Modern Language Association

Plato's Four Furors and the Real Structure of Paradise Lost Author(s): Michael Fixler Source: PMLA, Vol. 92, No. 5 (Oct., 1977), pp. 952-962 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461848 Accessed: 02/12/2009 13:12
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MICHAEL FIXLER

Plato'sFour Furorsand the Real Structure of Paradise Lost

Milton tells us, is, at its best, a POETRY, channel of grace, moving in a sort of divine cycle. It begins outside the poet, in the force that inspires him, and ends beyond the reader, in the final object toward which the poem has moved his mind and heart. It is a transitive process within which poetry's very essence appears as a species of energy, which is of course how Plato conceived poetry in the Ion (534): as a kinetic power possessing in turn poet, rhapsode, and listener. The Christian adaptation of the Platonic model simply completes the cycle implicit in this movement, so that poetry becomes one with all the descending and ascending cycles in the hierarchical yet circuitous scheme of things by which the One descends into the many and in the upswing recovers something of the spiritual power originally imparted to them. Indeed, hierarchy ontologically means a divine cycle, defined by the Pseudo-Dionysus, for example, as "a sacred order and science and operation" in all the channels of being. In the poetic cycle, however, the sacred order, science, and operation of hierarchy were sometimes formally identified with another Platonic model for the movement of poetic energy-namely, that scale of inspirational raptures known from antiquity onward as Plato's four poetic furors, the so-called frenzies out of which the momentum of poetic composition was initiated and sustained. My argument is that this model structures the sequence of invocations to the Muse beginning Books I, III, vii, and ix of Paradise Lost, and hence fundamentally orders the poem's design.' I say the four "poetic" furors, although only the first of the Platonic raptures was, properly speaking, the furor poeticus, the other three being successively identified with the inspirational raptures of Dionysus, Apollo, and Eros (or Love). To the extent that the scale had long been assimilated to the Christian mystical scale of ascent-from the soul's awakening, to its purification, thence to its illumination, and finally to its apotheosis in unitive vision with the divine -it was identifiable chiefly by its highest level and end, divine love. But to the extent that it served as a structural basis for conceiving the role of inspirational rapture in composition as a graduated progression, the whole sequence tended to be identified by its initiating impulse, as the four "poetic" furors. In this sense the sequence translated a differentiated inspirational momentum into a thematic hierarchy and a structural form, but a form with the inherent ability to accommodate itself, apparently inexhaustibly, to any poetic matter embodying a hierarchical principle of order.2 To some extent the history of this structural form resembles that of the other symbolic patterns, whether numerological, hieroglyphic, circular, or symmetrical, that are only now being recovered in the study of implicit literary forms, particularly as they have been used from antiquity onward; that is, its continuity can be traced as if it were part of a recognizable compositional tradition, but it has curiously lacked, as a form, the kind of explicit recognition a modern mind tends to expect. It has been suggested that earlier discussions of such structural forms are rare because descriptive and formalistic criticism of any kind is rare before the modern period. Doubtless this is so. Yet, the structure I find in Paradise Lost differs from other symbolic compositional forms in having a public history familiar in two ways: recognition of the Platonic furors is both a critical and poetic commonplace from antiquity through the eighteenth century; and the hierarchy implicit in their order has always been explicitly recognized in such other mainstream traditions as the Christian mystical scale or the universally accepted

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principle of order translated from the cosmic archetype of the great chain of being (within which, for example, simple height and depth can measure the contrasting possibilities of all human experience and knowledge).3 I intend, therefore, to suggest, first, that some earlier uses of the hierarchy of Platonic raptures as a compositional form indicate a recognizable tradition and, then, that this form is one of the major determinants of the basic structure of Paradise Lost, no less than of the succession of its themes. I say one of the determinants because the inspirational or compositional structure of the poem is but half of the work's underlying form, the other half being the pattern specifically shaping its narrative or temporal structure. Hence this study concludes with a brief look at a scholastically defined formal absolute, a metaphysically universal form, one that is, I suggest, the real model for the underlying structure of Paradise Lost. II The place to begin is with the familiar Christian mystical scale of ascent in its hierarchy of stages. Its relationship to Plato's scale of raptures is so clear it would be accurate to speak, not of the assimilation of one to the other, but of the derivation of the Christian from the Platonic form. The earliest indications are in the Platonizing commentary of Philo Judaeus on Adam's creation in Genesis, where primal man's original spiritual capacities are described in such a way that they seem clearly related to the soul's capabilities for winged ascent in Plato's myth in the Phaedrus (246C-247E). There are echoes as well of Plato's emphasis throughout the same dialogue on the divine condition of the mind being signaled by a state of madness, rapture, or ecstasy. Philo, however, also draws upon the Stoic and Neoplatonic doctrine of the correspondences between the human mind and the structure of the cosmos, a doctrine that he implicitly relates to the suggestion in Genesis of the human mind's correspondence with God, in whose image man is made. Thus, if we spell out the stages sketched by Philo, Man's mind, resembling "its archetypal model," mounts (1) from earthly things, (2) to the contemplation of what is mutable in the upper reaches of the ele-

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mental world, (3) thence to the knowledge of the upper heavens, or of celestial things and the starry harmonies, (4) "and being led on by love," is seized, as by an inspired Corybantian ecstasy, as it approaches God himself in his divine splendor.4 Beyond Philo and early Neoplatonic traditions (in which Plotinus and Proclus figure largely), Christian thought on the structure of the mystical scale draws on the influential hierarchical system developed in the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysus and other early Greek Christian Platonists, where the four stages of the Platonic hierarchy tended to reappear in the classic sequence indicated earlier-spiritual awakening, purification, illumination, and perfection. Throughout these writings, despite the variety of ways in which the stages are identified, the trace Platonic element is evident in more or less consistent preoccupations with furor, the energizing and revelatory power of inspiration, fervor, rapture, or ecstasy.5 As a sequence, the four furors originated, we know, in Plato's Phaedrus, where Socrates describes Love's power to raise the fallen soul as a divine inspiration like that of the Muses, Dionysus, and Apollo, but of a higher order. The four raptures are not explicitly linked as a series in the Phaedrus, but to the Neoplatonists their sequential nature seems to have been taken as selfevident, confirmed for them by Plato's tendencies elsewhere to order such things as cosmogonic, epistemological, and dialectical processes in hierarchically related fourfold series. Given the interchangeability that the belief in correspondences built into all analogical series -cosmogonic, epistemological, dialectical, and poetic-the hierarchy of raptures became, in effect, a vehicle for ordering as one essentially two kinds of knowledge, the extraordinary revelations of inspiration or intuition (including the knowledge conveyed by myth or any strong passion) and the more rational processes of dialectic, or of logic and rhetoric. In antiquity the Scholia of the fifth-century Alexandrian Hermeas on Plato's Phaedrus summed up many of the implied correspondences unfolding from a proper understanding of the four raptures, and for the Renaissance Ficino's varied discussions of the paradigm were the chief, though not the only, sources of detailed information about the

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the Hymns of Callimachus through the canzone by Dante's friend Guido Cavalcanti, referred to by his descendant, the speaker Giovanni Cavalcanti, in the last discourse of Ficino's Commentary on the Symposium, a discourse on the furores. (The poem, "Donna mia priega," in its English translation by J. B. Fletcher, is reprinted by Sears R. Jayne as an appendix to his edition of Ficino's Commentary.) The structure of Cavalcanti's poem becomes apparent once we realize that of its six stanzas the opening and closing ones bracket the essence of the poem, which is an upward movement in the four central stanzas, starting with the theme of love as the experience of the senses, moving to love and the passions, then to love and the intellect, and finally to love as a kind of negative spiritual consummation, much as in mystical theology there are no terms except negative ones by which truly to know God.8 The most suggestive English references to the Platonic raptures and their relation to poetic excellence are in Henry Reynoldes' Mythomystes, a work largely showing the influence of Pico della Mirandola. Reynoldes does not outline anything like a compositional paradigm, but from his discussion of the "extaticke elevations" of poetry's raptures, which signify its divine character, he moves to consider its revelatory power, as in the Orphic Hymns, for poetry unfolds "the series or concatenation of the universall Natures"; indeed, the function of poetry, he suggests, is really to elucidate "the right scale of Nature" as "by the links of that golden chaine of Homer, that reaches from the foote of Jupiter's throne to the Earthe." Milton uses the same image in Prolusion ii as a symbol interchangeable with the Pythagorean harmonies, the essence of which, of course, is itself the interchangeability of all tetradic systems in the occult harmonies of the cosmic scheme.9 That a sense of such interchangeabilities led a number of English writers to use the raptures as a structural basis for their work I will demonstrate elsewhere. But at the moment such evidence is only peripherally relevant to Milton's practice and need detain us only to make this point: if, in its own right, this compositional tradition is to be further studied or used in the structural analysis of other writings, some distinction has to be made between the arguable

progression. Again, however, as in the discrepancy between what we find in Plato's Phaedrus and the systematic doctrine about a hierarchical sequence of raptures that is attributed to him, there is more to the apparent compositional use of the paradigm than most discussions about it would suggest. The fact is that, on a broader basis than the available Neoplatonic commentary explicitly indicates, there is significant evidence of the structural use of the paradigm in composition, in works where each inspirational stage seems to govern in sequenced progression a corresponding thematic development.6 I must emphasize that hitherto no critic or commentator seems to have recognized in the scale a compositional paradigm, although since its raison d'etre was to account for the momentum of inspirational power in a graduated form, the possibilities would appear not only selfevident but indeed almost inevitable, especially in the light of the discussions of the scale of raptures by such writers as Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Pontus de Tyard, and Francesco Patrizi. In every case the furores were conceived as the structural form of both upward and downward epistemological progressions peculiarly animated by some extrinsic activation of spiritus humanus. Pico, for example, likens the movement of mind along this scale to a specifically "angelic" methodology, wherein a downwardly seraphic (active) progression alternates with an upwardly cherubic (contemplative) one. This much he makes explicit in an/early section of his oration On the Dignity of Man; less evident is the way in which the oration itself is structured on the methodological progression he calls "the Socratic frenzies." Ficino, in turn, repeatedly refers to the four madnesses as steps entraining imaginative movements and transformations of the mind, both of which necessarily involve a thematic disposition and ordering of the objects on which the mind in its movements dwells. And in a letter to Petro Devitio he even refers to the scale as a model for the evolution of Lorenzo de Medici's writings, their stages reflecting sequentially the fourfold progression in the maturing of his life.7 Recognition of the compositional possibilities evidently goes back earlier, however, and may be traced, I suggest, in productions ranging from

Michael Fixler
deliberateness of its presence in specific works and something else-an unconscious or differently conceived compositional approach to this form. Thus, I would assume that any work whose structure can be directly related to the four Platonic raptures and their peculiar constellation of themes and processes reflects a consciously manipulated use of the form. But such a work would correspond to that looser fourfold structural paradigm repeatedly identified by Northrop Frye as a form instinctively or unconsciously learned by poets from their predecessors, or from earlier works in which the hierarchically ordering tendency of the poetic imagination found its various schematic systems corresponding ultimately to the basic form of the old Ptolemaic world picture, with its four levels of earth, moon, sun, and empyrean.10 Among such deliberately constructed works I mention here only the most important and relevant to Paradise Lost, Dante's Divina Cornmedia and Milton's own Lycidas. To be sure, the Commedia is in three parts, not four, but there are four passages evoking inspirational rapture, the first and last more or less bracketing the work, and the middle two, like the first, introducing the main divisions within the poem's narrative order. The Inferno's invocation is to the Muses, the Purgatorio invokes Calliope specifically (for Milton "the Muse herself that Orpheus bore," both Calliope and Orpheus being conventional Dionysian surrogates), and the Paradiso directly invokes Apollo. Finally, the last lines of the poem evoke the ultimate stage of the poet's inspiration in that unitive vision where the power of divine Love is instantaneously grasped as the force moving everything, from the sun and all the stars down. Were Dante the present concern, the intervening matter of his poem could be shown to correlate quite regularly in every detail to this inspirational succession. But here let us merely suggest the possibilities. The inspiration of the Muses, corresponding to the Inferno, has thematic associations with things either terrestial or chthonic. The Dionysian inspiration is associatively purgatorial or cathartic and is often identified with the sphere of the moon and, as in the Purgatorio, with the mutability and alternation of light and darkness in the movements of the sun and moon. It is often also associated with the human nature of

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love, and so with sexual or generative themes. The Apollonian inspiration is associated with prophecy and with the symbolic illumination of the sun and the immutability of the harmony of the spheres, elements sustaining much of the Paradiso. And the inspiration of divine Love, evoked by Dante at the end of the Paradiso, is associated with transcendent intuitive or angelic knowledge and with the spiritual or visionary illumination emanating from the Good, the Beautiful, and the One.1" Milton, I submit, follows a similar progression in a number of his early poems, but nowhere more overtly and to better effect than in Lycidas, which, beyond its induction, begins by invoking the Muses, proceeds to a turbulent and downward-thrusting Dionysian transition evoking the dismemberment of Orpheus, picks up again with the higher strain of the Apollonian mood initiated with the words of Phoebus Apollo, and proceeds to a climax in its rapturous Apocalyptic vision of resurrecting love. As in Paradise Lost, this fourfold progression is part, not the whole, of the work's structural form, so that the poem lends itself to alternative structural analyses. Like the ambiguities of its genre and its "answerable style," the ambiguities of form in Lycidas are part of the poem's strategies, but once we learn to attend to them the formal meanings of the inspirational evocations are hard to ignore. At every transitional point of the scale in Milton's elegy there is a quickening movement, a special animation or excitation of spirit in the monodic voice we hear. The induction is a troubled descent, but with the sounding Muses of the sacred well there is, as it were, a plangent impetus to ascend from inspiration's hidden conduits to Olympian heights, to begin the first stage in allaying the perturbations of the mind and in setting the affections in right tune. Then the subsequent evocation of "the Muse herself that Orpheus bore"-the Orpheus who was dismembered by the Dionysian maenads-comes as an intrusive and again a sensibly felt intensification of mood, underlying which this time we sense primitive terrors and following which we have the characteristically Dionysian opposition of downward-tending sexual desire and upwardtending creative virtue. At the close of this section the terror returns to be purged by the higher

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ment's hell is memorably characterized as altogether "A Universe of death" (PL ii.622). But the ulterior theme of the poem is really the restoration of life through the love of "one greater Man," whose incarnation and descent are types of every descending grace, including the inspirational raptures. Life and death, no less than love and wrath, are thus aspects of a reciprocal interchange along a symbolic vertical axis that accommodates the conversion of the hierarchy of raptures into a medium for the specific concerns of this poem, and that explains the peculiar calculus by which Milton's Muse takes on her four successive identities. For example, the highest rapture in Book I's invocation is identified as a species of plenary inspiration assimilated to the love of God that had inspired in Moses and the Evangelists their scriptural revelation, and the fullness of this inspirational power is further associated with the cosmogonic creativity of the Holy Spirit. The poet rises at once to this height in an initial flight of inspiration, so as to descend, much as he does after the soaring flight inspired by his "graver subject" in "At a Vacation Exercise." There is, then, in the thematic unfolding of its narrative segment, a parodied inversion of this whole rising and falling motion in the movement of Satan in hell, who falls at first, to rise throughout the whole segment. The motion is repeated in the second invocation, at the outset of Book in, which rises imaginatively, but to a slightly lower stage, the Apollonian, a stage conventionally characterized as a species of prophetic inspiration associated both with the symbolic light of the sun and with the ethereal stream, the logoi spermatikoi or rationes seminales of spiritual light's inseminating influence, communicated especially through the translunar power of the sun and the stars. Hence Milton's Muse in Book iii is that attribute of the divine power actually communicated as illuminative understanding and as a transitive procreative stream, both understanding and the stream being identifiable in some degree with the divine Wisdom. Correspondingly, the narrative of Book III begins with the divine foresight and prophecies of Man's fall and his redemption, the knowledge of which colors all subsequent action within the framework of that level.13 The appropriate degree of death associated with it is the

Apollonian voice, which for the first time in the poem refers the whole knot of its tensions to heavenly justice and the divine scheme. In the prophetic mode the Apollonian section, the longest in the poem, looks back (with the "perfidious bark") to original sin and forward to Apocalyptic justice. Near its close the movement perceptibly intensifies with the evocation of the "two-handed engine," which is followed by a bridging passage wherein the theme of love, as the compassionate sympathy of the mourning flowers, is first sounded. But the real nature of the last stage is not fully revealed until the poem moves, in a climax of faith and love, from the homeward-looking angel to the flaming sun of the morning sky and the sweet societies of everlasting bliss. The fourth stage then, like the three preceding ones, begins in a descent in order to mount higher, achieving in its latter part a sustained rapture at the full and final revelation of divine love. In a comparable but reversed pattern the same progression is to be found in Paradise Lost.

III In Paradise Lost, a poem dealing with the fall both of the angels and of Man, with the descent of grace on which Man's recovery depends, and involving in a major way that characteristic downward imaginative motion on Milton's part that Don Cameron Allen called his "descent to light," the paradigm of the four raptures is inverted, so that the invocations correspond sequentially to the highest Platonic rapture first and the lowest last, a downward movement, moreover, entraining thematically, in a comparably reversed order, the four degrees of death Milton describes in The Christian Doctrine, where the fourth degree is the eternal punishment of the damned in hell, corresponding to the themes of Books I and II, while the first degree of death, coming last, is the very fall of Man himself, with all its consequences, corresponding to the final themes of Books ix through xni, the segment introduced by the poem's last invocation of the Muse.12 The opening invocation sets the poem's general theme as Man's disobedience, the fruits of which are death, and thematically the first seg-

Michael Fixler
death of the body decreed by God in Book in and specifically evoked as the "mortal snare" in the poet's warning that begins Book iv. And, with Man's mortality involving the mortality of all nature, much of the narrative of Eden's beauty at this level is overshadowed by Satan, in whose presence and with whose vision we first experience its loveliness as a perfection already doomed. At the midpoint of the poem, its Dionysian level, where "Half yet remains unsung," inspiration, as defined by the Platonic order, is mystical in a specifically ritual sense associated with the peculiar cathartic power of symbolic rites and of revelations whose efficacy depends in part upon the uncontamination of divinely generative creative power by the evil most comparable and antithetical to it. Here it is that, in a context of a sort of numinous dread, Milton evokes the Dionysian dismemberment of Orpheus (as he does at the same point in Lycidas) and symbolically excludes the unworthy reader. By the same token Satan is deliberately excluded from this whole segment, the essence of which is the sanctity of the divine procreative love that first generates the cosmos, in Book vii, and then, in Book viii, leads to the account of Eve's creation and of Adam's experience of that physical love through which he must learn to rise along the ladder leading to his ultimate spiritualization.14 Divine Love's negative face is destructive wrath, which is why Satan is excluded, lest "God incenst . . . / Destruction with Creation might have mix't" (viii.235-36). The Dionysian ambivalence of this middle phase, which involves all nature in what Yeats called its "sensual music," is reflected in the identity of Milton's Muse at this level. Urania's meaning, as well as her name, derives in part at least from Plato's Symposium, where she, as the "heavenly Muse" (187E), is identified with Aphrodite/Urania, the higher of two forms of generative love, whose lower, more physical personification is Aphrodite/Pandemus (180C-D)-she who, through Ficino's Commentary on the Symposium, became conventionally the lower Venus of Renaissance mythology, presiding over purely physical generation.l) Though Milton's Urania is the higher Venus, she has something of her lower sister's procreative force. In Paradise Lost she is paired allusively with yet a higher generative figure,

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Wisdom, her sister, in a figure intimating God's generative pleasure, and in Book VII Wisdom and Urania, as "Sapience and Love/Immense" (11. 195-96), both invest the Son, as he goes forth to create, with the Father's generative power. Indeed, everything at this level breathes generative life. But, correlatively, its negative face of destructive wrath is most expressible in terms of the second degree of death, the spiritual death, which is the danger that Milton evokes in the invocation's numinous dread and that Raphael warns Adam about, in the light of Adam's inclination to mistake the meaning of love, the love that he feels for Eve and that he must both enjoy and transcend (viii.540-94). In the lowest and most obliquely addressed invocation, beginning Book ix, the poet's Muse is identified with a peculiar imaginative receptivity in the sleeping state, much as at the outset of Prolusion vii the young Milton referred to the Muses' copulative visitation while he slept.16 Such a visitation is a conventional figure for the lowest threshold of inspiration, and here the Muse is simply a name for the descended power working through the poet's spirit on his imagination within the express limitations of his proper physical nature, intermixed heavily as that is with its characteristic elemental "humour." Hence the qualifying reservations Milton gives us about his age and the unfavorable climate, for at its lowest, at the level of the Muses, the power of inspiration contends most with what is purely natural and recalcitrant in the poet's condition. At this level, the physiologically volatile human spirit begins to clarify, to free itself from its "humours," as in the phantasmagoria of dreams, and often in an involuntary imaginative release, which suggests to the poet the inspiration of his unpremeditated verse. The hesitancy of the language in Book ix's invocation, its "answerable style," thus accords with our being at the furthest distance from plenary inspiration and with the relative abjectness of the theme of this whole last narrative segment, the fall of Man and its consequences. The fall is defined by Milton as the first degree of death, or "all evils which tend to death and which . . . came into the world as soon as Man fell," the sum of which is expressed in terms of the guilt and fear accompanying the general degradation of Man's mind.17 Hence

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drus, love implicitly aligns in one scale all the divine raptures.

both the invocation and the sounding of the thematic keynote in Book ix are aspects of the spiritual phase, shared by the poet and by men generally, that is furthest from the height of grace, the phase before the descending grace of heaven stoops to help the penitent and aspiring soul to recover its upward momentum. The poet's symbolic abjectness at the beginning of Book ix is matched by the abjectness of Adam and Eve at the end of Book x, the midpoint and fulcrum of the last fourth of the poem, where, before recovering their upright posture in the inspiration of prayer, fallen Man and his wife lie prostrate in penitent contrition, mortal on the earth from which they had been shaped. Mediating their prayers at God's high altar and throne is the Son, now expressing in heaven most fully his unique character as divine love. And so once more, for the second time in the lower half of the scale, love emerges as the underlying force tempering the downward thrust, which reflexively turns upward again, reversing the fall's momentum and accounting for the curious play of motifs in Milton's last invocation at the head of the final narrative segment. First his notes are "tragic," with the word bearing its old sense as the lowest point of a turning wheel in the fall from high felicity. Then, as a tragic argument underwrit by love, Milton's theme is not less but more heroic than "the wrath of stern Achilles" and such subjects, wherein epic struggles were grounded in the great cause of love. We are reminded that Phaedrus' first discourse on love's inspirational power in Plato's Symcommends Achilles as posium (179E-180A) the highest exemplar of that heroic love which will make men die for others, a love, said Phaedrus, "inspired by God." But in Christian terms this is the kind of self-sacrificing love that leads Adam sinfully to share in Eve's fall and that tempts Eve despairingly to suggest a suicidal love pact. Clearly for Milton the only truly heroic sacrificial love, its consummate type, is that of the Son of God, through whose death grace, like inspiration, descends, and in expectation of which "the better fortitude" is not that of embattled knights and heroes but, Milton tells us, the "patience and heroic martyrdom" of the saints (ix.31-32). Rightly understood, therefore, love stands at both the bottom and the top of the scale shaping the poem; as in the Phae-

IV As schematic as for the moment this account must be of the relation between the formal series of invocational raptures in Paradise Lost and the poem's narrative structure, it is clear, I think, that the progression of the poem is not simply downward or upward but both simultaneously, with the real emphasis falling on the symbolic character of the axis itself as the underlying vertical track for whatever moves between heaven and earth, or lower. "Thee I revisit safe," the poet says to the personified ethereal stream of his inspiration in Book III, "Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down / The dark descent, and up to reascend" (11. 19-21). Or, as in the thematically downward-tending hymn of devotionally rising praise sung by Adam and Eve in Book v, there are motions involved in creation's universal worship of God that "Rising or falling, still advance his praise" (1. 191 ). But what is, in effect, the bearing of this vertical axis with respect to the real structure of Paradise Lost? For we have been describing only the poem's instrumental order, that which, in the form of the invocations, nominally mediates the narrative order for the reader. And, while the instrumental order framed by the invocations is in its essence vertical and therefore spatial, the narrative order, considered in itself, is really temporal and considered in relation to the poem's vertical axis, horizontal-a lateral coordinate stretched out along a track running from the beginning to the end of time. Some years ago I suggested that the implicit narrative or temporal design of Paradise Lost is an episodic sequence whose seven parts-Hell, Heaven, Eden, the War in Heaven, the Creation, the Fall, and the Visions of the Future-recognizably transform the seven visions of the Apocalypse of John of Patmos. Pointing out that Milton, in his Art of Logic, prescribes the method of crypsis for the formal disposition of poetic materials, I then argued that the presence of the Apocalyptic design in the poem was cryptic, invisible, constituting an inner order reflecting the mystery of providential design in the

Michael Fixler
events unfolding from the beginning to the end of all things. "The hidden ways of God's providence we adore and search not," Milton once wrote, "but the law is his revealed will."18 By the law Milton meant that extension of God's being, his will, which within an ontological framework governs all things according to their nature. If, then, the temporal order of Paradise Lost accords with "the hidden ways of God's providence," there remains in the overt aspect of the poem's basic form something analogous to the downward revelation of God's will as law, and this clearly would be an aspect of that law of being figured by Raphael in the image climaxing his account of how, from "One first matter all," God's goodness descends to generate in Man, as in a plant, an aspiration leading him heavenward to his spiritual self-transcendence (v.469-500). The largest design in the poem shaped along such a vertical axis is that of its upward and downward movements calibrated to the scale of the four Platonic raptures. But this axial movement is intervolved with the lateral, or narrative, order of the poem in time, in movements like the heavenly dance of worship in Book v, "regular / Then most, when most irregular they seem" (11. 623-24). In static terms the archetypal form these movements describe is suggested by Milton himself in a crucial proposition of his Art of Logic: "For all the arts," he wrote, "there is something that is their highest good and final end, this is the form of the art. . . ." Form here involves first the specific determinants and ends of each art and corresponds to what elsewhere Milton called "internal form." But it also points teleologically to a comprehensive and generative archetype for all created things, what scholastics called "universal form." The latter sense is implied by the "highest good and final end," terms that formally designate in space and time what Dante, for example, near the end of the Paradiso called la forma universal, (xxxIIi.85-145)

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within which, in his beatific high fantasy (alta fantasia), he saw the generative origin of all created forms and thence the power moving all things.19 In a prefiguration of the larger pattern of Paradise Lost, Milton's early "At a Solemn Music" likewise soars upward, in the thrust of his "high-rais'd fantasy," to touch first the height of beatific vision, the highest good, descending thence back in time to Man's primordial perfection and forward to the anticipation of his blessed final end. The movements in space and time to the highest good and final end shape a form that is literally the design of the poem's imaginative movements. So too in Paradise Lost the movement along the line of the poem's invocations to the Muse becomes the type of every spiritual movement, from the highest good to the lowest depths, while the movement of the poem's narrative order becomes the imaginative extension of time experienced in terms of the mysterious identity of its beginning and final end, the identity, as in Revelation, of Alpha and Omega. But within the coordinate pattern of both movements time really dissolves into space, and Paradise Lost is emphatically a spatialized poem, its intermittent and ambiguous temporal shifts in narrative point of view always subsumed back into the poet's own single perspective, oriented as that is on earth, between the heavens and the lowest depths.20It is a perspective conditioned by the rapture of inspired conviction, a rapture encompassing a circuit first formally measured out when, outside of Athens, Socrates walked with Phaedrus by the Ilissus and talked about the apparently impassable distance between the heaven of heavens and the poet's, the lover's, the madman's inspired urge to reach for it. Tufts University Medford, Massachusetts

Notes
1 The argument of this paper was originally presented in a somewhat different form at the December 1975 Convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco. For help in its preparation and in the research of its larger contexts I owe thanks to the Faculty Research Fund of Tufts Univ. and the American Council of Learned Societies. On Milton's assumption about the nature and ends of poetry as a cyclical transitive process, see the digression in The Reason of Church Government, espe-

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Plato's Four Furors and the iReal Structure of Paradise Lost

Poetic Structure (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957), p. 76.
4 "A Treatise . . . on the Creation of the World as

cially his characterizationof inspired poetry as a power "besides the office of a pulpit," and his account in Animadversions of the transitive cycle of such spiritual work, in The Complete Prose Works (henceforth

designated as CPW), ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953- ), I, 816-21, 721. On hierarchy as a sacred order in the thought of the
Pseudo-Dionysus, see The Heavenly Hierarchies, Bk. III, Sec. i, in The Works of Dionysus the Areopagite,

Given by Moses," xxiii, trans. C. D. Yonge, in The Essential Philo, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 19-20. 5 Often the four stages are reduced to three by the elimination of the first or, conversely, expanded by the elaboration of one of the other stages, usually the last.
See The Ecclesiastical Hierarchies and The Heavenly Hierarchies, in The Works of Dionysus the Areopagite

trans. and ed. John Parker (London: J. Parker, 1897), p. 13. Finally, the identification with the hierarchy of the four furors of the cycle of poetic energy implied in Plato's Ion is made explicit by Marsilio Ficino in his commentary on the Ion, in Opera Omnia (Basil, 1576; facsimile rpt., Torino: Bottegha D'erasmo, 1959; reissued 1962), I, 1281-84. 2 There seem to be as many references, in Renaissance writings, to the Platonic or poetic frenzies in the plural form as to the singular furor poeticus. About half of Milton's specific allusions to inspirationalrapture are in the plural, as in his reference, in the early letter to Alexander Gill, to "those heaven sent frenzies" (CPW, i, 316). What scholarly attention the four raptures have attracted has been focused on one of three areas: (1) their relation to the thematic treatment of inspiration in poetry, as in R. V. Merrill and R. J.
Clements' Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry

and, more generally, A. C. Lloyd, "Greek Christian Platonism" and "The Cappadocians,"in The Cambridge
History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy,

(New York: New York Univ. Press, 1957), Ch. vi; (2) the role of inspiration in critical theory, as in Bernard Weinberg's A History of Literary Criticism in the

ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), esp. pp. 425-31, 438. In Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism (New York: World, 1955), Pt. ii, passim, the Christian scale of mystical ascent includes the typical four stages, although the last stage, perfection, becomes differentiatedinto successsive conditions of spiritual surrender and union. I suggest that the archaic roots of this pattern are to be looked for in the various cosmological ladder images associated with pre-Pythagoreanand ultimately shamanistic accounts of differentiatedstages of ecstatic flight. 6 For the main references to the inspirationalraptures in the Phaedrus, see 243E-245C and also 228B, 235C, 238D, and 265A-B. On interchangeability or correspondences, see George P. Conger, Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy

(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1922), Chs. i-iii;

and S. K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony: and Renaissance Poetics Pythagorean Cosmology

Italian Renaissance,2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), passim; in Baxter Hathaway's The Age of
Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca: Cor-

nell Univ. Press, 1962), Pt. v; and in Grahame Castor's PlMiadePoetics (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), Ch. iii; or (3) the part played by the doctrine of the four raptures in the musical theory of the Renaissance, specifically as it concerned belief in the energizing and occult effects of the union of music and poetry, as in Frances Yates's French Academies of
the Sixteenth Century (London: The Warburg In-

(San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974), passim. Both works stress the crucial significance of fourfoldness in the protean correspondences postulated by so much of the speculation on the general coherence of the various parts of the world system.
For Hermeas, see Hermiae A lexandrini In Platonis

stitute, Univ. of London, 1947), passim, but esp. Ch.

iv; in D. P. Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: The Warburg

Phaedrum Scholia, ed. P. Couvreur (Paris: Librairie Emile Bouillon, 1901). An English translation of the most relevant part of the Scholia is included in Thomas Taylor's notes to his translationof Proclus' commentary on Plato's Timaeus. It is also reproduced in Taylor's
translation of lamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians (Chiswick, Eng.:

Institute, Univ. of London, 1958), pp. 20-24, 119-25; and in J. E. Phillips' contribution to Music and Literature in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth

Centuries, papers delivered by James E. Phillips and Bertrand H. Bronson at the Second Clark Library Seminar, 24 Oct. 1953 (Los Angeles: Clark Library,
1954).
3 On the absence of discussions of underlying symbolic forms or early commentary on their presence and nature in specific works, see Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), Ch. i; and R. G. Petersen, "Measure and Symmetry in Literature,"PMLA, 91 (1976), 367-75. And for some perceptive observations on inexplicit underlying principles of order generally, see Kenneth Burke,

A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952,

passim, but esp. pp. 137-42, "A Metaphorical View of Hierarchy"; and J. V. Cunningham, Tradition and

n.p., 1821), pp. 350-58, which is the English version I have seen. Presumably it was in one of these editions of Taylor that W. B. Yeats became familiar with the paradigm of the raptures as a compositional scheme. He uses it, for example, as a descending sequence ordering the characters and themes evoked in his poem "All Souls' Night," only one of a number of his poems in which the structuraluse of the paradigmis apparent. Hermeas' Scholia appears as a source in the writings of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and seems to be a vital link in the tradition behind the use of the scale of rapturesas a structuralform. 7 Ficino, Opera, i, 612-15. See also Ficino's letters to Naldus Noldio and Peregrino Agli, I 830, 927, and his commentaries on Plato's Ion, Symposium, and Phaedrus, II, 1281-84, 1320-86. For Pico see the translation by C. G. Wallis, among the writings in Pico della

Michael Fixler
Mirandola, ed. P. J. W. Miller, The Library of the Liberal Arts (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), esp. pp. 7-14. The fourfold progression in the oration is downward, and the stages may be identified in paragraphs 1, 8, 18, and 27 of the edition cited. For Agrippa, who mainly follows Ficino, see The Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. F[reake] (London: printed by R. W. for Gregory Moule, 1651), Bk. iii, Chs. xlv-xl, pp. 499-511. For Pontus de Tyard, see Le Solitaire premier, in CEuvres, ed. by S. F. Baridon (Lille: Librairie Giard, and Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1950), pp. 12-29, 40-49. For Patrizi, see La cittat felice (Venice, 1553), pp. 44-67; and Della poetica: La deca disputata (Ferrarra, 1586), pp. 3-26. And see also the discussions by Walker, Yates, and Hathaway cited in n. 2 above. 8 Commentary on Plato's Symposium, Univ. of Missouri Studies, xix, No. 1 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1944), 239-40. 9 Mythomystes, rpt. in Literary Criticism of 17th Century England, ed. by E. W. Tayler (New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 232-36, 247, 253-54. Milton, Prolusion II, CPW, I, 236. 10 Compositional use of the raptures as a basis for structural disposition seems to me evident in Spenser's Fowre Hymnes, in Campion's Lord's Masque, and in Henry More's little-known four-part poem Psychodia Platonica: A Platonic Song of the Soul, to name but several among a number of suggestive possibilities. Frye makes his point notably in The Stubborn Structure (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), p. 275, but it is one of the most frequently recurring generalizations about archetypal poetic structure throughout his work. As such, I take it to support the likelihood that there was a compositional tradition based on the four Platonic raptures and that, in terms of the deliberateness of its use in specific works, a new area of structural study is here being opened. 1 The significance of the furor poeticus for Dante was early noted by his biographer, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, the author also of a Latin translation of the Pliaedrus and of a canzone, "A laudi di Venere," which was one of the sources for the Renaissance elaboration of the theory of the four furors. His and Christoforo Landino's references to the furor poeticus in relation to Dante are discussed by Andre Chastel, in Marsile Ficin et l'art (Lille: Librairie Giard, and Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1954), p. 129. In Dante and the Legend of Rome (London: The Warburg Institute, Univ. of London, 1952), Ch. ii, Nancy Lenkeith notes Dante's theoretical distinction of four types of poetic raptures, though she does not appear to see the Cozmmedia as structured in these terms. She does suggest, however, that the progression of the poem as a scala perfectionis and scala amoris is climaxed in the final visio Dei; and here her terminology reminds one of Socrates' reference in the Pliaedrus (247C) to that heaven of heavens which poets had never adequately described, and possibly never could. 12 For D. C. Allen, see "Milton and the Descent to Light," Journal of English and Germlanic Philology, 60 (1961), 614-30. On the four degrees of death, a convential theological see The Christian distinction,

961

Doctrine, ed. Maurice Kelley and trans. John Carey, Bk. i, Chs. xii-xiii, CPW, vi, 393-414. Interestingly enough, the distinction seems to go back to a comparable pagan Neoplatonic distinction of four kinds of death. See Fragment 80 of lamblichi Chalcidensis In Platonis Dialogos Commentariorum Fragmenta, ed. and trans. J. M. Dillion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), pp. 193-95, 370-71. lamblichus was commenting on Plato's Timaeus, a work that sees the creation and the cosmos itself as having been ordered in terms of certain fourfold ratios. With respect to the fourfold division of Paradise Lost, the segments are specifically identified here with the four invocations to the Muse and their implications, but E. M. W. Tillyard, in Milton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 243-54, made a similar structural division and identified each segment topically with, respectively, hell, heaven, paradise, and the fall of Man. In "The Function of the Prologues in Paradise Lost," PMLA, 57 (1942), 697-704, John S. Diekhoff amplified Tillyard's point, suggesting that the invocations marked stages of the poem's argument as well as stages in the narrative. Finally, Alastair Fowler, in the discussion of Paradise Lost in his and John Carey's edition, The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, and New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 851-52, also notes the structural function of the invocations and stresses two points: that the fourfold structure in its binary aspect really divides the poem successively into the themes of the fall of the angels and fall of Man and that the poem's four parts reflect the numerological significance of the Pythagorean tetractys. All these views are compatible with the argument that the poem's fourfold divisions derive formally from the four Platonic raptures. 13 A paradigmatic table of mythological themes, theological correlatives, cosmological and physical attributes, psychological equivalents, and other associated features, drawn up in terms of the successive levels of the four raptures and their respective Muses and brought into relation to a wide range of Renaissance writings, would, I think, prove most instructive. Its chief principle would be the one summed up by Pico della Mirandola in his account of the correspondences between the four worlds identified with, respectively, God, the starry heavens, the elemental sphere, and Man himself: "Bound by the chains of concords, all these worlds exchange natures as well as names with mutual liberality. From this principle . . . flows the science of all allegorical interpretation," Heptaplus, trans. Douglas Carmichael, in Pico della Mirandola, pp. 7879. The identification of each of the four invocations to the Muse with a descending order of inspirational amplitude I also base on a fourfold distinction relating to the Christian forms of inspiration traced by Courtland Baker in his study "Certain Religious Elements in the Doctrine of the Inspired Poet," ELH, 6 (1939), 301-02. The distinctions Baker recognized, though rooted in a classification of types of biblical inspiration, are ultimately derived, I believe, from the differences in the four Platonic raptures. In any event, Baker lists three

962

Plato's Four Furors and the Real Structure of Paradise Lost

Milton's Epic Process (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,

main revelatory types, and a fourth that is more purely lyrical or poetic: (1) plenary inspiration, such as Moses received on Mount Sinai; (2) mantic, or prophetic, inspiration, such as possessed Isaiah and Jeremiah; (3) mystical inspiration, such as seized the Apostles at the Penecostal visitation described in Acts ii, when they babbled in tongues; and (4) inspiration likened to "the servant of the thought of God," such as moved David to compose his hymns. 14For a discussion of the numinous dread Milton evokes in the invocation beginning Bk. vii, see my earlier study, "Milton's Passionate Epic," in Milton Studies, 1 (1969), 167-92. There I also discuss Milton's structural use of the hierarchy of the four raptures in relation to Ad Patrem and to his well-known characterization of poetry in Of Education (CPW, II, 403) as

1973), pp. 129-33, and, more relevantly to the argument here, by Michael Lieb, in "Milton and the
Metaphysics of Form," Studies in Philology, 7 (1974),

206-24. The term "universal form" seems to derive, I find, from Aristotle's Poetics (1455b), where it refers to something like the exemplary form of a particular poetic argument, a form that is the essential concept out of which the artistic work is elaborated. The filiation thence of the term is obscure. See, for example, the allegorical personificationof generative form, called
pantomorphos or Omniformis, whom Bemardus Sil-

vestris places at the outermost limit of the created universe, near the primum mobile, about where Dante
sees his vision of la forma universal (in Cosmographia,

"more simple, sensuous and passionate" than logic or rhetoric.

15 Commentary,

Opera, II, 1326 ff., or see in Sears

R. Jayne'strans., pp. 142, 151-52, 191-92. 16 See my discussion of this point about inspiration in sleep, in "The Orphic Technique of 'L'Allegro' and
'II Penseroso,'" English Literary Renaissance, 1 (1971),

trans. and ed. WinthropWetherbee [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973], p. 96). In the Commedia, where the essential artistic argument and its religious ends are virtually the same, it is easy to see how Aristotle's esthetic concept of universal form and the Christian ontological idea of the formal and original causes as form could be assimilated to each other. Ficino, in his
Theologia Platonica (xi.v), says something like this: by finding "all the arts . . . implicit in the one God, and

170-71, n. 7.
17 The Christian Doctrine, CPW, vi, 393-94. 18 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, CPW,
II,

292. In "Milton's Passionate Epic," I discuss the implications of this distinction between adoration and the rational quest for God's revealed will in law as it relates to the character of Paradise Lost as an act of worship and as a logical argument. For my preliminary argument on the sevenfold Apocalyptic episodic or narrative structure of Paradise Lost, see "The Apocalypse in Paradise Lost," in New Essays on Paradise

uniquely in the form of God." (Opera, i, 256: "Cunctae [artes]denique in uno singulariDeo atque una dumtaxat Dei forma.")
20 Of the many structural studies of Paradise Lost

the only ones directly relevant to my approach here and to this provisional conclusion are Northrop Frye's The Return of Eden (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1965) and Jackson Cope's seminal work The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost (Baltimore: Johns

Lost, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 131-78. The source of the reference to Milton's prescriptionof crypsis in poetry is
The Art of Logic, trans. Allan H. Gilbert, in The Works

Hopkins Univ. Press, 1962), with its emphatic and skillful demonstration of the pervasively spatial and metaphorically vertical structure expressed through the action and imagery of the poem. Also notable is
Galbraith J. Crump's The Mystical Design in Paradise

of John Milton, ed. by F. A. Patterson, 20 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931-40), XI, 297-99, 471, 483-85.
19 Milton's Latin in the Artis Logicae reads as fol-

lows: "Omnium artium est aliquod summum bonum &

finis extremus; quae & earum forma est . . ." (p. 66). And see also p. 63, as well as Tetrachordon, CPW, iin,

608, for referencesto internal form. Milton's conception of internal form is discussed by Christopher Grose, in

Lost (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1975), which finds a circular or cyclical pattern dominatingthe poem, a pattern signifying anagogically the mystical perfection of what the poem celebrates. His argument that circular patterning in fact extends throughout the epic is clearly assimilable to my point about the circular movements, or movement both down and up the spatial axis of the poem's inspirationalform. To that extent I find his analysis both relevant and suggestive.