political climate into which PL was born

“THE RESTORATION of the English monarchy in 1660 behind the facade of a ritualistic and scholarly high churchmanship ushered in the Age of Secularism. After 1660 many poets were to profess a nominal Christianity. Pope, the Deist, was to remain in communion with Rome. The King of England would still be styled “Defender of the Faith.” But the centre of gravity in English culture would no longer be Christian, although persistent habits of sentiment and ethic might obscure for a while the new situation.” pp 3

Fire rebuttal of Empson here – refusal to engage with the text as intended

“Is it not by now clear that a verbalist and formalist like William Empson seriously limits his critical method when he treats of the Christian paradoxes of Donne and Herbert as though they were born of Donne and Herbert, as though they had no life before and beyond the poems in which Empson happens to find them?” pp5

Something like this in the conclusion when discussing the extent to which Milton may be appreciated aesthetically by modernity

“The scholarly corrective had to be administered. But perhaps it does not in itself close the case. If we assume that a tradition of image and symbol persists into the poetry of the seventeenth century from the very earliest Christian times, can we also assume that Herbert was read in the same way by Anglican, Catholic, and Puritan, that a typological image like Blood of the Lamb has the same force in Crashaw as in Milton, or that a twentieth century reader, with knowledge but without faith, can receive the full aesthetic impact of a seventeenth century Christian poem? Can we assume, as some do, that the specifically aesthetic effect of a poem is residual, is what is left after extraneous coverings of meaning and belief have been rotted away by time, that naked structural “tension,” that “paradox” and “ambiguity” as things-in- themselves without root or roof, are presented only at this late last sub specie eternitas, and that therefore only now is it possible to appraise the distant poetry of Christianity in the exclusively aesthetic order?” pp 5

Dogma before Freudian symbol lol

Include in PR of Oedipus

“The word dogma frightens us today, and we try to be rid of it. But we are concerning ourselves with Christian poetry, and Christianity i is a dogmatic religion. Christianity demands of the — believer a certain precision of belief. Christianity has a precise use for its own symbols—a fact which we would do well to take into account before attempting to interpret Christianity to itself with the aid of Freud and Suzanne Langer. For no matter how strongly we may be inclined to psychologize the symbols of the Christian faith, to explain them in terms of the “quest myth” and the “father image” (and thereby to explain them away), we must rernember that for Christians the great symbols of revelation and dogma have ontological as well as psychological reference.” pp 7 - 8

Include in SA discussion of Carey’s 9/11 ism lol

Milton’s poetry bears dogmatic stamp. Its beauty is derived from this, not its application to modernity

Milton disagreed with this acc to his "priest, poet, king" thing

“The Christian poet is not a preacher. Nor is his end the salvation of souls. Like any artist he seeks to create beauty. His end is aesthetic and not moral. Art whether Christian, Buddhist, or Freudian is still art.” pp 8

Include in expulsion from the Garden. Malcolm Catholocizes Milton’s poem

“Some of the implications of the dogma, for art.as well as for life, are certainly these:. Though the flesh is frail, and though nature herself has suffered the wound of sin, the Incarnation redeems the flesh and the world, laying. nature and the reasonable faculty open once more to the operation of the. supernatural. In other words, the Incarnation makes possible, indeed demands, the sacramental vision of reality. The flesh, the world, things, are restored to dignity because they are made valid again. ” pp 10

Perhaps split this quotation between intro and conclusion a la “I believe in the Pterodactyl!” – but I don’t really want to throw my hat in with Ross

“Is it surprising that we prefer the primitive myth stained with wish-fantasy to the theological symbol ordered by thought? PP In such a temper we cannot, with any conviction, hold to a positive progressive bias against the mediaeval culture. It is even fashionable these days to be a mediaevalist, to specialize in the Middle Ages, to found academies which contain the Summa, Chartres, the fabliaux, precisely as the geologist’s box contains specimens of the pre-Cambrian. We hunt the museum piece. And if we philosophize our task, we confess that we do no more than hunt, disinterestedly, exhausted symbols, the fossils of a process of symbolization no longer living whereby man once tried to pin his shadow to the sky. We make so bold even to compare the fossil pieces with the evolved structures of living styles in art, just as we might compare the wings of the pterodactyl and the sparrow. But let no one dare accuse us of believing that the pterodactyl lives!” pp 14-15

definition of symbol from Bevan

“Bevan carefully distinguishes two major types of symbol. “There are visible objects or sounds which stand for something for which we already have direct knowledge. Such symbols are not intended to give us any information about the nature of things or things symbolized but to remind us of them. . . . The other kind of symbol purports to give information about the things they symbolize, to convey knowledge of their nature which those who see or hear the symbols have not had before or have not otherwise.” !” pp25

C.f. Lutheranism & Empsonian pessimism

“For Luther, of course, original sin is total in its effect. Man’s sin is incurable. Even his good works are no more than blasphemous presumption. Only the act of faith, the belief in God’s mercy and the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, can save him from damnation. The sinner in being saved does. not become holy. He remains as corrupt as Adam. Christ’s righteousness does not begin to live within him. It is merely imputed to him, and God, for the sake of His Son’s sacrifice and pain, winks, presumably, at the ugly reality.” pp 46

The extent to which Milton succeeds in his task of justifying the wayes of God may be observed or measured by the volume of criticism seeking to co-opt his triptych to suit wholly disparate atheistic or catholicized ends.

There was a transformation or reduction of Sacramant to mere symbol during the protestant reformation.

“As Dom Gregory Dix points out, the Catholic view of the church was destroyed at one stroke by the exclusively emotional and interior nature of this novel doctrine. “The idea of The Church was reduced to the only one compatible with Protestantism—it was regarded chiefly as the divinely founded society for continually proclaiming the history of redemption as it happened long ago in Judaea, and so challenging every individual to make the personal act of faith which alone serves.” pp 46

There was a transformation or reduction of Sacramant to mere symbol during the protestant reformation.

“By the very fact that it can exist only within its own feeling for itself, this new religious individualism constitutes far more than-a denial of particular Catholic dogmas; it effectively denies the possibility of any dogma as a symbol “behind which we cannot see.” It denies the possibility of dogmatic objectivity. It not only annihilates the Catholic Eucharistic symbols; it ensures that no religious symbol can have more than a personal psychological force or reference.” pp 47

TODO: cite The Question of Anglican Orders by Dix

PR is Lutheran in Jesus “sober” or “abstemiousness” and its purge of sacramanetal significance

“It is instructive to observe how Luther’s own’ conceptualization of the Eucharist hopped from one level of opinion to another as the ‘import of his doctrine of justification took hold of him. In 1523 he brought out a new Latin Mass, the Formula Missae et Communionis. His main concern at this timé was to eliminate from the liturgy anything suggesting the sacrificial character of the Mass. However, he retained an emphasis on the reality of Christ’s Presence on the altar. When Zwingli attacked the formula as a concession to Catholic .superstition, Luther replied with his “doctrine of Christ’s Ubiquity.” As Christ is everywhere, he is already in the bread and wine, already in the soul of the believer. The function of the Eucharistic act is therefore not to effect a real change in the elements but to deepen in the believer an awareness of Christ’s Presence. Such an argument defends the Real Presence by abolishing it. And, logically, it abolishes the Eucharist except as a stimulant to individual perception. Gone, of course, is the analogical awareness of the simultaneous Presence of the Mystical, the Historical, and the Glorified Body of Christ. Gone is the corporate sense of participation in the redemptive act. There is left a simple univocal sense of an almost pantheistic Christ, to be apprehended only by religious feeling. ” pp 47

Zwingli a Puritan

“Zwingli completed the destruction of the Catholic firmament of symbol. In his thought, symbol and fact are fully and finally put apart.

The body and blood of Christ are nothing else than the word of faith, namely that His body which died for us and His blood which was shed for us on the Cross, redeemed us.22

In the Holy Eucharist the real body of Christ is present by the contemplation of faith. Thus it is, those who give thanks to the Lord for the benefit conferred on us in His Son, recognize that He took teal flesh, that in it He really suffered, that He really washed away our sins by His blood, so that everything done, by Christ becomes as it were present to them by the contemplation of faith.29

“The real body of Christ is present,” but only by “the contemplation of faith.” The memory of the real is substituted for the real as such. Psychological act replaces ontological fact. Yet the old Catholic words are still used. Here, surely, is an instance of the decline of symbol into metaphor, of the unfleshing of the word. Here we look behind a symbol behind which we cannot look, and we see exactly what we want to see. ” 49

Good P to include when introducing Calvin – definitely want to flesh out more information about all the reformation thinkers

“It is Calvin who first stresses the idea, pervasive in Anglican theology, that the Eucharist insofar as it can be called a sacrifice, is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving and therefore can have nothing to do with a “renewal” of Calvary, or with the efficacious remission of sins. The word sacrifice in Calvinist theology is drained of its biblical and traditional content. Sacrifice in Calvin is as nonsacrificial as Presence, in Zwingli, is absent. The semantic difficulties mount. It will soon be no simple matter to write a simple Christian poem—or to read it.” pp 51

Include in the nuance about how predestination is wrongly attributed to Calvin

“For Calvin, no form of worship can be acceptable that is not specifically authorized by Scripture. Man is corrupt; his works cannot be pleasing to God. Therefore, ritual not prescribed by the Bible is positively sinful. For churchmen, and poets, heedful of both masters, the choice had to be between a thoroughgoing rejection of ancient liturgical and ritualistic symbol and a carefully selective use of such bits and pieces of traditional symbol as can be disinfected of germinal Catholic implication.” pp 51

“In the main, then, the firmament within which seventeenth century Christian poetry is conceived, is determined by the conflicting revolutions in Eucharistic dogma precipitated by Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. Such a generalization awaits, of course, the support of chapters to come. Meanwhile, it is proper to keep in mind certain consequences of the sixteenth century revolution in Eucharistic dogma, consequences in idea and attitude which leave their mark on the firmament of poetry: The sacramental efficacy of the Eucharist is now at least in doubt. The corporate nature of Christian life and worship is either denied or forced to find a new and non-Eucharistic rationalization. The language of crucial Christian symbol is either reduced to mere metaphor or made uncertain and treacherous by the confused and vacillating relationship now obtaining between dogma, concept, and rhetoric.” pp 54

As Px poetry departs the eucharistic firmament, it necessarily approaches the secular

“The influence of each of the main dogmatic tenets of the continental Reform will be observed in English Christian poetry of the seventeenth century. And it will be seen that as a result of the multiple dogmatic pressures that converge in the period, the firmament of poetic symbol from the early years of Elizabeth to the settlement of William and Mary is characterized by incredible confusion and continuous motion. … Anglican poetry, rooted in sacramentalism, but tinged also with the pseudo-sacramentalism of Luther and the antisacramentalism of Calvin and Zwingli, moves by zigzags, detours, and returns, and presents us with a difficult but fascinating problem in aesthetics. It is to Anglican poetry, and to the conflicting dogmatic and social pressures put upon it, that we must go first-—and last— for a vision of the new firmament of Christian poetry taking shape in the seventeenth century.” pp 54

Aesthetic retention of Catholicism throughout reformation poetry

“It would be unfair to ignore the persistence of a Catholic party in the Establishment and to put a Protestant label on the whole of Tudor and Stuart churchmanship. And it is simply mistaken to regard the Anglican situation of the time as a miraculous via media, a pure golden thread of patristic (and reasonable) doctrine and practice without knot or snarl, unspotted either by the rich purple of Rome or by the thin milk-white of Geneva. This myth of a gentle Anglican middle way, comforting as it may be to those who must read back a sweet and tidy reasonableness into a precarious and turbulent past, has done much to damage our understanding of seventeenth century poetry. The Anglican firmament is neither wholly Protestant nor wholly Catholic, and the opposing theological and practical tensions are never truly resolved.” 55

Lmao @ use of the word ‘annihilate’ C.f. Milton’s attempt at Px poetry

“Without doubt Fletcher has an almost patristic ‘flair for the language of paradox. However, his poem [Christ’s Victory and Triumph] consists of three main stylistic layers: the paradoxical, the allegorical, the sensuous. Not only do these layers remain separate, fail to cohere in an artistic totality: they annihilate each other. In brief, the proper dogmatic implications of Fletcher’s paradox are contradicted by the conceptualizations of his allegory and made wholly irrelevant to as final layer of sensuous rhetoric.” pp 81

C.f. the arch trinity of Sin and Death as crude, indecorous figurations of virtue or vice

“Remember that this contention of Justice and Mercy occurs in the presence of a bewildered Father and in the absence of a purposeless Son.” pp 82

Idk how he can draw this comparison at this location in his analysis. PArticularly when discussing the war in heaven

“Christ does not act. He is silent and still and lovely. He is exhibited to confound the world, the flesh, and the devil. He was absent during His victory on heaven. He is passive and alone during His victory on earth. The perspective of motion, of the journey of the Christian in union with Christ, is thus denied. The idea of Christ is manipulated for diverse ethical and spiritual ends; as an idea, Christ is even adored. But He is here the Word illustrated by the flesh and no longer the Word made Flesh. As we will note later, Milton’s Christ is the Christ of Fletcher. And Milton’s vast structures of sound and sight will be seen as the imposing substitute for a shattered liturgy, a massive objective correlative for an interior predicament. For Milton,like Fletcher, is forced to be an illustrator.” pp 85

doctrine that the state is superior to the church in ecclesiastical matters

Lickingest of boots

“I would not and need not argue that Shakespeare’s analogical sense of history is as secure as Dante’s. And Shakespeare is not all of a piece. No doubt one can detect points of infection both in the early and late plays through which seep slowly the diseases of Erastianism and pessimism.” pp 89

Unfair to judge Milton just a neoplatonist given the climate of the time

“In philosophy, concern for the process of nature displaces the proper metaphysical concern for value. Meanwhile, the revival of neo-Platonism in the period goes in an opposite direction, threatening to spiritualize man out of all recognition. A wholly nonsacramental mysticism develops as a vessel. for the life of the spirit set free from world, flesh, and time. No wonder that society falls victim to the Machiavellians and that knowledge is finally captured by the materialists. There were no defences left against these marauders. ” pp 91

Mention when describing diggers – reformationists co-opting Calvin to suit their needs

“One soon discovers that there are marked differences between the poetic-historical symbols of Catholic and Protestant-minded Anglicans. It is not surprising that there should be a difference between the historical symbols of churchmen (of whatever altitude) and nonchurchmen. Nor would one expect to find conformity within dissent. Calvinist, Quaker, and Digger do not share the same historical bias. Yet the diversity of symbolization and bias is not so slippery as one might expect. When one moves from the more Catholic Anglicans leftward, one encounters a strikingly proportionate series of rationalizations concocted of apt accommodations between fragments of Christian doctrine and the various aspirations of particular social groups or classes. For example, Calvin’s terrifying distortion of the Pauline doctrine of predestination is further distorted by English Calvinists to fit their immediate revolutionary needs. ” pp 94

Ross is like a foil for Empson in his dogmatic evaluation of Px (from a super Catholic pov)

Ironically, deism adheres to horseshoe theory, and so both Empson and Ross agree in the abandonment of history by the God of PL

“The Archangel Michael, in the final books of the poem, displays to Adam the consequences of his sin. The history of the world is unrolled before Adam’s eyes. After the long agony of pre-Christian history has passed before him, Adam cries out with joy at the entry of Christ into time. But his joy is shortlived. For Adam discovers that after the brief apostolic age the heaven of the Word is lost. Worldliness infects the church. Even the Reformation does not reform, and the world wags on “to good malignant, to bad men benign,” until the last days of history when Christ comes again, not to inaugurate the Millennium but “to dissolve Satan and his perverted world.”” pp 96

“This is not the place for a careful analysis of the Eucharistic theology of each of these poets. Obviously Milton’s rejection of Catholic dogma is more thoroughgoing than Vaughan’s. But it will be observed in the poetry of Anglicans, as well as in the poetry of an avowed antisacramentalist like Milton, that time is never understood to be in any way contained by the Presence of Christ.” pp 96

Ross misses or neglects the fact that Milton never calls Jesus/SoG the “Christ” – quick to project his own dogma, and so he is disappointed by Milton

The Catholic logos is perpetual, Milton’s is decided temporal

“In Catholic theology the historical Christ of Galilee, the Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father in Heaven, the sacramental Christ of the altar, the Christ of the Mystical Body are, analogously and actually, one Christ. Perpetuating His Mystical Body in time by the sacramental renewal of Calvary, Christ joins to Himself not only historical man, but also the works of man and therefore the concrete historical event. This is not to say that ‘Christ is identical with history, becomes history, but rather that the Incarnation extends itself within history, perpetually reordering it, reshaping its broken structures, never abandoning history, but redeeming it.” pp 98

Horse shoe theory / abdication

“In such poetry the loss of “the historical concrete” is obvious, and the connection between this loss and the loss of traditional Eucharistic theology is equally obvious. And there should be little difficulty in seeing how a theological drift of this kind prepares for the “extricationism” of poets like Vaughan and Traherne and the Milton of Paradise Lost. PP But if Milton’s pessimistic account of history (as abandoned by a Christ who returns to it only for the burning) is anti-Eucharistic, the optimistic antithesis of such an account is equally anti-Eucharistic. For the redemptive action of Christ is not completed by time, although it operates in time and through time. It does not come to rest in Charlemagne—or in Charles I. It is not an Erastian process aiming at the exaltation of particular kings or peoples. Christ did not offer Himself first and always for His Englishmen. Nor is His sacrifice fulfilled in “the historical concrete” by the return of Arthur or by the defeat of the Armada. Any such nationalistic millenarianism is quite contrary to the implications for history of Catholic Eucharistic theology.” pp 103

dialectics

“In the Catholic view, the church itself, the Bride of Christ, the visible extension in time of the Incarnation, is ever and inevitably infected by sin. There is always tension between the sacramental holiness of the church and the historical sin of the church, just as there is always tension between the Presence of Christ in history and the denial of Christ by history. But if in this situation there is no ground for complacency, neither is there ground for despair. The redemptive process is never arrested.” pp 104

Banger, but keep to myself lol. Maybe include in terms of Milton’s tact where Dante couldn’t help but beck to contemporary issues

“The danger inherent in any anti-Eucharistic view of history is that success in any given historical circumstance is finally as fatal to it as failure. Christianity, in short, endangers itself as much by the optimistic accommodation to history as by the pessimistic withdrawal from it. Certainly it would not do for us to mistake an optimistic acceptance of history, bred and nourished by a happy chance of events, for an analogical perception of history, bred and nourished by Eucharistic dogma. An optimism of the former kind is perishable because it cannot be weaned from the mother that bore it. A mere change of circumstances may convert it quickly into its opposite.” pp 105

“It must be remembered that Spenser in his view of the Eucharist and the Romish “cup of abomination” is scarcely less Protestant than Milton.! For Spenser, England’s greatness is fulfilled by the Virgin Queen. In the myth of the return of Arthur, one is aware of a striking secular parallel to the Christian figura. Elizabeth “encloses or fulfills” the promise of Arthur, and though at one level of the allegory Arthur indeed symbolizes divine grace, it is quite clear that Spenser understands spiritual fulfillment as possible only by way of a nationalistic fulfillment and in terms of a theology which is at once Erastian and anti-Eucharistic. Because, and only because, the Golden Age has seemed to return with the defeat of Rome and the rule of this latter-day English Virgin, history teems with possibilities and the Garden of Adonis assures the fecundity of time.” pp 105-6

Popery by any other name. Erastianism

Milton dislike Anglicans for similar reasons that he disliked Catholics

Mention alongside Laud??

“The prayer is not that he may always and sedulously consult the will of parliament (and convocation), but that he may incline his will to God’s will, that he “knowing whose minister he is may above all things seek the honour and glory of God”; and that “we (duly considering whose authority he hath) may faithfuily serve, honour and humbly obey him.” Prayers for the king (and his kin) occupy a much larger place in the Anglican service than do prayers for the Pope (and his intentions) in the Catholic rite. And there can be no gainsaying the fact that in all the prescribed Anglican services, prayers for bishops and clergy are relatively scant and decidedly secondary. The crown is almost the focal symbol in Anglican devotion. This emphasis has never been altered, although by the reign of William and Mary it had become incongruous to the point of the ludicrous.” pp 111

prelacy

The discordant english church

Def want to cite Pansebeia: or a view of all religions in the world (london 1658 pp 239)

“It must also be recognized that within the doctrinal bedlam of the whole Stuart period, any notion of the church thinking and acting as an autonomous, self-instructed organism is sheer delusion. A striking passage in a treatise by the Reverend Alexander Ross, a chaplain to Charles I, gives us a vivid picture of the religious situation in Caroline England and reveals both the confusion and the impotence of church and sects.

Some reject scripture, others admit no other writings but scripture. Some say the devils shall be saved . . . others that there are no devils at all . . . Some will have all things in common, some not. Some will have Christ a body only in Heaven, some everywhere,. some in the Bread, others with the Bread, others about the Bread, others under the Bread, and others that Christ’s Body is the Bread or the Bread His Body. And others again that this Body is transformed into his Divinity. Some will have the Eucharist administered in both kinds, some in one, some not at all... . Some will make Christ two Persons, some give him but one Nature and one Will. ... The main causes of these distractions are pride, self-love, ambition, contempt of Church and Scripture, the Humour of Contradiction, the Spirit of Faction, the Desire of Innovation . . . the Want or contempt of Authority, Discipline, and order in the Church. . . . Therefore wise Governors were forced to authorize Bishops, Moderators or Superintendents (call them what you will) for regulating, curbing and punishing such luxurious wits as disturbed the peace of the Church and consequently the State... .” pp 116

Reformationist confusion – include in one of the earlier chapters to set the tone on reformation aesthetics and beliefs

Anglican dilemma was a lack of coherent dogma

It would not be hard, then, to be judged heretical. Milton is neither unique nor interesting purely because of his deviation from orthodoxy since the Anglican orthodoxy of the time –nor many of the emergent sects of protestantism of the time– were particularly coherent at this time. It would not be hard to be heretical. But to be as thoroughly orthogonal to al with a more comprehensive theology than most “orthodox” theologies prevalent at the time, as Milton did possess, makes him incredibly interesting.

“In this regard it is well to remember that the most widely divergent doctrinal views were admissible within the Anglican communion, were indeed encouraged by the adroitly ambiguous Thirty-Nine Articles. Thus a man like Thomas Turke, presumably, is orthodox. Lancelot Andrewes is also orthodox. Now this is only possible in a situation in which orthodoxy means little more than a consent to be godly and quietly governed, a consent to be loyal. What really is the yardstick with which to measure heresy? Decent order. That kind of uniformity which is the note of quiet. Men who differ as widely in their views as Turke and Andrewes are held together only by institutionalism, only by church polity, and not by the dogma of the church. And if both men have faith in the church, which one can be said to have the faith of the church? What is that faith? Leaving aside the scandalous extremes of the time, is there a sober doctrine of any importance held outside the church which cannot, quietly and safely, be held within it? Cannot an Anglican believe in a Calvinist predestination, in a Lutheran justification, in a Zwinglian Eucharist—or in one or all of the alternative Catholic doctrines? Finally, when the battle comes, is it not obvious that what really divides the Calvinist churchman from the Calvinist non-church- man is loyalty to the throne? The Puritan royalist remains within the church, the Puritan antiroyalist rides against Rupert.” pp 117

Cite England’s Eliza

Virginity as part of English, not just Puritan, culture in the post-Elizabethan culture Milton was born into

“There can be no doubt that centuries of Catholic devotion lie behind the ardour of the cult now devoted to the Virgin Queen of England: In Elizabeth’s England a very ancient conviction still had a standing hallowed from the darkest antiquity. That the virgin way of life is somehow the more blessed one . . . was a belief that a dominant church had favoured for centuries. Now came a mere English princess who persisted in exalting her virginity when official allegiance to the church had been severed, and when hostility to it was increasingly synonymous with love of country and devotion to its queen. Human devotion changes more slowly than its objects shift. From 1558 the virgin queen was the object of a love not dissimilar in quality from that which for centuries had warmed English hearts that looked to the Virgin Queen of heaven for all grace.3 ” pp 120

“As I have already observed, it was perhaps fortunate that patriotic Elizabethans were able to attach their confused religious emotions to the fact of their queen’s virginity. Alas, the persons of the Stuart monarchy offered no such felicitous possibilities for the image-maker. Instead of a debased Mariolatry, there is in the Stuart period something rather like a debased Christolatry. The king in these frantic days of the gathering storm incarnates the will of Christ. More exalted than the Roman Catholic Vicar of Christ on earth, the king, like Christ, is attended by marvellous portents in the skies and is subjected finally to the sacrificial and redemptive Christ-death.” pp 127

Towards aereo agitica. Include in intro P to Aereo perhaps?

“The cult of Elizabeth the Virgin gives way to the cult of Charles the Christ. Thus the crown symbol is reduced to a scandalous personal icon.” pp 132

There is a finality to Milton’s tryptech

“MILTON IS the last great Christian poet until Gerard Manley Hopkins. Between these two there are poets of stature who are Christian, but there are no Christian poets of stature. … It is not merely that Milton comes at the end of the great Christian tradition. In a real sense he ends that tradition. His role in the process of cultural change must be recognized as active. He carries Christian poetry, and in particular the poetic use of the Christian symbol, to a limit beyond which it cannot go and remain Christian. ” pp 183

Carey / SA / 9/11

“For Milton scholarship is increasingly thin-skinned.” pp 184

Begins to depart from his usefulness as he co-opts Milton to Catholocism while still identifying his antisacramentalism which is incoherent. Hi argument becomes incoherent. His placement of Milton in the canon, particularly as a reformation poet, is invaluable but his argument is incoherent.

Calls Milton a Catholic artist

“Milton, with his vast, external poetic “ritual,” is the type of Catholic artist, and T. S. Eliot, who disapproves of Milton’s rhetoric, is the naked Protestant purist.” pp 185

Succumbs to a peculiarly (for his Catholic disposition) post modern trap of divorcing art from an artist who refuses to be disentangled from his poem(s)

His protestant theology is not at all irrelevant how can you even say that with a straight face hahaha

“Briefly, then, Milton the poet is a Catholic, and Milton the Protestant theologian is quite irrelevant to the poetry. ” pp 186

This is fundamentally incompatible with any conception of what it means to be a Catholic poet, by his own early 180 pages discussing the reformation treatment of incarnation and eucharist lol what the fuck are you talking about

“It will become clear, I think, that the rhetoric which Milton invents destroys ritual. The Christian symbols in Milton’s poetry are indeed externalized, but in the Protestant context of Milton’s thought and by an intriguing kind of dialectic, they cease to be ritualistic at the very point of externalization. It is not within the scope of this essay to define Milton’s theological position. ” pp 187

It has to be, bud, and DDC is right there for consideration. This becomes a fundamentally dishonest argument and his desire to co-opt Miltonic power on behalf of Catholocism without Milton becomes transparent

“It is not within the scope of this essay to define Milton’s theological position. But we know his Puritanism to have been impure. Always Protestant, he is sometimes Catholic in his differences with Calvin and Luther. Characteristically humanist, he is sometimes Manichean in abrupt fits of reversion to a pre-Augustinian sensibility.” pp 187

Talk more about Il Penseroso

“Yet one cannot mistake here the relish of the poet for images he must presently destroy. Because of this relish it will be no easy task for Milton to make “the beauty of inner Sanctity” outgleam the “dim religious light” of the Anglican cathedral. It is the fully Protestant Milton who will soon give us the Lady of Comus in place of the Nun of I Penseroso. The difference between the two is highly significant. The Nun makes Contemplation visible. Her virginity is not presented as a supreme value in itself. In her, purity is for the sake of devotion and achieves the rapt soul sitting in the eyes, the ecstatic veneration which forgets the self to marble.” pp 194-5

“The power of chastity has been relative and not decisive. The Elder Brother, like the Lady, had placed an almost smug confidence in it. But the Attendant Spirit had no such confidence and speaks of “the aidless, innocent Lady.” Evil shall not “back on itself recoil” because of the “complete steel” of chastity with which the Lady believes herself armed. That it is, in fact, much less than complete, the presence and action of the Attendant Spirit—divine aid—amply demonstrate. Nor will heroic force avail against the grip of evil. The rescue of chastity may be effected, it seems, only through the protective virtue of “haemony,” with its suggestion of poetry and philosophy working bright miracles with the help of heaven.” pp 197

“Characteristically, the Lady seems to overestimate her own role in the workings of grace. She thinks that if she should but try, “the uncontrolled worth of this pure cause” could be made to shatter the devil and all his works. But when the Brothers rush in to the rescue, the Lady is found senseless (though otherwise intact) under the dread spell of Comus. Self-sufficiency has failed. The saving doctrine of virginity is presumably transcendent beyond the Lady’s faithful but egotistical comprehension of it.” pp 198

Earlier Px confusion in Milton’s Chastity/Virginity

The message vs action cancel each other out. It is not until Lycidas that he commits to any doctrine

“The total effect of the scene, however, is not to lift the doctrine of virginity to the shining regions of heavenly grace but to destroy the doctrinal abstraction by actualizin g it. The virginity of Sabrina is as specific and unmystical as the virginity of the Lady. The Communion of Saints, distantly but inevitably suggested by the invocation of the virgin and by the baptismal imagery, becomes nothing more than a special league for the protection of unchaperoned girls. Virginity turns out to be nothing, after all, but virginity—in the utterly physical sense. One's hope for a metaphysical realization of the doctrine is flattened. There is no doctrine.” pp 198-99

Commits to doctrine

“In Lycidas, the Christian and classical symbols confirm rather than confound one another. The exteriorization of the Christian image is completed with a consequent consistency of style. The difficulty of lingering Catholic associations is cleared with a single sweep, and Milton moves now with magnificent ease.” pp 201

Lycidas completes, corrects, and/or perfects Comus

Use first part when introducing Peter as a confusing image, and maybe sprinkle in the 2nd half after

“St. Peter ushers into the poem precisely what was lacking in Comus—a specific problem involving actual definable conflict. The poem is unified by division. The personal ethical theme of Comus is absorbed into a wider morality of struggle, and the dedicated chastity of the poet is at last directed to an object. As a result, conventional classical and unconventional Christian images cohere, their evocative powers equally exploited for novel and positive ends.” pp 202

The Christian Poet of Milton is baptized through Lycidas

He Christianizes the pastoral form while also opening the door for an emergent secularization

“The artistic consistency of Lycidas is a thoroughly Protestant achievement. New means serve a new end. A shaping idea born of the Protestant temper recasts with daring and originality traditional Christian symbols and prepares a new and different tradition. The gain is apparent. An almost infinite artistic freedom is made possible. But, as far as the Christian tradition itself is concerned, the dangers are correspondingly great. For the movement of the specifically Christian symbol from the centre to the periphery of the work of art implies a decisive shift of value and anticipates the emergence of a dominantly secular culture. The exteriorization of Christian symbolism opens a vacuum at the centre which must be filled. And even the massive theological barricade of Paradise Lost will not shut out the invader for long.” pp 204

shut the fuck up lol

Writing before Fish, Before Carey, before XYZ of the great Miltonists of the later 20th Century, before me

“We are confronted in these latter days with every conceivable interpretation of Paradise Lost. Further novelties in the reading of the poem are not possible.” pp 206

leaving traces in every genre (on culturl power)

“To thicken the “darkness visible,” it is only necessary to recall that Milton himself is now bestuck with darts wondrous if not slanderous. He is still, for some, the hard and sour Puritan. He is for many American scholars the last voice of the High Renaissance. Mr. C. S. Lewis places him at the centre of the Augustinian-Catholic tradition. Professor Bush regards him as a Christian humanist next door to the Cambridge Platonists. He is, besides, all other things to all other men—an Aristotelian, a masked materialist, a sinister apostle of the Zohar, a prim Victorian liberal, a “protofascist,” a ruddy forerunner of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin! Of his kingdom, seemingly, there is no end.” pp 207-8

Says that we have to appreciate art for what it is according to the poet. But Milton is a Catholic, sure.

“Unless we are to esteem poetry chiefly for its impact on the nervous system, and as a patterned emotional therapy that can operate apart from the conceptual and contemplative intent of the poet, we must be impatient with this capricious diversity of our judgments. ” pp 208

omit

“Waldock finds serious aesthetic flaws in the poem where Diekhoff sees only the purest beauty. It should not be surprising that Waldock dislikes Milton’s ethical intention and does so because he dislikes the theology. The point to be observed here is that the aesthetic response is governed finally in both cases by a kind of belief, by agreement or disagreement with what is thought to be Milton’s belief.” pp 209

Good to paraphrase something like this in Miltonic Power

Nother opportunity to dunk on this guy too, because he’s just as bad as everyone he cites lmao

“I shall not argue that it is impossible to “enjoy” Paradise Lost without sharing or without understanding Milton’s theology. (Tillyard enjoys Paradise Lost without sharing Milton’s theology. Saurat enjoys Paradise Lost without understanding Milton’s theology.) I contend, however, that any full critical estimate of Milton is determined first by the degree of our understanding of his thought, and second by the extent of our sympathy with it. Here we cannot forget that Milton’s thought is involved at every point in belief, and what is more troublesome, in belief that is heterodox. Consequently, understanding will not necessarily imply sympathy.” pp 209

Perhaps by comparison, but surely not in actuality – Milton’s God disappears over the duration of the triptych

Attribute to Waldock and then attribute also to Ross

“Whereas Waldock compares … , and Ross says ^^” neither are the case

“Milton suffers here, thinks Waldock, by comparison with Dante, whose method with God was “to keep him hidden: to lead us toward him, it may be, by degrees of mounting suspense, but to refuse the final revelation.” ® Milton’s method is an invitation “to stare God full in the face.”” pp 210

This is not possible, and not even something Ross himself attempts to do. “It is not possible to fully enjoy PL without agreeing with Milton” is such a wank argument. There is no sect of Miltoniasm

“The contention of Yvor Winters that the non-Christian may share a wide community of ethical belief with a poet like Dante and yet fail to ascend with him to the mystical levels of the Paradiso is surely correct and is appropriate to my argument here. Full enjoyment depends upon an imaginative agreement that is not really possible without theological agreement (or similar mystical experience), just as a lesser enjoyment depends upon a lesser or partial belief and at least some capacity to accept the ethical understructure of the vision. ” pp 212

Something which he said verbatim earlier was out of scope dunk

“I do not think that Diekhoff’s is the right appreciation or that Waldock’s is the right understanding. Both men fall short of an objectivity of method which is quite possible to the scholar, whether he be Catholic, Protestant, agnostic, or Marxist. Moreover, this objectivity is prerequisite both to full understanding and to legitimate appreciation. The effort to attain it must begin with a precise knowledge of Milton’s theology. ” pp 216

fire

“In these dark pages, illuminated only briefly by the abstract Christ, who soon vanishes, Milton’s justification of God is surely never an attempt to make His ways agreeable to men. The ways are dark, and for the mass of men are meant to be so. Milton is expressing here his own angry despair for society and for history and at the same time is seeking to salvage his personal religious hope. Like his Adam of the last few lines of the epic, he both despairs and hopes at once. A harsh and violent God, the vindictive stage God whom Waldock cannot abide, treads upon the lost history of men. Yet quite another God assures “the paradise within.”” pp 217

“With a boldness (and a strength) impossible to a Herbert or a Donne, Milton will risk a reform even of the Reformation itself. As “pope of his own church” he will make his own ex cathedra pronouncements. He will pilfer from the Fathers and the scholastics, as from Luther, Calvin, and Boehme, but always to his own peculiar purpose. He will twist the economy of redemption to fit his own private intuition of the nature of things. Thus his doctrine of free-will is more Catholic than Protestant, yet for Milton the consequence of -man’s freedom is as dark as if man-in the mass had been pre- destined to damnation. Milton’s free conceptualization (and improvisation) of dogma permits a parallel freedom in the use of rhetoric which startles us, not by the incongruity which we might expect to result from these montages of Catholic, pagan, and Protestant surface, but by the incredible propriety of the mongrel effect. For Milton neither negates nor affirms the images of particular and exclusive dogmatic traditions. He uproots them; he rearranges them. And they come somehow to cohere in living novel patterns.” pp 219

Would say abstemious, terse, and Lutheran rather than snobbish

“It is only within the typological frame of the Samson that Milton manages to convey a sense of the redemptive Christian act as sacrificial and corporate. Read in the full context of Milton’s Christology, Samson is clearly not the type of the whole Christ. He is the type of Man, not the God-man, not the Son of Man. Yet, held within the vise of an evocative typology, Samson is much more suggestive of the Christ of Catholicism than is the scornful, snobbish Miltonic demigod of Paradise Regained. ” pp 222

There is no love in his vengeful act wtf lol?

“But he [Samson] is given the function of Christ in the symbolization of self-sacrificing—and victorious—love.” pp 223

Adam is yucky

“The surfaces of pagan, ecclesiastical, and feudal rhetoric merge in an overpowering evocation of the feeling of power and grandeur from on high, and in a sense of man’s mighty doom. As I noted in an earlier study,!® Milton the antiroyalist does not scruple to deck out God, Satan, and even, at times, Adam in the brave trappings of the tyrannical king. Difficulties in interpretation and in the total aesthetic effect are thereby created, as they are un- questionably created, too, by Milton’s freewheeling use of the Christ-image. ” pp 225

Dilemma of degradation of Anglican aesthetics which may even be generalized to the belief itself by theologians braver than I There exists within Christianity a confusion. Milton is an exemplar of both the problem and its solution

“WE HAVE NOTED the unmistakable deterioration in seventeenth century poetry of the traditional firmament of Christian symbol. Dissociated in one degree or another from its generative core of dogma, the rhetoric of Anglican poetry either dissolves into bloodless abstraction (as in the poetry of men like Lok and Gressop) or, with a kind of half-life, haunts nostalgically the edges of ancient symbol (as in the poetry of Beaumont and Herbert).” pp 228

None of the other Reformation poets hold a flame to the comprehensiveness of either Milton’s theology nor his poetic capability

And this should not be a hot take

“It is the Miltonic firmament which displaces the old Catholic firmament.” pp 230

The degradation of Catholic poetry occurs in proportion to the chronology of the reformation

“If George Herbert, dismayed by the secularizing tendencies of his day, is driven to an interior and otherworldly piety, how much greater must have been the pull of a pure and detached spirituality on the will of the hated and persecuted Catholic! Certainly, Catholic poets from Southwell to Crashaw proclaim a contempt for the world which seems to be just as antihistorical as the typical note of the disenchanted spiritual Anglican. Southwell longs fervently for martyrdom and a quick release from life and time. Is this very different from that profound distrust of the evil moment which prompts Anglicans like Herbert to drop time like a hot coal?” pp 235

Ref the chapter for examples of catholic poetry

“Yet, in a real sense, Crashaw is shut in, rather than released, by the act of devotion. He worships indoors, in the church, in the baroque church. No sound is heard from the street. No one kneels beside Crashaw at the altar rail. He is indoors and he is quite alone. He never works like a gardener in the garden. His flowers are cut flowers sent in to be arranged to an interior design, He arranges them as a sacristan might arrange the linen and the candles of the altar.” pp 242

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