In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

HUMANITIES 113 Hugh MacCallum. Milton and the Sons ofGod: The Divine Image in Milton's EpicPoetry University of Toronto Press. x, 325. $35.00 Professor MacCallum's book has been several years in the making. Part of the second chapter was in fact read at a conference on Paradise Lost which I organized twenty years ago. It is reprinted, as MacCallum himself notes, 'with little revision.' To say this is not to reproach MacCallum for an implied inflexibility but rather to inquire about the circumstances in which a work of criticism can remain unchanged despite the drastic changes which two decades have wrought in our perceptions of the nature of literature. The answer lies largely in the careful restrictions which MacCallum's book places around itself. As a study of the divine image in Milton's poetry it is concerned principally with the theological outlining of that image and the place of that outline in post-Reformation thought. This exploration is carried out with accuracy and skill and with steady attention to the sometimes rarefied discriminations that mark off one seventeenth -century theologian from another. MacCallum is particularly effective in dealing with Milton's relationship to interregnum theology, the period in which he proceeded from apparent orthodoxy to his highly heretical treatise on Christian doctrine. In tracing the relationship of Milton's view of the Son both to the inheritance and to the contemporary milieu, MacCallum's book marks a Significant step forward in Milton scholarship which justifies the time and trouble which have gone to its production. The nature of Sonship may be central in Milton's understanding of divine disposal, but the nature of creation, the freedom of the will, the soul's mortality, and the nature of deliverance from the law's bondage need to be brought into the foreground more emphatically than in MacCallum 's book. A systematic theology ought to be systematic and it can be argued that Milton's heresies are structurally interrelated rather than local responses to the problems of reading the Bible. It can further be argued that the relationships have a literary consequence - that they look not only to the Bible but also to the specific pattern of the poem that we know as Paradise Lost. Beliefs can pass into poetry but we have to ask ourselves what happens in the passage. If the translation of doctrine into literature is not seen to falter in MacCallum's book it is largely because no faltering is envisaged. Calvin may well have viewed 'nature and history as God's theatre' and may well have displayed a strong sense ofthe 'dramatic and epic potential of the mediator: giving it 'a distinctive emphasis, heroic yet mysterious.' A poem may be latent in theology but the difference between the poem and the theology is by no means merely a difference of genre. A systema- tic theology is out of history. A work of literature is embedded in history. A theology expounds the invariant word in its ultimate coherence. Literature struggles through the human incoherence to ascertain how the word addresses us. Between the unchanging truth and the time-bound human endeavour to connect itself to that truth a distance must open by which the poem must be troubled even though that distance is formally the space of incarnation. MacCallum has clarified the design of Paradise Lost, but whether the poem is fully assimilated to its design and whether the design itself is rigorously unproblematic are matters which still need to be explored. We can and probably should argue that the distinctiveness of Milton's theology is important in bringing about the distinctiveness of his poetry. But poetic distinctiveness must be shown in relation to the literary milieu, just as theological distinctiveness is defined by MacCallum in relation to the environment of religious debate. MacCallum's literary comparisons are sparse. Donne is mentioned four times in passing and Herbert never. The poet most often cited is Joseph Beaumont. Giles Fletcher, whose poems on Christ's victories comprise the only literary treatment similar to Milton's in completeness, is absent from MacCallum's pages. That more needs to be said in Milton scholarship is always obvious. MacCallum's...

pdf

Share