Blackburn, Thomas H.

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Swarthmore College Works English Literature Faculty Works English Literature Fall 2001 Review Of "Milton And The Death Of Man: Humanism On Trial In 'Paradise Lost'" By H. Skulsky Thomas H. Blackburn Swarthmore College This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in English Literature Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit  Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Thomas H. Blackburn. (2001). "Review Of "Milton And The Death Of Man: Humanism On Trial In 'Paradise Lost'" By H. Skulsky". Renaissance Quarterly. Volume 54, Issue 3. 991-993. DOI: 10.2307/1261961 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/87  The University of Chicago Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve  and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly.http://www.jstor.orgReview Author(s): Thomas H. Blackburn Review by: Thomas H. Blackburn Source:   Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 991-993Published by:  on behalf of the  The University of Chicago Press Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261961Accessed: 05-05-2015 14:37 UTCYour use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jspJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Tue, 05 May 2015 14:37:30 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsREVIEWS 991 possibilities as actually entirely "contained," effectively nullified in sixteenth-cen- tury texts. Baker also takes issue with Mary Thomas Crane's Framing Authority: Sayings, Se6Cand Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993). Crane emphasizes schools as the locus of English Humanism; Baker rightly sees a Human- ist "emphasis on printed ivulgation" (I 1) also. Crane sees Humanist eachers as gearing their students towards careers of upward mobility; for her and other ecent scholars, Humanists contemplated less the displacement of social hierarchy than revision of the existing one to allow the rise of those with Humanistic training. Baker wants to give Humanism a more radical shading, but his case here is some- times questionable. In fact, the possibility of a communist social order is indeed raised only to be disowned by many of the writers he cites, from Elyot through Morison, Cheke, and it would seem Spenser, who instead valorize a society in which men of talent can gain more rewards and higher social station than others. Baker might have conceded the strength of this line more systematically without fatally disabling his argument that Humanism had some radical potential. Finally, his book invites comparison with David Norbrook's Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Routledge, 1984), where the sense of Humanists' "radicalism" isless nuanced, at times better grounded. Baker has chapters on Erasmus, More, Elyot, the mid-century translations ofThe Praise ofFolly by Chaloner and Utopia by Robinson, and Spenser. He writes gracefully, and his analysis of Humanist discourse issubtle and rich. There are other strengths and weaknesses and questions to be asked of this original, provocative book, but it has seemed most important to sketch and contextualize its main argu- ment, particularly its way of connecting Humanists' relations to social radicalism and to the world of print. JOHN F. McDIARMID New College of Florida Harold Skulsky. Milton and the Death ofMan: Humanism on Trial in Para- dise Lost Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 262 pp. $44.50. ISBN: 0-87413-719-5. Professor Skulsky's schema for Paradise Lost casts the speaker Milton as "the Advocate," God as his "Client," and Satan, or any other who might think God evil or tyrannical, as "the Adversary." The epic itself, as this terminology suggests, is defined as a forensic narrative making the case for the justice of "God's ways to men." The "Advocate" deserves praise both for his acceptance of the challenges inherent in the source narrative, and for his "libertarian" willingness to risk includ- ing in the narrative all of the adversary's best arguments. The larger case Skulsky wishes to argue, however, is for Milton as perhaps the last voice speaking for a "humanist theodicy," or a "Christian materialism," that grants man genuine per- sonhood. At the moment in history when ideas of man typified by Hobbes's theories emerged as precursors of the modernist "death of man" reduced to a bun- dle of impulses or helplessly propelled by external forces, Milton's poem "has some This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Tue, 05 May 2015 14:37:30 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions992 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY claim to being an imaginative vindication of the humanistic dea that persons and their values are at least as much a part of the basic structure ofreality as elementary particles and their powers" (227). Personhood, however, can only be defended at the expense of the justification of God's ways. Man deserves punishment for the Fall because he had the power to do otherwise (as Skulsky argues in his defense of free will), but the nature of the punishment "Vindicates God's justice by impugning his love. It clears the judge by convicting the Creator" (212). Skulsky dismisses as "Mickey Mouse" any argu- ments that would somehow turn the resulting horrors of human history into some sort of good, thus effectively denying the transforming powers of faith as repre- sented in Milton's notion of the "Paradise within." What is left, then, is a universe in which the fall is classically tragic. God himself, faced with a contradiction between justice and love that he cannot resolve, becomes the "supreme adult called on to make his peace with an ambiguous reality" (224). He cannot transform his- tory, but Skulsky suggests, rescues his love by entering into the tragedy as man himself through the Son. Sliding entirely over the complications of the relation of Father to Son in Paradise Lost, Skulsky sees God himself join his creation as a human victim of that "indeterminacy without which there can be no love. "At the end of the day," the epic offers "a magnificence unavailable to comedy, no matter how divine" (227). In the tradition of all those who praise the decision to fall as both necessary and positive for man, we "watch Adam and Ever newly ripened to adulthood and to a tragic vision they share with God" (227). The Son's compassionate incarnation onetheless does appear to decide "the Advocate's case as he explicitly defines it." But the question of whether or not the ways of God have been vindicated, Skulsky further concludes, is not the critics "to decide alone." In a curious abdication of that humanistic agency he seems so to value, Skulsky declares that it is for the "jury . . . acting in concert," presumably humankind asa whole, to decide, and "the jury is still out" (227). This account of SkulsWs argument, I fear, may be inaccurate, since that argu- ment is by no means easy to follow. It is clogged with analyses pursued at length only to be repudiated at equal length. Veering from quite technical philosophical arguments to such colloquial conclusions as "with enemies like Erasmus, Luther doesdt need friends," the style makes it difficult toknow on what level one should read the text. Too often, in referring to the admirably wide range of biblical, patris- tic and philosophical sources intended to locate the "Advocate" in intellectual history, Skulsky jumps from one source to another without giving any indication in his own text. In what seems to be a discussion of The Christian Doctrine, for instance, quotations from Aquinas are slipped in and detectable (unless one has either or both texts fully in memory) only by reference tothe footnotes atthe back of the book. Though he never argues the case, or refers to others' arguments about it, he appears to assume that Milton was not actually the author of The Christian Doctrine, "though it seems to have been written by his favorite theologian (let's call him 'the theologian' for short)" (91). This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Tue, 05 May 2015 14:37:30 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsREVIEWS 993 A further catalogue of the irritations and contradictions in the booles style and argument would require more space than this review permits. Although I found insight and stimulation i moments such as the analysis of Milton's discomfort with the biblical curse on the serpent and of the "maternal" aspects of God's work in cre- ation, the book as a whole is disappointing. Rather than being, as Skulsky claims, a"contribution to the literary and intellectual history of early modern Europe," Mil- ton and the Death ofMan is an intensely personal quarrel with Milton's God, Milton's poem, and a loosely defined idea of modernity. THOMAS H. BLACKBURN Swarthmore College This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Tue, 05 May 2015 14:37:30 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  Milton And The Death Of Man: Humanism On Trial In \u27Paradise Lost\u27  By H. Skulsky

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Review Of Milton And The Death Of Man: Humanism On Trial In \u27Paradise Lost\u27 By H. Skulsky

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