Background and Politics in John Milton`s Paradise Lost

Milton has dramatic vision of graven image in history, re-creating the key stories of Scripture. Once an active participant in the governmental turmoil of seventeenth-century England, he now asserts in paradise helpless stark(a) Providence that transcends not however his contemporary England but to a fault the hellish counterfeits of men in history. Milton finds the will of God, not in the re tenderal of the policy-making world, but in the spiritual reformation of each item-by-item. and so he becomes a prophet, seeing the things undetectable and proclaiming the values that are eternal.Recent critics keep back called attention to Miltons baffle of history reflected in his heaven Lost. They tend to repose a lot emphasis on his political awareness to see spiritual aspects that underlie Miltons poetic imagination. Christopher Hill (1978), for example, stresses the importance of a diachronic improvement to Miltons Paradise Lost. Hill connects Miltons ideas, or even his theology, to the political circumstances of seventeenth-century England.For Hill, it is astonishing if Paradise Lost is not about politics he calls it a different type of political action from those which have failed so woefully (67). It is true, that Miltons concern with political circumstances is an important element that en ables him to perform his situation as a prophet and to participate in the historic bear upon with a prophetic vision of teaching and correcting his genesis. Paradise Lost is plain political poem. The text conceals the historical traces of its own composition so skilfully that readers are kindredly to forget its political significance.While Paradise Lost was seemingly composed over the long period beforehand and later the Restoration, it see new political problems in post-revolutionary society. Among Miltons three major poems, the abbreviated expansive thus addressed itself most specifically to the Restoration audience. The purpose of this phy sical composition is to historicise Paradise Lost as a Restoration poem in order to propose a new political way of interpret the epic. No English writer dealt more directly with Eden at sea and redeemed than John Milton, and this work analyses his uses of Paradise to express his ambivalence about empire.After the establishment of Puritan Massachusetts in 1630, British colonial energies (and Miltons) were inattentive by internal conflicts through the civil wars of the 1640s and into the Interregnum of the 1650san introversion brought to an end by Oliver Cromwell in 16541656 with his unilateral Western Design against Spanish America. However much Paradise Lost (1667) reveals Miltons double-mindedness about such designs, there can be little doubt that the highwater mark of Miltonic anti-imperialism is bring in Paradise Regaind (1671).It is in this brief epic that heroism is most fully reimagined along Augustinian and humanist lines. Here Jesus, Christendoms moral model, rejects fr eshman the temptations of patriotic conquest and, beyond these, the temptations of universal virtue. Therefore, Miltons poetic message is for his contemporary England. Even though Milton as a poet-prophet does not ignore the situations in which he is placed, the message he delivers in Paradise Lost contains a spiritual meaning that transcends the political and temporal world of his time.A similarity surrounded by Milton and Isaiah can be comprise in their pursuit of the time slight truth that God is our salvation. Isaiah foresees that truth in the future history of Israel, while Milton sees it in Adams historical preview, which is to a fault a historical review for Milton. With regard to Isaiahs prophetic vision, Hobart Freeman argues that Not every prophecy needs to be traced to a definite contemporary historical situation, nor directly applicable to the generation to whom it is spoken.If we apply this to Miltons poetic work, Milton speaks from an ideal, future base as if it wer e the present or past (166). Milton clearly demonstrates his role as prophet in the last two books of Paradise Lost by immersing himself in future events in order to allow Adam a vision of the restoration of man from his fallen state. Paradise Lost deals with Gods intervention of human affairs in history, and out of that context, delivers the spiritual message to the individual man. The first is the revelation of manufacturer truth, the second the illumination of the mind.Milton presents in Paradise Lost two important aspects of Gods purpose first, Gods macrocosmic purpose in history, and second, His microcosmic purpose in each individual soul. These two elements, historical and spiritual, are essential comp angiotensin converting enzyments of the poem. Milton in his writings shares the fundamental outlook that traces its grow to the ideology of saintly war. In the case of the Civil Wars, this occurrence is only natural considering the extent to which the Civil Wars were looked upon as holy wars both by those who upheld in battle the cause of God against the king and by those who inculcated holy war ideology into the warriors.It is no accident that the War in heaven is conceived as a civil or Intestine War (6. 259). In this sense, Abdiel, that most outspoken of nonconformists, refers ironically to himself as a dissenter and to the emcee of God as sectarians (6. 145-47). Milton saw no contradiction in the fact that as one who supported the rebellion against Gods so-called vicegerent on earth, he could write an epic portraying the evils of rebelling against Gods true Vice-gerent in heaven (5. 609).Miltons aery battle transcended the conflicts of Miltons own time and expressed the larger conceptions of holy war, conceptions that are both cosmic and apocalyptic. The historical orientation of Paradise Lost in the political context of Restoration society requires a juxtaposition of the brief epic not so much with Miltons political pamphlets before the Resto ration, identical Eikonoklastes (1649) or The Readie and Easie Way (1660). Paradise Lost is historically in adjacent proximity to Of True Religion than to any other polemical darn of the author.With all their generic differences, the two works, sharing the plain style extraordinary to the Restoration Milton, were published in a crucial period before and after the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, when Restoration society was look for for a new direction after the lapse of the Clarendon Code which had oblige existence regulations on the matter of private faith. Paradise Lost appeared when Miltons contemporaries were eager to settle the developing issue of the relationship between the public and private spheres in Restoration society.And should I at your harmless honour Melt, as I do, yet public reason just, Honor and empire with revenge enlarged By conquering this new world, compels me now To do what else though damned I would abhor. Satan, John Milton, Paradise Lost 4. 3889 2 Whoever shakes monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 4. 146 In October 1568, 114 English seamen, their ship badly damaged by a battle in the Gulf of Mexico, voluntarily stranded themselves on the coast of the Yucatan peninsula.They stepped ashore into what would become forthe British one of their most luridly imagined hells a howling tropical jungle, steaming with disease, weirdo with exotic vermin, peopled with fierce tribesmen, and, worst of all, governed by Spaniards. Fifteen days later one survivor, Miles Philips, landed back in England alone, bearing on his body the marks of chains, the rack, and the lash, and bearing in his mind the kind of stories that ghost the hearers sleep. These stories, which get ahead blackened the already Black Legend of Spain, he record for Richard Hakluyt, who included them in his 1589 Principal Navigations (9398445).We cannot adequately understand the British emp ire or its literary productions unless we see them in the tremendous Spanish backside that loomed so large at the empires birth. Paradoxically, Spains empire very nearly make British expansion impossible, and yet it created conditions that do British imperialism feasible. Furthermore, Spanish threats made English colonization seem materially necessary and above all, Spanish atrocity made the English response seemto most Protestant imaginations, at leastspiritually righteous.Indeed, Spain menaced the English Protestant imagination out-of-the-way(prenominal) longer than it menaced the English nation. As a case in point, this work examines one of the enduring literary fruits that encyclopedic piece of Protestant imagining cognise as Paradise Lost. Composing 150 years after Las Casas first compared the conquistadors to demons, and nearly a century after the last serious Spanish threat to English interests, John Milton nevertheless chose to compare his Prince of Darkness to a conquis tador. Throughout his epic, Milton amplifies Satans audacity and atrocity with frequent, implicit parallels to Cortess conquest of Mexico.These Spanish inflections afforded Milton special(a) means to demonize the Devil. They also suggest the degree to which the British were able to transmute their own daunting imperial liabilities into ideological advantages and virtues. Many parallels between the Satanic and Iberian enterprises in Paradise Lost involve sanctioned matters of setting and plot. David Quint has looked for analogues mainly to Portugal and the East, demonstrating that Satans voyage in books 2 and 3 parodies Vasco da Gamas discovery of the sea route to India, as rendered by Luis de Canoens in Os Lusiadas.But Miltons allusions to Spains western discoveries are equally suggestive. These begin with Satans commission in Pandemonium. Speaking under the Vatican-like dome of Hells capital, his lieutenant daemon climaxes the hellish pertain by proposing the easier enterprise (2. 345) of an attack on the happy isle (2. 410) of this new world (2. 403). here perhaps Some advantageous act whitethorn be achievd By sudden onset either with Hell disregard To waste his whole Creation, or possess All as our own, and poke as we were driven, The puny habitants, or if not drive, Seduce them to our Party (2. 36268) Beelzebub envisions a kind of geopolitical coup, one that we can recognize as analogous to Spains American outflanking of its Islamic and Christian rivals at the end of the ordinal century (Hodgkins 66). Also, while Satan the navigator may resemble da Gama and Columbus, as a traveler he is even more like the wily Cortes. There is more at work in Satans triple-crown voyage than mariners luck, skill, and perseverance there is also, most essentially, interpersonal guile.In his crucial negotiations at the frontiers guarded by Sin, destruction, and loony bin in book 2, Satan seems less like Columbus the earnestly persistent and more like Cortes the tri ckster. source of all, both Satan and Cortes opportunistically stoke the fires of resentment and dissension. Cortess chaplain, Gomara, writes that, upon reaching the Mexican coast, Cortes found Montezumas outlying imperial vassals ripe for rebellion and sought their aid and direction. The Indians of Cempoala and of Tlaxcala further inland were not well affected to Mutezuma, but readie, as farre as they durst, to entertayne all occasions of warre with him (Purchas 15. 509).Similarly, in Paradise Lost, Sin and Chaos, while nominally subject to God th Ethereal King (2. 978), willingly receive Satans flattering promises that his mission will yield rich booty and restore their just power and sovereignty over the realms lately possessed by the divine Emperor. I shall soon return, Satan assures his daughter and lover, Sin, And bring ye to the place where Thou and Death shall be fed and filld / Immeasurably, all things shall be your prey (2. 83940, 84344).Further on, Satan implores the personified Chaos to direct my course, for, he promises, Directed, no mean recompense it brings To your behoof, if I that component lost, All usurpation thence expelled, reduce To her original darkness and your rocknroll (2. 98084). So Chaos blesses the venture and shows the way, and Satan wastes no time in launching out on the last leg of his journey to this decrepit World (2. 1030). After Satans voyage and earthly landfall, Miltons reimagining of earth and Eden as an idealized western planting permeates the poem.Though he explicitly compares the gentle gales that portion out / Native perfumes to the exotic east of Mozambic and Araby the blest (4. 15663 track downim), aromatic breezes also announce the American shore from Columbuss first scent of San Salvador and Hispaniola, to Michael Draytons Edenic Virginia and Andrew Marvells imagined Bermudas, the west is also the land of spices (Knoppers 67). Yet Milton evokes not only pre-Columbian Americas fragrant tend delights but also its golden and urban splendors.The conquistadors came west for treasure, and Satan has an mall for it as wellthe golden Chain that Satan sees linking Earth to Heaven (2. 1051), the potable gold of Earths rivers (3. 608), and especially the vegetable gold hanging from the Trees of intent and Knowledge (4. 21820 9. 57578). Similarly, Cortes wonders at the Mexicans simplicitie in undervaluing their abundant gold and touts it as a literally consumable elixir, telling Montezumas emissary that he and his fellowes had a disease of the nucleus, whereunto Gold was the best remedie (Purchas 15. 507 8).Similarly Satan, by claiming to have consumed the golden fruit, persuades aboveboard Eve in book 9 of its transformative powers (9. 568612). However, when Satan first sees the Earth, Milton compares the view to a city, not to a garden, and the view is strikingly similar to the Spanish scouts first sight of the Mexican capital from the barren volcanic pass of Mount Popocatepetl, lookin g down on the cities glittering on Lake Texcoco. In Paradise Lost, the epic simile unfolds as Satan Looks down with wonder at the sudden view Of all the World at once.As when a Scout Through dark and desert ways with peril bygone Obtains the brow of or so high-climbing Hill, Which to his eye discovers unaware The ample prospect of some foreign land First seen, or some renownd Metropolis With flash Spires and Pinnacles adornd, Which now the Rising Sun gilds with his beams (3. 54244, 54651). Likewise, in Gomaras words, Tenochtitlan and its sister cities were an exceeding goodly sight. But when Cortes saw that beautiful thing, his joy was without comparison. Whoever hath good beholding might discern the gates of Tenochtitlan.. . . These Towres of the cities Coyoacan and Vizilopuchtli are planted in the Lake, and are adorned with many a(prenominal) Temples, which have many faire Towres, that doe beautifie exceedingly the Lake. and many drawne Bridges built upon faire arches (Purch as 15. 52021, 522, 523). Even the roadways into Tenochtitlan and Eden are similarly convenient. Gomara writes that the Mexican capital was entered over a faire calsey causeway, upon which eight horsemenne may passe on ranke, and so directly straight as though it had been made by line (Purchas 15.523). Likewise, Satan sees A transit down to th Earth, a passage wide (3. 528). In terms of Englands domestic affairs, Miltons return to poetry after 1660 was no mere quietism or withdrawal from politics, but rather, as Laura tubercular Knoppers has suggested, a complex internalization of Puritan discipline that can declare on the Good Old Cause in the very family of the Stuart monarchy. Thus in Paradise Lost, Milton seeks to restore right reason with an eventual(prenominal) view to restoring right rule at home. In other words, his regress is strategic.Similarly, beyond the domestic sphere, when Paradise Lost exploits colonial imagery so extensively so soon after the failure of Cromwell s imperial republic, Milton is not merely spiritualizing a language of defeated earthly hopes (Barnaby 56). Instead, he is practicing some other kind of strategic retreat, engaging in what Blake aptly called mental fightstiffening the hearts sinews against all temporally and temporarily ascendant tyrannies, whether in the heart or at home or abroad. He is biding his time, the readers time, the nations time, serving by standing and waiting for Providence to show his hand.Like Cortes the conquistador, like the conquistadorial Satan, Milton knows that conquest, and reconquest, start with the souls invisible empire. And Milton never fully abandons his belief that war against flesh and blood has its place in the wars of the spirit. Works Cited Barnaby, Andrew. Another Rome in the West? Milton and the gallant Republic, 16541670. Milton Studies 30 (1990). Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. New York, 1978. Hodgkins, Christopher. Reforming Empire Protestant Coloniali sm and Conscience in British Literature.University of Missouri Press Columbia, MO, 2002. King, crowd together. An Introduction to the Old Testament Prophets. Berkeley University of calcium Press, 1977. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Historicizing Milton Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England. Athens University of Georgia Press, 1994. Milton, John. Paradise Lost Paradise Regained Samson Agonistes. Collier Books New York, 1962. Purchas, Samuel. Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes. 20 vols. Glasgow James MacLehose and Sons, 19051907.