Reflections on Michael Lieb and His Writings: The Influence of a Mentor

In my final year of doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I served as Stanley Fish's research assistant as he worked toward completing How Milton Works. I was granted this opportunity at the recommendation of my dissertation director, Michael Lieb, and I, who had been spending recent months immersing myself in the history of Milton criticism, was humbled by the realization that I was now working with two of the greatest living Milton scholars. As I sought to establish rapport with Dean Fish, as I always called him, I asked him who were his earliest influences in Milton scholarship. Joseph Summers and A. J. A. Waldock, he replied thoughtfully. And William Empson, although with reservations. “How about you?,” he asked. Although I was surprised by his interest, my response was immediate: Michael Lieb, The Dialectics of Creation (1970)—the initial monograph on Milton to capture my critical imagination. Dialectics was Michael's first book, published in the earliest years of his professorate before he turned thirty. In retrospect, I recognize it as the effort of an earnest and sincere young scholar, a book perhaps somewhat removed from Michael's more mature works focusing on matters of vision and violence and theology in Milton's writings. But it is no less valuable, and especially dear to my heart as I reflect on the long history of Michael's influence upon my own thought and disposition toward Milton. I discovered The Dialectics of Creation at a pivotal, vulnerable time in my intellectual and spiritual development. It was my junior year at Northwestern University, and I was pursuing an honors thesis on Milton and George Herbert. Michael's book, subtitled Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in Paradise Lost, greatly aided my modest study, which focused on pastoral images of death and rebirth in both authors.1 As I read Dialectics, I felt a certain kinship with the author. I did not know if he shared my Christian faith, but he modeled a kind of deep, affectionate, even spiritual engagement with Milton's epic that I longed to emulate. Indeed, as I have come to deeply disagree with C. S. Lewis's claim that Paradise Lost is not a poem that quickens devotion (A Preface 127), I realize how profoundly my first inclinations toward the opposite view were influenced by my youthful engagement with The Dialectics of Creation. Although as an undergraduate I did not have the wisdom or bravery to contact my benefactor, I did, while teaching in China, reach out to Michael by letter in spring 1992 after being accepted as an MA student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Michael promptly demonstrated his approachability and kindness by responding with a handwritten note that welcomed me to his school and encouraged my current teaching. I met him in person that fall as a student in his Bible as Literature course, for which, in a final research paper on several pseudepigraphal apocalyptic texts, I made extensive use of Michael's then-most recent book, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (1991). But even as Michael in that class demonstrated his ongoing and varied scholarly expertise, he also revealed himself as a caring and complex person. My memories of him in that semester are manifold. His large-bearded and rather intimidating appearance recalled to me an image of an Old Testament prophet, something that coincided easily with his genuine excitement toward the texts he taught. But Michael also exhibited a certain tenderness, something he displayed most memorably when he choked up and briefly wept while teaching Genesis 22, Abraham's binding of Isaac. Later that day I had the temerity, perhaps the foolishness, to visit Michael in his office and inquire what had moved him so deeply. And although Michael was not forthcoming, I believe that eventually I understood. It was his love for his two sons, Larry and Mark, to whom a decade earlier he had dedicated his Poetics of the Holy (1981), who had now come of age, and of whom he now had to let go to whatever degree as they pursued their next stages of life. Graduating with an MA in 1994, I perhaps puzzled Michael by postponing doctoral studies to earn an MDiv at a nearby university. I did not directly study Milton with Michael until I returned to UIC in fall 1998 to pursue my doctorate. From that time forward, Michael began to introduce me to the world of Milton scholarship. He invited me to the Newberry Milton Seminar, where I first met my colleagues in the present forum, each of whose scholarship has influenced me profoundly,2 as well as graduate students from other Chicago area schools whom he also mentored.3 At my first MLA conference, in Chicago in late 1999, Michael introduced me to his two closest Miltonic friends, Albert Labriola, the longtime Secretary of the Milton Society of America, editor of Milton Studies, and editor of Duquesne University Press's Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies series; and his own mentor, John T. Shawcross, each of whom encouraged me tremendously in my early days as a scholar.4 Along the way Michael gave me, through a brief offhanded comment in his Milton course, the idea for my doctoral dissertation, and a year and a half after my graduation, he exhorted me, against my initial reservations, to apply for the position I have now held for twenty years. It was also during my doctoral years that I became conversant with Michael's larger body of scholarship. As before, Michael's approach to Milton's writings proved formative to my own engagement with particular texts. What most impressed and influenced me then was his work on Samson Agonistes, displayed specifically in his concluding chapters on Samson in both his The Sinews of Ulysses (1989) and Milton and the Culture of Violence (1994), as well as in his Milton Studies essay, “‘Our Living Dread’: The God of Samson Agonistes” (1996). Writing at a time when it was becoming increasingly fashionable to separate Milton from his Samson and especially from Samson's final massacre of the Philistines while destroying Dagon's temple, Michael argued for a strong connection between Milton and Samson, strong parallels between Milton's Defenses and Samson's words, and a strong final identification between Milton's God and Samson himself, whom Michael proclaimed to be “‘our Living Dread’ incarnate” (16).5 After graduate school, I found myself deeply influenced by Michael's foray into another controversial topic: his award-winning Milton Studies essay, “De Doctrina Christiana and the Question of Authorship” (2002), in which he, again pushing against more acceptable scholarly trends, commends William B. Hunter for challenging Milton's authorship of the treatise, asserting, “I do not think we shall ever know conclusively whether or not Milton authored all of the De Doctrina Christiana, part of it, or none of it” (172). This essay continues to hold a pivotal place in the history of the authorship controversy, which has resurfaced in recent years.6 Although in his final monograph, Theological Milton (2006), Michael declares himself “a firm believer in Miltonic authorship” of De Doctrina (4), he nonetheless maintains that “Milton's exact presence” in De Doctrina's manuscript “is obscured by a host of factors” (4), cautioning that De Doctrina ought not “in any sense be construed as a ‘gloss’ on [Milton's] poetry” (2). In recent years, Michael's words on this topic have served to inspire my ongoing investigation into the theology of Milton's later poems largely independent from the specter of the treatise.7 Sadly, Michael's health challenges made it increasingly difficult for him to communicate with colleagues in the years following Theological Milton, something that severely limited our direct interaction as I matured as a scholar. But Michael continued to guide me through his precious scholarship, guidance that became especially evident when, as I significantly revised the manuscript that became my book Milton and the Parables of Jesus (2018), I saw, in addition to his aforementioned influence on my understanding of Samson Agonistes, how my understanding of Milton's Abdiel was influenced by Michael's Poetics of the Holy; how my understanding of Sonnet 19 was influenced by Michael's encyclopedia entry “Talents”; and how my understanding of Eve's temptation and fall was influenced, yet once more, by Michael's Dialectics, an influence that continues to manifest itself in my most recent work.8 Truly I am thankful to Michael for imparting to me a love for and fascination with Milton's texts, a love that engages the author on his own terms, particularly in matters of temptation and fall, spiritual regeneration, violent destruction, and Milton's paradoxical combination of the last two. It is a love that Michael, through his mentorship and many writings, continues to pass on to scholars and students of Milton.