Milton and the Death of Man: Humanism on Trial in 'Paradise Lost' by Harold Skulsky (review)

Abstract

MLR, 97.4, 2002 933 Many of the best essays in this book can be regarded as corrections to Lieb's bafflingly nai've reading of Adam's version of his relationship with Eve (e.g. 'Adam's delightful account of his courting', p. 40) in Paradise Lost and beyond. J. Martin Evans raises the above objections brieflyand brilliantly; Lynne Greenberg produces a critique of the social-contract theory only apparently at work in Eden (Eve nowhere consents to her marriage); Anna K. Nardo's refreshing essay on Victorian fictional versions of Milton's love life demonstrates how male-authored texts transformed Milton into the object of the erotic glance. In such works, Milton nevertheless confidently rejects this rather manly Eros of ladies melting over a Hyacinthine poet for the even more manly patriotism of political service. But the female writers demur. Manning's The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell and Eliot's Middlemarch both reject these lush, iconic versions of Milton, emphasizing instead the limitations, even emotional deficiencies, of the scholar figure. Susan McDonald writes on Caesarean section, and Sarah Morrison questions the status of Miltonic text, pointing out that the clashes between allegorical and literal plains in the epic 'flaunt' (p. 190) the accommodated, inconsistent nature of Milton's text. John Leonard overturns the current idea that Chaos is a good thing in Paradise Lost because of some supposed congruence between the ideas of chance and freewill. The problem is that the randomness of Chaos is anything but Miltonic free will; reason is choice, and choice reason. (Only in Marvell, you might say, is the fall a stumbleon fruit.) Leonard also argues disturbingly that Chaos is eternal and that Milton's epic is thus troubled by metaphysical dualism. The implications of this are massive, and for me at least, Rumrich's reply is ineffectual stuff. And I sympathize with W. B. Hunter's proposition that the Chaos of De Doctrina is quite unlike the unique Chaos of Paradise Lost. De Doctrina again occupies a good deal of attention. Paul Sellin, always a shrewd analyst, proposes a connection to the Huguenot theologian Amyraut. Sellin is convincing , but also aware that to identify the predestinarian discussions in De Doctrina as 'Amyrauldian' is further to destabilize an already disintegrating text, as Amyraut would have no truck with much of the rest of the treatise. Likewise, while Hunter is keen to emphasize dissimilarity, Kenneth Borris counters that the epic and the treatise are aligned on the issue of Incarnation. But it seems to me that, given the peculiar sta? tus of this manuscript, this sort of game can be played indefinitely,and I cannot help wondering whether invocation ofthe law ofdiminishing returns might not be overdue. There are miscellaneous pieces, the firsttwo noteworthy, on Milton's Hebrew by Peggy Samuels, Satan and Servius by Raphael Falco, Gregory of Nyssa by Claude Stulting, Jr,the evil eye by Cheryl Fresch, and Of True Religion by Hong Won Suh. Downing College, Cambridge William Poole Milton and the Death of Man: Humanism on Trial in 'Paradise Lost\ By Harold Skulsky. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 262 pp. ?35. It's an odd yet undeniable fact that Milton stands in need of defence, all the more so today, according to Harold Skulsky, when an atheist materialism is in the ascendant, and a humanist belief that persons are fundamental to the constitution of the universe or to our understanding of it has been all but eflaced. Milton's theodicy?his justification of God's ways?was written during the birth of this anti-humanist view of agency and creation, and sought to exonerate God through an exposition of his justice and goodness. Milton places God in the dock, and creates an Advocate to argue his case through a narrative of the facts (the most effective form of plea), one which 934 Reviews does not shrink from the plentiful evidence against his client. To do his job properly the Advocate must not conceal the case against the accused, indeed should make it seem insuperably difficultto refute?this is the argument of the firstof four chapters. Skulsky thus writes as the...