Spatial Allegory and Creation Old and New in Milton’s Hexaemeral Narrative

According to William B. Hunter’s interpretation of Paradise Lost’s War in Heaven, Raphael’s martial narrative works as a temporal allegory, the three days of angelic warfare evoking, in various subtle ways, the Paschal triduum. The article demonstrates that Raphael’s hexaemeral narrative in book 7 serves as an allegorical companion piece to his epyllion in book 6. Raphael’s account of the Creation operates as a spatial allegory that communicates the Son’s work of restoration by associating vertical movements of descent and ascent with the salvific process of the Son’s incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and session. In addition to this overarching, restorative scheme of symbolic vertical movement, Milton implements a range of other literary devices to inscribe within Raphael’s history of the original, prelapsarian, “old” Creation the promise of the future, postlapsarian, new Creation of humanity accomplished by the incarnate Son’s saving work.