Book 4, lines 59-79

[Previous: lines 1-58]

John narrates. He is telling Pilate how God made the universe.

“Quid verò impulerit tantos adiisse labores,
atque haec ferre Deum, dum morti obnoxius errat,      [60]
dicam equidem; et repetens altas ab origine causas
expediam. Cœlum, et cœli, quos suspicis, orbes
vix opifex rerum extuderat, terrasque iacentes;
cùm simul aligeros populos, sanctosque volucres,
ter ternas acies, celerem et sine corpore gentem,          [65]
qui cœli incolerent ipsos septemplicis orbes,
condidit aeterno Genitor succensus amore;
ut sua, qua fruitur solus, Natusque per aevum,
communis foret, et multis concessa voluptas.
Continuò, fuerat quos aequum dicere laudes                 [70]
auctorique Deoque suo, ac persolvere grates,
regnandi vesanus amor (quis ferret inultus?)
haud partem exiguam invasit, furiisque subegit;
ut cuperent summo sese praeferre Parenti
immemores, animis victi, caecique furore.                     [75]
Non tulit omnipotens sator, et meliora sequutos
armavit contrà: nulla hinc mora, talia adortos
indecores cœlo sedes detrusit in imas;
noctis ubi horriferae nigror, aeternaeque tenebrae.

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“On the subject of why God undertook such labours
subjecting Himself to obnoxious death—                       [60]
I will explain; and summarise the causes from
the beginning. No sooner had the heavenly
orbs been formed and the Maker laid down Earth,
than he shaped the holy winged race of angels,
in thrice three orders, fast and bodiless,                         [65]
to inhabit the seven spheres of heaven
for eternity—he did this inflamed with love,
to share the ages, they, Himself and his Son
a community of many pleasures.
Immediately, some who should have justly praised       [70]
their creator and God, and paid high thanks, were
seized by mad passions (could they go unpunished?)
frenzied with the urge to attack, one after another;
as if to raise themselves above their Parent—
ingrates, blind with anger, soon defeated.                       [75]
Consequences followed from the Almighty Father:
Without delay he unleashed his loyal angels
and flung the twisted rebels into hell—
all bristling night and black, eternal darkness.

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I’m translating line 79’s adjective horrifer (from horridus: ‘rough, bristly, shaggy rude, rough, uncouth dreadful, horrid, frightful’) not as ‘horrid’ since that seems to me an English word too touched by its kindergarten associations of ‘yuk!’, but as ‘bristling’. To be strictly accurate I should probably go with ‘scary’ or ‘fearful’: Gardner has ‘a land of horrid night and never-ending darkness’.

Here, then, is Vida’s rapid little cameo of the First War in Heaven. Here, and in the next passage (lines 92-122)—which details the creation of Adam and his fall—we see passages that directly influenced Milton. The briskness at least disposes of one of the problems some Miltonists have located in Paradise Lost’s much more lengthy and detailed scenes of celestial battle. As Christopher Ricks puts it, Milton is sometimes ‘trapped by some difficulty or other’.

For example, the narrative inconsistences into which he is forced are nowhere clearer than in the War in Heaven. Voltaire in 1727 protested at ‘the visible Contradiction which reigns in that Episode’, since God commands his troops to drive them out: ‘how does it come to pass, after such a positive Order, that the Battle hangs doubtful? And why did God the Father command Gabriel and Raphael, to do what he executes afterwards by the Son only?’ [Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1963), 17-18]

Voltaire has a point. One way of thinking about this, I suppose (it’s not Ricks’s point) is that Vida is interested in the before and the after; justice, for him, is swift and total. Milton, though, is more interested in medio, the uncertainties of—at root—temporal existence: the beginning behind us and the end uncertain. This is surely a less mendacious vision of human existence even if it does entail some inconsistency with the professed commitment to God’s absolute temporal omniscience and the quasi-fantasy worldbuilding of Paradise Lost as a text. Even the fall itself is prolonged—nine days, as you’ll remember:

Into the wastful Deep; the monstrous sight
Strook them with horror backward, but far worse
Urg'd them behind; headlong themselves they threw
Down from the verge of Heav'n, Eternal wrauth
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.

Hell heard th' unsufferable noise, Hell saw
Heav'n ruining from Heav'n and would have fled
Affrighted; but strict Fate had cast too deep
Her dark foundations, and too fast had bound.
Nine dayes they fell; confounded Chaos roard,
And felt tenfold confusion in thir fall
Through his wilde Anarchie, so huge a rout
Incumberd him with ruin: Hell at last
Yawning receavd them whole, and on them clos'd,
Hell thir fit habitation fraught with fire
Unquenchable, the house of woe and paine. [Paradise Lost 6:862-877]

Vida doesn't mention hellfire; his more Homeric hell is all darkness and bristling fear. It is odd, though, that Vida doesn't permit, as Milton pointedly does, Christ to have this military victory. It's an epic poem he's writing, after all.

Still, perhaps the way to take this is not that Vida is downplaying Christ so much as bigging-up his angels. There are loads of angels in this poem, and they're always flocking about, threatening to rush the world and intervene on Christ's behalf (having to be restrained by God). Milton individuates two angels, Gabriel and Raphael, and includes a couple of junior angels, though with the implication that they're not necessarily all that bright (easily fooled by Satan-in-disguise, say) but otherwise merely gestures at the larger body of angelic hosts. Vida throngs his poem with them.

Here, I'm not sure if Vida's description of angels as ‘swift and bodiless’ (line 65's celer et sine corpus) is standard theology, or something more daring. My understanding is that the conventional view is that angels do have bodies, but bodies made of something more refined and spiritual than our material atoms.

“Subtle bodies” was a favored theological formulation for the nature of angels. The formulation was ascribed to Macarius the Great, but it was the primary definition used by John of Thessalonike (d. 649) in his defense of the worship of angels’ images ostensibly before a pagan opponent. Moreover, the fathers of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 included the “dialogue” between John of Thessalonike and the pagan in the conciliar acts, and so the definition—slippery, imprecise, but apt—became the basic definition of the nature of God’s messengers. [Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (University of California Press 2001), 194]

But subtle-bodied is not the same as bodiless, now, is it. I daresay I'm making something of nothing, except that ‘swift and bodiless’ angels blur, it seems to me, into a kind of Wallace Stevensesque inexistence:

The fiction of an absolute—Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through evening's revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

Supremely fictional: noted. The image at the head of the post is one of Gustave Doré's illustrations to his 1868 edition of Paradise Lost: ‘La Bouche de l'Enfer.’ Click on it to see it properly.

[Next: lines 80-122]