Gender and the Power of Relationship: "United as one individual Soul" in Paradise Lost

ONE: Pattern Divine: Milton’s Triune God

Milton’s Triune God 1 1 ONE Pattern Divine ❧ Milton’s Triune God “United as one individual Soul” (5.610) points to the dialectic / synthesis implicit in the divine pattern of relationships in Paradise Lost. As characters in the poem, the Father and the Son possess separate and unique individualities, with the Son subordinate to the Father in an unorthodox, hierarchical association; yet they are also “united” and “equal,” thus revealing a pattern by which we can understand and measure gendered human relationships in the poem.1 Milton’s presentation of the godhead in the invocation to book 1, book 3 (56– 343), and books 11 and 12 suggests the essential paradox of the “three in one.” For while, as John T. Shawcross explains, Milton attributes to Father / Son / Spirit distinct essences and functions, these distinctions dissolve in the oneness of their shared roles of creation, regeneration, illumination, and support , as united manifestations of grace.2 2 Gender and the Power of Relationship From the narrator’s prayer to his Muse for enlightenment so that he may “assert Eternal Providence” (1.25), through the dramatic enactment of that assertion in book 3, to the ultimate justification of “the ways of God to men” (1.26) in books 11 and 12, by means of verbal, structural, and thematic parallels, Milton shows a triune God acting in the lives of both the individual and the community. At the beginning of Paradise Lost, in a manner not unlike John Donne’s in “Holy Sonnet 14,” “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” the narrator invites the reader to identify the source of poetic inspiration as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit; at the same time, he causes those identifications to slip, shift, and, finally, coalesce as the poem projects the reconciliation of temporal divisions and hierarchies in the oneness of a God who “shall be All in All” (3.341), the epitome of unity in diversity.As Diane McColley argues, “those whom God shall be in are not reduced from an ‘all’ meaning a communicating congregation of lives to an ‘All’ that digests them, but may retain the distinctions that the process of creation proliferates. The phrase ‘All in All’ not only brings divinity into the multiplicity of creatures but counters Neoplatonic ideas of the inadmissibility of multiplicity into the unity of Transcendent Being.”3 The dense texture of allusions to the triune God in the first 26 lines of Paradise Lost and our first view of Father and Son acting in concert in the divine colloquy anticipate the narrative of the final books, in which Milton recapitulates the role of the triune God from a new beginning in the repentant prayers of Adam and Eve, through human history, “Till time stand fixt: beyond is all abyss, / Eternity, whose end no eye can reach” (12.555–56). The pattern of imagery, particularly horticultural (seed / fruit / tree), visual (darkness / light, blindness / sight), and vertical (depth / height, falling / rising), underscores the shared roles of Father, Son, and Spirit, which are further revealed through Milton’s focus on the paradoxical nature of beginnings Milton’s Triune God 3 and endings and the overall movement in each of these sections from loss to restoration, from division and hierarchy to unity, from time to eternity.4 Suggesting, at the beginning of his epic, “first” and “last” as paradoxes within a scheme eternal, Milton turns to the “beginning” of human history, “First Disobedience” (1.1) and the “loss of Eden” (4), which is likewise an ending, in that it “Brought Death into the World” (3) and a close to the all too brief days of paradisal happiness. Shifting, in line 4, to the end of human time when “one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat” (4–5), Milton anticipates another beginning . Within the context of “Man’s First Disobedience,” the invocation of the Holy Spirit (17), the presence of the divine within humankind, is appropriate. However, before Milton gives his Muse a name, he alludes to God the Father and God the Son, who together with the Holy Spirit, are the source of inspiration and instruction:5 Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill Delight thee more, and Siloa...