Milton's Lonely God

Abstract

abstract:In book 8 of Paradise Lost, God ironically laments that he is "alone / From all Eternitie" (405–6), lacking an "equal" suitable for companionship. This article argues that God's provocative claim to loneliness registers a history of divine desocialization stretching from the depolytheization of the biblical and classical gods to Milton's own relentless reduction of Christianity to its monotheistic core. Milton could not have endorsed divine loneliness, but his poem thinks about it deeply nonetheless.