Page 29 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

even when monastic life cannot exist without temperance.43 Hence, Comus’ criticism of temperance’s negative aspect, abstinence, makes sense only in relation to excessive immoderation. Just as immoderation manifests itself in the irrational, Chastity or temperance manifests itself in the rational. By orienting her gaze away from Comus’ erotic tonic 3⁄4 a twice shadow 3⁄4 she gazes towards sublime light.44 This seeing, this turning towards the sober, luminous, and numinous dictates of the Supreme Good negates, naturally, everything intemperate and profane. It refuses madness, passion, sensual follies; it refuses a lesser, bestial form of existence. It refuses Comus’ baneful, enticing cup and magic wand that “unthreads joints and crumbles sinews” (614,5). It desists, too, mingling with monstrous howling herds lost in rites to Hecate (515-35). Thus, resisting Dionysian pipes, it seeks Apollonian lutes. Thus, resisting imitation of erotic nature, it seeks pure sublimation in the sameness of the same 3⁄4 luminosity as noesis not as poiesis.
43 Hume. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Claredon Press, 2006. IX, 1.
44 As mentioned, Lady Chastity’s gaze is always oriented towards the Platonic heaven. Plato’s idea is that education must be oriented towards turning souls’ gazes from ignorance’s dark towards understanding’s light, from false images to contemplating true reality and its final end, the Supreme Idea or Form of the Good. In their ascension towards what is, that is, “true philosophy” (521c), individuals will move “away from becoming” towards “truth and being” (525c): Sun light. Plato. Republic. Book VII. Plato. Complete Works. Republic. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
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