"In the course of the poem, the reader 1) is confronted with evidence of his corruption and becomes aware of his inability to respond adequately to spiritual conceptions, and 2) is asked to refine his perceptions so that his understanding will be once more proportional to the truth of the object of it."

"Throughout PL there are continuous interplays between humiliation and education. The poem itself is a recreation of the drama of the Fall at the reader’s expense, so that we may better understand our position and responsibilities as Fallen men."

“in each case Milton follows the voice of Satan with a comment which complicates, and according to some, falsifies, our reaction to it” → “So spake th' Apostate Angel, though in pain, / Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair.”

Waldock’s indignation at this authorial intrusion is instructive: “If one observes what is happening one sees that there is hardly a great speech of Satan's that Milton is not at pains to correct, to damp down and neutralize. He will put some glorious thing in Satan's mouth, then, anxious about the effect of it, will pull us gently by the sleeve, saying (for this is what it amounts to): 'Do not be carried away by this fellow : he sounds splendid, but take my word for it. . . .'”

“A Christian failure need not be dramatic ; if the reader loses himself in the workings of the speech even for a moment, he places himself in a compromising position. He has taken his eye from its proper object — the glory of God, and the state of his own soul — and is at least in danger. Sin is a matter of degrees. To think 'how fine this all sounds, even though it is Satan's', is to be but a few steps from thinking, 'how fine this all sounds' — and no conscious qualification. One begins by simultaneously admitting the effectiveness of Satan's rhetoric and discounting it because it is Satan's, but at some point a reader trained to analyse as he reads will allow admiration for a technical skill to push aside the imperative of Christian watchfulness. To be sure, this is not sin. But from a disinterested appreciation of technique one moves easily to a grudging admiration for the technician and then to a guarded sympathy and finally, perhaps, to assent. In this case, the failure (if we can call it that) involves the momentary relaxation of a vigilance that must indeed be eternal.”

Fish dunking on Waldock falling for fallen deceit

: “Waldock complains, 'Belial's words are not only "cloath'd in reason's garb" : they are reasonable.'1 Belial's words are not reasonable, although a single uncritical reading will yield the appearance of reason rather than the reality of his ignoble ease.”

By first 'intangling' us in the folds of Satan's rhetoric, and then 'informing us better' in 'due season', Milton forces us to acknowledge the -personal relevance of the Arch-fiend's existence ; and, in the process, he validates dramatically one of western man's most durable common- places, the equation of the rhetorical appeal (representative of the world of appearances) with the weakness of the 'natural man', that is, with the 'defects of our hearers'.

Stanley Fish is still retarded himself tho

Spends multiple pages dissecting this simile wrongly

And reads it wrong? While simultaneously citing James Whaler who provides a correct instruction about how to read this passage: “James Whaler does, a statement of relative magnitudes (Spear is to pine as pine is to wand)1 but while this may be logical, it is not encouraged by the logic of the reading experience which says to us : If one were to compare Satan's spear with the tallest pine the comparison would be inadequate” – all this to say, we’ll take Fish with a grain of salt,

“His spear, to equal which the tallest Pine / Hewn on Norwegian Hills to be the Mast / OF some great Ammiral, we but a wand”

Milton's intention is to strip from us another of the natural aids we bring to the task of reading.

Traces the stilted chronology tracing both A&E’s and Satan’s timelines, not until L54 that that Milton slips by him the 'now' of 54 and the present tense of 'torments', the first present in the passage. The effect is to alert the reader both to his location (Hell) and to his inability to retrace the journey that brought him there.

he contests between Satan and Adam, Leviathan and the pilot, rhetoric and the reader — the simile compresses them, and all deceptions, into a single instant, forever recurring.

Madsen would refer to this as a sacred metaphor because the thing is what it represents

The similes are particularly relevant here. The first of these compares Satan to Leviathan, but the comparison, to the informed reader, is a tautology ; Satan is Leviathan and the simile presents two aspects of one, rather than the juxtaposition of two,

The reader who falls before the lures of Satanic rhetoric displays again the weakness of Adam, and his inability to avoid repeating that fall throughout indicates the extent to which Adam's lapse has made the reassertion of right reason impossible. Rhetoric is thus simultaneously the sign of the reader's infirmity and the means by which he is brought first to self-knowledge, and then to contrition, and finally, perhaps, to grace and everlasting bliss.

Fish asserts that Christian guilt is the source of pleasure in reading a poem which is perpetually condescending to the reader in this manner lol

Milton transforms this commonplace into a poetic technique ; he leads us to feel again and again the conflict between the poem's assumed morality and our responses, and to locate the seat of that conflict in our fallen nature and not in any failure in composition. ... The value of the experience depends on the reader's willingness to participate in it fully while at the same time standing apart from it. He must pass judgment on it, at least on that portion of it which is a reflection of his weakness.

‘God in his own voice can never speak metaphorically.’

Irene Samuel: obvious contrast between diabolic and heavenly rhetoric : 'The flat statement of fact, past, present, and future, the calm analysis and judgment of deeds and principles — these naturally strike the ear that has heard Satan's ringing utterances as cold and impersonal.

Milton communicates moral distinctions through rhetorical signature

“Rhetoric is the verbal equivalent of the 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.”

This tracks with I think the human conception of God lol, Balloq’s head exploded when he saw the holy of holies, parsing God’s speech not addressed to us would be mysterious, insistently virtuous for reasons that are not rationally convincingg

God’s style is hard to parse: es Sims lists eight biblical sources for lines 85-86 alone.3 God's syntax also contributes to the 'proof or demonstration of his character. Satan's fallacies are wrapped in serpentine trains of false beginnings, faulty pronoun references, missing verbs and verbal schemes which sacrifice sense to sound ('Surer to prosper than prosperity / Could have assur'd us') ; it is a loose style, irresponsibly digressive, moving away steadily from logical coherence (despite the appearance of logic) and calling attention finally to the virtuosity of the speaker.

“What Addison admires is the art that conceals art, the rhetoric that denies itself recognition. The effort required to secure this effect may have been great, but the impression given is one of effortlessness. As we read, God is innocent of Milton's skill ; his eloquence is not eloquence at all, but the natural persuasiveness that is inseparable from wisdom.”

The closeness of God's methodical logic works against any effort to follow it. God dwells on a point only for the length of time it takes to state it concisely (truly), and that time is insufficient for a merely human mind to assimilate the various parts of a complex argument (Boethius spends five books saying something God says in six lines)

heretical, somewhat blasphemous, but also perhaps the most in-touch and well-meaning presentation of the divinity.

No one had more skin in the game except perhaps Charles I (zero great epics written)

And Milton did truly see himself as a channel of God. Whether his works were divinely inspired is debatable, but he did everything humanly possible for that to be the perception

“Books draw out what is in a man, and Scripture, the best of books, searches out a man's corruption and reveals it to him.”

This is acc to other critics that Fish himself is referencing Stein, Answerable Style, pp. 66—67. 2 Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford, 1964), p. no.

‘Before the Fall, the word error argues, from its original meaning, for the order in irregularity, for the Tightness in wandering — before the concept of error is introduced in man’s world and comes to signify wrong wandering’

Fish’s description of Eve is worth quoting or paraphrasing in its entirety pp. 102

What we learn from Adam and Eve is that corruption is a relative matter once one moves away from purity. The fallen angels betray themselves when they fail to see that physical configurations are to be interpreted morally ; the fallen reader betrays himself when he feels obliged to pass moral judgment on every action or utterance. 'Wanton* and 'loose* and 'error* trouble us because we cannot help but read into them moral implications that are not relevant until the Fall has occurred.

wandering

wandering signifies undirected movement, but the fallen angels wander through God's high sufferance ; even their aimlessness is not their own.

wandering

The word ‘wander’ according to Mrs. MacCaffrey, 'has almost always a pejorative, or melancholy connotation in Paradise Lost, but in these early instances the word has a neutral connotation

calls the wandering tactless after citing critics who correctly identify precisely the rheotrical effect which Milton achieves with his diction

The extent to which these distinctions are made consciously will vary with the individual reader ; but in Books iv, v, and vi the placing of 'wand'ring' is obviously and unmistakably provocative. 'wand'ring' is obviously and unmistakably provocative. In Paradise the four main streams are said to run 'diverse wand'ring many a famous realm' (iv. 234). Why 'wand'ring'? Even to a reader who has thought little about the word, its appearance here, in Paradise, is disconcerting and on Milton's part, tactless.

By confronting the reader with a vocabulary bearing the taint of sin in a situation that could not possibly harbour it, Milton leaves him no choice but to acknowledge himself as the source, and to lament.

(It is physically and psychologically exhausting to read this poem.)

Milton insists on the innocence of icons he has previously used to represent sin … it is, to say the least, surprising, then, to meet the simile once again in strange surroundings, amidst the joyful numbering of God's created [[VII.412-25]] The creation scene is the most objective presentation in the poem of the cosmic harmony Milton celebrates; it is the reader's misfortune not to be able to imitate the joyous and spontaneous abandon God's other creatures display here. Instead he saddles them with his burden.

fire

Satan's single action — the exploitation of the serpent — is a model for what man does every day of his sinful life. He makes things the vehicles of his evil and then puts them away (judges them accursed) as if they were guilty

This is more impressive than its predecessors because the angels themselves attest to the literalness of the hyperbole by retiring with speed. It is a shock to realize that the small thing in the simile is the disruption of Nature's concord and the collision of planets ; how infinitesimally small, then, must be the reader's sense of horror compared to the reality of the 'unspeakable fight*.

Clearly, the difficulty of regarding the War in Heaven as mock heroic is that the heroics of the good angels are also mocked. Broadbent is uneasy about the language of Book vi because 'it makes no poetic distinction between Heavenly and Hellish power (a distinction which Milton has previously been keen to exploit)

God staging the battle in heaven as ontologically doomed for the fiends from the outset:

“by assigning them a task they cannot accomplish and an enemy whose disloyalty should be a crippling liability but is not, and a physical arena designed to force them into strategic absurdities, God creates a situation in which the conventional motives for heroic fortitude — success, glory, personal fulfilment — do not pertain and perseverance can only be attributed to a faith in the goodness of the Almighty, to obedience. (Even now Raphael participates in a similar action, imparting a warning he knows will go unheeded.)”

Fish argues well that we mustn’t let our foreknowledge of what unfolds precipitating the Fall marr our reading of actions up to that point.

This is an example of the blind alleys foreknowledge can lead us into if we use it illegitimately to determine the significance of present actions which, with 'bad recompense’ then become the cause of what is foreknown. (this while dunking on Arnold Stein)

Thus the entire sequence, from the first words Adam speaks in Book iv ('needs must the Power / That made us . . . / Be infinitely good') to the sociable angel's departing warning at the close of Book viii ('stand fast ; to stand or fall / Free in thine own Arbitrement it lies') is an image of the harmonious co-operation possible between creatures of differing capacities who are united in their desire to understand and be faithful to the will of God.

The unintelligibility, and hence the freedom, of the transition is Milton's thesis. Making it intelligible, and hence excusable, either by compromising the sufficiency of the will or by forging a chain of causality, is the reader's temptation.

Is he overlooking the entire discourse beginning Book IX between A&E?

Had they exercised reason on the morning of the fateful day, the imprudence of separation would have been immediately obvious, and an unpleasant situation could have been avoided.

“In slightly varying situations, but with the same troubled awareness, Eve, Adam, and (possibly) the reader fall when they do not affirm the primacy of revelation against the claims of present circumstances as they are urged by the affections and interpreted by the reason.

The limits of reason are established in the discussion of astronomy in Book vm.1 Adam explains to Raphael how reason has led him to doubt the wisdom of God's disposing of the heavens (XIII.25-27)

This affirms Empson’s stance that God is setting man up. Left only to reason, sans conscience, he will fall. He cannot reason himself towards obedience

“God has instituted it thus so that man will exercise his reason, and, through reason, discover its inadequacy.”

“Satan's formal temptation builds on the success he has achieved merely by appearing and attracting Eve's attention. His entire argument is contained in two phrases: look on me (687) do not believe (684)

Satan LIES

“Aside from the matter of fact — he lies, he has not eaten — his conclusion is premature, since there are not enough instances to provide data for the formulation of a general rule that could anticipate the effect of an analogous action”

God accommodates himself to man via sight, but Raphael points out that there is more which cannot be comprehended by man and his feeble sight. Nevertheless, in the scene of the temptation, “the Sun, producing every kind, / Them nothing' (719-22). Throughout the scene the metaphor which controls his temptation is sight”

Though here tis the rigid Raphael, rather than the wisened and battle-tested Abdiel/Milton who encourages straining the mettle of reason and virtue

The moral Raphael draws from the battle in Heaven is, 'listen not to his Temptations*. Listening is not sinning, but it does signify a tacit acceptance of the situation and of the relevance of logical or experimental inquiry to a commandment of God's.

Merely to analyse the process by which she arrives at her decision, he continues, 'is to go part of the way toward excusing her . . . tout comprendre, c est tout pardonner.1 Here Peter touches inadvertently on the place of this scene in the poem's most rarefied temptation, the temptation to inquire into the causes of matters which are specifically exempted from such inquiries.

Eve keeps faith if she upholds God's word against the urgings of her reason ; the reader keeps faith if he continues to affirm the spontaneousness of the Fall (and her culpability) in the face of the alternatives his reason presents to him.

Empson malding abotu this

The reader who loses sight of Eve's crime in a maze of reasons will have been prompted in part by the poet's declaration of purpose : That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.

This is usually interpreted as a promise to defend God in terms men will find comprehensible and logically satisfactory, but a more accurate reading is provided by L. A. Cormican: ... by justification Milton did not mean a merely logical demonstration which would prove an intellectual conclusion and bring God within the framework of the rational universe. He uses the word with the overtones it acquired from New Testament usage, where it implies a divine, not a human or logical understanding, a supernal illumination from the Holy Spirit. ... If the ways of God can be justified, it must be through a purification of the heart rather than by the reasonings of the intellect.1

Horse shoe theory of mysogyny at play here

Eve is the victim of Adam's passion, for by choosing her he implicates her in his idolatry, absorbing her into a love that is self-love.

Adam, no less than Eve, arrogates Godhead when he accepts the horizon of his own perspective as final.

For seven hundred lines Samson 'labors his mind* (1298) in order to extricate himself from his slough of despond : 'Nor am I in the list of them that hope ; / Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless'

In the second book of Paradise Regained Satan prepares a banquet for Christ and sets up a choice which is itself a trap. The meats, Satan explains, ae not 'by the Law unclean (327), therefore Jesus may eat of them. But in fact they are unclean. Michael Fixler explains the dilemma : . . . the banquet which Satan offers was intended to lure Jesus into knowingly violating the Jewish dietary laws or into confessing that he who came as the Messiah to abrogate the Mosaic law could not eat because the same laws bound him to the scrupulous observance of ritual purity. [Milton and the Kingdoms of God, p. 256)

Unlike Wand’ring A&E, Jesus remains steadfast refusing to even entertain the feast set before him, (Mee hung'ring more to do my Father's will'). The action taken is, as Fixler remarks, evasive, denying the claim of the situation as it seems to be ; it is an affirmation of faith and trust, and does not reflect at all on the issues Satan tries to attach to it

Whataboutism, but it’s not a worthless thought experiment to play out, for it’s one that Milton reaffies himself in PR

Or, as Lewis suggested, he might have 'chastised Eve and then interceded with God on her behalf'.1 The second course of action recommends itself particularly because it would accord with everything Adam knows about God. 'Whatever was to be risked', Irene Samuel explains, 'demanded only Adam's faith that the benevolence he had always known would remain benevolent . . . Eve was not irredeemably lost, as Adam at once concluded in his immediate assumption of a hostile universe.'

Rejection of enlightenment

Eve’s petition to Adam for forgiveness: But Eve breaks the cycle by gesturing beyond the contest to a reconciliation rooted not in justice 01 in adjudication, but merely in love. She asks for pardon even though she deserves none (does one ever deserve a pardon) and more importantly expects none. She denies nothing ('unweeting have offended') and appeals in the name of the dependency she had earlier rejected : 'forlorn of thee, / Whither shall I betake me ?' (92 1-2). … indeed the entire speech is strategically unsound, delivered to the wrong person at the worst possible time, when the desired end is least likely to be effected. In a similar situation, Dalilah makes essentially the same appeal ('Let weakness then with weakness come to parle') with disastrous results.

Eve's speech is occasioned by a genuine need and informed 'by a love sincere' (this distinguishes her from Dalilah) whose expression takes precedence over the reckoning of probable effects.

Points out how Adam continues to follow categorically, in a postlapsarian manner, from this point on:

The epic voice comments approvingly, 'He err'd not', a statement which is increasingly ironic in retrospect since from this moment on Adam errs in every respect possible, slipping by degrees, as fallen man always does, into his old ways.

“Adam is in danger of losing sight of this truth because of the illusion of remedilessness.”

Seems to miss the redemptive point? Or maybe this is the secular truth of Milton's Christian history

Fish calls defines facts as “disease, war, pain, death”

XI.743-55 are so sad man:

Has Milton failed to justify the ways of God to men? No, rather he’s calling out man’s troubled reason: inadequate alone before the fall, and certainly not increased after the Fall. Reassured by the addendum “yet to say truth” as he begins to question his own reasoning and convince himself of his own ways, thus erring “All my evasions vain and reasonings though through mazes, lead me still but to my own conviction “The way out is there, but not through reason, which conspires, like rhetoric, to prevent the mind from looking beyond the artificial coherence of a limited system.”

“it were but right and equal to reduce me to my dust, desirous to resign, and render back All I receiv’d unable to perform they terms too hard by which I was to hold” … “inexplicable thy justice seems”

The chapter in which Fish puts the reader on trial along with Adam and Eve for their complicity in trying to justifie their wayes to God. This book is great because it flips the script on PL crit which for so long argued Milton's thesis

Imprisoned in the mazes of his rational intellect, Adam can only await the redeeming inappositeness of Eve's unthinking gesture.

The chronicle of human backslidings, relieved only by the sporadic appearance of a single Nazarite, is on its surface a linear progression of events which occur in time ; but it is also decidedly cyclical, a depressing testimony to the persistence of sin and corruption ('sinful man') even in the face of a benevolent deity ('supernal grace') and thus a corroboration in history of the doctrine of natural depravity ; the reader sees the weaknesses he has acknowledged in himself writ large in the calendar of nations.

thus erring

“the delayed verb or adverb appearing diffidently,” to describe God’s omispeech

The division of the original tenth book into the eleventh and twelfth is meant to call the reader's attention to this turning point in Adam's education (renovation) Adam has advanced sufficiently to be able to deliver a speech praised by the angel as 'the sum of wisdom'

Indirectly, though, Milton humbles us for “Any superiority we enjoy in respect to Adam is, of course, accidental, the result of having been granted informationdeliberately withheld from him.” Thus Michael’s education transcends the space and time of the Christianic histoy confines and educates us , gently and firmly, as well.

Rhetorically, Milton parallels Adam’s growth by suspension of the surprise element or mazes of reason which naturally align us to Adam as we experienced in the first several books (like convos with Raphael) – e.g. “confusing sensual delight with true happiness, and hears Michael reply swiftly, 'Judge not what is best / By pleasure* (603-4).” a moral which we are able to sus out well ahead of our representative protagonist in the discourse.

bad poetry, but a necessary purpose

Michael's moralitas is 'bad poetry', dull, overlong, and unnecessary since it has been anticipated and discounted even before Adam speaks.

I contend (perhaps shakily) that it is more enjoyable to read Milton if we believe in him as much as he believed in himself. That is not to excuse poor writing, but instead to acknowledge that Milton knows just as well as us that the preceding thousand score of lines of his manuscript are decidedly richer.

I think this read is legitimized by tone of PR which is similarly dry, or “poetically disastrous”

Missing Miltonic traits of “he sonorous richness of sound, the intricate but precise syntax, the wealth of pointedly relevant ambiguities” Instead we get “a rhetoric that consistently avoids all deeper imaginative surprise ; the surface of things dominates, clear, cold, hard” which makes sense. Man has demonstrated that he cannot be trusted with lavish verse We are treated with one (1) such ornamental passage which the reader clocks as bait from a mile away.
“Even the epic voice's 'point of view' is absorbed into the relentless drone.”

CS Lewis calls Books XI, XII an 'untransmuted lump of futurity' lol

Calls it poorly written, as does Martz: theologically sound, but “poetically it is a disaster”

Rogers balances this reading by indicating that that is the point. Why would we think that after authoring The epic poem, that he forgot how to write verse?

Milton wants us to conclude that “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. Paradise Lost is not a microcosm of the human condition, but an instrument for seeing through it to something more substantial.”

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