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Shore, Daniel. "Why Milton is Not an Iconoclast." PMLA 127:1 (2012): 22-37.

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Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast daniel shore

N THE CRITICISM OF THE PAST THIRTY YEARS THE TITLE ICONOCLAST Ihas been appended to ’s name like a Homeric epithet: Hektor, “tamer of horses”; Agamemnon, “shepherd of the people”; Milton, “breaker of idols.”1 John Guillory, an early adopter of the term, observed in 1983 that Milton is an “iconoclast, programmati- cally a breaker of images” (22). Critics have subsequently elevated the term to an overarching description of Milton’s approach to theology, poetics, politics, and history. Lana Cable, for instance, writes of “Mil- ton’s literary iconoclasm”: his “iconoclast impetus” and “iconoclastic instinct” produce “iconoclastic motifs” and “iconoclastic activity” (1). She calls iconoclasm “that most Miltonic yet analytically elusive trait” and describes her own project as an attempt to understand Milton’s “iconoclastic poetics” (2). David Loewenstein refers to the poet of Par- adise Lost as “Milton Iconoclastes” and argues that his works involve “breaking the image of the past,” “casting down . . . imaginations,” and “shattering” the pretensions of his adversaries (62–64). Scholars oten employ a substitute vocabulary to describe Milton’s writings: instead of refuting idols he demolishes them; instead of criticizing images he breaks them; instead of a pen he wields a crowbar; instead of the written word, a sledgehammer. Metaphors of iconoclasm allow critics, much as they once allowed Milton, to trade the dry terminol- ogy of controversia for a language imbued with verve and force and to blur the line between literary debate and physical violence. DANIEL SHORE is assistant professor of En- Critics who consider Milton an iconoclast are nevertheless glish at Georgetown University. His essays among his most sensitive, and they envision him as no ordinary have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Milton Studies, and Milton Quarterly. This essay breaker of idols. Cable writes of “creative iconoclasm,” which she will be part of his book Milton and the Art deines as the dynamic interplay between destruction and creation of Rhetoric (Cambridge UP, forthcoming). (4–5). Loewenstein sees in Miltonic idol breaking a “regenerative”

22 [ © 2012 by the modern language association of america ] 127.1 ] Daniel Shore 23 element that is intimately connected to “liter- glass window, or ire to altar rail. he second ary creativity” (147). In what follows, however, sense involves recommending the removal I argue that these critics labor under a shared or destruction of idols. Two of Milton’s late misconception. Milton was not an iconoclast. tracts make this recommendation: Of Civil This misconception arises from two Power (1659) allows for magistrates to pro- sources. First, although much of Milton’s ca- hibit the “publick and scandalous use” of reer is, as Achsah Guibbory puts it, “driven idols (255), while (1674) ar- by an obsession with idolatry” (147), critics gues that popish idols and ceremonies should have wrongly assumed that such an obsession be removed from public and private spaces necessitates destruction. Their assumption alike. A third sense will receive most of our has limited our recognition of the unique- attention. As a poet and polemicist, Milton ness and signiicance of Milton’s opposition writes about and against idols. For this rea- to idols and of his attempts to think beyond son the critics mentioned earlier have sought the preexisting cultural role of the iconoclast. to expand iconoclasm to include the ways in Second, while Milton styles himself as an which his texts challenge and refute other ar- iconoclast at least once in his writings, critics guments, ideas, and texts. But it is precisely in have been too quick to take him at his word. the domain of the printed word, I will argue, Far from destroying idols, Milton seeks to that he practices an alternative response to capture and preserve them under judgment, idolatry, one that foregoes breaking. investing them with poetic care even as he En gland had been awash in iconoclasm hollows them out from the inside, thereby re- for more than one hundred years when Mil- fashioning them as the instruments of their ton began his polemical career. An injunction own disenchantment. Milton’s complex re- of 1538, issued under Henry VIII, had warned sponse to idolatry has much in common with En glish clergy against “that most detestable sin the attempt “to suspend the urge to destroy of idolatry” and directed them to take down images” and “to leave the hammer to rest” “such feigned images as you know . . . to be that the theorist Bruno Latour has dubbed so abused with pilgrimages or oferings” (As- “iconoclash” (15). Beginning with On the ton 227). Nine years later, during the reign of Morning of Christ’s Nativity and ending with Edward VI, parish churches were ordered to , my argument will fol- “take away, utterly extinct and destroy” im- low Milton’s eforts to develop and put into ages, ceremonial objects, and “all other monu- practice his alternative response to idolatry. ment of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, At its most contentious, this essay will argue and superstition” (Aston 256). A new swell of that even the tract (1649) is not iconoclasm was building as Milton composed an iconoclastic text. At its most speculative, his antiprelatical tracts in the early 1640s. A it will propose that Milton’s late poems gain parliamentary ordinance of 1643 called for “the much of their aesthetic power from the idols utter demolishing, removing, and taking away they preserve, through a kind of Lucretian ex- of all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry” perience that I call the “idolatrous sublime.” and ordered that ixed altar rails and “all cru- Because previous critics have employed ciixes, crosses & all images of any one or more iconoclasm broadly and oten metaphorically, persons of the Trinity” be “taken away and de- some clariication is in order. I take the term faced” (Ordinance). he commission to carry to have three relevant senses. he irst is the out these orders was given to William Dows- literal destruction of images and objects. No ing, who over the next two years defaced or one, to my knowledge, has argued that Milton took away thousands of religious objects in 245 ever put blade to canvas, hammer to stained- parishes across Cambridgeshire and Sufolk. 24 Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast [ PMLA

Many of Milton’s early polemical writings iconoclastic conlagration meant to incinerate suggest that he took an active part in the cul- the brass statue but a sacriicial blaze sparked ture of iconoclasm. He encourages his read- by the idolaters for the immolation of chil- ers, in his (1641), to “apply dren. The visible, material world remains your sledges, your levers, and your iron crows unchanged at Christ’s birth. The most dra- to heave and hale your mighty Polyphem of matic physical transformation in the poem Antiquity”; there he also threatens to “batter, occurs when “chill marble seems to sweat” as and throw down your Nebuchadnezzars Im- it is abandoned by its resident power (195; my age and crumble it like the chafe of the Sum- emphasis). And even this “sweat” is a linger- mer threshing loores” (700). In An Apology ing illusion, like the residue of a itful dream. against a Pamphlet, published the following he Nativity Ode describes in vivid detail year, he imagines the martyrs who “rip up what Max Weber calls the Entzauberung, or the wounds of Idolatry and Superstition with “disenchantment,” of the world. Disenchant- a laughing countenance” (903). But Milton’s ment does not cast down idols but rather earliest mature poetry already presents a dif- leaves them void of spirit, value, and power. ferent response to the threat of idolatry. his is why the devotees of the pagan gods are On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, described, in three instances, as worshipping which Milton composed in 1629, when he was the monuments of the banished deities “in just twenty- one years old, depicts the triumph vain” (204, 208, 219), from the Latin vanus of an infant Christ over a throng of pagan (“empty”). he infant Christ does not break deities. his triumph is not achieved through the former objects of their veneration; he hol- physical violence or destruction. he weap- lows them out from the inside, leaving behind ons of carnal warfare, the “spear and shield” only lifeless husks (Koerner 179). (line 55), remain “idle . . . high up hung” be- Another early work, A Masque Presented cause the savior of mankind is able to “con- at Ludlow Castle, imagines what it might trol” the gods of antiquity through his mere mean to oppose idolatry without resorting to presence in the world (55, 228). On his ar- iconoclasm. he masque features two magical rival, Oracles grow “dumb,” Apollo lees Del- objects that are the source of ’s power: phos with a “hollow shriek,” Peor and Baalim a glass and a wand. Planning the rescue of “forsake” their temples, and the Egyptian the Lady from Comus and his “rabble,” the gods Isis, Osiris, and Anubis “haste” away Attendant Spirit directs her two brothers to (173, 178, 198, 212). There is evident and at “break his glass, / And shed the luscious li- times palpable aggression in Milton’s descrip- quor on the ground, / But seize his wand” tions. Thammuz has been “wounded” and (651–53). he brothers carry out the irst of Osiris feels “the dreaded infant’s hand” (204, these commands successfully. Just as Comus 222). And yet violence is directed only at the lits the glass to the lips of the Lady and en- resident spirits of the “damnèd crew” (228). joins her to “taste” (813), they “rush in with Even as the spirits lee, their idolatrous mon- swords drawn, wrest his glass out of his hand, uments are let behind unscathed. “Shrine” and break it against the ground” (91). But the and “temples” (176, 198), “archèd roof” and Attendant Spirit scolds them for failing to “prophetic cell” (175, 180), “spring, and dale,” carry out his second command: “tangled thickets,” “grove, or green,” “urns, and altars” (184, 188, 214, 192)—all these ma- What, have you let the false enchanter scape? terial objects remain, uninhabited but intact. O ye mistook, ye should have snatched his Moloch, we are told, has “led . . . his burning wand idol” (205–07); the lame, however, is not an And bound him fast; without his rod reversed, 127.1 ] Daniel Shore 25

And backward mutters of dissevering power, essarily limit the iconoclastic impulse. A We cannot free the lady that sits here hammer might pulverize an idol, reducing it In stony fetters ixed, and motionless. . . . to dust, but writing cannot defeat idols with- (814–19) out reproducing them. All controversia must, to varying degrees, rebut and perpetuate, de- he two magical objects correspond to two bunk and preserve what it opposes. he part modes of opposition. he power of the glass of the oration rhetoricians called refutatio evaporates with the physical integrity of the requires one to quote, summarize, or at least glass. This is the causal logic generally as- point back to the arguments one intends to sumed by the iconoclast: if one wishes to refute. We might think of all controversial put an end to idolatry, one must irst put an writing as operating on a spectrum. end to the idol. But the wand suggests an al- On the low end of the spectrum is writ- ternative logic, in which the object that has ing that attempts to hush even the echoes of wrought an enchantment may, when seized the voices it contests. I include at this end the and “reversed,” be used to disenchant. By this writing of early church fathers who, in seek- alternative logic, idols that reduce to servil- ing to wipe heresies out of existence, reluc- ity also contain a “dissevering power” capable tantly preserve skeletal accounts of heretical of freeing from “fetters.” Because the broth- doctrine. Every heresimach must, in efect, ers fail to bind Comus and snatch his wand, engage in heresiography. As historians of reli- they must resort to the outside intervention gion oten point out, our knowledge of many of the nymph Sabrina, and the logic of cap- heresies (including those, like Arianism, that ture and reversal remains unrealized. But this may have inluenced Milton) depends less on logic will be amply realized in Milton’s later the intact writings of heresiarchs than on the writings, in which captured idols become the partial remains passed down by the creators instruments of dissevering power. and defenders of orthodoxy (Lieb 263–64). he case for an iconoclastic Milton rests On the high end of the spectrum, contro- most irmly on the prose tract Eikonoklastes. versial writing faithfully reproduces and dis- Written in 1649 to refute the popular Eikon seminates the arguments it aims to refute. At its Basilike, a book purportedly by the recently extreme, such writing recites these arguments executed King Charles I, Milton chose to in full or simply reproduces the contested text title his tract—and by extension himself— in toto. Here we might think of Lorenzo Valla, “Iconoclastes, the famous Surname of many who quotes large swaths of The Donation of Greek Emperors, who in thir zeal to the com- Constantine even as he demonstrates its spuri- mand of God, ater long tradition of Idolatry ousness using the tools of philology. in the Church, took courage, and broke all su- Eikonoklastes stands at the high end of perstitious Images to peeces.” An iconoclas- the spectrum, reprinting a large proportion tic response to the image of the dead king is of the words it wishes to refute. Indeed, the needed, Milton claims, because “the People, entire structure of Milton’s argument is dic- exorbitant and excessive in all thir motions, tated by , which it follows chap- are prone ottimes not to a religious onely, but ter by chapter and even sentence by sentence. to a civil kinde of Idolatry in idolizing thir If we did not have myriad copies of the king’s Kings” (343).2 But despite its title, and despite book—if they had all been destroyed by anti- these claims, Eikonoklastes is not an icono- royalists following the death of Charles I—it clastic tract. would nevertheless be possible to reconstruct To see why, we must consider the con- the book from Milton’s tract. Far from break- straints of controversial writing, which nec- ing all superstitious images and arguments to 26 Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast [ PMLA

pieces, the tract preserves them as the objects Where there’s an iconoclast, there’s an idol of discrediting judgment. to be broken. One of Milton’s chief aims is to Loewenstein speaks of Eikonoklastes as fuse the concepts of monarchy and idolatry Milton’s “most vehement polemic,” in which into the single concept that he calls the “civil he “demolishes, with such unrelenting rancor kinde of Idolatry” (Hardin 15). Second, the and fury, the image and spectacle of royalty language of iconoclasm endows the oten pe- projected in Eikon Basilike” (143). Compare destrian task of textual refutation with verve this with the description ofered by Gordon and force. Milton closely follows the argu- Campbell and homas Corns in their recent mentative structure of Charles’s book, but he biography: “Milton works through Eikon uses the metaphor of iconoclasm to imbue an Basilike, translating its pieties into substan- otherwise reactive text with active energy. tive claims, which in turn are relentlessly Two representative passages from the discredited by reference to common knowl- tract’s 246 pages of refutatio suggest that an edge and plain sense” (225). If these two ac- operation other than iconoclasm is at work: counts (one ascribing “rancor” and “fury” to the text, the other “common knowledge” But what good Man had not rather want any and “plain sense”) seem to describe diferent thing he most desir’d for the public good, then at- documents, in some respects they do. Loew- tain it by such unlawfull and irreligious meanes; as much as to say, Had not rather sit still and enstein detly represents the tract’s preface— let his Country be Tyranniz’d, then that the some eleven pages in the 1649 edition—using people, inding no other remedie, should stand Milton’s own vehemently iconoclastic lan- up like Men and demand thir Rights and Liber- guage. Campbell and Corns capture Milton ties. his is the artiicialest peece of ineness to at work in the tract’s other 246 pages, where perswade men into slavery that the wit of Court he engages in the familiar activities of writ- could have invented. (392) ten debate: weighing and judging, uncovering He bids his Son Keep to the true principles of and comparing, questioning and challenging. piety, vertue, and honour, and he shall never If, as I contend, we are mistaken in see- want a Kingdom. And I say, People of En- ing Eikonoklastes as an iconoclastic text (not gland, keep ye to those principles, and ye shall least because of its title), the fault is Milton’s. never want a King. (581) Put simply, Milton engages in criticism and then disguises it as iconoclasm. We should What we find here is properly called criti- always be ready to compare Milton’s self- cism. Milton breaks Eikon Basilike into sepa- representation with his habits, the roles he as- rate phrases and sentences that he subjects to signs to himself with the deeds he performs. judgment, but his fragmentation of the text is, In the case of Eikonoklastes, the disparity is as I suggested earlier, a necessary condition sharp. he tract opens by emphasizing violent of textual refutation. He does employ vehe- breaking, only to spend the rest of its pages ment irony, ierce vituperation, and the kind subjecting the arguments of the king’s book to of prophetic zeal that he irst defended in An carefully considered criticism. Milton is not Apology. But only insofar as Charles’s words an iconoclast; he just plays one in his preface. remain present, preserved in italics, can they Why dramatize refutatio as idol break- serve as the objects of irony, vituperation, ing? First, adopting the role of iconoclast al- and zeal. Like the immobile lovers depicted lows Milton to activate a forceful association. on Keats’s Grecian urn, never consummating he title Eikonoklastes transforms the king’s a desire that never fades, Miltonic criticism eikon, meaning “image” or “portraiture,” into perpetually debunks lies that perpetually an object of excessive and heretical devotion. mislead. Assertion and refutation are pre- 127.1 ] Daniel Shore 27 served alongside each other, capturing on the length of Mulciber’s fall, a “summer’s day.” In printed page the dynamics of Interregnum his controversial writings Milton extends to controversy. he passages quoted above dis- idols a provisional and pragmatic amnesty; in play a rhetorical form that is central to Mil- he ofers them a kind of poetic ton’s polemics—the preservation of an idol care.3 Epicritical form allows him to invest under discrediting judgment—which I will idols with the highest rhetorical and aesthetic refer to as epicrisis. From the Greek ἐπικρίσις, appeal even as he subjects them to discredit- “to cast judgment on,” epicrisis names the act ing judgment. of quoting a text and then ofering commen- Why would Milton have sought an al- tary on it (Lanham 43). ternative way of opposing idols? By the time he epicritical form repeated throughout he began his polemical career in the 1640s, Eikonoklastes is largely the product of the con- a century of iconoclasm had failed to eradi- ditions of controversia: one must quote in or- cate idols from the En glish church (Aston der to refute. But Milton makes a virtue of this 220). Previous eforts at casting down images necessity in his late poems, which employ epi- had been sporadic and incomplete. Even in crisis even when the constraints of Interreg- churches visited by iconoclasts, most images num debate are no longer operative. Consider, and objects managed to avoid destruction, for example, the famous description of Mul- while many parishes escaped violence alto- ciber’s fall in the irst book of Paradise Lost: gether. Where icons were demolished, new ones sprang up in their place. he 1630s saw a [A] nd how he fell particularly strong resurgence of images and From Heav’n, they fabled, thrown by angry ceremonial objects under the supervision of Jove Archbishop William Laud, but there had been Sheer o’er the crystal battlements; from morn earlier periods of resurgence as well. Most To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun obvious was the reign of the Catholic Queen Dropped from the zenith like a falling star, Mary, but even under Elizabeth a proclama- On Lemnos th’ Aegean isle: thus they relate, tion issued against the “breaking or defacing Erring. (1.740–47) of monumentes” intended “for memory, and not for superstition” had charged church gov- he form of this passage hews closely to that ernors to employ “sommes of money . . . upon of Milton’s prose refutations. Here too error the spedy repayre or reediication of any such is preserved under judgment, such that we monuments so defaced or spoiled” (Procla- might imagine all the words, with the excep- mation). What is more, idols could efectively tion of “they fabled” and “thus they relate, / survive their own destruction through me- Erring,” printed in italics, as they were in chanical reproduction; the printing presses the passages from Eikonoklastes. here are, rapidly appearing throughout En gland in the however, some important diferences. While seventeenth century allowed them to be mass- Milton preserves the idolatrous myth of the produced (Eisenstein). Persons, objects, ideas, past, he does so in his own words, not directly and arguments lived idolatrous aterlives on quoting the expressions of another. Judgment the printed page. It is telling that Milton spoke has receded to a curt if unambiguous retrac- of King Charles I as an idol only ater his exe- tio, allowing error a fuller and more continu- cution, when his printed image was widely cir- ous exhibition. Myth is not simply saved from culated in the front matter of Eikon Basilike. oblivion, as polemical necessity would re- Finally, even as idols were destroyed, the quire; it is retold with a protracted, lingering category of the idol expanded dramatically. pleasure that corresponds to the protracted At first idol referred primarily to images, 28 Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast [ PMLA

to eikons , but by the 1640s the term encom- are indeed true and are well accommodated passed ceremonial objects like crosses, cruci- to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, ixes, altar rails, fonts, and inscriptions. For what they have said should be taken from some, like Milton, even persons, institutions, them as from unjust possessors and con- arguments, ideas, and ceremonies—anything verted to our use. Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the that reduced men to servitude—could count people of Israel detested and avoided, so also as idols. Barbara Lewalski observes that “Mil- they had vases and ornaments of gold and ton’s conception of idolatry was much broader silver and clothing which the Israelites took and more far- reaching than that of his Puritan with them secretly when they led, as if to put contemporaries,” since he “insisted that any- them to a better use. (2.40.60) thing could be made into an idol” (214). When anything can be made into an idol, the icono- In Augustine’s cheerful assessment, the intel- clast must be prepared to break everything. lectual achievements of an idolatrous civili- Stained glass may be susceptible to the ham- zation can, like raw materials, be proitably mer, but what Francis Bacon called “the idols mined for the projects of Christian faith. of the mind” are more elusive. As long as the Milton’s gold has a darker sheen. he spoils of inner propensity to idolatry remains, the outer other cultures, as he tells it, carry with them destruction of material idols cannot fulill its an “infection” that prevents full and uncon- inal end, at least not without tempting univer- taminated appropriation. Idolatry is not eas- sal ruin. Milton sought an alternative means ily let behind, no matter how “detested and of combating idols not because of a principled avoided.” When melted down for new uses, opposition to violence, or because of secret “borrowed gold” ends up recapitulating its old iconophilia, or even out of some pluralist or function in a still more debased form; where tolerationist impulse, but because recent his- the Egyptians had worshipped only the “mon- tory had demonstrated iconoclasm’s futility. strous shapes” of “gods disguised in brutish The catalog of fallen angels in the first forms” (1.479–81), the Israelites “composed / book of Paradise Lost makes evident the futil- he calf in Oreb”—that is, a brute pure and ity of iconoclasm. In its inventory of “various simple—for the object of their worship. names, / And various idols” drawn from the Iconoclasm can break individual idols, Old Testament and a range of other sources but it cannot eradicate the infection that gives (Rosenblatt), the catalog traces the pattern of rise to ever- changing forms of idolatry. Bruno events whereby even God’s chosen servants Latour elaborates this predicament: “Why is “fell / To idols foul” (1.374–75, 445–46). Af- it that all those destroyers of images . . . have ter recording the names of bestial Egyptian also generated such a fabulous population gods—“Osiris, Isis, Orus and their train”— of new images, fresh icons, rejuvenated me- the passage recounts the tribe of Abraham’s diators: greater lows of media, more power- fall into animal worship as it journeyed to the ful ideas, stronger idols?” (15). Idolatry and promised land: “Nor did Israel scape / h’ in- iconoclasm succeed each other in a cycle of fection when their borrowed gold composed / repression and return, in which every re- he calf in Oreb” (1.478, 482–84). he phrase pression is more violent, every return more “borrowed gold” looks back not only to Exodus debased than the last. For Milton and other 12.35–36 but also to Saint Augustine’s famous opponents of idolatry, this vicious cycle de- analogy of pagan philosophy to Egyptian gold: manded a practical response. In 1643 the oicial, state-sponsored re- If those who are called philosophers, espe- sponse to iconoclasm’s earlier failures was cially the Platonists, have said things which to broaden and systematize the project of 127.1 ] Daniel Shore 29 destruction. At the behest of Parliament, ular idols, no record of their individuality or William Dowsing treated the defacement of concreteness. But this scene lacks an icono- churches as an administrative undertaking to clast. Described in the passive voice as “blot- be carried out thoroughly and eiciently. “His ted out and razed,” the fallen angels erase irst task in each church,” writes John Mor- themselves from history “[b] y their rebellion.” rill, “was to make an inventory of all objects As in the Nativity Ode, idols are successfully of idolatry and superstition; his second was defeated without the ruinous intervention of to destroy what he conveniently could and to an iconoclast. By rebelling against God, idols leave orders for the destruction of the rest” become their own best breakers. (16). When time did not allow Dowsing or he names of the angels in heaven are not his assistants to demolish all the objects on “blotted out and razed” by God, or Milton, his inventory, he would deputize local inhab- or Milton’s poem. On the contrary, all three itants to inish the job, occasionally return- forces—divine, authorial, and textual—work ing to a parish multiple times to ensure that to retrieve names, to recall and reinscribe his instructions were successfully completed. them. Reinscription is, after all, the stated Dowsing’s journal, a record of his destruc- purpose of the catalog of demons: “Then tive itinerary through Cambridgeshire and were they known to men by various names / Sufolk, vigilantly documents the objects he And various idols throughout the great destroyed, ordered destroyed, or failed to world. / Say, Muse, their names then known, destroy. Here is the writing of an iconoclast: who irst, who last” (1.374–76). Drawing on “Jan. 5, 1643. At Linton, we took up 8 inscrip- heavenly inspiration and the conventional tions, we beate downe 3 cruciixes, and 80 su- gestures of epic anamnesis, Milton seeks perstitious pictures, and brake the rayles, and to give idols a local habitation and a name, gave order to deface 2 grave- stones, with Pray saving them from the oblivion they impose for our soules” (210). Dowsing’s journal stands upon themselves. To short-circuit the vicious at the low end of the spectrum I introduced cycle of iconoclasm and iconophilia, idols are above: although it records the things he has preserved as idols, held up to public view for defaced, it preserves only minimal traces of continual criticism and judgment. he “bor- their existence. Devotional objects are listed rowed gold” of Milton’s Israelites becomes and divided into categories, so that the last a threat when it is melted down to compose vestiges of their sensuous appeal are lost be- new creations, thereby losing the visible neath the indiference of numbers.4 traces of its idolatrous origins. The catalog The first book of Paradise Lost offers a of demons, conversely, rescues idols from dramatically different way to “scape / Th’ efacement and reconnects them with their infection” of idolatry. Before cataloging the origins. Unlike childish things, idols can- names by which the fallen angels were known not simply be put away; they must be kept on on earth, Milton remarks that they had dif- public display as a record of their past infamy. ferent names when they “erst in Heaven sat Protestant churches in Reformation Germany on thrones” (1.360). As a consequence of the sometimes housed a Götzenkammer, or “idol fall, “of their names in Heav’nly records now / chamber,” used to store ritual objects and pic- Be no memorial, blotted out and razed / tures of saints that had been removed from By their rebellion from the Books of Life” view. The catalog of fallen angels—and in- (1.361–63; my emphasis). he phrase “blotted deed Paradise Lost itself—is a Götzenkammer out and razed” is written in the language of thrown open as an exhibition hall. iconoclasm, and, like Dowsing’s journal, the articulates the central rea- “Books of Life” contain no memory of partic- sons for preserving and exhibiting idols. “[I] n 30 Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast [ PMLA

the ield of this world,” Milton writes, good demons (490–91), he delivers the most per- and evil “grow up together,” leaving us with suasive oration in the demonic council of the the “incessant labor to cull out, and sort asun- second book, arguing that the fallen angels der.” Our chief intellectual vocation, by his should resign themselves to their place in hell: account, is not the extirpation of error—it will always be with us because it arises from the hus repulsed, our inal hope “impurity” within us—but rather the ardu- Is lat despair: we must exasperate ous task of extricating from it the truth with h’ almighty Victor to spend all his rage, which it is closely “involv’d and interwoven.” And that must end us, that must be our cure, To be no more. Sad cure; for who would lose, he “true warfaring Christian” is not charged hough full of pain, this intellectual being, to dispose of idols, since this would merely hose thoughts that wander through eternity, put them out of sight and thereby render them To perish rather, swallowed up and lost still more insidious (514–15). As in Paradise In the wide womb of uncreated Night, Lost, error is understood as an “infection that Devoid of sense and motion? (2.142–51) may spread” (517). But this infection “cannot be supprest,” Milton argues, likening the at- he appeal of this passage is founded on the tempt to the actions of “that gallant man who theoretical ideal. “All men,” writes Aristotle in thought to pound up the crows by shutting the opening sentence of the Metaphysics, “nat- his Parkgate” (520). he solution lies neither urally desire to know” (980a22), and Belial in destroying the artifacts of error nor in would have his demonic listeners believe the removing them from view. To the contrary, same of themselves. Like Aristotle’s philoso- once they have been culled from truth, they pher, their thoughts “wander through eter- must be put on display, since “the knowledge nity,” free from practical constraints (982a15). and survay of vice is in this world so neces- In language as ravishing as any in Milton’s sary to the constituting of human vertue, and epic, Belial elevates speculative knowledge, the scanning of error to the conirmation of divorced from obedience to God, to the posi- truth” (516). Like errors more generally, idols tion of supreme good. must be singled out, materially preserved, and he introduction to Belial’s oration warns made available for “survay” and “scanning.” of its allure: Milton effectively dismisses iconoclasts on practical grounds when he writes, “hey are On th’ other side up rose not skilfull considerers of human things, who Belial, in act more graceful and humane; imagin to remove sin by removing the matter A fairer person lost not Heav’n; he seemed of sin” (527). he objection is not that “remov- For dignity composed and high exploit: ing the matter of sin” is wrong in principle, But all was false and hollow; though his tongue but rather that it is inefective (“not skilfull”), Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear since knowledge of the “matter of sin” is nec- he better reason, to perplex and dash essary to the “constituting of human vertue.” Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low; The form I have been referring to as To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds epicrisis is the product of the strenuous Timorous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear, “sort[ing] asunder” by which idols are culled And with persuasive accent thus began. . . . from truth and held up to judgment. In Para- (2.108–18) dise Lost no idol is more carefully culled or unmistakably judged than Belial. Mentioned Belial is condemned in no uncertain terms. last in the catalog of “various idols” in the irst The more false and devious his intent, the book as the most “lewd” and “gross” of the more efective his oratorical abilities are as 127.1 ] Daniel Shore 31 instruments wielded for evil purposes. So are not carnal; but mightie through God” powerful are Belial’s counsels that the end of (257)—and thereby obscures the distinction his speech is greeted with yet another round crucial to both the tract and Milton’s broader of narrative censure: “hus Belial with words response to idols. he passage is not advocat- clothed in reason’s garb / Counseled ignoble ing destructive violence; to the contrary, this ease, and peaceful sloth, / Not peace . . .” quotation is taken from an extended argu- (2.226–28). If he seems to have offered the ment repudiating “the force of this world.” path of facility and peace, we are cautioned In matters of conscience, “spiritual power” is that these decent goals are vitiated by ignobil- not only morally superior; it is also “allsui- ity and sloth. cient.” Compared with this power, writes Mil- For all their evident contempt, the nar- ton, “how unefectual and weak is outward rative warnings do not mar the gorgeous force with all her boistrous tooles.” Might we surface of Belial’s oration but rather attest to include among these tools not only the “idle it. he most graceful and humane of the de- spear and shield” of the Nativity Ode but also mons is given over a hundred lines of dazzling the “sledges,” “levers,” and “iron crows” of the blank verse to state his arguments. he narra- iconoclast? Such tools violate the inverted hi- tive warnings do not splinter these arguments erarchy instituted by Christ, who “hath not or eliminate their force but render them “hol- chosen the force of this world to subdue con- low” (2.112), much as the infant Christ hol- science . . . but rather conscience . . . to sub- lowed out the dwellings of the pagan deities in due and regulate force.” the Nativity Ode. Readers are asked to appre- Rejecting “carnal” weapons and “the hend at once the outer appeal of Belial’s “per- force of this world” does not leave Milton suasive accent” and its inner vanity. It is as if without means of opposing idols. On the next Dowsing, stumbling on a dilapidated stained- page he quotes, from Matthew 23.23, Christ’s glass window in a parish church, had, instead reprimand to the Pharisees: “Ye have forc’d of ordering its demolition, painstakingly illed the conscience, which was not to be forc’d; each empty pane with deep stains of light and but judgment and mercy ye have not exe- color, and then, ater restoring it to a beauty cuted: this ye should have done, and let the beyond its original state, written beneath it other alone.” It is “judgment and mercy” that these words: “thus they relate / Erring.” Milton “executes” with regard to Belial: mercy Loewenstein has argued that Milton re- in granting him the most seductive argu- mained an iconoclast through his “late” po- ments, judgment in declaring them “false and lemics, “right up until the Restoration and hollow.” By executing judgment and mercy, beyond,” giving as evidence the following he has forged the weapon of his spiritual war- from Of Civil Power (1659): “the weapons fare: an idol “reversed,” turned back on itself of our warfare are . . . mightie through God as an instrument of “dissevering power.” to the pulling down of strong holds; casting It is with a feeling of regret, familiar by down imaginations and everie high thing now to Miltonists, that I note an unavoidable that exalts it self against the knowledge of exception to Milton’s “judgment and mercy.”5 God . . . having in a readiness to aveng all Whereas Of Civil Power had opposed only the disobedience” (142). Itself a quotation from “publick and scandalous use” of idols (255), 2 Corinthians 10.3–6, this passage is written Of True Religion, Milton’s final published about iconoclasm. But to make the treatise prose tract, unequivocally recommends the into an endorsement of iconoclasm, Loew- removal of “Papist” idols from both public enstein elides the following phrase, italicized and private life: “Toleration is either public or in the original—“the weapons of our warfare private; and the exercise of their Religion, as 32 Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast [ PMLA

far as it is Idolatrous, can be tolerated neither nations “fell / Idolatrous” (1.430–44). Satan way: not publicly, without grievous and un- also ofers himself as an idol to Christ, prom- suferable scandal giv’n to all consciencious ising “the kingdoms of the world . . . / On Beholders; not privately, without great ofence this condition, if thou wilt fall down, / And to God, declar’d against all kind of Idolatry, worship me as thy superior lord” (4.163–67). though secret” (430–31). Having rejected the Like his infant self in the Nativity Ode, the possibility of tolerating Catholicism, the tract mature Christ does not raise his hand to top- advocates a return to the logic of the icono- ple shrines, temples, or oracles. he haunts of clast: “first we must remove their Idolatry, idols do not crumble. hey merely fall silent, and all the furniture thereof, whether Idols, “mute” before the “living oracle” (1.459–60). or the Mass wherein they adore their God Nor does Jesus silence altogether or “forbid” under Bread and Wine” (431–32). In this en- Satan from coming to ply him with idolatrous dorsement of iconoclasm we ind neither the rhetoric (1.495). Rather, he hears him out, al- regenerative historical drama nor the dy- lowing the adversary to assert his claims in namic process of destruction and creation full before calmly and briely rebutting them. that Loewenstein and Cable attribute to idol With nearly all action and narration stripped breaking. We ind rather the banality of in- away, the epicritical form characteristic of tolerance, the failure to extend, to Catholics refutatio is more starkly manifest in Paradise as well as Protestants, the more principled Regained than in Milton’s other poetry. opposition to idolatry articulated in earlier At only one point in the poem does the works and, indeed, in Of True Religion itself. savior of mankind speak of violent, iconoclas- Removing the “furniture” of idolatry is also, tic destruction. In the fourth book he proph- by Milton’s own standards, a failure of prac- esies that his future reign will be “as a stone tice. In proposing “to remove sin by removing that shall to pieces dash / All monarchies be- the matter of sin,” Milton allies himself with sides throughout the world” (4.149–50). Lew- those he deemed in Areopagitica “not skilfull alski has noted that the image of the stone, considerers of human things.” drawn from Daniel 2.32–45, “seems to refer Other writings are more skillful. A to [Christ’s] millennial kingdom,” which will Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle suggests come at an undetermined point in the future the possibility of an alternative, nonicono- (226). Christ may be an eschatological icono- clastic method of opposing idols; Eiko no klas- clast, but in the unfolding of human history tes carries this method out in practice (if not he adopts a noniconoclastic response to idols. in self-representation); Paradise Lost diagno- This response is illustrated by the different ses the infection of idolatry and, by way of ways in which the image of the stone is recast treatment, holds idols up to discrediting judg- throughout the poem. For instance, Satan’s ment. In the figure of Christ, Paradise Re- rhetorical forays are compared to “surging gained depicts the success of this treatment, waves against a solid rock, / Though all to showing how a perfect man may triumph over shivers dashed, the assault renew, / Vain bat- the most persuasive of idols without resort- tery, and in froth or bubbles end” (4.18–20). ing to iconoclasm. Most of Milton’s brief epic Before the advent of his millennial king- is given over to the arguments of Satan, who dom, this is how Christ chooses to thwart tempts Christ with various forms of worldly his adversary. he idols end up “all to shivers might. Christ immediately recognizes his dashed” not because Christ assaults them but interlocutor as the adversary who has set up rather because they repeatedly renew their “shrine[s],” “temples,” and “oracles” as mouth- “assault” on him. Like the fallen angels in pieces for the “deluding” rhetoric whereby the Paradise Lost, whose names were “blotted out 127.1 ] Daniel Shore 33 and razed / By their rebellion,” Satan acts as [T] here will I the instrument of his own destruction, while build him Christ triumphs by resisting the persuasive A monument, and plant it round with shade powers of the idols he repeatedly encounters. Of laurel ever green, and branching palm, In the complex and messy middle ground With all his trophies hung, and acts enrolled In copious legend, or sweet lyric song. of human history, it is the image of the waves hither shall all the valiant youth resort, breaking against the rock, rather than the And from his memory inlame their breasts stone dashing “to pieces,” that best captures To matchless valor, and adventures high: Christ’s inal defeat of Satan. Placing Christ on he virgins also shall on feastful days the highest pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusa- Visit his tomb with lowers, only bewailing lem, Satan challenges the Son of God to rely His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice, on a miracle to save himself from falling, ob- From whence captivity and loss of eyes. serving that angels “shall uplit thee, lest at any (1733–44) time / Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone” (4.558–59). But Satan finds that he As Laura Lunger Knoppers has argued, “the has dashed himself against a stone when Je- supreme irony about the violence with which sus stands and responds, “Also it is written, / Samson Agonistes ends is that Samson’s active ‘Tempt not the Lord thy God’” (4.560–61). At iconoclasm against the Philistines enhances this reply, Satan is “smitten with amazement” the tendencies toward idolatry in his own peo- and falls to earth. However these lines are read, ple” (61). I would add that violence does more it is clear that Christ’s inal triumph is not ac- than enhance “the tendencies toward idola- complished through destructive violence.6 try”; it also leads to the construction of new Without needing to act, he stands “[p] roof idols. Manoa’s monument amounts to a new against all temptation as a rock / Of adamant” object of worship in place of the Philistine (4.533–34; my emphasis). When man’s obedi- idols destroyed with the theater. Again the ence to God remains unshaken, iconoclasm symptoms of idolatrous “infection” present proves superluous as well as inefective. themselves: iconoclastic destruction gives rise does not depict an to uncritical devotion to objects, succeeded iconoclastic response to idols, but Samson Ag- in turn by new acts of “matchless valor.” As I onistes, published in the same volume in 1671, noted earlier, Milton’s conception of idols ex- certainly does. Nowhere in Milton’s works do tends well beyond images and ceremonial ob- we ind a more spectacular act of destruction. jects to include people, actions, and ideas—in At the poem’s climax, Samson pulls down the short, the fullest range of persuasive human theater of the Philistines and with it all the errors. In Manoa’s vision we see the scope of rituals, games, and ceremonies dedicated “to idolatry extended further still: the memorial Dagon their sea-idol” (line 13). Critical de- he plans to build in “monument,” “legend,” bate has centered on whether Samson’s sui- and “song” shows how Samson’s inal acts will cidal iconoclasm is the act of a regenerate soul themselves become the objects of idolatrous submitting to God’s will or of a misguided regard. For Milton, even idol breaking may enthusiast motivated only by his own inner insidiously come to serve as an idol. promptings (Wittreich, Shiting Contexts 130). Iconoclastic readings of Samson Ago- But we may put this question aside to inquire nistes dwell on the similarity between into the public consequences of his violent Samson’s actions and Milton’s beliefs (Loew- act rather than the personal impetus behind enstein 140–51). Such readings understand it. Following Samson’s death, Manoa plans to the representation of iconoclasm as its en- memorialize his son with a monument: dorsement. he reading I propose here seizes 34 Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast [ PMLA

instead upon the difference between what it is elsewhere in Lucretius, the lure to in- Samson does as an iconoclast and what Mil- struction, the honey-rimmed cup that coaxes ton does as a poet: where Samson pulls down a child to drink bitter medicine (4.12–14); through might, Milton preserves through delight is rather the product of instruction, verse. This reading understands the repre- the joy that attends on our intellectual inde- sentation of iconoclasm as both an analysis of pendence from ignorance and sufering. he and an attempt to avoid iconoclasm’s failure. experience described by these lines, at once By chronicling Samson’s cataclysmic destruc- educative and aesthetic, has sometimes been tion of the Philistine idol and the substitute referred to as the Lucretian sublime.7 idol erected in celebration, Milton’s tragedy In both Paradise Lost and De rerum na- leaves the hammer to rest, refusing to repeat tura the sublime is a diicult, elevated plea- once more the cycle of iconoclastic repression sure, the achievement of which requires one and idolatrous return. to look upon idols to realize one’s indepen- I wrote at the outset that the rescued dence from them. Two opposed forces are idols that populate Milton’s poetry produce necessary to produce the experience of the an experience we may call the “idolatrous sublime. In his account of the “dynamically sublime.” In his criticism of Paradise Lost sublime,” Kant calls the irst force Gewalt: an Samuel Johnson famously observed, “The overwhelming power or subduing violence characteristick quality of his poem is sublim- (260–61). For Lucretius, as for Kant, this ity. He sometimes descends to the elegant, force is epitomized by the storm-tossed sea, but his element is the great. . . . He can please but in Milton’s poetry it is the persuasive al- when pleasure is required; but it is his pecu- lure of the idol that threatens to reduce us to liar power to astonish” (286). Subsequent crit- uncritical servitude. By rescuing and preserv- ics have agreed, employing the term sublime ing such idols as Mulciber, Belial, and Satan primarily in the sense deined by Longinus, at the height of their aesthetic and rhetorical to denote an elevated or “grand” style (Ricks appeal, Milton has placed behind this force 22). But the structure of epicrisis, of idols the whole of his poetic care. he second force captured and preserved under judgment, sug- is a capacity for resistance. It carves out the gests that Milton’s poetry gains much of its secure vantage from which we can safely wit- power from a philosophical sublime as well. ness the overpowering threat of idolatry, pre- In the most famous passage of De rerum venting us from prostrating ourselves before natura, Lucretius writes of watching from a even the most compelling idols. In a 1958 es- safe height the terror of mariners tossed on say Geofrey Hartman refers to this second stormy seas below. his spectacle gives us de- force, which removes the reader to the posi- light, “not because any man’s troubles are a tion of “observer ab extra” (6), as “Milton’s delectable joy, but because to perceive what Counterplot”—a plot, that is, counter to the ills you are free from yourself is pleasant” fall of our irst parents into sin and idolatry. (2.4–6). A still greater pleasure is available he two forces that produce the experi- to those who, possessing “lofty sanctuaries ence of the sublime correspond to the two serene, well fortiied by the teachings of the parts of epicritical form. An idol is made wise,” are able to “look down upon others and available for scanning, but we are at least behold them all astray” (2.7–10). By observ- partly sheltered from its seductiveness by ac- ing turmoil from a secure vantage, we gain companying criticism. Epicrisis thus allows an awareness of our independence from af- us to gaze upon overpowering idols without liction and the feeling of pleasure that arises being overpowered. As in Lucretius and Kant, from this awareness. Here delight is not, as the idolatrous sublime results in more than 127.1 ] Daniel Shore 35 aesthetic pleasure. Readers look upon idols these objects were cut of from their religious without becoming enthralled and thereby rise purpose, rendered (in the terms of Kant’s aes­ to an awareness of their independence. Emi- thetics) ohne Zweck (“without purpose”). But nently “public” but no longer put to “scandal- Milton’s poems are not art museums. Read­ ous use,” idols themselves liberate readers ing Paradise Lost is hardly akin to strolling from idolatry. through a gallery, admiring relics of the past he idolatrous sublime furnishes us with as harmless cultural treasures. Instead, the an inverted account—a photonegative, as poem confronts us with dangers—enthralling it were—of the formal features of Paradise orations, seductive errors, eloquent idols— Lost that Stanley Fish famously describes in that require unceasing vigilance. he closest Surprised by Sin as a “programme of reader analogues are not the collections of the Lou­ harassment.” In Fish’s account, reading the vre but rather, perversely enough, the muse­ poem makes us repeatedly aware of our own ums of scientiic atheism that Lenin set up in fallen nature. Ater being carried away by the churches throughout the Soviet Union (Bee­ eloquence of Satan or Belial, we are brought mans; Blakeley). These museums displayed up short by “a comment which complicates, religious images and artifacts as dangerous and according to some, falsiies” our initial instruments of ideological repression, not as reaction to these seductive figures (4). It is objects of adulation. Composing Paradise Lost this alternation of idolatrous seduction and involved a bizarre kind of curatorial labor, an corrective comment that I have described as unusual kind of care. For Milton, as for Lenin, epicrisis and that I take, as Fish does, to be every exhibit is out to enslave us. a key feature of the epic. But the idolatrous sublime efectively overturns Fish’s account of this experience: instead of discovering our fallen nature, we discover our indepen­ NOTES dence from idols. he efect of our discovery is not, as Fish would have it, a sense of guilt 1. he description of Milton as an iconoclast is pervasive or shame but rather a kind of rational exu­ and unchallenged: see Lewalski 213; Knoppers 8–9; Shoul­ berance. In the sublime experience of idols son 231; Bryson 148; Sauer 164. Gilman addresses broader issues of iconoclasm in English Renaissance literature. we ind ourselves surprised not by sin but (to 2. All quotations of Milton’s Eikonoklastes are from restore C. S. Lewis’s title) by joy. he Complete Prose Works. Earlier I likened Paradise Lost to a Götz- 3. While I write of “amnesty,” I am also partial to en kam mer, or Protestant “idol chamber,” the metaphor Gregerson uses when she suggests that the thrown open as an exhibition hall. his com­ similes of Paradise Lost constitute “a kind of house arrest for the likes of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid” (257). Despite parison locates Milton somewhere between describing Milton as an iconoclast, she claims that he and the iconoclasts of the seventeenth century Spenser seek “to remedy idolatry by preserving and re­ and the art collectors who rose to prominence forming the impulse they conceive to be idolatrous, not in the eighteenth. Over the course of Milton’s by fruitlessly seeking to eradicate it” (5). I argue, by con­ trast, that Milton preserves the idols themselves. lifetime, northern European Protestants in­ 4. This essay benefited from James Simpson’s con­ creasingly came to regard the material appur­ versation and generosity. For his account of Milton and tenances of Catholic worship as “beautiful Dowsing, which is contrary to my own, see 85–121. things” to be collected and cared for with 5. See Hadield on Milton’s anti­Catholicism, which secular rather than sacred adoration (Impey inds its most explicitly iconoclastic expression in Of True Religion but is present even in Areopagitica (565). and MacGregor 147–59). Detached from their 6. he essays collected in Wittreich’s Calm of Mind liturgical and devotional contexts and placed and Rajan’s he Prison and the Pinnacle contain a range in Wunderkammern, salons, and exhibit halls, of readings of these lines. 36 Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast [ PMLA

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