XII
B. Rajan, in his important study, Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader, has observed that Paradise Lost was meant to be an epic of the Christian world and therefore aimed at the utmost general conformity to the body of universal Christian belief. The words "utmost general" are, of course, the operative ones. Rajan would hardly deny unorthodox traces. Milton, being what he was, would certainly not violate his own integrity by quite submerging his differences from universal Christianity; but, according to Rajan, he would never let them obtrude in a work which was intended to be a moral and religious poem, not a systematic theological treatise in verse, and whose appeal should be to every Christian mind.
No doubt, Milton's metaphysics - his vision of ultimate realities, his basic world-philosophy - comes out as universally Christian in its dramatic part: Satan's opposition in Heaven, God's way with it, Man's original state and its loss, the role of Evil in world-history, God's providential bringing of Good out of Evil through Christ's intercession. And perhaps this part has mattered most to Christendom. But it should not induce us to agree with Rajan.
For, we can show how Milton, at least once, makes no bones about his poor opinion of Roman Catholicism, the creed of the Christian majority, and how without raising explicit theological controversies he is absolutely clear in his unorthodox tenets wherever he sets them forth in a poetic manner organic to his tale.
At a point in Book III his prejudice against the Roman Church gets so much the better of him that he frames a downright condemnation of all its religious orders and instruments. The close of the picture of Limbo evidences no attempt to be unobtrusive in sectarian attitude. That "Paradise of Fools" is reserved for "all things vain", all hope-
Page 165
builders on vain things, all half-finished or hideous "works of Nature's hand" including not only "embryos and idiots" but also
eremites and friars,
White, black and grey, with all their trumpery.1
And among the vain things are to be seen
Cowls, hoods and habits, with their wearers tosst
And fluttered into rags, then relics, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls.2
We may gauge the extreme strength of Milton's anti-Roman bias by noting that the context in which it leaps out is perhaps the only one where he writes inconsistently with the doctrinal passages occurring from Book III onward. Here we have the suggestion of human beings existing after death in a recognisable form, even though the existence is but in a Chamber of Horrors, as it were. This suggestion, as we shall demonstrate, is at odds with Milton's heterodox solution of the problem of what a few lines earlier he calls "the other life". Ironically, horror-crowded Limbo appears to constitute his sole concession to the body of universal Christian belief in the field concerned. And it strikes us that Milton is carried away on a flight of fancy spurred by vehement antipathies, and is not altogether conscious of doctrinal implications. In all other places where he fits metaphysics into poetry, especially when some celestial being who cannot but be endowed with responsible knowledgeableness is made to talk, Milton's meaning is unequivocal. And its frequent non-conforming peculiarity should go home to anybody who is not rapt away from intellectual questions by (to quote Todd) "his sweet and solemn-breathing strains" or (to quote Rajan) his "background of incantation".
We shall not involve ourselves in every metaphysical detail and turn; nor shall we more than touch on the
Page 166
Unitarian-Trinitarian dispute - whether Milton believes Christ to be co-essential with God or inferior to Him. We shall briefly busy ourselves, in the Miltonic context, with the fundamental nature of God, the relation of it to that of His Creation, the nature of man's spirit and body, man's future on earth and beyond.
Milton's God has often been mocked: He has been dubbed a sophistical bore, a litigious autocrat, a dry-as-dust justicer. The mockery is partially correct, for a certain icy rhetoric is, time and again, put into God's mouth; but several aspects of Paternal Deity are easily overlooked and the lack of sympathy with which the modern mind receives that rhetoric leads one often to overlook the majesty and beneficence which still go with it. And even in the very first speech He makes, where He spins out in a lofty tone an unconvincing argument about foreknowledge and freewill, He ends with these quietly thrilling words:
In mercy and justice both,
Through Heaven and Earth, so shall my glory excel;
But mercy, first and last, shall brightest shine.3
Similarly His second speech, equally self-important and severe though still lofty, ends on a grandly moving note: it is about man's sin and its sole possible expiation:
He with his whole posterity must die; -
Die he or Justice must; unless for him
Some other, able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Say, Heavenly Powers, where shall we find such love?
Which of ye will be mortal, to redeem
Man's mortal crime, and, just, the unjust to save?
Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?4
Behind the facade of the tedious weaver of logomachy, the contentious enforcer of His own wish and the stern upholder
Page 167
of the letter of the law, we feel - in connection with man's frailty - a fathomless heart mysteriously planning man's final good from the very beginning, a mighty mind of intrinsic grace subtly evoking on the highest level an urge towards the redemption of mortality.
Nor must we forget that in this Book III, which first presents God to us, Milton through an account of the symphony of the Angels raises up an image and concept of God which is truly magnificent:
Thee, Father, first they sung, Omnipotent,
Immutable, Immortal, Infinite,
Eternal King; thee, Author of all being,
Fountain of Light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st
Throned inaccessible, but when thou shad'st
The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud
Drawn round about thee like a radiant shrine
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,
Yet dazzle Heaven, that brightest Seraphim
Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes.5
Here we have a general definition or description of God's nature. Two later passages serve as a commentary on the expression "Author of all being". One is related to Christ's work of creation. God bids His Son go with His Power:
My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee
I send along; ride forth, and bid the Deep
Within appointed bounds be Heaven and Earth.
Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill
Infinitude; nor vacuous the space,
Though I, uncircumscribed, myself retire,
And put not forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not. Necessity and Chance
Approach not me, and what I will is Fate!6
Page 168
This is philosophical poetry at its most pregnant-puissant. Neither the sophist nor the bore is speaking. And, if the autocrat is heard, there is nothing litigious about him: we are drawn irresistibly into immeasurable profundities that leave us emptied of ourselves yet filled beyond all aching and seeking. Nothing of the justicer's dust-dry dealing confronts us: what we meet is the all-silencing wisdom, the all-brood-ing perfection of the Ineffable. Poetry equally fine and intense and "epiphanic" lays bare in his true intent Milton the metaphysician of God in Book VIII where Adam and God converse on the subject whether Adam should have a mate as he desires. God asks Adam:
What think'st thou, then, of me and this my state?
Seem I to be sufficiently possessed
Of happiness, or not, who am alone
From all eternity? for none I know
Second to me or like, equal much less...7
Adam, contrasting to God Man's limited and imperfect individuality which needs "collateral love" and has to beget its like and multiply its image, says:
To attain
The highth and depth of thy eternal ways
All human thoughts come short. Supreme of Things!
Thou in thyself art perfect, and in thee
Is no deficience found...8
... No need that thou
Should'st propagate, already infinite,
And through all numbers absolute, though One...9
Thou, in thy secrecy although alone,
Best with thyself accompanied, seek'st not
Social communication - yet, so pleased,
Canst raise thy creature to what highth thou wilt
Of union or communion, deified...10
Page 169
These passages point to a Godhead at once transcendent and immanent and cosmic. In His essential being He is one without a second. Above all the references usually taken as balancing each other and hanging in "dubious battle" in the Unitarian-Trinitarian debate we may put the general expressions - "alone from all eternity" and "none... second... or like, equal much less" - which render God unique and unparalleled. The expressions are nominally related to the occasion of Adam's problem of a mate but in themselves they might go the whole way with the "Arian heresy" of Christ's inferior status in Milton's later prose treatise, De Doctrina Christiana.
Yes, Paternal Deity is, as another phrase has it, in His "secrecy... alone"; yet His unity is neither sterile nor self-blocked. He can be ever productive, and His oneness is essential, not numerical, not broken or abrogated by many-ness. Being infinite, He runs His unity through all multiplicity and holds all "numbers" realized eternally in Himself. And even what we may consider distinct from Him - the Deep of Chaos before Creation - is really pervaded by His infinity and is nothing except Himself in a special state - a state in which His being exists with all His goodness inactive in it, withdrawn, as it were, by the freedom He eternally enjoys to put it forth or no. And when He chooses to put it forth, Creation takes place, an imposition of form upon a crude confused inconsistence of stuff. The assertion of His formative will upon that part of His substance from which He has "retired" is the creative process. Creation is not ex nihilo, out of nothing, as most Christians hold, but out of His own Self or, if we like, out of nothing except His own Self - His concentrated Self acting upon His Chaos-Self within His own single yet multipotent boundlessness. And in whatever He does He is neither compelled by anything outside Him nor driven haphazardly: He is sole and whole master and everything is decided by His decree.
However, His mastery and decision are to be understood in connection with His power to suspend His active virtue.
Page 170
By suspending this virtue He not only can leave part of Himself an undivine blindly driven Chaos: He also can leave a part of Himself divinely free from His own mastery and decision. There is the phrase:
God in Heaven
Is centre, yet extends to all...11
Here we get a higher counterpart to what is done with regard to Chaos. In Chaos the God-essence grows passive, the goodness inactive: in Heaven a withdrawal into centricity is accomplished and yet it does not render the God-essence null in what is left outside the centre: the divine goodness extends everywhere in Heaven without sacrificing its concentration as Something Other or without everything being God in His supremacy. The result is, in the first place, God as a particular Person no less than a general Presence and, in the second place, the company of Angels - of "Gods", as Milton often calls them - in distinction from the one central Godhead. In relation to these Gods the central Divinity Himself grows passive, as it were, and transfers to them a freewill akin to His own, though on a minor and less widely powerful scale. He is still lord over all inasmuch as He can overrule whatever is willed by others; and others can freely will nothing else, than what He permits. But He does not directly initiate their willings: He curbs His own omnipotence, voluntarily allows others to will by themselves. Thus He remains sole and whole master without being a dictator. Although able to determine everything and to arrest any-thing, He refrains, and He allows His creatures to exercise in free action the divine essence He has put into them. But, in the very movement of refraining from letting His omnipotence hold active sway over everything, He brings to birth a certain weakness in those whom He grants freedom: their freedom to act as they wish in distinction from God is the same as a weakness in them by which, though divine, they can act undivinely and fall from grace.
Page 171
All this complicated position is not stated explicitly by Milton but it is hinted at by him and perhaps most interest-ingly when God is made to say that nought done by Satan or by Adam was "immutably foreseen" by Him. Evidently, if anything is immutably foreseen, it cannot help happening precisely as foreseen: otherwise God would be proved essentially fallible. And, if immutably foreseen, everything would be predestined. Milton specifically says that the Maker's relation either to the Angels or to human beings in Eden is not
As if Predestination overruled
Their will, disposed by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge.12
However, Milton does suggest some kind of foreknowledge on God's part, and he is not very clear in distinguishing it from the power by which things would be "immutably foreseen". He leads God to state:
If I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.13
Here we seem to face a contradiction: the fault, although foreknown to be certain, was not certain because of the foreknowledge. But the contradiction can be partly resolved on our realising that the certainty known beforehand was a logical deduction from God's perfect knowledge of the nature of the agents concerned. The agents were free to choose among the possibilities open to them, but their nature was such that under a particular set of circumstances they would be certain to act in one way and not another: they would be bound by their own nature and would be free only in the sense that nothing outside that nature bound them. Thus the resolution of the contradiction depends on a change of the meaning of the word "free". I wonder whether Milton
Page 172
himself was quite aware of the change. The change introduces a sophistry in the speech of God; and, if we do not allow it and stick to a perfect freedom of choice among the possibilities open, the foreknowledge which God can have is, according to that phrase about nothing being immutably foreseen, a mutable one. We can characterise it as the foreknowledge which, by a voluntary self-limitation, catches only an extreme probability because of God's perfect awareness of the nature of the agents - an extreme probability which amounts to practical though not absolute certainty.
Before we proceed further, we may remark that Milton's God, being the single substance that variously disposes its own infinitude as divine centre, heavenly self-extension, chaotic self-suppression, creative form-imposition, is not at all the God of common Christian belief. A pantheism is here of a special sort. It is not a pantheism such as Western thinkers posit, restricting the Supreme Existence by negating the Deity as Person and as Lord of all. It does not identify God and Nature or even God and Supernature to the exclusion of an independent over-ruling status. Miltonic pantheism is akin to the ancient Indian or Vedantic type, the realistic Adwaita of the Upanishads and the Gita rather than the later illusionistic one, though even the illusionistic has the same fundamental multi-aspected theology and differs from the realistic only in its ultimate attitude to the world. Of course, Vedanta has several features not found in Milton. And it may be asserted that Milton's system remains undeveloped and contains elements which have not been worked into a final harmony. But its basis is avowedly an omni-presence of God in a literal and substantial sense: this sense conflicts with the general Christian doctrine that God is omnipresent only by having His power active everywhere as creator, sustainer, overseer and not by being essentially identical with everything He freely creates and sustains and oversees.
In regard to the problem of angelic or human freewill, Milton seems to be in line with the usual Christian thought.
Page 173
And, in consonance with that thought, man's freewill in his system is a necessary postulate in relation to - among other things - the punishment God metes out to him. But when we consider the content of the punishment we are brought up once more against a Milton wildly at loggerheads with conventional Christianity. For, the problem of "the other life" is the burning topic here. And the right answer would be the one with the best logic, considering what God's punishment is generally taken to be and that it should apply most to the inner rather than the outer being of man since it is the former which is primarily concerned in the free disobedience constituting man's sin against God. The punishment is clearly defined in the first few lines of the epic, when man's disobedience is said to have
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden...14
"Death" is the central stroke and we find that, Adam's "whole posterity must die" in payment of his sin, and this sentence can be relaxed only if God's Son incarnates himself and by his self-sacrifice pays "death for death". But, as the result of Christ's redeeming "Man's mortal crime", what do we get in place of death? In other words - to quote the poem's opening again - how does
one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat?15
To understand the nature of man's punishment it is important to grasp the character of Christ's restoration or redemption of man.
In Book III the restorative act, the redemptive process, is expounded in an explicit form for the first time and the terms used at the poem's opening gain their elucidation. God's long speech to Christ has the verses:
Page 174
... be thou in Adam's room
The head of all mankind, though Adam's son.
As in him perish all men, so in thee,
As from a second root, shall be restored
As many as are restored; without thee, none.
His crime makes guilty all his sons; thy merit,
Imputed, shall absolve them who renounce
Their own both righteous and unrighteous deeds,
And live in thee, transplanted, and from thee
Receive new life. So Man, as is most just,
Shall satisfy for Man, be judged and die,
And dying rise, and, rising, with him raise
His brothers ransomed with his own dear life.16
An unmistakable meaning resides in the term "restored". The restoration is of the life that Man forfeited through Adam's sin: the fate of perishing, of dying, which this sin incurred is in principle annulled by the death of God made Man who rises from the grave and thus assures the rising of the whole death-doomed race of Adam by resort to the power of God made Man and by abnegation of all power of self expressed either in human virtue or in human vice.
Now comes the crucial question. Christ conquers death by his resurrection after being laid in the grave. He rises bodily from death and, as we learn from other passages of the same Book, he ascends to Heaven in physical form. Thus, after God's promise of grace and His demand for a sacrifice to appease Justice, Christ says:
Behold me, then: me for him, life for life,
I offer; on me let thine anger fall;...17
But I shall rise victorious, and subdue
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil.
Death his death's wound shall then receive, and stoop
Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed;
I through the ample air in triumph high
Page 175
Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of Darkness bound. Thou, at the sight
Pleased, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile,
While, by thee raised, I ruin all thy foes...18
Then, with the multitude of my redeemed
Shall enter Heaven, long absent, and return,
Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud
Of anger shall remain, but peace assured
And reconcilement: wrath shall be no more...19
God speaks next. Towards the end of His speech we read of Christ's reward on his return, the despatch by him of Archangels to proclaim the Last Judgment, the hastening from everywhere of the living and of all the dead roused from their sleep by a peal, the judging of "bad men and Angels" who will be shut up in Hell for ever:
Meanwhile
The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring
New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell...20
The "New Earth" would mean the regaining of the blissful Seat, Eden, on a wider scale than before - an event about which we read also in Book XII with a more direct reference:
for then the Earth
Shall be all Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden...21
The terrestrial Paradise would continue till the time when all the happy just ones would go to Heaven in their new physical bodies. If these passages are taken along with the other in a literal sense, the terms definitely imply that Man's redemption is identical with Christ's conquest of death: he is freed from death by being enabled to rise, like Christ, physically from the grave and ultimately to ascend to Heaven as Christ does. No other kind of death-conquest is implied.
Page 176
But, if man's bodily resurrection is the saving grace and the significant prelude to his regaining of Eden on the one side and his subsequent entry into Heaven on the other, the question of questions is: 'What happens to his inner being, his 'spirit', when the body dies - what happens to it in the period between the body's death and the physical resurrection?"
Ordinarily, we should suppose this crucial query in a Christian context to be concerned with an after-life in Heaven or Hell or Purgatory. And the early fanciful flight of Milton's about Limbo prompts an idea of after-life. But, when Adam is condemned to die, no after-life of any sort at all figures in his anxious thoughts. He poses the mournful argument:
Yet one doubt
Pursues me still - lest all I cannot die;
Lest that, pure breath of life, the Spirit of Man
Which God inspired, cannot together perish
With this corporeal clod. Then, in the grave,
Or in some other dismal place, who knows
But I shall die a living death? O thought
Horrid, if true! yet why? It was but breath
Of life that sinned: what dies but what had life
And sin? The body properly hath neither.
All of me, then, shall die...22
The concern in this speech is: either in a grave or in some other dismal substitute of a place where the dead body lies, will the "spirit" survive alongside the perished "corporeal clod", and undergo in its company "a living death"? To Milton's Adam, to Milton's Man, the idea of survival as Christians commonly conceive it is irrelevant: the single pertinent idea to be resolved is the issue raised by the school of Mortalism which had some influence in Milton's day: "Does the spirit die with the body or does it stay alive with the lifeless flesh wherever the flesh is deposited?" Milton, in his De Doctrina Christiana (XIII) returns an unequivocal
Page 177
answer: "Inasmuch as the whole man is uniformly said to consist of body, spirit and soul (whatever be the distinct provinces severally assigned to these divisions), I will show that in death, first, the whole man, and secondly, each component part, suffers privation of life.... No reason can be assigned why if God has sentenced to death the whole man that sinned, the spirit, which is the principal part offending, should be alone exempt from the appointed punishment." The terms of this answer echo some of Adam's own:
It was but breath
And sin?
Adam's conclusion - "All of me, then, shall die" - is the same as Milton's in his doctrinal declaration. On the strength of it we should ascribe unqualified Mortalism to Milton of Paradise Lost.
Critics like Rajan are not sure on this point. They refer us to another passage which they regard as the only one bearing on Adam's "doubt". It is a speech of Christ:
On me let Death wreak all his rage.
Under his gloomy power I shall not long
Lie vanquished. Thou hast given me to possess
Life in myself for ever; by thee I live;
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due,
All that of me can die, yet, that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul
For ever with corruption there to dwell.
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil.23
It is pleaded that the lines are not decisive. But they are actually part of a passage containing the long excerpt made by us, from which analogically we inferred that "restoration"
Page 178
for man can mean only resurrection like Christ's and no intermediate existence after death in another world. Our inference should hold unless we find elsewhere a statement to the contrary. None of the critics denying explicit Mortal-ism in the epic have produced such a statement. And they have failed to note that there is another passage which leaves no doubt of Milton's Mortalism in Paradise Lost. It occurs in Book XI, where God speaks of His two gifts to man:
I, at first, with two fair gifts
Created him, endowed - with Happiness
And Immortality; that fondly lost,
The other served but to eternise woe,
Till I provided Death; so Death becomes
His final remedy, and, after life
Tried in sharp tribulation, and refined
By faith and faithful works, to second life
Waked in the renovation of the just,
Resigns him up with Heaven and Earth renewed.24
Observe the three stages in man's existence mentioned here: (1) the present life, a term for refinement and preparation for the future; (2) the state of death which continues till what Christianity knows as the last trump, a state from which that trump will wake him and so a state resembling sleep; (3) the new or "second life" that will be ushered in by a double event, man's resurrection and the renewing of Heaven and Earth. Between the death and the resurrection there is no survival of man's spirit: there is only a long slumber-like subsistence of the spirit together with a similar condition of the body, a death of the spirit along with the body's death. Our lines clinch Milton the epic poet's Mortalism.
Of course, the general Christian reaction would be, in Adam's words: "O thought horrid!" But Adam was horrified only by the prospect of having his spirit consciously tied up with the dead decaying body. He in fact welcomed the alternative of the spirit's death. The common Christian
Page 179
recoils because he is appalled by the tremendous length of time during which he would be totally extinct if Mortalism were true. But Milton, with the comparison of sleep in his mind, was quite placid: when we wake up in the morning after unbroken sleep, do we consider the length of time spent in sleep to be horrid? It is as if no time at all was spent - the morning awakening is almost instantaneous after the falling asleep at night. Mortalism has no fears: it is neither an intermediate waiting nor an endless extinction, it is but the moment before the resurrection.
Perhaps we may ask Milton: "How can a substance like the spirit die?" Here we enter the whole philosophy of Milton regarding Body and Spirit. This philosophy is clearly formulated in Book V when the visiting Angel explains how it is that he is able to eat of earthly food with creatures like Adam and Eve:
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,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
As nearer to him placed or nearer tending
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit works, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root
Springs lightly 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,
Discursive, or Intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
Page 180
Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
Wonder not, then, what God for you saw good
If I refuse not, but convert, as you,
To proper substance; time may come when men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit,
Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend
Ethereal, as we, or may at choice
Here or in Heavenly Paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progeny you are...25
This passage should be taken in association with what we have concluded from Milton about God's Self. God in His specific Godliness concentrates Himself in supreme transcendence, the central Divinity; but, in an unformed state, all is God, for He is the one infinite being. When He applies His creative will to make form, all existences come forth: they "proceed" from Him, as our quotation puts it, in a vast variety but all linked by their common being-stuff, so to speak, the "one first matter", and constituting an ordered hierarchy. Within this hierarchy there can be progression from one degree to another, right up to Godhead, so long as things are "not depraved from good". Body and Spirit are, therefore, the same "matter", but only different grades or intensities of it. Body is not inherently mortal: it can enjoy immortality if it retains the goodness given it by God. In fact, immortality is an attribute of the bodies of Adam and Eve, side by side with happiness. Conversely, mortality is not impossible to Spirit, except when - as we shall shortly see - they happen to be Heavenly and can only be annihilated by God. Earthly spirits are immortal if they stay "good": the moment they lose the God-granted goodness they can be as mortal as earthly bodies.
Page 181
Thus Mortalism is perfectly logical for Milton, once depravity sets in. And, naturally, what we may term Immortalism is just as logical, provided depravity is absent. Nor is that all, on the positive side. Within the Immortalism of both body and spirit, there is the wide range of progress opened up by Milton: human bodies can all turn to spirit, gain wings and move about freely in earthly or heavenly Paradises.
Here is a doctrine, however crude, of physical transformation, by which the human form can be completely spiritualized and live a divine life, the life of "Gods". Of course, to Milton, such a life was possible to unfallen Man and cannot be lived now by any means: it can come about only at the Resurrection for those who have passed their days virtuously before death. But the concept is of curious interest in view of the "Integral Yoga" propounded by modern India's greatest spiritual figure, Sri Aurobindo who, by the way, was educated at Milton's own University, Cambridge, and has written, among other things, the sole full-blown epic that, after Paradise host's 10,565 lines, has seen the light in English: Savitri, A Legend and a Symbol, whose lines add up to 23,837. Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga envisages a total transformation - not only the liberation of our inner being into the Infinite and Eternal but also a divinisation of our entire nature culminating in a spiritualised earthly body. The bodily transformation would be the result of a descent or manifestation of the archetypal form of man, the divine original "truth-body", known to the ancient Vedanta as the kāraṇa śarīra, "the causal body", secretly underlying the sūkṣma śarīra, "the subtle body" as well as the sthula śarīra, "the gross body".
Just as the doctrine, in Paradise Lost, of God's literal and substantial omnipresence has broad affinities to the Vedantic multi-aspected pantheism, so also the doctrine of body turning all to spirit has a broad suggestion of the profoundest modern development from the Vedantic vision of man's triple-bodied existence.
As to what would be the nature of the body turned all to
Page 182
spirit, Milton offers several vivid descriptions when he tells us of the matter composing the Angels, the Spirits, whether obedient or rebellious. First we hear of the marvellous capacities of their pure essence:
For Spirits, when they please,
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not tied or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their airy purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfil.26
Next we learn of their invulnerability and are told again of their capacities. A further elaboration is made on the theme of their being "Not tied or manacled with joint or limb, / Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones". The positive aspect of this freedom is now briefly sketched, with the consequence of being invulnerable as well as infinitely plastic:
Spirits that live throughout
Vital in every part - not, as frail Man,
In entrails, heart or head, liver or reins,
Cannot but by annihilating die;
Nor in their liquid texture mortal wound
Receive, no more than can the fluid air:
All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense; and as they please
They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.27
Finally, we come to know of the wonderful relationship among themselves, that the Spirits are capable of. Adam asks Raphael:
Page 183
Love not the Heavenly Spirits, and how their love
Express they - by looks only, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?28
Milton continues:
To whom 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..."29
We may well end our survey of the metaphysics of Paradise Lost with these words and particularly one phrase from the passage. This phrase quintessences the beatific life of the Spirits and does it with a Dantesque economy of mingled sweet and severe:
Let it suffice thee that thou know'st
We find in the expression a felicitous balance to the one which, though emanating from the mouth of Satan, is still revelatory of the Archangelic in him, representative of "a mind not to be changed by place or time":30
Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering...31
Strength that saves one from being miserable, love that leads
Page 184
one to being happy - the two in their highest form would make the perfect life in the Miltonic vision, their highest form which would show them as part of a constant communion with Divinity. Such a life Milton saw not only in Heaven eternally but also on earth at the end of time and mingling even throughout time with earthly existences in an unremitting movement towards God:
Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night...32
Milton's "spiritual Creatures" provide the followers of Sri Aurobindo, of whom the present author is one, with a model for the fulfilment of their own Yogic attempt here and now at turning their bodies "all to spirit". They may regard those unseen millions as kindred to their own archimages, so to speak, active secretly upon earth and waiting to be turned in them all to body.
Notes and References
1.Bk. III, 474-5.
2.Ibid., III, 490-2.
3.Ibid., III, 132-4.
4.Ibid., III, 210-17.
5.Ibid., III, 372-82.
6.Bk. VII, 165-73.
7.Bk. VIII, 403-7.
8.Ibid., VIII, 412-6.
9.Ibid., VIII, 419-21.
10.Ibid., VIII, 427-31.
11.Bk. IX, 107-8.
12.Ibid., IX, 114-6.
13.Ibid., IX, 118-20.
14.Bk. I, 3-4.
15.Ibid., I, 4-5.
16.Bk. III, 285-96.
17.Ibid., III, 237-8.
18.Ibid., III, 251-9.
Page 185
19.Ibid., III, 261-5.
20.Ibid., III, 334-6.
21.Bk. XII, 463-5.
22.Bk. X, 782-92.
23.Bk. III, 241-51.
24.Bk. XI, 57-66.
25.Bk. V, 469-503.
26.Bk. I, 423-31.
27.Bk. VI, 344-53.
28.Bk. VIII, 615-7.
29.Ibid., VIII, 618-29.
30.Bk. I, 254.
31.Ibid., I, 157-8.
32.Bk. IV, 677-80.
Page 186
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.