This is especially true of the similes, many of which are borrowed from earlier epics, and so enter Milton’s poem with a cluster of associations – some excitingly troublesome. At the end of book iv of Paradise Lost Milton likens the good angels (who are preparing to fight Satan) to wind-tossed corn:

                    th’ angelic squadron bright
Turned fiery red, sharp’ning in moonèd horns
Their phalanx, and began to hem him round
With ported spears, as thick as when a field
Of Ceres ripe for harvest waving bends
Her bearded grove of ears, which way the wind
Sways them; the careful ploughman doubting stands
Lest on the threshing floor his hopeful sheaves
Prove chaff.                                         (iv 977–85)

‘It certainly makes the good angels look weak,’ Empson remarks of this simile5 – and epic precedent supports his view. Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Ariosto and Tasso all compare armed warriors to wind-tossed grain, and in every case the army so described is demoralized, routed, or about to be cut down. Homer uses the simile of the Greeks when they rush to their ships in despair of conquering Troy:

As when the west wind moves across the grain deep standing, boisterously, and shakes and sweeps it till the tassels lean, so all of that assembly was shaken, and the men in tumult swept to the ships. (Iliad ii 147–50)6

Milton’s angels intend to stand and fight, but the words ‘which way the wind / Sways them’ do not inspire much confidence in their prowess. A seventeenth-century reader might recall that Tasso had used the simile of wind and cornfield to describe Rinaldo cutting down his enemies. Milton’s wording directly recalls Edward Fairfax’s translation of 1600:

He brake their pikes, and brake their close array,
   Entred their battaile, feld them downe around,
So winde or tempest with imperious sway
   The eares of ripened corn strikes flat to ground.
                                                                (xx 60)

Editors have been reluctant to acknowledge these analogues. Fowler briefly notes that ‘the comparison of an excited army to wind-stirred corn is Homeric’, but he omits the detail that Homer’s Greeks are deserting, and he makes no mention of Tasso. For Fowler, the real heart of Milton’s simile is not the cornfield but the threshing-floor. Noting that this was a biblical metaphor for divine judgement, Fowler pertinently cites Jeremiah 51. 33: ‘Babylon is like a threshing-floor, it is time to thresh her: yet a little while, and the time of her harvest shall come’. From this analogue, Fowler concludes that God as ploughman ‘is careful that the final judgement, and the final reckoning with Satan, should not be premature’. Attractive as this reading is, it encounters an obstacle in Milton’s words ‘ripe for harvest’ which suggest that the time of reckoning is now, not later. Pursuing the notion of judgement, Roy Flannagan sees an allusion to Matthew 3. 12 where John the Baptist prophesies Christ’s final separation of the wheat from the chaff. To this we might add Psalm 1. 4 where ‘the wicked’ are ‘as chaff which fanned / The wind drives’ (Milton’s translation). Yet even these analogues run into the difficulty that Milton has likened the good angels to ‘a field / Of Ceres’, so it is they, not Satan, who are in danger of becoming chaff.

Milton’s analogues often work like this. Much as we editors would like to police them, they escape our control. My own candidate for a safe analogue (were I forced to choose one), would be Phineas Fletcher’s The Apollyonists ii 40. Fletcher, like Milton, is describing Satan, who has just broken out of Hell, accompanied by a host of devils. These descend on our world as when the South wind

                     sweeps with his dropping beard
The ayer, earth, and Ocean; downe he flings
The laden trees, the Plowmans hopes new-eard
Swimme on the playne.

The connection with Milton is fortified by the ploughman, who here represents the peaceful world threatened by Satan’s invasion. Critics have often tried to identify Milton’s ploughman with God or Satan, but I suspect that Milton intended him to have much the same significance as Fletcher’s. This does not mean that Fletcher’s simile can drive all subversive possibilities from Milton’s. Whatever Milton’s conscious intentions, the classical and biblical analogues complicate his simile in ways that both trouble and enrich it. Throughout this edition I have endeavoured to annotate Milton’s analogues in such a way as to permit rather than prohibit difficult questions. I do this not because I am determined on indeterminacy, but because I want to provide readers with the materials that will enable them to determine interpretative matters for themselves.

Throughout my notes I have assumed that Milton wrote the De Doctrina Christiana, even though William B. Hunter has argued that the traditional ascription of that work to Milton is unsafe.7 Although I am unpersuaded by Hunter’s arguments, I think they are valuable both for their own sake and for the excellent replies they have elicited from (among others) Christopher Hill, Maurice Kelley, Barbara Lewalski and John Shawcross.8

In preparing this edition I have received valuable help and guidance from many learned colleagues, as well as from graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Western Ontario. I owe a special debt to Gordon Campbell, John Creaser, Roy Flannagan, and Christopher Ricks, both for their own work as editors and for their advice on numerous points of detail. I have also received generous assistance from Christopher Brown, Gardner Campbell, Dennis Danielson, Richard Green, John Hale, Jeremy Maule, Diane McColley, Earl Miner and Alan Rudrum.