*

*

*

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/john-milton

*

At the same time, however, one may acknowledge that some traditional traits of
epic heroism are embodied in characters such as the Son.

*

Surely wrath and
martial effectiveness are manifested in the War in Heaven, but Milton more
emphatically affirms that the greater triumph of the Son is his voluntary
humiliation on behalf of humankind.

*

Accordingly, faith, patience, and fortitude
are the crucial virtues to be exercised by the Son in his redemptive ministry,
which he has agreed to undertake because of meekness, filial obedience, and
boundless love for humankind.

*

http://books.google.com/books?id=JqWhS7oWMI4C&pg=PA125&lpg=PA125&dq=milton’s+irony&source=bl&ots=xcePmY9ytA&sig=vKkncOyksUq1uyhtZPFdVK5NytY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=w1CVUf3SMKHViwL4q4CIDg&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=milton’s%20irony&f=false

*

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7063.html

*

THE PREDICAMENT OF MILTON’S IRONY

**Caught as we are between possibility and mortality, irony remains a quintessentially human expression that, without platitudes, conveys the perplexity of our condition.**

*

**This is especially the case when irony is taken to the extremes of absurdity or extenuation, since these manage to ridicule that most fundamental of human dogmas,**

*

namely, our pretension to something grander and finer than mere animal existence.

*

For even as irony expresses the rueful if distinctive impulse to reflection or consciousness of ourselves as creatures, our very attempts at that perspective tend to leave us lost in Swiftian loathing at the unangelic thing we find, in terror of what looks like our own bestial futility.

*

Of course, absurdity has always inspired such revulsion at our creatural nature, designed as it is to deliver us from the rational delusion of human preeminence.

*

Yet more tacitly or more insidiously, so do the endless placating, temporizing, casuistical rounds we make in the opposite direction, invoking ‘mere humanity’ to excuse our seemingly invariable failure to improve ourselves.

*

I mean the unctuous irony of rationalization, when we devote all our ingenuity to the task of avoiding thoughtfulness, and whose point is how we debase and betray our peculiar intelligence in thus refusing responsibility for what we have made of human being.

But intelligence, however it is expressed, remains our obligation as creatures, and the one quality capable of rendering this existence meaningful, memorable, artistic in the ancient sense.

*

And for the most part, we invoke irony both more kindly and scrupulously to assess just this intelligence, in the desire to better if not transcend human nature as we find it, and at the same time to acknowledge the finitude of the creature on which human vanity appears doomed to founder.

*

That is why irony and drama show such an entire affinity for each other, because drama is the mode of representation most completely capturing not just the sense but the intimate sensation of this tension integral to human being–between our aspirations and our actualities.

*

When Aristotle says that epic, like tragedy, is a mimesis or imitation of an action, he is distinguishing this dimensionality that attends any populated, diversified account of our experience: it is the genius of drama as an expressive mode to imagine and depict the human predicament much like we undergo it, projected as the perpetually latent meaning that fugurative persons must encounter and negotiate–forever latent because forever contingent upon the humanly inevident and incalculable train of motive and circumstance. For no matter how resolute or pointed, drama makes for an uneasy, restless literature just as irony does an uneasy, restless meaning.

These observations may seem entirely superfluous to Paradise Lost, which is not a drama, at least in the conventional sense, and whose idiom is explicitly cast as a justification, which we generally take to mean a positive assertion of truth–God’s ways being truth, as Milton reminds us.

*

Understandably, then, critics both friendly and hostile to what his speaker relates about the loss of Eden and all our woe have supposed the poem to be anything but dramatic or ironical, incapable of surprise or self-criticism.

*

With ever more sophistication and nuance, they have tended instead to read it as symbolic and propositional–a poetic tractate if you will; and it is this supposition which ensures that there isn’t much middle ground of opinion where Milton is concerned, with the readers of the poem either vindicating or condemning what it more or less figuratively asserts, and loving or hating its author accordingly.

*

Without seeking to exonerate Milton of what he says there (although it will inevitably appear that way), I would like to show that Paradise Lost is both dramatic and ironical in some perhaps surprising and self-conscious ways.

*

Yet I also want to suggest that this is why there are, broadly speaking, two Miltons to be found in Milton studies and why people tend to evolve such exclusive and opposed ideas of them.

*

It is telling, I think, that we never get so exercised over what we presume to be Shakespeare’s notion of things (unless we are George Steiner or Wittgenstein). But then, Shakespeare’s meanings are dramatical and, as such, too oblique and manifold to give indelible offense. But Milton and his poem have been offending someone or other for more than three hundred years.

Needless to say, this project of arguing Milton’s irony is by no means incidental to yet one more reading of Paradise Lost, which I will give in a somewhat episodic fashion, the better to explain how the dramatic and ironical aspects of the poem are created not so much despite, but because we know the outcome of the story.

*

For irony

not only causes there to be two Miltons;

*

**it is the reason that there are two Gods in Milton’s poem–**

*

one tedious and repellant,

*

the other unremittingly if only vicariously delightful,

*

and both the source, or rather the occasion,

*

of some extraordinary poetry.

*

In relating the two — Milton with Milton’s God — I am of course enlisting William Empson, without whose book I could not proceed.

*

For as one admiring critic has described Empson’s place in Milton studies, his offense was “to take seriously and to force us to take seriously the idea that Milton truly thought that God’s ways needed justifying, that this was a hard, not an easy thing to do, and that a case could also be made for the other side.”And Empson’s triumph, like his Milton’s, was “a triumph of the will, a work of extraordinarily perverse dedication”–“to try to keep us from thinking that Satan’s grandeur can be easily dismissed, or that God’s goodness can be easily cleared.”

I would like to take up our understanding of Milton where Empson left off–with the uneasy significance of Paradise Lost and that perdurable human need to justify God’s ways–and will begin by stating the obvious: that we usually undertake to justify something only when we suffer an injustice, by which I mean an incoherence, a challenge or conflict in our experience of the world. For whether or not they go by that name, our religious commitments tend to respond not to our ease but to our difficulties with things, on those occasions when the ordinary would seem to behave not just extraordinarily but wrongly–defying reasonable expectation and eluding that mastery of our circumstances to which we presume.

*

Crises like these make us fearful but also reflective, self-conscious, moving us to pursue the justification, the right conceiving or ordering of such experiences, precisely because we cannot as creatures tolerate the uneasiness left in their wake.

*

So rather like Lord Macaulay’s Francis Bacon, or Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, we make an enduring scandal of the discovery that the familiar remains unknown or perhaps unknowable at its core, because we dearly want to assume that human expectation and human understanding are one and the same, when they are not.

*

Indeed, our human predicament is chronic, ineluctable surprise at the discrepancy between these dimensions of our experience, which we are obliged daily to witness as

*

expectation outstrips understanding even in the smallest things.

*

**This aspect of being human is what irony enacts for us.**

*

And while there is something really wonderful and hopeful about the fact that we are always learning what we do not know,

*

yet as thinking and time-bound creatures, we are unable to leave our existence to what feels like chance.

*

So we worry it endlessly, which is why we are also religious.

*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temptation_of_Christ#Is_it_a_parable.3F

*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Regained

*

Paradise Regained is a poem by the English poet John Milton, published in 1671. It is connected by name to his earlier and more famous epic poem Paradise Lost, with which it shares similar theological themes. It deals with the subject of the temptation of Christ.

The poem was composed in Milton’s cottage in Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, and was based on the Gospel of Luke‘s version of the temptation of Christ. Paradise Regained is four books in length, in contrast with Paradise Lost‘s twelve.

One of the major concepts emphasized throughout Paradise Regained is the play on reversals. As implied by its title, Milton sets out to reverse the “loss” of Paradise. Thus, antonyms are often found next to each other throughout the poem, reinforcing the idea that everything that was lost in the first epic is going to be regained by the end of the mini-epic.

Additionally, this work focuses on the idea of “hunger,” both in a literal and in a spiritual sense. After wandering in the wilderness for forty days, Jesus is starved of both food and the Word of God. Satan, too blind to see any non-literal meanings of the term, offers Christ food and various other temptations, but Jesus continually denies him.

*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_lost#Interpretation_and_criticism

*

https://curtisnarimatsu.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/irony-can-include-paradox-and-paradox-can-include-irony/

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

At the same time, however, one may acknowledge that some traditional traits of epic heroism are embodied in characters such as the Son.

*

Surely wrath and martial effectiveness are manifested in the War in Heaven, but Milton more emphatically affirms that the greater triumph of the Son is his voluntary humiliation on behalf of humankind.

*

Accordingly, faith, patience, and fortitude are the crucial virtues to be exercised by the Son in his redemptive ministry, which he has agreed to undertake because of meekness, filial obedience, and boundless love for humankind.

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

THE PREDICAMENT OF MILTON’S IRONY

Caught as we are between possibility and mortality, irony remains a quintessentially human expression that, without platitudes, conveys the perplexity of our condition.

*

This is especially the case when irony is taken to the extremes of absurdity or extenuation, since these manage to ridicule that most fundamental of human dogmas,

*

namely, our pretension to something grander and finer than mere animal existence.

*

For even as irony expresses the rueful if distinctive impulse to reflection or consciousness of ourselves as creatures, our very attempts at that perspective tend to leave us lost in Swiftian loathing at the unangelic thing we find, in terror of what looks like our own bestial futility.

*

Of course, absurdity has always inspired such revulsion at our creatural nature, designed as it is to deliver us from the rational delusion of human preeminence.

*

Yet more tacitly or more insidiously, so do the endless placating, temporizing, casuistical rounds we make in the opposite direction, invoking ‘mere humanity’ to excuse our seemingly invariable failure to improve ourselves.

*

I mean the unctuous irony of rationalization, when we devote all our ingenuity to the task of avoiding thoughtfulness, and whose point is how we debase and betray our peculiar intelligence in thus refusing responsibility for what we have made of human being.

But intelligence, however it is expressed, remains our obligation as creatures, and the one quality capable of rendering this existence meaningful, memorable, artistic in the ancient sense.

*

And for the most part, we invoke irony both more kindly and scrupulously to assess just this intelligence, in the desire to better if not transcend human nature as we find it, and at the same time to acknowledge the finitude of the creature on which human vanity appears doomed to founder.

*

That is why irony and drama show such an entire affinity for each other, because drama is the mode of representation most completely capturing not just the sense but the intimate sensation of this tension integral to human being–between our aspirations and our actualities.

*

These observations may seem entirely superfluous to Paradise Lost, which is not a drama, at least in the conventional sense, and whose idiom is explicitly cast as a justification, which we generally take to mean a positive assertion of truth–God’s ways being truth, as Milton reminds us.

*

Understandably, then, critics both friendly and hostile to what his speaker relates about the loss of Eden and all our woe have supposed the poem to be anything but dramatic or ironical, incapable of surprise or self-criticism.

*

*

Without seeking to exonerate Milton of what he says there (although it will inevitably appear that way), I would like to show that Paradise Lost is both dramatic and ironical in some perhaps surprising and self-conscious ways.

*

Yet I also want to suggest that this is why there are, broadly speaking, two Miltons to be found in Milton studies and why people tend to evolve such exclusive and opposed ideas of them.

*

*

For irony

not only causes there to be two Miltons;

*

it is the reason that there are two Gods in Milton’s poem–

*

one tedious and repellant,

*

the other unremittingly if only vicariously delightful,

*

and both the source, or rather the occasion,

*

of some extraordinary poetry.

*

In relating the two — Milton with Milton’s God — I am of course enlisting William Empson, without whose book I could not proceed.

*

*

Crises like these make us fearful but also reflective, self-conscious, moving us to pursue the justification, the right conceiving or ordering of such experiences, precisely because we cannot as creatures tolerate the uneasiness left in their wake.

*

*

Indeed, our human predicament is chronic, ineluctable surprise at the discrepancy between these dimensions of our experience, which we are obliged daily to witness as

*

expectation outstrips understanding even in the smallest things.

*

This aspect of being human is what irony enacts for us.

*

And while there is something really wonderful and hopeful about the fact that we are always learning what we do not know,

*

yet as thinking and time-bound creatures, we are unable to leave our existence to what feels like chance.

*

So we worry it endlessly, which is why we are also religious.

*

At the same time, however, one may acknowledge that some traditional traits of
epic heroism are embodied in characters such as the Son.

Surely wrath and
martial effectiveness are manifested in the War in Heaven, but Milton more
emphatically affirms that the greater triumph of the Son is his voluntary
humiliation on behalf of humankind.

Accordingly, faith, patience, and fortitude
are the crucial virtues to be exercised by the Son in his redemptive ministry,
which he has agreed to undertake because of meekness, filial obedience, and
boundless love for humankind.

**Caught as we are between possibility and mortality, irony remains a quintessentially human expression that, without platitudes, conveys the perplexity of our condition.**

**This is especially the case when irony is taken to the extremes of absurdity or extenuation, since these manage to ridicule that most fundamental of human dogmas,**

**it is the reason that there are two Gods in Milton’s poem–**

**This aspect of being human is what irony enacts for us.**