Milton's Quasi‐Persons

This article proposes that a number of mysterious figures in Milton's writing can best be understood as “quasi-persons,” entities that occupy an ontological space on a spectrum between full literal personhood and symbolic metaphorical personification.1 As will be explored more fully below, Milton writes in De Doctrina Christiana that the female figure of Wisdom (Sapientia) in the book of Proverbs is presented “quasi personam” (as if a person) in the manner of poetry (“more poetico”) (OCW 8: 284), and it is possible to translate Milton's Latin here as saying that Wisdom in Proverbs is a “quasi-person.” Lady Wisdom is a key example of the category of “quasi-persons” in Milton's work but not the only one. Rather, she provides a gateway into an approach to Milton's fluid ontology of personhood that offers fresh insight into Milton's heterodox understanding of the Son and the Spirit, the fluid identity of Milton's muses in Paradise Lost, and the status of Milton's Sin and Death. In the context of early modern literary studies, such an ontological spectrum has recently been posited by Henry Turner. Turner distinguishes between personation as “the mimetic representation of human beings and anything to which a quality of ‘personhood’ may be attributed” and personification as “the mimetic representation of an abstract idea in figural form” (Turner 473).2 Yet the distinction between these two categories is not absolute for Turner: “When a personation or personality becomes exemplary in some way—the more its psychological or historical particularity is inflated by a general principle that applies across circumstances and occasions – the more it can be said to approach personification” (Turner 474). Turner thus implies a spectrum between the realistic mimetic representation of individual persons and the figurative representation of symbolic personifications. However, in Turner's schema, this spectrum of degrees of personhood primarily relates to fictional characters in a literary universe. In the context of Milton's monist cosmology, however,3 this ontological fluidity is objectively true of the cosmos, a cosmos inspired and infused with the flow of divine personality. In Milton's monist universe, all beings other than God the Father emanate from the spiritual-material substance of God, and thus all persons other than the Father are arguably temporary and contingent forms of the divine intelligence. It might indeed be comforting to say that, as surely as Keats knew urns do not talk, Milton knew that pre-existence had no shape, color, or gender, and that to question the figures of Chaos and Night would be a naive failure to grasp the conventions of language. Working against this comforting supposition, however, is the fact that Milton's metaphors characteristically trail ontological residues. (98) instructing and bettering the Nation at all opportunities, that the call of wisdom and vertu may be heard every where, as Salomon saith, She crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets, in the top of high places, in the chief concours, and in the openings of the Gates. (CPW 1: 819)4 Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed, Thou with eternal wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play In presence of the almighty Father, pleased With thy celestial song. (8–12) When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men. (Prov. 8.29–31) No mortall nature can endure either in the actions of Religion, or study of wisdome, without somtime slackning the cords of intense thought and labour: which lest we should think faulty, God himself conceals us not his own recreations before the world was built; I was, saith the eternal wisdome, dayly his delight, playing alwayes before him. (CPW 2: 596–97)5 Sapientia is thus the most protean of goddesses. Seen as a manifestation of Christ she belongs, like Caritas, to the sphere of primary divinity; considered as an allegorical figure she belongs, like Natura, to that of secondary godhead. When she is identified with Mary, she once again straddles the boundary. (193) To attribute a divine nature to Lady Wisdom may initially appear to be at odds with Judeo-Christian monotheism by positing a second divine being, but Christian understandings (orthodox and heterodox) of a plurality of persons within the Godhead increase the options for embracing Lady Wisdom. In the patristic era, some of the Church Fathers, such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Theophilus of Antioch, identified Wisdom with the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.6 However, the majority view among patristic writers is to identify Wisdom with the Son, reasoning from parallels between the Wisdom of Proverbs 8 and the Logos or “Word” of the prologue to John's Gospel (1.1–14), and St. Paul's words that “Christ [is] the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1.24).7 This identification of Lady Wisdom with the Son persisted into the early modern period. For instance, the Elizabethan Puritan minister William Perkins, fellow of Christ's College Cambridge the generation before Milton was a student there, writes of “Wisdom in the prouerbs (which with one consent of all divines is said to be Christ)” (137). If he is correct regarding this consensus, Milton would agree with Reformed orthodoxy in identifying the feminine figure of Wisdom with Christ, despite his numerous departures from it elsewhere. To whom the great creator thus replied. O Son, in whom my soul hath chief delight, Son of my bosom, Son who art alone My word, my wisdom, and effectual might[.] (167–70) But as for Prov. ch. 8, I should think it is not the son of God but personified Wisdom who in accordance with poetical custom is being brought in there as speaker. (Ad illud autem Proverbiorum cap. 8 quod attinet, crediderim, non filium Dei, sed Sapientiam, more poetico, quasi personam illic induci) (OCW 8: 284–85) As Maurice Kelley recognizes in the notes to this passage in the Complete Prose Works, Milton's exegesis of Proverbs 8 here closely parallels that of The Racovian Catechism, the exposition of Socinian belief that Milton is widely thought to have licensed for publication in 1649 in his role as a licenser for the press (6: 304n18).8 The Racovian Catechism seeks to refute the use of Proverbs 8.23, “where Wisdome saith of her self, I was begotten from Eternity” as one of the proof-texts commonly cited in defense of the orthodox belief “that Christ was begotten out of the Essence of the Father from Eternity” (Racovian Catechism [1652], 32).9 The 1652 Catechism outlines the typical use of this text to argue for the eternal begetting of the Son in the form of a syllogism: “you must know that the Adversaries reason from this place in this manner. The Wisdome of God was begotten from eternity. Christ is the Wisdome of God. Therefore he was begotten from eternity.”10 The Catechism proceeds to deconstruct both premises in this syllogism, arguing that the Hebrew translated “from eternity” may mean “from of old” rather than “from everlasting,” and also, more significantly for our purposes, that the figure of Wisdom here is not to be identified with Christ. On this point, the Catechism argues on two fronts: that the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs is a personification rather than a person, and that, even if conceded to be a person, Lady Wisdom is more likely to be a reference to the Holy Spirit than to the Son. On the first of these points, the wording of The Racovian Catechism closely parallels Milton's De Doctrina: “Hence it appears that Solomon writes of a wisdom which neither is nor could be a person: but only by a common figure (prosopopoeia) introduces it as speaking … ” (Racovian Catechism [1818], 74)9 The Racovian Catechism thus sees Lady Wisdom as a literary character created by the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia and not as an ontologically real person—in Turner's words, a personification rather than a personation (473).11 Despite Milton's exegetical endorsement of a non-Christological reading of Proverbs 8, he leaves creative space for a continuing link between Wisdom and the Son. I would suggest that Milton's Latin here allows for a stronger sense of personhood for Wisdom in his writing than John Hale's English rendering might suggest. Rendering the Latin of De Doctrina more literally if a little awkwardly, Milton writes that Wisdom/Sapientia is brought in “as a quasi-person” (quasi personam – as if a person) in the manner of poetry (more poetico) (OCW 8: 284). The figure of Wisdom, even if not a literal divine person in Milton's exegetical logic, is a quasi-person in his poetic imagination, that is, an entity that fluctuates somewhere in between a substantial person and a metaphoric personification. In De Doctrina Christiana, the Wisdom of Proverbs is defined as “a poetical personification of wisdom” rather than a representation of God's Son. But the point in that treatise is to argue that the female figure who speaks in Proverbs 8 represents the Father's wisdom rather than a distinct divine person, and that, therefore, one cannot make claims about the coeternity of the Son on the basis of Proverbs 8. (349n48) Helmer Ringgren suggests this kind of intermediate ontological status for the biblical Wisdom by viewing her as a hypostasis, “a quasi-personification of certain attributes proper to God, occupying an intermediate position between personalities and abstract beings” (8). Such a status within Milton's works means Lady Wisdom is and is not the Son. In Grossman's words, the “ontological residues” (98) of personification in Milton's ontologically fluid cosmos also mean that Wisdom can be identified both with the Son and with the Spirit without the persons of either the Son or the Spirit exhausting Wisdom's identity. While Milton's Son is a distinct divine person from the Father, but less fully divine, Milton's Spirit possesses a lesser degree of distinct personhood. This may in part be because Scripture often describes the Spirit through the imagery of inanimate entities such as wind and fire (see, e.g., Job and the of with or in both Hebrew and suggests that the Spirit is an principle that to and Scripture attributes actions to the Spirit that such as speaking and being (see, e.g., John and and In the early Christian the personhood and the of the Holy Spirit to be as orthodoxy than the personhood and of the Son The personality of the Spirit was once again in the era, by such as the who understood the Holy Spirit to mean the power of God and not a distinct person or and For both Milton and the the Holy Spirit is arguably a quasi-person on an ontological with Lady Wisdom, rather than the full personhood posited by The Racovian Catechism “the Spirit of God” to be a for the divine of God the Father rather than a distinct divine person, and the Milton of De Doctrina that the “the Spirit of God” in a divine 1: 2: the Spirit of God that is, God's divine power rather than some (OCW 8: Yet this that “the Spirit of God” a distinct person might to Milton's exegesis of a rather than his understanding of all of the of God” or in The of is to God and to and also to the of the Spirit of God or the is it must be understood in the as God the as at my not the power and that divine which and all in which both and more that 1: 2: the of God however, the son rather to be through whom the is often said to have created all (OCW 8: This sense of personhood is in Milton's of the Spirit of God a (quasi at his say to here that a is not a person, for an is a person, as by (OCW 8: Milton not only the Spirit but also the a person, even the biblical text not an but rather the Spirit like or in the form of a The Spirit as a but the for Milton as a person in its own It thus appears that, for him, a person or is by the substance of even if that form is temporary and notes that Milton biblical such as these “as that the Spirit as a person a of which suggests both that Milton sees the personhood as and that he that personhood with symbolic or metaphorical While sees Milton's metaphoric persons as “ontological sees Milton a being ontological personhood as to that, as a is not a person, no the text cannot be to that the Spirit is a person: the point is that only an individual would appear as an individual In the context of Milton's monist cosmology, in which all beings other than God the Father emanate from the spiritual-material substance of God, all persons are arguably temporary and contingent forms of the divine and of the divine such as the may for as do of the divine such as the Son. Yet persons and may metaphorical of the divine, degree of ontological substance For God the Father is the of being out of spiritual-material substance all other beings are While not the as the Father, Milton's Son possesses more substantial being than Milton's Holy Spirit, and thus possesses a more distinct individual personality. The of Milton's Spirit in the character of the divine in Paradise Lost, in which the Son to the of within with The is arguably a degree of personhood by the with which suggests that the possesses and is by of some this is in the general sense of an principle or “the in the sense of the Holy Spirit is Milton and have identified this as an to the the of God in the of the of in which the divine presence is by a by out of which “the of that the of a The to the in general and the in in the of and Christian and biblical exegesis by and the of this However, one of is – the divine being, by the without is through the personation of the that are more to human … that Father's didst not thy that have that in is a of the divine by which will be in the as a in his of notes that is the divine with I would argue that the is one of the divine with the presence of divine is only an or of the flow of divine personhood. It the of divine personhood and is thus less with and the Son On his great appeared, with with divine, and and all his Father in his were and and and the of God, of between two a at and for within on when God to in … to appear by the of divine power and to are to the presence of God. as of God have divine Such beings are of Holy Spirit, in Milton's beings” are the he at in Paradise Lost, and the fluid of his that have the of of regarding the identity of Milton's The first of a in Paradise is in the that In a of the first is in the first but the is not the The as a is in its a to one of who inspired If Milton's of one of these muses is this would make Milton a the of divine persons the Christian of this is to with the of the and for use in a Christian context by rendering poetic rather than literal persons However, I would like to this by that the is here a in between a literal person and a poetic personification. The could make the a of the or the celestial or it could the as a Christian rather than a that on the top or of didst who first the In the the and out of fluidity in the identity of divine persons is by in his of Paradise that the of is the of but here with the divine Logos both on and the of at understanding of the identity of Milton's here is as the divine While the Logos has in of a divine principle of or in Christian the divine Logos is identified with the person of Christ the Son the prologue to John's However, in his on O at the Logos or the Holy Spirit is on It is not from he is that either the Logos the or the Holy Spirit is or if he is that the Logos with the Holy Spirit is being is Milton's in this with the divine principle of the Logos more commonly identified with the Son. there is a between the of divine persons in this reading of or not on or Milton's from by that If art … The not the I for of the nor on the top but Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed, Thou with eternal wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play In presence of the almighty Father, pleased With thy celestial song. question by the that is or not is the at the of or a As that the of book is the of this is not his In of this identification is the fact that is the of and thus could be identified as a in the sense of being a of the or celestial that is the by Milton in Paradise in the only reference to the proper of his in the Milton her as – the of for the of she sees as a personification for a Christian by the of into a – that is, role as a of the is a Christian by as the of divine poetry If one as a in for person who divine could be with the Spirit of who both Scripture and Milton's divine poetry that in the of in which Milton's from for the Judeo-Christian biblical cosmos is to her as in the of her Lady Wisdom The play of Wisdom and here the play of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 in As John the of Milton has his with some of the attributes of her the notes that “When Milton the of the he her with the allegorical Wisdom of both to the identifying both and Wisdom as allegorical rather than substantial persons Yet as Wisdom's rather than as Wisdom persons of the orthodox have on been to by Milton has been as a feminine representation of the Son, as the Holy Spirit, and as a personification of certain attributes of God the If Lady Wisdom possesses a full ontological personhood that is to be identified as the Son in feminine and possesses a personhood fully distinct from that of cannot be the Son. In this instance, as Wisdom's could be as the Spirit, a with the Son to that of as both in some from the of the for all of these with that all of the as to these I suggest that with Lady Wisdom and with Milton's Spirit the intermediate ontological status of a of these entities are of the Godhead that the divine attributes of Father and Son, and all can as distinct but all can into one as In this both and Wisdom could be “the of as “the power and (OCW 8: as by De rather than as a distinct divine person, but the Spirit may for be distinct from the Son. This reading of Wisdom, and the Spirit as ontologically fluid in the of Milton's the in Milton on the of the to book of Paradise is to be identified with the O and either or both of these are to be with the figure of in The category of quasi-person may also to as as divine figures in Paradise Lost, a I would like to more in has been the of Sin and as and the of these allegorical characters in an other characters are real in a literal sense within the world of the and to be real persons by Milton and his to persons which have no real as characters real in and to of such a within an in 2: However, it is that the Father, the Son, and and as appear in Paradise are literary even if real persons the of are and actions not in the but can thus be said to be from the literary of ontological characters are even if the as this world of on Sin and as as and and the Son, as real persons within the But figures divine such as Wisdom, the Spirit, and the can be as who form a for divine Sin and are arguably to divine less substantial I in with that Sin and of substantial in with figures such as and in which is not an entity in but an or of the On these presence in Paradise against the of and for the allegorical personhood of Sin and in an mimetic not the that this for the presence of in Paradise such as I would argue that an ontology of suggests that such as Lady Wisdom may have more substantial ontological than Sin and Death. While Wisdom, and the Spirit are for Sin and being and might thus be such a can be from the biblical and Wisdom which Milton not in the of and not with the works of For God not neither hath he in the of the For he created all that might have and the of the world were and there is no of in nor the of the earth: is But with works and words it to for when thought to have it to and a with because are to part with However, even this of the ontological flow of personhood leaves some in the form of a or ontological substance is even more than that of Sin and Death. In Paradise Lost, is the both of the of fluid and of a figure who this with the two into one and not I would agree in a sense with that “the character is from the he but the two are not In the book of Paradise Lost, the first appears as an abstract the the and out of before being an degree of personification in the the of Chaos and the of can be as a without Chaos the full character of personhood. In is a degree of personhood when “the and in The of Chaos is even to make sense of than that of Sin and by of Chaos to a to his on Sin and The of Chaos is because it is not like Sin and but rather in an of between God and that to into While notes that Chaos is to God's work in by that Chaos of on his no less than of God's Yet in orthodox Christian understanding true between and is and I would argue that is always on the of rather than as by the that when him. The personified figure of Chaos is not by a his the personified and and of the and being and can have and are While the beings and have proper of are also more than the English to the of in a that the of to that is more real than Sin and it is but less real than it The character and his on the between being and I do not think fully the While the of the Chaos appears to be the personhood of the Chaos into a for an The of Chaos is of a in Milton's understanding of and poetic representation of and the of in this article is a first of a not a