The Irony of The Passion and Why Milton Admired The Christiad

The Passion.

I.

Ere-while of Musick, and Ethereal mirth,

Wherwith the stage of Ayr and Earth did ring,

And joyous news of heav'n y Infants birth,

My muse with Angels did divide to sing,

But headlong joy is ever on the wing,

In Wintry solstice like the shortn'd light

Soon swallow'd up in dark and long out-living night.

II.

For now to sorrow must I tune my song,

And set my Harpe to notes of saddest wo,

Which on our dearest Lord did sease er'e long,

Dangers, and snares, and wrongs, and worse than so,

Which he for us did freely undergo.

Most perfect Heroe,try'd in heaviest plight

Of labours huge and hard, too hard for human wight.

III.

He sov'ran Priest stooping his regall head

That dropt with odorous oil down his fair eyes,

Poor fleshly Tabernacle entered,

His starry front low-rooft beneath the skies;

O what a Mask was there, what a disguise!

Yet more; the stroke of death he must abide,

Then lies him meekly down fast by his Brethren's side.

IV.

These latter scenes confine my roving vers,

To this Horizon is my Phoebus bound,

His Godlike acts, and his temptations fierce,

And former sufferings other where are found;

Loud oe'r the rest Cremona's trump doth sound;

Me softer airs befit, and softer strings

Of Lute, or Viol still, more apt for mournful things.

V.

Befriend me night best Patroness of grief,

Over the Pole thy thickest mantle throw,

And work my flatter'd fancy to belief,

That Heav'n and Earth are colour'd with my wo;

My sorrows are too dark for day to know;

The leaves should all be black whereon I write,

And letters where my tears have washt a wannish white.

VI.

See see the Chariot, and those rushing wheels,

That whirld the Prophet up at Chebar flood,

My spirit som transporting Cherub feels

To bear me where the towers of Salem stood,

Once glorious towers, now sunk in guiltles blood;

There doth my soul in holy vision sit

In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatick fit.

VII.

Mine eye hath found that sad sepulchral rock

That was the Casket of Heav'ns richest store,

And here though grief my feeble hands up-lock,

Yet on the softned Quarry would I score

My plaining vers as lively as before;

For sure so well instructed are my tears,

That they would fitly fall in order'd Characters.

VIII.

Or should I thence hurried on viewles wing

Take up a weeping on the Mountains wilde,

The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring

Would soon unboosom all their Echoes milde,

And I (for grief is easily beguild)

Might think th'infection of my sorrows loud,

Had got a race of mourners on som pregnant cloud.

The shapeless poem titled by Milton The Passion has less impact than the sentence of prose subjoined to it; it is less striking and less audacious. The sentence reads: "This Subject the Author finding to be above the yeers he had, when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinisht." Had he simply stated that he was unable to finish it, that would be one thing; but to add that he found absolutely no merit in (was "nothing satisfied with") the eight stanzas he did write, is another. Samuel Johnson's complaint is justified: "He thinks he has better taste than we do." But if the reader has enough taste to see that The Passion is a grotesquely bad poem, how provocative, in its context, is the appended statement! The Poems of Mr. John Milton of 1645 were Milton's long-delayed presentation of his credentials to the world. In the past, leaving his work in ms. or writing for the press, he had professed himself immature and unready. In Sonnet VII he had bewailed his "late spring" and envied "more timely- happy spirits," presumably meaning Abraham Cowley. The poet called his Nativity Ode a "tedious song" and excused it by saying that he had to have it ready as a Christmas present before dawn on the 25th. In Lycidas his "forced fingers" wrote before the coming of the "mellowing year." On the title-page of A Mask Presented at Ludlow he lamented that he had "let the spring wind in upon my flowers." He wrote Paradise Lost after "long choosing and beginning late" (IX.26). Not even Robert Frost was more aware than was Milton of the dangers of rushing into print. And, the 1645 volume was a bouquet of masterpieces: the Nativity Ode, On Time,An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, On Shakespeare, Lycidas, L'allegro, Il Penseroso, A Mask, ten sonnets. To go to such lengths to make a perfect book, and include a failed poem with a note saying he didn't care for it, seems inexplicable.

But when we begin to think of the humor in Poems of Mr. John Milton... 1645, an explanation takes shape. There is the epigram on William Marshall, playing on the engraver's inability to read an insult in Greek (frontispiece). In the Hobson poems (pp. 38-39), the phrase "Here lies," or "Here lieth," the personification of Death, the inscription on the tombstone, the praise of the dead, all the somber conventions of funerary poetry, are brought in to serve as foils to undergraduate jests of a Hasty Pudding kind, e.g.,"Too long vacation hastned on his term"(Prolonged idleness killed him). As for the opening stanza of Il Penseroso with its halloween of Cerberus, blackest midnight and the rest, E.M.W. Tillyard informed us as long ago as 1938 that it was a jest. What if The Passion,in combination with its subjoined repudiation, meant "Actually, I don't think much of the Crucifixion"? Odd though that might be as an orthodox Christian poet's theme, it would be perfectly apt for an Arian heretic.(1)

To make this case, I shall divide it under three headings: (1) the rhetorical scheme of deceiving expectation, (2) the self-cancelling content of The Passion and the Crucifixion-passage in Paradise Lost Book XII, (3) the Christiad of Girolamo Vida as a model Arian poem.

The Rhetorical Scheme of Deceiving Expectation

The persona of The Passion keeps announcing with an air of trepidation that the Crucifixion is about to arrive, at least in the form of its versified description; and the reader is still awaiting it when he learns that it has been over for three days, and yet, the Resurrection having also passed without notice, the weeping is to continue.

A brief precis of the eight stanzas follows:

(I)

Humanistic learning and Christian faith, symbolized by my muse and angels, blent their voices perfectly to make my Nativity Ode a success; but this poem must be different (the reader wonders: Do you mean this one will not succeed?)

(II)

This poem will be very sad.

(III)

It will concern the death of the Son of God.

(IV)

The subject is confining; if the poem concerned the life, instead of only the death, of Christ,it might succeed better, as did Girolamo Vida's Christiad.

(V)

This poem is very sad.

(VI)

See, see, I ride Ezekiel's wagon to find a lake of blood completely covering Jerusalem. (The reader thinks: Are you stalling?)

(VII)

On Christ's tomb, formerly the casket of heaven's richest store, I weep. (Wait! Stop! cries the reader. You are saying that Jesus has been there and gone again. Then it is not Good Friday, but Easter Sunday or afterwards, and you ought to rejoice and be glad.)

(VIII)

I weep on a mountain and make so much noise that the echoes make me think I have impregnated a cloud with other weepers. ("The worst line he ever wrote," said Louis Lohr Martz.)

The inventory of Renaissance rhetoric contained a scheme,adapted to judicial trials, called apoplanesis , whose effect was that "when some point against us has come before the judge or has been moved by the adversary, we obscure it by promising to speak of it in its place, raise another matter and move on to other things, drawing the attention of the judge from the point against us." Cicero, defending someone on a murder charge, "sigheth, weepeth, and bewaileth [the victim's] death whereby he staieth and appeaseth his adversaries, and causeth them to mourn with him." (2) So if Milton thought of the Crucifixion as a murder case with God the Father as defendant (a point to be gone into fully in a moment), then The Passion is a weepy apoplanesis in the true Ciceronian vein.

But apoplanesis is but a special type of the scheme of deceiving expectation, the perennial method of comedy, looking back from the contemporary shaggy-dog story to Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas.

The latter creates an expectation of the parts of the knight's arms and person, doubtless to conclude with his lofty brow, strong arm, or stout heart:

Sir Thopas wax a doghty swayn,

Whit was his face as payndemayn,

His lippes rede as rose;

His rode is lyk scarlet in grayn,

And I yow telle in good certayn,

He hadde a semely nose (ll. 34-39).

In Hamlet,the comic figure of Polonius constantly creates expectations only to defeat them. He announces important news to Gertrude and Claudius, but it turns out to be only that Hamlet loves Ophelia, and Gertrude already knew that (II.ii.152). Instead of news, Polonius offers discourse that belittles itself: a tautological definition of madness, and the phrases "let that go... a foolish figure, but farewell it... see here, that's a vile phrase...." (ll.93, 95, 98-9). But the persona of The Passion does the same thing: in Stanza II he warns the reader to expect a poem less impressive than the Nativity Ode; in Stanza IV he criticizes the topic as confining; he says that Girolamo Vida's Christiad exceeds all verse biographies of Christ; in Stanza VII he says his poem is "well instructed," apparently meaning derivative; he perpetrates his last and most atrocious metaphor because in his present mental state he is "easily beguiled."

The first five stanzas are one long prediction that we will go to Golgotha, although we seem to be having trouble getting started. Then at Stanza VI we suddenly have wheels, and they rush us to Jerusalem, near Golgotha, but not quite there,and a poor setting for any memorable event anyhow, as the city is completely concealed beneath a lake of blood. In VII we visit the tomb of Christ, still not quite Golgotha, and learn that the Passion and Resurrection are already over (the poem thus resembling one of those colossal mistakes when you arrive at an event on the wrong day).The persona flies through the air to a high mountain--stillnot Golgotha--to continue his pointless weeping while the apostles rejoice.

The end-note becomes suspect.It was quite unlikely that the poet left his work unfinished. What remains to be said? Both the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are past; should the poet fly to yet another mountain and produce yet another excruciating metaphor for the hugeness of his grief? As a narration this is incomplete but as a scheme of deceiving expectation it has all it needs.

(2)Self-Cancelling Content

But soon one detects the note of travesty not only in the form but in the content. This begins when the persona hails Jesus as "most perfect Heroe." The word occurs nowhere in the Old or New Testament. It is the Homeric word for "warrior" and this is a tactless moment at which to employ it as a hero is largely defined by the way he dies. He may, if there is no war on at the moment, die in bed, like Timoleon; he may die in battle either winning or losing; he may commit suicide to prevent himself from falling into the hands of the enemy. But to fall into those hands, and suffer a death inflicted by them, is to forfeit the title of hero, as is plain from Manoah's comments on the death of Samson in Milton's tragedy. When Manoah is told of Samson's death he is impatient to know the circumstances. "How died he? Death to life is crown or shame" (l. 1579). On learning that Samson was a hero twice, by suicide and by a very warlike act, Manoah rejoices that he "heroicly hath finish'd/ A life heroic" (ll.1710-1711) and begins planning the monument surrounded with ornamental shrubs; the trophies; the commemorative prose works, songs, and annual festivals with floral offerings, that are to perpetuate the memory of the hero.

Of interest in this regard is the fate of Mark Antony whose career was checkered: he won glory in the civil wars following the death of Caesar, then covered himself with shame running from the Battle of Actium, then regained some honor by suicide. Plutarch compares him with Demetrius, who likewise had a checkered career but surrendered to the enemy and died in prison.

We cannot admire the death of either, but that of Demetrius excites our greater contempt. He let himself become a prisoner, and was thankful to gain a three years' accession of life in captivity.... Antony took himself out of the world in a cowardly, pitiful, and ignoble manner, but still in time to prevent the enemy from having his person in their power.(3)

When he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus tamely submitted to Roman soldiers and rebuked Peter, who drew his sword and tried to fight. Heroe was the last word one would want to apply to him during this eighteen-hour period,however noble his conduct may have been from the viewpoint of a value-system other than the Greco-Roman.

Also of importance is the rule that a lingering death, as by strangulation, is unfit for a person of honor, who should rather die in an instant by the stroke of sword or axe. When Odysseus orders Telemachus to use his sword on Melantho and the other faithless serving-maids, the lad replies, "I will not give a decent death to women who have heaped dishonor on my head and on my mother's," and, stretching a cable across the palace courtyard, and suspending many nooses from it, he hangs them all (tr. E.V. Rieu, Penguin Books, New York, 1984: p. 339). In Vida's epic, Judas is thinking of falling on his sword when devils appear, showing him how to fashion a hangman's noose. "Thus he... as he deserved, found death by the infamous noose (laqueo infami)."4 Othello has determined to poison Desdemona when Iago recommends strangulation instead; the angry husband remembers the Homeric tradition and says, "That's good; the justice of it pleases" (IV. i. 206). That the death on the cross is not only torture, but moreover is disreputable, is perhaps Milton's strongest reason for finding it unsuitable as a subject for a poem in stilus altus, the high style. Mere torture scarcely bothers Satan and his legions, pleased to be in Pandaemonium,"Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms"(II. 164).

And crucifixion was common in another sense: it was all over the place, inflicted on insignificant persons for insignificant reasons. Two guides, leading the way in Italy to places whose names were garbled by Hannibal's foreign accent, accompanied his army in the Second Punic War; when they made a blameless error that led to casualties, Hannibal had them both crucified (5).

So the conduct and fate of Jesus during the last eighteen hours of his life made him so unsuitable for the epithet hero that its mention actually compels us to see why Milton leaves him out and instead writes a poem concerned solely with the emotions of the persona.

My next point concerns the "Godlike acts...temptations fierce,/And former sufferings"--that is, whatever Jesus may have done or suffered before his arrest in Gethsemane. Milton admiringly states that Vida, writing on these topics, uses a trumpet and sounds it louder than any other musician attempting to play the same piece; but for his own part, he must play a viola da gamba. If loudness correlates with violence, however, one would think the previous life of Christ should be scored for strings and the Passion for the brass.

The trumpet signalled the onset to battle in the Roman army and Milton took advantage of this symbol. As the angelic armies crash into each other in Paradise Lost,"Michael bid sound/Th'arch-angel trumpet: through the vast of Heav'n/It sounded"(IV. 202-4).

Vida,too, starts his War in Heaven (not the same one; Christian epics seem to produce rather a lot of them) sounding a trumpet. "And now a boy, not least of the winged kind,who excelled in calling the muster on the curved trumpet, in nimble flight soared to the steep heights. Then hovering over the axis at the pinnacle of the roseate sky, he sounded the call to war. The broad heavens were rent everywhere and the stars quaked at the strange tumult."(6)

The symbolism of Vida's trumpet versus Milton's own viola da gamba hints that, at least when not writing about the Passion, Vida had the advantage of an epic theme; but that, as for Milton himself, Christ's unheroic conduct reduced him to the necessity of writing a mere tearful effusion.

We now come to that lake of blood, a metaphor that depresses without convincing. No less an authority than Jerry Falwell was heard on television recently stating that no one is a Christian unless he accepts the substitutionary blood-sacrifice of Christ.

To supply a metaphysical pretext for their notion that the physical blood and flesh of Christ are present in all the masses celebrated every day all over the world, the Catholics held "the body of Christ to be present in the sacrament without quantity or local extension... This indeed they explain by his divine power, their usual resort in such cases."(7)

On 27 January, 1343, in the act of establishing a Treasury of Merit and issuing notes called indulgences drawn on it, Pope Clement VI explained how Christ could shed so much blood that it would, in its nature of propitiatory offering, lend its power to all these indulgences, making thousands, it might be millions of them effective in obtaining remission of sins: one drop of the blood shed by Christ on the cross would have sufficed to save the human race because of the union of Christ's body with the Word (Verbum). But in fact, he poured out a whole flood of it in such manner that no part of him was unwounded from the soul of his foot to the crown of his head. The extra blood flowed into a treasury which was not placed in any handkerchief or hidden in any field but committed to the bearer of the keys, Peter, and his successors to be salubriously dispensed to the faithful. (8)

The owner-operator of a spiritual brokerage house, Clement was assuring the public that his newly-floated issue of forgiveness was backed by huge assets of sacrifice. It made sense to emphasize the quantity of the latter.

Another function of the blood poured out on the cross was the satisfaction(the exact theological term, both Catholic and Protestant--PL XII. 419) of the Father's desire for revenge. In his poem on the Circumcision, Richard Crashaw produces a conceit about this: the few drops of blood shed by Jesus when circumcised are an hors d'oeuvre to whet the Father's appetite for the banquet he can expect in 33 years.

Tast this, and as thou lik'st a lesser flood 3

Expect a Sea, my heart shall make it good.

Thy wrath that wades here now, e're long shall swim, 5

The flood-gate shall set wide ope for him.

Then let him drinke, and drinke, and doe his worst,

To drowne the wantonnesse of his wild thirst. (9)

The imagery seems more fitting for a poem about Sardanapalus, Nero, or King Farouk than for one about our Father which is in Heaven, hallowed be his name. The word wrath in line 5, and the phrase doe his worst in line 7 betray the real meaning of the blood-banquet; it is a metaphor for the Father's intense enjoyment of his son's torture. The baby Jesus seems delighted to make this offering to his Father; but at line 5 the first-person format changes to third-person, the poet speaks and his language (wrath,repetition of drinke,worst, wantonnesse, wild) shows that he finds the Father's behavior embarrassing. The huge quantity of blood (flood, Sea, swim, flood-gate) justifies Milton's parody.

Crashaw in On the Bleeding wounds of our crucified Lord outdoes Clement VI; whereas the pope says a whole deluge of blood resulted from wounds inflicted on every part of Christ's body, the poet asserts that every hair on Jesus' head somehow contributed its part:

Jesu, no more, it is full tide

From thy hands and from thy feet,

From thy head and from thy side,

All the purple Rivers meet....

Not a haire but payes his River

To this Red Sea of thy blood

Their little channels can deliver

Something to the Generall floud (Complete Poetry, pp.110-12).

The inflation of symbolic or counterfeit sacrificial assets continued in the Roman church. Twelve years after the publication of Milton's Poems, a Jesuit said to Louis Montalte, the persona of Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters,"there would not be too many priests even if not only all men and women, if that were possible, but also inanimate bodies, and even brute beasts,bruta animalia,were turned into priests to celebrate mass." The persona comments: "I was so astounded by such a bizarre fantasy that I could not speak." (10)

Calvin reduced the sacraments to the externa subsidia of faith, and his followers consumed the bread and wine rather to demonstrate salvation than to achieve it. Milton, as I have pointed out in "Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians..." in this website, divided predestination in three parts: unconditional election, conditional election, and conditional reprobation. The unconditionally elect have no need to consume Christ's blood or be purchased by it; the decision to bring them safely to heaven was taken before the Father even pronounced sentence of death on Adam and Eve,before the Son even volunteered to submit to it (PLIII.143-4, 209). The conditionally elect make their way to heaven thus:

...I will clear their senses dark

What may suffice, and soften stony hearts

To pray, repent, and bring obedience due.

To prayer, repentance, and obedience due,

Though but endeavour'd with sincere intent,

Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut.

And I will place within them as a guide

My umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear,

Light after light well us'd they shall attain,

And to the end persisting, safe arrive (III. 148-197).

No sacraments aid the pilgrim, nor does Calvin's Irresistible Grace, that force proceeding directly from God that renders it impossible not to have saving faith, and which John Donne, pleading for it, compares to being overthrown, captured by an army, imprisoned, enslaved, ravished (Holy Sonnet VII: ll. 3, 6, 12, 13, 14.) God offers the conditionally elect an education, admission to a given stage of which presupposes successful completion of the last. The phrase well us'dis a Latin participle expressing the past occurrence of an event, like After the Tuscan mariners transform'd(Comus, l. 48; when they had been transformed), and after Eve seduc't (PLX. 332; when she had been seduced). So the meaning is, They shall attain more light when they have used well what they have(and, one gathers, not before). The Calvinist adoption,or salvation in an instant (see the essay, "Do Donne's Sonnets Tell a Story?"in this website)is replaced by a lifelong labor of salvation resembling John Keats's conception of the world as a "vale of soul-making." The word safe at l. 197 signals that all this time the conditionally elect have been in danger. It was that danger, in Arminian salvation, of apostatizing and going to hell, that outraged the Calvinists; Christ died for nothing if we have from him, and his Father, only good advice. Milton, an existentialist avant la lettre, posited a humankind condemned to be free. Accordingly, he went to no church and participated in no ceremonies after the Restoration; not even baptism, though De Doctrina Christianashows him to be a "re-baptizer." Hence his contempt for the idea of Christ's blood flowing in real or metaphoric floods.

My last point concerns the uncouth metaphor with which the poem ends, when the persona, hearing echoes of his outcries, thinks that "th'infection of my sorrows loud, /Had got a race of mourners on some pregnant cloud."

The myth of Ixion, to which the pregnant cloud,the raceand the infectionall allude, follows: King of Thessaly, he offered to marry Dia, daughter of Eioneus, promising the father-in-law rich marriage gifts and a banquet. But he laid a pitfall containing a great charcoal fire before his palace, into which Eioneus fell and was burnt to death. The lesser gods of Olympus were so horrified by the heinous deed that they refused Ixion the ritual purification for murder; but Zeus, reasoning that he himself had done things as bad when in love, both purified Ixion and invited him to his table. (What follows is not in the mythographers, so far as I know, but it seems to me an inevitable reflection:Was Zeus having a bad day? Not love, nor even lust, but avarice impelled Ixion's crime.) Here Ixion, slily calculating that Hera must have become indifferent to her husband owing to his various amours, heated his audacity with wine and tried to make love to her. Meanwhile Zeus, guessing Ixion's intent, had fashioned a simulacrum of Hera out of a cloud and it was into this that Ixion, too drunk to discern the false from the real Hera, ejaculated, impregnating the cloud with Centaurus, who later begot the race of the centaurs. Zeus ordered Hermes to scourge Ixion and then bind him to a fiery wheel rolling eternally through the sky; in another version Ixion was chained to a wheel ceaselessly turning in Hades.

Ixion's story exemplifies evil never redeemed because it is simply irredeemable, and unforgivable wrongdoing continued in spite of forgiveness. Ixion represents those people, like Huckleberry Finn's father, who really are totally depraved, who never have a thought for the rights of others or for fair play, and who respond to grace by exploiting it for the opportunities it offers of committing greater outrages than before. A 16th-century emblem book shows an image of Ixion fastened to his wheel, not spread-eagled over the hub and spokes but in a posture of agony on the rim, his arms fastened behind him and his ankles together. The legend is:

Who knows his own wrongdoing and that his own mind is his punisher, he lives an unwelcome life, which he desires to live no more. And though he wants to die, and feels his death's wounds, he still dies not, but carries his torment with him. Then he feels that he is his own hangman, and wishes he could divide himself from himself. But there he is, and he is turned on the wheel like the wretched Ixion and follows and flees himself.(11)

Milton continues, with this fable, his critique of the oceans of redemptive blood we have already seen. During the intensive sale of indulgences in Saxony in 1517, Martin Luther was moved to denounce a report he had heard somewhere to the effect that an indulgence could obtain remission of a man's sin even if he had raped the Mother of God (not unlike seducing Hera, at that).(12) Thus the Roman Church laid claim, both through indulgences and through its sacrament of penance, to huge powers of making God forget his anger, its oceans of blood in prose and verse representing the magnitude of this claim. Ixion's career refutes it, consistently with Milton's concept, announced in De Doctrina,of the "tempus definitum gratiae," the limited period of grace after the expiration of which the door of heaven is locked against an Ixion still alive and still perpetrating abominations on earth. In Paradise Lost we read:

This my longsuffering and my Day of Grace

They who neglect and scorn will never taste:

But hard be hardn'd, blind be blinded more,

That they may stumble on, and deeper fall,

And none but such from mercy I exclude(PLIII.198-201).

The pregnant cloud in the last line of The Passion resonates in another way. Ixion's mistaking the false for the real Hera, and going so far as to fornicate with a cloud, is a fitting emblem of any human being embracing a scientific, metaphysical, or religious belief that is a mere delusion, and never desisting from his attempt, as we say, to make it work. Writers like Crashaw, who tried to make hyperbolic poems about the Crucifixion, were, in Arian belief, foolishly praising an ignominious defeat. Christ's surrender of his person in Gethsemane was, as we shall see, extremely premature.

All that I have said is confirmed by Milton's companion-piece to The Passion, namely the account of the Crucifixion in PL XII. 411-423, which can be quoted in full:

For this he shall live hated, be blasphemed,

Seiz'd on by force, judg'd, and to death condemn'd

A shameful and accurst, nail'd to the Cross

By his own Nation, slain for bringing Life ;

But to his cross he nails thy Enemies,

The Law that is against thee, and the sins

Of all mankind, with him there crucifi'd,

Never to hurt them more who rightly trust

In this his satisfaction; so he dies,

But soon revives, death over him no power

Shall long usurp; ere the third dawning light

Return, the stars of morn shall see him rise

Out of his grave...

In traditional Christian orthodoxy, the Crucifixion/Resurrection is the central event of history, indeed, the event for the sake of which the universe was created. Here, Milton boils it down to twelve lines, as opposed to, for example, 39 lines for Adam and Eve's rites of connubial love (IV. 736-75), and 142 lines for Raphael and Adam's discussion of the heliocentric and Copernican systems (VIII.15-197). The Passion and this twelve-line summary, each in its own way, slight the Crucifixion. The Passion leaves it out altogether; the summary rushes through it in all haste, and even congratulates itself that the business was done with such dispatch (ll.420-21). While The Passion has emotion but no Crucifixion, the summary has a Crucifixion with no emotion. The poet in the summary, well aware of the infamy of crucifixion, like that of hanging, calls it a "cursed death"(l.406), then a "death... shameful and accurst" (ll. 412-13); at the same time, by means of an isocolon of participles, he belittles the Crucifixion, levelling it with all the unpleasant things that happened to Christ during his lifetime: he was hated, blasphem'd, seiz'd on, judg'd, condemn'd, nail'd (ll. 411-13). Though line 414 says Christ was slain for bringing life, the verse in this passage was so obsessed with death that it mentions it sixteen times in 69 lines:

line 392 thy death's wound 398 On penalty of death, and suffering death 406 cursed death 412 to death condemn'd 414 slain 420 death over him 424 from death redeems 425 His death 428 the death thou shouldst have died 431 Sin and Death 433 temporal death 434 a death like sleep 445 For death 460 quick and dead 461 th'unfaithful dead

Even the positive things about the Crucifixion--that it will free mankind from the legal code of Leviticus and obtain them remission of sins--are stated with a metaphor that unites them to the shameful and accurst death of the cross: Christ shall nail Leviticus and sin to the cross. The poet was obviously in a hurry to get through these twelve lines and makes the reader share his feeling;Milton pointedly leaves Christ's death as well out of his epic about him. In conclusion, the Crucifixion produced in Milton, not the inspiration of his great lyrics or epic purple patches, but only irony as well as blank verse like flat Champagne. Yet in Stanza IV of The Passion suddenly darts out that praise of Cremona's trump: the Christiad of Marco Girolamo Vida. Here, among so many negatives, must be some indication of what Milton wanted the death of Christ, or a poem about it, to be.

(3) The Christiad

Pope Leo X, like many humanist ecclesiastics, believed Christianity would be duly honored only when its Gospel was paraphrased in an epic poem with Virgil's manner imitated to perfection. Convinced that Girolamo Vida of Cremona was the man for the job, Leo gave him a sinecure, the Priory of St. Silvester in Frascati, so that he should enjoy the necessary leisure.Milton also assumed at first that he should write a neo-Latin Christian epic and switched to English only when he realized that he would be second-rate compared to "the Latins." (13)

Perhaps because they are roughly identified with popery, perhaps for some other reason, neo-Latin Christian epics have suffered a bad press.John Addington Symonds, in The Renaissance in Italy, wrote:

What the cold churches of Palladio are to Christian architecture, this frigid epic is to Christian poetry. Leo X. delighted to recognize the Gospel narrative beneath a fancy dress of mythological inventions, and to witness the triumph of classical scholarship in the holy places of the medieval faith.

To fuse the traditions of Biblical and secular antiquity was, as I have often said, the dream of the Renaissance.... Religion, attiring herself in classic drapery, threw off the cobwebs of the catacombs, and so acquired the right of petites entrees at the Vatican. It did not signify that she had sacrificed her majesty to fashion, or that her tunic a la mode antique was badly made. Her rouge and spangles enchanted the scholarly Pontiff, who forthwith ordered Vida to compose the "Christiad" and gave him a benefice at Frascati in order that he might enjoy a poet's ease. (14)

I.A. Richards in Practical Criticism studied stock responses to words, phrases, metaphors and short lyric poems; but here we have a stock response to a whole epic, so sudden and sweeping that it completely ignores its own subject, giving not one detail of the Christiad itself. In this it strangely resembles The Passion. As Milton was repelled by the Crucifixion, I believe Symonds was repelled by the Arianism of The Christiad but disguised his revulsion as a reaction to stereotyped things which, in fact, are not in the poem: Palladio's coldness (but he's not cold), fancy dress, rouge, spangles. Symonds comes close to his real response when he speaks of classical scholarship in the holy places of the medieval faith. Renaissance Arianism was indeed but research in the Greek New Testament, discovering that nothing like the Trinity was believed in Christendom till centuries after Christ and his apostles had died.

Near the end of The Christiad, God the Father addresses to the Son a gorgeous prediction of the things that will result from the Son's death. The religion he has established will overrun the earth; it will be believed on the banks of the Po and the Adige. And:" after the sun in heaven shall have completed fifteen centuries... true prophets, forgetting the lies of the Greeks (Graium mendacia) with a new song, shall tell of your death" (Christiad, p. 281).That is,The Christiad predicts itself.

Greek was the language of Christian creeds in the age of the First Four General Councils, 325-451 C.E., each of which in one way or another systematically garbled the issue whether the Father and the Son were jointly the Supreme God, or the Son was what Arius took him to be, distinct from the Father and thus contingent on him if not inferior to him. The councils held both propositions to be true: Jesus was and was not the Supreme God. The words homoousiosfrom Nicea ("same substance," expressing the complete identity of the Son and the Father);hupostasis from Constantinople ("foundation,"the godhead shared by the three persons of the Trinity);anhupostasia from Ephesus ("not fundamental," said of the human nature of the Son by theologians trying to emphasize his divinity); and monophusis from Chalcedon ("one nature," the possession by the Son of one composite human-divine nature, rather than two natures, one human and one divine)--these are "the lies of the Greeks."Vida, sweeping them aside, substitutes the idea that the Son is quite distinct from the Father, and expresses this by calling the Son Deus,"God,"(VI.743-45) and the Father Genitor,"Begetter" (VI, 731, 834) expressing the notion that when the Father has brought forth the Son (an event completed in the dimension of time, not eternal as in the Athanasian creed) his function has ended and he may fade into the landscape. (This is also Milton's concept, PLIII.339-41.)

Vida begins with the traditional invocation to the Muse, with whose help he promises to "find out the plans of God the Father and the causes of a death so horrible" (summi...parentis/Consilia, atque necis tam dirae euoluere causas, I. 13-14). The epithet "horrible" (dirus,also "cruel, frightful, of evil omen") anticipates the negative "shameful and accurst" of PL; more shocking, to a Trinitarian, is the implication that the Father's plans and the causes of the Son's death remain to this day to be found out, as if Vida were investigating a crime.

Our story begins on Palm Sunday, when Christ, approaching Jerusalem with his apostles, says, "There are prepared for me the horrible tortures of an unspeakable death" (Illic informis leti mihi dira parantur supplicia, I.42-43). The word informis,here translated unspeakable, is based on forma,"character, form, nature, kind, manner,"with a negative prefix signifying lack of all these things, so informis letum is a death of such kind that it cannot even be named, defined, or described. This becomes Jesus' habitual phrase for the Crucifixion, and Vida avoids the common words crux and crucio.

How long has Jesus known this? In the orthodox Christian view he has two natures, human and divine, the divine one being omniscient and incapable of being kept in the dark by his Father about anything. But in the Arian view the Son and the Father are two different beings and might well be adversaries.

We have it on the authority of the Father that the Son suddenly manifested most ungodlike fear as the hour of his death approached.

...of his own will he offers his life and goes to meet death. But suddenly he has shuddered at the sight, and fear has confused him and taken his courage from him at the threshold of death. As if doffing his godhead ( Deum uelut exutus,"as if God were stripped off") he has taken his last stand as a helpless mortal, and his vulnerable body awaits their violence. Otherwise no human force could have prevailed against his divine limbs, and he would have been invincible against all weapons (p.223).

So on Palm Sunday God the Son suddenly reveals facts of unheard-of horror to his apostles, and during Holy Week God the Father tells the angels that the Son has suddenly lost courage. It is reasonable to infer that the Son learned of his impending death-by-torture only when it was a week or less away. Perhaps he knew that, like all of us, he was going to die; but he had not known he would die like this.

Night on Maundy Thursday finds him sweating blood in Gethsemane, pleading with the Father. Again he calls crucifixion informis letum, and adds, "change your cruel plan for a better one, and prevent this extreme agony" (tua flecte seuera/Consilia in melius, durosque auerte dolores,II.751-2). Some may dispute the translation cruel plan for seuera consilia(in another context perhaps stern counsel. But seuera has a bad sense, "cruel, hard," as well as a good, "serious, strict, austere."That the bad sense of seuerais meant, appears from its antithetic relation to melius,"better." After Jesus has made this plea several times without success, and given up, "a shining child with rainbow wings glided down from the starry heaven and stood near him, bearing a message from the Father to assuage his whirling thoughts; he comforted the anguished Man, and lightened his anxiety, and wiped the dark sweat from all his body"(p.81). In short after receiving the Son's plea viva voce,the Father answers by a messenger service. As Hotspur fumed when his father failed to appear at Shrewsbury: "Letters from him! why comes he not himself?"(IHenry IV, IV.i.15)

Roman soldiers having arrested Jesus drag him before the high priest, Annas, who in turn takes him to Pontius Pilate and denounces him for the criminal intent of "seeking to extinguish the Sun and, when he has invaded heaven, to draw down the stars with magic spells" (Et iam iam uolet ipsum etiam restinguere Solem, /Sideraque obsesso uerbis deducere coelo,V. 128-29). The phrase obsesso coelo,"when he has besieged, invaded or occupied heaven," recalls Satan's attempt to overthrow the Father; drawing the stars down recalls the verse in Revelation (12:4) in which the dragon sweeps one-third of the stars from heaven, in turn symbolizing Satan's seduction of one-third of the angels. In short, Annas sees Jesus as a potential revolutionary leader about to mount an attack on heaven, and though this is not Jesus' intent, we learn that it is an option.

Jesus carries his cross, and I will choose this moment to quote a cry of protest uttered by the persona of the poem and directed at the Father when Jesus is arrested in Gethsemane:

Father almighty, ruler of those above on Olympus, can you behold these things so phlegmatically and not mingle heaven with hell? When will you ever hurl the terrible lightning from your hand if the world is unclouded and unshaken at a time like this? By breaking the covenant let things be mingled in confusion, and let the elements instantly vanish, let the high heavens vanish!Why is your hand empty? Why does the earth not smoke with your three-bolted thunder? Your devouring flame must be saved for what?

(Haec pater omnipotens superum regnator Olympo

Tam lentus cernis, nec coelo tartara misces?

Ecquando horrificum dextra iaculabere fulmen,

Si nunc immoto facies innubila mundo est?

Foedere iam rupto rerum confusa laborent,

Atque repute elementa ruant, ruat arduus aether

Cur tua dextra uacat? cur non face terra trisulca

Iam fumat?quos flamma uorax seruatur in usus?--II.852-59)

The phrase Foedere iam rupto,"by breaking the Covenant," l. 856, deserves attention. The agreement between God and man according to which God will forgive men's sins in exchange for faith in Christ is called the Covenant, foedus. The reader instantly learns that the covenant to be broken here is among the four elements, to keep their due bounds, but the effect is as if someone had said, for example, "Stop this murder--" only to provide some such context as the murder of Wisdom by Folly. Vida's phrase in like manner suggests breaking the Covenant that presupposes Christ's death.

Mary rushes to Golgotha to find Christ on the cross; he explains the situation by saying, "I suffer this through the will of the Father, who governs all things with merely a nod" (haud sine parentis/Haec ferimus, solo qui temperat omnia nutu.--V. 837-8). There is no mention of love, or willing obedience-- only the Father's power. At the cry of "Father, why hast thou forsaken me?"heard by every angel in heaven, they fly to arms, resolved to conquer Judea and free their chief.

Not enough attention has been paid to such events both in Vida and in Milton. Heaven is a vast military base, the angels are soldiers, and not reservists; they train incessantly, they are armed to the teeth, they are combat-ready. The heavenly army in PLbivouacks in tents around the Mount of God (V. 651, 654). The boy-angel who sounds the attack in the Christiad(p.217)excels at calling the muster on the curved trumpet, so there is a muster. Raphael tells Adam that on the sixth day of creation he and thousands of other warriors "squar'd in full Legion"(VIII.231) were on a training mission deep in Chaos "to enure Our prompt obedience"(239-40). Both Vida's angels and Milton's have swords, spears, armor and chariots; Milton's have besides, helmets and shields and Vida's have javelins, fire-darts, bows, arrows, gauntlets, slings. Vida explains that heaven has weapons as part of a war-memorial from Satan's revolt, "the relics of an outrageous war which [the loyal angels] had waged against their maddened former allies" or "the relics of a war, hateful to them, which they had waged against their hard-fighting friends"(belli monimenta nefandi,/ Quod socios olim contra gessere furentes.--V.551-52). Depending on the meaning of nefandi,"outrageous because war in heaven is forbidden" or "outrageous because the Father made us fight our friends"; socios,"military personnel serving under the same flag with us, with no emotional bond," or"true friends"; and furentes,"raging like damned spirits," or "hurling themselves into the fight,"this verse is either orthodox or Arian.

Milton must have seen the flaw in Vida's explanation why there are weapons in heaven; suppose Vida is right and they remain from Satan's revolt,where did the participants get them in that war? Rather than suppose monimentafrom a still earlier war, Milton lets the reader infer that there have been weapons as long as there have been angels. When this angelic army decides to mutiny against the supreme commander, they mobilize with incredible speed. In Vida they seem to take less than an hour;in Milton, between 9 pm. and dawn.The heavenly battalions are deployed even in the Nativity Ode on that morning when, as to the human participants,

No war, or Battle's sound

Was heard the World around:

The idle spear and shield were high up hung...(ll.53-55)

--in spite of these precautions, the angels who report for duty are ready for anything:

The helmed Cherubim

And sworded Seraphim

Are seen in glittering ranks with wings display'd...(ll. 111-13)

Besides the military words,helmed, sworded,and ranks,the phrase wings display'dis a term of heraldry, meaning the outspread wings of a bird of prey; and, hence, a military insignium. So the Father,a cautious leader, well remembers that the celestial begetting of his Son provoked a civil war, and is ready in case the terrestrial one should do the same. The Father resembles one of the "barracks emperors" of the late Roman Empire who founded their power solely on an invincible army and would have reigned unchallenged except for the troops' readiness to turn against them.

As Vida's angels marshal for their attack on Judea, God the Father employs the allegorical figures of Mercy, Hope, Faith, Holiness and Love to fly forth from his palace into the length and breadth of heaven, ordering the angels to desist at once from their rescue of Jesus, to report at once to the Father, and to disarm before doing so. This last detail is of such urgency as to be mentioned four times.

Let them stop, lay down their arms,and come here at once (Considant,positisqueadsint huc ocius armis,V.636).

Mercy announces "the immense fury of the Father if they did not quietly return at once,laying down their arms"(...patris ingentes passim denuntiat iras,/Ni redeunt, positisque quiescant protinus armis,V. 638-39).

As the five allegorical figures fly through heaven, "Wheresoever they took their way, one could see from afar all the angels at once throw their weapons far from them and become peaceable, their zeal transformed."(Quaque egere uiam, uideas procul ilicet arma/proijcere,et studijs mitescere uersis, V. 643-44).

And now, obeying his decree, the soldiers came unarmedinto the king's presence (Iamque in conspectu positis exercitus armis/Regis adest, dicto parentes, V. 645-46)

After the assassination attempt of 20 July, 1944, Adolf Hitler gave orders that all army officers, regardless of rank, before entering his presence were to hand over their sidearms to sentries. But he was only a mortal and vulnerable being. Could an omnipotent God give such an order?

He might if he wasn't really omnipotent; such is Vida's innuendo.

And now to the climax of this strange, powerful poem.

At the pinnacle of heaven is a golden temple where the Father goes to watch the cruel death of his mortal Son(Mortalis nati letum...crudele, V.450).It looks down upon the stars and contains a hall at whose midpoint a "slope of adamantine granite rises little by little...Manifold seats cover it from bottom to top, rising in nine rows"(p.215). The angels seat themselves here; the Father concentrates his gaze on Golgotha.

In Gethsemane,the Son,failing to deflect his Father's "cruel plan,"had concluded with philosophical resignation, "it is not right that I should fail to save the world. I will gladly go..."(p.81). With the advantages of an omniscient observor,the reader can see at once the Son's innocence and the Father's wickedness;the latter creates an amphitheater so that he can impersonate a Roman emperor revelling in the torture of a human being.

Thus, Vida sees the Crucifixion as a missed opportunity, by seizing which, Jesus, capitalizing on mutinous feelings in the heavenly army, could have overthrown his ruffian of a father and inaugurated an era of real, rather than only nominal, peace and love. The importance of this idea in the shaping of Milton's epic verse has yet to be measured.The Passiononly shows that in 1630 he preferred not to talk about it.

Notes

(1)On Milton's Arianism, see the review of W.B. Hunter et al.,Bright Essence,in this website.

(2)Julius Rufinianus, De figuris sententiarum,and Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence,quoted in Lee A. Sonnino, Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric(London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, n.d.), pp. 195-96. The emphasis is added.

(3)Plutarch, The Parallel Lives,"Comparison of Mark Antony with Demetrius."

(4)Marco Girolamo Vida: The Christiad, tr. Gertrude C. Drake and Clarence A. Forbes, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1978: p.197.

(5)Plutarch's Lives, tr. John Dryden, ed. A.H. Clough; Bigelow, Brown and Co., New York, n.d., I, 403.

(6)Christiad, p. 217. For the most part I rely on Drake's and Forbes's translation, but when I differ I give the Latin and let the reader be the judge; I cite the English by page and the Latin by book and line.

(7)Milton, Works, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al.,New York: Columbia U.P.,1933, Vol. XV, p.271.

(8)"...sui ipsius agni...sanguine nos redemit, quem in ara crucis innocens immolatus non guttam sanguinis modicam, quae tamen propter unionem ad Verbum pro redemptione totius humani generis suffecisset, sed copiose velut quoddam profluvium noscitur effudisse ita, ut a planta pedis usque ad verticem capitis nulla sanitas inveniretur in ipso....Quem quidem thesaurum non in sudario repositum, non in agro absconditum, sed in beato Petro coili clavigerum, eiusque successores suos in terris vicarios, commisit fidelibus salubriter dispensandum..."--B.J. Kidd, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation,Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911, pp. 1-2.

(9)George Walton Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw,Doubleday and Co., Garden City, New York, 1970: p.9. Milton's poem on the Circumcision has a similar conceit while omitting the theme of the Father's appetite.

(10) Tr. A.J. Krailsheimer, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1967, p. 97.

(11)Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundertsed. Arthur Henkel und Albrecht Schone, Stuttgart, n.d., col. 1658.

(12)"Opinari venias papales tantas esse ut solvere possint hominem,etiamsi quis per impossibile Dei genetricem violasset, est insanire."--the 75th of Luther's 95 theses, in Kidd, Documents, p. 25.

(13)Merritt Hughes, ed.; John Milton: Complete Poems and Major ProseOdyssey Press, Indianapolis, 1957: p. 668.