Milton's Rival Hermeneutics: “Reason is But Choosing”

6. Sites of Contention in Paradise Lost: Scenes of Instruction, Lessons in Interpretation

101 Sites of Contention in Paradise Lost Scenes of Instruction, Lessons in Interpretation Joseph Wittreich Making the future different from the past is Milton’s creative territory. That is the reason Milton is firmly aligned with the scientific revolution beginning in the seventeenth century and Shakespeare is indifferent to it. —Gordon Teskey Milton’s poems are a provocation to repeated readings, with their deepening complexity becoming strikingly evident, as William Hayley attests, in “how ingeniously the great poet adopted the most opposite interpretations of Scripture.”1 Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are rife with rival hermeneutics, sometimes encoded, typically colliding. At the center of Paradise Lost, for example, secrets are hidden, meanings encrypted, within books 5 and 6 and their story of the celestial battle, while in books 7 and 8 (originally one book) alternative accounts of the Creation story jostle: 6D 102 Joseph Wittreich Genesis 1 with 2 and both with Genesis 5 and these, in their turn, with Pauline interpretations of these much earlier narratives . Folded between these accounts are competing cosmologies , Ptolemaic and Copernican, prompting questions of whether Milton remains indifferent toward them or insinuates a preference for one over the other. In Milton’s last poems generally, but especially in Paradise Lost, rival hermeneutics clash like armies in the night even as they coalesce within what Mary Ann Radzinowicz describes as “progressive revelation,” often in carefully marked “stages of enlightenment.”2 What we observe in both Milton’s epics, but especially in Paradise Lost, are scenes of instruction in which impaired vision is improved and expanded and in which sight is refined into insight. As Radzinowicz has shown so compellingly, competing interpretations are aspects of the intellectual debate at the core of Milton’s epics, of their multivocality, multiperspectivism, and counterpointing —and evidence, too, of spiritual dueling within situations where interpretations, once compounded, are arrayed, then interpreted and reinterpreted, but not coercively and not (as Stephen Fallon would have it) as “dueling certainties” to which Milton is unflaggingly committed.3 Interpretive options often force interpretive choices, which, paradoxically, as they bring us closer to the truth, lead us into ever deepening quagmires of uncertainty by teasing us into thinking with Edward Ericson that in Paradise Lost we become witnesses to “Milton’s recognition of the equal status of...alternative exegetical strategies,” or into believing, as does Harry Blamires, that in Paradise Lost “Raphael seems to treat the rival Ptolemaic and Copernican theories equivalently .”4 Such convenient truths become inconveniences in Milton’s last poems, where uncertainty is an aspect of both their experimental exegesis and experimentalist poetics, with Milton, as Joanna Picciotto goes on to explain, engaging himself and his readers in ways that “make uncertainty productive, and therefore redemptive.”5 Sites of Contention in Paradise Lost 103 In Paradise Lost, Milton’s representations of Adam and Eve, when read whole rather than taken piecemeal, point toward interpretations the opposite of those usually presumed—by readers of both Genesis and Milton’s poem. The effect of Milton’s authorial maneuverings is to problematize both Scripture and its interpretive traditions, as well as Milton’s poem. What we can say—now only provisionally—is that Milton means to remind us that his entire poem is the product of fallen, though not necessarily false consciousness; that what always seems to falsify consciousness, especially fallen consciousness, is its propensity for taking the part for the whole, an improved interpretation (Copernicus’s over Ptolemy’s, let us say) for the final truth. Indeed, this centering of cosmological theory and dispute in Paradise Lost is one of many signals that this poem is partly about what it relates: competing interpretations, the status that should be accorded each of them, their respective truth-claims and truth-values. Paradise Lost is a poem in which a sun-centered cosmology upholds a Christocentric (son-centered) theology—a poem that out of such interdependency creates what one theologian will call a “science of salvation” wherein Jesus, as both “the true center of the world and...the sun of our souls,” subtends a heliocentric astronomy and a Christocentric religion.6 Milton’s exceptional education included, as Toni Morrison says of William Dunbar, “the latest thought on theology and science” with a poem like Paradise Lost representing Milton’s effort, again like Dunbar’s, to make theology and science “mutually accountable, to make one support the other.”7 Milton’s poem avows...