MILTON'S IMAGE AND POETICS OF HUMANITY Walter Gardner Campbell Salem, Virginia B.A., Wake Forest University, 1979 M.A., University of Virginia, 1982 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia May, 1992 i Copyright by Walter Gardner Campbell All rights reserved May, 1992 ii Milton's Image and Poetics of Humanity A Dissertation by Walter Gardner Campbell supervised by James Nohrnberg and Gordon Braden ABSTRACT Milton's image of humanity is a poetics of humanity: a dynamic, dialogic image that multiplies and explores what Nicolas of Cusa calls "conjectural otherness," a poetics fully responsive to the pathos and ironic com­ plexities of human existence. Critics tend to dismiss Milton's image of humanity as an inferior element of his poetic achievement, usually because they force Milton's texts into a premature or inadequate univocality. In fact, however, an insistent binarism of emphatic alterity, an agonizing, transformative approach of opposites, per­ vades and characterizes Milton's work. I find four inter­ pretive analogues of Milton's image of humanity in Blake's "contraries," Kierkegaard's revision of Socrates, Valesio's rhetorics, and Bakhtin's dialogics. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, two strenuously opposed "companions," are the first extended examples of Milton's image of humanity. Their exaggerated opposition is an exercise neither in renunciation nor in static synthesis, but instead a piercing counterpoint, a music of opposition and alterity sounding within and between them. A confrontational dialogic also characterizes Satan's progress in Paradise Lost. Here a provocative God con- iii tinually confronts Satan with gracious opportunities for redemption: the renewal of heaven that precedes his fall, the "Jacob's ladder" that dares him to reascend to heaven, the sun/Son that he lands on then bitterly renounces, and the moment in which he is struck "stupidly good" before a solitary Eve. Milton's Arminianism and Origen's doctrine of apocatastasis suggest that Satan may not be finally damned until Eve falls. Prelapsarian Adam and Eve are also continually tempted by "contrarieties": they wrestle with God, the Son, an angel, a devil, each other, the Tree of Knowledge, even Paradise itself, all of which are "provoking objects." Yet Paradise's surprising hazards, its "enormous bliss," its prohibitions, and its defeats (save one), can quicken its keepers toward the glory for which they are created. One of the most provocative and diffi­ cult opportunities in Paradise is Adam and Eve's dialogue of gender differentiation and marriage, especially in Book 9's separation scene. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A great cloud of witnesses surrounds me. My best teachers bore me here: Mrs. Wills, Dennis Reaser, Elizabeth Phillips, Wilmer Sanders, Ralph Wood, Donna Mayer-Martin, Edwin Wilson, Germaine Bree. I am grateful to Alan Howard for his friendship, wise instruction, and integrity. James Nohrnberg and Gordon Braden provided imaginative supervision and generous encouragement. Their deeply reflective minds were exactly what this disserta­ tion needed; its remaining flaws are my own. Louis Schwartz and Terryl Givens have given me incalculable solace and inspiration. I thank my students for teaching me; I remember in particular Doug Bader, Eddie Dean, and Dabney Hammer. Special thanks must go to my two favorite Miltonists. Diane Mccolley saved my professional life during a dark time; her brilliance still brings me inward light. I owe most of all to William Kerrigan, my teacher, who prophesied I would be a Miltonist, and whose image of Milton provoked my own. I am blessed to have studied with him, and to continue to be enlivened by his spirit. To my mother and father, my mother-in-law and my father-in-law, and most of all to my wife Alice, without a doubt my most resembling unlikeness and my most unlike resemblance, I owe a debt I cannot name or repay. Their unflaggingly patient love has made this possible; their faith in me has not been in vain. V TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: The Image of Humanity........................ ! I. The Image of Milton............................ 3 II. The Renaissance Image of Man.................. 23 III. Milton's Poetics of Hurnanity.................. 34 IV. Four Analogues................................ 51 Chapter 2: The Music of Opposition................•.... 65 I. The Critical Tradition .........................67 II. Opposition and Counterpoint.................... 80 III. The Recovery of Opposition .....................94 IV. The Music of Opposition ....................... 133 Chapter 3: Satan Provoked ............................. 140 I. The Provoking Object ..........................149 II. The Gates of Heaven........................... 164 III. Spring and Fall............................... 186 IV. The Heavens and the Earth..................... 196 Chapter 4: The Provocations of Paradise ............... 219 I. The Wilderness of Sweets...................... 225 II. The Great Chain of Dialogue................... 238 Chapter 5: Differentiation and Dialogue............... 287 I. The Separation Scene.......................... 287 II. The Dialogue of Deception ..................... 308 Bibliography...................... ..................... 323 vi FOR MY MOTHER, WHO TAUGHT ME JOY FOR MY FATHER, WHO TAUGHT ME WONDER FOR ALICE, WHO TAUGHT ME AMOR VINCIT OMNIA S. D. G. 1 Chapter 1 The Image of Humanity In his Renaissance Concepts of Man, Paul Kristeller retells Petrarch's account of a mountaintop transfigura­ tion. Petrarch had climbed Mount Ventoux and found the view at the top overwhelming. At that emotional moment, he took his copy of Augustine's Confessions out of his pocket, opened it at random, and came upon the following passage: 'Men go to admire the heights of mountains, the great floods of the sea, the courses of rivers, the shores of the ocean, and the orbits of the stars, and neglect themselves.' Petrarch's response, Kristeller tells us, was one of anger and shame that this spectacle of natural sublimity had caused him to forget the fundamental truth that "man and his soul are the truly important subjects of our thought," a truth, tellingly, Petrarch found both in the Christian st. Augustine and the pagan Seneca.1 In coming to himself in this way, Petrarch becomes a true Renaissance man, standing near the headwaters of a current of Man-centered thought that comes to define the Renaissance for its inhabitants and its scholars.2 As Thomas Greene puts it, 1 Paulo. Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) 6-7. 2 Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy {1860) is perhaps the best known scholarly treatment of the theme of the Renaissance as an age that believed the proper study of Man was Man. The Image of Humanity 2 Petrarch at this moment gives us "literature growing out of an existential impulse," an impulse that Burckhardt 3 also judges a cornerstone of the Renaissance. In James Although many subsequent studies have complicated and supplemented Burckhardt's often idealized view of the Italian Renaissance as a Golden Age of human optimism and accomplishment, none has supplanted his central thesis: the Renaissance is strikingly, character­ istically preoccupied with Man in a newly intense way. In Burckhardt's words, the "inward development of the individual" in the Renaissance "corresponds [to] a new sort of outward distinction--the modern form of glory" (for which, of course, pagan antiquity was the model) (108). For a sympathetic analysis and supplement of Burckhardt, see William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 3-69. 3 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) 104. Charles Trinkhaus reaf­ firms Petrarch's judgment of Augustine's Confessions: "There the self, Augustine's self, is made manifest as pure subject in search of a vision of the world that corresponds to its own inner experience of truth••.. Petrarch ..• imitated Augustine both in the poignancy of his own search for wholeness and serenity and in his use of his own experiences as a guide for his brothers." See In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (London: Con­ stable Press, 1970) 18-19. Coming from a different angle, Greene argues that Petrarch's attempt at imitatio is poignant because it fails: "the passage from Augustine's text can only serve to underscore the pathos of the repetition's inadequacy" (111). See also Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; New York: Random House, 1954) 100: "In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness--that which was turned within as that which was turned without--lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil...• In Italy this veil first melted into air ...• The subjective side .• asserted itself ••• man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such." Burckhardt's account of medieval humanity is distorted The Image of Humanity 3 Nohrnberg's words: If we were to attempt to summarize the burden of Renaissance literature as a whole, we might say that it takes its birth from an expansionary ideal of human virtuosity, and then exposes the resulting myth--the myth of an awakening or potential godhood as available to man--to the profound critique of human subjectivity that seems to emerge as a rival for the myth itself. 4 I. The Image of Milton How very odd and ironic, then, that the Englishman who represents the last, fullest flowering of Renaissance Christian humanism, John Milton, should be thought by many readers to have ascended the most sublime peaks of vision and wonder of any English poet, yet also to achieved that virtuosity at the expense of a profound examination of human experience. For such readers, Milton's account of the subject is entirely, even obstinately inadequate; Petrarch's "existential impulse" at the headwaters of the Renaissance irrigates a fertile plain of vast extent--but by our standards, but perhaps not so much by the Renaissance's.