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The Verbal Gate to Paradise: Adam's “Literary Experience” in Book X of Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Georgia B. Christopher
Georgia B. Christopher*
Affiliation:
University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia
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Abstract

It is not Eve's reconciling gesture of “love” in Book x of Paradise Lost that leads Adam back to God. Instead, Adam is restored by a mysterious “literary” insight as he suddenly perceives his sentence as a promise. Adam's “opening” is the sacramental moment toward which the action of Paradise Lost is leading and reflects the Reformers' understanding that the first promise (protevangelium), like other promises in the Bible, constitutes an inner scripture that equalizes all ages. Thus, in the main, the Reformers appropriate Old Testament stories without resorting to typology, for they treat the patriarchs as the first Christians who embraced the word. They see the Old Testament narratives as a sacramental vessel through which the viva vox Christi can speak to the reader of any age as he identifies with the patriarch in the story.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , January 1975 , pp. 69 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

1 Burden argues that Adam rationalizes his yielding to Eve's “Femal charm” by invoking the necessary bond of a higher married love—the “sweet Converse and Love” described in Bk. IX of Paradise Lost (The Logical Epic: A Study of the Argument o/Paradise Lost, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967, pp. 163, 165).

2 E. M. W. Tillyard, Studies in Milton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), p. 43.

3 Answerable Style (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1953), p. 118.

4 Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London : Macmillan, 1967), p. 273.

5 77;i? Muse's Method (New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 177–78, 183.

6 John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957). All further references to Paradise Lost will be to this edition and will be included in parentheses in the text. Protecangelium is the term commonly used in exegesis for the earliest utterance of the gospel in Genesis iii.15. See, e.g., S. R. Driver, “Introduction and Notes,” The Book of Genesis, Westminster Commentaries, ed. Walter Lock (London: Methuen, 1904), i, 48.

7 Williams, The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1948), and Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).

8 MacCallum, “Milton and Figurative Interpretation of ths Bible,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 31 (1962), 397445, and Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth (New H wen: Yale Univ. Press, 1968). For the typological study of Paradise Regained, see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton's Brief Epic (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1966).

9 Cf. Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), in.ii.7, cited hereafter in the text as Inst., with De Doctrina Christiana, trans. Charles R. Sumner, in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1933), xv, 409, cited hereafter as CD.

10 Lectures on Deuteronomy in Luther's Works, gen. ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia, and Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955-), ix, 63. Cited hereafter as LW. See also “Treatise on the New Testament,” LW, xxxv, 83, and “Preface to the Old Testament [1545],” LW, xxxv, 236–37.

11 “A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels,” LW, xxxv, 122–23.

12 John William Aldridge, The Hermeneutic of Erasmus, Basel Studies of Theology, No. 2 (Richmond: Knox, 1966), p. 48.

13 “Preface to the Old Testament [1545],” LW, xxxv, 237.

14 Theses 12–15 of “The Licentiate Examination of Heinrich Schmedenstede [7 July 1542],” LW, xxxiv, 304.

15 Cited by Heinrich Bornkamm in Luther and the Old Testament, trans. Eric W. and Ruth C. Gritsch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), p. 83.

16 “Selected Psalms,” LW, xiv, 257, 324.

17 “On Philip Melancthon's Scruples about the First Prophecy,” cited by Bornkamm, p. 201.

18 The Paradise Within (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 110.

19 Lectures on Genesis in LW, i, 197; italics mine. See also “Preface to the Old Testament [1545],” LW, xxxv, 237, and “Treatise on the New Testament,” LW, xxxv, 83.

20 Commentaries of the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. John King (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847), I, 65. Italics mine.

21 Lectures on Genesis in LW, i, 191. See also I, 220.

22 Cf. Luther's statement that Adam and Eve “were the first Christians, and to them were promised and entrusted the oracles of God (Rom. iii.2)” in LW, ix, 214–15.

23 “Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, I, 66; italics mine. Cf. LW, I, 224.

24 Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), i, xliv.

25 “Prologues by William Tyndale Shewing the Use of the Scripture, Which He Wrote before the Five Books of Moses,” Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge, Eng.: University Press, 1848), p. 400. All references to Tyndale are from this edition.

26 For the narrator's relation to the fable, see Anne Davidson Ferry, Milton's Epic Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uriiv. Press, 1967), and Martz, The Paradise Within, pp. 108–09.

27 My paragraph is substantially indebted to Bornkamm, pp. 38–43.

28 This is the Quaker term (see Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964, p. 26), but the idea of the “opening” is itself much older, probably deriving from the biblical account of Luke xxiv, in which the resurrected Christ returns and explicates scripture for his awestruck disciples: “And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures” (Authorized Version, Luke xxiv.44–45). One could argue that St. Augustine's account of his conversion in the Confessions, Bk. vm, Ch. xii (in which he tells how mysterious singing in the garden urged him to take up the scripture and read, and how his eyes then lit upon Rom. xiii. 13 : “Walk honestly as in the day, not in chambering and wantoning”), is the prototype of the “opening” in the evangelical tradition. As I explain below, however, it seems to me that Luther provides the pattern of “literary” experience for the English puritans. The Quaker term “opening” is useful and not inappropriate in a discussion of Milton, since the Quaker Thomas Ellwood was known to be a frequenter of the Milton household during the poet's later years. William Riley Parker, for one, believed that toward the end of his life, Milton's faith in the “inner light” was very close to the Quaker position (Milton, Oxford: Clarendon, 1968, ii, 1058, n. 12).

29 “Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther's Latin Writings,” LW, xxxiv, 337.

30 LW, xxxiv, 337. See also “Bondage of the Will,” LW, xxxiii, 92, in which Luther cites Psalm cxix.30 (“The opening of thy words gives light”) and comments, “Here the words of God are represented as a kind of door, or an opening, which is plain for all to see and even illuminates the simple.”

31 The Mystery of Godliness and Other Selected Sermons (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950), p. 122.

32 Though Madsen is primarily concerned with establishing the typological context for Paradise Lost, he notes the significance of the first promise: “Adam's regeneration is accomplished chiefly through the ear, and the decisive upward movement begins when he considers the significance of Christ's metaphorical prophecy” (From Shadowy Types to Truth, p. 165).

33 Cf. explication of Luke xxiv.45 in CD, xv, 289, 291, and in Inst., m.ii.34.

34 George S. Hendry, The Holy Spirit in Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956), p. 23.

35 See, e.g., U. Milo Kaufmann, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 45.