2 - Typology and Milton's Masterplot

Summary

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”

The sixteen-line opening sentence of Paradise Lost runs through a series of biblical scenes. The four prepositions modifying the main verb condense providential history and situate the narrative of the poem within that larger arch: “Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater man / Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, / Sing heavenly muse.” The passage compresses biblical history and the 10,565 lines of Paradise Lost to a six-line summary while prefiguring the paradigmatic structure of the epic. The “man” of the first line recurs in the fourth to produce an analogy between the two. The parallel between the disobedient man and the “greater man,” mirrors the association of Eden, in the fourth line, with the “blissful seat” of the fifth. Rather than a return to Eden, the “blissful seat” suggests the post-Revelation heavenly kingdom and the “living temples,” of the redeemed Christian heart (12.527). Adam is not subsumed to Christ, the “Greater Man,” just as Eden is not sublated to the “Blissful seat.” Rather, the relationship between them is typological: that of type to antitype. The figures represent successive scenes in God's master-narrative, aligned to represent history as a purposeful succession of analogous figures and situations. These lines both condense Milton's justification of providence and indicate the poem's principal form of organization: typology.

The invocation of the Holy Spirit, Milton's “heavenly Muse,” connects the inspiration of the Pentateuch to the composition of Paradise Lost. Milton's muse is Mosaic, the same “that on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire / That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed / In the beginning how the heavens and earth / Rose out of chaos” (1.6–10). He connects Moses’ inspired writing during the forty-day fast on Sinai and the education of the Israelites to his own epic intentions. Set apart on the “secret top,” sacer, the primal scene of Judeo-Christian holy teaching is figural for Milton. It anticipates subsequent scenes of divine guidance, including the Pagan muses’ perversion of the “divine afflatus” (noted in Fowler, 58).