IN the invocation to book 7 of Paradise Lost, the speaker distinguishes between a name and its meaning, or between an object and its representation: “Descend from Heav'n Urania, by that name / If rightly thou art call'd … / The meaning, not the Name I call” (7.1–2, 5). This distinction marks a dichotomy that Milton continually expresses throughout the poem. Milton's Paradise Lost can be read within the context of a wider seventeenth-century debate about the processes of naming, language, and human epistemology. Milton's poem raises many questions, both theological and epistemological, regarding these processes: does naming create human knowledge, or is knowledge of creation endowed a priori by God? Is Adam's knowledge, his “sudden apprehension” (8.354), equally bestowed upon all of God's creation? What is the relationship between “naming” and “knowing” in the poem? Finally, what might that relationship tell us about Milton's materialism? In this essay, I will argue that the complexity of the naming process throughout Paradise Lost forces us to reconsider traditional critical assessments of Milton's monism.

Milton continually undermines our senses through a poetic strategy which collapses the binary of prelapsarian and postlapsarian knowledge. Throughout the poem, Milton problematizes the process of naming within both the human and angelic realm. These problems of naming are a result of man's fallen state and are the result of ontological differences within creation. Further, Milton's repeated emphasis on Satan's dualistic presence adds another important dimension to the problems of naming within the poem.