Sam Hushagen
Masters Essay
Department of English
University of Washington
6/13/14
“To Compare Great Things With Small:” Milton, Edwards, and the Limits of Reason
In this paper I intend to explore the affinities between Paradise Lost and the moral
philosophy of Jonathan Edwards. I contend that Milton’s engagement with the tension between
mechanical determinism, providence, and freedom in Paradise Lost frames subsequent debates
about moral agency and responsibility as they relate to the broader philosophical problem of
causality. The question that emerges from close scrutiny of Milton’s epic is how can one account
for human freedom, creativity, and novelty in nature, while retaining the necessary relation
between cause and effect that yields scientific insight? Milton does not merely treat this
philosophical issue thematically: the verse itself thinks through, in a multifarious and shifting
manner, possible reconciliations of freedom and causality, specifically in the logic of Milton’s
amplificatory, agglutinative similes.1 It follows that my reading of Paradise Lost will be
particularly focused on the formal elements of the Miltonic simile. I contend that Milton’s
engagement with freedom and necessity in Paradise Lost provides a framework for
understanding Jonathan Edwards’ mature philosophical theology, in Enquiry on the Freedom of
the Will, The End of Creation, and The Nature of True Virtue. To this end, my paper will devote
considerably more attention to Paradise Lost, as the reasoning that takes place in Milton’s
similes provides a compelling framework for interpreting Edwards’ mature philosophy.
Edwards’ effort in his moral and ethical treatises aims at the preservation of liberty, and a full
See Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, on the rhetoric of amplification in Milton’s
poetry.
1
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account of providence, while not rejecting outright the mechanical causality that yields scientific
insight into certain products of nature. My interpretation is influenced by Kantian teleology, and
the formulation “causality in accordance with ends,” the high point of philosophical
formalizations of the central problem animating Paradise Lost and Edwards’s mature
philosophy.
Two profound challenges confront the critic attempting to place into conversation
Jonathan Edwards and John Milton. The first is the size and scope of their respective archives.
The Complete Works of Jonathan Edwards, published by Yale, stretches to seventy-three
volumes, and the Complete Prose Works of Milton, also published by Yale, to eight, excluding
the two volumes of poetry.2 On this account, my study in this paper will be by no means
comprehensive, but my selection of texts from both figures focuses on their mature work as the
culmination of lifelong engagement with arguably the fundamental philosophical debate of
seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy: the question of mechanical determinism and
freedom.3 Where necessary I draw upon earlier work, particularly in my handling of Edwards,
I point out the curiosity of this coincidence because I haven’t discovered in my research any
thorough, scholarly investigation of the relationship between Milton and Edwards, despite their
engagement with the same fundamental question. A potential reason for this is the tendency to let
labels stand in for critical inquiry: Edwards=Calvinist; Milton=Arminian. The easy equation of
Milton with Arminianism overlooks the defense of divine Providence in Paradise Lost, as well
as Milton’s theological disputes with the Arminian Prelacy under Archbishop Laud. Similarly,
labelling Edwards Calvinist ignores his substantial revisions of traditional Calvinism, and his
exclamation, “I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin!” For Milton’s relationship to the
ecclesiastical and political powers of his time, see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English
Revolution. For Milton’s handling of providence see Raymond B. Waddington, Looking into
Providence: Designs and Trials in Paradise Lost (2012). For Edwards’ significant departures
from traditional Calvinism, see Douglas Elwood, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan
Edwards.
3
In this I am in agreement with Stephen Fallon, who argues in Milton Among the Philosophers
that the question of the relationship between mind and substance as it emerges from Descartes
and informs the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes represents a fundamental philosophical
dispute within which Paradise Lost must be read. While I disagree with Fallon’s argument for
2
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whose brief and prolific career charts a fascinating development from his early speculative and
scientific papers to his mature philosophical theology. Edwards’ Catalogue of Books
demonstrates the breadth of his reading, from theology, natural science, philosophy, to poetry, in
particular Milton’s Paradise Lost, which appears in multiple entries. Like Milton before him,
Edwards followed closely the philosophical debates produced by developing scientific theories
of atomism and laws of motion, and his life-long work demonstrates a sustained effort to bring
together natural science, theology, ethics, and aesthetics.4
The second and perhaps more troubling challenge is the historical distance of a
contemporary reader of Milton and Edwards from the debates in which they were active
participants. This distance produces a tendency in Milton and Edwards scholarship to allow
abstract theological camps, ideologies, and philosophies to do our thinking for us.5 The
identification of these figures with Monism, Arminianism, Calvinism, Deism, Hylozoism, or
Animist Materialism, to cite a few prominent examples, oversimplifies the theological and
philosophical positions of both Edwards and Milton, and allows an abstracted body of doctrine to
shape interpretations of the works themselves. This tendency is often marked in the secondary
Milton’s “solution” to the problem of freedom in a world that admits of mechanical causality, his
laying out of the problem itself is a watershed moment in Milton criticism (as seen from the
innumerable articles and monographs in response) and is indispensable.
4
Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and its British Context; Leon Chai,
Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy; Elwood, The Philosophical
Theology of Jonathan Edwards; Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers.
5
A good example of this tendency is evident in Stephen Hequembourg’s “Monism and
Metaphor: The Rhetoric of Early Modern Materialism” (2011). While Hequembourg’s handling
of Milton’s use of metaphor in Paradise Lost is impressive, his argument is handicapped by his
reliance on the notion of monism, which Paradise Lost presents as a potential solution to the
opposition of freedom and causality, but ultimately treats as insufficient in itself. Nevertheless,
my own argument owes much to Hequembourg’s study because, among scholars examining the
relationship with philosophy of Paradise Lost, Hequembourg stands out as working from the
inside of Milton’s poetry out. A prime example of the dominant tendency of making Milton fit
into a prefabricated philosophical doctrine is Stephen Fallon’s Milton Among the Philosophers,
in which over 100 pages pass before a single verse is looked at, and then, quite selectively.
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criticism with a “yet” or “but,” as in the characterization of Edwards as a Calvinist, but not quite,
or of Milton as Arminian, yet with important differences.6 The novelty of both writers is
precisely what is lost by such attributions. My interpretation will resist sublating Milton or
Edwards to a homogenous, preconceived philosophical framework, though I will have recourse
to Kantian critical philosophy, as a philosophy to which Edwards and Milton both contributed.
With these challenges in mind, my own account handles a limited body of texts from
Milton and Edwards on their own terms. This is not to say I will be inattentive to the topical
debates that produced the novel insights of these writers, or neglect the historical context in
which each is writing, but the unorthodox quality of each author is sufficient to provoke
skepticism of an easy identification with a clearly definable set of doctrines.7 Instead, I will be
attentive to drawing out continuities and affinities in the works I am examining, rather than
connecting these works to various ideological, theological, or doctrinal camps. My focus is on
the matrices of relation that emerge from close scrutiny of the texts themselves, beginning with
an analysis of Milton’s similes.
“Beyond Dust and Nature’s Law:” Simile and Causality
In Milton studies, the Miltonic simile is a sub-industry.8 The similes feature prominently
in the first commentary by Patrick Hume, and are a central point of contention in the dispute
6
See especially Hequembourg (2011), Donnelly (1999), and Ricks (1961) on Milton. On
Edwards’s post-Calvinist Calvinism see Elwood (1960), Lee (1989), and Guelzo (1989).
7
The iconoclasm of both writers is widely acknowledged. See William Empson, Milton’s God
(1964); Peter Herman, Destabilizing Milton (2005); Neil Forsythe The Satanic Epic (2003); J. A.
Wittreich Feminist Milton; J. P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound for a representative sampling of
Milton’s iconoclasm. On Edwards, see Guelzo, Edwards on the Will (1989); and especially Leon
Chai, Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy.
8
See James Whaler’s paradigmatic “The Miltonic Simile” and “The Grammatical Nexus of the
Miltonic Simile”; Christopher Ricks’ “Simile and Cross-Reference” in Milton’s Grand Style
(1964); R.J. Shorck’s “Hordes, Hounds, and a Comma: Milton’s Negative Similes”;
Hequemborg’s “Monism and Metaphor: The Rhetoric of Early Modern Materialism”; Geoffrey
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between Richard Bentley and Zachary Pearce.9 While Bentley argued that the heresy of Milton’s
similes was grounds to believe them to be the work of a secondary author or editor (thereby
justifying their removal from the poem), Pearce disclaimed the heterodox homologies of
Milton’s similes that disturbed Bentley by arguing that they are decorative, and, “often take the
liberty of wandering into some unresembling circumstances: which have no other relation to the
comparison than that it gave him the hint and (as it were) set fire to the train of his
imagination,”10 a position repeated nearly three centuries later to explain away inscrutable
elements of the similes by Christopher Ricks in Milton’s Grand Style.11 The minimizing
interpretation of the similes exemplifies one common approach to Paradise Lost. The critical
procedure is one of grinding down irregularities and departures from orthodoxy to present a more
domesticated poem than what any careful reader actually encounters.12 On the other end of the
spectrum is the kind of formal exactitude represented by John Whaler, who contends that what
distinguishes Miltonic simile is not the incongruity of its associative logic, but rather its perfect
homology of terms and their comprehensive intentionality. Milton’s similes, Whaler argues in
his series of articles, are purposive, never merely decorative, and remain under the masterful
Hartman’s “Milton’s Counterplot” in Beyond Formalism; William Moeck’s “Bees in my Bonnet:
Milton’s Epic Simile and Intertextuality”; and Julia Staykova’s “Structures of Perception in the
Similes of Paradise Lost” for a limited, though representative sampling of this sub-industry.
9
William Empson, “Milton and Bentley” (1964).
10
Quoted in Empson, “Milton and Bentley.” Unlike Homer, whose similes, as Whaler argues,
are marked by the heterogeneity rather than perfect homology of terms (their winning feature,
according to Dr. Johnson) or Spenser, whose similes often take on the character of free
association, unhitched from the initial “as… so” construction, Milton’s similes are meticulously
controlled. In this I agree with Whaler, and Staykova.
11
Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, “The Unsuccessful Metaphor”
12
Peter Herman, in “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found, or the New Milton Criticism,” and in
Destabilizing Milton (2005) identifies this tendency as a paradigm in Milton studies, calling it
the “Certain Milton” paradigm.
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control of the poet.13 I agree with Whaler that Milton never untethers tenor from vehicle, to use I.
A. Richards' influential terms, nor does Milton use the complex simile as a dispensable rhetorical
flourish.14 The simile does often function as a form of amplification or “auxesis” in Paradise
Lost, but the analogical amplification of the simile is purposefully subordinated to the ends of the
epic itself.15 In this I depart from Whaler, who never explores the more general role of the
similes in the symbolic economy of Paradise Lost, despite his admirable handling of the formal
features of individual similes. Unfortunately, without a view to the end the similes serve, many
of their key features remain inscrutable, or pass unnoticed. I reject the view that Milton’s similes
serve as rhetorical excursus or momentary reprieve from the dramatic action of the plot, a
perspective that, as Peter Herman persuasively argues, has been frequently adopted to discount
the heterodoxy of Milton’s homologies and minimize the iconoclasm in the poem.16 Rather, I
view the simile in Paradise Lost as a complex model of reasoning, a formal device for thinking
through the fundamental concern of the epic: nothing less than the relationship between the
human order, the natural order, and the divine.
Milton sets for himself the task of justifying “the wayes of God to man,” and in this
undertaking he is wholly classical. The imperative of Milton’s “advent’rous song” is to make
Whaler, “The Miltonic Simile,” “The Grammatical Nexus of the Miltonic Simile”, “Animal
Similes in Paradise Lost” and “Compounding and Distribution of Similes in Paradise Lost.”
(1931)
14
Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) 89-114.
15
“To Compare Great Things” in Paradise Lost 1668-1968: Three Centuries of Commentary,
435.
16
See Peter C. Herman, “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found” and Destabilizing Milton: Paradise
Lost and the Poetics of Indeterminacy. While I dispute a number of Herman’s central claims (as,
for example, his claim that the effort of critics to force unity and coherence on Paradise Lost
where none is found serves a doctrinal, orthodox Christian perspective) his discussion of the
tendency to minimize potentially heretical positions in much Milton criticism is quite persuasive.
As will become clear, however, Herman’s own position, and the positions he successfully
critiques, depend upon a fundamentally mistaken view of poetry as a storehouse of discrete,
paratextual doctrines or maxims.
13
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understandable to discursive human cognition the transcendent: the creation of the universe, the
human position within it, and the reason why the human occupies the place they do. The impulse
“to compare great things with small,” inheres in the epic tradition, and is fundamental to the
structure of Milton’s similes. Indeed, the simile is the primary formal feature whereby Milton
undertakes this kind of comparison. Milton’s use of the Virgilian phrase in Paradise Lost to
compare the cacophony of chaos, which sounds to Satan’s ear as though “this frame/ Of heaven
were falling, and these elements/ In mutiny had from her axle torn/ The steadfast earth” to the
din of warfare when “Bellona storms” functions in two primary ways, neither of them
decorative.17 The first function of the comparison relates to the internal symbolic system of the
poem: the imagery of warfare foreshadows Raphael’s effort to “relate/ To human sense th’
invisible exploits/ Of warring spirits” and the danger of cosmic unhinging evoked by the war in
heaven (Book 2. 921-22; Book 5. 564-66). The second function of the comparison relates to the
problem at the heart of the epic: the relationship between the transcendent and finite human
understanding, as Raphael’s statement implies. The question that emerges from the allusion to
Virgil, and Raphael’s challenge in relating the war in heaven in human terms, is the problem of a
seemingly unbridgeable chasm between human understanding and transcendent truths.
The movement toward totality – the encyclopedic impulse of the epic genre – implies that
epic is always navigating the relationship between the human and the transcendent.18 The Aeneid
opens with Juno compelling Aeolus to release the winds and scatter the fleet of Aeneas with an
Virgil is by no means the first in the tradition to use the phrase, “compare great things with
small.” It appears in Herodotus, Thucydides, and is a common theme in Latin poetry. Paradise
Lost: 1668-1968: Three Centuries of Commentary (436) goes on to cite Cicero, Virgil’s
Eclogues, Ovid’s Amores, Metamorphoses, and Tristia, Statius, and Pliny. Given Milton’s wide
reading it is safe to assume his familiarity with these sources.
18
On the “encyclopedic” quality of Milton’s epic, and epic more generally, see Northrop Frye,
“The Story of All Things” in Five Essays on Milton’s Epics.
17
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image of capricious gods directly intervening in the lives of humans, while the Iliad opens with
wrathful Achilles, and the risk that his kleos may transcend finitude to raise him up among the
gods.19 These epic beginnings introduce the relationship of human to the transcendent order as
the abiding question of epic. As Philip Hardie explains, epic in antiquity represents “cultural and
scientific blueprints,” and concerns itself fundamentally with the causes of the universe, its rules
and arrangement. The tale of the tribe, Hardie reasons, produces an identification of the culture
producing the epic with “the limit of the human and even of the natural worlds,” an impulse that
he identifies with the Virgilian reading of Homer. Milton’s theodicy undertakes not a national
epic – as he initially planned – but an epic of all humanity, an inquiry into the source and cause
of “all our mortal woe.”20 In Paradise Lost, Milton soars beyond the surreptitious substitution of
national blueprint for world that previously distinguished the epic by not basing his narrative on
a story of national or cultural becoming.21 The effort is to comprehend the totality of history as
contained within a Christian teleology, as Adam’s view of the entirety of the world, East to the
seat of “Cathaian Khan” and west to “the seat of Motezume,” from the top of the mount in
paradise, where Michael unfolds to him all of human history, makes clear. The engagement with
the question of causality links Paradise Lost with the tradition more generally, but his impulse to
universality on supra-national grounds and in a more comprehensive cultural context oversteps
the tradition.
19
See Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans chapter 9 for an interpretation of the kleos of
Achilles and apotheosis.
20
J. M. Steadman, in A Milton Encyclopedia, argues that Milton, despite reading widely in early
English history in the 1630s and 1640s, likely never began writing an English national epic. The
turn to ottava rima at the end of “Lycidas” indicates that Milton, in 1637, was still considering a
more traditional epic.
21
The epics of Ariosto and Tasso, and Dante before them, are less open to this accusation, but
Milton’s most immediate antecedent, Spenser, can readily be criticized from this perspective.
Camoes’s Lusiads presents a particularly interesting example in this tradition of the epic, where
Portugal, through the colonial project, literally does become the world.
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Epic simile plays a definitive role in the impulse of epic to account for the relation
between human and divine orders. As Denis Feeney points out, in a forthcoming article, the
complex simile is virtually unique to epic poetry. There are few examples of it outside the genre,
and it does special work within the epic. Feeney argues that the first similes in epic, “have a
special role in the economy of their poems, since they provide a programmatic image of the
themes that will be important for the whole poem.”22 First similes, Feeney reasons, contain a
compact microcosm of the vision of the epic, a feature of first similes that goes back to Homer’s
Iliad, and continues well past Virgil. First similes condense the primary concerns of the epic and
present an archetypal image for the rest of the poem: “In general, the first similes in epic are
programmatic for the cosmos of the whole poem, for they present an icon of the relationship
between human being and the natural world, which in turn gives us an icon of the poem’s
relationship between order and disorder, chaos and harmony.” To illustrate this point Feeney
focuses on the first similes in Homer, Lucretius, and Virgil. The first complex simile in Homer’s
Iliad likens the various Achaean tribes harkening to Agamemnon’s call to the orderly comings
and goings of bees to a hive. The image is one of cohesion, of individuals coming together under
a common purpose, and thus presents an idealized scene of social harmony. Of course, as Feeney
points out, this ideal is already imperiled, as the Myrmidons and their leader Achilles are
conspicuously absent from the uniting tribes. Therefore, the image that the initial simile presents
prefigures the fundamental problem of Homer’s epic: what is the ground for a unified social
identity constituted by different groups with individual motives and large egos.
Feeney, “First Similes in Epic.” The manuscript of this article, forthcoming in Transactions of
the American Philological Association, was made available to me by Professor Steven Hinds,
and is used here by permission of the author.
22
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The first simile contains in compressed form the ground for interpreting Homer’s epic in
terms of national and cultural blueprint. As Feeney explains, Homer’s “first simile introduces the
concept of the Achaean host as an organized and ordered group,” the constitution of which is the
central drama of the poem. The subsequent chain of similes introduce disorder into the initial
idealized image of harmonious cohesion by recourse to tropes “from the natural world of chaotic
storm and sea,” until order is restored by Odysseus, in another simile held up as the ideal for
cohesion: the single, strong leader as rock buffeted by wind and seas who nevertheless remains
steadfast, a solid rallying point in a scene of turmoil. The archetypal image of the initial bee
simile is affirmed, as obedience to a single powerful leader and perfect harmony in the pursuit of
a single end is recognized as the ground for the success of the Achaean host, and in Virgil’s
reading, as the ground for a sense of Greek national identity.
Similarly, the first simile in Virgil’s Aeneid depicts Neptune silencing the seas that have
been whipped up by the released winds of Aeolus, as an accomplished statesman silences an
unwieldy rabble with sagacious speech. Feeney reasons that both Homer and Virgil present a
purposeful natural and social order: the natural order guided by divine regulation, the social by
centralized political and military power. Virgil’s second simile emphasizes this point by restating
the bee theme from Homer, to describe the Carthaginians busy at work on their city under the
guidance of their queen. In contrast, Lucretius presents an understanding of natural and human
order as purposeless, caused by chance and the random buffeting of unseen forces, in a manner
that foreshadows seventeenth century atomism and mechanical determinism.23 As Feeney
Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 20-21. Hobbes’s Leviathan attributes all natural forms
to causation by unseen forces of motion. This belief, as Sang Hyun Lee and Allen Guelzo both
point out, was similar to certain strains of Calvinism that emphasized God’s arbitrary and
deterministic causality. See Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, and Guelzo
Edwards on the Will.
23
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explains, in the Lucretian vision that emerges from the first simile of De Rerum Natura, “Order
and predictability at the level of the senses emerge from chaotic unpredictability at the atomic
level, where we can imagine nothing but the purposeless and undirected buffetings of atoms,
which are generated ultimately by the randomness of the ‘swerve’ (clinamen).”24 Feeney argues
that Virgil’s first similes actively reassert a purposive model of the universe in the wake of
Lucretius’s purposeless cosmology, in a manner that represents a metaphysical principle of order
and natural regularity in natural and human spheres as an act of transcendent will. This
metaphysics in turn justifies a political order (the beginnings of Imperial Rome) as consonant
with the order of the universe, against the radically unchained vision of Lucretian
unpredictability. On the basis of this analysis of select first similes, Feeney argues they condense
the metaphysics of their poem and present an iconographic representation of the relationship
between the transcendent order, the natural order, the state, and the individual.
Milton’s first complex simile appears in lines 1.193-210 and describes Satan coming to
awareness on the lake of fire:
With head uplift above the wave, and eyes
That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides
Prone on the flood, extended long and large
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge,
As whom the fables name of monstrous size,
Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove,
Briarios or Typhon, whom the den,
By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream:
The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,
Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind
Moors by his side under the lee, while night
Lee interprets Edwards’ ontology of creation ex Deo in terms of habitus, or disposition, in a
strikingly Epicurean, or Lucretian manner. Lee The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan
Edwards ch. 2. As will become clear, I disagree with this interpretation.
24
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Invests the sea, and wished morn delays:
So the stretched out huge the archfiend lay
The simile begins traditionally enough with a comparison to huge figures from mythology, to
emphasize Satan’s bulk. The classical allusion creates a parallel between the war in heaven,
referenced in Revelation, and the war of gods and titans in Greek myth, that Milton will exploit
especially in Books Six and Seven. The comparison also introduces a connection between Greek
and Roman deities and the fallen angels that enables Milton’s typological use of the classical
tradition. About midway through the complex simile, however, there is a thoroughly
unconventional turn. The pilot introduces into the scene a human observer with little sense of the
precariousness of his situation. Unlike the Homeric and Virgilian first similes, that compare
directly natural and human orders, Milton’s first simile introduces a mediating third in the figure
of a reasoning individual. Stanley Fish interprets the insufficiently attentive pilot as the imprecise
reader of Paradise Lost, who, for his misrecognition, will be dragged down to his death. Fish
argues that throughout Paradise Lost Milton sets up hermeneutic traps for his readers who, if
careless, will be plunged downward like the pilot.25 While I disagree with Fish’s premise of the
“harassed reader,” the first simile does introduce a fundamental problem with human judgment.
The connotations of ship within the symbolic economy of the poem creates an association with
the human vessel or body, the guide or pilot of which, as Raphael explains in Book Five, is
human reason. As Julia Staykova aptly points out, the observational figure of the pilot introduces
human fallibility, as the simile hinges on the pilot’s misrecognition of the Leviathan for safe
harbor.26 The misrecognition in the first simile introduces the question of the grounds on which
we might establish a fitness or rapport between human understanding and the transcendent order.
25
26
Fish, Surprised by Sin 22-37; and “The Harassed Reader in Paradise Lost.”
Staykova, “The Structures of Perception in the Similes of Paradise Lost” pg. 164 (2013).
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If the first simile is intended to produce an archetypal image for the relationship between “the
human being and the natural world,” as Feeney argues, in Milton’s epic this relationship is itself
under interrogation. The relationship between the human order and the transcendent order is
mediated by fallible human reason. The first simile therefore places Milton firmly within the
context of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical debates about the nature of
perception, the security of human cognition, and universal truth.27
The Leviathan simile is programmatic for the interrogation into the limits of human
knowledge that Milton undertakes in Paradise Lost. The pilot is a figure for a human
understanding prone to misapprehension, and subsequent action on the basis of misrecognition.
He unwittingly tethers himself to something he doesn’t recognize or understand. Milton declines
to finish the folk story, and, as Peter Herman points out, we are left wondering whether the pilot
raises anchor with the rising sun, or is dragged under.28 Thus, the pilot figure, as is true of many
of Milton’s observers, introduces individual use of reason as closely connected with salvation or
damnation. An understanding of “the relationship between human being and the natural world,”
following Milton’s first simile depends on an understanding of the limits of human reason. The
central question raised by the simile – what is the relationship of finite human understanding to
the transcendent – is addressed directly by the subsequent similes in Book 1, and is carried
forward through the epic to yield a complex symbolic system that interrogates this relationship,
while deferring a settled answer to the question.
The second simple simile (distinguished from an epic or complex simile by Whaler, as a
simile containing only two terms of comparison) compares the distance from heaven to hell with
Fallon, 19; Chai, 21; Stephen Daniel “Edwards as Philosopher,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Jonathan Edwards, 166.
28
Herman, “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found: The New Milton Criticism” (2005).
27
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the distance from earth’s center to the “utmost pole” as multiplied by three. The use of human
metrics to ascertain a spatial dimension that is, by definition, supersensible and beyond measure,
is pointed to by Ricks as a key feature of Milton’s sublimity, as all finite measurements are
humiliated by the grandiosity of what they seek to compass.29 At stake is the compatibility of
human understanding, which is by definition limited, to any universal that finds its ground not in
the a priori use of reason but in experience or intuition. The issue is continuous with the
Scholastic wrangling with universals, often mocked in the abstruse question, how many angels
will fit on the head of a pin?
The famous Galileo simile, coming seventy lines after the Leviathan simile, picks up on
the sense of the second simple simile by developing the inquiry into scientific reasoning. Satan’s
shield, as he strides the plain of hell, is described hanging from his shoulders “Like the Moon,
whose Orb/ Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views/ At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,/ Or
in Valdarno, to descry new Lands/ Rivers, or Mountains in her spotty Globe” (1.284-91). The
ekphrastic simile comments on scientific inquiry into nature, and enacts a slippage between
scientific investigation and metaphysical speculation. It is hard to read this simile as a
repudiation of the validity of scientific observation, as Julia Staykova does, given Milton’s
personal relationship with Galileo, and his investment in and appreciation for natural science.30
However, the semantic insecurity of the passage provokes skepticism. Where exactly is Galileo?
Is he on Fesole or Valdarno? Milton regularly uses “or” constructions that destabilize previous
The unfitness of human metrics to the immeasurably vast is the constituent feature of Kant’s
mathematical sublime, which comes as little surprise considering Kant’s engagement with both
Milton, and the reception of Milton in Addison, Burke, Klopstok, and Herder. For a thorough
study of the “constellation of German Miltonism” see Sanford Budick, Kant and Milton (2010).
30
Staykova, 160.
29
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formulations, with the natural pause of a line-break establishing dialectic of postulation and
revision that introduces an ambiguity not easily interpreted away.31
I disagree with Stephen Dobranski that the Tuscan artist represents an ideal figure to
counter to Fish’s vessel pilot as uninformed reader. Dobranski writes, “I would suggest that the
Tuscan astronomer represents Milton’s informed reader peering intently into the text to descry
new allusions and previously ignored contexts and ideas.”32 I find myself closer in agreement to
Fish’s reckoning of the passage that the Tuscan astronomer’s mechanically enhanced perception
still falls short of compassing its object. What, exactly, does Galileo see? The discovery of “new
lands” on the surface of the moon is a stretch, but intelligible. However, the line-break and the
first word of the next line, “Rivers” shatters the intelligibility of the scene. Dobranski misses a
key interext here in the shield of Achilles, on which are depicted rivers, mountains, valleys, and
entire worlds to descry, an allusion that is developed in the widely acknowledged
characterization of Satan throughout book one in terms of a classical hero of antiquity. The
disjunction is not a refutation of scientific investigation so much as an expression of the limits of
deterministic human understanding, aided though it may be by mechanical instruments. The
shield of Achilles interposes itself between the Tuscan artist and the object of his attention, as his
observation of the enlarged moon through his optic glass is led back into culturally accreted
tropes of power and magnificence. As with the Leviathan simile, human investigation into the
transcendent is limited and determinations of belief or action on the basis of assumed glimpses
into transcendent reality are open to fallibility and the intermediations of conventional ways of
understanding the transcendent.
31
See Herman, Destabilizing Milton (2005). Unlike Herman, I think there is a ground for
intelligibility here that does not serve an ideological positon.
32
Dobranski, Stephen. “Pondering Satan’s Shield in Milton’s Paradise Lost.” 490-506.
Hushagen/ 16
The position I am developing should strike the careful reader as potentially Satanic: “The
mind is its own place and in itself/ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” (1.249-51).
Have I fallen into one of Fish’s hermeneutic traps, artfully laid by his mischievous Milton?
Satan, for whom service in heaven was hellish, seems qualified to make an assertion of the
fundamental dualism of mind and matter, for whether in hell, heaven, or paradise, “from hell/
One step no more than from himself can fly/ By change of place” (4.21-3). Satan’s formulation is
a vulgar idealism, holding “that matter or the external world is not independently real, or at least
that it cannot be known, or known with certainty, as real,” which, for Milton, would have been
closely associated with Cartesianism.33 Satan’s mind is hell, regardless of where he finds
himself, and his experience of the outside world depends upon the constructions of his hellish
mind.
The similes following Satan’s metaphysical pronouncement participate in his inquisition
into the nature of the relationship between mind and matter. The metrics of scientific
quantification are not invalidated by these similes, but their dominion is delimited. Following the
Galileo simile a series of negative constructions illustrate the inutility of human metrics for the
transcendent. So, Satan’s spear, “to equal which the tallest Pine/ Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be
the mast/ Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand” (1.292-94). The simile emphasizes the
unfitness of large though still finite comparative measures to give an accurate sense of the scale
of something transcendent. The negative simile captures Satan’s self-professes separateness and
unfathomability. His removal from the world of experience, as his solipsistic reasoning assure,
render him incomprehensible by experiential measures. As Satan’s endorsement of a dualistic
idealism argue, incommensurability of the mind and the external world is in part a product of
33
Ameriks, Karl. “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, 8.
Hushagen/ 17
individual perspective, it that Satan’s dualism assumes no ground for similarity from mind to
mind, since each mind is wholly its own.
The next complex simile in Book One subtly explores the problem of perspective by
shifting the viewpoint while keeping the object in place. Referred to as the “Vallombrosa” simile
in Miltonist shorthand, it is by my reckoning the most widely discussed, because of its striking
heterodoxy:34
His legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t
Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’ Etrurian shades
High overarch’t imbowr; or scattered sedge
Afloat, when with fierce winds Orian arm’d
Hath vex’t the Red-Sea coast, whose waves orethrew
Busirus and his Memphian Chivalry
While with perfidious hatred they Pursu’d
The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore thir floating Carkases
And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown
Abject and lost lay these, covering the flood,
Under amazement of thir hideous change. (1.301-13)
The simile presents serious challenges to any careful reader. What justifies the homology
between the idyllic, pastoral image of scattered leaves on placid Italian brooks and the fallen
angels? The image of imbowering trees presents a hellish locus amoenus, purged of fire and
desolation in a pleasant, pastoral scene. Geoffrey Hartman argues that the formalism of the
simile gives Milton aesthetic distance, enabling him to create images with aesthetic beauty,
unhinged from their immediate context.35 My view of the purposiveness of the similes, and their
relationship to the animating and programmatic question of the epic, forecloses on such a
34
The Vallombrosa simile is treated in virtually every book and essay that deals with the similes.
It is at the heart of Hartman’s discussion in “Milton’s Counterplot,” and is one of the few that
troubles Whaler’s central thesis of perfect homology. Besides Hartman, the simile is treated in
Hequembourg, Staykova, Whaler, Donnelly, and Ricks, among others.
35
Hartman, “Milton’s Counterplot,” Beyond Formalism 113-24.
Hushagen/ 18
reading, amounting, as it does, to little more than a affirmation of Pearce’s early view that the
similes are merely decorative, the product of fancy and free association, and otherwise cut-off
from the rest of the poem. The significance of Vallombrosa, the shady vale, has been connected
to the valley of the shadow of death of Psalm 23 and thereby introduces a foreboding connotation
to the otherwise pastoral image, but this hardly answers the challenge of this simile. Alistair
Fowler points out that the image of fallen leaves to depict the innumerable dead is commonplace
in the Latin poetic tradition, but these are not dead men, who readers are encouraged to pity, as
they are in Virgil.36 These are fallen angels, responsible for the existence of evil in the world.
A question that has apparently never occurred to the multitude of commentators on this
simile is to whom do the fallen angels appear as scattered seaweed, or leaves in autumn? The
immediate context of the simile has Satan, unchained and walking unstably on the shore of the
lake of fire, gazing out at his fallen host. It is reasonable that, following Satan’s pronouncement
of metaphysical dualism, to him the devils should appear as the pitiable dead in hell appear to
Aeneas, “multitudinous as the leaves of the forest that in the first of autumn fall away and
drop.”37 But the simile is not spoken by Satan, who speaks only one complex simile in the entire
epic, during the war for heaven in Book Six. Instead, the free-indirect discourse of Milton’s epic
voice presents the vision of hell and its occupants as they appear to Satan in the first two
comparisons of the simile, severed from how the scene ought to be seen by orthodox
Christianity.38 Rather than the homology becoming more strained as the simile progresses, we
have the opposite effect, as the devils appear first, and most jarringly, as autumnal leave, then
36
Fowler, 79. Virgil Aeneid, vi.309-10.
Ibid.
38
This perspective is fundamentally at odds with Hartman’s interpretation. The simile is not the
product of a flight of fancy or aesthetic unchaining from immediate context, but instead makes
sense only in the context of Milton’s interrogation of seventeenth century metaphysical debates
around the relationship of mind and matter.
37
Hushagen/ 19
like seaweed stirred up by a storm sent by Orion – a figure, as Fowler points out, commonly
associated with “God’s power to raise tempests and pass judgment” – yielding ultimately an
orthodox revision of the initial pastoral image in the scene of the overthrown “Memphian
chivalry.39
Syntactically, the image of the scattered Egyptian cavalry, sent by pharaoh and drowned
by the closing of the Red Sea, is subordinated to the proper noun “Red Sea.” While this image,
coming last in the sequence, seems the most apt homology for the description of the fallen
angels, it is not properly a term within the structure of the simile because it modifies Red Sea,
which is in a relationship of homology to the brooks of Vallombrosa, and one tenor of the simile,
the lake of fire. The orthodox depiction connecting fallen angels to defeated Egyptians is a
subordinate term in the succession, but the pivotal words, “whose waves” put the image at a
remove from the initial, perspectival comparison of devils to autumnal leaves. The verbal
parallelism of the closing and opening words of the simile returns to the initial pastoral image, as
the fallen angels are described as “thick bestrewn,” echoing the first line’s “thick” and “strow.”
There is a more significant problem with the simile, related to the limits of Satan’s knowledge.
While God can perceive the entirety of history and time at once, angels and humans do not have
this time sense, as is emphasized in Michael’s unfolding – rather than revealing – the history of
the world to Adam in Books Eleven and Twelve. Satan does not know what the outcome of his
venture to Earth will be before he undertakes it, which the stuttersteps of doubt in Books Four
and Nine make clear. Therefore, he cannot know the future of human history, including the flight
from Egypt, the founding of Israel, and the ultimate redounding on his own head of his seduction
in the last judgment. There is, therefore, a perspectival pivot from the first two images in the
39
Fowler, 80.
Hushagen/ 20
simile to the third. There is a further irony that challenges an orthodox reading, in that the fallen
angels are themselves described in Book Seven as “driven,” pursued by Christ, into the abyss.
Furthermore, the systematic parallelism of the simile deconstructs any orthodox interpretation, as
Satan, viewing the scene, is in the position of the “sojourners of Goshen,” looking on as
Pharaoh’s forces are drowned. The simile thus re-introduces a moderating figure that is
physically embodied in other similes as Milton’s observers, but provided here by the epic voice,
that abstracts from the scene as witnessed by Satan and provides a corrective to the otherwise
positive valuation of the fallen host as seen through Satan’s eyes. The image of the drowned
Memphian cavalry emphasizes the problem of perspective as the scene of the devils prostration
on the lake is presented both as Satan views it, and as it should be viewed from an orthodox
Christian perspective that is itself in question. The quickness of the comparisons nearly elides the
shift in perspective, as through a failure parallax to produce a single image. That the dialectic
between these images is not brought to a stable synthesis in part accounts for the trouble
commentators have had in accounting for its logic.
The tension between the historical perspective on the fallen host, likening them to
Pharaoh’s drowned cavalry, and Satan’s pastoral and elegiac vision brings out the claim, implicit
in Satan’s statement of the mind’s fundamental separateness, that there can be as many worlds as
there are minds, without any basis for their commensurability. The resulting dualism severs mind
from matter to the extent that there is no justifiable objective validity for experience. This
position is essentially where Descartes arrives through doubt, and his only recourse is to a
benevolent God to salvage the reality of experience. It is also the problem Locke seeks to resolve
Hushagen/ 21
with his notion of simple ideas conveyed immediately into the mind by objects.40 Satan’s
identification of the mind as its own place essentializes his identity, as his sense of self is
hermetically sealed against extrinsic influence, and hell his inborn principle. The soliloquy that
opens Book Four, has Satan beset by conscience, ultimately dismissing these influences and
embracing the maxim “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell” (4.75). At stake in Satan’s claim
is the risk of solipsism implied in Cartesian dualism. The relativizing impulse of Satan’s
perspectivalism imperils any verifiable connection between mind and matter.
As Book One of Paradise Lost progresses, the similes introduce ever-greater distance
between human understanding and the transcendent. The second-to-last complex simile in Book
One revisits Homer and Virgil’s icon of the bees, in which the devils are likened to bees
swarming to the hive (Pandemonium) in response to Satan’s call. The imagery is again pastoral,
“As bees/ In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides,/ Pour forth thir populous youth about
the hive/ In clusters” (1. 769-72). The devils are gathering to discuss their course of action, and
the political overtones of the passage create an express allusion to Homer’s initial simile in the
Iliad. The image here, however, does not emphasize an ideal of cohesion of many individuals
behind a single purpose, but rather highlights the drone-like following of a charismatic leader,
without individual use of reason. The final simile of the book withdraws from this scene and
presents it as a spectacle observed, or dreamed, by a “belated peasant” who watches the
“midnight Revels, by a Forrest side/… At once with joy and fear” (1.776-92). The semantic
ambiguity of “sees/ Or dreams he sees,” introduces an instability in the encounter that challenges
the effort to determinately interpret the scene. The final simile of book one, taken alongside the
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 105. See also Leon Chai’s fantastic
discussion of Locke’s attempt to establish “epistemological certitude” on the basis of nonmediation of mind in sense perception, in Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment
Philosophy ch. 1.
40
Hushagen/ 22
first, bookends the opening of the epic with the question of fallibility in human understanding,
and the relationship between the sensible and the supersensible. In Milton’s epic, individual
reason stands at the interface between the divine order and the human order.
If first similes are programmatic, as Feeney argues, does the Leviathan simile, and its
vexing of the relationship between the sensible and the supersensible through the figure of the
mistaken sailor, endorse a dualistic perspective, comparable to that expressed by Satan? We do
not know the fate of the sailor, just like we don’t know if the belated peasant is taken in by the
midnight revelry of the devils. As with the Vallombrosa simile, Milton leaves it open by
deferring closure. The symbolic system of the first book, does not endorse a perspective by
providing the fate of these observers. The first simile introduces the relationship of sensible and
supersensible as a problem that subsequent similes explore. As the epic proceeds the simile
emerges as the predominant method for thinking through various formulations of this
relationship without necessarily endorsing one. A settled account is indefinitely deferred.
Instead, the inquiry into the problem animates the epic, and not its unequivocal solution.
“Putting off/ Human, to put on Gods:” Milton’s Anti-Dogmatism
Stephen Fallon, in Milton Among the Philosophers, states, without equivocation, that
Milton’s philosophical position, as articulated primarily in On Christian Doctrine and Paradise
Lost, endorses what Fallon calls “animist materialism.”41 Drawing selectively on the lengthy
instructional scene of Raphael and Adam that occupies the central four books of the epic, Fallon
argues that, for Milton, “All that exists, from Angels to Earth is composed of one living
corporeal substance,” and that this monism is indispensable for understanding Milton’s theology.
The notion of creation ex Deo brings Milton and Jonathan Edwards together, alongside various
Fallon, 2. Fallon flatly states that Milton believes in “animist materialism,” before turning to
the non-Miltonic, Cartesian and Hobbesian origins of the problem Milton investigates.
41
Hushagen/ 23
positions endorsed by Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Cambridge Neoplatonism generally, as
a body of responses to atomism and Hobbesian determinism that sought to carve out a space in
the new science for the traditional metaphysical ideas of God, freedom, and the immortal soul.
Fallon is correct that there are monist principles expressed in Paradise Lost, and he is also
correct that the claims of monism respond to and comment on tropes of dualism and mechanical
determinism in the poem. However, the end to which Fallon bends this insight – the endorsement
of a philosophical dogma of animist materialism – is fundamentally mistaken.
Fallon quite rightly points out that the seventeenth century revival of Epicurean atomism
and subsequent Newtonian mechanics presented a fundamental problem to theology and ethics.
Atomism, and the subsequent reduction of all causality to determinable laws of motion in the
philosophical systems of Descartes, Hobbes, and later Newton, left for God only the diminished
role of first mover, who sets mechanical laws into motion and then abstracts himself, and
presented a human will invariably determined by necessary causal relations. As Fallon explains,
“If, as Hobbes argued, all matter is in motion – even thought – then our choices are determined
by antecedent physical motions, and freedom of the will is an illusion.” 42 Mechanical causality
undermines moral universality, freedom, and the role of God in creation, but yields impressive
insights into nature, the action and behavior of bodies extended in space, and the rules of motion
that enable us to understand the astrological phenomena that, as the similes show, particularly
fascinated Milton. Milton’s simultaneous enthusiasm for natural science and his unwavering
belief in human freedom and rationality represents a philosophical problem that undergirds the
logic of his theodicy.
42
ibid. 4.
Hushagen/ 24
The great value of Fallon’s book is the clarity with which it establishes Milton’s
sustained engagement with the fundamental philosophical problem of the seventeenth century:
mechanical causality and its relation to the metaphysical ideas of freedom, God, and immortality,
as they unite around debates about the relation of mind to substance – defined by Fallon as a
transcendent principle that underlies the existence of things. Fallon argues that, “Descartes
offered a way to reconcile mechanist physics with Christian orthodoxy through a radical new
dualism.”43 Descartes’ solution, to posit the res cogitans and a res extensa, and thereby separate
mind from body, allowed the mind to remain free from mechanical causation, while bodies,
extended in space, were subject to mechanical law. Elements of this dualism are evident in
Satan’s argument in Book One for the self-authoring autonomy of the mind. The problem
Descartes runs into, as Fallon expresses it, is how res cogitans can realize ends in the physical
world: the question of will and causality in accordance with ends. If mind is a fully incorporeal
principle, a thinking substance, then how can it bring about through will ends in the physical
world? The point and mode of transfer between res cogitans, housed according to Descartes in
the pineal gland, and the world of objects, including the body, was an insoluble problem for
Descartes, and led him to move increasingly towards the kind of mechanist materialism that
Hobbes later articulated.
Hobbes ultimately banished formal and final cause, and treated causality in accordance
with will as an effect of mechanical determinants, asserting mechanism as the sole mode of
causality, and thereby negated human freedom and displaced God as a principle of causality. For
Hobbes, there is no causality in accordance with ends, in which the end or goal set by the will
determines the means. Fallon explains, “Every element in Hobbes’s philosophy rests on his
43
ibid. 22
Hushagen/ 25
certainty that the universe contains nothing other than matter in motion which can be analyzed
mathematically.”44 Hobbes renounced any incorporeal world, or any space that is not determined
according to the laws of motion, including the mind, and thereby turned all thought and action
into response necessitated by foregoing cause and external stimuli. All action is reaction to
material determination. The question, then, as raised by Fallon, is “If our actions are the
inevitable consequences of prior corporeal motions, then how are we to be held responsible for
them?”45 Fallon argues that Milton resolves the problem by developing a philosophy of “animist
materialism.” In this view, Milton conceives of substance in terms of an “emanative hierarchy of
matter” in which soul and body are at union, and “corporeal substance is animate, self-active,
and free.”46 The soul is corporeal, and the closer it grows towards God, or the further up the
“emanative hierarchy” it moves, the more spiritual it becomes.
Fallon justifies the identification of this perspective as Milton’s “philosophy” by recourse
to Milton’s argument in On Christian Doctrine for creation ex Deo – the emanation of prime
matter from God, which partakes immediately of divinity – and a handful of passages from book
five of Paradise Lost.47 The chief strength of this perspective, as Fallon argues, is that it presents
a unification of the sensible and supersensible, and a fundamental rapport between finite human
understanding and the transcendent that is made possible through a unity of corporeal and
incorporeal substance. The view incentivizes moral and ethical goodness as enabling ascent up
the “emanative chain.” And most importantly, the monism of Milton’s “animist materialism” can
account for causality in accordance with ends, or purposiveness, because uncoerced moral
44
ibid. 31
ibid. 38.
46
Ibid. 81
47
Fallon, and many commentators that want to make Milton endorse a dogmatic perspective,
enact an elision between Paradise Lost, and prose works at multiple decade’s remove to marshal
support for their interpretations. See Herman, Destabilizing Milton (2005).
45
Hushagen/ 26
agency – the means by which one ascends the emanative chain – is presented as the primary end
of God’s creation of rational life. Human will is like divine will, only qualitatively lesser, but
formally that same in its ability to realize ends in the physical world that it establishes for itself.
On the grounds of this monism, human knowledge obtains “epistemological certitude,” as a
result of a material continuity of the particular with the universal, and human knowledge is
thereby safeguarded against skepticism. Cartesian dualism was left open to the critique of
skepticism that it provides no ground for certitude or a rapport between mind and matter, while
Hobbesian determinism could not account for moral causation. However, as Fallon reasons,
“Milton’s monism was a solution to a question for which Hobbes’s and Descartes’s answers
were not exhaustive.”48
The skill with which Fallon stages the philosophical problem that confronted Milton in
undertaking to write an epic about the origin of all things is admirable. His solution, however, is
betrayed by close analysis of the text itself. As mentioned above, over 100 pages pass before
Fallon interprets a single line of poetry, and by the time he turns to the poetry itself, he has
already prepared a philosophical doctrine for it to perform. Critics, including Fallon, discount the
dualism of the first book of Paradise Lost –the programmatic presentation in the similes of the
relationship between sensible and supersensible as a potentially unbridgeable divide – because
the clearest articulations of dualism are voiced by Satan, and in the context of hell. As readers,
we are to believe that Milton would put compelling arguments into the mouth of Satan, since he
is, after all, quite convincing, but certainly no perspective Milton himself endorsed.49 For
48
Ibid. 17.
Satan’s persuasiveness is perhaps the fundamental problem of the epic. He does, after all,
convince Eve. See Empson, Milton’s God; and Michael Bryson, The Tyranny of Heaven.
49
Hushagen/ 27
Milton’s identifiable view, Fallon (among others) look to Raphael’s speech to Adam in Book
Five and impute Raphael’s discourse alternatively to God or to Milton himself.
The discourse on metaphysical substance takes place in the middle of Book Five, after
Adam and Raphael have eaten together, and Adam expresses surprise that Angels eat of earthly
food. Raphael replies:
O Adam, one almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depraved from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all
Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refined, more spirituous, and pure,
As nearer to him placed or nearer tending
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds,
Proportioned to each kind. (5. 468-79)
The principle espoused by Raphael is a continuity of sensible and supersensible, separated only
by degree. Fallon’s “emanative chain” aptly describes the hierarchy of being that Raphael
articulates, terminating in God himself, and scalable through “tending” towards God in will and
deed. Raphael’s speech turns to metaphors of alimentation: “So from the root/ Springs lighter the
green stalk, from thence the leaves/ More airy, last the bright consummate flower/ Spirits
odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit/ Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed/ To vital
spirits aspire, to animal/ To intellectual, give both life and sense,/ Fancy and understanding,
whence the soul reason receives, and reason is her being” (5.480-88). Fallon reads these lines
straightforwardly as an endorsement of a monistic, animist materialism that introduces only
qualitative distinction between beast, man, angel, and God. “Even the most pure and spirituous
substance remains corporeal.”50 Monistic vision is epiphanic, as every particular leads to the
50
Fallon, 104.
Hushagen/ 28
transcendent. However, keeping in mind the programmatic nature of the first simile, and its
assertion that the relationship between sensible and supersensible is problematic at best, the
question is whether interpreting this passage as a singular statement of Milton’s philosophy is
justified.
The complex simile beginning “So from the root” brings this passage into conversation
with the earlier formulations of dualism, and proposes a solution to the problems raised by the
first simile with the introduction of a Neoplatonist notion of the One, and the continuity of
sensible and supersensible. By moral and holy action, as a kind of alchemical transformation, the
individual ascends by degrees the continuously emanating flow of creation from God. The full
image is one of nature striving towards perfection, described by Alastair Fowler as a dynamic
and “quasi-evolutionary” cosmic vision.51 In the above simile, the root is the common substance
uniting all things finite and transcendent, a kind of undivided prima materia that flows from
God.52 From this prime material the individual springs, as a refined formalization of originary
matter. The adjectives describing the ascent emphasize lightness (“airy,” “refined” and other
terms with alchemical associations such as “sublimed”), as an increasingly spiritual existence is
consummated not in the flower itself but the entirely incorporeal scent of the flower. The selforganization of matter tends toward perfection and a return to God, from whence it originally
emanates, as though matter itself were imbued with intelligence and a teleological impulse.
Raphael’s monism is based on a principle of causality in accordance with ends in which the
elements of experience all exhibit purposiveness: “Of elements/ The grosser feed the purer, earth
the sea,/ Earth and sea feed air, the air those fires/ Ethereal, and as lowest first the moon” (5.41518). Everything in this metaphysics is from God and for God.
51
52
Fowler, 312.
P.J. Donnelly, “The Character of Milton’s Monism” (1999).
Hushagen/ 29
The reciprocal causality of the elements of the passage, each in a causal relationship with
the rest and all tending towards God, introduces an image of nature as systematically organized
in accordance with a divine will. The representation in the passage of matter organized in
accordance with an end justifies Raphael’s subsequent explanation to Adam that he, too,
possesses will, “By nature free, not over-ruled by fate/ Inextricable” (5.527-28). The logical
progression from emanation to ascension literalizes the notion of atonement into an ontological
principle of substance. Following out the logic of the simile, the upward ascent is not
consummated in the flower, but the fruit as the final stage in the development. A shade of
foreboding attends here. The fruit is nourishment to the physical body, and by the
transubstantiation of digestion, fuels reason and sublimation in the ascent to “vital spirits,” that
results in a return to God of primary matter. The teleology encapsulated in the simile from
emanation to ascension and atonement maps onto the teleology of the epic from creation, fall,
judgment, and atonement – when God will be “all in all.”53 The principle of purposiveness that
Milton’s monism introduces in this passage yields a mode of understanding that is marked by
metaphors of organicism, as opposed to the mechanism of Book One. Monistic purposiveness
provides a principle that justifies causality that is not mechanistic, but in accordance with
willing, thereby carving out a space for morality and free agency. However, any mention of fruit
imbued with powers of ascension in this poem is a provocation, and the enacted collapse of
alimentation with transcendence should raise red flags and invite skeptical interpretation.
Within the monistic ontology, the formal comparisons of simile can establish real,
typological connections between the transcendent world of devils, heavenly warfare, creation,
and the finite world human understanding. In the context of this monism, as Steven
“Then thou thy Regal Scepter shalt lay by/ For regal scepter then no more shall need/ God
shall be all in all” Paradise Lost, (3.338-40).
53
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Hequembourg observes, simile “can be boldly literalized,” because the universal can be seen in
the temporal as merely qualitatively distinct, “the truth inhering in the very material nature of
things.” 54 This is a far cry from Book One, where the unlikeness and misrecognition of the
sensible and the supersensible signified serious bodily (the pilot) and moral (the belated peasant)
peril to human observers. The early similes are cases of failed correspondence with serious
repercussions. But the “monist cosmos” of Book Five is “a space in which tenor and vehicle,
body and soul, mind and matter all partake of the same, richly varied physical existence, all
difference but in degree, of kind the same – on earth as may compare with heaven.”
The language of ascent from sensible to supersensible, material to abstract, or literal to
figurative in the homologies of the simile, is not confined to Book Five. It recurs most tellingly
in the scene of Eve’s seduction, Raphael’s logic used by Satan to induce Eve to disobey God’s
command by attempting to become his equal. Eve’s seduction is less an inversion of Raphael’s
instruction, than it is a continuation, or thinking through the potential conclusions of Raphael’s
“emanative chain.” The scenes are linked formally by a series of repetitions of important phrases
and images from Raphael’s discourse.
Satan begins his seduction with fawning, calling Eve, “Fairest resemblance of thy maker
fair,” and licking “the ground whereon she trod” (9.526; 9.538). Satan proceeds like an Ovidian
lover, elevating Eve through flattery to “celestial beauty,” “A goddess among gods,” that is
balanced rhetorically with the language of physical lust: “ravishment” and “gaze insatiate.
Satan’s flattery is a proem to his seduction, intended to gain purchase on Eve’s attention by first
appealing to vanity, and later to reason, as the strangeness of “language of man pronounced/ By
tongue of brute,” leads Eve to inquire, “How cam’st thou speakable of mute, and how/ To me so
54
Hequembourg, “Monism and Metaphor in Paradise Lost,” (2011) pg. 50.
Hushagen/ 31
friendly grown above the rest/ Of brutal kind, that daily are in sight?” Satan then launches into
his well-reasoned seduction, continuing to play to Eve’s vanity (established in the Narcissus
sequence of book three) calling her “Empress of this fair world.” Satan answers that what gave
him gift of speech and “speculations high and deep” was “tasting those fair apples” of the tree of
knowledge. Upon eating the fruit, Satan explains, “To speculations high or deep/ I turned my
thoughts, and with capacious mind/ Considered all things visible in heaven/ Or earth or middle,
all things fair and good” (9.601-5). Satan neatly literalizes Raphael’s simile in Book Five. The
fruit that Raphael describes as purposive for reason, that is in turn purposive to man’s ascent of
the emanative hierarchy to spirit, is particularized and literalized in the “apple” of the tree of
knowledge.55 Satan identifies the fruit with an apple, in the only instance in the poem where it is
named – referred to everywhere else only as “fruit.” Milton’s intent in not distinguishing the fruit
is to emphasize that it is not the literal fruit that occasions the fall, nor does it provide any
knowledge whatsoever, but rather it is the act of transgression itself that introduces evil. An
identification of the fruit would lend credibility to Satan’s claims that transcendent power inheres
within the fruit itself. The purposiveness of the fruit to reason, and therefore ascension, cannot be
literalized without catastrophic consequence, thus, Raphael’s speech cannot be understood as an
objectively valid metaphysics. The formula of postulate and revision, centering on an “or” is put
to great rhetorical use by Satan as he strategically prioritizes the transcendent knowledge yielded
by the fruit over the earthly and intermediate forms of knowing that are already available to Eve.
Eve, though skeptical of Satan’s praise, has been primed to accept the logic of his
argument by her conversation with Raphael and Adam. In Book Five, she does not actively
In many ways Milton’s monism anticipates Hegel’s phenomenology and the logic of ascension
to Absolute Knowing. Milton’s critique of monism indicates that in many ways he was far ahead
of the philosophers who followed after. But that is another paper altogether.
55
Hushagen/ 32
participate in the discussion, but she doesn’t absent herself from the instructional scene until
Book Eight, which, importantly, contains Raphael’s warning to Adam about the limits of human
reason. She hears Raphael’s enthusiastic, though optative, reflections that “from these corporal
nutriments perhaps/ Your bodies may at last turn to spirit,/ Improved by tract of time, and
winged ascend/ Ethereal” (5.496-99). But she exits the conversation with Raphael when it turns
to “studious thoughts abstruse,” and has not been warned, as Adam has, against taking Raphael’s
ontology as objective knowledge, the logical conclusion of which is the possibility of human
transcendence. Raphael’s metaphysics throughout Book Five is marked by “perhaps,” “may,”
and signifiers of the subjunctive, while Books Six and Seven continue to cast aspersion on the
initial monist ontology. The initial closeness of corporeal and incorporeal, Earth and heaven, is
variously confounded as the instructional scene progresses.
In Book Eight Adam inquires after the motions of celestial bodies, “spaces
incomprehensible,” and the truths of transcendent principles, at which point Eve, “Rose and went
forth among her flowers,” and doesn’t hear Raphael’s warning that, “God to remove his ways
from human sense,/ Placed heaven from earth so far, that earthly sight,/ If it presume, might err
in things too high/ And no advantage gain” (8.119-22). This passage definitively revises
Raphael’s earlier precepts and establishes not continuity of Heaven and Earth, but distance, and
warns against the presumptions of human sense to objective knowledge of transcendent truths:
“heaven is for thee too high/ To know what passes there” (8.172-3). The skepticism provoked by
the similes in Book One towards the capacity for human metrics to compass the transcendent
returns in Book Eight, as Raphael warns against assuming a commensurability of human
understanding with divinity. It follows that Satan’s development of monistic ontology in Book
Nine represents the danger of objectivizing the argument for the continuity of human and
Hushagen/ 33
transcendent, that, in Raphael’s earlier handling, was merely a possible metaphysics, affording
potential insight into the purposiveness of natural forms, accounting optatively for free moral
agency and securing causality in accordance with ends.
Satan overcomes Eve’s initial skepticism, described in a simile recalling Virgil’s first in
Aeneid, of the persuasive force of a skilled orator. He first praises the fruit of knowledge in an
apostrophe: “Mother of science, now I feel thy power/ Within me clear, not only to discern,/
Things in their causes, but to trace the ways/ Of highest agents, deemed however wise.” Satan
contends the fruit gives him the power to see objectively the principles of causality operating in
the world, and his language of clear sight recalls fulfillment of the promise of Corinthians 13:12
to know God immediately: “Ye eat thereof, your eyes that seem so clear,/ But yet are dim, shall
perfectly be then/ Opened and cleared, and ye shall be as gods,/ Knowing both good and evil as
they know” (9.706-9). 56 Eve has heard this line of reasoning before from Raphael: “from these
corporal nutriments perhaps/ Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit” (5.496-7). Satan imitates
Raphael’s logic of ascension: “That ye should be as gods, since I as man,/ Internal man, is but
proportion meet,/ I of brute human, ye of human gods” (9.710-13). The parallel of the scene of
the seduction to Raphael’s representation of divine continuity should lead any careful reader to
question viewing Raphael’s “animist materialism” as a metaphysical principle for objective
determinations of reality, thereby seriously challenging Fallon’s argument that Milton places his
mature philosophy in Raphael’s speech in Book Five.
The fruit, in Satan’s argument, makes transcendent knowledge visible, ascertainable by
finite sapience – an important word in Book Nine, mixing knowing and tasting. It is finally the
objective determination of Raphael’s monistic ontology that plays the central role in the fall of
“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: for now I know in part but then
shall I know even as also I am known.”
56
Hushagen/ 34
man. In this view, Eve’s guilt is radically mitigated, as she merely enacts the most fundamental
mistake of philosophy: the failure to acknowledge the limits of human reason, and to give in to
the desire of reason to possess objective knowledge of metaphysical ideas. The language of
alchemy in Books Five and Nine makes the forbidden fruit a philosopher’s stone, and Eve into a
mistaken, but forgivable dogmatic philosopher. Satan’s question, “What are gods that man may
not become/ As they, participating Godlike food?” lands in Eve’s ear as in soil made fertile by
Raphael. Satan capitalizes on a curiosity and desire intrinsic to human reason, a desire not totally
discounted, but which needs to be set within certain limits.
The actual consumption of the fruit is set off by what Phillip Gallagher has called
“perhaps the finest epic simile in Western literature:” the ignis fatuus simile, which returns us to
where we began – human fallibility:
Hope elevates, and joy
Brightens his crest, as when a wandering fire
Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night
Condenses, and the cold environs round,
Kindled through agitation to a flame,
Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,
Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way
To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool,
There swallowed up and lost, from succour far.
So glistered the dire snake (9.633-43).
The poor pilot in his “night founder’d skiff,” the unassured astronomer, and the belated peasant,
are brought together in the “amazed night-wanderer,” who follows the will-o-the-wisp, a figure
drawn from the folklore traditions of northern Europe and England, to his doom. The delusive
light is a negative reflection of what Jonathan Edwards, fifty years later, will call “divine and
supernatural light,” the immanent light of true virtue, and “the sense of the heart.” Satan’s
glowing crest inverts the positive guiding light of St. Elmo’s Fire. His logic is imminently
Hushagen/ 35
believable because it merely literalizes what Eve has heard from the lips of a divine
representative, though in the language of possibility. This is the fundamental problem that has
divided Miltonists since Bentley and Pearce, through Blake and Byron, and William Empson to
Steven Hequembourg and Julia Staykova most recently. The poem’s deliberate parallelism is
both a provocation to dogmatic reading, and a refusal. Raphael’s monist ontology is only subtly
distinguished from Satan’s by the discrete use of the subjunctive mood and the language of
possibility. He is convincing because he capitalizes on an human impulse to transcendent
knowledge. Eve’s mistake is that she has not been told the limits of reason, a weakness intrinsic
to human desire: the drive to know the very things about which we can have no objective
knowledge. The question, then, of the relationship between the human order and the transcendent
order remains profoundly unsettled, despite the attempts of Fallon and others to derive a unified
philosophical position from the poem.57 From the programmatic first simile on, the poem
interrogates and follows through various modes for accounting for the relationship between finite
humans and universals. The ignis fatuus simile introduces a further complication by questioning
how can human understanding tell the difference between divine and demonic light?
The mistake Miltonists have made is fundamentally a substitutive one. Paradise Lost is
first and foremost a poem, and to read a poem for objective determinations of the world or for
philosophical dogmas is to misunderstand the role and function of poetry. This
misunderstanding, as mentioned above, accounts for the recourse of critics seeking to impose a
univocal and doctrinal reading on Paradise Lost to Milton’s pamphlets, tracts, and most
commonly, On Christian Doctrine, for supporting evidence. On Christian Doctrine, however, is
separated from Paradise Lost by nearly twenty years, during which time Milton, blind and
57
See Fallon, Hequembourg, and Donnelly for examples of this tendency.
Hushagen/ 36
besieged, witnessed the fall of Cromwell into despotism, the Restoration, and the prospect of
execution. A long period of silence followed, as Milton receded from public life to work on his
epic. It is hard to imagine that the experience did not enlighten him to the risks inherent in the
claim to objective knowledge of transcendent truth. The second invocation at the opening of
Book Seven, contains a reflection on the epic and Milton’s vocation. The passage is rife with
uncertainty, as Milton invokes Urania “by that name/ If rightly thou art called.” The passage
explicitly marks a turn in the poem: “Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound/ Within the
visible diurnal sphere;/ Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole,/ More safe I sing with mortal
voice, unchanged/ To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,/ On evil days though fallen,
and evil tongues” (7.21-26). The invocation revises the one that opens the poem and announces
the ethos through which the second half of the poem should be read: humility – the humility and
acceptance of the limits of human reason that Raphael will insist upon in Book Eight, the
humility that should provoke skepticism at claims of divine knowledge. The second invocation
situates Milton “within the visible diurnal sphere,” limiting the range of his reflections into the
transcendent, and introduces a limitation of Raphael’s monism by re-establishing the limits of
objective human knowledge. A monistic worldview, tending as Satan shows, towards absolute
idealism, is fundamentally at odds with the ethos of humility, that Edwards will later formalize
under the term “benevolence to Being in General.”
The network of similes both opens a gulf between sensible and supersensible and
simultaneously attempts to bridge that gulf. The simile is both an engine “to compare great
things with small,” by drawing likeness from incorporeal to corporeal, as if “earth/ Be but the
shadow of heav’n, and things therein/ Each to other like, more than on earth is thought,” and a
vehicle for producing this distance, as demonstrated by my interpretation of some key negative
Hushagen/ 37
similes in the first book. The final question is whether the gulf remains unbridgeable, leaving us
in Satan’s camp, of mechanical determinism and solipsism, or whether there is a principle in the
poem that would enable transfer from sensible to supersensible without the danger posed to the
ethos of humility by a finite individual claiming possession of the truth of metaphysical ideas, as
Satan does in Book Nine.
Satan’s misleading light in the ignis fatuus simile, is an externalized, negative figuration
of what Milton treats elsewhere under the language of “inward sight” and “inner light.” The
invocation in Book Three hails light, but immediately opens the aubade to scrutiny: “May I
express thee unblamed? since God is light,/ And never but in unapproached light/ Dwelt from
eternity” (3.3-5). Milton goes on to separate light as a principle from its physical embodiment in
the sun. The separation leads to an analysis of brightness and dark in terms of sight and
blindness, in which Milton connects himself with “Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,/ And
Tiresias and Phineus prophets old” (3.35-6). Physical light is denied these figures, but Milton has
dissociated light from physical determinants, and makes it a principle of inner reflection:
“celestial light/ Shine inward, and the mind, through all her powers,/ Irradiate, there plant eyes,
all mist from thence/ Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell/ Of things invisible to mortal
sight” (3.51-55). Physical vision of the transcendent, as the similes make clear, will err. The use
of a principle for reflection from subjective grounds for objective determination leads to
misrecognition and resultant damnation because of the limits of deterministic human
understanding. Raphael’s monism cannot be fully disregarded as a result of the fall, but the
utility of his metaphysics is only speculative, as marked by his use of the subjunctive, and his
subsequent admonishment against using the metrics of finite intelligence to attempt to compass
“distance inexpressible/ By numbers that have name” (8.114-5). Satan’s use of the logic of
Hushagen/ 38
monism as an objective principle, rather than a principle of “inner light,” marks out the limits of
Raphael’s monism. Raphael’s purposive, monistic metaphysics is a possibility, but not an
objectively determinable truth, and the attempt to make it so accounts for the fall.58 Milton’s
“inward sight” is not a figure of non-rational divine revelation, or epiphany, so much as it
represents the limitation the principle of purposiveness as expressed by Raphael. The gulf
between sensible and supersensible is not wholly unbridgeable, but is valid only as a principle of
reflection, not for objective determination. The systematicity of nature remains for Milton a
problematic though indispensable principle for reflecting on the world, and the place occupied by
the human within it. The distinction between objective determination and “inward sight”
introduces a modified dualism by introducing different modes of reflection that can thereby
account for both causality in accordance with ends, as a principle of “inward sight” for
reflection, and mechanical causality, as the cause-effect principle that enables Adam’s astute
observations into nature in Book Eight.
“Inner light” as a principle of “inward sight,” that does not denote anything about objects
themselves, but is valid only for the purposes of reflection, connects Milton’s navigation of
dualism, monism, and mechanism with Jonathan Edwards engagement with the same
fundamental philosophical problems. The modified dualism of Milton’s “inner light” as a
principle for reflection, inadmissible for objective judgment, constitutes an attempted solution to
the philosophical problem opened up by the similes, and provides the most direct line of
continuity to the mature theology of Jonathan Edwards. For Milton, as for Edwards, the idea of a
purposively arranged universe remains problematic, and without any objective validity.
In this reading, Fallon’s book is itself a repetition of the fall as a reassertion of the possibility
of objective human knowledge of the transcendent, as it turns Milton’s merely subjective
principle for reflection – “inward sight” – into a principle for determination of objects.
58
Hushagen/ 39
Reason and Divine Light: Jonathan Edwards’ Transcendental Ethics
The connection of Edwards to Milton is of the nature of a problem. Both writers are
responding to the fundamental issue driving seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy.
More pertinently, the particulars of their connection remain a problem for me, and therefore my
discussion here is by no means exhaustive nor comprehensive. My intention is to provide an
overview of Edwards’ late ethical writings that will in turn yield fruitful connections backward to
Milton, and forward to Kant that are open to subsequent elaboration in future work.
In his 1734 sermon, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” Edwards distinguishes between
the external light of the sun that provides illumination for objective understanding, and a
principle of “supernatural light” as a mode of perceiving through what he calls “a sense of the
heart,” as a subjectively grounded, affective experience. The distinction is essentially between an
aesthetic sensibility and understanding. Immanent light, or light as a principle of mind for
reflection connected with aesthetic reflection, is contrasted with the extrinsic light that is
associated with investigation into nature of things by the understanding. It is by supernatural
light that we perceive “excellency,” defined by Edwards as a perfect reciprocal causality in
forms where each individual part is for the sake of the others, indispensable, and perfectly
harmonious with the other parts in a given whole. The “sense of the heart” leads humans to
reflection on “excellency,” and the reflection on “excellency” produces an experience of
causality in accordance with ends that are only possible by an act of transcendent will. Reflection
on excellency, or purposive arrangements in nature, leads in turn to reflection on divine will and
its human counterpart. There are significant homologies in the sermon with Raphael’s monism,
in particular Raphael’s statement that “Heaven is as the book of God before thee set/ Wherein to
read his wondrous works.” The immanence of the divine in the particular, and the shining of the
Hushagen/ 40
sacred through the profane is a common trope in metaphysical poetry, and in certain strands of
Puritanism. Edwards, like Milton, differs from his antecedents, however, in his limitation of this
to a certain mode of non-deterministic perception. 59Edwards preaches that reflection on the
excellency in nature, through an aesthetic experience in which the “sense of the heart” is
dominant, rather than the understanding, leads naturally to reflection on God.
Edwards’ description of “excellency” in the sermon connects to a monistic metaphysics
similar to that presented by Raphael. Excellency is a principle of internal harmony and reciprocal
causality in which each part of a given whole is subordinate to the whole, as cause, while the
whole is reciprocally the cause of and reason for the existence of the part. For Edwards,
excellency is the primary constituent of beauty and is not determinable by the understanding.
The “sense of the heart” is drawn to reflecting on excellency in nature, and by a monistic logic of
ascension, drawn towards God. Edwards distinguishes primary beauty, as fitness and excellency,
from secondary beauty as mere agreeableness to sensation. Edwards’ earliest publications in
Notes on the Mind and in Notes on the Flying Spider are concerned principally with examining
the causality in accordance with ends that is apparent in organized matter, in which ends, or
purposes, ground the possibility of the means. Mechanical causality, as the necessary move from
cause to effect cannot account for this mode of causality, as Hobbes’ reduction of all causality to
mechanically determined response demonstrates. However, as Edwards’ close scrutiny of the
flying spider makes clear, nature exhibits a mode of causality – in the case of the spiders,
movement through the air across considerable space – that cannot be understood in terms of
strict mechanical determinism. The flying spider, and the purposive arrangement of its parts in
conjunction with the systematic lawfulness of nature, is an example of excellency in nature, that
59
On the mixture of transcendent and corporeal, particularly in late-Medieval love poetry, such
as the Carmina Burana, see Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (1972).
Hushagen/ 41
for Edwards that draws him into reflection on divine authorship. In contrast, Hobbes argues,
“Nature worketh by motion; the ways and degrees whereof cannot be known, without the
knowledge of the properties and properties of lines, and figures. … Nature does nothing but by
motion.”60 Edwards closely scrutinizes the physical features of the spider, and its means of
locomotion and can only explain its biological forms by recourse to an effect that nature must
have aimed at in their construction. Causality by laws of motion alone proves insufficient for
judging dynamic systems, as exemplified in the form of the spider. Only the presupposition of a
systematic lawfulness in nature, or purposiveness, in accordance with a principle of intention can
yield insight for Edwards. Causality in accordance with ends presupposes a will that establishes
ends which in turn determine the means for attaining that end. But mechanical causality holds
that organized products in nature result from determinable laws of motion as causes for an end
not established by a willing agent. However, the perfect reciprocity of part to whole and whole to
part that Edwards observes in his scientific papers cannot be accounted for as the result of
mechanism without the presupposition of an artificer.
Edwards’ early, and sustained interest in causality in accordance with ends provides the
key to understanding his massive 1754 treatise, A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern
and Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of the Will which is supposed to be essential to Moral
Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. The treatise runs to nearly
five hundred pages and, in the wake of its publication in Scotland, and later in the United States,
it was deemed the final word on debate.61 Like Milton’s reduction of reason to choosing,
Edwards defines the will as “that power, or principle of the mind, by which it is capable of
60
61
Leviathan, 456.
Guelzo, Edwards on the Will.
Hushagen/ 42
choosing: an act of the will is the same as an act of choosing or choice.”62 Edwards
controversially contends that the will is not free for two primary reasons: the first is that the will
is not a faculty in itself capable of making determinations, and secondly, the will is instrumental
in its action. It makes no determinations on its own, but is instead a means for realizing ends in
the world, which are not set by the will for itself. Thus, the will can serve the impulses of
appetites, of reason, and of understanding, but can never be said to serve the impulses of the will
itself. In this the will is always determined by something extrinsic to it: “It is that motive, which,
as it stands in the mind, is the strongest, that determines the will.” Edwards sounds quite close to
Hobbes here. Hobbes argues that “Whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire; that
is it which he for his part calle good: and the object of his hate and aversion, Evill.”63 Edwards
was regularly accused of smuggling Hobbesian determinism into his argumentation by viewing
the will as always determined by ends that it does not itself set. Hobbes argues that external
forces determine the will, just as the individual is the effect of extrinsic, mechanical
determinants: “Nothing taketh motion from itself, but from the actions of some other immediate
agent without itself. And that therefore when first a man hath an appetite or will to do something,
to which immediately before he had no appetite or will, the cause of his will is not the will itself
but something else not in his disposing.”64 Edwards does not reject that the will can be
determined by forces that are external to the individual, but he holds, against Hobbes, that the
will is equally determinable by motives originating in the individual in reason and understanding.
While he claimed to have never read Hobbes, there is an element of Hobbesian necessity in
Edwards’ formulation. However, the Enquiry notoriously leaves largely undefined what
62
Freedom of the Will, 4.
Leviathan, 120
64
Ibid. 161.
63
Hushagen/ 43
constitutes the “strongest motive” that determines the will, leaving Edwards open to the charge
that the will is always determined in accordance with sensibility, agreeableness, or appetite and
is thus wholly in the service of sensation, as Hobbes contends.
Nevertheless, Edwards merely counts the determinants of sensibility as one among many
possible determining forces of the will, and does not elaborate on the relative force of the various
determinants. Avoidance of pain and enhancement of pleasure or happiness is by no means the
only causality of the will. Edwards uses a metaphor of a scale to describe the “greatest apparent
good” or strongest motivation of the will. He writes, “When such a dictate of reason concurs
with other things, then its weight is added to them, as put into the same scale; but when it is
against them, it is as a weight in the opposite scale resisting the influence of other things; yet its
resistance is often overcome by their greater weight, and so the act of will is determined in
opposition to it [the dictate reason].”65 Of course, one side of the scale always wins out and
determines the will one way or another. Edwards denies the possibility of total equanimity to
humans, as there must always be a “greatest apparent good” in the eyes of the individual making
the decision. The main thrust of the argumentation in the Enquiry is to provide a rigorous
argument for determination of the will in accordance with ends that are not set by it, rather than a
thoroughgoing analysis of precisely what the motives are that determine the will. As with the
Notes on the Mind and the Notes on the Flying Spider, Edwards is pursuing a mode of causality
that is irreducible to the effects of motion, but that will provide a rigorous philosophical defense
of ends determining means (the means, in this case, being the will). Extrinsic determinations of
the will are only part of the picture, a single weight in the scales. The theological aspect of his
argument, as with Milton, is to defend providence and Christian teleology as the unfolding of
65
Freedom of the Will, 7.
Hushagen/ 44
God’s divine will, and to account for a mode of causality that presupposes a divine author by
accounting for the same mode of causality in human agents.66 There is a scientific impulse as
well that is an outgrowth of Edwards’ early engagement with natural science: the inadequacy of
mechanical causality to account for dynamic systems and self-organizing beings.
While Edwards argues that the will in and of itself is not free to do as it will, he bases this
on a more fundamental argument that human individuals are themselves free, and that human
reason is not always determined by extrinsic factors. Such determination, which Edwards refers
to as determinations by “natural necessity,” such as the subjection of bodies to forces of gravity,
does not extend into the realm of moral reasoning. Moral necessity is consequently an empty
term, as an individual always possesses the ability to do otherwise, despite habit, or demands of
agreeability to sensation. Edwards writes,
It cannot be truly said, according to the ordinary use of language, that a malicious
man, let him be never so malicious, cannot hold his hand from striking, or that he
is not able to show his neighbor kindness; or that a drunkard, let his appetite be
never so strong, cannot keep the cup from his mouth. In the strictest propriety of
speech, a man has a thing in his power, if he has it in his choice or in his election,
and a man cannot be truly said to be unable to do a thing if he can do it if he will.
The thing wanting is not a being able but a being willing.67
In the Enquiry, Edwards opens up a problem that he does not resolve in the treatise. He
thoroughly demonstrates the manner in which the will is determinable by faculties extrinsic to it
such as understanding and sensibility, and contends that it is precisely the determinability of the
will by reason that can account for the blame or praise attributable to actions. If the will were
determined of its own account, the individual doing the willing would not hold proper
responsibility for the actions of the will, as an autonomous and undetermined faculty. The
determination of acts of will is attributable to the free agent whose will is consciously
66
67
Guelzo, 49.
Ibid. 11
Hushagen/ 45
determined by their choices, therefore making them subject to blame or praise, and providing a
ground for moral responsibility. However, Edwards does not explain what the “greatest apparent
good” of the will may be, and how the greatest apparent good might trump other apparent goods,
such as one’s self-love or personal happiness. He leaves largely unresolved the question of what
motives determine the will, as his chief point in the Enquiry is that the will is a means for
achieving ends set in the physical world, but not ends set by the will itself.
The problem of what determines the greatest apparent good is deferred until the Two
Dissertations: The End of Creation and The Nature of True Virtue. The publication history
supports the view that these three works are best read together. Taken together, these three works
comprise over 700 pages, written in a dramatic flurry of intellectual activity during Edwards’ last
four years of life, roughly from 1751-1755.68 Edwards died before the publication of the Two
Dissertations, but they represent a clear continuation of what was unresolved in the massive
Enquiry. To resolve the problem that Edwards left open in the Enquiry, in The End of Creation
and The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards returns to the distinction between understanding and the
sense of the heart from the 1734 sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, where I began this
discussion. The analysis of causality in accordance with ends in the Enquiry leads directly into
the consideration of the purpose of all creation – the question of why God created the universe
which Edwards addresses in The End of Creation – which in turn prepares for the argument as to
what constitutes true virtue in The Nature of True Virtue. Edwards’ analysis in the Enquiry
confirmed his belief that mechanical causality is insufficient for understanding excellency, or
objects in which there is a reciprocal relationship between cause and effect, and in which the
effect is antecedent to the cause. The thoroughgoing analysis of causality in accordance with
68
“Editor’s Introduction,” The Freedom of the Will 8.
Hushagen/ 46
ends, that is demonstrated in moral decision making, leads Edwards to the question that if we can
suppose our will to be like the will of God, in that it brings about ends determined by reason,
then what is the end for which God created the world? The reflections on the will taken
alongside Edwards early interest in “excellency” leads to the question of teleology. As Kant
explains, “The same kind of objective purposiveness in nature (especially in organized beings) is
now thought as objective and material and necessarily carries with it the concept of an end of
nature (either real or imputed to it) in relation to which we also attribute perfection to the
things.”69 Edwards writes, “We must suppose that God had some good in view, as a consequence
of the world’s existence, that was originally agreeable to him in itself considered, that inclined
him to create the world or bring the universe with such intelligent creatures into such a manner
as he created it.”70 An ultimate end must have determined God’s creation of the universe, as all
acts of will are determined by an end “as a consequence” that reciprocally determines the means
of attaining that end. Edwards views creation itself as a cause for an anterior end that God had in
view in undertaking creation. The perfection and infallibility of God presupposes his totality, and
therefore God cannot receive anything from his creatures, which means that God’s end in
creation is not human devotion or anything that rational, created beings can “add to God.” 71
Rather, God’s end in creation is God’s own glory in the “emanation” of his fullness into creation.
God’s highest creation, rational and reasonable humanity, constitutes, “A proper representation
of his divine excellencies and especially his moral excellence, consisting in the disposition of his
heart.” The end of creation, as consummated in rational and reasonable humans, is “to show this
69
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 30.
The End of Creation, 412.
71
Ibid. 421
70
Hushagen/ 47
supreme respect to himself, wherein his moral excellency does primarily consist.”72 Having
established the end of creation as God’s own glory, the question addressed in The Nature of True
Virtue concerns in what is God most glorified?
Human moral agency turns out to be the principle in which God is most glorified.
Edwards famously defines true virtue as “benevolence to being in general.” It is in this line of
argumentation that Edwards’ two-tier moral system, fully consonant with his earlier distinction
between understanding and “the sense of the heart,” becomes most important to resolve what the
Enquiry left undefined: what motivates the will? Edwards distinguishes between two modes of
morality, natural morality and what I am perforce to call the transcendental principle of “true
virtue.” The principles of natural morality relate directly to self-love, happiness, and are
consonant with what Edwards treats in the Enquiry under the terminology of agreeableness, or
the “greatest apparent good.” As two individuals might enjoy different things it is perfectly
reasonable to suppose two individuals to come to absolutely contradictory conclusions about
their respective “greatest apparent good.” The inherent problem with this, as Edwards addresses
it in The Nature of True Virtue, is that it provides no ground for moral harmony. As everyone
may be possessed of their own “greatest apparent good” there is infinite potential for conflict, as,
for example, one individual’s patriotism conflicts with the patriotism of a citizen with which his
country is at war, or one man’s enjoyment of his own material well-being may cause him to
neglect the well-being of his neighbor. Edwards writes, “Such a private affection, detached from
general benevolence and independent of it, as the case may be, will be against general
benevolence, or a contrary tendency; and will set a person against general existence and make
72
Ibid. 422
Hushagen/ 48
him an enemy of it.”73 Without a transcendental principle for morality it remains relative, subject
to the idiosyncrasies of the individual. The solution Edwards proposes is his definition of true
virtue as consisting in “benevolence to being in general:” an unqualified benevolence to God and
to all creation.74 Edwards subordinates natural morality, or what John Rawls refers to as
“rationality,” to “benevolence to being in general,” as a universalizable, regulative principle for
moral action that directs natural morality towards universality. “Natural morality,” is not
dispensable, but to attain true virtue, it must be subordinated to the regulation of the transcendent
principle of benevolence to being in general, or what Rawls refers to as “reasonableness.”75
The two-tier moral system that Edwards presents is mapped onto a distinction between
primary and secondary beauty. Secondary beauty relates to natural morality, and the usefulness
of things as ends to happiness or pleasure, whereas primary beauty relates to the transcendental
principle of benevolence to being in general as that which is good in itself. Regard of primary
beauty entails an identification not merely with another, but with others in general, which, as
Edwards explains, is the true meaning of Christ’s Golden Rule to love others not as you would
want them to love you, but as though you yourself were Christ and therefore given only to total
benevolence. Edwards writes, “That consent, agreement, or union of being to being, which has
been spoken of viz. the union or propensity of minds to mental or spiritual existence may be
called the highest, and first or primary beauty that is to be found among things that exist; being
the proper and peculiar beauty of spiritual and moral beings, which are the highest and first part
of the universal system for whose sake all the rest has existence.”76 The human affinity for
primary beauty, as a sense of the heart, is what grounds moral universalizability. It represents a
73
The Nature of True Virtue, 555.
Fiering (1981)
75
Rawls, “The Critique of Practical Reason: Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” (1989).
76
The Nature of True Virtue, 561
74
Hushagen/ 49
non-determining mode of judgment on affective grounds for a universal principle of moral
behavior. Edwards continues, “Everybody sees that if [self-love] be not subordinate to and
regulated by another, more extensive principle, it may make a man a common enemy to the
system he is related to.”77 Moral reason, under the regulation of the higher principle of
benevolence to Being in general therefore provides the means by which an internal, affective
experience of primary beauty can, from purely subjective and finite grounds, rise to universality,
as a supersensible, transcendent principle. Edwards’ experience of a lawful and systematic nature
is grounded on a subjective principle for judgment that in turn provides a ground and
justification for human freedom. Benevolence to being in general “greatly enlightens the mind in
the knowledge of divine things and does … in many respects assist persons to right
understanding of things in general, to understand which our faculties were chiefly given us.”78
Edwards presents moral reasoning as the bridge between finite human understanding and
transcendent, universal principles, but only on the subjectively valid ground of an affective
experience, “the sense of the heart.” Moral reasoning thereby becomes the place in which we can
observe the realization of a transcendental principle in the experiential world. The will, as
determined by “the sense of the heart,” establishes fitness between transcendent principles and
physical reality, providing an example of transfer between the supersensible and the sensible.
The trajectory of Edwards’ mature ethics progresses from his inquiry into of a mode of
causality that cannot be accounted for by laws of motion, that is, causality in accordance with
ends set by reason, to an analysis of what determines the ends set by reason: natural morality in
its service to self-love, and true virtue, defined by the transcendental principle of benevolence to
being in general, provoked by the affective “sense of the heart.” The problem of the relationship
77
78
Ibid. 611
Ibid. 626.
Hushagen/ 50
between the sensible and the supersensible that Milton raises in Paradise Lost is the same
problem at the heart of Edwards’ mature works. If you want to get from sensible to
supersensible, there is absolutely no way to get there through objective, deterministic reason.
Milton’s “inward sight” and “inner light” are consonant with Edwards’ affective grounding in
the “sense of the heart,” in the experience of primary beauty and excellency, as purposiveness,
and moral feeling, in that both provide a procedure and justification for ascending from the
individual affective experience to a universal principle. The key distinction that must be
maintained is that the experience is subjectively grounded though universally valid, to use Kant’s
formulation.
What monism allows one to to do is explain natural forms as purposive, as formed in
accordance with an end or purpose, since monism presents the entire world as itself purposive,
and an emanation ex Deo. That is the logic of Raphael’s speech, and Edwards’ End of Creation –
in reflection the world is seen as constituted by purposive arrangements up to the final end for
which God created the universe. Monism secures formal and final causality, but it only can do so
as a principle for reflection into nature, not for determination of nature, as Raphael’s use of the
subjunctive, and Edwards’ distinction between the “sense of the heart” and understanding, makes
clear. Finite human sapience has no insight into the true nature of things as purposive in
themselves. Purposiveness, as experienced through the sense of the heart, is an indispensable,
regulative principle for looking into nature, as it justifies the experience of nature as a system.
However, finite human intelligence is barred from ascribing purposiveness to things themselves.
It remains merely a regulative principle for reflection, albeit an indispensable one. The
“monism” of Edwards provides a perspective on nature as systematic and organized in
accordance with a will, but only on the basis of a more fundamental dualism that refuses the
Hushagen/ 51
possibility of objectivizing monistic metaphysics into intellectual intuition, or human access to
divine sapience and the apotheosis it entails.
Milton and Edwards both pursue a middle way between dualism and monism that retains
the values of both. Dualism sets limits on human understanding of things in themselves, while
monism provides a basis for conceiving of a mode of causality in accordance with ends that can
account for the human experience of willing, but only as a regulative and not as a constitutive
principle for the use of reason. Edwards’ emphasis on the affective grounds of “the sense of the
heart” comes at the cost of using the insights of the experience for objective determinations by
the understanding. The middle way between dualism and monism, as it emerges from Milton and
Edwards thoroughgoing interrogations, leads ultimately to Immanuel Kant, and the distinction
between reflecting and determining judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Coda: The Kantian Watershed
My language throughout this paper is decidedly Kantian, as I have discovered profoundly
Kantian elements in Milton and Edwards as they grapple with the fundamental questions of what
we can know, and how we can know it. The reason for bringing together Milton and Edwards is
their solutions to the problem have in common an incorporation of dualism and monism that
distinguishes them from other contemporaneous philosophical solutions to their shared problem.
More, Cudworth, and the Cambridge Neoplatonists, who stand as mediating figures between
Milton and Edwards, endorsed a Plotinian notion of the One, and generally committed to a
monistic philosophy of nature imbued with organizing, intelligent spirit. The metaphysics
endorsed by More of the “world as a chain of emanations and thence divine” is analogous to the
pronouncements by Raphael in Book Five of Paradise Lost, but without Milton’s skeptical
subjunctive. What makes Milton and Edwards unique is their restriction of a principle of the
Hushagen/ 52
purposive and systematic arrangement of nature to a regulative principle for the use of judgment.
And it is the limiting of the logic of monism, as a logic of ascent from particulars to transcendent
universals, that make Milton and Edwards important antecedents to Kant.
Kant’s third critique introduces a mediating faculty of mind, itself not part of the system
of philosophy, that provides a connection between theoretical and practical philosophy which he
calls the power of judgment. The power of judgment is itself divided into two modes.
Determining judgment, in which the power of judgment subsumes a given particular under a
concept provided by understanding, thereby producing an objective proposition, or a proposition
that says something about an object. This is the mode of judgment Kant handled in the Critique
of Pure Reason, that provides judgments for the understanding, as the faculty of cognition
through concepts. Reflecting judgment is distinguished from determining judgment as “a mere
faculty for reflecting on a given representation in accordance with a certain principle for the sake
of a concept that is thereby made possible.”79 The principle that guides reflection on a given
representation is the concept of purposiveness. Purposiveness, as I have been discussing it
throughout this paper, is a principle of the systematicity of nature, and its organization into
increasingly generalizable though still empirical laws. The principle of purposiveness, as
causality in accordance with ends (“that the existence of which seems to presuppose a
representation of the same thing”), is borrowed from practical reason, through an analogy to art,
in order to experience nature as a systematically ordered whole in accordance with a principle of
systematicity, and therefore, intention.80 The reflecting power of judgment, “Must assume for
this purpose that nature in its boundless multiplicity has hit upon a division of itself into genera
and species that makes it possible for our power of judgment to find consensus in the comparison
79
80
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 14.
Ibid. 20.
Hushagen/ 53
of natural forms, and to arrive at empirical concepts and their interconnection with each other
through ascent to more general but still empirical concepts.”81 An experience of nature as
systematically ordered requires us to assume that nature is itself systematic – despite having no
objective ground for this assumption – in order to proceed from observation of given particulars
to their connection and comparison with other particulars. Without the assumption of
systematicity human experience of nature would be anarchic and impossibly heterogeneous. The
power of judgment assumes the “indeterminate principle of a purposive arrangement of nature in
a system, as it were, for the benefit of our power of judgment” as though nature were itself so
arranged as to be suitable or fit to our power of judgment. The principle of purposiveness of
nature introduces a principle of a fundamental rapport between mind and organized matter, but it
does so only as a subjective principle, that is, without determining that this purposive
arrangement inheres in things in nature themselves.
The crucial connection between Kant, Edwards, and Milton, is the limitation Kant
imposes on this mode of judgment. Purposiveness, as a principle of systematicity that introduces
a connection from an empirical, sensible particular to increasingly generalizable, universal
concepts thereby made possible, is valid only subjectively: “The explanation of an appearance,
which is an affair of reason in accordance with objective principles of reason, be mechanical,
while the rule for judging the same object in accordance with subjective principles of reflection
on it, should be technical.”82 Judgment that proceeds technically proceeds in accordance with an
analogy to art, and is appropriate for products of nature that contain an internal systematicity that
mechanical cause, in which the cause immediately determines the effect, cannot account for.
Systematic products of nature display to judgment an internal organization that appears only
81
82
Ibid. 17.
Ibid. 21.
Hushagen/ 54
possible in accordance with an end, or representation, that thereby grounds the existence of the
thing. The use of causality in accordance with ends to explain the appearance of purposive forms
in nature is a principle borrowed from practical reason as the faculty which sets ends that in turn
determine the means of attaining those ends. It is by analogy to intentionality that judgment is
able to proceed from particulars of experience to increasingly generalized empirical laws. The
reflecting power of judgment introduces an idea of the technique of nature, but this idea is valid
only for reflecting on nature from subjective grounds.
The notion of a merely subjectively valid technique of nature coincides with Edwards’
“sense of the heart,” as a principle for judging internal systematicity, or “excellency,” that is
grounded on affective experience rather than on understanding. It also coincides with the
optative monism in Book Five of Paradise Lost that Milton treats as a principle of “inward
sight,” or reflection from subjective grounds that, when “boldly literalized,” or turned into a
principle of determining judgment, results in an endeavor to transcend the finite limitations of
human understanding, as understanding through concepts. The middle way between dualism and
objective purposiveness that is formalized in Kant, and emerges first in Milton and later in
Edwards, has the benefit of establishing limits to human understanding, provided by dualism,
while retaining the causality in accordance with ends that is indispensable for understanding
nature as a dynamic and lawful system, and providing for free agency, and non-deterministic
uses of reason. That these principles are restricted to the subject, by restriction to a regulative
principle of “inner light,” a “sense of the heart,” or the “merely reflecting power of judgment,”
prevents their use in the service of totalizing or absolute knowledge.
Kant was criticized for not providing sufficient defense against the charges of skepticism.
It was charged that his system does not sufficiently defend the correspondence between nature
Hushagen/ 55
and human concepts.83 What Milton does, and what Edwards and Kant pick up on, is leave
human knowledge open to critique, to scrutiny of the conditions of its possibility. Dogmatism,
“absolute idealism,” intellectual intuition all attempt to close the gap between sensible and
supersensible on objective grounds – rather than on merely subjective grounds as we have seen
in Milton, Edwards, and Kant – in order to assert the possibility of knowledge of God, freedom,
and the immortal soul. However, as Milton witnessed first-hand, claims to possession of
transcendent truth produce the kind of claims to dogmatic and doctrinal politics that he spent his
career agitating against.
It might fairly be claimed that I have criticized philosophical systems constructed on
Milton’s poetry, only to do the same by seeing Milton as an indispensable forerunner to Kantian
critical philosophy. Such claims are only valid if one ignores the fundamental distinction
between determining and reflecting judgment. I do see a unity of philosophical thought in
Paradise Lost, but the kind of unity it affords is not that of a dogmatic philosophy. Paradise Lost
is a poem that thinks through in a reflective and generative way, potential solutions to the
fundamental problems of mechanism, determinism, atomism, the security and limits of human
reason, providence, and human freedom. In this way, the poem more generally, and the similes in
particular, embody the form of reason that Kant would formalize one hundred years later under
the terminology of reflecting judgment. While Milton never formalized a philosophical system,
in Paradise Lost we witness the reflections of the greatest mind of his generation on the
fundamental questions of philosophy, in a manner that was generative for subsequent systematic
philosophers such as Jonathan Edwards and Immanuel Kant. Paradise Lost provides a case study
in poetry leading philosophy by virtue of its reflective energy, opening out possibility rather than
Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “The Early Philosophy of Fichte and Schelling,” The Cambridge
Companion to German Idealism.
83
Hushagen/ 56
yielding closure in a sealed system. This is the chief problem of making Milton a monist, or an
animist materialist, or whatever other doctrinal philosophies one may deploy to domesticate the
poem. Its reflective, generative force, and the refusal of closure in a comprehensive denotation or
unified system constitutes the poem’s enduring iconoclastic power. This is not to assert its
“indeterminacy,” so much as to defend its status as poem: a non-determining and nondeterministic form of reasoning that so positions the reader to reason with it, without falling back
into idiosyncratic subject positions, preconceptions, or ideologies. As a poem of all things, it
enjoins us to constantly revaluate the networks of relation between the individual, the natural
world, the political order, and the transcendent order with the profoundly Edwardsean, and
Kantian, notion that every individual possesses freedom and a capacity for autonomous
reflection.
Hushagen/ 57
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