Christopher

chest (Latin cista, Greek kiste) 

A Box-like container, corresponding also 

to the Latin area (see ARK) . 

The mystic chest of Dionysus (see BAccHus) - probably a basket rather than a wooden chest - was filled with symbolic objects and carried by special priests known as kistophoroi; 

when The Mysteries of Dionysus were celebrated, 

a SNAKE emerged from it. 

The image of Demeter (Latin Ceres) as worshipped in 

the Eleusinian mysteries shows the goddess seated on a chest. In the Roman period the cista became a general symbol for esoteric mystical religions. The anatomical meaning of the English word "chest" is an extension of this same ety- mology. chi-rho A monogram derived from the first two Greek letters in the name of Christ, which resemble the Roman letters X and P; the chi-rho has been a symbol of Christian- ity since the time of Constantine I, fre- quently appearing on church banners (see FLAG), often within a CIRCLE or a victor's WREATH. On the LABARUM (the banner of the CROSS), the chi-rho was said to have accompanied Constantine's victory over Maxentius in A. D. 312, after the prophecy to Constantine "In hoc signo vinces" ("Un- der this sign will you be victorious"), but its earlier use has been documented. It sym- bolizes the universal victory of Christianity or the victory of the Savior over the domi- nation of sin. The chi-rho is at times placed within a triple circle (a reference to the TRINITY), with the ALPHA AND OMEGA on either side. Within a circle the monogram also has the effect of a WHEEL-like symbol for the SUN, which heightens its triumphal character. chimera or Chimaera In present-day usage only a symbol of imaginings or rumor; in Chi-Rho: early Christian catacomb painting with doves and olive branches Chi -Rho: the monogram of Christ antiquity, a monster part LION, part GOAT, and part SERPENT (the Etruscan "Chimera of Arezzo" having one head from each of these animals). The Chimera is said to be the daughter of Echidna, who was part ser- pent and part woman, and Typhon, a mon- ster from the underworld; her brother was the HELL-hound Cerberus. According to Robert Graves, her TRIADIC form symbolizes the divisions of the year: the lion corre- sponding to spring, the goat to summer, and the serpent to winter. In the myth, the Chimera was killed by the hero Bellerophon riding on his WINGED HORSE PEGASUS; BeI- lerophon was thus a pre-Christian prototype of such DRAGON-slayers as St. George and St. Michael. Chimeras appear occasionally in medieval mosaics (and in the capitals of pillars and columns) as embodiments of Sa- tanic forces. In antiquity the terrifying mon- ster appeared in the coats of arms of several cities, including Corinth and Cyzicus. The rationalistic interpretation of the tripartite creature saw her as the embodiment of the dangers of land and sea, but above all of the volcanic forces in the EARTH'S interior. Chimera. Etruscan bronze, 4th century B.C. 

Christopher, Saint 

The personification of a saintly legend, behind which there stands no historically documented person. 

Nevertheless, the legendary saint was venerated as early as the fifth century and is counted among the "14 catholic saints."

There are accounts that identify him as a GIANT named Offero or Reprobus of the savage race of the Cynocephali (dog-headed), who would offer his services only to The Strongest; a KING and The DEVIL 

proved to be timid, and only the Christ chiIld remained. 

The Giant was to carry him across a RIVER (an image of transition; see AFTERLIFE), and The Child became so heavy that he pulled The Giant under The Surface of The WATER, baptising him 'Christopher' ("The Bearer of Christ") in The Process.

He is said to have died A Martyr's Death under The Emperor Decius; his day was July 25. Christopher was portrayed as a giant with a leafy staff or stake in his hand (sym- bolizing justification through divine grace) and on his shoulder the Christ child, who is holding The Imperial APPLE, Symbol of The World. 

Frescoes depicting St. Christopher are common inside churches, which is ex- plained by the popular belief that anyone seeing Christopher's image would not die on that day; this encouraged frequent visits to churches. Christopher thus came to be seen as offering protection against sudden death; hence his modern status as patron saint of travelers. Iconographic prototypes may in- clude late Egyptian portrayals of the dog- headed Anubis with the child Horus, or 68 Chronus Saint Christopher. Woodcut, Buxheim, 1531 images of Hercules with the child Eros (CUPID) on his shoulder. The legendary .saint is an image of the witnessing believer who bears Christ through the world and thus attains salvation. The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1270) gives the following ac- count of him: "He carried Christ in four ways: on his shoulders, when he transported him over the water; in his body, through the mortification to which he submitted himself; in his spirit, through his fervent prayers; in his mouth, through his witness and his sermons." In the Jewish and Islamic faiths the ancestral father ABRAHAM, who will serve only the greatest master and thus comes to know God, in this respect plays a role analogous to that of Christopher. (See also STARS.) 

Chronus The personification of Time, often not distinguished ftom the God Cronus (Latin SATURN); Saturn was thus often portrayed with symbols of transitoriness, which are properly the attributes of Chronus: the hour- glass and the SCYTHE. Cronus, who devoured his children, became a symbol of Time, which Creates and then destroys. 

In ancient mysterious religions, Chronus was a primeval god of the cosmos, also known as Eon (orig- inally Aron or Aeon); this Chronus was believed 

to have emerged from The DARKNESS 

to create The World, 

making a primordial SILVER EGG out of the ether. 

The figure of The Time-Guardian Chronus appears on many baroque clocks. The fleeting nature of passing time is often suggested by his WINGS, its cruel inevitability by The Scythe with which Cronus (in Hesiod's theogony) had castrated the primeval god -- His Father -- Uranus; drops of Uranus' BLOOD seeped into the ground, and from them the FURIES (Greek Erinyes) arose. chrysanthemum In East Asia a prized flower: in Japan an imperial emblem, and in China a symbol of autumn, as the PLUM- blossom is of spring. Its Chinese name (cha) is a homonym for "wait, linger" and suggests reflective contemplation, an association that is found in poetry as well: "0 yellow chry- santhemums, in the light from my little lamp you have grown quite pale," or "In late splendor do chrysanthemums bloom. " State attire was often decorated with designs containing chrysanthemums. Rebus-like messages of good will or congratulations were built on homonymies linking "PINE" and "chrysanthemum" ("May you have long life"), or "nine," "quail," and "chrysanthe- mum" ("May nine generations live together in peace.") A European wildflower variety, the tansy (Chrysanthemum vulgare), was used in folk-medicine against intestinal worms but is used today only for garden decoration. cicada (Greek tettix) The "tree cricket" of the Mediterranean region. According to Greek myth, Tithonus, the brother of King Priam of Troy, was the lover of EOS, the goddess of dawn. She asked Zeus to make Chronus as an angel. St. Hawes, The Pastyme of Plea- sure, 1509 Cicada ornament, symbolizing immortality. China, ca. 1200 B. C. Tithonus immortal but forgot to ask that he might remain forever young. He therefore lived forever, but became more and more feeble, mumbling to himself meaninglessly, until he shriveled up and was transformed into the constantly chirping cicada. The literature of antiquity sometimes describes the high-pitched drone of the insect as pleasant, sometimes as annoying. For Cal- limachus (ca. 300-240 B.C.), the sound symbolized "elevated" poetry; the cicada, in various contexts, stood for the tireless poet, was his helper, or appeared as an attribute of the MUSES. In ancient China the cicada (shan) sym- bolized immortality or life after death; a JADE amulet representing a cicada was placed in the mouth of the dead. A queen of the Cicada singing from the summer heat. J. &schius, 1702 circle 69 vassal state of Ch'i in the east was said to have been transformed into a cicada when she died; for this reason, the insect was also known as "the maiden of Ch'i." A stylized cicada ornament also represented "loyalty to one's principles." Circe A Greek demigoddess and the quin- tessential enchantress (see WITCH); the daughter of the SUN god Helios. She was said to have transformed men whom she loved into animals; she turned Picus, the son of SATURN, into a woodpecker. She did not manage to transform Glaucus when he requested a love-elixir from her, but she did change the nymph Scylla, whom he loved, into a hideous monster, the bane of seafarers (see WATER SPIRITS) . Circe is best known for her adventure with Odysseus, whose men she turns into swine (see PIG). Only Odys- seus himself-protected by the magic herb moly, which Hermes (see MERCURY) had given him-was impervious to her spell. He forced her to reverse the transformation of his men, spent a year with the enamored sorceress, and was finally freed by her and sent on with useful advice. Circe came to symbolize the seductive woman whose en- chantment leads her admirers to forget their dignity. circle Arguably the most important and most widespread geometric symbol; its form also corresponds to that of the SUN and MOON as they appear to us. In the specula- Circle: Cosmos, zodiac. R. LuHi's Practica compendiosa artis, 1523 70 circle Circle: Mausoleum decorations. Ireland (Sess Kill- green), Brittany (Gavr' Inis) tive philosophies of the Platonists and the Neoplatonists, the circle is the ultimate, the perfect form. The legendary Hyperborean temple of Apollo is described as circular (a reference to the prehistoric Stonehenge in southern England?), and the capital of Pla- to's "island of ATLANTIS" as a system of concentric rings of land and WATER. In mys- tic systems God is spoken of as a circle whose center is everywhere-an expression of per- fection and of surpassing human understand- ing (limitlessness, eternity, the absolute). In the circle there is no beginning or end, no direction. The "canopy" of the HEAVENS (see BALDACHIN) is represented as a round Circle: Reconstruction of shrine at Stonehenge. Southern England, ca. 1800 B. C. dome (partly because of the circular trajec- tory of the STARS around the celestial pole), and thus the circle also stands for heaven and all things spiritual. When spokes are drawn in, it becomes a symbolic WHEEL, which however carries dynamic associations opposed to the permanence of the circle. The Egyptian symbol for eternity is a string tied to form a circle; the corresponding sym- bol in the world of the ancient Greeks was a SNAKE biting its own tail (UROBORUS) . Concentric circles arise also when an object is thrown into the water. The frequent de- signs of this sort on megalithic gravestones can be interpreted as representations of sink- ing into the seas of death (see AFTERLIFE), or perhaps of miraculously re-emerging from them, suggesting a doctrine of death and rebirth, symbolized by concentric waves. A Circles inscribed with names of God, to repel demons. England, ca. 1860 circle with its center drawn in is the tradi- tional astronomer's symbol for the sun, and the alchemist's for the solar metal, GOLD. In magic lore the circle (drawn around the conjuring magician and not to be crossed throughout the ceremony) is supposed to serve as protection against evil spirits. The symbological opposite of the circle is the SQUARE, which is associated with the terrestrial world and things material. The circle stands for God and heaven, the square for humans and the earth. The proverbial task of "squaring the circle," constructing a circle (by purely geometric means) that has the same area as a given square, thus offers an image of human efforts to transform their own substance into that of God, and thus to render themselves divine. This insoluble problem in geometry was a frequent Renais- sance allegory for human striving for divine perfection, one that was also of great im- portance in the symbolism of ALCHEMY. Without going into the problem of equal areas, the Cabala also treats the circle and the square: a circle inside a square is seen as symbolizing the divine "SPARK" within a material envelope. In Christian iconography the halo (NIMBUS) around the head of a saint is usually circular, and concentric cir- cles also represent God's original creation. The first represents the earth, where humans will be placed only later, and God draws it with a drafting COMPASS (in the Bible Mor- alisee of the 13th century), or he reveals himself in the form of a HAND, which emerges from the center of multiple circles and breaks through them "transcendentally" on the pe- riphery (Romanesque fresco, St. Climent de Tahull, Catalonia, ca. 1123). Naturally, the importance of the circle as a symbol is not restricted to Occidental culture. For various Native American peo- ples, the orbit of the moon, and the appar- ent orbits of the sun and the stars, are round forms, and such forms appear in the way things grow in nature. Thus the camp, the teepee, and seating arrangements are all based on the circle. It is not uncommon to find traditional dances following (or gener- ating) circles. In Zen Buddhism the circle stands for enlightenment, the perfection of humanity in unity with the primal principle. In the Chinese symbol of YIN AND YANG, duality is enclosed in a circle (t'ai-chi, the primal One) . In Europe the notion of con- centric cosmic spheres dominates medieval cosmology and is represented poetically in Dante's Divine Comedy in the form of the "circles" of HELL, PURGATORY, and heaven; the hierarchies of ANGELS serve as guardians of these spheres and thus of the entire struc- ture. The TRINITY is often symbolized by three mutually intersecting circles. (See also MANDALA and SPIRAL.) city 71 city One criterion for some cultural his- torians seeking to determine whether a na- tion or people can be referred to as having attained "civilization." A city is not simply an agglomeration of fixed houses; it is also defined by central civil and religious orga- nization, and in some cases by the presence of city walls. For the symbologist, the city is a reflection in miniature of cosmic struc- tures, not sprung up in a totally random way, but laid out systematically, having at its center a terrestrial counterpart of the midpoint of the heavens (see OMPHALOS, MUNDUS, AXIS MUNDI). At this center we often find the shrine of the tutelary god of the city (in China: ch'eng huang-shen) or of a god-like hero, a local deity who ranks with KINGS. We find this not only in the Greek city-state (polis) but also in ancient Meso- potamia and Egypt. When an empire is established, the tutelary god of the central polis often becomes the god of the entire realm, bringing the gods of other cities into the pantheon over which he presides; the EMPEROR is then the earthly representative of this ruling deity. To a very limited extent, in the Christian world the patron saint of a city takes on something of the role played by the tutelary gods of old. The ideal city of the Western world is JERUSALEM, with BABYLON its ancient op- posite, subsequently replaced by heathen City: Assyrian portrayal of a Phoenician city. Nine- veh, 8th century B.C. 72 clouds Rome. The "city of God" is also a symbol of "Mary, Mother of God," and in the Middle Ages tabernacles and shrines for rel- ics were often constructed like cities, with decorative walls and miniature towers. In the symbology of the psyche, the city stands for the regularized center of a person's life, which can often be reached only after long travels, when a high degree of emo- tional maturity has been attained and the GATE to the spiritual center of one's life can be traversed

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Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos'd at several times.

On the morning of Christs Nativity. Compos'd 1629.

I.

THis is the Month, and this the happy morn 

Wherin the Son of Heav'ns eternal King, 

Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born, 

Our great redemption from above did bring; 

For so the holy sages once did sing. 

⁠That he our deadly forfeit should release, 

And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

II.

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable, 

And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty, 

Wherwith he wont at Heav'ns high Councel-Table, 

To fit the midst of Trinal Unity, 

He laid aside; and here with us to be, 

⁠Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day, 

And chose with us a darksom House of mortal Clay.

​

III.

Say Heav'nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein

Afford a present to the Infant God?

Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,

To welcom him to this his new abode,

Now while the Heav'n, by the Suns team untrod,

⁠Hath took no print of the approaching light,

And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?

IV.

See how from far upon the Eastern rode

The star-led Wizards haste with odours sweet:

O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,

And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;

Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,

⁠And join thy voice unto the Angel Quire,

From out his secret Altar touch'd with hallow'd fire.

The Hymn.

I.

IT was the Winter wilde,

While the Heav'n-born childe,

⁠All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;

Nature in aw to him

​

Had doff'd her gaudy trim,

⁠With her great Master so to sympathize:

It was no season then for her

To wanton with the Sun, her lusty Paramour.

II.

Onely with speeches fair

She woo's the gentle Air

⁠To hide her guilty front with innocent Snow,

And on her naked shame,

Pollute with sinful blame,

⁠The saintly veil of maiden white to throw,

Confounded, that her Maker's eyes

Should look so near upon her foul deformities.

III.

But he, her fears to cease,

Sent down the meek-ey'd Peace:

⁠She crown'd with olive green, came softly sliding

Down through the turning sphere

His ready Harbinger,

⁠With Turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,

And waving wide her myrtle wand,

She strikes a universal peace through Sea and Land.

IV.

No War or Battleils sound

Was heard the World around:

​

⁠The idle spear and shield were high up hung;

The hooked Chariot stood

Unstain'd with hostile blood,

⁠The Trumpet spake not to the armed throng,

And Kings sate still with awful eye,

As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

V.

But peaceful was the night

Wherein the Prince of light

⁠His reign of peace upon the earth began:

The Windes with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,

⁠Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,

Who now hath quite forgot to rave,

While birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.

VI.

The Stars with deep amaze

Stand fixt in steadfast gaze,

⁠Bending one way their precious influence,

And will not take their flight,

For all the morning light,

⁠Or Lucifer that often warn'd them thence;

But in their glimmering Orbs did glow,

Until their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go.

​

VII.

And though the shady gloom

Had given day her room,

⁠The Sun himself withheld his wonted speed,

And hid his head for shame,

As his inferior flame,

⁠The new-enlighten'd world no more should need,

He saw a greater Sun appear

Than his bright Throne, or burning Axletree could bear.

VIII.

The Shepherds on the Lawn,

Or ere the point of dawn,

⁠Sate simply chatting in a rustic row;

Full little thought they than,

That the mighty Pan

⁠Was kindly come to live with them below:

Perhaps their loves, or els their sheep,

Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep.

IX.

When such music sweet

Their hearts and ears did greet,

⁠As never was by mortal finger strook,

Divinely warbled voice

Answering the stringed noise,

⁠As all their souls in blissful rapture took:

​

The air such pleasure loth to lose,

With thousand echoes still prolongs each heav'nly close.

X.

Nature, that heard such sound

Beneath the hollow round

⁠Of Cynthia's seat, the Airy region thrilling,

Now was almost won

To think her part was don,

⁠And that her reign had here its last fulfilling;

She knew such harmony alone

Could hold all Heav'n and Earth in happier union.

XI.

At last surrounds their sight

A Globe of circular light,

⁠That with long beams the shame-fac't Night array'd;

The helmed Cherubim

And sworded Seraphim,

⁠Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displaid,

Harping in loud and solemn quire,

With unexpressive notes to Heav'n's new-born Heir.

XII.

Such Music (as 'tis said)

Before was never made,

⁠But when of old the sons of morning sung,

While the Creator Great

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His constellations set,

⁠And the well-balanc't world on hinges hung,

And cast the dark foundations deep,

And bid the weltring waves their oozy channel keep.

XIII.

Ring out ye Crystal spheres,

Once bless our human ears,

⁠(If ye have power to touch our senses so)

And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time,

⁠And let the Base of Heav'n's deep Organ blow;

And with your ninefold harmony

Make up full consort to th'Angelic symphony.

XIV.

For if such holy Song

Enwrap our fancy long,

⁠Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,

And speckl'd vanity

Will sicken soon and die,

⁠And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,

And Hell itself will pass away,

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

XV.

Yea, Truth and Justice then

Will down return to men,

​

⁠Th' enameld Arras of the Rainbow wearing,

And Mercy set between,

Thron'd in Celestiall sheen,

⁠With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing,

And Heav'n as at som festivall,

Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

XVI.

But wisest Fate sayes no,

This must not yet be so,

⁠The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy,

That on the bitter cross

Must redeem our loss;

⁠So both himself and us to glorifie:

Yet first to those ychain'd in sleep,

The wakefull trump of doom must thunder through the deep,

XVII.

With such a horrid clang

As on mount Sinai rang

⁠While the red fire, and smouldring clouds out brake:

The aged Earth agast

With terrour of that blast,

⁠Shall from the surface to the center shake;

When at the worlds last session,

The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne.

​

XVIII.

And then at last our bliss

Full and perfect is,

⁠But now begins; for from this happy day

Th' old Dragon under ground,

In straiter limits bound,

⁠Not half so far casts his usurped sway,

And wrath to see his Kingdom fail,

Swindges the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail.

XIX.

The Oracles are dumm,

No voice or hideous humm

⁠Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.

Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

⁠With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspire's the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell.

XX.

The lonely mountains o're,

And the resounding shore,

⁠A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;

From haunted spring and dale

Edg'd with poplar pale,

⁠The parting Genius is with sighing sent,

​

With flowre-inwov'n tresses torn

The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

XXI.

In consecrated Earth,

And on the holy Hearth,

⁠The Lars, and Lemures moan with midnight plaint,

In Urns, and Altars round,

A drear, and dying sound

⁠Affrights the Flamins at their service quaint;

And the chill Marble seems to sweat,

While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat.

XXII.

Peor, and Baalim,

Forsake their Temples dim,

⁠With that twise-batter'd god of Palestine,

And mooned Ashtaroth,

Heav'ns Queen and Mother both,

⁠Now sits not girt with Tapers holy shine,

The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn,

In vain the Tyrian Maids their wounded Thamuz mourn.

XXIII.

And sullen Moloch fled,

Hath left in shadows dred,

⁠His burning Idol all of blackest hue,

In vain with Cymbals ring,

​

They call the grisly king,

⁠In dismall dance about the furnace blue,

The brutish gods of Nile as fast,

Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis hast.

XXIV.

Nor is Osiris seen

In Memphian Grove, or Green,

⁠Trampling the unshowr'd Grasse with lowings loud:

Nor can he be at rest

Within his sacred chest,

⁠Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud,

In vain with Timbrel'd Anthems dark

The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt Ark.

XXV.

He feels from Juda's land

The dredded Infants hand,

⁠The rayes of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;

Nor all the gods beside,

Longer dare abide,

⁠Nor Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:

Our Babe, to shew his Godhead true,

Can in his swadling bands controul the damned crew.

XXVI.

So when the Sun in bed,

Curtain'd with cloudy red,

​

⁠Pillows his chin upon an Orient wave.

The flocking shadows pale

Troop to th' infernall jail,

⁠Each fetter'd Ghost slips to his severall grave,

And the yellow-skirted Fayes,

Fly after the Night-steeds, leaving their Moon-lov'd maze.

XXVII.

But see the Virgin blest,

Hath laid her Babe to rest.

⁠Time is our tedious Song should here have ending,

Heav'ns youngest-teemed Star

Hath fixt her polisht Car,

⁠Her sleeping Lord with Handmaid Lamp attending.

And all about the Courtly Stable,

Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.

2. The Infant Cry of God 

Milton's early ode, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (1629) is presented and discussed. 

The author's preoccupation with his standing as a novice poet and his early ambitions, as carefully outlined in the letter to Charles Diodati, are examined. 

The ode's subject matter, other poets' treatment of the Nativity, and Milton's peculiar contributions to the micro-genre are discussed, including his curious temporal choices, the competitive attitude of his narrator, and the mingling of Christian and classical elements. 


The rejection of the pagan world in the poem's final stanzas is explicated and underscored as an issue that will recur throughout the corpus.

Additional reading assignments for this class meeting include "At a Vacation Exercise in the College" (1628), "On the Death of a Fair Infant" (1628), and "Elegia sexta" (1629). 

00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: The Nativity Ode 

05:10 - Chapter 2. Milton on Poetry as a Divine Vocation 

16:02 - Chapter 3. The Poetic Celebration of the Birth of Christ 

18:43 - Chapter 4. Nativity Ode: The Prelude 

30:59 - Chapter 5. Nativity Ode: The Hymn 



ENGL 220 - Lecture 2 - The Infant Cry of God

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Nativity Ode [00:00:00]

Professor John Rogers: It’s fitting that the first poem of Milton’s that we study in this class is “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” In a number of ways, it’s both a first poem and it’s a poem about firsts. It isn’t exactly, though, the first poem that Milton wrote. As you can see from your – from actually any – edition, any modern edition, of Milton which arranges the poems more or less chronologically – you can tell that the young Milton had actually written quite a few things before he wrote what we call colloquially the Nativity Ode, but most of these early pieces are written in the Latin that Milton had perfected at school and these earliest of Milton’s Latin poems are lyrics. They’re of an incredibly impressive technical proficiency and they are absolutely soaked with the references to the classical writers that Milton had been ingesting from his earliest youth. Milton had also written a couple of very short poems in English. But there’s an important and, I think, a very real sense in which Milton wanted to make it seem as if the Nativity Ode were the first poem that he had written. There’s also an important and, I think, a very real sense in which Milton wanted to make it seem – and obviously this is a much more difficult feat – wanted to make it seem as if the Nativity Ode were the first poem that anyone had written.

Now Milton was born in 1608 and he wrote the Nativity Ode along with the Sixth Elegy, the Elegia Sexta, that we read for today in December of 1629, a couple of weeks presumably after he turned twenty-one. It wasn’t until 1645 at the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven that Milton would publish his first volume of poems, which he titled simply Poems. And it wouldn’t be another twenty-two years after that until Milton actually published Paradise Lost. Now I am mentioning these dates here because the dates on which Milton wrote and published his poems, the temporal sequence of these publications, have a peculiar and particular importance for the poet. As early as 1629 (that’s the date we’re in now) Milton is thinking of himself as a poet who has not yet published. He delays for an unusually long time his poetic entrance into print, and he’s musing almost continually on what it means to be a poet who has delayed his publication: to be a poet who’s waiting for something, to be a poet who’s always looking to the future to the poem that he hasn’t yet written, to the future and to the readers he hasn’t yet attained, and maybe most gloriously, a poet who’s looking to the future to the fame that he has not yet successfully secured or secured at all because no one at this point knows John Milton.

When in 1645 Milton finally publishes that first volume of poetry, the first poem that he places in this volume is the Nativity Ode, our poem today. And under this title, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” appears – as you can see from your text – appears the subtitle, “composed 1629.” Milton’s taking pains here, and he does this with very few other poems, to let us know precisely when it is that he’s written it. “Composed 1629” – whether or not that’s actually true, and there’s some controversy about that – but nonetheless, the subtitle announces to all who know John Milton that the poet was twenty-one years old at the moment of its composition and that he had therefore just reached his majority.

Now the subject matter that he’s chosen for this poem, for this so-called first poem, couldn’t possibly be more appropriate. With this first poem treating the subject of the nativity of Christ, Milton is able implicitly to announce something like his own nativity as a poet. It goes without saying that there is something outlandish, to say the least, about this. We’re struck by the arrogance implicit in Milton’s active identification here. What could possibly be more presumptuous than the association of the beginning of one’s own career, one’s own literary career, with the birth of the Christian messiah? Milton’s implicit connection between his own birth as a poet and the birth of the Son of God is an act of hubris that I think a lot of his contemporaries would feel more comfortable actually calling blasphemy.
Chapter 2. Milton on Poetry as a Divine Vocation [00:05:10]

John Milton will remain unique in English letters for the degree of thought that he gave to the shape of his literary career, or actually to the notion of a career at all. No English poet before Milton ever suggested that he had been chosen by God at birth to be a poet. None of England’s pre-Miltonic poets – Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare –had dared to suggest – and it would never have occurred to them to suggest –that theirs was actually a divine vocation. I think it takes your breath away to think of the unspeakably high hopes that John Milton had for his career.

If you have a chance, you might want to take a look – I think this is in the Cross Campus Library [a Yale library] – at the facsimile version of the very first edition of Paradise Lost. It’s in ten books rather than twelve. It’s a modest thing, the 1667 volume, and the text looks perfectly ordinary until you realize that in the margin alongside the lines of the poem are printed the line numbers for the poem. just like the line numbers in any modern edition of Milton that’s been produced for the likes of you, for the consumption of college English majors. As far as I know – I know of no exception, although someone may well be able to produce one – no original poem in English had ever been published with line numbers in the margin in its very first printing. And it may well be that no poem has ever been since Paradise Lost published with line numbers in its very first edition. Any right-thinking printer or any right-thinking publisher would scoff at the presumption of a poet who demanded such a thing. The only precedent Milton would have had even for the idea of line numbers would have been the great ancient classics, the magnificent Renaissance editions of Homer and Virgil. They would have appeared in the seventeenth century with line numbers because line numbers obviously facilitate the production of scholarly commentary and facilitate the study of those texts in the classroom. And I can only assume that that is precisely the point, that Milton would – later in 1667 when Paradise Lost is published, he would make his poem canonical just like The Iliad and just like The Odyssey and The Aeneid before anyone had actually read it. Milton would insert into the printed text of his poem his own anticipation that his epic would receive the same universal approbation as Homer’s and Virgil’s. It’s a daring way to jump-start one’s own literary celebrity.

Milton was continually in a state of anticipation. And it’s this rhetoric of anticipation, this language of looking forward, that structures all of Milton’s own narratives about his own literary career. And this is exquisitely visible to us in the Nativity Ode. At a very early age, Milton brooded on his poetic vocation as if it were an actual calling from God. But the problem of one’s being called to be a great poet is that one may have an inkling or some sense of a promise of future greatness but nothing really to show for it yet. And he knew this. He had obviously been a successful student at St. Paul’s School in London and then later in college at Cambridge University. He had written a large handful of college exercises and assignments in Latin, and he had obviously made a favorable impression on his teachers, one of whom, at least, he stayed in touch with for years. Even when he was a young boy Milton’s Latin seems to have been impeccable, and he was quickly establishing himself as one of the best Latinists in the country. But Milton’s calling – this is what John Milton knew – his calling was to be a famous English poet, a famous English poet writing in English: a calling that he holds despite the fact that he appears to have written next to nothing in English verse. All Milton has at the beginning of his poetic career is the promise of greatness, the anticipation of a luminous body of English poetry.

Now in the first original poem that Milton wrote in English, titled “At a Vacation Exercise,” Milton – and you will come to recognize this as so unbelievably Miltonic – Milton doesn’t write about love or about death or about any of the subjects that typically engage the youngest practitioners of poetry. Milton’s subject in his first English poem is – we can guess it: it’s his future literary career. You can look at page thirty-one in the Hughes edition. So Milton begins by addressing not a fair mistress or a blooming rose or – he doesn’t even begin by addressing God. He addresses instead the English language: “Hail native Language,” Milton begins, and then he proceeds to set out in his heroic couplets of iambic pentameter a map for his future career as a famous poet.

Now when Milton publishes this poem, he makes it clear that it was written at age nineteen. That’s important to him. Milton claims that he will one day use the English language to express what he calls “some graver subject,” some more important subject matter, and he proceeds to characterize what that graver subject will look like. I’m looking at line thirty-three here.

    Such where the deep transported mind may soar
    Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’n’s door
    Look in, and see each blissful Deity
    How he before the thunderous throne doth lie…

Now the graver subject that Milton is intending at some point to expound upon is clearly an epic one. Like Homer and like Virgil, Milton intends to soar above the wheeling poles of the visible world and describe the otherwise invisible comings and goings of the gods. And, of course, this is what he would go on to do in Paradise Lost. The nineteen-year-old Milton hasn’t yet imagined that his own epic would take for its subject a story from the Bible, but the poetic ambition is clearly identifiable to us as epic in scope.

We will hear again of Milton’s intention to write an epic in a versified letter that he writes to his best friend, Charles Diodati. This is the letter to Diodati which Milton publishes as the Sixth Elegy. That’s the Latin poem that was assigned for today’s class. So take a look at page fifty-two in the Hughes. Milton naturally wrote his friend letters in impeccable Latin verse, and this one he seems to have composed almost immediately after having written, having completed, the Nativity Ode. The letter to Diodati gives us another glimpse of the anticipatory narrative that Milton is sketching for his career. Milton claims that epic poetry is the highest ambition for a poet and then he goes on to explain how it is that the epic poet should comport himself. I love this. So this is Milton to his best friend:

But he whose [imagine receiving a letter like this!] theme is wars and heaven under Jupiter in his prime, and pious heroes and chieftains half-divine [I’ll skip a little bit]… let him live sparingly like the Samian teacher; and let herbs furnish his innocent diet… and let him drink sober draughts from the pure spring. Beyond this, his youth [the youth of the future epic poet] must be innocent of crime and chaste, his conduct irreproachable and his hands stainless.

So Milton is explaining to Charles Diodati that if you’re going to become an epic poet, you have to start acting like one. You have to remain celibate and, as we will see in the coming week, this is important to Milton. You have to remain sober, and you must eat vegetarian (“let herbs furnish his innocent diet”). And then Milton goes on to explain that this is exactly what Homer did. This is how Homer prepared himself to be the greatest and the first of all epic poets. It’s not uninteresting, I think, to note that there appears to be absolutely no evidence whatsoever available to John Milton that Homer was either vegetarian or a lifelong celibate. By all accounts, Milton has just made this up in his letter to Diodati. Clearly, this is something that he wants to believe or that he needs to believe, but there does seem to be evidence that at least at this early point in Milton’s life he’s intending to remain sexually abstinent forever. He would remain a virgin in order to prepare for and to maintain this incredibly important role as an epic poet. And, as I mentioned a moment ago, we will return to this question of what has been interestingly called the young Milton’s “chastity fetish.”

So Milton implies to Diodati that he isn’t yet up to the task of epic, but as he describes the Nativity Ode that he’s just written, it’s almost as if he considers it something of a mini-epic. This is page 198 in the Hughes: “I am singing the starry sky and the hosts that sang high in air, and the gods that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines.”

Now we have the trappings here of epic grandeur and epic subject matter. The poem on the morning of Christ’s nativity serves as Milton’s preparation for something greater than itself. It’s a poem on which this very young poet is cutting his teeth.
Chapter 3. The Poetic Celebration of the Birth of Christ [00:16:02]

The nativity of Christ, as you can imagine, was a popular subject for early seventeenth-century poets – for pious early seventeenth-century poets. Nearly all of the poets that we come now to recognize as the major religious literary figures of the period like John Donne, whom you may have read in English 125, or Robert Herrick or Richard Crashaw – all of these poets had tried their hand at the poetic celebration of the birth of Christ. And actually it’s instructive. You can learn a lot by comparing Milton’s poem to those of so many of his contemporaries. His contemporaries are doing a kind of thing with their representation of the birth of Christ that Milton seems carefully to have avoided. And you can actually imagine without even having read them what a lot of these poems are like. Most poets who write nativity poems are interested in the miracle of the virgin birth, emphasizing the Virgin Mary and the tender mother-son relationship between Mary and Jesus.

Milton shows unusually little interest in the miraculousness of the conception or anything like the domestic details of the manger scene. The focus of the Nativity Ode isn’t even really on the Incarnation – that’s the theological doctrine of divinity’s descent into humanity, how God becomes a mortal. What Milton is primarily interested in in his Nativity Ode is the redemption, the promise of what Christ’s Nativity will do at some future point for mankind. The birth of Jesus doesn’t immediately effect the redemption of fallen man but it’s the moment – and this is why it’s so important to Milton – it’s the moment at which that promise is made. The Nativity for Milton is purely an anticipatory event. It’s less meaningful in itself than it is for what it promises for the future, because it’s not going to be until after the Nativity that we have the event of the Crucifixion, and after that the event of the Resurrection, and finally the terrible moment of the Last Judgment which will bring the narrative of Christian history to its ultimate close. So the satisfactions of the moment are for Milton deferred here; and it’s something like a recognizable process of deferral and postponement that you will see beginning to form themselves at the very center of Milton’s poetic imagination.
Chapter 4. Nativity Ode: The Prelude [00:18:43]

Okay. Let’s look at the poem on page forty-three in the Hughes. As soon as Milton describes for us the events in heaven that lead up to the Nativity, he begins the – this is the prelude of the poem, it’s broken up in to two chunks: the prelude and then what Milton calls the hymn – he begins the third stanza of the prelude to his poem with a plea to the Heavenly Muse for inspiration. This is line fifteen, page forty-three in the Hughes. The poet is asking for help with the composition of the poem.

    Say Heav’nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
    Afford a present to the Infant God?
    Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
    To welcome Him to this, his new abode…?

We’re struck, I think – or at least I’m struck – by what I find to be the oddly negative, almost scolding tone that Milton is adopting, really quite inappropriately, I think, in this address to the muse. He seems less interested in actually praying for divine assistance than he is in chiding the muse for not having come to his aid sooner.

We might be able to understand some of the weird, anxious energy behind this stanza if we think of the phrase that Milton uses here: the phrase “Infant God.” As someone who would quickly establish himself as the most talented Latinist probably in all of England, Milton is naturally – how could he not be? – highly attuned to the etymological prehistory of the English word infant. Our word infancy comes from the Latin word infans, which literally means “not speaking.” Christ, whose Nativity Milton is honoring, is still just a baby. He isn’t speaking at this moment yet. He isn’t yet producing language. And in his role here as a mute, as an infant, Christ is serving, I think, an important function for Milton. He serves as something like a complicated double for the young, unpublished, and as of yet unproductive poet himself. Consider that even this early on in his career, Milton is harboring epic ambitions, as we’ve seen. He is very much an infant in 1629. He isn’t yet able or he hasn’t yet produced epic speech. And I think it’s possible to see that one of the purposes of this poem is precisely to correct that situation. It’s one of the purposes of this poem to allow Milton to grow out of his infancy, to incarnate or to put actually into words the talent that he believes himself to possess.

Now it’s not until the fourth stanza of the prelude that we can fully understand the magnitude of the strange anxieties here. We can’t know exactly – and this is one of the wonderfully unsettling things about this stanza – we can’t know exactly to whom Milton is addressing this stanza. It would appear that Milton has stopped addressing the muse, the Heavenly Muse, and that he has begun addressing himself – although that’s unclear. 

But it may be the case that it’s something like a situation in which over the course of the previous stanza, Milton has actually usurped the role of the muse and has begun providing something like his own inspiration.  

So in the fourth stanza we as readers have no idea where we are or when it is the speaker of the poem imagines himself to be speaking, and it’s at this point that something quite strange happens. Milton tells the muse – or is he telling himself? we don’t know – Milton tells someone to hurry up – think of this – to hurry up with the inspiration of the ode, to hurry up with the inspiration of the ode because Milton can see the Three Wise Men bearing their gifts as they dutifully follow the Star of Bethlehem to the manger.

This may seem to be a perfectly reasonable vision for a poet considering himself to be an inspired poet to have, but there’s something peculiar here. Milton wants to beat the Three Wise Men to the scene. Milton wants to arrive in Bethlehem to hand Christ his poem before the wise men are able to bring their gold and their frankincense and their myrrh. Look at line twenty-two.

    See how from far upon the Eastern road
    The Star-led wizards haste with odors sweet:
    O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
    And lay it lowly at His blessed feet.
Think of what this poem is now asking of us. 

We’re being asked to accept the fiction that Milton is having this very poem laid at the blessed feet of the infant Christ. 

Milton, who is writing at the present moment of December of 1629, is claiming the capacity to arrive at a moment in history that he has already described as a long-completed one. 

Milton tells himself to run, and naturally he would have to run fast indeed in order to arrive at a moment in time that had already occurred before he even set out! 

This weird temporal disjunction is an important part of the poem, and it not only gives the poem its peculiar air of something like a conceptual time-warp, but it’s an important part of Milton’s profoundly anticipatory imagination.

So Milton is struggling here to catch up with the star-led wizards, who – as you can note – are already themselves hasting. And he tries to “prevent” them with his humble ode. We’ll talk about humble in a minute, but I’m interested now in the word prevent, which for me is really the central word of this remarkable stanza. Now, I don’t know if Merritt Hughes weighs in on this or not. 

Most editors of Milton tell us that the word prevent in this line retains its original Latin meaning as you can see on your handout. It means “to come before.” The Latin is praevenire; it means “to anticipate.” 

Milton wants his ode to make it to Bethlehem before the Three Wise Men do. 

Now, this is a form of competitiveness with which we are all familiar. 

This is the straightforward, perfectly understandable competition to be first.

Now, it’s Milton’s annotators who tell us that the word prevent means “to come before, to anticipate,” and on some level it obviously means that and that goes without question. But I think this definition is also limiting, and this is a phenomenon that I hope you will come to be familiar with. The good scholars of Milton reveal their typical resistance to anything even remotely interesting or alive in the text. Surely this word prevent also has a little bit of its modern meaning. I think it might actually be the more obvious meaning, which is “to hinder” or “to preclude.” When Milton tells himself to “prevent” the “Star-led wizards… with thy humble ode,” he’s also saying that the wise men should be prevented from making it to the manger at all, that somehow the wise men need to be headed off at the pass and precluded from presenting any gifts to the Infant God that may compete with the so-called humble ode of John Milton.

Now this is a darker form of competitiveness, a competitiveness spawned – think of our own environment here in the academy – spawned by courses that grade strictly on a curve: a type of environment where one succeeds not merely by doing well but by doing better than other people, and especially in addition by preventing other people from doing well. It’s an extraordinarily dark way to characterize the composition and the process of the poem.

We have a strained image of the composition of the poem at its very outset and we have an image of someone writing as if he were participating in a race. And we’re reminded of the etymological root of our modern English word career. Milton will only use the word career once in his poetic oeuvre and it comes – it will come pretty soon, actually, in Sonnet Number Seven. The word career comes from the French carrière, which means “a race course” and etymologically “a career.” What we think of as a career isn’t simply the benign product of the gradual development of a certain potential. That’s how we generally think of a career. It’s the outcome of a race – one’s running faster than all of the other guys – and it’s as if to have a career at all one has no choice but to come in first.

The desire to be first is really central to this poem and it continues in this stanza:

    Have thou the honor first thy Lord to greet
    And join thy voice unto the Angel Choir,
    From out his secret Altar toucht with hallow’d fire.

As you may have guessed, because you have this on your handout, Milton is alluding here to the famous words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Isaiah in this passage is describing a crucial moment in his career, his career as a prophet: the moment in which his lips are cleansed and he is empowered – divinely empowered – to speak prophetically. These are the Old Testament lines:

    Then flew one of the seraphims unto me [Isaiah tells us], having a live coal in his hand
    which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar:

    And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is
    taken away, and thy sin purged.

    Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?
    Then said I, Here am I; send me.

So what are we to do with this allusion? What are we to make of Milton’s use of this striking and painful image of prophetic preparation? Milton can join his voice to the angel choir and have the honor of being first to greet the “Infant God.” But before he can actually be made present at the actual event of the Nativity, he has to endure something painful and obviously momentous: “from out his secret Altar toucht with hallow’d fire.” The iniquity of his lips must be burned off by a live angelic coal, that the sinfulness of his lips – we could think of it as the sinfulness of his voice, his poetic voice – will have to be purged. What exactly that purgation will entail and why Milton’s voice needs to be purged at all – I think these questions are really the subject of the entire rest of the poem. The hymn, what Milton calls the “humble ode,” that follows this introduction is the poem that Milton wants to present to the Lord. But the hymn at the same time is something like the process, the process by which Milton is attempting to purge and cleanse his poetic voice and make it a voice that will actually be equal to the extraordinary ambition that he has for it.
Chapter 5. Nativity Ode: The Hymn [00:30:59]

The hymn, the large part of the poem, can be divided roughly into three sections. First, in the first eight stanzas you have Milton describing the scene of the Nativity and the effect that the birth of this new infant has on the natural world. I don’t have time here to discuss this section right now, but you’ve already had some encounter with the incredibly impressive level of ingenuity and grotesquery in this remarkable passage. Nature, who is an effeminized, personified being, is shamed and humiliated when she finds herself naked in the presence of this new God, Jesus.

The second section runs from stanzas nine through seventeen, and it characterizes the song that the heavenly choir sings at the moment of the Nativity. But when Milton describes the song of the angelic choir he can’t – it’s amazing – he can’t seem to focus on the event at hand. What we should, I think, be witnessing here is the nativity of Christ and all of the events immediately surrounding the actual birth of the Infant God; but no sooner has Milton mentioned the singing of the angelic choir at the Nativity than he reminds himself of all the other times that they’ve sung. It’s something like liner notes or a performance history of the cosmos’ greatest singing group ever.

Look at line 120. Milton writes that this choir had been singing at the moment of creation. Not bad.

    While the Creator Great
    His constellations set,
    And the well-balanc’t world on hinges hung…

It’s almost too much for this poet. He’s already been playing around with the temporality of the poem. as we’ve seen, establishing a fiction that works to place himself at the scene of a nativity that obviously occurs 1600 years and change before his own birth. But it’s almost as if Milton were tempted now to make himself go even further back, to write a humble ode that he could place at the feet of the Creator, the Creator at the moment of the actual creation of the entire universe. The stakes of coming first seem are getting higher and higher.

Before long the speaker realizes that this fantasy (and it is a fantasy that he’s been engaged in) is starting to sound a little extreme or maybe a little dangerous. In line 134, Milton indicates that this holy song has enwrapped his fancy, that it has in some perilous way absorbed his imagination:

    For if such holy Song
    Enwrap our fancy long,
    Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
    And speckl’d vanity
    Will sicken soon and die,
    And leprous sin will melt from earthly mold,
    And hell itself will pass away,
    And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

The holy song Milton has been describing is beginning to look almost too tempting even to contemplate. There’s almost a danger here in listening to it too long or describing it in too much detail and the danger seems – or what Milton thinks of as the peril seems to involve the problem of time. “For if such holy Song / enwrap our fancy long,” then we’ll mistakenly convince ourselves that time could actually run backwards and that we’ve been returned to the Golden Age, the very first age of human history according to classical legend.

We, of course, know as we read the prelude to this poem that this is a work consumed with questions of temporal disjunction, with that problem of temporal discontinuity. Milton clearly wants us to know that this Nativity Ode was written by a young Londoner in 1629, but it’s a poem that is at the same time deliverable to the infant Christ by some extraordinary violation, of course, of all of the established laws of temporal sequence. And when you reread this poem and you look at it in your discussion section, you may want to think about the tenses – it sounds tedious but I am convinced that it’s not tedious – the tenses of the verbs that Milton’s using. Milton is switching here from present to past to future incredibly rapidly and really with a bewildering kind of facility And it is at some point impossible, I think, for the reader to tell whether the poet is discussing something that’s happening now, something that’s happened a long time ago, or something that will happen at the end of time. The thematic problems that Milton is attempting to tackle are written into the very grammar and the syntax of the poem.

Now, Milton understands the problems besetting what we could think of as the poem’s confused temporality; he understands this a lot better than we do. And there’s a self-consciousness about the temporal strangeness of this poem that leads, I think, to its crisis moment. Look at stanza sixteen. This is the stanza that begins with line 150. Milton has just been entertaining the glorious moment of the apocalypse at the end of time – because he’s always looking further and further and further ahead. He’s been doing that when we get this. Line 150:

    But wisest Fate says no,
    This must not yet be so,
    The babe lies yet in smiling Infancy,
    That on the bitter cross
    Must redeem our loss;
    So both himself and us to glorify…

“But wisest Fate says no, / this must not yet be so.” It’s here that we have something like a crystallizing moment of reality-testing. Milton, he checks himself. Reality intrudes and the poet has no choice but to say, “No. You’ve gone too far. You’ve gone too far in your anticipation of the future event at the end of time. Fate will permit no apocalypse before its time, before the necessary and painful steps that have to lead up to the Last Judgment. Before the ecstatic fulfillment of all of Christian history, the great Christian narrative – Jesus actually, of course, has to grow up and lead his life and then sacrifice that life on the bitter cross.”

In alluding to the prophet Isaiah in the prelude, Milton suggested that the iniquity of his lips had to be purged off – burned off, with the live coal supplied by one of the seraphim. One of those sins, I think, that needs to be purged is clearly the sin of eagerness or over-anticipation, the drive to move ahead of oneself and the drive to get ahead of others (as we saw Milton trying to do with the Three Wise Men). These are drives that the poem seems to be struggling to keep in check, or that Milton is representing the poem as struggling to keep in check, or to purge in some way.

But there’s something else that needs to be purged, and the poem recognizes that even more profoundly. The Nativity Ode is continually presenting the speaker with temptations, with incitements to sin that need to be purged from the speaker’s poetic voice. The final section of the poem presents us with the most powerful temptation that John Milton can confront, and we will find that this is a problem that continues for the rest of his writing life. He will have to do battle with this temptation forever: the temptation offered by classical literature. You remember that Milton had vowed to his friend Charles Diodati in the Sixth Elegy that he would become an epic poet some day, and that he was taking all of the necessary steps to transform himself into an epic poet.

But it’s strictly a Christian epic poem that Milton seems to imagine himself as writing. Now, he hasn’t yet settled on the topic of the Fall, the fall of Adam and Eve from their place of bliss in the Garden of Eden. But Milton knows that the general feeling of the thing is, of course, going to be Christian, and he’s probably taking as his model at this point the Italian poet Torquato Tasso who wrote Jerusalem Delivered, a slightly earlier Christian epic poem, romance-epic poem, that Milton greatly admired. But Milton’s also sensitive to the fact that the very phrase “Christian epic” is in some way a contradiction in terms. The epic form is a classical, pagan form. It’s a poem structured around the interaction between human beings and an entire pantheon of pagan deities. To write any kind of epic at all might very well seem to be embracing an inappropriately sensual paganism at the expense of the higher discipline of good, old-fashioned monotheistic Christianity. And the ode, too – the form in which this poem is written – is a pagan form invented by the Greek poet Pindar to express the sublimities of emotion arising from a contemplation of the actions of the gods.

Now, in writing in these genres, Milton is, of course, confronted with a dilemma. He’s a humanist scholar. He is more steeped in the sensuous beauty of classical literature, the classical tradition, than probably anyone else of his generation. Since he was an unusually small lad, he had been mainlining Greek and Roman poetry. The language of Homer and of Virgil and of Pindar and of Ovid had become an inextricable part of his literary imagination and of his consciousness in general. But Milton was also beginning to develop in this period a much more strict, a much more disciplined religious temperament. He was beginning to join ranks with those early seventeenth-century English Protestants who imposed upon themselves rigorous and strict codes of behavior and self-denial, and who were increasingly being called by their enemies Puritans. And it’s possible that the very idea of a Puritan poet presented Milton with what may have felt like an insoluble conflict. It’s possible that Milton would continue – well, if Milton were to continue this cultivation of a poetic career, he would clearly have to purge (this is the Miltonic logic at this stage) he would have to purge his poetic voice of the sin and the taint of pagan iniquity. If he was going to become a specifically Christian poet, he would have to expel from his system the sensual world of classical learning that for him was at the very core of his being.

And it’s precisely a silencing of classical literature that Milton is attempting to effect here. With the scene of the flight of the pagan gods at the nativity of Christ Milton is also depicting a scenario that, I think, on some level he’s hoping will occur within himself. We have the silencing not just of any literature here but of pagan literature. It’s now the pagan deities who have turned into “infant” gods. Milton is narrating or representing the process by which they are silenced. They’re rendered speechless or dumb, and the poem effects this process in order to give someone else an opportunity to speak. Milton calls upon a whole range of violent, exciting, militaristic images, and set-pieces to describe the triumph of Christ over the petty gods of paganism, but this routing of the gods brings with it a certain cost. Something is lost here as well. Look at line 181. Hands down, these are, for me, the best lines in the poem:

    The lonely mountains o’er,
    And the resounding shore,
    A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
    From haunted spring and dale
    Edg’d with poplar pale,
    The parting genius is with sighing sent;
    With flow’r-inwov’n tresses torn
    The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

It’s here in this stanza, filled with the resounding voices of weeping and lament, that we realize that something more is going on than merely a routing of the pagan gods, something more even than Milton’s pious triumph over his classical literary imagination. Suddenly, the literary genre that Milton is writing in is no longer this triumphant classical ode. You have an elegy here, a beautiful and plangent lament for something or someone lost. And we have to ask ourselves, “Could this be a paradise lost?” We hear a clear mourning for those pagan beings who are forced to depart because of the violent onset of Christianity. When Milton writes that “the parting Genius is with sighing sent,” he means the genius loci or the local spirit of the place, the natural spirit of a place: those beneficent beings that pagans had believed inhabited certain woods and streams. But the parting genius is also a part of Milton’s own genius, his literary genius, that aspect of his literary career and his literary expertise that has been nourished and fed, lovingly fed, by classical literature.

The conflictedness that Milton is encapsulating here is probably most intense in the last lines of this wonderful stanza: “With flow’r-inwov’n tresses torn / the Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.” This densely tangled thicket of clustered consonants in this amazing couplet is a signal to us of the weight, of the import, of this terrible event. These are difficult lines physically to read, and they may very well be the most painful lines in the entire poem from an emotional perspective. It’s one thing for the evil pagan deities like Moloch and Peor to be forced in to hell by the newly born Christ. Who are they to us? We find it difficult to bewail their absence. But the nymphs in all of their sensuous beauty, with “flow’r-inwov’n tresses,” they have to experience the same fate. I think it’s impossible not to wince when we imagine the painful tearing of the nymphs’ tresses. Their hair gets caught on the tangled thickets of the forest as they abandon – as they are forced to abandon – the classical corners of Milton’s literary imagination.

The elegiac tone of this final section of the poem should give us some clues to the type of victory over paganism that Christ’s birth is actually heralding here. How new will this new world order actually be? We may imagine that henceforth, now that he has written his Nativity Ode, Milton has fully expunged from his literary system that youthful attachment to the pagan classics. But the expulsion of paganism described in the Nativity Ode is a scene that Milton will return to and return to again and again, and in many ways it will be Christianity’s triumph over paganism and all of the pain that that triumph produces that will become the hidden subtext of many of Milton’s greatest works.

THE NIGHTMARE

“Are you sure,' asked his companion, 'that this is the nineteen-eighties?'

The Doctor looked around. 'Which nineteen-eighties did you have in mind?'

Conversations that never happened.

“I began to dream absolutely unbearable dreams. 

My dream life, up to this point, had been relatively uneventful, as far as I can remember; furthermore, I have never had a particularly good visual imagination. Nonetheless, my dreams became so horrible and so emotionally gripping that I was often afraid to go to sleep. I dreamt dreams vivid as reality. I could not escape from them or ignore them. They centered, in general, around a single theme: that of nuclear war, and total devastation – around the worst evils that I, or something in me, could imagine:

My parents lived in a standard ranch style house, in a middle-class neighborhood, in a small town in northern Alberta. 

I was sitting in the darkened basement of this house, in the family room, watching TV, with my cousin Diane, who was in truth – in waking life – the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A newscaster suddenly interrupted the program. The television picture and sound distorted, and static filled the screen. My cousin stood up and went behind the TV to check the electrical cord. She touched it, and started convulsing and frothing at the mouth, frozen upright by intense current.

A brilliant flash of light from a small window flooded the basement. I rushed upstairs. There was nothing left of the ground floor of the house. It had been completely and cleanly sheared away, leaving only the floor, which now served the basement as a roof. Red and orange flames filled the sky, from horizon to horizon. Nothing was left as far as I could see, except skeletal black ruins sticking up here and there: no houses, no trees, no signs of other human beings or of any life whatsoever. The entire town and everything that surrounded it on the flat prairie had been completely obliterated.

It started to rain mud, heavily. The mud blotted out everything, and left the earth brown, wet, flat and dull, and the sky leaden, even grey. A few distraught and shell-shocked people started to gather together. They were carrying unlabelled and dented cans of food, which contained nothing but mush and vegetables. They stood in the mud looking exhausted and disheveled. Some dogs emerged, out from under the basement stairs, where they had inexplicably taken residence. They were standing upright, on their hind legs. They were thin, like greyhounds, and had pointed noses. They looked like creatures of ritual – like Anubis, from the Egyptian tombs. They were carrying plates in front of them, which contained pieces of seared meat. They wanted to trade the meat for the cans. I took a plate. In the center of it was a circular slab of flesh four inches in diameter and one inch thick, foully cooked, oily, with a marrow bone in the center of it. Where did it come from?

I had a terrible thought. I rushed downstairs to my cousin. The dogs had butchered her, and were offering the meat to the survivors of the disaster. I woke up with my heart pounding.

I dreamed apocalyptic dreams of this intensity two or three times a week for a year or more, while I attended university classes and worked – as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on in my mind. 

Something I had no familiarity with was happening, however. I was being affected, simultaneously, by events on two “planes.” On the first plane were the normal, predictable, everyday occurrences that I shared with everybody else. On the second plane, however (unique to me, or so I thought) existed dreadful images and unbearably intense emotional states. This idiosyncratic, subjective world – which everyone normally treated as illusory – seemed to me at that time to lie somehow behind the world everyone knew and regarded as real. But what did real mean? The closer I looked, the less comprehensible things became. Where was The Real? What was at the bottom of it all? I did not feel I could live without knowing.

My interest in the cold war transformed itself into a true obsession. I thought about the suicidal and murderous preparation of that war every minute of every day, from the moment I woke up until the second I went to bed. How could such a state of affairs come about? Who was responsible?

I dreamed that I was running through a mall parking lot, trying to escape from something. I was running through the parked cars, opening one door, crawling across the front seat, opening the other, moving to the next. The doors on one car suddenly slammed shut. I was in the passenger seat. The car started to move by itself. A voice said harshly, “there is no way out of here.” I was on a journey, going somewhere I did not want to go. 

I was not The Driver.

I became very depressed and anxious. I had vaguely suicidal thoughts, but mostly wished that everything would just go away. I wanted to lay down on my couch, and sink into it, literally, until only my nose was showing – like the snorkel of a diver above the surface of the water. I found my awareness of things unbearable.

I came home late one night from a college drinking party, self-disgusted and angry. I took a canvas board and some paints. I sketched a harsh, crude picture of a crucified Christ – glaring and demonic – with a cobra wrapped around his naked waist, like a belt. 

The picture disturbed me – struck me, despite my agnosticism, as sacrilegious. I did not know what it meant, however, or why I had painted it. Where in the world had it come from? I hadn’t paid any attention to religious ideas for years. I hid the painting under some old clothes in my closet and sat cross-legged on the floor. I put my head down. It became obvious to me at that moment that I had not developed any real understanding of myself or of others. 

Everything I had once believed about the nature of society and myself had proved false, the world had apparently gone insane, and something strange and frightening was happening in my head. James Joyce said, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” For me, history literally was a nightmare. I wanted above all else at that moment to wake up, and make my terrible dreams go away.

I have been trying ever since then to make sense of the human capacity, my capacity, for evil – particularly for those evils associated with belief. I started by trying to make sense of my dreams. I couldn’t ignore them, after all. Perhaps they were trying to tell me something? I had nothing to lose by admitting the possibility. I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and found it useful. Freud at least took the topic seriously – but I could not regard my nightmares as wish-fulfillments. Furthermore, they seemed more religious than sexual in nature. I knew, vaguely, that Jung had developed specialized knowledge of myth and religion, so I started through his writings. His thinking was granted little credence by the academics I knew – but they weren’t particularly concerned with dreams. I couldn’t help being concerned by mine.

They were so intense I thought they might derange me. (What was the alternative? To believe that the terrors and pains they caused me were not real? Nothing is more real than terror and pain.)

 

Much of the time I could not understand what Jung was getting at. He was making a point I could not grasp; speaking a language I did not comprehend. Now and then, however, his statements struck home. He offered this observation, for example:

“It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.”

The second part of that statement certainly seemed applicable to me, although the first (‘the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious”) remained mysterious and obscure. Still, this was promising. Jung at least recognized that the things that were happening to me could happen. Furthermore, he offered some hints as to their cause. So I kept reading. I soon came across the following hypothesis. Here was a potential solution to the problems I was facing – or at least the description of a place to look for such a solution:

“The psychological elucidation of... [dream and fantasy] images, which cannot be passed over in silence or blindly ignored, leads logically into the depths of religious phenomenology. The history of religion in its widest sense (including therefore mythology, folklore, and primitive psychology) is a treasure-house of archetypal forms from which the doctor can draw helpful parallels and enlightening comparisons for the purpose of calming and clarifying a consciousness that is all at sea. It is absolutely necessary to supply these fantastic images that rise up so strange and threatening before the mind’s eye with some kind of context so as to make them more intelligible. Experience has shown that the best way to do this is by means of comparative mythological material.”

It has in fact been the study of “comparative mythological material” that made my horrible dreams disappear. The “cure” wrought by this study, however, was purchased at the price of complete and often painful transformation: what I believe about the world, now – and how I act, in consequence – is so much at variance with what I believed when I was younger that I might as well be a completely different person.

I discovered that beliefs make the world, in a very real way – that beliefs are the world, in a more than metaphysical sense. This “discovery” has not turned me into a moral relativist, however: quite the contrary. I have become convinced that the world-that-is-belief is orderly: that there are universal moral absolutes (although these are structured such that a diverse range of human opinion remains both possible and beneficial). I believe that individuals and societies who flout these absolutes – in ignorance or in willful opposition – are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution.

I learned that the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems can be rendered explicitly comprehensible, even to the skeptical rational thinker – and that, so rendered, can be experienced as fascinating, profound and necessary. I learned why people wage war – why the desire to maintain, protect and expand the domain of belief motivates even the most incomprehensible acts of group-fostered oppression and cruelty – and what might be done to ameliorate this tendency, despite its universality. I learned, finally, that the terrible aspect of life might actually be a necessary precondition for the existence of life – and that it is possible to regard that precondition, in consequence, as comprehensible and acceptable. I hope that I can bring those who read this book to the same conclusions, without demanding any unreasonable “suspension of critical judgment” – excepting that necessary to initially encounter and consider the arguments I present. These can be summarized as follows:

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however – myth, literature, and drama – portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the “objective world” – what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is “the world of value” – what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action.

The world as forum for action is “composed,” essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory – the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things. Second is explored territory – the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory – the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory “Word” and vengeful adversary. We are adapted to this “world of divine characters,” much as the “objective world.” The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in “reality” a forum for action, as well as a place of things.

Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of “ritual imitation of the Great Father” – as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. When identification with the group is made absolute, however – when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist – the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no longer manifest itself. This “restriction of adaptive capacity” dramatically increases the probability of social aggression and chaos.

Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to “identification with the devil,” the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omniscience – is adoption of “God’s place” by “reason” – is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops because creative exploration – impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown – constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives life much of its acceptable meaning.

“Identification with the devil” amplifies the dangers inherent in group identification, which tends of its own accord towards pathological stultification. Loyalty to personal interest – subjective meaning – can serve as an antidote to the overwhelming temptation constantly posed by the possibility of denying anomaly. Personal interest – subjective meaning – reveals itself at the juncture of explored and unexplored territory, and is indicative of participation in the process that ensures continued healthy individual and societal adaptation.

Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal hero – the “savior” – who upholds his association with the creative “Word” in the face of death, and in spite of group pressure to conform. Identification with the hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with a standpoint that simultaneously transcends and maintains the group.