- Milton’s “Genial Angel”: The Identity and Salvific Office of the Son in Adam’s Narrative of Creation and Recreation
The works of Milton cannot be comprehended or enjoyed, unless the mind of the reader co-operate with that of the writer. He does not paint a finished picture, or play for a mere passive listener. He sketches and leaves others to fill up the outline. He strikes the key-note, and expects his hearers to make out the melody.
Thomas Babington Macaulay1
And thou glad Genius, in whose gentle hand, The bridale bowre and geniall bed remaine Without blemish or staine
Edmund Spenser, “Epithalamion” (398–400)2
John Leonard has remarked upon the importance of assigning names while we are in the process of reading and interpreting Paradise Lost:
In giving names we place ourselves in relation to the poem, defining for ourselves a particular perspective upon it. “Truth came once into the world . . . and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on”: no reading of a literary text can ever constitute an adequate description of anything we might call its “Truth”, [End Page 366] but there are such things as “true names” in Paradise Lost, and an awareness of these can aid our recomposition of the unity and coherence which Hume, Richardson, and Newton perceived and which we are only beginning to rediscover.3
One of the most intriguing instances of namelessness in Milton’s epic is the anonymous “shape Divine” of Adam’s creation narrative in book 8.4 This divine figure creates and converses with Adam, sculpts Eve from Adam’s rib, and, finally, weds our first parents before they happily retire to their bridal bower to consummate their marriage. Miltonists have offered various nominations for the “shape Divine.” Some critics suggest the presence of God the Father, while others propose that the divine figure is the Son.5 Still others recommend various compromise solutions so that God the Father is pictured working through his Son; or that the divine shape betokens a Trinitarian totality; or that, as Leland Ryken argues, Milton, being reluctant to commit himself categorically to a divine person, employs a deliberate “blurring technique” of the Father and the Son that relies upon a calculated use of paradox and ambiguity.6 I would argue that an attentive reading of Adam’s creation narrative, considered in its context within the epic as a whole, encourages us to nominate the Son as the “shape Divine.” In the first section of the article I present a case for the identity of the Son, drawing upon the theology set forth in the treatise De Doctrina Christiana to support [End Page 367] my discussion. While I realize that many critics will be perfectly willing to accept my identification of the Son, a detailed and substantiated portrait of this sort has not yet been made in studies of the poem and is, I believe, justified. A great deal is at stake in correctly identifying the Son as the divine shape of book 8, not least because the Son’s presence informs with soteriological significance the nuanced texture of Milton’s poetic language and the action of Adam’s narrative. Consequently, in the article’s remaining two sections I provide a reading of book 8 that acknowledges a parallel narrative of redemption and recreation subtending Adam’s creation account.
Leonard observes that Christ, “of all unnamed names, is the central hidden name in the poem,” and his momentous claim helps to alert us to the Son’s major role within Milton’s diffuse epic.7 Milton’s Son predominates within God’s providential plan for Creation—as the agent of human restoration in his offer to redeem humankind at the heavenly council of book 3; as God’s Messiah, his champion over the rebel angels, and the restorer of the wasted heavens in Raphael’s narrative; and as the redeemer and consummator of human history at the culmination of Michael’s narrative vision. Paradise Lost’s exordium commences with a robust typological proclamation, a typology that has its origins in Pauline theology (see, for example, Rom. 5:15 and 1 Cor. 15:21–22), which...