Angels-MILTON, JOHN

Angels are at the very center of John Milton’s (1608—74) cosmic scenario,
dwelling in organized ranks in the Empyrean, the highest heaven,
a boundless region of light and freedom. Using the old Ptolemaic
astronomy, Milton was able to build a magnificent literary atlas of
comparative maps, showing the arrangements before and after the fall
of the angels.
The oldest son of a London scrivener, John Milton was born in
London on December 9, 1608. As a boy, he was very studious and was
supplied with the best teachers by his father. He entered Christ’s College,
Cambridge, where he developed a deep interest in classical literature.
Among his favorite poets were the Italians, through whom he
improved his knowledge of medieval romance. Besides classical literature,
the source of Milton’s poetic inspiration was the biblical Christianity
of Puritan England.
Milton left the University in 1632 without taking orders and
spent the next six years of his life at Horton, where he pursued his
studies in classical literature, history, mathematics, and music, with
occasional visits to London. His earliest Italian verses were inspired by
his love for a young Italian girl, whose first name, Emilia, is the only
thing known about her. In this period he also developed his knowledge
of English poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Jonson, and the
later Elizabethans, who considerably influenced all the poems written
during these years.
In 1638, he went abroad. In Paris he met Hugo Grotius, whose
Adamus Exul was one of the sources of Paradise Lost. He spent two
months in Florence, then proceeded to Rome and Naples. He made
his way back to England via Venice and Geneva. Once in England,
he became involved in a long course of controversy, ecclesiastical and
political, which determined the choice of themes, the doctrinal
framework, and the spirit of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and
Samson Agonistes.
From 1649 to 1659, he served as Latin secretary to the council of
state. In 1653, his wife died, and in 1656, he married Catharine
Woodcock, whose early death in 1658 inspired the most touching of
his sonnets. His marriage to Elizabeth Minshull in 1663 was an
arrangement of convenience. The only English poems Milton wrote
during these years were some sonnets on public events or persons and
private incidents in Italian form.
In 1658 he resumed Paradise Lost. It was then composed to dictation,
corrected, and completed by 1665—finally published in 1667. It
was followed in 1670 by Paradise Regained, an epic on the “brief
model” of the Book of Job, and by Samson Agonistes. Paradise Lost, like
Dante’s Divine Comedy, is primarily a didactic exposition of Milton’s
theological creed. His concept of God, Christ, and the angels and devils
is the same as the one presented in On Christian Doctrine, which
contains Milton’s disdainful opinion of conventional dogmatisms
about questions for which no sure answer is possible. Paradise Lost can
be considered a restatement in poetic form of the doctrines that will
finally justify God and indict man, whereas Paradise Regained constitutes
Milton’s ideal of Christian virtues such as obedience and temperance
and the scorn of worldly glory.
Paradise Lost has many points in common with Christian Doctrine.
In both, for instance, Milton says that angels are spirits and sons of
God; that they see God dimly and are around his throne praising
him; that seven in particular are before the throne; that both the
good angels and the fallen ones are in a kind of order; that the fallen
angels can do nothing without God’s permission; and that the elect
angels are impassible, although they do not look into the secrets of
God (and in Paradise Lost God must instruct even Michael before he
can know the future).
In Book 1 of Christian Doctrine, Milton finds that good angels
are ministering agents around the throne of God, and that their
principal office is praising God and presiding over particular areas.
Sometimes they are divine messengers, but, although they have
remarkable intelligence, they are not omniscient. In both Christian
Doctrine and Paradise Lost, Milton asserts, against the majority of
Protestant opinion, that by the name Michael the Bible signifies not
Christ but the first of the angels; against a majority of all denominations,
he alleges that the angels were created long before the world;
and against almost everybody, he envisions hell as a local place outside
the universe, with elect angels standing by their own strength,
not by compulsive grace.
In Paradise Lost, however, Milton presents some ideas not found
in Christian Doctrine, including some views that he could not have
derived directly from the Bible, although they had wide acceptance
among those who believed in angels: devils can suffer physical pain
and in a sense are always in hell; devils are the deities of heathendom;
God created men to repopulate heaven after the fall of angels;
Satan tempted Eve from the mouth of the possessed snake; and
angels, good or evil, know the world by intuition rather than by discourse
and can control the humors in humans’ bodies to produce
dreams and visions.
In Paradise Lost, Milton also rejects the ancient view that fallen
angels were corrupted by the beauty of women. He argues that the
sons of God (the angels) were never involved with women, because
the love they knew was not libidinous. He also, does not commit
himself on the three principal angelological controversies between
Protestants and Catholics—worship of angels, guardian angels, and
the Dionysian orders—although his personal views were probably
Protestant.
Milton’s angelic messengers are not merely epic machinery, but
rather characters and agents in the justification of God’s ways to men
via the exploration of the causes and effects of the Fall. Milton never
expressly denies the archangelic order, and he seems to use the other
eight terms that Dionysius used for orders. Although he mentions
Beelzebub, Zephon, Ithuriel, Zophiel, and Usiel only as cherubim,
Abdiel only as seraph, and Nisroch only as principality, he names
Raphael once as seraph and again as virtue. To the rest of the great
spirits—Satan, Gabriel, Uriel, Michael—he applies only the general
term angel or the special title archangel.
Raphael and Michael, along with Gabriel and Uriel, are the four
angels ministering before the presence of God. Etymologically,
Raphael means “medicine of God” or “God has healed,” and Michael
means “godlike” or “strength of God” or “who is as God.” Traditionally,
Raphael is also the angel of prayer, love, joy, and light and the
guardian of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden; he is also the angel
of science and knowledge, the preceptor angel. Michael is the angel of
repentance, righteousness, mercy, and sanctification; he is the deliverer
of the faithful, the angel of the final reckoning and the weigher of
souls, the benevolent angel of death, and the mighty warrior of God.
In Paradise Lost, Milton names only Satan, Uriel, Raphael, and
Michael as archangels. The three good angels of the list all have special
worldly missions—Uriel to be the regent of the Sun, and the others
to convey God’s messages to Adam—but plainly they rank in
heaven as archangels aside from these missions. Milton speaks repeatedly
of the angels as pure spirits, intelligential substances, and the like.
In Christian Doctrine, Milton says that a spirit does not have flesh and
bones. Plainly, the angels of Paradise Lost are without flesh and bones,
although this is not to say that they are simple forms.
Milton’s concept of the composition of angels in Paradise Lost
seems to suit the Puritan view of the angel as in some sense possessing
a body, but one that is almost spirit. He thus follows an ancient tradition
common to the great Alexandrian school of Christian philosophy,
according to which the universe is full of incarnate spirits that are
corporeal although not densely corporeal. They are seen only by clairvoyant
eyes. In accordance with that ancient tradition, Milton’s
angels really do eat and excrete, although not in our crass way. They
are not disembodied spirits; rather, their embodiment is so much finer
than ours that they might seem to us to be so.