As Advent Begins

There is something wonderfully accessible about Advent.

Perhaps part of it is the long lack of focus that tends to obtain during Ordinary Time. That is certainly true for me, wherefore I have been looking forward to the season for quite some time. But I think that mostly Advent is accessible for much the same reason that Dante's Purgatorio is the most accessible part of the Divine Comedy- it's where we are.

Who is not acquainted with longing? Who does not know the desire for something just out of reach? Who has not felt the thrill and sweet pain of awaiting something promised but not yet received? The spring in the step as one embarks upon a long journey, the accelerated heartbeat as the plane takes off on its way to a foreign country, the joy of anticipated reunion- sehnsucht is part of the universal human experience. "How long, O Lord?", we ask in eager anticipation.

Or it can have its darker side. Orwell speaks in 1984 of the way in which pain drives out principles until all one desires is simply for it to stop. Many of us, young, affluent and comfortable, are insulated from such an experience, but myriad others are not. Persecutions and injustices and bloodshed go on, and those in the middle of them cry out, "How long, O Lord?" in agony and desperation.

Advent is where all of us are. If we allow ourselves to be free of our distractions long enough (or even, sometimes, if we don't) we are aware that all is not right in the cosmos. There is a lack. There are problems. There are atrocities and petty selfishnesses and parasitic wasps. We know within ourselves that the world is not the way it is supposed to be. Much closer to home, we know that we are not as we are supposed to be. At a most basic human level, we sense our alienation and dislocation.

Some of us know that that for which we long, that for which we hope, is Christ. He Who will put all to rights, the universe's rightful sovereign, is coming. We try to strengthen in ourselves the desire for Him. He, cure of our miseries, better than our hopes, will not delay.

He came once before, and we know His face. We had the opportunity to get to know Him. And He has left behind Him, for our sake, the Church which bears witness to Him, and the Spirit through Whom it speaks and which sanctifies its members.

But He has not come back yet.

And so we Christians wait, knowing Him for Whom we wait. Knowing Him, Who brings into focus our hopes, desires and longings, our distresses, difficulties and failures, knowing that He will fulfill them all and bring them to their predestined end.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like...

Spooky supernatural stories will have to wait. I have another poetic offering in the offing. Not my greatest work, I'll admit, but some of the lines are fair to decent. Feedback is most welcome.

While others might have found their place

By giving in and saving face,

And many are the kind that chose

To swim the way the current flows,

I far prefer to such a set

The ones not loath to make a bet

On odds unfair and prospects bleak

And risk the loss of what they seek,

Who disregard the passing fad

And do not miss the things they had

When sold was all their earthly wealth

In hopes of winning joy by stealth.

No sure thing is the hidden yield

Beneath some undistinguished field

Which randomly is bought and sold

Because it may hide buried gold.

And what of him whose only gain

Consists in fruit of oyster's pain

For which he'd give up all to take?

It may well be a clever fake!

Such ventures will not ever earn

The smile of an insurance firm,

Nor would economists approve

As valid a financial move

Which had such low chance of success,

Whose sure end would be sore distress

For anyone who chanced to take

Such low odds for so high a stake.

But sense and safety won't suffice

For dungeon-dwellers, 'mid their lice,

Who won't accept their grim surrounds

But second-guess the dubious grounds

On which their fellows built a case

For keeping to one's proper place.

A prison schedule keeps the mind

Alert and fit, but disinclined

To look beyond it's narrow walls.

But somewhere out there, something calls...

An unobtrusive, subtle sound,

A snatch of music echoing round,

A half-remembered melody

Like waked love or old company;

A siren song scores have declined

That grabs the heart and wakes the mind.

Though many happy minds remain

Encelled, with means to entertain

Themselves for endless hours on end,

A few, a very few, contend

That only by their breaking free

Will they save their humanity,

And maybe even come upon

A greater one than Solomon.

So contrary to all advice,

A small band reckons small the price

And, staking all on what they'll find,

They smile and, trembling, leave behind

The multitudes who found their place

By giving in and saving face.

I Write Like...

I discovered (courtesy of Fr Ray Blake) this site, which purports to analyse your writing style and tell you to which famous writer your writing is most similar. Curious, I gave it a shot, and apparently...

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

I had put in the text from a lecture I gave a while ago on Galatians. 'Peculiar,' I thought, 'I wonder how reliable it is.' So I pasted in an old blog post. Same result. So there you go. Maybe I should leave off the poetry and try my hand at a spooky supernatural story sometime.

Strains of Beowulf

Given the title of this blog, it would be bizarre and perverse to refrain from providing a link to this very nice reading and step-by-step explanation of the opening lines of Beowulf (found in, of all places, the Telegraph!). So I won't.

The reader's pronunciation is slightly different from the way I was taught, but not by much. A delight to hear the ancient words articulated once more.

The Diverse Significances of the Humble Poppy

A clash of cultural symbols, by turns amusing and interesting, took place last week the day before Remembrance Day. The symbol was the poppy. For English speakers (and the French as well, I imagine), the poppy conjures up images of Flanders, the Somme and crosses row on row. For the Chinese, on the other hand, it conjures up the collective memory of the two Opium Wars and humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. Read about the aforementioned clash here.

In fact, I had a much smaller-scale version of the same clash the following day. A number of my students (the overwhelming majority of whom are Chinese) inquired after the flower I was wearing (I had been to a service earlier in the day). I explained to them its significance and, having done that, told them the name of it. Immediately, electronic dictionaries appeared and a flurry of typing ensued, whereupon a collective, almost simultaneous, gasp went round the classroom. Shock registered on a number of faces, followed by questions and remarks such as, "But...but...isn't it illegal?" "You must not have this flower. It is bad" and the like.

That such things can have such divergent associations in different cultures fascinates me, diplomatic incident or no. What intrigues me particularly in this case is the fact that, contrary to his advisers, David Cameron still wore the thing. Of course, cultural associations don't de facto trump each other, but it has become an almost reflexive habit of us Westerners over the past forty-or-so years to give automatic deference to other cultures before our own. Cameron's breaking of the mould is slightly refreshing and I can't help wondering if it's a precedent for something.

Implications of Language Reform

In the New Year, I will be visiting China, so in recent days I have been brushing up on my Chinese, which had been lying in a lumber room growing mouldy. I tell you this by way of lead-in to the following anecdote. The other day, I was chatting with one of my students during the break between periods. This particular student hails from Taiwan and I had some particular questions about some items of Chinese vocabulary, which I proceeded to write/draw for him (the distinction between writing and drawing fades somewhat in a pictographic language like Chinese). It was at this point that the conversation took a turn for the interesting. My student didn't understand what I had written. And, surprisingly enough, not because of my dodgy handwriting.

In the 1950s, ostensibly to encourage greater literacy and increase efficiency, the Chinese communists reformed the language by introducing simplified Chinese characters to replace many of the traditional ones and introducing the pinyin system for foreign learners of Chinese. Warren Carroll, one of my favourite historians, despises the pinyin system and refuses to use it in his works, opting instead for the older Wade-Giles system, but I've never felt any particular animosity towards pinyin. The romanised spelling of Chinese words which is used in that system is rather counter-intuitive, but once you get the hang of it it's more or less phonetic, and unlike the Wade-Giles system it is capable of depicting the all-important Chinese tones. Unlike Carroll, I don't see anything particularly Marxist in pinyin.

Simplified characters, on the other hand, are a different matter. I had been technically aware of the distinction between simplified and traditional characters before, but wasn't aware of any practical implications (apart from making them easier to remember and therefore read) before speaking to my Taiwanese student, whose name is Mars.

A spelling reform in a European language is a purely practical matter of standardising writing so everybody is spelling things the same way. It may accrue political overtones depending on who supports or opposes it, but it is not by nature a political thing. This is because European languages use an alphabet. The letters of the alphabet denote, more or less approximately, the pronunciation. They do not denote meaning. Spelling reform, therefore, can only ever be an attempt to conform writing with current pronunciation or new conventions regarding depicting particular sounds. Chinese, on the other hand, does not use an alphabet. The various components of characters may contain a hint of how to pronounce the word but mostly they denote meaning. Which means that when you change characters, you change meaning. As Mars explained to me with a few examples, by simplifying characters the nuances of meaning that words formerly had are lost. This naturally has repercussions on how people think.

Does this sound familiar? It should.

Interestingly, I discover that there was a second attempt at further simplification in the 1970s which did not go down well and was rescinded.

Quant a moi, I fully intend to continue brushing up on the simplified characters if for no other reason than that they are easier to learn and read. But, following this conversation, I can sympathise with Chinese outside the People's Republic who see them as a form of cultural rape. Yet another thing the Communists have to answer for.

For John Milton, Concerning the Barbarous Nature of Rhyme. A Retort.

A shadow passed across the world, as those who saw can tell,
The day that, with a deaf'ning crash, Rome faltered once and fell;
And Cicero turned in his tomb, but no verse from him came;
Catullus' lyrics, like his corpse, grew cold; he said the same.
And eastwards, where an emperor yet sat upon a throne,
Men chose words for precision, and left their art alone.
Thus Homer's six dactylic feet, whose sound would bless the ear,
Were saved and savoured, handed on, but no one wrote their peer;
The Versifiers left their pens and gave up prosody,
But Providence was moving, moving imperceptibly;
Soon from the mist-filled valleys of the Frankish realm there came
A rumour of a righteous king, one worthy of the name;
From out his mouth came eloquence in Frank and Roman words,
More earthy than the badger's lair yet lofty as the birds;
And many men then came to him to see if it were so
An emperor was in their midst like those of long ago.
He called to him the artisans, the skilled of mind and hand
And then like falcons sent them forth, that all throughout the land
His tribe might feel transcendent warmth, with vision magnified
By craftsmanship's forgotten fruits, exceeding ancient pride.
Then men recalled magnificence, exulting to regain
A past surpassed by things within the mind of Charlemagne;
And in the days to come, though some achievements came to naught,
The sparks remained, and others fanned to flame what he had wrought-
In later years, when tongues were changed and others were no more,
In newbuilt towns were heard the sounds of those called troubadour.
A troop of trav'lling wordsmiths were these Carolingian sons,
Each man a gold-tongu'd Orpheus who captivates then runs,
And each one left behind him sheer enchantment when he'd gone,
A ling'ring vision built of lyric verse of Occitan:
Of ladies unattainable the lowly fain would woo,
Of cunning foxes, Roland's horn, of tales told anew
Of Arthur and his knights- these were the subjects of their song.
It broke upon the people like the sounding of a gong.
And ere long this unprecedented, mesmerising style
Had found a place among the race of England's scepter'd isle;
In noble rhyme did pilgrims wend their way to Canterbury,
In self-same form was one knight sworn to uphold cortaysie
While seeking for a man of green that he had seemed to slay
Whom he must journey far to find, and find ere Christmas Day;
The lilting sound of English words, their rhythm and their shape,
Made drunk the cream of England like the crushing of the grape;
Their interlocking sounds, like jigsaw pieces, like a jar
And lid did show our tongue's true worth thence in perpetua;
The very ideal Form of verse was this, its hard-won peak! -
Thus English made its own that which was sought in vain by Greek.
And all the poets gathered round and marvelled at the sight,
That such a humble language should ascend to such a height.
As for a hoard of scattered jewels, they grabbed and grasped around
That each might show his peers his own rendition of the sound;
The Muses smiled as they surveyed this thing they had achieved
And blessed the poets, who in turn revered what they'd received
And handled with grave reverence this sacred gift of rhyme,
As circumspect as priests, or actors in a pantomime,
Yet joyful with an almost Dionysian delight-
They came before an altar every time they sat to write.
So Spenser wrote in wonder of his virgin fairy queen,
The Bard improved on Petrarch in ways hitherto unseen,
And Robert Southwell's verses, which he offered with his blood,
Were kept by grateful hands the day his gore was mixed with mud;
Then Donne, late as a cleric or as first in passion's heats,
Did sigh to write of fleas and maps and various conceits,
And Pope and Dryden tried their hand at epic; with respect
Translating from the masters who were mouldy with neglect,
But reasoning such brilliant verse could yet more brightly shine,
To set it off, they placed it in a rhyming dual line.
Then lest the rhyme grow hoary with convention as with age,
Will Wordsworth and Sam Coleridge began another stage-
For rhyme can work as epic but is not thereby confined-
It can appeal to both the learned and the simple mind.
Achilles is no more fit subject than a man and son
Discussing which place they prefer- this or a different one.
But while these poets wrote their works and all the Muses smiled,
A figure in a darkened spot was sulking like a child,
A man apart whose hardened heart did curse them as uncouth
For writing rhyme, which he believed the realm of wayward youth
And Philistines- he far surpassed such unsophisticates:
"Blank verse," he said, "is better for our tongue's inherent traits."
And so he cursed the verse that rhymed, his face towards the wall;
Its very sound was bitter to his ear, like bilious gall.
The poets disregarded him and kept on just the same.
"He is," they said, "a harmless man- John Milton is his name."

Glimpses of the Age of the Soapbox

"The past is a foreign country," said L.P. Hartley, "they do things differently there."

In recent weeks I have had the at times frustrating but also rewarding privilege of proof-reading and editing my grandfather's memoirs. The experience has been enlightening, to say the least. In it, my grandfather details his childhood growing up during the war (at 13 he was overseeing a factory because there were no experienced men left to fill the job), his years as an itinerant preacher in Queensland and his subsequent years as pastor of various Baptist churches.

What has struck me most (and there have been several things that have struck me) is the difference between the culture of the 50s, when my grandfather was an itinerant driving from town to town in a "gospel wagon", and the culture now. Simply put, there is no way the kind of evangelism my grandfather practiced would work now. Not just the content of the message but the methodology.

A slight tangent. There is a fellow whom I regularly see who preaches from a soapbox (actually a small platform) outside the Queen Victoria Building opposite Sydney Town Hall a few evenings a week. He is, I think, Baptist, or certainly from that tradition of preaching, and almost never does anybody stop to listen to him. Mostly, people are embarrassed that he is there. Some, no doubt, are offended by things he says (he invariably sets up shop during the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and preaches hellfire in shrill tones to the passersby), others are simply put off by the fact that he is there at all, waxing eloquent to bustling crowds of the indifferent. I admit I usually have the latter reaction, even when I happen to agree with what he's preaching about, and I feel like taking him aside and telling him, "Mate, you're not helping the cause here. You're just making people more alienated from Jesus than they were before."

Yet, returning to my grandfather's memoir, in the 50's my grandfather was doing a very similar thing. He would park his wagon in the main street of a country town or a Brisbane suburb, stand up in the back and begin preaching. And a crowd would gather. People would come and listen. Some would heckle, of course, but others wouldn't. Occasionally, there might even be converts. He tells of one time when he was assisting a Baptist church in Park Ridge, south of Brisbane, over the course of a few months. As part of the work, they initiated a Sunday school and would drive through the town to pick up children and take them to the church. As the weeks went on, the number of children who wanted to come rose steadily until they had to sell their vehicle for a larger one to accommodate them. This would not happen now, I think.

I don't think these reminiscences are symptoms of a rose-coloured view of the past or, indeed, are isolated examples. For example, I think of what Frank Sheed used to do, first in Sydney and later in London- very much the same style of thing.

What does this mean? Were people more spiritual in the 1950's? Are they less spiritual now? Or is there some other reason? One could, I suppose, argue that people who had lived through the war would naturally be more open to God and anyone claiming to speak for Him. On the other hand, can anyone deny that today's generation is more hungry for meaning than any within living memory? Alternatively, it could be merely evidence of different things appealing to different generational cultures. Perhaps both theories are true to one degree or another.

There are of course practical considerations to take from that observation. If soapbox preaching was accessible to one generation but not to another, there surely must be some mode of evangelism which would appeal to the latter as soapbox preaching did to the former.

In any case, it is enlightening to get a glimpse of this foreign land where getting up on your soapbox did not automatically make you a pariah and an oddity.

St Augustine on Hillsong

When St Augustine visited Hillsong last week, many interested parties plied him for comment on Australia's biggest and most influential mega-church. At the time, he was strangely silent; however, through conniving and skullduggery, I have managed to obtain portions of the manuscript for his Sunday morning sermon tomorrow. Though he doesn't mention Hillsong by name, I think readers will agree that his visit has clearly made an impression, and that he has some important things to say about it to his own congregation:

What kind of men are they who, fearing to hurt those they speak to, not only do not prepare them for imminent temptations, but even promise the happiness of this world, which God did not promise to the world itself? He foretells toil upon toil, that will come upon the world right to the end; and do you wish the Christian to be exempt from these labours? Because he is a Christian, he is likely to suffer more rather than less in this world.

For the Apostle says, 'All who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution.' Now if you will, you shepherd seeking your own advantage not that of Jesus Christ, let Paul say, 'All who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution,' and do you say, 'If you have lived piously in Christ, all good things will be yours in abundance. And if you have not children, you will take up and nurture all men, and not one will die on your account'? Is this your way of building? Notice what you are doing, where you are placing a man. He is on sand, this man you are setting up. The rain will fall, the floods will come, the wind will blow; they will beat upon that house of yours and it will fall, and great will be the fall thereof.

Raise him up from the sand, set him upon a rock; let him whom you wish to be a Christian live in Christ. Let him note the indignities and sufferings of Christ; let him observe the sinless Christ paying for what He had not stolen; let him attend to the words of Scripture, telling him, 'The Lord chastises every son whom He accepts.' Let him prepare himself for chastisement, or else not seek to be accepted.

Great-Grandson of Discovering the Classics

This week, I finally finished Milton's Paradise Lost.

I confess I have mixed feelings about it. I should emphasise, though, that that is a personal reaction. It would be futile to deny that this is one of the great works of English literature. Certainly I have no intention of denying it. Let me therefore unpack some of my impressions, for what they are worth.

The Poetry

Milton really knows his way around iambic pentameter. And he knows how to sustain it for the long haul. That's no mean feat. Shakespeare could take advantage of the nature of dialogue to allow him some variety in his use of that metre, but Milton, though he has several series of long monologues (I'm not sure if its legitimate to call them dialogues when its mostly long speeches replying to each other or whole books of recounted narrative in direct speech), also has masses of poetic description sustained for pages. To maintain that in iambic pentameter is impressive.

And some absolutely delicious lines result. Who could deny the delectability of a line like 'So glozed the tempter and his proem tuned'? How I would love to use that in a conversation one day! Or this description of ante-deluvian women: 'Bred only and completed to the taste/ Of lustful appetance, to sing, to dance,/ To dress, to troll the tongue and roll the eye.' Or the description of Noah as 'the only son of light in a dark age'. Wonderful.

I was a bit put off by Milton's aversion to rhyme (this would have been alleviated if he had accorded any affection to alliteration, but nothing was apparent). He has strong views on the matter- he speaks of rhyme as 'the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre' and those who will regard its absence as a defect are, to him, 'vulgar readers'. But he refuses to be constrained by 'the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming', whatever anyone else may think. To which, my hackles being raised, I was of a good mind to retort, "Hey!" in a wounded and indignant tone. But that is a rather inarticulate way to reply to a great English poet, so this vulgar reader has a good mind at some point in the future to craft a poetic protest defending rhyme in heroic couplets (and yes, they will be in iambic pentameter). Watch this space.

The Story and Theology

There's no way of treating the narrative and its theological ideas and implications separately, so I won't.

There's no denying that Milton writes a cracking tale, rousing and suspenseful. It does go on a bit in parts, and the modern reader is likely to get bogged down in a few bits (so, perhaps, even some older readers- Samuel Johnson declared of the poem, 'None ever wished it longer than it was.'), but the narrative as a narrative is very well-crafted. Particularly notable bits, and certainly the most memorable ones, are the opening in Hell, the account of the war in Heaven (very anthropomorphically told, but Milton sidesteps this by Raphael's explaining to Adam that he has had to translate what happened into terms Adam can understand) and most especially the temptation itself.

This latter is a particularly brilliant piece of work. Milton extrapolates from details of the Fall narative in Genesis and ties these together to make a temptation scene that is dramatically complex but utterly plausible. The reader, even with the benefit of retrospective knowledge, cannot help but be tempted, if only vicariously. Milton does this by drawing attention to things which the reader of Genesis too easily passes over. Eve meets a talking snake. Naturally, she does what we all would do- wonders how a snake could talk. The snake, who has been possessed by Satan, informs her that he ate of a particular fruit which, somehow, endowed him with the ability to reason and understand and this has made him capable of speech. Where is this remarkable fruit, wonders Eve. The snake leads her to the forbidden tree. She knows what it is, but begins to wonder. If an animal can gain abilities and faculties proper to creatures higher than it in the hierarchy of being (in this case, human faculties) by eating its fruit, what would happen if she ate it? What would she then be capable of? She begins to wonder about the prohibition as well. Surely the prohibition was a test. But what kind of test? Did God, through the mediation of the angels, tell them not to eat the fruit of this tree because He didn't want them to eat it? Or did He tell them not to eat it to see if they would? Was it a test of their ability to reason independently, rather than just follow arbitrary orders? Did He actually secretly want them to eat of it the whole time? All the while, Satan remains completely in character as the snake, not telling Eve to do anything, but all the while suggesting and encouraging her in these trains of thought, until at last she eats. It is a masterfully conceived scene.

Of course, right at the outset, Milton declares the purpose of the poem to be to 'justify the ways of God to men' and much ink has been spilled on whether or not he succeeds. A lot of this ink I haven't seen, but I have read the poem myself and that, I believe, entitles me to an opinion. There are two extremes on the matter, and those at least I have read. On the one hand, there is Blake's assertion that Milton could make Satan an interesting character but not God and the angels (the angels in particular strike one as cardboard cutouts, in stark contrast to the demons in the first couple of books who are remarkably distinct) because Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it.' On the other hand, there is C.S. Lewis' assertion that those who are offended by Milton's God feel thus not because He is somehow different from the Christian God but because He is the same. "Many of those who say they dislike Milton's God," he says, "only mean they dislike God." Interestingly, the edition of Paradise Lost that I have puts an interesting spin on Lewis' assertion. It is edited with an Introduction by Phillip Pullman, the well-known atheist and author of the His Dark Materials trilogy (which some have described as a kind of Chronicles of anti-Narnia). Pullman finds God offensive and repulsive, tyrannical, manipulative and cruel, the very opposite of loving or benevolent, and this picture he finds abundantly confirmed by Milton.

Contrary to Lewis, I too found such characteristics clearly portrayed in the character of God in the poem, and I do not believe any of them are characteristic of God as He is. It is worth asking, then, why God is depicted in this way.

Reading Pullman's introduction initially, I wondered if this portrayal of God might not be a consequence of Calvinist ideas. Milton was, after all, a Puritan (sort of), and I am not alone in finding the implications of TULIP to result in a God Who, though undeniably sovereign, is also morally repugnant. However, in reading the poem, I found this was not the case. Calvinism is nowhere particularly explicit and the more discomfiting aspects of Milton's God do not appear to be consequent upon Calvinist ideas. That appears to come from a quite different quarter, because it turns out that Milton was also an Arian.

One of the chief theological problems with Arianism is it naturally leads to a theology of 'divine child abuse'. Many modern atheists have accused Christians of subscribing to such an idea (admittedly, the tendency of some Christians to reduce the whole doctrine of Redemption to exclude everything except penal substitution doesn't help matters) but this is only because they don't get the concept of the Trinity. God is on the Cross as much as He is up in heaven. For Arians, however, the accusation is legitimate- they really do advocate a theology of 'divine child abuse'. So, in Paradise Lost, though it is never really made explicit (though a couple of passages come close), the distinction drawn between the Father and the Son so that they are two clearly separate characters means that the reader doesn't really see the Son as God to the same extent and in the same way as the Father, if at all. Thus, the Father's waiting three days while watching His angels battle and fall against Satan and his minions, then sending the Son out to win the day in one foul swoop, seems callous and cold-hearted. One is more likely to ascribe that characteristic to God than the Son's heroism in routing the foe. Likewise, the Father's acceptance of the Son's offer to sacrifice himself to redeem man introduces all kinds of problems on a character level. Whereas Milton could (albeit with difficulty) have demonstrated God's love for mankind by implying that the Son's gracious offer to be incarnated, suffer and die was something proper to God and consistent with His character, the reader is more likely to see the Father's pragmatic acceptance of this offer as God's proper act in that scene. Pullman admits that the Son is the more sympathetic character, but is also perfectly aware that Milton did not believe the Son was God, even if other Christians do, and thus it is the Father Who is the depiction of what Milton understood God to be like.

In addition to his Arianism, I could not shake the impression that a large part of the problem with Milton's depiction of God is the fact that he decided to make Him a character among other characters at all. There is some beautiful poetry associated with God throughout the poem, but little sense of transcendence or the numinous when God is treated of directly. God has speeches just like everyone else in the poem has speeches. There is little sense when the Father speaks that He is qualitatively different from the other characters around Him. More powerful, perhaps, but not fundamentally different. Of course, if one wants to treat of the transcendent or mysterious in a story, the easiest way is to never let the reader see it, like the way Tolkien never depicts or deals with Sauron directly in The Lord of the Rings. Moreover, though it is awfully difficult to write about the numinous in a narrative, it is not impossible. Kenneth Grahame achieved it with Pan in The Wind in the Willows in a scene that has never ceased to resonate with me since childhood (Pan? The goat-footed minor Greek deity, Pan? Yes, Pan- if you haven't read it, do so and tell me if you don't get goosebumps). Lewis, likewise, to a greater or lesser extent with Aslan and, above all, with 'the god of the mountain' (actually Cupid) in Till We Have Faces. Likewise H.P. Lovecraft in The Call of Cthulhu. Milton was a greater master of English than any of these; surely he could have pulled off a God who would inspire awe in his readers if he had wanted to. So, I don't know if I would go as far as Blake, but (much as I regret to say it) I believe Lewis far off the mark on this one. Milton's theodicy is, for me, a failure.

So, mixed feelings about Paradise Lost. I think it is inadequate in what it sets out to do (i.e. in how it works as a theodicy); on the other hand, if only all inadequate theodicies could be as spectacular and brilliantly written as this one.