Infelix culpa: Milton's Son of God and the incarnation as a fall in Paradise Lost

Philological Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Neil D. Graves

In a sermon written fifty years before the publication of Milton's Paradise Lost, John Donne ruminates that "I must not ask why God took this way to incarnate his Son." (1) Despite the centrality of the concept of the Incarnation in Christian doctrine, it is perhaps not surprising that such a theory raises numerous problematic questions for most Christian thinkers. The OED defines the Incarnation of God in Christ as the "investiture or embodiment in flesh; assumption of, or existence in, a bodily form," and any explanation of the translation of the divine form into the human body is essentially speculative. Indeed, the history of Christian doctrine is testament to this as virtually every patristic, scholastic and Renaissance religious thinker struggled to explain what Milton called "the greatest mystery of our religion" (CPW 6:420). (2) Yet what was for most theologians the greatest act of divine love, the ultimate manifestation of God's redemptive power, is for others a mystery of far darker and more sinister implications. Sometimes such negative speculation is merely an inadvertent questioning of God's status, such as the statement quoted in the OED under "incarnate" from Bishop Hall's Contemplations upon the New Testament, "That God should be incarnate of a virgin was an abasement of His maiestie." More interesting is the only entry pertaining to divine incarnation listed in the OED that details the meaning of "to degrade from spiritual nature, despiritualize," and this comes from Book 9 of Paradise Lost.

Critics have become increasingly aware of Milton's heretical Christian theology. For centuries regarded by most as the preeminent English poet of Christian orthodoxy Milton's name is now almost synonymous with Arianism, and his thinking on mortalism, polygamy, material monism, and creatio ex Deo cosmogony are well documented. However, critics have not explored the problems into which Milton embroils himself as he expounds the Incarnation towards the end of his writing career. What seems like the simple affirmation of Christian orthodoxy in On the Morning of Christ's Nativity has certainly become by the writing of the great epics deeply troubling, and Milton himself is very aware of this. In the middle of God the Father's elaborate exposition to the Son of his gift of salvation in Book 3 of Paradise Lost he takes time out from his Miltonic grand style of powerful, bombastic and complexly layered verse to interject a brief, almost anomalous, two line refutation: "Nor shalt thou by descending to assume / Man's nature, lessen or degrade thine own" (303-4). It is my contention that Milton here uncomfortably confronts the conclusions of his own idiosyncratic ontological philosophy. The narrative of Paradise Lost documents two philosophical shifts within the ontological and epistemological scale of being, and prophesies a third that is finally explored in the narrative of Paradise Regained. These philosophical shifts are "falls," and the fall of Satan and the fall of Adam and Eve are easily comprehended in the Miltonic context of both material and ethical debasement. The third "fall" is the Incarnation of the Son of God. I will argue that philosophically the ontological change in the person of the Son is not dissimilar to those demonstrated in Satan and conceptualized in mankind, and that it is therefore possible, and indeed inescapable as Milton himself found, to appraise the Incarnation theologically in the light of these other two "falls."

The idea of the Incarnation as a form of ontological degradation is not unique to Milton, but the implications for the Incarnation being a "fall" within a material monistic hierarchy of being are revealing. In Milton's metaphysical Weltanschauung, essence is determined by ethics. Working within what Michel Foucault would call in Les Mots et les choses the "resemblance" episteme current before the Age of Reason, Milton's poetics is uniformly consistent in representing formal composition as a consequence of moral behavior. (3) In other words, Milton's philosophical system dictates that the Son of God's ontological "fall" is a direct result of an ethical "fall." While this conclusion may appear at first sight as the unfortunate result of a metaphysical theory that is insufficiently flexible to cope with diverse spiritual subjects, yet it is particularly interesting in the light of Milton's well-documented convictions regarding the Son of God. Is Milton's treatment of the Incarnation yet another example of his subordination of the Son? (4) In Milton's theology the Son is a being created within time like Satan and Man, and is therefore subject to the same axioms. Or conversely, is Milton's depiction of the Incarnation in Paradise Lost unintentionally derailed by his metaphysical philosophy?

1

Recent studies of Milton's metaphysics by Stephen Fallon and John Rogers as well as classic statements by Walter Curry, C. A. Patrides and William Madsen have been convincing that the famous poet and political disputant was also a proficient philosopher. Milton's metaphysical monism is remarkable for the dynamic hierarchies of the Scales of Nature and of Knowledge, and this was expressed by Milton in a surprisingly consistent form throughout his writing career both in the philosophical prose and in the early and late poetry. While it may be an example of immature idealism in Milton to suggest, as he does in A Masque, that Man may achieve actual physical advancement up the ladder of Being through moral rectitude, the same metaphysical process was promised to Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost thirty or so years later. (5) Milton is entirely conventional in positing two hierarchical scales of metaphysical Nature and epistemological Knowledge, which are independent and yet parasitical of one another; it is the fact that their symbiotic relationship realizes a dynamic scale of Nature that differentiates Milton's metaphysical system from several other rare monistic systems. This is a radical adaptation of the conservative Scholastic theory of a static hierarchy famously coined in literary circles by E. M. W. Tillyard as the "Elizabethan World Picture." The dynamic quality of Milton's scala naturae, "the scale of nature set / From centre to circumference" (PL 5.509-10), was arguably the result of the development of Protestant theology which replaced the old medieval ideas of hierarchical order based on essential being with that based on action and active "God-like-ness." Certainly the Arminian Milton had a far greater affinity with that part of the Puritan movement which grounded its value structure on Godly action, rather than the austerely minded Calvinist Puritans, who with their belief in the pre-ordained status of the Elect effectively reverted back to the medieval Catholic conception of a hierarchy of substance rather than of behavior. (6)