Divided Empire: Milton's Political Imagery

By Robert Fallon

In Divided Empire, Robert T. Fallon examines the influence of John Milton's political experience on his great poems: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This study is a natural sequel to Fallon's previous book, Milton in Government, which examined Milton's decade of service as Secretary for Foreign Languages to the English Republic.

Milton's works are crowded with political figures—kings, counselors, senators, soldiers, and envoys—all engaged in a comparable variety of public acts—debate, decree, diplomacy, and warfare—in a manner similar to those who exercised power on the world stage during his time in public office. Traditionally, scholars have cited this imagery for two purposes: first, to support studies of the poet's political allegiances as reflected in his prose and his life; and, second, to demonstrate that his works are sympathetic to certain ideological positions popular in present times.

Fallon argues that Paradise Lost is not a political testament, however, and to read its lines as a critique of allegiances and ideologies outside the work is limit the range and scope of critical inquiry and to miss the larger purpose of the political imagery within the poem. That imagery, the author proposes, like that of all Milton's later works, serves to illuminate the spiritual message, a vision of the human soul caught up in the struggle between vast metaphysical forces of good and evil. Fallon seeks to enlarge the range of critical inquiry by assessing the influence of personal and historical events upon art, asking, as he puts it, "not what the poetry says about the events, but what the events say about the poetry." Divided Empire probes, not Milton's judgment on his sources, but the use he made of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PSUPress
• Release date: Nov 8, 1995
• ISBN: 9780271041551

Robert Fallon

Robert Fallon was born in Scotland. He moved to Leicester in his teens and still lives there today. He is an award winning poet, with his own range of birthday cards and historical prints. His previous work includes a children’s book called The Dream Maker (2007), and an early learning book titled The Itsy Bitsy Family (2007).

Book preview

Divided Empire

Divided Empire

Milton’s Political Imagery

Robert Thomas Fallon

The Pennsylvania State University Press

University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fallon, Robert Thomas.

Divided empire : Milton’s political imagery / Robert Thomas Fallon.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-271-01460-1 (acid-free paper)

1. Milton, John, 1608-1674 – Political and social views.

2. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – 17th century.

3. Political poetry, English – History and criticism.

4. Milton, John, 1608-1674 – Style.

5. Figures of speech.

I. Title. PR3592.P64F33 1995

821’.4–dc2094-41636

CIP

Copyright © 1995

The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Published by

The Pennsylvania State University Press,

Barbara Building, Suite C, University Park, PA 16802-1003

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

CONTENTS

Preface

1 / The Image of Rule

France and the Kingdoms of the Imagination

A Handmaid to Truth

2 / The Kingdom of Heaven

God the Father

God the Son

3 / To Reign in Hell

The Great Consult

The Voyage

4 / Heaven and Hell

5 / The Lords of the Earth

Prelapsarian Rule

Postlapsarian Rule

Fulfilled All Justice

6 / Divided Empire

Cosmic Conflict

The Missions to Earth

The Conflict Within

7 / The Final Things

The Trump of Doom

All in All

8 / Embattled Humanity

Paradise Regained

Samson Agonistes

Notes

Works Cited

Index

PREFACE

This book is the natural sequel to two earlier works. The first, Captain or Colonel: The Soldier in Milton’s Life and Art, examines the influence of England’s wars on the poetry. Since Milton never served in a military unit, that influence was indirect, a consequence of his experience as a citizen of the besieged city of London and the accounts of battle he heard from others. His experience in political life, on the other hand, was immediate and protracted, and the account of it fills a volume of its own, Milton in Government, a study of his decade of service as Secretary for Foreign Languages to the English Republic. In its early stages, that work had a subtitle, The Making of a Political Imagination, intended to convey my conviction that Milton’s experience in public service played a role in shaping the political imagery of his later poems; but an early reader of the manuscript, the distinguished historian, Dr. John Morrill, wisely observed that since the book said little about the poetry, the subtitle seemed to promise more than it delivered. As a result, Milton in Government appeared with its colon deleted.

In hopes now of delivering on the promise of that abandoned subtitle, I examine Milton’s great poems here, appraising the imprint of those years in office on his creative imagination. During the first three years of his tenure as Secretary for Foreign Languages, until he lost his sight entirely, Milton served the Commonwealth’s Council of State in a variety of capacities, most of them in connection with foreign affairs, as he later put it (Prose 4:628; MG 25). For the entire decade of his public service his chief function was to prepare correspondence between the English Republic’s executive bodies and foreign heads of state and to assist in the processing of documents exchanged in treaty negotiations with continental powers. The accepted language of diplomatic discourse at the time was Latin; thus it was Milton’s responsibility to translate English documents into that ancient tongue for dispatch abroad and to render those received by his superiors into English for their consideration (MG vii-viii, 20-21, and passim). Milton in Government endeavors to demonstrate that the poet was much more deeply engaged in the duties of his office than has been hitherto supposed, that he was responsible for many more documents than the 170-odd which appear in the early manuscripts (MG 268-71) and very likely composed a number of them, hence that this experience had a significant influence on his imagination.¹

That influence, as will appear, was both general and specific. It was general in that Milton conceived of the cosmic struggle between good and evil as a clash of political forces. The poetry is crowded with a host of public figures – kings, counselors, senators, soldiers, and ambassadors – competing for power in a comparable variety of public acts – debate, decree, diplomacy, and warfare. These figures and these acts define traditional political oppositions – the individual and society, loyalty and rebellion, obedience and freedom – the balance of which ultimately determines the quality of any system of governance in any time. They offer, moreover, a wide spectrum of government structures, ranging from absolute monarchy to egalitarian community. The specific influence of Milton’s public service is manifest in a wealth of individual images traceable to political events of which the poet was intimately aware. In brief, having lived through two turbulent decades of war and political experiment, Milton came to imagine spiritual matters in terms of the exercise of power; and certain events of those years left such a lasting impression on his imagination that they reappear in lines where art closely imitates life.

Recent studies of Milton’s political imagery argue that his stance in the poetry accurately reflects his stance in the prose,² or that it is consistent with what is known of his political allegiances,³ or that it conforms comfortably to prevailing ideologies of his own time or our own.⁴ Divided Empire rests upon a rather different premise: Paradise Lost is a poem, not a political testament, one, moreover, whose purpose is to delineate universal spiritual values, not partisan ideologies. Its political imagery, therefore, like all the imagery of the poem, is not an end in itself but serves a larger purpose, as handmaid to spiritual truth. The effort, therefore, to force that imagery into conformity with the poet’s polemic political or religious prose, or to insist that it mirrors his lifetime allegiances, serves only to constrict it to the Procrustean bed of this or that narrow ideology external to the poem and runs the risk of ignoring, or distorting, the purpose of the imagery within the work, that is, its artistic end. As Joseph Wittreich observes, Ideology, especially when its workings are unrecognized, unacknowledged, distorts and disfigures interpretation.⁵ Milton surely drew his political imagery from his experience, whether from the many books he read or from his life richly lived, but it plays a role in Paradise Lost quite different from that to be found in his library or his life. Milton drew images of warfare from Homer and Virgil, but put them to a different purpose than did his classical predecessors. So too, the kings and councils of his poetry can be shown to resemble those of his experience; but when they appear in his lines, their purpose there may have little to do with the part they played in his life. Milton’s art was obviously influenced by historical events. The object of these pages, however, is to discover, not what the poetry says about the events, but what the events say about the poetry.

To state the book’s premise in these spare terms is, admittedly, to run certain risks. It seems almost perverse, on the surface, to propose that the poet’s political imagery does not define his political ideology; and readers accustomed to studies that enlist the poetry to paint him in one color or another within the spectrum of political sentiment may find the argument unsatisfactory, or even irrelevant. Another risk, of course, is that even the suggestion that life influences art may relegate the present author to a premature grave in the unhallowed ground where lie the late and unlamented biographical critics. These seemed risks worth taking, however. For the moment, I can only ask forbearance, promising a diligent effort to justify the approach in the pages to come.

Politics

The word politics has unhappy connotations for citizens of modern states. In a free and open society it is more often than not uttered with a sneer. Though all can find much to admire in a favorite politician, one distinguished by high-mindedness and devotion to a local constituency, the profession as a whole does not stand in great esteem. In the eyes of many, public officials are far too prone to become mesmerized by the exercise of power and to view issues of great national moment as opportunities to gain advantage and garner votes rather than as questions of moral significance. Seldom are these public officials lauded as skilled practitioners of the art of the possible, who engage in the demanding practice of compromise to achieve a worthy end.

In order to avoid the pitfalls of that perception, this study will interpret politics in the broadest possible sense, much as Milton did in Of Education, that is, as the study of the beginning, end, and reasons of politicall societies (Prose 2:398). The OED, citing that same passage, defines the word as the science and art of government; the science dealing with the form, organization, and administration of a state or part of one, and with the regulation of its relations with other states. The focus, then, of our concern is, first, the relationship between the governing and the governed within a state, and, second, the competition among sovereign nations for advantage on a global stage.

That some men govern others and that nations compete for power Milton accepted as sorrowful features of a fallen world. The human race found it necessary to form communities and nations by common league to bind each other from mutual injury, and joyntly to defend themselves against harm from without; and they established authority within the state to restrain by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common right (Prose 3:199). In a broader sense, political institutions provide the fallen race with a means of ordering physical existence, keeping at bay the anarchy of social Chaos, which in Milton’s symbolic cosmology surrounds the World, all too ready, given the opportunity, to replant "the Standard there of ancient Night" (2:986). Milton’s poetry, however, is not a discourse on the politics of Man; it is rather a revelation of the love of God and the ways in which fallen humanity can escape the snares of evil and return that love. His theme is governance of the self rather than the state; but he does convey the ordering power of that love in political terms to make it accessible to human understanding.

Milton was ambiguous about conflict, as are we all, yearning for unity yet exhilarated by competition. The narrative voice in Paradise Lost is indignant about our squabbles: O shame to men! Devil with Devil damn’d / Firm concord holds, men only disagree / Of Creatures rational (2:496-98). Yet in Areopagitica the poet delights in the disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, ev’n to a rarity, and admiration (Prose 2:557) of the citizens of London, and urges that the power of Truth is displayed in contest: Let her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter (Prose 2:561). Human conflict is a legacy of the Fall; and yet, paradoxically, it is the means whereby the race will arrive at its desired end.

To Milton, then, politics was an inescapable feature of the human condition; and he embraced it in both his life and his art. Paradise Lost presents Heaven and Hell as political states, and the conflict between them as a contest for hegemony in a political cosmos. By accommodating an inner spiritual conflict to human understanding, the poet depicted the abstract in terms of a struggle for advantage between two powerful rulers. The politics of paradise, lost and regained, may not, therefore, carry a political message at all; it does, however, constitute a narrative structure around which Milton shaped his vision of religious truth, of the struggle between the forces of good and evil in the universe and within the human spirit.

In the minds of seventeenth-century citizens religion and politics were, of course, virtually inseparable. There can be no doubt that they were so in Milton’s mind, nor can there be doubt as to which he considered the more significant. As he put it, until religion [is] set free from the monopolie of hirelings, I dare affirme, that no modell whatsoever of a commonwealth will prove successful or undisturbd (Prose 7:275; see also 1:853, 7:379). He considered the individual soul to be the primary concern of the Almighty; and Paradise Lost lays out the path of salvation for wayfaring and warfaring Christians alike, regardless of how they may govern or be governed by their fellows. Paradise Lost, again, is not a political statement; it is a beacon of belief for that soul; and though the poet, drawing on his experience in public life, represented his beliefs in a striking series of political images, we are not free to assume that in those images he is defining a political ideology. His theme is how the individual should govern himself, as guided by Scripture, not how men should govern men, concerning which the message of Scripture is most uncertain.

Some two generations ago, Paul Phelps-Morand published The Effects of His Political Life on John Milton, which arrived at conclusions on the subject that scholars since have labored diligently to discredit. Drawing on the earlier work of S. B. Liljegren, he depicted Milton as a censor, a forger, and a liar, a writer who probably hastened the death of Salmasius and then callously took credit for his demise.⁶ His political prose, further, is offensively polemic, course and ferocious throughout, full of omissions, half truths, and outright falsehoods, such as his claim to have visited Galileo. Once he entered political life, Phelps-Morand argued, Milton abandoned the values of his idealistic youth and embraced an arena in which expediency is commonplace and the ends fully justify the means. Unlike Liljegren, however, who found Milton’s political activities morally reprehensible, Phelps-Morand considered none of this offensive. It is simply the sort of activity that one should expect from a revolutionary government composed of zealots devoted to building a kingdom of God on Earth, and no moral taint should be attached to a man so persuaded of the hallowed justice of his cause. Indeed, the experience greatly enhanced Milton’s later works, especially in the description of Satan as a consummate political and military figure. Of the poet, Phelps-Morand concludes, Though not Machiavellian in character, he could on occasion, for the Great Cause, stoop to Machiavellian means.⁷

Against this distasteful backdrop, Milton scholars a half-century later are still uneasy about acknowledging the influence of the poet’s political career on his great works. Though many of these charges have been dismissed or defused by later studies, some slight stain yet discolors Milton’s political activities; and it is feared perhaps that to identify them too closely with his poetry might taint it as well.⁸ As a consequence scholars, apprehensive about straying too far outside of the text itself, have been largely content to limit their inquiries to a comparison of the poetry and the prose in an effort to understand Milton’s political philosophy. Milton in Government was conceived as a work designed to place Milton’s political career in somewhat more favorable light; and the present work proposes that his poetry is not tainted, but enormously enriched, by the experience. Scholars, it is hoped, may once again address the influence of life on art without fear of thereby diminishing the art.

A Note on Sources

This book quotes liberally from Milton’s prose works, both political and religious, cites extensively his experience in public office, and on occasion refers to his literary sources, but to the purpose only of illuminating the spiritual theme of his poetry, not of constructing a theory of his political philosophy, which many fine minds have already explored.⁹

The modern poet often adopts the stance of social critic, standing outside the established order to see it more clearly and draw attention to its flaws and inequities. Milton is an instance of a poet who played an important role within that order, as a public servant in the government of his country, one, moreover, who left a substantial body of prose articulating in extensive detail a body of political thought that evolved from that experience. He wrote these works in response to pressing historical events, the passage of the Licensing Act, the execution of Charles I, the concerted attacks on the legitimacy of the English Republic, and the impending election of a new Parliament in 1660, among others; and as a result these works are quite specific, vigorously polemic, and notably partisan in their expression of political allegiance.¹⁰ Hence, the prose, like the sonnets, is for the most part occasional; and to dispense with any discussion of those occasions is to limit both our understanding of their meaning and our appreciation of their achievement. The imagery of the great poems is assuredly drawn from that same experience but it surveys events from a loftier vantage, placing those two or three eventful decades within the grand sweep of cosmic history, and in the final books of Paradise Lost in the context of the sorry spectacle of human history. Milton views both of these histories from the perspective of his few decades, standing at a moment in vast time, looking to the past and to the future, interpreting their passage in terms of his own personal instant, in which he finds a microcosm of the cosmic struggle that he believes will prevail until the final day. He read history avidly and found in the past a confirmation of his judgment on his own time. He read Scripture with equal fervor and in the biblical vision of the future he found reason for hope despite the failure of his age to realize the New Jerusalem. He used both history and Scripture in all his works, but to different purposes. In the prose they bolster his argument, reflecting the thought of a politically committed man reacting to the historical moment. In the poetry they embellish that same man’s vision of his moment’s participation in eternity.

Milton’s prose works are an indispensable source of information for what the poet knew about the political life of his time. Eikonoklastes and the two Defences offer a detailed survey of the clash of interests that precipitated the upheavals within the country, and the State Papers constitute a record of his knowledge of events on the wider stage of continental Europe. These works are, then, a rich storehouse of information for the chronicle of Milton’s time as he saw it, knowledge on which he drew to narrate his vision of cosmic history.

The relationship between Christian Doctrine and Paradise Lost is another matter entirely, since they both survey the state of the human soul from its creation to its final destiny. But the two works were composed to different ends and employ distinctly different methods. Maurice Kelley draws attention to the distinctions between the two works, the one a systematic theology, the other a blank verse epic, but he is so intent on showing them as professing the same body of belief that he is reluctant to pursue the significance of their differences.¹¹ Christian Doctrine is an appeal to reason, its thought imparted in the language of logic. As many have noted, of Milton’s prose works the one with which it shares the closest affinity in tone and method is The Art of Logic.¹² Milton asserts, time and again, that divine truth is accessible to anyone who will study the plain meaning of Scripture and dismiss the sophistries of the theologians. God gave Man reason, and then revealed as much of his nature as reason could comprehend; and so much as he did reveal is entirely sufficient for salvation. In his rational exposition of divine truth, Milton scorns those who pry into the mysteries of the Christian faith. Forget about such matters, he counsels, just use your head and you can save your soul.¹³

Paradise Lost, on the other hand, is a work of the imagination; hence it operates under a different imperative entirely, engaging the dynamic of poetic expression and appealing to a faculty of comprehension that transcends pure reason. It can do more, it can say more, than a systematic theology; it can touch deeper chords of our nature, sounding responses from emotional and spiritual centers that reason has no access to. Christian Doctrine attempts to explain God, Paradise Lost to justify him, and to do so in more than the legal sense. It must satisfy an intuitive perception of justice, one that when violated can excite pity, fear, and rage in the human breast. The one, therefore, appeals to reason alone, the other to a reader’s emotional and spiritual life as well. The treatise may throw light on the poem, but it does not interpret it.

I do not personally subscribe to the grim view of the world that perceives everything as political; but Milton seems to have detected a political dimension to most philosophical, theological, and social questions. These pages will address a number of subjects in his poetry that may seem to some readers marginally political at best: the Holy Spirit (Chapter 1), the Holy Trinity (Chapter 2), divine love (Chapter 4), the innocence of Adam and Eve (Chapter 5), the destruction of the world (Chapter 7), and the divinity of Christ (Chapter 8) – only Chapters 3 and 6 seem unreservedly political. This is not to claim resolution of any of these frequently contested questions about Milton’s thought, but simply to add to the debate an ingredient too often missing: the poet’s use of political imagery to define these abstractions and accommodate his spiritual message to temporal understanding.

The organization of Divided Empire is fairly straightforward. Chapter 1 introduces the method by examining analogies between the French monarchy and Milton’s vision of cosmic rule. Paradise Lost offers five different patterns of governance, those in Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and the pre- and postlapsarian worlds. Chapter 2 examines Heaven; Chapter 3, Hell; Chapter 4 compares the two; and Chapter 5 addresses the political changes occasioned by the Fall. These are followed by a discussion of the imagery of cosmic conflict (Chapter 6), the political dimensions of Milton’s apocalyptic vision (Chapter 7), and the spectacle of human governance figured in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (Chapter 8).

The use of Man, Mankind, and similar gender-specific generic terms may cause some annoyance. I can only plead that I employ such terms as Milton does, and ask an appreciation of the difficulty of remaining entirely correct in such usage while discussing the political art of a seventeenth-century male and the political life of a nation governed entirely by men.

A Note on Documentation

This book draws on material developed at length in Captain or Colonel and Milton in Government. While mindful of the need to avoid reploughing ground already prepared, I am also conscious of the obligation to offer a complete and self-contained work; hence some restatement of that earlier material is unavoidable. To avoid troubling the reader with the need to juggle two other books in order to make sense of this one, I summarize the historical accounts in sufficient detail to illustrate the parallels between the experience and the poetry. For those desiring more thorough accounts, historical and interpretative passages are cross-referenced to the earlier volumes, "(CC)" to Captain or Colonel and "(MG)" to Milton in Government.

Of the two major editions of the prose, the Columbia volumes are cited as Works and the Yale as Prose.

Intertextual documentation is held to a minimum so as not to render unreadable pages already crowded with quotations. Use is restricted to the following:

1.The poetry, cited by book and line number from Merritt Y. Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Prose.

2.The State Papers, cited by reference to the numbers assigned them in Works and Prose, e.g., (W1, P5).

3.The prose other than the State Papers, cited by volume and page number in Prose, e.g., "(Prose 1:501)."

4.The aforementioned cross-references to Captain or Colonel and Milton in Government.

The premises of this book would seem at times to place it somewhat at odds with certain modern critical schools of thought, those, for example, which question authorial intent, textual integrity, and the influence of life on art, and especially those which read the political imagery as ideological testament. It is not my intent to quarrel with colleagues with whom I may disagree but for whom I have only the highest regard, some of whose studies have opened up the scholarship to valuable new insights. My chief concern in these pages is to address Milton’s works from a