"Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books": Essays on the 1667 First Edition

9. The Mysterious Darkness of Unknowing: Paradise Lost and the God Beyond Names

9 The Mysterious Darkness of Unknowing Paradise Lost and the God Beyond Names MICHAEL BRYSON In 1667, John Milton dropped a bomb on the literary and intellectual world of England. Unfortunately, that bomb proved initially to be a dud, an object of curiosity rather than an immediate literary sensation . Received with more of a collective raised eyebrow than with the buzz and stir for which Milton must have hoped, the ten-book edition of Paradise Lost proved to be a difficult sale, and goes nearly completely unread today.1 Published without any of the editorial apparatus modern readers take for granted, the first edition of Paradise Lost was also published without the “arguments” or miniature plot summaries that have become so familiar to readers of later editions (including the now dominant twelve-book version of 1674). In effect, the first printing of Paradise Lost was loosed upon a world that was not yet ready for it, in a form that it could not—and did not—fully digest.2 Though the 1667 Paradise Lost does all the same work that the 1674 version does, perhaps the audience it sought, though “fit,” was far too “few” for the work to have sufficient impact or to provide its author with a legacy that the world would not willingly let die. So why read, much less write about, the 1667 Paradise Lost today? Much can be written about the difference in form between the 1667, ten-book edition, and the more famous 1674, twelve-book edition. Choosing the ten-book format, rather than the twelve-book format 183 184 Michael Bryson is, as Barbara Lewalski argues, “an overt political statement . . . [as] Milton eschewed Virgil’s twelve-book epic format with its Roman imperialist and royalist associations for the ten-book model of the republican Lucan.”3 Even more politically suggestive, however, is the timing of the poem’s publication, coming after the plague of 1665 and the devastating fires of September 1666, and after the conclusion reached by many that the disasters were the judgment of God upon a debauched and dissolute nation.4 Robert Elborough provides an excellent example of this way of thinking in his 1666 sermon, entitled “London’s Calamity by Fire”: What is it that God saith to others by Londons conflagration? Oh have a care of Londons abomination. If you partake of London, as to its sinning , you shall partake of London as to its suffering. . . . alas, who will not acknowledge that God hath dealt severely with London? . . . God comes with the Plague and that don’t work; God comes with the Sword; & that don’t work; at last he comes with a Fiery Judgment, that so he may not come with this, London adieu, and England Farewel, thy house is left desolate unto thee, and thou are left desolate without an house.5 Thomas Vincent, a Nonconformist minister who is one of our most vivid sources of descriptive detail about London during the 1665 plague, argues in Gods Terrible Voice in the City (first printed in 1666) that both the plague and the fire were sent as judgments from God: “The Plague is a terrible Judgment by which God speaks unto men,” and “God spake terribly by fire when London was in flames.”6 Like Elborough, Vincent is not at all shy about assigning blame for the disasters; in fact, he offers a list of 25 sins prevalent in London that caused God’s anger. Among the highlights are the eleventh sin, “fullness of Bread, or intemperance in eating”; the fifteenth sin, “Drunkennesse,” and the twenty-first sin, “Prodigality and profuse spending.”7 But more than these sins, for Vincent it seems to have been the various provisions of the Clarendon Code (specifically, the Act of Uniformity of 1662, and the Five-Mile Act of 1665) that angered God to the point that he sent plague and fire as punishments: Here I might speak of the Judgment executed, August 24th 1662, when so many Ministers were put out of their places, and the judgments The Mysterious Darkness of Unknowing 185 executed, March 24, 1665, when so many Ministers were banished five miles from Corporations. . . . Gospel-Ordinances, and Gospel-Ministers were the safeguard of London, the glory and defence. But when the Ordinances were slighted, and the Ministers were mocked . . . God is provoked.8 Barbara Lewalski quotes a letter of the same period (dated September 1666) that...