Milton and the Logic of Annihilation Does Paradise Lost earnestly advance a "great argument," in the logical sense? Does the poetry construct a case for God's justice on rational, philosophical premises? While I construe this question as far from decided, my purpose in this essay is to lend some support, however tentative and indirect, for an affirmative answer. This I will try to do by examining Milton's treatment of an issue on which he did express logical convictions, but on which he eventually fell into a logical trap because of the Bible. I suggest that if we detect him trying to gloss over this trap, what we are seeing is an urge to justify God's ways logically, but one which Milton is constrained to curb. The specific issue is that of annihilation; a focus there will point to a Milton who does care about logic, but who is prevented by the Bible from applying the full force of it. Logic leads Milton to an ex deo creation and to its corollary, a nonannihilable universe-but thence he is led toward another corollary, universal salvation. And of this the Bible deprives him, at least in his reading of it. Some passages, I hope to show, betray Milton feeling this deprivation, and feeling, coordinately, uneasy with the concept of an eternal hell, illogical as well as harsh. With Chaos and Moloch, in particular, we have prime instances of Milton's evasiveness with the problem posed by annihilation, an evasiveness that reveals, I think, his awareness of it as a problem and his wish, which the Bible makes unfulfillable, that he could posit universal salvation. In addressing the very basic question of whether Paradise Lost renders a demonstration of Miltonic principles of theological philosophy, scholars have achieved much in the way of fine interpretations but little in the way of consensus. Even if we exempt the deconstructive readings tracing back ultimately to the Empsonian school, and set aside for our purposes here the idea of Milton's subversion of God, on the poet's commitment to logical comprehensibility we shall not meet much agreement. The anti-logic side would seem to have more adherents, but among themselves they disagree, for example on whether Milton poeticizes what for him are foregone conclusions, 1 or deliberately fosters uncertainty and irresolvable conundrums. 2 Meanwhile, the positing of a logical Milton, while associated with older authorities like Denis Saurat and Maurice Kelley, persists in much more recent commentary as well, with Joad Raymond declaring that Milton "writes with a startling literalism" (199-200). 3 Interestingly, however, readers who grant importance to Milton's logicality, troubling themselves to refer to Milton's own Art of Logic, can come close, accidentally or not, to turning back to an idea, like Stanley's Fish's, of Milton mostly subordinating discursive reasoning to what is self-evident-creating a universe of "tautological auto referentiality," in John T. Connor's words (194). 4 With this extra wrinkle, it seems like the question of Milton's true degree of logical purpos...
