Pedagogy or Gerontagogy: The Education of the Miltonic Deity

Abstract

When Gonerill and Regan in King Lear squabble with their father concerning the number of his retinue, reducing it by stages from one hundred to five, Shakespeare is parodying the scriptural topos of the divine whereby the irascible Old Testament Deity is challenged by a presumptuous human intercessor. In one of these encounters in the book of Genesis, Yahweh and Abraham wrestle over the ever-declining number of righteous inhabitants needed to save the city of Sodom an exercise comparable to that by which the enraged English monarch is coerced by his superior interlocutors into accepting the smallest retinue possible to uphold his honor. Shakespeare's is illusory, for Lear is controlled by his daughters, but the question of whether Yahweh is manipulated by his chosen son Abraham, or vice versa, is problematical for biblical exegetes. Milton reencodes this confrontation in his justice debate between father and child in Paradise Lost, book III; Milton's Son of God repeats verbatim Abraham's challenge to Yahweh in Genesis 18.25: be from thee far, / That far be from thee, Father, who art judge / Of all things made, and judgest only right (III, 1 53-55). l The Miltonic source of this intercessory debate from Genesis, as well as the unmistakable verbal and thematic echoes from two Mosaic encounters with God in Exodus, chapter 32, and Numbers, chapter 14, has been recognized since Thomas Newton's 1749 edition of Paradise Lost, and more recently critics have offered several interpretations to account for Milton's use of these biblical passages.2 However, I will contend that these critics and Milton's Son of God coalesce in misunderstanding Milton's God, as well as Milton's appropriation of the scriptural topos, which results in their mutual misreading of the scene in Paradise Lost. Modern criticism of Milton's council in heaven starts with Irene Samuel's Reconsideration, in which she correctly argued that the first four hundred lines of book III comprised a divine debate between distinct characters rather than an inartistic presentation of crucial theological material.3 Merritt Y. Hughes responded with a scholarly article which argues two important premises that remain accepted by most critics to this day.