In his eight-stanza poetic fragment, "The Passion," Milton begins by recalling his successful exploration of Christ's birth in his "Nativity Ode" and ends by leaving the poem incomplete: "This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished." Some critics take this as an admission of failure due to poetic immaturity or temperament. Was he too young to recreate the powerful narrative of Jesus' arrest, trial, death and burial, or was he somehow unsuited to handle the matter? In this informative and engaging study, Erin Henriksen offers alternatives to these assumptions about Milton and the passion. By placing this early fragment in relation to Milton's major poems, Henriksen presents the more positive possibility of Milton's "alternative passion." Absent as a sustained and direct subject in Milton's poetry, the passion is paradoxically present in his representations of the biblical narratives central to Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Working from the premise that biblical narratives and images can convey the passion proleptically and typologically, Henriksen develops dialectics between presence and absence, removal and restoration, omission and revelation, in order to demonstrate Milton's unique method of representing the passion from various perspectives. The alternative passion reveals Milton's response to early modern problems of representation, and demonstrates his ongoing "participation in a larger project of remaking Christian art after the Reformation" (2). Henriksen's study brings Milton's treatment of the passion into a new and positive focus.
The book's eight chapters comprise two distinct phases of analysis. Chapters 1-3 examine broad Reformation contexts: representation in pre-Reformation Christian art, iconoclasm, and representation during the Reformation. Chapters 4-8 apply these contexts to Milton's writings with emphasis on the shorter poems published in 1645, Eikonoklastes, and the three major poems. Chapter One, "Strategies for Depicting the Son in Christian Art," explores the influence of visual art on Milton's alternative passion. Henriksen challenges the familiar binary contrasting the rich visual expressions of medieval Catholic tradition with austere and iconoclastic puritanism in order to situate the passion as a product of a more dynamic history of "Christian representational traditions, theories and controversies" (20). The chapter establishes the earliest representations of the passion in the figures of Christ the Pantocrator, Christus Victor, and Christus Patiens. Charting key developments in this history of visual representation, Henriksen notes the first period of iconoclasm in eighth-century Byzantium, and observes the role of visual images in sixteenth-century vernacular Bibles and the growing Laudian controversy over material expressions of holiness, which coincided with Milton's first-hand exposure to the richness of Catholic art during his Italian tour (1638-9). Milton had a wide range of visual resources to draw from, and was not conditioned by any single influence.
Chapter Two, "Iconoclasm as an Artistic Strategy," argues that iconoclasm, more than a destructive activity, "acted as a creative force, shaping English poetry and the Christian theory of representation" (35). Recent scholarship on early modern iconoclasm supports the dialectical tension between image making and breaking that informs Henriksen's argument. The dual nature of Christ apparent in representations of the Father and the Son is a focus for this iconoclastic tension: the sixteenth-century Homily Against the Peril of Idolatry, for example, which affirms the superiority of the Word over created images, influences Protestant representations of the Son. Delay and deferral, prominent features of Paradise Regained, form an artistic strategy that allows artists to present the passion proleptically as it is anticipated by earlier events in the life of Christ. This strategy avoids representations of Christ's body in the passion. Eikonoklastes, Milton's attack on the Eikon Basilike , which portrays Charles I as a type of Christ in his passion, can be read as an illustration of the artistic challenges posed by the passion. Since image breaking is both destructive and recreative, Milton "corrects the mistaken beliefs of the original and demonstrates the process of corrective breaking it has undergone" (48).
Chapter Four, The Post-Reformation Passion, notes the prominent role of the speaker in poems that meditate on the passion, a characteristic they share with Milton's early fragment. Examples include Quarles, Donne, Markham, and Herbert. Henriksen does not include Lanyer. It would be interesting to have her perspective on Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The examples she chooses frame her subsequent analysis of Milton's alternative passion in chapter four. The chapter emphasizes two poems that treat the passion through the poetics of delay and deferral, the "Nativity Ode" and "The Passion." Henriksen observes important traditions in visual art in the first poem, while noting both the abstraction of the passion in the proleptic deferral of redemption and the iconoclastic routing of the pagan gods that produces a final portrait of the nativity in the final stanza. Her reading of "The Passion" is a particularly important component of this book. Her challenge to critics who regard the poem as a failure is persuasive. She considers the poem an intentional fragment, and situates it within a tradition of fragment poems by noting the technique of aposiopesis or deliberate interruption that is a key to the meaning of the poem rather than a sign of its failure. Acknowledging the inexpressible nature of the passion as a subject beyond his powers, the poet creates an early identification with those angels who "stand and wait" in the posture of patience that is central to Milton's later poetry. Chapter five completes the survey of Milton's early poetry by considering the early elegies and "Lycidas" in the context of the 1638 commemorative volume for Edward King. The elegy raises questions of the place of the grave and the body and the potentially idolatrous reverence for the dead that Milton evaluates in writing the Protestant elegy. "Lycidas" is both the "apotheosis of the passion" in the volume and an assertion that "the passion cannot be represented" (117). King gains eternal life through the "dear might of him that walked the waves" ("Lycidas" l. 173), making the triumph over death through resurrection central to the alternative passion. The reading, however, raises the question of the precise relation of the resurrection to the passion, two distinct narrative movements Henriksen at times elides in her study.
The title of chapter seven--"The Art of Omission and Supplement in Paradise Lost"--identifies a central dialectic Henriksen discovers in Milton's mature poetics of the passion. Omission and supplement generate a "system of concealment and revelation, presence and absence, which characterizes Protestant art on divine subjects" (123). Milton's decision to represent God the Father in relation to the Son in the epic entails a further dialectic between obscurity and visibility in the image of the Father. Henriksen argues that the myth of incarnation, whereby the Son conveys his privileged perception of the Father to his creatures, becomes the alternative passion in Paradise Lost. This approach functions consistently across a range of parallel episodes that comprise the poem. Satan parodies kenosis and incarnation in his journeys to earth; the pre- incarnate Son foretells his passion in Book 3. The Father gives the final victory over Satan to the Son rather than to Michael on the third day of the war in heaven; the passion emerges proleptically and typologically in the prophetic-historical continuum of Books 11-12. Henriksen notes that Michael's compressed account of the passion in Book 12 does not represent the crucifixion, instead emphasizing the "arrest, questioning and judgment" of Jesus (140). Henriksen does not contextualize Milton's passion in the milieu of Restoration dissent as that is not her goal; still, her observations on arrest and interrogation may bring insights for readers interested in connecting Milton's sympathies for dissenters to his treatment of the passion.
Paradise Regained is a central text in the scope of Henriksen's argument. It is "a poem of the dual nature" (146) that emphasizes the nativity and incarnation while exploring the temptation of Jesus by Satan, an episode that anticipates future events such as the passion while exploring the dimension of kenosis and Jesus' reliance on his human nature in his response to temptation. The dialectic of concealment and revelation calls attention to shifting perspectives in the poem, from Satan's misperception of the divine nature at the baptism, to the anxiety and uncertainty experienced by Mary and the disciples when Jesus departs into the desert. The majority of the poem consists of the opposed perspectives of Jesus and Satan in the three temptations. Henriksen identifies key points of diction that anticipate the passion, notably the word "born" in I:305, as Jesus meditates on his identity and purpose, and John 18:37, where Jesus asserts his purpose before Pilate. Her reading of this nuanced point of diction is persuasive and insightful. The final image of Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple evokes the crucifixion through elevation and triumph while also manifesting the human obedience and patience that make Jesus an accessible example for human readers.
Samson Agonistes pursues the Christus Patiens tradition in the typology linking Samson to Jesus which has been contested in recent criticism. Henriksen offers some fine insights into body imagery in the poem, noting references to circumcision, to signs of weakness, and to wounds in places that anticipate the crucifixion. The tension between idolatry and iconoclasm also functions in this chapter, since Samson is both an iconoclast who holds the potential for self-idolatry in his life and for reverence by others in his death. Henriksen's examination of the omissa, ten lines missing from the poem itself but supplied at the end of the 1671 volume, is particularly interesting in relation to her overall thesis. These lines convey the responses of Samson's followers to his destruction of the Temple of Dagon. Without these lines, the scene conveys uncertainty concerning faith and the perception of providence. With these lines added, the scene is more triumphant from the perspective of Manoa and the Hebrew Chorus. The omissa constructs a dialectic of presence and absence that demonstrates "Milton's habit of destabilizing his own poems, of introducing the active participation of the reader and training him as an interpreter, and of leaving traces of the passion in unexpected places" (187). Henriksen nevertheless offers a clear reading of the meaning of Samson's final action by viewing Samson as an ironic "counter-type" to the Christus Patiens figure (193).
Henriksen's study offers a broad and informative perspective on the history and traditions of Christian visual and literary art. She establishes The Passion as a poem to be reconsidered as a vital reference point for understanding Milton's poetic development. She presents a Milton who engaged in the challenge of representing the passion throughout his career, and argues persuasively that this engagement is an indispensable aspect of the meaning of his poems. This book will be valuable for Miltonists and for early modernists working in the areas of literary studies, art history and religion.