1. John Milton who?
John Milton was born when Shakespeare was in his mid-40s.
Milton started writing poetry in Latin and English as part of his early schooling. In his twenties he wrote lyric poems and a short poetic play for a festival and an elegy to a schoolmate who had drowned. These would become some of the most famous works of English verse.
But Milton’s real ambition from the age of nineteen was to be the first in English to write a great epic poem in the style of Homer and Vergil. There was a political impulse behind this project: he wanted to elevate the language of his modern nation closer to the dignity of the classical languages. At one time he thought his epic should be based on the Arthur legend, but he also considered heroic subjects from British history and the Bible. He couldn’t choose, and in any case he was convinced that to produce such a work would take divine inspiration. He resigned himself to wait for it to come.
In the meantime he traveled to Italy to study both the past accomplishments of European civilization and the latest scientific discoveries. He had planned to continue on to Greece, but he was brought back to England by news of armed clashes there over questions of church government.
This religious conflict was really a political one that would soon develop into active class war. The established church was supported by the king and the nobility, and opposed by the newly rising bourgeois class, which wanted an elected church leadership and a limited monarchy. To their left were the Puritans, who were generally against any human being claiming religious authority; politically, they stood for a republic. This was the side of the artisans and the peasantry.
Milton came to align himself with the Puritans, though not with the most radical currents of that movement, the Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters. He was no democrat—and still less an anarchist or communist—but he was a freethinker and a republican. He started writing pamphlets attacking the established church and taking sides on related social questions.
He scandalously advocated the right to divorce when husband and wife are not compatible. This was a personal issue for Milton: his wife had left him soon after their marriage and did not return for three years. He argued that a couple that doesn’t want to be together should not be forced, in a memorable phrase, to “grind in the mill of an undelighted and servile copulation.”
He also wrote against censorship in what is now known as a classic defense of freedom of speech, as well as an exemplary specimen of English prose. In it he wrote, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
At this time a social revolution was taking place in England. Parliament, representing the common classes of people, raised an army and took state power. They beheaded the king, an act that Milton defended in print, making the case that “it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death.” Having been appointed Secretary of Foreign Tongues to the republic, he used his rhetorical skill and mastery of Latin to compose the diplomatic correspondence of the revolutionary government, defending its policies before the rest of the world. His sight, already weak, got so bad that he could only write through dictation.
Though it had been the petty-bourgeois radicals who made up the army and stood in the front lines of the revolution, it was the more conservative and wealthy bourgeois class that was in a position to take control of the new society (with Cromwell and his loyalists like Milton balancing on top of this shaky coalition until it came apart). As soon as the power of the king and the great landowners had been decisively broken, the bourgeoisie had no more need of the radicals and were happy to make their peace, on new terms, with the old ruling class.
In little over a decade’s time a new king was put on the throne of England, where his successor is still sitting today. Milton’s writings were burnt and he very narrowly escaped hanging as a traitor and a regicide. After a general pardon was issued he came out of hiding but was arrested anyway and put in jail. Some influential friends were able to get him released, and at the age of 51—silenced and shunned, or as he wrote, “On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; / In darkness [literally: Milton was now totally blind], and with danger compassed round, / And solitude”—he turned to his literary projects: a history of Britain he had been working on, a theological treatise so heretical it wasn’t published for another hundred and fifty years, and his later poetry, including the long-postponed epic.
2. Paradise what?
“Paradise Lost” is a narrative poem in blank verse over ten thousand lines long. Milton would compose a little of it in his head each night and dictate the new lines in the morning. There’s a story that if the person for whom he had arranged to come by and take them down was late, Milton would complain that he needed to be “milked.”
The subject is the war in heaven and the fall of the rebel angels led by Lucifer (or Satan, as he is later called), followed by the creation of Adam and Eve, their own fall as engineered by Satan in a counterattack, and their being made to leave Paradise as a result. It’s a Biblical story, but Milton’s telling is informed in complicated ways by the experience of the revolution. Satan is a tyrant like Charles I and sets himself on a throne. But he is also a rebel like Cromwell, and some of his speeches specifically echo the arguments of the more radical elements to Milton and Cromwell’s left.
The poem’s overall argument—seeking to “justify God’s ways to man”—is that good causes fail and tyrants win not because God is unjust, but because people by their nature are not strong enough in their faith to deserve better. This can be read as a bitter acceptance of defeat: there’s nothing for us to do but wait for God’s judgment. It can also be read as a defense of the revolution (our cause failed in this fallen world because it was right), an analysis of that failure (our forces were corrupted by our divided natures), and a rallying cry, under conditions of censorship, to fight on (the faithful will one day prevail, through God’s grace).
You can hear some of that mixture of sad regret and cautious anticipation, based in turn on a deep sense of human solidarity, in the poem’s beautifully spare final lines, describing Adam and Eve as they make their way out of Paradise:
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
3. What was that about angels and gay sex?
Milton agreed with many of the radicals of his time that neither the body nor its pleasures are inherently bad. “Hence,” in the words of historian Christopher Hill, “Milton’s insistence, contrary to orthodox tradition, that Adam and Eve made love in Paradise before the Fall: the body, like all matter, is good until man falls, and can be good thereafter. Since all matter derives from God, the differences between angels and men, soul and body, spirit and matter, are of degree, not of kind.”
The angels in “Paradise Lost” have real bodies. Bodies that work like human ones, though of course more perfectly: they don’t wear down or die, and can even change shape as needed. But they bleed when wounded in battle, and when the angel Raphael comes to visit Adam and Eve in Paradise he sits down with them to eat. He does so, the poem points out, not “seemingly / […] nor in mist,” as orthodox theologians tend to interpret such accounts, “but with keen dispatch / Of real hunger,” while “at table Eve / Ministered naked, and their flowing cups / With pleasant liquors crowned” (so not exactly an egalitarian vision, for all its progressive content).
At the very end of this visit, Adam, begging the angel to “bear with me then, if lawful what I ask,” wants to know:
“Love not the heavenly Spirits, and how their love
Express they, by looks only, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?”
In other words, do angels make love, and how?
To which (blushingly)
the Angel with a smile that glowed
Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue,
Answered. “Let it suffice thee that thou know’st
Us happy, and without love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.”
(Book VIII, lines 614-629)
In other words, yes, by total mutual interpenetration.
4. So OK, Milton’s angels have sex. But is it gay?
Well, they all have masculine names: Raphael, Michael, Gabriel….
I subscribe to an email discussion list about Milton. Most of the participants are teachers and scholars, including some of the biggest authorities on Milton, but anyone can join. The discussions are sporadic, occasionally wide-ranging, and unpredictable. Milton people can be fucking weird.
Last year someone wrote in asking for help finding “queer readings of Milton” for an interested student of hers. A number of people replied with suggestions, while others questioned the application of modern categories to earlier societies, blah blah blah.
The passage quoted above on angelic sexuality was cited by one person. Someone else wrote in to say it wasn’t relevant:
“I'm trying to recall offhand, but in PL couldn't angels take on either male or female forms at will? I don't think it makes sense to speak of angelic ‘sexuality’ in any sense analogous to human sexuality. Human sexuality, for quite a long time in western thinking, existed primarily for reproductive purposes. Human physicality, for that matter, existed primarily for reproductive purposes. Angelic ‘sexuality,’ being non-reproductive, is not sexuality at all. Their mutual whole-being interpenetration occurs irrespective of their appearance as either sex and, I imagine, irrespective of their appearance as any sex.”
To which I replied:
“Let us note that Raphael eats alongside Eve and Adam not ‘seemingly... nor in mist, the common gloss / Of theologians, but with keen dispatch / Of real hunger….’ Milton insists on drawing pointed and daring analogies between human bodies and appetites and those of his angels, which is a way of conferring value on the former.
“Jim R, reaching for the theologian's mist or the censor's blur, wants us to overlook the basic point of the passage in question: ‘[w]hatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st / (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy / In eminence.…’
“Sex is just for reproduction in Western thinking? Does Western thinking include Plato? By that definition, it certainly doesn't include Milton, who writes rhapsodically of unfallen romantic and sensual love: ‘half her swelling breast / Naked met his under the flowing gold / Of her loose tresses hid,’ etc., etc. He speaks persistently and at length of ‘joy,’ ‘delight,’ ‘transport,’ ‘desire,’ ‘passion,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘kisses,’ ‘embrace.’ The particular Western tradition this emphasis is in tune with is radical Protestant materialism.
“If there's no such thing as angelic sexuality because it’s not reproductive, then, by Jim R’s logic, there’s no such thing as gay sexuality. Hmm.
“And angelic love is more like male-male love for Milton in another way too: it is love between equals.”
Jim R went on to reply that whatever is going on in that passage, to call it gay is anachronistic, which I suppose is valid. And I’ve already noted in passing a couple of times that Milton was no opponent of traditional sex roles in the case of women (although it should be said that not even the radicals of his time were qualitatively better on that question).
But I’m not trying to make some ahistorical case that Milton’s thinking was magically ahead of his era. On the contrary, my point is how representative he was of a revolutionary era that was in certain ways ahead of itself. It was an era that Milton not only lived through but helped to shape, as one of those who dared (in the words of his one-time comrade and fellow poet, Andrew Marvell)
To ruin the great work of time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mould.
Paradise Lost
Trotsky on the English Revolution
Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday by Frank Kermode
Milton-L
my blog, The Purest of Treats
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