6 - Revisiting Milton's (Logical) God: Empson 2018

Summary

Fifty years ago, William Empson published the revised second edition of Milton's God (1965) in which he reaffirmed his case that the reason that Paradise Lost “is so good is that it makes God so bad.” Empson was of course participating in a rich and deeply divided critical tradition about Paradise Lost which John Leonard has instructively split into three positions in his field-defining variorum: (a) the poem is good because it makes God seem good; (b) the poem is bad because it makes God seem bad; (c) the poem is good because it makes God seem bad. Half a century of historicism and high theory has passed since Empson's revised text appeared, and I wish to take the opportunity opened up by Leonard's variorum to revisit Milton’s God to argue for a fourth available reading of Milton's God and the poem’s ensuing goodness (or lack thereof). This chapter engages with Milton the scholar, both as a reader and writer of textbooks, to argue that as both trainee and trainer the poet is presenting an epic that is definitively (provably) good, but only if construed according to the divine art of logic. Calling on Milton’s own evaluative writing methods from his Artis plenior logicae (1672) to read the logic of his God, I argue that the poem is good not primarily because it makes God either good or bad, but because it lays bare the cosmic structure to which we are all subject. That structure in and of itself seems to be at least potentially separate from any inherent moral valency, either good or bad, but when explored by Milton's penetrating logical searchlight it manifests as a very uncomfortable and difficult universe in which mankind must strive to “persevere” in his “happy” state (5.520–25). In this structure, God will be justified, because it is his own creation; yet that justification does not have to make him good or kind within human definitions of those terms. Through a logical reading of God and his interactions with his creations, I wish to suggest that Milton's God is indeed Empson's unpalatable deity, but that he achieves this status through a rigorous system of justification founded upon the logical independence and individuality of his creations, and which we can access courtesy of Milton's output as a scholar.