To the Heart of Specificity
I have recently undertaken to do something I set down thirty years ago. I am committing Paradise Lost to memory. At the moment, I’m nearing the end of Book Six, about 5,000 lines into the whole, close to the halfway point. What in this enterprise I’ve come to learn about the greatest poem in English, things I had not seen despite having taught the poem about twenty-five times, I’d rather not enumerate. One such thing, however, is this: there is in Milton no turning God into a vague and general being of benevolence, or turning his providential governance of the world into a set of general laws that rule out his particular action in each mustard seed of matter, each yeast-like impulse of the human mind, each beat of the human heart. The will of God is sharply specific as well as general: a bolt of lightning as well as a calm blue sky.
Such specificity may not always be to modern tastes. The final version of Paradise Lost was published in 1674, the year Milton died. In 1738, Alexander Pope, echoing and revising Milton all the way, published his completed Essay on Man, in four epistles, appending to its end his “Universal Prayer. Deo Opt. Max.”—that is, to God the Best and Greatest. With this prayer, Pope transmutes the Our Father into an appeal that any man on earth might make, at any time, to any vague notion of God; the very phrase optim[us] maxim[us] comes from the Roman pagans and their worship of Jupiter. Here is its opening stanza:
Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
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Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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