Professor John Rogers:
 Everyone agrees that the
epic similes in Paradise Lost
are different from the epic
similes in any other epic poem,
and everyone agrees -- I'm just
going to be presenting to you a
sense of critical consensus here
-- everyone agrees that the
similes are in some way
absolutely essential to an
understanding of this remarkable
poem.
Everyone agrees that what
Milton is doing in the similes
is educating the reader,
the reader of this poem.
He's introducing the reader to
a mode of vision different from
the vision typically permitted
him from within the poem's more
or less straightforward,
linear, narrative boundaries.
The similes enable us to see
something about the story that
the rest of the poem doesn't
enable us to see.
I think that it's fair to say
that everyone agrees on that,
and that's not nothing but
that's pretty much where the
agreement ends.
Milton's similes are
notoriously difficult as you no
doubt have already experienced.
The poem seems unusually
self-conscious about the role
that its similes play.
So think of the article on
Milton's similes by Geoffrey
Hartman.
Hartman describes Milton's
tendency in Paradise
Lost, and he takes this term
from Coleridge:
the tendency to stand ab
extra,
to stand from outside.
Milton's looking in at his own
work from a distance,
according to Coleridge and then
Hartman.
Hartman associates this image
of Milton's standing ab
extra with the figures in so
many of those similes who seem
also to be standing ab
extra.
I think Hartman is absolutely
right to note that it's this
aspect of Milton's similes that
sets them entirely apart from
the similes in any other epic
poem.Everyone should have a
handout.
Does everyone have a handout?
Yes, okay.
So this is my first point.
There's always,
and I think this is nearly
invariable -- there's an element
in Milton's similes that stands
outside the framework of the
basic comparison.
In Book One alone there are
four primary instances of what
we can think of as this primary
simile dynamic.
We can call these the observer
similes, and you see that
they're listed on the handout.
First we have the "Pilot of
some small night-founder'd
Skiff," and the pilot stands
ab extra,
from outside,
in the simile.
The simile is there ostensibly
to compare Satan with the great
sea beast, leviathan.
In the comparison of Satan's
shield with the moon is the
figure of the Tuscan artist,
the Tuscan artist being
Galileo.
Galileo appears in the simile
but actually seems to be
unnecessary for the general
purposes of the comparison.
Then we have the simile of the
fallen leaves,
which compares the fallen
angels to fallen leaves,
and in that simile we have the
image of the Israelites.
Milton calls them the
"Sojourners of Goshen," and
they're standing outside the
general parameters of the
comparison.
In each of these cases the
figure who stands ab
extra, from outside,
is an observer,
an observer looking in and
interpreting the action before
him and an observer in a
position presumably to make some
kind of moral judgment on the
action taking place.Okay.
First of all,
let's look at the simile that
compares Satan's shield to the
moon.
This is Book One, line 283.
This should be in the
Hughes, page 218.
Okay: 
He scarce had ceas't when
the superior Fiend [that's
obviously Satan]Was moving
toward the shore;
his ponderous
shield,Ethereal temper,
massy, large and
round,Behind him cast;
the broad circumferenceHung
on his shoulders like the Moon,
whose OrbThrough Optic
Glass the Tuscan Artist
viewsAt Ev'ning from the top
of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno,
to descry new Lands,Rivers
or Mountains in her spotty
Globe.
Let's try to take this apart.
As I see it,
the official function of this
simile is to give us a sense of
the size of Satan's shield and
thereby to give us a sense of
the size of Satan himself.
Satan's shield is as big as the
moon -- this is the most common
form of simile,
epic or otherwise,
and it can be schematized.
Well, I'm going to write on the
board, "shield equals moon," and
you can schematize it with,
let's say, "A equals A'."
A'?
You get it, something slightly
different from A.
That kind of makes sense,
but there's more,
of course, here than the moon
to describe Satan's shield.
It's a much more elaborate
simile than that:
"the broad circumference / hung
on his shoulders like the Moon
whose Orb / through Optic Glass
the Tuscan Artist views.
All of a sudden a third element
has been injected in to the
comparison.
It has nothing whatsoever to do
with the question of simply the
size of Satan's shield,
and we realize that we have to
redraw the schema into which we
fit this simile.
So it's not merely "A equals
A'."
It's "A equals A' X," and X
here would be Galileo,
the Tuscan artist.
The X of course doesn't
announce its purpose within the
logical context of the simile.
One of the labors of reading
Paradise Lost is the
reader's obligation to supply
the analog for the X,
and this poem is filled with
such X's.So,
what is it?
What is it, we ask,
in the action of the poem that
this X could be analogous
to?
It's a good question,
and I think it still stands
unresolved in the general
understanding of this poem.
What does this observer ab
extra represent?
Milton's similes always seem
overstuffed.
They're overdetermined.
They always mean or signify far
more than they're supposed to if
their job is simply to make a
comparison.
There's never been any
agreement, so far as I can tell,
as to who it is we're supposed
to be imagining the outside
observer to be,
and there are all sorts of
conjectures.
There is the reader.
There is God.
There's Milton.
There are a number of
possibilities.Now,
this particular simile conjures
for us an image of someone
trying to get a fix on Satan's
shield,
and there's the suggestion here
of an attempt to get a proper
perspective on this huge
character,
Satan.
By extension we have our
attempt as readers to arrive at
an understanding of the first
two books in general.
I think it's easy to see why
Milton would have wanted to do
this.
There's no question that it's
Satan who in these first two
books completely overwhelms our
imagination.
He's without question the most
compelling figure,
certainly, in the first two
books and, I think,
arguably in the entire poem.
This fact is a continually
troubling phenomenon both for
Milton and, of course,
for Milton's readers.
It only stands to reason,
I think, that Milton would want
to inscribe within this poem the
problem posed by this
extraordinarily compelling
characterization of Satan.
How are we supposed to see
Satan?
How are we supposed to arrive
at some kind of proper moral
discernment of Satan's being?
This is the type of question
that these similes are
continually raising.But we
have further to go with this
simile.
So initially the ponderous
shield is of an "ethereal
temper," we are told.
It has been tempered in a
celestial fire in ether,
and it was the ether of the
ethereal heavens that had always
been thought -- throughout the
Renaissance and long before,
of course -- to be the most
perfect substance imaginable.
The moon, too,
was widely believed to be a
perfect sphere of fiery ether.
Like the sun,
it was thought to be a perfect
heavenly body and,
as you probably know,
it was Galileo though -- the
Tuscan artist,
the Italian astronomer -- who
disproved just that assumption
in 1610 when he published the
Sidereus Nuncius (The
Starry Messenger). So
with his optic glass,
his telescope,
Galileo was able to discern
spots on the orb of the moon.
It turned out to be a spotty
globe just like the earth.
The moon seemed to contain all
of the geological imperfections
[laughs]
of earth.
Suddenly, looking through the
optic glass, one could see
valleys, it seemed to have
rivers, and there were
mountains.
It could no longer be said that
the moon was perfect.
It was no longer a fiery
heavenly body.
It was no longer,
after Galileo,
of an ethereal temper.It's
in this light that the
introduction,
I think, of Galileo in this
simile starts to make a little
more sense.
If we had been thinking -- and
some of us may well have been
thinking and we were right to
think provisionally -- that
Satan was a character that we
could actually identify with,
if we had been thinking that
Satan was in any way a perfect
character with some sort of
justifiable claim -- these
thoughts are now being corrected
by the means,
by the mechanism, of the simile.
Like the moon,
Satan may look beautiful,
but upon a closer scrutiny that
beauty begins to yield certain
metaphysical flaws.Okay.
That's one way to read the
simile, one way to make sense of
this mention of the X,
the Galileo figure.
That's a moral reading of
Paradise Lost that I've
just given you;
but of course,
it's only a partial one because
we haven't gone further enough.
It's not simply that Galileo
represents the admiring observer
of Satan who is finally able to
arrive at a just sense of his
moral spots and imperfections.
It's more complicated than that.
Galileo himself is viewing the
situation from a fallen and an
unperfect, uncertain
perspective.
Galileo's only using,
of course, his telescope in the
first place because his human
capacity for vision is
insufficient to see the truths
of the heavens.
The unfallen Adam certainly
didn't need a telescope to
discern a lot about the heavenly
bodies.
Further complicating the
picture, Milton places this
scene of observation with
extraordinary care at the moment
of evening.
You'll be noticing as you read
and reread the poem just how
many crucial moments in
Paradise Lost occur at
evening or twilight,
that privileged moment between
day and night in which objects
in our field of vision may be
visible,
but they're nonetheless
indistinct and indeterminate.
They're blurred.So,
Galileo here is struggling to
get the proper visionary fix on
the moon at a point in the day
when there are no absolutes.
We're in between absolute day
and absolute night,
light and dark.
Milton pushes this image even
further into indistinctness with
an instance of his famous
deployment of the conjunction
or.
It has been argued,
and I think this is a brilliant
point, that the most important
word in Paradise Lost is
or, the conjunction.
We'll be talking about why
that's the case,
but you'll get a little sense
of it here: "the Tuscan Artist
views…
/ from the top of Fesole,
/ or in Valdarno…"
Well, on some level we'd kind
of like to know which it is,
either on the top of a mountain
or in a valley -- the Valdarno,
the valley of the Arno River in
Italy.
The place names may seem just
superfluous here,
something additional that has
nothing whatsoever to do with
the actual purpose of the
comparison,
but Milton's uncertainty or the
narrator's uncertainty as to
whether Galileo has stationed
his telescope at the top of a
mountain or deep in a valley
raises an important question
about the status,
literally the status,
of the observer here.
It's not just that Satan or the
moon or whatever it is that
we're looking at seems
indeterminate until we get a
proper look at it.
It's so much more complicated
than that.
We don't even know where it is
we're supposed to be looking
from, and the choice between
Fesole and Valdarno that Milton
gives the reader is crucial
here.
The fact of the proliferation
of possible perspectives is just
as important,
and I would think it's actually
even more important,
as any single seemingly proper
perspective.Okay.
This is only the first mention
of Galileo in the poem and,
as you will see if you're
careful in looking at your
footnotes in the Hughes,
appears two other times within
the later similes in the poem,
always in a simile.
You have on the handout the
other mentions in Paradise
Lost of Galileo.
It would be a wonderful paper
topic, an examination of all of
the Galileo similes.
I think it stands to reason to
assume that this figure of
Galileo is of some importance to
Milton and the workings of the
poem.
Galileo is the only
contemporary personage,
the only seventeenth-century
figure, even so much as
mentioned in Paradise Lost.
The rest of contemporary
history, including all of the
stormy events leading up to
Milton's own beloved Puritan
Revolution,
in which Milton himself,
of course, had participated --
all of that has been at least at
the literal level,
at the explicit level,
expunged from the
poem.Galileo's important.
Milton had written in
Areopagitica that he had
actually met Galileo on his
journey,
when Milton was a young man and
Galileo was a very old man,
through the continent.
When Milton met him,
Galileo would have been old and
blind, not unimportant to the
later Milton,
and Galileo was under house
arrest at his home in Fiesole.
He'd been imprisoned for his
intellectual daring and
affirming the Copernican view
that the earth orbited around
the sun.
He had rebelled against the
supreme authority of the Roman
Catholic Church,
and in this respect,
he provides the poem with
something like an earthly
version of the arch-rebel Satan
of course: Satan who rebels
against the supreme authority of
the heavenly father.Well,
that makes sense,
kind of, that Milton had
clearly admired the astronomer.
In calling him here the Tuscan
artist, in some respects we can
see him forging an
identification between himself
as a literary artist and Galileo
as a scientific artist.
The rebellious artist Milton
and the rebellious astronomer
Galileo are continually
threatening to lapse into some
sort of identity with Satan
himself.
Suddenly, the distinctions that
the simile works so hard to
establish are beginning to
erode.
Not just that,
but the moral certainties that
may have seemed distinct when we
contrasted the ethereal heaven
with the spotty and the
imperfect nature of Satan and of
the moon -- those,
too begin to seem fairly hazy.
The simile sets out to
establish the moral polarities
between good and evil,
but it then works almost
systematically to undo that
understanding.
The perspective is an evening
perspective rather than a
perspective of total
illumination.
The similes are continually
working to unleash -- and
they're really quite unruly in
this respect -- to unleash the
moral and the theological
confusion that so much of the
rest of the poem seems really
quite eager to pin down and to
fix.That was the Galileo
simile.
That's how big Satan's shield
was: well, how big is Satan's
spear?
Milton compares it to the mast
of a ship.
This is line 292 in Book One,
the bottom of page 218 in the
Hughes.
This is a simile that Stanley
Fish brilliantly describes as
central to a certain temporal
procedure common in Milton's
verse;
Fish is interested in the
temporal process of reading in
general.
It's this extraordinary insight
that he gives us:
we can only read one word at a
time, we can only read one line
at a time.
Fish argues that the simile has
no choice but to unfold over
time, and so in the example
about Milton's spear,
we read first that -- this is
line 292, this is how Stanley
Fish's reading goes:
"His Spear,
to equal which the tallest Pine
/ hewn on Norwegian hills,
to be the Mast / of some great
Ammiral [or flagship]."
An "Ammiral" is a big
warship.Now we may assume,
having read only that much of
the simile,
that Satan's spear is as tall
as the mast of the ship,
not a small spear.
And so we adjust our minds to
accommodate -- because
presumably we weren't imagining
Satan to be that big -- to
accommodate this sense of
Satan's tremendous physical
magnitude.
Surely, Satan is bigger than
anything we had been assuming,
but the simile continues.
As soon as we read the next
lines, we're struck with the
possibility -- and surely it's
just a provisional possibility,
but we're struck by the image
that Satan's spear is actually
quite small.
His spear "were but a wand / he
walkt with to support uneasy
steps."
If only for a moment,
Satan suddenly seems old and
frail.
This is an image of an old man
with a cane.
We have to adjust our
understanding of his physical
size one more time,
and of course necessarily his
moral magnitude would be
adjusted as well in our
interpretation.Needless to
say,
we're not done.
The simile isn't telling us
that Satan's spear is as small
as a wand because what we have
is a syllogism here.
Satan's spear is to the tallest
pine what the tallest pine is to
a little, bitty wand.
Finally we realize that Satan's
spear [laughs]
is of an unimaginable
proportion.
Just as soon as we crowded our
imagination already with the
image of the spear the size of a
Norwegian pine,
which took a certain
imaginative leap on our parts,
we realize that Satan and his
spear are immeasurably larger
even than that.
The simile pushes the size of
the spear clean out of our
rational comprehension,
and it's this process that is,
according to Stanley Fish,
the point of the simile.
The circuitous,
logical route that we had to
take in order to arrive at this
new sense of Satan's size has
everything to do with our status
as temporally bound,
temporally constrained
readers.The genius of Fish's
reading of Milton's similes is
to understand the particularly
time-bound nature of Milton's
verse.
So first we read that Satan's
spear is big.
Then we read,
or at least we think we read,
that Satan's spear is small,
and then we realize over the
course of this reading process
that Satan's spear is
unimaginable,
and we realize that our
time-bound mode of knowing is
ultimately inadequate to
understand anything about the
inscrutable truths of eternity:
this is according to Fish.
We can't know anything certain
about the eternal and the
immortal world of Paradise
Lost except through these
faculties we have and those are
uncertain,
imperfect, fallen human
capacities of reading.
Milton wants the reader to know
that she's fallen,
we are all fallen,
and any problem that we have in
understanding the theology of
heaven and hell is our problem
as fallen readers.
Fish imagines Milton as always
on some level slapping the
reader's wrist,
reminding the reader of his or
her fallen-ness,
that there's a constant
pedagogical correction going
on.That was Stanley Fish.
The other great critic of the
Miltonic simile for my money
takes a completely different
tack,
and that's Geoffrey Hartman who
makes an argument that might
even be thought to contradict
Fish's argument,
although actually Geoffrey
Hartman wrote his piece first.
Hartman's image of the simile
isn't temporal the way Fish's
was.
It's spatial.
For Hartman,
the Miltonic simile actually
permits the reader something
like the perspective of
eternity,
a divine perspective,
and of course,
this is exactly what Stanley
Fish had told us was impossible.
The rhetorical strategy that
Milton uses to give us this
perspective of eternity is what
Geoffrey Hartman called Milton's
counter-plot.
Like Fish, Hartman is most
interested in the similes of the
first two books,
the similes that provide some
kind of window onto the world of
Satan, and he focuses on the
simile actually that follows the
simile of Satan's shield that
we've been looking at;
it follows the simile of the
spear that Fish had analyzed.
This is the simile of the
leaves.
I'm going to ask you to look at
line 300 of Book One,
page 219 in the Hughes.
Satan has roused himself
from off the burning marl,
and he stands in order to call
up his fallen minions,
to rouse them to acts- great
acts of heroism.
…
he stood and call'dHis
Legions, Angel Forms,
who lay intrans'tThick as
Autumnal Leaves that strow the
BrooksIn Vallombrosa,
where th' Etrurian
shadesHigh overarch't
imbowr;
or scatterd sedgeAfloat,
when with fierce Winds Orion
arm'dHath vext the Red-Sea
Coast,
whose waves
o'erthrewBusiris and his
Memphian Chivalry,While with
[this thing doesn't end]
perfidious hatred they
pursu'dThe Sojourners of
Goshen,
who beheldFrom the safe
shore thir floating
CarcassesAnd broken Chariot
Wheels;
so thick bestrewnAbject and
lost lay these,
covering the Flood,Under
amazement of thir hideous
change.
For me the [laughs]
absolutely shocking fact of
this simile is that its primary
purpose is merely [laughs]
to describe the number of
angels who are prostrate on the
burning lake of hell.
They lie entranced,
thick as -- how many angels
were there?
They lie "thick as Autumnal
leaves that strew the Brooks /
in Vallombrosa";
but Milton will pursue this
simile with such a relentless
drive -- it's exhausting -- that
by the end of it,
I think we've probably
forgotten its role in merely
illustrating the quantity of
angel forms.Now the angels
lay as thick as the sedge on the
Red Sea coast when
Pharaoh--Milton uses the Latin
Busiris for
"Pharaoh"--with all his Egyptian
army chased the Israelites
across the Red Sea after God --
and this is the story told in
Exodus 14 -- parted the Red Sea
to allow the "Sojourners of
Goshen,"
the Israelites, to cross.
Satan's described initially
here as the wind god Orion,
a classical figure who vexed or
tossed the waves of the Red Sea,
just as Satan is rousing and
inspiring his fallen host of
angels;
but Milton continues to
complicate the simile.
He quickly complicates our
identification of Orion with
Satan, which wasn't arrived at
that easily to begin with.
Satan may be like the wind,
Orion, but Orion here is also
seen as vexing and destroying
the Egyptians whose carcasses
wash up on the shores of the Red
Sea,
and the Israelites,
having crossed the Red Sea
safely, look on at this
destruction from the safety of
their shore.Think about it.
Something's gone awry in this
simile.
The wind, Orion,
had initially represented the
heroic general of his troops,
Satan -- Geoffrey Hartman would
describe this as the plot of the
simile;
but this wind,
Orion, begins immediately to
destroy the evil Busiris,
the Egyptian Pharaoh:
a figure that biblical history
had long associated with Satan
and had considered to be an
earthly version or a type of
Satan.
So you have a wind god who is
identified with Satan destroying
Pharaoh, who is also identified
with Satan,
just as he attempts to destroy
God's faithful.
And it's this final movement of
the simile, according to this
ingenious argument by Geoffrey
Hartman, that Hartman calls the
counter-plot.
Embedded within the explicit
plot of the simile is a secret,
a kind of buried narrative,
and it's a hidden story that
illustrates Satan's
self-destruction.
It illustrates Satan's
self-destruction even as the
main narrative of the simile
portrays Satan's heroism.
The plot around the simile is
glorifying the heroic Satan
here, and Hartman ingeniously
locates throughout a number of
Milton's similes this same
dynamic of a redemptive
counter-plot.
It's as if there is a
subterranean,
figurative movement at work in
the simile that's continually
reminding us,
according to Hartman,
of the calm efforts of divine
providence on behalf of us,
of good Christian men and women
-- some ultimate divine control
over the evil actions of
Satan.Now the genius of
Hartman's argument about the
counter-plot was that when
Hartman floated this argument in
the late ‘50s was that it
enabled us to understand -- not
us,
we weren't born then,
but it enabled readers of
Milton to understand for the
first time something like the
theological purpose behind a lot
of the most fascinating and
extraordinary rhetorical effects
of the poem.
And Hartman made sense of the
seemingly chaotic and confused
movement of the narrator's
imagination here.
This counter-plot continues to
reinforce, according to Hartman,
our faith in the two most
important elements of the poem's
theology: and that's man's free
will or Milton's doctrine of
free will on the one hand,
and Milton's insistence on the
importance of divine providence
on the other hand -- God's
foreknowledge.
Through the dynamics of the
counter-plot,
the similes reassure us of what
Hartman calls the "graceful
coexistence of free will and
divine providence."Let's
move on.
Neither of these critics --
neither Fish nor Hartman
discusses one of the most
celebrated aspects of this last
simile that we've looked at,
and I have a little hunch that
there's a reason for their
neglect.
This is the initial part of the
simile that describes the
leaves: "thick as Autumnal
Leaves that strow the Brooks /
in Vallombrosa,
where th' Etrurian shades /
high overarch't imbow'r."
At least since the eighteenth
century, these lines have been
singled out for their beauty
and,
considering that Milton is
describing the hideous demons
under Satan's control,
the pastoral elegance of this
little simile really catches us
off guard.There's naturally
a lot of pressure on Milton to
make this part of the simile
beautiful and striking because
he's echoing not just one epic
poet,
but essentially he's echoing
just about every epic poet.
Homer and Virgil and,
well after them,
Dante and innumerable others
have all applied the simile of
the leaves or some version of it
to describe the numberless-ness
of the dead.
This is on your handout.
In The Iliad,
as you can see,
the warrior Glaucus uses the
simile of the leaves to dismiss
the importance of genealogy.
"Why does it matter what family
I'm from?"
he asks Diomedes.
"Very like leaves upon this
earth are the generations of
men."
There's a kind of organic
continuity that men partake of
just as the natural world does.
Virgil alludes to just this
passage in Homer when he
describes the entrance of a
whole crowd of people in to the
underworld as "the falling of
leaves in the early frost of
autumn."
This is where Milton gets the
"autumnal."
Finally, Dante alludes to this
image of the Virgilian
underworld in The Inferno
when he describes the
descent of humanity,
the evil seed of Adam,
into the Christian hell.
It's Dante who first supplies
the notion of fallen-ness,
the theological notion of
fallen-ness,
to this idea of the fact that
the leaves have fallen because
of course Dante,
unlike Homer and Virgil,
is a Christian and has access
to the Christian myth of the
Fall.And so it would seem to
be Dante's use of the image that
has a primary influence here on
Milton,
but, as we might expect,
there is a complication in the
way that Milton uses this
particular image.
Vallombrosa is a place in Italy
that Milton had actually visited
as a young man.
He visited Vallombrosa when he
was introduced to Galileo in
Fiesole.
Vallombrosa literally means
"shady valley," and I think it
recalls Galileo's shady place,
Valdarno, another valley.
As you know,
in classical literature the
dead are referred to as shades,
but here in Milton's simile
"shades" merely means "shade
trees."
It refers solely to trees,
and Vallombrosa is the place
"where th' Etrurian shades /
high overarch't imbow'r."
If these trees are still
supplying shade,
embowering the entire valley of
Vallombrosa, the leaves haven't
all fallen, of course.
They're only in the process of
falling.
I think this is an important
distinction because what you
have here in the middle of this
simile in Milton's account of
hell is an image of a bower.
This is a little paradise,
a paradise on the verge of
being lost as the shades lose
their leaves.
The leaves are about to fall
but they haven't yet fallen.
I think it's the imminence of
their fallen-ness that lends
this image its incredibly
powerful emotional intensity and
also,
I think, its beauty.Now,
the simile concludes with the
strong sense of a hideous change
-- and you will recognize this
pattern again and again in
Milton -- the hideous change
undergone by the fallen angels.
But what we have here is an
image of the beauty of that
change, the beauty of the fact
that the leaves are falling.
Both Hartman and Fish argued
that the rhetorical strategies
of Milton's similes work to
reinforce the theological
categories of good and evil.
They argue that the similes are
supposed to reassure us that
there is a divine good that
ultimately overwhelms the evil
represented by Satan;
but neither of these critics
was able to discuss directly
Milton's aestheticization of the
Fall in the lines on
Vallombrosa.
That's because it's here where
the rigid polarities between
light and dark and good and
evil, all of these absolute
oppositions, begin to collapse.
Milton opens up a shady space
for something approaching a kind
of moral relativism where black
and white theological categories
simply don't apply.
Of course, this is only
provisional but the shady space
exists nonetheless.
He returns us to the lowly
perspective that Galileo had
when he set up his telescope in
that other valley,
Valdarno, and it's this lowly
vantage point that's beautiful
in part because it's a fallen
perspective,
not in spite of the fact that
it's a fallen perspective.I
think now we can see why these
lines about the autumnal leaves
are so difficult for us to
incorporate into a moral reading
or a theological reading of the
poem.
They're invariably cited as
among the most beautiful and
exquisite lines in Paradise
Lost but on some level
they've proven the bane of
scholars because they can't be
squared with any of the poem's
theological message.
This is the remarkable thing
about so many of Milton's
similes: they're always bursting
out of whatever critical or
theological constraints that we
work so hard to impose on them.
So for Stanley Fish,
Milton is always reminding us
of our fallen-ness as readers
and we're continually being
encouraged to submit all of our
uncertainties and all of our
doubts to the power of faith.
God is in control of the
universe and if the poem seems
-- not that Stanley Fish
believes in God,
but nonetheless his Milton
certainly does -- God is in
control of the universe.
If the poem seems momentarily
to suggest otherwise,
that's simply Milton's way of
reminding us of the extent of
our fallen-ness.
Geoffrey Hartman's theory had a
similar tendency to align the
poem with a kind of a religious
orthodoxy.
The similes are for him
instrument in the poem's larger
agenda to reinforce our faith in
the coexistence of free will and
divine providence -- difficult,
huge concepts.Hartman's
absolutely right to insist that
no theological concept is as
important to Paradise Lost
as free will on the one hand
and divine providence on the
other.
We can say that,
but I wonder if it's possible
even for these similes to
convince us of the easy
coexistence of these two
incredibly important theological
categories,
free will and divine
foreknowledge.
Long before Milton had begun to
[laughs]
tackle the problem,
Christians had for centuries,
for millennia,
puzzled over the logical
inconsistency between these two
concepts.
We all have our version of
trying to wrestle with this:
if God knows what you're going
to do tomorrow,
to what extent does it make
sense to say that what you do
tomorrow you do freely?
Milton, like a lot of orthodox
Christians, will insist when
he's speaking theologically that
God's foreknowledge has no
causal effect whatsoever on the
future,
and so it doesn't actually
impinge on our free will.
God the Father will make a
similar argument in Book Three.
The conclusion reached in Book
Three is that God has
foreknowledge but he isn't
interested in actual
predetermination or some type of
divine action that literally
compels the behavior of human
creatures.
So it's possible,
presumably, to say that Adam
and Eve actually had no choice,
they had no choice when they
decided to eat the fruit,
and even though God knew that
of course -- no,
[laughs]
I said exactly the wrong thing.
This is the confusion --
"wandering mazes lost"!
-- that the problem of free
will and foreknowledge puts us
in.
Even though God knew exactly
what Adam and Eve would do --
that they would eat the fruit --
we still have to be able to say
that they ate the fruit freely
out of their own free
will.Now,
scholars are ingenious in their
ability to skirt absolutely the
central conundrum of Providence
that this poem raises and which
it raises so insistently and
really refuses to let go of;
but that doesn't mean that the
problem just goes away.
I can't help but feel that
within the context of the
[laughs]
actual story of the Fall,
the Fall of Adam and Eve,
that the idea of divine
providence isn't actually all
that comforting.
The very idea of divine
providence, when it's injected
into the story of Adam and Eve's
perfectly disastrous choice to
eat the apple,
seems to arouse in a lot of us
feelings of injustice.
What would we call this now?
This is entrapment.
Why did God place the stupid
fruit in the garden in the first
place if he knew in advance that
Adam and Eve were going to eat
the thing?
The very idea of Providence in
this context can,
in fact, assume a kind of
menacing force that seems to
compel men and women to their
evil actions regardless of their
technical possession of this
capacity that we feel very
comfortable calling free
will.So,
Hartman and Fish have forwarded
two perfectly ingenious theories
of Milton's similes,
and they've had a tremendous
impact, rightly,
on generations now of readers
of Milton.
They've taught us how to
appreciate what's strangest and
most remarkable about
Paradise Lost,
 but I simply cannot
agree with their suggestion that
Milton's similes work in any
meaningful way to strengthen our
belief in the Christian idea of
the coexistence of free will and
God's foreknowledge.
I am not convinced that the
poem's radical and most
subversive and most exquisite
rhetorical effects,
these amazing similes,
present us with anything like a
simple and unambiguous religious
message.
Paradise Lost as a whole
clearly wants us to believe that
God has foreknowledge and it
also clearly wants us to believe
that we have free will,
but the similes seem just as
often to open up and to question
the poem's doctrinal
conclusions.
The similes work not to sew
everything up but make it
impossible for us to maintain
anything like the official
position on a moral distinction
between heavenly good and
satanic evil.
Milton's interest in moments of
blurriness and of visual
indistinctness suggest that the
distinction between good and
evil is actually never that
clear.Okay.
We have time for another
simile, the last simile of Book
One.
This is page 231 in the
Hughes.
This is the simile of the
belated peasant that Hartman
describes.
Satan and the fallen angels are
entering the magnificent
structure of Pandemonium,
and at one instant all of the
angels shrink in order to fit in
to the building,
however big it is.
It's obviously too small for
the angels to fit there in their
proper dimensions.
Look at line 779 of Book One: 
[They]
in narrow roomThrong
numberless, like that Pigmean
RaceBeyond the Indian Mount,
or Faery Elves,Whose
midnight Revels,
by a Forest sideOr Fountain
[Well, which is it?
This is another important
or]
some belated Peasant
sees,Or dreams he sees,
while over-head the
MoonSits Arbitress,
and nearer to the
EarthWheels her pale course;
they on thir mirth and
danceIntent,
with jocond Music charm his
ear;At once with joy and
fear his heart rebounds.
Now, the purpose of this simile
is to evince the indistinctness
and the confusion produced by
our vision of the fallen angels.
We can only imagine the fallen
angels with a kind of dim
uncertainty just as the belated
peasant sees,
or perhaps he only dreams he
sees, the dance of fairy elves
by a forest side.Now,
so many scholars of Milton are
under some sort of pressure to
reconcile everything in Milton's
universe to a single theological
message,
but I think there's something
in this simile that resists our
alignment of all the things that
the peasant sees with the
satanic world of unmitigated
evil,
of the fallen angels.
There's a difference between
fairy elves and hideous demons,
I submit, and with the phrase
"sees or dreams he sees,"
Milton's alluding to Virgil's
Aeneas who descends to the
underworld and catches a glimpse
of the shade of his dead lover,
Dido -- or he thinks he catches
a glimpse of the shade of his
dead lover, Dido.
The Virgilian echo gives this
passage in Milton an
unmistakable pathos and an
undeniable beauty.
As with the passage on the
falling of the leaves there's a
kind of elegiac tone that works
to undo,
or at least to challenge,
our theological certainty.
As we've noticed,
all of these similes have these
observer figures and this one
does, too.
There's a second figure here
standing ab extra,
and that's the moon hovering
overhead: "while over-head the
Moon / sits Arbitress."
We're naturally invited to
question what force is it that
this moon represents.
Now you may remember what
Geoffrey Hartman had argued that
the moon represents the power of
divine providence,
and there's a lot of ways in
which this reading makes sense.
An arbitress is a judge and she
would seem to oversee the
justice in this world.
The question of providential
justice is of course of primary
significance to Milton's poem,
but Hartman goes on to say that
the moon, which reminds us of a
calm and perfect sense of
Providence,
also works to guarantee the
principal of free will.So,
this is my question to you:
how complete and perfect is the
image of Providence that hovers
moonlike over the pages of
Paradise Lost?
I think Milton is
encouraging us in these similes
to question, really to wrestle
with,
the theological certainties
that the rest of the poem labors
to establish.
The uncertain status of divine
providence here,
I think, is made clear by its
figuration as a moon.
So I'm going to conclude here
by reminding you what you
already know.
We have already seen a moon in
Book One.
The moon was compared to
Satan's shield,
and Milton was preparing us
then for this radically
ambiguous status of this
providential moon.
It was Galileo's job,
you'll remember,
with his telescope to detect
the otherwise undetectable spots
and imperfections in this
seemingly,
but only seemingly,
perfect moon.
I'm convinced that it's the
reader's job to apply the same
degree of critical scrutiny,
a kind of Galilean critical
scrutiny, to the image of
Providence that will be
elaborated,
as you will see,
at extraordinary length in Book
Three of Paradise
Lost.So,
for next time you'll read Book
Three.
You will focus,
however, on the opening
invocation.
Please do read all of the other
selections as well.
You will have sonnets and
little bits of prose.
We'll be talking about Milton's
blindness.
 
