Milton knew what he was up to, that sly dog. The middle books of Paradise Lost are a dialogue between Adam, in his state of grace before the fall, and the archangel Raphael. The angel has a mission to carry out—he’s charged by God with warning the first man against Satan’s deceit. But in an exceptionally charming feat of imagination, Milton decides that angels and humans, before sin, might actually enjoy each other’s company. And so as Adam and Raphael warm to one another, there develops between them what I can only describe as an epic bromance.
Adam, having listened in awe to the angel’s discourse of heavenly warfare and divine creation, ventures a bold proposal: maybe now, he suggests, he has something to tell the angel. “Now hear me relate / My Story, which perhaps thou hast not heard”: staggeringly ancient and powerful though the spirits of God are, they have witnessed in mankind a new creation, with something fresh to reveal.
Adam’s proposal is a perfect mixture of chivalrous daring and courteous self-effacement: he winningly admits that this is really just a ploy to hang out with Raphael a little longer. “Thou seest / How subtly to detain thee I devise, / Inviting thee to hear while I relate.” Raphael in turn pumps Adam up a little:
Nor are thy lips ungraceful, Sire of men,
Nor tongue ineloquent; for God on thee
Abundantly his gifts hath also pour'd
Inward and outward both, his image fair:
Speaking or mute all comliness and grace
Attends thee, and each word, each motion forms.
Nor less think we in Heav’n of thee on Earth
Then of our fellow servant, and inquire
Gladly into the wayes of God with Man[.]
“You’re looking huge, bro!” “Just trying to get big like you, king!” They are getting to like each other, and finding adorably roundabout ways of saying so in the course of talking about other stuff. The whole thing is at once completely recognizable to anyone who has ever made a gym buddy, and also impossibly elevated above any of the mundanities we typically exchange in everyday life. If I were writing a commentary on this poem, my note to this passage would be the following clip:
There’s touching a line in the song What A Wonderful World that my dad is always repeating: “I see friends shaking hands, saying ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really saying, ‘I love you.’” What I love about it is the shyness, which feels utterly true to life: ashamed as we are of our shortcomings, I think we may be most embarrassed by our tenderness. It’s too brilliant to approach head-on. Milton, in his signature style, has pulled back the veil of our everyday exchanges to let the holy light come pouring out of them.
Dionysius the Areopagite writes in his Celestial Hierarchy (Chapter 10, 273a-b) that “the theologians tell us the holiest of the seraphim ‘cry out to one another,’ and, it seems to me, this shows that the first ranks pass on to the second what they know of God.” The reference is to Isaiah 6, where angels at the throne cry out “Holy, Holy, Holy”—which, says C.S. Lewis in a riff on Dionysius, suggests that “every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest.”
The fact of other people—the sheer otherness of them—is like an exponential multiplier for reality. When you love people, writes Thomas Traherne, “the world quickly becometh yours: and yourself become a greater treasure than the world is. For all their persons are your treasures, and all the things in heaven and earth that serve them, are yours.” The Jazz number, the Greek theologian, and the epic poet alike are all saying the same thing: the mundanities are the mysteries, and small talk is a veil of modesty to cover the nakedness of the heart. What we feel most deeply, we say out of the side of our mouths. And who can say what wild brightness we will see when our eyes grow strong enough to look at one another face to face.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
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