The End of Monolithic Language: Raphael’s Sematology in Paradise Lost

Abstract

T H E E N D O F M O N O L I T H I C L A N G U A G E : R A P H A E L ’S S E M A T O L O G Y IN P A R A D IS E L O S T MARTIN KUESTER Universitât Augsburg JLhe part played by the archangel Raphael in Adam and Eve’s education in Paradise Lost has long left critics with at least a “vague sense of dissatisfac­ tion.” 1 His role has traditionally been interpreted as that of a teacher sent down to Earth in order to instruct Adam and Eve and thus prevent their being seduced by Satan, but he fails, as Arthur E. Barker claims, to “prepare Adam (and Eve) for the trial to come . . .”2 Other critics refuse to take Raphael’s message at face value, interpret his rhetoric in terms of seventeenth-century theories of accommodation and Augustinian exegesis,3or they have recourse to intertextual interpretations in order to justify his behaviour (Gallagher). My own interpretation of Raphael’s part in Paradise Lost differs from tra­ ditional criticism because it redefines his role in the educational process and reinterprets the use he makes of language. Relying on seventeenth-century and modem linguistics in order to show how Milton works with the Augustinian concept of a language of transcendence, this analysis sees the archangel in a new perspective, inadvertently undercutting the need for his own strategies of accommodation. Raphael’s behaviour — although at first sight somewhat inept — can be explained within the larger framework of Paradise Lost, in which he functions as an instrument of God’s ironic teaching, meant to elicit Adam’s and the reader’s insight that God and man can speak the same lan­ guage if the gap between apparent and actual meaning in God’s message is bridged through human understanding. Such a negation of any insurmount­ able difference between earthly and heavenly languages and worlds influences our reading of Paradise Lost as well as our answer to the question of what kinds of accommodation, if any, are really at work in the epic. What I will argue is that Raphael is not only unable to save Adam and Eve from falling — which is inevitable given the context of God’s predictions — but that it is his linguistic practice that shatters Adam and Eve’s trust in the monolithic state of language. In theological terms, logos for them ceases to be the Word and becomes the word: it loses “the extraliterary properties that God’s ‘word’ was presumed to have in Milton’s religious tradition. . . ,” 4 The fall of language E n g l i s h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , xv, 3, September 1989 seemed reparable to many seventeenth-century philosophers, but in Milton’s view it could be overcome only by faith rather than science. The ideal language that seventeenth-century theorists envisioned in their “sematologies” 5was “a language free of redundancy or ambiguity, i.e., a wordthing language.” 6 The philosophers of language among Milton’s contempo­ raries believed that a reinvention of a universal language representing the order of things would lead to the restoration of a paradisal state. A prime example of such optimism is John Wilkins’ An Essay Towards A Real Charac­ ter, And a Philosophical LanguageJ In spite of the present fallen state of language, Wilkins is confident “in his ability to establish the truths of religion by fashioning a language free of affectation” (Fish 120). Milton himself shared some of this optimism early in the Civil War. His pamphlet Of Education (1644) argues that “The end . . . of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge... to be like him ... .”8However, in Paradise Lost his opin­ ion has changed, and he reacts against “the speciousness of a programme that offers salvation in the guise of linguistic reform” (Fish 128). While Wilkins, as a member of the Royal Society, was interested in language as representation of reality, Milton’s poetry relies on...