Revisiting Milton’s (Logical) God: Empson 2018

Abstract

Draws on Milton’s Artis Plenior Logicae (1672) to read the logic of his God, arguing “that the poem is good not primarily because it makes God either good or bad,” pace Empson, “but because it lays bare the cosmic structure to which we are all subject.” In this structure “God will be justified, because [the cosmic structure] is his own creation; yet that justification does not have to make him good or kind within human definitions of those terms.” Ultimately “Paradise Lost is good because God is bad and justified at the same time.”