A Study of Selected Biblical Types in Milton's “Nativity Ode”
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A number of critics have noted the role of typology plays in the Nativity Ode but have not observed detailedly the connection between Milton’s handling of time in the poem and the types they identify. Though the casual use of typology indicates a lapse of time between the appearance of the type and its fulfillment in the antitype, some Scriptural formulations of typology suggest that the antitype exists at the same time as the type. For example, Christ is not only the antitype or fulfillment of the old covenant, He is also the type, “an high priest of good things to come,” of man’s salvation by virtue of His own death. Old Testament events also function as both shadows of heavenly things and foreshadows of events which occur later even than events and persons in the New Testament in the history of man’s salvation, and it is this use of typology which necessitated the mixing of tenses or the negation of time in the poem. By way of preparing his reader for this use of types and antitypes in the “Hymn,” as an example, Milton introduces in stanza ii of the proem the idea of the pre-Nativity Christ as a “glorious Form” who willingly came to earth as a shadow of His former heavenly essence, forsaking “the Courts of everlasting Day” and choosing instead “a darksome House of mortal Clay” which both imperfectly imitates His previously “glorious Form” and types His ultimate reclaiming of that “Form” when He completes the task of working mankind “a perpetual peace.”Milton uses types like the sun, the Creation, the Nativity, and the waters in the Ode. For example, if Milton treats the Creation as a type of the Nativity, he also treats it and the Nativity as types of the Last Judgement. Milton makes this idea an explicit part of the Ode by expanding on the notion of the sea as a type of Hell in his reference to the Nativity as the beginning of the Last Judgement. In stanza 18 Milton, drawing on the account in Revelation 20 depicting the binding the Dragon, images Satan as an aspect of the sea he had introduced in stanzas 5 and 12 by describing him as a sea-monster. By linking all of the types to the dominant type of the poem, light, Milton forces all the types into a dual role; on the one hand they image or represent vertically the eternal divine plan for man’s redemption, and on the other hand they prophesy horizontally future events in the history of that redemption. Thus in order to set forth his theme of the eternal nature of Christ’s gift to man, Milton had to establish poetically a timeless world in which biblical types both image an eternal plan and adumbrate a temporal enaction of that plan.
Abstract
A number of critics have noted the role of typology plays in the Nativity Ode but have not observed detailedly the connection between Milton’s handling of time in the poem and the types they identify. Though the casual use of typology indicates a lapse of time between the appearance of the type and its fulfillment in the antitype, some Scriptural formulations of typology suggest that the antitype exists at the same time as the type. For example, Christ is not only the antitype or fulfillment of the old covenant, He is also the type, “an high priest of good things to come,” of man’s salvation by virtue of His own death. Old Testament events also function as both shadows of heavenly things and foreshadows of events which occur later even than events and persons in the New Testament in the history of man’s salvation, and it is this use of typology which necessitated the mixing of tenses or the negation of time in the poem. By way of preparing his reader for this use of types and antitypes in the “Hymn,” as an example, Milton introduces in stanza ii of the proem the idea of the pre-Nativity Christ as a “glorious Form” who willingly came to earth as a shadow of His former heavenly essence, forsaking “the Courts of everlasting Day” and choosing instead “a darksome House of mortal Clay” which both imperfectly imitates His previously “glorious Form” and types His ultimate reclaiming of that “Form” when He completes the task of working mankind “a perpetual peace.”Milton uses types like the sun, the Creation, the Nativity, and the waters in the Ode. For example, if Milton treats the Creation as a type of the Nativity, he also treats it and the Nativity as types of the Last Judgement. Milton makes this idea an explicit part of the Ode by expanding on the notion of the sea as a type of Hell in his reference to the Nativity as the beginning of the Last Judgement. In stanza 18 Milton, drawing on the account in Revelation 20 depicting the binding the Dragon, images Satan as an aspect of the sea he had introduced in stanzas 5 and 12 by describing him as a sea-monster. By linking all of the types to the dominant type of the poem, light, Milton forces all the types into a dual role; on the one hand they image or represent vertically the eternal divine plan for man’s redemption, and on the other hand they prophesy horizontally future events in the history of that redemption. Thus in order to set forth his theme of the eternal nature of Christ’s gift to man, Milton had to establish poetically a timeless world in which biblical types both image an eternal plan and adumbrate a temporal enaction of that plan.
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