The Dialogue in Heaven: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, III.1–417

Abstract

When Douglas Bush and C. S. Lewis—not to name readers as disparate in time and temperament as Pope, Blake, and Shaw—find the God of Paradise Lost unattractive, it may be ill-advised to attempt the justification of Milton's ways with Heaven. Even the excellent refutation of the Satanist position in John S. Diekhoff's book on Paradise Lost ignores rather than answers, perhaps quite properly, those who have objected to Milton's God as not so much a tyrant as a wooden bore. My paper is addressed to such readers and to any others who are willing to start from the assumption that Milton may have known what he was about in the first half of Book III as surely as in Books I and II. I put it thus because objections have generally turned on the first episode in Heaven and have rather consistently echoed Pope's quip that “God the Father turns a school-divine.” I wish to argue that we have mistakenly read the scene as a mere presentation of doctrinal assertions conveniently divided between the Father and the Son, and that to take it thus is to forget both how highly Milton prized poetic economy and how central he made this episode to the action of his whole poem. For may not the trouble be that we have incautiously misconstrued as dogma what Milton intended as drama? In short, the failure may be not in the scene but in our reading of it.