Milton as Human Being

In ramping up my reading on Milton in preparation for teaching Paradise Lost starting this week, I have finally begun reading Dennis Danielson's Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy. This title and author kept cropping up several years back when I was writing my thesis on Milton but it never seemed entirely germane to the topics about which I was writing. And, as Robert Frost famously says, "way leads onto way" and here I am six years later finally picking it up.

I couldn't be more pleased thus far. I have long intuited that creative works have more theodical value than theological or philosophical tracts. Theodicy is basically a way of giving justice to God. Theos of course refers to God. Dike is the Greek goddess who personified justice. So, a theodicy is a work that attempts to justify God, what we more commonly today call apologetics.

Milton's entire project in Paradise Lost is theodical. The poem presents his attempt to "justify the ways of God to men." Since my first reading of the poem, I have felt that Milton did a far better job through the story-form and within the conventions of epic poetry of completing this justification project than any works of apologetics with which I concerned myself in my post-adolescent can-this-all-be-true seeking stage.

But before I get into any of that, I wanted to pause over a passage in the introductory chapter, "The Contexts of Milton's Theodicy," where Danielson argues for something very near and dear to my reading of Milton: the fact that, insane intelligence and 400 year gap aside, Milton is a human being. I'll quote Danielson at length here:

Now the fairly naive recognition that Milton was a person like you or me actually encourages an intellectual-historical model less naive than one often encounters in studies of Milton. For ourselves, I believe, we generally posit unity of mind and creative personality; and we should therefore be wary of radically distinguishing Milton the poet from Milton the thinker. . . We would also surely deny that a recognition of the sources and parallels of our own thought and expression somehow explained it all away, and we must likewise avoid thinking that, once we have presented analogues or demonstrated influences of Milton's thought, we have "said it all." 

Danielson here lucidly describes a problem I had while working on my thesis: so many of the Milton critics I read seemed more concerned with elucidating his influencers as a means to explain him away than they did with appreciating his work. Further, they denied so many other factors that determine the intellectual and spiritual life of a human being--which Danielson helpfully reminds us Milton was--that exist beyond the books we read. He continues: 

While admitting that we ourselves are influenced, moreover, do we not also recognize that our conceptual and pistic landscape is like a patchwork stitched together from various scraps of conversation, reading, experience, and disposition, the dye from each scrap bleeding into the one adjacent to it in the quilt, so that the hue of the each is subtly altered by virtue of its now integrated relation to the whole? [If we accept this picture as true for ourselves] it might curb the academic urge to treat written texts (especially written texts available to us) as if they were the only sorts of things by which Milton could have been influenced. 

Danielson goes on to conclude that while texts may be all we have now to go by, an awareness of the "nontextual background" will both make us more humble and sophisticated as readers of Milton.

I can't tell you how much I resonate with this. Danielson isn't nullifying historically-justified speculative work, studies of influences and forebears, or dismissing historical criticism more broadly. Indeed, his whole project as he readily admits is a historical, theological, and literary view of Paradise Lost. What he is saying is that humans are vastly more complex than some literary critics would have us believe. Have I been shaped by the books I read? Undoubtedly. But I have also been shaped, and this perhaps moreso, by the conversations I have had about those books with other people. If someone were to write an intellectual history of my life (and, dear God, I can't imagine being that poor sucker), they could go by the books on my shelves and the ways I have marked them up, but there is simply no way to be privy to the conversations, to the thinking I do while running, driving, or taking a shower. 

I love the metaphor Danielson uses of our lives as a quilt, where the dye from each square bleeds into the next. We are not intellectual beings or spiritual beings or rational beings or emotional beings or instinctual beings but intellectual-spiritual-rational-emotional-instinctual beings. We cannot pull apart these threads without unraveling that whole quilt. It is good to be reminded of this, if not merely out of charity, in the way we read and approach others.