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Regeneration in Books 11 and 12 14 MARY C. FENTON Regeneration in Books 11 and 12 The i nal books of Paradise Lost show us that when life feels like “endless misery” or a “deathless death,” more courage might be required to choose to continue living than to choose to die (10.810; 798). Whatever seemingly unbearable suffering any of us may have to endure, we have the merciful advantage of not knowing the future. Unlike Adam , we are not given a time- lapsed vision of futurity that reveals the consequences of our sins rippling forward in time. The gift of not having foreknowledge empowers us with a guaranteed uncertainty about what the future holds, a lack of knowledge that may at times provide hope – the energizing, imaginative, and rejuve- nating strength that elevates the will to carry on living. Deeper than wishful thinking and larger than optimism or idealism, true hope is for the unseen and unknown, and Milton asserts in the last books of the epic that true hope requires faith in God and in the ways of God. Adam and Eve , knowing what they have done, knowing what they have lost, knowing – even worse – what the future holds because of what they have done and lost, must exhibit the profoundest faith and hope, i rst, in choosing to continue to love one another (10.958–61), then in not committing suicide (10.992–1046), and i nally in producing a human race doomed to sin and death. Still, they surmise that self-destruction or “willful barrenness” cuts them “off from hope” (10.1042–43), and they discover the most compelling reason to continue living is to enact the promise that they shall bring forth the “seed [that] shall bruise/ The serpent’s head” (10.1031–32). The very thing their knowledge of the future might dissuade them from doing presents itself as the very thing that will bend their sad story to its promised “happy end” (12.605). In living and in creating life, despite inevitable suffering – and in some ways because of suffering – there may yet be joy. The image of the seed i gures both the natural and spiritual process of regeneration, and is both a metaphor and metonymy for Christ , but Adam and Eve do not know this at i rst (Shullenberger 167). The “mysterious terms” (10.173), “obscurely . foretold” (12.543) when the Son curses the serpent, 179 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, on 09 Apr 2021 at 15:14:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139333719.018 Fenton will not be understood as referring to the Son’s later actions in his role as incarnated Redeemer until the archangel Michael reveals this in the visions to Adam in Book 12. Michael prefaces his exuberant account of the “great Messiah” (12.244) by reiterating the redemptive promise about the seed, the protevangelium (“the i rst prophecy of Christ”). Adam and Eve thus begin their return back to a right relationship with God with faith in the promise that will not only provide some merciful comfort for their personal and immediate future, but the primary source of hope for all humanity: by Eve “Man is to live, and all things live for man” (11.161). The i nal books cannot be read in isolation, though, detached from Raphael ’s earlier teachings, the narrator’s commentary, or the epic scenes showing the altogether different worlds of Eden and Heaven . These earlier portions of the epic animate Books 11 and 12 with an aching poignancy, and they help elucidate why Adam and Eve are able to discover resources they have for joy, comfort, and regeneration in the face of the sorrow and loss they will have to bear. The i nal books resound with the sad, but ulti- mately hopeful message of the epic, possible only because of human anguish and suffering, which, as C. S. Lewis says, is “the very nerve of redemption” (2002, 103). Regeneration and Suffering Still, readers have often complained that Books 11 and 12 feel anticlimactic, harsh, depressing, and even poetically disappointing after the psychological drama and invigorating tensions of the i rst ten books. Even C. S. Lewis himself famously complained that the i nal books were “inartistic” – an “untransmuted lump of futurity” (1943, 125). Other Milton critics have admitted that sometimes “the episode of Adam ’s visionary and auditory instruction [is] easier to read about than to read” (Shullenberger 176). The archangel Michael ’s lessons to Adam from the highest hill of Paradise, the “top/ Of Speculation” (12.588–89), strip human history bare to its iniquities and force us to witness dreadful human suffering – Adam’s and humanity’s. There seems to be very little goodness, let alone joy, possible in the world, so little that it might be fair to say that although the i nal books do not focus on Satan himself as a character, they certainly focus on his achieve- ments. Books 11 and 12 raise the provocative question of whether Satan accomplishes what he has set out to do since his own fall from Heaven : “to interrupt [God’s] joy” (2.371). Books 11 and 12 indeed circle back to Book 2 where Beelzebub i rst pub- licly proposed the retaliatory plan against God, “i rst devised/ By Satan,” proclaiming that interrupting God’s joy would “surpass/ Common revenge” 180 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, on 09 Apr 2021 at 15:14:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139333719.018 Regeneration in Books 11 and 12 (379–80; 370–71). This is no insipid, lackluster goal, symptomatic of a weakened, fallen state. Satan and the devil’s party aim to do nothing short of “kill[ing] God, as it were in the eye” (Areopagitica , YP 2:492). More than simply a state of divine emotion, joy, Satan recognizes, is the manifesta- tion of something essential to God. In this, Milton is following St. Thomas Aquinas ’s notion of how love and joy exist in God: “love is the origin and joy is the end result,” and thus “divine joy is identical with divine being” (Summa Contra Gentiles 17 n.19; Summa Theologiae I-II, q.3, a.2, ad I). Milton’s choice of word is telling. In “interrupting” God’s joy, Satan hopes, he will collapse, reverse, or disintegrate God’s providential design (the bringing of good out of evil). He hopes he will “grieve” God so deeply as to “disturb/ His inmost counsels from their destined aim” (1.167–68). From the Latin inter (“between”) and rumpere (“break”), “interrupt” means “tear apart,” and signii es breaking in, cutting short, even destroying the continuity of something, whether it is time, space, serial order, or action. Satan aims to fracture time itself, or at least the ordered time of the providential narrative: God’s will in action, the history of his creation unfolding in and toward joy. Satan believes, in other words, that he has identii ed joy as a divine vulner- ability. Having failed in direct confrontation, he strives with a new method of violence, a subterfuge that intends to collapse the equilibrium, tranquility, and dynamic stability of God’s love for his “new created world” (9.937), so that He might “with repenting hand/ Abolish” it (2.369–70). The critical, if unsettling, question of whether Satan can or does inter- rupt God’s joy centers on the synergetic relationship between suffering and regeneration that Michael ’s prophetic visions presents. The signii cance of the i nal books, then, comes not merely from the relentless spectacle of human faithlessness and its consequences, but from the remarkable possi- bilities of hope, love, and joy that must be shown to arise from it (either that or Milton’s justii cation fails, and Satan’s rupture is all there is). Milton therefore encloses the visions in Books 11 and 12 within the dis- course of regeneration, framing them with a preface and an epilogue, a narrative construction purposeful for two reasons: the prefatory section, describing Adam and Eve ’s penitential prayer (10.1086–11.21), and God and the Son ’s subsequent response (11.22–126), serves to “assert eternal providence” and to orient readers to the meaning and purpose of the upcom- ing visions. The visions’ preface emphasizes that suffering is not good for its own sake, but necessary because the human heart “Self-left” without God is “variable and vain,” (11.93, 92). Suffering leads to submission of the human will that leads to a return and reorientation to God, which is essential to regeneration (Lieb 1971, 205). Suffering causes Adam to fear, but also to feel pity and compassion, which brings him to a deeper understanding of 181 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, on 09 Apr 2021 at 15:14:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139333719.018 Fenton freedom and love because suffering presents choice: to continue to suffer as a result of being isolated from God, or to return to God in atonement – literally, “at-one-ment,” to make as one. As the Son puts it to the Father : “with me/ All my redeemed may dwell in joy and bliss,/ Made one with me as I with thee am one” (11.42–44).
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