Milton and Monotheism

ONE Polytheism and “truest Poesie”

25 ONE Polytheism and “truest Poesie” As the action in Paradise Lost begins, the only physical detail present is that of Satan’s eyes: “round he throws his baleful eyes” to view “No light, but rather darkness visible” (PL 1.56, 63). These eyes construct a being who is present and observing but disembodied, like the nearly immaterial hell around him. Satan is there in the world of the story, but only barely there. Tellingly, God enters book 3 with the same minimal presence of gazing eyes: in almost identical position, at line 58 rather than 56, the Father “bent down his eye, / His own works and their works at once to view.” With their reluctance to become fully present, these parallel entrances can be recognized as typically monotheistic . They resemble how Deutero-Isaiah, one of the most ideologically monotheistic books of the Hebrew Bible, introduces a council of gods only to dissolve it into total impossibility. The pagan gods are invited to prophesize and to prove their existence by doing “something, either good or evil” (Isa. 41:23). The gods’ apparent presence in council suggests that we are in a storyworld in which other gods have existence. But then the gods never speak or act, as Yahweh instead declares, “I looked, and there was no one; and of these there was none to give counsel / That I should ask them and they should answer. / See, all of them are nothing , and their works are nothing; / Wind and emptiness are their 26 Milton and Monotheism images” (41:28–29).1 In the final analysis the gods are nothing: unable to speak or do works, they have no agency or existence. The important feature of this passage, however, is not the final analysis, but the narrative’s move from presence to total absence. This melting away of the gods enacts in narrative the exclusion of polytheism, a dynamic clearly absent from Homer’s or Virgil’s councils. The minimal presence of Satan’s eyes begins the action of Paradise Lost within this process of monotheistic exclusion. Marginally there, Satan awakens the aniconic sense that it would be transgressive if he were fully there. This first moment installs in the story a background awareness that Satan should not have narrative presence. Soon after Satan’s eyes, however, appears his “head uplift above the wave” (1.193). Then emerges an inert but massy body, “extended...many a rood” (1.195–96). Then Satan unfurls his body, as “with expanded wings he steers his flight” (1.225), before attaining heroic stature on the shore of the burning lake, complete with shield “massy, large and round” (1.285) and spear to which the tallest pine “were but a wand” (1.294). If book 1 begins with a monotheistic anxiety about Satan’s narrative presence, it goes on to exacerbate that anxiety thoroughly. The action gathers momentum with the emergence of Satan’s body, and the sublime presence of Satan is fearful not only because we, like the Romantics , may feel attracted to the devil, but because in its rich presence Satan’s body threatens to transgress monotheism. Milton highlights this monotheistic anxiety when he supplements Satan’s “extended” body with the simile of the Leviathan: Thus Satan talking to his nearest mate With head uplift above the wave, and eyes That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides Prone on the flood, extended long and large Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the den Polytheism and "truest Poesie" 27 By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream: Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff, Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, With fixed anchor in his scaly rind Moors by his side under the lea, while night Invests the sea, and wished morn delays. (1.192–208) The simile first expands Satan’s physical presence, as he suddenly balloons from head and eyes and “other parts besides,” to “monstrous size” and Titanic proportions. The poetry echoes this expansion: first “eyes” and “besides” form a couplet, remembered three lines later by “size,” creating a sense of containment and bondage. Then the blank verse opens up with names of mythology , with...