A Critique of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin

Introduction

Since the Seventeenth Century, critics and commentators of Paradise Lost have been divided into two groups, the poet-sacrificers and the poem-sacrificers. The poet-sacrificers, while hailing many felicities in the poem, such as characters, plot, descriptions, allusions to the classics, metaphors, metrical subtleties, and tropes and schemes of rhetoric, confess reluctantly that Milton did not succeed in justifying the ways of God to men and hence that the epic is more or less flawed. The poem-sacrificers, on the other hand, when the poem seems to falter because Satan in Book I is magnificent or because God in Book III is ghastly, or some such reason, are inclined to blame the reader,and insist that he or she try harder to be a good Christian.

I adopt this terminology because the first group gives up the poet, saying he made a mistake when choosing his theme and, in effect, condescending to him by implying they could have saved him had they been there to counsel him; and because the second group give up the poem, twisting and wrenching it unmercifully to throw a veneer of justice on God and of viciousness on Satan, Adam, and Eve, or for the like purposes.

The queer thing about the situation is the degree to which poets have rallied to one side only, that of the poet-sacrificers. Among the latter, on the one hand, are John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, William Blake, John Keats, Percy Shelley,A.E. Housman,T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves and William Empson. The poem-sacrificers, on the other hand,have not one poet to show; they are all academics.Poets are less inclined to forgive a colleague who bungles an opportunity to write a perfect poem;but teachers, confronted by a poem with some great passages and some poor ones, are more likely to blame themselves.

Graduate students of all English departments, if you want to be poet-sacrificers, take heart. Behind you stands a platoon of laurelled bards;before you, nothing but a rabble of English teachers.

The issues in Paradise Lostconcerning which the two groups of poet-sacrificers and poem-sacrificers are most likely to engage are as follows:

1. Satan, in Books I and II, is magnificent.

2. God, judging man in Book III,is detestable.

3. Eve, though innocent, arouses in the reader feelings that are not innocent.

4. The War in Heaven, after beginning as an impressive clash of arms, deteriorates into a pie-throwing contest.

5. Adam's praise of Eve, VIII.547-559, seems to be a perfect love-poem but we are supposed to reject it as an expression of bestial passion.

6. Eve is under so much and such subtle pressure from various supernatural agents when she eats the forbidden fruit that she really has no choice.

7. Adam, resolving to die with Eve rather than live without her, evidently does what he has to do.

8. The scene in which Satan involuntarily becomes a monstrous serpent on his belly prone reads like propaganda rather than poetry.

9. The last two books are a bore.

The only way to account for Professor Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin is to suppose that he wants to be the last and greatest poem-sacrificer;to write the ne plus ultra of poem-sacrificing accounts of Paradise Lost.And, he succeeds. No previous commentator ever twisted the poem into such unrecognizable shapes to prove that it does, after all, justify the ways of God to men. A principle of criticism states that it is never an available explanation of something in a poem to say that the poet didn't know any better. Apply that principle to Paradise Lost , take it to the limit, ignore every other principle, and you will have to admit that by this criterion, Fish's is the best book that could possibly have been written.

But at what a price!Another principle of criticism condemns the Didactic Heresy but Fish declares that we need Paradise Lostto learn how to live, and finally to become Christian heroes, and then (in a circle) read the poem, because only a Christian hero can do so. In outline and in its details--all of them--the book is absurd, and the following is an attempt to demonstrate this.

Commentary on Chapter One
Professor Fish's first chapter, in which he establishes the basis of his claim that the weak parts of Milton's Paradise Lost were put in deliberately, says that Milton accepted Plato's disparagement of rhetoric as appealing only to the emotions while logic, by contrast, appeals to the reason. This prepares the way for Fish's later claim that Satan is rhetorical while God is logical, and hence that we ought to reject Satan and accept God. Unfortunately, apart from his vague idea that rhetoric appeals to emotion, Fish never defines it, and hence there is no way to distinguish, in point of rhetorical or logical content, between two sentences such as the following:

To bow and sue for grace with suppliant knee...

That were low indeed.

Die he or justice must.

The first is attractive, the second repulsive; but both are equally metaphoric(the word low, the idea of justice dying) and both work equally on the emotions. Professor Fish's attempt to stigmatize Satan as rhetorical depends on a nonexistent distinction.

Much more relevant to the composition ofParadise Lost than Plato's views on rhetoric are Plato's views on poetry, which are well known. He banished Homer from his republic to keep poetry from corrupting the people with its unseemly representations of the gods and for portraying war and death in a manner damaging to military morale. In spite of his youthful enthusiasm for Plato, expressed in Comus, the older Milton came to reject his "fabling... and smooth conceits,"and certainly Paradise Lost embraces Homer as completely as the Republic rejects him. As for the censorship in Plato's Laws, Milton wishes it had been "buried and excused in the genial cups of an academic night-sitting." To imagine that Milton found a program for the composition of his epic in Plato is desperate.

The Renaissance humanist tradition was to employ a metaphor comparing rhetoric to the outstretched palm with which you soothe a person by stroking him, and logic to the clenched fist with which you punch him. The intent was clearly, not to oppose the two to each other, as if logic were good and rhetoric bad, but to recommend both as parts of the equipment of an effective speaker.Then, in the Seventeenth Century, an anti-rhetorical tradition grew up, promoted by puritan preachers (but not all of them) and prophets of modern science or the modern state (but not all of them). According to this second tradition, all objective writing should be free of metaphors and other tropes and schemes; and the acme of this tradition was reached when Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan said that though metaphors were allowed in orations of praise and blame, they were utterly excluded from all rigorous search into truth because "they openly profess deceit." Thus Milton could choose between two traditions of logic and rhetoric, one commending both, one disparaging rhetoric. Professor Fish believes he embraced the second.

But, in Of Education,Milton writes:

And now, lastly, will be time to read with them those organic arts which enable men to discourse and write perspicuously,...Logic, therefore ... is to be referred to this due place with all her well-couched heads and topics, until it be time to open her contracted palm into a graceful and ornate rhetoric, taught out of the rule of Plato...To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate.

This is pure Renaissance humanism, complete with the outstretched palm metaphor. Rhetoric is sandwiched between logic and poetry and is so close to the latter that Milton doesn't know whether to teach rhetoric before poetry, or after it. Instead of deriving from Plato the idea that rhetoric is bad,Milton says the boys are to be taught rhetoric according to Plato's rule. <

To write his account of Milton's attitude towards rhetoric, Professor Fish read Bacon's Great Instauration , Sprat's History of the Royal Society Hobbes's Leviathan Perry Miller's The New England Mind and The testimony of the President...Against the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield . But among all this ransacking of unlikely texts he ignored Milton's Tractate of Education , the first place to look.His attempt to exceed all the poem-sacrificers is perverse, and breeds perverse methods of research.

Commentary on Chapter Two

Pursuing the chimera of his false idea of Milton's attitude towards logic and rhetoric, Professor Fish now reaches the point of saying, "Rhetoric is the verbal equivalent of fleshly lures that seek to enthral us and divert our thoughts from Heaven, the reflection of our own cupidinous desires, while logic comes from God and speaks to that part of us which retains his image." He then creates a predicament for himself that he blandly ignores, namely how such passages as the description of paradise, IV.264-86, and Eve's poem to Adam, IV.639-56, can be justified. If rhetoric is as bad as Fish says it is, the very smoke of hell belches from these lines.

Fish produces a parade of poem-sacrificers--Arnold Stein, Jackson Cope, Thomas Kranidas, Irene Samuel, J.B.Broadbent--to support his view that God's speech, III. 56-134,leaves the reader cold, and that this is good as the austere literary style of divinity must be preferred to the seductive language of hell. This idea perversely ignores a salient truth about Satan's speeches in BookI and God's in Book III; what works chiefly on the reader's feelings is what is said, not the way it is said.

A rebel leader has suffered a crushing defeat, and for a time has been stunned, but rising from the bottom of the elevator shaft, he swears that he will fight on indefinitely, simply because he refuses to acquiesce in the tyranny of his adversary.This is one of our great mythic figures (Prometheus, Davy Crockett, Athelstan, Tolkien's Aragorn), often enough enacted in reality (the young Charles de Gaulle, William III when he pledged himself to die in the last ditch).Though Milton's verse is magnificent it is fair to say he would have had difficulty spoiling such a concept. It's a fat part.

Many things might be said about the contrast with a tyrant in the cold security of undoubted triumph, torturing his adversary, as Shelley said, with the express intent of exasperating him to deserve new torments, but let me quote one line only:

He with his whole posterity must die.

Many people believe a sentence of death can be justified; but to put a man to death along with all his children...Milton with all his genius multiplied by ten could never make that line part of a becoming speech. The fundamentalist will point out that Joshua massacred the children in Jericho and that Nachon's children were executed when their father stole a wedge of gold. Other Christians will say that the line which outrages me is only a translation into the language of epic poetry of the doctrine of original sin, common to all versions of Christianity. Right;and that doctrine outrages me. That such arguments should be vented in the year 2000 explains why I have created this website. Centuries of Christianity have corrupted academia till massacres of children can be defended with ingenious sophisms.

Adding to the outrage of God's speech is the mendacity of its opening lines when he pretends to blame Satan for breaking his chains in hell and escaping. Milton has taken care that we shall not be deceived by this propaganda; he has told us (I.210-220) that God arranged Satan's escape to set in motion the whole train of causation including Adam and Eve's fall and the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ, and terminating in the last judgment. Joseph Stalin did similar things many times. He would have some high-ranking communist murdered, then publicly deplore the death of his faithful comrade, vowing vengeance on his murderers whoever they might be, and lastly he would exterminate the dead man's followers, thus ridding himself of a rival and all the rival's supporters at one blow.Empson thinks that III.80-86 is "one of God's grisly jokes," but it seems to me rather propaganda to give the angels a false impression of God's innocence in causing the fall of man. God's words from line 80 on are not a tete-a-tete with the Son, but a speech that can be heard by thousands of angels. At X.40, orating to a crowd of angels, God says, "I told ye" what he says at III.92.A public speech would be too solemn an occasion for a paternal jest like the one at V.721.

Not only is the contrast between the courage of Satan and the cruelty of God patent, but Milton even constructed the first three books of his poem to make it more patent by means of a symmetrical plot.In Books I-II, Satan's speeches and the council in hell; in Book III, God's speeches and the council in Heaven. It is as if Milton were saying, "Here, look upon this picture, and on this," forcing the reader to hate God to the limits of the power of poetry. We need a hypothesis to account for this extraordinary state of affairs.

Calvinism attracted millions in the Seventeenth Century chiefly because of the doctrine of unconditional election. In contrast to Roman Catholic devotional literature, which encouraged vigilance in the faithful by hypothesizing the case of a man who, after a long life of virtue and participation in the sacraments, suddenly commits a mortal sin, dies in a freak accident before he has time to repent, and expiates his casual mistake in an eternity of torture, the Calvinist creed asserted that God's decree that an individual should be saved could never be frustrated in so trivial and random a manner; in fact, that it could never be frustrated at all. Hence, if you could persuade yourself that you were one of the elect, you could stop worrying about your salvation;without the slightest qualification, beyond the shadow of a doubt, it was a done deal. The splendid courage and determined confidence that such persons as Cromwell, Knox, and Calvin himself derived from belief in their unconditional election is well known.

The converse of unconditional election was unconditional reprobation, meaning that nine-tenths of the human race cannot be saved no matter what they do, because God willed before he even created them that they should spend their sojourn on earth in total depravity and then should burn in hell; and this decree, like the other, could never be frustrated at all. With their usual contempt for the feelings of ordinary human beings, the Calvinists said that this decree fulfilled God's justice and was done for his glory.C.S. Lewis in his history of Sixteenth-Century English literature compares the carefree attitude of Sixteenth-Century Calvinists towards the fate of the reprobates with the carefree attitude of English leftists of the 1930's towards the fate of the bourgeoisie when the revolution should come. Acceptance of unconditional reprobation became the touchstone of a Calvinist's ability to accept and masochistically love his cruel God. Jonathan Edwards wrote:

From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God's sovereignty, in choosing whom he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased; leaving them eternally to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me....[Later] I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it. I have often since had not only a conviction but a delightful conviction. The doctrine has often appeared exceedingly pleasant, bright and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God.

In like manner, the last sentence of 1984 is "He loved Big Brother."

The doctrine of reprobation included the idea that God predestines all the sins as a result of which the reprobates will deserve hell. This made God in reality the only sinner, a fact that impelled Jacob Harmensen or James Arminius to seek another solution.He replaced unconditional with conditionalelection and reprobation, arguing that God's predestination depends on his foreknowledge of faith in his elect. This had the very great merit of letting the reprobates out of their intolerable predicament, and for this reason does credit to the humanity of Arminius. But to Calvinists, the doctrine destroyed the certainty of election by creating the logical inference that a man with saving faith could lose it totally and end in hell. Arminianism returned Christendom to the Roman Catholic system under which an elect person had to fear damnation to his dying day. For that reason they abhorred it.

Related to the question of unconditional election and reprobation,but not quite identical with it, was the supralapsarian controversy. Calvin held that God had predestined every event, big and small,in the history of the universe. If so, he had predestined Adam's eating of the forbidden fruit,and the supralapsarian party held that he did so because he had already decided to elect one-tenth of the species and reprobate nine-tenths,and needed original sin as a precondition of this, and Adam's offence as a precondition of original sin. The unfairness of his not even giving Adam a chance,no more than he gave the reprobates,galled Arminius, who advanced instead the sublapsarian doctrine: that God foresaw that Adam would eat the forbidden fruit, and responsively to this,decreed election, reprobation, the incarnation and the crucifixion. The Calvinists jeered at a God whose world aborted almost as soon as he made it, forcing him to cope with his own failure by sacrificing his son. But to Milton the sublapsarian doctrine was true and necessary to preserve a modicum of decency in this sadistic God, as he shows clearly at III.92-99;III.111-128.Besides disagreeing with the supralapsarians, Milton resented them;they were the same Presbyterian ministers he had attacked in verse for trying to bring back the tyranny of the Roman Catholic and Anglican clergy.

The surprise in Paradise Lostis the quite novel account of God's plan of salvation. Certain persons are unconditionally elect (III.183-84).Others are conditionally elect, and are tested by prolonged trials of obedience and faith (III. 185-97).Those who fail these tests are conditionally reprobate (III. 198-202). Milton's God gives some humans free passes to heaven while forcing others to buy a ticket.

This eclectic scheme is designed to unite the best features of Calvinism with those of Arminianism. To supply unconditional election,with the exhilarating confidence it gives believers, Milton specifies that some are "elect above the rest."To release the reprobates from their intolerable condition,their damnation is made conditional; no more can it be said that they shall go to hell regardless of what they do or attempt to do.

The commentators have wearied themselves in discussions whether God's speeches in Paradise Lost Book III are Calvinist or Arminian, but in fact Milton's scheme is so original that it requires a new name.Calvin and Arminius both divided mankind in two groups, the elect and the reprobate. The difference was, that Calvin said both were predestined unconditionally and Arminius said both were predestined conditionally.Milton, rejecting both Calvin and Arminius, gives us three groups: the unconditionally elect, the conditionally elect, and the conditionally reprobate.

Jonathan Richardson in his Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost,1734, describes a religious doctrine according to which "Some are elected peculiarly, the rest may be saved complying with the conditions; this is the doctrine of Milton, and 'tis the opinion of the moderate Calvinists."Richardson's "peculiarly" echoes Milton's "peculiar grace"(III.183) strikingly.Did these moderate Calvinists come before Milton, or were they after him? Did Milton, perhaps, invent moderate Calvinism?I should be grateful to any reader of this website who might inform me about this.

Clearly, Milton lay open to the charge of sentimentalism and playing to the gallery by both groups. The Calvinists could maintain that Milton had been tested with their touchstone and had failed;he had confronted the unfairness of the plight of the reprobates and instead of inuring himself to it and eventually finding it pleasant, bright and sweet,he had abolished it. The Arminians might point out that while he had accepted most of their system his logic had not been equal to theirs in accepting its least attractive feature,namely the idea that predestination to heaven is conditional and hence that no one is ever free from the dread described above, from which the Calvinist unconditional election purports to free him. Milton seems to have abandoned logic in a vain attempt to please everyone.

This then is the motive for the deliberate attempt to make God hateful. Milton is assuring us that whatever drove him to assert sublapsarianism, and his division into three groups, it wasn't sentimentalism;he can set forth a repulsive God with the best of them.Further, the sublapsarian doctrine implied that God had to impel Satan, the rebel angels, Adam and Eve to disobey by playing on their feelings, rather than simply decree their disobedience. For the purpose he must grate on their feelings, and incidentally those of the reader. For Milton's contemporaries as for us, Empson's maxim holds good, "Paradise Lostis so good because it makes God so bad."

Milton's sublapsarian scheme puts God in a strange position.His ultimate goal is to promote his son to his own monarchy (III. 313-14) and retire (III.339-41). For the purpose he intends to terrorize the angels with the falls of the rebel angels and of man with the aim of making all obedient to his son. Unable simply, as the supralapsarians would have it, to decree these events,he must instead trick Satan into rebelling and Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit.He has so many ways of stacking the cards against his creatures that success is almost certain, yet it is not certain.Milton's task is to show how, notwithstanding that Satan, Adam, and Eve have free will and might jib, God's scheme works like a circus act or a well-planned bank robbery. To articulate this in detail, Milton represents the mental processes of Satan, Adam, and Eve so minutely that one might say he invented the novel to establish sublapsarianism.

Commentary on Chapter Three

In Chapter II, as we saw, Professor Fish identifies Satan with rhetoric, which he says is bad, and God with logic, which he says is good, in this way trying both to explain the chilling effect God has on the reader, and to turn it into something praiseworthy. In Chapter III he expands this critique of style or language, calling as witnesses Plato, Genesis, John Webster (a linguistic theorist, not the playwright) Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Seth Ward (an astronomer), John Wilkins and Peter Ramus to prove that God and his unfallen creatures all spoke and still speak a perfect language in which each word corresponds exactly to a single thing and language is free of the three damning faults of redundancy, equivocal terms, and metaphor; conversely, Satan, Adam and Eve all begin to speak a redundant, equivocal, and metaphoric language when they become corrupt.Perhaps Fish's book originally had for working title The Epic of Language Corruption or something like, and he changed the emphasis to what it is because the idea is baseless. For we cannot distinguish God's language from Satan's by the presence or absence of redundancy, equivocal terms or metaphors. Is redundancy Satanic? Yet God says:

...whom no bounds Prescribed, no bars of hell, nor all the chains Heaped on him there, nor yet the main abyss Wide interrupt can hold...(III.81-84)

If conciseness had been the aim, one obstacle might have stood for bounds, bars, chains and abyss.

Are equivocal terms bad? God says,

...what rage Transportsour adversary (III.80-81)

The authorial voice, describing God presumably in God's own vein, says that he

...bent down his eye,

His own works and their works at once to view (III. 58-59)

Are metaphors bad? Or, speaking more precisely, are they the characteristic mode of expression of hell, not to be found in the language of heaven? The idea is counter-intuitive;language itself is metaphoric, metaphor is the indispensible tool of every speaker or writer trying to make himself clear, and besides crossing these intractable facts, Milton would apparently be overthrowing the esthetic standards of Shakespeare and the entire Renaissance.Lastly, in Paradise Lost,God loves metaphors:

Will and Reason... ...had serv'd necessity, Not me (III.108-111).

So without least...shadow of Fate (III.120)

Mercy ...shall brightest shine (III.134)

...he shall stand On even ground against his mortal foe (III.178-9).

I will... soft'n stony hearts (III.189-90).

My Umpire Conscience (III.195)

The writers who denounced metaphor in the Seventeenth Century committed the fiasco of creating stunning metaphors even as they tried to convict all metaphor of mendacious intent. Thomas Hobbes said that metaphors were excluded from all rigorous search into truth because "they openly profess deceit."If so, one of the books that openly profess deceit is Leviathan, the book containing this sentiment, for its title and especially its title-page constitute a huge and frightening metaphor.And Hobbes must be trying to deceive the public with his anti-Catholicism in that book, for he expresses it with a magnificent metaphor, that the Roman church is the ghost of the Roman empire, sitting throned on the grave thereof.Thomas Sprat tried to banish metaphor from the Royal Society, but Joseph Glanvill in The Vanity of Dogmatizingwrote that to analyze the relation between the body and the soul was like uniting a sunbeam with a marble statue, or hanging weights on the wings of the wind.The Seventeenth-Century attack on metaphor was silly, and instead of seeking vainly for evidence that Paradise Lost somehow embodies this negative idea of metaphors we should be glad that Milton never shared it.

That the language of the unfallen is just as ambiguous as that of the fallen is finally conceded by Fish who tries to save his vain theory with a desperate distinction: Satan makes frivolous puns about firing the cannon while Eve makes etymological puns about storing food (V.322-4).The reader is baffled by the nonsense of this dichotomy, frivolous pun/etymological pun; Fish might as well have contrasted military airplanes with jet airplanes. We might patch up his meaning by constructing such a dichotomy as frivolous pun/serious pun or etymological pun/non-etymological pun; but it is enough if we understand that Fish, trying to save some miserable remnant of his idea that fallen language is different from unfallen language, is now condemning, not ambiguities as such, but ambiguities that are not etymological.These he fastens on the devils. But Belial's pun on understand at V.625-6 depends on the history of the word, and is quite as etymological as Eve's pun.The whole notion of an unfallen language that is logical versus a fallen language that is rhetorical vanishes, as Bacon said, in the fume of subtle and delightful speculations.

Commentary on Chapter Four

This chapter begins with a deplorable passage of special pleading for God, written by Milton and seconded by Fish. The Christians have always been embarrassed that their loving God should punish millions with suffering and death for an offence so trifling as eating some fruit, and Milton tried several different ways of extenuating the fact.In Areopagiticahe made the apple a mere token of Adam's freedom to choose,and called it a "provoking object."In Christian Doctrine , on the contrary, the eating of the fruit combines so many and such heinous sins that Adam becomes nothing less than a monster for engaging in it:"theft, invasion of the rights of others,sacrilege, deceit," et cetera. This bill of indictment is unconvincing and and one item is blatantly deceptive;"an insensibility to the welfare of their offspring, and that offspring the whole human race."Neither in Genesis nor in Milton's poem does Jehovah inform Adam and Eve of the heritability of the results of eating the fruit. I believe it was Gibbon who first said that Christian special pleading, covered with arguments intended to save it, resembled Milton's angels, clad in armor that only makes them more vulnerable.Jehovah is covered by three layers of evil:he punishes Adam's children, he fails to warn Adam that he will do this, and Milton puts the blame on Adam.

The chapter states boldly in its penultimate sentence that by reading Paradise Lost one learns how to read and by extension how to live, and becomes finally the Christian hero who is, after all, the only fit reader(p. 207). When a university professor says a thing like that, in print, it is clear that Empson has a case. What these neo-Christians are getting from the poem is evil.

The topic of the chapter is all the violence in the epic, and its starting point is the undoubted truth that, as epic violence, it is profoundly disappointing. Many have said so since Samuel Johnson characterized the book containing the War in Heaven as "the favorite of children."But Professor Fish has a new idea:the frustrating and futile quality of the War in Heaven becomes attractive to the reader seeking the Christian virtue of obedience because the good angels, though they accomplish nothing, do exactly as they are told.

Friends, don't you agree that, apart from dealing with small children, obedience is a dreadful bore associated with moral mediocrity?And so, if Milton wrote a whole epic about obedience he created a fiasco?I question whether anybody really likes obedience. Rastignac defying Paris, Moll Flanders determining to become a gentlewoman any way she can, Donne eloping with Ann More, Milton writing that whatever William Chappell did to him was "not to be borne by a man of my spirit,"Milton defying Laud, Milton defying the Licensing Act, Milton defying the Restoration court--these are the people for whose company we make literature our lifelong study. I question whether one obedient person rates more than a single column in the Dictionary of National Biography .

Besides, Christians do not enjoy, any more than other people, dedicating huge exertions to a task only to discover at the end that it is unperformable. George Herbert's ministry at Bemerton producing no results that a man of his talents could take satisfaction in, he wrote:

At length I got unto the gladsome hill

Where lay my hope,

Where lay my heart; and climbing still,

When I had gained the brow and top

A lake of brackish waters on the ground

Was all I found.

With that abashed and struck with many a sting

Of swarming fears,

I fell and cried, Alas my king!

Can both the way and end be tears?

--after which he consoled himself with the belief that a Christian's reward is after death, not before it, adding that death would be a relief"after so foul a journey."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, another poet-turned-priest, and like Herbert frustrated in his ministry, was plunged in such misery that he almost went mad:

Oh, the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall Sheer, frightful, no-man-fathomed...

In short, if the check the loyalist angels encounter from Satan's cannon, and later the comedy of the hills hurled to and fro with jaculation dire, is explained as a huge exercise in obedience, and so justified as better than the Chanson de Roland or the Iliad as Christian humility is better than secular or pagan self-assertiveness, nothing is really mended by this. We already knew that God is forever humiliating the angels by giving them useless tasks, as drill sergeants do to recruits (VIII.238-40). The battle is still an anticlimax, which would appear to be the very worst thing a literary battle could be.

Before, I found that Milton had two reasons for making his God as bad as he did, namely that other men were setting forth fiercely logical, but loathesome, versions of God, and Milton wished not to seem their inferior in toughness;and, secondly, that the sublapsarian doctrine, implying that God must provoke Satan, the rebel angels, Adam and Eve to disobedience, rather than simply decree it, compelled Milton to make God ugly enough to do this in a convincing manner. I have a simple explanation for Milton presenting war as silly: sour grapes--his side had lost the Civil War.

When he was young, Milton believed, consistently with the Calvinist concept of the elect nation, that England's wars were made by God, so that she could either expiate her sins or triumph over her enemies. He attempted an epic about King Arthur and his knights, but abandoned it as soon as he had begun.In Of Reformationwritten when he was 33, he set forth a vision of five foreign invasions ( Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman)and the Wars of the Roses punishing the land for pagan and popish superstitions.Then, England having become protestant,he portrayed God using war in an opposite sense to favor England by defeating the Spanish Armada. The latter engagement was virtually God against the Devil, as "for us...the very maw of Hell was ransack't and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that horrible and damned blast." In conclusion, at the Second Coming of Christ, Milton expects to be heard "offering at high strains in new and lofty measures to sing and celebrate thy divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages."There can be little doubt that the English national epic he was planning would include a glorious war, as the Faerie Queeneas Spenser originally planned it, was to end with a crusade waged by Arthur and Gloriana against Islam.

And then it all went smash:the war of Puritan against Anglican, or Calvinist against Arminian, became a waste of wealth and loss of blood;the Puritan leadership became frightening, hireling wolves whose gospel was their maw, from whom Milton pleaded to be saved. By the time he was ready to write his epic, Milton was determined to be the first epic poet in history to do justice to the futility of war.Renaissance literary critics liked to repeat an epigram of Martial's, Cinna vult pauper videri, et est pauper:Cinna likes to look poor, and that's just what he is. Thus Milton demonstrated that he could write fine war poetry in the impressive first day of battle before reducing war to a farce in the jeering and bowling-green imagery of the second day and the "hills encountered hills" foolishness of the third.

But to say that the War in Heaven is a huge exercise in obedience and for that reason has the anticlimactic structure and grotesque imagery that it does is, yet again, desperate; it is one more wrenching of the text in order to save the concept that Milton succeeded in his attempt to justify his God.

Commentary on Chapter Five

The academic custom of dismissing-ignoring makes this chapter almost unreadable, for Professor Fish never mentions Empson, but in general terms he condemns the tendency to "circumscribe the fall [of Eve and Adam] in a network of circumstance."This refers to Empson's discovery of the subtlest thing God does to Eve to induce her to eat the fruit: he arranges for the dream-angel to say "as we" at V.79 and then for the real angel to say "as we" at V. 499. The context of both phrases is human beings eating special substances and in consequence acquiring the ability to do space-travel, so Eve is led to infer that Raphael confirms the wisdom of the dream-angel's counsel. The other things this Richard-Nixon-like God does to make sure that Adam and Eve will not escape his snares are well-known: he permits Satan to rise from the burning lake; he allows Sin to open hell-gate; he prevents Gabriel from arresting Satan (though Milton justifies this as saving the universe from destruction,he makes it clear that God can render Satan helpless and harmless any time he pleases, IV. 860-861); Raphael distracts Adam and Eve with an endless tale of war in heaven and of creation without ever hinting that Eve might meet the rebel leader disguised as a talking snake. But this clever "as we" is new, and is doubtless one of Empson's most important reasons for writing the book.

As I explained before, Milton's epic is single-mindedly directed against the supralapsarian doctrine, at least as it applies to Satan, Adam, and Eve, while Milton admitted that certain things, at least, are predestined, such as the election of those with peculiar grace (III.183).A cosmos with some creatures predestined and others free may be compared to a paradigm soon to collapse as described in Thomas Kuhn's influential book,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The free creatures are an anomaly in the paradigm; increasingly, the attention both of conservatives defending the paradigm and of radicals attacking it will be focused on the anomaly. Thus, the lengths Milton's God has to go to in order to seduce Adam and Eve while respecting their freedom soon become the most powerful arguments that he is evil. The very care that Milton takes to avoid the supralapsarian doctrine, and not depict a God who simply decrees the fall of the rebel angels and man, drives him to suppose so many underhanded tricks played by God that at last we utter the same cry of outrage whether Adam and Eve are free or predestined.

With great consistency, if nothing else, Professor Fish warns us against doing this, and says that to do so is to repeat Eve's mistake (which makes Empson the serpent).It seems that God was Milton's co-author; "these evasions" (i.e., attempts to blame the falls on God) "undermine our understanding of the situation as God and Milton have instituted it." I had thought that, some time in the first century A.D., God gave up writing poetry. Has Professor Fish a flaming sword that turns every way to drive the Empsonians out of their departments?

Though Saints Paul and Augustine had asserted predestination as mercilessly as Calvin himself, medieval Catholicism through its stress on the sacraments and on good works such as pilgrimages had permitted the average Christian to live as if free will mattered and indeed as if he were employing it every day to earn salvation. Then in the early 16th century predestination came back with a vengeance and precipitated 150 years of wars, persecutions and controversies. Towards the end of that time Milton tried to make the definitive statement with the mixture of conditional and unconditional predestination we have seen.The specter of God's wickedness had never loomed so appallingly as it did in those 150 years and though Milton believed he had palliated it by by asserting the freedom of Adam, Eve, and Satan, he felt defensive about saying so and this defensiveness rings out in God's repeated protestations that he left the human pair free, that they mustn't blame him, that it was their choice and nobody else's. But in 2000 we may ask, what difference does it make, really?Do we care whether an omniscient, omnipotent being compels his creatures or only exploits the difference between his resources and theirs? Whether he decrees their fate or only tricks them into it?

Nevertheless, Northrop Frye has said "The great events in Paradise Lostshould be read as a discontinuous series of crises."Stanley Fish, quoting with approval, says "the reader must not only see this, he must continuously affirm it by refusing at every point to accede to any suggestion which impairs the freedom of such confrontations."This vague language means you must do your best not to see how Sin's opening hell-gate for Satan is connected with Satan's victimizing Eve.To do so might bring on angry thoughts about God, and that must not be. Yet, strangely, Milton would not be pleased by Frye's and Fish's way of reading his poem. He created a most elaborate plot (in both senses of the word plot) to replace the supralapsarian doctrine with the sublapsarian, and he would be puzzled by people trying to ignore its interconnections.

Commentary on Chapter Six

We have now to do with the falls of Adam and Eve, and to begin with, I must quote the most amazing thing Professor Fish says in his wretched book. The poem-sacrificers, besieged by poet-sacrificers hailing Adam's decision to commit suicide as just what Eve calls it, a "glorious trial of exceeding love,"tried to answer what was in fact a rhetorical question, What they would have Adam do. C.S. Lewis said he should chastise Eve and intercede for her. Stanley Fish says Adam should say this: "What you say is persuasive (impregn'd with reason to my seeming),but I would rather not make such a momentous decision without further reflection."

Here, if anywhere, Stanley Fish is pulling the reader's leg. To imagine that Milton's poem could be improved by--to imagine that it could survive--such a piece of bathos as this bureaucratic communique, this dodge, slipped into the place of Adam's magnificent outpouring, is a delusion for a high school student, not a university professor. Fish must believe, either that his friends will not read his book, or that they will take anything from him.

Fish was himself apparently unable to hold a straight face as the author of that bit of dialogue, so he got in line behind C.S. Lewis, and said that Adam should intercede for Eve (Surprised by Sin , p. 336).

Milton in fact composed one of the great Liebestod scenes of western civilization, in the same series with the last moments of Tristan, Troilus, Romeo, Antony, Radames. Empson explained it well enough by saying that Milton liked to pitch his temptations terribly high. I should like to sharpen the focus by saying once more that Milton by combining the Calvinist system with the Arminian had put himself and his characters in a delicate situation. The reader had to be reminded at every moment that Adam was free.

Contrast a sinner who is truly predestined: Macbeth. Before the murder he struggles against his passions of ambition and submissiveness to his wife:"We will go no further in this business."Then he succumbs to the visionary dagger. As soon as the deed is done, there is instant remorse as he looks at his bloodied hand, saying "This is a sorry sight."

Milton's Adam is utterly unlike this. He makes his decision in an instant with no struggle:"Certain my resolution is to die." No hallucination or magic trick deceives him. And, when the deed is done, instead of expressing remorse, he gaily and insolently tramples on God's threat with puns and jests. That his behavior is admirable or deplorable is less clear than that it is free.

Certainly Milton expects the reader to experience feelings of sympathy for Adam and rage against God. The poet himself, frustrated in an affair of the heart, had been ready to "despair in virtue and mutiny against divine providence."But, greatly daring, he created this extraordinary drama to establish the sublapsarian creed. The cost of making Adam undeniably free was to make him so attractive that the great forbidder, as Eve calls him, is perceived as being by a whole dimension a worse tyrant than before.

With wearisome insistence, Fish puts us all in the wrong for feeling this way. He says we must condemn Adam, and admits that we must, for the purpose, do violence to our feelings, or as he puts it, invert our natures, this being "exactly what the poem hopes to achieve by bringing us to put off the Old Adam-- the body of sin, the conformity to the world, the inborn tendency to evil--and to put on the new." Inborn tendency to evil! He doesn't threaten Empson and his adherents with hell-fire, but he might as well do so.

Next come his vague insinuations about reason, leading to a quote from a Puritan preacher, "Reason is a monster, and the root and ground of all infidelity." One infers that in order to condemn Adam and Eve, we must not only invert our natures (i.e., loathe what we love) but abjure reason as well, and its outstanding Seventeenth-Century manifestation, empirical science. A case is made for Milton thinking science is devilish, notwithstanding the enthusiasm he shows for alchemy-chemistry in Il Penseroso 87-88 and Paradise Lost III. 591-605; for zoology, geology and botany in Prolusion III; for Galileo's struggle for the Copernican theory in Areopagitica; for Kepler's theory of planets kept in their orbits by magnetism in Paradise Lost III. 582-3 and VIII. 124. Ignoring all this evidence, Fish seizes on the words cause, effect, taste, reasoning, experience and open eyes in the speeches of Satan and Eve to imply that the poem's message is an attempt to identify original sin with reason in general and experimental science in particular.

This exemplifies the Everywhereness Topos. As Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor put it in "The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism," "one of the most persuasive endeavors that a literary scholar can engage in is to find something (a device, an image, a linguistic feature, a pattern) that no one else has seen--and to find it everywhere." Fish examines 57 lines of dialogue spoken by Eve and finds nine instances of the words quoted above to show that the lines are full of reason or experimental science or both. But close examination renders this claim dubious. For example: is the word taste typical of reason or science? Adam puns on its English meaning of the palate sense and its Latin meaning of knowbut the first has no relation, and the second very little, to reason or science. One can taste, sapere, in the sense of experience, anything:masturbation, Handel's Messiah, roast duck. The relation with reason is lost. Unfortunately, Eve uses taste more often than any other word in Fish's list:

make them gods who taste (866)

And hath been tasted such (867)

I/Have also tasted (874)

Thou therefore also taste (881)

Lest thou not tasting (883)

tasting this fair fruit (972)

Taste so divine (986)

freely taste (988)

This cascade of tastesgives poor support to Professor Fish's claim that the two speeches are full of reason and science, and he seems to know it. His conventional method of showing (on p. 253 of Surprised by Sin) that a word such as effector tasteoccurs in the text as proof of his theory is to italicize the word. But he italicizes taste only once (866). Two tastes are in Roman and the other five are left out. Apparently Fish decided that taste supported his case, then decided it did not, and finally split the difference by entering one taste in evidence and omitting the other seven.

For a second example, is the phrase open eyes necessarily related to reason or science? Eve uses it in a context of pure passion:

...I feel

... not death, but life

Augmented, opened eyes, new hopes, new joys,

Taste so divine... (986)

And, for that matter, eyes can be a metaphor for faith, as at III. 53.

If we read the same speeches by Eve, looking for indications of passion rather than reason, we find:

agony of love till now/Not felt (858-9)

pain of absence(861)

dilated spirits, ampler heart (876)

For bliss, as thou hast part, to me is bliss(879)

One heart, one soul in both (967)

linked in love so dear /To undergo with me one guilt,

one crime (971)

not death, but life/Augmented, new hopes, new joys, Taste

so divine(984-86)

The speeches are not expositions of reason but arias of passion. This is exactly what we should have expected. Together with almost every poet of the Renaissance, Milton feared the power of passion,which he called appetite, not that of reason (IX.1127-31). In the fatal moment,Eve speaks to Adam in a voluble torrent of various passions.

Attempting to demonstrate overreliance on reason and foreshadowings of modern science in Eve's speeches, Professor Fish appears to have collected evidence in a hasty manner, defied the plain sense of the text, ignored counter-examples and in general committed every intellectual misdemeanor one can commit to huddle up a book in a hurry.

Commentary on Chapter Seven

This chapter comes eventually to the point by referring to "the flat, prosy, almost clinical drone" of Michael's long narration to Adam of the history of the world. Compared to the other ten books, the last two are a flat prosy drone. If anyone tries to condemn the entire poem for this reason, the remedy is to send him or her to Sir William Davenant's Gondibert or Abraham Cowley's Davideis and when (s) he has read 2000 lines, ask him or her in all candor if Milton at his worst is not much better than other Seventeenth-Century epic poets at their best.

That Milton's last two books are a prosy drone--except for one sudden flash of tremendous poetry about Eden becoming a barren island (XI. 829-35) and another as Adam and Eve are hustled out of the garden, forming the conclusion (XII. 625-49)--must now be explained away like the attractiveness of Satan, the repulsiveness of God, and the rightness of Adam's eating the fruit. For, as I said in my home page, ethics and esthetics are the same thing. Commit yourself to the proposition that Milton succeeded in his defense of God, and you shall end up defending the poetry of the last two books, simply as poetry.

As before, Fish puts the reader in th wrong and maintains that a prosy drone, which would be a defect in a lesser poem,is in this one, because of its sublime theme, a merit.He points out that phrases that occur in the construction of Pandemonium, Book I, recur in Tubal-Cain's invention of metallurgy, Book XI, and that this is a greatbeauty of the poem, for it shows that humanity, like the angels in hell, is fallen. But I must not try to paraphrase such a masterpiece as the sentence in which Professor Fish points out the resemblances of XI-XII to the earlier books. Here it is verbatim:"the reader...brings together within a single framework incidents he has not connected previously, thereby gaining an insight into the sameness of all spiritual experience. Despite its predictability then, the sequence is illuminating and even moving."

(In passing note that Fish exhorts us not to circumscribe the fall of Eve in a web of circumstance. That is, we must not link her fall to earlier incidents in the poem. Now we learn that we must by all means link the incidents of the last two books with earlier incidents. When the making of connections might exonerate Eve, fie on connections; when it might redeem the last two books, hasten to make them. I have called these readers the poem-sacrificers but what they really destroy is their own ability to read it.)

To return to the sentence I just quoted verbatim, notice that the sameness of all spiritual experience is here posited as a concept we all share, like the national debt, but it is so abstract, so general and so dubious that if Professor Fish had written a book the length of Surprised by Sinto define it, to illustrate it with examples, and to prove that it exists, he would have been better employed than he was.

To hide your lame meaning, or the fact that you have no meaning at all,behind abstract words is a vice of schools and their inmates from Clifton Junior High School to the innermost sanctuaries of the Ivy League. And though I have consistently attacked Professor Fish, let me give him his due. He almost always puts his false ideas into clear, concrete, specific words. The cossacks in the 1812 campaign who resolved not to fire on Murat because of his courage are an emblem of the respect I feel for that (only I'll fire).

But in this chapter he falters.As Milton seems to have got tired when he wrote Books XI and XII, Fish seems to have got tired while he tried to defend them. His prose becomes abstract, general, vague, and uninterpretable:

In this way the reader comes to the end of the passage fully attuned to the reverberations of its allusiveness and yet at the same time in step with the surface movement of the poem as it proceeds more or less in sequence towards a conventional denouement(pp. 305-306).

...life is real only when it is lived with an awareness that through it one participates in the image of eternity the poem gestures towards(p.310).

...the linear presentation of history becomes a viable mode when within it can be seen the similaic form, that is, when we come to regard the time-space mould of experience as an unfortunate consequence of our fortitude and mortality, a refraction of reality rather than reality itself (p.317).

From their different vantage points, one discovering, the other anticipating, Adam and the reader have been working to extract the rhythm of eternity from the irregular fluctuations of the visible world, and when the mainspring of that rhythm is manifested in the rainbow, their consciousnesses are taken over by it, and they rush together with increasing speed toward the intersection of divine purpose and human destiny (p.321).

The book has simply fallen apart.As the author loses control of his words and forgets their meaning, he mixes a metaphor that might have inspired Salvador Dali: the mainspring in the rainbow.He coins empty categories: the surface movement in the poem, as if there were a subsurface movement; the time-space mould of experience, as if there were experiences outside of time and space;the intersection of divine purpose and human destiny, as if even a Christian could distinguish between the two.Fish asks us to envision relations, defying comprehension, among abstractions. How do I become attuned to the reverberation of an allusiveness? How do I participate in an image of eternity? How does a poem gesture towardsthisimage? How does a presentation become viable (see H.W. Fowler on viable )?How do purpose and destiny intersect ? How do I rush toward their intersection ? And lastly, what reason could there be for creating this neologism, similaic?

When Fish seizes on a detail, it turns out that in his haste he has misinterpreted it. Concerning these lines--

...By his own nation, slain for bringing life;

But to the cross he nails his enemies...(XII.414-15)

--Fish writes:"the most significant... detail is the reversability of 'nails' and 'slain.'"(p.326) "Reversability" evidently means the two words are palindromes. But they are not palindromes. A man searching for interesting things to say about Paradise Lost, XI-XII,may well produce the same nonsense, or should I say similaic nonsense, as in the made-conversation racket. And speaking of nonsense, when Fish tries to quote a phrase of At a Solemn Music ," disproportion'd sin/ Jarr'd against nature's chime," he produces "Christ's godlike act...dispels the jarring chimes of disproportion'd sin in the universe ('At a Solemn Music')."--p. 329. The innocent chime, which was jarred against by sin in Milton, becomes pluralized to chimes which themselves do the jarring in Fish. This is unfortunate, as nature's chime is good sense in Renaissance cosmology (being in fact the sphery chimeof Comus1021, the music of the spheres) but the chimes of sin is gibberish.

Commentary on the Appendix

We are now at the end of Chapter Seven and at page 332. Professor Fish's attempt to glorify the last two books of Paradise Lost has expired, but not before it bursts an "Appendix: Notes on the Moral Unity of Paradise Lost ." This asserts that obedience to God is the supreme good (pp. 332-3); that Adam's love for Eve and his love for God are the same thing, and hence it makes no sense for him to rebel against God out of love for Eve (pp. 333-336);that Satan's deterioration is owing to change, an inherent property in him, and hence that A.J.A. Waldock's description of it as a degradation imposed from without has no foundation (pp.336-339). All these topics have been gone over before;the three parts of the Appendix should be in the text, Part i in Chapter Two, Part ii in Chapter Six, Part iii in Chapter One or Two. Fish apparently had afterthoughts, mostly about his low opinion of A.J.A. Waldock, but by this time was too tired of his own book to begin work anew and weave them into the text in the appropriate places.

The attack on Waldock is, however, ineffectual, depending as it does on platitudes of Christian orthodoxy such as the following: "If all values are one, the clash of any two is impossible (or the creation of a distorting vision)..."Hence either Adam's love for Eve should not have made him rebel against God, or else it was not really love. This statement depends on one even more sweeping,that in Milton's universe "'all things are of God'(de deo)."(In passing let me ask, what does Professor Fish find in the Latin de deothat he can't find in the English "of God"? A critic tossing Latin tags to show he knows theology should find better tags.)Amazingly, Fish fails to document this platitude, which is not even Christian;the existence of Evil, an entity radically opposed to God, to be acknowledged without being exalted into a second god, has always been maintained by Christians, among them Thomas Aquinas who, in his Summa Theologica , cited the existence of Evil as an objection to his own five proofs of the existence of God.

Moreover,if Milton described in Paradise Lost a world in which no two values can clash, he rejected so large a part of Greek civilization that I can't see how much is left. In the Iliad, the Greeks and the Trojans are both brave people but they clash. In Antigone, Creon has law on his side and Antigone has her duty to her dead brothers on hers. In the Oresteia , Orestes has the duty to avenge his father and the Erinyes have the duty to punish matricide.Classics teachers have always taught that in Greek tragedy everybody is in the right. Now we must imagine Milton hurling all these books in the trash and muttering, "Away with all these stories about clashing values. I shall write an epic in which values never clash."It doesn't read that way. Satan's former brightness as an angel, though impaired, remains in hell like the brightness of the sun shining through clouds. Adam's wish to know how the solar system works clashes with God's need to be amused by making it incomprehensible. Gorgeous, gaudy Pandemonium clashes with the opal towers of heaven. The serpent, guileful before Satan invades him, clashes with the innocence of the other animals. Milton could have titled his work Clashing Values, A Poem in Twelve Books .

But, more importantly, I reject a Milton who is such a child. His Christian faith, condemn it though I must, gave him the strength he describes in Sonnet XIX. It could not have done this had it amounted to such a refusal to face obvious facts as Fish's formulation, "The clash of any two values is impossible."

Henry Adams describes how, in 1870, he watched his sister for ten days while she died of tetanus, talking cheerfully and laughing between bouts of convulsions. As a Nineteenth-Century Calvinist he was supposed to believe that this was decreed by God to test and train his sister's virtues and that by his grace she passed the test. Instead he wrote:"the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to men only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but he could not be a Person."

His sister's death offered Adams the choice of blasphemy or atheism, and he chose atheism. Milton, too, confronted this choice, rejected atheism, and presented something he thought better than blasphemy (XI.466-499).He confronted the issue squarely and earns one's respect for that, but he would not if he had written a poem in which no two values ever clash.

Summary

Let us now list briefly the intellectual crimes and misdemeanors Professor Fish committed in order to produce his deplorable book. He completely missed the point of the poem, which was not to affirm traditional Christianity but to examine the motives of Satan, Adam and Eve in a way that would make Milton's combination of sublapsarianism and supralapsarianism convincing;he plunged headlong into the Didactic Heresy; he pursued a chimera in the form of his theory that Satan speaks rhetoric while God speaks logic, ignoring the evidence against it; he tried to construct a dichotomy out of frivolous and etymological ; he labored hopelessly to make the last two days of the War in Heaven into great poetry by maintaining that their true theme is obedience; he tried to refute Empson and ignore him at the same time; he insisted we make a conscious effort not to see the connections between Eve's fall and the earlier events in the poem; he praised the virtue of obedience as if he were talking, not merely about children, but to them; he created an absurd speech for Adam to make to Eve, declining the fruit; he commanded us to "invert our natures" in order to condemn Adam, and added exhortations in the vein of a medieval preacher; searching for interesting things to say about Books XI and XII, he produced empty phrases such as the sameness of all spiritual experience , and then, becoming exhausted, produced boilerplate with garbled metaphors such as the mainspring in the rainbow and became unable to perceive that nailsis not slainspelt backwards, or to quote "At a Solemn Music" without hashing it up; having afterthoughts on some topics he had extensively discussed, he put them in an Appendix instead of in the text where they belong; he stated that no two values ever clash in Paradise Lost, whereas clashes of two values virtually define the poem.

As before I called this book the ne plus ultraof poem-sacrificing, so I can now state the converse; commit yourself to poem-sacrificing and this is where you shall end up, in a critical posture so grotesque, so false and finally so boring that you will be unable to copy-edit your own books. All future criticism of Milton must begin with the admission that he made a mistake, reducing his great verse to become the vehicle of a theological idea that, to say the least, has itself lost all power over the mind of the reader.