A Gust For Paradise: Milton's Eden and the Visual Arts.

Diane Kelsey McColley. Milton's Eden and the Visual Arts. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. xx + 306 pp. + 60 figs. $49.95.

Diane Kelsey McColley, the author of Milton's Eve, has now written a second essential book for contemporary readers of Paradise Lost. As its subtitle suggests, her new book is concerned with Milton's poetry and the visual arts, especially with depictions of the Garden of Eden in illuminated manuscripts, paintings, frescoes, and prints. The book is worth its price for the illustrations alone, the details of which, finely brought out in McColley's perceptive commentary, are endlessly fascinating. But McColley's central purpose is suggested by her main title: that there was in Milton and in some of his contemporaries a gust for paradise and an appreciation for God's creatures that was almost ecological in nature. Something went wrong in a few late Renaissance allegorical paintings of Eden, McColley suggests. The playful animals were subordinated or eliminated, Eve became purely a temptress or even a personification of sin, and the joy which earlier painters -- both Catholic and Protestant -- took in the Edenic scene and the Edenic relationship between Adam and Eve disappeared. McColley is especially interested in portrayals of a joyful Eden which represent the interval between the creation and the temptation, and in the suggestion that this happy, natural, and endlessly various Eden might in part be recoverable.

McColley also wants to recover the innocent pleasure a reader might feel in reading Paradise Lost. As she points out, even though Milton called his poem Paradise Lost, "the far larger portion of its earthly scenes devoted to keeping paradise than to losing it creates a taste for blessedness and reactivates paradisal choices for life not only beyond this world but in it" (1). One might contrast her book with Stanley Fish's classic Surprised by Sin, which reads Milton's poem as a bludgeoning, ensnaring, and enveloping attack on his guilty readers, and one designed to make them feel badly about themselves. Other more recent studies read Paradise Lost either as a radically ideological blunt instrument or as a cautionary tale of patriarchy and colonialism. I hasten to add that McColley is far too tactful and irenic to force such comparisons herself (the blame is mine). But she is concerned to deflect or to set aside current pieties that view Genesis as "intrinsically imperial and its god coldly detached from his creatures," or as "a Levite plot to suppress Goddess-worship and subject women" (6). The culture wars she alludes to will play themselves out in due course. Meanwhile, readers who prefer to read poems in pursuit of joy and fruitful instruction rather than masochistic self-chastisement will find much to like in McColley's book.

Although it was published too late for her to have read him, her book bears some resemblance to Jonathan Bate's important recent work, Romantic Ecology. They have in common a desire not to dismiss real life and look backward toward some vaguely nostalgic "appreciation" of poetry, but rather to move forward from the hermeneutics of suspicion toward views of literature as a source of what one might call spiritual renovation -- with or without religious implications, as one prefers. Criticism, which now so often divides texts into the progressive and admonitory or the regressive and incorrect, might be encouraged to rediscover poetry and the pictorial arts as perennial and still-living sources of refreshment, renewal, and encouragement to virtuous action. As McColley puts it: "Seeing nature and human nature as innocent, cursed, and blessed, seventeenth-century visual and literary arts about Eden take us literally, symbolically, and mimetically through those three stages. Their images are hieroglyphs of real and daily choices by which we preserve or spoil or renew the world. We can . . . see defect and disintegration; or we can use these glyphic tests as purgatives and cordials by which to 'rectify / Nature' and those epitomes of nature they help us learn we are" (98-99).

Paradise Lost hardly lacks a powerful vision of evil, loss, ruin, and death. But in the end Milton dismisses nostalgia for lost innocence and sets his face forward to the hope of rebuilding paradise in this world as well as regaining it in the next. I strongly recommend McColley's book not only for its numerous fresh and delightful insights into the details of Milton's poetry and the visual arts, but even more for its renovative response to today's too frequently suspicious and accusatory discourse.

Stephen R. Honeygosky's Milton's House of God tells the reader most of what he or she may want to know about Milton's ecclesiology. Focusing on Milton's discussion of the universal church and particular churches in De Doctrina Christiana, but also alluding copiously to his other works, Honeygosky argues that Milton follows a lead left open by Luther in the direction of the radical, "gathered," or congregational church. Two or three people (or perhaps even just one person if he is Milton) agree among themselves to found and constitute their own particular church. At the universal level, God's individual saints are mysteriously united under the headship of Christ. Honeygosky views this reformative progression toward the radical church or household assembly as always a Good Thing. His Milton is always entirely admirable and correct.

At times this attitude results in some strain, as when he interprets Milton's often-deplored reservation in Areopagitica: "I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstitions, which as it exterpats all religious and civill supremacies, so it self should be exterpat, provided first that all charitable and compassionat means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled." Honeygosky oddly finds nothing to question in Milton's truly inquisitorial formulation here. Indeed, without a trace of irony he praises his unifying ecumenicism, embodied in "the gentle demeanor ('charitable and compassionate') with which Milton recommends that even Papists, the epitome of enemies, be treated" -- that is, presumably, before those who resist are extirpated (35). On the whole, Milton was an admirable man and an incredible poet, but he was not without warts. Nor were his views of church-government and religious freedom wholly lacking in instrumental violence and intolerance.

This does not, I think, represent an isolated moment of blindness on Honeygosky's part. While his book is admirable for what it says, it is equally notable for what it omits. Although ecclesiology is its central concern, nothing is said, beyond a few brief references to Wyclif, about traditional church doctrine before Luther, who is himself selectively quoted and might not have wanted to be taken for quite the latitudinarian Honeygosky makes him. More broadly, one would scarcely imagine in reading this book that there were real grounds for controversy in Milton's time about the nature of the Church. Honeygosky's evidence is selective. He presents the alternatives to Milton's views, where they are mentioned at all, unsympathetically. They are, evidently, enemies to be compassionately overcome, rather like those extirpated papists. Everything seems to lead, by a natural evolutionary process, to Milton, the last, best prophet of them all (238-39). Milton's model of a church may or may not have been admirable, or even workable, but surely it was not uncontroversial.

Lucy Newlin's Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader is too large and complicated a book to be easily characterized. As she notes, Milton's influence on the Romantics has already "spawned whole libraries" (2). Of her predecessors, the weightiest is Harold Bloom. It is a measure of Newlin's sophistication that she copes with Bloom -- who causes almost as much anxiety among critics as Milton among poets -- more effectively than most of her predecessors have done. She takes a middle path between the thesis that the Romantics were rendered anxious by Milton and the counter-thesis that they simply flowered without qualms under his benign influence. She suggests that the right description for the Romantic response to Milton is neither passive imitation nor struggle but engagement.

Perhaps the most interesting of her theses is that Milton was more like the Romantics--and more like Shakespeare -- than has usually been thought. She argues that "it has been customary to acknowledge the presence of ambiguities in Paradise Lost, but none the less to underestimate their importance." Far from being a "repressive authority figure," Milton is often open-ended and has near-Shakespearean negative capability (5).

Among the topics Newlin treats are Milton's revolutionary politics in relation to Romantic reactions to the French Revolution. His Satan has an ambivalence that allows him to represent revolution in both its heroic and its rebarbative aspects. (Yet, like most of the Romantics, Newlin leans toward admiring Satan rather than repudiating him.) Under the topic of religion, "the deeply troubled and divided attitude of Romantic writers toward religious authority can be seen to emerge as much through the amplification of Miltonic ambiguity as through revisionary misreading"(7). Like Satan, Milton's Eve provides Romantic readers with a model of creative ambiguity, who can be read either as an object of patriarchal oppression or as an exemplar of successful revolt and self-fashioning. Not all readers may agree, however, with the proposition that one cannot admire Eve without admiring Satan.

Under the heading of "subjectivity," Newlin considers Milton's Fall to have a double nature too; it represents the loss of innocence but also the gaining of experience. Again Milton provides ammunition for everyone across the ideological spectrum to draw on, from conservatives to revolutionaries. Related to this theme is Milton's imagination, which anticipates the Romantics by being both creative and perilous. The book ends with a reading of Blake's Milton as the most extended instance of characteristically Romantic responses to Paradise Lost.

Newlin's book is well worth consulting. She reveals a penetrating intelligence clothed in admirable style. Within the parameters of her sympathetic commitment to the Romantic position, she is judicious about large matters and often interesting on small points of interpretation. She is at her best on such topics as Milton's ambiguous allusiveness, his frequent indeterminacy, and his sublimity. Occasionally -- as is only to be expected in a book this wide-ranging -- the style droops and the argument defers too much to prevalent authorities (most notably in the chapter on Eve and sex). Certainly every Miltonist will find something to disagree with. But the intellectual grasp and the emotional sensibility are admirable. It is more satisfying to engage with an intelligent book than agree with a dull one.