magnifying the works of god Pre- and Postlapsarian Knowledge and Language in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Katherine Lassetter

In his article “Language and Knowledge in Paradise Lost,” John Leonard argues

that “in a world where names correspond to natures, language is knowledge” (141), and that Adam’s perfect naming of the animals and landscape informed by perfect apprehension of the essences of those things reflects “the completeness of his understanding” (131). But while Leonard proposes the corruption of language brought about by the Fall as a corruption of innocence and a departure from the “bold humility” (131) with which Adam glorifies God, the text of Paradise Lost recognizes some deficiency in Adam’s understanding, an absence of what Milton’s cosmology calls virtue: something that cannot be had except by being tried, by sifting through all contraries—good and evil—and choosing the good. Virtue encompasses the idea that working through good and evil is what really endows man with the capacity to “magnify” the works of God and glorify him. This virtue is best attained by 92 criterion

entering into the experience of postlapsarian language and in that space testing the contraries of good and evil.

Leonard emphasizes the effortlessness with which Adam begins to speak, explaining that he “has no need to acquire language laboriously” because his “language is natural, not conventional” (“Language” 130). As Christopher Eagle explains in “‘Thou Serpent That Name Best’: On Adamic Language and Obscurity in Paradise Lost,” unlike Adam’s “perfect language . . . in which word corresponds to thing adequately and with clarity” (183), a conventional, postlapsarian language system relies on representational forms to adumbrate one’s ideas about a thing. However, though in a postlapsarian language system true essences are veiled, one can representationally, through description of things absent, gain a priori knowledge of something, even though its pith is hidden. In Eden, however, Adam’s language is based on his sense experience—that is, he can only apprehend the natures of what is immediately present to him (and that which is immediately present to him is only that over which he is given dominion).

Milton, writing in a postlapsarian world, can determine Eden—a place and an experience totally absent to him sensually—by metaphor, sustaining the “distinction between prelapsarian and postlapsarian nomenclature” (Leonard, “Language” 135) by using negative similes to describe Eden. Milton navigates his experiential absence from Eden using mythical associations, such as “the fair field / Of Enna” (4.268–9) and “that sweet grove / Of Daphne by Orontes” (4.272–3), ascertaining knowledge of Eden by describing what Eden is “like”—that is, comparing something he has never experienced to something he has experienced (or at least, experienced indirectly, through another web of language which is eventually tied to sense experience; the classics describe places he has never been by describing them in terms of things he has experienced sensually). In other words, postlapsarian language, with its “splintered, fragmentary, fallen” (135) nature is capable of describing absent things in a way the Adamic language is not.

Adam is at a loss, for example, to name the “fellowship” he seeks, “fit to participate / All rational delight” (8.389–91). He can easily name all the things Woman (his “fellowship”) is not: “the brute / Cannot be human consort . . . much less can bird with beast, or fish with fowl . . . nor with the ox the ape; / Worse then can man with beast, and least of all” (8.391–92, 395–97)—all things immediately present to him. But putting a name to the thing he desires, and thus lacks, proves impossible.93 winter 2012

Adam finds a similar challenge in apprehending the nature and actions of God, since He too is absent from the Garden and from Adam’s immediate sense experience. Speaking to Raphael, Adam requests to learn more about Creation. Leonard takes Adam’s questions as less a line of inquiry than a “celebration of the magnificence of God’s works” (“Language” 138). But Adam’s questions indicate some gap in his knowledge. He recognizes that unlike all the earthly things he has been given dominion over, God’s essence and works are veiled to him. So he asks, “How first began this heaven?”, “What cause / Moved the creator in his holy rest?”, and “The work begun, how soon / Absolved?” (7.86, 90–1, 93–94). He explains that his motive in asking is “the more / To magnify his works, the more we know” (7.96–7). The lines allude to the Book of Job, as Leonard identifies, in which Elihu exhorts Job to “remember that thou magnify his work, which men behold. Every man may see it; man may behold it afar off. Behold, God is great, and we know him not” (KJV Job 36:24–6). Anticipating this injunction, Adam’s line of questioning unwittingly hints at what is required in order to glorify God: not merely “seeing” God’s works in His communication with man, but “knowing” them; not just being able to identify their existence concretely, but “reading” them as meta-phors and symbols. To answer his own questions and fill the gaps in his understanding, Adam (though he doesn’t yet realize it) must have a language system that relies not only on empirical evidence, but also on linguistic experience.

Adam interprets this absence of sense data regarding these questions as incompleteness—hence his final question, “The work begun, how soon / Absolved?” (7.93–94). If “absolved” is taken in the sense of completion, rather than as remission of sins (as sin has not yet been introduced into the world), then this question seems to express that Adam—more rational and intelligent than all the beasts (as Satan observes: “growth, sense, reason, all summ’d up in Man” [9.113])—has noticed in himself some limit to his sense experience, some absence in his understanding of the nature of things. And if he is limited—if his language and mode of apprehension is deficient in some way—then he, as the crowning glory of God’s creations and to whom the gift of reason was given, must not be finished. Since Adam doesn’t have the kind of experience (a sort as yet undetermined by the text) to, as Milton says in “An Apology for Smectymnuus,” “himself to be a true Poem, that is, a composition, and pattern of the best and honorablest things,” he cannot presume “to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities” (62). That is, until “he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praise-worthy” (62, 94 criterion

emphasis added), something which he evidently doesn’t yet have, he cannot fully glorify God. When he tempts Eve with the fruit, Satan promises (insofar as he is trustworthy) and delineates

postlapsarian conditions. Satan explains of the fruit’s power that “in the day / Ye eat thereof your eyes, that seem so clear / Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then / Opened and cleared and ye shall be as gods / Knowing both good and evil as they know” (9.705–09). The effects of what Satan promises are twofold: first, that Adam and Eve’s “eyes that seem so clear”—their ability to immediately apprehend what is present—will grow dim, and second, that a new way of interpreting the world will be opened to them, a way through which they will know good and evil. In other words, the process of their acquisition of knowledge will change from “sudden apprehension” to one which relies on the ability to recognize contraries—good and evil, absence and presence.

The kind of experience that Satan proposes is the kind for which Milton argues in “Areopagitica,” wherein literary experience is likened to life, and language itself is an experience and not necessarily directly related to the essence of its referents. In this form of experience not wholly reliant on the senses, both good and evil can be safely sorted by contemplation—tried and tested by reason, and either accepted and integrated into one’s actions or dismissed. For, as Milton explains, “When God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing” (220), and to choose good over evil when both alternatives are fully known is true virtue, for virtue is had only by “he that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better; he is the true wayfaring Christian” (213).

One condition of postlapsarian language is the disjointedness between a signifier and its signified. This Derridean language system is no longer a “nomenclature of essences” reflecting “natural correctness” and flourishing naturally from the essence of a thing (Eagle 184, 185). Instead, postlapsarian language communicates via representations, and for the first time since Satan entered the Garden, Adam and Eve are subject to a language capable of misrepresentation, of a multiplicity of meanings, and of duplicity in meaning. Rather than representing reality, postlapsarian language functions on a principle of nonidentity and can represent in language what is not present in the natural world. It is an insular form of experience, and the kind of experience Adam must enter into in order to glorify God.95 winter 2012

As an experience separate from but related to the natural world (insular but not wholly isolated), postlapsarian language offers a unique sort of testing ground through which to gain the virtue Adam requires to glorify God. This is a testing ground for which Milton argues in “Areopagitica” in order to “know . . . good and evil, that is to say [to know] good by evil” (213) and is the process by which one obtains virtue—not a “fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary” (213). Rather, Milton’s cosmology demands a virtue purified by “trial, and trial is by what is contrary” (213). This virtue is not “a youngling in the contemplation of evil,” but is instead attained by using postlapsarian language in an intellectual realm, by trying the “contraries” of good and evil through reason.

These contraries are best experienced and worked through by Adam and Eve in postlapsarian wordplay: puns, metaphors, and symbols—anything that uses a tangible or concrete signifier to represent something absent via association, comparison, or resemblance. In his “Self-Contradicting Puns in Paradise Lost,” Leonard explains that “a bracing sense of oppositeness enlivens much of Milton’s wordplay” (393). Availing “himself of the energizing spark that exists within or between such words” (339), Milton embeds in Paradise Lost evidence of the power of absolution (that is, of Creation’s completion) through postlapsarian linguistic proving ground: he uses puns. This kind of wordplay depends on multiplicity of meaning, and in Paradise Lost, Leonard asserts, the puns are ironic because both meanings are “true, in some degree, in both senses” (397). Frequently the different, or even contrary, meanings of the pun allow for disparate interpretations of the lines in which the pun is found—sometimes one interpretation declaring innocence and the other decrying guilt, or one condemning and one redeeming.

One such pun is found in book 12, when Michael presents a panorama of the whole history of the world and admonishes Adam, “Doubt not but that sin / will reign among them as of thee begot / and therefore was the Law giv’n them to evince / their natural pravity” (12.285–88). Here, Michael puns the word “evince,” using it to mean “make clear,” and in this sense his statement seems to condemn mankind to sin. However, his postlapsarian pun as the testing ground for Adam’s intellectual work also requires that Adam take the word “evince” in its sense of “overcoming.” The interpretation rendered by this half of the pun is reinforced by his later allusion to Christ. It makes clear that mankind is not doomed to sin but will be able to triumph over the natural “impurity” (“Areopagitica” 213) it brings into the world, and people will do so, 96 criterion

as he says, by arriving at “Truth” via “shadowy types” (12.303). Yes, part of their ability to become virtuous will stem from their adroitness at working with and within metaphors and symbols—the “shadowy types” that exist only in the realm of language—to arrive at Truth.

Michael presents one such symbol to Adam: the rainbow that appears above Noah following the flood. Seeing this, Adam joyfully identifies Michael as “thou who future things canst represent / as present” (11.870–71), rejoicing in Michael’s capacity to linguistically make present what is experientially absent. Adam suggests his own literal interpretations of the symbol—perhaps, says he, they are appeased God’s eyebrows or perhaps “serve they as a flow’ry verge to bind / the fluid skirts of that same wat’ry cloud” (11.881–82). Michael praises his efforts, but describes the abstract interpretation of the rainbow—it is “a cov’nant never to destroy / the Earth again by flood” (11.892–93). This “reading” of the symbol offers Adam insight into what he could never have arrived at experientially: the intents of God and “what cause” moves Him.

In books 11 and 12, Michael gradually coaches Adam into understanding the new conditions of the Fall, specifically the disjunction between external and internal realities, between his sense data and its representations. Adam is “enforced to close his eyes” (11.419), and to “see” the histories presented by Michael only with his “mental sight” (11.418). As his senses are gradually stripped away, he is left only with dependence on the word—language—to glorify the Word—Christ, or God enfleshed. He is finally pressed to exclaim, “Now clear I understand / what oft my steadiest thoughts have searched in vain” (12.377)—that “divine self-presence . . . [manifests] itself in language and the Word” (Nyquist 187).

Later, he even tries his own pun to describe that what is best for him and all mankind will be “ever to observe / His [God’s] providence” (12.563–4). Playing on the word “observe” as it connotes “seeing,” Adam gently ribs his previously wholesale reliance on sense experience, and refers to his own anticipatory allusion to Job—that “every man may see [God’s work]” and thereby glorify Him. By simultaneously evoking the word’s connotation as enactment of certain beliefs, he registers the beginning of his ability to understand that the knowledge and virtue necessary to truly “see” God’s work and glorify Him is accessed only by engaging in linguistic experience. Glorifying God, he realizes, is an act of faith: Adam must “see” not through reliance on his physical eyes, but by engagement with language, by learning to work through repre-sentational and abstract forms. Although God is no longer physically present 97 winter 2012

to Adam, He will convert His absence into presence through these representational forms. In response, Michael praises Adam’s pun and the new “wisdom” it reflects: “This having learned thou

hast attained the sum / of wisdom” (12.575–6), even though, he adds, “all the stars / thou knew’st by name and all th’ethereal powers” (12.576–66) by his old, prelapsarian language system. And here, Michael reminds Adam of the effect of this new mode of apprehending knowledge: if he adds to his knowledge “deeds,” he will have virtue (11.581–3).

In “‘Thou Serpent That Name Best’: On Adamic Language and Obscurity in Paradise Lost,” Christopher Eagle notes that in the moments following the Fall, Adam and Eve’s “words now pretend, in the ‘proper and primary signification,’ of the word, meaning they stretch in front as a covering . . . the linguistic fig leaf, so to speak” (190). Just as God assured Adam earlier in the poem that he would abide by Adam’s choice of names (“Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleased [8.437–38]), the Son offers what Michael later reinforces: divine sanction of this new linguistic system of coverings. The Son provides them with coats of animal skin—a gesture of approval of and future assistance in their future linguistic efforts, a signal that their work within this new linguistic system will yield virtue by experience, and thereby knowledge of God’s virtue and the capacity to glorify Him and absolve (complete) themselves as God’s creations.

“Adam’s ability to call things by their proper names” was not an “expression of . . . perfect wisdom” (“Language” 133), as Leonard believes, and the surrender of “that pure and natural speech which Adam had spoken as a birthright on first waking into life” (133) was not the end of said “wisdom.” Though a stunning gift, their prelapsarian language was limited to sense experience and, left untried, Adam and Eve could not apprehend the nature and works of God as a divine and absent being, and therefore could not glorify Him. Satan’s proposal regarding knowledge of good and evil aligns with Milton’s conception of virtue: that understanding God’s virtue and magnifying His works requires a postlapsarian language and form of experience capable of representing absence through such wordplay as metaphors and puns; only in and by such a linguistic and experiential form is inspection of and proving the contraries of good and evil possible.98 criterion

Works Cited and Consulted Eagle, Christopher. “‘Thou Serpent That Name Best’: On Adamic Language and Obscurity in Paradise Lost.” Milton

Quarterly 41.3 (2007): 183–194. Web. 16 November 2011.

Leonard, John. “Language and Knowledge in Paradise Lost.” The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Ed. Dennis Danielson. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 130–143. Print.

———. “Self-Contradicting Puns in Paradise Lost.” A Companion to Milton. Ed. Thomas N. Corns. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001. 393–410. Print.

Milton, John. “An Apology for Smectymnuus.” John Milton: Selected Prose. Ed. C. A. Patrides. 1985 ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985. 61–65. Print.

———. “Areopagitica.” John Milton: Selected Prose. Ed. C. A. Patrides. 1985 ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985. 196–248. Print.

———. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. Norton Critical Ed. 2005 ed. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.

Nyquist, Mary. “The Father’s Word/Satan’s Wrath.” PMLA 100.2 (March 1985): 187–202. Web. 16 November 2011.

The King James Bible. Utah: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1979. Print.