As came up in class discussion today, Milton's relationship to the pagan world can seem puzzling. On the one hand, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" seems most certainly to be the poem of a devout Christian, meditating on a central mystery of the Christian faith, the Incarnation. In his Latin Elegy 7, written to his friend Charles Diodati around December 1629, Milton says that he is composing a birthday gift for Christ. This is one Christian poet writing to another devout young man.
On the other hand, the same elegy refers (in Latin) to the baby Jesus as the "peace-bearing king of heavenly race," almost as if he might be one of a pantheon of gods. The association is all the easier to make, as this description of Jesus as a "king of heavenly race" occurs immediately after Milton's thoughts on the sacred vocation of the poet: "Truly the bard is sacred to the gods; he is their priest, and both his heart and lips mysteriously breathe the indwelling Jove." (Truly JM? Do you mean that the pagan Roman god Jove dwells within you, or do you mean Jehovah?)
The Nativity Ode's image of the infant Jesus strangling the pagan snake gods just like the infant Hercules reinforces this striking representation of the Christian Messiah. He doesn't just replace the pagan gods or show that they don't count or were never real: baby Jesus subdues them, makes them his victims, giving them a reality on the same plane as his own. And in the process, the poet shows just how deeply immersed he is in details of the ancient pagan cults -- with the lars, lemures, and flamens of Roman religion (stanza XXI), or the ceremonies of the cult of Osiris (XXIV).
Because he chose to be a Christian poet and not a Christian priest, Milton can -- in his learnedly allusive figurative language -- play with the expressive possibilities of syncretism, which is the attempt to reconcile two different, even conflicting, systems of belief and thought. This is what he does too with the image of the shepherd in "Lycidas." The shepherd places the poem squarely within the poetic genre of pastoral inherited from Greek and Roman writers, but it simultaneously suggests the Christian sense of a 'pastor' of a congretation
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I took the Pagan references to be a subtle attack against the church. As I mentioned in my respones, I read that he is acknowledging Christianity as Sun worship that stems from a long tradition of sun worship.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't bringing up the similarities between Christianity and Pagan religions then saying the Pagan religions are wrong, open up the question, "what will happen to Christ when a newer, better diety cames along"?
I guess being an Athiest dictated my interpretation of the text. I really wanted to believe that Milton was not a true Christian, but I guess I can accept that he is at least an unorthodox one.
I think that Milton's way not only of portraying the pagan deities, but Christ also (or 'the Son' as he is called in Paradise Lost) opens up precisely the question you pose. Orthodox Christianity insists on the identity of the Father and the Son (and the Holy Spirit): this is not pantheism, multiple deities, but One God with three different 'persons' or aspects. Milton, unorthodoxly, came to challenge this idea of the trinity. It's clear in a late work he wrote, De Doctrina Christiana, which lays out his highly idiosyncratic religious beliefs, but it's possible to see his unusual views about Christ/the Son developing earlier. For instance, even in his youth he finds himself unable to complete a poem about Christ's crucifixion, the event at the centre of a Christian's belief. Why?
ReplyDeleteI was talking with one of my colleague's in class who believes that Milton was a Pagan and only claimed to be Christian because of the time he was in.
ReplyDeleteI find that his claims of faith are hard to believe, since these references to Pagan gods contradict them. I know that, for me, it was the knowledge of how many times the Christ myth has been used before Christ that really turned me away from religion. Also, reading Paradise Lost, God is portrayed as a bit of a bully.
Is it possible that Milton could intentionally write work that is very Christian at face value, yet mocks Christianity between the lines. This would be similar to the reading people have of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, in which the cloud's in the background look like a brain, implying that religion is a contruct of the mind?
It just seems weird that Milton would have Christian text, with parts of it that reveal the absurdity of Christianity.
Using McCarthyism as an example, let's imagine that Milton was writing during the Cold War. And he had some socialist values that he really wanted to communicate with the public. He couldn't just go out and say it, or else he might be viewed as a communist. Another approach would be a piece praising capitalism, yet juxtaposing the image of Wall street and Skid
Row, therefore revealing the flaws of capitalism while at the same time stating to be a capitalist.
Is it too questionable to believe that Milton is doing something similar? That he is actually an agnostic who claims to be a Christian for political purposes.
I would like to comment on what csmichau has said.
ReplyDeleteGod does seem like a 'bully' in Paradise Lost because, if you study the bible and Christianity, you will see that the character and disposition of God is presented as a binary in the Old and New Testament's. In the Old Testament, God is not all loving, nurturing, and he is to some extent, a feared character. Therefore, I think that Milton accurately portrays the image of God when telling a similar story to that in Genesis. I do not necessarily feel that Paradise Lost is a mockery of Christianity but rather a view of it from a different angle.