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written permission from the JHU Press. The final confrontation between Christ and Satan on the pinnacle of the temple continues to be a problem for Milton's interpreters. 1 Because Paradise Regained chronicles both Christ's role as the second Adam and his journey of self-discovery, many readers have understood his rebuke as an illuminating reduction to essentials of the poem's thematic burden--temptation is presumption--and as evidence that the Son has come into full self-knowledge. 2 This reading is not without its difficulties, of course, and whether Milton means us to infer some hypostatization of the Son has been debated. If Christ's words are a declaration of godhead, the argument runs, then Milton is guilty either of allowing the dramatic texture of his poem to obscure its theology or of endorsing a rather heterodox Christology. 3 Thus, most interpretations fall on a sliding scale between the obvious extremes, attempting to reconcile the requirements of dogmatic theology with our sense that, as Empson puts it on another occasion, Christ has finally and deservedly gotten his spurs. While the situation is reminiscent of Paradise Lost, in which epic heroism is weighed against the ideal of Christian conduct and found wanting, the passage remains recalcitrant, if for no other reason than that it pushes the minimalist or less-is-more logic of Christian heroism to the breaking point. At the risk of giving short shrift to the interpretive energy expended on the problem, one can hardly quarrel with Hugh MacCallum's wry characterization of the pinnacle as an "uneasy station for criticism" (313n32).
An adequate reading of the crux may require something like a suspension of critical and theological belief. We need not make an extra-textual detour to the pages of De Doctrina Christiana, where MacCallum finds evidence of Milton's subordinationism in the analysis of Colossians 2.9, or pretend to any sophistication with theology, to realize that if Christ's rebuke implies a hypostatization of the Son, then Milton's reference to the "uneasie station" is a peculiar estimate of divinity indeed. By the same token, we should not read the theology without the poetry. To do so would have been troubling to Milton, and doctrinal interpretations of his poetry are often less illuminating than obviously misplaced aesthetic accounts. Rather than dismiss readings of Christ's rebuke which deviate from an orthodox Christology, might we not grant that Milton's text is unclear? This is at odds with what most readers recognize as Milton's prodigious control over his material, but perhaps the epiphany on the pinnacle of the temple is meant to be puzzling. Perhaps Milton's praxis is in the service of a theory which aims to point out certain expressive and cognitive limits. 4
It bears recalling that the common-sensical if theologically problematic notion that Christ declares himself God is not necessarily of modern or post-Romantic derivation. In her discussion of Paradise Regained, for instance, Irene Samuel uses two eighteenth-century commentaries to focus the conflicting readings of the final temptation. One reader for whom Milton's poem is not perplexing is Reverend Calton of Lincolnshire, who writes: "Here is what we may call after Aristotle the anagnorisis, or the discovery. Christ declares himself to be the God and Lord of the Tempter; and to prove it, stands upon the pinnacle" (qtd. in Samuel 112). We may reject the good Reverend's gloss on account of its implications for Milton's Christology, but it is a richly suggestive comment. While eighteenth-century readers were obviously inclined to read poetry in Aristotelian terms, finding, for example, that the authorial intrusions in Paradise Lost violated neoclassical principles of literary decorum, Milton's work is anything but theoretically naive, and he wrote in the wake of the great Italian commentaries to the Poetics. Calton's designation of Christ's rebuke as an anagnorisis, perhaps a banality for an eighteenth-century reader, is provocative because it suggests that Aristotle was a heuristic tool for Milton's reading of the Bible.
Such a possibility becomes more likely when we compare Milton's narrative with its primary source, Luke 4.9-13.
And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself [End Page 7] down from here;
For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee;
And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
And Jesus, answering, said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not put the Lord, thy God, to the test.
And when the devil had ended all the testing, he departed from him for a season.
Turning from the gospel account to Paradise Regained, we cannot but think that Milton's rendition of the final conflict between Satan and Christ is tighter, more sharply focused in its drama, and more unequivocal in its sense of closure. 5 Indeed, Milton's procedure seems to reverse or repress the enigmatic open-endedness of a phrase like "all the testing." The point is not so much that Milton distorted scripture, for he doubtless would have felt justified in making good faith extrapolations from the narrative itself, as it is that his modifications of the story suggest a great deal about his habits of mind.
If Milton in this instance seems bent on heightening the dramatic interest and moral clarity of the scriptural episode, more than one critic has described the larger shape of Paradise Regained in terms assimilable to an Aristotelian logic. The dialogues between Christ and Satan, characterized by Satan's rhetorical range and sophistication on the one hand, and Christ's simplicity and increasing terseness on the other, are a case in point. More than a dramatic expedient, the dialogues are part of a dialectical "narrowing" which leads Satan to defeat and, Fish suggests, man to God: "On the dramatic level the definition of the relationship between man and God takes the form of a progressive narrowing of the area in which the self is preeminent. . . . On the verbal level there is a progressive diminishing" ("Inaction" 27). Regardless of whether the logic of a "progressive diminishing" ultimately exposes plot as the main (literary) temptation of Paradise Regained, the idea that the poem contracts into a climactic moment of recognition and misrecognition would seem generally agreed upon. 6
The principal source for Milton's understanding of recognition or anagnorisis was, of course, Aristotle's Poetics. Without digressing at length to summarize the argument of the Poetics or its reception in the Renaissance, suffice it to say that Aristotle rates highest those tragic plots which achieve narrowness and concentration. 7 Crucial to this effect of narrowness and concentration are the moments of recognition and reversal. Because recognition and reversal arrest events, turning them back upon themselves, they shift the emphasis of drama from plot and the narrative of adventures to the expression of character. In tragedy, and especially in Oedipus, Aristotle's prime ex ample of the genre, the moment of recognition is wrenching because it reveals relations which might well have remained hidden. Thus, recognition is the motive or raison d'être for tragic poetry, particularly to the extent that it takes as its subject the transgression of familial boundaries.
Milton's description of Satan's fall is suggestive in this respect. Evoking a world of tangled and tragic relationships, it betrays an almost Aristotelian concern for the vicissitudes of recognition.
But Satan smitten with amazement fell
As when Earths Son Antaeus (to compare
Small things with greatest) in Irassa strove
With Joves Alcides, and oft foil'd still rose,
Receiving from his mother Earth new strength,
Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple joyn'd,
Throttl'd at length in th' Air, expir'd and fell;
So after many a foil the Tempter proud,
Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride
Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall.
And as that Theban Monster that propos'd
Her riddle, and him, who solv'd it not, devour'd;
That once found out and solv'd, for grief and spight
Cast herself headlong from th' Ismenian steep,
So strook with dread and anguish fell the Fiend. (4.562-76)
Inasmuch as classical heroism here consists of the ability to unravel riddles, and Milton telescopes the oedipal and familial within the existential (i.e., Hercules triumphs because he knows the source of Antaeus's strength, while Oedipus triumphs because he understands the nature of man), it does not take a [End Page 8] great deal of imagination to see that Milton is weighing one of the major narratives of antiquity against a central mystery of Christian theology. 8 Yet if Milton's point is presumably that Oedipus's insight into the human condition, which hastens rather than forestalls his ultimate fate, is a poor substitute for an understanding of what it means to be a Son of God, his evocation of the Greek myth is oddly disruptive. Although the paired classical allusions are likely to strike modern readers as sufficiently Freudian, the narrative of Antaeus's defeat serving as a subliminal reminder of the sexual content of Sophocles' play, the comparison of Christ and Oedipus startles and seems almost a con taminatio. Moreover, the second simile is an awkward fit, for Satan is less the speaker of a riddle than one driven to solve a riddle, and what is most Sphinxlike about the events on the "uneasie station" is the meaning of Christ's rebuke. Without diluting Milton's theology, one might wonder that the carefully-wrought formalism of Paradise Regained should blur at this crucial moment. Unless we want to characterize the similes as blunt instruments which serve only to illustrate the action of falling, or rationalize the text with an appeal to some notion of artistic clumsiness, it would appear that Milton is critiquing the logic of recognition. Much as Oedipus's ability to see affinities both enables his triumph and leads to his destruction, so too, one surmises, tragedy can replay but never transcend its constitutive formalism.
Lest this seem abrupt, we might recall Satan's elaborate rationalization of his own conduct, for he is initially much the Oedipus of the piece.
Thenceforth I thought thee worth my nearer view
And narrower Scrutiny, that I might learn
In what degree or meaning thou art call'd
The Son of God, which bears no single sence;
The Son of God I also am, or was,
And if I was, I am; relation stands;
All men are Sons of God; yet thee I thought
In some respects far higher so declar'd. (4.514-21)
Suffering from a theological version of sibling rivalry, Satan betrays his familiar confusion with the assertion "relation stands." While he probably means that relation "obtains" or "endures," Satan's final temptation of Christ, the ironic exhortation to "stand," is a wild and unwitting literalization of his own trope, one which is turned against him when Christ stands and he does not. Moreover, Milton's allusion to the riddle of the Sphinx, which serves as a gloss on Satan's fall, reveals that his quest was never more than one of co-option. While Oedipus's mastery of the riddle--one version of which asks, "What is it that has one voice, but becomes four-footed, and two-footed, and three-footed, and is weakest when it has most feet?" (qtd. in MacKellar 243)--would seem a vindication in extremis of the proposition "relation stands," it is Christ, or so Milton's simile suggests, who has this knowledge. Implicit then in Christ's rebuke, not to mention his balancing act, is the idea that relation does indeed stand. Howsoever enigmatic the phrase "Son of God" or the relationship between the Father and the Son, Milton might have argued, these mysteries are the ultimate basis for reality.
More than a bit of peremptory one-upmanship, Milton's partisan likening of Christ and Oedipus creates a textual double focus and enacts a complex polemic. Because Oedipus's triumph, that of a mind supple enough to reduce the ages of man to one term, is a figure for the transgressions of incest and foreshadows his tragic fate, the wisdom of antiquity is found lacking and the familial entanglements traced in tragic drama are exposed as a demonic parody of the Trinity. If this parody is reenacted in Satan's failed attempt to make Christ reveal the mystery of his paternity, the issue is as much one of literary theory as theology, for Satan, as Milton's simile indicates, is not Oedipus. What distinguishes Satan from the great tragic hero, with whom he shares an eye for affinities and experience in the ways of incest, is that his belief in his own powers looks decidedly like Aristotelian rationalism. The assertion "if I was, I am" is the defensive gesture of an embattled logician, and Satan's confidence in the power of "narrower Scrutiny" is the bias of the formalist, an apparently ironic and "tragic" misappropriation of Milton's larger strategy for investigating his biblical sources.
What I hope is clear by now is that the climax of Paradise Regained skirts the territory of Oedipus and the Aristotelian construction of tragedy. If Satan's [End Page 9] plight seems richly oedipal, perhaps it is only fitting that an Aristotelian structure of recognition and reversal--albeit anatomized somewhat differently, for Satan falls without ever fully recognizing what he has seen--should modulate to an allusion to the poem Aristotle took as the model par excellence of the tragic mode. Nor does it seem special pleading to see Milton's restyling of the biblical narrative as the product of a formalist sensibility. The difficulty with this reading is what to make of Satan's Aristotelianism. Since Satan and Milton investigate the Bible in seemingly similar fashion, what, one wonders, are the implications of Satan's fall?
On the face of it, Satan's defeat is consistent with the larger impulses of Paradise Regained, for the poem is memorably antagonistic toward classical learning and culture. 9 Although a tradition at least as old as August ine's On Christian Doctrine held that Christians might legitimately appropriate the intellectual and rhetorical tools of antiquity in the battle of the faith, Milton takes great pains to dramatize Christ's rejection of the temptation of learning. Personally and pointedly polemical, this conservatism reverses both the argument in Milton's treatise Of Education and the defense of poetry in the preface to the second book of The Reason of Church-Government. Given the overt anti-classicism of Paradise Regained, it is not surprising that Satan, who is at once an Oedipus manqué and a slightly baffled Aristotelian, should be undone on the pinnacle of the temple. In effect, Satan's fall recapitulates the horrors of ancient tragedy and functions as a cautionary tale about the dangers of rationalism in literary criticism.
Yet to say as much is not entirely sufficient. Not only does this explanation make Milton's Aristotelian refashioning of the biblical narrative more rather than less striking, but it discounts the difficulty which Christ's rebuke has posed for countless commentators as well. I want to insist on this, for if the events on the temple pinnacle constitute Milton's recognition scene, this recognition scene is almost disciplinary in its assertion of conceptual and experiential limits. In simplest terms, readers of all stripes have had to follow Satan's lead and disentangle a riddle of paternity which is presented at the poem's climax. While we are likely to feel comfortable in the knowledge that we trust dogmatic theology rather than "narrower Scrutiny," there is, pragmatically considered, little difference between Satan's determination to find out what is meant by the phrase "Son of God" and our own critical worrying over a possible hypostatization of the Son. Should we be inclined to think otherwise, Milton's double-edged Aristotelianism would seem to imply, we need to be prepared for a shock of recognition.
Milton's procedure may not intimate an anti-rationalist bias in his theology, but it does suggest that his attitude toward ancient tragedy and literary theory is more complex than Christ's dismissive speeches indicate. We might account for both the larger issue of Milton's apparently mixed motives and the disruptions in his recognition scene by arguing that his text recapitulates (at a critical distance) a problematic at work in the Poetics. In a recent discussion of Aristotle, Paul Fry identifies a crucial tension in the formalist position:
Aristotle's rage for order, the "narrower" and more "concentrated" the better (ch. 26), leads to moments, primarily though not entirely at the level of tragic plot, in which characters who are too intimate overcrowd one another and threaten to break out of their confines with violence. The pathos, or "tragic inci dent," that occurs in such close quarters is brought on by the recognition of what could have been kept hidden in a less constricting situation, the recognition, that is, of the kinship or intimacy (philia) of antagonists. The irony of Aristotle's critical predicament is that his formalism, with its bringing to the fore of likenesses and affinities . . . tends to ensure the coming to light of just the sort of unruliness that the observance of proportion is meant to suppress. (12) 10
Something like the "unruliness" Fry describes clearly inha bits the climax of Paradise Regained, and it is not so much grudgingly admitted as actively sought. Since Milton probably assumed readers who were theologically literate and unlikely to be shaken in their faith by textual ambiguity, the confounding of formal and categorical clarity on the pinnacle of the temple may serve to indicate certain "interpretive" limits. If Aristotle acts as a heuristic device for the scriptural account, perhaps this works both ways, and the Bible [End Page 10] is being used to interrogate Aristotelian formalism, exposing its inadequacies and charting a transcendence which is as much aesthetic as moral and theological.
Essential to this proposition is the debate between Christ and Satan over the putative merits of classical tragedy and rhetoric. Satan:
Thence what the lofty grave Tragoedians taught
In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight receiv'd
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life;
High actions, and high passions best describing:
Thence to the famous Orators repair,
Those antient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce Democratie,
Shook the Arsenal and fulmin'd over Greece,
To Macedon, and Artaxerxes Throne;
To sage Philosophy next lend thine ear.(4.261-72)
In Satan's hands, tragedy and rhetoric have a crucial proximity. Doubtless part of the point of this is to underscore the Satanic distortion of classical ideals, for Satan's celebration of bellicose oratory reverses the fundamental assumption of Ciceronian humanism, namely, that rhetoric civilizes man and establishes the political order. Satan's unwitting use of the word "repair"--a crucial and charged entry in the Miltonic lexicon--sets up a complex relay, simultaneously exposing his rejection of the civilizing potential of rhetoric and reminding us of the gulf between antiquity's noblest imaginings and the Christian promise of Paradise restored.
Yet there is more to it. In addition to marking the crossing between tragedy and rhetoric, "repair" calls attention to the unstated proposition in Satan's account of tragedy. Specifically, the formula "moral prudence, with delight receiv'd / In brief sententious precepts" is puzzling and seems to suggest that tragedy is not so much tragic as pleasurably didactic. Regardless of Satan's ultimate theoretical source, we would seem to be at some remove from Aristotelian fear and pity. Yet Satan's explanation is Aristotle's, or at least that of Milton's Aristotle, and his odd construction of tragic delight is reminiscent of the preface to Samson Agonistes, where Milton writes that tragedy is "said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight . . ." (149). Without insisting that Milton's discussion of catharsis is revisionary, we should not ignore the way in which it reverses a common sense understanding of fear and pity. 11
What distinguishes Satan's account of tragedy from Milton's is that it is even more optimistic. While Milton's equivocation ("a kind of delight") in the preface to Samson reflects an uneasiness with the categorical juggling needed to find delight in fear and pity, we would be hard pressed to know from Satan that tragedies have unhappy endings. To the extent that he rehearses tragedy as the pleasures of didacticism, Satan is the mouthpiece for a reductio ad ab surdum of the Aristotelian gesture of evading or repressing the unruliness of tragedy. That Satan's bad faith optimism is not the same thing as Milton's reconstructed Aristotelianism could be deduced from the dramatic irony of the poem's climax. Christ's final rebuke ("Tempt not the Lord thy God" [4.561]) fulfills the Satanic requirements of prudence, brevity, and sententiousness, but does so in a fashion which refutes the affective flattening in Satan's definition of tragedy. We may feel delight, but Satan is treated to a double-dose of the Aristotelian medicine he would repress: "So strook with dread and anguish fell the Fiend" (4.576).
Satan's fall, then, is meaningful as narrative and meta-narrative, for it exposes both the limits of his power and the partiality of his critical position. Casting Satan as a faux Aristotelian, one begins to suspect, is Milton's way of intimating a solution to the contradictions in the formalist position. After all, Satan's unwitting use of "repair" is Milton's witting or conscious strategy. While the word marks the contradictions in Satan's position--he is a too cheerful Aristotelian and deeply invested in the art of war--it is also a convenient shorthand designation for the motive behind the rigorous askesis which is the Son's testing in Paradise Regained. An emblem of both the exilic experience of post-lapsarian man and its typological redemption, "repair" is the concept which allows Milton to absorb and transcend the contradictions of history. [End Page 11]
This crossing between tragedy and rhetoric, their suggestive proximity in Satan's defense of classical learning, raises several questions. Should we assume that both arts are suspect and cannot transcend the downward spiral of unredeemed history? Or does the strategic placement of "repair" imply that rhetoric might be redeemed? If rhetoric can be retrieved, under what terms is this possible, and what implications does this have for Milton's art? To answer these questions we need to understand that Satan's argument depends on the supposition that rhetoric, in both matter and manner, is sublime (e.g., "fulmin'd"). It is with this idea, arguably yet another complication in Satan's Aristotelianism, that Christ most directly takes issue. A point-by-point refutation of Satan's defense of oratory, Christ's speech reappropriates and dramatical ly recasts the constitutive (ontological) ground of rhetoric.
Thir Orators thou then extoll'st, as those
The top of Eloquence, Statists indeed,
And lovers of thir Country, as may seem;
But herein to our Prophets far beneath,
As men divinely taught, and better teaching
The solid rules of Civil Government
In thir majestic unaffected stile
Then all the Oratory of Greece and Rome. (4.353-60)
If Christ underscores the moral ambiguity of rhetoric with a categorical ad hominem attack ("Statists . . . as may seem"), his response also describes a countersublime, specifically, the "majestic unaffected stile." This version of the sublime confounds classical distinctions between high and low styles, yet the result, as the phrase "solid rules of Civil Government" would imply, is anything but chaos. While Satan's "resistless eloquence" energizes speaker and hearer alike, with tragic consequences for the state, Christian rhetoric devolves from and ensures a sort of politico-ontological stability.
Satan's argument is of a piece with his performance in the first two books of Paradise Lost, for the common denominator in this account of rhetoric and the sublime is that which characterizes Satanic activity generally, mobility. Although the etymology of "sublime" implies that it is an activity of standing, its liminality presupposes the sudden discovery of great depths or heights. In this regard, the sublime is the experience of what Emerson, projecting a poet for the matter of America, would call the "tyrannous eye," and its pleasures are of a piece with those provided by the rhetor's afflatus and the spectacles of epic heroism. Thus, just as Satan's early adventurism in Paradise Lost is instructively undercut by God's irony ("Onely begotten Son, seest thou what rage / Transports our adversarie . . ." [3.80-81]), so too his celebration of the sublime sight of "that fierce Democratie" should be resisted, for it glamorizes both the demiurgic pretensions of the demagogue and the transporting violence of war.
The crucial element in Christ's reappropriation of the sublime--underscored by the fact that he triumphs by standing--is the idea of stability or solidity. Milton's aim is not so much to repropose the formalist gambit, a partial or too cheerful version of which is the enabling assumption behind Satan's bad faith rehearsal of the power of eloquence, as it is to point a way beyond the contradictions of tragic formalism. Marked by humility and lack of pretense, the "unaffected stile" is untroubled by the unruliness of tragic affect. Nor is this merely proscriptive, a "thou shalt not" which requires us to be satisfied with less, for the humble style is "majestic" and speaks the language of the prophets. While tragedy courts the sublime only by disrupting its own formal order, rather the reverse is true of the Miltonic ideal: anchored to prophecy and typology, its incursions into the sublime necessarily presuppose faith in a "formalism" of the highest order.
Returning to the crux of the "uneasie station," we might hazard the assertion that Milton's Aristotelianism is to good purpose. While Christ's words are perhaps the supreme example of the "majestic unaffected stile," and carry with them a promise of Paradise regained which refutes all political and aesthetic tragedies, their meaning, or so the critical debate would suggest, is anything but clear. Perhaps Milton means to teaches a negative lesson, and his "theorized" restyling of the biblical narrative calls attention to that which can barely be expressed, much less contained, in his text. We can domesticate the crux and argue that the passage moves within the boundaries of an orthodox Christology, but to do so [End Page 12] diminishes Milton's poem. If we must recognize our interpretive quest in Satan's determination to understand who is properly a Son of God, we need not share his confidence in the power of "narrower Scrutiny." Skirting the unruliness of classical tragedy, the climax of Paradise Regained maps a counter sublime which is poetic, political, and theological. Yet the eschatological promise of the brief epic, which requires of us a commitment to the arduous work of reading and repairing, is also a reminder of the limitations of theory and the necessity of faith.
1. Interpretations of the crux constitute a cottage industry within the voluminous and ever-growing scholarship on Milton and his work. Rather than try and review all the studies in a note, I would refer the reader to the guides by Patrides and Klemp.
2. For a recent refutation of the idea that the final temptation should be understood as an "identity test," see Rushdy.
3. Stein, for instance, writes: "What has happened? Surely not that Christ is directly replying to Satan's challenge by finally declaring himself, by saying: thou shalt not tempt me, the Lord thy God! That would be to violate the whole discipline . . . of Christ's moral and intellectual example: the witness of whence he is by the seeking of glory not for himself but for Him who sent him...The flesh becomes word. Christ says it, and then becomes it. The full revelation occurs, the miracle of epiphany, theophany, but not as an act of will, not from the self" (128-29). It might be invidious to say that Stein's insistent orthodoxy deconstructs itself, but epiphany and theophany are not the same thing, and this terminological slippage, if not quite sufficient to readmit a hypostatized Son, is testimony to the difficulty of Milton's text.
4. Somewhat differently, Pearce finds the Milton of Paradise Regained probing the limits of humanist rhetoric.
5. Almost any interpretation of Paradise Regained must sooner or later consider Milton's reading of the Bible. See, for example, Ades and Radzinowicz.
6. Fish's "Things and Actions Indifferent" is a pro vocative essay which pushes the logic of a "narrowed" plot to its ultimate conclusion.
7. Weinberg's study of the development of critical theory in the Italian Renaissance (and especially of the shaping presence of Aristotle) is still authoritative.
8. For a fine discussion of the Oedipus Complex, Freud, Milton's similes, and the odd disruptions present in the poem's climax, see Kerrigan, who has the distinction of being one of the few commentators to note that Milton's description of Satan's fall, especially in the syntax of 4.581-85, has the peculiar effect of making us confuse Christ and Satan.
9. The temptation of learning has been a problem at least since the time of Pope's study, which found that there were not significant precedents for Milton's procedure. More recent treatments include Rajan and Swanson and Mulryan.
10. Fry's discussion of Aristotle and Longinus is situated in the context of contemporary post-structuralist debates and meant to offer a way out of the impasse of deconstruction. To oversimplify considerably, one of the theses of the book is that the (Longinian) sublime, particularly in its capacity for disrupting formal order, exposes the ground of being; thus, it is an alternative to the "aporias" which deconstruction almost inevitably registers as absence or loss. Much has been written about Milton and Aristotle. See, for example, the studies by Rees and Wood.
11. The problem of Milton and the sublime dates from the eighteenth-century commentaries to Paradise Lost. A standard (albeit somewhat dated) reference for the transmission of the sublime is Monk, who takes a dim view of the idea that Milton was a theorized poet of the sublime: "It is a strange paradox that the most sublime of English poets should not have caught from Longinus the suggestion of the sublime as the expression of the ultimate values in art, beyond the reach of rhetoric and her rules. He did not; and it was left to the propounders of an adolescent aesthetic in the next century to find in John Milton's poems...the supreme illustration of whatever particular type of the sublime they advocated" (20). While it is perhaps true that Milton was not explicitly a theoretician of the sublime, he could have learned all he needed to know from Tasso and Ariosto. Indeed, the description of Christ and Satan flying through the air ("and without wing / Of Hippogrif bore through the Air sublime" [4.541-42]) is suggestive in this respect. If it seems late in the game to remind us that Paradise Regained is not romance, the allusion nonetheless implies that Milton means to reclaim the sublime for Christian poetry. For a recent and illuminating discussion of Milton's negotiation of the romance tradition, see Patterson.
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___. "Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained." Milton Studies 17 (1983): 163-85.
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Rajan, Balachandra. "Jerusalem and Athens: The Temptation of Learning in Paradise Regained." Th'Upright Heart and Pure. Ed. Amadeus P. Fiore. Pittsburgh: Du quesne UP, 1967. 61-74.
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/milton_quarterly/v032/32.1mcmurray.html