Int class trad DOI 10.1007/s12138-015-0369-z ARTICLE

Milton’s Olympian Dialogue: Rereading the First Council Scene in Heaven (Paradise Lost III.56–343) Kalina Slaska-Sapala

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

The account of the redemption in St John’s Gospel depicts the Father’s decision to exercise mercy towards fallen mankind. There is a tradition, however, which imagines this decision as preceded by the intercession of the Son. This tradition was revived in the Protestant theories of the Atonement which spread after the Reformation.1 In this theory, the claims of justice and mercy are split between the first and second persons of the Trinity, with the Son imagined both as defender of mankind against the wrath of the Father and as the means of conciliation. The medieval ‘Parliament in Heaven’ had dramatized the debate between the personified allegories of Justice and Mercy as well as others who together constituted the ‘four daughters of God’.2 Milton himself had planned a similar scene in the draft of Paradise Lost as a tragedy, preserved in the Trinity manuscript, with ‘Justice’, ‘Mercy’ and ‘Wisdom’ ‘debating what should become of man if he fall’.3 In the divine concilium in Book III of his eventual epic Paradise Lost (1667), however, Milton presents a dialogue which takes place between Father and Son. There, as Barbara K. Lewalski noted, ‘instead of allegorical personifications stating fixed and

1

See the discussion in G. Campbell, T. Corns, J. Hale and F. Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, Oxford, 2007, p. 113, who argue that Milton was most likely to have subscribed to the ‘forensic’ or ‘penal-substitutionary’ theory, ‘which drew on earlier theories and on juridical language in order to understand the atonement as a legal transaction … This theory gained wide acceptance among Protestants, and, at a popular level, was responsible for the Protestant image of an angry God.’

2

H. Travers, ‘The Four Daughters of God: A Mirror of Changing Doctrine’, PMLA, 40, 1925, pp. 44–92, remains the most exhaustive treatment of medieval dramatizations of the Atonement.

3 John Milton, Trinity MS, Draft iii, ‘Paradise Lost: The Persons’, reproduced in John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler, 2nd ed., Harlow, 2007, p. 2. See the discussion, with further bibliography, in B. K. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, Princeton, 1985, p. 118.

K. Slaska-Sapala (&) Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Merton Street, Oxford OX1 4JF, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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apparently exclusive positions, the two speakers are dramatic characters, each of whom responds and incorporates the argument of the other’.4 The ‘dramatic characters’ of this scene, could equally – and more precisely – be considered within the generic framework of the epic concilium deorum: the Father and Son function here as epic characters, re-enacting dramatic moments in the divine concilia of Homer and Vergil. The opportunity to recreate an epic dialogue in which the words of one speaker are capable of altering the position of the other is a striking result of Milton’s turning to the epic genre in Paradise Lost. In his scene in heaven, Milton engages the poetics of Christian epic and its transformation of the pagan machinery into a monotheistic model (a transformation which Tobias Gregory traces in his 2006 study).5 At the same time, however, Milton casts the Father and Son as separate characters in his epic, recreating the conditions of the Olympian dialogues. Milton’s capturing of the dynamics of the ancient model allows him to transform the scenes through recusatio and retractatio: the expectation of division arising between the first two persons of the Trinity in their enactment of Olympian roles is created but also resolved by means of allusion to classical sources. By recalling the rhetoric of the Olympian dialogues, and particularly the attacks by the interceding goddesses on the father of the gods, Milton portrays the Son as a divine intercessor whose speech asserts rather than undermines the power, justice and mercy of the Father. If Milton’s anti-Trinitarian views are expressed in De doctrina Christiana by revising the scriptural tradition,6 the tensions between the unity and division of the Father and Son in the council scene in Paradise Lost are negotiated in his reading of ancient epic texts. As well as identifying a number of Homeric and Vergilian allusions previously unidentified in Milton’s scene in heaven, this paper will further consider epic allusions mediated through the Neo-Latin New Testament epics of Marco Girolamo Vida and Jacopo Sannazaro. Vida’s Christiad (1535) is a well-known source for a number of scenes in Paradise Lost (as shown by Estelle Haan),7 and Sannazaro’s depiction of the Father’s decision regarding the Incarnation and Atonement in his short epic De partu Virginis (1526) activates Vergilian allusion in a poetics of correction which is echoed in Milton’s scene. Finally, I shall consider examples of Milton’s own theological writings in De doctrina Christiana, which provide a 4

Lewalski, Rhetoric of Literary Forms (n. 3 above), p. 119. Earlier studies of this scene include I. Samuel, ‘The Dialogue in Heaven: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, III. 1–417’, PMLA 72, 1957, pp. 601–11, and M. Y. Hughes, Ten Perspectives on Milton, New Haven, 1965, pp. 104–35. 5

T. Gregory, From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic, Chicago, 2006.

6

For the most recent discussion of Milton’s anti-Trinitarian views and their impact on Paradise Lost (specifically PL XII.439–43, a scene which may revise the Johannine Comma), see De doctrina Christiana, ed. J. K. Hale and J. D. Cullington, in John Milton, The Complete Works, ed. G. Campbell and T. Corns, VIII.1, Oxford, 2012, pp. lix–lx.

7

Milton’s praise of ‘Cremona’s trump’ in his early work The Passion reveals his regard for Vida, while E. Haan, ‘“Heaven’s purest Light”: Milton’s Paradise Lost 3 and Vida’, Comparative Literature Studies, 30, 1993, pp. 115–36, established common points of contact between Book III of Paradise Lost and the council scenes in the Christiad. See also C. J. Warner, The Augustinian Epic, Ann Arbor, 2005, pp. 156– 82, in which he considers points of contact between the Christiad of Vida and Alexander Ross, and the assumption of familiarity with these works as part of the reader-response theory discernible in Milton’s poetics of allusion to pagan epic.

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blueprint for his confrontation between Christian and epic theology in his later dramatization of the Atonement in Paradise Lost. Previous studies of Milton’s scene in heaven and its resemblances to ancient epic have considered local allusions to epic scenes within a wider framework of the many genres of this scene.8 In this paper, however, I suggest that a fuller account of the shape and role of his epic allusions in Book III of Paradise Lost uncovers a uniquely epic narrative of Christian salvation, which systematically revises both its ancient and Neo-Latin models.9 The ‘dialogue in heaven’, a term first used by Irene Samuel, appears as a celestial counterpoint to the council in Pandaemonium in Book II.10 In Book III, the action, hitherto in hell, veers to heaven to depict the Father, the Son and the assembled angels in council. The Son’s offer of his life for man counterbalances Satan’s voluntary journey to Eden in Book II; and it is in the process of implementing this plan that the Father beholds him, journeying across the cosmos to Eden. The Father, from his all-encompassing spatial and temporal perspective, foretells the fatal consequences of Satan’s action for Adam and the entire human race: ‘so will fall, / He and his faithless progeny’ (Paradise Lost [hereafter, PL] III.95–6). At the end of his speech, the Father reconciles the positions of justice and mercy within his own person, dismissing the generic expectation of a ‘parliament in heaven’ type-scene. As he declares that ‘in mercy and justice both, / Through heaven and earth, so shall my glory excel’ (PL III.132-3) the narrative evokes a recognizably epic atmosphere, as ‘ambrosial fragrance’ spreads throughout heaven: … man therefore shall find grace, The other none: in mercy and justice both, Through heaven and earth, so shall my glory excel, But mercy first and last shall brightest shine. Thus while God spake, ambrosial fragrance filled All heaven, and in the blesse`d spirits elect Sense of new joy ineffable diffused (PL III.131–7) The ‘ambrosial fragrance’ not only signals the joy of the angelic hosts, but also marks the solemnity of the Father’s promise by means of a Homeric allusion. In Iliad I, the epithet ἀμβρόσιαι describes the hair on Zeus’s immortal head (‘κρατὸς 8

These include: M. Hammond, ‘Concilia Deorum from Homer to Milton’, Studies in Philology 30, 1933, pp. 1–16; J. Steadman, ‘Milton, Virgil, and St. Jerome (“Paradise Lost”, III, 168–170)’, Notes and Queries 6, 1959, pp. 368–9; F. Blessington, Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic, Boston, 1979; C. Schaar, The Full Voic’d Quire Below: Vertical Context Systems in Paradise Lost, Lund, 1982; Lewalski, Rhetoric of Literary Forms (n. 3 above); C. Martindale, Paradise Lost and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, Bristol, 2nd ed., 2002.

9

My approach differs from that of T. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 40, who speaks about a type of eclectic style (with reference to Petrarch’s Sonnet 3) in which a clash between classical and Christian allusion produces ‘no higher meaning’. For the wider context of Renaissance practices of classical imitation, with specific reference to Milton, and their mediation through the medieval romance tradition, see C. Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton, Oxford, 1993. The influence of Neo-Latin style on Paradise Lost is the subject of the final chapter of William Porter’s Reading the Classics and Paradise Lost, Lincoln and London, 1993. 10

Samuel, ‘Dialogue’ (n. 4 above).

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ἀπ’ ἀθανάτοιο’), mirroring the Olympian supremacy of Zeus ἄναξ as he nods in assent to Thetis’s supplication, and causes Olympus to tremble (‘ἦκαὶ κυανέῃσιν ἐπ’ ὀϕρύσι νεῦσε Κρονίων: / ἀμβρόσιαι δ’ ἄρα χαῖται ἐπερρώσαντο ἄνακτος / κρατὸς ἀπ’ ἀθανάτοιο: μέγαν δ’ ἐλέλιξεν Ὄλυμπον’, Iliad I.528–30). Milton’s ‘ambrosial fragrance’ also recalls a scene of divine revelation in Aeneid 1, where Venus appears to Aeneas in the guise of a huntress, a scene that reveals Venus as a ‘true goddess’ (‘uera … dea’, Aeneid I.405), as ‘from her head her ambrosial tresses breathed celestial fragrance’ (‘ambrosiaeque comae diuinum uertice odorem / spirauere’, I.403–4).11 Vergil’s scene of divine recognition forms the basis of Milton’s introduction of the Son, which, as Haan has shown, is mediated through Vida’s account of the Transfiguration of Christ before his disciples (Christiad I.936–40). By activating the language of revelation at the outset of the Son’s appearance, Milton corrects the Vergilian scene, in which Aeneas complains about the false images of the gods (the revelation of the disguised Venus had prompted Aeneas’s reproach against the goddess for deceiving him with false images: ‘quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis / ludis imaginibus?’ Aeneid I.407–8). For the early modern Vergilian commentator Juan Luis de la Cerda, Aeneas’s complaint reminds us of two charges against the Olympian goddesses: Venus is responsible for deluding Aeneas, while Juno for persecuting him: ‘Cum ait crudelis tu quoque, fit nonnulla allusio ad Iunonem. quasi dicat, illa saeuissima est in me affligendo, tu nonnihil in illudendo’.12 As an image of the Father ‘substantially expressed’ (PL III.140), by contrast, the Son reflects the quality of the Father’s speech.13 The Son’s appearance and his later speech function as a continuation of the Father’s expression, in whom ‘mercy first and last shall brightest shine’ (PL III.134). In the first appearance of the Father, Milton had mirrored the introduction of Jupiter in Book I of the Aeneid. As he turns to a depiction of heaven, and the Father at its highest point, Milton imitates the delayed appearance of Jupiter in the Aeneid and the ‘nowness’ of the narrative turning to Olympus: Vergil’s ‘Et iam finis erat, cum Iuppiter aethere summo despiciens’ (Aeneid I.224) is exceeded at PL III.56–8 11 For ‘ambrosial fragrance’ attached to the benevolent intervention of gods into human affairs, cf. also Georgics IV.415–16, where the nymph Cyrene pours down a stream of fragrant ambrosia upon her son Aristaeus (‘Haec ait et liquidum ambrosiae defundit odorem, / quo totum nati corpus perduxit…’). At Aeneid XII.418–19, Venus effects the healing of Aeneas by sprinkling ambrosial juice and a fragrant allhealing plant into the water that will bathe his wound (… ‘spargitque salubris / ambrosiae sucos et odoriferam panaceam’); though W. S. Maguinness, Virgil. Aeneid, Book XII, London, 1953, ad loc., argued that ‘this external application is evidently not the ambrosia that was the favourite item on the Olympian menu’. See R. J. Tarrant, Virgil. Aeneid 12, Cambridge, 2012, ad loc. All translations from the Aeneid are from Virgil, transl. H. R. Fairclough and G. P. Goold, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA, 1999–2000. 12 Juan Luis de la Cerda, P. Virgilii Maronis priores sex (posteriores sex) libri Aeneidos argumentis, explicationibus notis illustrati, 2 vols, Leiden, 1612–17, ad loc. La Cerda’s commentary was likely to be used by Milton: Martindale, Transformation (n. 8 above), p. 108, observes that it ‘was in regular school use … with the famous commentary of Servius and Thomas Farnaby’s Notes on Vergil’, and it is mentioned by Milton’s correspondent, Carlo Dati. 13

Haan, ‘“Heaven’s purest Light”’ (n. 7 above), p. 128, compares the phrase to Vida’s description of the transfigured Christ as ‘Genitoris imago’ at Christiad I.940. For Fowler, Paradise Lost (n. 3 above), ad loc., Milton’s participle ‘expressed’, functioning as ‘intransitive preterite’, points back to the Father, ‘[r]endering the Father’s expression in the Son’s compassion’.

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by Milton’s ‘Now had the Almighty Father from above, / … High throned above all height, bent down his eye’. The account of the Father, who ‘foreseeing spake’ at PL III.79, may be an approximation of the Vergilian fabor, a verb that through a ‘bald etymological play gives us to understand that the fata (‘things said’) are what he says’14 – an etymology that Milton had traced in De doctrina Christiana (‘… et fatum quid nisi effatum divinum omnipotentis cuiuspiam numinis potest esse?’, ‘And what can fate [fatum] be but the divine decree [effatum] of some almighty deity?’).15 Venus’s intercession in Aeneid I had provoked Jupiter to reveal his secret counsel and the fates in a sequence. On the one hand, Jupiter announces that the fates of her people are immota (‘manent immota tuorum / fata tibi’, I.257–8), as he himself is unmoved in his earlier promise (‘neque me sententia uertit’, I.260). On the other hand, he is compelled by Venus’s intercession to ‘move’ the secrets of the fates (‘longius et uoluens fatorum arcana mouebo’, I.261–2). Unlike Jupiter, who reveals the fates to comfort Venus, the Father’s prophecy precedes the intercession of the Son, who reflects the performative aspect of the Father’s speech (‘Father thy word is past, man shall find grace’, PL III.227). If the appearance of the Son announces harmony between the first and second persons of the Trinity, his first speech nevertheless presents a series of questions that appear to voice a series of charges against the Father: at lines 150–66, he voices the charges that would be raised had the Father not just made his speech about his provision for mercy (‘So would thy goodness and thy greatness both / be questioned and blasphemed without defence’). The questions of the Son recall several elements of the rhetorical technique of Venus’s first appeal to Jupiter in Aeneid I. The Son’s appeal to ‘thy creature late so loved’ at PL III.151 echoes Venus’s famous appeal ‘tua progenies’ (Aen. I.250).16 The Son’s allusion to the ‘end’ of the enemy at PL III.156–7, ‘Or shall the adversary thus obtain / His end, and frustrate thine?’, echoes Venus’s question about the ‘end’ of the narrative – ‘quem das finem … laborum?’ (Aen. I.241) – a line that inaugurates the rhetorical contest between Jupiter and Juno for the conclusion of the Vergilian narrative. Venus’s question to Jupiter is, as Richard Tarrant has noted, embedded in the question posed in turn by Jupiter to Juno in the last book of the Aeneid: ‘quae erit finis?’ (XII.793), and has been considered as introducing his final equivocation to Juno, undermining the implication created in the opening of the Aeneid that the poem’s finis is synonymous with Jupiter’s intentions alone.17 This line is recast in Jacopo Sannazaro’s New Testament epic, De partu Virginis (1525), where the question is posed rhetorically

14

D. Feeney, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition, Oxford, 1991, p. 139.

15

Latin text and English translation from Milton, De doctrina (n. 6 above), pp. 24–5. Milton’s discussion may reflect Servius’s comment on fata deum at Aeneid II.54: ‘“fata” modo participium est, hoc est, “quae dii loquuntur”’. See R. G. Austin, P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Primus, Oxford, 1971, p. 101, n. 262. 16

At Christiad I.843, Christ describes himself as ‘progenies tua’, see Haan, ‘“Heaven’s purest Light”’ (n. 7 above), p. 127. 17 Feeney, Gods in Epic (n. 14 above), pp. 137–8, notes two significant moments in Aeneid I: the first appearance of Jupiter at I.223, and in Aeneas’s speech at I.199. But cf. the slightly different interpretation of Jupiter’s rhetoric in this scene in S. J. Harrison, Vergil, Aeneid 10, Oxford, 1991, ad loc.

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by the Father alone, who, as Michael Putnam has noted,18 utters these words at the beginning of the narrative, as he looks down from a Jovian height and sees the souls of men being dragged to Tartarus: Viderat aetherea superum regnator ab arce undique collectas vectari in Tartara praedas … Tum pectus pater aeterno succensus amore sic secum: ‘Ecquis erit finis? …’ The Ruler of the gods had observed from his celestial citadel that booty drawn together from every side was being carried into Tartarus. … Then the Father, his heart on fire with ever enduring love, spoke thus to Himself: ‘Will there be any end?’ (De partu Virginis I.33–41).19 The dialogue with which the divine action of the Aeneid ends becomes a monologue that begins the story of the Incarnation in Sannazaro’s Christian epic. In causing the Father to utter these words to himself, Sannazaro not only reminds us of the words of Jupiter to Juno, but revises the moment of apparent equivocation of the father of the gods to Juno’s antagonism to Troy, as the Father appears to take the rhetorical space occupied by Juno in the narrative. In Sannazaro’s imagining of the Atonement, the decision about the Incarnation begins and ends with the Father who, ‘his heart on fire with eternal love’ (‘tum pectus pater aeterno succensus amore’, De partu Virginis I.40) takes the narrative and allusive place occupied by Juno, who appears early in the Aeneid ‘nursing an eternal wound in her breast’ (‘cum aeternum seruans sub pectore uulnus’, I.36) and with heart and mind inflamed with rage and resentment (‘necdum etiam causae irarum saeuique dolores / exciderant animo’, I.25–6, and ‘Talia flammato secum dea corde uolutans’, I.50). In Paradise Lost, the Son’s question about the Father’s ‘end’ functions as a momentary destabilization of the epic narrative, building epic tension: we see this at the exact moment preceding the Son’s volunteering of his life for man, in a scene that recreates a Homeric narrative technique. In the second edition of Thomas Newton’s 1749 variorum commentary on Paradise Lost, a commentator contrasted the ‘fragrance delight’ that spreads throughout heaven following the first speech of the Father with the oppressive silence following Zeus’s speeches among the gods in the Homeric concilium deorum.20 The ‘scene of terror and awful consternation’ that Newton describes may refer to the concilium scene in Iliad 8,21 where Zeus speaks out 18 Jacopo Sannazaro, Latin Poetry, ed. and trans. M. C. J. Putnam, Cambridge MA, 2009, ad loc.: ‘With Ecquis erit finis? Sannazaro is reminding us of the words with which Jupiter begins his speech to Juno at Vergil Aen. 12.793.’ 19 All references to the text and English translation of Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis and Lamentatio are from Sannazaro, Latin Poetry (n. 18 above). 20

Cf. Hera’s fear after Zeus reminds her of her own previous punishment (Iliad XV.34).

John Milton, Paradise Lost. A Poem, in Twelve Books … The Second Edition, with Notes of Various Authors, ed. T. Newton, I, London, 1750, ad loc.: ‘Our Milton here shows, that he was no servile imitator of the Ancients. It is very well known that his master Homer, and all who followed him, where they are presenting the Deity speaking, describe a scene of terror and awful consternation … Our author has very 21

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among the assembled gods, threatening them with a punishment he will inflict on any god who will attempt to aid the Trojans or the Greeks (Iliad VIII.10–18), which makes the gods fall silent (VIII.28–9). It is important to note that, despite the commentator’s insistence on the contrast between the Miltonic and the Homeric scene, Milton recreates a similar atmosphere as he builds dramatic tension leading to the offer of the Son and asks who will volunteer their life for man, following the Father’s question: He asked, but all the heavenly choir stood mute, And silence was in heaven: on man’s behalf Patron or intercessor none appeared, Much less that durst upon his head draw The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set. And now without redemption all mankind Must have been lost, adjudged to death and hell By doom severe, had not the Son of God, In whom the fullness dwells of love divine, His dearest mediation thus renewed. (PL III.217–26) The narrative tension built through the silence that spreads throughout heaven is heightened by a conditional (lines 222–6), a construction that strengthens the Homeric resonance of the scene. The Homeric conditional serves as a ‘quasinarrative’ device, noted by Charles Martindale at other points in Milton’s narrative, such as in the duel between Satan and Gabriel at the end of Book IV (ll. 990–7) and in the final stage of Raphael’s account of the war in heaven (PL VI.679–74), where both interventions are instigated by the Father.22 In offering a glimpse of events that would have occurred were it not for the intervention of a deity,23 Milton situates the intercession of the Son within the tradition of Olympian appeal and intercession. As John Steadman has noted,24 the Father responds to the first speech of the Son in the words of Venus to Cupid in Book I of the Aeneid (‘nate, meae vires, mea magna potentia …’, I.664), a line that had already been adapted in Proba’s Cento Vergilianus, where the words are uttered by genitor, the Father (397–403).25 In Milton, too, they are used to express the unity between the will of the Father and the Son: Footnote 21 continued judiciously made the words of the Almighty diffusing fragrance and delight all around him’ (Newton ascribes the note to ‘Harrington’). 22

Milton echoes this Homeric formulation at other points in the narrative such as at PL VI.699-78. See the discussion by Martindale, Transformation (n. 8 above), p. 99.

23

Martindale, Transformation (n. 8 above), p. 80, offers an example at Iliad VIII.130-2. Other Homeric examples include Iliad II, where the narrator states that, following the arguments of Agamemnon, ‘a return would have occurred, beyond fate, had not Hera made a speech to Athena’ (‘Ἔνθά κεν Ἀργείοισιν ὑπέρμορα νόστος ἐτύχθη,/εἰ μὴ Ἀθηναίην Ἥρη πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν·’, II.155–6). In Odyssey V, Athena helps the shipwrecked Odysseus swim to safety as a wave threatens to drown him: ‘ἔνθα κε δὴ δύστηνος ὑπὲρ μόρον ὤλετ Ὀδυσσεύς,/εἰ μὴ ἐπιϕροσύνην δῶκε γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη’, ‘Wretched Odysseus would have perished there, beyond what was fated, if grey-eyed Athene had not given him prudence’, V.436–7. English translation from Homer, The Iliad, transl. R. Lattimore, New York, 1965. 24

See Steadman, ‘Milton, Virgil, and St Jerome’ (n. 8 above), p. 368.

25

See The Golden Bough, the Oaken Cross: The Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba, ed. E. A. Clark and D. F. Hatch, Chicago, 1981, pp. 58–60.

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To whom the great creator thus replied. O Son, in whom my soul hath chief delight, Son of my bosom, Son who art alone My word, my wisdom, and effectual might, All hast thou spoken as my thoughts are, all As my eternal purpose hath decreed: Man shall not quite be lost, but saved who will, Yet not of will in him, but grace in me Freely vouchsafed … (PL III.167–75) Milton’s account of grace ‘freely vouchsafed’ avoids the imagery of concession or defeat present in Vida’s account of the Father, ‘won over by love’ (‘deuinctus amore’) in Christiad VI, where the phrase echoes the figurative defeat of Vulcan through Venus’s persuasion at Aeneid VIII.394: ‘tum pater aeterno fatur deuinctus amore’.26 This subtle disparity between the two accounts bears witness to the two poets’ contrasting Christologies and theologies of the Atonement. In making a provision for salvation through grace, Milton’s Father asserts that man shall be ‘saved who will, / Yet not of will in him, but grace in me / Freely vouchsafed’, reflecting both the Arminian theology of free will and the Calvinist position of necessary and sufficient grace, while avoiding the charge that the Father is ‘forced’ to save those who wilfully choose salvation (a charge levelled at the Arminian position).27 The reaction of the Father to the offer of the Son in Vida’s scene appears to illustrate the ‘satisfaction’ theory, where the Son’s suffering serves as payment of a debt to God incurred by the sin of Adam and Eve, and the wrath of God is overcome by the sacrifice of the Son.28 Thus, in Vida’s account the Father appears ‘defeated by love’, and responds to the offer of the risen Christ, stating that Christ’s wounds ‘have earnt’ (‘meruere’, VI.870) not only the salvation of Adam, but of all mankind (Christiad VI.869– 76). Milton’s account of the Son’s offer subverts the mercenary language of satisfaction theory through the verb ‘account’, as he offers his life in place of Adam’s: it is not his wounds, like in Vida, but his whole self that serves as price for salvation29: Behold me then, me for him, life for life I offer, on me let thine anger fall; Account me man (PL III.236–8). 26

Vida’s scene also activates the exchange between Jupiter and Venus in Aeneid I: as Jupiter does Venus, the Father kisses his Son (‘oscula nato / reddidit’, Christiad VI.845–6, cf. ‘oscula libauit natae’, Aeneid I.256). M. A. Di Cesare, Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic, New York, 1964, p. 104, noted the importance of Vida’s emulation of both the ‘volatile and plaintive Venus’ and the smiling Jupiter in Aeneid I in the dialogue between Christ and the Father at Christiad VI.863–7: ‘The contrast [of the Son] with the volatile and plaintive Venus is effective, and even more, the contrast of the Father with the half-mocking Jove’.

27 For the argument that the entire speech of the Father in Book III serves as a negotiation of charges excited by both the Calvinist and Arminian theologies of grace and free will, epitomized in Milton’s narrative claim to ‘assert the eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to men’ (PL I.25-6), see D. Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy, Cambridge, 1982. 28

Further discussion of satisfaction theory and its place among other theories of the Atonement appears in Campbell et al., Milton (n. 1 above), p. 113. 29

See OED, s.v., 2a, trans.: ‘To provide or present an account of (transaction money given or received, etc.), esp. formall. Also fig.’ See also 4b, trans.: ‘To include (something) in an enumeration or reckoning; to count or reckon in. Obs.’ See also 4c, 6a.

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The offer of the Son, with its repetition of the pronoun ‘me’, alludes to the Vergilian language of sacrifice and substitution, recalling – as Haan and, more recently, Leah Whittington have noted – the words of Nisus at Aeneid IX.427–30 (‘me, me, adsum qui feci, in me conuertite ferrum, / o Rutuli!’).30 The argument of the Son mirrors the epic intercessions on the divine level, too: unlike Athena interceding on behalf of Odysseus, or Venus for Aeneas, the Son cannot appeal to the merit of soon-to-befallen Adam. As Lewalski has observed, the Son’s appeal on behalf of fallen man, unlike Athena’s above, cannot be based on Adam’s merit. Instead, the Son intercedes with the Father in terms of mercy and of his own merit.31 At the same time, the Vergilian language of substitution is activated. The language of epic also imbues Milton’s theology of the Atonement in De doctrina Christiana, where he had considered the doctrine of the general punishment for original sin already to be attested in pagan authors. Milton cites the example of Vergil’s Juno, who, in Book I of the Aeneid complains that (Pallas) Athena was able to destroy the whole Argive fleet for the sin of one man at Troy: Verum in piaculis vindicandis eadem divinae iustitiae ratio nec ignota aliis gentibus, nec iniqua unquam visa est. Sic … Virgil: Aeneid. l. I. –Pallasne exurere classem Argivuˆm, atque ipsos potuit submergere ponto, Unius ob noxam–? However, the same principle of divine justice in avenging acts that demand atonement has been seen neither as unknown to other races nor as ever unfair. … So … Virgil, Aeneid [Book] I. [39-41]: … Could Pallas burn up the Argives’ fleet, And drown the men themselves in the deep, Because of one man’s wrongdoing …? (De doctrina Christiana I.11).32

30 Haan, ‘“Heaven’s purest Light”’ (n. 7 above), p. 133: ‘In Vida the offer to die in the place of another as conveyed by the heightened tone and adsum (825) recalls the words of Nisus in Aeneid 9.427–30 as he attempted to die in Euryalus’s place. Milton transposes the Son’s offer to make it the central point of the heavenly proceedings. Nisus volunteered to die for a fellow man; Christ volunteers to die for all mankind … The repetition of the pronoun me and the express wish that anger be turned upon the speaker suggest that Milton, like Vida, is echoing Nisus’s words: me, me adsum quifeci, in me convertite ferrum (9.427).’ L. Whittington, ‘Vergil’s Nisus and the Language of Self-Sacrifice in Paradise Lost’, Modern Philology, 107, 2010, pp. 588–606, considers the repetition ‘me … me’ in this passage as an echo of Nisus’s speech in Aeneid IX.427–30, deliberately revising the ambiguity of the Vergilian association of a counternarrative in the Aeneid. 31

Lewalski, Rhetoric of Literary Forms (n. 3 above), p. 116: ‘In the Odyssey, Athena, goddess of wisdom, plays the suasory role in the Council of the Gods. Appealing to the same principles of justice that rightly condemned Aigisthos, she bespeaks pity and aid for beleaguered Odysseus, who is agreed to be wise and worthy. By contrast, the Son’s pleas for fallen man (hardly wise and worthy) are appeals for mercy, not justice’.

32

I give the text and English translation according to Milton, De doctrina Christiana (n. 6 above). Hale notes, p. 426, n. xii, that ‘[t]he passage … shows Milton drawing on the question of theodicy as found in ancient epic.’

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Where an act of impiety was performed, the death of one results in the death of many in the reckoning of the gods, and becomes, in Milton’s treatise, an image for the damnation of the entire human race by original sin. In the Aeneid, it is the Trojan helmsman Palinurus who emerges as the human ‘double’ for the Greek Ajax, whose life is offered to the gods for the safe passage of the Trojan ships. In the scene of the crucifixion in the Christiad, Christ’s exclamation at V.502–3, ‘heu quianam extremis genitor me summe periclis / deseris?’, recalls the words of Palinurus during the storm at the beginning of Aeneid V: ‘heu quianam tanti cinxerunt aethera nimbi? / Quidue, pater Neptune paras?’ (V.13–14).33 Palinurus’s question (‘quid … paras?’) is particularly apt: Neptune is indeed planning something, an action that will be revealed at the end of Book V, where Palinurus will be offered as a sacrifice for the Trojans’ safe passage through the storm. Neptune announces this plan to Venus at V.815, describing him as a sacrifice of one for all, ‘unum pro multis’.34 As the action moves to heaven – departing from the Gospel accounts of Christ’s passion – Vida evokes a further epic scene, in which Homer’s Zeus grieves for the imminent death of his son Sarpedon and confides in Hera, who reprimands him (Iliad XVI.431–61). The allusion to Iliad XVI is mediated in Vida through its Vergilian ‘correction’ in the dialogue between Hercules and Jupiter about the death of Pallas in Aeneid X: Audiit has summus voces pater; audiit omnis coelestum chorus. Ipse (alta secum omnia mente versabat genitor, nutu haud oblitus agi rem nempe suo) stetit immotus seseque repressit. The supreme father heard these cries; all of the heavenly choir heard it. But He (the father weighed all things with himself deep in his mind, not forgetting that surely a thing is done by his nod) stood his ground, unshakeable, and restrained himself. (Christiad V.504–7) In the anaphoric ‘audiit … pater; audiit …’, Vida may recall the pathos of the dialogue between Jupiter and Hercules in Aeneid X, echoing the reaction of Hercules to the appeal of Pallas (‘audiit Alcides iuuenem magnumque sub imo / corde premit gemitum lacrimasque effundit inanis’, X.464). In Vergil’s scene, Jupiter reminds Hercules of his duty towards the other gods and the wider fates, as the latter grieves for his prote´ge´, Pallas. He alludes to ‘my son Sarpedon’ (‘Sarpedon, mea progenies’, X.471), who died at Troy, strengthening the epic link between Virgil’s Jupiter and Homer’s Zeus. 33

The question which follows in l. 503, ‘aut gnati quo tibi cura recessit’, echoes Venus’s words at Aeneid II.595 (‘aut quonam nostri tibi cura recessit?’), where the goddess reproaches Aeneas for neglecting her counsels. The words of Christ balance the sense of frustrated ignorance of divine plans as expressed by the human character (Palinurus) with a reproach by a divine figure demonstrating anthropomorphic ignorance of human action (Venus). Vida’s fusion of human and divine speech in the language of Christ in his epic, with their mixed agenda and perspectives, is fitting for a figure who exhibits both divine and human qualities at this moment.

34 For a discussion of the Vergilian motif of ‘the one and the many’ in the epics of Lucan and Statius, see P. R. Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 3-10.

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But unlike Homer’s Zeus who is dissuaded from saving his son by Hera, Vida’s Father does not need a divine speaker to remind him of his duty towards fate and the other gods, as Hera does Zeus in Iliad XVI – he himself recalls (‘haud oblitus’)35 the nod of Zeus which gives the words of Zeus their weight in Iliad I, and the consequences of which include allowing the death of his own son. Like Vergil’s Jupiter, Vida’s Father exercises Stoic virtue: he ‘represses himself’ (‘seseque repressit’) and holds off the legions arming in heaven, as they prepare to avenge Christ and seize him from death. He is immotus, an epithet used by Jupiter of the fates themselves at Aeneid I.257.36 Vida’s account of the Father enduring the death of his Son combines the technique of showing the pity of the Father through Homer’s Zeus with the restraint of Vergil’s Jupiter. Haan saw the timing of Milton’s dialogue as one of the key ways in which Vida’s dialogue is transformed, in that the events in Milton’s account precede the Incarnation.37 In Book VII, Raphael relates the Father’s prophecy of a kingdom in which heaven and earth intermingle, in which ‘earth be changed to heaven, and heaven to earth’ (PL VII.160).38 The Father’s prophecy predates even the creation of Eden. The refrain-like ‘without end’ echoes the Jovian ‘imperium sine fine dedi’ (Aeneid I.279) as the Father announces the creation of ‘Another world’: Another world, out of one man a race Of men innumerable, there to dwell, Not here; till, by degrees of merit raised, 35 Vida’s use of oblitus in this context is a marker of poetic intertextuality, a function associated with verbs of memory in Latin literature at least since G. B. Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, transl. C. Segal, Ithaca and London, 1986. 36

Cf. the description of Aeneas resisting Dido’s entreaties at Aeneid IV.331–2. Aeneas’s ‘steadfast gaze’ and the suppression of his pain is directed by Jupiter himself: ‘ille Iovis monitis immota tenebat / lumina et obnixus curam sub corde premebat’. 37 Haan, ‘“Heaven’s purest Light”’ (n. 7 above), p. 128: Milton’s account ‘invert[s] the order of events in Vida. There the Son’s offer to die preceded the Father’s speech; in Paradise Lost it follows upon the Father’s words to constitute the professed fulfillment of a condition. Milton has also transformed what was in Vida an interaction between earth and heaven into a debate located solely in heaven itself. Vida’s incarnate Christ has not yet been born in Milton. Instead he is envisaged as pre-existing incarnation, but already emitting love and selflessness’. 38 The idea of the heavenly kingdom comprising earth, land and heaven appears in Prudentius’s Apotheosis, 153: ‘qui mare qui terras qui lucida sidera fecit’, a line echoed in Vida’s invocation to the spirit ‘who fill[s] the sea, earth and sky’ (‘qui mare, qui terras, qui coelum numine comples’, Christiad I.1). Vida’s line echoes Venus’s reproach towards Jupiter in Aeneid I, where the goddess reminds him of the promise given to the Trojan race, a people ‘who will hold the sea and all lands beneath their sway’ (‘qui mare, qui terras omnis dicione tenerent’, I.236). The diction of Vida’s line closely mirrors Vergil’s: the ablative of means, dicione, uttered by Venus, is replaced with numine, and the end-stopping of the line is maintained (contrast with Jupiter’s account of Juno in his prophecy to Venus at Aeneid I.280, ‘quae mare nunc terrasque metu caelumque fatigat’– a fitting account of her attempts to thwart the foundation of Troy). In Vida’s narrative, the spiritual promise of the kingdom of God is achieved through the earthly kingdom. Golden Rome, aurea Roma, becomes the future of the Christian Roman empire, and is transformed into an apotheosis of the present age. In this way Vida fulfils and extends the Vergilian prophecy, a technique which Di Cesare, Vida’s Christiad (n. 25 above), has analysed. See also P. R. Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature, Cambridge, 2012, p. 419: ‘Christ’s victory and fame [in the Christiad] are expressed through the vocabulary of Virgil’s Roman imperialism, whose military conquests will be outstripped by the spiritual conquests of Christianity’.

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They open to themselves at length the way Up hither, under long obedience tried; And Earth be changed to Heaven, and Heaven to Earth, One kingdom, joy and union without end. (PL VII.155–61) The Father’s first prophecy appears to be frustrated at the beginning of his speech in Book III: instead of opening ‘to themselves at length the way / Up hither’, to heaven, Adam and Eve will fall by their own powers: ‘They trespass, authors to themselves in all’ (PL III.122). The Father’s prophecy of the Fall of man and defence of their free will echoes the complaint of Zeus in the first council scene in the Odyssey (discussed most recently by David Quint for the role it plays in Milton’s narrative).39 At the end of his chapter on predestination in De doctrina Christiana, Milton had given the example of Homer’s Zeus in the council scene in Odyssey I as a pagan exemplum of his theology of free will: that men are responsible for their deeds was proven ‘even by the pagan Homer’, whose Zeus expresses a frustration at men who blame the gods for their sufferings, when they themselves are to blame for their sufferings that arise ‘out of their own recklessness’40: Accusant enim revera Deum, tametsi id vehementer negant: et ab Homero etiam ethnico egregie` redarguuntur, Odyss. I. 7. αὐτῶν γάρ σϕϵτέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο Suis enim ipsorum flagitiis perierunt. Et rursus, inducta Iovis persona: ὦ πόποι, ο ον δή νυ θϵοὺς βροτο α τιόωνται! ἐξἡμέων γάρ ϕασι κάκ’ ἔμμϵναι. ο δὲ κα αὐτο σϕῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἅλγϵ’ ἔχουσιν. Papae, ut scilicet Deos, mortales accusant! Ex nobis enim dicunt mala esse: illi vero ipsi Suismet flagitiis, praeter fatum, dolores patiuntur. ‘For they actually accuse God, although they strenuously deny it; and they are superbly confuted even by pagan Homer, Odyssey, I. 7: For by their own personal outrages they perished.

39

D. Quint, Inside Paradise Lost. Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic, Princeton and Oxford, 2014, p. 59: ‘irritated at the prospect of the impending Fall, the Deity takes us back to the beginning of the Odyssey’. See also Quint’s bibliography at p. 256, n. 42. 40

Blessington, Paradise Lost (n. 8 above), p. 48, argues that these lines are the locus classicus of ancient theodicy in epic. Stephanie West, in A. Heubeck, S. West, J. B. Hainsworth, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, I, Oxford, 1988, p. 77, n. ad 32–3, places greater emphasis on the rhetoric of the statement within the wider context of the Homeric narrative and argues that blaming the gods is ‘a standard feature of Homeric conversation, sometimes serious and sincere, sometimes a way of disclaiming responsibility.’

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And again, when the character of Jupiter has been brought in: Oh dear! how indeed mortals reproach gods! For they say that evils come out of us, yet they themselves By their own outrages suffer sorrows beyond fate.’41 Zeus’s speech evoked a comment about its decorousness by the Renaissance translator and commentator Jean de Sponde (Spondanus), for whom the speech by the pagan god is ‘worthy of a Christian’ (‘Elegans est his locus, & non Ethnico, sed Christiano homine plane dignus’, ad 33).42 Spondanus (ad Homer, Odyssey I.7) also notes a link in the diction of Zeus’s complaint of men who suffer ‘σϕῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν’ (‘by their own outrages’, Od. Ι.34) and the narrative account of the loss of Odysseus’s companions, who perished ‘σϕϵτέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν’. The example is also given prominence in the passage from Milton’s De doctrina Christiana quoted above: this phrase is isolated in his Homeric exemplum and furnished with an additional Latin translation.43 The prominence given to this example is reflected in the diction of the Father in the council scene in Paradise Lost and resolved in the portrayal of the Son’s intervention in the human narrative. Unlike Odysseus, whose inability to save his companions places him on a par with Zeus, Christ, the divine and human hero of Paradise Lost, can save his companions who ‘trespass, authors to themselves in all’ (III.122). The voluntary offer of the Son balances the complaint of the Father in Milton’s council scene and elicits the final prophecy, incorporating and foreshadowing the Incarnation: ‘thy merit, / Imputed, shall absolve them who renounce / Their own both righteous and unrighteous deeds’ (III.290–3).44 The condensed epic narrative told by the Father at lines 294–7 (‘So man … will die / And dying rise, and rising with him raise / His brethren ransomed with his own dear life’) functions as a retelling of the Aeneid mediated through Vida’s presentation of Christ as the hero who will ‘by his death bring the souls of the pious to paradise’ (‘morte sua manesque pios inferret Olympo’, Christiad I.7).45 It is through the intercession and offer of the Son, activating the language of epic prophecy, that the fullness of the 41

Milton, Doctrina (n. 6), pp. 116–19.

42

J. de Sponde, Homeri quae extant omnia: Ilias, Odyssea, Batrachomyomachia, Hymni, poematia aliquot, Basel, 1583. 43

Campbell et al., Milton (n. 1 above), p. 150, note that parallel translation is not Milton’s usual practice and conclude that in this example ‘the needs of faithful clarity are uppermost’. 44 The Son’s merit appears as the counter-image of image of Satan, who appears in the council of Pandaemonium ‘exalted … by merit raised / To that bad eminence’ (PL II.5–6) among his peers, and whose ‘sense of injured merit’ (I.98), moreover, raises him alone ‘with the mightiest to contend’ (I.99). 45 In Vida’s invocation, the destination of Christ’s heroic journey is literally extended, appearing at the end of the line: compare Vida’s ‘pios inferret Olympo’ at the end of l. 7 with Aeneid I.6, which begins with ‘inferret deos Latio’. Christ will not lead his people to a human city, as Aeneas does, but to heaven itself, expressed through epic diction as ‘Olympus’, a region barred to mortals in the traditional world of heroic epic, ‘opening the blocked path to Olympus,’ as Sannazaro states in his own proem (‘obstructique viam patefecit Olympi’, De partu Virginis I.4). As Burrow, Epic Romance (n. 9 above), p. 276, has noted, the pietas of Christ himself and that of those he has redeemed become one, foretelling Christian piety and enabling all humans to share in the heroic quality of Christ. See also E. Contzen, R. Glei, W. Polleichtner and M. Schulze-Roberg, Marcus Hieronymus Vida, Christias, II, Trier, 2013, ad Christiad I.7.

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Father’s plan for the narrative of salvation is revealed, as the Father declares: ‘All hast thou spoken as my thoughts are, all / As my eternal purpose hath decreed’ (PL III.171–2). This paper has considered the role of allusion to Homeric and Vergilian Olympian scenes as actively serving the theodicy of Milton’s first dialogue between the Father and Son in heaven. Through widely placed allusion, Milton’s scene creates multiple points of contact between the theology of the Atonement and the imagining of the Olympian scenes, the features of prophecy, intercession and the activation of charges against the presiding father of the gods – charges which Milton resolves through a poetics of correction in Vergilian allusion developed in dialogue with the New Testament epics of Vida and Sannazaro. Ancient epic imaginings of divine justice and free will influenced Milton’s theology of the Atonement in De doctrina Christiana, as well as its dramatization in Book III of Paradise Lost, and the Christian message of this scene is shaped by its interaction and generic placement within the tradition of ancient epic. As we have seen, the relative success of Milton’s theodicy can be better appreciated by considering how he redefines the actions, motivations and results of the epic Olympian dialogues. Acknowledgments My debts for this piece are many. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Stephen Harrison, Frances Muecke, David Norbrook, and Tobias Allendorf. I also wish to thank the editor, Jill Kraye, and the anonymous reviewers for IJCT for their constructive comments.

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