In 1787, Mary Wollstencraft complained that she was “sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton.” The judgment had become as hackneyed and vacuous as the observation that Shakespeare possessed an “original, untaught genius.” But did Milton himself have regard for Longinus, or any ambition to write sublimely? He does, to be sure, recommend “a gracefull and ornate Rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus” in his treatise Of Education (1644). But there end the references. Perhaps, as Samuel Monk concluded in his 1935 classic The Sublime, Milton “seems not have felt Longinus’s charm.” Indeed, if we were to follow the narrative of Robert Doran’s The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (2015), we might conclude, naively, that Longinus lay dormant and largely unknown from the first century CE till the French translation of Nicolas Boileau appeared in 1674, a year that also saw the publication of the twelve-book version of Paradise Lost and the death of Milton himself. Thereafter, according to such narratives, the sublime was elevated from a rhetorical effect to an aesthetic or philosophical concept by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.
As Vozar himself is the first to acknowledge, such an intellectual history of the sublime overlooks important recent scholarship produced by classicists, medievalists, and scholars of the Renaissance. In The Sublime in Antiquity (2016), James Porter has demonstrated that notions of the sublime were not narrowly rhetorical in the ancient world and could appear in discourses of natural history and philosophy. The medievalist C.S. Jaegar and his collaborators have explored the sublime in medieval aesthetics (2010). And a whole raft of Renaissance scholars have explored the reception of Longinus in Italy, France, and the Netherlands, both before and after the 1554 editio princeps. The problem, we are told, is that “Miltonic scholarship has not fully assimilated this emerging new understanding of the history of the sublime as a pre-asethetic concept (i.e. as a concept pre-dating eighteenth-century aesthetics). . . . The subject of Milton and the sublime in a seventeenth-century context has not yet received the comprehensive treatment it deserves” (3). The word comprehensive is asked to carry a lot of weight here, for Annabel Patterson, Nigel Smith, David Norbrook, Blair Hoxby, and others have written about Milton and the sublime in a seventeenth-century context. Still, Vozar explores the subject with an authoritative command of the evidence that can be revealing.
In his first chapter, he offers a genealogy of the sublime—which he takes to be an “historical inquiry into the evolution and development” of the concept—from antiquity to the Renaissance. In practice, this endeavor involves tracing three ancient lineages of the Miltonic sublime: the sublime seen in its rhetorical, natural, and divine aspects. For Vozar, notions of the rhetorical sublime were in the air before “Longinus,” whoever he may have been in reality, wrote Peri hypsos sometime between the first century BCE and the first century CE. Vozar observes that the sophist Gorgias described how poetry could produce a “fearful shudder” (phrikē periphobos, Gorg. Hel. 9); that Aristotle maintained that orators could make their audience “enthused” or “ecstatic” (Rh. 3.7.11); and that his pupil Theophrastus spoke of the orator’s power to “shock” (ekplēxai) and “overpower” (cheirōthenta) his auditors. Perhaps most important, Demetrius in his Peri hermēnias suggested a four-fold division of styles, two of which—the magnificent (megaloprepēs) and the vehement (deinos)—seem to lay the foundation for Longinus’s notion of the sublime. These are just some of the authors whom Vozar imagines must have informed Longinus’s treatise, which he believes was likely produced in the Augustan age.
Given the excitement that the rediscovery of the treatise would provoke in the Renaissance, it is striking that Peri hypsos is neither quoted nor cited in any of the extant writings of Greco-Roman antiquity. The earliest reference to the text appears in a work by John of Sicily, who was active in Constantinople during the reign of Basil II (976-1025), around the time that the earliest surviving manuscript of the text was produced. It should have been available for Aldus Manutius to include in his Rhetores Graeci (1508), and did in fact circulate in manuscript in Europe, but it had to wait till 1554 before its editio princeps, which Johannes Oporinus published in Basel with notes by Francesco Robortello, best known for his edition of Aristotle’s Poetics. Thereafter, a range of authors—including Tasso, Montaigne, Chapman (the first English translator of the Odyssey), and John Hall (a supporter of the revolutionary Commonwealth government)—alluded to, cited, or even (in the case of Hall in 1652) translated Longinus.
Yet this rhetorical sublime is just one of the lineages that Vozar wants to trace. The other lineages conceive of the sublime not as a matter of expression but of “majestic thought” (ennoiai … semnai). Hermogenes observes that such thoughts can be caused by nature (phusis), as when we inquire into the causes of earthquakes or celestial motions (Id. 1.6.4-1.6.6), or by gods when they are “spoken about as gods” (Id. 1.6.1). Just as Vozar does not wish to limit conceptions of the sublime to Longinus in the ancient world, he notes that some Medieval writers such as St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, and Richard of St. Victor could refer to the “power of the invisible sublimity” of the Spirit, or the “terrible sublimity” (altitudo terribilis) of God, or the power of divine light to to suspend the soul in wonder and so shake it with violent astonishment that it is forced out of place. These three aspects of the sublime—the rhetorical, physical, and theological—furnish the organizing principle of the remaining chapters of the book, which focus on their manifestation in Paradise Lost and some of Milton’s other writings.
Vozar guesses that while some of Milton’s early tutors and school masters were familiar with Longinus, and thus might have exposed Milton to his ideas, it is more likely that Milton’s reading of Hermogenes at Cambridge University served as his introduction to the values of “grandeur” and “majesty” in writing. He must have become acquainted with Longinus before 1644 (when he was thirty-six years old), for he includes him in his ideal course of reading for a young pupil—the first instance of such a prescription known in England. As Vozar sees it, Milton blends a classical sublimity of style—epitomized by the flights of Icarus and Phaethon (fatally ambitious youths with whom the poet-narrator seems to identify) and by Satan’s sublime oratory to his fallen troops—with a Biblical one that often relies on the magnificence of the word as deed. In Paradise Lost, the Father commences the Creation by addressing his Son: “By thee / This I perform, speak thou, and be it done” (7.163-4).
When Vozar turns his attention to the physical sublime—which is often close to what Kant would later term the mathematical sublime, but may include a tincture of the dynamical sublime—he focuses primarily on the astonishment we may feel in the presence of vast extent or an insurmisable number. Key examples include some of Milton’s most famous epic similes:
His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast
Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand. (PL 1.292-4)
Or:
On th’other side Satan allarm’d
Collecting all his might dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas unremov’d:
His stature reacht the Skie, and on his Crest
Sat horror Plum’d. (PL 4.985-9)
The incalculable extent and complexity of the cosmos offers another instance of the physical sublime in Milton. In Book 8 of Paradise Lost, for example, when Adam asks the angel Raphael why the vast primum mobile should revolve around the earth, he is told:
The swiftness of those Circles attribute,
Though numberless, to his Omnipotence,
That to corporeal substances could adde
Speed almost Spiritual. (PL 8.107-10)
Neither hell nor the heavens have an exclusive claim on the physical sublime.
Vozar’s discussion of the theological sublime may be his most original and provocative contribution to Milton studies, for while many distinguished critics from William Empson to Arnold Stein have found something resembling a mock-heroic burlesque in the epic, Vozar asks us to take wholly seriously lines such as, “Hills amid the Air encountered Hills / Hurl’d to and fro with jaculation dire” (PL 664-5). He can produce lines from Hesiod and Longinus and other authorities to make the suggestion plausible. This, he tells us, is not slap-stick comedy but the hyperbole of the sublime style. So Milton’s seventeenth-century readers also concluded. In his 1695 Annotations, Peter Hume praised the scene as a nobler idea of warring angels than any poet had given of the “Gigantic Invasion of Heaven by the Titans,” and in his 1696 appreciation, John Dennis affirmed that the “most delightfull and and most admirable Part of the sublimest of all our Poets, is that which relates the Rebellion and Fall of these Evil Angels.”
Whereas the language of Milton’s God has sometimes been judged colorless, Vozar defends the deity’s speech as an instance of “biblical sublimity, or what Milton elsewhere calls a ‘majestic unaffected stile’ (PR 4.359).” And while critics have sometimes noted the irony that God seems to be as capable of hate as Satan, Vozar is most concerned to emphasize the sublimity of God’s wrath, as when the Son tells the Father, “whom thou hat’st, I hate, and can put on / Thy terrors” (PL 6.734-5). Milton’s God is distant, incomprehensible, and remote, and terror of him lies at the heart of the Abrahamic religions. To dread a false god is idolatry; to dread the true God is to begin to work out one’s salvation in fear and trembling.
The book concludes with a bibliographical appendix that reviews the existence of Longinus in English private libraries up to 1674 and a textual appendix that includes a transcription of British Library MS Lansdowne 1045, which contains a translation of Longinus that may date from the mid-seventeenth century.
I find the first chapter, which sets Longinus in a larger classical discourse about the majestic, the vehement, and the pathetic in rhetoric; the bibliographical account of copies of Longinus in English libraries before 1674; and the transcription of the Lansdowne Longinus to be the most valuable parts of this book. The readings of Milton’s poetry are solid and reliable, if a little conservative and predictable. I doubt they will surprise many Miltonists, for notwithstanding Vozar’s protestations to the contrary, discussions of Milton’s sublimity remain a staple of undergraduate lectures on Paradise Lost.