Fighting for Saint Michael: The Typology of Defeat in Milton's Celestial and Sublunary Civil Wars

Milton's God moves in mysterious ways. In book 6 of Paradise Lost, Raphael quotes him as follows:

Go Michael of celestial armies prince,And thou in military prowess nextGabriel, lead forth to battle these my sonsInvincible, lead forth my armèd saintsBy thousands and by millions ranged for fight;Equal in number to that godless crewRebellious, them with fire and hostile armsFearless assault, and to the brow of heavenPursuing drive them out from God and bliss,Into their place of punishment, the gulfOf Tartarus, which ready opens wideHis fiery chaos to receive their fall.

(6.44-55)¹

God's imperatives here are two: the loyal angels are to "assault" the rebels and then "drive them out" of heaven. Only a breath's pause separates the two commands. There is nothing to indicate that another entity will intervene in the battle, nothing to suggest that Michael and his angels will not be victorious. And yet, as Raphael proceeds to narrate the details of the assault and expulsion, it becomes clear that no direct relation obtains between the two acts. The opposing sides, as God subsequently explains it, are "Equal in their creation . . . formed" (6.690-91). The warring angels are doomed to an implacable stalemate, a "perpetual fight" that "needs must last / Endless, and no solution . . . found" (6.693-94). God has misdirected Michael and Gabriel with his rousing speech, if only by omission. And Michael, at least, is led astray. He misreads God's Word as presaging the loyal angels' total victory over the rebels. During the first day of the conflict, Satan approaches this "prince of angels" (6.281) in order to challenge him to single combat. Michael is "glad," for he "hop[es] here to end / Intestine war in heaven, the arch-foe subdued / Or captive dragged in chains" (6.258-60). Armed with his adamantine shield and his infallible sword "from the armoury of God," Michael has every reason to be confident that he will prevail (6.321). What he does not and cannot know, for he has been given no hint of it, is that God has stage-managed the war in heaven for the greater glory of his Son. Michael and his angels can and do win a battle, but they cannot and do not win the war. Only the appearance of the Son in his chariot, a Christian deus ex machina, can end the conflict once begun.

Virtually all Christian readers, artists, and hagiographers before Milton imagined the war in heaven quite differently. Whether their hermeneutic was literalizing or allegorizing, Catholic or Protestant, their understanding of its dynamic as an uninterrupted sequence of assault-and-expulsion anticipated Michael's in Paradise Lost. Where Milton's fictionalized archangel bases his interpretation upon the Word of God spoken directly to him, theirs was rooted in the Word transmitted to them in the Bible, especially in the book of Revelation:

And there was warre in heaven, Michael and his Angels fought against the dragon, & the dragon fought and his angels,

And prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven.

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devill and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: hee was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

(Rev. 12:7-9)²

Although theologians for centuries had been divided sharply over what they took to be the passage's seeming signification of Michael as the passive agent responsible for "cast[ing] out" the "great dragon" in verse 9, the grammatical crux that enables Milton's own heterodox solution to this problem does not seem ever to have been disputed. Underlying the poet's idiosyncratic exegesis is the implied pronoun reference at the start of verse 8, which all major early modern English translations preserve from the Greek. From a purely grammatical standpoint, the "they" in "And [they] prevailed not," because of its failure to differentiate, might be interpreted either as referring to the fallen angels alone (because of syntactical proximity) or to the fallen and unfallen angels alike. Because verse 9 unequivocally establishes that the rebel angels alone are cast from heaven, the implied pronoun in the previous verse would seem to indicate the same group. Yet Milton, without apparent precedent, takes it to refer not merely to Satan and his minions but to the whole of the warring angels. He affirms this interpretation in De doctrina Christiana when he writes, "Michael is introduced as leader of the angels and [GRK] (antagonist) of the prince of the devils: their respective forces were drawn up in battle array and separated after a fairly even fight, Rev. xii. 7, 8."³ What De doctrina Christiana does not do is explain the theological grounds of this unconventional exegesis, which surely must involve more than an arbitrary grammatical choice or unspoken semantic quarrel with the Greek word, [GRK]. Nor does it explain why in his epic poem Milton should have Michael commit precisely the same interpretive error that the author believed his contemporaries did, only to correct that reading within the space of the same book.

Despite the great care that Milton takes in book 6 to foreground the archangel's role as an interpreter of the divine Word, few critics have sought to locate Michael's failures as a warrior and exegete within a cohesive hermeneutic schema. Although critical discussions of books 5 and 6 abound, most engage the poet's unusual treatment of the celestial war in terms of aesthetics, topicality, or religious allegory. The war has been interpreted variously as driven by artistic rather than theological concerns, as a reflection of the "secondary attack" battle tactics employed during the English civil war, as a parody of earthly warfare, as an allegory of the militant church's unrelenting war against the forces of evil, and as a "somber" Restoration expression of the poet's political or millenarian disillusionment.⁴ Those scholars who do attempt to situate the war within Milton's broader hermeneutic make no mention of Michael's function as a reader in book 6. This oversight is puzzling given the vast amount of scholarship devoted to the archangel's exegetical, and explicitly prophetical, role in books 11 and 12. Because the poem's closure is dependent entirely upon Michael successfully discharging his role as scriptural exegete, no critical account of the war in heaven can be fully satisfactory unless it explains both why and how Milton in book 6 reads Revelation as he does and why he makes the figure of Michael bear such crucial interpretive weight.

Taking its cue from Paradise Lost, this essay offers a new way of looking at the celestial war, one that positions Michael, rather than Christ or Satan, at the interpretive center of book 6. Obliquely following Stanley Fish, I will argue that the poet "ostentatiously calls . . . up" two interpretations of the war in heaven in order to provide both the archangel and the epic's readers "with the shock of their disappointment" at discovering their own hermeneutic failure.⁵ By invoking these competing versions of the celestial war, Milton dramatizes and seeks to bridge the gulf, as wide as Tartarus itself, stretching between the Word and its significations. His representations of the war remain true to the Bible, on the one hand, and elaborate the difficulties presented by any attempt to read it transparently, on the other. Read as a cautionary tale about reading, God's education of the archangel in book 6 should be seen as preparing Michael to lead Adam through his own scriptural exegesis lesson in books 11 and 12, a lesson that extends equally to Milton's fallen readers.

As I will demonstrate, Michael's inadequacies as champion and reader, while rooted in abstract theological matters, speak directly to the religio-political events of the English civil wars and their aftermath. The archangel's misreading of God's speech regarding the war in heaven replicates the eschatological misreading made by millenarian English dissenters who believed that they were ushering in the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth under a succession of earthly Michaels, including Essex, Manchester, and Cromwell. By having Michael misread, and then having Raphael reread, Revelation 12, the poet offers an illuminating, retrospective adjustment to the millenarian expectations of the English revolutionaries. Yet he does so not to repudiate but to recuperate them. Although the degeneration and eventual collapse of the revolutionary project during the 1650s and 1660s may have led Milton to relinquish his belief in the imminence of the millennium and his radical contemporaries' role in portending it, his doctrinal certitude in the eschaton's eventuality remained unshaken. "War wearied" may have "performed what war can do" (6.695) on English soil, but the military failures of the revolution, read correctly, had not been for nought, any more than Michael's failures had been for nothing in the celestial war.

Milton's characterization of Michael in Paradise Lost emerges at the convergence of preterist and historicist applications of theology. The first restricts itself to the archangel's identity as it is inscribed in the pages of the Bible and other religious writings. It recognizes Michael as an independent actor in his own right as well as a type of Christ, but it grants him no agency in the temporal world outside the bounds of biblical history.⁶ The second reaches beyond Scripture; it searches human history, past and present, for one or more earthly manifestations, or quasi-typological incarnations, of the archangel. Central to both approaches is the theory of typological resemblances, which propounds that the images of the Old Testament are "shadow[s] of things to come" in the New Testament⁷ or, in the historicist mode, potentially in the future course of history. Early modern millenarians often combined the two approaches to recognize Michael as an actor participating in heavenly and sublunary events alike. The multivalent typological hermeneutic enabled English radicals to identify the historical actors and events of their own time as repetitions, or even fulfillments, of types delineated in the Bible. Yet those repetitions were always marked by difference. Typology asserts an identity between remote things; it does not imply an identicalness. The space of uncertainty generated by the tension between like and unlike, between same and different, always leaves open the possibility of conflation (mistaking type for antitype) or error (misidentification).

When Milton stages Michael's misreading of God's Word in book 6, he metatheatrically negotiates this space of theological uncertainty. Anxiously underwriting every debate concerning Michael's agency were worries about the potential for mistaken identity. Although apparently unremarked by Milton scholars, since the time of the primitive church, the confluence of Judaic and early Christian beliefs had engendered a wholly inappropriate rivalry between the Son and Michael that was nearly as pronounced as the adversarial relationship between the Son and Satan. Michael, whose name translates as the interrogative "who is as God, or who is lyke unto God?,"⁸ emerges in the writings of Jewish angelologists and the Old Testament bearing striking functional, titular, and visible likenesses to Christ. In Hebrew texts, Michael is portrayed as "a mediator between God and men for the peace of Israel,"⁹ a role that the New Testament explicitly ascribes to Christ alone.¹⁰ Both Michael, in the Judaic tradition, and Christ, in the Christian one, share claim to the titles of protector of the church, commander of the heavenly host, and prince of the angels.¹¹ The imagery surrounding the archangel and the Son also exhibits remarkable similarities.¹² These resemblances were troublesome for several reasons. For one thing, Michael's central role in the eviction of Satan from heaven was seen as an infringement upon the Son's divine prerogative.¹³ At the same time, by drawing attention to the Son's absence from the expulsion, the archangel's exemplary heroism opens the possibility that Christ may have had no existence prior to his incarnation and hence that he, like the angels, is a created rather than eternal being.¹⁴ Michael thus threatens the Son in the very same ways that Satan does,¹⁵ even as his heroic and cultic stature makes him potentially more dangerous to the Son than even the demonic adversary is.

In a 1640 critique of the Michaelmas Day collect and epistle prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer (outlawed by Parliament in 1645), the Church of England clergyman Lewes Hughes makes explicit the blasphemous potential of a literal interpretation of Michael's agency in Revelation 12:7-9. The Church of England's prescription that these verses be read to honor "S. Michael and all the Angels" as ones who "succour and defend us in [sic] earth" distracts churchgoers' attention from their true champion and defender, the Son, dimming his just glory.¹⁶ The verses, Hughes argues, are "appointed to be read . . . of purpose to pervert the meaning of our Saviour Christ, by misse-applying to Michael and all Angels in the highest Heaven, the victory that Christ hath . . . fighting the battell against Antichrist."¹⁷ It is precisely this misreading that Milton stages for us in book 6 when he has Michael infer a guarantee of his success, rather than the Son's, from God's command to "assault" the rebels and "drive them . . . / Into their place of punishment" (6.51-53). We are not passive as this erroneous exegesis unfolds and then later unravels. The poet and the archangel himself invite us to misread Revelation. The fact that Milton allows us to harbor our hermeneutic delusions for much of the book before finally exposing them as fallacious suggests that there is a method, and a lesson, in what he does.

In Paradise Lost, Michael neither flouts nor questions Christ's authority over him, as Satan does, yet there is a momentary suggestion of hubris in Milton's archangel, as though he has temporarily forgotten his place. Even though God addresses both Michael and Gabriel in his speech, and then only in their roles as captain and lieutenant, respectively, of the angelic host, Michael concludes that he will single-handedly overcome Satan and, with him, the rebel forces as a whole. For most of the first day of the war, the loyal and rebel forces remain at a stalemate. As the narrator Raphael tells us, the "battle hung" (6.246) until Satan approached the heroic Michael, who with "two-handed sway" of his sword was busily inflicting "Wide wasting . . . destruction" upon the rebel squadrons (6.251, 253). Once brought face-to-face with Satan, Michael hastily comes to surmise that he personally will turn the battle and thereby "end / Intestine war in heaven" once and for all (6.258-59). While clearly Michael recognizes intellectually that his power derives solely from God, in practice he metonymically relocates that power, investing it in the sword of justice that he carries. The symbolic weight of the weapon is so great that Michael demands of Satan, "Hence then, and evil go with thee along / Thy offspring, to the place of evil, hell, . . . / Ere this avenging sword begin thy doom" (6.275-76, 278). Yet the "Author of evil" (6.262) is far from cowed by the archangel's bold words, which he perceives, rightly as it will turn out, to be mere "airy threats" (6.283). Satan not only dismisses Michael's warning out of hand but also challenges the archangel's entire interpretation of the celestial war when he remarks, "The strife which thou callst evil, . . . we style / The strife of glory" (6.289-90). From the rebel forces' point of view, their struggle is noble and just; it seeks to restore them to the place of glory that they believe the Son has usurped from them. While the reader presumably knows better than to sympathize with the rebels, Satan, in turning Michael's characterizations of the sword and the war against him, nevertheless gestures toward the flexibility and potential for error inherent in every act of interpretation.

Although Michael never openly quests for the kind of "glory" that Satan does, his desire is implied, not only by his forwardness in assuming his own exemplary role in the battle, but also by his belief that his single-handed defeat of Satan will cause the mass of the rebel forces to turn tail and flee the battlefield. Given Michael's overconfidence in the singularity of his agency, however fleeting it may be, Satan's rendering of the war as fame-driven ultimately implicates the archangel as well as the fiends whom he battles. If we compare Michael's behavior with that of Abdiel at the opening of the celestial war, the aptness of Satan's characterization of the conflict becomes clear. Readers certainly would recall that fewer than 100 lines before he approaches Michael, Satan is facing Abdiel in single combat. Then, Satan accuses his opponent of being "ambitious to win / From me some plume, that thy success may show / Destruction to the rest" of the fallen forces (6.160-62). Abdiel's duly humble response to Satan's allegation acts as a foil to the presumptuousness of Michael. Although Abdiel smites Satan, as the prince of the angels will later do, he recognizes that the value of the stroke is wholly emblematic, just as his reasoned defiance of Satan's seduction of the angels to sin had been. Abdiel never loses sight, as Michael does, of whose hand will finally bring down the archfiend and his cohort. As he explains to Satan, God easily could "Have raised incessant armies to defeat" the rebels "or with solitary hand" finished them off (6.138, 139). Instead, he chose to stage the war in heaven as a lesson for all of his angels, fallen and unfallen alike. God decreed that the opposing forces should be equal in strength and number (6.227-29) precisely because this created a state of equilibrium within which he could unfold his didactic mystery play at his leisure. When, as a consequence of Abdiel's "noble stroke" (6.189), Satan "back recoil[s]" until he comes to rest "on bended knee" (6.194), the loyal angels are right to see this symbolic enactment of the fiend's subjugation to God and the Son as a "Presage of victory" (6.201). Where they go wrong is in interpreting it as a sign of their own victory in battle. For Satan to bow to the Son would be entirely appropriate; for him to bow to Michael or the other angels would be completely inappropriate, given that the angels are his equals, "save what sin hath impaired" (6.691). As Michael will do in his parley with Satan, the angels put too much confidence in their own, inimitable battle power, and too little in the "solitary hand" of God that supplies them with that power.

Michael is distracted by the materialism of his own physical battle, so much so that he loses sight of the godhead's behind-the-scenes exercise of his invisible, spiritual agency. A painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) entitled The Fall of the Rebel Angels (fig. 1) offers a useful visual representation of Michael's perspectival position. Though the colorful figure of the heroic dragon-trampler looms large in the painting's foreground, an ethereal God directly above him peers down from a mass of unformed clouds

Fig. 1.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1621/22). Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich, Germany. Reproduced with permission of bpk, Berlin / Alte Pinakothek Bayerische Staatsgemmaeldeslungen, Munich, Germany / Art Resource, NY.

into which he almost dissolves. With his eyes turned downward as they are, Michael seems caught up in the moment, as indeed he is in Paradise Lost. The visual arrangement of the painting, in a way analogous to the Michaelmas Day collect about which Lewes Hughes complained, threatens to distract the viewer's attention sufficiently that he may "misse-appl[y] to Michael and all Angels in the highest Heaven, the victory that Christ hath . . . fighting the battell against Antichrist."¹⁸ And, in fact, many artists, including virtually all sculptors and the painter Raphael (fig. 2), fail to include even a hint of heavenly involvement in Michael's battle against Satan.

If we, as readers, miss the point of Milton's juxtaposition of Abdiel's and Michael's respective fights with Satan, and hence the implicit gesture toward a higher power, we too may be led to believe that the battle involving Michael will end the war, and that the archfiend and his minions will be expelled as a consequence. The narrator Raphael, however, intervenes at this point, as he often does, to destabilize our certainty in our reading. Reiterating his earlier anxiety (5.564-76) about the impossibility of accommodating celestial events to the language and concepts of the sublunary world, Raphael informs us that he must now "with the tongue / Of angels" speak the "Unspeakable" (6.297-98). As his account of the physical fight between the leaders of the warring forces unfolds, Raphael's paradoxical vocal voicelessness speaks directly to Michael's and our temptation to mistake the sign for the real thing. If we see Michael not as a figura of Christ, as we see Abdiel, but as one who fulfills Christ's dragon-trampling role, then we are perceiving too close a resemblance between things that are at least as dissimilar as they are alike. To put it another way, we are assuming an equivalence between what is voiced (the material) and what cannot be voiced (the spiritual) that can never exist. We are mistaking Michael for the godhead. Raphael's caution in describing Michael and Satan as merely "likest gods" who only "seemed" "Fit to decide the empire of great heaven" (6.301, 303) reminds us that the two captains are most emphatically not gods. Because each possesses a merely "next to almighty arm" (6.316), neither is

Fig. 2.

Raphael, St. Michael Confounding the Devil (1518). Louvre, Paris. Reproduced with permission of Scala / Art Resource, NY.

capable of implementing heaven's fate. Only the "Almighty arm" itself can deliver heaven from the scourge of the rebels.

Raphael's warning to us introduces a potentially powerful dramatic irony, assuming, of course, that we have heeded his message. When he remarks that "Michaël and his angels," after driving Satan from the field, "prevalent / Encamp[ed]" (6.411-12), Raphael opens to interrogation the textual crux embodied in Revelation's "And [they] prevailed not" (12:8). Eliding the gap between what God says and what he means, the loyal angels mistakenly assume that they indeed have prevailed, and that the rebel angels in all likelihood already will have "fled" heaven (6.531). Sage readers, having been educated by Raphael not to make this mistake, will not be surprised when the fruitless war resumes, reasserting the stalemate. At this stage, though, the readers' knowledge remains limited, for it is impossible to predict how the standoff will be broken, and hence how the war finally will end. All that we do know is that it will not be effectuated by Michael and that Revelation 12:7-9 therefore must be read in some other way.

Protestant theologians would have agreed. Most often, they recuperated the Bible's threatening allusions to Michael by appropriating them in some fashion to Christ. But they did not do so in the same way that Milton does. Following the precedent established by the early church fathers, the majority of commentators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries responded to the challenge posed by the archangel by "transform[ing] Michael traditions" in such a way that writings from the Bible or other religious texts "which originally referred to Michael could be understood messianically."¹⁹ Most commonly, they did so by stripping the archangel of his individual agency by treating his appellation, "Michael," as a mere signifier of Christ. Because Michael's name means one "who is as God, or who is lyke unto God?" and because it was believed that only Christ could be said to share God's nature, the designation "Michael" was interpreted as a title for the Messiah rather than as the proper name of some discrete entity.²⁰ To avoid any appearance of too close a resemblance between Michael and Christ, commentators who adopt this approach collapse the two figures in such a way that the first is erased altogether. Repudiating the literal sense of the Revelation passage, those who effect such a reassignment invariably read the battle between "Michael" and the "dragon" allegorically. The notion of a literal war in heaven is deemed oxymoronic. After all, "heaven . . . is no place of dragons or quarrels" but a place of peace.²¹ Such theologians deny that the Revelation verses depict the fall of the rebel angels at all.²² Instead, they interpret the prophet John's vision as a sign either of Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection or, more generally, of his metaphorical ousting of Satan from the true church.²³

By contrast, while Milton acknowledges in De doctrina that a "lot of people are of the opinion that Michael is Christ," he rejects this reading as nonsensical (YP 6:347). In his view, "it would be very strange for an apostle of the Gospel to talk in such an obscure way, and to call Christ by another name, when reporting these odd and unheard-of-things about him" (YP 6:347).²⁴ From the poet's perspective, when Protestants erased Michael in this way, they merely reversed the problem of misinterpretation. In order to prevent the pious from naïvely misrecognizing Michael as Christ, they foolishly misrecognized Christ as Michael. What Milton seeks to do in Paradise Lost is to preserve both figures while making their similarities and differences explicit. Considered from a dispassionate hermeneutic standpoint, Michael could be allowed to retain his angelic identity if he was understood correctly as a type, or partial prefiguration, of Christ, rather than as a usurper of the Son's divine powers and prerogatives. In the terms that Milton sets forth in Paradise Lost, Michael needs to be seen to look a bit more like Abdiel and a bit less like the Son.

The problem with the typological approach to Michael was that it was rarely viewed in this dispassionate way by Protestants, whether radical or conservative. To most, it seemed to bear the indelible taint of popery. There was good reason for this, since this strategy was precisely the one favored by Catholics. The seventeenth century Jesuit theologian Robert Bellarmine makes Michael's and Christ's typological power relations explicit when he explains, "in the universal Catholic Church there are two supreme pontiffs established under Christ the Lord, one a man and visible [the Pope], and one an angel and invisible, who we believe is the Archangel Michael. As once the synagogue of the Jews revered him as a patron, so now does the Church of Christians."²⁵ Putting aside for the moment Protestants' obvious objections to Bellarmine's view of the pope, we may observe that the theologian preserves Michael's traditional role as set forth in the Old Testament and other Judaic writings. At the same time, he insists upon the archangel's subjection and inferiority to the Son, whom Bellarmine believes has installed him in the office of the church's protector. Michael's actions, whether on earth or in the celestial battle, parallel and indeed presage Christ's victories, but those actions are never successful in the way that Christ's are in the New Testament and finally will be at the eschaton. Bellarmine's assertion of Michael's subordinate role would seem to solve the problem posed by the archangel's potential for conflation with Christ. But Bellarmine also introduces new problems. His positioning of the pope as Michael's earthly counterpart, and his linking of Michael to the institution of the Catholic Church—which here becomes indistinguishable from the "Church of Christians"—would have appeared to Protestants as a coopting of the archangel for sinister ends. Even as Bellarmine's formulation forestalls the inordinate exaltation of Michael by refusing to treat him as equivalent to Christ, it proposes a quasi-typological resemblance between the pope and Michael, and therefore between the pope and Christ.²⁶

From a Protestant perspective, there were other problems as well. The Catholic insistence upon Michael's inferior status is belied by the prayers and reverence offered to the archangel within the institution of the church. The Michaelmas Day collect and epistle prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, discussed above, was perceived as inherently idolatrous, one of the remnants of Catholicism that remained to be stripped from the Church of England. Until 1644, parishioners in some English churches still knelt before images or statues of the archangel Michael in what appeared to be a form of worship.²⁷ The fact that Michael was most often visually represented in the guise of the heroic dragon-trampler of Revelation, in a pose very nearly identical to one occasionally used to depict Christ (fig. 3),²⁸ further blurred the distinction between the two figures, paradoxically reaffirming the troublesome conflation that Bellarmine and other Catholics purportedly had sought to undo through the application of typology. Although Catholics insisted, rationally enough, that the veneration paid to saints and angels (dulia, a form of respect) was of a different character from that paid to the godhead (latria, a form of reverence), for the most part "such niceties . . . were lost on puritans."²⁹ As the English dissenters saw it, the papists, despite their protestations to the contrary, treated "the Angells . . . as halfe goddes"³⁰ even as they sought to cover over their idolatry with typological sophistry.

Because of Milton's antipathy toward Catholicism and his deep-seated iconoclasm, it would be preposterous to conclude that his depiction of Michael as an active agent in Paradise Lost reveals Catholic sympathies on his part.³¹ What Milton does in book 6 is retain the literalizing and typological aspects of the Catholic reading while preventing his reader from making the elisions that the Catholics were believed to make in practice. In short, he treats the war in heaven as a teachable moment. As we have seen, he initially invites his readers, along with Michael himself, to make this slippage by misreading the scriptural account of the celestial war as it is voiced by God in the poem (6.45-55). In doing so, he implicitly tempts us to commit precisely the same error that Catholics did when they glorified Michael too much.

In the final act of his military drama, however, Milton proceeds to scrutinize this interpretation. Once Raphael has hinted to the reader that the loyal angels' perception of their victory may not be as it seems, and once the bootless battle resumes, proving him right, the scene changes. God, who at the opening of the war had ordered Michael and Gabriel to "Pursuing drive them [the rebels] out from God and bliss, / Into their place of punishment, the gulf / Of Tartarus" (6.52-54), now repeats these instructions to the Son, whom he commands to "Pursue these sons of darkness, drive them out / From all heaven's bounds into the utter deep" (6.715-16). Like the typologically congruent figures of Michael and Christ, the

Fig. 3.

Christ Militant (sixth century). Museo Arcivescovile, Ravenna, Italy. Reproduced with permission of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

two speeches on the surface appear virtually the same, but they are not identical. God's words on both occasions mean precisely what they say, but only in Christ's case do his words mean only what they say. In God's speech to Michael and Gabriel, there is a lacuna stretching between his commands to "assault" the rebels and then "drive them out" of heaven (6.51-52). This lacuna can be filled only by the Son, since only the Son can instantiate God's Word, and since only Christ can defeat the dragon. Whereas Michael possesses only a "next to Almighty arm" (6.316), God himself tells the Son, "my almighty arms / Gird on" (6.713-14).

When God addresses the Son in the final scene of book 6, he iterates rather transparently the didactic purpose implicit in his tempting of Michael to hermeneutic error. It becomes clear for the first time that God has not engineered the angelic impasse between the warring forces merely to admonish Satan and the rebels. When God tells the Son that he has "ordained" his victory so "that all may know / In heaven and hell thy power above compare" (6.700, 704-05), the deity's dual motives become clear. God has tested Michael and found him wanting; the archangel, like Satan, needs to remember that he is subordinate to the Son, and that he is no more a god than is the posturing archfiend, though both on the surface "likest gods . . . seemed" (6.301). Strictly speaking, the archangel has not misread God's words to him; rather, he has failed to supply what is absent. This is true in terms of both Scripture and script. What is missing is not only the textually incarnate form of Christ potentially implied by the scriptural "And [they] prevailed not" (Rev. 12:8) but also the embodied form of Christ as the agent to whom Satan will bow. Michael has been called upon to perform a literalizing reading, but he has also been expected to supplement that reading with his larger knowledge of the Word. He has been asked, so to speak, to turn and face the aeriform figure hovering above him in the clouds in Rubens's pictorial depiction of him (see fig. 1).

In Paradise Lost the intertextual key to filling the lacuna in God's initial command to Michael and Gabriel to "assault" the rebels and "drive them out" (6.51-52) of heaven is the scene of the Son's exaltation in book 5. Through the careful application of geometric imagery, Raphael's narrative at the close of book 6 restores the Son to his rightful places, both literal and symbolic, at the center and at the apex of the spiritual order. As we witness Christ's appearance on the battlefield, we are meant to recall that when God summoned the angels to hear his declaration of Christ's elevation, the angels gathered around him and the Son in "circuit inexpressible . . . / Orb within orb" (5.595-96). Viewed from above, God and the Son are at the midpoint of a celestial circle. Viewed from the side, they are at the vertex of a heavenly triangle. In their singular "brightness," it is as if the Father and Son are at the "top" of a "flaming mount" that manifests, below, the lesser brightness of the angels who form the triangle's base (5.599, 598). This imagery of verticality is reinforced, but also complicated, by the fact that the angels carry "ten thousand thousand ensigns high advanced" (5.588) which

    for distinction serveOf hierarchies, of orders, and degrees;Or in their glittering tissues bear imblazedHoly memorials, acts of zeal and loveRecorded eminent.

(5.590-94)

The Miltonic "or" in these lines is critical. It points up the fact that these banners would seem to offer two possible models of angelic identity—one determined by the angels' hierarchical relationship to the godhead and their peers, the other determined by the honorable actions they have performed. But these two classes of identity markers are not meant to be mutually exclusive. The angels' heroic deeds should arise solely from their desire to serve and glorify the godhead. As such, they also signal, though in a more oblique way than the explicitly hierarchical ensigns, the angels' acquiescence and subjugation to the proper order of things.

Raphael's reintroduction of the imagery of encirclement and verticality in book 6 allows us to recognize that Michael in the heat of battle has mistakenly interpreted all of the signs—God's Word to him, the emblems of angelic virtue, and Satan's prophetic kneeling before Abdiel—as signifiers of his own potency, rather than the Son's. He has lost the ability to distinguish between the dulia, or respect, to which he is entitled, and the latria, or reverence, due to the godhead alone. Recalling the imagery of book 5, Raphael describes the Son as seated atop a chariot-throne "flashing thick flames" and shining so brightly that the loyal angels can see him from "far off" (6.751, 768). He is again "attended with [the] ten thousand thousand saints" who before had surrounded him and the Father (6.767). No longer, though, do the angels carry flags advertising their own virtues and hierarchical standing. Now, only "the great ensign of Messiah blazed / Aloft by angels borne, his sign in heaven" (6.775-76).

Despite the prophecy implicitly contained in God's speech to the whole of the heavenly host that the Son will be the one before whom Satan bows (5.607-08), Michael is "surprised" when the Messiah appears on the battlefield, as are the other loyal angels (6.774). Importantly, though, it is a surprise marked by "unexpected joy," for the angels instantly realize that Christ has come to deliver them from the futility of the celestial war (6.774). As soon as he realizes that his interpretation of his own dragon-trampling role has been mistaken, Michael acts quickly, and properly. He "soon reduced / His army" under the Son, so that they were "circumfused on either wing, / Under their head embodied all in one" (6.777-79). Once again, the angels find themselves encircling Christ, even as they stand beneath him, rehearsing once more the visual hierarchies that they performed in book 5. By contrast, whereas Michael rejoices in discovering and remedying his error once it is revealed to him, the fallen angels merely "envy" the Son more (6.793). The reprobates cling to their hermeneutic failure, fueled by their unrelenting desire for the glory that belongs to the Son alone. Hence, the only possible outcome for them is to be cast out of heaven and sent to "their doom" (6.817). The restoration of the Son's, Michael's, and Satan's proper places is symbolically enacted in the pathetic fallacy of a self-reordering nature. The destruction that accrued from the angels' warfare is undone with a Word from the Son. Just as the angels had returned to their rightful positions of their own volition, "at his command the uprooted hills retired / Each to his place" (6.781-82). God's will that all things should bow before the Son is reiterated when the hills defer, "obsequious" (6.783). Sharing the loyal angels' joy at the coming of the Messiah, every "hill and valley smiled" with a profusion of "fresh flowerets" (6.784). When the Son drives Satan and the rebels out of heaven, all is again right with the heavenly world.

Like his mainstream Protestant contemporaries, Milton ultimately rereads, and rectifies, Michael's agency in the celestial war by appropriating his role to the Messiah.³² The end result, at least, is the same: Michael is stripped of his efficacy, and his potency as described in Revelation is transferred to Christ. Yet Milton's hermeneutic is quite different from that of his more conservative contemporaries. He neither elides Michael nor reduces the celestial war to mere allegory. The poet's belief in the efficacious intervention of angels on earth, combined with his millenarianism, situates him not with his conservative Anglican contemporaries but in the camp of radical Protestant figures like Joseph Mede and Thomas Brightman, whose works were translated and published in England at the direction of Parliament during the early 1640s.³³ Throughout the English civil war and Protectorate, radical religious dissenters identified themselves with the army of "saints" described in Revelation 13:7, whom they believed would usher in Christ's visible reign on earth.³⁴ Typologically speaking, they believed that they were the chosen people of "Israel," God's "firstborn, whom he will not have any longer kept in bondage" and on whose behalf he "rebuketh kings and Parliaments, armies and Councils."³⁵ Michael, as the "great prince" of the Israelites (Dan. 12:1), was their "chiefe patron" and "Defender."³⁶ The conservative Protestant elision of Michael had the advantage of containing and depoliticizing a figure who occupied a prominent place in the millenarian narratives of English revolutionaries. By disavowing Michael's role in the celestial war that demarcated the beginning of human history (the Creation), mainstream Protestant commentators also disclaimed his apparent usurpation of Christ's precedence in the eschaton signaling the end of the temporal world.³⁷ Milton's treatment of the archangel, which is far more nuanced than his contemporaries', enables the poet to preserve Michael as a discrete figure even as he reassesses Michael's typological roles in the celestial and sublunary civil wars that provide the text and subtext of books 5 and 6.

Although their responses to the figure of "Michael" in Revelation 12:7-9 are not uniform, all early modern millenarians share a belief in the celestial battle as a "double warre," one signifying on both earthly and spiritual levels.³⁸ The English clergyman Thomas Brightman (1562-1607) argues with most of his Protestant contemporaries that the reference to "Michael" in Revelation is to be interpreted as a title for Christ, while the celestial war itself is to be interpreted as an allegory of the "battell in the Church upon the earth." At the same time, however, he urges that "Michaell by communication of name is [the fourth-century Roman emperor] Constantine, the faithfull souldier of Christ" who defended the primitive church against the advances of the pagan emperors Maxentius, Maximinus, and Lucinius, collectively representing the "Dragon . . . by whose tyranny the Devill powred forth his hatred against the Church." Writing in 1611, and historicist in his outlook, Brightman believes that a renewed battle against the dragon by Michael's/Constantine's successors, including Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, and Elizabeth I, has already begun and will continue to rage until 1650. At that time, the reformation of the church will be complete: the papacy will be overthrown, the Jews will be converted, and a New Jerusalem will be established on earth. Brightman invites his contemporaries as well as the later English civil war revolutionaries to imagine themselves, like Constantine, as "faithfull souldier[s] of Christ . . . warring under the banner" of their captain "Michael" in a protoapocalyptic battle on earth.³⁹ The closest early modern analogue to Milton's reading of Revelation, though, is to be found in Joseph Mede's The Key of the Revelation (1650). Between 1610 and 1638, Mede served as a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, where Milton may have studied under him.⁴⁰ As Brightman does, Mede interprets Michael as historically signifying the Emperor Constantine and his early modern English heirs. Unlike Brightman, but like Milton, Mede also preserves Michael's distinct identity as the leader of the angels who engages Satan in a literal, celestial battle.⁴¹

Milton's De doctrina Christiana is entirely consistent with Mede's theology and the apocalyptic narratives of the poet's civil war and Protectorate contemporaries. The author argues in his sixth book that certain "signs" common to "the destruction of Jerusalem, the type of Christ's second coming, and his second coming itself" will herald the millennium. He notes immediately after that "some authorities" believe the millennium will be announced by "the calling of the entire nation not only of the Jews but also of the Israelites" (YP 6:617), the latter term encompassing the international community of saints that Milton envisioned in The Second Defence (YP 4:554-55). In Areopagitica (1644), Milton describes the English people as the vanguard of this holy host. A "concurrence of signs," he argues, has made it apparent that the nation has been "chos'n before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclam'd and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europ" (YP 2:552). The English saints, like Constantine before them, have been called to war against the dragon, and they will usher in "some new and great period in [God's] . . . Church, ev'n to the reforming of Reformation it self" (YP 2:553). While it is true that in Areopagitica Milton's focus is upon truth and spiritual warfare, his language has strong militaristic overtones. Though the England of Areopagitica is indeed "a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with [God's] . . . protection," "the shop of warre" that supports it also is kept busy with "anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer'd Truth" (YP 2:553-54). As The Second Defence (1654) demonstrates even more clearly,⁴² the English army in Milton's view fights a "double warre," one both literal and spiritual. Neither can be separated from the other. When he stages in Paradise Lost Michael's misreading of God's directive to him, Milton therefore should be seen as attending as much to his politico-religious convictions as to his theological ones.

Given the indebtedness of the revolutionaries' prophetic schema to the book of Revelation,⁴³ it is perhaps inevitable that the figure of Michael should occupy a central place in their millenarian readings of the English civil war. From the onset of hostilities through the Protectorate, the mantle of Michael was passed to a succession of parliamentary champions.⁴⁴ A military banner carried by the parliamentary forces beginning in 1642 (fig. 4), for example, depicts an armed man trampling a bishop's mitre beneath his feet, a sword upraised in his hand, with the motto "Pro deo et patria," or "For God and country."⁴⁵ Eventually, the archangel's dragon-trampling role came to be associated with Oliver Cromwell, a fact that I will argue is central to Milton's depiction of the war in heaven. During the early years of the conflict, though, the most prominent military figure on the parliamentary side was Robert Devereux, the third Earl of Essex. John Taylor unequivocally alludes to Essex's assumption of Michael's office in a 1643 satirical tract. In this text, Taylor describes his purportedly autobiographical "conversion, confession, [and] contrition" from his former state as "a misled, ill-bred, rebellious round-head." Before he regained his senses, casting off puritanism and returning to the bosom of the Church of England, Taylor writes, "I was at Boston, in Lincolnshire, where I heard Mr Anderson the diligent Preacher say, that the Earle of Essex was Michaell the Archangell, and that the King was the Dragon, which he must Tread under his feet. verily [sic] it was strange doctrine to me, and I (like an asse) beleeved him."⁴⁶ A year later, the royalist John Cleveland complained that the dissenters thought Edward Montague, second Earl of Manchester, "so sanctified a Thunderbolt, that Burroughs, in a . . . blasphemy to his Lord of hosts, . . . stile[d] him the Archangel, giving Battel to the Devil."⁴⁷

Ultimately, however, the Michael-like military leader who most captured and sustained the imaginations of the English dissenters in general and Milton in particular was Oliver Cromwell, who had served under both Manchester and Fairfax. As Laura Lunger Knoppers demonstrates, the English during the war became accustomed to seeing Cromwell depicted as a glorious, conquering military hero. Such portraiture quickly became conventionalized, persisting even after the Protector's death in 1658.⁴⁸ Some republican depictions of Cromwell associate the parliamentary

Fig. 4.

Banners of the Parliamentary Army, in the time of Charles I, with the Arms of the Captains.

© British Library Board, MS. Sloane 5247, fol. 71v.

forces' leader with Michael overtly. In a 1655 pamphlet, for example, the Quaker leader George Fox addresses Cromwell as the one "into whose hands God hath committed the Sword of Justice, that under thee all may be Godly and quietly governed. A terror to the evil doers, and for the encouragement of them that do well; and to the rest of the Army, whom the Lord hath set above all your enemies."⁴⁹

While Milton never directly equates Cromwell with Michael, as Fox does, his praise of the renowned general is uncustomarily effusive. In "Cromwell, Our Cheif [sic] of Men" (1652), the poet commends Cromwell for having "reard Gods Trophies" and for having "his [God's] work pursu'd."⁵⁰ In the Second Defence (1654), Milton declares Cromwell England's "defender," a "strong and faithful . . . pillar" to its glory, and a "support of English interests." The author gushes, "For while you, O Cromwell, are safe, he does not have sufficient faith even in God himself who would fear for the safety of England, when he sees God everywhere so favorable to you, so unmistakably at your side" (YP 4:670). Milton endows Cromwell with virtually all of the archangel's most revered qualities. Cromwell is the "defender of liberty" and "father" of his country (YP 4:670). Milton elaborates at length upon Cromwell's role as the "general of England's armies," declaring, "he traversed the entire realm of Britain with uninterrupted victory" and exhibited a "rare and all-but-divine excellence." Indeed, "there flourished in him so great a power, whether of intellect and genius or of discipline (established not merely according to military standards, but rather according to the code of Christian virtue) that to his camp . . . he attracted from every side all men who were already good and brave, or else he made them such, chiefly by his own example" (YP 4:668).⁵¹ As the favored object of the divine regard and a man of "all-but-divine excellence," Cromwell sounds a great deal like the angelic "halfe goddes" once honored in the Book of Common Prayer.

As the Interregnum during which Christ's return was anticipated got underway, though, many of the English revolutionaries began to suspect Cromwell's unworthiness as the saints' champion. The regicide, for one thing, led many to abandon or lose faith in the cause, including Essex. The king's execution generated an outpouring of rhetoric and images that depicted Cromwell as a perverter of justice and a greedy and duplicitous usurper of Charles I. Royalists, of course, were responsible for most of this vitriol.

Yet even to those who supported the regicide, the pure figure of a Cromwellian Michael appeared to degenerate over time as the Protector increasingly adopted the very temporal dignities that had been seen as emblematic of the corruption of the Stuart king and the Church of England. More and more, he seemed to live up to the archangel Michael's name, meaning one "who is as God," but only in the sense that he looked surprisingly, if only outwardly, like the English monarchs who had associated their office strongly with presumptions of divine right. The ceremonial rites of Cromwell's 1657 investiture ceremony especially jarred many iconoclasts, including the Puritans. The visual spectacle of the Protector's installation seemed to bear out the postregicide wave of anti-Cromwellian propaganda.⁵² An illustration contained in A Further narrative of the passages of these times in the Common-wealth of England (1658) reveals that the Protector received at his investiture an impressive array of monarchical accoutrements. According to the caption, "Mr. Speaker. in ye name of ye Parmt. presented Seuerall thinges to his Highness Viz: a Robe of Purple Velvet Lined wth Ermine: a Large Bible Richly Guilt & Bossed: Next a Sword & Lastly a Septer of Massie Gold."⁵³ From the viewpoint of many, Cromwell's mock-coronation mirrored his spiritual degeneration. In the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson's view, Cromwell had once been "so uncorruptibly faithful both to his trust and the people's interest that he could not be drawn" in by King Charles's "trinkling" during the latter's captivity at Hampton Court.⁵⁴ By the time of his accession to Lord Protector, though, Cromwell had all but abandoned the Good Old Cause and become little better than a usurper of the crown. As Hutchinson describes it,

Cromwell and his army grew wanton with their power, and invented a thousand tricks of government. . . . He weeded, in a few months' time, above a 150 godly officers out of the army, with whom many of the religious soldiers went off, and in their room abundance of the King's dissolute soldiers were entertained; and the army was almost changed from that godly religious army, whose valour God had crowned with triumph, into the dissolute army they had beaten, bearing yet a better name. His wife and children were setting up for principality, which suited no better with any of them than scarlet on the ape; only, to speak truth of himself, he had much natural greatness in him, and well became the place he had usurped.⁵⁵

Though Milton in 1654 praised Cromwell for having "spurned" the "name of king . . . from your far greater eminence," by 1657 it was in name only that the Protector was perceived by many to differ from his royal predecessor (YP 4:672). Parliament's restoration of Charles II to the Stuart kingship in 1660 was almost anticlimactic, for Cromwell's perceived pride and power-grabbing already had shaken radically many dissenters' hopes that England, under Michael's leadership, was destined soon to fulfill its role as the harbinger of the Second Coming.

Although English millenarians found it increasingly difficult after 1649 to reconcile the historical Cromwell with his biblical persona, they clung to the larger typological schema in which the figure of the English Michael was embedded because it underwrote in significant ways their revolutionary narrative. Michael's interpretive failure in Paradise Lost, and Milton's subsequent exposure of that failure, rehearse, but also recuperate, the dissenters' millenarian misreading of Cromwell's agency. A 1658 engraving by William Faithorne (fig. 5) positions Cromwell unambiguously as a quasi-typological incarnation of Michael. The Embleme of Englands Distractions⁵⁶ depicts the Protector standing astride both a serpent ("Error") and the body of a prone woman (recalling Psalm 91:13) with a crown and rosary cast to the ground beside her head (the whore of "Babilon" of Revelation 17). The upraised sword in Cromwell's right hand and the unclasped book in his left suggestively evoke the apocalyptic war described in the "seal[ed] . . . books" of prophecy, which according to Daniel 12:4 would be opened with the arrival of the end of days. Surrounding Cromwell are several typologically significant Old Testament scenes. Above the Protector

Fig. 5.

William Faithorne, The Embleme of Englands distractions (1658). Reg. No. 1848,0911.242.

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

and to his left, Noah's ark is pictured, while the dove of the same story, an olive leaf in its beak, hovers directly overhead. The inclusion of this imagery of the Flood evokes, in Milton's words, the moment when "God vouchsafe[d] to raise another world / . . . and all his anger to forget" (PL 11.877-78). As such, it prefigures the new world that would begin at the time of the Second Advent, when Christ would commence his reign on earth.

A raised hill to Cromwell's left makes explicit the millenarian foreshadowing implicit in the imagery of the flood. The hill is identified as Mount Sion, normally taken as a synecdoche for Jerusalem, where in the last days God will gather together the remnant of his faithful and establish "the house of the Lord" (Mic. 4:1). Pictured below are various scenes, glossed by Micah 4:3, depicting both the Judgment and the eventual peace that will ensue from Christ's Second Coming when "he shall judge among many people . . . and they shall beate their swords into plowshares." At that time, no longer will any "nation . . . lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learne warre any more." The implications of the engraving are clear: Cromwell, by making war against the serpent and the Roman Catholic Church with the sword and Bible that he carries, has ushered in the culmination of the Old Testament narrative of the chosen people and an end of war forever.

The iconography of Faithorne's engraving threatens to transfer Christ's glory and agency to the twinned figures of Michael and Cromwell. Streaming from the triple crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland upheld on the martial hero's sword are the words, "I will never faile thee, nor forsake thee" (Josh. 1:5) on one side and "Bee still, and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10) on the other. Although the streamers extend from the sword into heaven, and thereby assert that the sword and the power of Cromwell and Michael derive from the "almighty arm" of the godhead rather than from the martial hero's merely "next to almighty arm" (PL 6.316), the iconography's assertion of a heavenly hierarchy is so subtle as to be easily missed, even taking into account the overwhelming vertical visual orientation of the drawing, which parallels the emphatically hierarchical imagery that Raphael deploys in books 5 and 6 of Paradise Lost. Like Milton's fictionalized Michael, the illustration's interpreters are hermeneutically positioned between two competing representations of authority, the one embodied in the Word, the other in the sword: in the first, agency is vested solely in the godhead, while in the second it is invested in a material weapon. If readers fail to recognize that the latter is a mere figura for the former, they may inadvertently mistake the type for the antitype, as Milton's Michael does.

The three figures occupying the right-side column in the illustration reiterate the ambiguity inherent in the millenarians' bivalent hermeneutic. Although their eyes are turned upward, presumably toward heaven, they also are turned toward—and perspectivally positioned beneath—the figure of Cromwell/Michael, so that the figures appear to be bowing reverentially before him. Their apparent worship of Cromwell/Michael presumably should be interpreted as merely emblematic, that is, as directed not to the type but above him to the antitype, just as Satan's bow before Abdiel in the epic prefigures the fiend's submission to Christ alone. Nevertheless, because the figure of Cromwell so dominates the scene, the engraving tempts its beholders to see Cromwell not as one "who is as God, or who is lyke unto God,"⁵⁷ but as the very referent of the "I am God" that appears on his sword's banner. As such, it stages, but fails to contain, the very challenge that Michael in the sacred texts was seen to pose to Christ's prerogatives and uniquely exalted status.

In his depiction of Michael in Paradise Lost, Milton acknowledges and responds to the interpretive difficulties engendered by the millenarian reliance upon typological resemblances or correspondences. Arguably, had the poet followed the lead of his orthodox Protestant contemporaries and elided Michael's role in the celestial war altogether, he could have erased the troublesome failures of Cromwell by redirecting the reader's attention solely to a heavenly world where wars are fought only allegorically by the perfect figure of Christ. But to do so would be to deny the very millenarian narrative that undergirded the dissenters' earthly revolution. However disillusioned Milton may have been with Cromwell's failures, he never wrote against the Protector in the ways he had written against Charles I. As David Loewenstein notes, "Milton himself never represented the ambiguities of Cromwell's character and religious politics in satanic and opportunistic terms: despite his godly republican ideals and his likely disappointment with the Protectorate, there is not a shred of evidence that Milton came to envision Cromwell himself as a 'false dissembler,'" a term applied to Satan in Paradise Lost.⁵⁸ Since Cromwell, in the eyes of the poet and his revolutionary contemporaries, stood as the champion of truth and liberty, he could not be renounced without admitting that the claims supporting the millenarians' violent crusade all had been lies. Milton would permit no such apostasy.

Instead, he reread his source text, Revelation 12:7-9. He determined that the failures of the revolution demonstrated that the English radicals had mistakenly presumed too close an identity between type and antitype, between the archangel's war against Satan and the Son's. During the millenarian fever of the 1640s and 1650s, the dissenters' military leaders had looked like the angel who defeats Satan in Revelation 12, who in turn looks like the Christ of Revelation 20. But these seventeenth century military leaders were not Michael any more than Michael is Christ. The English champions, and especially Cromwell, needed to be recognized as imperfect. Rather than denying Michael's agency as so many of his more traditional contemporaries did, the poet in Paradise Lost and De doctrina Christiana clarifies the nature of the archangel's role as a type of Christ and establishes the limits of his efficacy. Against an artistic and hagiographic tradition that exalts Michael's exemplary heroism, Milton draws a clear boundary between him and Christ. Rather than focusing on the apparent similarities between the two figures, he emphasizes their differences. As he does so, Milton illuminates the standing of Oliver Cromwell as a historical, seventeenth century manifestation of Michael.

The political and religious failures of the English revolution, along with the moral failures of Cromwell, offered a humbling lesson to the dissenters. Milton reminds his disillusioned readers, to borrow from The Souldiers Pocket Bible, that "all of us upon such occasions" of defeat in battle must "search whether we have not put two [sic] little confidence in the Arme of the Lord, and too much in the arme of flesh."⁵⁹ To commit this error is to confuse, and indeed conflate, one reality with another. This does not mean that Michael's battle, or the parliamentarian rebels', signified nothing or served no purpose beyond humiliating the war's otherwise righteous participants. As the Son explains to his angelic "saints" in Paradise Lost, their offerings of "faithful . . . warfare" and "fearless[ness] in his righteous cause" are "accepted" by God as signs of their loyalty and fidelity to truth (6.803-04). The workings of the "arme of the flesh," in both Milton's celestial and sublunary civil wars, remain "type[s] of Christ's second coming," announcing "the calling of the entire nation not only of the Jews but also of the Israelites" (YP 6:616-17). But the "doom" of Satan's forces rightly belongs to Christ alone (6.817). Christ and only Christ will exact due "vengeance" (6.808) when he fulfills the typological promise in the celestial angels' and earthly saints' struggles. Like Michael, Cromwell and his followers are revealed to be imperfect, as all angels and humans are. But these imperfections do not negate the symbolic value of the respective champions' victories. They merely need to be interpreted properly. Time, rather than the trappings of visible success, Milton urges, ultimately will prove the justness of their cause.