Milton and Monotheism

Notes

320 NOTES Notes to Introduction 1. Compare Adam’s words to the fallen Eve concerning the apple: “inducement strong / To us, as likely tasting to attain / Proportional ascent, which cannot be / But to be gods, or angels demi-gods” (9.934–37). 2. This in turn leads to a refutation of Trinitarian readings: “Attention should be paid to all these points to prevent anyone from being led astray by linguistic ignorance into assuming immediately that when the word Elohim is used with a singular it denotes a single essence composed of several persons” (YP 6:236). Also see YP 6:315–16 and Kelley’s note 57. 3. Compare James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 51–52. Milton’s reenactment of Genesis 1:26 may respond to Rashi’s commentary, which reads the plural as indicating that God is speaking to his heavenly court. Rashi says that God takes counsel with the angels so that they will not be jealous of humans—evoking a feeling of strife that is clearly present in Satan’s mind. Rashi also captures the way that elohim wavers between monotheistic and polytheistic meanings: he admits that Genesis 1:26 provides an opportunity for the skeptic, but argues that the next verse forms a rebuttal to him, as elohim is repeated in 1:27 but becomes the subject of a singular verb (not visible in the English), “So God created man in his own image.” First risking polytheism and then rebutting it, this passage captures the ontological negotiations that surround the one God. These negotiations are perhaps most clear in the punning of the tetragrammaton , which resists naming God in the present tense. 4. Milton is quoting Hebrews 1:6, which reads “And again, when he bringeth in the first-begotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him.” Sister M. Christopher Pecheux, “The Council Scenes in Paradise Lost,” in Milton and the Scriptural Tradition, ed. James H. Sims and Leland Ryken (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 82–103, shows that Milton departs from this text for Psalm 97:7, which has “worship him all ye gods.” 5. This distinction is also a part of De doctrina’s consideration of elohim, which notes that visiting angels are sometimes referred to as God (YP 6:234). Milton cites Judges 13, which is discussed at greater length in chapter 7. 6. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols., ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:184. 7. According to Herbert Grierson, “A high and austere monotheism is of the innermost texture of Milton’s soul.” See Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1915), vol. 8, s.v. “Milton,” p. 646. 8. “Monotheism,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989. “Monotheismus,” Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994). “Monotheismus,” Historisches Wèorterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–98). As late as 1736, Nathan Bailey, Dictionarium Britannicum (London: 1736), includes “monotheism” among a list of brand-new words in his dictionary: “The following words in some modern Authors, not occurring till the Dictionary was entirely printed, except the Preface, I chose rather to insert them here, than omit them” (preface). 9. See “Monotheismus,” Theologische Realenzyklopädie. 10. Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth , 1975), 3. 11. Maurice Kelley shows that Milton is here following Wollebius, whose Compendium theologiae Christianae was published in 1626 (YP 6:656n3). The general orthodoxy of Wollebius’s work does not mean that Wollebius was ignorant of developing rational conceptions of religion, as John W. Beardslee III points out in Reformed Dogmatics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965),3–11. 12. Charles Blount and Charles Gildon, The Oracles of Reason (London : 1693), 91. 13. Brian Schmidt, “The Aniconic Tradition,” in The Triumph of Elohim : From Yahwisms to Judaisms, ed. Diana V. Edelman (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995), 75–105. 14. Several good studies have shown the centrality of iconoclasm to English poetry, and to Milton, for example, Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); David Lowenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lana Cable...