The Non‐Necessity of the Son, or, Christianity as Charade

Before answering the title question --"Is Paradise Lost a Christian poem?" --one way or the other the prior question of what makes a poem Christian must be answered.One's answer to that will determine one's answer to the current one.My answer is that a poem is Christian in a meaningful sense if it takes the Incarnation and Crucifixion of Christ to be matters of central importance.One might think that putting the matter this way is unfair to Milton's epic, since its focus is on a period or periods long before the Incarnation.But this is not a valid objection, since the poem treats, one way or another, the whole "race of time" from before the creation to the Apocalypse (PL 12.554).So the lack of prominence of the Crucifixion might count as part of an answer.The Crucifixion does, in fact, appear in the poem-for two lines in Book 12.412-13.But the suffering of the figure on the cross is not mentioned, and immediately his power is reasserted-"But to the Cross he nails God's enemies" (415).This is seen as bringing salvation to "as many as offer'd Life / Neglect not" (425-26), and the Savior is seen as putting in some brief appearances to the Apostles and then entering into glory to await "When this world's dissolution shall be ripe" (464), so he can reassert his glory and power in the Last Judgment.Meanwhile, on earth, shortly after the Apostles bring their message to "all Nations" (440), corruption sets in and history takes its dark course, dominated by superstition backed up by secular power.But of course we have been looking in the wrong place for Milton's celebration of the Son's mission and sacrifice (the name Jesus barely appears in the poem).We must look not to Book 12 but to Book 3. My argument for the rest of this piece will be that in Book 3, the Son's willingness to undergo death temporarily is entirely superfluous.I see the Son as no more needed in Book 3 than he is in Book 6.It is clear that in Book 6, the Chariot of Paternal Deity, in which and through which the Son demolishes the rebel angels, could perfectly well be self-steering (and really ought to be so).My claim is that the Son's role in Book 3 is exactly parallel to this in its lack of necessity.Milton has been, as we all know, much rebuked for having God the Father speak in his own defense in the poem.But it seems to me to have been quite predictable, even inevitable that Milton would do so.He greatly admired Zeus's speech at the beginning of The Odyssey, and that speech-on why mortals are wrong in blaming their problems on the gods-is clearly the model for God's speech in Paradise Lost.Zeus claims that mortals bring about their fates through their own sins, and do so even when they are warned about committing the sins in question (Aegisthus was told to leave Agamemnon and his wife alone, and warned that Orestes would in turn kill him if he did not do so [Homer,).Milton wanted to give his own version of this, with more explicit moral reasoning.He sets up for what might be seen as the presumption of writing a speech for the Almighty