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Milton's Heaven

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John R. Knott Jr.
John R. Knott Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan Ann Arbor
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Abstract

As the only stable element of Milton's universe in Paradise Lost and the theological if not the dramatic center of the poem, heaven deserves more attention than it usually receives. Although Milton drew heavily upon the Biblical New Jerusalem, his heaven is unusual in being far more pastoral than the heaven of Revelation. Insofar as it resembles the New Jerusalem, heaven suggests the regality and power of God. The victory of the Son in his jeweled chariot, the best illustration of omnipotence in the poem, reflects the spirit of Protestant commentators on the final victory of Christ in Revelation. In its pastoral aspect heaven embodies the bliss and repose of the angels and foreshadows the sabbatical rest of the saints. The tradition of a pastoral heaven, entwined with the tradition of the earthly paradise, was transmitted primarily by medieval hymns and vision literature and by the Renaissance pastoral elegy. Milton's heavenly paradise offers the consolation of a bliss which resembles that of Eden and also a higher, festive joy arising from the continual praise of God. Heaven may be less engaging than Eden, but it is the image of the true city and the true paradise toward which the human drama moves.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , May 1970 , pp. 487 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

Note 1 in page 487 A Reading of Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1965), p. 55.

Note 2 in page 487 Quotations of Milton's poetry are from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York, 1931–42).

Note 3 in page 487 I think that one can understand Eden to be the “shadow” of heaven in both a Platonic and a typological sense without any serious difficulty.

Note 4 in page 487 See C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford, 1966), pp. 282–283, for a brief discussion of the attitudes of Christian apologists toward the problem of picturing heaven. Patrides notes that one method was “to resort to the theologia negativa, to state what will not be found in Heaven.”

Note 5 in page 487 Milton often referred to heaven as Olympus in his early poems and imagined himself looking in on a Homeric heaven in At a Vacation Exercise.

Note 6 in page 487 DeParlu Virginis, ed. Antonio Altamura (Naples, 1948), 1.444–452.

Note 7 in page 487 The Descent from Heaven (New Haven, Conn., 1963), p. 157.

Note 8 in page 488 The Christiad, trans. J. Cranwell (Cambridge, Eng., 1768), p. 301.

Note 9 in page 488 77 Mondo Create, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi (Florence, 1951), vii.397–400, 423.

Note 10 in page 488 Gerusalemme Conquistata, xx, passim.

Note 11 in page 488 F.Q. i.x.lv.

Note 12 in page 488 Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, ed. F. S. Boas (Cambridge, Eng., 1908), i, 82.

Note 13 in page 488 Complete Poems of Dr. Joseph Beaumont, ed. A. B. Grosart (Edinburgh, 1880), i, 42–44.

Note 14 in page 488 Complete Poems, ii, 223–226.

Note 15 in page 488 Sermons, ed. Evelyn Simpson (Berkeley, Calif., 1953–62), viii, 82.

Note 16 in page 488 ii Peter iii.13.

Note 17 in page 488 Omitting all but one of the traditional twelve gates and greatly reducing the kinds of jewels.

Note 18 in page 488 See Austin Farrar, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (Oxford, 1964), pp. 214–223, on the correspondences between the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalems.

Note 19 in page 489 Malcolm Ross has argued that Milton's heaven is not adequately distinguished from earthly monarchies; he prefers the simple majesty of Adam. See Milton's Royalism (Ithaca, ?. Y., 1943), pp. 100–112. J. B. Broadbent has expressed his unhappiness with the idea of God as king and Milton's use of it. See Some Graver Subject (New York, 1960), pp. 225–228.

Note 20 in page 489 The Ruin of Rome (Glasgow, 1798; originally publ. in 1603), p. 80.

Note 21 in page 490 Revelation vi.16.

Note 22 in page 490 The Muse's Method (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 135. John M. Steadman has said that the war in heaven is “the archetype of the Church's combats with her spiritual and temporal enemies on earth; Messiah's office as head and saviour of the angelic forces is the celestial paradigm of his role in human history, ‘captain of our salvation’.” See Milton and the Renaissance Hero (Oxford, 1967), p. 94.

Note 23 in page 490 Revelation xix.11–15: “Then I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood : and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.” This warrior “Faithful and True” is identified as Christ by modern commentators on Revelation (see Farrar, e.g., and Hans Lilje, The Last Book of the Bible, trans. Olive Wyon, Philadelphia, 1957) and was widely understood as Christ in Renaissance commentaries. See Dent's The Ruin of Rome; Thomas Brightman's A Revelation of the Revelation (Amsterdam, 1615); John Napier's A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (London, 1611); William Cowper's A Commentary Upon the Revelation, in Works (London, 1623); and the influential work of David Pareus, admired by Milton, A Commentary upon the Divine Revelation, trans. Elias Arnold (Amsterdam, 1644). Pareus comments (p. 489): “The Majesticall description of the Captaine figureth the glorious comming of Christ from heaven, to judge Antichrist and the ungodly.”

Note 24 in page 490 See Dent, Cowper, Pareus. Pareus' commentary on Christ's arrows provides an interesting example of how contrasting roles were reconciled. Literally, they are arrows piercing the enemies of God; allegorically, they represent the gospel piercing the souls of the godly.

Note 25 in page 490 Broadbent points out that Milton misread the psalm, but his concern is with the irony that he sees in this misconception. See Some Graver Subject, p. 228.

Note 26 in page 490 See Christian Doctrine, Works, xv, 287–303.

Note 27 in page 490 The phrase is a heading in Christian Doctrine. See Works, xvi, 355.

Note 28 in page 490 ii Thessalonians, i.7, ii.8.

Note 29 in page 491 The power of celestial food to renew life is more dramatically shown in Paradise Regained.

Then in a Howry valley [the angels] set him down

On a green bank, and set before him spred

A tabic of Celestial Food, Divine,

Ambrosial, Fruits fetcht from the tree of life,

And from the fount of life Ambrosial drink.

(iv.586-.S91)

Note 30 in page 491 Compare the ecstasy of the senses that Fletcher pictures:

Here the glad soules the face of beauty kisse,

Powr'd out in pleasure, on their beds of blisse . . .

Their braine sweet incense with fine breath accloyes.

Poetical Works, i, 83

Note 31 in page 491 The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York, 1950), p. 864.

Note 32 in page 491 Paradise xxviii.

Note 33 in page 491 See Calvin, Institutes, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia, 1936), ii, 253: “Let us be content within these limits which God prescribes to us—that the souls of pious men, after finishing their laborious warfare, depart into a state of blessed rest, where the)' wait with joy and pleasure for the fruition of the promised glory.”

Note 34 in page 492 Revelation xiv.13.

Note 35 in page 492 Christian Doctrine, Works, xvii, 175.

Note 36 in page 492 The Complete Works of Joshua Sylvester, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1880), i, 104. The Faerie Queene ends with the contemplation of the “steadfast rest of all things, firmly stayed / Upon the pillars of eternity”:

For all that moveth doth in change delight;

But thenceforth all shall rest eternally

With him that is the God of Sabaoth hight.

(F.Q. vii.viii.ii)

Note 37 in page 492 See The Earthly Paradise in the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, 1966), p. 66.

Note 38 in page 492 The Poems of Prudentius, trans. Sister M. Clement Eagen (Washington, 1962), i, 36 (Cathemerinon, Hymn 5, 11. 113–124). Franz Cumont traces the evolution of pagan thought on the afterlife by which the abode of the blessed was transferred from the underworld to heaven. See After Life in Roman Paganism (New Haven, 1922), Ch. viii.

Note 39 in page 492 In The Other World (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). A. B. Van Os, in Religious Visions (Amsterdam, 1932), p. 21, offers the following characterization of medieval visions of heaven: “Heaven is mostly represented as a meadow with fragrant flowers, where the elected are enjoying themselves with sports, dancing, singing, and looking upon God. As a rule they are dressed in white, adorned with gold ornaments and precious stones.”

Note 40 in page 492 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, trans. J. E. King (London and New York, 1930), ii, 261.

Note 41 in page 492 See The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed. F. J. E. Raby (Oxford, 1959), pp. 187, 222, 224. Stanley Stewart, commenting on the presence of garden elements in descriptions of heaven, cites a similar hymn of Augustine translated by Sylvester. See The Enclosed Garden (Madison, Wis., 1966), p. 212. Stewart notes that heaven frequently was made to resemble the Garden of Eden in the longer allegorical poems of the seventeenth century, e.g., Thomas Peyton's The Glasse of Time (620).

Note 42 in page 492 Peace is blossoming there, the pastures are green, the sap is living; there is no trouble, no tragedy, no weeping.

Note 43 in page 493 Other mountains, other plains, other woods and streams thou beholdest in heaven, and fresher flowers and other Fauns and Silvani in sweet places of summer's warmth, following the nymphs in happier loves.

Note 44 in page 493 Thou beholdest other forests, other shores, other higher rocks, other greener groves, other grassier meadows, and thou pasturest thy flocks with other fairer flowers that never die.

Translations by Harry Joshua Leon, in The Pastoral Elegy, ed. Thomas Perrin Harrison (Austin, Tex., 1939).

Note 45 in page 493 Spenser, imitating Marot, in the November eclogue from The Shepheardes Calender.

Note 46 in page 494 Sermons, vin, 52.

Note 47 in page 494 See The Saints Everlasting Rest (London, 1649), p. 28. See also Ulrich Simon, Heaven in the Christian Tradition (New York, 1958), pp. 233–236. Simon traces the concept of the sabbatical rest in the Bible and rabbinical commentary. From New Testament texts he understands the heavenly Sabbath as a “continual feast day”: “the participants are released from the burden of toil so as to be free for the worship of God” (p. 236). Compare Augustine's formula for describing the various aspects of life in heaven: “There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise” (The City of God, p. 867).

Note 48 in page 495 These phrases are also from Stevens' “Sunday Morning.'