Stanley fish. (Elusive stances).(How Milton Works)(Review)

Stanley Fish How Milton Works. Harvard University Press, 616 pages, $35

In Book VII of Paradise Lost Milton wrote:

 
   Forthwith the Sounds and Seas, each Creek 
   and Bay 
   With Fry innumerable swarm, and Shoals 
   Of Fish that with their Fins and shining 
   Scales 
   Glide under the green Wave, in Schools that oft 
   Bank the mid Sea ... 

Our particular Fish and his school have been a promontory in the sea of Milton criticism since the publication of Surprised by Sin in 1967. Writing on literature, as on jurisprudence, Stanley Fish has attacked certain traits of liberalism, among them the assumption that we can transcend the immediate and historically contingent in order to scrutinize or evaluate the ethical bases of our actions. That being the case, it is puzzling that his new book--which is, in fact, largely a compilation of previously published articles, inadequately copyedited to eliminate repetition or streamline the argument--is so lacking in any sense of historical or biographical context. "In my story" he claims, "agents are always and already situated"; since our wish to know, or act, other than we do, is doomed to fail, morality is a matter not of decision-making but of predetermination. Fish is, of course, free (or perhaps he would say he isn't) to believe this depressing doctrine if he must, but the argument of his book is that Milton believed it too, and here there is room for disagreement.

Fish's account of Milton's mental world is initially set out with force and clarity. It is uncompromisingly absolutist. If God is God, all resistance to his will is useless, all opposition to him sin, all efforts to win his favor futile. Happiness lies only in faith, obedience, and submission. Hence inaction, not action, is the path to virtue, for action would imply the possibility that one's principles could change, that there were alternatives to the divine plan: action, like freedom and choice, is rejected by the elect. The Lady in Comus, for instance, "is not good because she does x; rather, x is good because she does it" while Satan in Paradise Lost is a typical liberal, enthroning his own will and choice as supreme and believing that ethical questions are open to rational debate. Far from being elusive and relative, truth is a plain and simple matter; ambiguity, whether conceptual or verbal, is a snare of the Devil.

One might well ask, if human reason is depraved and all argument a waste of time, why Milton felt he had to "justify the ways of God to men" by writing a twelve-book epic. If metaphor is deceit, why write poetry? If all worldly knowledge is vain, what becomes of Milton's pamphlet Of Education, with its insistence on the need to master the classical languages, literatures, and philosophical systems? If obedience to authority is preferable to the exercise of private judgment, where does that leave Areopagitica, or Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, or Milton's republicanism? Above all, if Christian orthodoxy is unchanging and unchangeable, what are we to make of the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity in On Christian Doctrine--a work of disputed authorship that Fish, nonetheless, accepts as Milton's? In chapters 3 and 4 of that work, furthermore, Calvinist determinism is rejected in favor of a broadly Arminian position that advocates human freewill. For Fish, Milton's theology is simply Calvinist throughout; one has to go to a biography, such as Barbara K. Lewalski's Life of John Milton (2001), to learn that Milton's thought developed away from Calvin. Since Fish has already decided that "development" of any kind is wicked, he can't allow for this, or for the chronology of Milton's works that he also ignores. Yet we find him welcoming the Fall on account of its potential for development; mortality "generates hope and gives time and history a reason for unfolding." The inconsistency and illogicality are glaring, but they don't seem ...