The Question of “what Cause?”: Storytelling Angels and Versions of Causation in Paradise Lost

No, Virgil, no:Not even the first of the Romans can learnHis Roman history in the future tense,Not even to serve your political turn;Hindsight as foresight makes no sense.

—W. H. Auden, “Secondary Epic”

And why should Raphael be so tied up to the Letter in Genesis, who makes this Narrative thousands of Years before Genesis was writ?

—Richard Bentley, Paradise Lost

These epigraphs by W. H. Auden and Richard Bentley serve as reminders that Paradise Lost grapples with the problems of hindsight and foresight, particularly in relation to the poem’s angelic histories. Both Raphael’s “history” (which narrates Satan’s fall and the war in heaven in books 5–7) and Michael’s narrative (which reveals to Adam in books 11–12 the future of the human race after the Expulsion) encounter problems with temporality and causality analogous to those Auden located in Virgil’s Aeneid. In writing these angelic narratives—which are largely defined by the preexisting scriptural narratives that their stories claim to antedate—Milton confronts the possibility that they may, in fact, “make no sense.” Hence, the “mighty Scholiast,” Bentley, recognizes this problem some 200 years before Auden, but rather uncharacteristically accepts the fiction in the name of narrative consistency.¹ But should we, as readers of Paradise Lost, simply follow suit? Or should we ask instead about the degree to which these angelic narratives complicate the main epic narrative, and to what extent they are, in fact, only superficially consistent with it?

While the angelic histories belonging to Raphael and Michael are seemingly meant to clarify, and thus reinforce, the grand narrative of the poem, this essay explores how they actually cause problems for the epic narrative in subtle and fascinating ways. Although the overarching narrative of Paradise Lost is concerned with cause-and-effect pictures congenial to Scripture and biblical exegesis, the poem itself begins in medias res, moving dynamically up and down, backward and forward in time. The result is that what seems to be ordered and straight becomes twisted, turned, and contorted, transformed into a spiral of interconnected and unpredictable events. Narrative is no longer a rigid structure that imposes definitions of causality; rather, it provides a framework within which causality is explored by opposing models of narrative.²

This essay thus contends that behind an ostensibly clear and straightforwardly Aristotelian account of efficient causation in Milton’s angelic histories is another, disconfirming model. Insofar as this conflicting model gives rise to moments of temporal disorder, it might best be characterized as Augustinian in style though not necessarily in genesis.³ While Milton’s angels adhere, at least superficially, to Aristotelian causal logic and rationally attempt (ostensible) narrative coherence, causal possibilities are immediately generated in the intervening spatio-temporal field of narrative the moment God enters the picture. Overdetermination, or the occurrence of many different kinds of causes that operate simultaneously, proliferate, as do time-loops, which are prompted by the misinterpretation of the eternal within a temporal sequence.⁴ As narrative prolepsis and time-loops erupt, the narrative itself is placed under intermittent strain.

In examining how Raphael’s “history” and Michael’s “history of the future” move between an Aristotelian sequential, time-based model of causality and the alternative Augustinian model, this essay explores the problems of theologizing aetiological narratives that arise in Milton, just as they did in Virgil when he gave his “history in the future tense.”⁵ It suggests that in their relentless pursuit of causes Milton’s angelic histories eventually end up with no easy-to-understand cause, but with the greatest mystery of all: God. And with the entry of God into their respective histories, the angelic narratives encounter disruptions in the temporal continuum that fracture their otherwise clearly delineated (Aristotelian) causal ordering of events.⁶ The result is that as the content of narrative turns out to involve nonlinear, non-Aristotelian causal factors, the jagged edges and aporia of the angelic histories break up the narrative’s overall “chronologic homology.” Even though the material is sternly arranged...