To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton

3. Milton’s Empyreal Conceit

77 Milton’s Empyreal Conceit Gardner Campbell —for Rich [The] example of Parrhasios makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it....[In trompe-l’oeil] the picture does not compete with appearance [as it did for Zeuxis], it competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea. It is because the picture is the appearance that says it is that which gives the appearance that Plato attacks painting, as if it were an activity competing with his own. —Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis Andrew Marvell, like Plato in the epigraph above, worried that a particular kind of poesis might compete with philosophy, especially that kind of philosophy concerned with the discursive expression of sacred truths: theology. The object of Marvell’s worry, of course, was Milton, the poet whose strength filled Marvell with apprehension that the blind poet might “ruin.../ 3 78 Gardner Campbell the sacred truths.”1 It is tempting to say that the history of Milton criticism nearly splits in two on either side of this worry. On one side are those critics, like William Empson, who believe Milton ultimately failed in his professed theodicial project of justifying the ways of God to men: the ways of the Christian God cannot be justified, and Milton’s Christianity would not permit him to acknowledge this. When we cannot make sense of Milton, such critics argue it is because the poet himself has foundered on the shoals of his own religion’s theological incoherence. On the other side are those critics, like William Blake, who believe Milton did ruin at least some of the sacred truths, willy-nilly, because he was a “true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.”2 For these critics, Milton’s apparent incoherence merely indicates the greater coherence of his helpless abandonment of sacred truths he believes himself to be supporting. But perhaps there is an excluded middle to be considered. Like the trompe l’oeil veil that awakens desire to see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight, the character of poetry is to be, as Lacan puts it, “the appearance that says it is that which gives the appearance.” Somewhere in that riddling, recursive formulation stands an essential truth of Milton’s poetic imagination, one in which mimesis and primary creation (or revelation) not only intertwine but fuse. This chapter focuses on one particularly powerful agent of that fusion, what Milton in The Reason of Church-Government calls an “Empyreall conceit.”3 By examining the implications of that two-word phrase, I hope to demonstrate its importance for a full understanding of Milton’s poetic imagination. Of the several passages I analyze, two in Paradise Lost are of particular importance: Raphael’s accounts of the heavenly banquet that followed the “begetting” of the Son in book 5.627–41, and his account of the beginning of Creation in book 7.165–73. Book 7’s passage is vitally important to our understanding not only of Milton’s God and God’s creation, but of what it meant for Milton to see himself as a creature imbued with a capacity for his own acts of creation. I believe Milton’s heavenly imagination can be understood as both the way Milton Milton’s Empyreal Conceit 79 imagines heaven and also as Milton’s imagination of imagination itself: an unlimited capacity that reflects, and can faithfully yet freely reenact, God’s own creating imagination. This “Empyreall conceit”—precisely what he accused his opponents in the 1640s (as well as many of his readers) of lacking—is a heavenly mode of conceiving, the kind of imagination required to imagine heaven and to descry the kinship of earth to heaven. It is thus the foundation of any attempt to “justify the ways of God to men” (PL 1.26), which in its broadest sense is Milton’s vocation through most of his mature poetic career. Even Milton’s supporters, however, have sometimes found it difficult to understand or develop the empyreal conceit he urges upon them, though there are several possible reasons for this difficulty. One is that Milton’s apparently straightforward polemical approaches to theology can obscure his more complex poetic expressions of theology (his poetic...