Milton, John (1608–1674)

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MILTON, JOHN
(1608–1674)

John Milton, the English poet, author, and political writer, was born in London, the son of a prosperous scrivener. He was educated at St. Paul's School in London and Christ's College, Cambridge. After receiving an M.A. in 1632, he spent six years in study at his father's estate in Horton. In 1638 and 1639 he traveled to Italy, where he met Galileo Galilei, and on his return to London he found employment as a tutor. He wrote five pamphlets (1641–1642) attacking episcopacy, and his unhappy marriage in 1642 lent intensity to his subsequent tracts on divorce. In 1644 he published the tract Of Education, as well as Areopagitica, his famous attack on censorship of the press. His pamphlet justifying regicide, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), probably brought him the post of secretary for foreign tongues to the Council of State. He wrote several defenses of the revolutionary government, but after 1652 total blindness forced him to withdraw gradually from public life. He turned to the completion of his theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, and his History of Britain and to the fulfillment of his poetic ambitions. Despite a brief return to public controversy in 1659 and 1660, Milton was treated leniently by the Restoration government. His epic, Paradise Lost, was published in 1667; Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained appeared together, in one volume, in 1671. He died in 1674, survived by his third wife.

Approach and Method

Milton was essentially a religious and ethical thinker, and his views are a striking blend of Christian humanism and Puritanism. The fullest statement of his position is De Doctrina Christiana, which was complete in all but certain details by 1660.

Milton believed that the Bible is divine revelation, plain and perspicuous in all things necessary to salvation. In matters of religion Scripture is the only outward rule or authority, and conscience, illuminated by the spirit of God, the only guide within. This scrupulous biblicism, however, is linked (as in Socinianism) with a strong emphasis on reason. Conscience, even when illuminated by the spirit, operates in rational terms rather than through mystical insight, so that "right reason" becomes the guide to Scripture. At the heart of this view, authorizing yet limiting the role of reason, is the doctrine that Scripture is an accommodation of God's will to the limited understanding of man. God has made in the Bible as full a revelation of himself as man is capable of receiving, and the safest approach is thus to form in the mind "such a conception of God, as shall correspond with his own delineation and representation of himself." This view eliminates speculations of a transcendental kind, reserving an area of mystery into which reason may not trespass; at the same time it encourages reason to assimilate biblical revelation to the categories of ethics. Thus, the theological treatise, like Paradise Lost, is a theodicy; its aim is to discover a view of God that is both worthy of him and consistent with revelation.

Theology

Milton's aim led him to some unorthodox conclusions, the most striking of which is his rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. Embracing a loosely Arian position, he insisted on the unity of God and the consequent subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father. The Son is the first of the creatures, and although he is the perfect image of the Father and even made of the same substance, he is not of one essence with the Father. The Spirit, a rather supernumerary figure, was created at a later date than the Son. Milton maintained that the doctrine of the Trinity is a purely manmade mystery, with no scriptural foundation; it defies logic and degrades our conception of deity.

There was a second deviation from orthodoxy in the direction of monism. Milton rejected the Augustinian doctrine of the creation of the world ex nihilo and presented a theory of creation de Deo. Drawing support from both Scripture and reason, he argued that the universe was made out of the substance of God. This view, he claimed, is not only more logical than the alternative position, but in its assertion of the goodness of matter it underlines more emphatically the benevolence of the creator. The same antiascetic impulse is present in Milton's theory of body and soul; he argued that the higher comprehends the lower, that spirit contains matter, and that the body should thus be seen not as the prison house of the soul but as integral to it: "The whole man is soul, and the soul man." From this conclusion two corollaries proceed: first, the human soul is not created immediately by God but is propagated from father to son in a natural order; second, the whole man dies, body and soul, and does not live again until the end of time. Milton's view of spirit and matter probably encouraged both his rejection of traditional Eucharistic theory and his radical endorsement of divorce and polygamy.

free will

The doctrines we have examined, which are departures from the main traditions of Christianity, were designed to avoid dualism and to make theology conform to the canons of logical thought. A second group of doctrines emerged as a defense of free will against Calvinism. Milton rejected the orthodox Calvinist view of predestination and reduced the decree of predestination to a general offer of salvation to all men who are willing to believe. Other Arminian views reinforced his conviction that man is free to pursue or refuse salvation. Milton wished to show that regeneration is a matter neither of faith nor of works but of works of faith. Faith, it is true, is a gift of God, but every man is given sufficient grace to put a saving faith within his reach. Finally, the object of a saving faith is God the Father rather than Christ, so that such a faith is possible beyond the bounds of the Christian religion.

Ethics

The relation of the individual to the community absorbed Milton's attention during two decades of public controversy (1640–1660). His tracts, written in response to the disturbing events of the period, received force and direction from his lasting concern with liberty. Reason is "but choosing"; it is the power of ethical action, and man must therefore be free to choose between good and evil. Only by knowing evil and rejecting it can one become virtuous, for, as Milton remarked in Areopagitica, "That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary." Prescriptive morality, enforced by church or state, prevents both the real understanding of truths already known and the discovery of new truths.

Milton defended the autonomy of reason by appealing from manmade authorities—positive law, canon law, custom, or tradition—to the law of nature. The work of John Selden probably encouraged him to develop a distinction between the primary law of nature, given to Adam at the creation, and the secondary law, the imperfect remnants of the primary law in fallen man. Secondary law allows for the "hardness of heart" that was introduced by the Fall and thus prescribes for such aspects of man's fallen state as war, servitude, divorce, and private property. In De Doctrina Christiana, however, Milton stressed the importance of the primary or unwritten law of nature that was "given originally to Adam, and of which a certain remnant, or imperfect illumination, still dwells in the hearts of all mankind; which, in the regenerate, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, is daily tending towards a renewal of its primitive brightness." This law teaches whatever is intrinsically good and agreeable to right reason, and in making it the final authority, Milton gave his ethic a religious orientation.

Thus, Milton's ethical position was that of the Christian humanist. Grace, he believed, comes to perfect nature, not to destroy it; by means of grace reason is illuminated and natural virtue sanctified. In this emphasis he resembled the Cambridge Platonists, writers like Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, and Nathanael Culverwel, who sought to unify man's natural and religious experience by insisting that reason is "the candle of the Lord." Milton also resembled these philosophers in his habit of drawing upon Platonic writings, particularly on Plato's myths, in order to enrich his treatment of reason and the passions. Although his stress on the Bible prevented classical philosophy from making a direct contribution to his theology, Platonism nonetheless played a major and continuous part in shaping his ethical idealism.

The influence of Puritanism, as well as of humanism, led Milton to stress the importance of liberty. Believers are a "royal priesthood," and those who force the conscience of the individual are guilty of forcing the spirit of God. Central to Milton's conception of Christian liberty is the distinction between the Mosaic law, a law of bondage that extorts servile obedience through fear, and the Gospel, which offers a free, elective, and spiritual service based on man's filial relation to God. Spiritual regeneration, moreover, brings about a renewal of man's natural powers; the understanding is restored in large measure to its primitive clearness, the will to its primitive liberty. This strong emphasis on inner law led Milton to the antinomian view that Christ, by his life and death, abrogated the whole Mosaic law, the moral parts as well as the judicial and ceremonial parts. The sum of the law—love God and love your neighbor—remains and must be fulfilled by following the spirit, or the "internal scripture" (De Doctrina Christiana, I, xxvii). At this point, in spite of a continuing emphasis on reason, Milton had moved toward a position similar to the Quaker doctrine of inner light.

Church and State

Despite his early support of Presbyterianism, Milton soon came to believe that "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large." He defended the growth of religious sects on the ground that God requires unity of spirit rather than unity of doctrine, and he denied both the claim of the church to exercise secular power and that of the state to wield ecclesiastical power. His final view was that a particular church is a purely voluntary association of believers. Ministers should be elected by their congregations and supported by free offerings, and no ceremonial observances, such as the Sabbath, should be made obligatory. Despite his separation of the powers of church and state, however, Milton could not follow his more radical contemporaries in divorcing civil good from the good of religion. Although he denied the magistrate "compulsive" powers in matters of religion, he left him the "defensive" function of protecting Protestant Christianity from the threat of open "popery and idolatry."

Milton's view of the state varied in accordance with the changing conditions in which he was called upon to defend the revolutionary party. A basic line of his argument founds the state upon a social contract. Men are born free, but the effects of the Fall cause them to agree to a common league to bind one another from mutual injury. The people are thus the sovereign power in the state and have the right to revoke the power that they have delegated. When it became apparent that the Puritan party represented a small part of the nation, Milton resorted to a further argument that was not entirely consistent with the social contract theory. The revolutionary party, he maintained, was guided by providence and consisted of those most worthy to rule and to interpret the good of the people. The minority must force the majority to be free.

Poetry

The themes and preoccupations of Milton's prose gain in power when expressed in the "more simple, sensuous, and passionate" language of poetry. All the major poems center on the theme of temptation and move toward a clarification of true heroism. Temptation works through passion, in its simplest form through sensuality and anger but more subtly through specious reasoning and the lure of evil means to good ends. The definition of true heroism involves the exposure of such false forms as the romantic sensuality of Comus in the early "Masque" (1634) or Satan's courage of despair in the late epics. Paradise Lost, which was written to justify God's ways to man by dramatizing man's freedom and responsibility, ends with Adam setting out to imitate the spiritual heroism of the Son of God—revealed to him in a vision—and thus to achieve a "paradise within" that will be "happier far" than the outward paradise he has lost. Samson, in Samson Agonistes, also achieves a victory over himself through suffering and discovers that freedom is enjoyed only in the service of God. Paradise Regained, which has as its subject the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, presents Milton's final and most complete study of heroism. Avoiding the temptations to distrust and presumption, the Son rejects Satan's offers of worldly power and authority and realizes the spiritual sense in which he is Messiah.

Arts and Sciences

In his literary theory Milton emphasized the importance of genres and of decorum and urged the power of literature to create moral order in the individual and the society. (See his preface to Book II of The Reason of Church Government, the preface to Samson Agonistes, and the invocations to Books I, III, and IX of Paradise Lost. ) His view of education (Of Education ) was humanistic in its stress on languages and classical texts, its dislike of scholasticism, and its ethical aim. He showed no deep interest in the new science, and he used the traditional science in his poetry because it was for him a better source of metaphor. As a historian he had a critical sense of the value of evidence, but his view of history moved from millenarian optimism to the pessimism that informs the survey of history in the last two books of Paradise Lost.

Bibliography

works by milton

The definitive edition of the text is The Works of John Milton, edited by Frank Allen Patterson et al., 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–1938), with an index, 2 vols. (New York, 1940). A supplement to the Patterson edition, A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, with Merritt Y. Hughes as the general editor, was also published by Columbia University Press (New York, 1970).

There are editions of the poetry and selected prose by Frank Allen Patterson, The Student's Milton (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1930; rev. ed., 1933); Merritt Y. Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957); and others. Editions of the poetry include those by James Holly Hanford, Poems (New York, 1937; 2nd ed., 1953); Harris Francis Fletcher, Complete Poetical Works (Boston, 1941); and Helen Darbishire, Poetical Works, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952–1955).

Scholarly introductions provide continuous commentary on the prose in the closely annotated Complete Prose Works, edited by Donald M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 8 volumes.

works on milton

General Criticism

Douglas Bush provides a penetrating review of Milton's life and works in English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945; rev. ed., 1962); a survey of the scholarship is found in James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook, 4th ed. (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1946). The standard biography is still David Masson's The Life of John Milton, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1859–1880; rev. ed., with index, 1881–1896).

Milton's Thought

Pioneer work is found in Denis Saurat's stimulating if erratic Milton: Man and Thinker (London: Dent, 1925; rev. ed., 1944) and in the more literary Milton (London, 1930) by E. M. W. Tillyard. G. N. Conklin considers theological method in Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton (New York: King's Crown Press, 1949), and the growth and significance of Milton's theology are examined authoritatively by Maurice W. Kelley in This Great Argument (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941). On Milton's political and ethical views, see A. S. P. Woodhouse, "Milton, Puritanism and Liberty," in University of Toronto Quarterly 4 (1934–1935): 483–513; William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938) and Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942; reprinted, 1955); Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (London: Faber and Faber, 1964); Ernest Sirluck, "Milton's Political Thought: The First Cycle," in Modern Philology 61 (1964): 209–224.

Other aspects of Milton's thought are covered in Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956); Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1955); Walter C. Curry, Milton's Ontology, Cosmogony and Physics (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957); and Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947). Further criticism is listed in a selective bibliography by Douglas Bush, op. cit.; in the bibliographies by David H. Stevens, A Reference Guide to Milton, from 1800 to the Present Day (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930); Harris Francis Fletcher, Contributions to a Milton Bibliography, 1800–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1931); and Calvin Huckabay, John Milton: A Bibliographical Supplement, 1929–1957 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1960); and the annual bibliographies of Studies in Philology and PMLA.