On John Milton

John Milton and the Law of Genres:
Paradise Lost as a Pluralistic Text


In this essay I will discuss how the style employed by John Milton (1608-1674) in composing his greatest work, Paradise Lost (1667), was significantly affected, and almost predetermined, by the social changed that were occurring in seventeenth century England. Written in a time of emerging pluralism, the cosmopolitan structure of this work was influenced by the sweeping demographic and societal changes of the time. As we shall see, this monumental epic incorporates what may be called a pluralistic form of textuality, for Paradise Lost, in defiance of the law that prohibits the mixing of genre-forms, exhibits an unparalleled freedom of creativity. In reaction to these changes, Milton swings from one genre-form to another, something that, at the time, was a radical approach to literary composition. This essay will look at Milton's prose works, showing how his desire to affirm the public's right-of-access to a greater degree of discursive forms can be traced back to works as early as The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty (1642) and Areopagitica (1644), two tracts that pre-date the English revolution. In these works, too, Milton advocates the spirit of freedom in a pluralistic society. However, before we begin discussing these works, either prose or poetry, we must first investigate the English history that was the background of Milton's literary performance.

As Christopher Hill has written, the period of English history in which John Milton came of age was a time of flux and possibility. In particular, the period encompassing the early years of the seventeenth century to the year 1640, the period that Hill brackets off as the time of Milton's 'apprenticeship', was a troubling period of mounting tension for the English. During this period, the composition of English society was altering on many levels--economically, ideologically, sociologically and demographically. One might even say that England was experiencing its own multicultural crisis. Hill suggests that one of the main causes behind this age of anxiety can be found in the shifts in alignment regarding religious faith, as the consensus that had established a privileged position for the prescribed national faith, Protestantism, began to fragment. To discern the reason why this was such a traumatic state of affairs, one must delve back further into English history in an attempt to discover how this religious and cultural consensus came to be.

Even the most casual student of history remembers that Protestantism, England's national religious faith, was born when Henry VIII, in his desire to wrest authority from the Roman papacy, created the Church of England. Over the course of time, an equivalency between England and Protestantism was formed in the national consciousness, as the English people gradually came to see themselves as a nation chosen by God to receive the Protestant faith. Unsurprisingly, this sacrilization of the origin was especially active in times of warfare. For example, when the English forces went to war against Spain, the war was often conceived in terms of a religious struggle between Protestants and Catholics. This belief served as a sediment, solidifying the association between England and Protestantism until these two separate things, country and religion, came to be seen as indivisible. To help instill opposition to the enemy, the monarchy continually stressed the relationship between nationalism and Protestantism as one whose originary nature was essential to the life of the people. These false beliefs were passed down through English history and into the Elizabethan era, at the end of which Milton was born.

With the ending of the Elizabethan era, the pressures of change that had hitherto been abated began to mount, eventually falling with great impact, irrevocably altering the country by dissolving the consensus that had held England together under Elizabeth. Many people reacted to the enormous wave of change by interpreting it as a test of their faith, as a crisis in spirituality. However, Hill believes that Milton saw these changes as indicative of a more neutral process, seeing this dilemma as the product of many cultural and ideological uncertainties. The first successor to Elizabeth was James VI who, although he was Scottish, was crowned in 1603, five years before John Milton was born. James continued a political policy similar to that of the Elizabethan era and, as a result, both Puritan and non-Puritan Protestants alike were united by their mutual adherence to Calvinistic theology. It was under the rule of Charles that this consensus began to break down with full vigor.

Striking an alliance with the Armenians, a religious group who wanted to re-define the doctrine of the Church of England, Charles exacerbated the political and social tensions he had inherited along with his kingdom. The Armenians believes in universal salvation of mankind, something that stood in marked contrast to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. A second action Charles took was his appointment of William Laud as bishop of London in 1628, and later as archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. The leader of the anti-Puritan party, Laud took over as bishop in a city that was of strong Puritan character. Initiating his anti-Puritan policies, Laud oversaw the advance of Armenians to influential positions in the church and subtly promoted Armenian theology. Naturally, the Armenians responded by supporting Charles in his causes against Puritanism and Parliament. We now have a good idea of the many tensions that caused England to become a divided society, and we can see how these battle-lines that were drawn between the monarchy and the people led to a civil war, which occurred despite Milton's cries for greater freedom to be given to the people. When the New Model Army, a Parliamentarian army of 22,000 men commanded by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, defeated Royalist forces in 1648, King Charles was executed and Cromwell assumed the position of authority, now becoming England's Lord Protector.

Cromwell, too, saw the Reformation as a religious struggle over the souls of the English people. He made this known in his famous pronouncement, "The reformation of England shall be more glorious than of any nation in the world, being carried on by the spirit of the Lord." He selected John Owen, an independent clergyman, to guide the religious settlement under Cromwell's commonwealth. This settlement in England under the Puritan commonwealth may be most appropriately described as pluralistic ; for the various parish churches in the community were led by a variety of denominators including Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents and others. As stated previously, we have begun with an extended look at the historical background of the seventeenth century, for these events had a profound impact on the form of John Milton's canonical masterpiece, Paradise Lost. Of course, this is not the only significant work of Milton's that reveals the extent to which the surrounding social body was important to his work. Milton's entire literary output, both prose and poetry, addressed itself to the changes the English people were exposed to through the shifting relationships and structural transformations in the society at large. His conscious acknowledgment of the significance of these changes within the space of his work is so unmistakable that one might even say that these changes constitute the source from which his work derives its historic impact and emotive force. As we shall see, Milton's prose essays, written before the English civil war, also support the growth of this pluralistic community.

Much like Oliver Cromwell, Milton saw the Reformation as evidence of God's blessing on the English people, a gift that they deserved due to their indomitable Christian fortitude. In The Reason of Church Government (1642), Milton composed an anti-Episcopal tract argued against the Church powers whom, he felt, were an obstruction to the liberty of England. Again, it was the monarchy that was to blame: in giving the Church the power to dismiss Parliamentary actions, the monarchy effectively prohibited the right of the people to establish their own power in the form of a legislative body. While Milton was against hierarchies in general, he was especially agitated by what he saw as Church interference in the public domain, and he expressed the view the restoration of secular stability was the top priority for the English people. This is not to say that Milton was anti-religious for, as we know from reading Paradise Lost, Milton was a man of profound religious spirit. He was against axiomatic cultural precepts--religious, political or ideological--and persisted in the belief that there was no one ecclesiastical polity that was divinely authorized, neither the Presbyterians nor the Puritans. On the contrary, he felt that a pluralistic religious culture was the only redemptive possibility for the country, and that the stability of religious interests was of prime importance for a culture. In his desire to see England develop a public policy that would advance the causes of the Reformation, Milton wavered in his opinions, at first welcoming the progress made by the Presbyterians, then growing angry when he saw signs that they had founded a stable religion of their own.

In Reason of Church Government Milton set forth the Utopian view that, if the bishops were removed from their positions of authority, the state would return to its original state of equilibrium, and this would allow for a more intimate dialogue to form between the King and Parliament. While these historical details are all of great interest, our prime interest in this document is that it also provides a glimpse into Milton's poetics, revealing his complex approach to the Renaissance genre-system.

Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem to profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home in the spacious circuits of her musing hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer and those two of Virgil are diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model: or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art and use judgment, is no transgression but an enriching of art... If to the instinct of nature and the emboldening of art aught may be trusted, and that there be nothing adverse in our own climate or the fate of this age, it haply would be no rashness, from an equal diligence and inclination, to present the like offer in our own ancient stories: or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides resign, shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a nation. The Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral drama in the Song of Solomon.... And the Apocalypse of St. John is the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy... And if occasion shall lead to imitate those magnificent odes and hymns wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy... But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be made easily appear over all the kinds of lyric poetry to be incomparable.

For Milton, the law that proscribed the artist's restriction to a single genre was a purely formal constraint. In opposition to this law, Milton invoked the artist's privilege to create as he sees fit, developing his inspiration from a combination of different sources without having to fear that he has somehow corrupted the essential being of his work through this mixture. As the de facto prohibition against plurality was an institutional norm both in literature and in the society of Milton's day, a passage such as this one must have been seen as the height of radicalism. Here Milton suggests that the poet should compose with all of his freedoms intact, retaining the ability to develop his work from a variety of literary sources. This includes a great variety of world literature, as Milton enumerates a number of literary achievements throughout history, including various poets of antiquity, both Greek and Roman. In addition, this passage includes Milton's appreciation of the Bible as a literary text, seeing the Song of Solomon and the Book of Job as literary works comparable with those of ancient civilizations. Most importantly, this passage contains Milton's critique of the rules set forth in Aristotle's Poetics regarding the formal features of literary representation. In Milton's view, the creation of a work that fails to observe the rules set forth by Aristotle is not an act of literary terrorism, something to be prevented at all costs but, rather, should be seen as a further contribution adding to the range of artistic achievements. In this way, Milton positions his own formalistic experiments in Paradise Lost as an elevation of the work of art--but we shall come to this work later.

We will now turn to a second prose essay, Areopagitica, a work whose genesis Milton summarized in his Second Defense of the People of England (1654), saying:

I wrote my Areopagitica in order to deliver the press from the restraints in which it was encumbered; that the power of determining what was true and what was false, what ought to be published and what ought to be suppressed, might no longer be entrusted to a few illiterate and illiberal individuals, who refuse their sanction to any work which contained views or sentiments at all above the level of vulgar superstition.

This statement is quite true, for Areopagitica (1644) was a tract in defense of the liberty of the press. It was written in response to the Parliamentary order to return to the code of governmental censorship that had long kept the English people from exercising their liberty to choose. As Milton said:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seed which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to be cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps that is the doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil.

As this passage shows, Areopagitica was a statement on the indivisibility of good and evil, and also on the positive value of human errors. Milton re-emphasized this point, saying: "Many there be that complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing..." In this quotation, as well as in the passage above, Milton speaks of the necessity that man should be permitted to exercise his capacity to choose. In order that these categories of good and evil should be values correctly, people must attain knowledge from both in order to legitimize their goodness. For Milton, life consists in having navigated between good and evil and, after one has been acquainted with both, true knowledge consists in possessing the moral compass that allows one to tell the difference. To make this choice in one's own name, not in the name of another, is the only way that an authentic choice can be made. As can be seen from this passage, Milton equates our essential humanity with this capacity of reason, to choose between good and evil.

This being an imperfect world, we must have knowledge to choose between right and wrong and, in order to ensure the autonomy of individual liberty, this knowledge has to be acquired experientally. Through his advocacy of complete and total access to one's personal decision-making process, Milton wanted to create a society that did not enforce the imposition of normalizing restrictive clauses that served as the adjudicators of moralistic standards of social goodness. Specifically, he wanted people to be able to test their experiences against their own moral standards, with the goal of arriving at ideas they could then export into the framework of civil society or into the consciousness of literary works.

The combination of Reason of Church Government and Areopagitica constitute Milton's contribution to the debate on the question that, in some ways, had instigated the English Civil War. That is, to what extent does the government, or the Church, have the right to insist on the people's strict adherence to the law, whether this law be a divine monarchical law, such as was Charles' law, or a societal law, an example of which manifested itself in the civil uprising of the 1640s. A third set of laws, a form that Milton attempted to supersede, were the laws of literature, a code that prescribed the classical unities of time, place and action. As we can see from our analysis of these two works, here Milton argues that any governmental suppression of the social will to enact its own developmental process invariably has deleterious effects for the greater society at large. Rather than extend these repressive measures, Milton advocates the growth of a civil society where citizens possess the liberty to realize their own desires, extending personal knowledge as they choose to, and thus opening up possibilities for transformation on both the social and individual levels. In writing these two tracts, Milton expressed his belief that man's liberty to make choices, even ones that might be considered to be the wrong choices by some, must always be preserved; the freedom to make decisions is more than something merely commensurate with God's will--it is the manifestation of God's will, our desire to attain happiness. Holding this pre-utilitarian philosophy, Milton advocated the principle that people allow themselves the opportunity for intellectual growth and spiritual development through unhindered freedom of inquiry. Implicit in his argument is the suggestion that any systematization or codification of the rules governing artistic productions, such as Aristotle's Poetics, is valuable insofar that it does not detract from the human will to create.

In "The Genres of Paradise Lost" Barbara Kiefer Lewalski speaks about the Renaissance as a time of "heightened genre-consciousness in literary theory and poetic practice" and names Milton as "the most genre-conscious of all English poets." She sees Paradise Lost as containing a multitude of literary forms, all of which contribute to the weight of its cultural and historical distinction as one of the great masterpieces of English literature. Specifically, Lewalski finds textual evidence for each of the following types of dramatic categories; the form of the morality-play is suggested in the scenes where God speaks with the Son among the heavenly spheres:

To whom the great Creator thus repli'd,

O Son, in whom my Soul hath chief delight,

Son of my bosom, Son who art alone

My word, my wisdom, and effectual might,

All hast thou spok'n as my thought are, all

As my Eternal purpose hath decreed,

Man shall not quit be lost, but sav'd who will,

Yet not of will in him, but grace in me

Freely voutsaf't; once more I will renew

His lapsed powers, though forfeith and enthrall'd

By sin to foul exorbitant desires;

Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand

On even ground against his mortal foe,

By my upheld, that he may know how frail

His fall'n condition is, and to me owe

All his deliv'rance, and to none but me.

...

Father, thy word is past, man shall find grace,

And shall grace not find means, that finds her way,

The speediest of thy winged messengers,

To visit all thy creatures, and to all

Comes unprevented, unimplor'd, unsought?

Happy for man, so coming; he her aid

Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost;

Atonement for himself or offering meet,

Indebted or undone, hath none to bring:

Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life,

I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;

This epic also incorporates a domestic farce in the scenes where Death delivers an address to his distant father, Satan:

Art thou that Traitor Angel, art thou hee,

Who first broke peace in Heav'n and Faith, till them

Unbrok'n, and in proud rebellion Arms

Drew after him the third part of Heav'n's Sons

Conjur'd against the Highest, for which both Thou
And they outcast from God, and here condemn'd

To waste Eternal days in woe and pain?

And reck'n'st thou thyself with Spirits of Heav'n.

Hell-doom'd, and breath'st defiance here and scorn,

Where I reign King, and to enlarge thee more,

Thy King and Lord? Back to thy punishment,

False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings,

Lest with a whip of Scorpions I pursue

Thy ling'ring, or with one stroke of this Dart

Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before.

Domestic tragedy becomes the central genre-form in the scene where Adam blames Eve for having succumbed to temptation:

O Heav'n! In evil strait this day I stand

Before my judge, either to undergo

Myself the total Crime, or to accuse

My other self, the partner of my life,

Whose failing, while her Faith to me remains,

I should conceal, and not expose to blame

By my complaints; but strict necessity

Subdues me, and calamatious constraint,

Lest on my head both sin and punishment,

However insupportable, be all

Devolv'd, though should I hold my peace, yet thou

Wouldst easily detect what I conceal.

This Woman whom thou mad'st to be my help

And gav'st my as thy perfect gift, so good,

So fit, so acceptable, so Divine,

That from her hand I could expect no ill,

And what she did, whatever in itself,

Her doing seem'd to justify the deed,

She gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

The final book takes the form of a tragic masque, as the miseries of humankind are described by the angel, Michael, who speaks of the power Death exerts over the world:

But first the lawless Tyrant, who denies

To know thir God, or message to regard,

Must be compell'd by Signs and Judgments dire;

To blood unshed the river must be turn'd

Frogs, Lice and Flies must all his Palace fill

With loath'd intrusion, and fill all the land;

His Castle must of Rot and Murrain die,

Botches and blains must all his flesh imboss,

And all his people; Thunder mixt with Hail,

Hail mixt with fire must rend th' Egyptian Sky

And wheel on th' Earth, devouring where it rolls,

What it devours not, Herb, or Fruit, or Grain,

A darksome Cloud of Locusts swarming down

Must eat, and on the ground leave nothing green:

Darkness must overshadow all his bounds,

Palpable darkness, and blot out three days;

Last with one midnight stroke all the first-born

Of Egypt must lie dead.

As Lewalski points out, the reason why Milton included such variety of dramatic forms into this epic poem has to do with the nature of the epic itself. Historically, the epic has been seen as the form that serves as the nexus of all meaning, the site where all writing takes place, the locus from which all knowledge derives its origin. Lewalski speaks of the classical form of the epic, a heterogeneous composition whose pluralistic textual form allows it to address many subjects, including "philosophy, mathematics, history, geography, military art, religion, hymnic praise, rhetoric and all literary forms." With this conception of the epic in mind, Milton designed Paradise Lost to contain a similarly diverse number of genre-forms, including "law, history, prophecy, heroic poetry, psalm, allegory, proverb, hymn, sermon, epistle, tragedy, tragicomedy and more."

Like many people living during the Renaissance, Milton saw history as a cyclical process. This view carried over into his view of himself as a preeminent English poet, a social role that was his life's enduring engagement. Seeing his function as the poet of England being bound up with the fate of his country, Milton set out to compose Paradise Lost, consciously attempting to write a work that would, in time, become one of the nation's literary treasures. In this way he sought to win God's favor for the country through his great deed as the individual who can shape history through his art. As Michael Fixler has noted, in Milton's mind, his ultimate goals for this work were bound up with the goals of the Reformation and, over the course of time, he began to see his own struggles, both personal and political, as being caught up in this circular scheme. Having this kind of psychological framework, it is not surprisingly that Milton came to write a religious epic for his country, a work that blended the country's past with its future through the familiar story of the Biblical account of the Fall. Composed at a time when it had already become apparent that the Reformation was unable to change life as he had hoped, Milton took the goals for revolutionary change he had deferred, and transposed them into the creation of this work. In effect, writing Paradise Lost was Milton's way of completing the work of the Reformation on his own. Like the writing of his tracts, it was his way of taking an active role in history rather than suffering through the long process of historical change. Now having demonstrated the plurality of Paradise Lost, we are able to see of these historical, cultural and psychobiographical influences played a role in shaping this text which, as we have shown, is pluralistic in terms of its formal composition.

In light of these distinguishing facts, when reading the passage from Reason of Church Government once more, one suspects that Milton was even then thinking of a way that he could incorporate the entire genre-system into a single work of art. This critic sees Milton's method of incorporating this variety of literary forms and genres into a single work as a way of enhancing his own poetic vision, since each of these literary forms provides an additional dimension to his poetics, enabling him to advance his reader's own poetic understanding of the world through his exposure to a pluralistic literary universe. Milton's reconfiguration of the literary text may be seen as a response to the alterations in the composition of the English populace and their relationship with the divinity in that, by transgressing the law that forbade the use of multiple genres, Milton created a work that was able to suggest the plenitude of life that occupies the highest order of being; that is, through his representation of God and the angels in a literary form, Milton brings the divine in closer contact with reality, a contact that made real through the mixtures of genres and forms. As can be seen from the section on the historical background of seventeenth century England, this plurality of form grew in response to a culture that needed to recognize the diversity of its composition in order to affirm its continued solidarity as a European power. Finally, we are able to see that the recognition of this plurality, both in works such as Paradise Lost and in the surrounding social body of seventeenth-century England, is of profound significance when interpreting Milton's art.