“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669Earlier, in the exchange on the battlefield between Abdiel and Satan, Abdiel’s lan-
guage identifies his lone resistance to and departure from Satan’s multitudes with
the stance of sectarians and dissenters from the established church who will at last,
like Abdiel now, be assimilated into God’s vast legions:
there be who Faith
Prefer, and Pietie to God, though then
To thee not visible, when I alone
Seemd in thy World erroneous to dissent
From all: my Sect thou seest, now learn too late
How few somtimes may know, when thousands err. (6.143–8)Certain elements of Milton’s theology, set forth in De Doctrina Christiana at about
the time he was writing his epic, worked greatly to his literary advantage in enhanc-
ing the poem’s drama. Tasso and most other Christian epic poets and theorists thought
it would be impossible and probably sacrilegious to undertake a literary representa-
tion of the Christian God, but Milton’s principles allow the presentation of God as an
epic character – though not as a unified, fully realized one or (by human standards)
always an attractive one. Since Milton believes that all ideas or images of the incom-
prehensible God are necessarily metaphoric, but that they should correspond to the
way God has presented himself in the Bible,^131 the God of Paradise Lost is sometimes
anthropomorphic. He displays a range of emotions (fear, wrath, scorn, dismay, love)
as he comments on Satan, on humankind’s fall, and on the actions of the Son. He
engages in dialogue with his Son, with the angels, and with man and woman. In
some of his aspects he invites comparison with Jehovah in various Old Testament
theophanies, and also with Zeus in Homer and Hesiod and Jove in Ovid. But in
Milton’s understanding these are all partial reflections: God cannot be seen whole.
Also, Milton’s Arianism allows him to portray the Son as a genuinely dramatic
and heroic character, whose choices are made and whose actions are taken freely, in
a state of imperfect knowledge. Since Milton holds that the Son is not omnipotent
or omniscient or eternal, or immutable, but was generated at some point in time by
an act of God’s will, and that he enjoys whatever Godlike powers he has by God’s
gift,^132 he can show the Son in Book III engaging in a genuine dialogue with the
Father. God’s stern words seem to proclaim the Fall as an irreversible event until
the Son’s questioning appeal elicits a partial statement of God’s plan for redemptive
grace. Then God seems to pose an insoluble dilemma – “Dye hee or Justice must”
(3.210) – after which he calls throughout heaven for a volunteer to substitute for
man. The Son then understands and freely takes on his sacrificial role, and God
commends him for the love that shows him to be “By Merit more then Birthright
Son of God” (3.309). During the War in Heaven the Son accepts the charge from
God to conquer the rebel angels, and God infuses into him some part of his own
omnipotence: “Into thee such Vertue and Grace / Immense I have transfus’d... /