Infelix Culpa: Milton's Son of God and the Incarnation as a Fall in Paradise Lost

Abstract

In a sermon written fifty years before publication of Milton's Paradise Lost, John Donne ruminates that must not ask why God took this way his Son. (1) Despite centrality of concept of Incarnation in Christian doctrine, it is perhaps not surprising that such a theory raises numerous problematic questions for most Christian thinkers. The OED defines Incarnation of God in Christ as investiture or embodiment in flesh; assumption of, or existence in, a bodily form, and any explanation of translation of divine form into human body is essentially speculative. Indeed, history of Christian doctrine is testament this as virtually every patristic, scholastic and Renaissance religious thinker struggled explain what Milton called the greatest mystery of our religion (CPW 6:420). (2) Yet what was for most theologians greatest act of divine love, ultimate manifestation of God's redemptive power, is for others a mystery of far darker and more sinister implications. Sometimes such negative speculation is merely an inadvertent questioning of God's status, such as statement quoted in OED under incarnate from Bishop Hall's Contemplations upon New Testament, That God should be of a virgin was an abasement of His maiestie. More interesting is only entry pertaining divine incarnation listed in OED that details meaning of to degrade from spiritual nature, despiritualize, and this comes from Book 9 of Paradise Lost. Critics have become increasingly aware of Milton's heretical Christian theology. For centuries regarded by most as preeminent English poet of Christian orthodoxy Milton's name is now almost synonymous with Arianism, and his thinking on mortalism, polygamy, material monism, and creatio ex Deo cosmogony are well documented. However, critics have not explored problems into which Milton embroils himself as he expounds Incarnation towards end of his writing career. What seems like simple affirmation of Christian orthodoxy in On Morning of Christ's Nativity has certainly become by writing of great epics deeply troubling, and Milton himself is very aware of this. In middle of God Father's elaborate exposition Son of his gift of salvation in Book 3 of Paradise Lost he takes time out from his Miltonic grand style of powerful, bombastic and complexly layered verse interject a brief, almost anomalous, two line refutation: Nor shalt thou by descending assume / Man's nature, lessen or degrade thine (303-4). It is my contention that Milton here uncomfortably confronts conclusions of his own idiosyncratic ontological philosophy. The narrative of Paradise Lost documents two philosophical shifts within ontological and epistemological scale of being, and prophesies a third that is finally explored in narrative of Paradise Regained. These philosophical shifts are falls, and of Satan and of Adam and Eve are easily comprehended in Miltonic context of both material and ethical debasement. The third fall is Incarnation of Son of God. I will argue that philosophically ontological change in person of Son is not dissimilar those demonstrated in Satan and conceptualized in mankind, and that it is therefore possible, and indeed inescapable as Milton himself found, appraise Incarnation theologically in light of these other two falls. The idea of Incarnation as a form of ontological degradation is not unique Milton, but implications for Incarnation being a fall within a material monistic hierarchy of being are revealing. In Milton's metaphysical Weltanschauung, essence is determined by ethics. Working within what Michel Foucault would call in Les Mots et les choses resemblance episteme current before Age of Reason, Milton's poetics is uniformly consistent in representing formal composition as a consequence of moral behavior. …

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