Milton's Loves: From Amity to Caritas in the Paradise Epics

233 Pages·2023·1.616 MB·English

by  Rosamund Paice

Milton’s Loves
This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise
Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false
loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion.
In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the
Paradise epics, it reveals Milton to have made creative use of the tensions
between philosophical ideals, social conventions, and the rather messier
ways in which love emerges in practice. Love, so central to Milton’s view
of Edenic joy and obedience to God, unsettles earthly and heavenly
communities and is the origin of Miltonic transgression. Milton’s Loves
sheds new light on some of the most prominent concerns of Milton
scholarship, including why Milton’s God is so difficult for readers to
connect to, Satan’s apparent heroism, Milton’s radical theology, and
the nature of Milton’s muse. It is a book that will appeal to students
and scholars of Milton and early modern studies more broadly and is
structured in a way that will aid easy reference.
Rosamund Paice is Associate Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle
University and Northumbria University.
Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature
and Culture
Titles include:
Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind
Edited by Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon
Literature and Historiography in the Spanish Golden Age
The Poetics of History
Sofie Kluge
From Narcissism to Nihilism
Self-Love and Self-Negation in Early Modern Literature
Anthony Archdeacon
Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent
Mary Sidney Herbert, Mary Sidney Wroth, and their
Genealogical Cultures
Marie H. Loughlin
Dante Alive
Essays on a Cultural Icon
Francesco Ciabattoni and Simone Marchesi
Private Honour and Noble Masculine Image in Early Modern England
Sir Robert Sidney and His Contemporaries
Erika D’Souza
Milton’s Loves
From Amity to Caritas in the Paradise Epics
Rosamund Paice
To learn more about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Studies-in-Renaissance-Literature-and-Culture/book-series/
SE0537.
Milton’s Loves
From Amity to Caritas in
the Paradise Epics
Rosamund Paice
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Rosamund Paice
The right of Rosamund Paice to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Paice, Rosamund, author.
Title: Milton’s loves : from amity to caritas in the Paradise epics /
Rosamund Paice.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge
research in renaissance literature and culture | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022050701 (print) | LCCN 2022050702 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost. | Milton, John,
1608–1674. Paradise regained. | Love in literature. | LCGFT: Literary
criticism.
Classification: LCC PR3562 .P23 2023 (print) | LCC PR3562 (ebook) |
DDC 821/.4—dc23/eng/20221212
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050701
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050702
ISBN: 978-1-032-39021-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-39028-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-34806-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003348061
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Critical Loves 2
2 The Loves of an Educated Man 5
3 Love and Emotion 7
4 Love and Conflict 9
5 An Unlikely Couple 11
6 ‘Milton’s Bogey’ 14
7 Milton’s Epic Loves 16
1 Lessons in Love: Raphael and Adam 27
1.1 Virtuous and Obedient Love 28
1.2 Loving Things 35
1.3 Ascending and Descending Ladders 38
1.4 ‘The Affable Arch-Angel’ 42
2 Falling in Love: Adam and Eve 56
2.1 The Terms of Marriage 58
2.2 Separation 62
2.3 The Theory and Practice of Love 69
3 Strange Love: God the Father 86
3.1 Fatherly Distance 87
3.2 Princely Companionship 94
3.3 Creating an Equal 99
3.4 ‘All in All’ 102
vi Contents
4 The Anti-Friend: Satan 114
4.1 False Friendship 114
4.2 Companions of Woe 125
4.3 The Temptation of Friendship 136
4.4 Satan’s Solitude 141
5 Suspended in Love: The Son 149
5.1 Between God and Humans 150
5.2 The Missing Body 163
5.3 ‘The Glorious Eremite’ 169
6 In the Name of Love: The Narrator and Muse 177
6.1 One or Two Voices 179
6.2 Visitations 184
6.3 Urania 191
6.4 Being Led 199
Conclusion 209
Index 212
Acknowledgements
I started on this project while recovering from a head injury; I completed
and revised Milton’s Loves following my redundancy in 2020, and it has
become an important symbol for me of my recovery from both experi-
ences. I would therefore like to thank, first of all, those who provided
emergency care at Queen Alexandra Hospital, the various neurologists
who assessed and advised thereafter, and two incredible GPs, Catherine
Causer and Nick O’Donovan. For the camaraderie, and even laughter,
during 2019/2020, I salute and celebrate my former colleagues at the
University of Portsmouth: Christine Berberich, Maggie Bowers, Charlotte
Boyce, Ben Davies, Benjamin Dew, Jessica Dyson, Páraic Finnerty, Mark
Frost, Christopher Pittard, Bronwen Price, Elodie Rousselot, and Diane
Warren. You made the bad times very much better than they could have
been. The other person I could not have finished this without is Brycchan
Carey, my husband, best friend, and all-round excellent person. I dedicate
this book to all of you.
I would like to register my gratitude, too, to the staff of the British
Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Robinson Library (New-
castle University), and the libraries of the Universities of Northumbria
and Portsmouth. Your assistance, as well as your physical and electronic
resources, has been invaluable, especially across the Covid lockdowns.
Many other people have helped me over the course of this project,
some by inviting me to give research talks, others by reading drafts, and
others still by providing moral support or chatting about all or nothing
whatsoever to do with this book. Thank you, Pascale Aebischer, Scott
Alexander, Dave Andress, Janet Bryant, Kate Chedgzoy, Angie Crack, Ella
Dzelzainis, Mike Esbester, Andrew Frayn, Rob Frith, Emmanuel Godin,
Claudine van Hensbergen, Meiko O’Halloran, Becca Jiggens, Jennifer
Jones, Simon Kövesi, Moray McAulay, Liz Moore, Alix Paice, Cas Paice,
Christine Paice, Tony Paice, Jennifer Richards, Gillian Skinner, David
Stewart, Natalya Vince, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson, Helen Williams, and
Rachel Willie.
viii Acknowledgements
Finally, I would like to thank the editors of Early Modern Literary
Studies for the permission to use and develop material from an essay
published in a Special Issue of that journal in 2014 (‘Falling in Love and
Language: Earthly Companionship and Spiritual Loss in Paradise Lost’)
and the editors and readers at Routledge for their support and advice in
bringing Milton’s Loves to press.
Introduction
Looking down on Eden, Milton’s God observes Adam and Eve ‘Reaping
immortal fruits of joy and love, / Uninterrupted joy, unrivald love’ (PL
3.67–68).1 Soon, however, this emphatically joyful and loving couple will
‘hearken to [Satan’s] glozing lies, / And easily transgress’ (PL 3.93–94).
We know the theological questions: why did a couple created ‘good’ (Gen-
esis 1:3) transgress, and why did God permit evil to enter his creation to
begin with? This book argues that Milton’s explanation is love, or rather
loves, since the affections and interpersonal relations of his characters
point to the multiple constructions of love found in classical and Christian
traditions. For Milton, love was not simply a matter of preference or emo-
tional need: loving appropriately was tied to philosophical constructions
of virtue as well as a consciousness of humankind’s place in a God-created
world. While Milton draws aspects of classical philosophy into a synthesis
with Christian teachings (as did Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and
Desiderius Erasmus before him), his poetry exploits the uneasiness of that
synthesis. Throughout the Paradise epics, Milton repeatedly complicates
abstract understandings of love by making creative use of the tensions
between philosophical ideals, social conventions, and the rather messier
ways in which love emerges in practice. In the predicaments and actions
of his epic lovers, he places those tensions at the heart of not only redemp-
tion but also creation, temptation, and transgression.
Milton has God himself pronounce on the relation between human love
and susceptibility to transgression. Still looking down from heaven, he
explains that he made humans and all other created beings ‘just and right, /
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’ (PL 3.98–99), because ‘Not
free, what proof could they have givn sincere / Of true allegiance, constant
Faith or Love [?]’ (PL 3.103–104). The ability to choose (whether actions
or lovers) is, in the Christian scheme, founded in God’s gift of free will,
but with free will came the requirement to love God consciously, ratio-
nally, and above all, voluntarily. What seems paradoxical—the imperative
to love voluntarily—was fundamental to Milton’s beliefs.
Love is central to the state in which Milton’s God creates and asks
obedience of his creations; false shows of love are central to Milton’s
DOI: 10.4324/9781003348061-1