Another world; out of one man a race
Of men innumerable.
This last is the account we must accept. Milton no doubt was attracted by the dramatic superiority of this version, which makes the Creation of Man a minor incident in the great war, so that the human race comes, a mere token and pawn--
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.
But he was probably also aware that this view had not the highest warrant of orthodoxy.
There is something absurd, perhaps even something repulsive, to the modern mind in this careful, matter-of-fact anatomy of Milton's poem. But it is a useful and necessary exercise, for all his greatest effects are achieved in the realm of the physical and moral sublime, where the moral relations are conditioned chiefly by the physical. There is no metaphysic, nothing spiritual, nothing mysterious, except in name, throughout the whole poem. The so-called spiritual beings are as definitely embodied as man. The rules that Milton followed in dealing with his heavenly essences are very fully laid down in the Treatise of Christian Doctrine. He consigned the Fathers to limbo, and built up his entire system from the words of Scripture. Now the Scriptures, in a hundred passages, attribute human passions and actions to Divine beings. We have no choice, said Milton, but to accept these expressions as the truest to which we can attain. "If after the work of six days it be said of God that 'He rested and was refreshed,' Exodus, xxxi. 17; if it be said that 'He feared the wrath of the enemy,' Deuteronomy, xxxii. 27; let us believe that it is not beneath the dignity of God ... to be refreshed in that which refresheth Him, or to fear in that He feareth." Milton had here the sharp logical dilemma that he loved. Either these expressions are literally true, or they are not. If they are, well and good; if they are not, how can we hope to frame for ourselves better and truer notions of the Deity than those which he has dictated to us as within the reach of our understanding, and fit and proper for us to entertain? So also with angelic beings: Milton dismisses the nine orders of the apocryphal hierarchy--although he enumerates five of them, in the wrong order, in the roll of that recurring verse--
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers--
and bases himself upon Scripture. There he finds mention of seven chief angels, with some kind of pre-eminence enjoyed by Michael. In the poem he finds employment for only four, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, with a few Seraphim and Cherubim, to whom he invariably, and very improperly, assigns a subordinate position.
His angels fight and play games, as they were doing at the gate of Paradise on the evening when Satan first appeared there. They wear solid armour, and so fall a ready prey to the artillery of their foes--