Milton and Homer: "Written to Aftertimes"

Three “A Fabric Wonderful”: The Marvelous and Verisimilar in Milton’s Christian Epic

75 THREE “A Fabric Wonderful”  The Marvelous and Verisimilar in Milton’s Christian Epic In the previous chapter, I studied Milton’s relation to Homer by considering a single episode within Paradise Lost: the war in heaven. I now move to a dimension of this interpoetic relationship that manifests itself throughout the entirety of Milton’s epic. The discursive mechanism of canonization on which I focus is the phrase “Christian epic.” As Thomas Greene says, “from Petrarch’s youth to Milton’s age Europe awaited the poet and the poem which would demonstrate the equality of the modern age to antiquity.”1 And, he argues, this expectation expressed itself in the notion of a Christian epic, an ideal whose successful realization would secure an author immense prestige. The ideal of the Christian epic functioned as a pre-established canonical slot (something like “the great American novel,” perhaps), to be 76 Milton and Homer occupied by whoever might persuasively fulfill the expectations implicit within the ideal. But Christian epic is not so much a category enabling literary production as it is problem to be solved. For as Milton quite clearly saw, “the better fortitude of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” does not lend itself to narration within a genre that has hitherto deemed “Warrs...the onely Argument / Heroic” (PL 9.28–31). I argue that Milton solves this so-called “problem of Christian epic” by radically reconceiving the fundamental characteristics of the genre of epic. Rather than follow Virgil in defining the genre in terms of a set of martial episodes, Milton locates the essence of the epic in a particular aesthetic effect suggested to him by Homer’s formulaic diction, and captured by him in his own allusive style in which the phrases are simultaneously elevated and yet familiar. Even where no hermeneutic connection is established by the allusive phraseology, something as simple as the mere familiarity of verbal echoes can be aesthetically and canonically functional. The Problem of Christian Epic Like a host of other Renaissance writers, Milton confronted what has been termed (in the subtitle of Judith Kates’s book on him and Tasso) “the problem of Christian epic.”2 From the time the concept first appeared in Italian literary criticism (in Lorenzo Gambara’s 1576 Tractatio de perfectae poeseos ratione), an incompatibility has been seen in the terms Christian and epic.3 The problem, as it is usually formulated, stems from the difference between the value system to which Christians adhere and the one celebrated in pagan epic; a ubiquitous word in criticism that takes up the topic of Christian epic is “revaluation.” The Renaissance writer wanted to depict characters and events admirable from a Christian point of view—“the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” (PL 9.31–32)—but the genre in which he wanted to compose, the exalted genre of epic, was characterized “A Fabric Wonderful” 77 by a conventional set of episodes pertaining to “Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument / Heroic deem’d” (PL 9.28–29), episodes for the most part incompatible with a Christian theme. In Thomas Greene’s formulation of the problem of Christian epic, “really to count, the new work would have to look like the Aeneid,” by which he means that the events narrated in a would-be Christian epic would have to be the ones with which readers of classical epic are familiar.4 Yet little of what is important to Christianity looks like the events narrated in the Aeneid. Nevertheless, critics argue, Milton did manage to “solve” the problem of Christian epic, and his doing so accounts in some measure for the canonical status of his poem. The standard argument runs as follows. Milton associates traditional epic material with characters condemned in his poems: with Satan and his cohorts, or with such figures as Sin and Death. The inclusion of such material makes the poem epic; its condemnation makes the poem Christian. John Steadman is the primary exponent of this view. According to Steadman, by “invest[ing] Satan with traditional heroic attributes,” Milton “exposes the heroic pretences of these traditional heroes [Achilles and Odysseus] as essentially diabolical ....Milton’s ‘heroic’ archfiend turns out to be an ingenious literary device for reassessing the heroic tradition. The paradox of a ‘godlike’ devil enables him to arraign epic and history alike for mistaking brutishness for heroic virtue, and thus celebrating the counterfeit idol of heroism...