The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution

THREE. Milton’s Angelic Vanguard, Uriel and Gabriel

THREE Milton’s Angelic Vanguard, Uriel, and Gabriel During the nearly quarter of a century between Of Education and Paradise Lost, the innovative pedagogical practices and discursive representations of English scholars had become better established, and the tentative shift in natural philosophy had developed into the English Scientific Revolution. With Paradise Lost, the archetypal figures of pastoral teacher and natural philosopher stand thoroughly distanced from the dynamic governors of nature of Restoration England, a new model intellectual army working for the common good. Paradise Lost overgoes symbolic, classical figures and instead advances a vanguard of Judeo-Christian instructors comprised of the angels Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. The four archangels blaze onto the learning environment of Paradise Lost endued with qualities to help them in a collaborative effort of knowledge reconnaissance and combat. One of the strongest characteristics of Milton’s “argument / Not less but more Heroic” (PL 9.14) is collaboration, inscribed in so many of the interdependent cultural movements of the period, from late humanism to politics, as for example David Norbrook clarifies in his discussions of republicanism.1 My emphasis in chapters 3 and 4 is on how Milton’s poetic construction of the archangels’ characteristics and activities concern emerging modern 71 72 The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution science. This chapter focuses on the first two and most critically neglected archangels, Uriel and Gabriel, and both chapters strive to clarify how Milton’s poetic inscription of the Scientific Revolution in the archangels does not stand outside of but rather in direct relation to other cultural movements of the period, especially that of educational reform. Uriel, “Interpreter through highest Heav’n” Perhaps it is only within the context of the English Scientific Revolution that we can fruitfully approach Uriel, whose role has been overlooked even though the poem signals it as exceedingly significant by his position as the first good angel we meet in the narrative. As I hope to clarify, Uriel’s encounter with the disguised Satan and his later engagement with Gabriel lays the foundation for the remaining books’ representations of good teachers and, by extension, the manner in which English intellectuals in the second half of the seventeenth century within the bifurcating fields of the arts and sciences marshaled together to replace the inherited image of the lonely scholar with that of an intellectual vanguard to fight the invisible wars of God. Milton depicts Uriel in the complementary roles of warrior, teacher, and early modern scientist in three relatively short scenes. We first see Uriel in book 3, as Satan leaves Chaos in search of Paradise. Milton immediately associates Uriel with one of the chief new scientific figures, Saint John the Divine. He makes the overt link with the ascribed author of the Book of Revelation when he describes Uriel as the “glorious Angel. . . . The same whom John saw also in the Sun,” with its clear echo of Revelation 19:17: “I saw an angel standing in the sun” (622–23). Milton makes other numerous links as when, for example, both the narrator and Satan refer to Uriel as “one of the seav’n / Who in Gods presence, neerest to his Throne / Stand ready at command,” merging the biblical descriptions of both John and the angels he sees: “John to the seven churches which are in Asia: Grace be unto you, and peace” and “And I saw the seven angels which stood before God” (PL 3.648–50; Rev. 1:4, 8:2). The only two references to classical mythology in the passage of the encounter of Uriel and Satan are associated, significantly, not with the sharp-sighted archangel but rather with those with erroneous perspectives. It is Satan’s survey of the created world that makes it seem “Like those Hesperian Gardens fam’d of old” (568), and the sun like the philosopher’s stone, “Imagind rather oft then elsewhere seen” when philosophers vainly try to “binde / Volatil Hermes, and call up unbound / In various shapes of old Proteus” (602, 599, 602). Neither the narrator nor Uriel figure Uriel as Apollo, Helios, or Sol. While Milton makes ample use of classical mythology in the epic, he withholds explicit representational alliances to mythological figures in this moment, which sets up expectations for such alliances.2 Milton’s careful use of pagan figures parallels that of early modern English scientists, who actively expunged them...