1
âNot but by the Spirit understoodâ: Miltonâs Plain Style and Present-Day Messianism
Arguments for Miltonâs ability to speak to our moment seem increasingly to refer to the rationalist thrust and parry of contending ideas in his work. In a 2008 article in the New Yorker, Jonathan Rosen avers that â[in] America, where God and the Devil live alongside Western rationalism, Milton seems right at home.â1 Milton scholars draw similar conclusions. Nigel Smithâs fine introduction, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?, objects to a reading of the poet that places God too firmly in the center of his vision, arguing especially against the views of Stanley Fish and claiming that Milton is âboth theistic and post-theistic, mono-theistic and polyglot.â2 âMilton matters,â Joseph Wittreich claims in more sanguine terms, because âhe forces us to reach beyond an axis of good and evil in the world ... to a more ambiguous reality.â3
I am not persuaded by this view, but it does alert us to aspects of Milton that might be overlooked by too narrow an emphasis on his theism. Perhaps a term that might productively describe Milton is âpre-secular.â We hear everywhere in his writings the footfalls of those modes of thought predominant in secularism, but these are contained within and measured by a fundamentally non-secular system of belief. Implicitly at issue is the value of reason as a category significant to discussion of secularization. Turning away from the dubiously productive distinction between faith and reason, current studies point to secularismâs dissociation of belief and imagination.4 When natural order is secured by myth rather than knowledge we are in a frame of mind at odds with secularism. Biblical narrative governs Miltonâs view of the worldâs creation, progress, and ultimate end, though he gives space to the language of geographical exploration and scientific discovery. We shall see how Alain Badiou finds in Saint Paul a similar faith in the âpure fableâ of the Resurrection that is the standard by which law and language are measured.
If Milton is âpre-secular,â he might be brought into productive dialogue with our post-secular moment, the most obvious symptom of which is the revanche de Dieu that seems to be awakening zeal in all religions across the globe and producing increasingly un-liberal theologies claiming, like the Reformation sects before them, repristination of religious ideals: whether the rise of Wahhabism; or the Catholic Churchâs appointment of a pope decidedly of the global North and West; or the June 2008 assembly in Jerusalem of conservative Anglican divines threatening to split from the Communion in their ire over the openly gay American bishop Gene Robinson. Among these conservatives the Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Orombi, has articulated aims that will sound familiar to any student of the Reformation: âI want that we go back to the first love that the early Church had in Jerusalem ... that we go back to believing the word of God to be the word of God, as it is in the Bible.â5 (These splitters, however, themselves are split over whether to adopt Saint Paulâs anti-feminism with his anti-gay sentiments: the purest purists among them object to the ordination of women as bishops.)6
It is easy to object to a brand of religion that, like Spenserâs Ignaro, is ever looking backward in its progress. But the post-secular turn equally pervades current philosophy. This is not a moral equivalenceâthe authors in which I am interested claim no victims and repair to no ancient bigotriesâbut a discursive equivalence. This chapter will explore Miltonâs primacy of belief alongside post-secular formulations, paying particular attention to the way in which the adoption of plain expression affirms that primacyâthe dissociation of belief and imagination brings to mind Eliotâs âdissociation of sensibilityâ with its attack on poetry residing in the realm of thought more than feeling. That attack is mistaken in taking aim at Milton. The privilege accorded to the plain style in Paradise Lost is an immediate expression of a felt truth received by divine illumination, and seems in Miltonâs terms to represent poetryâs highest strain. Milton himself critiques a poetry that dissociates thought and feeling, the kind of poetry where emotional and intellectual richness are only literary. A similar relationship between style and truth can be found in current models of immanence. We will explore especially Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as Alain Badiou, with respect to the nature of truth and especially the democratic and anti-democratic dynamics of truth-claims. Particularly relevant is the model of democratic universality in which Badiou enlists Saint Paulâs fidelity to the âeventâ of the Resurrection.
I. Plain style as epistemic ground in âParadise Lostâ
âGeoffrey Hill, Style and Faith (2003)
There is a great deal to unpack in Geoffrey Hillâs characteristically rich comment on Donne, Milton, and Herbert: it encapsulates each poetâs relationship to language, which is also a relationship to faith (âstyle is faithâ), and how poetic authority resides in having achieved this âequation.â7 We must also see immediately the good sense of not otherwise equating the three poets. Donne shows us time and again that ordinacy in language is only ordinacy in language, mastery over a limited and limiting human system ever falling short in its attempts to incorporate divine Truth. This style corresponds to a faith where soteriological self-assurance is a temptation to be resistedâthe lesson of the third satire is that our eternal fate depends upon a necessary doctrinal commitment of which we cannot be certain and for which no worldly authority can equip us. For Herbert style and faith are a stripping away of human confusion so that we can arrive at a Truth reminding us of the divine order beyond our grasp. This is the lesson on style of the âJordanâ poems.
For Milton the equation of style and faith is more complex, for we must first ask, âWhich style?â There is perhaps no other poet who has at his command so broad a range of styles, from grand to plain. It is the former that has always been taken as his hallmark, earning Addisonâs comment that Milton adopts the grand style âto give his Verse the greater Sound, and throw it out of Proseââan observation made more feline in T. S. Eliotâs comment that Miltonâs âpoetry is poetry at the farthest possible remove from prose,â and that he is âthe greatest of all eccentrics. His work illustrates no general principles of good writing; the only principles of writing that it illustrates are such as are valid only for Milton himself to observe.â8
Leavis and Eliot tend to object to Miltonâs style as excessively ornamented and big-mouthedâthat it is grand in the way of rococoâs garish display rather than in the way of baroque sublimity. In his Origin and Progress of Language (1773â92), the Lord Monboddo more accurately observes that Miltonâs style is both lofty and âchaste,â that it is characterized by its compactness of expression and that no device, it seems, is used without effect. His pet example is Satanâs justification of his rule in book 2:
Mee though just right, and the fixt Laws of Heavân
Did first create your Leader, next free choice,
With what besides, in Counsel or in Fight,
Hath bin achievd of merit, yet this loss
Thus farr at least recoverâd, hath much more
Establisht in a safe unenvied Throne
Yielded with full consent. (18â24)
Milton departs from ânaturalâ word order, âtaking advantage of the pronoun I having an accusative, and has placed it at the head of the sentence, at a great distance from its verb established.â In that distance are âwhole sentences concerning the laws of Heaven, the free choice of his subjects, the atchievements in battle and in council, and the recovery of their loss so far; and some of these are parentheses.â Monboddo finds precedent for such separation in Horace, and argues that the intervening statements are not âidle wordsâ but âsuch as fill up the sense most properly, and give a solidity and compactness to the sentence, which it otherwise would not have.â Word order and syntax thus not only lend âelegance and beautyâ to the passage, but also a âdensity of senseâ;9 in his felicitous phrase, Miltonâs style is ârounded, compact, and nervous,â a collocation that captures well its tightly and intricately interlaced energies.10 That he connects these qualities especially to the oratory of Demosthenesâthe measure of eloquence for Monboddoâand opposes them to the empty ornament that he locates in French influence on English prose style, qualifies the excessive ornamentation of which the moderns accuse Milton. As we use the term âgrandâ style, it will be with awareness of Monboddoâs insight on its âchasteâ qualities.
We must also raise some questions of Monboddo, however, when we find him identifying as the apex of Miltonâs style the speeches of Satan and the fallen angels in book 2, which he relates to the âmanly eloquenceâ and âhigh republican spiritâ of Eikonoklastes.11 That Satanâs republican spirit is so far from Miltonâs own should lead us to be skeptical of equating the style by which the two are expressed. Much as readers of Paradise Lost have long relished the twists and turns of diabolical eloquence, Milton himself seems strongly to value plainly expressed truth. The early prose suggests that ornament and opacity are modes of human expression opposed to the flawless clarity of Godâs word. By this standard Of Reformation declares that the âvery essence of Truth is plainnesse, and brightnes; the darknes and crookednesse is our ownâ (YP 1: 566); reform depends upon the casting off of the âpamperâd metaforsâ of the Fathers in favor of the âtransparent streams of divine Truthâ (YP 1: 568â69). The Reason of Church Government describes ornate poetry as appealing to those of a âsoft and delicious temper who will not so much as look upon Truth herselfe, unlesse they see her elegantly drest,â and who are distracted by âlibidinous and ignorant Poetastersâ from âthat which is the main consistence of a true poem, the choys of persons as they ought to introduce, and what is morall and decent to each oneâ (YP 1: 817â18).
Plainness is of course central to Paradise Regained, which all but eliminates epic convention in Jesusâ straightforward dismissals of Satan. This seems for Milton a long-standing model of resistance to temptation, equally discernible in the Ladyâs steadfastly moral, if also sententious, handling of Comus:
swinish gluttony
Neâre looks to Heavân amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Cramms, and blasphemes his feeder. Shall I go on? (776â79)12
âPlease donât,â we might reply. This is Miltonâs language, as the Lady terms it, of âsacred vehemenceâ (Ludlow Mask 795), which is not to be confused with emotional vehemence. The force of this locution derives from its expression of truth, rather than any stimulation of passionâas opposed to the temptingly infectious energy of Comusâs brisk couplets: âThe Star that bids the Shepherd fold/Now the top of Heavân doth hold,/And the gilded Car of Day ...â (93â95).
The most infamous example in Paradise Lost of a character who speaks unadorned truth is of course God the Father, whose lines on the Fall are as elegantly dressed as a kick to the mid-section:
ingrate, he had of mee
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all thâ Ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood and them who faild;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have givn sincere
Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,
Where onely what they needs must do, appeard,
Not what they would? what praise could they receive? (3.97â106)
It is easy to join William Blake in seeing this as Milton writing âin fettersââas Milton simply not being himselfâbut to do so is to sell this most careful poet short, as though he feels something akin to Woody Allenâs character in Stardust Memories: âHow can I play God? I donât know what Iâm doing, and I donât have the voice.â13 We certainly see here an absence of those elements that Christopher Ricks has described as characteristic of Miltonâs grand style. The syntax is not at all what we would expect: rather than flowing periods, there are six independent clauses in under ten line...