Editing William Empson (section)

===''Milton's God''===
Empson's ''Milton's God'' is often described as a sustained attack on Christianity and a defence of [[John Milton|Milton]]'s attempt to "justify the ways of God to man" in ''[[Paradise Lost]]''. Empson argues that precisely the inconsistencies and complexities adduced by critics as evidence of the poem's badness in fact function in quite the opposite manner. What the poem brings out is the difficulty faced by anyone in encountering and submitting to the will of God and, indeed, the great clash between the authority of such a deity and the determinate desires and needs of human beings:

<blockquote>the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power. I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like [[Aztec]] or [[Benin]] sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of [[Franz Kafka|Kafka]], and am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious.
(''Milton's God'' (1965), p. 13)</blockquote>

Empson writes that it is precisely Milton's great sensitivity and faithfulness to the Scriptures, in spite of their apparent madness, that generates such a controversial picture of God. Empson reckons that it requires a mind of astonishing integrity to, in the words of [[William Blake|Blake]], be of the Devil's party without knowing it:

<blockquote>[Milton] is struggling to make his God appear less wicked, as he tells us he will at the start (l. 25), and does succeed in making him noticeably less wicked than the traditional Christian one; though, after all, owing to his loyalty to the sacred text and the penetration with which he make its story real to us, his modern critics still feel, in a puzzled way, that there is something badly wrong about it all. That this searching goes on in ''Paradise Lost'', I submit, is the chief source of its fascination and poignancy...
(''Milton's God'' (1965), p. 11)</blockquote>

Empson portrays ''Paradise Lost'' as the product of a poet of astonishingly powerful and imaginative sensibilities and great intellect who had invested much of himself in the poem.

Despite its lack of influence, certain critics view ''Milton's God'' as by far the best sustained work of criticism on the poem by a 20th-century critic. [[Harold Bloom]] includes it as one of the few critical works worthy of canonical status in his ''The Western Canon'' (where it is also the only critical work concerned solely with a single piece of literature).