Milton and Ecology

M I LTO N A N D E C O L O G Y

In Milton and Ecology, Ken Hiltner engages with literary, theoretical, and historic approaches to explore the ideological underpinnings of our current environmental crisis. Focusing on Milton’s rejection of dualistic theology, metaphysical philosophy, and early modern subjectivism, Hiltner agues that Milton anticipates certain essential modern ecological arguments. Even more remarkable is that Milton was able to integrate these arguments with biblical sources so seamlessly that his interpretative “Green” reading of scripture has for over three centuries been entirely plausible. This study considers how Milton, from the earliest edition of the Poems, not only sought to tell the story of how through humanity’s folly Paradise on earth was lost, but also sought to tell how it might be regained. This intriguing study will be of interest to eco-critics and Milton specialists alike. k e n h i lt ner has published widely on Milton. His articles have been published in Milton Studies, Milton Quarterly, and English Language Notes.

M I LTO N A N D E C O L O G Y K E N H I LT N E R

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521830713 © Ken Hiltner 2003 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2003 - isbn-13 978-0-511-48363-9 OCeISBN isbn-10 - isbn-13 978-0-521-83071-3 hardback - isbn-10 0-521-83071-0 hardback

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Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

page vi vii

Introduction

1

part i: hav ing pl ace 1 Place defined: the ecological importance of place

11

2 Place given: Eve as the garden’s spirit of place

30

3 Place lost: Eve’s Fall as an uprooting

43

4 Place regained: Sabrina puts down roots

55

part ii: the underlying importance of pl ace 5 The New Testament’s call to place: Paul’s and Luther’s deconstructions

75

6 Rejecting the placeless ancient doctrines: confusing Paradise Regained

86

7 The Old Testament’s call to place: Job’s wisdom in Milton’s poetry

102

8 The influence of time on place: forbidding unripe fruit

113

9 Place, body, and spirit joined: the Earth–Human wound in Paradise Lost

125

Notes Select bibliography Index

135 156 163 v

Acknowledgments

I owe an enormous debt of thanks to Diane McColley, not only for her generous guidance throughout this project but for suggesting what at first seemed outrageous, though now seems utterly obvious: that Milton might be read “Greenly.” Without her support, this book would not have been possible. Certain chapters also benefited greatly from the readings given them by Albert Labriola, Richard DuRocher, and Jeffrey Theis. Portions of my second and third chapters appeared, in somewhat different form, under the title “The Portrayal of Eve in Paradise Lost: Genius at Work” as chapter 4 of Milton Studies 40, ed. Albert Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). Sections of my final chapter were first published as “Place, Body, and Spirit Joined: The Earth–Human Wound in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 35 (May 2001). Additional material was also drawn from my “A Defense of Milton’s Environmentalism,” which is forthcoming in English Language Notes.

vi

Preface

Why consider the role of place in Milton’s poetry? A few years ago, while attending a seminar conducted by Diane McColley on the relation of nature to culture in the literary history of the natural world, I found myself returning again and again to the same question: what happens when culture is privileged over place? No mere academic question, as the last acres of the place my family had farmed for generations had given way to bulldozers the year before, I found myself feeling that I had somehow lost my place in the world. What was most startling about this development was the total disregard for the place: the great homogenizing culture of late twentieth-century America had seen my family’s farm as merely space in which to develop itself. In order to make this “space” into the current suburban dream, nearly every aspect of the landscape was altered, with whole lakes appearing overnight. That this space developed was once a remarkably self-contained place, which offered food, fuel, water, shelter, and life, was lost with the place. In one sense, the answer to my question of what happens when culture is privileged over place was appallingly clear: if a human culture has enough resolve, technology, and belief in its destiny, it can literally landscape every last feature of a place to conform to its vision of itself. To such a culture – to what is now our culture – place is all but irrelevant. To be clear, the farming practices of my family may have also done some violence to the place, but underlying our habitation of the land was an ancient peasant pact between the place and the culture dwelling upon it – an acknowledgment that, as part of the place, our lives were inexorably caught up there. In another sense, as it became increasingly clear to me, my question of what happens when culture is privileged over place has another less obvious answer: in the two decades which saw my family’s farm give way to our culture’s need to spread itself out in space, there was coincidentally an extraordinary interest in certain circles being directed towards “culture” – which in many quarters became the academic buzzword. That culture has vii

viii

Preface

come out of the margins of academic discourse is no doubt positive, but what if the focus on culture has marginalized something else? As our preoccupation with culture had utterly destroyed the place that was my home, so too our privileging of culture in less literal fields – the field of literary study, for example – might marginalize place as well. In comparison to culture, place, as place on the Earth, is rarely found in academic circles. Though Edward Casey has recently written the first booklength account of place, the environmental importance of place is hardly to be found in the work. With place having such a comparatively small role in academic discourse, it was with some surprise that I first read Diane McColley’s writings on Milton. By drawing attention to the place Adam and Eve dwelled through their relation to the Garden, McColley’s work marks a crucial shift in Milton studies as she restores Milton’s own emphasis on place: not only is Paradise Lost filled with astonishing descriptions of the Garden place (so much so that we, like Satan, might be struck speechless at first encountering the immense fertile beauty of the place), but the epic itself is the story of a place, called Paradise, lost. To my surprise, my question of what happens when culture is privileged over place was also asked by Milton in Paradise Lost: when we, like Eve (tempted by the thought of what we might become) forget, even for a moment, that we still need our roots to run deep into our place on Earth, what happens to the place? Milton’s answer is that the place will surely suffer as Earth feels the wound of our uprooting. This is not merely an environmental ethic, but a reclaiming of the original sense of the Greek ethos, which was not only a custom or habit but also an accustomed (a-customed) place. Ethical behavior is to act well towards not only the human beings in our place but also towards the plants and animals found there – as well as the place itself. To act ethically is to be in the habit of the place we dwell. For just a moment Milton’s Eve, the poet’s shinning paradigm of Christian ethical behavior (who should be an ecological exemplar for us as well) is tempted to uproot herself from her place on Earth. In many respects the epic Paradise Lost is an answer to a simple, though rarely asked, question: how does one consider the allegory of the Fall, which introduces the Judeo-Christian ethos, without pondering our own place on the Earth? If in reading Paradise Lost (or any work of literature for that matter) we give in to the temptation to dwell on culture, what happens to the place on Earth where we dwell? This same question concerning the relation of culture to place, whether asked regarding the field of literary study or the fields of a family farm, elicits the same answer given by Milton: it is not

Preface

ix

only our place on Earth which suffers from our marginalizing of it, but, as Eve laments when she is exiled from her place, it will also be felt by us as an unexpected stroke worse than death – a startling and altogether chilling prophecy on Milton’s part that is now being felt in innumerable places across the Earth. This is as much an ethical matter for Eve as it is for Milton who tells her story: for the poet not to tell the story of Paradise (place) lost would also be to forget his deep roots in the Earth. This is also an ethical matter for those in the field of literary study: to marginalize place as culture becomes central to our readings may do as much violence to place as those bulldozers did to my family’s farm. In contrast to this violence, Paradise Lost is a call to regain our lost place on Earth. As I understand the work of Diane McColley and others who seek to read Milton “Greenly,” theirs is an effort to recognize and repeat the poet’s call to regain lost place. This is not merely the calling of those who would explicate Milton’s works, but a call to anyone sympathetic to the Earth’s places.

Introduction

The hardness and smell of the oakwood began to speak clearly of the slow and lasting way in which the tree grew. The oak itself proclaimed that all that lasts and bears fruit is founded on such growth alone; that growth means to lie open to the span of the heavens and, at the same time, to have roots in the dark earth, that everything real and true only prospers if mankind fulfills at the same time the two conditions of being ready for the demands of the highest heaven and being safe in the shelter of the fruitful earth. Martin Heidegger 1

Place is of profound environmental importance. Indeed, if we all acted well towards our individual places on Earth, from our bodies to the earth beneath our feet, the Earth would not be experiencing global devastation. We in the modern West have all but forgotten that many of our peasant ancestors were once so thoroughly bonded to their places on Earth that separation from place seemed a fate worse than death. To a people who, on average, transplant ourselves and our households twice a decade, emphasis on place may seem altogether misguided. But along with this idea of being rooted in the earth comes a deep commitment to place and to the Earth. In what I find the most moving lines of Paradise Lost, when a confused Eve learns that she is to be exiled from her place (the Garden), she cannot help but emote the bond she has with her place: “O unexpected stroke, worst than of Death! / Must I leave thee Paradise? thus leave / Thee Native Soile?”2 To our modern sensibilities, Eve’s response to the news of her exile may seem more the reaction of a plant faced with being uprooted than a human being confronting the prospect of moving. But it is these modern (which were forming in the seventeenth century) sensibilities which reject thinking of ourselves as planted in place, to which I shall argue Milton’s poetry speaks – or more accurately, rebuffs. Although there is a temptation to see profound ecological change as a modern phenomenon, the history of seventeenth-century England sadly 1

2

Introduction

argues otherwise. In Milton’s era England’s old-growth forests were almost completely destroyed, not only because of a boom in housing and ship construction but to fuel such emerging industries as cooper smelting and glassmaking.3 Enormous agricultural changes, in part brought about by enclosure and engrossing, also radically altered the English landscape. Following the 1523 publication of the Boke of Husbondrye by John Fitzherbert, a century of works by Thomas Tusser, Barnabe Googe, Andrew Yarranton, and others propounded the theme that changes in agricultural practices could lead to dramatic increase in crop yields.4 Not only did this radically alter existing cropland, but the desire to make previously unproductive lowlands arable led to the substituting of indigenous plants with ryegrass, clover, trefoil, carrots, turnips, and sainfoin.5 Moreover, increased demand for meat, tallow, and wool led not only to overgrazing but also contributed to the draining of fens, marshes, and wetlands for pasture and cropland. Mining, not only for metals but increasingly for coal (as Sir William Cecil noted in 1596, “London and all other towns near the sea . . . are mostly driven to burn coal . . . for most of the woods are consumed”6 ), also took its toll on places. (Aghast at mining practices, in Paradise Lost Milton describes human beings who “with impious hands / Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth / For Treasures better hid” [1.686–88], as having been taught the practice by the epic’s devils.) Moreover, the advent of proto-industrial practices not only pushed urban development into new places but also increased reliance on imported goods; especially grain,7 as subsistence gardening no longer supported a broad swath of the population. Aside from setting policy for the exploitation of undeveloped (and what was perceived as under-developed) places, the Commonwealth itself, having confiscated land from Church, Charles I, and private royalists, was pressured to develop formerly unused land to service its own debts.8 With each of these changes in practices came the loss of places that had otherwise been unchanged for thousands of years. While it may seem that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a monopoly on the rampant development of largely unmolested places, the history of Milton’s era sadly proves otherwise. Not surprisingly, these massive ecological upheavals fueled public debate. Consider the example of deforestation: in 1653 Sylvanus Taylor baldly stated that deforestation had become a central issue for all of England, that “all men’s eyes were upon the forests.”9 Although discussed earlier, the issue exploded in April 1649 with the scandal that royalists had nearly decimated the Forest of Dean. Accordingly, the 1649 Act for the Sale of Crown Lands temporarily excluded forests as debate on woodland management

Introduction

3

continued through the next decade. While not expressly environmental (the Commonwealth was actually hoping to preserve a supply of timber for ship construction), the debate nonetheless centered on the issue of sustainable yield, with Taylor enthusiastically suggesting that two trees be planted for every one cut down. A report prepared by Dr. John Parker and Edward Crasset encouraging mass deforestation carried the day and resulted in November 1653 in the passing of the Act for the Deforestation, Sale, and Improvements of the Forests.10 While debates like these raged, Milton was writing his poetry. Indeed, in 1664, when the poet was likely finishing his Paradise Lost, John Evelyn published his enormously well-known Silva, a sentimental and unabashed plea for the preservation of forests. Underpinning my current inquiry is a desire to understand how the ecological upheavals of the seventeenth century appear in Milton’s poetry. Eco-critic Robert Pogue Harrison has argued that with this loss of woodlands came a “remarkable inversion” as early as the sixteenth century, in which the representations of forests in literature begin to shift from “sinister” to become instead “innocent, pastoral.”11 If Harrison is correct in holding that even works written in Shakespeare’s day were “works of nostalgia,”12 wistfully harking back to an improbable past of innocent pastoral, then Milton’s poetry may be the most nostalgic of all, finding in our past an unrivaled Paradise, lost through our own folly. Read this way, Paradise Lost is indeed a retelling of the biblical story of the loss of Eden, but, told in an early modern age witnessing the passing of a once-pristine landscape, the epic brings fresh new meaning to the notion of losing a Paradise. The present inquiry is not largely historical – although such an investigation is not only possible but sorely needed. Fortunately, Diane McColley has recently completed the first book-length eco-critical treatment of the early modern era, which is firmly historical in its approach. Something of a complement to McColley’s work, I instead draw attention to Milton grappling with issues of theology and philosophy in his “Green Reformation” of Christianity and early modern thinking. For example, while medieval theology often interpreted the Fall as humanity giving in to the temptation of the “earthy” flesh – and in so doing cast much that is of the Earth as not only inferior and suspect but evil – Milton offers a startling reading of scripture which finds Eve falling as she attempts to pull away from the Earth. Not surprisingly, such an Earth-friendly approach puts Milton in the company of some very modern environmentalists. In my opening chapter I note how a group of environmental thinkers known as “Deep Ecologists” have since the late 1960s sought to rethink the

4

Introduction

relation of human beings to the places on Earth we inhabit. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, Deep Ecologists eschew the traditional subject– object distinction of Western thought for a view that human beings are as much a part of the places we inhabit as those places are a part of us. As the “subjectivism” these ecologists are railing against can principally be traced back to Descartes, Milton’s much-noted rejection of Cartesian mind–body (and accordingly mind–place) dualism has profound environmental import. Those ambivalent to place in Paradise Lost are always devils. Either the epic’s devils see place as objectively that which can be consumed and developed, or like Satan, boast they have attained the subjectivist’s dream of being a mind apart from both body and place – that “mind is its own place.” In contrast, Adam and Eve are found to be thoroughly rooted in the Earth; understanding their garden place (in particular the Bower) not as dead re-sources to be utilized, but rather as the very source which makes life in the Garden possible. Before the Fall Adam and Eve are never subjects who view their place as an object. When Satan finally realizes the horrid truth that being without place is Hell itself, the tragedy of Paradise Lost ensues as he tempts Eve to uproot herself from her own life-giving place. In chapter 2 I consider how a close reading of the major works of the 1645 Poems together with Paradise Lost reveals a remarkable similarity between humanity in the epic and the “spirits or guardians of the place” (genius loci) of the early works. Many of Eve’s characteristics were first penned to describe the early genius figures. This is especially clear in the case of “the Genius of the northern Wood” from Arcades: both Eve (with Adam) and the Genius are given “dominion” over their particular place, live in a “Bower,” “nurse” the plants in their place, see to the bounty and beauty of their place, protect the place from “nightly ills,” attend to their place with morning “haste,” “number the ranks” of the plants, “visit” the plants in their domain, and are as attentive to a spiritual realm as they are to the Earth. While certain medieval Christian thinkers considered human beings as merely visitors here on Earth, as essentially “spirits without place,” in Paradise Lost Milton has Adam and Eve not only moored to the Earth, but actively attending to the place which makes their lives possible. As will become apparent in upcoming chapters, this reunification of human beings and place is nothing less than a deconstruction of medieval theology’s dualistic representations of Christianity. Milton’s reverence for place is made especially clear, I argue in chapter 3, when we consider the wound Earth receives at the Fall in Paradise Lost. This very unusual wound is not caused by something striking at the Earth, like a fist or spear, but instead something struck from the Earth – humanity.

Introduction

5

Paradise is lost as a dualistic theologian (in devil’s clothing) momentarily dupes Eve, the genius of the Garden, into believing that she should uproot herself from her place on Earth. Like some great tree which had simply reached too high for its roots in the Earth to support it, Eve falls and leaves a massive open wound in the Earth. With this extraordinary – though entirely plausible – interpretation of the biblical Fall, Milton delivers Christianity to the fold of environmentalists who hold that our own foolish acts have brought ecological devastation to the Earth. But Milton goes further in suggesting that this foolish uprooting of ourselves from our place on Earth was the pivotal human act – and the source of our current sorrow. However, because the wound is the site of the separation, humanity’s greatest opportunity to renew a precious bond we once had with the Earth is to allow ourselves to feel this shared wound at once for ourselves and for the Earth (as Milton’s sentient “Earth felt the wound,” at once for herself and for humanity). While Paradise Lost tells the story of how humanity was uprooted from its place on Earth, the much earlier Ludlow Mask rewrites the role of the genius loci Sabrina in a traditional British founding myth to tell the story of how humanity might restore the Human–Earth bond. In chapter 4 I suggest that, in a rather circular way, one could say that Sabrina is both mother (along with the other genii of the 1645 Poems) to Eve, as Paradise Lost’s heroine inherits many of the characteristics Milton first penned in the Mask, but also daughter to Eve as Sabrina takes up the mother of humanity’s postlapsarian task of “re-rooting” humankind in a new place on the Earth. Through the inclusion of three “spirits” in the Mask (Sabrina, Comus, and the Attendant Spirit), Milton introduces a ternary structure which makes problematic medieval theology’s either of the Earth (“earthy,” like Comus) or not of the Earth (“spiritual,” as in the Attendant Spirit) dilemma. While medieval theology generally favored the “not of the Earth” horn of the dilemma (at the cost of marginalizing the Earth), through Sabrina and Eve Milton enacted a deconstruction bent on revealing what is arguably the original Judeo-Christian understanding of Adam and Eve as “spirits thoroughly of the Earth” – first expressed by Milton in the bio-regional terms of the Mask as “spirits of place,” genius loci. The observant reader no doubt will have noticed (perhaps even winced at) my passing use of deconstruction in connection with Milton, yet the link is not as tenuous as it might first appear. Chapter 5 considers how Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth and Luther’s theologia crucis are not only, as recent scholarship has disclosed, sources for (Heidegger’s early formulation of ) modern deconstruction, but direct attempts to undo Christianity’s

6

Introduction

fusion with the Greco-Roman-exalted Judaic traditions. According to both Luther and Paul, by substituting a physical for a meta-physical God, a manifestly weak God-Man for an all-powerful transcendent God, an absent (as Christ is until the Parousia) God for an eternally present God, and celebrating weakness over strength, Christianity from the very start attempted to destabilize the Greco-Roman tradition – a tradition which has brought horrific environmental consequence to the Earth. Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard, and the young Heidegger all argue for a Christianity firmly rooted in place on Earth. Ironically, however, through the influence of the ancient traditions (especially Greek), what became orthodox Christianity actually reversed its position on the importance of place on Earth to human beings. 1 Corinthians also had an enormous influence on Paradise Regained. Chapter 6 places Milton in the company of Paul, Luther, and Heidegger in their deconstructive enterprises as Paradise Regained can be considered a confusing text precisely because it con-fuses (stands against the fusion of ) those born into a fusion of the Christian, Greek, Roman, and exalted Judaic traditions. In looking past the crucifixion (the source of the deconstruction conceived by Paul and Luther) to Jesus’ temptation in the desert, Milton radicalizes the approach by holding that Jesus himself countered the prevailing Greco-Roman-exalted Judaic juggernaut; represented in Paradise Regained through the corresponding central temptations of Greek learning, Roman power, and the glorious Throne of David. In Paradise Regained we can actually see in the Son the emergence of the paradigmatic Christian Self as a counter to Greek and Roman values: not until Satan offers distrust, power, glory, and a kingdom here does the Son understand he must privilege trust, weakness, humiliation, and a kingdom not here. In this view, Christian values are themselves con-structed to deconstruct the Greco-Roman-exalted Judaic world-view, though the fact that Christianity has again and again (such as in medieval theology) been fused with the very traditions it was constructed to oppose is not only one of history’s great ironies, but the reason Milton may have felt compelled to pen the con-fusing Paradise Regained. While this deconstruction has profound environmental significance, as it places Christianity in the company of such placefriendly approaches as Native American spiritualism, the understanding of Christianity put forth in Paradise Regained has the added characteristic of actually being tailor-made (con-structed) to counter the Greco-Romanexalted Judaic mindset. To Milton, Christianity is not a disease infecting the Earth, it is a well-crafted cure.

Introduction

7

Although critical of the exalted Judaic mindset in Paradise Regained, Milton also argues that it is a mistake to consider Christianity apart from Judaism as an environmental cure, as my chapter 7 suggests. The Book of Job, and the wisdom contained in it, had a remarkable influence on both the form and content of Paradise Regained. However, if Job’s wisdom is Hellenized, as is often done by Milton scholars, it is possible to completely miss the “wisdom” of Paradise Regained. In light of thinking by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Derrida, it becomes clear that to Milton wisdom (sapientia) in the postlapsarian world is not Augustine’s quiet knowledge and vision of his God, but rather Job’s fear and trembling before a God neither known nor seen. By directing our thoughts back to the here-and-now of our existence on Earth, Milton rejects the Greek notion of quiet contemplation of anOther realm. This point is also made abundantly clear in Paradise Lost: while Adam and Eve fully experience the terror of their fallen existence, the devils in the epic immerse themselves in speculative theology in order to avoid confronting the horror of their condition. Chapter 8 considers how the concept of “appointed time” (as the New Testament Greek kairos and the Hebrew zem-awn’ ) is constantly at work in Milton’s work. Without taking kairos into account, the central temptations in Paradise Regained, Paradise Lost, and the Ludlow Mask cease to be temptations at all. Satan and Comus do not tempt the Son, Eve, and the Lady of the Mask with what they should never have, but rather with what, in the best of possible futures, they each will have: the Throne of David, the attainment of Heaven, and a sensuous and sensual life, respectively. Whether the Son, Eve, and the Lady act fully to realize their destiny or act to squander it, is all a question of kairos. As kairos arguably forms the basis of the late Heidegger’s environmental maxim of “standing reserve” (Bestand), it is possible to use Heidegger’s postmodern thought to explicate the environmental implications of kairos on place. By having his protagonists tempted with the prospect of appointing their own time, thereby ignoring kairos, it can be argued that Milton is suggesting that the Earth’s places should not “stand in reserve” for human needs, but quite the contrary, human beings should stand in wait for the Earth’s places to present their gifts in the Earth’s (God’s) time. Milton clarifies the environmental importance of time on place through his clever reformulation of medieval thought: what the Earth has to offer is only forbidden fruit when it is not yet ripe. Because Milton has placed the wounding of the Earth in Paradise Lost where we might have expected the wounding of the Son, my final chapter

8

Introduction

considers the typology surrounding Christ’s wound as well as the “wound” opened in Adam’s side during the Creation of Eve. Christ’s, Adam’s, and the Earth’s wounds are all quite unusual, as something of consequence actually emerges from them to connect the wounded and what emerges from the wound in a mystical way. However, for this bond to remain intact the wound must be continually felt. The typological tradition describes the bond between the wounded and what emerges from the wound in three ways: as a sort of “birth,” as a relation among parts of the body, and as the relation of roots to a tree. Milton uses each of these three approaches to portray how the Earth is wounded at the Fall. Through this use of typology, Milton suggests that our relation to “Mother Earth” is not only that to a “mother” who gave birth to humanity, but also to the “earth” we must be deeply rooted in if we are to grow towards Heaven. Furthermore, in Milton’s poetry this mystical bodily connection we share with the Earth runs as deep as our bond to Heaven rises above it. Finally, it should be noted that throughout the work I make what may seem heavy-handed use of some very modern thinkers: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and especially the young Heidegger. Considered together, I argue that the common enterprise of these philosophers can be seen in part as a radical “reformation” of Christian thinking: Kierkegaard’s avowed mission is the unsettling of the Church (“Christendom”); Nietzsche’s own reform project, although more hostile, is undertaken with near-constant reference to Christianity; and the young Heidegger, who considered himself a Christian theologian, undertook (then quickly concealed and disavowed) a radical reformation of the Western tradition through his secularization of early Christian thinking. My approach is not simply to use these thinkers to explicate Milton’s work, but rather to argue that Milton’s poetry contains an early modern anticipation of many of the ideas key to this second “Reformation.” My larger aim, however, is to explore the ecological implications of Milton’s strikingly modern efforts to reform Christianity.

part i

Having place

1

Place defined: the ecological importance of place

All that any of us may know of ourselves is to be known in relation to this place. Wendell Berry1 2

“O unexpected stroke, worst than of Death!” When Milton’s Eve learns that she and Adam are to be uprooted from the Garden, she not only cries out that it is a fate worse than Death, but in a surprising turn of events, she looks not to God’s messenger, Michael, for further confirmation, but instead directly questions the Garden: “Must I leave thee Paradise?” (11.269). This is one of the few occasions in Paradise Lost where the Earth is addressed, though earlier, after surveying “Hill, and Vallie, Rivers, Woods and Plaines . . . Rocks, Dens and Caves,” a bitter Satan remarked to the Earth, “but I in none of these / Find place or refuge” (9.116–19). In contrast to Satan, who surveyed the entire Earth to find his place, Eve’s attention next drops to where she is particularly placed – the very earth beneath her feet – to which she echoes her question in disbelief: “thus leave / Thee Native Soile?” (11.269–70). Satan searched the whole of the Earth in vain for what has been lost by Eve, which has been right under her feet all along: place, now the paradise lost. Christopher Fitter has aptly noted of the above passage that “the utmost weight of the tragic vision in Paradise Lost falls here, in what must accordingly be one of the most crucial and carefully mediated experiences of the epic’s imagination,”3 as this is when both Eve and Adam learn what they have lost is not only – as is so often noted – sin-free life, but in that “unexpected stroke,” the place itself. While Jon Whitman has considered general theories of place in Paradise Lost, and Diane McColley, Wendell Berry, Richard DuRocher, and others have been reading the epic “Greenly” for years,4 the purpose of the present chapter is to consider how place and ecology are related in Milton’s account of our lost paradise. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Lynn White, Paul Shepard, Gary Snyder, Arne Naess, and others published a number of enormously influential essays 11

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Part I: Having place

laying out what has become known as the “ecocentric” or, more commonly, the “Deep Ecology” platform.5 From the very start Deep Ecology has given extraordinary emphasis to place. As Delores LaChapelle boldly states it, “the quality of a culture depends on the depth of the relationship of the human beings to their place” [her emphasis].6 Key to this approach is the idea of “relationship” – more specifically, the types of relationships human beings have to their place. Arne Naess clarifies by considering a statement made by an indigenous Laplander of Norway, who claimed that “part of the river” that flowed through his place was “part of himself”: We may try to make the sentence “this place is part of myself ” intellectually more understandable by reformulation – for example, “My relation to this place is part of myself ”; “If this place is destroyed something of me is destroyed”; “My relation to this place is such that if the place is changed, I am changed” . . . One drawback of these formulations is that they make it easy to continue thinking of two completely separable, real entities: a self and the place, joined by an external relation. The original sentence conveys that there is an internal relation of sorts.7

Perhaps because this passage appears in an essay written for a general audience, Naess does not further expound on the nature of an internal relation. But Naess, who years before helping to launch the Deep Ecology movement gained recognition as a scholar of Heidegger and Wittgenstein,8 knows full well that while Wittgenstein would take the extreme position that all relations are internal,9 Heidegger held that we “beings in the world,” though in the midst of (internal) relations, can “fall” out of these internal relations to understand ourselves as viewing subjects who perceive objects – an external relation. (The title of Naess’s essay in question, “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World,” is a not so veiled reference to Heidegger’s Dasein.) Simply put, when we are in an internal relation we do not objectify that which is in the relation with us, so rivers, mountains, plants, and animals are not apart from us as some-thing (in Naess’s apt phrase “a self and the place”), but rather, as existing in the same place we do, part of our-selves. Freya Mathews unfolds the ecological significance of an internal relation: “It becomes apparent that the individual denoted by ‘I’ is not constituted merely by a body or a personal ego or consciousness. I am, of course, partially constituted by these immediate physical and mental structures, but I am also constituted by ecological relations with the elements of my environment – relations in the image of which the structures of my body and consciousness are built. I am a holistic element of my ecosystem.”10

Place defined

13

It is noteworthy that Mathews also frames the discussion in psychological terms of ego boundaries. While the view from Freud onward is that ego boundaries form in infancy, and so differentiates the Self as ego from all Others, Deep Ecology has taken the position that perhaps these boundaries could be expanded outward so that human beings might not think of the rest of the Earth as something other than the Self. The further implication here is that harming our place on Earth is equivalent to harming our Selves: as Naess states it, “Our position is . . . that the destruction of Nature (and our place) threatens us in our inmost self” [Naess’s parenthetical comment].11 However, as the body is generally held to be the bounding region of the Self, if our ego boundaries are to be extended outward this might necessitate that we begin thinking of the body in broader terms – which is precisely what Paul Shepard suggests we do: If nature is not a prison and earth a shoddy way station, we must find the faith and force to affirm its metabolism as our own – or rather, our own as part of it. To do so means nothing less than a shift in our whole frame of reference and life itself, a wider perception of the landscape as a creative, harmonious being where relationships of things are as real as the things. Without losing our sense of great human destiny and without intellectual surrender, we must affirm that the world is a being, a part of our bodies.12

Bill Devall builds on this notion to connect the body to a particular place on Earth: “If a person can sincerely say after careful self-evaluation and prayer that ‘this Earth is part of my body’ . . . that . . . ‘if this place is destroyed, then something in me is destroyed,’ then that person has an intense feeling of belonging to the place.”13 The general thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is also instrumental regarding the connection of body to place. In response to Descartes’s notation of the body as merely res extensa, extended matter which could exist in any space, Merleau-Ponty proposed le corp vecu. In the succinct words of Edward S. Casey, through le corp vecu “Merleau-Ponty assures us that every activity of the body is closely attuned with its circumambient world: indeed, my lived body is said to be ‘the potentiality of [responding to] this or that region of the world’ . . . a mooring in the world not simply homogeneous and isotropic but regionalized in advance into a series of familiar settings. These settings are none other than lived places” [emphasis Casey’s].14 In Merleau-Ponty’s pithy statement: “I already live in the landscape.”15 Simply put, in response to Descartes’s notion that the body is extended in space (any space will do), Merleau-Ponty maintains that a body is forever moored to a particular place.

14

Part I: Having place

This idea that human beings are connected to a particular place on the Earth is often referred to as “bioregionalism,” which, as Jim Dodge argues, “has been the animating cultural principle through ninety-percent of human history and is at least as old as consciousness”16 because indigenous people of a region generally have been placed there for quite some time. Consequently, as Gary Snyder notes, “People developed in specific ways to be in each of those niches: plant knowledge, boats, dogs, traps, nets, fishing – the smaller animals and the smaller tools. From the steep jungles of Southwest China to coral atolls to barren arctic deserts – a spirit of what it was to be there evolved, that spoke of a direct sense of relation to the ‘land’ – which really means, the totality of the local bio-region system, from cirrus clouds to leaf-mould” [Snyder’s emphasis].17 This “spirit of what it was to be there,” or spirit of the place, is crucial for a people not only to know their place, but to know their own selves (spirits), for, in Devall’s words, “The more we know a specific place intimately – know its moods, seasons, changes, aspects, native creatures – the more we know our ecological selves.”18 “And,” LaChapelle adds, “it can only be a ‘particular’ place, because the needs of a particular soil . . . are going to be totally different than the needs . . . [of another soil.] . . . Such an ethic strives for a balance in the relationship between all the beings of the place, so that all beings may flourish” [emphasis LaChapelle’s].19 Poet, farmer, and English professor Wendell Berry also calls our attention to place, specifically the Kentucky hill where he was born: “I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.”20 As mystical as this may seem, it is important to note that to Berry and other ecologists this “sense of place” is thoroughly rooted in everyday practices, like the way a people make their shelter in a place. Such a habitat mirrors the place as much as the people who made it, indeed, it could be argued that the place makes the habitat even more than its inhabitants – one could hardly build an igloo in the southwestern United States, or an adobe pueblo in Greenland. What should trouble us all is that the notion of the Earth covered with particular places has almost completely given way to an understanding of the Earth as space. Again with respect to our habitats, this is now abundantly clear. While indigenous people inhabited particular places which had, as Devall notes, their own “moods, seasons, changes, aspects, [and] native creatures,”21 the dominant Western view is to see such “undeveloped”

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places as “wide open space” onto which a grid of streets, wires, and pipes can be imposed – entirely irrespective of the character of the place already situated in this “space.” The notion that the place itself could provide for its inhabitants is lost. In our time this is particularly clear in the northeastern United States, where innumerable places (even into this century) provided a remarkable bounty of food, water, and shelter without the need for irrigation, infrastructure, or fertilization of any sort. Yet these places were unfortunately situated in the space in which the industrial northeast in the last two hundred years has sought to expand itself. The result has been the loss of all these fertile places to one vast industrial complex stretching from Atlanta to Boston – and beyond. Consequently, the colonized space of the northeast has to import its water across hundreds of miles, its food across the continent (and the equator), and its energy across the Atlantic – even though the long forgotten and abused places beneath this colonized space once freely offered all this and more. In order to put the distinction between place and space into the theoretical context of the seventeenth century, Edward S. Casey has argued that in 1687, with the publication of the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, “the manifest triumph of absolute space [occurred] in Newton’s masterwork, [making] it perhaps surprising that place survives at all.”22 In this sense, Newton’s Principia was the triumph of a centuries-long movement: as Jon Whitman remarks, “in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance . . . the prevailing model of a finite cosmos . . . [was] gradually displaced by theories of an indeterminate universe extended in a uniformity of space.” Though Whitman proceeds to understand the escalating influence of these theories of space in Milton’s works by contrasting them to place in Aristotelian (topos), Platonic (khora), and, interestingly, Hebraic (Makom) terms, I propose instead to use the thinking of the aforementioned ecologists to approach the question of place in Milton. My approach is also a departure from Casey’s general assessment of space (astonishingly, the only “philosophical account of place . . . in a comprehensive [book-length] format” to be written to date23 ), which does provide an explication of the Earth– World relation in Heidegger, but nonetheless remains largely silent on the environmental issue of place. To proceed, it will be helpful first to consider how the burgeoning seventeenth-century theory of featureless space is portrayed in Paradise Lost. The space Satan must cross from Hell to Earth is clearly featureless space: “a dark / Illimitable Ocean without bound, / Without dimension, where length, breadth, & highth, / And time and place are lost” (2.891–94).

16

Part I: Having place

Perhaps the only way to characterize this timeless, featureless space in Paradise Lost may well be to say that it simply lacks places of any sort. Shortly after the Fall the devils in the epic approach this space in the same way that England was approaching “unused space” in Milton’s time: they set about to develop the “dark / Illimitable Ocean without bound” (2.891– 92). Beginning with a massive ocean-dredging operation, the devils toss up “what they met / Solid or slime” (10.285–86) to form the base for a bridge, “a passage broad, / Smooth, easie, inoffensive down to Hell” (10.304–05), “a Monument / Of merit high to all th’ infernal Host” (10.258–59). What the devils dredge up is viewed as merely “material” for the making of the bridge, and just in case this soil is living, “The aggregated Soyle / Death with his Mace petrific, cold and dry, / As with a Trident smote, and fix’t as firm / As Delos floating once” (10.293–96). It is difficult to imagine how the development of “space” could be described in more horrific terms than to have petrific Death touch everything in the place where the expansion is to occur. What soil Death did not petrify was “Bound with Gorgonian rigor not to move, / And with Asphaltic slime; broad as the Gate, / Deep to the Roots of Hell the gathered beach / They fastened” (10.297–300) the bridge. Setting aside the fact that development nowadays is also paved with “Asphaltic slime,” these lines introduce disturbing images of the place being held in bondage: “Bound . . . not to move . . . fastened.” This sublimation imagery continues: “And Chains they made all fast, too fast they made / And durable” (10.319–20), as they constructed a sort of suspension bridge. What could not be killed by Death’s “Mace petrific” (10.294) is to be chained into bondage. The most negative modern portrayal of the development of “open space” can hardly approach the kill or enslave mandate Milton gives his devils. The work of Milton’s devils echoes two massive assaults on space made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, the work of the devils, which Milton compares to the mythical continent-spanning bridge the Persian King “Xerxes . . . Europe with Asia joyn’d” (10.307–10), echoes the greatest expansion into earthly “space” in history, the movement to colonize the New World. In the words of the devils: “perhaps over this Gulfe / Impassable, Impervious, let us try / Adventrous work . . . to found a path / Over this Maine from Hell to that new World” (10.253–57). In playing on “Maine” as both an expanse of ocean and as part of the territory granted to the Plymouth Company in 1606, Milton paints a picture of a mythical bridge being built from England to the easternmost part of “that new World” it had claimed. One can hardly imagine a more scorching indictment of

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the colonization of open space than Milton’s portrayal of the “Adventrous work” as rooted in the sin-craving desire of devils. The work of Milton’s devils also invokes images of reclaiming the “unused space” of fens and marshes along the English coastline – lands which were drained in order to yield productive cropland. Through a scheme not unlike Milton’s devils, beginning in the sixteenth century, workers tossed up “what they met / Solid or slime” (10.285) in order to build earthen dams and causeways to hold back the waters. Enormously controversial, the people who lived in the places under assault argued that, essentially, this “space” being reclaimed consisted of already valuable places. Through a series of riots and lawsuits they made a case that, in the words of historian Joan Thirsk, “Fish and Fowl were disturbed in their traditional habitats by the drainage, wetland that had afforded lush pasture in summer was drained dry and robbed of the nutrients it had formerly received annually from winter flooding, and, in addition to this all, the commons were reduced to one-half to one-third of the former size.”24 In short, in draining the fens and marshes, “Death with his Mace petrific” (10.294) touched fish, fowl, pasture, and the people who had lived there with them. In a coincidence of insight, ecologist Wendell Berry also considers the effect not of building a bridge over “space” but of the late eighteenth-century road builders in Kentucky: I think that the comparison of these road builders with the Indians, on the one hand, and the Old World peasants on the other, is a most suggestive one. The Indians and the peasants were people who belonged deeply and intricately to their places. Their ways of life had evolved slowly in accordance with their knowledge of their land, and of its needs, of their own relation of dependence and responsibility to it. The road builders, on the contrary, were placeless people. . . . Having left Europe far behind, they had not yet in any meaningful sense arrived in America, not yet having devoted themselves to any part of it in a way that would produce the intricate knowledge of it necessary to live in it without destroying it. Because they belonged to no place, it was almost inevitable that they should behave violently toward the places they came to. [emphasis Berry’s]25

Perhaps too it was “almost inevitable” that Milton’s “placeless” devils would “behave violently toward the places they came to.” But this is how the exiled devils have proceeded from the start: in Hell “There stood a Hill” (1.670), a particular place, which the devils ransacked to create Pandemonium. Like an army shouldering weapons, “A numerous Brigad hasten’d. As when Bands / Of Pioners with Spade and Pickax arm’d / Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Field, / or cast a Rampart” (1.675–78). Poised for their attack on the hill, Mammon and “his crew / Op’nd into the

18

Part I: Having place

Hill a spacious wound” (1.688–89). In their pillaging of the hill the devils are a marvel of modern efficiency, putting to shame the development of the ancient world: And here let those Who boast in mortal things, and wond’ring tell Of Babel, and the works of Memphian Kings Learn how thir greatest Monuments of Fame, And Strength and Art are easily out-done By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour What in an age they with incessant toyle And hands innumerable scarce perform. (1.692–99)

Whether the open space of chaos, or the distinct place of a hill, the devils saw nothing but space to attack, kill, or enslave. Compare this approach to a hill to that of Wendell Berry in the aforementioned passages from his essay “A Native Hill,” in which he describes his family’s relation to a hill in Kentucky where they have lived and farmed for generations: “All that any of us may know of ourselves is to be known in relation to this place; I humble myself before a mere piece of the earth and speak of myself as its fragment.”26 While Berry clearly sees the hill as a part of himself to cherish and keep, the devils had to make a place for themselves, “Built like a Temple” (1.713) to themselves, by destroying the hill. Though we might hold the devils’ approach to be the consolidated attitude of the West – as the truest expression of Genesis 1:28, where human beings are given “dominion” over the Earth – nonetheless in Genesis 2:15 human beings are put “into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (echoed in Paradise Lost: “This Paradise I give thee, count it thine / To Till and Keep” [8.719–20]). As Miltonist Jeffrey Theis has noted, “to dress” (in Hebrew ‘bd) “means to serve” and “to keep” (‘smr) is “an act of protection.”27 Berry and his family, though making their home on the hill, have nonetheless taken upon themselves the solemn responsibility of protecting and preserving the hill as part of themselves as they learn a “particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in” [Berry’s emphasis].28 To destroy the hill, as the devils had done, would have been to destroy something of themselves. Put another way, Berry’s family desperately wish “to keep” their hill, while in order to build Pandemonium, Milton’s devils were happy to discard their hill. Berry himself, perhaps not surprisingly, directly quotes from Paradise Lost in order to make this type of environmental distinction clear. He begins by describing the “heroic” type of person who seeks to stand far outside of any

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direct relation to a place in order to bring about some change there – even if it is as noble as to “make a ‘breakthrough’ that will ‘save the world’ from some ‘crisis’ (which now is usually the result of some previous ‘breakthrough’).”29 “The best example we have of this kind of hero, I am afraid, is the fallen Satan of Paradise Lost – Milton undoubtedly having observed in his time the prototype of industrial heroism. . . . His heroism is of the mind only – escaped as far as possible from divine rule, from its place in the order of creation.” With this Berry cites Satan’s oft-quoted observation regarding place: “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–55). Berry continues, “But perhaps we cannot understand this secular heroic mind until we understand its opposite: the mind obedient and in place” [emphasis added]. Berry next quotes from Raphael’s instruction to Adam “not to know at large of things remote / From use, obscure and suttle, but to know / That which before us lies in daily life” (8.191–93). Berry’s point is clear: when we stand outside of our place, even if not to harm it as did the devils, it is nonetheless “an act of hubris, which Satan justifies by a compellingly reasonable theory.” On the other hand, if we stay firmly in place and look to “That which lies before us in daily life” (8.193), we avoid not only hubris, but environmental devastation. In Eve’s painful postlapsarian lament on learning she must leave her place, she speaks not only to the place directly, but to flowers (“O flours / That never will in other Climate grow” [11.273–74]) and to the Bower itself (“Thee lastly nuptial Bowre . . .” [11.280]). This is Eve’s second (the first being when she addressed the forbidden tree [9.745–802]) and last address to the place. In both cases she is standing outside of her relation with the place to address what she has been part of as a speaking subject to an object. This reification continues in Adam’s postlapsarian speech, which, as Christopher Fitter has noted, is filled with “objectifying substantives – ‘this happy place, our sweet recess . . . this mount . . . this tree . . . these pines’ [11.303–21].” As Fitter continues, Adam “pleads a love for Eden not as native soil but as holy ground.”30 In Adam’s own words concerning place: “here I could frequent, / With worship, place by place where he vouchsafed / Presence divine” (11.317–19). Outside of his relation with his place, Adam can only stand back and view the place as some sort of sacred ground. Though this would seem completely counter to Eve, who viewed the forbidden tree immediately after her Fall as some-thing to be consumed (and also counter to the devils who viewed a place, the hill in Hell, as mere material to bring about their ambitions); nonetheless these relations are those of a subject to an object.

20

Part I: Having place

As Adam makes clear the problem: “all places else / Inhospitable appear and desolate, / Nor knowing us nor known” (11.305–07). This reciprocal relation of knowledge, to say nothing of the fact that the place is understood as knower of its inhabitants, makes clear what Adam and Eve have lost with Paradise: that a horrific change in their relation to the place has occurred. After the Fall, even when inside the Garden, Adam and Eve are still outside of their relation with the place – simply put, they no longer enjoy what Arne Naess calls an “internal relation” with the place. From this is has been concluded by Christopher Fitter that this state of being “placeless” is the condition of humanity after the Fall. Fitter does make a provocative case for “the existence of an approved topos of exile consolation” (p. 148) which influenced Milton, and has the significant insight that for Milton, “the commitment to earthy location is valid at the human level, actualized in the case of Eve, through the bonds of geography and cultivation” (p. 160). However, Fitter undercuts this insight by focusing on the passage “mind is its own place” (1.254), suggesting that “geography and cultivation” are set aside as “at the highest level we learn the primacy of universal goodness over geographic sentiment” (p. 160). Unfortunately for Fitter’s thesis, “the exposition of the truth that the ‘mind is its own place’ ” (p. 159) is Satan’s truth, as the recently dis-placed angel is desperately hoping for refuge in some place, any place, other than Hell. That this is Satan’s hope is clear from the continuation of this line (left unquoted by Fitter): “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–55). This is mighty wishful thinking on Satan’s part, but as he himself comes to realize later in the epic, there is no such place: “Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell” (4.75). Fitter continues by looking to Michael’s response to Eve’s lament at losing her “Native Soile” (11.270). The angel suggests, as an alternative to the native soil of the Garden, that Eve should think of Adam: “where he abides, think there thy native soile” (11.292). Prompting Fitter to conclude, “For the forfeit ‘native soil’ of Paradise, Michael suggests compensation in the ‘native soil’ of Adam’s presence” (p. 159). But, as Michael continues to Adam regarding Eden: “this preeminence thou has lost, brought down / To dwell on eeven ground now with thy Sons: / Yet doubt not but in vallie and in plaine / God is as here, and will be found alike / Present” (11.347–51). While Fitter finds this merely a “consoling statement”(p. 151) on Michael’s part, it is clear from the context that Adam is being instructed that there are other places (described earlier as “fitter soile” [11.262]) where he is to reroot himself and Eve – which Eve is to then consider “native soile.” The

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instruction to Eve does not take the form of “where [ever] he abides [at any given time], think there thy native soile” (11.292), but rather, in the specific place Adam finally settles, “where he abides, think there thy native soile.”31 Had Milton not intended this meaning, he surely would have chosen a more transitory verb than “abides.”32 In direct contrast to Fitter’s conviction that Paradise Lost contains “The exposition of the truth that the ‘mind is its own place’ ” (p. 159), both John S. Tanner and Wendell Berry have read Milton as warning of the dangers in such a conviction – in Berry’s assessment, profound ecological danger. To understand the risk in making the mind its own place, it will be helpful to consider the last few hundred years of Western philosophy, here nicely summarized by Piotr Hoffman: Modern philosophy turns away from things of the world and zeroes in on the human self that grasps them in thought and transforms them in action. The self becomes the repository of both their truth and their ultimate purposes. By the same token, the human self is given the status of the self-grounding ground of reality. In this new and exalted status, the self ceases to be viewed as part and parcel of some independent order of things. Beginning with Descartes’s cogito, the self withdraws from the world and falls back on its own experiences and thoughts.33

With the 1637 publication of Discours de la m´ethode, Descartes gave a tremendous boost to the subjectivist tradition Hoffman describes. In some sense as momentous as the Copernican revolution, the Cartesian innovation was to put not the sun but the human mind at the center of the universe. Not merely to know the things of the world but, as Hoffman rightly notes, to transform “them in action,” to know “their ultimate purposes.” With Descartes, the human mind finds itself in a remarkably empowered, indeed godlike, position. Indeed, as Robert Harrison has noted, “on the basis of its [the human mind’s] certainty Descartes presumes to prove the existence of God. . . . The certainty of the subjective existence of the cogito becomes the ground for the certainty of God’s existence, not the other way around.”34 The threat posed to place by this exalted subjectivist position is made quite clear in Paradise Lost. In Tanner’s words: Satan becomes a paradigm [and a parody] of radical individualism . . . ‘ontological individualism’ . . . Not situated in place and time, the self must constantly invent itself out of its mind. Satan’s claim to possess such freedom presupposes two dubious premises that were to become common after Descartes: (1) the sharp rift between subject and object, and (2) the priority of subject to object. In this view, “being” is located in a mind not constituted by the world but itself constituting the world – a mind that is “its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell,

22

Part I: Having place

a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–55). Satanic individualism is thus rightly called “ontological” and identified with other forms of subjectivism. For Milton’s antihero tries to live out the subjectivist’s dream that one is god of one’s universe (now coterminous with one’s mind) and hence empowered to legislate the conditions of that universe.35

Like the dualistic theologians (which Milton, as a monist, rejected) who desired to be free of any place on the Earth, beginning with Descartes (perhaps earlier) a new dualism emerges in subjectivism – splendidly portrayed in Paradise Lost through Satan’s boast that “mind is its own place.” Separate and apart from any place, indeed believing he can actually, through sheer act of will, make a place whatever he pleases (even “a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n”), Satan clearly claims in Book I of Paradise Lost that he has realized the subjectivist’s dream. Before continuing with Satan, it is worth unfolding Tanner’s suggestion that in the view of subjectivism “‘being’ is located in a mind not constituted by the world.” Originally the Greek word for “being” (ousia – the participle form of the existential eimi verb) also carried the meaning of “one’s substance, property,”36 or, in the context of Herodotus, household, including house and land. Only in Plato does ousia come to mean the “essence” of a discrete thing. Thus the original Greek sense of “being” denoted the immediate surroundings of the Self (its place) every bit as much as it did the Self. Simply put, as ousia, our being was not only inexorably linked to our place, but was our place. What Descartes brought about was a radical consolidation of the being of the individual into just mind – separate and apart from not only body, but from all else, including the surrounding place. Clearly, the view of traditional peoples who considered the Self as part of the place (as Deep Ecologists and Berry have noted and endorsed) was under assault from Descartes – and from Milton’s Satan. When Satan first arrives on Earth the narrator observes that “for within him Hell / He Brings, and round about him, nor from Hell / One step no more then from himself can fly / By change of place” (4.20–23). The dark underside of Satan’s subjectivist boast that “mind is its own place” becomes clear as Satan has indeed separated himself from all place – but the placeless state he occupies is Hell itself. What Tanner has noted is clear here: in comparison to Dante’s Hell “damnation in Paradise Lost is primarily an inward condition,” which leads to the horrible consequence that “Satanic freedom is really slavery that entraps the self in itself.”37 This is a scorching indictment of subjectivism: far from the freedom the subjectivist Satan had imagined, free from any restraint holding the mind back (holding the mind “in place”), he is nonetheless constrained by the mind itself. As

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mentioned in my opening remarks, once Satan comprehends his horrid lack of place, he searches the entire Earth, “Hill, and Vallie, Rivers, Woods and Plaines . . . Rocks, Dens and Caves,” for a place, only to conclude sullenly “but I in none of these [nor in his own mind] / Find place or refuge” (9.116–19). The general danger in Satan’s subjectivist position (as it applies to anything other than the power-seeking mind itself ) is, as Tanner notes, that “Domination of the world, not cooperation, mutuality, reciprocity, or grateful acceptance, becomes the only way of connecting the self to the other.”38 Once the rift between subject and object is opened, every-thing other than the Self is seen as just that – a thing to have and possess. The danger to our place on Earth implicit in Satan’s subjectivism is made clear by Berry, who baldly states, “And now we are surrounded by the most insistent evidence that a mind that elects itself a place maintains itself as such by the ruin of earthly places. One cannot divide one’s mind from its earthy place, preferring the inner to the outer, without denying the mind’s care to the earthy places.”39 In a sense, this is a return of the danger inherent in dualistic theology, though in the subjectivist’s version it is not some Other super-sensible realm which is privileged over the Earth, but an inner realm of the mind – which, in the most extreme versions of subjectivism, such as Satan’s, becomes the Other realm: Hell. Were Satan’s desires to renounce place the extraordinary ambition of an other-than human being, we could easily dismiss Milton’s indictment of subjectivism; after all, why would anyone wish to be utterly devoid of place? Clearly Satan, cast into Hell, might wish to be placeless, but how could any mere human condition elicit such a desire? But, as Tanner notes, the appeal of Satan’s subjectivist freedom was widely felt: “These grand claims for individual freedom are not without heroic overtones. Indeed, at least since the Cartesian revolution, they have supplied the very grist of Western heroism. We can recognize versions of Milton’s Satan in both the Romantic and Existential hero.”40 And we can also recognize the danger to the Earth’s places posed by the Romantic hero. Of all the Romantic poets, Berry finds Shelley the most dangerous, as Milton’s “most blasphemous lines are quoted approvingly in [Shelley’s] A Defense of Poetry: ‘The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n’ (1.254–55).”41 What had been the view of an errant and fallen angel in Milton becomes in Shelley the highest of heroic visions. To Berry, that this heroic dream of the Romantic poets (which was a nightmare set in Hell in Paradise Lost) has had such influence on our present world is especially worrisome: “we cannot ignore Shelley, cannot

24

Part I: Having place

afford to ignore him . . . we have fully inherited his faults; his egotism, his rebellious individualism, his compulsion to divide reality into discrete parcels, his inclination to make a place of the mind. That last of those faults seems to be the greatest” [emphasis Berry’s].42 In contrast to this sort of environmentally dangerous dualism of mind and place, Berry lays out a different sort of mind–place relation: The human mind, then, within its limits, does have a power that is fearful and wonderful. It is not “its own place”; it cannot “make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n”; it can do little “in itself.” But depending on its ability or inability to see and preserve what is good, it can make a good place into a bad place or bad place into a good place; it can be the disease of a place or its healing and health.43

Unless we subscribe to Satan’s subjectivism, which proves to be a prison from which we cannot escape “By change of place” (4.23), we cannot deny the internal relation between place and mind. The irony in Satan’s situation is that, though he sought freedom from place, his placeless condition becomes a Hell from which he cannot escape. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the significance of Milton’s reproach of subjectivism. Though Stephen M. Fallon has considered in some depth Milton’s rejection of mind–body (and spirit/flesh) dualism,44 in suggesting that the belief that “The mind is its own place” (1.254) is flawed, Milton is not only scoffing at the notion that mind is separate from body but also that mind is separate from place. What Delores LaChapelle has said about place could certainly then apply to Paradise Lost: “The quality of a culture depends on the depth of the relationship of the human beings to their place” [her emphasis].45 On the one hand, like Satan, the culture of the devils in the epics sought to deny completely the value of place through subjectivism, and, on the other hand, like Mammon and his crew, to attack the place as if it were featureless space which they could develop into something they could use (a bridge to Earth) or a monument to themselves (Pandemonium). In this remarkable portrayal of the two-pronged attack on place in Paradise Lost, Milton gave a formulation of the now common view in environmental circles that Protestantism, in a seeming paradox, both sought to rise above place and at the same time viciously ransacked the Earth’s places. Max Weber noted this same paradox early in the twentieth century in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as in no previous period in history.”46 Not only does Protestant John

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Milton escape this indictment of Protestantism, he formulated it centuries before Weber. In direct opposition to Satan’s truth that “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–55), when faced with exile from her place, Eve wonders not only how she will “wander down / Into a lower World” (11.283–84), but how she and Adam will “breath in other Aire / Less pure” (11.285–86). Whereas Satan boasted he could make a heaven of Hell, Eve fears life in a new place will not even be possible. Satan represented that place was nothing; Eve fears that it is everything. In contrast to Milton’s Hell, before things went wrong in Paradise, the culture of the place, as best represented by Eve, was to be so rooted in place that separation from place seemed a “stroke, worst than of Death” (11.268). To understand this further, it will be helpful to consider the most particular place Adam and Eve inhabit in Paradise Lost before the Fall: the “blissful Bower” (4.690). Milton’s inclusion of a Bower in his poetry is hardly new, though the poet’s “blissful Bower” may be most closely related to Spenser’s “Bowre of Blisse”: the Bowre of Blisse was situate; A place pickt out by choice of best aliue, That natures work by art can imitate: In which what euer in this worldly state Is sweet, and pleasing vnto liuing sense, Or that may daintiest fantasie aggrate, Was poured forth with plentifull dispence, And made there to abound with lauish affluence.47

Though the outward similarities between these two bowers are many, their role in their respective works is fundamentally different. Vividly contrasted with the Garden of Adonis, Spenser’s Bowre of Blisse is first and foremost an enchanting temptation, perhaps as much for readers as for Guyon. Milton’s blissful bower, though pleasant, is in no sense a temptation – though it is conspicuous that we find this holdover from Spenser and Arcadian poetry in Eden. Before moving directly to the description of Milton’s bower, it will be helpful to recall that while “dominion” (which is the word Milton and the Authorized Bible use where human beings are given “dominion” over the Earth) does derive from the Latin domus (which is simply a house – hence “domicile”), it has been suggested that it may also have a root in the Greek demein, which is “to build.”48 By considering just what type of

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Part I: Having place

“building” Milton interprets “dominion” to be, we may get a glimpse of his ecology – as “ecology” is literally the “account” (logos) of the “house” (oikos). With dominion and ecology understood in this way, let me cite historian Oswald Spengler, who gives a beautiful “account of a house” rooted in the Earth: And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find everywhere the symbolic shape of the peasant’s dwelling, which in the disposition of the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood of its inhabitants. The peasant’s dwelling is the great symbol of settledness. It is itself plant, [which] thrusts its roots deep into its “own” soil.49

What is perhaps most significant about the above passage is the idea that the house is at root a planted plant. The house in Paradise Lost is the Bower “built” for Adam and Eve by God. Though “built” is a correct word here since (as the following quotation will show) God does “frame” the Bower, the distinction between “builder” and “planter” is blurred with intertwining images of the house both as framed and grown: Thus talking hand in hand alone they pass’d On to thir blissful Bower; it was a place Chos’n by the sovran Planter, when he fram’d All things to man’s delightful use; the roofe Of thickest covert was inwoven shade Laurel and Mirtle, and what higher grew Of firm and fragrant leaf; on either side Acanthus, and each odorous bushie shrub Fenced up the verdant wall; each beauteous flour. Iris all hues, Roses, and Gessamin Rear’d high their flourisht heads between, and wrought Mosiac; underfoot the Violet, Crocus, and Hyacinth which rich inlay Broidered the ground, more colour’d then with stone Of costliest Emblem: (4.689–703)

The Bower is a living “planted house” rooted in place, which makes literal Spengler’s words: “It is itself plant, [which] thrusts its roots deep into its ‘own’ soil” (p. 90). It is a prelapsarian image not of a house built of the place’s “resources” (as resurgere, “to rise again”), but as a living house still in its act of rising out of its place, it is still a source of life. The distinction here is rather like the two ways one may think of a forest: considered as a re-source, the forest is a great stockpile of material that can be taken from the place (uprooted) so as to “rise again” (resurgere) in some contrivance of

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human creation – such as a house “framed” of the forest’s dead wood. (As this occurs in the epic, the devils ransacked the hill to take from deep in the place minerals, as re-sources, in order that those minerals would rise again [resurgere] as Pandemonium.) Considered as a source (as surgere, “an original rising” – a surging forth), the living forest provides oxygen, food, and shelter (such as the Bower or animal houses), not only for humans but for all varieties of life. The Bower is not a “fallen” house, in that not a single tree or plant was “felled” (or, to put it another way, like Eve after her Fall, made “to Death devote” [9.901]) by an ax to “frame” it. Instead “it was a place” framed by the “the sovran Planter” out of the still standing (un-Fallen) life that surged forth in the Garden. As we shall see, like Eve before the Fall, the Bower is firmly rooted in its place on the Earth. Given Milton’s prelapsarian ecology (“account of the house”), it might be more than idle speculation to consider just how Adam’s and Eve’s future generations would have inhabited their place if there had been no Fall. To do this, we need to consider what the unrealized connection between “house raising” and “child raising” would have been like in the prelapsarian Garden. Though we know that the Garden was “Planted, with Walks, and Bowers” (8.305), we still can imagine the need for new Bowers to house all the humans that will “fill the Earth” (7.33) in its many places. Laurel and Myrtle, the large “framing” of Adam and Eve’s Bower, are not especially fast in their growth. (Having myself been raised in a place called “Mount Laurel,” I know this to be true.) While a forester intent on using the Laurel’s dead wood as a re-source would grow impatient waiting on the slow-growing plant (consequently, Laurel and Myrtle wood have not seen much use commercially, as a re-source, which is perhaps why Milton choose these “useless” woods for his Bower), its growth would be not only commensurate with a child’s but a source of constant change and emergence unfolding about the youngster, since we humans, as far as animals go, are rather slow growing ourselves. Therefore, for a new Bower to be “raised” as the home (place) for a child, it would have to be planted when the child was quite young to be fully raised when the child was fully raised. When the Laurel and Myrtle’s deep “bow” had turned to an embrace as they met and intertwined over the place they surrounded, not only would a Bower have been grown in the place but a person as well. So we can imagine the first young child (let’s assume this prelapsarian child was also a boy named Cain) being led by Adam and Eve to a particular place in the Garden which he would be told would be his domicile, where he would have dominion. At this the raising would begin, not only the raising of the Bower through planting, but also the raising of Cain as he

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Part I: Having place

became educated (as in educere, which carries the meaning of “to raise up”) as he was apprenticed to the peasant vocation of his parents. So each day we would see all three as On to their mornings rural work they haste Among sweet dewes and flours; where any row Of Fruit-Trees overwoodie reached too farr Thir pampered boughes, and needed hands to check Fruitless imbraces: or they led the Vine To wed her Elm; she spous’d about him twines Her marriagable arms, and with her brings Her dowr th’adopted Clusters, to adorn His barren leaves. (5.211–19)

This would not be idle busy-work (as some might read this peasant vocation in Paradise Lost), but the exercise of humankind’s dominion over their place in the Garden as a “building” (understood as “planting”) which would see the place not as space to develop (as the devils in Hell saw everything, as merely dead re-sources) but as the living source of life which in that one place in particular was being raised together with a child. The house would grow with the child, around the child, and through the child’s hands as the two literally grew together. As Adam and Eve carefully guided tiny hands to small limbs, it would not be to hold the Earth down submissively but quite the contrary, to raise it up with a child who cared for the place, as the place (as a lovingly crafted domicile) cared for the child and the adult he would become. As the growing place where the person would be rooted, the house itself would become a living expression of the peasant pact between the person and the place. And too, perhaps growing up with the Bower this young Cain, whose true “genius” would come from the fact that he was a genius grown in the place, would have learned from the Bower that we cannot force our “rise,” but must slowly grow from the place which grows around us. This image of the Bower, as a place where both nature and a child are raised, is a literal expression of what Diane McColley has noted: “The Gardening of Adam and Eve [in Paradise Lost] . . . is literally the care and cultivation of nature; morally the cultivation of virtue in response to God’s laws, both natural and revealed; ethically, the nurture of marriage and children.”50 This Miltonian “account of the house” (ecology) is so astonishingly intertwined with humankind and place that it begs us to reconsider just what it is we mean by “ecology,” especially if ecology is merely understood as saving the Earth’s re-sources. Milton’s ecology is far deeper in that the Earth is understood as an original “source” which saves us as much as we save her.

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Milton has also, perhaps as much as might be possible, portrayed a human habitat like an animal dwelling. Berry makes clear the significance of this maneuver: “In spite of all his [humankind’s] technical prowess, nothing he has built or done has the permanence or congeniality with the earth, of the nesting instincts of birds.”51 To counter the belief that our significant accomplishments far outstrip those of any other living thing inhabiting the Earth, Milton looks not to some grand edifice (like Pandemonium) but instead to the in-habitation of birds and animals for an exemplar of a dwelling, thereby bringing about a radical destabilization of accepted notions of how we should dwell on the Earth. In many respects Milton’s portrayal of Adam’s and Eve’s relation to their place is a reversal of biblical interpretation that many consider the only reading of scripture: in the words of William Leiss, the first chapter of Genesis contains “the idea that man stands apart from nature and rightfully exercises a kind of authority over the natural world.”52 But Milton does not have human beings standing apart from the Earth in some sort of external relation. Instead Paradise Lost contains a remarkable expression of an internal relation which has human beings so rooted in place that, as our roots grow deeper into the place, the place (as Bower) grows around us through the work of our hands – which is precisely why we grow deeper into the place. And the “authority” Leiss mentions is not given to humans but rather remains in God’s signature upon the pact between humans and the place which gives us “dominion” (understood as a “building/planting” that sees the place not full of re-sources but as the original source of ever-surging life) over our place on Earth. The stark contrast of Pandemonium to the Bower in the Garden clarifies Milton’s understanding of place and the “account of the house” in Paradise Lost as these habitats reveal two very different ways of in-habiting a place. But, more importantly, as I shall argue in the next two chapters, place is of central importance to Paradise Lost as it is the desire to stand apart from our place on Earth that brought about the Fall itself. Through Milton’s remarkable portrayal of Eve “a spirit of what it was to be there” (in Snyder’s words)53 firmly rooted in place on the Earth, is beautifully depicted. As we shall see, Eve is the spirit of the place called the Garden.

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Place given: Eve as the garden’s spirit of place

Why has man thus rooted himself firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? Henry David Thoreau, Walden1

In this section I intend to argue that Milton deconstructed medieval theology’s dualistic representations of Christianity. To suggest that Milton “deconstructed” anything (let alone Christianity) may seem little more than a thinly veiled attempt to attach this work to an influential movement; nonetheless, I hope not only to bring attention to recent scholarship that has traced deconstruction from Derrida (through Heidegger) to a surprising Reformation antecedent in Luther but also to approach Milton’s “monism” in a new way.2 I shall argue that this monism may be seen as the result of Milton’s de-structuring of medieval theology’s dualistic Christianity, Christianity understood as being con-structed within what I am terming the “Christian–pagan” dyad. Of course, it will not be suggested that Milton simply inverted the structure to privilege the pagan or Earthy; on the contrary, I shall argue that Milton suggests an origin of the Christian–pagan dyad in a scripturally sanctioned Christianity rooted in the Earth which understands human beings as “Spirits rooted in the Earth” or “Spirits of place.” Seen in these terms, Milton’s deconstruction may seem a risky business indeed, in that he is unabashedly embracing that Earthy aspect of Creation that a thousand years of Church doctrine had sought to cleave off from the Spirit. But perhaps the risk may be smaller than anyone would be likely to suppose: if Milton can integrate this “Christianity rooted in the Earth” so thoroughly with biblical sources that his interpretative retelling of scripture in Paradise Lost can be read as “orthodox Christianity,” then there may be no risk at all. Indeed, because Paradise Lost for hundreds of years was read as orthodox Christianity, the greater risk may be that we shall continue to allow the dualistic thinking of medieval theology to cover over something 30

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more original, in this case, an environmentally friendly Christianity rooted in the Earth. But first, on to Milton as “deconstructor” of Christianity. Derrida’s deconstruction was not only derived from Heidegger’s “destruction” (Destruktion) but, as the translator of Of Grammatology tells us, deconstruction was originally so similar to destruction that “in the first published version of De la grammatologie, Derrida uses the word ‘destruction’ in place of ‘deconstruction.’ ”3 Though Derrida’s deconstruction would come to be associated with the belief that signifiers are so freely (perhaps mischievously) at play within texts that all authority is undermined, destruction’s counter aim, as Heidegger defines it in Being and Time, is an effort to “stake out the positive possibilities of . . . tradition” and not (as in deconstruction) to succumb to “a vicious relativizing of . . . standpoints”4 – a remarkable 1927 prefiguring of Derrida’s deconstruction on Heidegger’s part. Simply put, when confronted with dualistic thinking in the form of binary structures in opposition, such as subjectivity–objectivity, Heidegger sought to de-structure the structure to arrive at the origin of the structure itself; in the case of subjectivity–objectivity, this “origin” was Heidegger’s much celebrated Dasein. The “origin” not only because both halves of the dyad are derived from this source but, as Heidegger’s analysis was historical after the “hardened tradition” was “loosened up and the concealments which it [the tradition] brought about” were “dissolved,”5 it would be found that the dyadic structure was historically preceded by the “origin” (Heidegger generally held that subjectivity–objectivity had yet to emerge in pre-Socratic thought). It is worth remembering that while destruction has a negative aspect in that it destabilizes the binary structure, as does deconstruction, its aim is nonetheless resoundingly positive because it attempts to recover something precious (concealed by the dyadic structure) that the tradition no longer sees. The relevance of all this to Milton studies becomes clear when we look for a historical precedent to Heidegger’s destruction. Because Heidegger destroyed many of his early notes, this precedent had been something of a mystery. Though some scholars suggested Nietzsche as a source, recent scholarship by Edward John Van Buren and others6 into Heidegger’s previously unavailable early lecture notes discovered a surprising Reformation origin for destruction. As John D. Caputo succinctly puts it, the young Heidegger, “who identified himself . . . as a Christian theologian,” had as “model in this project” of destruction none other than Martin Luther, who “even used the word ‘destruction’ to describe his project of recovering

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Part I: Having place

an authentic Christianity beneath the conceptual scaffolding of medieval theology.”7 Like Heidegger centuries later, Luther found himself mired in a tradition of duality, particularly with respect to the spirit–flesh dyadic structure propounded by the Church. As Luther puts it with characteristic directness, “Metaphysical theologians deal with a silly and crazy fiction when . . . they invent the notion that the spirit, i.e., reason, is something absolute or separate by itself and in its own kind an integral whole and that, similarly, opposite to it also sensuality, or the flesh, constitutes equally an integral whole.”8 For Luther the spirit–flesh structure, as a mutually exclusive dichotomy, was con-structed by medieval theologians and was without scriptural support, since it was largely through their reading of Aristotle (who Luther once said was sent by God “as a plague upon us on account of our sins”9 ) that Christianity had lost sight of the “whole man,” whom Luther sought to see again after the destruction of the constructed spirit–flesh structure. Surprisingly, Luther himself adopts the name and idea of destruction from an interpretative reading of 1 Corinthians, in which God declares “ ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise’ ” [emphasis added] (1:19). As Van Buren puts it, “Fatefully for the young Heidegger, Luther’s Theses 19 and 20 [of the Heidelberg Disputation] translate the term ‘destroy’ in 1 Corinthians into the Latin destruere [cognate for the German Destruktion], to pull down, to dismantle, to de-stroy, to deconstruct.” This is an important passage for Luther because it suggested to him that the spirit’s desire to pull free of the body, especially for the purpose of abstract theoretical thought, amounts to a very dangerous sort of pride that, as Van Buren states it, “willfully and hyperbolically oversteps its limits, and elevates itself into the Beyond (super) of its speculative visions, and thereby seeks to satisfy its desire for dominion (dominium), power (potestas), empire (imperium).”10 As I shall argue, Luther’s suggestion that understanding human nature as a spirit– flesh dichotomy tempts the spirit to overstep its limits and to elevate itself (which comes from a desire for dominion and power) will be important in helping us understand the Fall in Paradise Lost. While it is beyond the scope of this work directly or indirectly to link Luther’s destruction with Milton, I do intend to suggest that the mature Milton’s “monism” may be seen, in light of Luther’s enterprise, as the result of Milton’s de-struction of dualistic (as being of the Earth or not of the Earth) Christianity into a Christianity rooted in place on the Earth. Before moving directly to Milton, however, I shall explore the Christian– pagan dyad through a type of etymological destruction of the word “pagan” in order to arrive at its historical “origin.” To do this task, I cite the historian

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Oswald Spengler, who, though more interested in our Decline than our Fall, does have an interesting viewpoint on our original relationship to our place on the Earth. He explains how a deep transformation occurred in human beings when we first entered into a relationship with the Earth, not as hunters or gatherers, but as planters: To plant implies, not to take something, but to produce something. But with this man himself becomes plant – namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, with the new earth-boundness of being, a new feeling pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes Mother Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and grain, a profound affinity is set up. A new devoutness addresses itself in chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man. [Spengler’s italics and capitalization.]11

What I find most fascinating about this account of our beginning is the connection of plants and peasants. Though Spengler does not expound further on this link, an etymological consideration of our English word “peasant” will help us to understand peasants as plants. “Peasant” derives from the Latin pangere (and, as we shall see, so does “pagan”), which is literally to place something into the Earth, to fix it there, establish it, join and unite it (with the Earth), or simply, “to plant in the Earth.”12 As it carries the meaning of “something joined together,” pangere has a common root with pax, from which our words “pact” and “peace” derive, since people at “peace” with each other are, by way of a “pact,” joined together. “Peasant” then means (as Spengler noted) not only to be planter, but at the same time to be rooted in a specific place on the Earth ourselves, literally to be connected there by a pact between the peasant and the place in which each is at peace. A pact, as Spengler puts it, is “not to take something, but to produce something” (p. 89). “Pagan” (the idea and the meaning attached to pangere) was brought about by an early interpretation of Christianity13 that sought to construct itself in opposition to what Spengler called “chthonian cults,” and in so doing, created the Christian–pagan dyadic structure – and a thoroughly dualistic state of affairs. In essence, the “pagans” became those who, as rooted in and connected to the Earth, were thoroughly “Earth-bound,” whereas Christians, who had the capacity to transcend the Earthy “shell,” suffered no such “bondage.”14 The Earth and Spirit (as well as body and mind) were separate, and Christianity ran the risk not only of seeking a “divorce” of soul and body but at the same time of undoing that blessed union between human beings and the Earth that typifies peasants. If Milton is to overcome

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Part I: Having place

this dualism, he must undertake the de-struction of the Christian–pagan dyad by reclaiming the original sense of pangere (as peasant, rootedness in the Earth) from pagan.15 The difficulty of this enterprise can be seen in the ease with which Spengler moves from his perception of Earth as friend, then as Mother, then as the object of devotion at the center of “chthonian cults” (p. 89). In Milton’s time the danger of this type of dualistic thinking is painfully clear in Serafino Della Salandra’s Adamo Caduto (1647), where Adam’s birth from the Earth (as the Hebrew ha-adam: literally “creature made of Earth”) is referred to in a way that makes “earth” a pejorative term: Adam: Sir, I perceive that the almighty hands Drew me and formed me from the humble mire, The vile stench of the earth; and through Creation I recognize my origin as vile . . . God: I formed thee of the earth. That stamp divine That shines forth upon thy form, thou hast from me; For such a gracious likeness could not issue In any other way from such vile stuff . . . Of earth thou art: and ne’er could the World consent To revere thee, of vilest substance born If I had failed to set upon thy form The image of my venerable self. My graft divine I place upon so vile a trunk I placed, in order that it might dissolve The juices of the earth, and so the fruits Might not be human but in truth divine.16

If Milton fails to reclaim our original peasantry from being depicted as bondage with vile earth, then he too runs the risk of having the remarkable connection between Human beings and the Earth not only co-opted by the pagan but also eschewed by the Christian. To understand just how devastating this lapse into dualism can be for us and the Earth, it might be helpful to consider the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche before moving to Milton. In what some would see as an anticipation of deconstruction, Nietzsche set about from his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, to invert the privileged position that the Christian (interpreted as Spirit) had over the pagan (the Earthy). Milton scholar William Kerrigan succinctly expresses why the thinker undertook this enterprise: Nietzsche argued “with excruciating lucidly, that the concept of a transcendent world debases and devalues this world.”17 The ecological significance of Nietzsche’s understanding of

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Christian thinking becomes clear when we recognize that, to Nietzsche, the fantasy of the Christian was to have the Spirit pull free of the Earthy and be with God in a super-sensible realm. But since the Spirit is still connected to the Earth by way of the body, in Nietzsche’s view the Christian Spirit lashes back at the body (and the Earth) out of anger for having its dream of ascension thwarted. As noted earlier, this understanding was intimated by Luther, but Nietzsche saw this anger in Christianity in a more general way as a need for power and dominion not only over the body but over all that was Earthy, indeed, the Earth itself. As one recent environmental writer (Bruce W. Foltz) puts it, “And as Nietzsche saw so lucidly . . . this metaphysical hostility to the earth . . . is the very essence of revenge.”18 What is forgotten here, however, is what Nietzsche only came to see in the last few months of his sanity: this potential for ecological disaster only necessarily occurs when the super-sensible realm is inaccessible for the embodied human being.19 While Nietzsche believed that this was necessarily the case for Christianity and Platonism, he saw that Plato’s doctrine itself, before the historical advent of “Platonism,” did not postulate a super-sensible realm inaccessible to embodied human beings.20 As well Nietzsche might, for Plato held throughout the Dialogues that we recollect Ideas such as Justice, while still on Earth, by a lifetime of re-collecting Earth-bound examples of justice. To understand how Milton’s understanding of all this escapes Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, it will be first helpful to consider the genius loci figures in Milton’s poetry. In Lynn White’s enormously influential essay on the historical roots of our ecological crisis, the environmental significance of the genius loci is made clear: In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit . . . Christianity of course also had its angels and demons . . . But these were all as mobile as the Saints themselves. The spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated.21

To White, the environmental significance of a belief in a genius loci stems from the fact that there was a protective spirit of a particular place (or natural occurrence, such as a hill), and “it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated.” Christianity, which White argues opposed such beliefs in genius loci, “made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feeling of natural objects” as “the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.” White’s understanding of “guardian spirits” is that their sole function (as guardians) is to protect Nature from human beings. However, in Milton’s poetry, the

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Part I: Having place

genius loci of Antiquity receives a major rewrite as a human spirit joins with a specific place to become a “spirit of place” which guards both the place and human beings. Each of five major works of Milton’s 1645 Poems contains a genius loci (in most, actually named as “genius” by Milton), who generally figures prominently in the work – so prominently, that in “Lycidas” the role of the Nature of the place becomes critical in ameliorating the tragedy of the story. In “Lycidas” we come to understand that though Lycidas (Edward King) did drown, he is also saved as “Hence forth thou [King] art the Genius of the shore” (l. 183). In “Lycidas” a human being in peril is saved by the beneficent Nature of the place, which transforms the human being into the “Spirit of the place.” The story of Lycidas is not a transformation myth in the sense of the Daphne story – where there was once a woman now there stands a tree – but rather, the shore not only existed before King, but continues on as such with Lycidas made “Genius of the shore” (l. 183). At a moment of complete powerlessness, King’s spirit unites with the shore to become imbued with the immense saving power of the place, which enables him to save “all that wander in that perilous flood” (l. 185). In the Nativity ode we have the oft-quoted “parting Genius” (l. 186) reference, in which a genius loci, along with a host of pagan gods, is forced out of each “haunted spring, and dale” (l. 184) to make room for Christ. So perhaps not surprisingly, in “Il Penseroso” there is only a brief mention of a genius loci as there was a “sweet musick” (l. 151) that was either sent by a spirit, “Or th’ unseen Genius of the Wood” (l. 154). Yet in Arcades, a genius loci again has a central role. Why? To begin, it is not altogether clear that the 21-year-old Milton is truly exiling his genius locus in the Nativity ode. As Stella Revard comments on Apollo (another outcast in the Nativity ode), though it would seem that the pagan god must “either be a symbol for Christ or a rival,” Milton’s novel approach to this either-or dilemma was to “embrace it as he endows his Christ in the Nativity ode with Apollonian splendor and to reject it as he dismisses Apollo himself.”22 The genius loci who later appears in Arcades is just such a refusal to accept the either pagan or Christian dyadic structure. As Cedric Brown notes, in the Genius of the Northern Wood’s speech “Fifteen lines go to the description of plant doctoring. Ten lines play out ‘the celestial sirens harmonie.’ And each balances the other in a ‘puritan’ rhythm.”23 In Arcades we have the vocation of the genius loci clearly defined as caring for the Nature of the place (through plant doctoring) over which the Genius presides, yet seemingly in contrast to this rootedness in place, there is a near equal concern for “the celestial Sirens harmony” (l. 63). We are witness in Arcades to an early

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re-emergence of the pagan genius loci within the Christian tradition – a Spirit rooted in place, yet with an ear for a spirit realm. This Miltonian idea of genius loci as both rooted in the Earth and spiritually aware is probably nowhere clearer in the earlier works than in The Ludlow Mask. As Richard Neuse noted some thirty years ago of the Mask’s genius loci, “Sabrina becomes a symbolic expression of man’s lower nature seen in a truly new light, transformed, namely as no longer in conflict with spirit and reason, but as harmoniously responsive to them.”24 Neuse continues by suggesting that this thought would find fruition in Paradise Lost: “It would seem that Milton envisioned the essential harmony and continuity between the sensual and spiritual faculties long before he wrote the Tree of Life passage in Book V of Paradise Lost.” (At this point Neuse quotes lines 479–87 of Book V, in which the creation is seen as plant rooted in the Earth that ultimately flowers as spirit while still connected to the Earth.) While we might substitute Milton’s own coinage of “sensuous” for Neuse’s sexually evocative “sensual” in “sensual and spiritual faculties,” and see Sabrina more literally as an expression of the “Nature of the place” and not “man’s lower nature,” Neuse does make a provocative case for a spirituality rooted in place on the Earth being further developed in the Mask in the form of a genius loci, Sabrina. Adapting the Sabrina myth for this purpose did present something of a problem for Milton: as the Sabrina myth appears in Spenser, Drayton, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and even in his own The History of Britain as Milton records the story handed down to him, the River Severn is not the mechanism by which Sabrina is saved but, quite the contrary, the instrument of her destruction as she is murdered by being thrown into its swift current.25 Undaunted, Milton simply rewrites the tale to ascribe a saving power to a now beneficent river – a saving power that Sabrina will come to share in as she will be able to free the Lady. Of course, we need not look far for Milton’s inspiration for this maneuver: in “Lycidas” Edward King is made the rescuing “Genius of the shore” (l. 183) by the power of the place in the same way that in the Mask Sabrina is transformed into the saving “Goddess of the River” (l. 842). We have in Milton’s genius figures a remarkable internal relation between the human beings and their respective places on the Earth. While ecologist Arne Naess explicated the idea of an internal relation by referencing the indigenous Laplander of Norway who claimed that “part of the river” that flowed through his place was “part of himself,”26 even Naess’s explanation pales by comparison to what Milton is developing in these early works. Milton is making the notion of an internal relation between the place and

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the human being so literal that it can only be expressed mythically as the genius loci. Completely antithetical to Christian asceticism, in which the spirit seeks to pull free of the Earth, Milton is unabashedly drawing from pagan sources to develop a notion of spirit as irrevocably rooted in an Earthly place. The implications in Milton’s “genius” maneuver are considerable: Milton has his onetime human beings completely bodily connected to the place. Recall what Deep Ecologist Bill Devall had to say about the connection of human beings to a particular place on Earth: “If a person can sincerely say after careful self-evaluation and prayer that ‘this Earth is part of my body’ . . . that . . . ‘If this place is destroyed, then something in me is destroyed,’ then that person has an intense feeling of belonging to the place.”27 Could Milton’s genius figures possibly feel anything else? Moreover, this connection is life-giving in Milton’s formulation: the woman Sabrina would surely have drowned without the saving power of the place. Whether in terms of body, ego-boundaries, life-giving power, sensitivity to the moods of the place, or loving care of the place as part of one’s Self, the genius loci of Milton’s early poetry are clearly, indeed literally, expressions of the deepest of ecologies. However, the challenge facing the mature Milton is considerable: how can these clearly “pagan” adaptations be integrated into Christian thinking? It is rather surprising that Milton largely abandoned the idea of a genius loci in the great works of his maturity: there is no mention of a genius loci in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, or Samson Agonistes. Or did he? A careful look at Arcades and Paradise Lost together will reveal the remarkable final form that the “spirit of place” will take in Milton’s mature thought. Consider the description of the Genius of the Wood’s vocation of caring for his place in Arcades: For know by lot from Jove I am the powr Of this fair Wood, and live in Oak’n bowr, To nurse the Saplings tall, and curl the grove With Ringlets quaint, and wanton windings wove. And all my plants I save from nightly ill, Of noisom winds, and blasting vapours chill. And from the Boughs brush off the evil dew, And heal the harms of thwarting thunder blew, Or what the cross dire-looking Planet smites, Or hurtfull Worm with canker’d venom bites. When Eev’ning gray doth rise, I fetch my round Over the mount, and all this hallow’d ground, And early ere the odorous breath of morn

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Awakes the slumbring leaves, or tasseld horn Shakes the high thicket, haste I all about, Number my ranks, and visit every sprout With puissant words, and murmurs made to bless. (ll. 44–60)

The similarity between this Genius and the Sabrina genius in the Mask are obvious as both actively visit the place they inhabit: “oft at Eeve” (l. 843) Sabrina “Visits the herds along the twilight meadows” (l. 844), while the Genius in Arcades informs us that “When Eev’ning gray doth rise, I fetch my round / Over the mount, and all this hallow’d ground” (ll. 53–54). Sabrina “with pretious voild liquors heals” (l. 847) the effect of “all urchin blasts, and ill luck signes” (l. 845), while the Arcades Genius explains not only that he undertakes to “heal the harms of thwarting thunder blew” (l. 51), but also that “all my plants I save from nightly ill, / Of noisom winds, and blasting vapours chill” (ll. 48–49). What may be less obvious, however, is just how closely the Genius of the Wood in Arcades resembles Eve in Paradise Lost. Diane McColley was the first to notice the likeness between the Genius in Arcades and Eve. In order to give evidence of Milton’s “lifelong insistence on the responsible use of creative energy” towards the Earth, McColley draws our attention to Milton’s early spirit of place: “In Arcades, the Genius of the northern Wood says that it is his job to ‘nurse the saplings,’ save plants ‘from nightly ill,’ ‘heal the harms’ of thunder, unpropitious planets, and ‘hurtfull Worm,’ and, like Eve, hasten forth early to ‘Number my ranks, and visit every sprout / With puissant words, and murmurs made to bless.’ ”28 If we build upon McColley’s insight by considering, on a more fastidious line-by-line basis, just how much this Genius is “like Eve,” it becomes clear that we are examining an early formulation of Eve (and, to a lesser extent, Adam). Both the Genius in Arcades and humanity in Paradise Lost have been given by divine decree “dominion”29 over their place: the Genius knows that because of “Jove I am the powr / Of this fair Wood” (ll. 44–45), while one of Adam’s earliest memories is of God informing him that, “This Paradise I give thee, count it thine / To Till and Keep” (8.719–20). Now, of course, the idea that human beings have dominion over the entire Earth is sure to make environmentalists cringe, but as this early formulation in Arcades shows, the domain of the Genius (as a genius loci) is limited to a specific place (the “fair Wood”), which is also the case in Paradise Lost. Adam realizes that while “other Creatures all day long / Rove idle unimploid . . . And of thir doings God takes no account” (4.616–22), human beings must remain rooted to

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do their work of tilling and keeping their place: “Man hath his daily work of body or mind / Appointed, which declares his Dignitie” (4.618–19) by caring for the small part of the Earth where they are rooted – their “pleasant labour” (4.625). Both Adam and Eve realize that if human beings are to have dominion over the entire Earth (to be guardians of the entire Earth), there are going to have to be many more human beings to “Till and Keep” all the specific places: Adam remarks to Eve that the work will “require / more hands than ours . . .” (4.629), while Eve realizes that “till more hands / Aid us, the work under our labor grows” (9.207–08). There is a hint that the need for more human guardians of place has already been provided for: when Adam is first brought into the Garden, he notices that the Garden is “Planted, with Walks, and Bowers” (8.305), suggesting that there were many “places” (with Bowers in place) in need of “spirits” to tend them. It should be noted that the idea that a “Spirit of a Place” would dwell in a Bower was also introduced in Arcades: The Genius lives in an “Oak’n bowr” (l. 46), while Adam and Eve live in a “blissful Bower” of “Laurel and Mirtle” (4.690–94). Continuing with Arcades, we can get a clearer idea of just what sort of tilling the Genius practices in his place in the next line, in which he begins to describe his vocation: “To nurse the Saplings tall” (l. 46). This “nursing” of plants will mature into the dual image of fertility (as in a child’s nursery) and fecundity (as in a plant nursery) coming together in the single personage of the nurturing Eve whose plants “at her coming sprung” in “Her Nurserie” (8.46).30 As “nurse,” “nursery,” and “nurture” have a common root in the Latin nutrire (simply “to nourish”), keeping and tilling their place is first and foremost to the Genius and Eve a nurturing of the plants in the place they inhabit. Milton elaborates on this vocation of tilling and keeping a place on Earth as the Genius must “curl the grove / With Ringlets quaint, and wanton windings wove” (ll. 46–47). In Paradise Lost this activity is portrayed in two ways: first as the practical work of nurturing as Eve (with Adam) must work to insure that no “Fruit-trees overwoodie reachd too far” (5.213), and must lead “the Vine / to wed her Elm” (5.215–16). The idea here is that the immense fecundity of the Earth itself will prove a liability without the judicious Gardening of a “Spirit of the place.” Secondly, with “Ringlets quaint” (l. 46), Arcades introduces the aesthetic aspect of gardening that Eve would beautifully practice in the Bower: “Here in close recess / With Flowers, Garlands, and sweet-smelling Herbs / Espoused Eve deckt her first nuptial bed” (4.708–10), and that she would remember after the Fall, “Thee lastly nuptial Bowre, by mee adornd / With what to sight or smell

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was sweet” (11.280–81). In both of these works we have the idea that a “guardian of the place” is needed to insure both the bounty and beauty of their place. The next lines of Arcades deal with a postlapsarian world, in which ills and evils come at night. Though the Genius must save his plants “from nightly ill, / Of noisom winds, and blasting vapours chill” (ll. 48–49) and more ominously “from the Boughs brush off the evil dew” (l. 50), in the prelapsarian world, the “nightly ill” that Milton retains is far more benign as Eve fears that “one night or two with wanton growth derides / Tending to wilde” (9.211–12). Incidentally, not only is there an early formulation of Eve in Arcades, but in the postlapsarian night there lurks a prototype of the threat to her place as the “hurtfull Worm with canker’d venom bites” (l. 53). After the night references, the Genius tell us that he is so concerned with his vocation that with “the odorous breath of morn . . . haste I all about” (ll. 56–58). This deep sense of vocation (and with it deep joy) emerges again in Paradise Lost (as morning “haste”) when “On to thir morning work they [Eve and Adam] haste” (5.211).31 Next, the Genius further expounds on how he tends his place, as part of his task is to “Number my ranks” (l. 59) of plants in order to keep track of them through a sort of classification (or “ranking”) system. In the parallel passage in Paradise Lost, this “ranking” returns when Eve, faced with exile from the Garden, asks her plants, “Who shall reare ye to the Sun or ranke / Your Tribes” (11.278–79). So tilling and keeping means not only nurturing, but keeping track of the plants in the domain of the “guardian”, but as Milton quickly reminds us (beginning in the same line in Arcades that mentions “ranking”), nurturing is of the utmost importance as the Genius makes sure to “visit every sprout / With puissant words, and murmurs made to bless” (ll. 59–60). The idea of “visiting” plants returns in Paradise Lost as Eve goes “forth among her Fruits and Flours, / To visit how they prosper’d, bud and bloom” (8.44–45) and after the Fall remembers the flowers and her “early visitation” (11.275). (Note also, that to Eve they are “her Fruits and Flours” [emphasis added] (8.44) that she visits, in the same way that the Genius proclaims that “all my plants I save from nightly ill” [emphasis added] (l. 48): both the Genius and Eve understand their responsibility as they know full well that these plants are in their place – that these plants are “theirs” to till and keep.) While in Arcades the Genius only “blesses” the plants “With puissant words, and murmurs,” the metaphor is varied and strengthened in Paradise Lost: it is not “words” or “murmurs” of Eve’s voice, but her touch that affects the plants, and if there is any doubt that the Genius’s blessing was felt by his plants, there is no question that Eve’s

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flowers felt the work of her hands as “they at her coming sprung / And toucht by her fair tendance gladier grew” (8.46–47).32 In continuing with our comparison, it should be remembered that in Arcades the Genius has a split nature, being not only rooted in his place on the Earth, as we have been suggesting but also with an ear for a transcendental spirit realm: But els in deep of night when drowsines Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I To the celestial Sirens harmony (ll. 61–63)

Given how much Milton has used the Genius in Arcades as an inspiration for Eve (and Adam) in Paradise Lost, it is perhaps not surprising that this idea also reappears, though this time the celestial music is a hymn to God. As it is spoken by Adam to Eve: how often from the steep Of echoing Hill or Thicket have we heard Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive to each others note Singing thir great Creator. (4.680–84)

Arcades’ Genius and Eve (as well as Adam) are not merely rooted in the Earth but also have celestial awareness by virtue of the fact that the creation is understood as a plant rooted in the Earth that is also rising to Heaven. Withal, with the portrayal of Eve and Adam, Milton has startlingly reformulated the genius figures of his youth. No longer merely mythic, we have in Eve a compelling and practical paradigm for how human beings should be in relation to their place on the Earth. Though fully embodied human beings, Adam and Eve have nonetheless inherited the most salient (and Earth-friendly) features of Milton’s early genius loci. But if human beings are spirits rooted in place, the new genius loci for a Christian world, then what do we make of medieval theology’s conviction that Christians, as spirit, should attempt to pull free of the earthy aspect of Creation? Should Christians uproot themselves from the Earth and renounce their peasantry? As I shall argue in the following section, Milton’s description of the Fall offers an startling answer to these questions.

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Place lost: Eve’s Fall as an uprooting

To be in place is good and to be out of place is evil. Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Place”1

The image of human beings kept low on Earth while Heaven stands above the Garden is a persistent one in Paradise Lost. When Satan first hears of the command regarding the Tree of Knowledge, he simply assumes that God intends “To keep them [human beings] low whom knowledge might exalt / Equal with Gods” (4.527–28). In many respects his temptation of Eve is an effort to convince her of this conviction: “Why then was this forbid? . . . / Why but to keep ye low and ignorant” (9.704–05). Not surprisingly, then, the idea that Eve can rise above her place on the Earth is first offered by Satan in the dream he induces as he tempts her to “Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods / Thy self a Goddess, not to Earth confind” (5.77–79). But as genius loci, Eve is thoroughly connected to her place on the Earth, though not in the pejorative sense of Satan’s “confind,” but in that she is nurtured and nurturer of what she and Adam recognize in their nightly prayer as their “delicious place” (4.729). Nonetheless, to pull free of her place on the Earth is just what Satan makes Eve dream she can achieve: Forthwith up to the Clouds With him I flew, and underneath beheld The Earth outstretcht immense, a prospect wide And various: wondering at my flight and change To this high exaltation. (5.86–90)

But what should not be forgotten is Raphael’s counsel to Adam: “Heav’n is for thee too high / To know what passes there; be lowlie wise” (8.172–73). As Raphael had taught earlier, there is so much for Adam and Eve to search and know on Earth that they should be content to keep their knowledge within bounds: 43

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Part I: Having place Commission from above I have receav’d, to answer thy desire Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain To ask, nor let thy own inventions hope Things not reveal’d, which th’ invisible King, Only Omniscient, hath supprest in Night, To none communicable in Earth or Heaven: Anough is left besides to search and know. (7.118–25)

In an even earlier lesson Adam understands Raphael’s point that only “In contemplation of created things / By steps might we ascent to God” (5.511– 12). So, by being “lowlie wise” of the created things in their place, Adam and Eve will gradually gain the knowledge that God will communicate of Heaven: till by degrees of merit rais’d They open to themselves at length the way Up hither, under long obedience tri’d And Earth be chang’d to Heav’n, and Heav’n to Earth. (7.157–60)

The idea here is that eventually, after “long obedience” to God and study along with care of their place on Earth, while on the Earth, human beings will find “the way / Up hither” as they legitimately ascend upward towards Heaven. While this ascent would clearly be a wonderful reward for Adam and Eve, what is astonishing is the cosmic event it would precipitate: the literal de-struction of what I have been calling the “Christian–pagan” dyad, not because the boundary between Earthy and the Spiritual will be penetrable by human beings (angels have already had free passage between both realms), but because the Spiritual–Earthy dyadic structure will give way to something more basic as “Earth be chang’d to Heav’n, and Heav’n to Earth” (7.60). If there had not been a Fall, Heaven and Earth would have ceased to be the two aspects of a structure in opposition, since Heaven and Earth would have become one. But there is a problem with the notion that human beings can facilitate Earth being “chang’d to Heav’n, and Heav’n to Earth” (7.60): “Earthy Heaven” can only come about if human beings stay rooted in their place on the Earth, as Raphael expressed it in an earlier lesson: So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves More aerie, last the bright consummate floure Spirits odorous breathes. (5.479–82)

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While the Creation may flower as spirit, it must be rooted in the Earth if it is to live at all. If pulled free of the Earth, not only the root of the plant that grips the Earth, but the “aerie” leaves and the “odorous” flowers will die as well. This is an important passage that Eve would have done well to remember, for it is not as Satan suggests, that God intends “to keep ye low and ignorant” (9.704–05), but that like everything else native to the Earth, Eve and Adam, as rooted in the Earth, should make no attempt at an ascension if this means they must pull free of their place, since a plant pulled from the Earth will surely die. To understand this further, we need to consider just what happens when a “bright consummate floure” (5.481) forgets that she too is rooted in the Earth, forgets that she is the “fairest unsupported Flour” [emphasis added] (9.431). Eve is thoroughly of the Garden. Not only is she cast in language as a flower, but her effect on the flowers (“they at her coming sprung / And toucht by her fair tendance gladier grew” [8.46–47]) and their effect on her (after the Fall she laments “Oh flours . . . / which I bred up with tender hand . . . / Who shall now rear ye” [11.273–78]), suggests that Eve has (to borrow Spengler’s words) “roots in the earth that [s]he tends,” an “earth-boundness of being,” as she grows in “the fruitful earth that grows up along with [wo]man.” (ll. 89–90). Eve and Adam would be happiest if they sought “No happier state, and know to know no more” (4.774–75) than what they know of their place in the Garden. But as Eve did want to know more, her lapse can be seen as an effort to gain a knowledge outside of the Earthy Garden where she is rooted, not a knowledge of the Garden and Creation itself (which, except for a single tree, she and Adam have the opportunity, and are quickly developing the mental talents, to know quite well), but what immediately after her Fall she believes is within her grasp: “knowledge, as the Gods who all things know” (9.804) – knowledge reserved for a Creator. Immediately prior to her Fall, Eve does something she has not done before in the epic: she begins to speak to part of the place she inhabits. Following Satan’s lead (who straightforwardly addressed the Forbidden Tree: “O Sacred, Wise, and Wisdom-giving Plant . . . [9.679]), Eve begins speaking directly to the tree: “Great are thy Vertues . . . ” (9.745). At no point before the Fall does Eve begin to stand outside of her relation with the place (or any plant which therein dwells) to address what she has been part of as a speaking subject to an object (forging an external relation). Yet “So saying [to the tree], her rash hand in evil hour / Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck’d, she eat [and of course] / Earth felt the wound” (9.780–83). The danger to the place (and to the entire Earth) brought about through this

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act becomes clear as Eve resumes speaking to the tree after “she ingorg’d without restraint” (9.791): O Sovran, vertuous, precious of all Trees In Paradise, in operation blest To Sapience, hitherto obscur’d, infam’d, And thy fair Fruit let hang, as to no end Created; but henceforth my early care, Not without Song, each Morning, and due praise Shall tend thee, and the fertile burden ease Of thy full branches offer’d free to all (9.795–802)

Though Adam and Eve had attended to the plants in their place each morning with song, Comus as well as Eve could have voiced these lines. Never before the Fall does Adam or Eve look upon the “tending and tilling” of their place with consumer’s eyes, but here Eve promises to “tend” the tree with an eye to ease “the fertile burden.” In Comus’s words: “Wherefore did Nature powre her bounties forth . . . But all to please, and sat the curious taste?” (ll. 710–14). In these speeches, Comus and Eve, standing apart from the place in an external relation, are viewing with desire the place as object. The Fall comes about from a lapse in which Eve seeks to pull herself free of Creation (to “uproot” herself from The Garden) so as to gain a God’s-eye view of the Creation. Eve’s “fall” is the tragic consequence of a failed ascension. Indeed, immediately after the Fall both Eve and Adam mistakenly believe that they have succeeded at pulling free of the Earth: As with new Wine intoxicated both They swim in mirth, and fancie that they feel Divinitie within them breeding wings Wherewith to scorne the Earth. (9.1008–1011)

Had Adam and Eve only waited, they would have made the ascent to Heaven “by degrees of merit rais’d” (7.157); now, however, they only fancy themselves ascended, though sadly, the Earth has truly been “scorned.” As Eve’s Fall results from a move away from the Earth, it is the opposite of the humility of one rooted in place on the Earth, as the word “humility” comes from “humus,” earth. Clearly, then, this momentary lack of humility which rips Eve from her place on the Earth is the source of the wound felt by Earth. To illustrate this idea, one might imagine some great tree which had simply reached too high for its roots in the Earth to continue to support it, and so it falls. Now the crater left by such a fall, like Eve’s Fall, would truly be a wound that the Earth would feel. Because in this view humanity’s difficulties resulted from our desire to pull ourselves free of the Earth, our

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greatest postlapsarian hope should be in one motion to heal the wound felt by Earth and re-root ourselves in place on the Earth, a situation quite the opposite of what medieval theology generally held. Stephen Fallon has astutely noticed in Paradise Lost that Milton takes “a poet’s revenge” on the dualistic philosophers by “dressing the philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes in diabolic clothing” as the poet gives the devils in the epic the metaphysical views of Milton’s age.2 Milton’s startling account of the Fall makes a similar assault on dualistic medieval theologians. To many of these Christian thinkers, giving too much favor to the Earth is what happened at the Fall: a privileging of the not spiritual “Earthy.” It is hardly surprising that to many modern environmentalists this Christian tradition of privileging the spiritual at the cost of marginalizing the Earth is taken to be the source of much of our current woe.3 But in Milton’s reading of the Fall, Eve initiates the Original Sin as she momentarily acts like a good dualistic theologian by pulling away from the Earth. In other words, in Paradise Lost medieval theology’s attempt to counterbalance Original Sin through a one-sided privileging of the spiritual, becomes, with absolutely delicious irony, a likeness of Original Sin! This understanding of the Fall also radically destabilized medieval theology’s misogynous suspicion that Eve was a little too “Earthy.” As Paradise Lost celebrates Eve’s connection to the Earth, her downfall only occurs when she is momentarily duped (by a dualistic theologian in devil’s clothing) into believing she should turn away from the Earth. The “poet’s revenge” aside, in Paradise Lost we have a reading of the biblical Fall, friendly to both Eve and the Earth, that has for three centuries been taken as entirely plausible. It is Diane McColley who, in terms of Eve’s dream, brought attention to the fact that the “temptation to transcendence – a natural and, from the point of view of the Reformation, an unregenerate reaction to the temptation of sensuality – was one of which Milton’s contemporaries were well aware.”4 By citing John Donne, McColley focuses on a bridal song in Milton’s contemporary Joost van den Vondel’s Adam in Ballingschap in which Eve “Unties the bond that couples soul with body. / The soul, intent upon its heavenly nature, / Rejects the earthly.” Though in van den Vondel’s account the Earth is rejected, as McColley aptly remarks, “The dualism of this passage is thoroughly opposed to Milton’s sense of the original integrity of body and soul and the original harmony of heaven and earth.”5 What McColley identified as the “temptation to transcendence” in Eve’s dream is what I am attributing to the Fall itself as Eve’s desire to “uproot” herself. While the “temptation of sensuality” has been well identified in Paradise Lost,6 the “temptation to transcendence” has frequently escaped critics’

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attention.7 Nonetheless, in Paradise Lost the Fall is complexly depicted, with both the “temptation of sensuality” and “temptation to transcendence” as evils to be avoided. To understand just how human beings and the Earth share a single wound as a consequence of Original Sin, we need further to explore Milton’s description of the Fall. The imagery surrounding Eve’s and Adam’s Fall is not merely of a rootedness in the Earth. Milton is not prepared to relegate Mother Earth to the status she occupies in works such as The Faerie Queen. (As Walter Kendrick expresses it, Spenser’s Mother Earth “is subject to no personification and possesses little of what one could call character.”8 ) The fact that Mother Earth is so lovingly personified by Milton has recently led one critic, Richard DuRocher, to ask of the Earth’s presence at the Fall a long overdue question: “What is the personification of the Earth doing at this pivotal moment in Paradise Lost?”9 This is an important question, since, as DuRocher notes, “For all its originality and importance, the significance of this figure has virtually escaped critics’ attention” (p. 94). Adam is not present at Eve’s Fall, God is nowhere to be seen, even Satan has slithered away as Eve nears the moment of Original Sin. There is only Eve – and the Earth: Earth felt the Wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost. (9.782–84)

And at Adam’s Fall the Earth is again present: Earth trembled from her entrails, as again In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan, Sky lowr’d, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal Sin Original. (9.1000–04)

Now if Nietzsche (or even one of the Church Fathers) had written these scenes, one might have expected Earth’s presence at the event, but she would have likely felt pleasurable trembling as the flesh was privileged when Eve “ingorg’d without restraint” (9.791). But in Milton’s account the Earth was wounded. Why? DuRocher’s interpretation is provocative: “Seen in the sequence of the Earth’s personifications throughout the poem, this figure makes a turning point in Milton’s argument. Through anthropomorphic imagery of childbirth, Milton shows that during the Fall the Earth reverses the process of Creation” (p. 94).

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There is certainly much to suggest that there is “anthropomorphic imagery of childbirth” at the Fall. DuRocher argues that there is a parallel between the mining taught by the Fallen angel Mammon in Book 1 of Paradise Lost (“Men also, and by his suggestion taught / Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands / Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth” [1.678–90]) and the idea that “Adam and Eve’s sin likewise seems to involve a violation of Mother Earth’s creative power” (p. 101). Key to DuRocher’s argument is the idea that, when personified, Mother Earth’s “body” may bring forth naturally in birth – as in “The Earth obey’d, and straight / Op’ning her fertile Womb teem’d at a Birth / Innumerous living Creatures” (7.449–56) – or may unnaturally have her treasure taken from her (for example, Mammon’s desecration of Mother Earth). It should be added to DuRocher’s case that Milton’s use of “pangs” to describe what the Earth felt is telling, since from the sixteenth century through Milton’s time “pangs” was limited to either “death pangs” or “pangs of childbirth.”10 What all this means for DuRocher is that “Eve’s Fall is at first unlocalized, but as the depiction of the Earth after Adam’s Fall indicates, it is felt in the vital, creative part of Mother Earth, her womb” (p. 114). Though DuRocher states that “at the Fall Milton’s Earth registers both sympathy with human suffering and sentience of its own injury” (p. 112), the difficulty he encounters is that in holding to the idea that “during the Fall the Earth reverses the process of Creation” (p. 101), he is at a loss to explain what brought about the wound, only concluding that “Some kind of external injury . . . actually befell the Earth” (p. 114). On the other hand, if we do not think in terms of a literal childbirth, but rather a child’s own foolish act that causes a separation from the Mother Earth, then the wound becomes the site (the place of “rootedness”) where human beings and the Earth became separated. If a child is tragically taken from its mother through a momentary lapse in obedience by the child, we not only say that the mother feels her own wound at having lost the child, but we also rightfully say that the empathetic mother feels the child’s wound at having lost the mother. In this sense, the child’s and mother’s wound are the same, not only because the child’s act which pulled them apart created a single wound that they share, but simply because in their profound sorrow, they each share the wound by feeling it for their own sake and the sake of the other. Indeed, as long as they continue to feel the wound, though a great distance may separate them, they will always be together in the sorrow they feel. So we might say, though it sounds contradictory, that while the act that brought about the wound separated human beings from the Earth, through the act of feeling the single wound of the Self–Other, they are

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still, in a certain sense, together. This is a radical de-struction of the idea that spiritual Christians (even after the Fall) must be separated from the Earth. It can be further argued that the casting of the Earth’s wound at the Fall in terms of childbirth has more far-reaching implications. Consider Milton’s rewriting of Genesis 3:16 as it is told by Raphael: Thy sorrow I will greatly multiplie By thy Conception: Children thou shalt bring In sorrow forth (10.193–95)

Though Adam interprets this judgment as “to thee / Pains onely in Childbearing were fortold” (10.1050–51),11 Raphael speaks of childbearing only as a feeling of “sorrow,” and not as a punishment of pain. Because the Earth’s sorrow at losing her connection with humanity is portrayed anthropomorphically as childbirth, the birth of each human child is going to be, in some sense, a reenactment of the events of the Fall. In these terms, bringing forth children in sorrow is an attempt by God not to punish, but to remind, so that each new generation might be brought forth in the memory of what befell the Earth through our Original Sin. Again, this is not a punishment but a reminder of the wound we share with the Earth, so that we might renew the bond we had with the Earth by recalling that we still share the same wound. The environmental importance of this interpretation of the Fall in Milton becomes clear if we return to the earlier quoted environmental writer (Bruce Foltz), who accepted Nietzsche’s assessment of Christianity as being inherently in opposition to the Earth (understood as the pagan). Consider Foltz’s expressed intention of the way he intends to approach the modern environmental crisis in (what is to him) a very non-Christian manner: Yet it is possible to approach the problem from a different direction altogether, taking our fundamental relation to nature, rather than nature alone, as our primary subject of the crisis. Traditionally, however, this question has taken its bearing from a standpoint that attempts to rise above this relation; it has been decided from a position that strives to establish itself beyond phusis, that is, from a metaphysical position. I propose to consider this relation, then, with reference to a position that is within the relation itself and thus outside of metaphysics.12

That “metaphysical” position “beyond phusis” is, to Foltz, Christianity– Platonism. But it is also extraordinarily like the position that Milton’s Eve hoped to secure by knowing what God knows, a position outside of her very enmeshed existence with the Earth, which, of course, was tragically

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impossible for Eve. Eve, her place on the Earth, and the remarkable relation they shared (which I etymologically associated with “peasants”), received a single devastating wound at the moment of the Fall. Returning to Eve, the full tragedy of Eve’s lapse becomes clear to her when she learns that she will be permanently uprooted from her place. Though there is “A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament” (l. 183) when the “parting Genius” of the Nativity ode is forced from his place, we as readers are not privy to the “lament.” But in Book 11 of Paradise Lost, when in similar language the parting Genius Eve reveals herself by “audible lament” (11.266), Milton unfolds the scene as we hear Eve’s speech when Michael informs her that she must leave her place (the Garden). As Death is the punishment for disobedience to God, Eve’s lament is all the more astonishing as she now “feels the wound” she shares with the Earth as she learns of the separation: O unexpected stroke, worst than of Death! Must I leave thee Paradise? thus leave Thee Native Soile, these happy Walks and Shades, Fit haunt of Gods? where I had hope to spend, Quiet though sad, the respit of that day That must be mortal to us both. O flours, That never will in other Climate grow, My early visitation, and my last At Eev’n, which I had bred up with tender hand From the first op’ning bud, and gave ye Names, Who shall now reare ye to the sun, or ranke Your Tribes, and water from th’ ambrosial Fount? Thee lastly nuptial Bowre, by me adornd With what to sight or smell was sweet; from thee How shall I part, and whither wander down Into a lower World, to this obscure And wilde, how shall we breath in other Aire Less pure, accustomed to immortal Fruits? (11.268–86)

In her penultimate speech in Paradise Lost, on coming to understand that she must leave the Garden, her place, Eve has a moment of painful clarity in which her existence comes into focus even as it falls away from her with news of the impending exile. And it is not, as some existentialists might have it, a life in focus because she is faced with the prospect of her own death (she has known that she has been facing death ever since her Fall), but rather because she clearly understands here that she (along with Adam) has been a “spirit of the place” called the Garden.

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It is not her existence per se that Eve laments, but her existence as a genius loci, an existence so interwoven into the Garden that Eve is in essence asking, “What will happen to us: Eve, Adam, the flowers, the Bower – to the Garden that roots us all? “How shall we [Adam and Eve] breath in other Aire / Less pure, accustomed to immortal Fruits?” (11.285–86) And of the plants: “Who shall now reare ye to the sun?” (11.278). When Eve learns of the exile from the Garden (as she “feels the wound”), she realizes both that she is a “spirit of a place without a place” and that the place is equally without a spirit, which paralyzes her with fear of the separation of her life from the place of life that both nurtured her and had been nurtured by her – which will mean Death for All. While Aquinas argued for a “wounding of nature” (vulneratio naturae) at the Fall, it was a wound “inflicted upon all human nature [humanae naturae] by reason of the first parents,”13 and not upon the Earth herself. But Milton has the Earth as explicitly wounded at the Fall as he has Eve wounded when she learns she is to be separated from the Garden. Seen in these terms, it can be argued that Milton took the attributes of the pagan genius loci and used them to develop his Adam and Eve as “spirits of place” so as to embody a destruction of medieval theology’s dualistic representation of Christianity. Although Milton’s destruction is radical even by Luther’s standards. While in these terms, Luther’s destruction saw humanity as “spirits of flesh” (and equivalently as “flesh of spirit” – clearly problematizing medieval theology’s mutually exclusive dyadic structure with the flesh merely as vessel: as in “spirits in flesh”), Luther still ran the risk of having his human beings as “spirits of flesh” interpreted as unique spirit–flesh amalgams that, being fundamentally different from everything else of the flesh (Earth), are still privileged “visitors” merely sojourning on Earth as they make their way “home” to be with God in an un-Earthy realm. But in seeing human beings as “spirits of place” (which presupposes Luther’s “spirits of flesh” – and equally problematizes medieval theology’s “spirits in flesh”), Milton clarifies that human beings (though privileged by being made the “guardians of place” – by being given “dominion” over a place) are “spirits” rooted in a specific place in the Earth: that human beings are not “visitors” on Earth but in the truest sense “natives” whose vocation is to nurture and guard their place on Earth – their true home. Approaching the portrayal of Eve in Deep Ecology’s terms, Milton’s Christian genius loci seems tailor-made to address Paul Shepard’s somewhat veiled attack upon Christianity: “If nature is not a prison and earth a shoddy way station, we must find the faith and force to affirm its metabolism as our own – or rather, our own as part of it.”14 To Milton, it is not that

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we are in some sort of bondage to the Earth, but rather that we once had a remarkable bond with the Earth that needs to be renewed. Moreover, though a more literal (than the genius figures of 1645 Poems) expression of the mythic relation to the Earth, Milton’s genius Eve still affirms the place’s metabolism as her own. This said, what Wendell Berry remarked of his deep relation to his place (the Kentucky hill) sounds remarkably like the way Eve might have described her life in Eden: “I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.”15 Continuing with Berry’s insights, the relationship with place on the Earth that Eve lost is very much like what Berry comes to believe is the most worthy ambition of all: If I belonged in this place it was because I belonged to it. And I began to see that so long as I did not know the place fully, or even adequately, I belonged to it only partially. . . . I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether home here. That is still my ambition. But now I have come to see that it proposes an enormous labour. It is a spiritual ambition like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by nature, but as a man I can belong to it only by understanding and by virtue. It is an ambition I cannot hope to succeed in wholly, but I have come to believe that it is the most worthy of all.16

What makes Eve’s Fall especially tragic is that on the morning of the day she will lapse, she sees, like Berry, that tending to the place “proposes an enormous labour.” As Eve expresses it: Adam, well may we labour still to dress This Garden, still to tend Plant, Herb and Flour, Our pleasant task enjoyn’d, but till more hands Aid us, the work under our labour grows, Luxurious by restraint; what we by day Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind, One night or two with wanton growth derides Tending to wilde. Thou therefore now advise Or hear what my minde first thoughts present, Let us divide our labours. (9.205–14)

That Eve’s fall was precipitated by a hope to fulfill her role as genius loci more full certainly mitigates her lapse. As Diane McColley notes, “Milton’s Eve is distinguished from all other Eves by the fact other she takes her work seriously,” as Milton’s Garden is “a real garden really needing care.” “Clearly,

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this is a natural garden that responds to care in familiar ways, and in their labor it is a high delight. At the same time, it teaches Adam and Eve about its Maker,” and “about themselves.”17 Berry’s similar insight is that tending to one’s place is “a spiritual ambition like goodness.”18 As genius loci Eve lacks none of this “goodness,” though her “spiritual ambition,” to know and to tend to her place and herself, lapses for a moment when she is duped by Satan into seeking knowledge not of herself and her garden but “knowledge, as the Gods who all things know” (9.804). The horrid danger of uprooting from place, both for human beings and the place, is made clear as Adam and Eve are outside their place even when within it. Yet as Paradise Lost draws to a conclusion, not only is there the promise of redemption for humanity, but through the act of that “one greater Man” (1.4), place will eventually be restored: “the Earth / Shall all be Paradise, far happier place / Then this of Eden, and far happier days” (12.463–65). But until that far-off day, Paradise Lost also ends with the promise that Michael’s instruction to place themselves in “fitter soile” (11.262) will be heeded by Adam and Eve. While it is beyond their power to regain paradise, there is the promise that Adam and Eve might regain place: The World was before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and providence thir guide: They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took thir solitarie way (12.6.46–49)

The challenge before Adam and Eve as their epic ends is to reroot themselves in a new place on Earth.

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Place regained: Sabrina puts down roots

Does man still dwell calmly between heaven and earth? Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking 1

“They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow / Through Eden took thir solitaire way” (12.648–49). With these lines Paradise Lost closes, but after Adam and Eve take that long walk out of Paradise, what next? Once lost, how is Paradise to be regained? The sad truth is that the situation has gotten so out-of-hand that, try as they might, Adam and Eve simply cannot regain Paradise – regardless of what they do to atone. It is somewhat surprising, then, that Milton did not give greater emphasis to what the Son did to atone for humanity in Paradise Regained; instead the poet focuses on the decisive scene in the desert where the Son would “first lay down the rudiments / Of his great warfare” (1.155–58) in order to provide what is both his plan for atonement and arguably a new paradigm of human action. As I shall argue in the following sections, in Paradise Regained not by looking to what the Son did on the cross to atone but in laying down the rudiments of a startlingly new manner for humans to approach their world (for example, by resisting the temptation of Greek learning, Roman power, and exalted Judaic thinking), Milton delivers a fair measure of the responsibility of regaining Paradise (place) in the here and now back to humankind.2 So the question remains, after Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden, what can they do to work towards regaining place? Another way of approaching this question is to ask, if only the Son can “conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes” (Paradise Regained 1.159), what is left for humanity to do? Will resisting the temptations of Greece, Rome, and the glorious Throne of David conquer a less grand foe? In Paradise Lost there is a third foe (setting aside for a moment the Devil), no less grand, which is not only worse than Death, but in a seeming paradox, is both the cause and effect of Eve’s Sin. Though resisting the sort of lavish personification Milton gives 55

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to Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, this foe nonetheless is represented in the epic as both the wounded Earth and wounded humanity. From his title onward, Milton chooses not to emphasize the first two effects of Eve’s lapse by writing an epic entitled Sin Found or Death Released; instead he focuses on the wounded area of the Earth as he tells the story of how the place, Paradise, was lost. As Milton states it, from the first book he proposes “the whole Subject, Mans disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was plac’t” (Paradise Lost, The argument to Book 1). As Eve’s lapse in Milton’s epic comes about not from a desire to privilege the Earthy aspect of her existence (as it often does in medieval theology’s depiction of the Fall), but quite the opposite, as an attempt to pull free of her very enmeshed existence with the place, the cause of both Eve’s Sin and the Earth’s wound is in part this momentary desire to uproot herself. But as Eve finds to her horror, this Sin of seeking separation from the Garden has the effect of achieving just that, her separation, or exile, from the place – the stroke, worse than Death. On the one hand, this separation can simply be viewed as having a punishment that fits the crime, but if we interpret Milton’s depiction of what may well be the pivotal moment in the JudeoChristian unfolding of our history allegorically, especially in light of our current environmental crisis (which was germinating in Milton’s time), a different picture emerges. As noted earlier, more than a few environmentalists have suggested that the dualistic thinking of certain metaphysical theologians (such as the Scholastic philosophers) runs the risk of having these high-seeking spirits abandon, indeed scorn, the Earth as they seek to pull free of their Earthly bondage. This becomes especially clear when we remember that giving too much favor to the Earth, recast as “Earthly” in medieval theology, is to these metaphysical theologians just what happened at the Fall: a privileging of the not spiritual “Earthly.” Why should Christians worry about their place on the Earth when they should at each turn eschew the “Earthly” to avoid the Original Sin of privileging that which is of the Earth? It is hardly surprising, then, that, to many environmentalists, Christianity’s privileging of the spiritual at the cost of marginalizing the Earth is the source of much of our current woe. But in Milton’s radical approach, medieval theology’s privileging of the spiritual at the cost of marginalizing the Earth itself becomes Original Sin. For a moment, Eve, like a metaphysical theologian, pulls away from her place on the Earth, yet to her horror both Eve and the Earth suffer a devastating wound. The separation of humans from Eden is, of course, also what happened in the Genesis account, but in Genesis God merely “drove out the man;

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and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24). Milton significantly adds that a devastating change occurred in the place as “The brandisht Sword of God before them [the Cherubims] blaz’d / Fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat, / And vapor as the Libyan Air adjust, / Began to parch the temperate Clime” (12.633–36). In so doing, Milton gives a far more satisfying interpretation than medieval theology of why the Fall brought about our separation from Paradise: humankind, though thoroughly rooted in place in the Garden, had a momentary lapse in which we sought that which was reserved for the highest heaven, but in our Scholasticism-like preoccupation with that Other realm, we turned away from the Earth, causing an environmental disaster that devastated the place on the Earth that humanity occupied, the Garden. The Fall in Paradise Lost thus allegorically warned metaphysical theologians of what so many environmentalists now caution us all: if we privilege the spiritual at the cost of the Earth, our Paradise here on Earth will be lost. To Milton, the exile from the Garden is not some sort of appropriate punishment for the sin of favoring the spiritual at the cost of the Earthy, it is the effect of what happens when we do this: the Earth suffers, and as Eve’s lament (11.268–86) reveals, we suffer along with the Earth. If Paradise Lost’s environmental allegory is not to be lost on us, we must open ourselves to the possibility that what happened once might happen again (indeed, is happening all across globe at the present time), so our original question remains: once Adam and Eve (humanity) are exiled from Eden, what can they do both to avoid such future destruction and work towards regaining Paradise? The simplest answer to this question is that we should take the advice of Milton and modern environmentalists, who urge us to remain firmly rooted in the Earth. To the metaphysical theologians who would have their spirits soar free of the Earth, Milton counters that, like the prelapsarian Eve, we should be “spirits of place” (genius loci) with roots running deeply into the place on the Earth we inhabit – as we equally rise up towards Heaven. In Thoreau’s pithy self-answering question, “Why has man thus rooted himself firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?”3 While the Son’s task in Paradise Regained is to work out how he will conquer what humanity cannot (Satan, as well as “Sin and Death the two grand foes” [Paradise Regained 1.159]), there is still the prospect that humankind can wage warfare against that third foe, the cause and effect of Eve’s Sin which brought Death to the Earth. This can be achieved only by remaining firmly rooted in our place on the Earth while

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rising upwards towards Heaven in order to heal the single wound we now share with the Earth in our postlapsarian world. This is not to say that “the rudiments / Of his great warfare” (Paradise Regained 1.155–58) that the Son works out in Paradise Regained are of no use in healing the Human–Earth wound: as we shall see in the following sections, the temptations the Son resisted in the minor epic (some of which Milton contrived for the occasion of Paradise Regained) offer a highly provocative argument that humanity should carefully reconsider the Greco-Roman-exalted Judaic tradition in which we still find ourselves today, which arguably urges us to sever the bond we have with our place on the Earth – thereby replaying Original Sin all over again. By taking the Son in Paradise Regained as a new exemplar, humankind might work towards healing the wound, caused by Original Sin, that brought Death to the Garden. As provocative as the mature Milton’s thoughts are on what is needed to heal the Human–Earth wound, the purpose of this present section is to consider one of Milton’s earlier meditations on what happened to humanity after the exile from the place Paradise: A Mask at Ludlow. Humanity, in this case the common family of Sabrina and the Bridgewater children of the Mask, have, after long ordeal, finally landed on the British Isles after their exile from the Garden. And following humanity there comes not only Comus, but, as Cedric Brown noted, in the Mask there is also the prospect of “an ideal order, in which the temperate use of nature leads to a prosperity for the people, and in which the piety of the people is shown.”4 To reword our original question, exactly how is this ideal order attuned to Nature to be achieved? In a sense, the founding of this perfect order began long before the Mask begins. In the recent Hollywood film Sabrina, the title character surprisingly recites a portion of the “Sabrina Fair” song from Milton’s Mask (ll. 860– 66). To which her male lead (played by Harrison Ford), being something of an inattentive dolt, responds by asking if this is yet another fairy-tale story of a helpless woman in need of saving by her prince. Sabrina returns, quite correctly, that it is Sabrina who is the savior of this story. In true Hollywood fashion, the remainder of the film is given to the way the ultra-competent male lead comes to realize just how desperately he needs to be saved. In an unexpected way, this film’s radical reversal of the traditional fairy-tale mold mimics the Ludlow Mask. As Stella Revard reminds us, the story of Sabrina, both before and after Milton, is “a prototypical founding myth.”5 But in Milton, the traditional myth gets a significant twist – indeed, it gets altogether turned around. In Spenser, Drayton, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and even in his own The

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History of Britain as Milton records the Sabrina myth handed down to him,6 the River Severn is not the mechanism by which Sabrina is saved, but quite the contrary, the river is the instrument of her destruction as she is murdered by being thrown into its swift current. Though all the accounts of her death have Sabrina fleeing the not-so-Original Sin of domestic violence which has followed her family into Britain, only in Milton’s Mask does Sabrina seek protection from the sin following her as she “Commended her innocence to the flood [the River Severn] / That stay’d her flight with his cross-flowing course” (ll. 831–32) . . . a small but crucial change. As Brown notes, “There is no need to search for a source giving a version of the story closer to Milton’s details: he deliberately changed the emphasis.” In Brown’s view, Milton made the change because the “story of Sabrina’s drowning did not quite fit the celebratory context at Ludlow.”7 This is no doubt true, but Milton also dramatically reconsiders the relationship of human beings to the place on the Earth they occupy through this radical retelling of the Sabrina myth. As a founding myth, the story of Sabrina handed down to Milton casts the River Severn, a natural feature of the region of the Earth being settled, as rather like a weapon; a means of destruction – a potential horror. Which is not to say that the river, any more than a weapon, is in and of itself evil, but it does elicit fear, suspicion, and a deep-seated concern as to what role this instrument of destruction should have in our lives. This myth reveals a people deeply concerned for their well-being in what is taken to be a menacing new land. Milton, however, would have none of this for the River Severn. Not only is his Severn not cast as potentially harmful, but just the opposite, in the Mask the river has an astonishing capacity to save, not destroy. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the environmental implications of Milton’s reversal. It is now almost pass´e to talk about “saving the Earth.” It seems that everyone from politicians to scientists have their own pet initiative intent on saving the planet. While these enterprises vary widely, most have a shared characteristic so common it often eludes notice: most of these “initiatives” proceed from a position of power or strength, believing we are in a position not only to “initiate” change but to bring it to fruition as we, powerful entities that we believe ourselves to be, will save the helpless planet. (But, as ecologist Wendell Berry wryly remarks, to “ ‘save the world’ from some ‘crisis’ ” is nowadays usually to save the world from “the result of some previous ‘breakthrough.’ ”8 ) Sabrina is in no such position, the “guiltless damsell flying the mad pursuit” (l. 829) knows that it is she who is utterly helpless before she encounters the River

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Severn. During her flight it would have been absurd for Sabrina to believe she was in any sort of position to save the place on the Earth where she found herself – it was she who needed to be saved, and she knew it. To Milton (unlike Spenser, Drayton, and Geoffrey of Monmouth), Britain is founded by a people who desperately needed to be saved from the sin following them. What is fascinating is that, in the poet’s account, the saving power will not come directly from Heaven but rather from a place on the Earth. As John Knott has noted, “Sabrina’s power . . . seems to spring from the river itself. It is as though Sabrina by virtue of her own purity can call upon a power for goodness latent in the natural world.”9 James Obertino adds, Sabrina “suggests the positive powers remaining hidden in nature despite the Fall.”10 But perhaps it is not so much Sabrina’s purity that calls upon this latent power in nature, but, in addition, her acknowledgment that she needs the power of the place to save her. Seen in these terms, one can argue that in the Mask Milton is offering an early answer to our prior question of what humanity can do to work towards healing the Earth–Human wound: humans must undo Eve’s Original Sin of uprooting ourselves from our place the Earth by re-rooting in a new place. This, however, can only happen if we acknowledge the helplessness of our position of being without life-sustaining roots deep in the dark Earth. In Milton’s retelling of the Sabrina myth, this idea is made so literal that it can only be expressed mythically, with the isle opening up to receive its first daughter, Sabrina, thereby inaugurating a new regenerative era as Sabrina re-roots her people in a place called Britain. As noted earlier, in so doing, Sabrina joins the ranks of Lycidas, the “parting Genius” of the Nativity ode (l. 186), “th’unseen Genius of the Wood” of “Il Penseroso” (l. 154), and “the Genius of the Wood” of Arcades (l. 26), as a spirit of place (genius loci) who will now share in the saving power of the place. What makes the Ludlow Mask so fascinating is that, although in the Mask we can see Milton laying out the groundwork of the Human–Earth relationship, as genius loci (which will directly develop into Paradise Lost’s Eve), the Mask also offers a vision of how humans are to work towards regaining Paradise: by becoming protective spirits of the specific place on Earth where we dwell. Thus the genius of The Ludlow Mask is not only something of a “proto-Eve,” but the character Sabrina suggests what Eve must become if she is to wage her own warfare against that third grand foe: after the Fall and exile from her place in the Garden, Eve (humanity) must simply return to being what the mother of all humanity was, a “spirit of place,” though in a new place. In a rather circular way, one could say that Sabrina is both mother (along with the other genii of the 1645 Poems) to Eve, as Paradise Lost’s heroine inherits many characteristics that Milton

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first penned in the Mask, but also daughter to Eve, as Sabrina takes up the mother of humanity’s postlapsarian task of re-rooting her people in a new place on the Earth. With all this said about Sabrina’s relation to place, it naturally leads one to question just what relation this “spirit of place” has to spirit. In the Mask an approach to this inquiry has been nicely laid out for us through the inclusion of the Attendant Spirit. The dream of those aforementioned dualistic theologians to dwell in some Other realm is splendidly realized by the Attendant Spirit: Before the starry threshold of Joves Court My mansion is, where those immortal shapes Of bright aereal Spirits live insphear’d In Regions milde of calm and serene Ayr, Above the smoak and stirr of this dim spot, Which men call Earth, and with low-thoughted care Confin’d, and pester’d in this pin-fold here, (ll. 1–7)

Unlike Sabrina, the Attendant Spirit has no connection to any place on the Earth, though he certainly asserts he does – indeed, the Attendant Spirit is often interpreted as genius loci, in the words of Roy Flannagan: “In Milton’s terms he [the Attendant Spirit] is also a genius loci, a spirit which inhabits and protects a certain region.”11 Though the Attendant Spirit does play the part of the genius loci, “habited like a Shepherd” (stage direction at l. 490), and professing to the brothers in the Mask to have learned of Comus while “Tending my flocks hard by i’th hilly crofts, / That brow this bottom glade” (ll. 531–32), this is all a deception. In terms of the Earth, this Attendant Spirit is quite the opposite: a “spirit without place.” It is only because he has been dispatched “by quick command from Soveran Jove” (l. 41) that he even deigns to visit the “dim spot” (l. 5) Earth, otherwise “I [the Attendant Spirit] would not soil these pure Ambrosial weeds, / With the rank vapors of this Sin-worn mould” (ll. 16–17) and exchange “skie robes spun of Iris Wooff” for “the weeds and likeness of a swain” (ll. 83–84). As used by the Attendant Spirit, the word “soil” is actually a pejorative verb. Compare the disdain with another highseeking spirit’s view of this “dim spot” Earth: “I who erst contended / With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrained / into a Beast, and mixed with bestial slime” (Paradise Lost 9.163–65). Like good metaphysical theologians with eyes fixed on an Other realm, the Attendant Spirit and Satan both hold an altogether “dim” view of the Earth.12 This is not to say that the Attendant Spirit shares much else with Satan; the Attendant Spirit being as much a protector of humanity as Satan is a foe. But it is nonetheless a

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pity that these lofty spirits must suffer, if only for a short time, “earthly bondage.” But, of course, this bond with the Earth was exactly what Eve lost and Sabrina regained. This said, it could be argued that the Attendant Spirit, perhaps as much as Comus, stands in direct opposition to Sabrina. Simply put, Sabrina has a place on the Earth; the Attendant Spirit has none. Conveniently Milton has provided Satan and the Attendant Spirit as non-Earthy foils to draw attention to the fact that humans like Eve and Sabrina should be deeply rooted in their place on the Earth. Though casting this spiritual visitor from the Other realm as a classical “daemon” is an interesting maneuver on Milton’s part, suggesting that the poet might already have been pondering whether Christian “spirits,” such as Paradise Lost’s later “spirit of place” Eve, might not be fully Earth-bound. But in naming his Attendant Spirit as a daemon (as Flannagan noted, “Milton seems to use the word daemon in the Platonic sense of a divine spirit who may have a presence on earth”13 ), Milton sidesteps Christianity completely as he focuses his attention on the metaphysical Greek tradition that is arguably the West’s source of the dualistic thinking that eschews the Earth. E. M. W. Tillyard was neither the first nor the last critic to speak of the poet’s work as providing “conclusive proof of Milton’s early and deep devotion to Plato,”14 though by the time of Paradise Regained it is clear that Milton is bringing Plato into question. However, if we consider the actions of the Mask as a whole, an unwavering devotion to Plato (at least as Plato was understood by medieval theology) even as early as the Mask of 1634 seems unlikely. This is especially clear in the case of the Attendant Spirit: how is it that this emissary from “where those immortal shapes / Of bright aereal Spirits live insphear’d” (ll. 2–3) (no doubt immortal Platonic shapes, eide, made bright by the Good, ta Agathon, or some god), is so utterly impotent in the Mask? How is it that a “marble venom’d seat / Smear’d with gumms of glutenous heat” (ll. 916–17) is the match for such a brilliant celestial emissary? After all, the Lady’s actions are beyond reproach, and although the brothers do fail in their effort to thwart Comus, all three children never waiver in their single-minded dedication to “pure ey’d Faith, white-handed Hope . . . And thou unblemish’t form of Chastity” (ll. 213–15). Why, then, with all this working for her (not to mention temperance, courage, and a judicious use of reason), is the Lady not freed? Could it be that there is something rooted in this “dim spot” Earth that is far more powerful than this Attendant Spirit? If so, what does this say for Platonic idealism? Before continuing, we need to be clear about just what we mean by Platonic idealism. As mentioned earlier, towards the very end of his sanity

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Nietzsche saw that Plato’s doctrine was fundamentally different from what medieval theology believed it to be, in so far as Plato held that the soul never escaped its Earthly bondage: though human beings had access to that Other realm, this was achieved while they were still embodied on the Earth.15 To Nietzsche, this was a good thing – as well it should be – as it overcomes so many of the difficulties inherent in the dualism of later Platonism and medieval theology. Moving back to Milton, it should be fairly obvious that even a cursory look at the Mask suggests that something akin to Nietzsche’s view of Plato’s doctrine (and not medieval theology’s understanding of Christianity) is being developed here. In the second part of his speech, the elder brother declares that his sister’s “hidden strength,” (l. 418) which is “chastity, my brother, chastity,” (l. 420) takes the “unpolluted temple of the mind, / And turns it by degrees to the souls essence, / Till all be made immortal” (ll. 461–63). Not only is this a monism in which there is a sort of “sliding motion” in which the soul fluidly moves from the Earth realm to a spiritual one,16 while still in the body (indeed, without the body restraining the soul’s motion), but there is the tacit connection of the biblical temple of the body with the “temple of the mind.” From within a temple (the body), the temple of the soul makes the lifelong journey towards another realm simply because the embodied soul acted virtuously on Earth in that Earthy temple. (Although, as the inclusion of Sabrina suggests, this virtue is not itself sufficient.) For example, the Lady does not seek to deny the body, she knows that “good men can give good things,” (l. 703) but she resists Comus because her “wel-govern’d and wise appetite” (l. 705) knows “that which is not good, is not delicious” (l. 704). Unlike medieval theology, Milton is not denying the Earthy. The elder brother’s notion that the “temple of the mind” is turned “by degrees to the souls essence, / Till all be made immortal” (ll. 461–63) develops into the general understanding of the Spirit–Earth relationship expressed in Paradise Lost: So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves More aerie, last the bright consummate floure Spirits odorous breathes. (5.479–82)

To medieval theology’s conviction that there is a duality of spirit and Earth, Milton responds that there is but “one first matter” (5.472), and that (had there been no Fall) our “bodies might at last turn all to Spirit” (5.497), though we must never forget that this all springs “from the root” (5.479) that lies in the dark Earth. It is precisely this that the Attendant Spirit and

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Satan have forgotten. Similarly in the postlapsarian future foretold by the Son in Paradise Regained, the glorious Throne of David will not exist in some Other realm, but rather it will be like a tree firmly rooted in the Earth: “Know therefore when my season comes to sit / On David’s Throne, it shall be like a tree / Spreading and over-shadowing all the Earth” (ll. 146–48). This understanding in Paradise Lost, of Earthy and Spiritual as being “one first matter all” (5.472), however, is not at first glance the Lady’s grasp of the body’s relation to the spirit in the Mask. After taking the Lady to his palace, and informing her that he has her captive, the Lady seems to respond to Comus that he really does not have her at all: “Fool do not boast, / Thou cannot touch the freedom of my minde / With all thy charms, although this corporeal rinde / Thou haste immanacl’d” (ll. 662–65). The OED credits Milton for coining three separate uses of the word “rind”: first as “the outward form of a person,”17 the OED cites the Lady’s above-quoted speech from the Mask; the second definition as “the skin of a person or animal” is from Paradise Lost;18 finally, “rind” as “the peel or skin of fruits and vegetables,” also occurs in Paradise Lost.19 In none of these case is the “rind” in any sense inessential: a skin is obviously indispensable to a person. Moreover, in Paradise Lost Adam and Eve, like many cultures who live close to the Earth, make use of all that Nature offers: “Fruits which the compliant boughes / Yielded them . . . / The savourie pulp they [Adam and Eve] chew, and in the rinde / Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream” (4.332–36). Here the pulp and rind, like a person’s inner organs and skin, are not only of equal importance with respect to one another, but are not to be simply discarded. If the Lady’s speech is, like the elder Brother’s declaration (in the words of Stephen Fallon), a “Platonizing Speech,”20 then it seems clear that even in the early, seeming “dualistic” Mask at Ludlow, Milton is questioning how the rind of a person is any less integral than some other unseen part. But even if the Lady believes that she does not have integral bodily roots that reach deep into the Earth, what then? If we take the Lady as saying here that she is free and clear of any assault Comus might initiate, the Mask would be largely devoid of drama. The brothers, the Attendant Spirit, and the Mask’s audience are all waiting with pensive breath for the Lady to be freed; if like a salamander or magician the Lady had cleverly shed her skin, leaving Comus with only a “corporeal rinde,” the Mask could end at this point – why summon Sabrina to save a discarded rind? But the younger brother clearly knows that they must rush to save his sister, body and all, from a prospective assault, “To save her blossoms, and defend her fruit / From the rash hand of bold Incontinence” (ll. 396–97).

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In Paradise Lost Eve is duped by Satan into momentarily thinking like a dualistic theologian, the result of this deception being that she, who first and foremost (even more than Adam) is thoroughly rooted in the Garden, “uproots” herself from the place which has sustained and been sustained by her life. Similarly, every action in the Mask, from the Attendant Spirit being first dispatched to Sabrina’s appearance, as well as every tension we who see or read the Mask experience, assumes that the Lady’s body, that “corporeal rinde,” does matter. Or, to put it another way, as much as spirit, matter matters, so to speak. Whatever dualistic ideas the children of the Mask may have, if they have been led to believe, even for an instant, like Eve, that that Lady can somehow soar above her bodily connection with the Earth, then tragedy will certainly ensue. But it is precisely the connection with the Earth that the children may believe the Lady can and should eschew, the roots that Sabrina first set down into a place on British soil, that can save the Lady. Without roots like Sabrina’s that run deep into a place on the Earth, we are, like the Lady, powerless. This was the condition of the human being Sabrina before she was saved by (a place on) the Earth. It is also the condition of the Attendant Spirit. A parody of dualistic theology, the Attendant Spirit has realized Eve’s dream (induced by Satan in Paradise Lost 5.86–90) of being without roots in the Earth, yet far from a freedom, this lack of connection to the Earth has rendered him all but helpless. True, he does have practical knowledge (of haemony, for example) and a fair amount of wisdom but, without roots in the Earth, he is nearly powerless. Not surprisingly, then, each of the Attendant Spirit’s attempts to assist the Lady must enlist the help of something (or someone) firmly rooted in the Earth: the brothers, haemony, or Sabrina. In the case of Sabrina, this does raise questions regarding just how responsive the genius loci is to the call of the Attendant Spirit. As Richard Neuse noted, “Sabrina becomes a symbolic expression of man’s lower nature seen in a truly new light, transformed, namely as no longer in conflict with spirit and reason, but as harmoniously responsive to them.”21 While we might see Sabrina more literally as an expression of the “Nature of the place” and not “man’s lower nature,” Neuse does raise an important point which poses an essential question: is Sabrina “harmoniously responsive” to the call of the spirit? Well, certainly, Sabrina does answer the call (invocation) of the Attendant Spirit, but it is by no means certain during the invocation that she will respond, or even that she is responding, to a call of the spirit at all. Earlier in the Mask (ll. 128–34) Comus made a similar invocation to Cotytto without response. Moreover, the Attendant

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Spirit knows full well not only that Sabrina needs to be “right invok’t” (l. 854), but that his effort may not succeed: “this I will try / And adde the power of some adjuring verse” (emphasis added) (ll. 857–58). Indeed, only after the Attendant Spirit’s humble acknowledgment of the power of the genius (“Goddess dear / We implore thy powerful hand . . .” [ll. 902–03]), does Sabrina respond to what she believes is the invocation of a shepherd. Now, of course, as the beneficent genius of a pastoral place, Sabrina has a special relationship with the thankful shepherds: [Sabrina] oft at Eeve Visits the herds along the twilight meadows, Helping all urchin blasts, and ill luck signes That the shrewd medling Elfe delights to make, Which she with pretious voild liquors heals. For which the Shepherds at thire festivals Carrol her goodnes lowd in rustick layes, And throw sweet garland wreaths into her stream Of pancies, pinks, and gaudy Daffadils. (ll. 843–51)

So Sabrina’s response to a “shepherd” may have less to do with “spirit,” and more to do with a genius loci caring for the humans who rightly honor Sabrina’s care of the place they inhabit. Put another way, an invocation responded to loses a great deal of its significance as an invocation when the call is merely for the spirit do her vocation. Though the Attendant Spirit is quick to point out to the freed Lady that the grace that has come through Sabrina has a higher origin (“Com Lady while Heaven lends us grace, / Let us fly this cursed place” [ll. 938–39]), there is also a sense that this Spirit sent from an-Other realm knows that the grace given is beyond his power to muster and that they had better take quick advantage of it. With all the power ascribed to the genius loci Sabrina in the Mask, it is perhaps not surprising that, like the Attendant Spirit, Comus wishes to play the part of the genius loci: I know each lane and every alley green Dingle, or bushy dell of this wide Wood, And every bosky bourn from side to side My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood, And if your stray attendance be yet lodg’d, Or shrould within these limits, I shall know Ere morrow wake, or low roosted lark From her thach’t pallat rowse (ll. 310–18)

Although it is clear that, other than sauntering through his “place,” Comus has no real understanding of what a genius loci actually does. It can be

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similarly stated that Comus also has an equally shallow understanding of the role of his father, Dionysus. As Cedric Brown and others have noted, Milton “would have known the [Greek] words komos (the revel) komazein (to revel, reveling), and komazontes and komastes (revelers).”22 Comus, as a personification of komos, then become the embodiment of that particular kind of revelry we associate with the cult of his father, Dionysus. Though in deference to Brown, who is no doubt using the ever-reliable Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon to translate komos as “the revel,” komos seems to mean something more. Brown suggests this when he notes that, “As Milton would have known, moral writers, like Plato, wrote how the komos might disable a whole community.”23 The very fact that phrases such as “good-natured revelry” and “reveling in our success” do not sound discordant suggests that “revelry” might be far more benign to us than komos was to Plato. Perhaps a better word for that wild, ecstatic intoxication that could disable an entire community might be “frenzy.” It is difficult to imagine “good-natured frenzy”; impossible to imagine “good-natured ecstatic, intoxicated frenzy.” Though in English there is no one word that seems to capture the sense of komos, in German there is a single word, rausch, that means just that: ecstatic, intoxicated frenzy. Nietzsche, who used to boast that he, so to speak, “put Dionysus on the map,”24 thought like Milton that rausch–komos was a close relative to Dionysus. In the following passage from Twilight of the Idols, I am using the standard Kaufmann translation with the exception that I am substituting komos for Kaufmann’s use of “frenzy” as a translation of rausch. Here Nietzsche is explaining rausch–komos as what is necessary to create a great man such as himself: All kinds of komos, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all the komos of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of komos. Also the komos that follows all great cravings, all strong effects; the komos of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the komos of cruelty; the komos in destruction; the komos under certain meteorological influences, as for example the komos of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the komos of will, the komos of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such komos is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept us, one violates them . . . A man in this state transforms all things until they mirror his power – until they are reflections of his perfection.25

Here, in Nietzsche’s last formulation of the Dionysian, Dionysus as we knew him – son of the Earth deity, Semele, brother to Demeter, protector of crops, and celebrator of the harvest – is gone, all that is left is komos.

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(Or, in Milton’s formulation, all that is left of Dionysus is his son, Comus.) Though there is a nod to “certain meteorological influences,” Nietzsche severs the Dionysian connection to the Earth. The source (the Earth) of that intoxicating feeling of komos, as a people humbly gave thanks to the Earth for providing for them for yet another season, is altogether discarded by Nietzsche. If we, like Milton, personify komos into Comus, we have a “spirit of place” who believes that the place on Earth is not something of which he is a part (and is further his gratefully to protect), but is merely an object to have. Not surprisingly, Comus causes his followers to forget their place on the Earth: their “native home [to] forget” (l. 75). To Nietzsche, komos is the intoxication of power. But Nietzsche’s komos is equally a forgetting that the intoxicating power was first and foremost a humble human acceptance and celebration of the Earth’s creative power. Nietzsche’s language, more than astonishingly phallocentric, whether intentional or not, is the language of rape. Every “thing” exists to yield to his “increased strength and fullness” as “one forces them to accept” his “swollen will” as he “violates them” through “the komos of cruelty; the komos in destruction.” In a bizarre frenzy of sexual excitement (which could itself rightly be called komos), Nietzsche not only forgets that Mother Earth is the source (as in Dionysian myths) of the creative power in which he wildly revels, but utterly convinced that his power is self-created, Nietzsche adds licentious injury to insult as the Earth herself must now submit to him. Being so unlike his father, Dionysus, it is perhaps not surprising that Comus is not a classical deity at all. As the Variorum Commentary on the Mask reminds us, Comus does not appear until “the Imagines (1.2) of Philostratus the elder (c. ad 170 to c. ad 245).”26 While Philostratus could be considered as belonging to the late Classical period, we know that his most famous work, a life of the Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, shows not only a knowledge of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Lives of the Saints; but as such was enormously influential in cultivating a cult of Apollonius as a “Christianized” Greek alternative to Christianity.27 While not quite an early Christian character, Comus nonetheless belongs to an early Christian period, where he is directly constructed in opposition to Christian values. Having Comus (as komos) still deeply connected to the Earth (as was his father, Dionysus) simply would not suit early Christian values which, before the advent of dualistic medieval theology, still retained a strong Earth connection as Jesus himself urged human beings humbly to emulate “the fowls of the air,” and “the lilies of the field” (Matthew 6:25–34). Though Comus remained largely dormant for a thousand years,

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he exploded on the Christian Italian Renaissance scene with the works of Cartari, Mantegna, and others.28 The importance of Comus’s genealogy for Milton is that Comus, as komos, was not only uprooted from the deep Earth connection his father, Dionysus, enjoyed (as Nietzsche so vividly displayed), but (as Nietzsche also showed) the hideously destructive values Comus embodies are in direct opposition to Christian values. What makes Comus so fascinating is that he is not, as one might have expected him to be in a portrayal by dualistic medieval theology, anti-Christian because he is thoroughly Earthy. Had Milton wanted such a character, Dionysus (as Nietzsche realized early in his career) was certainly available, but Comus is as much not of the Earth as he is not of a heavenly realm. The inclusion of the Comus character in the Mask thus provided Milton with a wonderful opportunity to explore how an anti-Earth posture is equally anti-Christian. Considered in postmodern terms, the three “spirits” of the Mask provide a ternary structure which destabilizes medieval theology’s “either of the Earth or not of the Earth” mutually exclusive dyadic structure. The metaphysical position (taken by the Attendant “Spirit” who views the Earth as a “dim spot”) proves to be an altogether helpless condition without a connection with the Earth. Because the Attendant Spirit lacks the deep roots in the Earth that Eve lost and Sabrina regained, the supposedly powerful emissary from an Other realm proves to be utterly powerless without the help of something rooted in the Earth (the brothers, the symbol of rootedness haemony, or Sabrina). On the other of the metaphysical theologian’s hands, Comus, who is the seeming embodiment of every carnal lust, should be as obviously anti-Christian the most “Earthy.” But in Milton’s assessment, Comus, unlike his father, is anything but rooted in the Earth; rather, because Comus is what Nietzsche hoped to be (some sort of minor god), he basks in the intoxicating power over all that he might make into a mere object. In short, only because Comus believes himself separate from the Earth does he believe everything of the Earth should yield to him. The “either–or” choice of “Spiritual” (the Attendant Spirit) or “Earthy” (Comus) proves not only to be an oversimplification of the situation but rather a neither–nor choice in the Mask. But Milton’s third possible “Spirit,” the “spirit of place,” Sabrina, is both Spiritual and Earthy. Like the Attendant Spirit, Sabrina begins as thoroughly powerless, though the extraordinary power she draws from her place on Earth makes her stronger than either the Attendant Spirit or Comus. This is not to renounce God’s role in Nature but rather to declare that human beings and the Earth should be in accordance with God’s

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calling, as Milton states it in his definition of Nature from De Doctorina Christiana: “Nature cannot possibly mean anything but the mysterious power and efficacy of that divine voice which went forth in the beginning, and to which as a perpetual command, all things have since paid obedience” (15.93). This is something like what Lao Tzu remarked in the Tao Te Ching: “Man is in accordance with the earth. Earth is in accordance with heaven.”29 Unlike Comus, Sabrina never forgets that her power comes from the place that roots her, so in tending to “her place,” this “Spirit” insures not only the fertility of the place, but her own strength as well. Sabrina, unlike Comus and Nietzsche, would not brutally ravage the creative power of the Earth; rather she seeks, and is kindly permitted by the benevolent Earth, to take part in the creation. If Sabrina, like Comus, was to turn on the Earth, and, like Nietzsche, in a wild carnal frenzy forcibly to take from Earth (instead of gratefully receiving what the Earth provided), not only would the place suffer, but Sabrina would suffer as well. The environmental significance of all of this has not been lost on the children of the Mask. In one of Comus’s longest speeches (ll. 706–55), he begins with a question which already contains his answer as to why the Earth is so immensely fertile: “Wherefore did Nature powre her bounties forth,” (l. 710) was it not “But all to please, and sate the curious taste?” (l. 714). In other words, “Why is the Earth so fertile?” Why for me, of course. Comus concludes the long speech by suggesting that, like the Earth’s bounty, the Lady’s own considerable gifts “must not be hoarded” (l. 739) as “There was another meaning in these gifts, / Think what” (ll. 754–55). Though Comus clearly intends to arouse in the Lady erotic notions here, another meaning has already occurred to the Lady. To Comus, who views the Earth (and the Lady) as merely an object to yield to his will (in Nietzsche’s vernacular of rape, to yield to “the komos of an overcharged and swollen will”30 ), the Lady replies that there is indeed another meaning to these gifts, of which Comus seems unaware. Apparently the idea of a female provider was so unusual in Milton’s time that the poet coined the word “cateress” (l. 764) in the Mask to express the idea of a “female supplier of goods, usually to a household.”31 It is as a cateress that the Lady in the Mask understands the Earth. And what a good provider the Earth is: if only we were to “live according to her sober laws, / And holy dictate of spare Temperance . . . every man who now pines with want” (ll. 766–68) would be provided for and “she [the Earth] no whit encomber’d with her store” (l. 774). Through the “holy dictate of spare Temperance” [emphasis added], human beings and the Earth are a match made in heaven, with human beings temperately taking just what

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the Earth provides (in the Lady’s words, “a moderate and beseeming share” [l. 769]) and the Earth providing just what human beings need. In the far less poetic parlance of modern environmentalists, the notion the Lady is putting forth is something like “sustainable yield.” In an essay entitled “Poetry and Place,” Wendell Berry aptly remarks of the Lady’s speech (ll. 762–79) in the Mask that it “is a prototype of the ecological argument of our own time – or it is the traditional morality that we have now begun to perceive as ecological; humans can have a decent, permanent place in the earthy household [fed by the “cateress,” no doubt] only by knowing precisely the extent of their ‘beseeming share’ and by using no more.”32 The Lady’s speech is a prescription for how humans should live on the Earth, taking just what we need (and not the astonishing excess that Comus, along with our modern Earth-consuming lifestyle, urges) so that the Earth can sustain us, and in the process, “the giver [the Earth] would be better thank’t” (l. 775). This is completely unlike Comus, who “Ne’re looks to Heav’n amidst his gorgeous feast, / But with besotted base ingratitude / Crams, and blasphemes his feeder” (ll. 777–79). These lines (ll. 777–79) can also be read as the Lady offering a second meaning rather like Nietzsche’s language of rape, as Comus turns on her who has fed him, and with “besotted base ingratitude / Crams, and blasphemes his feeder [the Earth].”33 Once the Lady cleverly discloses to Comus that she has unmasked his true intent towards the Earth (and her) as rapist, she immediately breaks off her response to Comus (“Shall I go on? / Or have I said enough” [ll. 779–80]) to make direct reference to the “serious doctrine of Virginity” (l. 787). Though prior to 1637 – perhaps with greater drama – following the Lady’s clever double entendre, which disclosed Comus’s aim, her speech simply ends with “Shall I go on?”, to which Comus responds “This is mere moral babble” (l. 807). From 1637 onward the Lady adds that “To him that dares / Arm his profane tongue with contemptuous words / Against the Sun-clad power of Chastity” (ll. 780–82), “Thou are not fit to hear thy self convinc’t” (l. 792). Self-convinced and reveling in his power, like Nietzsche at the end of his sanity, Comus can only see the Earth (and the unfortunate Lady) as a feast to be had. The ne’er-do-well son of an Earth-deity, Comus has completely forgotten whence his inherited power originates. And, like Nietzsche, intoxicated with the life and power bestowed on him by Mother Earth, Comus turns back on the Earth with licentious, ecstatic, intoxicated komos. With this said about the Mask, considering Nietzsche’s earlier remarks will be illuminating. Though a few months after penning the earlier quoted passage from Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche lost his sanity, what he said

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regarding komos, far from being taken as the ranting of a madman (or in Milton’s formulation, the licentious intentions of what can best be called, as a Christian-era embodiment of carnal lust, a little devil), is now arguably the obscene posture most of the world now takes towards the Earth. Convinced of our own power, even to the extent that we believe it within our grasp to “save the Earth,” we have forgotten that all of the power in which we shamelessly revel comes from the Earth herself. Even more startling is that we have forgotten, along with Nietzsche and Comus, that the feeling of revelry itself was first and foremost a grateful, excited celebration of the Earth’s fertility – that the Earth had provided for us, and in so doing had saved us from hardship and hunger. In what may prove to be the last great irony of humankind, as we give ourselves, like Comus and Nietzsche, to the intoxicating thought of our own immense power (even if it is to force some goal as noble sounding as to “save the Earth”), our brutish ravaging of the Earth in order to foster this komos of power may forever destroy the Earth’s ability to save us from ourselves. Yet Milton’s Mask offers a startling alternative, both to this power-driven phallocentric scenario championed by Comus and Nietzsche, as well as to the radically ascetic position held by dualistic medieval theology and the Attendant Spirit. We need, like the helpless young woman Sabrina, to admit our own powerless position without life-giving roots deep in the Earth. Though masked by Milton as parents putting on a performance for the instruction of their children, the Ludlow Mask is also children putting on a performance for the edification of their parents. As the newly commissioned leader of a place and his wife watched the spectacle of their children (though in possession of every virtue and divine gift) rendered utterly helpless, Milton reminded this recently appointed “protector of place” that he was equally helpless without the Earth that had long ago accepted and saved his people.

part ii

The underlying importance of place

5

The New Testament’s call to place: Paul’s and Luther’s deconstructions

Beware that no one makes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit. The Apostle Paul1

In stark contrast to my literal discussion of “place,” Dayton Haskin opens his Milton’s Burden of Interpretation by noting how “Martin Luther wrote an account of what he took to be the turning point in his life. He connected it with an interpretative insight into a ‘place,’ as he called it, a particular biblical passage.”2 In Luther’s case, the “place” in question was a phrase from Romans 1:17, “the righteousness of God.” As Haskin makes clear, it was commonplace in the seventeenth century to feel a certain connection with a biblical “place,” to feel like Luther when the passage suddenly “spoke to him immediately, as if he were in the same ‘place’ that Paul had occupied many centuries earlier.”3 However, what made Luther’s epiphany such a turning point was that he used an interpretative strategy of linking passages to get to this “place,” prompting him fatefully to “study linguistic usage, comparing text to text, concentrating on how biblical language conveys meaning.”4 Similarly, “in the critical period of 1643–45,” Haskin argues, “Milton began radically to revise his thinking about biblical ‘places.’ ”5 Faced with the apparent biblical condemnation of divorce, Milton devised interpretative strategies to find a “place” in a text that seemingly offered no refuge for the divorced. Although Milton’s divorce pamphlets are certainly interesting in this light, what interests me in both Luther and Milton is the remarkable “place” they both found in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians for a very literal place on Earth for human beings. In spite of an oppressive amount of biblical interpretation that extended from the Church Fathers into their own eras, both Luther and Milton were able, through a largely deconstructive interpretative approach, to divorce Christianity from the ancient traditions acting upon it. 75

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With an eco-critical eye, the present chapter will look to Luther’s destabilizing approach in some depth as an introduction to Milton’s tour de force deconstruction of the Western tradition in Paradise Regained, which will be the subject of the following chapter. As the remainder of this chapter will not speak directly to Milton, I have provided a very brief synopsis of this material in the opening of the next chapter on Paradise Regained for Miltonists who wish to gloss over this Paul/Luther chapter. However, readers wishing to exercise this interpretative strategy should be forewarned that they are glossing over not only the early-modern emergence of deconstructive critical approaches but also a startling “Green-friendly” reading of Christianity. There is in Plato a desire to look away from any place on the Earth. True, he does make a life of looking towards beautiful trees, lakes, and mountains; but this is to enable him to turn away from trees, lakes, and mountains to see above all this “imperfection” Beauty itself. And perhaps, too, he sees the perfect Form of Tree, Lake, and Mountain, though Plato, seemingly uncomfortable with this prospect, prefers instead to look towards concepts such as Justice, Truth, and the Good in the wondrous invisible world that lies “above” (at least in importance, if not geographically) any place on the Earth. Now the environmental consequences of this type of thinking are twofold. On the one hand, if we do achieve something of a viewpoint “above” the physical, as scientists who followed Plato’s lead seek, we have removed ourselves from our enmeshed relation with the Earth. Not only does this have the effect of “distancing” us from the place as it becomes an object and we become viewing subjects (an external relation), but once the relations between the “objects” we view become established, the possibility of manipulating those relations appears as applied science. On a completely different hand, if not only as scientists, but as philosophers and theologians, we stand with eyes fixed on this meta-physical realm, privileging it, like Plato, over the physical Earth, there is a temptation to neglect our own “imperfect place” as we pine for perfection. The great irony here is that Plato’s thinking actually begets the two contradictory stances of at once being empowered to manipulate the Earth on a wholesale basis, and believing that one should, on principle, disregard the Earth. While the belief that place should be disregarded might have mitigated, if not eliminated, the desire to manipulate the place, our history is a testament to the sinister synergy of these two conflicting perspectives. As mentioned earlier, a century ago Max Weber clearly saw that “since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable

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power over the lives of men as in no previous period in history.”6 Indeed, because the Earth is rendered unimportant by virtue of the wonderful other realm, we can do with it as we please. This is less of a problem if this place on Earth is still “our home”: as we are embodied in this place we cannot completely have access to that Other realm; therefore we have to be careful just how we manipulate this Earthy realm, for neglecting our bodies along with the place could spell our Death. Enter Christianity. A typical way of approaching Christianity in these terms is as follows: to begin, Death is not a problem at all, since Death is merely the name for the passage of the faithful from this tainted place to the invisible perfect realm, renamed “Heaven.” Environmentally, the consequence is that the Greek problem of privileging the “Other” realm over the Earth worsens with Christianity, because now the place is not our “home” at all but rather a prison in which we are held, our cell being our bodies, until God grants us parole for our good behavior on Earth so that we might return to our “true home” with Him. As Heidegger late in his life summarizes this idea: That notion presents the earth to us as earthy in the sense of transitory. The soul, by contrast, is regarded as imperishable, meta-earthly. Beginning with Plato’s doctrine, the soul belongs to the super-sensible. If it appears within the sensible, it does so only as a castaway. Here, “upon the earth” the soul is miscast. It does not belong on earth. Here, the soul is something strange. The body is the soul’s prison, if nothing worse. The soul, then, apparently has nothing else to look forward to except to leave as soon as possible the sensible realm.7

Even worse, the Earth and our Earthy bodies run the risk of becoming the source of sin themselves as they tempt us with Earthy pleasures when we should, like Plato, be turning away from the Earth as we intently fix our gaze on the Other realm. With medieval theology, the potential for ecological disaster inherent in the meta-physical philosophy of the Greeks becomes realized in the Christian/Greek tradition of Scholasticism: at once to scorn and manipulate our place on Earth risks becoming a good, while all that is evil is invariably seen as “Earthly.” In direct opposition to this now conventional wisdom, which follows medieval theology in holding that the Greek tradition was “a match made in heaven” with Christian dogma, a number of thinkers have sought to deconstruct the very Greek tradition that it wed in medieval thinking – a marriage that begot the above-mentioned Scholastic mindset and with it horrific environmental consequences. In the writings of Luther, Kierkegaard, and most surprisingly in the writings of the young Martin Heidegger, a distinction emerges between apostolic and apostate

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Christianity. This distinction, perhaps most famous in Kierkegaard as between “Christianity” and “Christendom,” holds that the institutionalization of Christianity so thoroughly co-opts what the young Heidegger calls primal-Christianity (Urchristentum) with a profound Greek philosophic influence that it turns into its very opposite. Hence the need for deconstruction. In a general way, as James Shiel notes it in the introduction to his book on Greek thinking and early Christianity, this understanding of Christianity as having become reversed by Greek thinking is one that is, in some sense, possessed by many students of Classical philology and Christianity: The student of Greek thought wonders what to make of the New Testament. The book is printed in the same Greek alphabet as his other texts . . . Yet when he attempts to read this document of the ancient mind he is surprised. Its style of expression is not that of the Greeks he knows. It feels rather like a veneer of Greek over a Semitic mode of expression. Though the book deals with wisdom and morality he sees little hope of finding in it the congenial and lucid thoughts of the Greek thinkers. And that little hope will vanish if he happens to notice in Saint Paul’s letters a severe warning against Greek philosophy as a dangerous deception. If from here he moves forward to the Christian Greek writings of only a few generations later he comes upon a reversed situation. The religious message is now framed in philosopher’s language, reminiscent at every turn of Heraclitus or Plato or Aristotle or Cleanthes or Epictetus. Indeed, the Christian religion is now occasionally described as a philosophy and its founder described as a philosopher. One Christian bishop, Phileas, on trial before the Roman magistrate Cucianus in ad 303, says that Paul himself was the greatest of the Greeks and a finer philosopher than Plato.8

What Luther and Heidegger each envisioned was a deconstruction which could reclaim Christianity’s original revolutionary spirit from the Greek philosophic thinking co-opting it. The irony here is that the Greek tradition threatening Christianity was, in part, the very tradition that these thinkers argued Christianity itself was designed to deconstruct. As the young Heidegger prospectively put it in lecture notes that have recently come to light, “the great revolution [of Christianity] against ancient science, against Aristotle above all,” not only failed, but turned on itself as he became “the Philosopher of official Christianity – in such a manner that the inner experiences and the new attitude of [Christian] life were pressed into the forms of expression in ancient science.”9 The eco-critical implication of the deconstructive approach of Luther and Heidegger is that it is a strange amalgam of Christian and Greek ways of thinking that is responsible for much of our environmental woe. Underpinning this approach is the belief that while the Greek philosophers prompted human beings to fix their

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gaze away from the Earth, Christianity sought a reversal by urging human beings not only look towards the Earth, but also to live a more existential and Earthy, less speculative life. To recap quickly my earlier remarks regarding the origins of deconstruction, when confronted with what appeared to be a fixed structure, in Being and Time Heidegger sought to de-structure the structure so that after the “hardened tradition” was “loosened up, and the concealments which it [the tradition] brought about” were “dissolved,”10 it would be found that what had been taken for a monadic structure would prove to be only one half of a dyad. Scholarship into Heidegger’s early lecture notes revealed a surprising source of destruction: in the words of John D. Caputo, the young Heidegger, “who identified himself . . . as a Christian theologian,” had for a “model in this project” of destruction Martin Luther, who “even used the word ‘destruction’ to describe his project of recovering an authentic Christianity beneath the conceptual scaffolding of medieval theology.”11 What is even more surprising is Luther’s source for deconstruction: the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth, in which God declares that, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:19). In the words of Heidegger scholar Edward Van Buren, “Fatefully for the young Heidegger, Luther’s Theses 19 and 20 [of the Heidelberg Disputation] translate the term ‘destroy’ in 1 Corinthians into the Latin destruere [cognate for the German Destruktion], to pull down, to dismantle, to de-stroy, to deconstruct.”12 The declaration of Paul’s God that he “will destroy [deconstruct] the wisdom of the wise [Greeks]” (1 Corinthians 1:19) became a significant part of Luther’s Theology of the cross (theologia crucis). In one sense Luther’s Theology of the cross can be seen as a political construct, part of the Protestants’ protest against the Catholic Church. As one theologian explains it, “the theologia crucis passes judgment upon the church where she has become proud and triumphant . . . and recalls her to the foot of the cross” where “the scene of total dereliction, of apparent weakness and folly, at Calvary is the theologian’s [Luther’s] paradigm for understanding the hidden presence and activity of God in his world and his church.” The problem, of course, was that the official position of the Church had become, counter to a “Theology of the cross,” a “theology of Glory” (theologia gloriae) which “expects God to be revealed in strength, glory and majesty, and is simply unable to accept the scene of dereliction on the cross as the self-revelation of God.”13 The Church had simply grown too strong and, reveling in its strength, had forgotten God’s words to Paul, that “my [God’s] strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The Church in Luther’s time, constructed on a theology of glory, had made itself “perfect in strength,” prompting Luther’s deconstruction to recall to the Church

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the abject scene of Christ on the cross, by way of which, in utter weakness, the strength of the Christian faith was born. In another sense, as we are only now learning, Luther’s Theology of the cross would take on profound philosophical significance in the twentieth century, not as a political protest bent on deconstructing the Roman Church by Luther but because it offered insights into the deconstructive revolution initiated by Paul against the power of the old (Greek influenced) Roman empire. And one of the unlikely architects of this understanding of the theologia crucis would be the young Martin Heidegger. While Heidegger never tired of telling how he became captivated with the question of Being at age 18, it was not until twenty years later that Being and Time appeared – the only published work to have emerged, other than his thesis. Although Heidegger destroyed most of the work of these two decades, asserting that it was all made redundant by his magisterial Being and Time, a picture of those lost decades is now coming to light thanks to the aforementioned work of Van Buren and Caputo.14 And the image emerging suggests that the aim expressed in Being and Time, “to destroy [deconstruct] the traditional content of ancient [Greek] ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being,”15 may have first been undertaken by Paul. A deconstruction taken up again by Luther in his theologia crucis to “to destroy the traditional content of ancient [Greek] ontology” as it amazingly still thrived in the faith that originally sought its deconstruction. While Luther’s theologia crucis gave Heidegger a direction for his own secular thinking, it firstly gave him insights into “primal Christianity” (Urchristentum). As Heidegger understood it, by virtue of the theologia crucis, “Luther’s counterattack was now enacted religiously and theologically against Scholasticism that had been consolidated through the reception of Aristotle”; therefore, “what is at stake here is something decisive.”16 Decisive because what is at stake is an understanding of primal Christianity’s deconstruction of the Greek thinking propounded by Aristotle. As Van Buren expresses Heidegger’s perception of Luther’s theologia crucis: Since God is a mystery “hidden in suffering,” in the cross, there is nothing present before-the-hand [an apparent reference to Heidegger’s word for a reified entity, Vorhanden] that can be conceptually objectified, built up into the speculative dominion of a Christianity, Inc. and calculated in theoria, contemplation. There is no starting point in “the humility and shame of the cross” for ontotheological speculation to move from the visible to knowledge of the invisible, because what is given here is not the eternal, power, glory, the kingdom, but the very opposite; time, suffering, exile, the death of the King on the cross.17

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Simply put, the image of a physical, manifestly weak, humiliated God on the cross deconstructs the concept of a meta-physical, all-powerful, glorious God. To elaborate: because the Church represented Christianity as a monadic structure characterized by power and glory, Luther deconstructed this representation to reveal it to be a binary structure in opposition, with one half so completely marginalized as to have been obfuscated. So, because the Church sees only glory, Luther’s deconstruction offers the scene of humiliation on the cross. Similarly, Luther exchanges an infinitely power-ful God, for an utterly power-less one on the cross. Beauty is exchanged for horror; the elevated for the diminished; radiance for darkness; the extraordinary for the ordinary; a kingdom here for kingdom not here; and, on a more philosophical note, a meta-physical God for a manifestly physical one; a God out of time for one trapped in time; an omni-present God for an absent God – indeed in Greek “being” is of course ousia, but in the New Testament comes an emphasis on the par-ousia, the second coming – the waited for presence of the God who is absent. The young Heidegger took this to be a remarkable deconstruction of medieval theology brought about by Luther, cracking wide open an apparently monadic structure; and in so doing moving out of the margin something precious and forgotten. For Luther, the Church had, in adopting a theologia gloriae, completely reversed the import of the scene on the cross, “re-constructing” Greek thinking after the spectacle on the cross attempted to deconstruct it. In Van Buren’s words, to “Luther, ‘glory’ means the Greek onto-etio-theological experience of the being of beings as presence: radiant light, splendor, beauty; the wondrous and extraordinary, the elevated and exalted; and power, majesty and dominion” – quite the opposite of Earthy existence which to Plato was “deficiency, lack, absence, darkness, pollution, ugliness, falsity, and evil in relation to the heavenly topos.”18 But as the scene on the cross is precisely one of “deficiency, lack, absence, darkness, pollution, ugliness, falsity, and evil,” it deconstructs the theologia gloriae. In essence, Luther’s theologia crucis was an antidote, so to speak, for Christians who were enthusiastically climbing Plato’s ladder away from the Earth towards a “higher” realm. Luther hoped that he could cause these glory-seeking spirits to look back for a moment at the image of their Savior on the cross and, seeing their folly, turn back down towards their meta-physical God who had, as these theologians apparently forgot, come down to Earth. However, as one might imagine, this was a rather hard sell for Luther. Heidegger believed that by the end of Luther’s career, when his thinking had been institutionalized into “Lutheranism,” much of the

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force of the theologia crucis had again been co-opted by Greek-influenced Christian thinking. Nonetheless, the environmental import of the theologia crucis of the young Luther still stands: when we consider my earlier statement that there is, first in Plato, then in institutionalized Christianity, a desire first to look at, then move away from places on the Earth. In so far as the theologia crucis urges Christians to confront their God as manifestly physical, much of the desire to abandon their place on the Earth in favor of the Other realm is mitigated. This will be clearer if we return to Luther’s own source of his deconstruction of the theologia gloriae with the theologia crucis: the Apostle Paul. So unbelievable was the spectacle of God come down to Earth on the cross that Paul realized that “the Greeks [who] seek after wisdom” would never understand it (1 Corinthians 1:22).19 But it is precisely for this reason that Paul says, “we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:23). To counter the conventional wisdom of power, dominion, and intellectual transcendence that the Greeks preached, Paul tells us that, precisely because “the Greeks seek after wisdom,” his God declared, “I will destroy [deconstruct] the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent,” in order to make “foolish the wisdom of this world” (1 Corinthians 1:19–22). Moreover, when Paul asks “Where [is] the wise? where [is] the scribe? where [is] the disputer of this world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20), he not only is asking after the Greek philosophers, but is suggesting that as “disputers of this world,” it is arguably these philosophers who reject the here and now as base and inferior in comparison to the splendorous world of the “Other” realm. Hence the “base things of the world, and things which are despised [by Greek philosophers who privilege the other realm], hath God chosen” because He “hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise [the Greeks]” (1 Corinthians 1:27–28). Not surprisingly, then, Paul is not going to preach that one should attempt to understand the Christian faith in a Greek philosophic manner through complex intellectual arguments, but rather by recalling the image of Christ on the cross: “to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect” (1 Corinthians 1:17). It is precisely on this point that Luther would formulate his theologia crucis, as “the preaching of the cross is to them that perish [some of whom will be named in 1 Corinthians 1:23 as the Greeks] foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). “Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25), Luther understands that what Paul is

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suggesting is a deconstruction in which a reversal is being effected to undo the power of the Greek–Roman machine. Moreover, Paul argues – in words that could have been written by Derrida – that his God has chosen “things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.” Luther could not help but see this as a recipe for deconstruction: “things which are not [such as weakness, a nonentity to the Greeks, are chosen], to bring to nought [katargeo: destroy, arguably deconstruct] things that are [such as power].” “Things which are,” the word here is ousia, being. Therefore, in the general wording of 1 Corinthians, “things which are not [non-being],” are chosen “to bring to nought [deconstruct]” being. Both Luther and Heidegger would see this not only as deconstruction of Western metaphysics, but as a radical de-structuring of the prevailing Greek value structure, which, seeing only strength, had wholly marginalized its Other, weakness. Luther and Heidegger saw this as a deconstruction of power itself through a paradox in which power is achieved through weakness: a deconstructed “power-less” power, which nonetheless will undo the most “power-full” power. What may be most fascinating is that this strategy of deconstructing the Greek mindset being unfurled by Paul was a paradox of strength through weakness that the Greek mindset simply could not grasp. But, of course, that was the plan since “God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” (1 Corinthians 1:27), “and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent” (1 Corinthians 1:19). The young Luther’s innovation was to realize that this tactic of deconstructing power through weakness could destabilize the new seat of world power in Rome reveling in its strength, which, in one of history’s greatest ironies, was the very Church Paul strove to establish. It is worth noting here that because Luther’s was a deconstruction of the mindset that privileged things “high,” it led back to the concrete world of historical happenings: in the words of Heidegger’s friend and colleague, Catholic theologian Rudolf Bultmann, “the New Testament asserts that the authentic life of man is not that of the cosmos [the meta-physical realm], but runs in the course of the incidental, the individual, in the sphere of history: that what the Greeks regard as the appearance of reality [this Earthy sphere] is in fact the authentic sphere of life.”20 Because Paul and Luther deconstructed the privileging of the meta-physical realm, they were led back to what Bultman calls the “authentic sphere of life,” which was sorely in need of change. Long after he abandoned Luther, Paul, and Christianity, Heidegger would, in an entirely secular way, continue with his interest in the way Greek-influenced thinking has shaped our world. But in the later work

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the project takes a decidedly environmental turn, as Heidegger questioned what could stop the Greek/Roman juggernaut (part of the legacy of which is modern science and technology) from completely destroying the Earth. Heidegger’s answer? “Only a god can save us.”21 As Hubert Dreyfus explains, by this Heidegger was suggesting that to get what is still nontechnological in our practices in focus . . . a new paradigm [a new god] would have to take up practices that are now on the margin of our culture and make them central, while deemphasizing practices now central to our cultural understanding . . . If it worked it would become an exemplar of a new understanding of what matters and how to act. There would, of course, be powerful forces tending to take it over and mobilize it for our technological order, and if it failed it would be necessarily be measured by our current understanding and so look ridiculous.22

In terms of the argument I have been advancing in light of the recent revelations regarding Heidegger’s early Christian influences, Heidegger’s “paradigm” for this god, this Savior, who would be “an exemplar of a new understanding of what matters and how to act” to counter the Greek philosophic tradition may have been the early Church. By undertaking a radical deconstruction of Greek values (substituting the cross for glory, weakness for power, and so forth), the early Church was able to exalt what had been utterly marginalized in Greek thinking: the weak, the lowly, the ordinary, absence, faith, poverty. In Luther’s reading of 1 Corinthians, what the early Christian Church should have revealed to the Greeks was that their values represented only one half of an underlying mutually exclusive dyadic construct, which had been covered over by their unabashed privileging of only one half of the structure.23 But the remarkable success of the Greek enterprise made it impossible for the Greeks to see anything other than “foolishness” in what the early Church’s deconstruction revealed – how could weakness be favored over strength, or poverty over wealth? In Aristotle, for example, strength is understood as a kind of presence, where weakness is simply understood as an absence of strength – in other words strength is the “thing” that everyone wants and weakness is the “no-thing” that everyone hopes to avoid. This is not to say that all Greeks sought strength and power, but, like the wealthseeking materialism of modern America it is clear that in the consolidated view of most Americans, to have is good, to have not bad – as to the Greeks strength and power were that which should be had. While this all makes a rather provocative case for an early Christian origin of deconstruction, my own interest in this subject is largely environmental. Environmentalists have long asked just what it would take to stop (or

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at least mitigate) the vicious legacy that Greek and Roman thinking has wrought upon the Earth. While this Greek tradition in which we find ourselves has certainly had positive effects, it has also provided the philosophical and scientific foundations for the unleashing of destructive human power over the Earth. In the words of the enormously influential “Deep” ecologist George Sessions: “With the culmination of Athenian philosophy in Aristotle, an anthropocentric system of philosophy and science was set in place to play a major role in shaping Western thought until the seventeenth century [though conceptually long after]. But, as Sessions notes, Heidegger “provided a major critique and indictment of the development of Western philosophy since Plato. He concluded that this anthropocentric development paved the way for the technocratic mentality which espouses domination over nature.”24 Indeed it is to enable the deconstruction of the Greco-Roman mindset that Heidegger first openly employed deconstruction in Being and Time in order “to destroy [deconstruct] the traditional content of ancient [Greco-Roman] ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being.”25 Though in light of the recent disclosures by Caputo, Van Buren, and others on how Heidegger’s enterprise might actually be an adaptation of early Christian thinking – which chose “things which are not [such as weakness], to bring to nought things that are [Greco-Roman power, for example]” (1 Corinthians 1:28) – a new picture emerges of the early Church laying down the deconstructive thinking necessary to initiate the same type of counter-movement against the Greco-Roman approach (the great empirical power which had colonized the ancient world) that would make Heidegger not only famous but of great interest to environmentalists. These environmentalists would do well to consider Milton’s Paradise Regained, which, as I shall argue in the next chapter, contains an early modern deconstruction of the Western tradition which has profound environmental import.

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Rejecting the placeless ancient doctrines: confusing Paradise Regained

Hast thou not right to all Created things? Milton’s Satan1

Paradise Regained is a confusing text. In noting this I certainly mean to draw attention, as Barbara Lewalski did some thirty years ago, to the way readers have thought of the epic for more than three centuries, that the brief epic is “Milton’s most perplexing” major poem.2 But more than just perplexing, Paradise Regained brings the necessary con-fusion to take apart what hundreds of years of Western thinking have “fused” together; namely the Christian, Greek, Roman, and the Judaic traditions. In this sense of “con-fusing” I do mean “de-constructing,” though this sort of deconstructing does not so much de-construct a text as it con-fuses readers, in so far as it takes apart something of us as we are born into a fusion of these ancient traditions. Which raises the question, why should Milton, classicist non pareil, officiate over the divorce of what for a lifetime he had wed? Is it that Milton himself was simply confused? In this present section I intend to suggest just that: that Milton, and the Christianity he cherished throughout his life, is thoroughly “confused” in Paradise Regained, which gave the poet an astonishingly clear understanding of himself and his faith through this radical deconstruction. To recap quickly my last section: in Luther’s reading of 1 Corinthians, Paul was attempting to stand in direct opposition to the prevailing Greek thought of the time: because “the Greeks seek after wisdom,” Christians should “preach Christ crucified . . . unto the Greeks foolishness”; nonetheless, “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:22–25). This reading forms the basis of Luther’s celebrated “Theology of the cross” (theologia crucis), which was formulated to counter medieval theology’s privileging of glory. To Luther, it was largely through the reading of Aristotle, who was sent by God “as a plague upon us on account of our sins,”3 that medieval theology had quite reversed what Christianity should privilege: 86

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not glory but its opposite, which the abject scene on the cross discloses. In Luther’s understanding of 1 Corinthians, the dis-closure of the cross should have opened up what Greeks such as Aristotle saw as a “closed case” on their values. In terms of what the Greeks valued, strength for example, Aristotle held that there was really no-thing but strength since weakness was merely the absence of strength – on a scale of one to ten, true strength would be ten, while true weakness, as zero, would not even register on the scale.4 To the Greeks, strength was the thing and weakness utterly no-thing – case closed. How could it be otherwise; were not the weak merely those who were not strong? But to Paul, in reopening the “case,” his God brings dis-closure to this Greek situation. The horrific scene on the cross could be to the Greeks nothing but the glorious triumph of strength over weakness as complete domination of the alleged God-man signified nothing other than the strength of the Romans. Yet Paul responds that because “the weakness of God is stronger than men,” his God has “chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” (1 Corinthians 1:25, 27). On a more philosophical note, God has chosen “things which are not, to bring to nought [katargeo: destroy, arguably deconstruct] things that are [on: ousia, being]” (1 Corinthians 1:28). Both Luther and Heidegger would see this as a radical deconstruction of the prevailing Greek value structure, which, seeing only strength, had wholly marginalized its Other, weakness. But there on the cross, in utter weakness, a new strength was born. A paradox of strength in weakness, a might-less might to “confound the things which are mighty” (1 Corinthians 1:27). As this new strength was in complete opposition to the old strength of the Greco-Romans, it would not be (as so gloriously effected in the Greco-Roman model) a human strength at all. But rather, as a complete humbling of human beings before an immensely powerful God, this all-powerful God would be the seat of power for his power-less people. While Christianity has repeatedly been fused with Greek, Roman, and certain Judaic thought, to Luther and Heidegger it was con-structed as a power (though as a con-struction to the immense Greco-Roman power, this Christian power was a power-less power) to un-do these very opponents it has been fused with again and again throughout history. In this reading, although Christianity first asserted it-Self in complete opposition to its Greco-Roman Other, Christianity nonetheless time and time again lost it-Self and actually became the Other. The implication of this argument is that which is taken to be an environmentally injurious institutionalized Christianity may be something completely Other than Christianity’s origin.

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In short, to Luther and the young Heidegger, Christianity was a way of approaching the world which from its very beginning took a stand against the tradition now wreaking havoc upon the Earth. This leads me to Paradise Regained to see Milton push the origin of this deconstruction of Greco-Roman thought further than even Heidegger seemed to have imagined, not only past Paul to an astonishing beginning with Jesus, but to the very moment when the Christian Self emerged through his temptation. This is not to say that in pressing this deconstruction Milton was expressly attempting to make an environmental stand; nonetheless, the stand he and his protagonist take in Paradise Regained against the Greco-Roman juggernaut does have profound environmental import. I read Paradise Regained as a con-fusing text precisely because it does, to vary the language, de-fuse the explosive power contained in what has become an environmentally disastrous Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian machine. By con-fusing us readers, Paradise Regained not only pulls apart Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian thinking, but it pulls us apart as well, or at least it should. Anyone, faithful or not, who reads Paradise Regained in its original language is already squarely in a tradition that sees Christianity and Greco-Roman thinking as at least somewhat compatible, if not a match made in Heaven. To these readers whose thinking is this precarious blend of Christian and ancient thought, Milton not only brings confusion, but after pulling us apart, the poet urges us not to put our Christian-Greco-Roman-Judaic Selves back together. This is at the center of the temptations of Paradise Regained; for the power of Rome, the learning of Athens, or the glorious Temple of David are not merely temptations for the Son or Milton, they are central aspects of the way those of us in the Western tradition, even as we enter the twenty-first century, approach and understand our world. To turn away from the power of Rome is to reject the empowered manner in which we control the world we encounter and create; to eschew the learning of Athens is to reject not only an extraordinary amount of our Western heritage but the very way we conceptualize the world; and to decline the glorious Throne of David is to question just what we mean by dominion, empire, and kingdom. Nonetheless, Milton con-fuses us with these temptations. As Ashraf Rushdy aptly said, “although the gospel began in brightness, [as] Milton might have written, sixteen centuries had done nothing but obscure the primitive glory of its origins.”5 As Satan is “the god of this world [aion: age, world, or, arguably, worldview]” (2 Corinthians 4:4), he represents the values of the Greco-RomanJudaic age in which Jesus lived. This is not merely biblical interpretation,

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but a reading of Paradise Regained in which Satan’s crowning temptations of Athens, Rome, and the glorious Throne of David are a direct reference to an age (which could be equally Jesus’, Milton’s, or our own) dominated by Greek, Roman, and exalted Judaic thinking and culture. The triumph that Milton’s Son has over these temptations as he stands on the pinnacle (a Miltonian innovation, for while both Matthew and Luke have Jesus resisting the temptation to “cast thyself down” [Matthew 4:6], only Milton’s Son takes a literal stand against Satan) can itself be seen as a reference to lines in Ephesians by which Milton suggests that Jesus’ victory, though spiritual, has a decidedly cultural and political component as it has also been a triumph against worldly powers, principalities, and human rulers: put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world [aion], against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand (Ephesians 6:11–13).

A brief look at how readers have responded to the temptations in Paradise Regained, especially the temptation of Greek learning, reveals just how much these temptations still influence us. Speaking for most of us brought up in a culture that not only intensely admires, but arguably is, the extant Greek tradition, Louis Martz remarks of the temptation of Greek learning in the epic that “first of all, we should note, with some relief, perhaps, that these realms of Greek culture do not lie within Satan’s gift: he does not control them . . . The Son’s answer [to the temptation of Greek learning] at first should cause us no discomfort: he does not deny the value of Greek culture [emphasis added].”6 Martz’s careful reading does bring relief to what is admittedly discomfort, but why do we need this relief? Similarly, why are we relieved when Donald Swanson and John Mulryan refer to “the tongue-in-cheek denigration of Greek philosophy in Paradise Regained,” or call the “polemic against Greco-Roman philosophy a part of Jesus’ ruse against Satan”?7 These readings, in finding moments in the text where the question of accepting Greek learning wavers, relieve us of our confusion by re-constructing our Greco-Christian Selves, which have been pulled apart by our encounter with the epic. In Paradise Regained, it is somewhat perplexing that Milton should choose the temptation of Jesus at all for his New Testament epic: why not the birth of Jesus, the teachings, the miracles, the betrayal, the crucifixion, or the resurrection? As E. M. W. Tillyard put it, surprisingly in Paradise

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Regained “Christ is no longer in the main the Redeemer of man,” hence “the Pauline fabric of fall, grace, redemption, and regeneration, seems to have crumbled.”8 While there has been no shortage of reasons offered up for Milton’s choice of the temptation as the moment when Paradise was regained (not the least of which is to tell the complementary story of Paradise Lost, of the one man who stood where Eve and Adam fell) readers since the epic first appeared have nonetheless noted that Milton’s choice was hardly the best in terms of drama. Little drama is possible when few would expect the Son to lean towards Satan’s temptations at all, since, as Douglas Bush observed, “the sinless divine protagonist of Paradise Regained cannot falter, much less fall.”9 If Luther had written a New Testament epic, it would no doubt center on the crucifixion – with abundant drama. Nonetheless, it strikes me that Paradise Regained is intensely dramatic, not only (as I shall argue) as it astonishingly captures the very moment where the Christian faith is con-structed against ancient traditions, but as we find the epic’s author and readers placed in a position in which it is they who must resist enormous temptation, culminating in the almost irresistible enticement of the glorious Greco-Roman machine itself. To see in Paradise Regained not only the Son, but also the spectacle of Milton, who made a life of gloriously representing Rome and Athens, resisting its temptation is high drama indeed. Barbara Lewalski has aptly noted that as the confrontation with Satan begins in Paradise Regained, the Son not only does not know quite who he is, but is not quite who he will be either, that both the Son and Satan begin “with a limited and imperfect knowledge of Christ’s mission as well as his nature.”10 Only, as A. S. P. Woodhouse noted, “through his experience in the wilderness,” does the Son gain “a progressively deeper insight into his own nature as well as into God’s purpose.”11 Yet in the epic this is all part of God’s expressed plan to regain Paradise: “But first I mean / To exercise him [the Son] in the Wilderness, / There he shall first lay down the rudiments / Of his great warfare.”12 Not surprisingly, then, as we first see the Son in the epic he is not at all sure how to achieve what is required of him: “Musing and much revolving in his brest, / How best the mighty work he might begin / Of Saviour to mankind, and which way first / Publish his God-like office now mature” (1.185–88). This same bewilderment returns as we see the Son for the first time in Book 2: “Into himself descended, and at once / All his great work to come before him set; / How to begin, how to accomplish best / His end of being on Earth, and mission high” (2.110–14). Indeed, early in the epic the Son is so puzzled as to how to proceed he admits that as a youth “victorious deeds / Flam’d in my heart, heroic acts, one while / to rescue

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Israel from the Roman yoke.”(1.215–17). Dreams of heroic acts flaming in his heart? Hardly the biblical Jesus we are accustomed to, but as the series of temptations is presented (most taken directly from the Gospels), the Son gradually gains a sense of Self, becomes the Jesus to whom we are accustomed, and a paradigm for a new way of approaching the world, as he manages to stand against Satan during these confrontations. On the one hand, as Stanley Fish has noted, this series of confrontations brings about Satan’s defeat, “not because [of] something that is done to him (in the crude physical sense expected by Adam) but because of something that is shown to him, a mode of being whose very presence in the world brings about his defeat.” To Fish, the moral is that “the true form of action is not something one does (a wound inflicted, a battle waged), but something one is.”13 But, on the other hand, Milton’s Son simply is not this “true form of action” until he confronts Satan. As Satan offers one temptation after another, naturally in the form of Satan’s own “mode of being,” the Son, at first perhaps just as a reflex to resist that which he suspects to be evil, counter-moves against each temptation by standing for what to Satan is no-thing. In this deconstructive fashion the Son will effect by epic’s end a true reversal of the Greco-Roman-Judaic position that Satan will privilege through his corresponding temptations of Athens, Rome, and the glorious Throne of David. Fish’s observations on this count are particularly astute as the Son becomes both a new “mode of being” where previously there had been only non-being, and a “presence in the world” where previously there had been only absence. In the same way that God’s deconstruction of weakness for strength that Paul noted confounded the Greeks, so does it confound Satan, but not as Fish says by virtue of “something one [the Son] is,” but rather as something Satan is not. What Milton has done is to focus on the decisive moment where the Christian Self emerges in the Son precisely as he becomes the Other to the prevailing world-view offered by Satan. As the confrontation results in Satan’s being undone as the Christian Self is formed, it is the very moment where the paradigm of human action not only shifts but inverts, as out of the no-thingness of the desert14 comes some-thing that will turn the world upside down. But, of course, this new mode of human action will not be an “action” at all, but rather the in-action of doing nothing other than standing, though in making this stand, the power of the power-less Son will undo Satan. It is important to note that this new Christian Self is not merely derivative of the prevailing world-view championed by Satan – Milton’s Son is far cleverer than that. For example, in the first temptation, where Satan

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challenges the hungry Son to use his ability to “Command / That out of these hard stones be made thee bread” (1.343–44), the temptation, as the Son realizes, not only involves hunger but power and trust. Milton’s Son clearly knows he has the power to turn stones to bread, but the temptation of power is cast aside as the Son comes to understands that to flex his own strength would be a lack of trust in his God. The Son’s God had always provided for the faithful who trusted in Him: “in the Mount / Moses was forty days, nor eat nor drank, / And forty days Eliah without food / Wandered this barren waste” (1.351–54). This prompts the Son to ask of Satan, “Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust?” (1.355). This first temptation marks the beginning of the Son’s deconstruction, as it is precisely because Satan urges the Son to dis-trust that the future Savior begins to clearly understand why it is imperative he must trust. While the Son’s substituting of trust for dis-trust may seem little more than “nay-saying,” Milton puts forth a deeper rationale which clearly deconstructs and inverts Satan’s distrust. Both the Son and Satan know that power resides in God. To Satan, as Paradise Lost attests, this is a most vexing fact, but to the Son, it is a thought that comforts, as he knows that though he himself should be manifestly weak, his powerful God will provide for him. Satan’s difficulty is that in his privileging of power and strength he cannot understand weakness (weakness or praus, in Matthew 5:5, for example, in New Testament Greek should be understood as a “trust in God’s goodness and control over the situation”15 ). In this confrontation with Satan, the Son rejects power precisely because power represents a dis-trust in his God, yet amazingly, this privileging of weakness over power is what allows the Son to triumph over the temptation. In a sense, this single temptation, taken directly from Matthew 4:3, marked what could have (and given that Christianity gained worldwide influence, should have) been a profound shift in, indeed an inversion of, the paradigm of how human beings should act. To the Greek–Roman mindset, not to use power or strength available to one is frankly foolishness, as noted in 1 Corinthians 1:25, where the death of the presumably powerful God-man on the cross is “unto the Greeks foolishness.” As Donald Swanson and John Mulryan have noted, this is clearly an understanding at work in Paradise Regained as 1 Corinthians 1:22–25 “serves as the basis for the divine mandate that God issued to Milton’s Son; ‘I send him forth / To conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes, / By Humiliation and strong Sufferance: / His weakness shall o’ercome Satanic strength’ (1.158–61).”16 As Fish interprets the Son’s response to Satan: “if I were to do as you ask, it would imply that God cannot sustain his servants

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without natural means. The examples of Moses and Elijah – who trusted – suggest otherwise and it is in their tradition that I would enroll myself.”17 Though this would put the Son, in the eyes of the Greeks, in a remarkably precarious position, since the Son understood the vulnerable position as being like a trusting child in the hands of a powerful and loving parent, there was no danger at all. Because the Greeks and Satan lack this trust in a powerful and loving God (because they dis-trust), they believe they must seek power for themselves. The position in which we find ourselves today in our Greek-Christian world is essentially this same Greek posture of seeking power, though in different ways. We have achieved, and freely use, extraordinary technological power that seemingly provides for our every need – with never a nod to higher power, since we are the source of all the power we need. Because we trust in ourselves, through technology, we have urged ourselves to dis-trust in any god (other than technology). We have, to borrow Fish’s understanding, enrolled ourselves in a tradition, but, as Milton understood the situation, it is Satan’s, not the Son’s, tradition. Indeed, the astonishing dominion we have achieved over our world through our own substantial power is rather like what Milton’s Satan had aspired to in Paradise Lost; this becomes especially clear when we consider Satan’s next temptation: the banquet. Before conjuring up the banquet, Satan initiates the temptation by asking the Son a crucial question: “Hast thou not right to all Created things?” (2.324). In a way this temptation anticipates and eclipses the forthcoming offers of Parthia, Rome, Athens, and David’s glorious Throne, for while the banquet is certainly inconsiderable in comparison to these kingdoms, what is offered is the prospect of dominion over “all Created things.” While in the same breath Satan quickly diminishes the significance of the offer by narrowing Creation to the meat of creatures (“Owe not all Creatures by just right to thee / Duty and Service, nor to stay till bid, / But tender all thir power?” [2.325–27]), the significance of the temptation has not escaped the Son. In offering the Son dominion over all of Creation, beginning with the creatures, Satan is echoing the God-given right of human dominion put forth in Genesis, that human beings “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” (Genesis 1:26, though echoed in Genesis 1:28). This temptation of dominion differs from the enticement to turn stones into bread in that Satan now approaches the Son as manifestly human (and therefore unlikely to exercise miraculous power), who as a human being has the right to dominion over all the Earth as given by God in Genesis.

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The Son’s response to the temptation of dominion is at once an acknowledgment of the human right of dominion over the Earth and a human refusal to exercise that right, “And who withholds my pow’r that right to use? (2.380). It is not Satan or God who withholds the power of dominion, but rather the manifestly human Son. Although the Son quickly adds that he has more than human power (“I can at will, doubt not, as soon as thou, / Command a Table in this Wilderness” [2. 383–84]), it is first as a human being that he rejects the banquet. Milton’s Son is effecting a reversal of Judaic thought, though not by denying the God-given right human beings have over the Earth, but rather by simply refusing to exercise that right of dominion when it clearly is in opposition to God’s plan. As the pronouncement of human dominion is here mouthed not by God, as in Genesis, but surprisingly by Satan (“Said’st thou [Satan] not that to all things I [the Son] had right?” [2.379]), the Son naturally finds the gift suspect. What Milton has done is to deconstruct the idea of human dominion over the Earth by suggesting that, as this gift may come from either Satan or God, the only safe course of action is that taken by the Son in the epic, not to act on this right of dominion unless it clearly is in keeping with God’s design – thereby returning the gift of dominion to God. While this does deconstruct Genesis 1:26 and 1:28 by shifting dominion from human beings to God, it equally clarifies the Genesis transaction, for while the power-less people of a power-ful God have been given dominion, all human actions in this domain must be in keeping with their God’s will. This deconstruction by Milton does a great deal to clarify the dominion pact in Genesis which environmentalists have found so troubling. When Satan continues his temptations in Book 2 by suggesting that the Son “Get Riches first, get Wealth, and Treasure heap” (2.427), the Son at first responds by offering a number examples where riches were not a necessary prerequisite for “highest deeds” (2.438), so that he “May also in this poverty as soon / Accomplish what they did, perhaps and more” (2.451–2). Then, towards the end of this speech, a remarkable new idea occurs to Milton’s Son: “Besides to give a Kingdom hath been thought / Greater and nobler done, and to lay down / Far more magnanimous, then to assume” (2.481–83). While the Son had first just rejected getting wealth as a way to achieve his mission, here he dramatically reversed the idea of getting completely, substituting instead giving. The kingdom is not a kingdom that the Son will get; rather it is a kingdom that he will give. This idea is so astonishing that “Satan stood / A while as mute confounded what to say, / What to reply, confuted and convinc’t / Of his weak arguing and fallacious drift” (3.1–4).

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Had Satan comprehended what the Son had realized here, he might have saved himself the trouble of tempting him with the kingdoms of Parthia, Rome, and Athens. Because the Son’s deconstruction is so radical, what is arguably a cultural and political revolution bent on unseating the Greco-Roman-Judaic world powers assumes the appearance of not being political or cultural at all, as the kingdom sought is not a kingdom here at all, but a kingdom not here that the Son will give. Not surprisingly, this idea confounds Satan. But, as Barbara Lewalski succinctly reminds us, “in De Doctrina Milton defines Christ’s kingdom as existing in two stages, the Kingdom of Grace (the invisible church), which is at hand, and the Kingdom of Glory (the millennial kingdom), which is to come.”18 The Son will give both kingdoms, though the first, the Kingdom of Grace, will have a remarkable regenerative effect in the here and now. A profound political and cultural change will be effected to begin to regain Paradise. When Satan proceeds to urge the Son to take a kingdom here, Parthia, in order to fulfill his mission, Satan misses the point: that the Son is beginning to formulate a way to act upon his earlier inclination that it is “more heavenly, first / By winning words to conquer willing hearts, / And make perswasion do the work of fear” (1.221–23). While it is true that military power of Parthia might not only make the Son “possess’d of David’s Throne” (3.357), but also free Israel from the threat of “such enclosing enemies / Roman and Parthian” (3.361–62), the Son has already understood that this is just the sort of violent action that can “rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave / Peaceable Nations” (3.75–76). Just before the idea of the countermove of giving a kingdom occurred to the Son, he understood that “to guide Nations in the way of truth / By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead / To know, and knowing worship God aright, / Is yet more Kingly” (2.473–76). Though this might seem little more than foolishness to power-mongers like Satan, it is worth noting how political and cultural change can be and has been achieved through this paradigm of “saving Doctrine” alone. To certain thinkers, such Tolstoy, the thinking of Jesus on this point suggested a peaceful alternative to bring Russian serfs enslaved in their own homeland out of the margins of the political power structure that prevailed over them. Though this nineteenth-century effort largely failed, the twentieth century saw, with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., a more successful implication of the idea. Neither Gandhi nor King sought forcibly to take a kingdom, but rather both instilled the belief that a new kingdom was at hand, if only those marginalized would believe. By bringing those individuals and values marginalized by a dominant culture out of the no-thingness of their

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existence (in postmodern political parlance, to make the subaltern or subproletariat visible as a Self as opposed to being relegated into an Otherness intended to consolidate the prevailing Self ), Gandhi and King led these non-Self Selves into a political and cultural Selfhood. This was not done, qua Satan, through violence, but by raising these individuals to the level of signifiers, “letting them be heard.” In this sense, the rather puzzling admiration the Son feels for Socrates in Paradise Regained (“Poor Socrates, [who next more memorable?] / By what he taught and suffer’d for so doing, / For truth’s sake suffering death unjust, lives now / Equal in fame to proudest Conquerours” [3.96–99]), has, as the context here indicates, little to do with the upcoming temptations of Greek learning, but everything to do with how Socrates effected change non-violently.19 Put simply, Gandhi and King, like Socrates in the Apology or the Son in Paradise Regained, initiated a non-movement movement by giving a kingdom not yet here as they merely took a stand. The temptation of Greek learning is arguably the most fascinating in the epic, not only because it raised the question of Classical learning (as Swanson and Mulryan succinctly ask it, “why did Milton, who had a lifelong devotion to learning, and Greco-Roman learning in particular, so contemptuously reject, in the person of the Son, Satan’s temptation to learning?”20 ), but also because this question so dramatically effected the form of the epic. While, as Luther and Heidegger observed, Scholasticism may have officiated over the marriage of Classical and Christian thinking through medieval theology’s reception of Aristotle, it is also the case that Milton and a generation of poets both before and after him were responsible for immortalizing the occasion in verse.21 To Milton, arguably the greatest of these poets, this was achieved through an almost systematic revisiting and re-celebration of one classical form after another in which the Christian and the Classical were seamlessly interwoven into one glorious tapestry: sort of the literary counterpart to the theologia gloriae – a poetry of glory. As he matured,22 a Christian poetry of glory, perhaps because it might have implied a “theology of glory,” seems to have become questionable to Milton. However, as Roy Flannagan noted, “such a necessary rejection of ‘pagan’ philosophy and art must have been hard for Milton to endorse. It also may be difficult for later readers to reject the wisdom of Athens or Rome.”23 But this is more than just a difficulty, it is what I have noted as the most dramatic temptation both within and without the text of Paradise Regained. As Milton understood the mission of regaining Paradise, then, he needed to destabilize the very mindset he startlingly consolidated in the

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poetry that had been his life’s work. To achieve this end, Milton deconstructs in form the very “poetry of glory” that he helped to put together in his earlier work by privileging in Paradise Regained the quiet, humble forms of Hebrew expression, such as the Book of Job (as Barbara Lewalski and others have noted24 ), over the glorious Greco-Roman influence that Milton systematically celebrated in his youth. For example, the first book of Paradise Regained, as Martz observed, “contains no classical allusions whatsoever, except near the close of the book, where the pagan oracles are mentioned only in order to announce their demise,” though “the firm and quiet manner” of lines in this book, “dignified, yet modest, is representative of the ground-style of the whole poem’s action.”25 Though some might see this as a case of “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” Milton seems to have felt, like his Son, that he needed to question the temptation of his own immense (in Milton’s case poetic) power. This is not to say that Milton felt that admitting Greek forms into our tradition, pastoral poetry being an excellent example, is equivalent to an open invitation to let the Devil into our world. Milton’s mission to confuse we readers merely brings us to question the wholesale acceptance of the fusion of ancient traditions. In practice, Milton’s gesture of questioning what was dearest to him in the Greek tradition (and what is perhaps equally dear to those who feel a special fondness for Milton’s “poetry of glory”) might make us all pause to consider just what we ourselves should retain of our Western tradition. Still, in one of history’s great ironies, many of Milton critics would find Paradise Regained a “minor” epic in more than genre, preferring instead the “poetry of glory” of Paradise Lost. Even more remarkable, poets such as William Blake would find in Paradise Lost Satan and the mindset he represented so glorious that he took center stage in their reading of the epic. To Blake, and the generations of poets who followed him, the fact that Milton had humbly regained in Paradise Regained an uncorrupted Christianity, which he had so gloriously lost in Paradise Lost, was, well, lost. A biblical mandate for Milton’s rejection of Greek learning can, perhaps not surprisingly, be found in the same passages that motivated both Luther’s and Heidegger’s deconstruction: in the words of Swanson and Mulryan, “The rationale for this polemic [against Greco-Roman philosophy] is supplied by the programmatic role of 1 Corinthians, chapters I–II, as a source of basic premises for Milton’s poem [Paradise Regained].”26 In the closing lines of Paradise Lost this direction had already been intimated by Adam as he echoed 1 Corinthians: “by small / Accomplishments great things, by things deemed weak / Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise /

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By simply meek” (12.566–69). As Dayton Haskin has recently noted, the timing of Milton’s message, that the idea that indiscriminate acceptance of Greek learning should be questioned, was particularly opportune: Timely as the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans had been in the sixteenth century for effecting a disengagement from “merit-mongering,” the First Epistle to the Corinthians, read in light of Galatians and Romans, seemed a biblical message newly addressed to the learned in the Renaissance . . . The Pauline condemnation of the wisdom of the world, understood now as a function of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, was the principal source for the temptation of classical learning in Paradise Regained.27

In turning his attention to Greek learning, Milton would push the Reformation further as he himself re-formed the work of his life through Paradise Regained. This obviously necessitated a radical reconsideration of much of what Milton had spent a life believing: as Swanson and Mulryan express it: “The attitude towards learning that Milton conveys through the Son’s responses in Paradise Regained is surprisingly at odds with every thing else Milton had previously written on the subject.”28 While Milton’s deconstruction certainly does in a general way anticipate contemporary environmentalists who urge us to reconsider our wholesale acceptance of the Greco-Roman tradition, Milton’s deconstruction additionally takes the form of a direct assault staged on Renaissance Science itself. In Lewalski’s words, in Paradise Regained Milton assumes “a radical distinction between knowledge (scientia), which derives from the study of things of this world, and wisdom (sapientia), which comes only from above.”29 The rationale for this privileging of biblical wisdom over science is voiced by the Son in the epic: he who receives Light from above, from the fountain of light, No other doctrine needs, though granted true; But these are false, or little else but dreams, Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm” (4.288–92)

With these lines the Son rather scandalizes the general Greek theory of knowledge, indeed, epistemology as a theory (logos) of what we are standing (stamis) upon (epi), is based on the notion that there is something solid underneath our knowledge, but much of twentieth-century thought (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida) has tacitly agreed with Milton’s Son that this knowledge is really “built on nothing firm” (4.292). In essence, the Son has peeked under the grand Greek knowledge edifice to find not a rock-solid

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foundation, but “little else but dreams, / Conjectures, fancies” (4.291–92), prompting a complete reversal as he turns around to look upward towards his God. Though this might seem a questionable movement to our modern sensibilities, it should be remembered that in the case of Science, as so convincingly argued in the twentieth century by Thomas Kuhn, the rocksolid “truth” Science allegedly stands upon, as a disciplinary matrix, is perhaps more akin to faith than anything else.30 It has been noted by Haskin that having Jesus voice Paul’s counter to Greek learning from 1 Corinthians does present something of a difficulty: “According to the author of the Acts of the Apostles, the decisive moment when an inchoate Christianity met with Greek culture is to be found in the experience of Paul.” Nonetheless Haskin argues that Milton “reprojected the encounter between the classical and biblical back into the experience of Jesus. This enabled him to explore [in Paradise Regained] what might be the legitimate and fruitful accommodation of the scriptural data to classical culture and also, as the temptation of learning indicates, to insist upon the limits within which the marriage [of the Gospel and Classic culture] was to be made.”31 Haskin gives two responses to this difficulty: the first approach is simply that Milton “employed a characteristic imaginative technique that he learned early from his own Bible-reading . . . It involves placing a familiar bit of material into an earlier content in order to bring to light its wider significance.”32 In terms of the argument we have been advancing, by putting Jesus in opposition to aspects of the ancient world perhaps unknown to him, Milton was able to extend our glimpse into how the Christian Self was created to a realm outside of the historical Jesus’ likely experience – the Son of Paradise Regained becomes something of a paradigmatic early Christian Self. The fact that Milton did undertake the curious project of projecting Paul’s thinking regarding the Greco-Roman approach back to Jesus does suggests just what importance the poet gave to undoing Christianity’s fusion with the ancient traditions.33 Alternatively, Haskin suggests that “Milton, when he introduced the temptations of Athens,” made “the human Jesus aware of the broader world, including the cultivated world,” thereby giving the poet “the opportunity to respond to the greatest pagan accomplishments of the ancient world.”34 In Paradise Regained the Son responds not just to learning but to other ancient Greek accomplishments, both empirical and ideological. This reading is certainly supported by the epic. Though the Son makes reference to Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics a number of times (4.245–53, 4.273–80, and 4.293–99), the condemnation of the Stoics gets an extended treatment:

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In short, the Stoics “in themselves [alone] seek vertue, and to themselves / All glory arrogate, to God give none” (4.315). One could say that the Stoics were in a state of dis-grace, as they neither sought nor wanted a god’s grace, believing instead that they were sufficient in themselves. In a way, though this indictment is specifically of the Stoics, it could equally be applied to Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. In Plato’s thinking, the Good does not, in any way, through an act of grace on its part, allow human beings to attain its metaphysical realm. Socrates is not given the realm of the Good, he takes it, thereby believing that he has become, in the Son’s words, “Wise, perfect in himself, and all possessing / Equal to God” (4.302–03). To the philosopher-theologians who believed they could through their own (largely intellectual) acts take Heaven as Socrates took the realm of the Good, Milton’s Son reveals that they are in as much a state of dis-grace as the Stoics. As William Hunter noted, The rejection of pagan wisdom and especially of the self-sufficiency which was the Stoic goal in favor of Christian trust and obedience thus marks the events of this entire section of the poem [Book 4 of Paradise Regained], molding the wisdomnight terrors-pinnacle episodes as three different manifestations of the same faith in God, the same decision that Jesus not take matters into his own hands so as to resolve them. Satan had trusted in himself and his own powers; so had Adam and Eve, and they were all disobedient.35

This sort of Greek cultural bent towards self-sufficient strength, while hardly the sort of esoteric Greek learning that we might take Milton to refer to in Paradise Regained, is rather just the sort of general Greek inclination that he had the Son first encounter, then count. As Hunter sums up the temptations of Book 4: “Rejection of these ‘temptations of the devil,’ then . . . is a rejection of self-sufficiency, of pride. This is the paradise lost by Adam which Jesus regains (IV, 608).”36

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The Son’s own paradoxical statement regarding just what he does or does not know of Greek learning (“Think not but that I know these things, or think / I know them not” [4.286–87]), loses a good bit of interest when we understand that to him the Greek culture, like Satan, was motivated by a general propensity for self-sufficiency, strength, glory, empire and dominion, the elevated, the exceptional, reason, and wealth, which the Son will overturn into a reliance on God’s grace, weakness, humiliation, returning dominion to God, the lowly, the ordinary, faith, and poverty. It is not so much any particular Greek doctrine of learning that Milton’s Son rejects, it is rather the prevailing Greek mindset that has spawned not only these one-sided values but the Greek philosophic traditions as well. By placing the Son’s decisive encounter with this Greek mindset during the wilderness temptation, Milton makes a provocative case for the origin of the Sermon on the Mount’s values (weakness, humiliation, poverty, and so on) preached shortly after the temptation. As these Christian values are by the way of the Son’s deconstruction, the anti-values of the Greeks, one could say that the Son’s response to Satan takes the form, “It is not a question of what I know of Greek learning, I know enough to grasp that the Greeks have turned the world upside down, and I now understand my missions as being to right the world.” While Milton’s deconstruction has profound environmental significance as it places Christianity in the company of such Earth-friendly approaches as Native American spiritualism and the “pagan” practices of prehistory, Milton’s Christianity has the added characteristic of actually being tailormade (con-structed), from the very moment the Son “first lay down the rudiments / Of his great warfare” (1.155–58) in the desert, to counter the Greco-Roman mindset. In this sense, the startling vision Milton offers us of Christianity is not that of a disease infecting the Earth, but rather of a very specific, well-crafted cure.

7

The Old Testament’s call to place: Job’s wisdom in Milton’s poetry

These are my best days, when I shake with fear. John Donne1

From the discussion of the previous section it should not be inferred that the wisdom championed in 1 Corinthians is entirely a New Testament innovation. Indeed, the passage in 1 Corinthians on which both Heidegger and Luther would base their deconstructions (1:19: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent”) is a near faithful rendering of Isaiah 29:14. Paul quotes from Isaiah exactly as it would have appeared in the Greek translation of the Hebrew available to him, the Septuagint, with one minor exception: the second verb in Paul’s version, atheteso (in the Authorized Version, “I . . . will bring to nothing”), is a change from the Septuagint’s krupso, which is an accurate translation of the Hebrew satar, “to conceal.” As atheteso carries the meaning of rejecting or disregarding so as to nullify or make void, Paul is taking Isaiah’s claim that the wisdom of the wise will be concealed and strengthening it to suggest that, in light of the revelation of the cross, the wisdom of the Greeks is, through this radical deconstruction, simply undone. Though 1 Corinthians (and its roots in the Old Testament) certainly had much to do with the rejection of Greek learning in Paradise Regained, it is also the case that the Book of Job not only influenced the form of Milton’s brief epic (as Barbara Lewalski has well argued), but as it prefigured 1 Corinthians’ rejection of certain “wisdom,” Job also reveals a great deal of the foundation for Milton’s position regarding learning. This is not just to say, as Herman Rapaport has observed, that Milton simply “uses the New Testament in order to prop up the Old Testament’s fallen texts” (which, of course, Milton is doing) but also that the poet “radically transforms [scholastic] theological tradition . . . by taking a very Hebraic position in regard to Western Metaphysics.”2 This Hebraic position becomes especially clear when, as Lewalski suggests, we consider that the 102

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aforementioned crucial distinction between “knowledge (scientia) . . . and wisdom (sapientia) . . . [in Paradise Regained] was, interestingly enough, often developed through allusions to and commentary upon Job xxviii.”3 Most of this commentary particularly focused on Job 28:28: “And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that [is] wisdom; and to depart from evil [is] understanding.” The interpretation of Job 28:28, both before and after Milton, provides fascinating insight into how the confusion between Greek philosophical thinking and Judeo-Christian beliefs found a strange resolution in medieval theology. As Milton is clearly challenging this sense of resolution (as he brings con-fusion), considering how the wisdom (sapientia) of Job stands in conflict with Greek learning will show that Milton very much found in the Old Testament a wisdom which (along with the New Testament wisdom of 1 Corinthians) needed to be reclaimed from the Greek–Roman tradition co-opting it. Barbara Lewalski’s insightful and thorough connecting of the commentary on Job 28:28 and Paradise Regained provides an excellent position from which to start.4 Lewalski begins by assuming a “radical distinction” between scientia, “which derives from the study of things of the world,” and sapientia, “which comes only from above” (p. 291). As noted earlier, this distinction would certainly seem to be supported in Paradise Regained, where the Son explains that the “Light from above” (presumably sapientia) is entirely sufficient and what scientia provides is either false or insupportable: he who receives Light from above, from the fountain of light, No other doctrine needs, though granted true; But these are false, or little else but dreams, Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm (4.288–92)

To understand this further, Lewalski considers a number of commentaries on Job 28:28, starting with Augustine, who “sets the precedent for the direct opposition of sapientia and scientia” (p. 292). When Augustine translated Job 28:28 from the Septuagint (“
                ”5 ) into Latin (“Ecce pietas est sapientia; abstinere autem a malis est scientia”6 ), he interprets sophia as sapientia and episteme as scientia, thereby setting sapientia and scientia into opposition. As Lewalski states the situation, in so translating, the “Augustinian Christian tradition” was set up by Augustine to counter the Stoic idea of wisdom (sapientia), which was “knowledge of both human and divine things” (29–94) – in Latin the Stoic motto “Sapientia

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est rerum humanarum divinarumque scientia.”7 This is certainly the case, as the following quotation by Augustine (cited as it appears in Lewalski) reveals: Having examined a great number of passages from the Holy Scriptures, I find it written in the Book of Job, that holy man being the speaker, “Behold, piety, that is wisdom; but to depart from evil is knowledge” [Job 28:28]. In thus distinguishing, it must be understood that wisdom belongs to contemplation, knowledge to action. For in this place he meant by piety the worship of God, which in Greek is called theosebeia. For the sentence in the Greek MSS has that word. And what is there in eternal things more excellent than God, of whom the nature is unchangeable? And what is the worship of Him except the love of Him, by which we now desire to see Him, and we believe and hope that we shall see Him; and in proportion as we make progress, see now through a glass in an enigma, but then in clearness? . . . Discourse about these and the like subjects seems to me to be the discourse itself of wisdom. But to depart from evil, which Job says is knowledge, is without doubt of temporal things . . . And therefore, whatsoever we do prudently, boldly, temperately, and justly, belongs to that knowledge or discipline wherewith our action is conversant in avoiding evil and desiring good . . . When a discourse then relates to these things, I hold it to be a discourse relating to knowledge, and to be distinguished from a discourse belonging to wisdom, to which those things belong, which neither have been, nor shall be, but are; and on account of that eternity in which they are, are said to have been, and to be, and to be about to be, without any changeableness of times.8

As his last sentence suggests, wisdom (sapientia) to Augustine is also a sort of “knowledge,” but it is the hope for knowledge of the “eternal” (of God), where everyday knowledge (scientia) is “without doubt of temporal things.” Though this understanding of wisdom certainly smacks of Platonism, Lewalski clarifies the relation between the Augustinian tradition and Platonism as she quotes from “Cambridge Platonist Nathanael Culverel, [who] for all his devotion to the classics” (p. 296) rebukes Classical learning as grossly inferior to Christian wisdom: You may see Socrates in the twilight, and lamenting his obscure and benighted condition, and telling you that his lamp will shew him nothing but his own darkness. You may see Plato sitting down by the Waters with Lethe, and weeping because he could not remember his foormer notions. You may hear Aristotle bewailing himself . . . that his abrasa tabula has so few, and such imperfections upon it. The Candle of Socrates, and the Candle of Plato, the Lamp of Epictetus, they all did shine before men, and shine more then some that might be call’d Christians. Nature makes a very fine show, and a goodly glittering in the eye of the world,

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but this Candle cannot appear in the presence of the Sun; all the paintings and varnishings of Nature, they please and enamour the eyes of men, but they melt away at the presence of God.9

Though it is clear that Culverel is certainly rebuking Classical learning in this passage (as did Milton in Paradise Regained), it is equally clear that Culverel, like Augustine, is so thoroughly rooted in the tradition of Greek learning that even his rebuke is framed, with shocking precision, in Platonic terms – here in Culverel we have the structure of the Sun and Cave analogies from The Republic reproduced with surprising exactitude. In Book 5 of The Republic, “understanding” (the same episteme, which Augustine translated from the Septuagint MSS of Job 28:28 as scientia) is (as in Augustine’s view of scientia) related “without doubt” to “temporal things” (Augustine’s words10 ), in the same way that the faculty of the mind which has true knowledge of things (nous), is related to the fixed and immutable realm. This analogy of episteme/scientia being related to the Earthly realm as nous is to the eternal realm is exactly as Augustine interpreted Job 28:28, with the only difference being that Job’s sapientia stands in the place of Plato’s nous. Roughly put, both in Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s understanding of Job 28:28, we “know” (episteme/scientia) things of this world in the same way that we “know” (sapientia/nous) things in the other world. In Culverel, even Plato’s ocularism is reproduced, with the “Candle” and “Lamp” of the Greek philosophers “making a goodly glittering in the eye of the world,” in the same way that Plato’s prisoners lived in a realm illuminated by a false light, but in Culverel the true light, which is still described as the “presence of a Sun,” is found to be the “presence of [the Christian] God.” If there is any truth that revolutions do turn on their children, then in Culverel we have the philosophic revolution initiated by Socrates and Plato being turned on its creators with unabashed zeal, and yet the revolution itself is little affected as the rebuke of Greek learning is done through the methodical application of Greek learning. In Culverel, Greek learning is deposed by a Christianity which has assimilated Greek learning. Similarly, in setting up sapientia and scientia in opposition, Augustine goes a long way towards using Greek learning, with respect to human understanding, to construct the dualistic Christian view of scholasticism which I have been referencing throughout this work: in Augustine, true wisdom is of God’s fixed and immutable (and superior) realm, which is separate and apart from the here and now. As Lewalski states it: “In the Augustine Christian tradition the wisdom appropriate to the contemplative life is knowledge of God . . . Though the Scholastics modified the

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Augustinian position by attributing the name of wisdom to metaphysics and natural theology” (pp. 291–93), thereby clearly setting their sights on that “Other” realm. The danger in this understanding is, of course, that in fixing one’s gaze on that Other, meta-physical realm, one risks having turned away from our Earth and its changing realm. This marginalizing of the knowledge associated with what becomes our “inferior realm” becomes clear in a gloss by Filelfo (quoted by Lewalski) on Job 28:28: “Therefore that which is of wisdom is that by which unchangeable things are contemplated. The inferior realm of knowledge is versed in temporal and mutable things” [emphasis added].11 The deeper danger of Augustine’s position becomes clear in the imagery of the above passage from Culverel, where we see the dark underside of the desire to privilege the eternal meta-physical realm, as “all the paintings and varnishing of Nature, they please and enamour the eyes of men, but they melt away at the presence of God.”12 No longer mere ocularism as in Plato, the “presence of God,” more than just brilliant, is portrayed as a scorching, destructive heat which melts away the works of Nature. This is a rather remarkable way to describe the effect of the presence of the Christian God, who, after creating each aspect of our imperfect realm, repeatedly “saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:4–31). Such imagery depicts the here and now of Earth’s mutable realm as not only marginal but like the light in Plato’s cave, so eclipsed by the supernatural light that “this Candle cannot appear in the presence of the Sun.”13 Expressed in post-structural terms, that which “cannot appear in the presence of the Sun [God]”, is utter absence – a completely marginalized no-thing. It is worth considering in light of this discussion the thoughts of the young Heidegger, who held that, though he had remarkable insights into Christianity, Augustine’s understanding was nonetheless compromised (as we have noticed in his gloss on Job 28:28) by the influence of Greek learning. As Van Buren states it: [in his] 1921 lecture course “Augustine and Neo-Platonism,” Heidegger showed how Augustine compromised his own understanding of the relational sense of primal Christianity by adopting the Greek notion of the theoria . . . Augustine writes that “the perfectly blessed person possesses that quality [of absence of fear] by the tranquillity of the soul”. . . . Here in Augustine’s speculative anticipations of the afterlife, the anxious, uncertain, situationally oriented, and wakeful faith in the Parousia of the hidden unseen God (the word that is listened for) is Hellenized, ocularized, theorized, and delivered down to the remnant of a quietistic, ocular-aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment of the Paradise of God as

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summon bonum. . . . It is precisely the quietistic, ocular-aesthetic relational sense of Greek and medieval metaphysics that Luther characterizes as gloriatio, glory. (Van Buren’s parenthetical comments)14

The difficulty to which Augustine succumbs is that, as he understands sapientia to be a type of “knowledge” of the metaphysical realm (in the same way, qua Plato, that scientia is a knowledge of our Earthy realm), he believes that he is, in some sense, in a position to attain a wisdom which leads to a “tranquillity of the soul.” But is this the “wisdom” of Job? Though it is clear that what Augustine understood as Job’s wisdom (sapientia) has far more in common with Plato’s nous, just what was Job’s “wisdom?” Job 28:28 is quite clear on this point, “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that [is] wisdom.” More significant than Augustine’s translation of sapientia for sophia is his use of pietas for theosebeia: “the service or fear of God.”15 Though Augustine, interestingly, draws attention to theosebeia (“For in this place he meant by piety the worship of God, which in Greek is called theosebeia. For the sentence in the Greek MSS has that word”), the context in which this occurs is within Augustine’s understanding “that wisdom belongs to contemplation, knowledge to action.”16 Because Augustine does approach Job 28:28 from the perspective of Greek learning which holds, like Plato, that “wisdom belongs to contemplation,” Augustine seems to interpret theosebeia as simply a pious contemplation of God. Though theosebeia does carry the meaning of “the service of God,” it is difficult to understand how Augustine comes to interpret sapientia which is “the fear of God” (theosebeia), as a tranquil contemplation of God. Somehow in Augustine, quiet contemplation seems to have replaced the fear Job’s wisdom. To understand sapientia as the fear of God (theosebeia), we can enlist the help of an unlikely interpreter of scripture: Jacques Derrida. With the 1992 appearance of Donner la mort, which contained an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (itself an interpretation of the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac), Derrida, in the words of Kierkegaard scholar John Caputo, surprisingly revealed himself to be “one more child of Abraham, defending the claims of singularity and of the incommensurability of the individual against the universal.”17 In Donner la mort Derrida focuses on what just Abraham felt, the “mysterium tremendum,” which, as Caputo explains, “is a secret that makes us shudder. Tremendum means what is to be feared, something fearful that is to come, something that I cannot see or foresee. I know that there is something that I do not know

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and that causes me to tremble.”18 This idea of “fear and trembling” in the face of the unknown is persistent throughout both Testaments, occurring not only in 1 Corinthians19 but also when Paul writes to the Philippians to tell them that they should “work out their own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). To understand this passage in Philippians, Derrida poses a question (here succinctly expressed by Caputo): But Why fear and trembling? . . . Minimally, Paul may be understood to say that we can do nothing without God’s help. Taken more rigorously – and this is Derrida’s reading – Paul means that God does not have to give reasons (rationem reddere); God can give or take away salvation without giving an explanation. We are in the hands of God and we do not know what Gods wants, what is God’s pleasure, what is a secret (Donner la mort 59–60) shrouded in silence. We do not see (voir) or know (savoir) what God wants, otherwise god would not be God, i.e., Wholly Other (Donner la mort 59). God does not share his reasons with us; we cannot have a conversation with God; we cannot establish the homogeneity with God that having a conversation, and so a common language, would imply. The word of God is the word of the Wholly Other, and the word of the Wholly Other is wholly other than a word, otherwise than that what we mean by a word. His word reduces us to silence, is received in silence, cannot be understood, and cannot be repeated to anyone else.20

Compare this “fear and trembling” (which echoes the fear and trembling of Abraham at the prospect of sacrificing Isaac) in the face of the unknown (and unknowable) to Van Buren’s description of Augustine’s position as a “Hellenized, ocularized, theorized . . . [tranquil] contemplation and enjoyment of the Paradise of God as summon bonum.”21 A transformation takes place in Augustine in which the wisdom of Job, as a fear and trembling of the unknown, becomes the wisdom of Plato which is the quiet, tranquil contemplation (and knowing) of the Good (which becomes in Augustine God, then in Scholastic thought, as Lewalski noted, “metaphysics and natural theology” [pp. 291–93]). Indeed, in stark contrast to Derrida’s interpretation of Judaic wisdom which does “not see (voir) or know (savoir) what God wants,”22 the very etymology of Plato’s word “eide” is “to see,” and in the past tense (oida, “I have seen”), also becomes the present tense “I know”23 – to Plato, to have seen is to know. Plato’s wisdom is that in quiet contemplation he sees (and hence knows) the realm of the Good, while Job’s wisdom is that in fear and trembling he neither sees nor knows God. In describing Adam and Eve after the Fall, Luther says, “Adam and Eve . . . are so filled with fear and trembling that when they hear a breath or a wind, they immediately think that God is approaching to punish

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them . . . what a grave downfall, to plunge from the utmost security and lack of care . . . into such horrible trembling.”24 Similarly in Paradise Lost, in Adam’s loud lament after the Fall, we find “that fear / Comes thundring back with dreadful revolution / On my defensless head” (10.813–15), as his conscience “represented / All things with double terror” (10.849–50). As Adam’s lament suggests, the postlapsarian state for human beings is one of fear and trembling: “O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears / And horrors hast thou driv’n me; out of which / I find no way, from deep to deeper plung’d!” (10.842–44). In a coincidence of insight with Derrida, in his Poetics of the Holy Michael Lieb explored in considerable depth both the role of the “Wholly Other” and mysterium tremendum in Milton’s work. (Although both the terms “Wholly Other” and mysterium tremendum derive from Augustine, they were perhaps made most famous by theologian Rudolph Otto, who serves as an important touchstone for Lieb.) Lieb focuses, both in Poetics of the Holy and his recent reading of Samson Agonistes, on the crucial descriptive distinction between a notion of deity as rational and more primitive feelings of dread in the face of the holy, the latter which Lieb repeatedly attributes to Milton. Accordingly, Lieb rejects Mary Ann Radzinowicsz’s belief that Samson Agonistes contains “a rational conception of God,” arguing instead that no longer is it possible to look upon the God of Milton’s drama as the culmination of a movement or progressive revelation toward a more rational conception of the nature of deity. Any attempt to suggest that Milton’s god may be understood through . . . the enlightened categories of spirit, reason purpose, and goodwill is undermined by what actually transpires. The theology of dread that distinguishes this drama is one in which deity is portrayed in its most archaic and terrifying form.25

As Lieb compellingly makes clear time and again, the Deity in most of Milton’s poetry is one which invokes dread, not quiet contemplation.26 To understand further the implications of how fear and trembling in Milton, as the human postlapsarian state, is in opposition to the quiet contemplation of Plato and Augustine, it will be helpful to enlist again John S. Tanner and his “exquisite” comparison between Milton and Kierkegaard.27 Tanner begins from much the same position I have been developing, that for “Milton, the god of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Furthermore, Kierkegaard is also “profoundly subversive of this [the philosophers’] false god. As theology his work seeks to expose and overturn the Greek premises upon which Christian thought has been

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cantilevered at least since Augustine . . . This double enterprise, destructive of the god of philosophy and recuperative of the living God of Abraham, is calculated to disconcert a misguided Christendom, which for centuries has taken its intellectual bearings more from Athens than from Jerusalem.”28 These later statements could, of course, apply as equally to Milton as they do to Kierkegaard. Though in general Tanner provides an extended consideration of anxiety (Kierkegaard’s angst) in Paradise Lost, both before and after the Fall, what he has to say about the building of Pandemonium will throw light on the relationship philosophy has to fear and trembling. In Pandemonium the “devils recreate (or from the perspective of the poem, create for the first time) the world of Greek and Roman epics; their debates even occur on hell’s equivalent of the Areopagus . . . Philosophy and speculative theology are the highest achievements of Milton’s protoclassical Pandemonium, as they were of ancient Athens” (p. 140). Tanner’s assertion is certainly supported by Milton’s comical description of the devils after the construction of Pandemonium: Others apart sat on a hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate Fixt Fate, Free Will, Foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argu’d then Of happiness and final misery, Passion and Apathy, and glory and shame, Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophie: Yet with pleasing sorcery could charm Pain for a while of anguish, and excite Fallacious hope, or arm th’ obdured breast With stubborn patience as with triple steel. (2.557–69)

Tanner’s comment on all this philosophic musing in Pandemonium is squarely on mark: “what could be further from the point than to speculate in hell about God and truth all the while ignoring one’s existential relation to the topics of discussion?” (p. 140). But that is exactly the purpose of such musings: “to distract them from thinking seriously about their concrete, existential relationship to God . . . Such is its dread of a living God that the demonic empties the term of life, reducing the Word to dead letters on a page, a mere cipher for the Good rather than a being who thunders down from Sinai and whispers across Galilee insisting that we answer his voice with our lives. Thus the demonic drowns out God, ironically, with

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theology” (p. 140). Philosophy and speculative theology in Pandemonium are not in any sense a confronting of one’s existence in relation to God, but rather a running away from the fear and trembling that even the thought of such a confrontation invokes. Tanner continues his consideration of Milton’s Pandemonium by noting that Kierkegaard alludes to the River Lethe “in order to contrast Greek and Christian views of immortality. The one posits oblivion, symbolized by the River Lethe, at the threshold to immortality; the other imagines eternity opening up with the total recollection of Judgment Day” (p. 142). Tanner continues that, “in a striking coincidence of insight and imagery, Milton also concludes his depiction of Pandemonium with an account of the River Lethe. Since hell contains the rest of the classical world, it is not surprising that its demon explorers discover the ‘silent stream / Lathe the River of Oblivion’ as well (2.582–83)” (p. 142). This would seem to be a bonus to the devils since, in Milton’s words, “with one small drop to lose / In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe / All in one moment” (2.607–09). As Tanner notes, “To forget pain and woe, of course had been the intent of Pandemonium from the start,” but unfortunately for them, “they cannot drink from its anesthetizing stream” (p. 142) though in the epic they “wish and struggle . . . to reach / The tempting stream” (2.606–07). Though Heidegger would later deny the link,29 as one Heidegger scholar describes the philosopher’s famous understanding of inauthentic existence (from which Sartre’s concept of inauthenticity was largely derived), it is a “motivational account of . . . [why we] . . . pull away from authenticity . . . It helps to understand Heidegger here to realize that he can be read as again secularizing Kierkegaard, in this case Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the fall . . . That Heidegger is secularizing original sin is clear when he treats lostness in the one [becoming lost in public norms] not as a structural tendency but as a psychological temptation.”30 Inauthentic existence is a giving in to the temptation not to confront one’s own existence. This is precisely what the devils in Milton’s Pandemonium had hoped to do, both through the diverting activity of philosophy (as well as building Pandemonium) and by drinking of Lethe’s “anesthetizing stream,” but, as Tanner notes of Pandemonium’s builders, “However assiduously they busy themselves with learned proofs of God’s existence, demonic metaphysicians cannot avoid an even more anxious question of existence: namely, the issue of their own existence before a living God” (p. 141). This is a scorching indictment of Philosophy and speculative theology by Milton. Philosophy and speculative theology are not in any sense a confronting of our existence (nor a feeling of the fear and trembling such

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a confrontation necessarily invokes) but rather an elaborate anesthetizing diversion intent on avoiding the confrontation by looking to an-Other realm. In looking away from our own Earthy existence in the here and now to a not-here and eternal realm, the devils in Milton’s epic, and arguably metaphysical theologians in general, have enacted a true reversal of Judaic thinking by doing precisely what they should not be doing. In Kierkegaard (and arguably still in Heidegger), though we find ourselves in a fallen state, we continue to fall into inauthentic existence in so far as we do not confront, in a deeply personal way from within our place on Earth, our fallen state. Pandemonium is just such an attempt to divert attention away from the fear and trembling that our fallen state should elicit. The wisdom of Job 28:28 is not philosophic musings diverting us from our fallen state but quite the opposite: it is the wisdom to confront, with fear and trembling, our existence and God. Adam’s lament after the Fall (“O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears / And horrors hast thou driv’n me; out of which / I find no way, from deep to deeper plung’d!” [10.842–44]), though painful even to read, is just such a confrontation. As Milton understood them, the wisdom of Job (to confront God and our existence with fear and trembling) and the wisdom Paul teaches the Church at Corinth (the foolish wisdom of the weakness and humiliation of the cross) are both attempts to pull human beings back into an authentic, Earthy existence in the here and now. Again, what modern theologian Rudolf Bultmann said of the New Testament can as well apply to Job’s wisdom: “the New Testament asserts that the authentic life of man is not that of the cosmos [the meta-physical realm], but runs in the course of the incidental, the individual, in the sphere of history: that what the Greeks regard as the appearance of reality [this Earthy sphere] is in fact the authentic sphere of life.”31 To those Christian ascetics and secular (as well as Christian) subjectivists who argue that human beings should seek to pull free of our place on Earth, to obtain what Thomas Nagel has aptly called “the view from nowhere,”32 Milton responds in Paradise Regained by drawing attention to two of the biblical texts which most compellingly argue for our presence in our place on Earth.

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The influence of time on place: forbidding unripe fruit

To every thing there is an appointed season. Ecclesiastes (3:1)1

In Paradise Regained, Paradise Lost, and the Ludlow Mask, Satan and Comus tempt with fruit merely unripe, not forever forbidden. In Greek there is a word which conceptually deals with this idea of a not quite ripe fruit: kairos, the fullness or ripeness of time. While Leonard Mustazza noticed that in Paradise Regained “the concept of kairos, in God’s time, is constantly operative,”2 we could equally say (as have other critics) that kairos is constantly operative throughout many of Milton’s works.3 But more than just operative in the works, it is only through kairos that the works I have been citing operate at all. As I shall argue, without taking into account the ripeness of time the central temptations in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and the Ludlow Mask cease to be temptations at all. Indeed, the temptations are also the prescribed courses of action championed by the Bible (in Paradise Regained, the prophecy the Son reads), an angel (Raphael’s words to Adam), and proper thinking (by the Mask’s Lady). Whether forbidden fruit is forbidden or to be enjoyed – whether Eve, the Son, and the Lady act to realize fully their destiny or to squander it – is entirely a question of kairos. In the New Testament, kairos is a sort of timetable, known only to God, by way of which his plan is unfolding: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons [kairoi] which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7). In a sense, kairos is the cornerstone of Christian eschatology, as the time of the Parousia remains unknown to the faithful: Paul says, “But of the times and the seasons [kairoi)], brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:1). As Jesus himself said, “Take ye heed, watch and prey: for ye know not when the time [kairos] is. (Mark 13:33). From this it should not be assumed that the Christian should do 113

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nothing while God’s plan unfolds, to the contrary, the Christian needs to have faith in one’s actions: “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season (kairos) we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:9). Kairos also has a cognate in the Old Testament: the Hebrew zem-awn’: the appointed time or appointed season. Understanding zem-awn’ will further prepare us to understand the importance of kairos in Milton’s poetry. In one sense zem-awn’ is used to describe certain predictable events ordained by God which will take place in the future, like holidays: “Let the children of Israel also keep the Passover at his appointed season” [emphasis added] (Numbers 9:2). But in another sense, zem-awn’ is the unpredictable appointed time which, unknown to human beings, is at God’s choosing: “Then I [God] will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit” [emphasis added] (Leviticus 26:4). Though this is a promise from God to be fulfilled in the future, exactly when it will be satisfied is unknown. The appointing of the time belongs God: “The Lord shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season” [emphasis added] (Deuteronomy 28:12). The idea that zem-awn’ is a time known only to God becomes especially clear in some of the most oft-quoted lines from the Bible: To every thing there is a[n appointed] season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance [emphasis added] (Ecclesiastes 3:1–4).4

Who knows the time to weep? Perhaps everyone, but who knows when that time will come? Granted one can set the time of an organized social event called a “Dance,” but can one set the time when the desire to dance spontaneously announces itself across the body? Or set the “time to embrace,” or the “time to refrain from embracing” (Ecclesiastes 3:5)? Perhaps an almanac can set down the “time to plant,” but to a farmer the time is written in the soil, the sky, the wind: if winter lingers, the farmer will wait on the time to plant; if spring is early, the farmer will rush out to meet the appointed planting season. In what can almost be called a “post-structural approach,” by offering a series of binary structures in opposition, the Book of Ecclesiastes destabilizes the conventional idea that time can be directed and retained. Instead the future will hold birth/death, planting/harvesting, killing/healing, breakdown/build-up, weeping/laughing, mourning/celebrating – each couplet

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itself an endless play of absence and presence. But which half of each dyad will be the one that occurs? and when? All this will come to pass in God’s appointed time, not before, not after. “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time” [emphasis added] (Ecclesiastes 3:11). In Paradise Regained, Satan’s central temptations offer the Son what, in the best of possible futures, he will have: the Son will not only be “possess’d of David’s Throne” (3.357) but he will have power even greater than “Roman and Parthian” (3.362). In a seeming paradox, the Son will only achieve this power and David’s Throne if he resists them. This becomes less of a paradox when we think of the time (kairos) being not yet ripe for the Son to fulfill his destiny. When Satan presses the argument that the Son should do something soon, he responds: “My time I told thee (and that time for thee / Were better farthest off ) is not yet come” (3.396–97). As the brief epic nears its end, the Son makes known his understanding of appointed time as he echoes Ecclesiastes 3: “All things are best fulfill’d in their due time, / And time there is for all things” (4.182–83). In response to this declaration by the Son, a frustrated Satan then attempts to convince him that his time (kairos) has indeed come: “Now at full age, fulness of time, thy season / When Prophecies of thee are best fulfill’d” (4.381–82), so that the Son should not reject Satan’s offers as “The perfet season offer’d with my aid” (4.468) will gain David’s Throne. Satan’s promise to the Son reveals his understanding of kairos: that he believes he can bring about the appointed season: “The perfet season offer’d with my aid” [emphasis added] (4.468). Satan’s difficulty is simply that he refuses to “wait on” God’s time (kairos), instead he would bring things about in his own time. The Son, however, accepts and understands his manifestly human role as one of “waiting on” – both waiting on the appointed time and waiting on his Father as God’s servant. Had the Son taken the unripe fruit Satan offered, his story would have ended as tragically as Eve’s. Yet with every minute the Son waits, the bitter fruit with which Satan tempts grows sweeter. In the hands of a less competent devil (for example, Belial in Paradise Regained, or one on the many portrayals of Satan in medieval theology), the Son would have been tempted entirely with fruit truly forbidden, such as carnal pleasures. However, Milton’s Satan exploits the Son’s burgeoning understanding of his mission by tempting with the very fruit that the Son is coming to understand he is meant to take. Similarly, in so many medieval accounts, the reckless sensual abandon Satan offers Eve is truly forbidden: human beings should never abandon themselves to such excessive pleasure – not now, not in the future, not ever. By contrast, in Milton’s account Satan tempts Eve with the prospect that

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she might no longer be “low and ignorant” (9.705), but as in the dream he induces, be raised to a “high exaltation” (5.90). But this is precisely what Raphael has suggested to Adam may happen: “by degrees of merit rais’d / They [humanity] open to themselves at length the way / Up hither, under long obedience tri’d / And Earth be chang’d to Heav’n, and Heav’n to Earth (7.157–60). Milton’s Satan does not tempt Eve with what she should never have, but rather with what, in the best of possible futures, she most definitely should possess. Eve’s fatal mistake is momentarily to forget that only with the support of roots slowly grown in the Earth can she hope to reach such great heights. Eve took a fruit meant to be enjoyed when it was not yet ripe – when it was still forbidden. In the Ludlow Mask Comus tempts with pleasures both sensuous and sensual. Though we might expect the Lady categorically to reject what is offered, she surprises us through her acceptance that “good men can give good things” (l. 703). Hardly a prude, the Lady knows that one day she will have the pleasures offered. But because the Lady has a “wel-govern’d and wise appetite” (l. 705), she resists the unripe fruit. Far from being forbidden fruit, in the best of possible futures, the Lady will have everything Comus offers. Indeed, as something of a small reward for waiting (and a promise of the reward to come), both Paradise Regained and the Ludlow Mask end with a banquet at least equal to what the tempters first offered. Because Eve fails to wait on the appointed season, her story has a less celebratory ending. The central temptations in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and the Ludlow Mask are championed not only by the devils but also, astonishingly, by the clear-thinking protagonists themselves. What makes each of the temptations an evil and not a good is entirely a consequence of kairos. If kairos were of no consequence, when Satan suggested to Eve (or Raphael to Adam) that human beings could reach as high as heaven, Eve (or Adam) would have immediately acted on the suggestion, “And Earth be chang’d to Heav’n, and Heav’n to Earth (7.159–60). If kairos were of no consequence, when the Son first realized the Throne of David would be his (either from his reading of prophecy or through Satan’s suggestion), he would have assumed the Throne which would have become “like a tree / Spreading and overshadowing all the Earth” (ll. 146–48). If kairos were of no consequence, the Lady would have enjoyed something “delicious” (l. 704) with either Comus or that single one of the “good men” (l. 703) for which she waits. But the major consequence in each of these stories does hinge on kairos: the fruit is only forbidden when it is not yet ripe, otherwise it is to be enjoyed. Of course, the growth of the Son, Eve, and the Mask’s Lady is also

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subject to kairos – when each of their respective times come, it will come in part because they themselves have ripened. They themselves are completely subject to kairos. By making forbidden fruit merely unripe, Milton clearly makes problematic a great deal of medieval theology. In the case of the forbidden fruit in Paradise Lost, Milton has not only (as I noted in the section dealing with Paradise Lost) inverted medieval theology’s notion that the forbidden fruit is “Earthy” by making “heavenly fruit” in part the object of Eve’s desire, but the poet clarifies that Eve’s tragic quest for heaven was actually the proper pursuit, though improperly timed. In the case of Eve this certainly mitigates much of her sin; in Paradise Regained, even if the Son had taken the Throne of David when Satan offered it, it would be difficult to find a great deal of fault with his well-meaning intentions – why then should we subscribe to medieval theology’s vicious cynicism regarding Eve’s intentions? Though poorly timed, Eve’s attempt at a premature ascent (and consequent Fall) is at least understandable, though certainly not free of fault. In considering the environmental significance of kairos, it is clearly the case that we have, in our Christian-Greco-Roman-Judaic tradition, adopted Satan’s approach to time – seeking to have what we want when we want it. As Heidegger once said, humans should “not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest,”5 referring to our new-found propensity to hold day through night with electric lighting and our technological harassing of the days of the Earth which should be allowed to unfold in their own time. When Milton’s Son says that “All things are best fulfill’d in their due time, / And time there is for all things” (4.182–83), though he is referencing the time when his mission will begin, as echoing Ecclesiastes 3 he is also disclosing, in terms of the appointed season (zem-awn’ / kairos), his belief that human beings should serve in the unfolding of God’s plan, in God’s appointed time, and not seek (like Satan) to unfold a plan of our own in our time. In a world increasingly using technology to unfold a human plan, Milton’s emphasis on kairos may be as well-suited to our age as to his. Through the late Heidegger’s environmental maxim of “standing reserve” (das Bestand), it is possible to explicate the environmental implications of kairos. By having his protagonists tempted with the prospect of appointing their own time, thereby ignoring kairos, it can be argued that Milton is suggesting that neither human beings nor the Earth should “stand in reserve” for solely human needs, but quite the contrary, human beings should stand in wait for the Earth to present its gifts in God’s time. These ideas will be especially clear when we return to the Ludlow Mask after considering

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in greater depth Heidegger’s environmentally powerful notion of standing reserve. Heidegger explains that, “everywhere, everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for further ordering,” we call this idea “standing reserve [das Bestand].”6 This perspective on Nature could be understood by asking a simple question pertaining to humans and the Earth: “Just who is waiting on whom?” Heidegger maintains that the traditional answer, given by peasant farmers, is essentially “we wait on the Earth.” For example, traditional peasant farmers must “wait on” the rain – often for excruciatingly long periods – to irrigate their crops. In contrast to this peasant approach to the question of who is waiting on whom, modern technological thinking in terms of standing reserve answers that “the Earth waits on us.” Modern agri-business does not find it necessary to “wait on” the rain, but rather taps into underground aquifers, which, in the view of technology, have water standing in reserve, “waiting on” human beings to make use of it. If these underground reserves are not adequate, then technology will allow us to build dams, aqueducts, or storage tanks to ensure that the place’s water is indeed “waiting on” us to use it. Simply put, the peasant farmer waits on the (unknown) appointed time of rain, while modern agri-business, having no such patience, takes it upon itself to appoint the time of forced (from the Earth) irrigation. In the case of the peasant as well as that of modern technology, it should be noted that I am also suggesting that “waiting on” means “waiting on someone for a period of time,” as well as “waiting on someone as one who serves.” The traditional peasants view is that we wait to serve the place, while, on the other hand, as standing reserve to technological human beings, the place waits to serve us. To understand the ecological import of kairos in a Christian context (something Heidegger never attempts to do), it will be helpful first to quote from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought [merimnas – anxious thought] for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on . . . Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them . . . Which of you by taking [anxious] thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye [anxious] thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. . . . Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall

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he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no [anxious] thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? . . . for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things . . . Take therefore no [anxious] thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take [anxious] thought for the things of itself (Matthew 6:25–34).

What Jesus is suggesting here is that by sharing the practices of “the fowls of the air,” “the lilies of the field,” and “the grass of the field,” we might learn the correct posture towards life and the future. With the great power technology offers, the notion of kairos and much of the import of the story of the lilies of the field naturally might seem a little alien to our modern lives. Why, for example, should we wait for an appointed time for anything related to the Earth? Granted, the appointed time of each of our Deaths, as well as the Parousia to Christians, may be unknown, but whatever anxieties these uncertainties might cause, what need is there nowadays to be anxious over literally “what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink . . . [or] . . . what ye shall put on” in the morrow? Technology has long ago assured most of us in the developed world that there is a standing reserve of food, water, and clothing for nearly everyone – not only for the “morrow” but for each day after it. It would be absurd – and altogether frightful – for a modern people to “wait on” spring for the appointed season (kairos) to arrive when crops could be grown to end hunger and starvation. One of the motives behind the massive deforestation of the South American Rain Forests, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, was to provide an off-season source of food for North America – a reserve standing in South America just “waiting on us” to use it. Through countless technological practices, we human beings now appoint the time (as we have taken control of kairos) for all of our needs. It is clear that in many ways, though Christ is believed to stand past Death for the faithful, technology undeniably now stands (or at least promises to stand) between all human beings and Death. Technology has put an end to much of the play of presence and absence in our lives. Because of the success of technology in providing for our needs in the morrow, few human beings today are so anxious over the indefinite future that they offer prayers to a higher Power to spare their lives before an upcoming winter. One could argue that technology is now functioning to ease our anxiety towards our lives in the same way that belief in gods once did. Though in a far more consistent way than any of the old gods: in comparison to “unreliable gods” which allowed human beings to freeze in winter, technology, when “properly” deployed, is always Present and always Powerful. And the bonus

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is that technology is through-and-through a human creation, giving to us the power over our future previously held by gods. In comparison to the immense technological achievements of the Greeks, followed by the Romans, in architecture, agriculture, and city building, Jesus himself brought attention to previously ignored “teachers,” the birds and lilies (who were utterly marginalized as their habitat and growing space was taken by the human activities of architecture, agriculture, and city building), who would serve as “masters” to apprentice the faithful to a way of life which seemed utterly foolish to the prevailing Greek mindset. With the technological might of the Greeks and Romans within their grasp, Christians were to shun the ability to overcome kairos as they assumed a posture of weakness, gratefully receiving whatever their God’s grace bestowed upon them in His appointed time (kairos), even when it was no-thing (complete absence). Like the paradigm Christ, who was believed to have been able to wield immense power, yet resisted the temptation, Christ’s followers were also to resist the temptation of power as they lived in a moment looking forward to eternity. This idea of resisting the temptation of the power to appoint time (in the form of technological power towards the “morrow”), while accepting the weakness of appointed time (though one might have the immense technological power within one’s grasp to appoint time), may be one of Christianity’s most significant, though seemingly ignored, contributions to ecological thinking.7 Christians, in following the example of their teachers, the lilies and birds, most authentically live in a Time their God unfolds through the Earth – not in moments folded back upon themselves as we seek constant presence at the Earth’s expense. What does this all come to environmentally? Clearly this is very radical thinking. A people who held to Christ’s command that thou shalt be as the birds, as “they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns” (Matthew 6:26), would clearly eschew agriculture, to say nothing of the avalanche of technology that followed it. This would certainly put these extraordinarily devoted Christians in the company of the most radical of environmentalists, who hold that much of our environmental woe is caused precisely because we do not live like birds, lilies, and the rest of life on Earth. Followers of Deep Ecology hold that vast areas of the Earth should be mandated as “wilderness,” and as such be largely free of human influence, except for certain indigenous people.8 But since such tactics as “slash and burn” land appropriations have been practiced by indigenous peoples for hundreds of thousands of years, this “wilderness” model clearly is problematic. But if a tribe or two of these dutiful Christians, living in

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absence and presence like birds and lilies, were released into wilderness, their convictions would insure that they resisted the temptation of technological power. Only a people who lived like birds and lilies, resisting the temptation of the “next day,” could be stewards of wilderness. Prior to the Fall in Paradise Lost, the above described practices also apply to Adam and Eve: “they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns . . . [nor take anxious] . . . thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” (Matthew 6:26, 31).9 In the space opened up in his narrative of Paradise, Milton has depicted a place which makes literal some of the most practical (though seemingly im-practical) teachings of Jesus – especially regarding kairos. In the Garden Adam and Eve live in accordance with kairos, they do not see the Earth’s bounty as reserve standing as some sort of re-source to “wait upon” their needs. (As mentioned earlier, the living example of the Bower as opposed to the dead “material” used to build Pandemonium makes this especially clear.) On the contrary, through their gardening practices Adam and Eve “wait on” the needs of their place, the Garden. Indeed, Eve’s concern for the needs of the Garden is so great that she fears her labors inadequate to wait on the place: Adam, well may we labor still to dress This Garden, still to tend Plant, Herb and Flour, Our pleasant task enjoyn’d, but till more hands Aid us, the work under our labours grows, Luxurious by restraint; what we by day Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, of blind, One night or two with wanton growth derides Tending to wilde. Thou therefore now advise Or hear what my minds first thoughts present, Let us divide our labours. (9.205–14)

It is clear from this passage that Eve not only does not take anxious thought for “What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” (Matthew 6:31), which might make her wish to have the Earth “stand in reserve” to meet her needs, but quite the contrary, her anxious thought is for the needs of the place. Consequently, Eve is quite willing (even though, as we know all too well, it puts her in jeopardy) to “wait on” the place, even if it means separation from Adam. In terms of kairos, the ecological importance of Milton’s portrayal of the prelapsarian life in the Garden cannot be overstressed. By inverting the anxious thought Adam and Eve have for the morrow not to be for their uncertain future, but the uncertain future of the place which “One night or

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two with wanton growth derides” (9.211), Milton has, with respect to time, come very close to laying out a “geocentric” position – as opposed to the ecological perilous “homocentric” posture of much of the modern West. Even if they followed the letter of the Sermon on the Mount’s law not to have anxious thought for their future, Milton’s Adam and Eve could have taken this to mean that they should have no anxious thought for the future at all – and therefore attempted to “live in the moment,” oblivious to an uncertain future. But Eve’s above quoted speech in Paradise Lost (9.205–14) makes it clear that she is very much concerned for the future – the future of the place. As mentioned before, one of the great tragedies of Paradise Lost is that Eve’s strong desire to care for the Garden (especially, as I have been presently arguing, for the future of the place) should precipitate her inadvertent turning away from her place. It is important to note that kairos also appears frequently in Milton, “almost all unfailingly negative” (in John Mulryan’s words10 ), as the Greek goddess Occasion or Fortune. To the Greeks, if the goddess Occasion happened to be moving towards you, opportunity was approaching (hence, to the Romans Occasion became the god Opportunus), giving you the chance to seize her by her long braided forelock (literally to “seize the moment”) before Occasion (the moment) past. If you failed to lay hold of the moment as it approached, the loss was yours, since Occasion being bald at the back, made it impossible to “capture the moment” once it was past, as Occasion continued towards a future you missed. It is this sense of kairos as Occasion that Satan tempts the Son in Paradise Regained: “If Kingdom move thee not, let move thee Zeal, / And Duty; Zeal and Duty are not slow; / But on Occasions forelock watchful wait” (3.171–73). Later, however, the Son explicitly clarifies that any occasion afforded by kairos (here called Fortune) must be the work of God, and not (as the Stoic philosophers held) merely human actions: “And in themselves [the Stoic philosophers] seek vertue, and to themselves / All glory arrogate, and to God give none, / Rather accuse him under usual names, Fortune and Fate, as one regardless quite / Of mortal things” (4.314–18). Milton himself illuminates this idea in his prose: “But the name of ‘fortune,’ as was said above, grew out of ignorance of causes . . . For fortune surely is to be placed in heaven, but its name should be changed and it should be called ‘divine providence.’ ”11 Kairos, then, is misunderstood as the Greek goddess Fortune, as kairos in the New Testament (like zem-awn’ in the Old) is time appointed only by God. As Milton clearly saw, the Christian interpretation of kairos is a radical reversal of the Greek notion that time may be appointed by human beings.

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In some sense, John Mulryan makes much the same point, as he draws attention both to Satan’s attempt to convince the Son that his time has come (Paradise Regained 3.171–73) and the elder brother’s concern in the Mask that “Danger will wink on opportunity” (l. 401) as some evil might befall his sister. In Mulryan’s words: “Thus Milton turns the tradition of Occasion or Opportunity on its head: the devil tries to make Christ move with haste before ‘due time,’ while the second brother warns the first that the really vigilant ones looking for an opportunity are the evil ones . . . Of course what one is supposed to find through Opportunity is Fortune, wealth, whatever one most desires.”12 Crucial here is that both Satan and Comus, opportunists firmly rooted in the Greek understanding of kairos, believe that they can appoint the time for either the Son or the Lady fully to realize their destiny, but both characters understand that neither the time nor their own development has reached maturity. That this Christian notion of kairos has profound environmental consequences is made clear in the Lady’s rebuff to Comus’s idea that the Earth would be “strangl’d with her waste fertility” (l. 729): in the Lady’s words, if only we were to “live according to her sober laws, / And holy dictate of spare Temperance . . . every man who now pines with want” would have a “moderate and beseeming share” (l. 766–69). To quote Wendell Berry again, this “is a prototype of the ecological argument of our own time . . . humans can have a decent, permanent place in the earthy household only by knowing precisely the extent of their ‘beseeming share’ and by using no more.”13 Kairos becomes crucial to knowing that our “beseeming share” is not appointed by human beings but rather by the place which gives forth its bounty in its own time – or in Milton’s understanding, by God who has the Earth bring forth her bounty in a time not appointed by human needs or technology. As Comus would, entirely irrespective of the place, appoint the time for the place to bring forth, he stands as a chilling harbinger of how a broad swath of human beings was already beginning to approach the Earth in Milton’s era. On the other hand, most actions of the traditional peasant farmers were dictated by God, who appointed “a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted” (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2). Because these appointed times were unknown to human beings, many individuals felt that the need to be the appointers of time warranted their turning away from scripture. Milton provides a scorching indictment of those who would appoint time: in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained the character who seeks most to appoint time is Satan. To express this notion another

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way, to Milton the character of those who would appoint time is mostly Satanic. The ecological importance of time on place is perhaps most conspicuous in the Mask at Ludlow, which presents a single argument that is a prototype of both modern ecological and feminist thinking. To echo Luce Irigaray, “As for woman, she is place,”14 and it is the place of the woman’s body which is also under assault in the Mask. In terms of the Lady’s body, it is resoundingly clear that it is entirely her decision when her body will be shared. There are no mitigating arguments put forth by Comus that succeed in convincing the Lady (or the Mask’s readers) that he should have any say in this decision. In terms of the place on Earth at Ludlow, the same arguments marshaled on behalf of the Lady’s body also apply: when the place is shared is entirely dependent on the place and God. Though this might seem an untenably weak position for some of the human beings residing in the place (but by no means all, the peasant farmers of the place being as good an example as is the Lady), what Milton has said in his prose must be remembered: that the name of Kairos or Fortune “should be changed and it should be called ‘divine providence.’ ”15

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whose tallest Pines, Though rooted deep as high, and sturdiest Oaks Bow’d thir Stiff necks, loaden with stormy blasts, Or torn up sheer: ill wast thou shrouded then, O patient Son of God, yet only stood’st Unshaken (Paradise Regained, 4.417–21)

In terms of my earlier discussions on the necessity in continuing to feel the wound opened up at the Fall, the need to confront in fear and trembling the fallen human state is forever connected in Paradise Lost to the wounded state of the Earth. Milton’s unique contribution is that, with the image of a wounded Earth, he is able to connect both Old and New Testament wisdoms by exploiting the typology surrounding both the Fall and Christ’s crucifixion. To understand how this is achieved we need to consider, in terms of typology, the wounding of the Earth. Although it is not surprising that Eve feels wounded at the Fall, it is rather unexpected that Milton’s sentient Earth feels the “wound.” Given that, as Diane McColley has noted, in the iconography of Milton’s time there was a tradition approaching a “typology of regeneration,” making “the Fall a type of Crucifixion,”1 it would seem far more likely that if an account of the Fall depicted a common “wound” being opened at all, it would have been shared by humanity and Christ. In the chronology of Paradise Lost, long before Eve’s lapse, the Son has offered “life for life” (3:236) as Atonement for human Sin. This said, and with the tradition of typology in mind, not to mention an intimation of the “wound” Christ would receive in his side at the Crucifixion (John 19:34), if any character in Paradise Lost, other than Adam and Eve, was to have been wounded at the Fall one certainly might have expected the Son to have “felt the Wound” (9.782) he knew he was destined to receive. As Milton has placed the wounding of the Earth where we might have expected the wounding of 125

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the Son, this leads to what I take to be a rather provocative question: just what is the relation between the wound the Earth felt and the wound Christ received? To consider this further, it will be helpful to consider the typology concerning Christ’s wound, which, interestingly, is often connected with the Creation of Eve. The Creation of Eve is generally associated with either the emergence of the sacraments from the wound Christ receives in his side at the Crucifixion, or, more commonly, the origin of the Church from this wound. In the iconography of Eve’s Creation, this is especially clear in those images which show Eve directly emerging, fully formed, from Adam’s side.2 Though Milton does deviate somewhat from this tradition by portraying God as craftsman, fashioning Eve from Adam’s rib through the work of the hands, this typology is nonetheless suggested by Milton’s description of “the wound” “op’nd” in Adam’s “side” from which “cordial spirits warme, / And Life-blood” streamed: Who stooping op’nd my left side, and took From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warme, And Life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly with flesh fill’d up and heal’d: The Rib he formed and fashiond with his hands; Under his forming hands a Creature grew, Manlike, but different sex. (8.465–71)

Compare Milton’s account with Richard Hooker’s explication of the typology: The Church is in Christ as Eve was in Adam. Yea by grace we are every one of us in Christ and in his Church, as by nature we are in those our first parents, God made Eve of the rib of Adam. And his Church he frameth out of the very flesh, the very wounded and bleeding side of the Son of man . . . the words of Adam may be fitly the words of Christ concerning his Church, “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones,” [Genesis 2:23] a true native extract out of mine own body.3

Though it seems clear that Milton’s depiction of the Creation of Eve is in the same typological tradition as Hooker’s account, what may be less clear is how the wound shared by the Earth and humanity in Paradise Lost fits into this tradition. So, to understand how these wounds are related and to recap what I have said about the wound Earth felt in Paradise Lost, it will be helpful to enumerate the characteristics of these wounds one by one. The wounds are quite unusual as something of consequence actually emerges from them. In most wounds what is of most importance is what leads up to the wounding, the wounding itself, and the consequences to

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the wounded. While it is true that in Milton’s account of the Creation of Eve God does stoop down to reach into Adam’s side to obtain the rib, the actual act of opening up the wound fades from significance (like that nameless Roman soldier who inflicted Christ’s wound) as all attention turns to Eve, who emerges from the wound. Indeed, as stated above, in many of the images depicting Eve’s Creation, the opening up of the wound (the “wounding”) is altogether absent, as Eve simply rises up out of Adam’s side.4 What is most significant in the typological tradition is that which emerges from these very unusual wounds: Eve and the Church, in Hooker’s words the “true native extract.” If Milton’s description in Paradise Lost of the wound Earth received entirely involved something striking at the Earth, it would be difficult to see the commonality of the wounds which Adam, Christ, and the Earth incurred, but, as I have been arguing, the very unusual wound the Earth receives in Milton’s unusual description of the events surrounding the Fall does involve something being taken from the Earth: humanity, the “true native extract.” The wound connects the wounded and what emerges from the wound in a mystical way. In speaking both of the connection of the Church to Christ and woman to man, Paul says that men ought “to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth it and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are all members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones . . . This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:28–32). In Milton’s words in Of Church Doctrine, the “union and fellowship of the regenerate with the Father and Christ, and among the member of Christ’s body among themselves, result in the mystical body called the invisible Church.”5 Invisible and mystical, the wound is the site of the connection (for it is out of the wound that the Church emerges in the typological tradition) which holds the Church to Christ – and, too, woman to man. In postmodern parlance, we could say that the Self should feel for the Other what it feels for it-Self, or, in Paul’s words concerning the manwoman bond: “He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” Augustine draws attention to this bond between man and woman when he offers an explanation for the Creation of Eve from Adam: “God’s purpose in choosing to produce mankind from but one man was not merely to unite the human race in an alliance based on natural likeness but also to bind it up by the tie of kinship, as it were, into a single harmonious whole held together through the bond of peace [pacis vinculo].”6 It is this “bond of peace” that also connects the human race “into a single harmonious whole” with the Earth.

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The “peasant” (from the Latin pangere) has a similar invisible and mystical connection to the Earth, indeed it is believed that pangere is derived from the prehistoric Indo-European pag/pak root, which simply means just that: a connection or bond. Though in one sense, Eve broke the bond she had with the Earth at her Fall, in another sense an invisible bond emerges from the wound. When Eve first learns of the wound, the “unexpected stroke, worst than of Death” (11.268), her lament is an acknowledgment that she feels the invisible and mystical wound that bonds her with her place on the Earth. Eve’s painful lament brings us the next characteristic of these wounds: the wound must be continually felt. With an allusion to the wound in Christ’s side, Paul says, lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:7–9)

Though Paul sought to have the wound healed (through having the “thorn” removed), he comes to realize that the thorn allows him to feel what Christ felt, so that like Christ, his “strength is made perfect in weakness.” Letting the wound “heal over” would risk having the bond forgotten. Although Eve’s lament at feeling the “stroke, worst than of Death” (the worse than mortal “stroke” Eve inflicted upon herself and the Earth) may be painful even to read, it is necessary for her to feel the wound if she is to keep her bond with her place on the Earth. Since feeling the wound holds humans and the Earth together, in Milton’s assessment the wound is as much the site of connection as it is of separation. Finally, these wounds are alike in that the bond between the wounded and what emerges from the wound is described in three ways: as a sort of “birth”; as a relation among parts of the body; and as the relation of roots to a tree. Although these three approaches help us to understand the bond in different ways, because these metaphors are frequently mixed (in scripture, in Milton, and in biblical explication), confusion is often unavoidable. Indeed, up until this point I have been switching, rather indiscriminately, between describing the Earth–Human bond as either a “rootedness in place” or, in the terms Richard DuRocher introduced, as something like childbirth. Considering

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the typology surrounding the wounds Adam and Christ received will add greater precision to our discussion of the wound Earth felt at the Fall in Paradise Lost. As mentioned earlier, the iconography surrounding Eve’s Creation often depicts her emerging fully formed from Adam’s side – a sort of “birth.” As McColley notes, the emergence of the Church from Christ’s wound was also depicted as a birth: “In the Bible Moralis´ee in the Bodleian Library . . . the Creation of Eve, in which the Creator raises her from the wrist, is matched with a Crucifixion: not with water and blood, but with an actual child being extracted from Christ’s side as Eve is from Adam’s, to reinforce the analogy between Eve and the Church.”7 Not surprisingly, feminists have taken this type of “birth”, in which Adam (or Christ) usurps the woman’s childbearing role, as troubling. Milton does, however, mitigate this difficulty by having God form Eve outside of Adam’s body, as opposed to having Adam’s body directly bear Eve. While Milton may have shared modern feminists’ uneasiness with the typological tradition of having Adam directly giving birth to a fully formed Eve, the poet certainly has no such reticence in Paradise Lost towards Mother Earth, who “straight / Op’ning her fertile Womb teem’d at a Birth / Innumerous living Creatures, perfet forms, / Limb’d and full grown” (7.454–56). The connection between this ability of the Earth to give birth in Milton’s epic and the wound Earth felt at the Fall becomes clear when we look to the passage in Paradise Lost where Mammon and his cohorts “with impious hands / Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth / For Treasures better hid. Soon his crew / Op’n’d into the hill a spacious wound” (1.686–89). DuRocher makes clear the typological connection between these wounds: the “Devil’s opening of a ‘spacious wound’ may recall the wound opened in Christ’s side during the Crucifixion. Certainly the devil’s plunder of ‘ribs of gold’ echoes the Yahwistic account of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib” (p. 98). From a consideration of this early wounding of the Earth in Paradise Lost, DuRocher compellingly argues that “The ‘Wound’ the Earth feels upon Eve’s Fall is at first unlocalized, but as the depiction of the Earth after Adam’s Fall indicates, it is felt in the vital, creative part of Mother Earth, her womb” (p. 114). Though, as I have argued, there is a danger in interpreting this “birth” too literally, DuRocher makes a compelling case for a birth from the wound Earth felt at the Fall in Paradise Lost. The second approach to understanding Adam’s (and Christ’s) wound is through the idea that the Church is part of a “body” shared with Christ. The notion that the Church and Christ are one in body is a persistent one

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in the New Testament, found in Colossians (“And he [Christ] is the head of the body, the church” [1:18]), 1 Corinthians (“now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular” [12:27]), Romans (“So we, being many, are one body in Christ” [12:5]), and elsewhere. In the following passage, which has become infamous in feminist circles, Paul himself helps to establish the typological tradition we have been considering when he notes that the bodily relation between Christ and the Church is also the relation of man (as in Adam) to woman (Eve): For the husband is the head of the wife; even as Christ is head of the church. . . . So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nursisheth it and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are all members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. (Ephesians 5:23–30)

As I mentioned earlier, Paul concludes this thought by noting, “concerning Christ and the Church,” that “This is a great mystery” (Ephesians 5:32). We have here the notion that, though separate and distinct, Christ and the Church (like men and women) share a single mystical connection expressed through the image of a shared body. As Adam expresses it to Eve in Paradise Lost: “So forcible within my heart I feel / The Bond of Nature draw me to my own, / my own in thee, for what thou art is mine; / Our state cannot be sever’d, we are one, / One flesh” (9.955–59). My earlier argument (which made a play on words by suggesting that Milton’s deconstruction not only destabilized medieval theology’s dualistic “spirits in flesh,” but went further than Luther’s “spirits of flesh” destruction by suggesting that human beings are “spirits of place”) was a way of expressing this “bodily” relation. When Luther deconstructed spirit–flesh duality, the spirit and the flesh were in-corporated into a corporality which was (bodily) flesh and spirit. Milton’s innovation is that he in-corporates “place,” a region of the Earth, into this corporality, so that not only are human beings an embodiment of spirit and flesh but also of place – in simple terms, when Sabrina or Edward King became a genius loci, their “body,” the corporal aspect of their being, was the region of the Earth they inhabited. In Paradise Lost, then, though Adam and Eve have human bodies, as “spirits of place” in the tradition of Sabrina and Edward King, they also have something of this “bodily” connection to the Earth – they are indeed both “Adams” (in Hebrew “creatures made of Earth”). This bodily connection to the Earth is further suggested by the fact that the Creation of Adam, both in scripture and in Paradise Lost, is similar in type to both the Creation of Eve and the Creation of the Church, as “the Lord God formed

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man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). Though the typological tradition does not generally connect the Creation of Adam with the Creation of either Eve or the Church, Milton is careful to join Eve’s Creation with Adam’s as both are directly “formed” (Raphael informs Adam that “he [God] formed thee, Adam” [7.514], while from a rib Eve was “formed and fashion’d with his [God’s] hands; / Under his forming hands a Creature grew” [8.470–1]) by God, whereas the animals emerge from Mother Earth’s womb as “perfet forms, / Limb’d and full grown” (7.455–56) without the need of God’s direct handiwork. Though Milton does not refer to the place where Adam was taken from the Earth as a “wound,” there is nonetheless a similarity which suggests that Adam and the Earth may share a common “body” in the same way that Eve does with Adam and the Church with Christ. The wound Eve opened up at her Fall in Paradise Lost might then be likened to a self-destructive tearing at one’s own body, with the unfortunate effect that, as the body is shared with an other (the Earth), Eve also horrifically harmed the Earth through her self-destructive act. Finally, Adam’s (and Christ’s) wound can be understood in terms of a “rootedness.” This generally seams to have come about in two ways: first, biblical commentators such a John Calvin interpreted passages such as Colossians 1:18 (“And he [Christ] is the head of the body, the church” – which clearly referred to the “body” Christ shared with the Church) in organic terms, with Christ like a “root, from which the vital energy is diffused through all the members. Just like a root the head provides life for all its members.”8 Second, in reference to Adam, Paul Bayne mixes the “body” and “rooted” metaphors “as all who have descended, and shall descend, from the first Adam, are a compete body natural under Adam, the head and root of them.”9 Though Eve is not a descendant of Adam’s per se (nonetheless, as commentators have noted, in her biblical “birth” she is certainly derivative of Adam), Bayne is also referring here to Paul’s notion (Ephesians 5:23) that Man is also the “head” of Woman, though in Bayne the relation of head to body is also expressed as root to plant. In addition to commentaries which interpreted the Church as being “rooted” in Christ (as Eve was “rooted” in Adam), the New Testament itself introduces organic metaphors, such as when Jesus declares “I am the true vine” (John 15:1), which caused such commentators as Richard Hooker to intermix the body and vine metaphors for the Church by suggesting that heretics are “branches cut off from the body of the true vine.”10 Similarly, in Romans Paul suggests to Roman converts that they might be “grafted”

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onto the Church to replace those native “branches” broken off because of unbelief: “And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree” (11:17). Milton is certainly well aware of this “tree” metaphor for the Church: in Of Christian Doctrine, in a chapter entitled “Of Being Ingrafted in Christ, and its Effects,” Milton quotes Ephesians 3:17 (which speaks of members of the Church “being rooted and grounded in love” [emphasis added]) when he describes how new members of the Church are “ingrafted” into Christ.11 In addition to my earlier references to the poetry of Paradise Lost which suggest that Eve is indeed “rooted” in the Earth, we can further see how the above “tree” metaphor is at work in Milton’s poetry by briefly considering the portrayal of the Son in Paradise Regained. Though the most dramatic scene in Paradise Regained occurs when the Son stands on the pinnacle, this ability of his to stand against Satan had been intimated earlier in the epic during a storm Satan brings about: Fierce rain with lightning mixt, water with fire In ruine reconcil’d: nor slept the winds Within thir stony caves, but rush’d abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vext Wilderness, whose tallest Pines, Though rooted deep as high, and sturdiest Oaks Bow’d thir Stiff necks, loaden with stormy blasts, Or torn up sheer: ill wast thou shrouded then, O patient Son of God, yet only stood’st Unshaken (4:412–21)

Like a tree “rooted deep as high,” the Son “stood’st / Unshaken.” This is a remarkable way to describe Jesus. Compare it with the previously quoted Heidegger passage: “The oak itself proclaimed that all that lasts and bears fruit is founded on such growth alone; that growth means to lie open to the span of the heavens and, at the same time, to have roots in the dark earth, that everything real and true only prospers if mankind fulfills at the same time the two conditions of being ready for the demands of the highest heaven and being safe in the shelter of the fruitful earth.”12 – certainly not the position of Christian asceticism which seeks to pull free of the roots. What gives Milton’s Son the ability to withstand Satan’s storm is the future Savior’s roots, which reach as deep into the Earth as he rises above it. As Neil Forsyth has noted, the trees described weathering Satan’s storm are unique in the Classical tradition, with only Virgil describing a similar tree whose “crown thrusts upward to the heavens as far / As the roots stretched

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down to Tartarus.” Forsyth notes that Virgil’s tree (like Milton’s) may well be “the cosmic tree of European and Asian myth”, the “very axis mundi” which mythically obtains a “spiritual center.”13 In Paradise Regained, Milton has not only depicted the most un-Earthy human being in Christian history as being as deeply rooted in the Earth as he is able gloriously to rise above it, but it is this very Earth-rooted posture that gives Milton’s Son his “spiritual center” – a stability unequaled in human history. In direct terms of the wound he will receive on the cross, in Paradise Regained the Son comes to realize that his kingdom can only come about after his time has come, which, as we know, is only after his being mortally wounded on the cross. But after his mortal wounding, “when my season comes to sit / On David’s throne, it shall be like a tree / Spreading and overshadowing all the earth” (4:146–48). In a sense, we can say that out of the fatal wound the Son receives on the cross, not only the Church (as in the typological tradition) but also the promised (millennial) Kingdom will emerge – as a tree rooted in the wound. By using the wound Earth felt to connect the Fall with the Creation of Eve and the Church, Milton uses the typological tradition to throw light on the “invisible and mystical” bond between Humanity and the Earth which emerged from the wound opened up at the Fall. Furthermore, if this wound (which, in a seeming paradox, both bonds us to the Earth and reminds us of the severed connection) is to remain intact, it must be continually felt in our postlapsarian world as a “thorn in our sides.” Through his use of typology, Milton suggests that our relation to “Mother Earth” is not only that of a “mother” who gave birth to humanity but also as the “Earth” we must be deeply rooted in if we are to grow towards Heaven. Withal, as this mystical bodily connection we share with the Earth runs as deep as our bond to Heaven rises above it, we should be as responsible to the Earth as we are to our own bodies. Geoffrey Hartman once wrote of Milton that “His lines in the Nativity ode on the ‘parting Genius’ left their imprint on almost every major poet in the following century”14 as they diffused into the countryside in search of the exiled Genius. What they failed to see, however, was that, perhaps with greater insight, Milton had already caught a glimpse of the Genius as the poet himself pined for a more authentic Christian encounter with their place on the Earth. Earlier I made reference to Oswald Spengler to suggest that his enterprise (in a limited way) parallels Milton’s own, in that both thinkers proceed from the conviction that human beings were once so thoroughly rooted in the Earth that (because of this humble peasant rootedness in place) the Earth was nothing less than a Paradise. To Spengler

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this was not a question of biblical interpretation but rather a historical fact. This said, we can view Milton as having delivered Christianity to the fold of environmentalists who hold that our foolish acts have brought ecological devastation to the Earth. Indeed, Milton goes so far as to suggest that this foolish uprooting of ourselves from our place on the Earth was the pivotal act in human history – and the source of all our current sorrow. But it is this sorrow that may offer the greatest hope to renew our Earth-bound peasantry that was lost with Paradise. Because feeling the wound may offer the best chance at healing our shared loss with the Earth, Milton’s poetry may be seen as an attempt to have us again confront our Original Sin of believing anything less than that we are all “Adams” (literally “creatures made of Earth”), who, faced with our Earth-bound nature, may either choose to renew the bond or scorn it along with our future.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Martin Heidegger, “The Country Path,” trans. Michael Heron in Envoy, 3.11 (1950), 71. 2. The Riverside Milton. Ed. Roy Flannagan (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 11.268–70. All references to Milton are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 3. For seventeenth-century deforestation in England, see John Perlin’s A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization (New York, 1989), 163–90. 4. The history of English farm literature in the seventeenth century is covered by Lord Ernle’s “Obstacles to Progress,” in Agriculture and Economic Growth in England 1650–1815, ed. E. L. Jones (London, 1967), 49–65. 5. For the replacement of indigenous plants with new monocultures in the seventeenth century, see L. A. Clarkson’s The Pre-Industrial Economy in England 1500–1750 (New York, 1972), 57–59. 6. Cecil is quoted from John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, 186. 7. For the importing of foodstuffs in mid-century, see Joan Thirsk’s “Agricultural Policy: Public Debate and Legislation,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1985), V.II.309. 8. For the development of confiscated land, see Joan Thirsk’s “Agricultural Policy,” V.II.311. 9. Sylvanus Taylor, Common Good; or, The Improvement of Commons, Forests, and Chases by Enclosure, quoted by Thirsk, 310. 10. See Joan Thirsk’s “Agricultural Policy,” 316. 11. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago, 1992), 100. 12. Ibid. CHAPTER 1 1. Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill,” in Recollected Essays: 1965–1980 (New York, 1981), 74. Berry is here speaking about his family’s “place” – a hill in Kentucky where his people have lived and farmed for generations. 135

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2. Paradise Lost, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (New York, 1998), 11.268. All references to Milton, unless otherwise noted, are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 3. Christopher Fitter, “ ‘Native Soil’: The Rhetoric of Exile Lament and Exile Consolidation in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 20, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh, 1984), 147. 4. Jon Whitman, “Losing a Position and Taking One: Theories of Place in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 29 (1992), 21–34. Though much of McColley’s writing, both in content and form, is deeply ecological, see especially her Milton’s Eve (Urbana, 1983) and “Beneficent Hierarchies: Reading Milton Greenly,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (Selinsgrove, 1994). Berry’s works will be reviewed in some detail in the present chapter. Richard J. DuRocher, “The Wounded Earth in Paradise Lost,” Studies in Philology 93 (1996). See also Jeffery S. Theis, “The Environmental Ethics of Paradise Lost: Milton’s Exegesis of Genesis I–III,” Milton Studies 34, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh, 1996). 5. As George Sessions notes, “The classic ecocentric / Deep Ecology essays of the 1960’s and early ’70’s are Lynn White’s ‘Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’ (1967); Paul Shepherd’s ‘Ecology and Man’ (1969); Gary Snyder’s ‘Four Changes’ (1969); and Arne Naess’s ‘Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World,’ Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (Boston, 1995), 101. In an effort to portray Deep Ecology fairly, I shall quote from each of these authors, though in the case of Snyder and Naess I shall refer to more recent essays which focus directly on the question of place. In addition to being known as the “ecocentric” position, Deep Ecology is also closely related to what is known as “geopiety” or “ecopiety.” As Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung explain: “What then is piety? It is the sacrament of coexistence in which man attunes himself reverentially to other people and things . . . . Homopiety is man’s care and reverence for other men and women. . . . Geopiety underscores the idea that man is bound by space or place . . . geopiety concerns itself with a web of his connatural relationships with the surrounding world.” As I shall argue in the following section, in Paradise Lost Eve exhibits a reverence for place which even the most geopious would find remarkable. “The Way of Ecopiety: A Philosophic Minuet for Ethological Ethics,” in Commonplaces: Essays on the Nature of Place, ed. David W. Black, Donald Kunze, and John Pickles (Lanham, 1989), 87. 6. Delores LaChapelle, Earth Wisdom (Colorado, 1978), 130. 7. Arne Naess, “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World,” in Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (1995), 231. 8. See, for example, Naess’s Four Modern Philosophers: Carnap, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre (Chicago, 1965). 9. “We cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London, 1961), 2.0121.

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10. Freya Mathews, “Conservation and Self-Realization: A Deep Ecology Perspective,” Environmental Ethics 10 (1988), 351. 11. Arne Naess, “Self-Realization,” 232. 12. Paul Shepard, “Ecology and Man – A Viewpoint,” in Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, ed. George Sessions (Boston, 1995), 133–34. Although unsaid, clearly Shepard is here squaring off against what he understands as the consolidated view of Christianity: that the body is a “prison” and “earth a shoddy way station” as the soul makes its way back to God. 13. Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City, 1988), 46. In an essay entitled “The Body and the Earth,” Wendell Berry also connects our bodies with place through a series of long-asked and unasked questions: “The question of human limits, of the proper definition and place of human beings within the order of Creation, finally rests upon our attitude toward our biological existence, the life of the body in the world. What value and respect do we give our bodies? What use to we have for them? What relation do we see, if any, between body and mind, or body and soul? What connections or responsibilities do we maintain our bodies and the earth? . . . our bodies are . . . joined inexorably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures.” The Unsettling of America: Cultural and Agricultural (San Francisco, 1977), 97. 14. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, 1997), 233. 15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith (New York, 1962), 251. 16. Jim Dodge, “Living By Life,” CoEvolution Quarterly 32 (Winter 1981), 6. 17. Gary Snyder, “Re-Habitation,” in The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue (Berkeley, 1995), 68–69. 18. Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends, 48. 19. Delores LaChapelle, Earth Wisdom, 100–01. 20. Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill,” 79–80, 105. This profound connection to place also plays prominently in Berry’s fiction. In A Place on Earth, the ending of the novel – and the ending of the protagonist’s life – are inexorably linked with place: “He feels the great restfulness of that place, its casual perfect order. . . . The leaves brightly falling around him, Mat comes into the presence of the place. It lies clearly and simply before him, radiant as though a alight in the ground has become visible. He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as sleep.” (San Francisco, 1983), 317. 21. Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends, 48. 22. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, 1997), 142. 23. Ibid., xvi. 24. Joan Thirsk, “Agricultural Policy,” V.II.313. 25. Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill,” 85. 26. Ibid., 74, 105.

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27. Jeffery S. Theis, “The Environmental Ethics of Paradise Lost,” 64. 28. Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony, 67. 29. Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York, 1981), 278. The additional references to Berry in the present paragraph are to this work, pp. 278–79. 30. Christopher Fitter, “ ‘Native Soil,’ ” 150. Hereafter references to Fitter are to this essay and cited parenthetically in the text. 31. Not at all the misogynist statement that it may seem (that man is to lead; woman follow), traditional notions of fertility are here destabilized: it is woman who carries “the Promis’d Seed” (12.623) and man who provides the place to plant it. 32. Though “abide” is infrequently used in Paradise Lost, just after declaring that “Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell” (4.75), Satan remarks, “How dearly I abide that boast [that he could subdue God] so vain” (4.87). As Satan comes to realize all too well, clearly that which “abides” is lasting in Paradise Lost. 33. Piotr Hoffman, “Death, Time, History: Division II of Being and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge, 1993), 195. 34. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago, 1992), 109. 35. John S. Tanner, Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1992), 161. 36. Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford, 1978), ousia. 37. John S. Tanner, Anxiety in Eden, 145, 164. 38. Ibid, 164. 39. Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (San Francisco, 1983), 153. 40. John S. Tanner, Anxiety in Eden, 161. 41. Wendell Berry, Standing by Words, 153. The reference to Shelly is directed towards “A Defense of Poetry,” Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters, ed. A. S. B. Glover (New York, 1951), 1052. 42. Ibid., 161. 43. Ibid., 183. 44. For the mind–body relation in Fallon, see his Milton Among the Philosophers (Ithaca, 1991), 22–28, 68–77, 98–107, and 119–23 (Ithaca, 1991). In his recent “ ‘Matter’ Versus Body: The Character of Milton’s Monism,” Phillip J. Donnelly has suggested that Fallon may err in “treating ‘matter’ (materia) and ‘body’ (corpus) as synonymous,” Milton Quarterly 33 (October 1999), 79. 45. Delores LaChapelle, Earth Wisdom, 130. 46. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London, 1930), 181. 47. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, ed. Edwin Greenlaw (Baltimore, 1933), II.XII.42 2–9. 48. While acknowledging that the Latin domus quite obviously derives from the Greek domus (and is akin to the Sanskrit da
mas), Eric Partridge has further suggested the Greek demein as possibly an additional source for the Latin

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49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

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domus. Eric Partridge, Origins, A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (London, 1958), 162. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World History, Volume 2, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York, 1928), 90, his emphasis. Although I have used Atkinson’s translation of the German throughout, the first use of the phrase “peasants dwelling” in the quotation is my own, while the second is Atkinson’s. For reasons unknown, Atkinson uses “farmhouse” for the first occurrence of the original Bauernhaus and “peasant’s dwelling” for the second. For reasons of continuity in Spengler’s text (and admittedly my own) I have used “peasant’s dwelling” for both. Diane McColley, Milton’s Eve, 119. Wendell Berry, “The Long-Legged House,” in Recollected Essays 1765–1980 (New York, 1981), 70. William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York, 1972), 32. Gary Snyder, “Re-Habitation,” in The Deep Ecology Movement, 69. CHAPTER 2

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden. Ed. Joseph W. Krutch (New York, 1962), 67. 2. On the matter of Milton’s “monism,” Stephen M. Fallon has persuasively argued that the mature Milton developed a “monistic conception of the relationship between body and soul” which was “an affront to any of the available dualistic conceptions, including the Platonic, the Christianized Aristotelian, and the Cartesian” (Milton Among the Philosophers [Ithaca, NY, 1991], 99). My present work, which contends that Milton deconstructed medieval theology’s dualistic representations of Christianity, is in many respects built upon Fallon’s general arguments regarding the monism (especially Hebraic) at work in Paradise Lost. 3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (London, 1974), xlix. 4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), 44. 5. Heidegger, Being and Time, 44. 6. See Edward John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, Ind., 1994). Also see Caputo below for additional research connecting Luther and destruction. 7. John D. Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge, 1993), 272. 8. Martin Luther, Luther: Lectures on Romans, ed. and trans. William Pauk, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia, 1959), 214. 9. Martin Luther, Selected Writings of Martin Luther, ed. and trans. T. G. Tappert (Philadelphia, 1967), 337. 10. Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, 162, 161. 11. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World History, Volume 2, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York, 1928), 89–90. All references to Spengler are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

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12. However, both “pagan” and “peasant” first derive from the Latin pagus. In the words of Eric Partridge: pagus in all probability derives from “pangere, to stick (something) into (esp. the ground), to fix firmly, and therefore akin to pax.” Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (London, 1958), 463. Also see nn. 13 and 14 below. 13. Generally Theodosius I is credited with attaching our present meaning of “pagan” to pagus at around 400 bc. Certainly by the time of Augustine, pagus as “pagan” was widely in use. 14. This interpretation (which is admittedly my own) of “pagan’s” origin from pagus is certainly debatable. Though it has been suggested from the sixteenth century onward (probably beginning with Denys Godefroy) that “pagans” means “civilians” since they stand in opposition to Christians as “the soldiers of Christ,” more recently Pierre Chuvin, while acknowledging that pagus suggests “a man whose roots . . . are where he lives,” takes this to mean that “pagans are quite simply ‘people of the place,’ town or country, whereas the alieni, the ‘people from elsewhere,’ were increasingly Christian.” A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, trans. B. A. Archer (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 8–9. 15. Let me be quite clear in stating that I am not arguing that Milton, master wordsmith, is forging a new meaning for either the word “peasant” or “pagan” directly, as each word is used by the writer only once in his poetry. I merely wish to suggest that, in a broader sense, Milton is challenging us to reconsider just what we mean by “pagan” – and “Christian.” 16. Serafino Della Salandra, Adamo Caduto, trans. Watson Kirkconnell, in Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle (Toronto, 1952), 292–93. 17. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 279. 18. Bruce W. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1995), 164. 19. For a further analysis, see Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche, Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York, 1979), 200–10. 20. As Nietzsche succinctly puts it, in Plato’s doctrine the true world is “attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it,” while in Nietzsche’s understanding of Christianity the true world is “unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), 485. 21. Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, ed. Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens, Ga., 1996), 10. The immediately following references to White are also to this page. 22. Stella Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair: The Making of the 1645 Poems (Columbia, Mo., 1997), 74. 23. Cedric Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge, 1985), 54. 24. Richard Neuse, “Metamorphosis and Symbolic Action in Comus,” ELH 34 (1967), 58.

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25. For a consideration of Milton’s sources of the Sabrina myth, see John D. Cox, “Poetry and History in Milton’s Country Masque,” ELH 44 (1977), 634. 26. Arne Naess, “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World,” in Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, 231. 27. Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City, 1988) 46. 28. Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 126. 29. An explanation of my use of “dominion” is in order here. In the aforementioned paper by environmentalist Lynn White Jr., the charge is made that much of the ruthlessness towards nature in the modern West can be attributed to Genesis 1:28, where man is indeed given “dominion” over the Earth. While for two decades White’s view gained influence, in 1989 Jeremy Cohen published a booklength treatment on the influence of Genesis 1:28, concluding that, “with regard to Genesis 1:28 itself, the ecologically oriented thesis of Lynn White and others can now be laid to rest. Rarely, if ever, did premodern Jews and Christians construe this verse as a license for the selfish exploitation of the environment.” Jeremy Cohen, Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca, 1989), 5. Building in part on Cohen’s work, Jeffery Theis recently explored, in environmental terms, the influence of the early chapters of Genesis on Paradise Lost. Considering not only Genesis 1:28 but Genesis 2:15, where human beings are put “into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it,” Theis notes that, unlike in the history of the modern West, there is a “literal interpretation (and thus, a misinterpretation) of [Genesis] 1:26–28” in Paradise Lost: Satan’s understanding of dominion and rule. By contrast, Theis argues that in the epic Adam and Eve’s perception of their relation to the Earth is largely derived from Genesis 2:15 (echoed in Paradise Lost in the instruction Adam receives “to Till and keep” Paradise [7:320]) which Adam and Eve choose to interpret “through physical actions that culminate in an environmental practice which fuses work in Eden with worship.” As was intimated by McColley, through their gardening practices Adam and Eve reveal their interpretation of “dominion” as “to Till and keep” the specific place (the Garden) they inhabit. Therefore, “instead of standing outside of nature and subduing it,” says Theis, Adam and Eve stand “within it,” and their “task of tilling and keeping the land helps complete the natural world.” Jeffery S. Theis, “The Environmental Ethics of Paradise Lost: Milton’s Exegesis of Genesis I–III,” 74, 71, 64. I believe my argument that Eve is a genius loci in Paradise Lost, caring for the specific place called the Garden, builds upon Theis’s insights. 30. Michael Lieb has noticed that when Adam and Eve “led the Vine / To wed her Elm” (5.211–12) there is also a blending of fertility and fecundity: “the underlying image undeniably relates to the basic sexual metaphor of propagation. Adam and Eve cause a wedding to occur between plant and plant, so that barrenness may be avoided.” The Dialectics of Creation: Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in Paradise Lost (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 73. Jeffery Theis builds upon Lieb’s insight by suggesting that the “marriage metaphor . . . links

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the controlling act of gardening with the loving and productive act of marriage . . . This creates a complex whole within which nature and human beings are (in modern environmental terms) an interrelated ecosystem.” “The Environmental Ethics of Paradise Lost: Milton’s Exegesis of Genesis I–III,” 72. 31. Not only do the Genius of the Northern Wood and Adam and Eve rise in their morning to brush off the dew and otherwise tend their respective places, but angels also have a similar vocation, as “in Heav’n the Trees / Of life ambrosial frutage bear, and vines / Yield Nectar, though from the boughs each Morn / We brush mellifluous Dewes” (5.426–29). So it seems angels may not be, as Lynn White suspected, “mobile as the Saints themselves,” but firmly rooted in the heavenly place they tend. Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” 10. 32. Donald M. Freedman has aptly remarked of these lines: “in response to its nurse [Eve] the natural world of growing things grows, fulfills its intrinsic nature, becomes more like itself under her tutelage. Milton intensifies the point by his play on ‘gladier,’ in which the attributed delight of the flowers on encountering Eve is registered as more emphatic and healthier growth. The natural response to the hand of Eve is for vegetation to grow better and happier.” “The Lady in the Garden: On the Literary Genetics of Milton’s Eve,” Milton Studies 35 (1997), 130. CHAPTER 3 1. Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (San Francisco, 1983), 178. 2. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers (Ithace, 1991), 136. 3. I am, of course, speaking in a very general (and admittedly imprecise) way about Christianity – which unfortunately is often the case with many environmentalists. Certainly many medieval theologians followed Augustine in holding that “he who extols the nature of the soul as the chief good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as it were evil, assuredly is fleshy both in his love of the soul and hatred of the flesh.” The City of God Against the Pagans. Trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), Vol. 4, 281–83. 4. Diane McColley, “Eve’s Dream,” Milton Studies 12 (1978), 39. 5. Ibid., 40. Van den Vondel’s passage is also quoted from this page. 6. For one of the many identifications of the “temptation to sensuality” in Paradise Lost, see Balachandra Rajan, who argues that Milton “goes out of his way to draw attention to Eve’s gluttony.” Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (London, 1947), 70. In Milton’s own time this view of the Fall was well depicted, as in Hugo Grotius’s Adamus Exul (The Exile of Adam, 1601): because of Satan’s temptation, “Man has withdrawn his eyes from Heaven to earthy / things.” Trans. Watson Kirkconnell, in Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle (Toronto, 1952), 211. 7. Though not with direct reference to the Earth, a related understanding of the Fall resulting from an “upward pull” on Eve who “aspires to intellectual equality

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with angels” was suggested by M. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (New York, 1970), 221. Similarly, Patrick Cullen noted “Eve’s avarice for knowledge is a Faustian parody of the contemplative life.” Infernal Triad: The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton, 1974), 109. Walter M. Kendrick, “Earth of Flesh, Flesh of Earth: Mother Earth in the Faerie Queen,” Renaissance Quarterly 27 (1974), 537. Richard J. DuRocher, “The Wounded Earth in Paradise Lost,” Studies in Philology 93 (1996), 94. All references to DuRocher are to this text and are cited parenthetically in the text. My source for this definition is The Oxford English Dictionary, “pang,” 1. In a sense, the interpretation by Milton’s Adam is in accordance with more recent translations of the Bible: “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.’ ” The Revised Standard Bible (Texas, 1952), Genesis 3:16. Obviously Milton’s interpretation follows the Authorized Bible. Bauce W. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1995), 4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, ed. and trans. Thomas Gilby and T. C. O’Brien (New York, 1963), Vol. 26, 91. The Latin is also quoted from this volume. Though generally overlooking Aquinas, Merritt Y. Hughes considers the obvious (John Donne) and the obscure (Guillaume de Salluste) literary sources of the tradition that Earth was wounded by Original Sin in his “Earth Felt the Wound,” ELH 36 (1969), 193–214. Paul Shepard, “Ecology and Man – A Viewpoint,” in Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, ed. George Session (Boston, 1995), 133–34. Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill,” in Recollected Essays: 1765–1980 (New York, 1981), 79–80, 105. Wendell Berry, “The Long-Legged House,” in Recollected Essays: 1965–1980 (New York, 1981), 52. Diane McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana, 1983), 110, 146, 112. Wendell Berry, “The Long-Legged House,” 52. CHAPTER 4

1. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York, 1966), 48. 2. As Barbara Lewalski succinctly reminds us, “in De Doctrina Milton defines Christ’s kingdom as existing in two stages, the Kingdom of Grace (the invisible church), which is at hand, and the Kingdom of Glory (the millennial kingdom), which is to come.” Though both are given by Christ, the Kingdom of Grace will, through God’s grace and human action, do much to regenerate the here and now into a Paradise – assuming humans take the initiative to attempt to regenerate the here and now. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence, 1966), 257. 3. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Joseph W. Krutch (New York, 1962), 67.

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4. Cedric Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge, 1985), 129. 5. Stella Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair: The Making of the 1645 Poems (Columbia, Mo., 1997), 136. 6. For a consideration of Milton’s sources of the Sabrina myth, see Variorum (The Minor English poems), 956–73. Also, John D. Cox, “Poetry and History in Milton’s Country Masque,” ELH 44 (1977), 634. 7. Cedric Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments, 124. 8. Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York, 1981), 278. The additional references to Berry in this paragraph are to this work, pp. 278–79. 9. John Knott, Milton’s Pastoral Vision (Chicago, 1971), 121–22. 10. James Obertino, “Milton’s use of Aquinas in Comus,” Milton Studies 22 (1986), 33. 11. Roy Flannagan, from his introduction to A Mask at Ludlow in The Riverside Milton, 109. 12. For a splendid account of how in Paradise Lost Milton extracts “a poet’s revenge” from the metaphysical philosophers by “dressing the philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes in diabolic clothing” as the poet gives Satan and other devils in the epic the dualistic metaphysical views of Milton’s age, see Stephen M. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers (Ithaca, 1991), 136. I am, of course, suggesting that Milton gives the medieval theologians a similar treatment in the Ludlow Mask through the inclusion of the Attendant Spirit. 13. Roy Flannagan, from his introduction to A Mask at Ludlow in The Riverside Milton, 109. 14. E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (New York, 1966), 47. 15. To Nietzsche, in Plato’s doctrine the true world is “attainable for the sage he lives in it, he is it,” while in Christianity the true world is “unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), 485. 16. As Stephen Fallon succinctly comments on this section (ll. 461–63) of the Mask: “In this Neoplatonic version of the body and soul, creatures are arranged along an emanative hierarchy; the purer the soul the more refined the body. The step from Plato’s strict dualism to Neoplatonism and its monistic tendencies is mediated by Pauline dualism constructed as it is on a Hebraic monistic conception of soul and body.” Though Nietzsche would take exception to “Plato’s strict dualism,” believing Platonic doctrine not strictly dualistic, Fallon does make the case that Milton was reclaiming the Apostle Paul’s original sense of flesh, sarx, which arguably only became the flesh–soul dichotomy in medieval theology. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 82. 17. OED definition 6b for the substantive use of “rind.” 18. “The pilot . . . / With fixed anchor in his skaly rind / Moors by his side under the Lee” (Paradise Lost 1.207–10). Cited by the OED as definition 5 for the substantive use of “rind.”

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19. “Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden rinde” (Paradise Lost 1.249). OED definition 3b for “rind” as substantive. 20. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 82. 21. Richard Neuse, “Metamorphosis and Symbolic Action in Comus,” ELH 34 (1967), 58. 22. Cedric Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments, 66. 23. Ibid., 69. 24. A. J. Hoover, Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Thought (Westport, 1994), 8. 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 518–19. 26. A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: Volume Two, The Minor English Poems (New York, 1972), 769. 27. For a history of Philostratus and his influences, see Frederick Charles Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume 1 (New York, 1993). 28. A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, A Variorum Commentary, 769–71. 29. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Chung-yuan Chang in Tao, A New Way of Thinking (New York, 1978), 72. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 518. 31. The Oxford English Dictionary; which credits the Mask at Ludlow for introducing “cateress” into English. 32. Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (San Francisco, 1983), 112. 33. The OED references this line (779) of the Ludlow Mask for definition 2b of “crams”: “to eat greedily or to excess, to stuff oneself; to ‘stuff.’ ” Though the second meaning of Milton’s phrase, which suggests forced sexual intercourse, is certainly implied as “crams” derives from (as the OED reminds us) the Old English crummen, “to insert.” Still Milton’s second use of “crams” here seems unprecedented, perhaps underscored by the fact that the poet needed to clarify that the described action not only “blasphemes,” but is done with “besotted base ingratitude.” CHAPTER 5 1. Colossians 2:8, translation mine. All future references to the Bible, unless otherwise noted, are to the Authorized Version and are cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia, 1994), 1. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., xiv. 6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons (London, 1930), 181. In an environmental continuation of Weber’s thesis, Raymond Murphy argues that “The stripping of resources, the accumulation of waste, and in general the degradation of the environment risk producing an environment less capable of meeting human needs. Extending Weber’s analysis leads to the following conclusion. Whereas the Puritan wanted asceticism,

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Notes to ch. 5 materialist humans (or their decedants) may be forced into asceticism because their transformation of nature’s resources into waste and pollution has degraded the natural environment and diminished its future capacity to supply the resources necessary to produce material goods. Religious asceticism has led to secular materialism, which in turn threatens to lead to secular asceticism.” Rationality and Nature: A Sociological Inquiry into a Changing Relationship (Boulder, 1994), 35–36. While, as I have argued earlier, Milton also saw the two-fold danger of asceticism and rampant consumption in Protestantism, Murphy’s is a chilling continuation of this line of thinking. We can only hope that Milton’s alternative, which is to live fully in place (as Adam and Eve did before the Fall in the Garden – and Deep Ecologists and Wendell Berry now urge us all to do), will instead be heeded. Martin Heidegger, “Language in the Poem,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York, 1971), 161–62. James Shiel, Greek Thought and the Rise of Christianity (New York, 1968), 1. Quoted and trans. Edward John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 147. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), 44. John D. Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge, 1993), 272. See also the above note to Caputo for additional research connecting Luther and destruction. Edward John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, 162, 161. To be clear, it should be added that this is not to say that this Christian origin of deconstruction is the origin of deconstruction. There is evidence to suggest that Heidegger’s destruction was also influenced by the practical writings (which often struck a note of discord with the more theoretical work) of Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca. See Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, 165 ff. For an excellent consideration of how Heidegger’s de-struction, at least prior to and including Being and Time (the period I have been referencing), is very much akin to deconstruction, see William V. Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, foreword Donald E. Pease (Minneapolis, 1993). McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough (Oxford, 1988), 181, 167. In fairness, it should be noted that two of Heidegger’s colleagues at the University of Marlburg during part of his “decades of silence,” theologians Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, both held from the start the opinion that Heidegger’s work owed a massive debt to Lutheran and Catholic Christianity. In 1952 Heidegger’s lifelong friend Bultmann states, “Above all, Martin Heidegger’s existential analysis seems to be only a profane philosophical presentation of the New Testament.” Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, trans. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia, 1984), 23. And of Heidegger’s philosophy, Tillich noted in 1936 that, “by its explanation of human existence it establishes a doctrine of man, though unintentionally, which is both the doctrine of human

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freedom and human finiteness; which is so closely related with the Christian interpretation of human existence that one is forced to speak of a ‘theonomous philosophy,’ in spite of Heidegger’s emphatic atheism.” Though read in light of the recent work by Van Buren, Heidegger may have been far more intentional in his appropriation of Christian thinking than Tillich realized, despite his “emphatic atheism.” Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History, trans. N. A. Rosetski (New York, 1936), 40. Moreover, Heidegger’s friend and student Hans-Georg Gadamer stated simply that Heidegger’s “inspiration came from the young Luther,” while the Luther scholar Edmund Schlink held bluntly that “Heidegger’s analytic of human Dasein is a radical secularization of Luther’s anthropology.” Both Gadamer and Schlink are quoted in Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, 150. Heidegger, Being and Time, 44. From an early lecture by Heidegger, quoted and translated by Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 159–60. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 161. I should note that, in the argument I am advancing, I am reading “the Greeks [who] seek after wisdom” of 1 Corinthians in the same way that Luther and the young Heidegger read it: as the Classical Greek philosophers. In Luther’s words, “Consider, moreover, whether Paul himself is not citing the most outstanding among the Greeks when he says it was the wiser among them who became fools . . . Tell me, does he not here touch the sublimest achievements of Greek humanity – their reasonings? For this means their best and loftiest ideas and opinions, which they regard as solid wisdom.” Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will, trans. and ed. Philip S. Watson and B. Drewey (Philadelphia, 1969), 296. But scholarship since Heidegger, such as the groundbreaking work of Willi Marxsen, has argued that given an early Gnostic influence on the Church at Corinth, 1 Corinthians is an early account of Christianity’s response by way of Paul with Greek Gnosticism. Willi Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament, trans. G. Buswell (Oxford, 1968), 74 ff. Nonetheless, as my argument is centered on the danger of dualistic thinking which promotes an asceticism which seeks freedom from Earthly “bondage” even as it seeks power over the Earth, it could equally apply to the dualistic philosophy characteristic of Greek Gnosticism or the Classical Greek tradition which helped to promote those very ideas. Or, more simply, the aspect of Greek Gnosticism attacked by Paul was the extant Classical Greek tradition. Perhaps building on Marxsen’s work, feminist thinkers such as Carolyn Merchant have presented general arguments which could suggest that “the Greeks [who] seek after wisdom [sophia]” might have a special meaning, as in certain Gnostic religions “The divine mother was named Wisdom, or Sophia, a Greek translation of the Hebrew hokhmah. Wisdom was the creative force . . . Her wisdom was bestowed on men and women. Human nature, like God, consisted in a unity of equal male–female principles. Evidence for

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24. 25.

Notes to chs. 5–6 the appeal of Gnostic androgyny to women is indicated by their attraction to these heretical groups during the period ad 150–20, when Christianity was struggling to gain its stature as a worlds religion.” Though Merchant (c. Merchant, The Death of Nature; Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution [San Francisco, 1980], 67–68) makes no direct reference to 1 Corinthians “I will destroy the wisdom [sophia] of the wise,” I suspect she would take this as a direct assault on what she sees as a life-giving, nonpatriarchal, deity. Nonetheless, in 1 Corinthians it is clear that what the Greeks have is a “wisdom [sophia] of words” [emphasis added] (1 Corinthians 1:17), and not wisdom as a deity. What is specifically in question in 1 Corinthians is the Christian “foolish” propensity towards manifest weakness, as opposed to the Greek wisdom of strength, yet “the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25). Simply put, it is not a deity (Sophia) that Paul’s God wishes to destroy here, but rather his God would deconstruct the empowered stance towards the world that the Greeks have achieved through their “wisdom of words” – through philosophy and science. Rudolf Bultmann, Essays Philosophical and Theological, trans. J. C. G. Greig (London, 1955), 83. “Only a God Can Save Us,” quoted in an interview for the German Magazine Der Spiegal, 31 May 1976. Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge, 1993), 310–11. This is not to say that the Greeks did not embrace opposition: as Nietzsche so laboriously argued, the play of the Apollonian and Dionysian against each other was a salient feature not only of Greek tragedy but of Greek life itself. Nonetheless, what the early Church put forth was not merely an alternative presence, as the intellectual is to the physical, but rather absence itself, as utter poverty is to wealth or weakness to strength. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City, 1985), 98. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 44. CHAPTER 6

1. John Milton, Paradise Regained, 2.324. 2. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence, 1966), vii. Lewalski is hardly alone in finding Paradise Regained perplexing – to mention just a few of the quizzical responses to the poem: Georgia B. Christopher argues that “Milton’s second epic is a great enigma, if not a great poem,” in her “The Secret Agent in Paradise Regained,” Modern Language Quarterly 41.2 (June 1980), 131. Moreover, as William B. Hunter, Jr. observed in his “The Double Set of Temptations in Paradise Regained,” “It has long been recognized that the construction of Paradise Regained presents one of the most difficult problems in the entire field

Notes to ch. 6

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

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of Milton interpretation.” Milton Studies 14 (1980), 183. Indeed, this has been recognized for so long that Charles A. Huttar notes that “For most of the eighteenth century Paradise Regained was something of an embarrassment” in his “The Passion of Christ in Paradise Regained,” English Language Notes 19.3 (March 1992), 236. Martin Luther, Selected Writings of Martin Luther, ed. and trans. T. G. Tappert (Philadelphia, 1967), 337. This may be somewhat misleading in that Aristotle, in the Metaphysics (Book X, ch. 4, and elsewhere) and the Logic (Categories: chs. 8–10, for example), certainly allowed a category of privation which was not complete deprivation. Such privation denoted a profound difference of type, though not necessarily complete absence. But in the case of values such as courage, cowardliness signified no-thing other than the lack of courage, though Aristotle, clever fellow that he was, realized that opposite of cowardliness was not courage, but foolhardiness. Therefore we should all strive for a mean between the extremes of absence (cowardliness) and presence (foolhardiness). While this approach does somewhat mitigate the desire completely to marginalize absence, as we all should be as much cowards as fools, it still both set up the presence–absence dyadic structure and held that cowardliness was no-thing. This set the stage for less enlightened thinking, especially as adapted into Roman culture. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “‘In Dubious Battle’” Skepticism and Fideism in Paradise Regained,” The Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 53.2 (Spring 1990), 100. Louis L. Martz, Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry (New Haven, 1980), 265–66. Donald Swanson and John Mulryan, “The Son’s Presumed Contempt for Learning in Paradise Regained; A Biblical and Patristic Resolution,” Milton Studies 27 (1991), 254–56. E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (New York, 1966), 258. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660 (Oxford, 1962), 412. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 164. A. S. P. Woodhouse, “Theme and Pattern in Paradise Regained,” University of Toronto Quarterly 25 (1955–56), 173. Expressed even more simply by Rushdy, “Jesus has understood his own life through the temptations.” Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “Of Paradise Regained: The interpretations of a Career,” Milton Studies 24 (1988), 271. John Milton, Paradise Regained, The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (New York, 1998), 1.155–58. All references to Milton are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. Stanley Fish, “Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 17 (1983), 165. Because “the wilderness is a sort of black cloth against which the temptations are played out, largely an anti-image” (as Albert Cook has noted), it wonderfully stands as a positive manifestation of the sort of absence and no-thingness which

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20. 21.

22.

Notes to ch. 6 the Son would bring out of the desert as some-thing real and present to invert the paradigm of how human beings should behave. Albert Cook, “Imaging in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 21 (1985), 220. The “desert” of Matthew 4:1 is eremos, but as Liddell and Scott remind us, eremos has long meant just this sort of no-thingness as a “void” or simply the state of being “without.” Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford, 1978), eremos, definition 2. Strong, Strong’s Exhaustive, Concordance (Grand Rapids, 1983), praus, definition 4,239. Donald Swanson and John Mulryan, “The Son’s Presumed Contempt for Learning in Paradise Regained,” 256. Stanley Fish, “Inaction and Silence: The Reader in Paradise Regained,” in Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Cleveland, 1971), 34. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 257. Not all would agree with this conclusion. Swanson and Mulryan hold that the favorable view of Socrates in Book 3 is Milton’s true belief and that “The disparagement of Socrates in the forth book seems to be little more than a tongue-in-cheek debating play to beat the devil at his own dissembling game.” However, given that the reference to Socrates in Book 3 makes only minor reference to Classical learning, the context instead involving Socrates’ method of passive resistance at his death (which made Socrates “Equal in fame to proudest Conquerours” [3.99]), does make the conclusion reached by Swanson and Mulryan somewhat tenuous: “The Son’s concealment in Book IV of his true respect for classical learning is illustrated by the inconsistency of his positive (III, 95–98) and negative (III, 291–94) verdict on Socrates.” (Swanson and Mulryan’s second citation here [III, 291–94] should read [IV, 291–94] – there appears to have been a slight misprint in the otherwise reliable Milton Studies.) Donald Swanson and John Mulryan, “The Son’s Presumed Contempt for Learning in Paradise Regained,” 255, 258. Donald Swanson and John Mulryan, “The Son’s Presumed Contempt for Learning in Paradise Regained,” 244. As Wyman Herenden noted, a generation before Milton, writers such as Spenser began referring to Classic myths “to demonstrate that the new golden age of literature was established on English banks, that Apollo and his troupe of nymphs could survive in Thames water.” Wyman H. Herenden, From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography (Pittsburgh, 1986), 225. I am, of course, beginning from the position that Paradise Regained is one of Milton’s last works, in spite of the argument put forth by John Shawcross that the brief epic was begun “after Samson Agonistes and before Paradise Lost.” John T. Shawcross, Paradise Regained: Worthy T’have Not So Long Unsung (Pittsburgh, 1988), 9. If Shawcross is correct, it may be that the tension Milton felt with regard to the Greco-Roman tradition weighing so heavily upon him as he composed Paradise Lost that he felt especially compelled to finish Paradise Regained. It certainly is the case that the question of accepting the Classical

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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tradition had weighed on Milton’s conscience for some time, as the De Doctrina urges that “we should not rely upon our predecessors or upon antiquity,” but rather to “the Bible only.” John Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953–82), Vol. VI, 591. Roy Flannagan, from his introduction to Paradise Regained in The Riverside Milton, 715. See Barbara Lewalski’s Milton’s Brief Epic, especially pp. 10–36. Louis L. Martz, Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry, 248–49. Donald Swanson and John Mulryan, “The Son’s Presumed Contempt for Learning in Paradise Regained,” 256. Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia, 1994), 160–61. Donald Swanson and John Mulryan, “The Son’s Presumed Contempt for Learning in Paradise Regained,” 243. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 291. See Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1970). Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 151, 54. Ibid., 151. It is surprising that Heidegger seems to have largely stopped his historical investigation of deconstruction at the early Church, and not Jesus. On the one hand, it is certainly true that the intellectual trend of the time, perhaps best represented by Bultmann, was to “demythologize” Christianity, shrugging off all the “mythical” aspects of the faith as early Christian thinking was placed into a modern context, regardless of alleged events in the life of Jesus. As Bultman once remarkably said, “The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.” (Rudolf Bultman, Theology of the New Testament [London: 1965], Vol. 1, 3.) On the other hand, as I shall argue in terms of Paradise Regained, the Jesus of the Gospels can clearly be understood as first initiating the deconstructive enterprise taken up by Paul, Luther, and Heidegger. Even a cursory look at the Gospels suggests that it was Jesus, not Paul or Luther, who first substituted weakness for power, the lowly for the elevated, the ordinary for the extraordinary, a physical God for a meta-physical God, the insignificant for the significant, a kingdom not here for a kingdom here, an absent God (until the Parousia) for an ever-present God, humiliation for glory, faith for reason, poverty for wealth. Jesus’s deconstruction, though expounded throughout the Gospels, can perhaps best be seen in what is arguably the New Testament’s version of the Ten Commandments given at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. In these famous lines presented in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, each starting with “Blessed are” (Makarios), Jesus not only dramatically reveals that Greek values are only one half of dyadic structures, but goes far further in laying out the mindset which privileges the “other” half of the couplet: what to the Greeks was simply no-thing. Starting in Matthew 5:3, lack of exalted spirit is exchanged for richness in spirit, mourning replaces celebration, meekness strength, wanting righteousness for having it, mercy for vengeance, peace-making for war-making, being

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persecuted for escaping (or worse, dispensing) persecution, and, finally, being reviled is privileged over being exalted (Matthew 5:3–11). Similarly when this sermon is recounted in the Gospel of Luke, poverty is exchanged for wealth, hunger for being filled, weeping for laughing, being hated for being exalted, being rejected by society for being accepted, and being thought of as evil for being though of as good (Luke 6:21–22). Seen in this light, this sermon, and indeed many of Jesus teachings, can be read as a systematic deconstruction of prevailing Greek and Judaic thinking. 34. Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 150. 35. William B. Hunter, Jr., “The Double Set of Temptations in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 14 (1980), 190. 36. Ibid., 190–91. CHAPTER 7 1. John Donne, Holy Sonnet 19. 2. Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln, 1983), 219, 19. 3. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence, 1966), 291. 4. Ibid., 291–302. As this text will be carefully considered in the following section, all references to Lewalski are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 5. Septuaginta, ed. Alfred Rahils (Stuttgart, 1935), Vol. 2, 317. 6. Augustine, De Trinitate 12.14.22–23, trans. A. W. Haddan, in Works, ed. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh, 1877), 302. Quoted in Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 292. 7. Eugene R. Rice, Jr., The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 3. Quoted in Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 294. 8. Augustine, De Trinitate 12.14.22–23. Quoted as it appears in Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 292. 9. Nathanael Culverel, An Elegant and Learned Discourse on the Light of Nature (London, 1652), 128, 203–04. Quoted as it appears in Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 296. 10. Augustine, De Trinitate 12.14.22–23. 11. Francisco Filelfo, De Morali Disciplina, Book II, quoted and trans. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 294. 12. Nathanael Culverel, An Elegant and Learned Discourse on the Light of Nature, 203. 13. Ibid. 14. Edward John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 186–87. 15. Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford, 1978), theosebia. 16. Augustine, De Trinitate 12.14.22–23. 17. John D. Caputo, “Instants, Secrets, and Singularities: Dealing Death in Kierkegaard and Derrida,” in Kierkegaard and Post/Modernity, ed. Martin J.

Notes to ch. 7

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

153

Matusik and Merold Westphal (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), 216. Published prior to an English translation of “Donner la mort,” Caputo is translating and quoting from Jacques Derrida’s “Donner la mort,” L’Ethique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pens´ee du don (Paris, 1992). However, since Caputo’s essay, an English translation of “Donner la mort” is now available: Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago, 1995). John D. Caputo, “Instants, Secrets, and Singularities,” 219. Though I am quoting from Philippians, the idea of “fear and trembling” is tied to “weakness” in 1 Corinthians, where Paul relates to the Church at Corinth that he was with them “in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling” (2:3). John D. Caputo, “Instants, Secrets, and Singularities,” 220. Edward John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 186. John D. Caputo, “Instants, Secrets, and Singularities,” 220. Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon, eidos. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. and trans. William Paul (Philadelphia, 1955), Vol. 42, 127. Michael Lieb, “Our Living Dread: The God of Samson Agonistes,” in Milton Studies 33, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh, 1996). Similarly, David Lowenstein has questioned the whole notion of rational, “progressive revelation” in Milton’s poetry. Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Visions, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 1990), 133. Actually, it is the Kierkegaard scholar Gordon D. Marino who first called Tanner’s connection of Kierkegaard and Milton “exquisite.” “Anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alstair Hannay & Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge, 1998), 328. John S. Tanner, Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Paradise Lost (Oxford UP, 1992), 18. All references to Tanner are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. In his History of the Concept of Time, translated by Theodore Kiesiel (Bloomington, Indiana, 1985), Heidegger says “It should be noted here that the explication of these structures of Dasein has nothing to do with any . . . theory of original sin.” Then, seemingly both to cover up for the fact that these structures coincide with an existential understanding of the Christian Fall and the fact that he spent over a decade of his life studying those Christian structures, Heidegger adds, “It is possible, perhaps necessary, that all of these structures will reoccur in a theological anthropology, I am in no position to judge how, since I understand nothing of such things” (283). Heidegger is not known for his strong sense of ethics . . . Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being in the World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, 1991), 313–14. All emphasis by Dreyfus. Rudolf Bultmann, Essays Philosophical and Theological, trans. J. C. G. Greig (London, 1955), 83. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (New York, 1986).

154

Notes to ch. 8 CHAPTER 8

1. The Authorized Version reads “To every thing there is a season.” I have altered the translation of the Hebrew zem-awn’ from simply “season” to “appointed season.” In the Old Testament zem-awn’ is alternatively translated as either “season” or “appointed season,” depending on which book is being translated. For example, the four occurrences in the Book of Numbers are all rendered as “appointed season,” though those in Ecclesiastes are translated as “season.” As I shall argue in this section, “appointed season” seems a better translation of zem-awn’ for this verse in Ecclesiastes. 2. Leonard Mustazza, “Language as Weapon in Milton’s Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 18 (1983), 195. 3. A great deal of work has been done on Milton and kairos. See especially: Laurie B. Zwicky, “Kairos in Paradise Regained,” ELH (1964), 271–77; A. B. Chambers, “The Double Time Scheme in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 7 (1975), 189– 205; also Mother M. Christopher Percheux for a rather surprising large number of works by Milton which deal with kairos, “Milton and Kairos,” Milton Studies 12 (1978), 209, n. 1. 4. Although my emphasis is on zem-awn’, it should be noted that the Hebrew word repeatedly used in Ecclesiastes 3 for “time” is ayth, which also carries the meaning of “season.” The distinction here is that zem-awn’, as it is used in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Ecclesiastes is associated with God’s action, “I will give you rain in due season [zem-awn’]” [emphasis added] (Leviticus 26:4); while ayth is associated with human action, “a time [ayth] to be born, and a time [ayth] to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:1–4). This is a small but important distinction, for while God appoints the season (zem-awn’), it is up to human beings to know the time (ayth) to receive the gift of this season. 5. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), 150. 6. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), 17. 7. Resisting the temptation of power while accepting weakness also puts Christianity in the company of certain schools of Buddhism that call for human beings to “let things be.” By urging human beings to “let things be,” Mahayana Buddhism is suggesting that we allow all things to emerge in their own time. In response to the desire to direct and control kairos, Mahayana Buddhism maintains that we should take a “hands-off ” approach, witnessing and esteeming the creation as it unfolds around us, but never inhibiting the emergence. 8. See Andrew McLaughlin’s “The Heart of Deep Ecology,” in Deep Ecology for the Twenty First Century (Boston, 1995), 87. 9. It is important to note that while in English Adam and Eve do “reap” the Garden’s bounty, in the New Testament Greek “reap” is therizo, which, as James Strong tells us, is the two part “proverbial expression for sowing and reaping” [emphasis added]. In holding to this definition, it is interesting that at no point in Paradise Lost does Milton have Adam and Eve sow plants – the sowing

Notes to chs. 8–9

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

155

is done by the “sovran Planter” (4.691). Moreover, therizo has another more destructive connotation to which the New Testament’s Jesus may have been drawing attention: to “cut off, destroy . . . as crops are cut down with a sickle.” Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (Grand Rapids, 1983), therizo. John Mulryan, Through a Glass Darkly: Milton’s Reinvention of the Mythological Tradition (Pittsburgh, 1996), 119. John Milton, Art of Logic, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953–82), 8.229. John Mulryan, Through a Glass Darkly, 121. Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (San Francisco, 1983), 112. Luce Irigaray, “Place, Interval: A reading of Aristotle, Physics IV,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill (Ithaca, 1993), 35. John Milton, Art of Logic, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8.229. CHAPTER 9

1. Diane McColley, A Gust for Paradise (Urbana, 1993), 58–59. 2. For the iconography of the Creation of Eve in the visual arts, see Diane McColley’s A Gust for Paradise, 23–24, 40. 3. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, intro. Christopher Morris, 2 vols. (London, 1963), Vol. 2, 229. 4. For two of these Renaissance images, see Diane McColley’s A Gust for Paradise, figs. 5 and 18. 5. John Milton, The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank A. Patterson, 18 vols. (New York, 1933), Vol. 16, 64. 6. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 14.1. The Latin is also quoted from this Loeb edition. 7. Diane McColley, A Gust for Paradise, 28. 8. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Philippians, Colossians, and the Thessalonians, trans. John Pringle (Grand Rapids, 1948), 152. 9. Paul Byrne, An Entire Commentary Upon the Whole Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians . . . , ed. Rev. Thomas Smith (Edinburgh, 1866), 107. 10. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol. 2, 339. 11. John Milton, The Works of John Milton, Vol. 16, 2–11. 12. Martin Heidegger, “The Country Path,” Envoy 3.11, trans. Michael Heron (1950), 71. 13. Neil Forsyth, “Having Done All to Stand: Biblical and Classical Allusions in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 21 (1985), 209. The passage from Virgil (Aeneid 4:442–43) is quoted from Forsyth, his translation. 14. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci,” in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 317.

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Index

Appolonius of Tyana 68 Aquinas, Thomas 52 Aristotle 32, 78, 86–88, 99, 100, 104, 109, 149 Augustine 103–08, 127, 142

Earth’s wound in Paradise Lost 49–51, 58, 60 Education, in Eden 27–29 Ernle, Lord 135 Eve, in Paradise Lost viii, 1, 4–5, 7, 8, 11, 19–21, 25, 39–42, 43–54, 60–61, 62, 63–65, 115–17, 121–22, 125–34 Existential hero 23–24 Evelyn, John 3

Bayne, Paul 131 Berry, Wendell 8, 11, 14, 17, 18–19, 21, 23–24, 29, 43–54, 59, 71, 123, 135, 137 Bower in Paradise Lost 4, 19, 25–29, 40–41 Bridge from Hell in Paradise Lost 16–17 Brown, Cedric 36, 58, 59, 67 Bultmann, Rudolf 83, 112, 146, 151 Bush, Douglas 90

Fall, in Paradise Lost 3, 4–5, 16, 20, 43–54, 56, 57, 63 Fallon, Stephen M. 24, 47, 139, 144 Fens, draining of 2, 17 Filelfo, Francisco 106–07 Fish, Stanley 91 Fitter, Christopher 11, 19–21, 136 Fitzherbert, John 2 Flannagan, Roy 61, 96, 135 Foltz, Bruce W. 35, 50 Forestry, Milton’s critique of 26–27 Forsyth, Neil 132 Freedman, Donald M. 142

Calvin, John 131 Caputo, John D. 79, 80, 85, 107–08 Casey, Edward S. 15 Cecil, Sir William 2 Childrearing, in Eden 27–28 Clarkson, L. A. 135 Cohen, Jeremy 141 Cook, Albert 149 Crasset, Edward 3 Culverel, Nathanael 104–06

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 147 Genius loci: Attendent Spirit in The Ludlow Mask as 66; Eve as 29, 30, 35–42, 43, 51–54, 57–58, 130; in the 1645 Poems 4, 5; Sabrina in The Ludlow Mask as 37, 58–62, 66, 70, 130 Geopiety. See Deep Ecology Godefoy, Denys 140 Googe, Barnabe 2

Deconstruction 5–6, 30–35, 52, 86–88 Deep Ecology 3–4, 11–15, 22 Deforestation 1–3 Derrida, Jacques 7, 30, 31, 83, 98, 106–09 Descartes, Ren´e 4, 21, 22, 23, 47 Devall, Bill 13, 14, 38 Dionysus 67–68, 69 Dominion: in Paradise Lost 4, 18, 25–29, 32, 39; in Paradise Regained 93–94 Donne, John 102 Donnely, Phillip J. 138 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 84 Dualism 4, 12–13, 22, 23, 30–35, 44, 47, 52, 56, 65, 69, 114–15 DuRocher, Richard J. vi, 11, 48–49, 125–34, 136

Harrison, Robert Pogue 21, 135 Hartman, Geoffrey H. 133 Haskin, Dayton 75, 98, 99 Heidegger, Martin 1, 5–6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 30, 31–32, 55, 77, 78–85, 87–88, 96, 97, 98, 102, 111, 112, 117–18, 132, 135 Herenden, Wyman H. 150 Hobbes, Thomas 47 Hoffman, Piotr 21

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Index

Hooker, Richard 126, 127, 131 Hughes, Merritt Y. 143 Hunter, William B. 100, 148 Huttar, Charles A. 149

Newton, Isaac 15 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 31, 34–35, 48, 63, 67–68, 70, 71–72, 140 Obertino, James 60

Irigaray, Luce 124 Jung, Hwa Yol 136 Jung, Petee 136 Kairos 7, 113–24 Kendrick, Walter M. 48 Kerrigan, William 34 Kierkegaard, Soren 6, 7, 8, 77, 107, 109–12 Knott, John 60 Kuhn, Thomas 99 Labriola, Albert vi LaChapelle, Delores 12, 14, 24, 136 Lao Tzu 70 Leiss, William 29 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 86, 90, 95, 97, 98, 102–06, 143 Lieb, Michael 109, 141 Luther, Martin 6, 30, 31–32, 52, 86–88, 96, 97, 102, 108–09, 130, 147 Mahood, M. M. 143 Marino, Gordon D. 159 Martz, Louis L. 89, 97 Marxsen, Willi 147 Mathews, Freya 12 McColley, Diane vi, vii, viii, ix, 3, 11, 28, 47, 53, 125, 129, 136 Merchant, Carolyn 147 Milton, John: Arcades 36–37, 38–42, 60; “Lycidas” 36, 37, 60; De Doctorina Christiana 70; Divorce phamplets 75; “Il Penseroso” 36, 60; The Ludlow Mask 5, 7, 37, 46, 113, 116–17, 123–24; The Nativity ode 36, 51, 58–72; Paradise Lost viii–ix, 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 7–8, 11, 15–29, 39–42, 43–54, 55–57, 60–61, 62, 86, 97–98, 110–12, 113, 115–17, 121–22, 123, 125–34; Paradise Regained 6–7, 38, 55, 57–58, 62, 64, 76, 85, 86–101, 113, 115–17, 122–23, 125, 132–33; Samson Agonistes 38, 109; The History of Britian 37, 58 Mulryan, John 89, 92, 96, 97, 98, 122, 123, 150 Murphy, Raymond 145 Mustazza, Leonard 113

“Pagan,” origins of term 33–34, 128 Pandemonium, in Paradise Lost 18, 24, 27, 29, 110–12, 121 Paul, Apostle 5–6, 75–85, 86, 102, 113, 127–28, 130, 131 Perlin, John 135 Philostratus the elder 68 Plato 22, 50, 62–63, 64, 67, 76, 78, 81–82, 99, 100, 108, 109 Radzinowicsz, Mary Ann 109 Rajan, Balachandra 142 Rapaport, Herman 102 Revard, Stella 36, 58 Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. 88, 149 Salandra, Serafino Della 34, 140 Sapientia 102–03 Sartre, Jean-Paul 111 Scientia 103–07 Septuagint 102, 103 Sessions, George 136 Shawcross, John T. 150 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 23–24, 138 Shepard, Paul 11, 13, 52, 136, 137 Shiel, James 78 Snyder, Gary 11, 14, 136 Sophia 147 Source/Resource distinction in Paradise Lost 26–27, 28 Spengler, Oswald 26, 33, 133, 139 Spenser, Edmund 25, 48, 58, 60 Subjectivism, danger of in Paradise Lost 21–24, 31 Swanson, Donald 89, 92, 96, 98, 150 Tanner, John S. 21–23, 109–11 Taylor, Sylvanus 2–3 Theis, Jeffery S. vi, 18, 136, 141 Thirsk, Joan 17, 135 Thoreau, Henry David 30 Tillich, Paul 146 Tillyard, E. M. W. 89–90 Tusser, Thomas 2 Uprooting, in Paradise Lost 43–54, 56, 60

Naess, Arne 11, 12, 13, 20, 37, 136 Nagel, Thomas 112 Neuse, Richard 37, 65

Van Buren, Edward John 31–32, 78–79, 80, 81, 85, 108, 146

Index Varro, Marcus Terentius 162 Virgil 132 Vondel, Joost van de 47 Weber, Max 24–25, 76–77 White, Lynn 11, 35, 136, 141, 142

Whitman, Jon 11, 15, 136 Wisdom. See Sophia, Sapientia Wittgenstein, Ludwig 12–13, 98, 136 Woodhouse, A. S. P. 90 Yarranton, Andrew 2

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