast to the detail and
clarity of explanation of the loss of Paradise, what it means for man
to be restored to Paradise, to be redeemed, and why man is redeemed
are far more mysterious. This is no accident. For Milton, salvation is a

mystery, the mystery of a divine goodness unmerited by man, and he is
careful to maintain that mystery as such.19
Not only do the various schemes for explaining salvation not satisfy
Milton, Schwartz claims that in the poem they do not satisfy Jesus,
to whom they are offered as part of Satans temptations. As the Son
of Paradise Regained rejects each model of salvation, the example he
provides for imitation is one of rejection and silence.
Dayton Haskin has shown how Miltons habits of reading the Bible,
especially the comparison of places, drove his poetry. In the case of
Paradise Regained, he brings this insight about Miltons method to bear
on the question of the poems choice of subject. The discovery of so
many different keys to the poem, Haskin writes,
points directly to unresolvedsometimes even unaskedquestions about
what principles of selection and omission operate in Miltons choice of
biblical materials and about what effects are created by the combinations
of these materials.20
Haskin points to Miltons manipulation of Christian materials to shape
the kind of passion poem that would reflect his theology:
That Milton did not tell of a paradise regained through Christs death
on the Cross did not, as Tillyard claimed, ruin the Pauline fabric of fall,
grace, redemption, and regeneration. It redefined it. Milton used Pau-
line materials to play down what Paul had called the folly of the Cross.
Although Paul admitted that a suffering Messiah was a scandal to the
Greeks (1 Cor. 1: 23), he elsewhere (2 Cor. 4: 710) suggested that the
experience of temptation was analogous to the crucifixion. Perkins made
the connection explicit: in the wilderness Christ stood in our roome and
sted (as he did upon the Cross) encountering Satan for us, as if we in our
owne persons had been tempted. Milton knew all about using prolepsis,
and the fact that there was no biblical basis for the legend of the har-
rowing of hell gave him an added reason to depict the temptations as
the crucial battle with the Prince of Darkness.21
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.
attention to other aspects of the Sons character.26 A more produc-

tive connection between The Passion and Paradise Regained is made
by Joseph Wittreich, who claims that Blakes illustrations of the epic
insist upon Christs heroic acts of virtue and are designed to bring
forward the idea that Jesus, enacting his human career, epitomizes the
pattern of the Most perfect Hero.27 Like Miltons rewriting of tradi-
tional depictions of the passion,
Blakes illustrations to Paradise Regained deviate conspicuously from the
traditions of criticism and illustration that surround the poem. Blake
makes no effort to impose the Passion, Crucifixion, or Resurrection upon
a poem that underplays those events. Through this omission of tradi-
tional typological reference, Blake brings us closer to the poem Milton
has written than any previous illustrator.28
Paradise Regained draws closer than any of Miltons works outside of
The Passion to the events of the crucifixion. By substituting for them
another event from Jesus life, Milton adheres to the principles driving
the early short poem, while expanding the canvas on which he consid-
ers his alternative passion.
In Book One of Paradise Regained the Son describes his recognition
of a divine mission:
. . . myself I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth,
All righteous things: therefore above my years,
The Law of God I read. . . . (204207)
These lines are sometimes treated as autobiographical, another of
Miltons digressions on the subject of his own public and poetic self-
awareness. Whether or not this is the case, they explicate a parallel for-
mulation in the note to The Passion, which describes the poet finding
the subject of the poem to be above the years he had. The situation
of matter that is beyond the comprehension of even extraordinary
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
human perception is an especially apt condition for the passion but

also for each episode of Christs developing self-understanding. The
cluster of lines surrounding the phrase in this passage gives several
hints as to the nature of such obscurity. It must be approached with
a set and serious mind; in other words it is a matter for contempla-
tion as much as discipline. Further, its ends are active and tied to this
world, to do / What might be public good, and it becomes perfect
and sweet in the light of the Scriptures. The Son discovers his identity
as the messiah by searching what was writ, although the informa-
tion was to our Scribes / Known partly (I: 2602). These passages
reveal that, for the Son, Scripture lies at two removes because it is both
above him and partial. The same partiality and inaccessibility also
characterize the deeds of the Son and, in turn, the narrative of these
events provided by Paradise Regained. The narrator, using language that
recalls the initial justification of the poem as a song of deeds / Above
Heroic, though in secret done, / And unrecorded left through many
an Age (I: 1416), emphasizes that the exact nature of the Sons days
in the wilderness is not reveald (I: 307). Finally, Christ replicates this
characteristic secrecy in his scripturally-based answers to Satan. Book
One ends, for instance, with the Sons brief response to Satan (echoing
John 19:11) and the narrators comment that He added not (497).
Milton establishes this pattern of revelation and concealment as one
of the chief devices through which he expresses the Sons dual nature.
Rather than remain with the Son as focalizer, for instance, Book II
shifts back to a perspective of uncomprehending human witness to
the events of the temptation. All Mary, Andrew and Simon see is that
they dont see anything. Their awareness of the Sons absence seems
a necessary precondition to their full grasp of his true nature as Son
of God.29 Andrew and Simon draw on two models to make sense of
Jesus disappearance after his baptism:
Sometimes they thought he might be only shown,
And for a time caught up to God, as once
Moses was in the Mount, and missing long;
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.
And the great Thisbite who on fiery wheels

Rode up to Heaven, yet once again to come. (II: 1317)
The giving of the law at Sinai may be the most important biblical
place for the problems of Gods visibility (and of course a danger-
ous precedent for idolatry when the absence of a visible sign is mis-
understood). The second scriptural reference here, to the ascension
of Elijah, has an unarticulated but potentially meaningful typology
with another event of Christs life, the Transfiguration.30 Milton never
depicts the Tranfiguration and, outside of this passage, does not seem
to allude to it. Here the Transfiguration is invoked only so that Milton
may substitute something else for it. Rather than a dramatic event of
revelation, transformation and divine visibility, Milton selects an event
that is characterized by privacy, silence and inaction.
The Transfiguration, about which the disciples who witness it are
instructed not to speak, captures the dialectic of visibility and conceal-
ment that characterizes the doctrine and representation of the dual
nature. The ability of this particular event in the life of Christ to
convey this paradox was recognized by patristic commentary, which
from the beginning emphasized the Transfiguration as proclaiming
the hiddenness of God as much as being a revelation.31 As an event
which so powerfully conveys the dual nature, and an event in which
visual perception is both revelatory and unsustainable, Christs meta-
morphosis at Tabor recommends itself as a model for representation.
Chrysostom even commented that the Transfiguration required a
divine condescension because the full image of God is too power-
ful for human witness; others held that the invisibility of the divine
continued in the Transfiguration, but that Jesus disciples were granted
a spiritual sight comparable to that of Moses at Sinai.32 In Miltons
search for an aesthetics of biblical material within the parameters of
Reformation culture, events like the Transfiguration serve much bet-
ter than the crucifixion. By foregrounding ambiguity and the frailty
of human perception, but counterbalancing it with the enormous
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
power of the incarnation and resurrection, the Transfiguration aptly

expresses many Protestant artistic values.
The language that Milton uses in Book II of Paradise Regained war-
rants drawing a connection between the temptations and the Trans-
figuration. First he constructs a chiasmus to characterize the disciples
anxiety,
Now missing him thir joy so lately found,
So lately found, and so abruptly gone,
Began to doubt, and doubted many days,
And as the days increasd, increasd their doubt. (II: 912)
The chiasmus expresses the dialectic of concealment and revelation,
and the dislocation that attends human perception of the divine. It
also marks, as we see in Upon the Circumcision, a characteristically
Miltonic embedding of the cross in the lines of text, obliquely recall-
ing the crucifixion. A thematic chiasmus that also appears here is the
trope of joy turned to sorrow, which will eventually end in greater joy,
and which appears in both Upon the Circumcision and Lycidas
as well as in the opening lines of Book II, as soon our joy is turnd /
Into perplexity and new amaze (3738).
Because we have entered into the inner thoughts of Jesus and wit-
nessed the machinations of Satan in preparing his temptations, we
might be inclined to overlook the return, in Book II, to the limited
perspective of Jesus mother and followers. The Sons absence is not
explained to them as it is to readers, but Milton is careful to include
this point of view in the poem. The Son is covered, secret, unknown
and unrecorded. In Miltons portrait of the incarnate Jesus, his absence
becomes as meaningful as his presence. Marys frustrated worry at
finding him not returned with the others from the baptism reveals
the Sons divine aspect as Milton would have us recognize and make
sense of it.
But where delays he now? some great intent
Conceals him: when twelve years he scarce had seen,
I lost him, but so found, as well I saw
He could not lose himself; but went about
His Fathers business; what he meant I musd,
Since understand; much more his absence now
Thus long to some great purpose he obscures. (II: 95101)
The Son is concealed from human view; that is his divine nature.
At the same time, faith teaches Mary that He could not lose him-
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
Into himself descended, and at once

All his great work to come before him set;
How to begin, how to accomplish best
His end of being on Earth . . . (111114)
What does it mean that the Son descends into himself, especially dur-
ing a period when he is out of human sight, when his location is
not just remote but secret? Is the descent into the self related to the
model of kingship that Jesus offers at the end of Book II, in which the
true office of a king is held by he who reigns within himself, and
rules / Passions, Desires, and Fears (II: 46667)? In articulating this
alternative regency in response to Satans temptation of wealth and
worldly power, the Son asserts that a Crown, / Golden in show, is but
a wreath of thorns, introducing a prominent image of the crucifix-
ion as if to remind us, once again, of what lies ahead but will not be
shown (II: 45859). The gesture also closes the loop of time, drawing
together the beginning and end of Christs work as Milton often does
when he speaks of the crucifixion.34
The angelic choir who sing at the close of Book IV can perceive
the Son in all his forms. They have witnessed all that unfolded during
the time in the wilderness, which was concealed from the human wit-
nesses Mary, Andrew and Simon, and, unlike Satan, suffer no cognitive
dissonance as they perceive the fullness of the dual nature. The terms
that Milton selects to create this angelic song adhere to his preferences
throughout the poem.
True Image of the Father, whether thrond
In the bosom of bliss, and light of light
Conceiving, or remote from Heaven, enshrind
In fleshly Tabernacle, and human form,
Wandring the Wilderness, whatever place,
Habit, or state, or motion, still expressing
The Son of God, with Godlike force endud
Against th Attempter of thy Fathers Throne,

hast Regaind lost Paradise. (IV: 596608)
For Milton, Jesus is the only true image of God the Father, a creature
of light, in many habits and with a body in many locations, the Son,
possessor of at least some of Gods attributes, and the restorer of the
34
See, for instance, On the Morning of Christs Nativity, 133140.
world. The repetition of the phrase fleshly Tabernacle, borrowed

from The Passion, to convey the Sons incarnation marks this pas-
sage as a central text for the Miltonic passion.
It is often remarked that Jesus returns home at the end of the poem
to his mothers house, and that this scene is marked as the beginning
of his earthly ministry, though the angelic choir has celebrated how at
the pinnacle paradise has been regained. In addition to his privacy, the
Son also returns at this moment, according to Milton, to his obscurity,
hee unobservd / Home to his Mothers house private returnd (IV:
63839). The angels may see him in the light of his Fathers throne,
but in this respectand even to some degree in his human formhe
is unseen.
While Paradise Regained does not depict the crucifixion directly, this
does not mean that it is not present. As in The Passion and Lyci-
das, Milton rewrites the passion. Paradise Regained is his fullest attempt
to do so (though, as we will see, this attempt is incomplete without its
companion poem, Samson Agonistes). Rather than the crucifixion, which
is public and physical, Milton concentrates on events that are unseen
and that gradually build up a case for the philosophical over the cor-
poreal value of Christs ministry and death. The passion reasserts itself
in Paradise Regained in references to gospel passages that describe these
events. In most of Miltons works, citations from and allusions to the
four gospels almost entirely avoid the chapters concerning the passion.
Such allusions appear somewhat more frequently in Paradise Regained.
Notable instances include the Sons assertion in I.204205 myself I
thought / Born to that end, born to promote all truth, which echoes
Christs response to Pilate, For this cause am I borne, & for this cause
came I into the worlde, that I shulde beare witnes unto the trueth
( John 18:37). The Son paraphrases another of Christs responses to
Pilate as a way of answering Satan; his instruction do as thou findst /
Permission from above; thou canst not more (I: 49596) points read-
ers of Paradise Regained to the moment at which Pilate seeks to release
Christ (who has told him, Thou coldest have no power at all against
me, except it were given thee from above in John 19:11). Satans first
temptation invites the Son to turn the stones to bread to save thyself
and us relieve (I: 344), a parallel to the request of one of the crimi-
nals crucified alongside Christ in Luke 23:39, who implores If thou
be the Christ, save thy self and us. During the second temptation the
Son in effect contrasts his decision not to command
164 chapter seven
a Table in this Wilderness

And call swift flights of Angels ministrant
Arrayd in Glory on my cup to attend (II: 38486)
with Christs request to the Father to take away this cup (Luke
22:42). The passages in Book II considered above also echo the lan-
guage and circumstances that will occur in the passion, particularly
the inexplicable loss of Christ.35 In addition to these examples, Emory
Elliott identifies several passages in which 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 teachings.36 These
intertexts supply the passion at moments in the text which seem to
call for its presence.37 He suggests an echo of Luke 9:22 and 17:25
(The Sonne of man must suffre many things, and be reproved of the
Elders, & of the hie Priests and Scribes, and be slaine, and the thirde
day rise againe and he must suffer manie things, & be reproved of
this generacion) in III: 18892.
In addition to these allusions, another means through which the
passion appears in Paradise Regained is the device of forecasting, as in
the Sons response to Satans deliverance temptation:
What if he hath decreed that I shall first
Be tried in humble state, and things adverse,
By tribulations, injuries, insults,
Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence,
Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting
Without distrust or doubt, that he may know
What I can suffer, how obey? who best
Can suffer, best can do; best reign, who first
Well hath obeyd; just trial eer I merit
My exaltation without change or end. (III: 188197)38
These lines, though they do not specifically mention the cross of
Calvary, can be read as a Miltonic passion. They convey the role of
Christs death, its function as deliverance but primarily obedience, and
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.
they capture the sense of suffering that cannot be elided entirely in an

account of the passion. Looking closely, we also see how these lines
could not describe anything but the crucifixion. In what other episodes
from Jesus life is there to be found a trial, a snare, or a quiet suffering?
Further, the chronological order of the passion sequence comes across
intact in this passage, with the trial (before Pilate) followed by insults
(the mockery of the crowds and soldiers), physical abuse and finally
Christs silent acceptance of Gods will. Another classic gesture of the
Miltonic passion at work here is the insistence on the extra-historical
nature of Jesus in the passion, an event that does not alter him and
which has no end. Its lack of an ending implies its lack of a beginning,
a quality that gives narrative sense to the way the passion appears and
disappears from Miltons poems.
The most explicit references to the passion appear in the fourth
book, when Satan challenges the Son,
Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God:
For it is written, He will give command
Concerning thee to his Angels, in thir hands
They shall up lift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone. (55559)
After the Son has finally stood, and Satan fallen, the scene ends with
the angelic invitation to the Son to enter, and begin to save mankind,
a request that conflates the ending of the poem with its beginning and
prompts readers to imagine the events that follow the temptations (IV:
635). The association of the pinnacle scene with the imagery of the
crucifixion is the most explicit rendering of the passion within Paradise
Regained. Edward Cleveland has argued that on a pinnacle symbolic
certainly of the Cross, and following a patient sufferance certainly fore-
shadowing the submission at Calvary, Christ reveals his true being as
the divine Redeemer of mankind.39 In the pinnacle scene the Son is
elevated above Jerusalem, as on the cross at Golgotha; from a typologi-
cal perspective his elevation above the Temple represents the abroga-
tion of Jewish law and prefigures the destruction of the Temple that
follows the crucifixion (indeed in medieval and Renaissance histories
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
this event is often wrenched back in time by 70 years to accommodate

the symbolism). The pinnacle scene and the crucifixion also appear
just before the end of their respective narrative sequences. As he has
done in other poems, Milton disrupts the expectations of his readers
by placing an alternative event in the position at which we would
expect to find the passion.
Using the term pinnacle to describe the architecture of the Temple
further ties this scene to the image of the cross. The Variorum explains
this image by reference to Josephus, who described a series of spikes
covering the roof of the Temple. But the image is too rich to be so
simply accounted for. As Elizabeth Pope demonstrates, seventeenth-
century exegetes developed an interest in a more exact explanation for
the location of this temptation than simply reading it as the Temple
roof.40 Thomas Fullers Pisgah-Sight of Palestine notes that despite the
many vessels and utensils of Solomons Temple that were lost before
the building of the Second Temple,
in one eminent respect this Temple equalled, yea excelled Solomons. . . .
For hereon our Saviour, when a child, was presented to the Priests; when
a youth, disputed with the Doctours; when a man, wrought many mira-
cles, preached many Sermons; teaching within and tempted without the
Temple, on a pinnacle thereof
and
The pinnacles of the Temple (saith Josephus) were made so sharp, that
a bird could not sit on them, to prevent the defiling thereof. Wherefore
when the Devill set our Saviour on a pinnacle of the Temple, (where no
doubt his feet stood fast without any miracle, which the Devill could not,
and Christ would not causlesly work, as presumption against the will of
his Father) we understand thereby, not such a sharp pinnacle, but some
battlement, wing, or brink, of building, higher then the rest of the fabric.41
Miltons climactic image in Paradise Regained of the Son standing on
the pinnacle of the Temple is a significant rewriting of the passion in
that it negates the association between the crucifixion and the destruc-
tion of the Temple that is so prominent in early modern texts. Milton
chooses to show Christs body, like the Temple, unbroken, undestroyed,
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.
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
when interest shifts to human action and responsibility. Miltons Christ

is heroiceven the perfect herobut his definition of heroism differs
from what we find in classical epic. As Lewalski explains,
By avoiding either the broad panoramic treatment of Christs life, or the
choice of such particular episodes as the Birth or the Passion and Death
which virtually demand ritualistic rather than dramatic development,
Milton has seized upon a subject which he can develop as a genuine
adventure. Also, by presenting his hero in terms dictated by his anti-Trin-
itarian theology he is able to create a Christ subject to doubts and fears,
and undergoing a genuine adventure of testing and self-discovery.43
To put his emphasis on the crucifixion could convey little to Miltons
audience; it is an event that is closed and which does not yield up a
viable pattern of action or imitation. Christs suffering is valuable for
Milton only insofar as it supplies a model of human patience, develop-
ment and obedience.
Another early Miltonic revision of the passion will help to illustrate

many of his choices in Paradise Regained. Several critics have noted in
passing some of the similarities between the Lady of A Mask and the
Son in Paradise Regained.44 There are many parallels between the two
works: the Attendant Spirit descends, becoming viewless, perhaps
like the Holy Spirit (92); the Lady wanders in the woods, as the Son in
the wilderness; there is a magic banquet scene. The masques brothers
resemble Simon and Andrew in Paradise Regained, who are troubled and
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.
perplexed at the disappearance of the Son but console themselves that

he is under the protection of divine Providence. The absence of the
Lady as focalizer in the second scene of the Mask operates much as
the Sons absence in Book II of Paradise Regained does, to further ele-
vate the Lady above ordinary human perception. The Lady is tempted
but does not submit to the terms of Comus debate, often remaining
largely silent. Finally, the Lady returns home at the end of the masque
as the Son does in Paradise Regained.
If Paradise Regained approaches the dual nature through an investiga-
tion of secrecy and visibility, the masque offers similar opportunities,
making it an early instance of Miltons habit of investigating the pas-
sion in contexts that appear to be far removed from the gospels. The
Attendant Spirits opening soliloquy promises What never yet was
heard in Tale or Song, a claim that, as in the invocations to Paradise
Lost and Paradise Regained, refers not just to the works ambition and
scope, but to its poetics of obscurity (4344).45 The Spirit must become
viewless, but this is clearly not to say that he becomes invisible. He
appears as a humble swain to the brothers, which suggests that what
is viewless is his spiritual nature.46 The Lady, like the Son, can discern
something of this invisible, spiritual world:
O welcome pure-eyd Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovring Angel girt with golden wings,
And thou unblemisht form of Chastity,
I see ye visibly . . . (213216)
Even Comus, who is a master of disguise, dimly perceives the hiddn
residence of something holy in the Lady (24749).47 While it is
natural enough that a masque would thematize disguise and the search
for true identity, these explorations of partly visible sacredness may
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.
moving from a consideration of relative strength and weakness, to the

redefining of strength as an interior rather than a physical quality, to the
identification of that quality as chastity, to the redefining of chastity as
something (not yet specified) that can survive a bodily assault, even if, in
some superficial way, that assault is successful.49
As Fish acknowledges, this quality characterizes Miltons Jesusespe-
cially in Paradise Regainedas well. When the Lady is taken captive and
tempted, she remains motionless, like Christ on the pinnacle in Paradise
Regained. Critics have long been puzzled about why she does not imme-
diately break free of Comus bondage once she resists him, but there is
an important rhyme here with the pinnacle scene: she stands.
If A Mask is an alternative passion, what features of that narrative
does it emphasize, and which does it alter? Most obviously, the Lady
differs from the Son in her wholly human nature and in her gender.
What can this substitution tell us about the Miltonic passion? The
Mask highlights the sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity; chas-
tity, like divinity, transforms mere humanity into something closer to
heavenly perfection, also altering its outward form (78687). As the
Elder Brother explains to the younger,
So dear to Heavn is Saintly chastity,
That when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried Angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt
And in clear dream and solemn vision
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till often converse with heavnly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on thoutward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the souls essence,
Till all be made immortal. (453463)
This indwelling chastity is characterized as the opposite of death and
burial: the souls of the unchaste are
Oft seen in Charnel vaults and Sepulchers,
Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave,
As loath to leave the body that it lovd. (470473)
The most important difference between the Lady of the Mask and
Christ as he is traditionally rendered in the passion is that the Lady
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
REWRITING THE CHRISTUS PATIENS TRADITION IN

SAMSON AGONISTES
If Milton removes the crucifixion from Paradise Regained, does it occur

at last in that poems companion text, Samson Agonistes? Does Samsons
violent death in the Philistine temple at the close of the second poem
provide a crucifixion scene? If Samsons death can be read in this way,
it seems that even here Milton insists on a profoundly altered imagery
of the death of Christ to which it alludes. Samson Agonistes, like the
many other Miltonic texts examined here, belongs to an alternative
Miltonic passion, which rewrites the basic terms in which Samson, like
the Son, can be represented.
Though published at the end of Miltons poetic career, Samson Ago-
nistes fulfills one of Miltons earliest recorded intentions to write a pas-
sion poem. The Trinity College Manuscript contains a brief sketch
among Miltons notes on biblical dramas for a work on Christus
patiens:
Christus patiens / The Scene in ye garden beginning fr ye coming
thither till Judas betraies & ye officers lead him away ye rest by message
& chorus. his agony may receav noble expressions.1
This passion play remained unwritten, like most of the others listed in
the manuscript notes. But like Adam unparadisd, which no doubt
metamorphosed into Paradise Lost, Miltons Christus patiens seems to
have developed into The Passion and Paradise Regained, and to have
influenced the many scattered passion texts throughout Miltons prose
and poetry. It is perhaps best fulfilled, however, in Samson Agonistes,
Miltons only biblical drama and the text that most nearly resembles
this sketch, to a greater degree even than The Passion and Paradise
Regained, in form but also in its action and tone. At the end of his
career, Milton seems to have returned to this unwritten text, perhaps
finding its mood uniquely appealing in the aftermath of the Restora-
1
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
over contemporary interludes, a choice that is consistent with his

approach to the passion, in which he often reaches back for models
from the patristic church in favor of the modes inherited from late
medieval culture.
Finally, Milton insists that the drama never was intended for the
stage. This choice is an essential component of the works revision of
the passion play, an art form that exaggerated the aspects of the pas-
sion that Milton most resolutely rejectedspectacle, violence, death
and veneration. His insistence that Samson Agonistes was never intended
for performance is likewise another example of his habit of removing
the spectacular, public and visual aspects of the crucifixion in favor
of a study of the Sons interior development and role as the image of
God the Father. By removing his work from the performative mode,
Milton is able to deny readers the final scenes of Samsons death.
He could not remove the crucifixion from the passion, but with these
changes Milton can bring his revisionary poetics to the scenes most
troubling for a reformed imagination. In Samson Agonistes, he replaces
the crucifixion-type scenes with a set of events that recall Jesus medi-
tations in Gethsemane. In doing so he gives noble expression to the
agony in the garden, prompted by betrayal of those closest to the
Son, as he imagined doing in the Trinity manuscript note.
Samson is well known as a type or anti-type of Christ: his birth is fore-

told in a similar way ( Judges 13:3), he enters a special covenant with
God, and he is ordained as a redeemer of Israel. The most important
aspect of their comparison is the manner of their deaths, so that the
Samson typology often arises in early modern discussions of the cru-
cifixion.4 Two examples illustrate this tradition. First, Charles Herles
Contemplations and Devotions on the severall passages of our blessed Saviours
Death and Passion provides a particularly detailed consideration of this
typology in a work on the passion. Herle refers to Samson first in his
description of Christs arrest in the garden:
Sampson, the true Nazarite, is here againe taken, bound, abused, blind-folded:
innocent Susanna (in resemblance, if not tipe) is here once againe by the
envious Elders, bathing in a bloody sweat, surprisd in the Garden, yet
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.
it is not the case that Miltons Samson is to be condemned for falling

short of the traditional image of Christ. Rather, it is precisely the extent
to which Miltons Samson differs from the redemptive Christ of Calvinist
orthodoxy that enables him to function as the ideal Miltonic deliverer.8
In this reading, Miltons Samson offers an opportunity to rewrite the
violence and destruction of the typical passion narrative. Francis Quar-
les emphasizes that one of the key disparities between the two men,
Samson and Jesus, is the manner of their deaths:
Sampson was subject to their scorne and shame:
And was not Jesus even the very same?
Sampsons betrayd to the Philistians hands,
Was bound a while, but quickly brake his bands:
Jesus, the first, and second day, could be
The Graves close prisner; but, the third, was free:
In this they differd; Jesus dying Breath
Cryd out for Life; but Sampsons cald for Death:
Father forgive them, did our Jesus crye;
But Sampson, Let me be revengd and dye:
Since then, sweet Saviour, tis thy Death must ease us,
We flye from Sampson, and appeale to Jesus (lines 4960).9
Quarles adopts the negative comparison between Samson and the Son,
calling attention to the Sons greater victory through forgiveness and
grace. His appeal to readers to turn away from Samson and towards
Christ is a conventional enough interpretation of the typology. What
is worth noticing is the idea of Christ that Quarles establishes here. It
is a Christus victor purged of vengeance, suffering, and even death. This
portrait resembles Miltons idea of the Son very closely, and it hints at
the way to read his evocation of Samson in the 1671 volume.
If this is Miltons understanding of the typologythat Christ
supersedes Samson and replaces his physical strength with a model of
patient compassionwhy does the poem on Samson follow Paradise
Regained? The supplementary relationship between the two poems is
implied not only by their joint publication, but by the phrasing of
the title pageParadise Regained to which is added Samson Agonistes,
which seems to instruct readers to take Samson Agonistes as an addition
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
to Paradise Regained. Placing Paradise Regained first, however, gives Milton

additional possibilities.10 In this configuration, it is possible to read
Paradise Regained as a biblical text to which Samson acts as a human
interpreter. Another way of accounting for the order would view the
plots of the two works continuously, so that Paradise Regained depicts
the temptations and Samson Agonistes as a whole stands in for the cru-
cifixion, which seventeenth-century readers would expect to follow
the temptations.11 In this sense, Samson Agonistes supplements Paradise
Regained by providing imagery and language recalling the death of
Christthe central moment of the passion that readers do not find
in Paradise Regained.
The question of whether Samson should be seen as Christ-like or
as a failure when held up next to the perfect example of Jesus often
depends on whether Miltons Samson is regenerate at the end of the
poem. Even if we take the order of the 1671 volume to be a direc-
tive about how to interpret it, and see Samsons death in the temple
as a crucifixion image, it is worth remarking that this is another radi-
cal revision of the crucifixion on Miltons part. Samsons death is not
shown and characterized by calm of mind, all passion spent (1758).
If, on the other hand, Samson is mistaken, his error is in acting on
what he believes to bebut is notGods will. The Son of Paradise
Regained, by comparison, displays much greater reticence to act at all.
In this way, Samson Agonistes is closer to the type of passion that Milton
rejects, and Paradise Regained the kind of true rendering of what the
passion should represent that only the Son can accomplish.
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.
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
Miltons more traditional and conservative contemporaries contin-

ued to evoke a connection between the circumcision and the cruci-
fixion. Christopher Harveys poem on the circumcision sees it as the
beginning of the passion:
Alas, what pleasure hath
Thy Fathers justice to begin Thy passion
Almost together with Thine incarnation?
Is it to antidate Thy death? tindite
Thy condemnation Himself, and write
The copy with Thy bloud,
Since nothing is so good?
Or ist by this experiment to try
Whether Thou beest born mortal and canst die?14 (1018)
The representation of the circumcision as a pre-figuration of the cru-
cifixion also appears in William Cartwrights On the circumcision,
which claims that the circumcision Only preludes unto his riper cross
(line 12).15 Richard Crashaws Steps to the Temple implies the typologi-
cal link between the two events by means of poetic ordering, placing
the poem Our Lord in his Circumcision to his Father immediately
prior to On the wounds of our crucified Lord. Unlike these poets,
Milton turned away from the medieval traditions, altering the sense of
this event as a ritual or sacrifice.16 For him, the circumcision offered an
opportunity to reject law in favor of love, to characterize Jesus physi-
cal suffering as less relevant to the fulfillment of Gods covenant than
his obedience to the Father.
In Upon the Circumcision, Miltons speaker implores those who
celebrated Christs birth to mourn the circumcision:
Alas, how soon our sin
Sore doth begin
His infancy to seize! (1214).17
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 comparison to the wounds of the passion links this covenant of

law to Christs covenant of grace, and leads to the question which
follows this lamentation in the poem, O more exceeding love or law
more just? (15). For Milton, Christ is both law and love, which is why
he must be circumcised in order, first, to be qualified to redeem the
people of that covenant and, second, to justify the existence of the law
alone for those who came before his covenant of grace. The reference
in line 20 of the poem to Philippians 2:78 also offers a connection to
the passion, again dislocated into another biblical text. In this passage
Paul explains that Christ toke on him the forme of a servant, and was
made like unto men, and was founde in shape as a man. He humbled
him self, and became obedient unto the death, even the death of the
crosse.
The conclusion of Upon the Circumcision, like the Nativity Ode,
looks forward to the crucifixion without explicitly engaging it. The
poem reminds readers that
. . . O ere long
Huge pangs and strong
Will pierce more near his heart. (2628)
Yet Milton withholds a more detailed representation of the passion.
Finally, the most abstracted reference to the passion may be found in
the center of the poem. At lines 1415 there is a chiasmus, a gram-
matical crossing that leaves an x (or, a cross) in the center of the
poem: O more exceeding love or law more just? / Just law indeed,
but more exceeding love!18 Perhaps the most important aspect that the
passion shares with the circumcision is its transaction of a covenant
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.
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.
In addition to the celebration of Jesus wounds that Milton forestalls in

the poem, he also uses the Samson story to cancel out the idolatrous
veneration of Christs dead body. As in Eikonoklastes, one of the most
immediate concerns of Samson Agonistes is the threat of idolatry;
for Milton this danger makes the subject of the poem a rich site for
consideration of the potential idolatry generated by the crucifixion
and the sort of iconoclasm that might address this danger. Norman
Burns has argued that
though Samson in the Judges narrative shows no concern about idolatry,
Milton adds to Samsons character two traits that are never far from
Samsons consciousness: shame for having committed idolatry by his fail-

ure, and zeal to sanctify the divine name.23
Miltons framing of the Samson story in terms of idolatry and icono-
clasm suggest his grappling with these aspects of the passion as well.
Samsons pulling down of the pillars of the Philistine temple is the
most dramatic, but not the only instance in the poem in which idolatry
and iconoclasm occur. The chorus conveys how the entire setting of
the poem is steeped in an idolatrous context, remarking to Samson
that
This Idols day hath been to thee no day of rest,
Laboring thy mind
More than the working day thy hands. (129799)
The chorus is not always right but here they show insight, perhaps
unknowingly so, because they identify the struggle that Samson faces
as one of iconoclasm of belief rather than the iconoclasm of shattered
physical images. Dalilas speech elaborates on these dangers, when she
relates to Samson how the Philistine priests attempted to persuade
her
how meritorious with the gods
It would be to ensnare an irreligious
Dishonourer of Dagon. (86062)
Dalilas speech also establishes a precedent in Miltons text for idolatry
of the grave. Having brought down Samson, Dalila hopes that among
her people she
shall be namd among the famousest
Of Women, sung at solemn festivals,
Living and dead recorded, who to save
Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose
Above the faith of wedlock bands, my tomb
With odors visited and annual flowers. (98287)
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
If at this stage of the poem readers might be expected to identify such

reverence with a mild form of idolatry when practiced by the Philis-
tines, they must then confront a second image of the heroic tomb at
the end of the poem with some discomfort.
Indeed Samson is not presented unproblematically as a pure icon-
oclast. Laura Knoppers remarks that Samsons act of iconoclasm
against the Philistines enhances the tendencies toward idolatry in his
own people.24 More importantly, Samson carries with him the poten-
tial to become an idol. Samson describes himself as living
a life half dead, a living death,
And buried; but O yet more miserable!
Myself my Sepulcher, a moving Grave,
Buried, yet not exempt
By privilege of death and burial
From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs. (100105)
More than a moving expression of the pain of blindness, failure and
imprisonment, Samsons lament lays out at the beginning of the poem
the hallmarks of a portrait of Christs death that Milton is most eager
to destroy. The medieval veneration of a dying, dead, and buried Jesus
narrows the focus of the passion story to the one point that Milton
cannot accept, as his Son is always presented as living, beyond human
time and limitations, and glorious. Samsons first speech gets to the
heart of the questions surrounding idolatry in Miltons England. Not
only is an idol a dead thing, but the Renaissance discourse of idolatry
is caught up with the question of the human need to encase spiritual
ideas in outward containers because of our own bodily condition.
Samson seems to be awareor to be situated so as to make read-
ers awareof the full chain of idolatrous behavior: if he dies (or is
already the walking dead) he can become an idol. But it is his, and his
peoples, need for outward, visible signs (such as his hair) that brings
about his death.25 In Samson Agonistes the body of Samson provides
Milton with an opportunity to consider an iconoclastic poetics for han-
dling the body of Christ.
Manoas response to his death also raises the possibility that Sam-
sons burial will engender an idolatrous response:
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.
Come, come, no time for lamentation now,

Nor much more cause: Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroicly hath finishd
A life Heroic, on his Enemies
Fully revengd hath left them years of mourning
.
Let us go find the body where it lies
Soakt in his enemies blood, and from the stream
With lavers pure and cleansing herbs wash off
The clotted gore. (17081728)
These lines again recall passion imagery to be shattered. Apart from
the general error of seeing any other death as being equivalent or
analogous to that of the Son, a few small clues suggest that even if
applied to Christ, Manoas interpretation is faulty. The language of
heroism and revenge in this passage resembles the terms that can
acceptably be used to describe the Son, but as is the case throughout
the poem, the resemblance acts more as a caution than an analogy.
The kind of heroism and militarism that Manoa praises in Samson
are characteristics Milton always cautions against attributing to the
Son. Unlike Samson, whose story is in fact finished with his death,
the Sons voluntary submission, Milton insists, is unending, unfinished.
The ultimate target of Miltons concern with the idolatry of the grave
relates, however, not to Samson but to Christ. Just as there are no dead
bodies and no burials in Lycidas and Paradise Regained, Milton does
not dramatize the moment of Samsons death or his burial, rendering
impossible the potential idolatry that Manoas vision suggests out of
the scope of his poem.
The fullest engagement with the crucifixion in Samson Agonistes
occurs in the poems Omissa, ten lines omitted from the first edi-
tion of Samson Agonistes in 1671, and printed at the end of the volume.
These lines exemplify Miltons habit of destabilizing his own poems,
of introducing the active participation of the reader and training him
as an interpreter, and of leaving traces of the passion in unexpected
places. The omissa, which might seem to be a minor textual irregular-
ity possibly introduced into the poem by someone other than Milton,
leads to a broader set of questions raised by the poem, and reveals
Samson Agonistes direct struggle with the crucifixion.
The omitted lines appear at the end of the volume under the head-
ing Omissa, a category distinct from the errata. In addition to this
curious term Omissa, Milton uses a form of the word omit three
times in Samson Agonistes. First, in the preface, he notes that Division
188 chapter eight
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).
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
victory, the omitted passage emphasizes the consequences of his final

act.32
Dobranski sees the omissa as an alternate reading of the poem that is
presented and ultimately rejected in order to cast a sharper light on
the conclusion that Milton does finally provide.
The difference between the Omissa and the conclusion that Milton writes
for Samson Agonistes is the difference between miracle and tragedy, between
revenge fantasy and real-world violence, between deus ex machina and
the struggle of a wayfaring / warfaring Christian (YP, 2:515). Whereas
we glimpse a miraculous vision of Samsons restitution in the Omissa, the
poem instead concludes with a problematic image of his final actsui-
cidal, large-scale, dearly-bought . . ., yet glorious! (O8v / 1660)which,
we know from the Book of Judges, ironically fails to effect a lasting politi-
cal change for Israel.33
Dobranski recognizes how the condition of absence suits the content
of these lines: the placement of the Omissa suggests the implausibility
of the miracle that it describes: Gods special favor remains present
but absent, isolated from the text and not something on which we can
rely.34 Part of the importance of this observation is its articulation of
the play of presence and absence in Miltons poetics, which sometimes
extends even to the materiality of the printed texts of his poems.
While Dobranski does not identify any other instances of Omissa
within seventeenth-century books, he notes that some works do include
omitted passages at the end of the text. On the final leaf (H1) of the
first edition of Miltons The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), for
example, are printed two omitted passages with page and line numbers
for their insertion.35 Although the Samson Agonistes passage is labeled
Omissa, it occupies the place in a printed volume usually held by
a supplement. Milton may use Omissa to connote an idea usually
associated in the neo-classical use with a precious lost text. Omissa
in neo-Latin literature signals the inevitable absences in classical works
as they were received and reconstituted by Renaissance editors. In the
note that prefaces Ad Joannem Rousium Milton uses amisso to
describe the lost copy of the 1645 Poems, suggesting a likeness between
32
33
34
35
Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, 196197 n. 4.
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
That were a joy preumptuous to be thought.

Chorus. Yet God hath wrought things as incredible
For his people of old; what hinders now?
Manoa. He can I know, but doubt to think he will;
Yet hope would fain subscribe, and tempts Belief. (15281535)
After the comment, A little stay will bring some notice hither, the
reader should then add the line, Of good or bad so great, of bad
the sooner.
The lines of the Omissa raise the possibility that Samson, with his
sight restored, has triumphed over his captors, an image that recalls
Christs triumph on the cross. Read without the Omissa, the passage
expresses only the fear and confusion of Manoa and the Chorus. A
reader of the 1671 volume who returned to this part of the poem and
inserted the omitted lines would add an interpretation of Samsons
destruction of the Philistines that suggests three aspects of the passion.
First, the language recalls the taunting of Christ to save himself if he
really is the messiah: He saved others, but he can not save him self:
if he be the King of Israel, let him now come downe from the crosse,
and we wil beleve him (Matthew 27:42). Additionally, the comment
that evil news rides post, while good news baits, recalls the order of
events in the passion, in which the resurrection is delayed (1583). And
finally, the suggestion of Samsons role in a divine plan that is inac-
cessible to the human understanding of Manoa and the chorus has
connotations as well of the nature of Christs sacrifice.37
Slightly later in Samson Agonistes, Manoas comment that the noise in
the distance tore the Skie is another example of his language overlap-
ping with that of gospel accounts and early modern passion narratives
(line 1472). Matthew 27:51 describes how, in the aftermath of Christs
death on the cross, the vaile of the Temple was rent in twaine, from
the toppe to the bottome, and the earth did quake.38 In Samson Ago-
nistes, the second noise from the temple of Dagon is described by the
Chorus as a universal groan / As if the whole inhabitation perishd
(151112).39 Similarly, the messenger chooses language that recalls
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
descriptions in contemporary passion narratives of the unspeakable

nature of the crucifixion:
O whither shall I run, or which way flie
The sight of this so horrid spectacle
Which earst my eyes beheld and yet behold;
For dire imagination still pursues me. (154144)
As Wittreich and Rogers have shown, atonement theory is a key to
understanding Miltons view of the passion. By 1600 the controversy of
the reformed church was, according to Thomas Scott-Craig, whether
the Atonement was consummated chiefly by the physical sufferings
on the Cross or chiefly by the spiritual Agony in the Garden. This is
the religious milieu in which Milton arose.40 Scott-Craig claims that
Milton
was more affected by the Agony or pro-passion than by the Passion itself.
And this is the explanation of what has seemed the enigma of Milton
as a Christian poet; for where is his celebration of the Atonement? His
celebration is his poem on the spiritual agony of Christ; though like a
good Christian he treats the matter at a respectful distance, typologi-
cally; or as we would say today, in prototype. Samson Agonistes is really
Christus Agonistes.41
Scott-Craig is certainly correct in seeing Samson Agonistes as a rewriting
of the passion, but not exactly in the way he suggests. Rather than a
delicate and respectful cloaking of the Christus Patiens image, Miltons
Samson is a counter-type whose violent and idolatrous death is to be
rejected in favor of a passion that does not involve veneration of physi-
cal suffering and the wounded body, does not culminate in death, and
cannot submit to idolatry.
That Samson Agonistes completes the Miltonic passion may be seen in a

small detail of its preface on tragedy. Citing classical authorsMen
in highest dignity who have written in the tragic modeMilton refers
to Augustus Caesar, who had begun his Ajax but unable to please his
own judgment with what he had begun, left it unfinisht (549). This
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
BROKEN AND WHOLE
The questions addressed in the preceding chapters belong to a broader

issue in the study of Miltons work. Though he often referred to his
poetic vocation in his prose writings, and many of his poems are
explicit about the choices he made as an artist, Milton left no full
statement of his poetic approach along the lines of Sidneys Defense
of Poetry. Rather than a complete treatment of poetics, we find scat-
tered throughout Miltons works fragmentary comments on the art of
writing. This pattern of reference without full treatment, however, can
itself be considered a Miltonic statement about poetics. Irene Samuel
has remarked that Milton said a good deal about poetry, more per-
haps than any writer who has not devoted a separate treatise to the
subject, and Samuel and others have traced what can be deduced
about Miltons poetics from his many occasional statements on his own
poetry.1 My approach has been somewhat different. I hope to contrib-
ute some modest findings to our understanding of Miltons poetics by
looking at two other kinds of information. First, I have been interested
in what Milton did not write, in his silences. Additionally, I have been
asking how we can draw out of the poetry itself some of the principles
of Miltons work, whether they represent his intentions and beliefs, or
reflect the influence of his cultural atmosphere.
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
found. As Ernest Gilman has shown, the making and breaking of

images becomes Donnes figure for registering the deepest conflicts of
his imagination.2 Miltons approach to this problemit is a problem
of art no less than a problem of faithis magisterial. He takes the
passion as the ultimate example of the broken heart most whole and
when his verse approaches this subject, it too breaks. This is one of the
greatest achievements of his poetry, illustrating a deep awareness that
this system of images is at the center of the biblical imagination.3
In making the claim that a theology of brokenness is at the center
of Miltons theology, I accept a challenge issued by Stanley Fish, par-
ticularly in How Milton Works, to re-examine the many recent claims
that Miltons meanings are multiple, or intentionally indeterminate.
Fish reminds us that Milton adheres to a belief in perfect unity and
explores the many attempts to break that unity by Satan and others
who wrongly assert themselves, under the influence of a false premise
that anything other than God can exist. Fish warns against Milton
criticism that celebrates what he calls the un-Miltonic values of diver-
sity, dualism, and polysemy. Fish argues that
it is only if the first principle of Miltons thoughtthat God is God and
not one of a number of contending forcesis denied or forgotten that
his poetry can be seen as conflicted or tragic or inconclusive or polyse-
mous or paradoxical, words that name literary qualities most of us have
been taught to admire.4
Fish is certainly correct in reminding us of the centrality of Miltons
awareness of Gods unity. I share Fishs insistence on Miltons ground-
ing in the unity of God as a defining principle and I readily accede to
his claim that for Milton, obedience to God was the only and essential
gesture of meaning.
Further, I find Fishs readings of the texts compelling, especially as
he excavates the dynamic of hiddenness in Miltons poetry. His claim
that
The appearance of the Son on earth inaugurates the end of writing
understood as public marks forming a system of conventions and avail-
2
(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.
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
In this regard my research bears out R. V. Youngs claim that the

lack of uniformity in reformed church practices and theology exerted
a shaping influence over poetry from the early to mid-seventeenth
century.9 Poetry can aptly convey the kinds of ambiguities that char-
acterized the religious culture of the English Renaissance. It may, in
fact, be a better medium than the visual arts for expressing this set of
concerns. Poets in this tradition remind us that the Protestant Refor-
mation was not a complete rewriting of Christianity, but an attempt
to craft a position in what Young calls the slippery middle ground. It
required work on theology, on forms and practices of worship, and
on Christian art and representational theory. Going beyond the Prot-
estant spectrum of attitudes and religious practices, it is important to
consider as well the range of Catholic approaches to the doctrine and
representation of the passion in the seventeenth century. Looking at
the Catholic counter discourse is important because reformers were
immersed in this material from the previous generations of practice,
but also because they understood themselves as responding to it. The
themes investigated in this study will suggest, I hope, areas of further
research to compliment the claims made about Miltons poetry.10
Having claimed in the foregoing chapters of this discussion that
Milton calls on the theology of brokenness to create an alternative
passion that is based on fragmentation, omission and iconoclasm, I
hope also to have shown how complete Miltons alternative passion
nevertheless is. Miltons development of an alternative poetics of the
passion began, as we have seen, in his notes to the Trinity manuscript
and developed through the early elegies and short biblical poems. The
question sustained his interest throughout his composition of the epics
and reached its peak expression in the final 1671 volume joining Para-
dise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Though he marshals different strate-
gies in different texts, Miltons passion is consistent in its preference for
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).
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
212 index
Eucharist 3 Herle, Charles 55 n. 11, 6263,

Evans, J. Martin 75 175176
Herman, Peter 183
Failure 8085 Holland, Robert 61
Felltham, Owen 44 n. 20 Homily against the Peril of Idolatry
Fish, Stanley 15, 84 n. 40, 123 n. 1, 3637
170171, 196198 Horneck, Anthony 167 n. 42
Fitzgeoffrey, Charles 7778 Howell, James 30
Fleming, James Dougal 94 n. 55 Hunter, William 7 n. 14, 68 n. 5, 136
Fragment 1, 3, 9, 57, 83, 85, 87, n. 14, 151 n. 9
9193 Huttar, Charles 6667, 68 n. 6, 81,
Frye, Northrop 80, 153 n. 16 153, 156, 164 n. 37
Frye, Roland Mushat 12, 25, 129,
143145 Iconoclasm 13, 23, 3542, 54 n. 10,
Fuller, Thomas 166 97, 99, 100, 119, 123
Funeral monuments 2, 17, 43, Ide, Richard 6, 135
101104, 114 n. 35 Idolatry 118 n. 38, 127, 142143, 179,
186187
Gallagher, Philip 2 n. 4, 80 n. 26, Imitatio Christi 51, 58, 111, 152, 17
8384 Incarnation 1, 5, 7, 11, 12, 16, 23,
Garber, Marjorie 12 45, 51, 67, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 77,
Garganigo, Alex 101 n. 6 79, 8788, 89, 116, 129131, 134,
Gaule, John 6162, 63 1470148
Gerbier, Balthazar 29 Ineffable 10, 1516, 54, 6063, 71,
Gethsemane 55, 175 81, 149
Gilman, Ernest 13, 35, 196 Inexpressibility topos 16, 24, 75,
Gittings, Clare 104 n. 18 113115
God the Father 7, 51, 65, 69, 74, 80, Isaiah 7677
82, 100, 129131, 134, 147, 150, Italy 26, 2830, 92
153, 162
Golgotha 130, 165 Jensen, Robin 17, 20, 21 n. 6, 66 n. 2
Gospels 7, 4951, 124, 162 Job 150, 152
Grabar 22 n. 10 Jonson, Ben 108109, 112
Graves, Neil 11, 132 n. 7 Johnston, James 7071
Grimald, Nicholas 105
Greenblatt, Stephen 2 n. 4 Kenosis 68, 7071, 74, 75, 132, 134,
Grose, Christopher 178 n. 10, 189 150, 167
Gross, Kenneth 36, 97 Kermode, Frank 49, 61 n. 20
Grossman, Marshal 81 Kessler, Herbert 23
Grotius, Hugo 32 King, Edward 111, 113, 115, 116,
Grymeston, Elizabeth 63 117, 121
Guibbory, Achsah 172 n. 50 Kirkconnell, Watson 175 n. 4, 192
Guilfoyle, Cherrell 131 n. 6 n. 38
Gumbrecht, Hans 71 n. 10 Knoppers, Laura 152 n. 13, 153
Langdon, Ida 25 n. 21
Hamlet 23
Hanford, James Holly 1 n. 1, 83 Latency 7172
Hardison, O.B. 99 Laudianism 3233, 41, 119
Harvey, Christopher 180 Leslie, Henry 4546
Haskin, Dayton 155 Levinson, Marjorie 91, 92, 95
Haynes, Clare 28 n. 29, 30 Lewalski, Barbara 28, 152, 165 n. 39,
Herbert, George 5051, 52, 5660, 168
77, 94, 195 Loewenstein, David 14
index 213
Marilla, E. L. 134 The Passion 1, 9, 48, 59, 68, 69,

Markham, Gervase 5556 71, 79, 8091, 99, 107, 109, 113,
Mary 41, 69, 108, 147, 151, 158, 162, 114, 115, 156157, 163, 168 n. 44,
167 173
Mazzola, Elizabeth 2 n. 3, 34 The Readie and Easie Way 124
McClain, Lisa 4 n. 8, 107108, Samson Agonistes 10, 13, 1718, 67
111 n. 31 n. 4, 115, 117, 149, 152 n. 10, 163,
McColley, Diane 12 173194
McCoy, Richard 2 Sonnet XIV 109 n. 28, 116
McGuckin, John 159 n. 31 Sonnet XIX 68, 85
McLoone, George 158 n. 29 Tetrachordon 124, 125, 126
Meditation 87 Trinity College Manuscript 5, 8,
Memorial verse 111 67, 173
Merback, Mitchell 50 n. 2 Upon the Circumcision 68, 160,
Metonymy 11, 47, 50, 76, 93 180182
Michael 134136, 140143 Mohamed, Feisal 182183
Milton, John Moryson, Fynes 29 n. 32
Ad Joannem Rousium 190
Areopagitica 1213, 71, 123 n. 1, 124 Nochlin, Linda 93 n. 54
De Doctrina Christiana 1, 7, 1011, 17,
2627, 65, 71, 80, 148, 190, 1998 OConnell, Michael 28
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 126 Omissa 18, 187, 189192
Eikonoklastes 14, 36, 41, 4648, 49, Omission 1415, 18, 61, 86, 91,
152153, 184 123127, 187189
Epitaphium Damonis 110111
History of Britain 123 Paratext 71, 94
In Obitum Procancellarii 105 Parker, William Riley 27, 31, 80, 108
The Likeliest Means 123 n. 25, 109 n. 27
Lycidas 99, 104 n. 18, 105106, Parrish, Paul 30
107 n. 23, 111112, 113, 117122, Parry, Graham 4 n. 8, 33
160, 163, 169 n. 46, 187 Passion 1, 56, 14, 42, 4964, 65, 74,
A Mask 9, 10, 69, 168172 81, 147
Of Prelatical Episcopacy 125 Patrides, C. A. 26 n. 23, 137 n. 15
Of Reformation 56, 12, 26 n. 25, 27, Paulet, Jane, Marchioness of Winchester
6566 108110
Of True Religion 125 Paulson, Ronald 1314
On the Death of a Fair Infant Pearce, James 149
Dying of a Cough 106108, Pelikan, Jaroslav 24
109 n. 28 Pinnacle 121, 147 n. 1, 163, 165167,
On the Death of the 171
Vice-Chancellor, a Physician Pope, Elizabeth 148 n. 3, 152 n. 11,
105 166
On the Morning of Christs Prineas, Matthew 118 n. 37
Nativity 68, 7280, 86, 89, 94 Prolepsis 69, 91, 155
n. 55, 108, 131, 147, 150, 154, Protestantism 14, 27, 36, 50, 54, 65,
162, 168 n. 44 66, 67, 82, 96, 113, 115, 116117,
Paradise Lost 6, 10, 13, 17, 66, 68, 123, 140
69, 72, 81, 96, 106, 107 n. 23, 116,
123, 149, 173 Quarles, Francis 5253, 177
Paradise Regained 6, 10, 17, 4041,
46, 48, 66, 68, 69, 70, 77, 80, 81, Raphael 68, 172
82, 85, 106, 121, 123, 127, 131, Reformation 2, 35, 154, 159
134, 147169, 176177, 187 Relics 91, 93
214 index
Resurrection 20, 24, 65, 69, 112, 121, Summers, Joseph 9

137 Supplement 15, 83, 123
Revard, Stella 135136 Sweetnam, Mark 2 n. 4
Richards, Nathanael 5
Rogers, John 6970, 83, 106, 156, Temple 7677, 118, 165167, 170
176177, 182 n. 18 Temptations 46, 73, 147, 151155
Rosenblatt, Jason 131 Teskey, Gordon 18 n. 27
Rostvig, Maren-Sofie 168 n. 44 Theophany 24
Rumrich, John 148149 Tinsley, E. J. 1920, 65 n. 1, 77
Tomb 100104, 107, 109, 136137
Samson 152, 167, 170, 174175, Transfiguration 20, 24, 159
177178, 184187, 191193 Treip, Mindele 12 n. 19
Samuel, Irene 147 n. 1, 149 n. 6, 195 Tromly, Frederic 84 n. 36, 88 n. 45
Sandler, Florence 152 n. 13, 153 Typology 8, 73, 74, 81, 114, 117118,
Satan 40, 132, 136, 150, 158 120, 137, 154, 159, 165, 177178
Saurat, Denis 82
Schiller, Gertrud 20, 22 n. 9, 52 n. 5, Vaughn, Henry 77, 147148
7273, 179 Via, John 83 n. 33, 96 n. 62
Schoenfeldt, Michael 5051, 56 n. 15 Vicars, John 36 n. 4
Schwartz, Regina 154155
Scott-Craig, Thomas 193 Wabuda, Susan 4 n. 8, 33
Second Commandment 23 Walsall, Samuel 61
Shawcross, John 18, 108 n. 23, 181 Warmstry, Thomas 43 n. 18
n. 17, 189 Watson, Elizabeth 2 n. 4, 43 n. 18
Sheingorn, Pamela 100101 Weever, John 102103
Sherman, William 94 Wilheit, Mary Catherine 102
Shullenberger, William 84 Wither, George 32 n. 38
Simon 10, 69, 158161, 162, 167, 168 Wittreich, Joseph 106, 118 n. 37,
Sinai 127, 141, 159 120 n. 40, 121 n. 42, 157, 174 n. 3,
Smith, Barbara 9495, 97 178 n. 9, 188
Son 7, 41, 65, 89, 130, 157162, 175
Soteriology 4, 82 Yoder, R. Paul 85
Steadman, John 129 n. 2 Young, R. V. 199
Substitution 89, 116, 133
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Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics

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Acknowledgements ..................................................................... vii

Introduction: Miltons Poetics of Absence and Restoration ...... 1

Chapter One Strategies for depicting the Son in

Chapter Two Iconoclasm as an Artistic Strategy ................... 35

Chapter Three The Post-Reformation Passion ....................... 49

Chapter Four Miltons Alternative Passion ............................. 65

Chapter Five No Death!: Rewriting the Protestant Elegy

Chapter Six The Art of Omission and Supplement in

Chapter Seven Paradise Regained and the Art of the

Chapter Eight Rewriting the Christus Patiens Tradition

Epilogue: Broken and Whole ..................................................... 195

Bibliography ................................................................................ 201

Index ........................................................................................... 211

MILTONS POETICS OF ABSENCE AND RESTORATION

One of the most significant aspects of John Miltons poetry can be

not as a curiosity but as a crucial aspect of his poetics, as well as a

Elizabethan settlement.5 In their readings of Hamlet and other texts,

abandoned symbols or practices do not simply disappear from the men-

for reflection, devotion, and advice about Christian behavior, Miltons

To remind the reader of the larger narrative of which each episode

world, remission of sins, preservation, renovation, judgment, baptism,

the first note indicates, a beginning rather than a conclusion. Further,

To account for the specifics of Miltons alternative passion and its

Admittedly, God is always described or outlined not as he really is but

Christ as a living vehicle of accommodation. If, as Graves argues, Mil-

Areopagitica or the many disgusting aspects of the generation of Sin in

a process that I argue is at work in Miltons poetry.21 After the English

nearest to the poem itself, in its immediate environment and therefore

hidden, what techniques are used in poems to indicate something

often associated with funeral monuments, an alternative system of

John Shawcrosss image of Milton as a poet with a double vision

STRATEGIES FOR DEPICTING THE SON IN

contained this emphasis . . . All the more surprising, then, is it to discover

needed to decide whether to show Jesus alone, or with other figures,

concept of the dual nature generates these representational dilemmas;

broader culture of Reformation England, were aware of the delibera-

specifically in new aesthetic measuresis the most fitting endeavor for

One of the most importantand certainly the least acknowledged

Gerbier also mentions a sculpture of Christ by Michelangelo at the

I lived pure and untouched of all defilement and profligate behaviour,

of Christ, which is consistent with the Christian habit of conflating the

removed by reformers. Close attention to these restorations shows that,

ICONOCLASM AS AN ARTISTIC STRATEGY

Christian history has witnessed several periods of debate about images,

artistic strategy. Iconoclasm may generate what Kenneth Gross has

Like them, no sin in him was, nor could fall

As new, primarily textual portraits of the Son emerge in sixteenth-

images, revisions of divine representations, and the reformation of

offers the possibility of leaving the potentially dangerous materials in

rament, and performed his Devotions in preparation to his Passion.14

words in the Chronosticon of his reign heightens the readers sense

in idolatry. It goes further as well, to make from the broken pieces a

THE POST-REFORMATION PASSION

In Eikonoklastes, Milton rejects Charles Is appropriation of passion

The gospels operate through a dialectic of revelation and withholding,

development and production. Schoenfeldt bases his claim on a reading