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John Spurr, Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination. By Joad Raymond., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 62, Issue 1, April 2011, Pages 396–399, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flr009
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‘What surmounts the reach / Of human sense, I shall delineate so, / By likening spiritual to corporeal forms’, says the angel Raphael in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Although this is a poem about the Fall of Man, most of the agents and events that figure in its narrative are beyond the realm of human experience. Angels narrate the drama and recount the angelic war in heaven that precedes the creation itself: Raphael, the ‘heavenly guest, ethereal messenger’, sits down with Adam to describe creation; Michael, having driven the sinful pair from Eden, vouchsafes Adam a vision of fallen mankind’s future; while Satan, the fallen angel, can, of course, be said to drive much of the action of the poem. Anthropomorphic protagonists and a dramatic story are part of the process of accommodating divine realities to the limited comprehension of human beings. Angels themselves have been a vital part of the same process of making the spiritual accessible, as Joad Raymond explains in his intriguing study of Milton, angels, and seventeenth-century creativity. Angels exist to praise God, carry his messages, bear witness, and act as ministering spirits, but, as Raymond observes, Milton’s angels have a much more complete life than this: they ‘sing, watch, play games and exercise, eat, sleep, make love, bear messages, interpret, bear witness, move the universe, and, above all, talk. They make mistakes … They are agents with freewill, responsibility, and leisure time’ (p. 272).
