Dr Johnson, in his Life of Milton, refused to discuss the character of God in Paradise Lost, remarking that the topic was not proper for a slight occasion. Probably many present-day readers are in sympa thy with this a ttitude, and as much on literary, as on religious grounds. They feel Milton here was trying to express the ineffable,so we cannot be very cross or surprised at having him fail; and there is not likely to be much profit in worrying over the causes of his failure, as we cannot tell what would have succeeded. It would be more sensible to make the best of the good parts, as one commonly has to do in English Literature.' I think his treatment of God so strange that it rewards inquiry. But, in any case, tactful reticence is no longer enough here, and firm treatment can at least I think counter one reaction which has become widespreaq. It is that of settled disgust, perhaps never more firmly expressed than by Professor Yvor Winters in the Hudson Review for Autumn 1956:

It requires more than a willing suspension of disbelief to read Milton; it requires a willing suspension of intelligence. A good many years ago I found Milton's procedure more nearly defensible than I find it now; I find that I grow extremely tired of the meaningless inflation, the tedious falsification of the materials by way of excessive emotion. ..'. [Comparison to the gods in Homer]. ..Milton, however, is concerned with a deity and with additional supernatural agents who are conceived in extremely

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intellectual terms; our conceptions of them are the result of more than 2000 years of the most profound and complex intellectual activity in the history of the human race. Milton's form is such that he must first reduce these beings to something much nearer the form of the Homeric gods than their proper form, and then must treat his ridiculously degraded' beings in heroic language.

One can quite see that, read in this way, the poem is very bad. But reading it so is merely one of the harmful effects of modern literary theory; Milton would not be 'aesthetic' about God like that. We can be sure of it, because he is willing to lecture very drily in the poem when he needs to. make the theoretical position clear, for example about the digestive system of an angel (v. 410). Also, he did not share the respect of Yvor Winters for the intellectual labours of the Schoolmen, or of Aristotle either, and was fond of saying that our only sound evidence about God is the text of Holy Writ. He was thus likely to feel that he was sweeping away nonsense, insisting upon reality, when he presented God in this simplified way; it would give him a certain fighting exhilaration, so far from what Yvor Winters denounced that the critic probably felt about his own bit of writing a pale echo of what the poet had felt about his epic. Milton would also consider that even this way of writing about God, though the best, was very limited because God is ineffable; in the De Doctrina, he is inclined to think that no man or angel could see God, and that God could only act through the agency of the Son. The feeling of this comes out, though perhaps not the literal meaning, when Raphael says:

Commission from above
I have receiv'd, to answer thy Desire

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a knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain
To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope
Things not reveal'd which tp'invisible King
Only Omniscient hath supprest in Night, ,
To none communicable in Earth or Heaven. (VII, 120)

Yet he was determined to present the whole of the relevant text of Genesis, however literally false in his own opinion; as by making God walk in the Garden, or punish .the race of serpents. The surface effect is much what Yvor Winters described, but Milton had a very different purpose; the requirement made him give a grim picture of God, as he came to realize increasingly, one would think, while the work of detailed imagination went forward. Such, he considered, is the only kind of thing our minds, can know about God; and the result is to give an exposure from the inside of what goes on in the minds of ( 'Christians. .I think this at least saves the poem from the pompous fatuity which Yvor Winters would otherwise be very right to disapprove.

It seems to me that Milton leaves out only one major theological doctrine, and that he was right to, although the results are rather startling. The western half of the Eurasian land mass, unlike the eastern, has long regarded its supreme God of ultimate reality as a person; but has also long realized that this is a tricky belief which requires a subtle qualification. His Godhead must be mysteriously one with Goodness itself, so that he neither imposes the moral law by ukase as a tyrant nor is himself bound by it as external to him. As regards his Godhead, he is the impersonal Absolute of Hinduism; he is built into the moral structure of the universe so as to be quite unlike other persons, and his other unique ~ powers (omnipotence,C omniscience and absolute foreknowledge) are merely

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result. If you deny that God is a person, as many people do, you will not agree with YvorWinters that the western intellectual activity has been profounder than the eastern; but you have to agree that the western theologians were trying to h4ndle a real difficulty. Milton in his poem, apart from a few bare assertions perhaps, does not handle it at all. This was partly because he thought that the profound intellectual activity had often cheated; but, in any case if God is to be shown acting in a story) we have something better to do than take his status for granted. The fundamental purpose of putting elaborate, detail into a story is to enable us to use our judgement about the characters; often both their situation and their moral convictions, or their scales of value, are very unlike our own, but we use the detail to imagine how they feel when they act as they do, so that we 'know what to make of them'. Understanding that other people are different is one of the bases of civilization, and this use for a story is as much a culture-conquest as the idea of God. Milton, therefore could not have made God automatically good in the epic; God is on trial, as the Christian Mr Diekhoff well remarked; and the reason is that all the characters are on trial in any civilized narrative.

You may still say, even after accepting this argument, that Milton does not make God come out of the trial as well as he should; and the poet could answer that it was not his immediate business to invent a new theology. That a third of the angels reject the claims of God was inherent in the story; Abdiel tells them that God should be obeyed because he is good,' and they deny that he is good; so it would be no use for Abdiel to tell them about" the refinements of Aquinas. We are bound to be impressed by the weight of their testimony. Thus Sir Herbert Grierson soberly remarked (Milton and Words-

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worth, 1937; p. 116) "if the third part of a school or college or nation broke into rebellion we should be driven, or strongly disposed, to suspect some mismanagement by the supreme powers"; he does not discuss how Milton could have avoided this effect, but I think one must agree that Milton's treatment draws attention to It, and that it is what is fundamentally wrong about the behaviour of his God. The initial error of Satan is that he doubts the credentials of God, and I, like Grierson, naturally think of a Professor doubting the credentials of his Vice-Chancellor; such a man would not be pursued with infinite malignity into eternal torture, but given evidence which put the credentials beyond doubt. To be sure, there could be no such placid solution when Milton doubted the credentials of Charles I, but the poem assumes that the cases were quite different, because God actually had got credentials. We know that he could have convinced Satan, because he actually does it when he reduces Satan to despair on Niphates' top. God need not have shown his credentials in the manner calculated to produce the greatest suffering and moral corruption for both the malcontent angels and ourselves; it is in this sense, to recall an objection of C. S. Lewis, that Shelley could reasonably call Satan's wrongs 'beyond measure'. Regarding Paradise Lost as written to justify God for creating a world so full of sin and misery, it surely deserves the astonishment with which so many critics have regarded it; and critics who argue otherwise, whether out of piety or not, seem to me to preach an immoral moral. Part of the explanation has to be that Milton wanted us to imagine the temptation which made Satan fall, to realize how Satan might reasonably come to believe that God is a usurper, or at least what the belief would feel like. Surely this must have been his purpose in writing

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the very queer words of the Father to the 'Son at the beginning of the revolt:

Nearly it now concerns us to be sure ,
Of our Omnipotence, and with what Arms
We' mean to hold what anciently we claim
Of Deity or Empire. ..
Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defence, lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our Sanctuary, our Hill. (V. 720)

Here we are actually shown God 'doubting his empire which is w hat Sa tan began the poem by telling us God had done. Many a Christian reader must have been sufficiently unnerved here to wonder whether Milton's theology was going very wrong, till a few lines later the reply of the Son reassured him that this is merely one of God's jokes. The Son regards the strategy as a plan to restore his own badly shaken prestige:

Mighty Father, thou thy foes
justly hast in derision, and secure
Laughst at their vain designs and tumults vain,
Matter to mee of Glory, whom their hate
Illustrates, when they see all Regal Power
Giv' n me to quell their pride, and in th' event
Know whether I be dextrous to subdue
Thy Rebels, or be found the worst in Heav' n. '

It is an interesting point about our feelings, I think, that we feel no objection to this answer. One might point out that the Son can only be pretending to face a test, because the magic he is being given is all-powerful; so that really his jeering is as coarse as his Father's. The same kind of hole has been picked in the courage of the divinely

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equipped heroes of Homer, and feels off the point there too; perhaps because we need not expect the Bronze Age chieftains to believe quite completely in the magic of their weapons. Even if we call the Son simple-minded here, we don't feel that is to his discredit; the youth is eager to win his spurs. At this minor point, we can be content to read the poem like Yvor Winters as an imitation of Homer. But we cannot feel the same about the joke of the Father, and as Yvor Winters said the reason is a metaphysical one; though far short of the full horror of the story. The joke becomes appallingly malignant if you realize that God has a second purpose in remaining passive; to give the rebels false evidence that he is a usurper, and thus drive them into real evil. Milton himself necessarily understood that this was part of the meaning, but he did not care to thrust it upon all readers; he wanted, without yielding on his own convictions, to make the tremendous piece of engineering as broad in its appeal as he could, acceptable to all Protestant sects. Most readers, of course, have found no such horrible implication in God's joke; they have found it pretty flat, but thereby all the more jovial in an Old Testament manner. Even so, they have II felt that such a joke, while natural enough from simple omnipotence, does not suggest a transcendent God whose Godhead is mysteriously identical with Goodness. With out quite noticing it, they are already regarding Milton's God rather as Satan does.

The force with which Satan's rhetoric hits the reader derives partly from the fact that the story makes him seem evidently right. Going through the first two books for the first time, a Christian is likely to feel that the Devil is merely trying to seduce his judgement in a striking manner; but as he goes on with the poem and encounters God he is almost bound, if at all instructed in his

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theology, to feel a secret resistance- 'This can't be God.' Satan was intended to strike terror into the reader, not to 'be a figure of farce, and such a reaction would add to the terror, or indeed be the real basis for it- 'Satan is so subtle that he is actually liable to seduce you while you read about him.' Milton would presumably become aware of this dramatic effect, but it would not be his reason for telling the story as he did. Even if he remained unaware I am not proposing a new way to read the poem, because I claim to point out what often went on in the minds of pious readers who were deeply impressed by it.

It is hard to make this claim about any view of the words by which God is made to start the whole action of the poem. All angels must henceforth obey the Christ, he says, on pain of eternal expulsion, because

This day have I begot whom I declare
My only Son (v. 600)

One would expect the readers to be shocked for several reasons. Mr Grant McColley is rather too smooth at this stage of his proof that the material of the poem was standard tradition:

During Milton's era, the belief that the Exaltation (and Incarnation) occasioned Satan's ,rebellion enjoyed appreciable literary prestige. Cp. 33)

On page 257 he admits that making the Exaltation the only cause is "unique among works closely related to Paradise Lost." Still, the Latin Battle of the Angels by Valamarana (1623) had made Satan revolt because God prophesied the Incarnation before he created man. The poet was using a reputable theory; Calvin, of all people, rejected it because the Incarnation could not be necessary till the Fall had occurred, so he maintained that Christ

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had always been King of the Angels (A. H. Gilbert, The Composition of Paradise Lost, 1947). Thus the theory would be well known among fit readers, and it would take them over the first jolt of accepting Milton's story. Both McColley and Mr Gilbert explain the shocking part, so far as they recognize it, as due to the gradual growth of the epic from a drama; thus Mr McColley feels he is winning his case when he emphasizes

the impropriety of describing God as twice exalting the Son, and commanding the angels to bow before him. Such a Divine Decree as the Exaltation was as irrevocable as it was eternal. (p. 316)

Books III and V, on this view, must report the same scene in Heaven, and different, aspects of it were merely separated for the literary requirements of epic construction. This view lets you off attending to the story, and anything which does that ends by making you feel the poetry is bad. The poem exalts the Son a third time when he ends the war, and Milton might well think that the purposes of the Father though eternal were realized gradually in time. I am grateful to Mr McColley for showing that Milton did not decide on the order of the poem till he had composed a good deal of it; for example, I have long wondered why Beelzebub is not named as Satan's 'next subordinate' at V. 670, but now agree that Milton when he composed the lines thought he was giving the character a lead-in at the beginning of the story. But I do not believe that this idea of gradual development is enough to explain any important crux in the final version. Delighted by achieving the perfect order, Milton would have the whole text as far as it had got read over to him to make sure that the details clicked into ,place; the detail about Beelzebub would not need correcting, and of course to correct it

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might involve changing a lot of lines for their musical value. Raphael may just as well never mention Beelzebub. But we are not to think that Milton was careless about revision, like a collaborator in an Elizabethan play; he would only behave like that if he came to think that an accident due to his method of composition had been inspired. When he separates these councils in Heaven, he takes for granted that God foreknew the effects of the, first exaltation of the Son, and indeed exalted the Son because he foreknew that the Son would choose the Incarnation. Hence the order of events in Milton could be seen as reconciling the opposed theories it makes God look artful, but maybe only because Milton was trying to act as chairman. We should agree, I think, that the poem was written piecemeal and fitted together gradually, but not that this makes it 'merely episodic'; it records a prolonged effort to justify God.

Masson found that the Rev. T. Tomkins, then aged twenty-eight, was the official who licensed the poem for publication, and supposed with Victorian gaiety that he could not stand more than the first Book. But this was, in fact, a time when the Anglicans really did persecute, and the poem must have been scrutinized. It is an effort to realize that Milton was fairly safe about this beginning to his story, because it used a familiar text which had always needed explaining away. "This day I have begot" comes in Psalms ii. 7, apparently as part of a prophecy that the Kings of the Jews will rule the uttermost parts of the earth, and St Paul reasonably supposes (Hebrews i. 5-8) ; that the passage had best be regarded as foretelling the! Christ. At least, he recalls it to the Hebrews among other i Old Testament quotations, but he may have believed; that this one had been applied to Jesus directly. A Pelican Book Beyond the Gospels by Roderic Dunkerley (1957) '1

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gives the rather complicated textual background, much of which was available to Milton. When Jesus is baptized, explains Mr Dunkerley, the voice from Heaven is naturally enough made to complete the quotation: "Thou art my (beloved) Son; this day I have begotten thee" in a variety of the surviving records--

in 'Bezae' and also in some early Church writers, including ...the Ebionite Gospel. Canon Streeter, a great authority on the Gospels, believed that this was the correct reading in Luke, because the tendency was for the scribes to bring the Gospels into
harmony with each other.

Thus "there is evidence of disagreement or embarrassment about the use of the phrase at the Baptism, which Milton would find interesting. Mr Robert Graves (The Nazarene Gospel Restored, I953) gives authority for regarding the use in Psalm ii as a coronation formula (viii. a), but as one based on an older ceremony of adoption (vii. d). To regard it as an adoption formula seems enough; the literal absurdity of' 'This day I have begotten this man" drove home a specific meaning-'from now on, he is to count as my son in every way'. This fits the use in the Psalm, and the Synoptists would wish to fulfil the Scriptures; but, on second thoughts, you couldn't say it to a person who was already your son, so for God to say it to Jesus might be misunderstood. Milton in the De Doctrina (Chapter V) gives a rather lengthy analysis of the extended sense of beget, including the idea of giving a special honour, as in the final glorification of the Son. He accepts the Son as begotten before all worlds and as the Father's instrument for creating the angels, though not as equal or identical to him, and of course does not think that the Father begot the Son in a human manner. His Arianism must have been

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knocking about in his mind when he boldly transferred the phrase to the occasion of the fall of Satan, text was already so abstruse that the orthodox could hardly complain. I imagine that this gave him a certain sense of glee; but, in any case, it is hard to see what other device would have given him the necessary start at ,a point of time for his epic narrative. The technical difficulty had been in his mind, because he expressed it through the voice of Adam:

what cause
Mop'd the creator in his holy Rest

Through all Eternity so late to build. ..(VII. 90)

But, however necessary the device may have been, it makes the case for Satan's revolt look much stronger. If the Son had inherently held this position from before the creation of all angels, why has it been officially withheld from him till this day, and still more, why have the angels not previously been told that he was the agent of their creation? Unless he had always deserved the position, as Milton at least believed when writing the relevant passages of the De Doctrina, the case as put by C. S. Lewis, for example, falls to the ground. Thirdly, to give no reason at all for the Exaltation makes it appear a challenge, intended to outrage a growing intellectual dissatisfaction among the angels with the claims of God. Whether or not a reader feels dissatisfied by this slight jolt in the narrative, Satan and his troops object to it so much that they find it sufficient ground for revolt. Even granting that Milton wanted to give Satan a real temptation, he was not wholly concentrated at the time on trying to justify God. But there is no need to regard this as 'a mistake; he would probably answer that he was telling us a deep truth about the nature of God, whose apparently arbitrary

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harshness is intended to test us with baffling moral problems. To give us this warning is clearly more important than simply to whitewash God; indeed that would be a very irresponsible thing to do. Such is the real defence; and one may also suspect that, in a m ore casual but more impulsive part of his mind, he was angry with the people of England for .rejecting the Rule of the Saints, and would not 'have' minded punishing them a bit himself; so far as that went, he could feel himself on the same side as his Punishing God.

His God has in any case an authoritarian character, just what one would expect from a usurping angel, which can be felt all the time in Heaven, even in the relations of the angels with one another. Probably most readers recognize the trouble about him only in this diffused way, and the effect is that they merely blame the literary treatment. But why do the angels have to be organized into an elaborate hierarchy at all? Are they organized to do something, or is it merely what is called a 'pecking order' among hens? C. S. Lewis quotes some fine passages from Milton in both prose and verse to show that he had long loved the idea of a social order which can act perfectly because certain of loyal co-operation; he connects this with Milton's love of formal dignity in both life and art; indeed the idea that discipline secures freedom, he says, is 'perhaps the central paradox of his vision'. I cannot remember which critic extracted a mystical vision, surprisingly but I think justly, from the harsh words with which God begins all the trouble by promoting his son:

Under his great Vice-regent Reign abide
United as one individual Soul
For ever happy; him who disobeys
Mee disobeys, breaks union, and that day

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Cast out from God arnd blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place
Ordain'd without redemption, without end. (V. 160)

The second line feels oddly like Wordsworth, and Milton did I believe envisage here something like the biological co-operation of innumerable cells to make a man. The eternal curses which follow make the idea very remote; indeed, for most of the time Milton rather labours, with firm good sense one would think, to make the angels very like men and evidently not parts of a universal soul. I agree that he loved the order and unity of heaven, though the poetry about it never strikes me as haunting, but he also clearly found the idea hard to combine with the traditional story he was leader who expresses affection for his subordinates is Satan, when he weeps before his troops to win their "firm accord, more than can be in Heaven".

It is convenient to bring in here, at the cost of a slight) digression, another aspect of the lives of the angels,' again best approached through the penetrating treatment of C. S. Lewis. Discussing why Eve should blush at the approach of love in the state of innocence (VIII. 510), he says splendidly that even an angel may feel a noble sense of doubt whether he is perfect enough for the scrutiny of the beloved. Her modesty can thus be welcomed, but Milton has got something else a bit wrong:

His Eve exhibits modesty too exclusively in sexual contexts, and his Adam does not exhibit it at all. I There is even a strong and (in the circumstances) a most offensive suggestion of female bodily shame as an incentive to male desire. (p. 120)

Still, if it is an essential duty for a man to keep control

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over his woman, he must also hide from her any doubts he may feel that he is superior; indeed, he can hardly be permitted to love her unless she is showing consciousness of her inferiority. What Lewis rightly finds coarse here in practice seems to be merely the doctrine of Degree which he has been recommending in theory. Poor Adam does feel such modesty, though he manfully hides it from Eve; he confesses it to Raphael, who scolds him for feeling it at all, so it is hard to have Lewis scolding him for not exhibiting it. To be sure, Adam does not feel shame about sex, which the text of Genesis would be enough to forbid; but he feels the nobler shame described by Lewis, because he tells the angel that she can make hIm feel ill the wrong when he disagrees with her. On being upbraided for this breach of hierarchy, and told that "Love hath his seat in "Reason, and is judicious," he says in effect 'Come now, what do you know about this? Have you got any sex?' and Milton to his eternal credit makes the angel blush. Raphael explains that the angelic act of love is by total interpenetration (VIII. 62,0), a thing which human authors have regretted that they cannot achieve. Lewis decides ", that the idea is 'certainly not filthy' (p., 109), but, does not explain why the angel blushes at a mere reference to the topic; it cannot be for the noble 'reason he has given.

A scholarly article in the 'journal of the History of Ideas. ("Milton's Angelological Heresies", Robert West, 1953') decides that Milton had no real theological authority for the belief, but might have been misunderstanding one of the Caq1bridge Platonists. Probably Milton would have answered that he had plenty of authority, except that his authorities had been too timid to understand their own meaning; to describe the bliss of Heaven in terms of human love is very ancient. But I agree that some recent

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bit of writing had probably impressed him before he took the bit between his teeth and fe-interpreted the tradition about the loves of Heaven in a startling manner. So~: well-read a poet had certainly read the English poets who were prominent when he was young; I think his real 'authority' had been the love poetry of Donne, published after Donne's death when Milton was aged twenty-four but famous and accessible beforehand, which frequently claims that the ideal human lovers make one soul by interpenetrating completely. As to the idea that Milton betrays homosexuality by letting angels love each other, which Robert Graves used as an accusation, and C. S. Lewis felt to need earnest rebuttal, I think that a sensitive man who took Milton's attitude to women, especially a classical scholar, would be bound to toy in fancy at least with the happiness of having an understanding partner who need not be continually snubbed. There is not much evidence that Milton felt so, but if he did it is to his credit. We know from the Divorce Pamphlets that he considered an understanding pa1;tner as the basic requirement for the ennobling of a physical act of love. Donne of course was not made homosexual by this high conception of love, because he believed he knew at least "one woman who was adequate for the purpose; to present the belief as firmly as he did in The Extasie was inherently a blow at the doctrine of the inferiority of women. Milton would perhaps consider such love forbidden, to our fallen" condition, as to the devils, but he would find nothing in it to make an angel blush. The messenger may well feel that he has been caught' out talking nonsense about love and the hierarchy of Degree, in obedience to his instructions; this is why the incident is found welcome nowadays, but Milton would need another explanation. He may simply have had unexpected feelings about blushes.

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While at school I was made to read Ecce Homo by Sir John Seeley (1866), a life of Jesus which explains that, when he was confronted with the woman taken in adultery and wrote with his finger in the sand, he was merely doodling to hide his blushes; then the book makes some arch comments on his sexual innocence, as if by Barrie about Peter Pan. I thought this in such bad taste as to be positively blasphemous, which rather surprised me as I did not believe in the religion. Milton says in the poem that the rosy red of the angel is love's proper hue, so perhaps he did, in a Victorian manner, regard other people's blushes as a source of keen though blameless sexual pleasure. I am not sure whether this is the same as what Lewis calls offensive; Lewis may have confused it with the masculine sense of power through mastering an unwilling partner, though Milton roundly insists that Eve was willing, (VIII. 485).

The question is thus rather muddling, and one would expect Milton to have a firm justification ready. I am now to offer a sublime one, which fits in with other important doctrines of the poem. The angels feel that their act of love, being a unification of only two divine natures, is a step away from making 'ope individual soul' with God. God might be expected to be 'jealous', as he is ambiguously called in the Bible, but the poem makes him noticeably jovial about the matter. Thus, after prophesying a 'Union without end' which must include even the blessed among mankind, he dismisses the angelic regiment for a bit of comfort:

Meanwhile inhabit lax, ye powers of Heav'n. (VII. 160)

They need not watch him creating the world, which they are expected to resent, but can go off and have some cosy interpenetration. Some of them take an interest in the

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return of the unsuccessful guard after the Fall (x. 25), but they are again at leisure when God summons them to hear his next proposal:

Th' Angelic blast
Filld all the Regions; from their blissful Bowers
Of Aramantine shade, Fountain or Spring,
By the waters of life, where-ere they sat
In fellowships of joy; the Sons of Light
Hasted. ..(XI. 80)

Milton gives the same haunting moan here as in his descriptions of the nuptial bower of Adam and Eve, though not nearly so well; then the first line of God's announcement of their Fall is:

O Sons, like one of us Man is become. ..

M. Saurat considered this one of God's eerie jokes, and it certainly has a mysterious tone of connivance; though it was a safe enough thing for Mil ton to use, being simply quoted from Genesis iii 22.

Apart from this private act of love, which Raphael blushes even to mention, the good angels never have any fulfilment at all; that is, never feel they have carried through something they had undertaken. The sympathetic intelligence of C. S. Lewis was quite right to dive to the basis of any social structure, but there is nothing here for him to find. In human experience, we feel this pride in an organization when there is some purpose to be served, which all the subordinates want to help forward; as in a hospital, or an army at war, or even a farm getting in the harvest, where it commonly does not need a very elaborate hierarchy. If the angels have nothing to do, their aristocrats are not even ex- aristocrats, as in Proust. The crowds who go to the seaside on a public holiday would be annoyed if someone tried to organize them,

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because they want to sit around and let the kids make sand-castles; But in a Butlin camp or'a ski-ing hotel people will put up with a surprising amount of being organized, because they see some point in it, such as learning a new trick. Heaven, surely, is not usually visualized as like a Butlin camp, let alone a hospital; a variety of mystical writers have said, always with beauty I think, that it is like being at the seaside. It is that immortal sea where the children sport upon the shore. Thus to describe the God of Milton as 'legalistic' is too charitable; what we are offered is a parody of legalistic behaviour, a thing in itself often necessary and reassuring, but also often suspected of being employed to gratify the privileged few; and it is evidently used in Heaven for that purpose alone. Such a Heaven was a forcing-house to develop the pride of Satan, which is described as his fundamental sin. C. S. Lewis jeers at him, in the course of the sustained proof that he is ridiculous, because though fighting for liberty against hierarchy he hedges by saying:

Orders and Degrees
Jar not with liberty, but well consist. (v. 790)

I have tried to show that this would not seem very shocking anyhow, but also Satan has a war on his hands, a situation in which everyone agrees that subordination is necessary. The only person who has imposed it where it is not necessary is God. As so often in C. S. Lewis's treatment, the accusation aimed at Satan comes smack in the face of God.

A member of the Welfare State need not feel puzzled by the mind of Milton here, let alone contemptuous of it; to love the idea of an ordered society, and then feel repelled on being confronted with the details of working it out, is an experience familiar to our age. Milton some

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times realized that he was describing the situation of the good angels as a miserable one, but he felt this through an immediate social Judgement of what he had imagined, not as part of the structure of his argument. Thus Raphael remarks sociably to Adam that, he would like to hear about Adam's first experiences, 'because he wasn't there "that day" (we need not deduce, like some critics, that he wasn't present at the Creation during the previous week). Gpd had sent him with a troop to guard the gates of Hell:

Squar'd intuIt Legion (such command we had)
TQ see that none thence issu'dforth aspy,
Or enemy, while God was at his work,
list he incensed at such irruption bold
Destruction with Creation might have mix!.
Not that they durst without his leave attempt,
But us he sends upon his high behests
For state, as Sovran King, and to enure
Our prompt obedience. (VIII. 230)

They knew, and they knew that God knew, that this tiresome chore was completely useless. Apparently, most of them did not want to see Adam emerge into consciousness, but Raphael says that he did, and also that he assumes God gave him a job at the time merely to disappoint him. I grant that Milton is on strong ground so far as the situation is a military one, because an army does get disciplined like this; but then, consider the morale of this army. They know that they failed to defeat the rebels, and that God need never have ordered them to try, indeed must have intended to humiliate them, because as soon as he chose he removed the rebels with contemptuous omnipotence. Similarly, when he chooses to let Satan out of Hell, he simply orders his troops out

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o£the way. Raphael knows that Satan could not get out unless God let him out, but he cannot imagine the courage ofSptan, so he presumes that Satan would not dare to come without knowledge that God had let him. Incidentally, Raphael also takes for granted that God hasn't enough control of his temper to carry through a plan if anybody happens to irritate him while he is working on it; a theologian might suspect that God only pretends to lose his temper on such occasions' (God endorses this view at x. 625). It is a timid slavish mind that we get shown to us here, such as the conditions of service must be expected to breed. Milton imagines the type very clearly, however much against his overall intention, in a quaint bit of spite expressed by the less amiable Gabriel after Satan has been captured in Paradise:

thou sly hypocrite, who now would'st seem
Patron of liberty, who more than thou
Once fawn'd, and cring'd, and servilely ador'd
Heavn's awful Monarch? Wherefore but in hope
To dispossess him, and thyself to reign? (IV. 960)

When I was a little boy, about eight I think, I read a story in, my sister's Girls' Own Paper about a catty girl who accused another girl of tight lacing, whereas the truth was, the story explained, that all these girls, including the catty one, were ill and in pain because they had to tight lace. I crept away sweating with horror, but feeling I had learned an important truth about the way people behave. This quotation seems to me quite enough to prove that God had already produced a very unattractive Heaven before Satan fell.

But there is something much stranger than this about the activity of God in the poem. The most striking case was first pointed out I think by M. Paul Phelps Morand

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(De Comus A Satan, 1939); it comes just afterwards, at the same scene of capture:

Fly thither whence thou fledst: if from this hour
Within these hallowed limits thou appear,
Back to the infernal pit I drag thee chain'd,
And seal thee so, as henceforth not to scorn
The facile gates of hell too slightly barrd.

(IV. 965)

Some critic has accused Gabriel of weakness here, taking him to mean "Don't you dare come again," but he might mean to grant Satan one hour for decision whether to go of his own accord or be dragged in chains; it is a statesmanlike proposal, though no use because Satan decides to fight at once. We know that the loyalist angels could not defeat Satan's army, though twice their number; but surely the entire angelic guard would have a fair chance to capture Satan alone. God however prevents them from trying, by hanging forth in Heaven the constellation of his golden scales:

Wherein all things created firrt he weigh' d,
The pendulous round Earth with ballanc't Air
In counterpoise, now ponders all events,
Battles and Realms: in these he put two weights,
The sequel each of parting and of fight;
The latter quick flew up, and kickt the beam. (IV. 1000)

Gabriel interprets this to mean that God forbids him to try, pointing out that he and Satan can only do what Heaven permits; so Satan escapes, 'murmuring', but free to continue with the Temptation. I do not see what the incident can mean except that God was determined to make man fall, and had supplied a guard only for show; as soon as "the guards look like succeeding he prevents

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them. No doubt the Latin pun on ponder helps to emphasize that the whole incident is meant to be allegorical, but no translation of it into more spiritual terms can alter the basic fact about it. (This reflection is not from' Bertrand Russell but from Milton himself in De Doctrina Chapter II.) Satan still has to be clever; he remains in darkness by flying round the world every day for a week, .
and so on; but God has saved his liberty at the crucial point. Milton does not pick up Satan's story again till four books later,' and then remarks that he had 'fled before the threats' of Gabriel (IX. 55), a very official accoun t of what had happened. However, at the time Milton' gave a reason for God's action: that he stopped the fight because it might have spoiled his new-made universe (IV. 990). In the age of the Cobalt Bomb, one is inclined to find this rational and sympathetic of God; but,
still, if he is going to send nearly all of us to Hell as a result of Adam's Fall, we cannot be expected to agree with him that it was less important than the scenery. Yvor Winters' view that the poem is just,?n imitation of Homer is especially plausible here, but .as a rule Milton can make his learned imitations fit his purpose, and we may be sure he would have claimed that this one did too. I think we are struck by the incident, when it is pointed out, merely because we refuse to notice that similar things are going on all the time; we can swallow the general layout of 'Fate' by which God arranges what he has preordained, but it feels different when he nips in and prevents his own troops from doing what he had ordered them to do. Afterwards he forgives them for their failure, remarking with his usual grinding con tempt for them that they couldn't have been the smallest use anyhow (x. 35). Milton himself has just rubbed the point home here, using the insinuating hiss which he gives his Satan

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when particularly serpent-like; God of course knew at once about the Fall, he remarks,

for what can scape the Eye
Of God All-seeing, or deceive his Heart
Omniscient, who in all things wise and just

Hinder'd not Satan. .. (x. 5)

M. Morand well points out that God was quite right to forgive the angelic guard; if they were punished, there would be a danger of their considering who was the real culprit. Satan in Paradise Regained makes the same point, though this may be irrelevant-perhaps Milton did not try to make Satan's development consistent in both poems:

Tis true, I am that Spirit unfortunate,
Who leagu'd with millions more in rash revolt
Kept not my happy Station, but was driv' n
With them from bliss to the bottomless deep,
Yet to that hideous place not so confin'd
By rigour unconniving, but that oft
Leaving my dolorous Prison' I enjoy
Large liberty to round this Globe of Earth,
Or range in th' air, nor from the Heav'n of Heav'ns
Hath he excluded my resort sometimes.
I came among the Sons of God, when he
Gave up into my hands Uzzean 'Job
To prove him, and illustrate his high worth;
And when to all his Angels he propos'd
To draw the proud King Ahab into fraud. (I. 360)

and so forth; that God 'connives' with Satan is a rather striking accusation against him, and cannot be denied on the textual evidence which Satan quotes. We are often told nowadays that Milton's attitude to Satan must have

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been perfectly simple, but it is clear that when writing Paradise Lost he had plenty more evidence for God's connivance with Satan which he chose not to use. The reason why this game can be played, of course, is that the Old Testament is a rag-bag of material from very different 'stages of development; one would think Milton after his thorough study must have understood that, but his main allies were committed to relying on the text, to oppose the traditions of Rome. The furthest he went in writing was to conjecture that God allowed the text of his Word to become corrupt so as to force upon our attention the prior importance of our own consciences (De Doctrina, Chapter XXX),.