From JM's Nativity Ode

This blog has its seasonal traditions.  Enjoy!

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And spekl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron'd in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And Heav'n as at some festival,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

John Milton, Nativity Ode (1629)
[lines 135-148].

Read the whole here.

And Merry Christmas.

From John Milton's Nativity Ode

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And spekl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron'd in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And Heav'n as at some festival,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

[lines 135-148].

I love these lines, and post them here each year due to the vividness with which they display hope, the most forward-looking of the virtues.

Merry Christmas

Angelic Sex, Revisited

About three years ago I wrote a post about a passage of John Milton's concerning sex in Paradise.

I was delighted yesterday to discover that this post has been the portal through which someone calling himself Drummoyne Tram discovered that Miltonic answer to a question that seems to have bugged him, too.

Welcome, Mr. Tram. Drop in any time.

Random Quote from Paradise Lost

Satan, given a lemon, turns it into lemonade, as they say in self-help books. Confined to Hell? make the best of it!


So farewell, hope; and with hope farewell, fear;
Farewell, remorse! all good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my good; by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven's King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new world, shall know.

From John Milton's Nativity Ode

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And spekl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron'd in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And Heav'n as at some festival,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

[lines 135-148].

I love these lines, and post them here each year due to the vividness with which they display hope, the most forward-looking of the virtues.

Merry Christmas

As with Christmas, so with Easter

I have made it one of the traditions of this blog to quote Milton's verse, from the Nativity Ode, every Christmas Day.

I won't do likewise for Easter, but just this once I will look at this sacred day, through majestic 17th century verse, this time from Milton's

Paradise Regained.

From the title alone (and from the fact that it is a sequel of sorts to Paradise Lost) some one who hadn't read it might guess that the poem Paradise Regained would be set amidst the events of Easter week, when according to Christian faith the possibility of salvation was truly regained for the human species.

But no ... though philosophically that is exactly what Milton's PR is about, that is not the dramatic setting. The events of the poem take place during Jesus' sojourn in the desert, (Luke, chapter 4) with Milton giving us his own distinctive take on the temptations of the devil, and Jesus' majestic "Get thee behind me."

And I think on this week's end of the choir of angels who in Milton's telling appear and praise Jesus after his triumph over Satan's temptations, thus:

For, though that seat of earthly bliss be failed,
A fairer Paradise is founded now
For Adam and his chosen sons, whom thou,
A Saviour, art come down to reinstall;
Where they shall dwell secure, when time shall be,
Of tempter and temptation without fear.
But thou, Infernal Serpent! shalt not long
Rule in the clouds. Like an autumnal star,
Or lightning, thou shalt fall from Heaven, trod down
Under his feet.

PARADISE REGAINED, Book IV, lines 612-621.

From JM's Nativity Ode

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And spekl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron'd in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And Heav'n as at some festival,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

[lines 135-148].

I love these lines, and the vividness with which they display hope, the most forward-looking of the virtues.

Merry Christmas

From JM's Nativity Ode

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And spekl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron'd in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And Heav'n as at some festival,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

[lines 135-148].

Through the previous two Christmases, I maintained a blog with the same name as this one through another service, blog-city. Each of those years, I've used this Miltonic passage for the holiday. We've now created a tradition with cyberspatial portability.

Merry Christmas

Angelic Sex

Although some believers use the term "angel" loosely, in a pop-cultural sense, to refer to the condition of the soul of a deceased body after its entrance into paradise, in Christian theology generally the word has a different meaning than that. The angels properly speaking -- like Michael or Gabriel -- were created as angels, and have never had bodies.

If they can't have bodies, one naturally wants to ask: can they have sex? and if they can't have that either, how real is their paradise?

When I say "one" wants to ask this, I don't mean myself alone. No less of an inquirer into matters high and mysterious than John Milton asked this, and offered an answer.

In Book 8 of PARADISE LOST, Raphael visits the Garden of Eden. He talks of various serious matters with Adam -- Eve leaves the table when the talk turns to astronomy, because as she says she wants to hear such things directly from Adam.

Anyway, after astronomy is disposed of, Adam asks his guest another man-to-man question:

Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask;
Love not the heav`nly Spirits, and how their Love
Express they, by looks only, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?

---------

Raphael glows "celestial rosy red" at this question -- he's blushing.

But he answers:

Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy`st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier then Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring; nor restrain`d conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.