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Mr Empson’s book on Milton is bright, witty and exasperating. It is exasperating because for most of the time what is being discussed is not Milton’s God at all, but Mr Empson’s. And this is sad because the beginning of the book was very promising. In his first chapter, Mr Empson leads us to believe that he will refute those whom he calls the ‘neo-Christian’ critics (such as C. S. Lewis). These, he claims, have failed to justify the works of Milton in a theological sense. Mr Empson himself tends rather to the position held by Shelley, but as his argument proceeds he seems to fall into rather too many types of ambiguity.

     It is difficult, for instance, to see at first quite whom or what he is attacking. The ‘neo-Christians’? Yes, in a way. But though he delivers some telling blows, he is on the whole just and generous to them. Milton himself? No. Milton writes ‘frightfully well’ and, appreciating this, Empson makes tremendously ingenious efforts to bring Milton very slightly into line with Empson. In the end it appears plainly that Empson’s chief enemy is Christianity (or Empson’s idea of it); and on this subject he writes with skill and with enthusiasm. ‘The Christian God the father, the God of Tertullian, Augustine and Aquinas, is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man.’ (Why black, incidentally?)

     All this seems quite all right, though sometimes God gets mixed up with tobacco (both deleterious and not naturally things to which one takes). And, as I have already said, many shrewd blows are struck. For example, ‘Many good people still believe that support for Christianity is a public duty, however absurd it feels, because other people (though not themselves) cannot be made good without it.’

     This seems to me sincere, and the argument from it, if developed, could be interesting. But Empson, until he reaches his last chapter, has got himself bogged down in Milton — not at all the protagonist in any anti-God movement.

     The fact seems to be that, on certain presuppositions, the whole story of man’s first disobedience and God’s conduct both to man and to Satan makes no good sense and that this point is scarcely worth labouring. On these assumptions, for instance, Shelley’s sentence is quite unanswerable: ‘Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who, in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity but with the alleged design of exasperating him to new torments.’

     And yet it remains true that Milton did genuinely attempt to justify God’s ways. We may even assume that he considered that he had done so. He was both helped and handicapped by the convention of the epic and his own thorough knowledge of Homer and Virgil. It is perhaps worth pointing out that the hero of the Iliad behaves cruelly and spitefully and the hero of the Aeneid behaves like a prig. Certainly on purely moral grounds Hector is to be preferred to Achilles, just as Milton’s Lucifer is to be preferred to his God. Perhaps an even more significant parallel from ancient literature is to be found in Aeschylus’s Prometheus and Zeus. Here quite obviously Prometheus, rather than the supreme God, enlists our sympathy; yet we knew that he did not entirely enlist the sympathy of Aeschylus. The trilogy ended in a reconciliation between the rebel and the tyrant, each of whom, in the process of reconciliation, seems to have changed for the better. And in such a development there is, from a metaphysical point of view, something more profound than the straightforward enthusiastic moralism of Shelley. Any metaphysical subject demands something in the nature of allegorical treatment.

     Mr Empson is also a great moralist. He hates cruelty and is ‘still inclined to the theory of Bentham which was in favour when I was a student of Cambridge’. All very admirable; yet this very admirable zeal for justice and hatred of cruelty sometimes seems to prevent Mr Empson from seeing what Milton is aiming at. Milton may well have been heretical from every church but his own. On this subject, Mr Empson aptly refers to the work of Professor Sewell on the ‘De Doctrina’. But, however much of a heretic Milton may have been, it would be inaccurate to describe him as ‘inclined toward the theory of Bentham’. He meant something by God, and, in spite of all difficulties, would not admit that God was evil. I think Mr Empson makes out a good case against some of the ‘neo-Christians’ who insist that Milton’s story, taken literally, makes perfect sense; but he goes too far when he suggests that it makes no sense at all, or else is wholly evil. Here, strangely, he appears to be judging poetry as though it were prose — a fact that comes out sometimes in a certain vulgarity of writing. In writing of Samson and Delilah, for instance, it may be possible to describe Samson as ‘a dangerous lunatic’ but one can hardly view him as ‘a half-comic figure’. And in commenting on the line:

But fondly overcome with female charm

it does not help much to say ‘Female charm need not mean that Eve leered at Adam and waggled her hips.’

     These are minor points, but they suggest that Empson is not seeing Milton very plainly.