"The image of their glorious maker": looking at representation and similitude in Milton's Paradise Lost

This essay reads the narrator's representation of the Son of God in heaven and Adam and Eve in Eden in the opening Books of Paradise Lost alongside the famous chain of similes describing Satan in hell - the so-called leviathan simile. In so doing it suggests that Milton's descriptions and similes are integral not just to the poem's style and narrative but to its theology, anthropology, and diabology. What someone looks like is an ontological issue in the poem; it tells us about the nature of the being described and how far they resemble its God. As we shall see, Milton's supernatural and prelapsarian beings are described in terms that accentuate their embodied visuality, a trait which valorises the material world and the sense of sight while suggesting that the division between the spirit and the flesh is not so absolute