Milton and Interpretation

When Eve realizes that the tree to which Satan has brought her is the tree of forbidden knowledge, she immediately says, well, too bad if its effects are as wondrous as you claim they are, but I’m going to have to pass, for “of this Tree we may not taste nor touch; / God so commanded, and left that Command / Sole Daughter of his voice.”¹ Satan begins his response with a marvelously subversive word—“Indeed?” (PL 9.656). That is, you don’t say, fancy that; and the implication is that this is a matter that should be explored. What he is suggesting with this “Indeed” seems perfectly innocuous: let’s talk about it. This is the moment, I think, when Eve takes the first step that leads, although not inevitably, to the eating of the apple, and it is also the moment, not coincidentally, when Satan invents interpretation.

Interpretation is the effort to figure out what something means or what is meant by something (these two accounts of interpretation are quite different), and the effort is necessary because meaning is not immediately apprehensible; it resides elsewhere, and the task—a discursive one—is to wind your way to that elsewhere where, presumably, meaning in its fullness is waiting for you. I believe that this account of meaning—always incomplete and in need of a supplement—is one that Milton rejects, and because he rejects it, he rejects interpretation, at least if interpretation is conceived as an activity by which meaning is produced in time.

But before I lay all my cards on the table I want to backtrack a bit, and recall some observations made years ago by Thomas Sloane in his excellent book, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric. In Sloane’s analysis the end doesn’t come with Donne, who, Sloane says, is in many ways an exemplar of humanistic rhetoric, but with Milton. Sloane attempts to draw the contrast: “whereas for Donne discursive form … is suppositional, protean, and flexible, for Milton discursive form is in service of yet higher forms of knowledge which are themselves firm, conceptual, and non-verbal.” “For Donne,” Sloane observes, “man lives in and with uncertainty,” and therefore his efforts to know and to fix meaning are tentative and exploratory, a matter of turning a question first this way and then that. Hence the association of this form of knowing with Janus; for “it is essentially turned at once in opposing ways, signifying debate, division, contest and trial.” The classical models for this elongated and elaborate process are the controversia and suasoria, exercises in the skill of advocacy. As a mode of thought, Sloane explains, “controversia belongs within inventio … the means whereby arguments are discovered.”² For Milton, in contrast, true arguments or true propositions are not discovered; they are presupposed, known in advance, and hence neither debate nor interpretation is necessary to their identification; they are what they are independently of whether what they are has been recognized.

Of course, there may be situations in which these preknown truths are presented to an audience in the hope that those hitherto ignorant of them or blind to them may be enlightened. (Milton hesitates between believing that such enlightenment is possible—that virtue may indeed be “inbred” by persuasion and education—and suspecting that those who listen to him may be incapable of learning a lesson not already written in the fleshly tables of their hearts.) In such a situation, the arts of debate, rhetoric, and interpretation may be put into play, but they will then be handmaidens to a vision they did not generate. For Milton, there may be rhetorical performance, but, Sloane insists, “there could be no rhetorical thinking,” no thinking that achieves its resolution in a discursive process; rhetoric is entirely cosmetic even when it is applied for good purposes. “Truth itself,” and I quote Sloane again, “has been arrived at by other means.”³

In this vision, knowledge and meaning are basically nondiscursive; they will not be transmitted by a description or emerge at the end of a sequence of reasoning; they will be transmitted...