The Telos of Paradise Lost: Justifying the Ways of God to Men through the Heavenly Muse
By Josh Traylor
The opening lines of Paradise Lost tell us what the poem is about, and that Milton’s purpose is to accomplish two things: to “assert Eternal Providence” (25) and to “justify the ways of God to men” (26).1 I will briefly focus on what Milton’s justification of the ways to men, though this second stated purpose is certainly deeply connected to the assertion of God’s providence.2
To understand what he means here, we must understand that John Milton was a Christian humanist in the century after the Renaissance humanist intellectual movement. He was educated in what is perhaps the greatest school for boys in England at the time, Saint Paul’s School, and not only studied at Christ College, Cambridge, but spent much time being educated in continental Europe after completing his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Cambridge.3 It was in this period of Milton’s life that he devoted five years to reading through a massive corpus of European literature, in which during that era, he certainly would have encountered Dante’s Divine Comedy.4 This leads us to a question that is popular in the Milton scholarly community: was Milton a fan of Dante? A challenger to Dante? Or both? Such a question is interesting to explore, and I will not get into it here, but I do know one thing: Milton’s purpose to justify the ways of God to men in his epic poem is one thing him and Dante have in common.5
In concordance with the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Dr. Markos states that Milton’s purpose for his Christian epic was to “define and shape the dialogue between humanism and Christianity, Athens, and Jerusalem, Platonism and the creeds of the church.”6 Milton, though radically opposed to Dante in many theological convictions, is on his team here, facing off against those who would share the same conviction as Tertullian: what indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?7 In Myth Became Fact, C.S. Lewis, in Miltonian Spirit, answers this question for us.
Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which becomes truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis. Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular. Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.8
We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block of they weren’t. We must not, in the false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic–and the sky itself a myth–shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight.9
Many chapters, likely an entire monograph, could be written on each of these quotes above, but Lewis said best what Milton illustrated for us in the opening lines of Paradise Lost: that there is not just a connection between Athens and Jerusalem, and the Academy and the Church, but that they are deeply intertwined. What Dante and Milton both have done so well is to utilize pagan imagery to show us what they got right, and where they fell short. And this should make sense to the Christian worldview, for if God created the Universe ex nihilo and created man in the Imago Dei, then why would we not see shadows of the substance of Christ within pagan imagery? “For truth is limited neither to the Scriptures nor to the sacred tradition; the Bible, though it tells us all we need to know to find salvation in and through Jesus Christ, does not attempt or purport to be an encyclopedia of all knowledge and wisdom.”10 Pagans are not without epistemic abilities, their metaphysics and epistemology just fall short of the revelation of the Logos incarnate.
John Milton’s Christian approach to paganism and classics is put on full display as a banner in line 26 of book 1. Here, he sets out to embody the spirit of St. Paul in the New Testament, where the apostle quotes Aratus and Epimenides as a showing that these pagans weren’t wrong about everything, but provided small glimpses of truth into a mystery that would only be fully realized in Christ alone.11 By the time we reach Milton’s telos, he has already shown that the Holy Spirit, not Calliope, is the Muse of his epic poem (6, 17– 26). In fact, after invoking the “Heav’nly Muse” in line 6, he further describes this Muse as the Holy Spirit in the lines leading up to his two highest poetic purposes:
“And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure
Instruct me, for thou know’st, thou from the first
Wast present and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss
And mad’st it pregnant. What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the heighth of his great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men” (17–26).12
Here, Milton is showing us a pagan-to-Christian typological connection: Homer and Virgil, who invoked Calliope for their epics knew that they had to call upon the divine for inspiration.13 Hesiod referred to the muse of epic poetry as the “most important one of all, Calliope, for she attends upon respected lords,”14 but the Holy Spirit is the true Calliope. All that the ancient poets were calling upon and did can only be fulfilled in the true poetic Muse, the third person in the trinity, the Holy Spirit, who is Milton’s muse just as he was Dante’s muse in his journey through the Empyrean.15 It is with this invocation of the Holy Spirit that Milton sets out not just to do what Homer and Virgil did, but to do it better, because paganism is perfected by Christianity, and therefore the pagan epic is perfected by the Christian epic.
1. John Milton, Paradise Lost: Second Norton Critical Edition, Edited by Gordon Teskey (W.W. Norton C Company: New York, 2020), 6.
2. More could be said about the categories in which we break Milton’s first 26 lines of Paradise Lost into, but I chose these for simplicities sake.
3. Gordon Teskey, “Introduction”, Paradise Lost (W.W. Norton C Company, New York, 2020), xx–xxi.
4. Louis Markos, Heaven and Hell: Visions of the Afterlife in the Western Poetic Tradition, (Cascade Books: Eugene, OR, 2013), 132.
5. Markos, 131–132. Markos asserts that there “is not a single clear, unambiguous tribute or reference to the Commedia in the twelve books of Milton’s epic, but rather that they seem similar due to using the same source material and having the same ambition of baptizing the pagan imagination into the fullness of Christianity, which is the ultimate fulfillment of everything that paganism did get correct via natural theology.
6. Markos, 132.
7. Tertullian of Carthage, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol 3: Prescription Against Heretics, Trans by Peter Holmes (Christian Literature Publishing Co.: Buffalo, NY, 1885). https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0311.htm.
8. C.S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact”, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, MI, 1970), 66.
9. Lewis, 67.
10. Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove, IL, 2007), 10.
11. Markos, From Achilles to Christ, 17. See Acts 17:27–28; Titus 1:12 for the biblical usage of pagan quotations.
12 Milton, Paradise Lost, 5–6.
13. Ovid referred to Calliope as “Chief of all Muses”, Calliope was believed to be Homer’s muse, and Virgil directly invokes Calliope in Aeneid book 9. Dante calls upon Calliope in Purgatorio canto 1, but Dante calls upon the Holy Spirit in Paradiso.
14. Hesiod, Theogony, (Penguin Books, London, England, 1987), 25.
15. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Trans by Robert and Jean Hollander (Anchor Books: New York, 2007), 913.
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