Milton's Rival Hermeneutics: “Reason is But Choosing”

8. Rethinking “shee for God in him”: Paradise Lost and Milton’s Quaker Contemporaries

159 Rethinking “shee for God in him” Paradise Lost and Milton’s Quaker Contemporaries Teresa Feroli The meaning of gendered hierarchies in Paradise Lost has long stood as a contentious issue in Milton criticism. In particular , the line “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” has prompted a wide range of responses from critics.1 Some have suggested that it does not represent Milton’s but Satan’s view of sexual difference, while others have argued that the line sums up the poet’s conception of woman’s “mediated” relationship with the divine.2 Rather than coming down on one side or the other of the hierarchical divide, I shall consider this line, and particularly the words “shee for God in him,” in terms of the discourse of humankind as the imago Dei. One of the hallmarks of seventeenth century English Reformed theology, the belief in the immanence of the divine in the human originates in the Genesis account of man’s creation, “Let us make man in our image,” and is repeatedly portrayed as the state of perfection to which believers aspire to return 8D 160 Teresa Feroli (Gen. 1:26). In the words of William Ames, “Sanctification is a reall change of man from the filthinesse of sin, to the purity of Gods Image.”3 Although Milton’s line clearly places women at a remove from the divine image, two of his Quaker contemporaries, Martha Simmonds and Margaret Fell, effectively illustrate the latent potential for female authority of “shee for God in him.” Ultimately, these women call attention to the manifold ways, to borrow from Milton, that “The Spirit of God, promis’d alike and giv’n / To all Believers” (PL 12.519–20) disrupts traditional gender hierarchies and even that of “Hee for God only, shee for God in him.” As a statement about the immanence of the divine in the individual believer, Milton’s line presents a gendered interpretation of the more sexually egalitarian Priestly account of Creation found in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” As Mary Nyquist argues, Milton genders the Priestly account masculine by fusing it with the Yahwist narrative of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib. Milton’s synthesis of the two Creation accounts not only asserts man’s closer identity with Godhead but also does not attribute to woman a direct connection to the divine image. This is a significant departure from Reformed biblical commentators , who “always claim that woman is in some sense made in the image of God.”4 Addressing Genesis 1:26, John Calvin, for instance, wonders why “Paul should deny the woman to be the image of God, when Moses honours both, indiscriminately, with this title.” He resolves this discrepancy by claiming that Paul “restricts the image of God to government, in which the man has superiority over the wife.” According to Calvin, Paul regards men as “superiour in the degree of honour” but nevertheless agrees with Moses that women share in the “glory of God which peculiarly shines forth in human nature, where the mind, the will, and all the senses, represent the Divine Order.” William Perkins similarly views the attribution of the image of God to man as an Rethinking “shee for God in him” 161 “outward” distinction when he responds to the query “why the man is called the image of God, and not the woman”: “He is so called not because holinesse and righteousnesse is peculiar to him which is common to both: but because God hath placed more outward excellencie and dignitie in the person of a man then of a woman.”5 For his part, Milton not only posits that man, on a political or external level, more fully articulates the image of God but also attributes God-like creative powers to man that eliminate the possibility of woman’s direct connection to God. He does this most strikingly in Christian Doctrine as part of a meditation on the theory of traduction (the idea that men, and not God, propagate souls)6 in which he suggests Adam as the progenitor of Eve’s soul: But in fact the force of the divine blessing, that each creature should reproduce in its own likeness, is as fully applicable to man as it is to all other animals; Gen.i, 21,28. So God made the mother of all...