In Book VII of Paradise Lost Milton wrote:

Forthwith the Sounds and Seas, each Creek

and Bay
With Fry innumerable swarm, and Shoals
Of Fish that with their Fins and shining

Scales
Glide under the green Wave, in Schools that oft
Bank the mid Sea …

Our particular Fish and his school have been a promontory in the sea of Milton criticism since the publication of Surprised by Sin in 1967. Writing on literature, as on jurisprudence, Stanley Fish has attacked certain traits of liberalism, among them the assumption that we can transcend the immediate and historically contingent in order to scrutinize or evaluate the ethical bases of our actions. That being the case, it is puzzling that his new book—which is, in fact, largely a compilation of previously published articles, inadequately copyedited to eliminate repetition or streamline the argument—is so lacking in any sense of historical or biographical context. “In my story,” he claims, “agents are always and already situated”; since our wish to know, or act, other than we do, is doomed to fail, morality is a matter not of decision-making but of predetermination. Fish is, of course, free (or perhaps he would say he isn’t) to believe this depressing doctrine if he must, but the argument of his book is that Milton believed it too, and here there is room for disagreement.

Fish’s account of Milton’s mental world is initially set out with force and clarity. It is uncompromisingly absolutist. If God is God, all resistance to his will is useless, all opposition to him sin, all efforts to win his favor futile. Happiness lies only in faith, obedience, and submission. Hence inaction, not action, is the path to virtue, for action would imply the possibility that one’s principles could change, that there were alternatives to the divine plan: action, like freedom and choice, is rejected by the elect. The Lady in Comus, for instance, “is not good because she does x; rather, x is good because she does it,” while Satan in Paradise Lost is a typical liberal, enthroning his own will and choice as supreme and believing that ethical questions are open to rational debate. Far from being elusive and relative, truth is a plain and simple matter; ambiguity, whether conceptual or verbal, is a snare of the Devil.

One might well ask, if human reason is depraved and all argument a waste of time, why Milton felt he had to “justify the ways of God to men” by writing a twelve-book epic. If metaphor is deceit, why write poetry? If all worldly knowledge is vain, what becomes of Milton’s pamphlet Of Educa- tion, with its insistence on the need to master the classical languages, literatures, and philosophical systems? If obedience to authority is preferable to the exercise of private judgment, where does that leave Areopagitica, or Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, or Milton’s republicanism? Above all, if Christian orthodoxy is unchanging and unchangeable, what are we to make of the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity in On Christian Doctrine—a work of disputed authorship that Fish, nonetheless, accepts as Milton’s? In chapters 3 and 4 of that work, furthermore, Calvinist determinism is rejected in favor of a broadly Arminian position that advocates human freewill. For Fish, Milton’s theology is simply Calvinist throughout; one has to go to a biography, such as Barbara K. Lewalski’s Life of John Milton (2001), to learn that Milton’s thought developed away from Calvin. Since Fish has already decided that “development” of any kind is wicked, he can’t allow for this, or for the chronology of Milton’s works that he also ignores. Yet we find him welcoming the Fall on account of its potential for development; mortality “generates hope and gives time and history a reason for unfolding.” The inconsistency and illogicality are glaring, but they don’t seem to bother Fish.

Of course, understanding Milton’s views on anything is a complex and delicate matter, and Fish is right to protest against the distortion of Areopagitica into a plea for total freedom of expression (Milton didn’t advocate the total abolition of censorship; he would have suppressed Catholic works). But it is surely beyond dispute that Milton believed in the power of argument; he never shook off his early education in humanist rhetoric. Granted, he also believed that there were good and bad arguments, expecting us to recognize the difference between the debates in Pandemonium and in Heaven, for instance. In one of the best sections of the book, the discussion of Samson Agonistes, Fish can recognize that attempts to explain Samson’s predicament are all frustrated, that the Chorus, for example, deploys arguments from Augustine, Aquinas, or Boethius at various times, but he does not conclude in this case that the activity is either futile or sinful. Rather, as he says, it “articulates the misgivings we ourselves have felt” about the contradictoriness of the world and the inscrutability of the divine purpose. Many readers of Milton have felt that he was more perplexed about God than he sometimes pretended to be; Fish writes at his best when he is sympathetic to this view. Late in the book he acknowledges the ambiguity in Milton’s attitude to his own work—“he wants at once to leave his mark and to have it erased” —and admits that Milton’s belief in individual conscience “precludes him from laying down the law even though he preaches the necessity of conforming to it.” Unfortunately, Fish himself lays down the law while conforming to it only sporadically.

Fish has been a particularly successful close reader, and at moments in How Milton Works he shows a vigorous power of analysis and commentary. For example, his absorbing reading of the encounter between Comus and the Lady uncovers debts to Renaissance interpretations of Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus story and to the meeting of Aeneas and Venus in Book I of the Aeneid. He is also very attentive to nuances of syntax and grammar, as when he notes the choric effects achieved by the “nonsubordinating, appositional mode” of “At a Solemn Music.” In too many places, however, Fish is content with paraphrase or straightforward unexamined quotation, giv- ing ammunition to those who argue that Milton’s verse doesn’t offer enough richness of texture to bear close scrutiny, and assuming, in an almost neo-Augustan way, the separability of thought from expression. Sometimes he can be surprisingly gushing, as on the close of “Lycidas”: “One (no longer a one) hears the music of one’s own being, hears the inner music, is the inner music.” He happily produces self-contradictory local readings: “Milton’s Eden is not static, is not securely what it is, and [… ] in its insecurity lies its glory,” although he has earlier presented the static as the only good. He is generally better on the poetry than on the prose, although he omits much of both; among other gaps there is nothing on the Animadversions, Of Reformation, the Elegies or, astonishingly, the sonnets.

How Milton Works is offered as a summa of Fish’s life’s work, and no one can deny that he knows his author deeply and admires him sincerely. The main flaws in the book are its willful illogicality, its indifference to context, and its self-indulgent tone. Fish knows he is perceived as a major critic, and is rather too comfortable with that. We are implicitly invited to take his elusive multiplicity of stances as evidence of profound engagement. To do so would be to accept that very approach to the world—tentative, provisional, and contingent—that he asks us to reject. Had he been more self-critical about his own development, he might have given us more insights into Milton’s.