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Afterword: Monotheism, the Sublime, and Allegory
- Duquesne University Press
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309 Afterword MONOTHEISM, THE SUBLIME, AND ALLEGORY In place of a conclusion, this short, speculative essay frames my argument by moving later in time, to the eighteenth century reception, and earlier in time, to Edmund Spenser. By taking a broader view, drawing back from a close historical and theoretical focus, I hope to weave Milton’s monotheism into larger literary and critical conversations. To begin, I pick up a thread from chapter 4, on the war in heaven. There I argued that Milton’s monotheistic narrative carries the potential to be read as deist, and that John Dennis constructs a sublime Milton in order to avoid a deist Milton. With a discourse of sublimity thus emerging from Dennis ’s encounter with monotheistic narrative, this essay’s speculation is that the eighteenth century sublime contains the afterlife of Milton’s monotheism. As Dennis himself points out, he is the first critic fully to identify Milton as the poet of the sublime, even anticipating Joseph Addison. Dennis ignores the bathos of the war in heaven, instead presenting a Paradise Lost that is sublime in its use of epic machinery and revelation. Pioneering the sublime Milton, Dennis describes how, “he who is entertain’d with an accomplish’d Poem, is, for a time, at least, restored to Paradise. That happy Man 310 Milton and Monotheism converses boldly with Immortal Beings. Transported, he beholds the Gods ascending and descending, and every Passion, in its Turn, is charm’d, while his Reason is supremely satisfied” (Dennis 1:264). The easy movement and conversation of angels and gods provide passion to transport the reader, leading to poetic enthusiasm. And so in Christian poetry and Paradise Lost, epic machinery lifts the verse to the heights of sublimity. Dennis’s sublime uses angels, daemons, apparitions, and miracles , which can be awful and terrifying.1 But he is still closer to the neoclassical sublime of transcendence or elevation than to the more familiar versions of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. For although the content of the poetry may be mysterious and awful, the poetry itself must remain clear and unconfused. As David Morris puts it, “The phrase clear and distinct ideas (probably adapted from Locke) runs through his criticism like a leitmotif .” Burke, in contrast, establishes the firm distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, and announces: “A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.”2 While Kant, according to Samuel Monk’s paraphrase from the Critique of Judgment, sees the sublime as growing out of the failure of expression, “In experiencing the sublime, the imagination seeks to represent what it is powerless to represent, since the object is limitless, and thus cannot be represented. This effort and this inevitable failure of the imagination are the source of the emotions that accompany the sublime.”3 Essential to this later sense of sublimity is the breakdown of language. Whereas Dennis carefully forgets those parts of Paradise Lost that challenge the clarity of the sublime, Burke celebrates them as “obscurity,” locating this quality both in the subject matter and in the representation. Poets have the advantage over painters because language allows for a happy confusion in obscurity , as, for example, in Milton’s description of Satan as a tower: “The mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused.”4 It is this kind of linguistic confusion that the discontinuous wound [3.17.128.129] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:47 GMT) Afterword 311 introduces into the narrative of the war in heaven—in the impossible image of a wound healing even as it is cut, and in the pall of radical insignificance that the healing casts over the rest of the action. But Dennis avoids the discontinuous wound because, to create his version of the sublime, the deep sense of contradiction and bathos in the war in heaven must be forgotten. What Dennis forgets is precisely that kind of obscure language Burke comes to celebrate. That the failure of language can be productive marks a point of convergence between later theories of the sublime and the narrative texture of monotheism. As Aryeh Botwinick describes it, the experience of monotheistic language feels very like Burke’s crowded and confused images: “The utterance of the word ‘God’ initiates a process of endless displacement that finds no resting place. All we can ever do by way of assigning a content and pinpointing a reference...