Pilgrimage in Paradise Lost

Blake's Milton: A Poem is prefaced by a lyric (popularly known as "Jerusalem") that appears to invoke the myth that Joseph of Arimathea brought Jesus to Albion: "And did those feet in ancient time, / Walk upon England's mountains green."¹ Blake's emphasis on Christ's feet here is entirely in accord with the medieval pilgrimage narratives evoked by these lines—texts that likewise imagine a landscape transformed by the presence of the godhead and display an initially surprising obsession with feet and footprints.² However, precisely because feet are dusty and ordinary, they revive the wonder at God's condescension in becoming flesh, and footprints become memorials of the Incarnation, recording the spot where the divine and earthly once met.³ Pilgrimage literature, like Blake's Milton, focuses "sharply on the feet that repeatedly indicate encounters of one realm of existence with another."⁴ The opening sentence of The Book of Sir John Mandeville (ca. 1356)—the most popular of all pilgrim narratives—avows that the Holy Land is holy because God had chosen "to envyroun that lond with his blesside feet."⁵ One late-fifteenth-century pilgrim narrative anticipates Blake's Glastonbury myth by claiming that one of the imprints left by Jesus' feet at the Ascension "is taken awaie from thence and brought to Westmynstre in Englond."⁶ Both narratives are strikingly literal attempts to relocate the sanctity of the Holy Land (incandescent with Christ's footprints) to England. Blake's Milton, however, although attracted by the myth, states that the transformative power of the Incarnation is not restricted by place: whether or not Christ trod on English soil, the speaker can follow in his spiritual footsteps and forge a new Jerusalem—a renewed society—in his homeland.

In Milton's Paradise Lost, likewise, Adam's attachment to his homeland is expressed in the traditional terminology of geographical pilgrimage that he must learn to translate into an active spirituality. Adam articulates the desire to remain in a place where God has walked, where he can "trace" God's "footstep."⁷ Milton is deeply antagonistic to the practice of pilgrimage and this passage is one of Adam's "many errors in the course of his instruction" by Michael.⁸ But Adam's imagined pilgrimage around Eden's sacred sites brings forward a concept fundamental to the final books of the poem. The ubiquitous metaphor of the Christian life as a pilgrimage (the epistle to the Hebrews states that faithful are as "strangers and pilgrims on the earth," Augustine that "the City of God . . . is on pilgrimage in this world")⁹ underlies the final action of Paradise Lost: from the allusions that connect Adam with the archetypal holy wanderer, Abraham, to the famous closing lines.¹⁰

Out of Eden

Adam's imagined pilgrimage in book 11of Paradise Lost embodies humankind's "overfond" (PL 11.289) attachment to place and calls forward one of Milton's most radical additions to the Genesis story: the destruction of paradise. When Adam appears unresponsive to Michael's arguments against idolatrous attachment to his home, he is informed, "this mount / Of Paradise" will be destroyed "to teach thee that God attributes to place / No sanctity" (11.829-30, 836-37). Milton connects Adam's love of Eden with that of pilgrims for the Holy Land, so that when paradise is destroyed Adam becomes a pilgrim without a physical goal, a pilgrim ready—like Abraham—to leave the land he knows and trust that God will lead him to a heavenly home. Milton's striking decision to destroy the garden highlights (and enables) Adam's growth from his initial desire for place pilgrimage to an understanding of the spiritual pilgrimage he will undergo. Under Michael's tutelage, Adam learns that he must transmute his overliteral desire to remain where he can "trace" God's "footstep" into spiritual understanding of what it is to follow in the "track divine" (11.329, 354).

Despite the important, if implicit, pilgrim theme in the final books of Paradise Lost, there has been some critical resistance to the idea of Milton's use of such imagery. The editors of the Yale edition of Milton's prose argue that the original language of "the true wayfaring Christian" in the printed text of Areopagitica (1644) (which has been changed by a contemporary hand to "the true war-faring Christian") cannot be the correct reading because "the image of the Christian pilgrimage, frequently found elsewhere, never occurs in Milton."¹¹ In fact, there is another (albeit fleeting) example of such imagery in Areopagitica itself when Milton calls living an honest and faithful life "Christian walking" (YP 2:537).¹² But the significance for Paradise Lost of the biblically based trope of the Christian life as a journey (in which physical movement stands for the striving of the soul) has perhaps been obscured for modern critics by the poem's explicit denigration of geographical pilgrimage. Satan's wandering takes him through the barren limbo of "The Paradise of Fools" (PL 3.496) where "pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek / In Golgotha him dead, who lives in heaven," whirled thither with all their "relics, beads, / Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls" (3.476-77, 491-92). The asyndeton expresses a curt contempt for the practice of pilgrimage and, at first sight, such a passage seems to support the view that there is something inherently unlikely in Milton's use of "wayfaring" as a metaphor for the spiritual life.

The literary history of the trope of pilgrimage, however, suggests the opposite. In the medieval church there had been a "precarious harmony between moral, interior and place pilgrimage" and widespread disagreement over the efficacy of geographical pilgrimage in the wider scheme of the spiritual pilgrimage of a Christian's life.¹³ The Protestant suppression of the practice of pilgrimage, however, freed the metaphor from these tensions and in doing so made it into an even more vibrant devotional and poetic image. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) is only the most famous example of an outpouring of early modern divinity which—following in the footsteps of Arthur Dent's best-selling Plaine Mans Path-Way to Heaven (1601)—figured the Protestant Christian life as a "godly and ghostly pilgrimage."¹⁴ Antagonism to the practice of pilgrimage promoted the use of pilgrimage as a spiritual trope because it imbued it with a new clarity.¹⁵ For Protestants there was only one kind of pilgrimage, only one route to Jerusalem.

Place Pilgrimage in Paradise Lost

For Milton, as for many Protestants, there was something inherently suspect about place pilgrimage, and Adam's imagined peregrination around the mount of paradise is rendered spiritually dubious through its connection with the practice and lore of geographical pilgrimage. As Adam describes what he desires, he is unknowingly tracing the stations, stones, and altars of what will become the pilgrim route around Jerusalem:

    here I could frequent,With worship, place by place where he vouchsafedPresence divine, and to my sons relate;On this mount he appeared; under this treeStood visible, among these pines his voiceI heard, here with him at this fountain talked:So many grateful altars I would rearOf grassy turf, and pile up every stoneOf lustre from the brook, in memory,Or monument to ages.

(11.317-26)

Adam longs to remain in the place that communion with God has rendered sacred, and he imagines setting apart the mountains, trees, and fountains where God had "vouchsafed / Presence divine" by building "grateful altars" or piles of stones over them. Like the Franciscan friars who conducted pilgrims around the sites of the Holy Land, Adam imagines leading others around these holy sites and relating to them God's actions in these places.

The marking of holy sites with altars and piles of stones was ubiquitous on the pilgrim route around Judea, and one early-sixteenth-century English pilgrim (the chaplain to Sir Richard Guylforde who visited the Holy Land in 1506) notes that stones are used to memorialize the locations of scriptural events: "therby is the place shewed, by token of a stone, where Judas betrayed our Savyoure to the Jewes with a kyssse."¹⁶ These stones are placed, like Adam's, "in memory, / Or monument to ages" and sometimes, like his, they form altars. Egeria (ca. 381-84), the first pilgrim to leave a full narrative of her journey, notes of one holy site: "there is no building there, but it is an enormous round rock with a flat place on top where the holy men are said to have stood, and a kind of altar in the middle made of stones."¹⁷ Indeed, the stone that covered Christianity's holiest place—the site of the Resurrection—is likewise an altar.¹⁸

In the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem altars mark every place of importance. Adam's imagined procession "place by place" between the altars he has raised to mark the sites where God "vouchsafed / Presence divine" is reminiscent of that described by Guylforde's chaplain between the altars of this church:

And firste the sayd processyon broughte us to a place at an aulter in the southe yle, where our Savyour Criste was circumsised, &c.

And from thens we come to an other aulter on the northe syde, where the thre kynges made redy their offerynges to present unto our Savyour Criste.

And from this place descendyng by certyne stone grees we come into a wonder fayre lytell Chapell, at the hyghe aulter wherof is the very place of the byrthe of our Lord.¹⁹

Adam's route, like that of those pilgrims who "with a fulle reverent procession . . . circuett abowt the same glorius cherch visiteng and declaryng alle the forewriten hooli places,"²⁰ has an "incipient liturgical pattern."²¹ Egeria, for example, always read the Bible passage "proper" to the place when visiting sites as well as reciting appropriate psalms and prayers.²² In the Holy Land, as in Adam's paradise, place is understood as sacred because of the history that has been enacted on that spot: a history that is memorialized through reciting it on the very spot where it occurred in a ritual that confirms the reciprocal holiness of place and story.

Adam's holy places—like those in Jerusalem—are natural phenomena that act as contact relics, marking sites of theological memory rather than owning any inherent sanctity. The mountain, fountain, and trees of Adam's imagined route around paradise are strikingly close to the most important pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land. Mountains—such as the Mount of Olives and Mount Tabor—were major sites for pilgrims because of their importance in scriptural narratives.²³ Fountains are less biblically prominent, but those struck from the rock by Moses and sweetened by Elijah were augmented with apocryphal examples, such as the "very clere fountayne somwhat under therthe, where our blessyd Lady was wonte many tymes to wasshe ye clothes of our blessyd Savyour in his childehode."²⁴ Despite the more problematic nature of trees (Protestant travelers often ridiculed the idea that these could have survived since biblical times), they mark the pilgrimage route in profusion. In 333 the Bordeaux pilgrim (the first to leave an account of his journey) saw "the palm-tree from which the children took branches and strewed them in Christ's path," the sycamore that Zacchaeus climbed, and the plane trees "planted by Jacob."²⁵ Later pilgrims were likewise shown the tree under which Jesus and Mary rested, balm trees that Jesus watered at Mary's request, the terebinth at Mamre, and the burning bush out of which God spoke to Moses, "which is still alive and sprouting."²⁶

Adam's reification of trees, mountains, and running water is in part a primitive response, linked to the sanctity of place and the natural world in paganism, and rejected by Milton as such.²⁷ It has been argued that with the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century "came a reaffirmation of the spiritual significance of 'place,' a development which probably owed something to the pagan background of the emperor."²⁸ Once it had a Christian emperor, the church was able to openly designate its holy sites, and Milton's distaste for the establishment of the church under Constantine was allied to his rejection of this emphasis on the sanctity of place (YP 1:944). It may indeed be a sign of a residual pagan sensibility that led Constantine to build four temples in the Holy Land at the site of a tree (the terebinth of Mamre), a mountain (the Mount of Olives), and two caves (Bethlehem and Christ's tomb).²⁹

Milton's critique of Adam's desired proto-pilgrimage route around Eden appears likewise to imply that Christianity has been tainted by a pagan sense of the holiness of place. Adam is rebuked by Michael: "Adam, thou knowst heaven his, and all the earth. / Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills / Land, sea, and air" (11.335-37). Adam's localized devotion is corrected with words that recall Jesus' warning to the woman of Samaria: "the houre commeth, when yee shall neither in this mountaine, nor yet at Hierusalem, worship the Father" (John 4:21). Geographical pilgrimage is one of the strongest indicators of a belief in sacred places and hence the allusion to it in Adam's words (PL 11.317-26) is an implicit criticism of what Milton considered the overly physical worship of the Roman Catholic and, presumably, the Restoration Church.

The undercutting of papal authority is manifest in Milton's substitution of "rock" for "mountain," a substitution that "hits at the successors of St. Peter (the rock) for their attempt to confine God's presence with the narrow bounds of local pieties and institutionalized forms."³⁰ It is striking, however, that Michael's use of John 4:21 to rebut a neophyte's enthusiasm for worshipping God in holy places should have a direct analogue in a letter of Saint Jerome. Jerome is writing to Paulinus of Nola, attempting to cool the latter's ardent desire to visit the Holy Land: "I do not presume to limit God's omnipotence or to restrict to a narrow strip of earth Him whom the heaven cannot contain. . . . The true worshippers worship the Father neither at Jerusalem nor on mount Gerizim."³¹ It is a parallel that alerts us to a surprising aspect of this exchange between man and angel in book 11 of Paradise Lost. Adam's desires show Milton unexpectedly deploying his knowledge of the stones, altars, mountains, trees, and protoliturgical character of the pilgrimage route, but they also have a poignant beauty entirely lacking from the satirical description of pilgrims in the Paradise of Fools.³² The elegiac cast of Adam's lament recalls the lyricism with which other seventeenth century poets (of rather different theological persuasions) had mourned the falling away of the Old Testament's easy converse with God. Henry Vaughan's "Religion," modeled on George Herbert's "Decay," is a threnody for divine intimacy, suffused—like Adam's speech—with longing for a time when the Lord spoke to humankind beside fountains, under trees, and shared meals in shady groves.

The numinous landscape of the Old Testament, mirrored in Adam's description of Eden, is one in which there is a conversational intimacy between humankind and God. It is a relationship that would have held particular appeal for Milton for it required no mediating authority; and indeed, half of Paradise Lost is taken up with converse between humankind and God's angelic messengers. When the conversation with the affable archangel is over, the subsequent book opens with a lament over the divorce the Fall will create:

No more of talk where God or angel guestWith man, as with his friend, familiar usedTo sit indulgent, and with him partakeRural repast, permitting him the whileVenial discourse unblamed.

(9.1-5)

Fowler finds a problem here—"God talked with Adam (viii 316-51), but no common meal is mentioned"—but the passage is clearly referring to Adam's intercourse with Raphael, which, as it is modeled on the visit of the three angels to Abraham (Gen. 18:1-15), explains the phrase "God or angel guest." Abraham's encounter was understood as both an angelic and a divine visitation: "And the Lord appeared unto him, in the plaines of Mamre: and he sate in the tent doore in the heate of the day. And hee lift[ed] up his eyes and looked, and loe, three men stood by him" (Gen. 18:1-2).³³ Abraham's angelic visitors were universally understood in Christian exegesis as a "mystical sign of the Trinity": pilgrims visiting the oak that marked the site at Mamre claimed to have seen the place where "the Holy Trinity appeared to the Patriarch Abraham, and did eat with him."³⁴ (It is attractive to speculate that Milton's reduction in the number of angels from three to one is indicative not merely of the drive toward narrative simplicity, but also of unorthodox Trinitarian theology.)

The most significant evidence of heavenly condescension in the biblical account is that the angels share a meal with Abraham, but in Vaughan's version (like Milton's), verbal exchange becomes equally important:

In Abr'hams Tent the winged guests(O how familiar then was heaven!)Eate, drinke, discourse, sit downe, and restUntill the Coole and shady Even.³⁵

"Familiar" and "discourse" are likewise Milton's words (PL 9.2, 5): the conviviality of conversation expresses for these seventeenth century poets what sharing a meal symbolized in biblical culture. Adam believes that the loss of Eden comprehends the frustration of his desire for direct conversation with God: "among these pines his voice / I heard, here with him at this fountain talked" (PL 11.321-22). The closeness—in tone and choice of biblical allusion—of Vaughan's poem to Adam's words and the opening of book 9 suggests that Milton's epic is sensitive to the loss inherent in its iconoclastic destruction of paradise.³⁶

Divining the Track: The Vision of God

The ultimate desire of Adam's imagined pilgrim route is identical with that of pilgrims to the Holy Land: to "trace" God's "footstep" (PL 11.329). On viewing the imprint of Christ's feet on the Mount of Olives, a mid-fourteenth-century English pilgrim wrote, "we might say with David: 'We will go into his tabernacle: we will adore in the place where his feet stood.'"³⁷ "Where his feet stood" is a somewhat free translation of Psalm 131's hadom raglayw ("footstoole," l:7), and it was understood as giving biblical sanction for the practice of pilgrimage, as well as intensifying interest in sites where Jesus' footprints were believed to be still visible. Although these places were esteemed some of the most holy (they became, for example, the places most likely to be plundered by pilgrims seeking relics of earth to carry back home), "the land of Jerusalem is throughout holy and sanctified, seeing that the prophets, the Apostles, and the Lord Himself walked therein."³⁸ The whole of Jerusalem was one vast contact relic, sanctified by the touch of Christ's feet. Pilgrims such as Felix Fabri (ca. 1480) believed that to venerate the earth anywhere in Jerusalem was to kiss Christ's "footsteps."³⁹ Paulinus of Nola (ca. 354-431) wrote, "no other sentiment draws men to Jerusalem, but the desire to see and touch the places where Christ was physically present, and to be able to say from their very own experience: We have gone into His tabernacle, and have adored in the places where His feet stood. Though a deeper meaning may be read into this passage, we must not ignore the simple and literal sense when apposite. . . . the desire is a truly religious one to see the places in which Christ walked, suffered, rose again."⁴⁰

The spiritual benefit of walking where Christ had walked would have been impressed upon pilgrims by their Franciscan guides who, through their official role as the conductors of pilgrims around the Holy Land, literally embodied their rule's command to follow in Christ's footsteps.⁴¹ As late as 1601, the Protestant traveler Henry Timberlake recorded in his immensely popular True and Strange Discourse of the Travailes of Two English Pilgrimes (1603) the Franciscan sermon to which he had listened on arrival in Jerusalem, "tending to this effect: how meritorious it was for us to visit the Holy Land, & see those sanctified places where our Saviours feete had trode."⁴² The explosion of pilgrimages to Jerusalem between 1300 and the mid-sixteenth century suggests that pilgrims, like their guides, believed that tracing Christ's footprints in the soil of Judea would aid them in their search to become his spiritual disciples.⁴³

It was intended that pilgrims would be inspired by viewing the literal footsteps of Christ to walk his spiritual path, but for Milton such physical traces were a distraction from the business of discipleship. Adam desires to continue to reside in the place where God has walked, rather than to forge a new communion with him in a land without the comfort of his physical presence:

In yonder nether world where shall I seekHis bright appearances, or footstep trace?For though I fled him angry, yet recalledTo life prolonged and promised race, I nowGladly behold though but his utmost skirtsOf glory, and far off his steps adore.

(PL 11.328-33)

The primary meaning of "promised race" is Adam's posterity, but the accompanying "footstep" and "steps" make explicit the punning relation of the phrase to the life Adam is to lead: "let us run with patience the race that is set before us" (Heb. 12:1). The Pauline epistles regularly use metaphors of journeys and contests for the spiritual striving of a Christian life—"Know ye not that they which runne in a race, runne all, but one receiveth the price [prize]?" (1 Cor. 9:24)—and the double meaning of Adam's "promised race" comes to fruition when Adam is promised that some of his posterity will die their "race well run" (PL 12.505), recalling Paul's affirmation "Ye did runne well" (Gal. 5:7).⁴⁴ These layers of meaning in "promised race" are rendered profound rather than simply playful by the evocation in Adam's complaint of Moses' vision of God.

Toward the end of Exodus Moses asks God to "shew me thy glory," and God accedes with the proviso that he will not be permitted to see his face: "it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand, while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen" (Exod. 33:18, 23). At first Adam's (pre-) echo of this passage appears simply to be a sign of the separation that the Fall has brought between God and humankind: Moses is shown God's "back parts" because he could not sustain viewing his full "glory," and the postlapsarian Adam, who had once been capable of God's "bright appearances," must likewise learn now to view only his "utmost skirts." But the allusion also suggests that Adam has intuited the deeper meaning of Moses' vision. As Gregory of Nyssa explains, at the heart of this story is a narrative not of separation but of discipleship: "he who follows sees the back."⁴⁵ Moses sees God's "backe parts"—or "utmost skirts"—because he has become God's disciple: "all trace of an external and static relationship between God and believer is expunged. . . . The vision of God is discipleship."⁴⁶ (While the literal-minded pilgrims of the Paradise of Fools "fly o'er the backside of the world" [PL 3.494], the true pilgrim will be granted a view of the "back parts" of God because he has become his follower.)

Both Adam's words and Gregory of Nyssa's exegesis of Exodus describe the desire for a vision of God through the Pauline language of discipleship in which the Christian life involves athletic striving for salvation. For Gregory of Nyssa, Moses standing in the cleft of the rock is actually competing in the race of discipleship: "when he promised that he would stand him on the rock, he showed him the nature of that divine race. . . . For truly he who has run the race, as the Apostle says, in that wide and roomy stadium, which the divine voice calls 'place,' and has kept the faith and, as the figurative expression says, has planted his feet on the rock; such a person will be adorned with the crown of righteousness from the hand of the contest's judge."⁴⁷ Gregory of Nyssa sees in this moment an intimation of a Pauline understanding of discipleship, as shown by his quotations from the Second Epistle to Timothy: "I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Hencefoorth there is layde up for me a crown of righteousnesse" (2 Tim. 4:7-8). Adam's "footstep," "steps," and "promised race" bring forward the answer to his thwarted desire to remain immured, like Moses, on a "rock" (PL 11.336), and his echo of Exodus 33 holds the solution to his quandary; he will "trace" (the word means both "find" and "follow")⁴⁸ God's "footstep" not by remaining in paradise but by living the life of a true disciple, running his "promised race" and placing his own feet in the "track divine" (11.354).

Wandering Steps and Slow

Adam and Eve walk with "wandering steps and slow" (12.648) as they set out in the final lines of Paradise Lost, but—despite their apparent waywardness—in their forward motion they anticipate the biblical tropes of discipleship. Walking suggests growth in the spirit, for the correct moral stance begins merely with standing. The underlying metaphor in Paradise Lost of sin as "Fall" puts ethical pressure on the fact that humankind, alone among the creatures, stands upright. Man is "Godlike erect" (4.289): his distinctive posture implying moral rectitude and a divine capacity for reason and rule. In man God creates

    a creature who not proneAnd brute as other creatures, but enduedWith sanctity of reason, might erectHis stature, and upright with front sereneGovern the rest, self-knowing.

(7.506-10)

Milton knits together the classical idea that man's heaven-facing stance reflects a truth about his moral nature and the Christian metaphor of "the Fall" (which the bible literalizes in the punishment inflicted on the belly-creeping serpent).⁴⁹ Man is made "sufficient to have stood, though free to fall" (3.99), and at his creation Adam instinctively leaps up:

    raisedBy quick instinctive motion up I sprung,As thitherward endeavouring, and uprightStood on my feet.

(8.258-61)

(The poet treads carefully here: the enjambment of "upright / Stood on my feet" enacts the slight unsteadiness of Adam's first upstanding, while the strong initial "Stood" expresses the confidence with which Adam remembers the moment). The Holy Spirit desires "the upright heart" (1.18), and while the forces of Satan will end the poem "prone" just as they began it (1.195, 10.542), Adam and Eve, after their Fall, learn to stand again through penitence: "Thus they in lowliest plight repentant stood" (11.1). The inevitable Fall of Paradise Lost is balanced by endless upward striving: the 105 occurrences of "up" are extended by 60 compound uses ("upbore," "upheave," "upraised," "upreared," "uprooted," "uptore," etc.), including two Miltonic coinages ("upsent" and "upwhirled"). "Lapsèd" humankind is "upheld" by God (3.176, 178), and redemption will return humankind to the "upright" (8.260) state in which it was created. Once humankind is upstanding once more at the end of the poem, "wandering steps" can follow the "track divine." As Fowler notes, "wandering" "implies 'erring' as slow implies 'reluctant'"; however, the submerged pilgrim motif, which casts Adam and Eve's departure from paradise in the Pauline mold of a spiritual journey, keeps the less obvious, optimistic senses of the word in play.⁵⁰

Initially, "wandering" was a morally neutral word in English, meaning merely "to move hither and thither without fixed course or certain aim." Over time this ungoverned physical movement began to accrue dubious associations both literal—"to deviate from a given path, or determined course; to turn aside from a mark"—and figurative: "to turn aside from a purpose, from a determined course of conduct, or train of thought; to digress; to pass out of the control of reason or conscience; to fall into error (moral or intellectual)."⁵¹ There are 35 occurrences of "wander" and its cognates in Paradise Lost, and the word is frequently connected with the Fall, which is the result of Satan's "wandering quest" (2.830) and Eve's "desire of wandering" (9.1136). However (unlike, for example, Spenser's quest-epic in which to wander is to stray from the true path), in Paradise Lost "wander" remains a richly textured word that holds potential despite its fallen nature.⁵² Notwithstanding his fear of being left "erroneous, there to wander" (7.20) on the Aleian field, the narrator of Paradise Lost glories in the mental freedom that allows him "to wander where the Muses haunt" (3.27) (a freedom perhaps particularly grateful to a blind man who would not have been able to wander unaided without danger of pain or indignity in the material world). In Areopagitica, Milton likewise exalts in this freedom, stating that it is God (not the devil) who "gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety" (YP 2:528).⁵³

Milton also returns the word to its neutral signification in order to describe God's creation. The innocence of Eden's "wandering" rivers (7.302) is echoed in the "mystic dance" of the planets' punningly "wandring fires" (5.177-78; planeo, "I wander"), creating a landscape in which gods might "wander with delight" (7.330). When Raphael describes the waters of Eden as in "serpent error wandering" (7.302), the reader's foreknowledge of the Fall contaminates the ingenuousness of the rivers' undulations. But this audacious piling of words allows the reader to glimpse—as out of the corner of his or her eye—a pristine, prelapsarian world in which even such words as "serpent," "error," and "wandering" convey only the innocence of their literal meaning. As Ricks argues, Milton's Latinisms reach "back to an earlier purity"—to a time when error could mean simply "wandering (not to err)," and lapse "falling (not the Fall)."⁵⁴ This poetic tool creates a vivid word picture of a prelapsarian world by simultaneously evoking and excluding the reader's knowledge of the transgression now seemingly inherent to serpents, error, and wandering. There is an obvious dramatic irony in this intimation of the Fall, but Milton is also imitating the pedagogical method he finds in Eden itself: "it was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill" (YP 2:514). Milton gives his reader a glimpse of the prelapsarian purity of unfallen language, not simply (pace Fish) to awaken in them a consciousness of their own sin, but also to inspire in them a "conative" virtue: a virtue that finds itself through striving against sin.⁵⁵ The pure words of Eden confront readers with their own sin not simply to shame them but to remind them of the inherent purity of creation, to encourage them to use the knowledge of evil in pursuit of "knowing good": to strive, as the poet has done, imaginatively to recover innocence in the fallen world.

The striving of Milton's Latinisms for an earlier purity is a theological, as well as a poetic, stance. Protestants insisted that their faith was, as John Foxe puts it (in the preface to his edition of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels), "no new reformation of thinges lately begonne, which were not before, but rather the reduction of the Church to the Pristine state of olde conformitie."⁵⁶ Protestantism sought to lead the church back to its "ancient puritie,"⁵⁷ and in doing so it looked back not only to the apostolic church but also, ultimately, to the origins of the church in God's founding covenants with Abraham and Adam. According to some seventeenth century Protestants, the "first Church was the Garden of Eden," for "the Church had a beeing in all ages, ever since the Promise was given to our first Parents in Paradise."⁵⁸ Milton's attempt to reinvigorate prelapsarian meanings connects with Protestantism's theological desire to return to the earliest, purest forms of worship. Adam and Eve's daily morning orison (5.153-208) enacts worship in which the spontaneous outpouring of the heart is uttered in the formal eloquence of the church's liturgy: "for neither various style / Nor holy rapture wanted they to praise / Their maker" (5.146-48). In Eden there is no disjunction between emotional truth and rhetorical skill.⁵⁹ Despite the accretions of sin that have infected humankind's relationship with the divine—a lapse rendered audible in the debasement of words such as "wander"—Milton's revival of etymological innocence strives after an original purity in the hope that, through grace, humankind can return to the true worship of God.

In attempting to reclaim "wander" from its negative semantic change, Milton is following in the first footsteps of the English Reformation. Wycliffe likewise tried to purify "wandering" by using it to render the morally neutral ambulare of the Vulgate. When preaching on Galatians Wycliffe described how, "In this epistle techith Poul how wey-ferynge men that lyyven here shulden go the streight wey that ledith men to the blisse of hevene. . . . Poul biddith men, Waundre in spirit, and so not fulle desires of the fleishe. That man wandrith in spirit, whose spirit is led bi the Holi Goost."⁶⁰ Wycliffe's striking version of the famous injunction to "Walke in the Spirit" (Gal. 5:16) alerts his auditors to the way in which "wey-ferynge men," lacking the fleshy temptations of hearth and home, are more likely to be receptive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit: "that man wandrith in spirit, whose spirit is led bi the Holi Goost."⁶¹ In Paradise Regained the Son follows the promptings of this Spirit—"Thou spirit who led'st this glorious eremite / Into the desert"⁶²—and in Paradise Lost the "true wayfaring Christian" is given other exalted archetypes for God's guidance through the desert places. In Milton's epic both Noah's ark and the Ark of the Covenant travel under Providence's guiding hand in their "wandering" (11.779, 12.334).

In their chastened, repentant state, eschewing their "overfond" (11.289) attachment to place and knowing they will die before redemption comes but knowing too that it will come, Adam and Eve are the image of the patriarchs they will beget: "These al died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seene them a farre off, and were perswaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth" (Heb. 11:13). The author of the epistle to the Hebrews, as Philip Edwards argues, "was transposing the sense of exile which suffuses the Old Testament—the Jews seeing themselves as a displaced people, enforced wanderers in search of the Promised Land, longing for return to Zion, or Jerusalem—and allying it with the spirit of alienation from the life around them which inspired the early Christians."⁶³ This biblical metaphor of journeying for the faithful life is likewise embraced by Paradise Lost. When Adam is told that Jesus will "bring back / Through the world's wilderness long wandered man" (12.312-13), Israel's exile is, as in Hebrews, understood as metonymic for the wandering of humankind. Just as Abraham, the father of Israel, had been told by God to "walke before mee" (Gen. 17:1), so Adam, humankind's progenitor, learns "to walk / As in his presence" (12.562-63).

Abraham and Adam have been connected throughout Paradise Lost, most significantly in the modeling of Raphael's visit to Adam in book 5 on the visit of the three angels to Abraham (Gen. 18: 1-15).⁶⁴ Abraham was noted in Hebrews as one who was not a citizen, but rather "By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange countrey, dwelling in tabernacles" (Heb. 11:9). In Paradise Lost, Abraham's abandonment of his lands in Canaan and "wandering" (12.133) in the desert becomes an image for humankind, lost until Jesus comes to "bring back / Through the world's wilderness long wandered man / Safe to eternal paradise of rest" (12.312-14). Abraham's faithfulness is expressed by his leaving his home and setting out into the unknown, and the connection between Adam's exile and Abraham's "wandering" (12.133) gives an optimistic coloring to the final, famous, occurrence of the word "wander" in the poem:

The world was all before them, where to chooseTheir place of rest, and providence their guide:They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,Through Eden took their solitary way.

(12.646-49)

Eve's "wandering" has been underscored by the poem—she whose "will / Of wandering" (9.1145-46) has led to the Fall (see also 9.1136, 10.875). But just as her earlier dangerous desire for independence—"from her husband's hand her hand / Soft she withdrew" (9.385-86)—is recalled and redeemed here (the awkward repetition of "hand her hand" becomes the warm familiarity of "hand in hand"), so likewise her earlier "wandering" has the potential to be transformed. As Fish argues, "in Book XII, 'wand'ring' undergoes a final transformation and is absorbed into the Christian vision. . . . Wandering is now the movement of faith, the sign of one's willingness to go out at the command of God."⁶⁵

It is Eve, the first to wander, who is the first to repent, and her final words show that she has fully internalized Michael's injunction against attachment to external place, telling her spouse, "thou to me / Art all things under heaven, all places thou" (12.617-18).⁶⁶ Eve's loving paradox—"with thee to go, / Is to stay here" (12.615-16)—is an implicit correction of Adam's fallacious reasoning at his fall ("if death / Consort with thee, death is to me as life" [9.953-54]). Through her love for Adam, Eve has found that a truly loving relationship (with Adam, as with God) is independent of place. Eve's final words echo, as Barbara Lewalski notes, Ruth's declaration to Naomi: "whither thou goest, I will goe; and where thou lodgest I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."⁶⁷ Ruth's journey with Naomi leads her to the true God and the "erring" implied by the final occurrence of "wandering" in Paradise Lost is tempered by the biblical resonances of those who wandered in the desert and found their way home. The echo of Ruth's and Abraham's "wandering" (12.133) in book 12 keeps in play the spiritual possibilities of unfettered movement and retains the exquisite balance of the poem's final lines, which enact God's command to Michael, "send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace" (11.117).

As N. H. Keeble persuasively argues, in the Old Testament Israel's history is told through narratives in which "religious dedication and desert journeys are so interconnected that the landscapes of nomadic wanderings become emblems of moral conditions and the journey the means by which spiritual destinies are fulfilled. In the two traditions of Israel's origins, in the Abraham legends and the Exodus saga, is repeated the same pattern of decision to leave, journey under divine guidance, testing in the wilderness and covenant. This pattern came to control the narrative shape of the Protestant—still more, Puritan—imagination, for here was a Biblically authorised model for the representation of experience."⁶⁸ In the histories of patriarchs such as Abraham, Moses, and Noah, migrancy becomes the natural state of the faithful. Adam and Eve have erred in their previous "wandering," but there is another path for the word, and one that with "providence their guide" they may follow. Humankind, like the exilic Israel, may "gain by their delay / In the wide wilderness" (12.223-24).⁶⁹ Despite the pejoration of "wandering" there remains latent in the postlapsarian world the innocence it owned in Eden. To wander can be, like the patriarchs, to be detached from the pleasures of the flesh, to acknowledge oneself a stranger and pilgrim upon earth, searching for the New Jerusalem under the guidance of the spirit: "Adam fallinge out of that earthly Paradise, that was a figure of the heavenly, fownd a way into the true one by faith in Christ."⁷⁰

Many seventeenth century Protestants found spiritual succor in the Pauline combination of spiritual pilgrimage and the vigorous race for the heavenly crown. Bunyan, ever the strenuous spiritual athlete, wrote in his Heavenly Foot-Man (1698), that "they that will go to Heaven, they must run for it. . . . I say, there are many steps to be taken by those that intend to be Saved, by running or walking in the steps of that Faith of our Father Abraham. Out of Egypt, thou must go thorow the Red Sea; thou must run a long and tedious Journey, thorow the wast howling Wilderness, before thou come to the Land of Promise."⁷¹ There is something of Areopagitica's hot and dusty race here ("the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat"), but the poetics of ParadiseLost seem more trusting that God will eventually gather in "long wandered man" and that "the destiny to which the Christian hero accedes is not burdensome but fulfulling."⁷²

It has been convincingly argued that in Christian epic, "movement away from God may in the long run be movement toward him. With this principle Augustine gives new meaning to the circuitry that characterizes the movement of the epic hero: 'circumflectere cursus,' the injunction under which the epic hero moves, translates into the Christian precept that to be saved one must first be lost."⁷³ In his commentary on the Psalms, Augustine writes that we are all "wandering" to that heavenly Jerusalem where "the angels await us wanderers" (civitate Jerusalem caelesti, unde nos modo peregrinamur, adtendunt nos peregrinos).⁷⁴ Augustine's "unde" (both "from which" and "to which") creates a circular narrative that makes homecoming inevitable for the errant citizens of God's city. Adam and Eve leave Eden but through their wandering Providence will lead them back to their heavenly home for, as Fowler notes, the "wandering steps" and "solitary way" of Milton's final lines recall a hopeful biblical analogue: "They wandred in the wildernesse, in a solitarie way: they found no city to dwell in. . . . Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble: and he delivered them out of their distresses. And he led them foorth by the right way: that they might goe to a citie of habitation."⁷⁵ For Milton, as for Augustine, the motif of spiritual pilgrimage sets the reader on the right track.