Currently Reading, Guess I Don't Like Milton edition

John Milton, Paradise Lost
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

An apology to one of my good friends from grad school, who loved Milton and tried to get us all to read him: I did not like Paradise Lost. On a poetic level, I did not like it because it was a fusion of a bunch of things I don't especially like: a Roman cadence and insistence on highlighting the depth of reference of which he was capable (having recently read Ovid, this came across as Ovid in spades), a Greek insistence that every thought must be represented in speech (hat tip to Erich Auerbach for pointing that one out to me a long time ago), and a Catholic willingness to invent little filigree details to make the story "richer", which is to say longer. I had been led to believe Satan was a major character, but he disappears pretty early in the poem; its real hero is Angel Who Provides Exposition.

The thing about the story as represented in the Bible is that it is short and woefully short on details. It's not merely that Milton adds details, but that they begin to change the substance of the story itself in ways it's not clear to me that he's aware of. If Adam is prohibited from eating from a tree in Eden that's one thing; if he gets a long explanation from Angel Who Provides Exposition about what happened before Eden and also there's a bad guy who might be trying to sneak in, the meaning and import of Adam's actions change--especially if he does not pass any of this information on to Eve but subsequently blames Eve for not knowing it. Similarly, the human point of the Eden story seems to be that something has definitively come to an end with no particular hope of resolution; it's the first low point in a history full of low points. But Angel Who Provides Exposition explains to Adam that no, it's cool, it's all going to work out in the end; being banished but having definitive proof that things will be fine is very different than being banished and having no particular idea of how things will go. This is compatible, I suppose, with a certain kind of Calvinist reading, but it's not one that I'm aware of a Calvinist ever making, exactly.

It did strike me that this might just be churlishness, so I should read something that attempted to make use of a similarly gnomic passage in the Bible, and so I repaired back to Fear and Trembling for the first time since 1999? 2000? No later than 2001? And as it turns out, it uses similar material to quite a different end. Kierkegaard is working with some respect for the material and his own limitations--the text says what it says and he does not consider himself free to change it. In fact, he demonstrates conclusively that any other way one might frame the story would make it worse, and weaker, and that Abraham can only be a model in part because we cannot enter into the story or his mind other than how it is presented to us--it's just, in the end, a mystery.