Milton and Monotheism

THREE God and Genesis 18 in Paradise Lost

101 THREE God and Genesis 18 in Paradise Lost Milton’s readers have long had problems with God’s personality . Some have considered God, in Irene Samuel’s words, “a wooden bore.” Others, in a contrary position, have accused him of tyranny and viciousness. Pope’s famous couplet portrays both of these qualities: “In Quibbles, Angel and Archangel join, / And God the Father turns a School-Divine.” The school divine, at once a characterless figure and a familiar version of a dominating will, captures an important paradox: Milton’s God both lacks personality and seems to have too much.1 Douglas Bush, expressing a common sentiment, believes that the narrative would be better served by a less personal God: “Artistically , no doubt, it would have been better if Milton had relied upon his power of suggestion...and had not made God a speaking character.” Bush suggests an alternative to God as character, pointing to a single line to describe how Milton could have done better: he wishes Milton had written more in the vein of “Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear” (3.380). This moment is also a favorite of C. S. Lewis, who lists it as an example of “suggestion ” and “mystery.” What both Bush and Lewis wish for is a version of the mysterious and sublime theophany of Exodus—they want a God obscured by, and diffused into, a pillar of smoke. The 102 Milton and Monotheism problem is that God is represented as taking part in book 3 as if he could be imagined in the form of a person, and their response, following the frequent example of theophany in the Hebrew Bible, is to undercut God’s personal presence. Yet after quoting line 380, Lewis expresses regret in a way that recalls the anxieties of seventeenth century Christian poets: “Milton has failed to disentangle himself from the bad tradition...of trying to make Heaven too like Olympus.” Enthroned, speaking to his heavenly council, and even, it will be shown, responding to external discipline, Milton’s God is portrayed, and given a presence in the narrative, in terms of personality. Bush and Lewis, on the one hand, find Milton’s God to be too personal and too present. Their readings are perceptive and represent one response courted by Paradise Lost as well as by monotheism in general: a skeptical longing for an abstract, unrepresentable godhead.2 On the other hand, J. B. Broadbent represents another common view when he argues that Milton’s God is already thoroughly abstract: God lacks the attributes of personality, speaking “skeletally ” and “(not) with a human tongue.” Broadbent goes so far as to assert that Milton’s God is as impersonal as the godhead of pantheism or deism: “Neither the ‘serene and lovely God’ of John Smith nor its Deistic and Pantheistic derivatives...has any more personality than a God who ‘is light.’”3 Broadbent’s insightful association of Milton’s God with deism recognizes the strategy that Milton uses instead of the pillar of smoke recommended by Lewis: God in Paradise Lost threatens to diffuse into a bundle of divine forces that lacks the coherence of an individual personality . Melting at times toward absence, Milton’s God draws very near to the “Intellectual Principal” which, as described in the last chapter, was rejected by Henry More. Such a movement toward abstraction is an essential characteristic of monotheism, as in Freud’s myth of Aton. According to the philosopher Lenn Evan Goodman, the monotheistic God must not be a personality so much as a performer of fixed and knowable rules. To represent this quality, Goodman points in God and Genesis 18 in Paradise Lost 103 particular to the way Abraham engages God in debate over the fate of Sodom. After God declares his plan to judge and destroy the city, Abraham “stood yet before the Lord” and then “drew near” to ask strategically, “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?” (Gen. 18:22–23). Abraham wins the concession that Sodom will not be destroyed if 50 righteous are to be found—and then, remarkably, he negotiates with God, bringing the threshold down to 40, 30, 20, and finally 10 (Gen. 18:26–33). At the heart of Abraham’s successful plea bargain is the obviously rhetorical question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (18:25). For Genesis 18:25 presupposes a God that...