Milton and the Apocalyptic

Abstract

WHEN MILTON chose the story of the Fall for his epic, he at once faced the problem of portraying in human terms an action and setting which are not directly accessible to human experience. By presenting not only the fall of man but the entire celestial cycle-creation, the war in Heaven, the fall of man, and redemption-he further increased the proportion of supernatural and apocalyptic material in his narrative.' As a result, Paradise Lost is concerned with the more than any other poem in the language, and the poem is accurately described by the narrator as one which relates invisible exploits (V.565) and tells Of things to mortal sight (1I1.55).2 The action of the poem is removed from ordinary human experience by its heavy reliance on supernatural agents, by the fact that the two human characters are unfallen through most of the epic,3 and by the fact that the events occur in the mythic world of prehistory, before human experience as we know it existed. Although any study of how Milton portrayed apocalyptic reality must ultimately be based on an analysis of the poem itself, a preliminary question which deserves attention is the matter of the theoretic considerations with which Milton approached his supernatural subject matter. An awareness of these theoretic aspects will provide a historical perspective for reading Paradise Lost and will suggest profitable critical approaches to the poem. In the discussion which follows I have attempted to reconstruct the elements of poetic theory and general philosophic outlook which Milton brought to bear on the problem of how to portray the apocalyptic in humanly comprehensible terms. The most important of these theoretic considerations is undoubtedly the theory of accommodation, but the strain of Platonism in Milton's poetic theory is also part of the background of the subject.