The New Milton Criticism ed. by Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (review)

The New Milton Criticism, a collection of essays edited by Peter Herman and Elizabeth Sauer, opens with the assertion that this volume will "interrogate various paradigms of certainty" (1) that have dominated Milton studies. These essays (all but one are new) are the first explicit attempt to define a "new Milton criticism" in theory and practice; the volume draws together the disparate strands of scholarship that, often in homage to the long-neglected work of William Empson, have been among the most vibrant and challenging contributions to Milton studies for the last decade. Throughout the collection, Herman's influential identification of the "Miltonic or" serves as a touchstone for the new Milton criticism's primary method: the identification of uncertainty, alternatives, and disjunctions in Milton's monumental poetry.¹ This book will be of interest to any Milton scholar for its identification of new critical and scholarly possibilities; however, a key theme in this book is the identification and recovery of lost critical traditions. This volume provides a prospectus for a "new Milton criticism" but suggests that these new directions may be found through a more precise mapping of the field's histories.

The New Milton Criticism is divided into two sections: "Theodicies" and "Critical Receptions." The six essays in the first part contest "Milton's relationship to normative Christianities" (12) in the major poems. In one way or another, each of these essays challenges the contention, argued most forcefully in Dennis Danielson's Milton's Good God (1982), that Paradise Lost is an aesthetic success to the extent that its theodicy is successful or, in other words, to the extent that it solves the problem of evil, "excuses" God, and confirms the value of Christian faith. Richard Strier provides the most direct rejoinder to this influential argument in "Milton's fetters, or why Milton's Eden is better than Heaven," which is a revised version of an earlier essay.² Strier argues that the most "problematic and contradictory" (25) aspects of Paradise Lost stem from Milton's attempt to write theodicy, while the greatest success of the poem is in its representation of unfallen Eden. Here Milton wrote without "fetters" and by doing so escaped the "framework of choice, deliberation, and anxious duty" (37) that is always present in Heaven.

In one of the many examples of productive exchange between and among the essays in this volume, Thomas Festa's contribution, though found in the book's second section, reads as a response to Strier's redefinition of theodicy. Festa suggests that we transfer our attention from theodicy's traditional concern with evil to an alternative "problem of good." He identifies an "ironic theodicy" centered on the character of Eve and directed toward the exposure of the "immorality of rationalizing the suffering of others, including Christ, as a way to secure consolation for evil" (188). Festa's essay, like those in the volume's first half, contests the presumption, common in Milton studies, that choice and rationality are positive individual and social virtues. Instead, these essays seek to identify the possibilities for a non-rationalistic or a non-orthodox religious experience. John Rogers's "The Political Theology of Milton's Heaven" argues that the absolutism of Heaven should not be understood as an analogy—either positive or negative—for human political structure; rather, it provides a poetic form for Milton's heretical view that God's acts are arbitrary rather than necessary. Only this radical contingency allows God's creatures "unfettered freedom" (79). Michael Bryson's essay aligns the Son of Paradise Regained with what he calls a "Miltonic Gnosticism" (103). Though Milton could not have had direct knowledge of Gnostic texts, his distinction between custom and knowledge represents an independent discovery of the Gnostic distinction between pistis and gnosis, which, in Paradise Regained, informs the Son's attempt to "leave an external concept of God for an internal concept of God, a God found without for a...