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Plato's Four Furors and the Real Structure of Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Michael Fixler
Michael Fixler*
Affiliation:
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts
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Abstract

The four invocations to the Muse in Paradise Lost signal the stages of a compositional process coordinating the levels of the poem's inspiration and overall design. Using in downward sequence the four inspirational “furors” Neoplatonism derived from Plato's Phaedrus, Milton calibrated each narrative stage of his work to the thematic range governing that inspirational level, while the entire progression of the poem expresses the structural significance of this scalar paradigm. Such techniques were used by Dante and others and by Milton himself in Lycidas. But in Paradise Lost the inspirational pattern, as the spatial axis governing the poem's descending and ascending movements, combines with the narrative movements of the poem's temporal axis to shape a particular form that Milton considered essential to every art dedicated to the highest good and final end implicit in the divine scheme. It is this “universal form” that both metaphysically and structurally underlies Paradise Lost.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 5 , October 1977 , pp. 952 - 962
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 The argument of this paper was originally presented in a somewhat different form at the December 1975 Convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco. For help in its preparation and in the research of its larger contexts I owe thanks to the Faculty Research Fund of Tufts Univ. and the American Council of Learned Societies.

On Milton's assumption about the nature and ends of poetry as a cyclical transitive process, see the digression in The Reason of Church Government, espedaily his characterization of inspired poetry as a power “besides the office of a pulpit,” and his account in Animadversions of the transitive cycle of such spiritual work, in The Complete Prose Works (henceforth designated as CPW), ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953–), i, 816–21, 721. On hierarchy as a sacred order in the thought of the Pseudo-Dionysus, see The Heavenly Hierarchies, Bk. in, Sec. i, in The Works of Dionysus the Areopagite, trans, and ed. John Parker (London: J. Parker, 1897), p. 13. Finally, the identification with the hierarchy of the four furors of the cycle of poetic energy implied in Plato's Ion is made explicit by Marsilio Ficino in his commentary on the Ion, in Opera Omnia (Basil, 1576; facsimile rpt., Torino: Bottegha D'erasmo, 1959; reissued 1962), ii, 1281–84.

2 There seem to be as many references, in Renaissance writings, to the Platonic or poetic frenzies in the plural form as to the singular furor poeticus. About half of Milton's specific allusions to inspirational rapture are in the plural, as in his reference, in the early letter to Alexander Gill, to “those heaven sent frenzies” (CPW, i, 316). What scholarly attention the four raptures have attracted has been focused on one of three areas: (1) their relation to the thematic treatment of inspiration in poetry, as in R.V. Merrill and R.J. Clements' Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1957), Ch. vi; (2) the role of inspiration in critical theory, as in Bernard Weinberg's A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), passim; in Baxter Hathaway's The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962), Pt. v; and in Grahame Castor's Pléiade Poetics (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), Ch. hi; or (3) the part played by the doctrine of the four raptures in the musical theory of the Renaissance, specifically as it concerned belief in the energizing and occult effects of the union of music and poetry, as in Frances Yates's French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: The Warburg Institute, Univ. of London, 1947), passim, but esp. Ch. iv; in D.P. Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: The Warburg Institute, Univ. of London, 1958), pp. 20–24, 119–25; and in J.E. Phillips' contribution to Music and Literature in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, papers delivered by James E. Phillips and Bertrand H. Bronson at the Second Clark Library Seminar, 24 Oct. 1953 (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1954).

3 On the absence of discussions of underlying symbolic forms or early commentary on their presence and nature in specific works, see Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), Ch. i; and R.G. Petersen, “Measure and Symmetry in Literature,” PMLA, 91 (1976), 367–75. And for some perceptive observations on inexplicit underlying principles of order generally, see Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952, passim, but esp. pp. 137–42, “A Metaphorical View of Hierarchy”; and J.V. Cunningham, Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957), p. 76.

4 “A Treatise … on the Creation of the World as Given by Moses,” xxiii, trans. C.D. Yonge, in The Essential Philo, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 19–20.

5 Often the four stages are reduced to three by the elimination of the first or, conversely, expanded by the elaboration of one of the other stages, usually the last. See The Ecclesiastical Hierarchies and The Heavenly Hierarchies, in The Works of Dionysus the Areopagite and, more generally, A.C. Lloyd, “Greek Christian Platonism” and 'The Cappadocians,“ in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A.H. Armstrong (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), esp. pp. 425–31, 438. In Evelyn Underbill's Mysticism (New York: World, 1955), Pt. ii, passim, the Christian scale of mystical ascent includes the typical four stages, although the last stage, perfection, becomes differentiated into successsive conditions of spiritual surrender and union. I suggest that the archaic roots of this pattern are to be looked for in the various cosmological ladder images associated with pre-Pythagorean and ultimately shamanistic accounts of differentiated stages of ecstatic flight.

6 For the main references to the inspirational raptures in the Phaedrus, see 243E–245C and also 228B, 235C, 238D, and 265A–B. On interchangeability or correspondences, see George P. Conger, Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1922), Chs. i–iii; and S.K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974), passim. Both works stress the crucial significance of four-foldness in the protean correspondences postulated by so much of the speculation on the general coherence of the various parts of the world system.

For Hermeas, see Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum Scholia, ed. P. Couvreur (Paris: Librairie Emile Bouillon, 1901). An English translation of the most relevant part of the Scholia is included in Thomas Taylor's notes to his translation of Proclus' commentary on Plato's Timaeus. It is also reproduced in Taylor's translation of Iamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians (Chiswick, Eng.: n.p., 1821), pp. 350–58, which is the English version I have seen. Presumably it was in one of these editions of Taylor that W.B. Yeats became familiar with the paradigm of the raptures as a compositional scheme. He uses it, for example, as a descending sequence ordering the characters and themes evoked in his poem “All Souls' Night,” only one of a number of his poems in which the structural use of the paradigm is apparent. Hermeas' Scholia appears as a source in the writings of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and seems to be a vital link in the tradition behind the use of the scale of raptures as a structural form.

7 Ficino, Opera, i, 612–15. See also Ficino's letters to Naldus Noldio and Perëgrino Agli, i 830, 927, and his commentaries on Plato's Ion, Symposium, and Phaedrus, ii, 1281–84, 1320–86. For Pico see the translation by C.G. Wallis, among the writings in Pico della Mirandola, ed. P.J.W. Miller, The Library of the Liberal Arts (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), esp. pp. 7–14. The fourfold progression in the oration is downward, and the stages may be identified in paragraphs 1, 8, 18, and 27 of the edition cited. For Agrippa, who mainly follows Ficino, see The Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. Ffreake] (London: printed by R.W. for Gregory Moule, 1651), Bk. iii, Chs. xlv-xl, pp. 499–511. For Pontus de Tyard, see Le Solitaire premier, in Œuvres, ed. by S.F. Baridon (Lille: Librairie Giard, and Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1950), pp. 12–29, 40–49. For Patrizi, see La città felice (Venice, 1553), pp. 44–67; and Delia poetica: La deca disputata (Ferrarra, 1586), pp. 3–26. And see also the discussions by Walker, Yates, and Hathaway cited in n. 2 above.

8 Commentary on Plato's Symposium, Univ. of Missouri Studies, xix, No. 1 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1944), 239–40.

9 Mythomystes, rpt. in Literary Criticism of 17th Century England, ed. by E.W. Tayler (New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 232–36, 247, 253–54. Milton, Prolusion ii, CPW, i, 236.

10 Compositional use of the raptures as a basis for structural disposition seems to me evident in Spenser's Fowre Hymnes, in Campion's Lord's Masque, and in Henry More's little-known four-part poem Psychodia Platonica: A Platonic Song of the Soul, to name but several among a number of suggestive possibilities. Frye makes his point notably in The Stubborn Structure (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), p. 275, but it is one of the most frequently recurring generalizations about archetypal poetic structure throughout his work. As such, I take it to support the likelihood that there was a compositional tradition based on the four Platonic raptures and that, in terms of the deliberateness of its use in specific works, a new area of structural study is here being opened.

11 The significance of the furor poeticus for Dante was early noted by his biographer, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, the author also of a Latin translation of the Phaedrus and of a canzone, “A laudi di Venere,” which was one of the sources for the Renaissance elaboration of the theory of the four furors. His and Christoforo Landino's references to the furor poeticus in relation to Dante are discussed by André Chastel, in Marsile Ficin et l'art (Lille: Librairie Giard, and Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1954), p. 129. In Dante and the Legend of Rome (London: The Warburg Institute, Univ. of London, 1952), Ch. ii, Nancy Lenkeith notes Dante's theoretical distinction of four types of poetic raptures, though she does not appear to see the Commedia as structured in these terms. She does suggest, however, that the progression of the poem as a scala perfections and scala amoris is climaxed in the final visio Dei; and here her terminology reminds one of Socrates' reference in the Phaedrus (247C) to that heaven of heavens which poets had never adequately described, and possibly never could.

12 For D.C. Allen, see “Milton and the Descent to Light,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 60 (1961), 614–30. On the four degrees of death, a convential theological distinction, see The Christian Doctrine, ed. Maurice Kelley and trans. John Carey, Bk. i, Chs. xii–xiii, CPW, vi, 393–414. Interestingly enough, the distinction seems to go back to a comparable pagan Neoplatonic distinction of four kinds of death. See Fragment 80 of lamblichi Chalcidensis In Platonis Dialogos Commentariorum Fragmenta, ed. and trans. J.M. Dillion (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973), pp. 193–95, 370–71. Iamblichus was commenting on Plato's Timaeus, a work that sees the creation and the cosmos itself as having been ordered in terms of certain fourfold ratios.

With respect to the fourfold division of Paradise Lost, the segments are specifically identified here with the four invocations to the Muse and their implications, but E.M.W. Tillyard, in Milton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 243–54, made a similar structural division and identified each segment topically with, respectively, hell, heaven, paradise, and the fall of Man. In “The Function of the Prologues in Paradise Lost,” PMLA, 57 (1942), 697–704, John S. Diekhoff amplified Tillyard's point, suggesting that the invocations marked stages of the poem's argument as well as stages in the narrative. Finally, Alastair Fowler, in the discussion of Paradise Lost in his and John Carey's edition, The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, and New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 851–52, also notes the structural function of the invocations and stresses two points: that the fourfold structure in its binary aspect really divides the poem successively into the themes of the fall of the angels and fall of Man and that the poem's four parts reflect the numerological significance of the Pythagorean tetractys. All these views are compatible with the argument that the poem's fourfold divisions derive formally from the four Platonic raptures.

13 A paradigmatic table of mythological themes, theological correlatives, cosmological and physical attributes, psychological equivalents, and other associated features, drawn up in terms of the successive levels of the four raptures and their respective Muses and brought into relation to a wide range of Renaissance writings, would, I think, prove most instructive. Its chief principle would be the one summed up by Pico della Mirandola in his account of the correspondences between the four worlds identified with, respectively, God, the starry heavens, the elemental sphere, and Man himself: “Bound by the chains of concords, all these worlds exchange natures as well as names with mutual liberality. From this principle … flows the science of all allegorical interpretation,” Heptaplus, trans. Douglas Carmichael, in Pico della Mirandola, pp. 78–79.

The identification of each of the four invocations to the Muse with a descending order of inspirational amplitude I also base on a fourfold distinction relating to the Christian forms of inspiration traced by Courtland Baker in his study “Certain Religious Elements in the Doctrine of the Inspired Poet,” ELH, 6 (1939), 301–02. The distinctions Baker recognized, though rooted in a classification of types of biblical inspiration, are ultimately derived, I believe, from the differences in the four Platonic raptures. In any event, Baker lists three main revelatory types, and a fourth that is more purely lyrical or poetic: (1) plenary inspiration, such as Moses received on Mount Sinai; (2) mantic, or prophetic, inspiration, such as possessed Isaiah and Jeremiah; (3) mystical inspiration, such as seized the Apostles at the Penecostal visitation described in Acts h, when they babbled in tongues; and (4) inspiration likened to “the servant of the thought of God,” such as moved David to compose his hymns.

14 For a discussion of the numinous dread Milton evokes in the invocation beginning Bk. vii, see my earlier study, “Milton's Passionate Epic,” in Milton Studies, 1 (1969), 167–92. There I also discuss Milton's structural use of the hierarchy of the four raptures in relation to Ad Patrem and to his well-known characterization of poetry in Of Education (CPW, ii, 403) as “more simple, sensuous and passionate” than logic or rhetoric.

15 Commentary, Opera, ii, 1326 ff., or see in Sears R. Jayne's trans., pp. 142, 151–52, 191–92.

16 See my discussion of this point about inspiration in sleep, in “The Orphic Technique of ‘L'Allegro’ and ‘II Penseroso,‘” English Literary Renaissance, 1 (1971), 170–71, n. 7.

17 The Christian Doctrine, CPW, vi, 393–94.

18 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, CPW, ii, 292. In “Milton's Passionate Epic,” I discuss the implications of this distinction between adoration and the rational quest for God's revealed will in law as it relates to the character of Paradise Lost as an act of worship and as a logical argument. For my preliminary argument on the sevenfold Apocalyptic episodic or narrative structure of Paradise Lost, see 'The Apocalypse in Paradise Lost,“ in New Essays on Paradise Lost, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 131–78. The source of the reference to Milton's prescription of crypsis in poetry is The Art of Logic, trans. Allan H. Gilbert, in The Works of John Milton, ed. by F.A. Patterson, 20 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931–40), xi, 297–99, 471, 483–85.

19 Milton's Latin in the Artis Logicae reads as follows: “Omnium artium est aliquod summum bonum & finis extremus; quae & earum forma est …” (p. 66). And see also p. 63, as well as Tetrachordon, CPW, ii, 608, for references to internal form. Milton's conception of internal form is discussed by Christopher Grose, in Milton's Epic Process (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 129–33, and, more relevantly to the argument here, by Michael Lieb, in “Milton and the Metaphysics of Form,” Studies in Philology, 7 (1974), 206–24. The term “universal form” seems to derive, I find, from Aristotle's Poetics (1455b), where it refers to something like the exemplary form of a particular poetic argument, a form that is the essential concept out of which the artistic work is elaborated. The filiation thence of the term is obscure. See, for example, the allegorical personification of generative form, called pantomorphos or Omniformis, whom Bernardus Silvestris places at the outermost limit of the created universe, near the primum mobile, about where Dante sees his vision of la forma universal (in Cosmographia, trans, and ed. Winthrop Wetherbee [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973], p. 96). In the Commedia, where the essential artistic argument and its religious ends are virtually the same, it is easy to see how Aristotle's esthetic concept of universal form and the Christian ontological idea of the formal and original causes as form could be assimilated to each other. Ficino, in his Theologia Platonica (xi.v), says something like this: by finding “all the arts … implicit in the one God, and uniquely in the form of God.” (Opera, i, 256: “Cunctae [artes] denique in uno singulari Deo atque una dumtaxat Dei forma.”)

20 Of the many structural studies of Paradise Lost the only ones directly relevant to my approach here and to this provisional conclusion are Northrop Frye's The Return of Eden (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1965) and Jackson Cope's seminal work The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1962), with its emphatic and skillful demonstration of the pervasively spatial and metaphorically vertical structure expressed through the action and imagery of the poem. Also notable is Galbraith J. Crump's The Mystical Design in Paradise Lost (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1975), which finds a circular or cyclical pattern dominating the poem, a pattern signifying anagogically the mystical perfection of what the poem celebrates. His argument that circular patterning in fact extends throughout the epic is clearly assimilable to my point about the circular movements, or movement both down and up the spatial axis of the poem's inspirational form. To that extent I find his analysis both relevant and suggestive.