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STUDIES IN MAJOR
LITERARY AUTHORS

Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
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STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS

WILLIAM E. CAIN, General Editor

THE ARTIST, SOCIETY & SEXUALITY IN “NO IMAGE THERE AND THE GAZE REMAINS”
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S NOVELS The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham
Ann Ronchetti Catherine Sona Karagueuzian
T. S. ELIOT’S CIVILIZED SAVAGE “SOMEWHAT ON THE COMMUNITY-SYSTEM”
Religious Eroticism and Poetics Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel
Laurie J. MacDiarmid Hawthorne
Andrew Loman
WORLDING FORSTER
The Passage from Pastoral COLONIALISM AND THE MODERNIST
Stuart Christie MOMENT IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF
JEAN RHYS
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND THE
Carol Dell’Amico
ENDS OF REALISM
Paul Abeln MELVILLE’S MONUMENTAL IMAGINATION
Ian S. Maloney
WHITMAN’S ECSTATIC UNION
Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass WRITING “OUT OF ALL THE CAMPS”
Michael Sowder J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement
Laura Wright
READY TO TRAMPLE ON ALL HUMAN LAW
Financial Capitalism in the Fiction of HERE AND NOW
Charles Dickens The Politics of Social Space in D. H. Lawrence
Paul A. Jarvie and Virginia Woolf
Youngjoo Son
PYNCHON AND HISTORY
Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern “UNNOTICED IN THE CASUAL LIGHT
Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas OF DAY”
Pynchon Philip Larkin and the Plain Style
Shawn Smith Tijana Stojković
A SINGING CONTEST QUEER TIMES
Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Christopher Isherwood’s Modernity
Seamus Heaney Jamie M. Carr
Meg Tyler
EDITH WHARTON’S “EVOLUTIONARY
EDITH WHARTON AS SPATIAL ACTIVIST CONCEPTION”
AND ANALYST Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels
Reneé Somers Paul J. Ohler
QUEER IMPRESSIONS THE END OF LEARNING
Henry James’s Art of Fiction Milton and Education
Elaine Pigeon Thomas Festa
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THE END OF LEARNING

Milton and Education

Thomas Festa

Routledge
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For my parents
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Contents

List of Figures ix

List of Abbreviations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter One
Repairing the Ruins: Milton as Reader and Educator 23

Chapter Two
Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 45

Chapter Three
The English Revolution and Heroic Education 63

Chapter Four
The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 99

Coda 159

Notes 163

Bibliography 211

Index 231

vii
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List of Figures

Figure 1. Milton’s emendation to his copy of Euripides,

Hippolytus, line 998. Reproduced by permission
of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
(Don d. 27, p. 576). 35

Figure 2. Milton’s emendation to his copy of Euripides,

Suppliants, lines 754–71. Reproduced by
permission of the Bodleian Library, University
of Oxford (Don d. 28, p. 42). 37

ix
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List of Abbreviations

CM John Milton, Works, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al., 18

vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–38)
ET Euripidis Tragoediae, ed. Paulus Stephanus, 2 vols.
(Geneva, 1602), Bodleian Library shelfmark don. d. 27, 28
Geneva Bible All quotations of the marginal glosses and text of the
Geneva translation are taken from the most fully annotated
edition (London, 1599) unless otherwise noted.
KJV The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha,
ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997)
LCL Loeb Classical Library
NRSV The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989)
OED The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,
2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), checked
against the revisions and updates posted to the online edition.
Poems John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd
ed. (London: Longman, 1997)
Poems AM Andrew Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel
Smith (London: Pearson / Longman, 2003)
PL John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed.
(London: Longman, 1998). This is the main edition cited
throughout unless otherwise noted.

xi
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xii List of Abbreviations

PR John Milton, Paradise Regained in Poems, ed. Carey.

YP Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe
et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82)
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Acknowledgments

Thankfully, this book stands as evidence that the mind is not, as Satan imag-
ines in Paradise Lost, its own place. Over the years of researching and writ-
ing, I have become ever more greatly aware that, without the help and
encouragement of several individuals and institutions, this effort would have
landed me in a Paradise of Fools. An earlier version of this book was submit-
ted to Columbia University in 2004 as a Ph.D. dissertation. First of all I
must therefore thank my dissertation advisors for their unfailing generosity
and magnanimity. I only began to imagine that I could accomplish so
daunting a task when I met and studied under Edward Tayler, whose work
in the field of Milton studies has contributed immeasurably to the thought
of a generation of scholars. I feel especially privileged to have had the oppor-
tunity to work with him at the end of his distinguished career. Professor
Tayler taught me by example the very nature of scholarly virtue. David Kas-
tan has, from my first day as a graduate student at Columbia, welcomed me
with unmatched grace and wisdom into the larger world of intellectual life.
Without his continued support, learned encouragement, and unparalleled
wit, this project would never have seen its proper “end.” I was fortunate
enough to have been Professor Kastan’s student as his many years of teaching
and thinking about Milton came to fruition in his recent edition of Paradise
Lost for Hackett Publishing, and, as our ongoing exchanges about the text of
the epic during that process confirm, I am certain to remain his student for a
long time to come.
I must also thank several other kind teachers who, having read and
commented on drafts of my work on Milton, have sustained and challenged
me: Douglas Brooks, Julie Crawford, Michelle Dowd, Richard DuRocher,
Kathy Eden, Alan Farmer, Andrew Hadfield, Bruce Holsinger, Jean Howard,
William Kolbrener, Albert Labriola, Zachary Lesser, Elisabeth Liebert, Paula
Loscocco, Laura McGrane, Thomas Olsen, Douglas Pfeiffer, Peter Platt,

xiii
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xiv Acknowledgments

Anne Prescott, Jason Rosenblatt, Alan Stewart, Daniel Swift, Henry Turner,
and Adam Zucker. In the English Department at the State University of
New York at New Paltz, where I teach, I would like to acknowledge Stella
Deen, the current department chair, and my colleagues Nancy Johnson,
Daniel Kempton, Christopher Link, and Thomas Olsen. A little farther
afield, I owe special thanks to Kimberly Benston and James Boettcher, who
have discussed my work with me and have expanded my idea of the nature of
this undertaking more than they can know. Two other scholars deserve spe-
cial mention for help and guidance of a more general kind: Christopher
Grose, who first introduced me to the writings of Milton and inspired me to
continue in my studies; and Anthony Low, who provided an excellent model
of humane learning at a crucial point in my graduate education. I have been
fortunate in my friends.
I should like to express heartfelt gratitude to the staff at the Bodleian
Library; the British Library; the Folger Shakespeare Library; and Butler
Library at Columbia University. Generous grants from Columbia and from
the Folger Institute made much of my early research possible.
Two of the chapters first appeared as journal articles. Chapter 1
reprints with a few changes “Repairing the Ruins: Milton as Reader and
Educator,” from Milton Studies XLIII, Albert C. Labriola, ed. © 2003 by
University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of
Pittsburgh Press. An earlier version of Chapter 2 first appeared as “Milton’s
‘Christian Talmud’” in Reformation 8 (2003), published by Ashgate. The
article that became Chapter 2 won the William Tyndale Prize for 2004,
awarded by the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Printers,
London. I am humbled by the honor, and wish to thank Andrew Hadfield,
editor of Reformation, for this much needed encouragement. I am grateful to
the editors and anonymous readers for both of these journals, whose assis-
tance allowed me to improve and refine my arguments.
In bringing this book to the light, I have benefited greatly from the
patient professionalism and benevolent solicitude of everyone at Routledge. I
am especially grateful to my editors Max Novick and William Germano for
all their help in this process. Professor William Cain, the academic editor of
the series to which this book belongs, was enormously supportive and
encouraging, and it is fair to say that without his indispensable help this
book would never have appeared in its current form. In the last stages of its
completion, Jonathan Munk, my copyeditor, performed deeds above heroic
and saved me from many errors.
Finally I must thank my wife, Vicki Tromanhauser, whose love and
support have taught me more than I can say.
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Introduction

In the original sense of the word, education is a leading out, a drawing out,
or a bringing up. Liberation of the mind is also at the very heart of the con-
cept. Education has its roots, conceptually and linguistically, in the human
aspiration to greater freedom, so that the bond between education and polit-
ical enlightenment is as intimate as it is ancient. John Milton instinctively
grasped this primal power of learning, a recognition that lent particular
moral shading to his imagination. In the creative act, Milton’s effort to lead
the members of his fit audience toward their greatest intellectual and spiri-
tual fitness irradiated the mind through all its powers: education thus consti-
tutes the central trope for Milton’s political and poetic writing.
Sublime as Milton’s creative powers were, his theory of education, like
the material universe in his account of creation, was not forged out of noth-
ing. The substance of Milton’s educational thinking remains available to us
in the record of his thought, but we can also expand our awareness of its ele-
mental structures by analyzing his own practices as a student, reader, and
teacher. I take up the crucial matter of Milton’s reading in Chapter One, in
the analysis of books from his personal library, books undoubtedly used in
teaching pupils at his home. If thinking about how Milton read helps us to
understand what he expected of his audience, then piecing together the rela-
tionship between his practical pedagogical thought and his theoretical
assumptions about the educative function of literature will clarify the nature
of his intervention in his own context and allow us to reconsider the place he
has in our curriculum. Milton, from work to work, has a unity of purpose
underlying his exigent points, a didactic intention that of necessity changes
for him but becomes more vital over time; this unity is not, however, identi-
cal to the one Milton sets forth in his autobiographical writings as his inten-
tion. His own perception of, or argument for, the intentional shape of his
teachings riddles his works, yet Milton is notoriously contradictory and even

1
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2 The End of Learning

manipulative in his interpretation of his achievement. Nonetheless, analysis

of Milton’s concept of education must take into account the intentions he
avows in his writings, at least as an inaugural topic. When such authorial
claims have the relative consistency that Milton’s thoughts on education
exhibit over the course of about thirty-five years of publication, the asser-
tions themselves may be said to exercise a powerful force over the texts in
which they appear. This is even, or perhaps especially, true where the inten-
tion to educate seems to distort rather than to clarify what the text is really
about on more explicit or practical levels.
Milton’s instincts for pedagogy, and the habits of inculcation everywhere
visible in his writing, take on a larger political function in his use of education
as a trope for the relationship between an individual and the authority of tradi-
tion. In this, Milton’s educational thinking is consonant with the best minds of
his age. Questions of epistemological authority occupied a central position in
the thought of Bacon before him and of Locke after him, though the political
significance of this branch of philosophy has not always received the attention
that it deserves. For instance, although it has long been recognized that John
Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) made a major contribu-
tion to the philosophy of education, it has only recently been shown that the
educational writings form an integral part of Locke’s political philosophy by
uprooting the reliance upon customary authority and showing how a responsi-
ble polity could be inculcated outside of patriarchal structures of government.1
Milton’s educational project in the poetry and the prose, I contend, played an
important part in the formation of this revolutionary attitude toward tradition,
if from a different set of premises than those followed by the most influential
early modern philosophers.
Milton’s argumentative resourcefulness works as a literary strategy to
emancipate readers from the tyrannical bonds of their political innocence,
most immediately in the context of the failure of successive revolutionary
regimes to establish lasting institutions. But his fluidity of argument is pres-
ent in Paradise Lost as well as the political tracts and ought, therefore, to
encourage us to place the epic in the complementary contexts of its outright
educational claims and more subversive countervailing measures. Analysis of
this feature of Milton’s rhetoric will show how he dramatizes the nicely
ambiguous “end of learning,” which is to say both its objective and its aban-
donment. Milton’s works investigate the humane and intellectual yearning
for justice in response to the problem of evil, a problem not easily overcome
by educational, or political, means. Yet his enduring faith in the power of
education to train the citizens of a sophisticated polity suggests an ideology
not simply directed by the needs of the institutionally empowered but rather
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Introduction 3

committed to the empowerment of a public forum in which dissent will be

integral.
Addressing the members of the Long Parliament on just this issue in
Areopagitica (November 1644), Milton rails against religiously and politically
motivated prepublication censorship, since it discourages learning. Milton
reveals a predilection for open inquiry as a backdrop against which to meas-
ure the oppressive tendencies of his political moment. But this concept—for
which, according to the OED, he coined the adjective in the tract’s phrase
“Philosophic freedom”—is notoriously slippery, exclusive, hedged in by
doubt. Even this phrase stands not as a positive model of English liberty, but
rather an ironic indictment of encroachments upon it seen through the eyes
of unsuspecting “Italian wits” (YP 2:537–38). Although “lerned men”
abroad have counted Milton “happy to be born in such a place of Philosophic
freedom, as they suppos’d England was,” Milton offers us a glimpse of their
assumption only to retract this view as mistaken, merely “suppos’d.” Learn-
ing is always at risk of having fallen into a “servil condition,” he implies, at
home as well as abroad.
What sort of thing, then, is Miltonic education? The present study
endeavors to answer this question from multiple perspectives: historical and
philosophical, practical and poetic. At the simplest level, Milton asks how
one can realize the truth as a spiritual connection to Christ. If a person can
lay claim to an authentic knowledge of Christ, does it follow that one can
teach another to share this understanding, and if so, how could such an
inward discovery be communicated or, indeed, confirmed? For “inward
ripeness doth much less appear,” Milton maintains in Sonnet 7 (Poems, p.
153). The urgent question asked by educators from classical times to the sev-
enteenth century was whether something deeper than superficial knowledge,
something more than “learning,” something spiritual, could finally be
taught. In other words, can virtue be taught, or must it be innate? Recipro-
cally, we might ask whether virtue is the proper register of knowledge.2
Moreover, what is the relationship between learning and teaching, especially
since, in this relationship, a politics as well as a form of ethical reflection may
be said to inhere? Milton’s attempts to answer these and other questions draw
us toward a fuller consideration of his politics, his ethics, and his poetry as
we locate his educational thought across several genres and discursive modes.
The value of teaching no doubt consists in the ability of education to
address the constituents of a specific society in a particular time and place
and to empower them to act more effectively. Conflicting models of political
order and of the educational practices within them, as Milton and his con-
temporaries recognized, develop out of opposing theories of truth: the ends
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4 The End of Learning

toward which they aspire. Hobbes saw that his political theory requiring sub-
mission to the authority of the sovereign could only take root when his dis-
course was “profitably taught in the Universities,” which “are the Fountains of
Civill, and Morall Doctrine.”3 The political truth that Hobbes envisaged would
lead naturally to a reconfiguration of the universities, which would in turn
ensure the transformation of the government. Czech philosopher John Amos
Comenius, perhaps the most influential educational thinker of the seventeenth
century, imagined a reformation of society by conceiving a system of universal
education in which boys and girls alike would be compelled to attend school.
“For those who are in any position of authority,” writes Comenius, “it is as nec-
essary to be imbued with wisdom as it is for a guide to have eyes. . . . Similarly,
those in subordinate positions should be educated that they may know how to
obey their superiors wisely and prudently, not under compulsion. . . . For a
rational creature should be led, not by shouts, imprisonment, and blows, but by
reason.”4 The coherence of Comenius’s system of “pansophy” relied upon the
availability of all knowledge for synchronic comprehension and distillation.
From this encyclopedic digest of truth, the diachronic scheme of educating the
young could be restructured more harmoniously and synoptically. For Come-
nius, the nature of truth was such that it could be calibrated to all members of a
society at whatever stage of their intellectual development. Therefore Comenius
“may undoubtedly be considered,” according to Jean Piaget, “as one of the pre-
cursors of the genetic idea in developmental psychology, and as a founder of a
system of progressive instruction.”5 For Comenius as for Hobbes, formulating
an educational philosophy meant establishing the proper conduit between a
student’s psychology and a systematic approach to truth, with the further end of
creating a social dynamic that would foster the political arrangement.
For Milton, to clarify the theoretical problem of education is to engage
in a process that represents the contingency of truth, according to the alle-
gory in Areopagitica:

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was
a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his
Apostles after him were laid asleep, then strait arose a wicked race of
deceivers, who as that story goes of the AEgyptian Typhon with his con-
spirators, how they dealt with good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewd
her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter’d them to the four
winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst
appear, imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl’d body
of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they
could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons,
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Introduction 5

nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second comming; he shall bring
together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an
immortal feature of lovlines and perfection. (YP 2:549)

The allegory seems poised to suggest a method by which we might con-

struct an educational response, spiritual and intellectual, to the loss of
Truth, perhaps a war against “a wicked race of deceivers” to be fought by
the “warfaring Christian” referred to elsewhere in the tract (YP 2:515). By
its end, however, this passage asks us to sustain our efforts to re-member
the hewn body of Truth while acknowledging that we never shall find all
the pieces until the end of time. Over the course of the passage, the depic-
tion of Truth gradually undermines our ability to rest certain in the knowl-
edge that we have attained it. If truth is not precisely indeterminate, the
concept as Milton presents it here remains steadfastly contingent, unverifi-
able, and interrogative.
Given our epistemological predicament, we might well wonder why
Milton shifts to the obliquity of allegorical narrative to represent something
as absolute as truth. At this crucial juncture in his argument, the rhetorical
deflection is perversely unyielding. Allegory is a conventional method for
discovering truth, a mode that Milton elsewhere reserves for the depreda-
tions of tradition and for hollow mechanistic representations of the literal.
Hence the allegory of Custom that begins The Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce (in the second edition of 2 February 1644) or the residue of allegori-
cal figures such as Sin and Death, Chaos and Old Night in Paradise Lost.
When illustrating how a representation loses substance, Milton habitually
enters his metaphors on an allegorical register.6
That Milton has chosen to break down the impediments to education
from within this mode of representation invites further reflection. For alle-
gory operates on both sides of the literary transaction: it is a means of encod-
ing a text and of decoding or processing that text’s potential meanings. The
allegory of Truth in Areopagitica compresses several levels of Miltonic educa-
tion because it embodies, in its rhetoric, the problem that it appears to have
been set forth to remedy. Using a conspicuous and conventional method for
determining meaning, the allegory draws our attention to its conventional-
ity. The passage thereby denatures the intention that it ostensibly articulates.
In this way, Milton teaches us the meaning of our very pursuit of meaning.
Fidelity to truth, in this conception, requires that we remain faithful to what
we must acknowledge is oblique to us. Miltonic education encompasses this
critical effort of the mind, yet it further demands that we honestly confront
the limited circumference of our understanding.
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6 The End of Learning

Allegorical representation is especially implicated in religious history

since, as C. S. Lewis remarked, “the twilight of the gods is the mid-morning
of the personifications.”7 As a mode of expression, allegory therefore has a
special genetic link to a transitional moment in the history of religious
thought. Allegorical interpretation of Scripture, above all the fourfold exege-
sis of medieval scholastic philosophy, provides a method of divination. The
four layers exist simultaneously on the divine page of sacred writings: the lit-
eral (or historical), the allegorical (or typological), the moral, and the ana-
gogical (or eschatological).8 Precisely because of the narrative Milton relays,
the allegory may be schematically represented according to this method. Mil-
ton locates the allegory of Truth historically in the decay that follows the
death of the Apostles. False prophets arose, according to this version of early
church history, as “a wicked race of deceivers,” after Christ “ascended, and
his Apostles after him were laid asleep.” The allegorical level unfolds from
Milton’s source, Plutarch’s Moralia. Milton most likely knew Plutarch’s ver-
sion of the story, as his references to the Moralia in other places suggest.9
According to Plutarch, Typhon “tears to pieces and scatters to the winds the
sacred writings, which the goddess [Isis] collects and puts together and gives
into the keeping of those that are initiated into the holy rites.” Plutarch
immediately uproots the Egyptian myth and turns it into an allegory of “the
effort to arrive at the Truth, and especially the truth about the gods,” “the
end and aim of which is the knowledge of Him who is the First, the Lord of
All, the Ideal one.”10 The moral application of Milton’s allegory speaks
directly to his moment: to arrest the flow of books that might communicate
sacred information is to inhibit the sacrosanct drive toward our comprehen-
sion, however limited, of divine Truth. On the fourth level of the anagogical,
Milton offers his summation, that Truth shall not appear in its glorious like-
ness again until the end of time, the parousia.
The only piece Isis never finds, Plutarch tells us, is the male member of
Osiris, which becomes the source of the fecundity of the Nile as well as the
origin of the ancient phallic mystery cults.11 In his use of the allegory, Milton
tacitly equates the severance from Truth with castration. His narrative sym-
bolically admits this absence, as it makes no mention of this part that he sug-
gests could stand for the whole, or for the idea of wholeness.12 In this respect,
the narrative by which he represents the allure of a methodologically reassur-
ing, coherent emblem of truth engenders an originary displacement of
authority. Milton enacts an allegory of Truth to dramatize a misplaced desire
for systematic coherence, for customary exegetical method, for certitude.
Yet Milton reaches for allegory precisely because the narrative of dis-
memberment gestures out toward the affective nature of the trauma, the
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Introduction 7

primeval loss of truth. Dismemberment in the narrative signals displacement in

time: “From that time ever since” provides the setting for the unresolved melan-
cholic allegory. “Traumatic memories,” as contemporary researchers in psychia-
try remind us, “are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences,
which need to be integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed
into narrative language.”13 One symptom of the allegorical displacement in
Milton’s narrative is in the shift in gender, from a masculine Osiris as representa-
tive of Truth to a feminine “virgin” body—the “lovely form” of the primitive
church as the virginal Bride of Christ. Placed in a spiritual framework, the disso-
ciation increases exponentially. Each of us has been sundered from the mystical
body of Christ, torn from our connection to Truth. The depiction of “the sad
friends of Truth” thus questions us on a deeper, more therapeutic level as well.
How does one recover from a lost connection to the truth? Miltonic education
develops the historical sense, here “the carefull search that Isis made for the man-
gl’d body of Osiris.” We must first recognize our distance from the origin—“We
have not yet found them all,” he says—in order to understand the situation in
which we respond to its loss. What we can learn until Truth’s reappearance at
“her Masters second comming” is provisional, indirect, proper to reflection and
critique of the self and of society in its concrete historical manifestation. Given
the contingency of truth, Milton implicitly asks how, ethically, we may use the
past as precedent. How do we reconcile historicism to the unattainable Truth, to
faith itself? For Milton, education consists in teaching the proper attitude
toward history, tradition, and authority.
Milton’s paradigm of education unfolds gradually over the course of his
works in relation to hermeneutic understanding. Based on the encounter
with such remnants of sacred Truth as can be gathered from reading both
text and world, the problem of education becomes one of understanding
without external means of verification. This is why the problem of education
is one of interpretation, of hermeneutics, a problem that we shall revisit with
special attention in Chapter Four through a reading of Paradise Lost. Milton’s
notion of the contingency of truth has close affinities with the hermeneutic
stance described by Hans-Georg Gadamer:

Hermeneutics must start from the position that a person seeking to

understand something has a bond to the subject matter that comes into
language through the traditionary text and has, or acquires, a connec-
tion with the tradition from which the text speaks. . . . Given the inter-
mediate position in which hermeneutics operates, it follows that its
work is not to develop a procedure of understanding, but to clarify the
conditions in which understanding takes place.14
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8 The End of Learning

The connection to tradition, for Milton, was to be achieved only by means

of a struggle for rhetorical legitimacy in the “wars of Truth” (Areopagitica, YP
2:562). Given the historical context of the English Revolution, this connec-
tion (as we shall see) was fraught with political significance, as prelates, royal-
ists, Presbyterians, and finally Cromwell adopted the symbolic trappings of
customary authority in the effort to legitimate their rule. Milton would
locate the struggle to define and possess truth against such monumental
ideas of tradition, embracing instead a conflict of interpretations of history,
politics, and self.15 For Milton, as for Gadamer, the effects of tradition are as
inescapable as they are irresistible. Thus hermeneutics discloses our historic-
ity through the mediation of tradition.
As Milton shows in his allegory of Truth, the grounds of our historical
being are themselves unstable because of our distance from the unrecoverable
reality of the divine presence. The fractures within our understanding there-
fore become our true inheritance from a decimated origin in the past, a con-
ceptual bearing that Gadamer dates to the Reformation. The hermeneutic
circle does not teach a rehabilitation of authority and tradition so much as
“the right use of reason in understanding traditionary texts. Neither the doc-
trinal authority of the pope nor the appeal to tradition can obviate the work
of hermeneutics, which can safeguard the reasonable meaning of a text
against all imposition.”16 At the same time, just as the authority of tradition
cannot eclipse reason, neither can reason subjugate all other forms of author-
ity—as it would in confident idealizations of the Enlightenment. As I will
show in Chapter Two, this interpretive problem came to a head in Milton’s
reconsideration of the charitable teachings of the Mosiac Law in the divorce
tracts. The hermeneutic enigma, which Milton so eloquently confronted as
an educational challenge, becomes clearer when contextualized theologically.
Considering the history of exegesis from the vantage of early modern Protes-
tant readers, “the paradox of sacrifice,” as Deborah Kuller Shuger has finely
observed, “epitomized the pervasive ambiguities attached to humanist inter-
pretation of the past as simultaneously authoritative and alien.”17 It is just
this idea of history as at once “authoritative and alien,” inescapable yet
inescapably other, that drives Milton toward his particular understanding of
his relationship to the past.
We need not, in other words, concede to T. S. Eliot that tradition is a
totality and a “simultaneous” unity in order to observe this dynamic “percep-
tion, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”18 Milton har-
bored deep suspicions about essentialist metaphysics—about, for example, a
representation’s power to capture and contain the essence of the thing for
which it stands.19 The gravity of his doubt about metaphysics as a project for
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Introduction 9

human thinking makes some of his ideas proximate to philosophy of the

recent past.20 This “philosophy without mirrors,” as Richard Rorty describes
it, is a way of doing philosophy that is poetic. It substitutes education for
certainty of knowledge and does not, or cannot, construct a foundation
upon which to erect a systematic theory of existence. Such philosophy is, as
Rorty says, “therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than sys-
tematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philoso-
phizing rather than to supply him with a new philosophical program.”21
Similarly, hermeneutic understanding is “less knowing what the text means
in itself than . . . knowing how we stand with respect to it in the situation in
which we find ourselves.”22
The story I shall tell in this book takes cues from philosophical
hermeneutics insofar as I believe Milton’s writings can help us understand
our own concerns today with history, authority, and tradition—and because
I think contemporary preoccupations with interpretation can help us under-
stand the relationship to a literary past that I find exemplified in the writings
of Milton. This study is thus an attempt to come to terms with a particularly
Miltonic set of attitudes toward the past as articulated in the concerns of the
present. Investigating Milton’s approach to the philosophical problems that
beset historical reflection will furthermore allow us to scrutinize some critical
assumptions about the relations between historiography and literature and
will in this way provide access to debates about the concept of modernity.23
In recent years, the project of dismantling the monolithic conception of
scientific progress—a narrative that reached its peak of influence in the early
and mid-twentieth century—has become a point of convergence for thinkers
from across the disciplines. Stephen Toulmin, for example, attributes the twen-
tieth-century conception of philosophical modernity to an earlier historic shift
from practical to theoretical philosophy, from the non-dogmatic paradigm of
rhetoric to the foundationalist imperatives of Cartesian rationalism. In
response, Toulmin wants to resituate the origin of modernity in a skeptical,
humanist moment prior to the rise of scientific “method” and to show how
practical knowledge—as seen in such fields as jurisprudence, rhetoric, and
diagnostic medicine—in fact offers an alternative paradigm for modernity.
This pursuit of an alternative origin Toulmin parallels with the challenges that
Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Rorty pose to the Cartesian ideal of certainty as the
founding principle of modern philosophy.24
To some readers, the description of an alternative philosophical moder-
nity—one in which I see Milton as a vital participant—will frankly not
sound coherent enough to merit consideration as a form of philosophical
thought. However, the conflict between rhetoric and science as principles of
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10 The End of Learning

order within, and approaches to, human knowledge held a central importance
for Milton and his contemporaries. Indeed, as Quentin Skinner has recently
shown, this conflict between rhetoric and science remained a defining charac-
teristic of Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy, even as Hobbes transformed political
theory into a science through the application of geometrical demonstration to
political analysis.25 The persistence of rhetorical models of truth among such
diametrically opposed political thinkers as Hobbes and Milton suggests a
greater continuity of ideas when viewed in historical context than the history
of philosophy has traditionally allowed, and this ought to extend our category
of the philosophic appreciably so that it comprises the tensions produced by
rhetorical thought in an increasingly scientific age. Nonetheless, it is true that
the disposition I attribute to Milton has closer connections to rhetoric than to
philosophy as it is usually described, or is closer perhaps to “humanist logic”
than to the philosophy of the schools.26 The best scholarly work reconstructing
Milton’s own education has elucidated precisely this connection to classical
rhetoric in the humanist curriculum, which Milton studied while a young man
at St. Paul’s School in London.27 We shall return to the definitive influence of
humanism upon Milton’s thought in Chapter Three.
Attention to the history of educational theory and practice in the age
of Milton will refine the questions I seek to ask at length of Miltonic educa-
tion. Milton’s first recorded comments on the subject place him squarely in
the tradition of humanist educators. Under the heading “On the Education
of Children” in his Commonplace Book, in an entry dated circa 1635–38 by
the Yale editor, Milton writes: “The nature of each person should be espe-
cially observed and not bent in another direction; for God does not intend
all people for one thing, but for each one his own work; whence comes
Dante’s: ‘And if the world down there put its mind on the foundation that
nature lays,’ &c. See Paradiso cant: 8.” (YP 1:405).28 Nature and God’s voca-
tion unite in this humane concept of pedagogy, which promotes cultivating
natural proclivity rather than violently bending it, or imposing artificial
social constructs upon it. “God and nature,” as Abdiel tells Satan in Paradise
Lost, “bid the same” (6.176). Milton’s early formulation is grounded in prac-
tical or experiential knowledge, and as such has a clear if implicit antecedent
in Aristotle: “Education on an individual basis is superior to education in
common, as in the case of medical care. . . . It would seem that particular
cases are treated with greater subtlety if there is attention to individuals, since
each person is more likely to obtain what suits him.”29
In the early modern period, the prospect of fashioning an intellect
often took on the harsher attributes of discipline, even within the main-
stream of humanist thought. Erasmus says: “Nature is an effectual thing, but
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Introduction 11

education, more effectual, overcommeth it.”30 Milton’s disagreement on this

point reveals perhaps a difference of degree rather than of kind, but from this
formulation we can see that the divergence begins with the idea of nature.
For Milton, as he says in the De Doctrina Christiana, “nature cannot mean
anything except the wonderful power and efficacy of the divine voice which
went forth in the beginning, and which all things have obeyed ever since as a
perpetual command” (YP 6:340–41). The theological conviction that each
person has “his own work,” as Milton puts it in the Commonplace Book
entry, tames the impulse to shape pupils against their natural inclination. In
Sir Thomas Elyot’s conception, which seems to have influenced Milton, this
is the first duty of an educator: “The office of a tutor is firste to knowe the
nature of his pupil, that is to say, where to he is mooste inclined or disposed,
and in what thyng he setteth his most delectation or appetite.”31
Against the idea that natural inclination toward learning provokes an
impious curiosity, Milton repeatedly emphasized the way in which inquiry
into the universe could breed knowledge that is both natural and godly.
Receptivity to this aspect of what is perceived as the divine intention informs
the idea of learning in Milton’s paradigm. Indeed, attentiveness to God’s
design for the universe demands that education be pursued so that God may
be more deeply understood and therefore more profoundly worshiped. In an
early academic oration, most likely presented near the end of his time at
Cambridge (around 1630–31), Milton defends learning against stupidly
pious ignorance:

God would indeed seem to have endowed us to no purpose, or even to

our distress, with this soul which is capable and indeed insatiably
desirous of highest wisdom, if he had not intended us to strive with all
our might toward the lofty understanding of those things, for which he
had at our creation instilled so great a longing into the human mind.
Survey from every angle the entire aspect of these things and you will
perceive that the great Artificer of this mighty fabric established it for
His own glory. The more deeply we delve into the wondrous wisdom,
the marvelous skill, and the astounding variety of its creation (which we
cannot do without the aid of Learning), the greater grows the wonder
and awe we feel for its Creator and the louder the praises we offer Him,
which we believe and are fully persuaded that He delights to accept.
(Prolusion 7, YP 1:291–92)

The impetus must be to survey “from every angle the entire aspect”—an
unfathomably steep ascent, but Milton wishes to reassure his audience that a
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12 The End of Learning

deep harmony unites the study of God with the study of His creation. As in
the Commonplace Book entry, Milton expresses his intellectual ambition by
admiring and respecting “the astounding variety” of all creation, a quality he
lauds equally in his estimation of the natural wonders of the physical uni-
verse and in the spirit of each human being. The “peculiar sway of nature,”
he reminds us, “also is Gods working” (Of Education, YP 2:363).
Like many humanists who preceded him, Milton found no conflict in
the study of spiritual, physical, and political sciences. In his brief tractate Of
Education (June 1644), Milton synthesizes a multifarious program of study
that “would trie all [the students’] particular gifts of nature, and if there were
any secret excellence among them, would fetch it out, and give it fair oppor-
tunities to advance it selfe by” (YP 2:413). As when Roger Ascham seized
upon the connection between serving God and serving one’s country, Milton
urges the political benefit to the polity of educating “our noble and our gen-
tle youth” (2:406). Ascham sums up the humanist political insistence upon
the vita activa thus: “if to the goodness of nature be joined the wisdom of the
teacher in leading young wits into a right and plain way of learning, surely
children, kept up in God’s fear and governed by his grace, may most easily be
brought well to serve God and country both by virtue and wisdom.”32
Although Milton disagreed with the monarchical inclinations of such
thinkers as Ascham and Elyot, he believed that the effort to educate the mer-
itorious if not hereditary elite “could not but mightily redound to the good
of this nation” (YP 2:414).33 Milton advances his theory of education to rec-
tify shortcomings that he believes inhibit the reformation of the spiritual and
political nation. Hence he sets out in the midst of the Civil War “to write
now the reforming of Education . . . for the want whereof this nation per-
ishes” (YP 2:362–63). Milton’s radical humanism during the years of the
English Revolution, which I describe at greater length in Chapter Three,
fuses a commitment to political education with the spiritual project of refor-
mation in the hope of forming a godly republic.
For the most part, historians of education have emphasized the unorig-
inality of Milton’s tract.34 His debt to humanist theories of education is well
documented. Claims for his contribution to educational theory are usually
brought forth on the basis of his connection to the experiments of the uni-
versal reformers.35 Although Of Education is an aggregate of earlier theory
and of Milton’s own experience as a teacher, comparisons to the educational
reformers who followed Comenius have tended to produce little insight into
Milton’s larger educational and philosophical project.36
Miltonic education, I submit, extends far beyond the bounds laid out
in the brief tractate. Of Education was originally published, anonymously
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Introduction 13

and without a title page, as a pamphlet of eight pages (see YP 2:357). It was
cast as a familiar letter to the Prussian educational reformer (and translator of
Comenius) Samuel Hartlib, who then resided in London and exercised wide
influence over a circle of intellectuals. Milton shared certain ideals with the
universal reformers, though he did not believe that education should be
compulsory for all. While he had an interest and possibly a hand in some of
the schemes advocated by the Hartlib circle,37 Milton differed with them
fundamentally and irreconcilably by asserting the centrality of classical litera-
ture to education.38 Although Milton maintained that the study of the clas-
sics ought to remain the central feature of the curriculum, he critiqued the
idea of learning foreign languages for their own sake, since “language is but
the instrument convaying to us things usefull to be known” (YP 2:369). The
innovation that Milton introduced into the humanist curriculum stems from
his belief in the central importance of practical knowledge, natural science,
and acumen derived from experiment.
Like Francis Bacon, whom Milton seems to have been reading with
great care and only occasional disagreement since his Cambridge days, Mil-
ton differentiated between intellectual and moral curiosity. For Bacon,

it was not the pure knowledge of nature and universality, a knowledge

by the light whereof man did give names unto other creatures in Par-
adise, as they were brought before him, according unto their proprieties,
which gave the occasion to the fall; but it was the proud knowledge of
good and evil, with an intent in man to give law unto himself and to
depend no more on God’s commandments, which was the form of the
temptation.39

The “sensible and material things” that remain to be explored by inductive

scientific inquiry promote comprehension of God’s works and of “creatures
themselves,” which, relative to an understanding of God, can only produce
“wonder, which is broken knowledge.”40 Unlike Milton’s allegory of Truth as
the dismembered body of Osiris—in which an encyclopedic ambition des-
tined to fail reveals the fallible desire for omniscience—Bacon contends that
it is an error that “men have abandoned universality.” When knowledge “is
in aphorisms and in observations, it is in growth; but when it is compre-
hended in exact methods, it may perchance be further polished and illus-
trate.” For Bacon, method presents a sure means of “progression” and works
against those mere “intellectualists” who “disdain to spell out and so by
degrees to read in the volume of God’s works.”41 Bacon wishes to partition
theology from philosophy absolutely, which in effect secures a fully secular
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14 The End of Learning

space of scientific inquiry by means of a theological rationale, where Milton

sees the two ineluctably intermingling. Milton’s difference on this point,
then, resides in his skepticism about the end toward which the Baconian
method would take humanity. Often Milton’s doubts, rather than his sup-
posed certainties, convey a more profound layer of thought in his educa-
tional philosophy.
However, Milton could, like Bacon, cite Saint Paul’s sayings in order to
establish the neutralizing boundary between natural and divine science.
Referring to Colossians 2:8, Paul’s injunction that the faithful not succumb
to the allurement of “vain philosophy,” Bacon in The Advancement of Learn-
ing urged: “let those places be rightly understood, and they do excellently set
forth the true bounds and limitations whereby human knowledge is con-
fined and circumscribed; and yet without any such contracting or coarcta-
tion [i.e., restriction], but that it may comprehend the universal nature of
things.”42 Echoing precisely this sentiment in the concluding sentences on
the curriculum in Of Education, Milton explains that students ought to await
“the right season” before beginning poetic composition, “when they shall be
fraught with an universall insight into things” (YP 2:406). We may note, in
passing, the fine distinction between the outward reach of empiricist diction
in Bacon’s phrase “comprehend the universal nature” and the inward flow of
spiritualist diction in Milton’s phrase “universall insight into things.” Yet
Milton desires that students should work inductively from “a reall tincture of
naturall knowledge,” which he seeks to ensure by employing groups of visit-
ing experts, making pedagogical use of “the helpfull experiences of Hunters,
fowlers, Fishermen, Shepherds, Gardeners, Apothecaries; and in the other sci-
ences, Architects, Engineers, Mariners, Anatomists” (YP 2:393–94). Like
Bacon, Milton urges “beginning with Arts most easie, and those be such as
are most obvious to the sence” (YP 2:374).
Whatever may be said for the influence of Ramistic logical structure—
commencing with the universal and branching out to the particular—on
Milton’s thought, his curriculum begins with empirical observation and basic
grammatical training and then moves toward poetry and metaphysics. In Of
Education, after all, he describes the condition of humanity in a moral uni-
verse as requiring an ascent toward God through “orderly conning over the
visible and inferior creature” (YP 2:368–69). Inferior though it might be, the
mortal part occupies a primary role in the “orderly conning” by which “sensi-
ble things” transmit knowledge of God to the invisible soul. The study of
nature, like the study of human nature made possible by reading history,
shows the way to ethical behavior governed by moral intelligence. In effect,
the structure of Bacon’s argument in The Advancement also moves on both
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Introduction 15

tracks at once, as Ramistic analytic diagrams of the book show.43 In Milton’s

case, the centrality of faith, perhaps surprisingly, does not suggest introduc-
ing students to “the highest matters of Theology and Church History” (YP
2:399–400) until they have completed courses in Latin and Greek grammar,
arithmetic, geometry, agriculture, modern authors on cartography and geog-
raphy, natural philosophy, astronomy, trigonometry, architecture, military
engineering, navigation, Hebrew, the ancient poets, moral philosophy,
household management, Italian, and law. Pupils are then to advance to logic,
rhetoric, and finally poetic composition, which, being more “simple, sensu-
ous and passionate” than other intellectual endeavors, reflects the students’
“universall insight into things.”44 Following Bacon, then, Milton condemned
the fact “that scholars in universities come too soon and too unripe to logic
and rhetoric; arts fitter for graduates than children and novices.” And Milton
also shares Bacon’s belief that

these two arts [logic and rhetoric], rightly taken, are the gravest of sci-
ences; being the arts of arts, the one for judgment, the other for orna-
ment. . . . The wisdom of those arts, which is great and universal, is
almost made contemptible, and is degenerate into childish sophistry
and ridiculous affectation. And further, the untimely learning of them
hath drawn on by consequence the superficial and unprofitable teaching
and writing of them, as fitteth indeed to the capacity of children.45

Milton’s borrowings from Bacon are characteristic, in that Of Education at

once shares the Baconian emphasis on empirical observation leading to uni-
versals, but also reclaims the universal as the proper realm of the religious
poet.46 Milton would concur with Bacon’s judgment that “it disposeth the
constitution of the mind not to be fixed or settled in the defects thereof, but
still to be capable and susceptible of growth and reformation.”47 But Milton
also folds logic into the study of rhetoric, thus diminishing in a typically
humanist way the independent value of demonstrable analytic thought.
Moreover, Milton centers his entire project on the ultimate value of poetry, a
value famously depreciated through its identification with the faculty of the
“imagination” by Bacon in the second book of The Advancement.
Milton clearly learned a great deal from Bacon’s more rigorous treat-
ment of education. As a result, Milton extended the range of his educational
agenda considerably in the dozen or so years between the Seventh Prolusion
and Of Education. The expanded scientific breadth, and the increased spiri-
tual depth, of the mature educational project owed at least as much to Mil-
ton’s sustained engagement with the educational thinking of Bacon as it did
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16 The End of Learning

to his personal friendship with Samuel Hartlib and other Comenian reform-
ers such as John Dury.
In addition to the oversimplifications inherent in taking a linear histori-
cal approach to Milton’s educational theory, another apparent contradiction
plagues the critical conversation about Of Education. This involves a supposed
incongruity between the two overt definitions of education in the tract:

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by
regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him,
to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our
souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith
makes up the highest perfection. (YP 2:366–67)

I call therefore a compleate and generous Education that which fits a

man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both
private and publicke of peace and war. (YP 2:377–79)

To an extent, the tract thus defines education in a Janus-faced way, in that each
definition deals with an aspect of the soul. The distinction between the first
(which describes the purpose or result of education) and the second (which is
more utilitarian and prescriptive) arises from the outlook on human action
that each assumes. In the first definition, the Fall has brought about the decay
of human faculties and consequently the ruination of learning. The intention
of pedagogy, like the drive to reassemble the torn body of Truth, must be recu-
perative and memorial: “to repair the ruins of our first parents.” Milton accen-
tuates the belatedness and loss that haunt the effort to “repair” by “regaining.”
The dilapidated edifice of knowledge makes learning’s “end” asymmetrical to
the wish it articulates. Even as human beings may learn “to love” God “by pos-
sessing our souls of true vertue,” Milton signals the circumscription of our abil-
ity “to imitate him.” The end of learning is to be its limitation as well as its
aim. If we wish “to be like” God, we ultimately cannot, though we may come
“the neerest” to answering this longing by exercising our ethical intelligence,
our virtue. We may say, with Levinas, that Milton here gives voice to the
notion that, in the wake of the Fall, “The foundation of consciousness is justice
and not the reverse.”48 In other words, we are not just because we are conscious
human beings, but rather we express our consciousness through just action.
Although the human will must be “united to the heavenly grace of faith” to
make up “the highest perfection,” this union ultimately cannot be an act of
human will alone, and so our best resemblance is attained only through ethical
action, by “possessing our souls of true vertue.”
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Introduction 17

The limitation that inheres in our capacity to imitate God, then, opens
the way for the second, more ideological definition of pedagogy, which has
been called “a New Model Education.”49 In fact, the limitation that resulted
from the Fall was, according to Milton, what necessitated the initial forma-
tion of political society.50 If the goal in this second definition is unabashedly
ideological, this is because Milton takes for granted that the fragmentation of
human consciousness caused by the Fall initiated the aggressive ideologies
that have riven human society.51 This is to take “vertue” in another direction,
in which a classical republican ideal of civic humanism takes precedence in
the “offices” of the citizen. The greatness of the soul, or magnanimity,
emerges from the social dimension of duty, “all the offices both private and
publicke of peace and war.”
How does the concept of pedagogy that emphasizes imitation and love
of God overlap with this idea of the citizen? The two definitions, religious
and political, converge in Milton’s conception of liberty. No one, according
to Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649, 1650), “can be so
stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and
resemblance of God himself ” (YP 3:198). Projecting a condition which,
according to Quentin Skinner, “must be recognized as a God-given
birthright, and hence a set of natural rights,” this theory of the state of
nature as a condition affording “primitive liberties” yields an idea of govern-
ment designed to protect and uphold freedoms.52 Since this notion of Chris-
tian liberty forms the principle around which society organizes itself,
education therefore allows for intergenerational continuity of the political
order. As John Rawls puts the matter with respect to a pluralistic secular
democracy, “If citizens of a well-ordered society are to recognize one another
as free and equal, basic institutions must educate them to this conception of
themselves, as well as publicly exhibit and encourage this ideal of political
justice.” Although Milton restricts considerably the portion of the populace
to be educated, I would argue that Rawls carries Milton’s point to its logical
extreme when he describes “the public role of educating citizens to a concep-
tion of themselves as free and equal.”53
That Milton’s educational views helped shape his poetry has long
been accepted, but the ideological force of his moral didacticism has
received less focused attention—an imbalance that I have aimed to redress
in the chapters that follow. Readers of this book are in all likelihood
familiar with the thesis of Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin, that Paradise Lost
is “a poem concerned with the self-education of its readers.”54 Drawing
attention to the complexities of narrative and syntax as they relate to what
he perceives as the poem’s larger conceptual design, Fish persuasively
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18 The End of Learning

describes certain local features of the epic in terms of didactic effects. All too
often, however, he deductively imposes this idea of the poem’s intentional
design in order to proclaim the irrelevance of political interpretation.
In a groundbreaking essay, Mary Ann Radzinowicz dispelled the
notion that seeing the epic as “paideutic” necessitates reducing the fullness of
the poetic texture to a series of quickly unsurprising theological traps. “Par-
adise Lost constitutes a course in political education,” Radzinowicz writes,
“and political education serves in Milton’s epic purposes that a political pro-
gram might play in another kind of work,” such as a prose tract. This is an
especially astute remark given the period in which Milton began regularly to
compose the epic. As we shall see in Chapter Three, Milton readily displaced
the specific institutional recommendations of his later republican prose onto
a more broadly construed ethical imperative that he thought would finally
salvage the mission of the godly and meritorious few. In this sense, then,
Radzinowicz must be right when she says that Milton sets problems “in the
way a Socratic educator sets problems, the occasions for debate, and
instances for correction.” Modifying the more oppressive and totalizing view
of “correction” by the epic narrator, Radziowicz notes that “Milton did not
. . . calculate a magnificent plot to trap his readers into such misinterpreta-
tions and corrections as would lead them to salvation. His political paideia is
overt and historical; it results in progressive enlightenment as to the very
slowness and difficulty involved in human arrangements within fallen his-
tory.” Milton’s conception of the Bible corroborates this political reading of
the epic, even as the concept of “progressive enlightenment” relays the proper
skepticism about the experiential relationship between revelation and human
political behavior. Milton’s pedagogical efforts, while “overt and historical,”
are not simple or institution-bound: “Milton’s method,” she goes on to say,
“is not that of the propagandist for this or that institution or program; his
method is that of the teacher.”55 Even more than in the prose, Milton’s
poetry advocates the strenuous activity of right reason as the sine qua non of
human regeneration, while at the same time emphasizing above all else the
ethical attitude made manifest in self-sacrifice as the best possible means to
achieve the public good. Barbara Lewalski has lucidly restated this argument,
paying special attention to how Miltonic education affects the general politi-
cal project of the epic:

Milton’s epic is preeminently a poem about knowing and choosing—for

the Miltonic Bard, for his characters, and for the reader. It foregrounds
education, a life-long concern of Milton’s, and of special importance to
him after the Restoration as a means to help produce discerning, virtuous,
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Introduction 19

liberty-loving human beings and citizens. . . . The Miltonic Bard edu-

cates his readers by exercising them in rigorous judgment, imaginative
apprehension, and choice. By setting his poem in relation to other great
epics and works in other genres, he involves readers in a critique of the
values associated with those other heroes and genres, as well as with
issues of contemporary politics and theology.56

My analysis of Paradise Lost in Chapter Four will not presume that Mil-
ton’s intentions for his epic neutralize the effects of the text or definitively
limit the range of its signification. Stanley Fish’s presumption of “the” reader
“in” Paradise Lost unhappily and artificially reduces Milton’s possible, but
also his historical, audience. Before I quarrel with Fish, let me say that I have
myself been influenced by his work, and that I see the book’s central thesis as
a major landmark in the field of Milton criticism. But accepting the intu-
ition at the heart of the thesis does not mean conceding to the premises of
the argument. There are two key problems with the contention that “Mil-
ton’s method is to re-create in the mind of the reader (which is, finally, the
poem’s scene) the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam
did and with Adam’s troubled clarity, that is to say, ‘not deceived.’”57 First,
Fish’s assumptions tend toward an ahistorical conception of reading on
which the “reader response” model, as much as the New Critical method it
builds upon, finally depends.58 We are told that “the” reader will be the same
throughout time, a notion whose pernicious and exclusive ideology is imme-
diately visible in the attribution of gender to that reader. This might be
excused if the conception of education at work in Fish’s reading were more
historically informed. Fish argues that Milton writes in such a way as “to cre-
ate problems or puzzles which the reader feels obliged to solve since he
wishes, naturally, to retain a sense of control over the reading experience.”
Instead, readers repeatedly fall prey to “Milton’s programme of reader harass-
ment.” The authoritarian pedagogue time and again countermands us, and
we are “accused, taunted by an imperious voice.” “The reader,” in the man-
ner of a severely punitive catechism, “is continually surprised by sin and in
shame,” but one wonders how long this “surprise” is supposed to last: if we
feel reprimanded by the narrator’s interpolated commentary upon the action
in the first few books, which one of us will not learn to expect it as the narra-
tive continues? Whether or not “Milton secures a positive response to the fig-
ure of God,” it does not seem possible that, in a poem ever alert to the
multiplicity of human experience and piously committed to faith in the
absence of iconic resemblances, Milton should engender this effect “by creat-
ing a psychological (emotional) need for the authority he represents.” The
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20 The End of Learning

potentially ambiguous antecedent of that last “he,” given that it is not capi-
talized, suggests that Milton serves to enlarge chiefly his own authority, just
as his God does, and one cannot help but think in the light of Fish’s preface
to the second edition of Surprised by Sin, Fish’s own authority as a guide
through the poem.59
If Milton’s poetry suffers a grave diminution from the effort to univer-
salize the experience of a single, idealized reader, then it stands to reason that
one important corrective to this tendency would be to enlarge the sense of
the responses of actual historical readers.60 The second objection I have to
Fish’s thesis is that, for all the emphasis he places upon education, the con-
cept remains relatively inexplicit and uninformed by historical research into
the history of education in the period. In the important and provocative
study Milton Unbound, John Rumrich asks the critical question: “Does this
punitive and tedious didacticism actually have a place in Milton’s own his-
torical context?” Both my interpretation of Milton’s writings and the
research I have conducted lead me to answer resoundingly no. Rumrich is
surely right to challenge Fish on this point, even if he does not quite go so far
as to refute directly the educational paradigm that Fish presumes for Milton.
Theoretically, I share Rumrich’s general conception of Milton “as perhaps the
West’s most challenging, uniquely integrated, philosophical poet.” Although
I differ with Rumrich to some substantial degree in my concept of what it
means to call Milton a “philosophical poet,” I also find myself in agreement
with his emphasis upon indeterminacy in Paradise Lost. Milton presumed the
rationality of his theodicy, which accords with his depiction of the unrecov-
erable origin of Truth. As Areopagitica demonstrates, the provisional nature
of knowledge in the postlapsarian world requires that the search for truth be
perpetual and progressive. This ideal, as Rumrich says, “may be understood
as a principle of dynamic coherence, one that allowed Milton room to make
theodical art out of his uncertainties.”61
What we gain by seeing Milton in this way is a new set of problems, a
new vantage from which to challenge our own epistemological and ideologi-
cal positions. This book has grown out of a long-standing effort to grasp the
conditions within which Milton conceived of, and rigorously adhered to, the
philosophical paradoxes of learning. As a process without end, education
paradoxically must strive to articulate its aims, even as it surrenders certain-
ties to a contingent awareness of truth. Thus human consciousness must
learn to comprehend itself, all the while unsettled by the awareness that with
it consciousness does not end. As a result, the local and particular, instead of
being eradicated in favor of the universal, are restored to a greater dignity. In
this connection, Adorno’s axiom on the morality of thinking offers a useful
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Introduction 21

point of departure: “Knowledge can only widen horizons by abiding so insis-

tently with the particular that its isolation is dispelled. This admittedly pre-
supposes a relation to the general, though not one of subsumption, but
rather almost the reverse.”62 It is that “almost”—qualifying and even chal-
lenging as it does the effort absolutely to reverse deterministic relations
between universals and particulars—which allows Adorno’s philosophical
stance to illuminate a pattern intrinsic to Milton’s theology. As far as modern
philosophical speculation will help to place Milton’s thought in sharper defi-
nition, Wittgenstein, musing on the problem of definition itself, offers a use-
ful insight into one of the recurrent themes of Milton’s educational project:
“The man who is philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is
used, and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where
it leads to paradoxical results.”63 Wittgenstein here identifies as puzzlement a
confusion that stems from the presupposition of a systematic linguistic
approach to creating meaning. Trying to articulate a consistent approach to
the acquisition of knowledge led Milton to similarly paradoxical results early
on. Milton’s writings, starting with the divorce tracts, show that he under-
stood this paradox as a condition of interpretation. Rhetorically, they refute
systematic approaches to education in order to thwart the iconological
dependence of intransigent minds upon the false security of custom. Over
time, and in this way, Milton expresses a profoundly humane attitude toward
the educable spirit in human beings, such that he seeks “to try, and teach the
erring soul” according to the model of Jesus in Paradise Regained: “By win-
ning words to conquer willing hearts, / And make persuasion do the work of
fear” (1.222–24).
This book is organized as a series of chapters that explore Milton’s
developing attitudes toward education in his works from the onset of the
Civil War to the completion of Paradise Lost. The four chapters stand in a
structural relation to one another that goes beyond the chronology of the
works examined, though the sequence of chapters does make some conces-
sion to chronological order in the interest of telling the story historically. In
order, the chapters all address different aspects of the attitude Milton culti-
vates in himself and in his readers, an attitude toward history, authority, and
tradition. The first chapter further critiques the reader response paradigm of
interpretation through an analysis of Milton’s own reading habits. This his-
torical materialist approach to reading considers how Milton forms his iden-
tity as a writer through the material practices of reading and teaching. The
next chapter focuses on appropriation: how Milton uses evidence to establish
authority in the divorce tracts. There, Milton investigates and exposes the
paradoxes of his historicism, attaining authority by reforming pedagogy as a
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22 The End of Learning

metaphor for the vexed relation to the Law. In the third chapter, I set out to
clarify Milton’s idea of humanism by returning to the classical and early
modern sources of his conception. This leads to a discussion of how he char-
acterizes himself and his writing by creating an ethical and political persona,
the subject in history as a speaker. Milton seeks, throughout the revolution-
ary period, to teach the nation through his own exemplary character and
virtue, to acculturate the citizen of “the Commonwealth of learning,” and to
train the populace to grasp the significance of the emergent civic structures
(YP 2:529). I have endeavored in the first three chapters to lay the contextual
foundation for a new interpretation of the pedagogy of Paradise Lost. The
fourth and final chapter addresses the epic as an act of creative synthesis, in
which Milton interrogates the origins of our situation in history through a
refashioning of the remnants of historical memory, political subjectivity, and
sacred truth. In Paradise Lost, Milton teaches that liberty, or bondage to
servitude, is an inward condition. Miltonic education reaches its most pro-
found challenge in the discovery of what I term “inward archives.” Under-
standing the situation in which we find ourselves means comprehending the
myths of origin against which, and through which, we struggle in time.
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Chapter One
Repairing the Ruins: Milton as Reader
and Educator

Milton, like other teachers of literature, understood that education is essen-

tially communal—not something that happens in isolation, but rather at the
intersection of several minds, a collective endeavor. As Ben Jonson said, “hee
that was onely taught by himselfe, had a foole to his Master.”1 Reading, too,
involves not only a single reader, but a community, especially when it serves
as the primary medium of an educational process, and is therefore like edu-
cation at once expressive and constitutive of community. While recent for-
mulations of this concept—such as Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities”
and Roger Chartier’s “communities of readers”2—will be of some use here,
my present aim derives equally from an ancient concern of which Fish and
Chartier are no doubt aware. Early in Plato’s Symposium, when Eryximachus
proposes the subject of the ensuing conversation, he quotes the tag “mine is
not the tale” from Euripides’ Melanippe to signal that his subject does not
originate with himself but instead with his friend and fellow diner Phaedrus,
suggesting that the idea, like the locution, originates with neither of them
but nonetheless “belongs” to a far broader group than is, strictly speaking, in
attendance at the feast.3 The allusion to Euripides, by placing the speaker
and his meaning at one more textual remove, dramatizes the sharing of texts
as a means of encompassing hearers and readers alike in the formation of a
community.
The largest question I take up in this chapter also begins with Euripi-
des in order to ask, What do Milton’s practices as a reader and his conception
of the power of books tell us about his idea of education? In seeking answers
to this question, I will argue for the importance of thinking about how Mil-
ton read specific texts and what material evidence we have of these encoun-
ters. The nature of this evidence and the processes it records relate to broader

23
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24 The End of Learning

interpretive issues with far-reaching implications for comprehending Mil-

ton’s thought, such as how he perceived the relative legitimacy of textual
interpretations, the utility of such interpretations, and the formative contexts
in which interpretations are valorized or debunked. While he holds the valid-
ity of an interpretation to be in the first instance absolute, its value ulti-
mately depends upon its particular relation to other interpretations.
Moreover, I hope these considerations will shed some new light on Milton’s
evolving conception of all texts, including his own, as heuristic, not osten-
sive—that is, leading to the discovery of an interpretation, not providing it.4
By tracing the hermeneutic concept available and, indeed, advertised in Mil-
ton’s reading practices, we can further refine our appreciation of fundamental
epistemological positions taken and in some respects modified by Milton. I
shall discuss how, by first considering Milton’s annotating practices, we mod-
ern readers can deepen our understanding of what Milton says about books
in Areopagitica, and what such theories might, in practice, look like accord-
ing to Milton himself.
At some time in 1634, perhaps between the composition of A Maske and
its performance, Milton bought his copy of Paulus Stephanus’s edition of
Euripides, as his autograph inscription on the flyleaf indicates.5 It is clear from
the different states of Milton’s marginal handwriting that he read both quarto
volumes in their entirety at least twice, once before and once after his return
from Italy in 1639, before the onset of total blindness in 1652.6 Even critics
such as Samuel Johnson who have examined Milton’s annotations have occa-
sionally overlooked the care with which Milton read the books. “The margin,”
Johnson remarks in the Life of Milton, “is sometimes noted; but I have found
nothing remarkable.”7 What is most remarkable about the attentiveness of
Milton’s reading, however, only becomes clear when his annotations are com-
pared with the marginalia of other, later owners of the volumes. Notes in three
other hands accompany the two stages of Milton’s marginalia. The identity of
one of the annotators is certain: Joshua Barnes, editor of Euripides in 1694
and fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who absorbed some of Milton’s
conjectures and emendations into his edition (without attributing them) and
thereby introduced Milton into the historical collation apparatuses of modern
critical editions. About a dozen of his proposed emendations remain accepted
readings to this day in modern editions.8
The history of Milton’s intervention into the mainstream of modern
classical editing demonstrates the role of the material book in the transmis-
sion of the text and in what William Sherman refers to as “the intertextual
and interpersonal quality of Renaissance reading.”9 Although Milton’s hand
appears to be the earliest to have marked the exemplum, he may not have
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Repairing the Ruins 25

been its first owner and, moreover, he likely knew himself not to be last.
Marginal notation ranges, as Anthony Grafton has shown, from the crypti-
cally idiosyncratic to the overtly discursive, a continuum that itself discloses a
historical conception of the Renaissance book as material and intellectual
property that differs radically from our own.10 This historical conception of
the book in turn relays an idea of authorship quite distinct from modern
notions, evincing what Stephen Orgel has called “the legible incorporation of
the work of reading into the text of the book.”11 Milton’s Euripides margina-
lia present especially rich evidence of the habits of a seventeenth-century
reader because they not only indicate his idea of and interaction with a clas-
sical text, but also imply his projection of a future audience for his notes.
The students Milton was tutoring when he reread the Euripides vol-
umes comprise one such audience. Following his return from Italy, most
likely “in the autumn of 1639 or early in 1640,” Milton began to spend part
of each day teaching his young nephews—John and Edward Phillips, then
ages eight and nine.12 From the start, the younger boy probably lived with
his uncle, but later in 1640, when Milton found a larger house in Aldersgate,
both lived with him, their education becoming a full-time responsibility. In
April 1643, when it had become clear that Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell,
would not be returning any time soon from her “vacation” to her parents’
home in Forest Hill (near Oxford), Milton took in more pupils.13 In the
spring or summer of 1645, Milton began searching for a larger house, and by
September or October he had moved into a residence in the Barbican, where,
as Edward Phillips recalled, “probably he might have some prospect of put-
ting in Practice his Academical Institution, according to the Model laid
down in his Sheet of Education.”14 Among the students Milton probably
tutored were Cyriack Skinner, John Overton, Thomas Gardiner, Richard
Barry, Richard Heath, Jeremy Picard, William Brownlow, and, later, Thomas
Ellwood.15 In addition, “tho the accession of Scholars was not great,” he may
have had other students whose names have been lost, since Phillips mentions
Milton’s “having application made to him by several Gentlemen of his
acquaintance for the Education of their Sons, as understanding haply the
Progress he had infixed by his first undertakings of that nature.”16 By August
of 1647, however, Milton had given up the large house in the Barbican and
moved to a smaller residence in High Holborn. The death of his own father
and of Richard Powell, his father-in-law, had filled the house with relatives
and in effect brought to an end what Samuel Hartlib was by then calling
“Mr. Milton’s Academy.”17
In the portion of the biography devoted to his years at the Miltons’,
Edward Phillips memorialized his uncle’s “excellent judgment and way of
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26 The End of Learning

Teaching” and, by extension, the reading practices involved. “By Teaching,”

Phillips says, “he in some measure increased his own knowledge, having the
reading of all these Authors as it were by Proxy.”18 Milton would of course
have deliberately formulated his curriculum based upon his own vast reading
experience, but we can infer from Phillips’s description that Milton was
rereading “by Proxy” while instructing his pupils. Phillips depicts a pedagog-
ical environment in which students, seated together in Milton’s home, take
turns reading from his annotated books, sharing their translations aloud, and
participating in a conversation with and about the text that involves Milton’s
written memoranda and, certainly, his oral instruction. Phillips’s account,
therefore, suggests that Milton’s books became communal property while he
tutored his pupils and that he might have anticipated this when he wrote in
them during this period.
Leaving aside for the moment assessments of the validity of Milton’s
readings of Euripides, of his metrical and philological proposals for the
improvement of his Greek text, I want first to consider the kinds of com-
ment Milton made and, more importantly, why he made them.19 Through-
out the two volumes, Milton writes out full, discursive comments in Latin
where he makes his presence overt and thus the issue of his identity as
reader an integral part of the comment. In his pre-1638 hand, he questions
his own authority as he alters a word and thereby calls for a plainer sense to
line 1145 of Helena, “The sense will be plainer, unless I am mistaken” (ET
2:584). Similarly, in another pre-1638 annotation, Milton wonders whether
proper usage will allow him to change the position of a word in the Latin
translation to clarify its syntax: “If linguistic usage permit, I would transfer
pedens” (ET 1:525). These more tentative early comments show the young
scholar self-consciously working through the volumes and commenting,
most likely to himself, albeit with the knowledge that someone in the future
may be reading critically over his shoulder and evaluating his judgments
with superior knowledge.
In the earlier marginalia, Milton fashions his voice anxiously in relation
to tradition, interjecting puto ego (“I think” or “I consider”) primarily as a
means of differentiating his interpretation from the printed scholia included
with his edition. When he corrects the Greek text in his pre-1638 hand, Mil-
ton puts on display the same categories of discursive style that he will employ
in future evaluations of his reading text, though he makes his own presence a
less definite rhetorical feature of his statement: “This way the sense is plainer
and more elegant” (ET 2:486). After 1638, he introduces one emendation by
claiming, “I consider this to be more correct and elegant” (ET 1:484). The
comment, in Milton’s post-1638 hand, interjects the first person singular
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Repairing the Ruins 27

into the note with puto (“I consider”), rather than simply emending the text,
as he does in so many other places. He systematically introduces rectius and
elegantus, more correct and elegant, as if they were analytic categories emerg-
ing from his own interpretation, bearing witness to his critical judgment.
Positing an authorial identity in judgments announced by the post-
1638 hand becomes a repetitive act of self-mythologizing analogous to the
formulaic incantation of cogito, pronouncing “I think (this)” as a way to
proclaim “I was capable of thinking (this).” The implication of authorial
possessiveness surrounds the later notes, affecting their mode of address, as
when a note marks ownership of an ingenious but suspect onomatopoetic
etymology: “I think the word [i.e., διεκαναξε (diekanaxe)] comes from the
sound of drinking wine” (ET 2:440). When he thinks a word should be
omitted, Milton writes ejiciendum puto and explains his rationale instead of
simply crossing out the word in his Greek text (ET 2:685). When he adds
to a text, a rhetorical pause announces the weight of authority he wishes to
grant his own marginalia: “The verse demands it, and I think it should be
supplied” (ET 2:716).
Marginal annotations are not ordinarily read for their tone, but I
would argue that this is because of modern assumptions about the place of
marginalia in a volume that “belongs” to the “private” library of an “individ-
ual” collector, assumptions that have little to do with the actual reading prac-
tices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Applying the logic of
modern consumption to a book owned by Milton implies a misconception
about early modern libraries and a commensurate underestimation of mar-
ginalia’s communal utility. Readers, it is sometimes assumed, tend to address
only themselves in the margins of their books—by composing aides-mémoire
in the form of topic heading and summary—though early modern (like
many modern) readers were, of course, often adversarial in their annotating
practices, disputing with their texts as if with the authors themselves and reg-
istering that active engagement in lively marks and comments.20 While both
verbal and nonverbal notation indicate the character of a reader’s interaction
with a text, the tone of verbal comments, as in Milton’s Euripides marginalia,
discloses the construction of a mode of address and thus an audience, which
in turn proposes a conception of the material book as a communicative
medium in excess of its printed text. Thus the book becomes the hub of a set
of perceived relationships among readers extending beyond the horizon of a
specific act of textual interpretation.
If these notes convey something of the tone of Milton’s address, they
nevertheless leave ambiguous the identity of his audience. Milton could, after
all, be addressing himself to a time in which he would return to the volumes
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28 The End of Learning

an older and more experienced reader. Conversely, he may be imagining a

conversation with a future owner of his books. Again, the rhetoric of a cer-
tain kind of inclusion—where the information provided is, strictly speaking,
unnecessary—hints at Milton’s imagination of a broader audience for his
conversation with the text. He begins an annotation to the Latin translation
of Suppliants, line 530, “That verse should rather be rendered thus,” instead
of simply writing his correction alongside the faulty verse and crossing it out
(ET 2:30). To whom does he write this?
Other kinds of comments in the post-1638 hand suggest another con-
ception of the margins of texts: not merely a space for correction (even of
self ), they become a space of pedagogy. Milton’s marginalia offer exemplary
intellectual positions and thus demonstrate the processes at work in reflect-
ing upon a text. Placing readers of his volumes at one remove from the text
itself, Milton’s comments and corrections attune readers to a debate about
the text in order to prompt imitation. If the annotations reconfigure the
margin of the book as a pedagogical space, they do so by defamiliarizing the
intuitive recognition of meaning and thus making explicit the intellectual
processes involved in the act of interpretation. In this way, Milton’s margina-
lia provide a model for what he calls “a well continu’d and judicious convers-
ing among pure Authors,” in which “conversing” means not only
“discussing,” but also (from the Latin conversari) “associating” or living
among (YP 2:373; cf. 1:883).
The correction to Hippolytus, line 998, shows Milton marking up his
book with novice readers of the Greek in mind. Here, again in the post-1638
hand, Milton’s annotation takes the form of a repeated Latin translation of
his Greek correction to the Greek text (see figure 1). In this passage, Hip-
polytus—defending himself against his father’s charge that he raped his step-
mother, Phaedra—invokes his friends as character witnesses. Hippolytus
assures his father that his friends are not the kind of people who seek to do
wrong, that they are so blameless as to think it shameful merely to “report”
shameful things or to perform wicked services in exchange for friendship.
Milton changes the word apaggellein (“to report” shame) to epaggellein (“to
order to do” shameful things). Changing the vague hint of evil gossip to a
command to do evil, Milton renders the damning behavior in a crisper
idiom, one that the editorial tradition has subsequently accepted.21 By
accommodating the sense of the word—adapting the diction to a more deco-
rous relation with the play’s overall design—Milton draws a more profound
moral distinction in order to deepen the pathos of Hippolytus’s response to
the accusation.22 Since Hippolytus is Artemis’s “best friend among men”
(l.1332), it is crucial to the tragic structure that Theseus makes the whole
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Repairing the Ruins 29

question of guilt hinge on the evidence of friendship when he laments, “If

there were / some token now, some mark to make the division / clear
between friend and friend, the true and the false” (ll.924–26).23 As it hap-
pens, Theseus is as bad at interpreting moral character as he is at interpreting
Phaedra’s letter, since he has no recourse to the context Hippolytus, using
Theseus’ own criterion of friendship, tries to supply. Milton’s emendation
properly focuses the dramatic climax of the play on Hippolytus’s severe, mor-
alizing rectitude in contrast with the indecisive evidence of friendship. Thus
Hippolytus tries to contradict “the dead, surest of witnesses [marturos]”
(l.972) with a vain wish: “If I had one more witness [martus] to my character
/ if I were tried when she still saw the light, / deeds would have helped you as
you scanned your friends / to know the true from the false” (ll.1022–25).
Unfortunately, as the Nurse says, “words are wounds” (l.342), precisely
because words have the power to indict Hippolytus and therefore to set in
motion “deeds,” as in his father’s curse, which leads to his demise. The inde-
terminacy of verbal evidence—both the oral testimony of friends and the
written accusation of the dead Phaedra—represents the epistemological crisis
at issue in the play. The distinction emphasized by Milton’s emendation is
crucial: by focusing our attention on the force of indeterminate words to
cause determinate action, as in a military order or a divine annunciation,
Milton elucidates the tragic irony at the heart of Hippolytus’s futile response
to his father, since it is in fact his austere behavior that has convicted him in
the minds of his accusers.24
Given that Milton was such a skilled reader of the ancient Greek as to
be able to correct diction based on interpretation of context, idiom, and
(sometimes) conventions of versification, one wonders why he was rereading
the Latin translation at all, much less repeating a correction twice. In his
early grappling with the original, he, like any Renaissance student of classical
Greek, might well have relied upon the Latin from time to time as an aid to
comprehension. Or he may have imagined that some later owner of the book
would be helped along in this way. The repetition of his Latin translation
neque inhonesta petere (“not to solicit shameful deeds”) strongly encourages
the student-reader to return to the Greek original and serves to illustrate the
thrust of the emendation for the novice reading the Latin only as well as for
the intermediate reader working primarily through the Greek at the top of
the page. (The different functions of printed marginal glosses and paraphras-
tic footnotes in, say, Norton editions provide a modern analogue.) In all like-
lihood, as I mentioned earlier, he used these very books when working as a
schoolmaster, particularly in the education of his nephews, whom he taught
from his home with the volumes in his personal library.
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30 The End of Learning

The visual appearance of another set of corrections confirms the intru-

sive, meticulous, even obsessive, nature of Milton’s reading practices in a way
that cannot be communicated by mere transcription, as the modern edition
of Milton’s Works attempts to do (CM 18:309). When Milton redistributes
lines 754–771 of Suppliants (see figure 2), he modifies the text by mechani-
cally crossing out and rewriting the speech prefixes, with the explanation that
“these speeches seem rather between Adrastus and the messenger speaking
for the chorus, and so should be assigned to Adrastus” (ET 2:42). Likewise,
when he redistributes lines in Hippolytus (ll.353ff.), Milton corrects the
speech prefixes in both the Greek and the Latin texts (ET 1:527). These cor-
rections, involving the deliberate modification of the reading text rather than
simply altering the sense retrospectively by comment, seek to provide a con-
tinuity of reading experience while introducing editorial material, so that a
person reading this book for the first time could incorporate the emenda-
tions into the primary experience of the text without pausing to read the edi-
torial rationalization for them. At the same time, Milton’s marginalia
produce a de facto edition, illustrating the principles of exegesis by applying
them for students.
Furthermore, the inclusion of corrections that do not alter the Greek
text—that is, Latin corrections to the Latin translation—appears in this con-
text to have been motivated by practical pedagogy, especially when the cor-
rections carry on at some length. In this vein, Milton’s annotations include a
new translation of the opening five lines of Rhesus (ET 2:232). Milton excises
the circumlocutions, removes the repetitive and verbose poeticisms, from the
printed Latin translation, writing out a sparer literal crib that would act as a
help to students interpreting the Greek.
Preparation for teaching was the most likely cause for another variety of
marginalia, the cross-referencing note, which proves surprisingly scarce in the
extant marginalia given the extent of Milton’s reading. In the Euripides vol-
umes, the only specific edition to which Milton alludes—he mentions
Homer, but not an edition of Homer—is Scaliger’s Manilius, a pioneering
work of textual criticism (ET 2:29).25 Another book that survives from Mil-
ton’s library, the copy of Aratus with his marginal annotation, includes in his
post-1638 handwriting the comparison, “Thus Lucretius II, 991, says we are
all born of heavenly seed, and all have the same father, etc.”26 The note pro-
vides two forms of interesting evidence. First, given that, as Kelley and Atkins
suggest, this may have been one of the notes that “were a part of preparation
for teaching his nephews,” the intertextual reference implies the similarity of
Milton’s practical curriculum to the theoretical proposal in Of Education,
where he mentions the importance of “those Poets which are now counted
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Repairing the Ruins 31

most hard,” including among others “Aratus . . . and in Latin Lucretius” (YP
2:394–95).27 This account is further corroborated by the testimony of
Edward Phillips, who includes both Aratus and Lucretius when he lists some
of “the many Authors both of the Latin and Greek” that Milton had his
nephews study.28 Milton’s cross-referencing in this instance seems particu-
larly relevant to his teaching, since it links passages from two works he intro-
duces together into the curriculum in Of Education. The second point to
make about the note is that—like Phillips’s description of Milton reading
“by Proxy” when his students read or translated aloud—it helps flesh out our
picture of the pedagogic environment in Milton’s house, especially since
Phillips mentions what must have been the edition of Aratus owned and
annotated by Milton.29 In other words, the reference may have been meant
to inspire imitation. Milton handwrote the reference to Lucretius but did
not mention the place where St. Paul adopts the thought from Aratus in his
address to the Areopagus (Acts 17:28), perhaps thinking this too obvious for
mention, perhaps wanting his students to remember the appropriation on
their own.30
Euripides was one of Milton’s most abiding literary interests, next to
Homer and Ovid, and remained constantly in his thoughts, as the poet’s
daughter Deborah reported, even after his blindness prevented him from
reading at his leisure.31 As was shown above, Milton reread the volumes in
their entirety in exactly the same years during which he acted as a schoolmas-
ter to several young pupils. What effect did reading Euripides at that time
have on Milton’s writings, and what evidence can his marginalia provide of
his conception of the efficacy and potency of books? Milton had rather self-
consciously begun to figure his relations with a readership in explicitly peda-
gogical terms in the antiprelatical tracts published for “the honour and
instruction of my country” in the early 1640s (YP 1:810). Milton’s idea of
the power of a book emerges most fully, however, when he actively and pub-
licly responds to the Licensing Act of 1643. On 14 June 1643, the Long Par-
liament had issued an Order for Printing that mandated prepublication
inspection by Presbyterian censors, an effort to stem the massive influx of
dissent (both royalist and sectarian) that was adversely affecting parliamen-
tary control in the capital and drawing momentum away from parliament’s
war effort. This largely ineffective Order merged with the Stationer’s Com-
pany bid to secure rights of monopoly over the publishing trade.32 Areopagit-
ica represents Milton’s response to the threat of constricted circulation
impending as a result of the Order. How, then, did Milton conceive of read-
ers responding to a book, whether of poetry or prose, “something so written
to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die” (YP 1:810)?
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32 The End of Learning

We know from The Reason of Church Government that Milton thought

of his own work and Euripidean drama as analogously “doctrinal and exem-
plary to a Nation,” both as destined for an immediate occasion and as resur-
rected in posterity (YP 1:815). Since “the Apostle Paul himself thought it not
unworthy to insert a verse of Euripides into the text of Holy Scripture, 1
Cor. XV.33,”33 the Apostle’s citation of the verse affirms the didactic poten-
tial of Milton’s foray into the dramatic genre of the play from which it was
quoted. In fact, as Milton says in the Areopagitica, Paul “thought it no defile-
ment to insert into holy Scripture the sentences of three Greek Poets, and
one of them a Tragedian,” whereas “Julian the Apostat, and suttlest enemy to
our faith, made a decree forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning”
(YP 2:508). In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton—like Paul in the passage
Milton was so fond of—cites Euripides as he discusses the nature of the soul
and its fate after the death of the body: “Euripides in the Suppliants has given
a far better interpretation of this passage than my opponents, without know-
ing it” (YP 6:407). The identical thought, expressed by the pagan tragedian,
can resurrect a vital passage of Scripture through exact interpretation.34
If these allusions to Euripides reveal the way in which the tragedies
could become “doctrinal,” the quotation from Suppliants on the title page of
Areopagitica indicates how they could become “exemplary.” To put it in the
language of the tract, where the allusions in the preface to Samson Agonistes
and in De Doctrina Christiana affirm the activities of the “wayfaring Christ-
ian” reader, the epigraph seeks to energize the “warfaring” one. Theseus’s
retort to the Theban herald—who presumes that Athens, like Thebes, is
under the rule of a tyrannos (l.399)—was glossed as a “vituperation of
tyranny and praise of democracy” in one sixteenth-century edition:35

This is true Liberty when free born men

Having to advise the public may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserv’s high praise,
Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace;
What can be juster in a State then this?
(Areopagitica [1644], title page; orig. in italics)

Milton himself marked the speech—though not precisely these lines—in his
own copy. In his English version he effects a subtle, but interested, appropria-
tion of Euripides, making the verses more didactic than in the original by
changing the mood of the verbs from the Greek’s more straightforward pres-
ent active indicative to an auxiliary mood of permission, obligation, and con-
dition. In effect, he shifts the mood from “does” to “can, and will.” Milton
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Repairing the Ruins 33

intensifies the sense of civic duty by rendering the “Liberty” expressed by

Theseus’s hypothetical citizen—who “wishes” (thelei) to advise the city—
as the native responsibility incurred by “free born men / Having to advise
the public.”36
Voluntary participation, intrinsic to any civic debate, moves to the center
of Milton’s translation, which accentuates the choice to speak out as a conscious
act of reason. In the exordium that follows, proof of character, inhering in the
speaker as in the audience, assures “civill liberty” through the practice of civic
duty: primarily by means of “the strong assistance of God our deliverer”; sec-
ondarily through the exemplary leadership of parliament and its “indefatigable
virtues”; and ultimately in the citizens who, “mov’d inwardly in their mindes,”
speak “a certain testimony” as a challenge to the “tyranny and superstition
grounded in our principles” (YP 2:486–87).37 Milton allies the ability to speak
freely (the “can” of his epigraph), with the conscientious submission of “testi-
mony” that becomes the subject of debate within public assembly (the “will” of
his epigraph). When citizens pursue ethical action through political exigency
“in Gods esteeme,” “when complaints are freely heard, deeply consider’d, and
speedily reform’d, then is the utmost bound of civill liberty attain’d” (YP 2:487).
The excellence of parliament, the exordium repeatedly points out, is commen-
surate with its acknowledgment of and obedience to “the voice of reason from
what quarter soever it be heard speaking”: “there can no greater testimony
appear” (YP 2:490). As Melanchthon said in his oration at Luther’s funeral,
God imparts his blessings upon humankind by calling “forth prophets, the
Apostles, teachers and ministers. . . . Nor does He call only those to that warfare
who have customary power, but often He wages war against them through
teachers chosen from other ranks.”38 The “voice of reason” testifies willingly, is
heard freely, and wars against papist “tyranny and superstition.”
Milton’s argument in Areopagitica centers on his conception of reason,
which over the course of the tract undergoes something of a transformation,
not unlike Truth, “untill she be adjur’d into her own likenes” at “her Masters
second comming” (YP 2:543, 563). Books (such as Milton’s own copy of
Euripides) are instruments through which reason exercises itself in the edu-
cational process, when reason recognizes its likeness in a book: “as good
almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a man kills a reasonable crea-
ture, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe,
kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye” (YP 2:492). Just as the “eye” is
the organ that perceives the “Image,” the “reasonable creature” comprehends
“reason it selfe,” the analogy or correspondence between image and likeness;
according to Erasmus, “What the eye is to the body, reason is to the soul.”39
As a result of this apparently iconographic exchange, Stanley Fish has attacked
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34 The End of Learning

the encomiastic portion of Areopagitica as “decidedly unMiltonic,” arguing

that the logic of Milton’s praise of books seems grounded in idolatrous prac-
tices or worship of the objects themselves.40 But to characterize Milton’s eth-
ical defense of “that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books” as
idolatrous is to think too literally about the action “that slaies an immortality
rather then a life” (YP 2:493). Where Fish sees the “Image” of the letter that
“killeth,” Milton comprehends the “Image of God,” which is to say the spirit
that “giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6). In this conception of the divine logos as the
metaphorical “Image of God,” Milton is close to contemporaries such as
John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Henry Vaughan, who explicitly
deploy the trope during philosophical meditations and inquiries.41 Futher-
more, Milton had only recently revised his conception of the “Image of
God” in such a way as to locate the residuum in the human capacity for
choice. In The Reason of Church Government, as elsewhere in the course of
the antiprelatical tracts, Milton had defended the scriptural justification for
the Presbyterian “one right discipline” against the “English Dragon” of epis-
copacy on these very grounds: for “the Church hath in her immediate cure
those inner parts and affections of the mind where the seat of reason is,” the
faculty which he refers to later in the pamphlet as “the dignity of Gods
image” (YP 1:605, 857, 747, 842). But “the spurre of self-concernment”
brought on in the following years by Milton’s need to justify the freedom to
divorce—ultimately a freedom of choice—refocused Milton’s thinking about
the place of interpretation (YP 2:226).42
In the second edition of his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (Feb.
1643/4), Milton approvingly cites a work that commences with exegesis of
Genesis 1:26–27, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness. . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God cre-
ated he him” (KJV). In another connection (at YP 2:257), Milton shows that
he knew Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in Johann Buxtorf the Younger’s
Latin translation, Doctor perplexum (Basel, 1629). Maimonides’ argument, so
influential in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, centers on explaining
that the “image” of God is incorporeal, that is, that our “likeness” does not
comprise a physical resemblance but rather our “intellectual apprehension,”
or “the divine intellect conjoined with man.”43 Milton, like Maimonides,
partitions the “image of God” from idolatry, a division that is absolute. For
Maimonides, it is paradoxically by means of this “image” and “likeness” that
humanity upholds the Law, which is itself based on the destruction of idola-
try and the worship of the one true God. In the exposition on Genesis 1:27
that commences Tetrachordon, Milton pursues a similar method to a differ-
ent end. By “this Image of God,” Milton explains, “wherein man was created,
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Repairing the Ruins 35

Figure 1. Milton’s emendation to his copy of Euripides, Hippolytus, line 998. Repro-
duced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Don d. 27,
p. 576).
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36 The End of Learning

is meant Wisdom, Purity, Justice, and rule over all creatures. All which being
lost in Adam, was recover’d with gain by the merits of Christ” (YP 2:587).
Thus Milton explicates the phrase “Image of God” in the light of Pauline
theology, favoring a typological interpretation that was common to diverse
exponents of reformist doctrine throughout the seventeenth century.44 In De
Doctrina Christiana (1.18), Milton argues that “the inner man is regenerated
by God through the word and the spirit so that his whole mind [tota mente]
is restored to the image of God . . .” (YP 6:461; CM 15:366). Hence, “the
faithful” have “God as their instructor [edocti a Deo],” and the regeneration
of man’s “intellect and will” emerges with “the restoration of the will to its
former liberty” (YP 6:478, 462; CM 16:6; 15:370).
This “restoration,” then, must be logically consistent with the effort to
preserve “the pretious life-blood of a master spirit” since the ascent to spiri-
tual regeneration results from the exercise of reason (YP 2:493). Milton
makes the case in Of Education that all knowledge of God proceeds from
observation of the “sensible” to the “intelligible”: “[B]ecause our understand-
ing cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so
cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning
over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be
follow’d in all discreet teaching” (YP 2:367–69). This passage makes explicit
the epistemological assumptions underlying the educational system at work
in Areopagitica. The intellect moves from material observation toward theo-
retical assertion, from inductive perceptions toward deductive demonstra-
tions of truth.45 Insofar as the theoretical takes the form of the theological in
Milton’s formulation, his logic descends ultimately from Aquinas:

All creatures, even those lacking intelligence, are ordered to God as to

their ultimate end, and they achieve this end insofar as they share
some similarity with him. Intellectual creatures attain him in a more
special manner, namely by understanding him through their proper
activity. To understand God then must be the end of the intellectual
creature. . . . A thing is more intimately united with God insofar as it
attains to his substance, which comes about when it knows something
of the divine substance, which requires some likeness of him. There-
fore the intellectual substance tends toward divine knowledge as to its
ultimate end.46

Aquinas here makes explicit the fundamental rationale for philosophical pur-
suits in the context of Christian piety, a rationale that is not, contrary to the
assertions of Fish and others, considered idolatrous in most seventeenth-century
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Repairing the Ruins 37

Figure 2. Milton’s emendation to his copy of Euripides, Suppliants, lines 754–71.

Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Don d.
28, p. 42).
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38 The End of Learning

English Protestant thought. The editors of the Yale prose works, in their
annotations to the methodological passage in Of Education, surround
Milton’s sentence with echoes from Plato, Dury, Vives, Comenius, and
others. Yet the “commonplace” derives the force of its conviction from
Aquinas, who provides the logical connection between the Miltonic
defense of “the Image of God” in books and the intellectual ascent from the
inductive contemplation of the sensible to the deductive, if limited, compre-
hension of the intelligible.
Milton’s emendations to the Stephanus Euripides demonstrate the prin-
ciple in action. The “orderly conning” over the “visible and inferior” text
employs the same logical progression as observation of the natural or “sensible”
world, the Book of Nature. The hermeneutic circle—building a perspicuous
context out of the aggregate of analytic details—represents an analogous
process, as we have seen in Milton’s emendation to Hippolytus. A venerable
tradition of Christian hermeneutics has linked the operation of reason in this
way to the speculative approach to truth.47
To the extent that readers exercise their reason, they approach the “end
. . . of learning,” for by this act only do they regain “to know God aright, and
out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may
the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the
heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection” (YP 2:366–67). If in
the imitation of Christ we strive “to repair the ruins of our first parents,”
then the specific form of that imitation consists in our exercising the rem-
nant of divine “likeness,” the “Image of God” that is reason. Arguing, as
Maimonides did, against literal interpretation of Scripture, Milton reminds
his readers that many “of most renowned vertu have sometimes by trans-
gressing, most truly kept the law” (YP 2:588). By means of inspired trans-
gression against the material letter of the book, a reader who repairs the ruins
of a text by emendation—as Milton did in correcting his copy of Euripi-
des—evinces godly reason. This means that errors (even of typography) relay
to readers a didactic message, indirectly reminding them of a fall into print.
Thus the duty of an educated reader is “to repair the ruins” of this textual
fall. Restoring an Edenic “spirit” of the text, the reader must wrest it away
from the “letter” of its manifestation, but always with the knowledge that
this “spirit” remains accessible to us only through the material letter modi-
fied, emended with spiritual intent. Typography dovetails with typology.
It is as though, for Milton, the truth of a fallen text can only exist in the
record of its correction, not in the correction alone. The very transmutability
of the material text effects the transformation of its reader because perception
of the “spirit” of a text so often registers in perception and modification of an
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Repairing the Ruins 39

“error” in a book. Milton depicts books as open to inspired modification,

while still insisting on an essential conception of their verbal content, “the
purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them” (YP
2:492). If these two notions of textuality seem mutually exclusive, Milton
asks us to remember that the essence of truth, like the intention of an author,
can only be achieved provisionally after the Fall, by a reader who can only
partially “repair the ruins” he or she has been bequeathed.
In consequence of the Fall, as Browne remarks in the Pseudodoxia Epi-
demica, there is no longer “a Paradise or unthorny place of knowledge.” Our
postlapsarian “understandings being eclipsed . . . we must betake our selves
to waies of reparation, and depend upon the illumination of our endeavours.
For thus we may in some measure repair our primary ruines, and build our
selves men again.”48 Browne’s epistemological argument bears a structural
resemblance to the position Milton articulates with respect to knowledge in
Of Education and Areopagitica. Just as Browne believes that there exist certain
“waies of reparation,” so Milton famously encourages the worldly virtue of
the vita activa: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d
and unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of
the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and
heat” (YP 2:515). Far from suggesting an idolatrous insistence upon the let-
ter or indeed the object, Milton’s ethical defense of books against prepublica-
tion censorship—his likening the intellectual content of books to the “Image
of God”—emphasizes the active exercise of reason as a corrective measure
against just such literal-mindedness.
To return to the language of Areopagitica’s epigraph, the ability to
“speak free” stems from the right to interpret or differ in interpretation of
Scripture and, therefore, depends upon the freedom to do so—the “can” of
the epigraph. This makes for the apparent paradox expressed in the chapter
of De Doctrina Christiana devoted to biblical hermeneutics (1.30). Even
though “each passage of Scripture has only a single sense”—“the scriptures
. . . are plain and sufficient in themselves,” and “no inferences should be
made from the text, unless they necessarily follow from what is written”—
nevertheless “every believer is entitled to interpret the scriptures . . . for him-
self ” (YP 6:580, 581, 583). Each believer “has the spirit, who guides truth,
and he has the mind of Christ” (YP 6:583). Hence the centrality of scriptural
interpretation: “If studied carefully and regularly, they [Scriptures] are an
ideal instrument for educating even unlearned readers in those matters
which have most to do with salvation” (YP 6:578–79). The problem of inter-
pretation, however, broadens when considered in the context of Areopagitica,
where the consideration of all books, not just sacred Scriptures, is at stake.
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40 The End of Learning

The category of “things indifferent,” as against “those matters which have

most to do with salvation,” is therefore constitutive of the class of objects
open to interpretation as an act of reason.
As soon as interpretation becomes necessary, so does justification. An
interpretation, that is, will always be subject to challenge, and therefore must
rise above other competing interpretations in order to sustain its own claim
to validity. Interpretation, of course, first depends on recognizing the proper
object of contemplation. The “neighboring differences, or rather indiffer-
ences” or “brotherly dissimilitudes” that Milton considers the objects under
discussion in Areopagitica seem to have the ability to bring about “things not
yet constituted in religion” and, moreover, to assist in the “reforming of
Reformation it self ” (YP 2:541, 553). The problem, then, is at least in part
deciding what belongs in what category. In a tract heartily endorsed by Mil-
ton in Areopagitica (at YP 2:560–61), Robert Greville had collapsed the dis-
tinction between “things indifferent” and things necessary to salvation.
Following the Smectymnuans, Greville writes that it is “Papall, Tyrannical”
for the episcopacy to try to differentiate between indifference and necessity:
“They will do more than Adam did: He gave names to Things according to
their Natures; they will give Natures according to their owne fancies.”49 Gre-
ville asserts that “No Thing, No Act, is Indifferent . . . in it selfe, in the thing,
but either necessary to be done, (if Best) or unlawfull to be done, if Bad.” On
the other hand, “if Right Reason have not, or cannot determine me; to
which side soever I incline, and rest, I sin; because I act Unreasonably: being
determined by humour, fancy, passion, a wilfull Will.” The category of indif-
ference is the province solely of right reason; the Prelates “have no power to
determine what is Indifferent.”50 Greville goes further than Milton in arguing
for what amounts to a libertarian agenda. Unlike the view Milton is develop-
ing in Areopagitica, Greville’s Discourse—following his earlier treatise, The
Nature of Truth, its Union and Unity with the Soule—propounds the belief
that any man who knows the good will do it, that “recta ratio,” as he argues
circularly, can itself only be defined by “recta ratio”: “But who shall tell us
what is Recta Ratio? I answer, Recta Ratio.”51 Milton’s earlier conception of
virtue had, like Greville’s, derived from the Socratic paradox that doing good
is not an act of will, since no one knowingly does evil.52 As he writes in An
Apology Against a Pamphlet, “the first and chiefest office of love, begins and
ends in the soule, producing those happy twins of her divine generation
knowledge and vertue” (YP 1:892).53 Areopagitica of course concentrates on
a different but related pair of twins.
In Areopagitica, the whole matter turns on freedom of choice—the
“will” of Milton’s epigraph. At a critical moment, the speaker argues
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Repairing the Ruins 41

against those “who imagin to remove sin by removing the matter of sin” (YP
2:527). Milton’s philosophical play on the word “matter” induces exactly the
kind of consciousness for which he is arguing. The “matter of sin,” he
implies, is both the incarnation of fallibility that is the flesh and the pattern
of thought that engenders such a lapse in spirit. “Matter,” then, is both the
problem and product of sinfulness in a fallen world, a concept that Milton
represents when he collapses form into substance in a moment of ludic con-
centration, cause becoming interchangeable with effect. Mind, ordinarily
held in contradistinction to matter, emerges indistinct from the material
world; matter, charged with a vitality ordinarily reserved for descriptions of
mind, becomes indistinguishable from the consciousness that saturates it.
But the prose describing the desired removal of sin soon takes on language
analogous at once to the expulsion of the cosmos from a divine first sub-
stance and to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise: “Suppose we
could expell sin by this means; look how much we thus expell of sin, so
much we expell of vertue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove
that, and ye remove them both alike” (YP 2:527). “Matter” is not merely the
location of sin, as it is in more orthodox conceptions, but paradoxically man-
ifests both “sin” and “vertue.”54 And we, in turn, merely discard meaning in
the reduction of Milton’s telling pun to one or the other possibility.
Reading matter, therefore, cannot be the origin of sin, no more than
knowledge itself originates disobedience. If reason is the soul’s very “being”
(PL 5.487), and “reason also is choice” (PL 3.108), then in order for “each
man to be his own chooser” (YP 2:514), “the Church” cannot have the seat
of reason “in her immediate cure” (YP 1:747). On the contrary, the responsi-
bility must fall upon the “umpire conscience” (PL 3.195). In the Christian
Morals, Sir Thomas Browne appositely casts conscience in the role of judge:
“Conscience only, that can see without Light, sits in the Areopagy and dark
Tribunal of our Hearts, surveying our Thoughts and condemning their
obliquities.”55 The only redress for what Milton calls “the fall of learning” is
freedom of conscience: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue
freely according to conscience, above all liberties” (YP 2:520, 560). Individ-
ual conscience, guided by reason and the Holy Spirit, awakens the interpre-
tive faculty to choice, serves as our connection to the divine logos. As he says
in De Doctrina Christiana, “the phenomenon of Conscience, or right reason
[recta ratio]” gives evidence of the existence of God (YP 6:132; CM 14:28).
God wills that all may be saved, which is why Milton argues—following
Arminius—that election is simply the salvation available to all believers:
“The condition upon which God’s decision depends . . . entails the action of
a will which he himself has freed and a belief which he himself demands
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42 The End of Learning

from men. If this condition is left in the power of men who are free to act, it
is absolutely in keeping with justice and does not detract at all from the
importance of divine grace” (YP 6:189). The argument of Areopagitica simi-
larly inheres in the dilemma posed by freedom of choice. As he says, “many
there be that complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam to transgresse,
foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose,
for reason is but choosing” (YP 2:527). God “trusts him [man] with the gift
of reason to be his own chooser” because obedience to God, unless a con-
scious choice, is meaningless (YP 2:514; cf. PL 3.103–11).
Therefore, by analogy, human beings must have a certain capacity to
will change if they are to learn. “He who makes you teachable,” says Eras-
mus, “demands nonetheless your endeavor toward learning.” It is “reason,”
for Milton as for Erasmus, “from which the will is born,” and although
“obscured by sin,” it was “not altogether extinguished” by Original Sin;
rather, as Erasmus argues: “If the power to distinguish good and evil and
the will of God had been hidden from men, it could not be imputed to
them if they made the wrong choice. If the will had not been free, sin
could not have been imputed, for sin would cease to be sin if it were not
voluntary, save when error or the restriction of the will is itself the fruit of
the sin.”56 Not only sin, but also piety depends upon the freedom to taste
what Erasmus pointedly refers to as “the fruit of the sin.” The matter of
them both is the same. For it is not the fruit but our intention that makes
the sin what it is. If an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God
should not have created beings capable of choosing to transgress his law,
then as Irenaeus argues “neither would what is good be grateful to them,
nor communion with God be precious, nor would the good be very much
sought after, which . . . would be implanted of its own accord and without
their concern.” Irenaeus finds his way out of the supposedly aporistic
“trilemma” (God is benevolent and omnipotent, yet evil exists) by finding
the benevolence of God redolent of his will to educate us: “being good
would be of no consequence” if humankind “were so by nature rather than
by will” and thus became “possessors of good spontaneously, not by
choice.”57 God formed humankind, as the Father says in Paradise Lost,
“Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (3.99). Our condition in this
world necessitates choice, and choice depends on the presence of opposi-
tions (or at least distinct alternatives) from which to choose: “Assuredly we
bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that
which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary” (YP 2:515). Mil-
ton’s recognition of the dilemmas that necessarily face each person in this
world fostered one of his most characteristic habits of thought, a pattern in
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Repairing the Ruins 43

his works memorably described by C. S. Lewis as “the co-existence, in a

live and sensitive tension, of apparent opposites.”58 Given “the state of
man,” Milton asks, “what wisdome can there be to choose, what conti-
nence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill” (YP 2:514)? In recogni-
tion of this logical dilemma, “the question of censorship,” as Edward
Tayler puts it, becomes in Areopagitica “ultimately a question of reason in
relation to freedom of choice.”59
Milton therefore depicts the process of learning as a trajectory from choice
to recognition, or, as he says in Of Education, employing Aristotelian terminol-
ogy, from “that act of reason which in the Ethics is call’d Proairesis” (YP 2:396)
to anagnorisis. Hence the figure of the teacher that ends the brief tractate: teach-
ing is “not a bow for every man to shoot in . . . but will require sinews almost
equall to those which Homer gave Ulysses” (YP 2:415). In a counterintuitive
move, Milton figures the teacher as Telemachus, not Odysseus. Only
Telemachus has “sinews almost equall” to Odysseus’s in Book 21 of the Odyssey,
which is, I think, Milton’s way of suggesting that one is both taught and
becomes a teacher in the act of recognizing likeness: Telemachus becomes most
like himself when he demonstrates that he is most like Odysseus.
Because this comprehension of likeness requires a contrasting percep-
tion in order to achieve definition, Milton encourages the recognition of dif-
ference, or at least of “brotherly dissimilitudes” that come together to form
the Temple of Solomon, the ruins that reformation seeks to repair. In short,
the opportunity to correct error resides in its perception and therefore in the
possibility of error’s existence. Except in the recognition of difference—the
differentiation between “cunning resemblances”—how can we come to see
truth in its best likeness?

Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together
almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and inter-
woven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resem-
blances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were
impos’d on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out, and sort asunder,
were not more intermixt. It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted,
that the knowledge of Good and evill as two twins cleaving together
leapt forth into the World. (YP 2:514)

Except through the reading of books, how can we find the materials that
instigate choice between one portion of truth and another, when the very
structure of truth can only inhere in their composite? Therefore Milton
encourages us, “Read any books what ever come to thy hands, for thou art
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44 The End of Learning

sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine the matter” (YP 2:511).
Repairing the ruins of England’s “spirituall architecture” entails “an incessant
labor” like that which Psyche faced: “to cull out, and sort asunder” (YP
2:555, 514). Thus the effort on behalf of truth by its very nature entails the
considered sorting of opinion, so that what is for royalists the object of with-
ering satire—proliferation of “plainly partiall” expression, even of “unchosen
books”—is for Milton a mere statement of our condition in “this World”
(YP 2:510, 530). For Milton, it is not the publication of controversial pam-
phlets but conversely the inquisitional Licensing Order that “may be held a
dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves, for the tree that bore
it” (YP 2:507). Like the fruit, books tempt with the dangerous knowledge of
their arguments, but the fruit, Milton assures us, is not the sin. Book-like
“Dragons teeth” may metamorphose into armed men, such as the “warfar-
ing” Spartoi that sprang up before Cadmus—seeds, as it were, that sort
themselves out.60 But the chief labor of reformation activates a “Nation of
Prophets, of Sages, of Worthies” working at the “defence of beleaguer’d
Truth” in “the mansion house of liberty”: “there be pens and heads there, sit-
ting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and
idea’s wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the
approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting
to the force of reason and convincement” (YP 2:554).
When Milton translates or emends Euripides, as when he hopes for the
“reforming of Reformation” through “books promiscuously read,” he
advances reasonable choice as the necessary condition for the pursuit of truth
(YP 2:553, 517). Freedom of conscience demands freedom of choice, a con-
dition that in turn entails a “perpetuall progression” of alternatives, if reason
or virtue is to be exercised (YP 2:543). By a parallel logic, the closing verse of
John’s Gospel resists closure: “And there are also many other things which
Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even
the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” (21:25,
KJV). That Parliament (in the very “mansion house of liberty”) would pur-
sue such a policy as represented by the Licensing Order—an even more lit-
eral effort at containment—inspired Milton’s defense of the integrity of
reason as a judge of knowledge’s value. Milton’s practices as a reader and
annotator remain faithful to the paradoxical effort to sustain pure intentions
in a fallen world. By scripting their own transmuting exchanges with and
within books, readers participate in an ongoing textual conversation. Milton
presents an excellent example of how that educational metamorphosis, provi-
sionally repairing the ruins of our imperfect and fallen knowledge, arouses
the “life beyond life” that is a book’s progeny down through history.
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Chapter Two
Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the
Divorce Tracts

Among the vast archives of the British Library there is a small artifact whose
very form expresses the ambivalence characteristic of relations between Jews
and Christians in early modern England. The volume is a compendium of
twenty-one pamphlets bound together and entitled, Tracts Relating to the
Jews, 1608–1724.1 The contents of the volume range from virulent anti-
Semitic invective to vagaries of conversion narrative to so-called philo-
Semitic works. While the earliest pamphlet dates from the year of Milton’s
birth, the collection as a whole is the product of a later moment in which
self-conscious scrutiny of Jewish and Christian relations was rapidly intensi-
fying throughout Britain and Europe. On the inside of the back cover, on
the lower left hand side, “BOUND 1940” is stamped.
On the eve of the Shoah the book was bound or, perhaps, “recollected.”
If the artifact is emblematic of the conflicting desires to authenticate, recu-
perate, tolerate, or convert the Jews, the gesture of its anonymous editor is
also informed by the ambivalence legible in retrospect in its twentieth-cen-
tury context. I begin the chapter with this anecdote not only because it indi-
cates the historical situation in which Milton sought to rehabilitate the
Mosaic Law in the divorce tracts, but also because the book represents two
constitutive, mutually defining moments in the history of Anglo-Jewish rela-
tions. More specifically, both the 1640s and the 1940s witnessed complex
and lasting shifts in the cultural imagination of these relations, as well as
related changes in affective attitudes. It is, moreover, impossible to think
about early modern attitudes toward the Jews and ideas of Jewishness with-
out also calling to mind the Holocaust. What seem to be philo-Semitic atti-
tudes in one period may have the most disastrous implications three
centuries later.

45
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46 The End of Learning

It is in the light of this recognition that I examine the figure of the

Hebraic pedagogue in Milton’s divorce tracts. To begin with, Milton’s philo-
Semitic engagement with Hebraic tradition ought to be contrasted with the
limited concept of toleration discernible in the following remark from Obser-
vations on the Articles of Peace: “while we detest Judaism, we know our selves
commanded by St. Paul, Rom. 11. to respect the Jews, and by all means to
endeavor thir conversion” (YP 3:326).2 When Milton concedes to his audi-
ence that “we detest Judaism”—and recall that he has just referred to the
accusation of toleration for Judaism as “A most audacious calumny”—he
betrays his own difficulty reconciling intellectual commitment to compas-
sion, sympathy to the conception of Christian succession (YP 3:326). In
other words, “respect” and “conversion” would seem to be mutually exclu-
sive. Milton imagines a scenario in which Christians are teaching the Jews,
supplanting Christianity’s living ancestor as pedagogue in order to bring
about Jewish conversion. The desire to convert the Jews creates what I will
call the paradox of learned succession: Milton insists that learned Christians
cannot dismiss the Mosaic Law, but at the same time sees Christianity as a
fulfillment of Judaism’s promise.
Milton’s conception of the role of the Jews tends to equate their time
with the past, as Jeffrey Shoulson has convincingly argued, and thus to fos-
silize what was in fact a living culture.3 However, the increased efforts during
the 1640s to reappraise the origins of the Old Testament in the actual texts
of Hebrew Scripture as well as to readmit the Jews to England and convert
them to Christianity help elucidate Milton’s attitudes toward the inheritance
of Hebraic thought. Writers in England during the Civil War of the 1640s
articulated a renewed intellectual commitment to the Mosaic Law and even
at times a humanitarian interest in the continuing fates of the people of the
Covenant. Intellectual positions staked out by Milton, attitudes and habits
of thought cultivated particularly in the divorce tracts, contributed learned
cultural motivation to the emerging readmission debate of the 1650s.
Although as far as we know Milton participated in that debate only indi-
rectly, his contribution was significant enough to draw the attention of sev-
eral of his contemporaries. Milton’s tracts function within the broader
dogmatic environment as a kind of intellectual prehistory to the readmission
movement. Having rethought the pedagogical inheritance of the Mosaic Law
in the course of the controversy over divorce, Milton advocated the vindica-
tion of Hebraic thought as an especially radical adjunct to the foment of rev-
olutionary ideas.
Throughout the divorce tracts, Milton employs the metaphor of the
schoolmaster to represent continuity in the relations between Hebrew and
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Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 47

Christian scriptural traditions, referred to by synecdoche as the Law and the

Gospel. Yet the metaphor of the Law as a teacher derives most immediately
from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in which the Apostle argues for precisely
the opposite valuation: “But before faith came, we were kept under the law,
shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the
law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified
by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster”
(Gal. 3:23–25, KJV). This identification of Hebrew Scripture with instruc-
tion and guidance can of course be traced to the fact that the “Law” (νομος)
translates the Hebrew title Torah, which is based on a stem meaning “to teach,
to guide.”4 But Paul introduces the metaphor of the schoolmaster so that he
can argue for the irrevocable disruption of the Law’s influence under the new
covenant of grace. The Epistle to Galatians recommends the subordination,
appropriation, and ultimate transumption of Hebrew Scripture.5
Thus the narrative of the schoolmaster extends into an allegory of inher-
itance: “the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant,
though he be lord of all; But is under tutors and governors until the time
appointed of the father” (Gal. 4:1–2, KJV). The temporal dimension of peda-
gogy as a metaphor for succession is somewhat obscured by the translation of
παιδαγωγος as “schoolmaster.” In the Greek, paidagogos signifies a household
servant or slave who escorted a boy to and from school and served as custodian
and disciplinary figure until the child reached maturity.6 Thus Paul explains
that the Law, serving as a protection against transgressions, had a pedagogical
function only temporarily, in the period before Christ appeared as Abraham’s
“offspring.”7 Recalling Isaac and Ishmael, Paul goes on to elaborate the transfer
of the birthright from the firstborn to the heir, which confers onto the allegory
the further significance held in the distinction between birth by “flesh” and
birth by spiritual “promise.” As the Geneva gloss of 1560 spells out, “Agar and
Sina represente the Lawe: Sara and Ierusalem ye Gospel: Ismael ye Iewish Syn-
agogue, and Isaac the Church of Christ” (marginal gloss at Gal. 4:22–24). The
mothers are the two testaments, and their offspring embody the two commu-
nities of believers; the pupil or ward assumes his inheritance in a way that is
analogous to the child of a lawful marriage rather than, as it were, the offspring
of an adulterous affair.
Before turning to the divorce tracts, I want first to show briefly how
Paul’s metaphor of the schoolmaster functions in the writings Milton pub-
lished the year before he entered the divorce controversy. In The Reason of
Church Government, Milton adduces this passage from Galatians as a means
of challenging the prelacy’s claim to authority based in scriptural precedent.
If Christianity might be said to be the student of Judaism, how then can the
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48 The End of Learning

legitimacy or authenticity of the Christian faith be independently ensured

for believers who do not subscribe to the institutions of the established
church? Milton first needs to curtail the influence of the ancient Jewish
priesthood, from Aaron on down, as a model that could be said to have
informed the apostolic church and might therefore be used to justify the
Episcopal form of church hierarchy.
In matters of discipline Milton asks “how the Church-government
under the Gospell can be rightly call’d an imitation of that in the old Testa-
ment? for that the Gospell is the end and fulfilling of the Law, our liberty
also from the bondage of the Law I plainly reade” (YP 1:763). In this inter-
pretation, Milton is close to the early reformers, for whom preterite servil-
ity inheres in the bondage to outward or carnal forms of worship. “A son
and a seruant are so contrary one to an other,” says Luther, “that the same
man can not be both a sonne and a seruaunt. A sonne is free and willing, a
seruaunt is compelled and vnwilling: a sonne liueth, and resteth in faith: a
seruaunt in works.”8 Thus the doctrine of faith is in Milton’s argument
aligned with the Presbyterians, the doctrine of works with the “Romish”
bishops. By analogy, the prelacy for Milton is like “a schoolmaister of per-
ishable rites,” in that it imitates obsolete ritual and clings to an overly lit-
eral connection between the apostolic church and the earliest Jewish
priesthood (YP 1:837). As one paraphrast put it in 1642, “Politique Lawes,
Mens Traditions, Ceremonies of the Church, yea and the Law of Moses, are
such things, as are without Christ, therefore they availe not unto righteous-
nesse before God.”9
In The Reason of Church Government, Milton agrees with the reformers
in his interpretation of Paul’s metaphor of the schoolmaster. Milton explic-
itly denies that “the ripe age of the Gospell should be put to schoole againe,
and learn to governe herself from the infancy of the Law, the stronger to imi-
tate the weaker, the freeman to follow the captive, the learned to be lesson’d
by the rude.” (YP 1:763). None of “those principles which either art or inspi-
ration hath written” can be used to show that the educational authority of
the Law as schoolmaster endures (YP 1:763). Christianity, in this narrative,
has graduated from the Law’s school. John Donne vividly illustrates the idea
of the relationship between traditions as matriculation: “The Jews were as
School-boys, always spelling, and putting together Types and Figures,”
whereas “The Christian is come from school to the University, from Gram-
mar to Logick, to him that is Logos it self, the Word.”10 In the antiprelatical
tracts, Milton uses the metaphor of the schoolmaster to argue for the self-
sufficiency of the Gospel,11 thereby limiting the temporal reach of the Law’s
authority for Christians under the dispensation of grace.
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Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 49

Emphasizing the importance of recuperating and yet limiting the

influence of the Law, Luther acutely documents the paradox that will pre-
side over the compromise between finding corroboration in Jewish tradi-
tion and escaping its authority: “a good Scholemaster enstructeth &
exerciseth his scholars in reading and writing, to the ende they may come
to the knowledge of good letters & other profitable things, that afterwards
they might haue a delite in doing of that, which before when they were
constrained thervnto, they did against their willes.”12 The trope of the
schoolmaster leads Milton, too, in The Reason of Church Government, to
turn from reading to writing itself as metaphor for the precedence of the
Gospel over even the moral authority of the Law: “besides what we fetch
from those unwritten lawes and Ideas which nature hath ingraven in us,
the Gospell . . . lectures to us from her own authentick hand-writing, and
command, not copies out from the borrow’d manuscript of a subservient
scrowl, by way of imitating” (YP 1:764). The sense of history itself appears
to be at risk in this redeployment of the trope of education, as Milton all
but calls for the abrogation of the Law. The Gospel speaks directly from
Christ’s auctoritas, bearing the divine signature as “authentick hand-writ-
ing,” rather than slavishly copying out the “borrow’d manuscript” of the
Jewish tradition. The scroll of the Torah here represents the monastic tradi-
tion, a text imperfectly transmitted on the authority of human tradition,
whereas the Gospel pronounces a lecture that originates from the authority
of divine command.
At the same time, Milton cannot dispense with the idea of an authori-
tative text of Hebrew Scripture, and he therefore advances the concept of
God’s “authentick” writing when he seeks to justify the fierceness of his own
polemic in the Animadversions and elsewhere. Herein lies the basis for Mil-
ton’s critique, in An Apology Against a Pamphlet, of the “Rabbinical Scholiasts”
who “have often us’d to blurre the margent with Keri, instead of Ketiv, and
gave us this insuls rule out of their Talmud, That all words which in the Law
are writ obscenely, must be chang’d to more civill words. Fools who would teach
men to speak more decently then God thought to write.”13 Milton recalls the
tradition—from Masoretic textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible—of sup-
plying vowel points, alternative spellings, synonyms, tropes, and
euphemisms for vocalization (qere, Hebrew, “what is read”) in the margins of
the extant consonantal text (ketib, Hebrew, “what is written”). In a pejorative
tone, Milton critiques the tradition of pronouncing a marginal emendation
(qere) in place of the word or name of God as enshrined in the text (ketib). In
this way, Milton distinguishes between the relative authority of something
written over against a spoken utterance, investing the original transcription
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50 The End of Learning

(ketib) with a primary power and devaluing the mark of editorial interference
(keri).14
Yet this moment in the first edition presents readers with a revealing, self-
reflexive irony. For, twenty-four pages later, the pamphlet ends by appending a
single erratum that refers us back to the very sentence in which Milton has
excoriated the Rabbis for their emendations. The alteration Milton wishes his
readers to make to the text—“for speak correct it read”—removes any hint of
authority from the oral tradition embodied in a “marginall Keri,” denigrating
the editors as “Fools who would teach men to [read] more decently then God
thought to write.”15 This again recalls a comment by Luther, quoted above, in
which the Law “like as a good Scholemaster enstructeth & exerciseth his schol-
ars in reading and writing,” though in this case what the Rabbis “teach” dimin-
ishes in authority precisely to the extent that it supplants text with tradition.16
Milton’s change emphasizes the act of interpretation that is required for any
understanding of Scripture, the textual mediation that is necessarily involved
in reading, even prior to reading aloud. As the mild irony of Milton’s emenda-
tion to his own text demonstrates, the Talmudic distinction between “the tex-
tual Chetiv” and the “marginall Keri” does not, because it cannot, limit
interpretation: Milton’s own defense of his vituperation appropriates figures of
thought from rabbinic traditions.17 Characteristically Milton is dismissing the
Rabbis in order to engage them on this point, not just engaging them in order
to dismiss their practice.
Teaching, preaching, and prophesying are, of course, at their etymolog-
ical roots very close to one another, and so Milton connects pedagogy as a
metaphor for the relationship between traditions to the authority of the texts
from which interpretations originate. If the schoolmaster is to teach reading
and writing, he must do so from a textbook that does not contain errors.
Milton again and again transposes the issue of interpretive, which translates
in this context as spiritual, authenticity into the related topic of textual accu-
racy. Thus in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the earliest of his writ-
ings on divorce, Milton places himself in the position of a Christ-like
iconoclast bringing down the members of a priestly hierarchy who merely
support their own power by means of their traditional authority to interpret
Scripture. Milton posits that, in forming his own argument, he imitates
Christ, despite the fact that he objects to the expansive application of Jesus’
rigorous interpretation of the Law in Matthew 5:31–32, which restricts
interpretation of the Mosaic permission to divorce to what the King James
Version calls “the cause of fornication.”
Milton’s objection to the use of this New Testament proof-text as a
precedent for contemporary divorce law is historicist. His argument therefore
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Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 51

reconstructs the proper context within which the passage must be inter-
preted. Only the context of Christ’s pronouncement can regulate its applica-
tion, since exegetes must commit to a construction of His overall intention
as the court of last appeal. Milton insists that Christ’s injunction be read
within the specific context of the laxity to which the rabbinic tradition’s
overly literal interpretation of the Law had led. Christ’s stricture does not
represent a universal precept that would repeal “one jot or one tittle” of the
Law (Matt. 5:18). “For what can be more opposite and disparaging to the
cov’nant of love, of freedom, & of our manhood in grace,” Milton asks,
“then to bee made the yoaking pedagogue of new severities” (YP 2:636)?
It is precisely the novelty of the pedagogues’ “new severities” that
betrays their ideological and political motivation for interpreting Jesus’
response to the Pharisees as a cancellation of the Mosaic Law on the permis-
sion to divorce. So Jesus does not correct the Pharisees, “whose pride
deserv’d not his instruction.” Instead, he “only returns what is proper to
them. . . . But us he hath taught better, if we have eares to hear” (YP 2:307).
This is why in Matthew 5:31, Jesus “cites not the Law of Moses, but the
licencious Glosse which traduc’t the Law” (YP 2:317). In Milton’s historical
reenactment of the New Testament debate, Jesus hoists the Pharisees on
their own petard. He answers them in kind so that their spiritual error—a
lack finally of charity—will be exposed. Paradoxically, the Pharisees’ laxity
in allowing modification of God’s law has produced severity and diminished
the charity of the Law by restricting freedoms that Moses protects. Current
rigorists, Milton claims, adhere too rigidly to the letter of the wrong Law,
which is why Jesus, in refuting the lax Pharisees, “cites not the Law of Moses,
but the Pharisaical tradition falsely grounded upon that law” at Matthew
5:31 (YP 2:307).
Milton similarly co-opts the technical terminology of the rabbinic edi-
torial tradition to fashion a metaphor for prophetic exegesis: “Ye have an
author great beyond exception, Moses: and one yet greater, he who hedg’d in
from abolishing every smallest jot and tittle of precious equity contain’d in
that Law, with a more accurat and lasting Masoreth, then either the Syna-
gogue of Ezra, or the Galilean School at Tiberias hath left us” (YP 2:231).
The OED—in its rather uninspired explanation of the appropriated term,
“Masoreth”—misses Milton’s point altogether: “Milton seems (misled by the
rendering ‘tradition’) to have supposed the word to be applicable to the
exegetical traditions of the Rabbis, by which the severity of the Law was
increased.” But this is precisely what motivates Milton’s remarkable diction:
the received text is inextricable from the editorial tradition that produced it.
Time and again Milton confounds tradition in this way, binding the act of
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52 The End of Learning

interpreting or teaching to its codification or institutionalization. Masorah,

or Milton’s variant “Masoreth,” signifies most broadly the rules established to
govern the production of scribal copies of Hebrew Scripture; more narrowly,
the term refers “to the corpus of notes in copies of the Masoretic Text which
were prepared for scholarly use.”18 Thus “Masoreth” here is both text and
tradition, and Jesus in his interpretation of the Law enacts its fulfillment
through “more accurat and lasting” interpretation, generating as it were the
best text, a new record of the Law. Christ the mediator, as Milton’s trope
indicates, interposes the lens through which we begin to see the Law clearly.
Yet even Christ’s “more accurat and lasting Masoreth” must be articulated in
the terms of an interpretive tradition. Just as a “plain and Christian Talmud”
would have to be at once a Christian “teaching” and the text of such instruc-
tion (in this case, Milton’s own tract, Tetrachordon), so the “more accurat and
lasting Masoreth” will figure as a different text (YP 2:635). This new text,
then, is to be the text of “equity”—the technical hermeneutic term, derived
from ancient forensic rhetoric, whose synonym has been caritas in the Chris-
tian lexicon at least since Augustine.19
Milton makes the accuracy of the text commensurate with its “precious
equity,” such that every “jot and tittle” of the new covenant may stand for a
more enduring yet flexible text of the Law. To the extent that a “Masoreth”
conforms to the rule of “plain sense and equity” dictated by “the all-inter-
preting voice of Charity” (YP 2:309), it is “more accurat and lasting” than
the unstable, because not yet ameliorated, strictures of the Law. In Tetrachor-
don Milton inveighs against “crabbed masorites of the Letter” who will not
“mollifie a transcendence of literal rigidity . . . but must make their exposi-
tion heer [Matt. 19:9] such an obdurat Cyclops, to have but one eye for this
text, and that onely open to cruelty and enthralment” (YP 2:668–69). Lack-
ing the depth of perspective gained by “a skilfull and laborious gatherer,”
who arrives at the meaning of a passage of scripture by “comparing other
Texts,” literalists subscribe to “alphabetical servility” (YP 2:338, 282, 280).20
Christ’s “Masoreth” is set against the work of the Masoretes of
Tiberias—renowned for their linguistic accuracy and credited with the codi-
fication of Hebrew grammar—and the Synagogue of Ezra, the scribe and
prophet traditionally held to have established the canonical text of the
Hebrew Bible, who symbolized authoritative interpretation.21 Milton revisits
the historical sites of authoritative canonization, codification, and editing in
order to rewrite Christian succession from the authority of the Hebrew
Scriptures in their standard form, the authentic tradition of the Holy Land
passed on in an “unbroken line from the generation of Ezra” to the rabbinic
grammarians of Tiberias.22 As a result, Milton gives the impression that he is
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Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 53

conducting a kind of comparative religious anthropology, employing the ter-

minology of the Rabbis to corroborate a radical Protestant interpretation of
scripture and lending his argument the patina of historicism.23
What is again at issue is metaphysical priority, which the paradoxical
metaphor of temporal succession underscores. As one contemporary put it,
“Every book and letter which the Prophets wrote as Divine Scripture, for the
use of all Nations and Ages, Jesus Christ hath preserved by the diligence of
the Massorites.”24 Hugh Broughton defended the Masoretic annotations,
claiming that “God teacheth vs elegancie of the tongue, or sense of the text,
by setting a word in the margine, to adorne the text, and this passeth the witt
of man, and must needs be knowen to bee the worke of God.”25 Indeed,
learned contemporaries, such as Broughton and his admirer John Lightfoot,
doctored Talmudic texts so that all traditions would inexorably confirm
Christian succession.26 A combination of rabbinic lore and typological alle-
gory drives the midrashim of these “Christian Hebraists” on Matthew 5:18,
Jesus’ troubling and apparently contradictory explanation of the conformity
of his teachings to the letter of the law (“jot and tittle”), which Milton found
so useful in his expansion on the Mosaic permission to divorce.27 Citing the
Jerusalem Talmud (“Sandarin, fol. 20”), Broughton embroiders his tale of
inheritance: “The Iewes, to shew Gods care ouer euery letter in the Bible,
bring in the Law co[m]playining of loosing Iod.”28 For “when jod is taken
from Saraj, being the last letter of a womans name, [it] cometh first to make
Iesus,” so that “jod appeareth not contemned.”29 Because “a Testament which
faileth in a letter, faileth in all,” when Sarai becomes Sara the threat arises
that “Iod is gone, & the auctority of the Law is lost.”30 Consequently, “by
way of Prosopopoeia,” the Hebrew Doctors “bring in the Law as a Plantife
before God, complaining of losing Iod,”31 and “God answereth, thou hast no
losse.”32 The story is then recycled through the filter of the Gospel: “our lord
doth tell us, that the least Letter or Tittle in the Law shall not faile: but any
man may see he borroweth this speech from the Massorites diligence, touch-
ing the letter Iod.”33 Learned contemporaries of Milton found ways to mobi-
lize rabbinic teachings in order to buttress their own versions of arguments
from the Gospel on a range of interpretive issues. Even among those not
conventionally educated the 1640s and 1650s, as Nigel Smith has shown,
witnessed a rise in “the need to increase personal inspired authority by enun-
ciating” Hebrew, however imperfectly understood.34 It was in this climate
that Milton extended a greater sympathy toward Hebraic thought, which
became the central strand in his narrative of tradition and tuition.
Hence Milton’s appropriation of the vocabulary of rabbinic textual tra-
dition, while not necessarily unique in the period, nevertheless acquires a
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54 The End of Learning

radicalism absent from the doctrinal positions staked out by more ortho-
dox divines. The conventional tropes of Christian succession gradually give
way to a searching inquiry into the ongoing relevance of Hebraic thought.
To an extent, Milton’s use of rabbinic terminology participates in typologi-
cal interpretation. But Milton, more than other practitioners, wants to
have it both ways. The “living historicity” that Erich Auerbach and others
have seen as the legacy of Jewish tradition in Christian figuralism provides
Milton with a way of revitalizing Jewish tradition without dispensing with
Hebraic thought. I reluctantly take issue with Auerbach’s account of typol-
ogy, from which I have learned much. The characterization of Christian
typological interpretation as “indirect, complex, and charged with history,”
does an injustice, in the final analysis, both to what is meant by “history”
and to the aims of those who practiced typology. My disagreement resides
in the equation of pattern with historiography. This tendency—to see his-
tory as anticipating Christ’s triumph—was undoubtedly the normative
mode of regarding things scriptural for Milton and his Christian contem-
poraries. Typology always retroactively sees the past in terms of future
events, or at least events subsequent to the initial event. The integrity of
the initial event under scrutiny, then, gives way to the interpretive
demands of the future event, so that the inquiry becomes even more selec-
tive than historical analysis would permit. However, when treating a “thing
indifferent” to salvation, such as Milton believed the marriage bond to be,
Milton would not necessarily have resorted to typological exegesis where it
did not serve his purpose. Indeed, as I have been arguing, the nascent his-
toricism at work in the divorce tracts forestalls typological (and ultimately
antinomian) tendencies. For typological habits of thought would ulti-
mately erode the authenticity of Milton’s claim to historical accuracy in his
appeal to Hebraic divorce law as precedent.35
“It is a paradox applying to all narrative,” says Frank Kermode, “that
although its function is mnemonic it always recalls different things.”36 The
challenge to systems of typology remains: What, after all, becomes of the
Jewish history and prophecy upon which Christian fulfillment depends? As
popular manuals of typology such as William Guild’s frequently reprinted
Moses Vnuailed make graphically legible, a firm line must be drawn between
traditions which theologians nevertheless find meeting on every page of
scripture.37
Thus Milton self-consciously alerts his readers to the entanglements of
traditional spiritual inheritance and, at the same time, disburdens us of the
fantasy that we might disinherit or opt out of the history to which our ideas
are indebted. As William Robertson put it in an edition of the Psalms and
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Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 55

Lamentations that featured parallel columns of the Hebrew text alongside a

transliteration into the Roman alphabet:

[I]t is most necessary, and most profitable, that Christians should know,
themselves, to read, and understand their own rights, to their happiness,
in the words of life, & not only by their Teachers neither only by the
Translation of their Teachers, but by their own particular inspection and
knowledge, to know, read, and understand their own rights and evi-
dences to life, and that in the very self same Language and Words,
which they were at first delivered in, as in the first, primitive, and origi-
nal Copies of those rights and interests in eternal life: . . . the Rights and
evidences of their heavenly Inheritance.38

The priestly teacher gives way to the congregation of individual believers,

who at once disavow their relation to the clergy and also bypass the school-
master in order to receive directly the “authentick” writing of the prophet.
Thus the Apostle’s allegory of the pedagogue implicitly transforms into a jus-
tification for Protestant (and perhaps Independent) biblicism summed up in
the oxymoron “original Copies.” The populist appeal of Robertson’s pho-
netic guide to the Hebrew original pushes the allegory in a direction charac-
teristic of reformation humanistic learning: the return to the sources (ad
fontes) will lead the saints from their captivity and bondage under the hier-
atic Latin text back to the Holy Land of Scripture in the original languages.
As “The Translators to the Reader” of The Holy Bible [KJV] say: “we desire
that the Scripture may speake like it selfe, as in the language of Canaan, that
it may be vnderstood euen of the very vulgar.”39
Exegesis is after all, like education, etymologically a “leading out”; this
figure hovers over Milton’s translations of Psalms 80–88 from April 1648:

Thy land to favour graciously

Thou hast not Lord been slack,
Thou hast from hard captivity
Returned Jacob back. (Ps. 85, ll.1–4, Poems, p. 318)

Going back to the original language is like returning to the land of Israel. The
Bible should “speake like it selfe”: the concept is crucial as it plays out amid
the radical sectarians of mid-seventeenth century England.40 Nearly contem-
poraneous with Milton’s renditions of the Psalms into English was An Endeav-
our after the reconcilement of . . . Presbyterians, and Independents. With a
Discourse touching the Synagogue of the JEWES. And within a year of Milton’s
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56 The End of Learning

translations were The Petition of the Jewes For the Repealing of the Act of Par-
liament for their banishment out of ENGLAND and Edward Nicholas’s An
Apology for the Honorable Nation of the Jews, and All the Sons of Israel, possibly
the most genuinely philo-Semitic tract in the period. 41 Nicholas, to whom
Menasseh ben Israel favorably refers in his address to Cromwell,42 links the
fates of “all the sons of Israel”: “The sufferings of many of the faithful friends
of Parliament” parallel the “great indurings that honorable Nation hath suf-
fered, what bloody slaughters have been made of them in London, in the
North countrey of England, and divers other parts of this kingdom.”43 As
Nicholas claims in his relatively early bid for the readmission of the Jews:
“We have great and important cause to take heed, lest we of this Kingdom of
England, putting from us and abandoning these people of God, we separate
not our selves from Gods favor and protection, this being a greater aggrava-
tion of the sin, for that it is now more known.” Nicholas goes on to docu-
ment how “The rage of men in all countries of the world have been very
extreme against the Jews . . . In Spain there were 120000 Jews cast out and
banisht, in the year 1492. In Italy and other places, the like hardship they
have endured.”44
Nicholas was not alone in his condemnation of Christian attempts at
forced conversion. A similar rethinking of Anglo-Jewish relations emerges
inadvertently from entirely hostile accounts. As Thomas Edwards—who
cites “Miltons doctrine of divorce” as a source of heresy to be contended with
in the “Catalogue and Discovery of many Errours of the Sectaries”—
describes in his corrosive Gangræna,

The sectaries being now hot upon the getting of a Toleration, there were
some meetings lately in the City, wherein some persons of the severall
sects, some Seekers, some Anabaptists, some Antinomians, some
Brownists, some Independents met; some Presbyterians also met with
them . . . the Independents as well as the others holding together with
the rest of the sects . . . some professing at one of the meetings, it was
the sinne of this Kingdom that the Jewes were not allowed the open
profession and exercise of their religion amongst us; only the Presbyteri-
ans dissented and opposed it.45

Edwards identifies toleration as the most acute of all dangers to the new
orthodoxy as he dismisses sectarian heresies wholesale. Inadvertently offering
a glimpse into the social vitality of the sects, Edwards wishes to enlist Paul in
his cause, not surprisingly assailing heretics as “false Teachers, who broach
false Doctrine.”46 Although he does not name Milton in the passage quoted
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Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 57

above, Edwards does group Milton’s writing on divorce with the sectarians
who urge toleration of the Jews. Yet what for Edwards constitutes “false”
teaching is for Milton essential to “the charity of patient instruction” (YP
2:567).
For Milton the reasonable power of the Mosaic Law derives in effect
from historicizing the teachings of Christ within the tradition of Hebraic
interpretation. This in turn leads Milton to recontextualize the Mosaic per-
mission: divorce was not “permitted for the hardnes of thir [the Jews’] hearts
. . . for the Law were then but a corrupt and erroneous School-master, teach-
ing us to dash against a vital maxim of religion by doing foul evil in hope of
some uncertain good” (YP 2:285). The metaphor of the schoolmaster
remains the same as in the antiprelatical tracts, but its significance for Milton
in the divorce tracts is the opposite. The Law is God’s “reveled will” wherein
“he appears to us as it were in human shape, enters into cov’nant with us,
swears to keep it, binds himself like a just lawgiver to his own prescriptions,
gives himself to be understood by men, judges and is judg’d, measures and is
commensurate to right reason” (YP 2:292).47 Milton must get beyond what
Jesus says to the Pharisees in Matthew, which entails a return to Moses, in
effect reversing typology.48 Just as the binary opposition between nature and
grace breaks down when Milton seeks to defend the “compulsion of blameles
nature,” so the narrative of succession is revised when the Law proves more
charitable than a strict and decontextualized application of a precept from
the Gospel (YP 2:355; cf. 2:279). Thus, in the divorce tracts, Milton finds
“mercy” not only in the Gospel but also in Hebrew Scriptures. Rather than
seeing the “Old Testament” as prefiguring the Gospel, Milton sees the
Gospel in terms of the Hebrew Bible. He restores the ancient Hebraic inter-
pretation of divorce law against the Gospel, thus claiming that the New Tes-
tament provides a contextual application of the Old, an application that does
not abrogate the Mosaic Law but adheres to a broader interpretive precept of
equity and love.
As a result of his advocacy of the right to divorce on grounds of intel-
lectual incompatibility, Milton came to associate the Law with liberation.49
In the divorce tracts, Milton refutes the idea that the Mosaic Law is a “most
negligent debaushing tutor” and instead finds in the Law “the rules of all
sober education” (YP 2:654).50 Yet, by means of another paradox that opens
onto a more profound meditation upon what might be called Christianity’s
intellectual history, Milton recasts the pedagogical metaphor rejected in The
Reason of Church Government in the service of a diametrically opposed
hermeneutics. Thus the figure of the teacher reappears in the divorce tracts
with a difference. At the present time, Milton fears, “Custome still is silently
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58 The End of Learning

receiv’d for the best instructer” (YP 2:222). “Custome” serves as the figure
for intellectual sloth, the drudgery of inconsequential education commen-
surate with the “borrow’d manuscript of a subservient scrowl” monkishly
copied out. “Custome” stands for “obstinate literality” (YP 2:279), which
Milton deems a “Jewish obstinacy” (YP 2:319) not unlike “female pride”:
“Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for
woman; and that a husband may be injur’d as insufferably in mariage as a
wife. What an injury is it after wedlock not to be belov’d, what to be
slighted, what to be contended with in point of house-rule who shall be the
head, not for any parity of wisdome, for that were somthing reasonable, but
out of a female pride” (YP 2:324). On the face of it, this seems Milton’s
most egregious example of masculinist stereotyping. However, a predictable
pattern of misogynist wish-fulfillment strains against a more striking admis-
sion that “parity of wisdome” is possible. For a brief moment, then, Milton
reveals “somthing reasonable,” an insight beyond prejudice. In such
moments Milton exposes the limitations as well as the depths of his ideol-
ogy of liberty: evidence of “parity of wisdome” he finds to be only “particu-
lar exceptions” (YP 2:589) to a general rule. But I would argue that this
evidence suggests the relationship between an individual human being and
tradition “writ large,” an irony nicely conveyed in the pun at the heart of his
sonnet resisting the “new” forcers of conscience and their “classic” hierar-
chy.51 An individual, even as a representative of an alternative tradition,
counters the unoriginality of historical inheritance by finding just such
“particular exceptions.” When Milton admits the possibility of a “parity of
wisdome” among spouses, as when he recuperates the pedagogical role of
the Mosaic Law, he implicitly rejects the Pauline text that he explicitly
claims to endorse. Milton quotes Paul somewhat selectively: “I suffer not
saith S. Paul, the woman to usurp authority over the man” (YP 2:324). What
Milton has omitted from the verse is telling: “I suffer not a woman to teach,
nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (1 Timothy 2:12,
KJV). One is tempted to see this omission as suggesting that “parity of wis-
dome” should authorize “a woman to teach,” if not to “usurp.” Whether fig-
ured as a liberating discovery of precedent or sloughed off as a hindrance to
inspired thought, pedagogical authority for Milton signifies the ability to
judge accurately, and thus defend historically, the validity of a tradition—
whether a tradition corroborates truth or is contextually irrelevant. In this
case, the notion that one tradition was (like Eve in one version of the Gene-
sis myth) “created for” another would seem to endorse a rather literal-
minded interpretation of those “priorities” Milton had dismissed in
castigating the prelacy.
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Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 59

Amid the personal pain and special pleading of John Milton, as aban-
doned husband (“What an injury is it . . . not to be belov’d”), stands what
may, however, be taken as a metaphor for the relation between Hebraic
thought and Christian fables of succession. For, just as “particular excep-
tions” might reverse an assumed hierarchy obtaining in the marriage of a
man and a woman, so the exigency of an argument against Christian tradi-
tion will open Milton to an unprecedented sympathy for traditions of Jewish
thought. This sympathy Milton represents as a return to an originary rela-
tion with the Mosaic Law in the manner of Christ’s response to the Pharisees
on the question of divorce. Therefore learned succession is inherently para-
doxical. It involves not only knowledge of legal and scriptural precedent, but
also the ability to adjudicate flexibly between distinct contexts. And on such
occasions as the debate over the legality of divorce—in which according to
Milton the precedent, fully grasped, invites a legitimate resistance to custom-
ary interpretation—resistance to precedent is possible without violating the
charitable spirit of the New Testament, even where the legal interpretation
seems to reverse the literal sense of the Gospel text. The “Jewish obstinacy”
of the post-Exilic rabbinic tradition is aligned with Episcopal, Presbyterian,
even early reformist traditions that would hinder the domestic liberty of con-
temporary Protestants.
Thus “female pride” and “Jewish obstinacy” meet in a shocking image
for the “pretious literalism” of his opponent, who would take Matthew 19:9
to signify that Christ prohibits divorce absolutely, except in cases of adultery:
“let some one or other entreat him but to read on in the same 19. of Math.
till he com to that place that sayes Some make themselves Eunuchs for the king-
dom of heavns sake: And if he then please to make use of Origens knife, he
may doe well to be his own carver” (YP 2:334). Milton’s irony cuts both
ways: Origen, who was said to have castrated himself because he interpreted
Matthew 19:12 too literally, was also the strongest early advocate of Neopla-
tonic allegory as an exegetical technique.52 Thus this passage—fusing “female
pride” with “Jewish obstinacy”—suggests perversely that the father of patris-
tic allegory was an emasculated literalist who conjoined pride with obstinacy
to become a “Judaizing” eunuch, a neutered Jew.53 Edward Gibbon’s tart
iteration of this historical irony has it thus: “As it was his general practice to
allegorize scripture; it seems unfortunate that, in this instance only, he
should have adopted the literal sense.”54
The whole question of divorce seems to Milton essentially related to
the integrity of his gender: to take away from a Christian husband the option
of divorcing “were to unchristen him, to unman him, to throw the mountain
of Sinai upon him, with the waight of the whole law to boot, flat against the
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60 The End of Learning

liberty and essence of the Gospel” (YP 2:353). Just as a woman may exhibit
“parity of wisdome” with a man, Christian exegetes may uncover new ways
in which the Mosaic Law is “commensurat to right reason” (YP 2:292) above
and beyond the prescribed customs of Christian tradition. Moreover, a “rea-
sonable” resolution of conflict will illustrate the appeal to a higher interpre-
tive principle. The most powerful injunction and the basis of the new
covenant, charity provides the ultimate context within which to interpret a
particular passage of Scripture. The rule of charity instructs the exegete to
overturn the assumed hierarchies of gender and religion because it is reason-
able to be charitable and charitable to be reasonable.
Nevertheless, Milton displays an ambivalent attitude toward his own
instructors that resembles his outlook on gender relations in marriage. When
Milton describes Christ’s method of teaching as “not so much a teaching as
an intangling,” he insists that “it is a general precept, not only of Christ, but
of all other Sages, not to instruct the unworthy and the conceited who love
tradition more then truth, but to perplex and stumble them purposely with
contriv’d obscurities” (YP 2:642, 643). Readers of Milton’s prose are surely
familiar with heuristically “contriv’d obscurities.” In the space of a single sen-
tence, Milton enacts just such a pedagogical exercise: if tradition corrobo-
rates truth—as when “all . . . Sages” other than Christ confirm the truth of
his “general precept”—then the lover of truth need not fear the assent of tra-
dition. But Milton’s fear that he might himself be seen as one who loves “tra-
dition more then truth” is everywhere visible in the divorce tracts. As Milton
says in the preface to Parliament that begins The Judgement of Martin Bucer,
“I may gratulat mine own mind, with due acknowledgement of assistance
from above, which led me, not as a lerner, but as a collateral teacher, to a
sympathy of judgment with no lesse a man then Martin Bucer” (YP
2:435–36; orig. in italics). Supposedly having discovered the similarity of his
arguments for divorce to Bucer’s after publishing the second edition of The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton wishes to distinguish the inspired
originality of his own thought from even the anti-traditional tradition of the
reformers.
In doing so, he represses the authority of tradition while he weds it to
his insight. Milton depicts this ambivalent relation to tradition as his own
“collateral” pedagogical aptitude, “not as a lerner” but rather as one with an
intuitive or native “sympathy of judgment” deriving unimpeachable “assis-
tance from above.” Milton likewise acts out his reluctance to cite the author-
ity of Hugo Grotius: “First therefore I will set down what is observ’d by
Grotius upon this point, a man of general learning. Next I produce what
mine own thoughts gave me, before I had seen his annotations [on Judges
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Milton and the Hebraic Pedagogue of the Divorce Tracts 61

19:2]” (YP 2:329–30). Bolstered by Grotius, Milton can then claim the
“subsequent, or indeed rather precedent” authority of a shared opinion that
does not diminish his own originality of thought (YP 2:403).
This is the same anxiety palpable at the end of Tetrachordon, when Mil-
ton reluctantly ushers in the weight of patristic “testimony” corroborating
“the words of Christ concerning divorce, as is heer interpreted” (YP 2:692;
orig. in italics).55 Accustomed “not to scanne reason, nor cleerly to appre-
hend it,” some of the weaker sort of teachers who simply “follow authorities”
have made it necessary for Milton to establish that “this opinion which I
bring, hath bin favour’d, and by som of those affirm’d, who in their time
were able to carry what they taught, had they urg’d it, through all Christen-
dome” (YP 2:692–93). Because some of the “wisest heads” have “tended this
way” but have been less full in their reason than in their “assertion,” Milton
says, “I shall be manifest . . . to meet the praise or dispraise of beeing
somthing first” (YP 2:693). The habitual insistence upon what he calls in
Sonnet 7 “inward ripeness” obsessively displaces an awkward usury of ideas,
in which Milton, through the undisclosed interest of his appropriation, gains
more credit than he gives:

But herein the satisfaction of others hath bin studied, not the gaining of
more assurance to mine own perswasion: although authorities contribut-
ing reason withall, bee a good confirmation and a welcom. But God, I
solemnly attest him, withheld from my knowledge the consenting judge-
ment of these men so late, untill they could not bee my instructers, but
only my unexpected witnesses to partial men, that in this work I had not
given the worst experiment of an industry joyn’d with integrity and the free
utterance though of an unpopular truth. (YP 2:715–16)

Milton must “solemnly attest” to his own ethic, “industry joyn’d with
integrity”: more significant than the claim to testimonial corroboration from
“unexpected witnesses” is his autobiographical narrative.56 Milton relays how
“God withheld” awareness of “the consenting judgement” of authorities so
that he, as the champion of “an unpopular truth,” might find a way of “bee-
ing somthing first.” In making such a claim for the original, or prophetic, sta-
tus of his exegetical enterprise, Milton envisions himself “bearing the burden
of zealous contempt,” as befits a prophet.57 Yet once more, when Milton
argues through his sleight against the “partial men” who require authoritative
“witnesses” in order to validate an argument, he demonstrates how the origi-
nality of his thought relates to the integrity of his gender—makes him a
whole, as well as an impartial, man.
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62 The End of Learning

In his reluctance to admit his debt to his predecessors, his teachers, his
sources, Milton assumes the role of “a collateral teacher” (YP 2:436). The
gesture implies that, for Milton, from the divorce tracts onward, to resist
authority intellectually is to wield it as a teacher. Even as one’s own authority
relies on a commanding knowledge of precedent, Jesus exemplifies charity as
the ultimate pedagogy. And yet Milton in the divorce tracts found a more
equitable solution to the hermeneutic dilemma he faced by returning to the
charity of the Law. In his apparently contradictory celebration of the Law’s
continual pedagogical relevance and his disavowal of his own teachers, Mil-
ton assumes the paradoxical stance of the Christian Hebraist. The Hebraic
pedagogue triumphs in the contest of teachers in play throughout the
divorce tracts. As a Christian Hebraist, Milton crafted an inspired approach
to the historic struggle for liberty, a “Christian Talmud” resolute in its union
of heterogeneous materials.
In his disavowal as much as his effort to refashion and thereby lay claim
to the power vested in Hebraic authority, Milton reveals the tension inherent
in efforts to construct authorial stability out of the ruins of a textual inheri-
tance. The contradictory impulse to establish a univocal sense of presence by
appropriating multivalent Scripture is doubtless a reaction formed against
the perceived incursions of slack custom. For Milton, traditions therefore
must be contested by an enabling sociological “context” within which an
author appropriates precedent. If a writer is formed as a reader responding to
emergent occasions against other readers, then the intellectual culture toward
which an individual reader directs his or her attention requires the fullest
definition possible. In this regard, as we have seen, Milton re-imagines the
debate over the use of scriptural proof-texts as a contest centered on the
accuracy of a text, what he calls the text’s “authentick handwriting.” Later in
the English Revolution, Milton would return to the metaphor of the peda-
gogue as figure of political authority, thereby creating a character of such eth-
ical integrity that his resistance to the defenders of the monarchy on behalf
of the fledgling republic would represent the highest form of heroism. If the
Hebraic pedagogue triumphs, finally, as a model of reconstituted authority
in the divorce tracts, then Milton’s appropriation of a related legitimacy for
his own authorial persona in the political tracts and later in Paradise Lost
makes legible the social and literary implications of the interpretative strat-
egy he refined during the English Revolution.
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Chapter Three
The English Revolution and
Heroic Education

Criticism of Milton’s politics has often been couched in dismissive remarks

about his biography, but few censures in English literary history have
achieved the rancor or notoriety of Samuel Johnson’s criticism in the Life of
Milton (1779). While political disagreement between these two figures is to
be expected, the bitter sarcasm that Johnson reserves for Milton’s efforts as a
teacher during the opening years of the Civil War stands out:

Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of
merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who
hastens home because his countrymen are contending for their liberty,
and, when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in
a private boarding-school. . . . Of institutions we may judge by their
effects. From this wonder-working academy I do not know that there
ever proceeded any man very eminent for knowledge.1

Even as Johnson’s famous disdain for the “surly republican” manifests itself in
this instance as a mocking dismissal of his results as a teacher, his criticism
implicitly works at a deeper level to counteract the political intentions that
underlie Milton’s program of education. Although he claims that his digres-
sion is motivated by an unwanted intrusion of the natural sciences into Mil-
ton’s curriculum, Johnson’s emphasis upon “axioms of prudence” and
“principles of moral truth” has a clear ideological agenda. The “first requisite”
of education is, in Johnson’s view, “the religious and moral knowledge of
right and wrong.” Thus when he launches his notorious attack on Milton’s
politics, Johnson articulates his objection in terms of a moral and psycholog-
ical defect in the subject’s character: “Milton’s republicanism was, I am

63
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64 The End of Learning

afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of inde-

pendence; in petulance impatient of all controul, and pride disdainful of
superiority.”2 Envious, sullen, proud, and petulant, Milton failed in his
political and his educational projects alike, according to Johnson, because he
lacked the proper moral orientation.
Within a year, Francis Blackburne, clearly identifying the ideological moti-
vation behind Johnson’s Life, offered a rebuttal to this line of criticism. Johnson’s
moral condemnation of Miltonic pedagogy certainly deserved Blackburne’s tart
retort: “for the balance-master to reproach Milton for his pedantry is certainly
betraying a strange unconsciousness of his own talents, unless he depends upon
his reader’s sagacity in discriminating a great pedant from a little one. He is
obliged, however, to complete the humiliation of Milton, to put his prose-works
into the scale.”3 Blackburne, a republican, objected to the royalist motivations
for impugning “Milton the prose-writer, who, in that character, must ever be an
eye-sore to men of Dr. Johnson’s principles; principles that are at enmity with
every patron of public liberty, and every pleader for the legal rights of English-
men, which, in their origin, are neither more nor less than the natural rights of
all mankind.”4 That Blackburne published his defense as an introduction to an
edition of Areopagitica and Of Education indicates the political utility he found
in Milton’s educational strategies. Blackburne explains his rationale first for
engaging Johnson and then for overseeing the republication of the tracts:

We have only to add, that it has been thought convenient to subjoin to

these Remarks, new and accurate editions of two of Milton’s prose tracts;
viz. his Letter to Mr. Samuel Hartlib on Education, and his Areopagitica.
The first was grown scarce, being omitted in some editions, both of the
author’s prose and poetical works; but highly worthy to be preserved as
prescribing a course of discipline, which, though out of fashion in these
times, affords many useful lessons to those who may have abilities and
courage enough to adopt some of those improvements, of which the
modes of learned education in present practice are confessedly susceptible.
The other will of course recommend itself to all advocates for the lib-
erty of the press, and moreover may, in half an hour’s reading, entertain
some part of the public with a contrast between the magnanimity of
Milton, in facing a formidable enemy, and Dr. Johnson’s see-saw medi-
tations, the shifty wiles of a man between two fires, who neither dares
fight nor run away.5

Blackburne uses the metaphor of single combat to describe Milton’s heroic

work, a trope that, as we shall see, derives from Milton’s own representation
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 65

of his role as defender of the English republic. The “magnanimity” of Milton

became the assurance of his political soundness for those who wished to
endorse what they perceived as his defense of natural rights and his patron-
age of liberty. However, just as his blindness could be employed as a sign of
divine punishment or of human virtue in action, Milton’s representation of
his labors as evidence of a new form of courage—of intellectual heroism—
during the polemical years of the English Revolution would be used against
him by his enemies.
Johnson and Blackburne quarrel over the political intentions beneath
Milton’s use of his learning, and both find in the ethical composition of the
life an index to the political works’ authenticity, though from diametrically
opposite ideological perspectives. What this episode tells us about Milton’s
reception in the eighteenth century, during the American Revolution, is that
for better or worse Milton’s early readers followed the criteria that he himself
established for judging his works. As we shall see, his personal virtue was the
mark of authenticity Milton himself offered long before his early biographers
drove the point home for future polemicists and ideologues. This effect,
which he carefully cultivated throughout the revolutionary prose, reveals the
profundity with which Milton conceived of his own pedagogical duty to his
countrymen, a duty that carried on through the composition of the epic.
Arguing for the historical utility of literary representations, Christopher
Hill remarks that, unlike other documentary evidence, literature “can convey
the ethos of a society, what its members thought right and proper behaviour as
well as what they thought outrageously possible.”6 Hill’s comment serves as a
crucial reminder of the dynamic interaction between the conceptual work—
assumed in a culture’s metaphors and analogies for heroic achievement—and
the behavior of a person, such as Milton, seeking to create works that could be
found, as he said in The Reason of Church Government, “doctrinal and exem-
plary to a Nation” (YP 1:815). In order to accomplish this heroic task, Milton
had to dramatize not only his country’s struggle to achieve the liberty he
thought to be England’s native inheritance, but also his own epic struggle to
defend himself from the enemies of freedom.

CIVIL WAR AS POLITICAL EDUCATION

After the Restoration, a satirical poem by Thomas Jordan appeared twice, in

1662 and 1663, published for the second time in the collection A Royal
Arbor of Loyal Poesie with the title “The Players Petition to the Long Parlia-
ment after being long silenc’d, that they might play again. 1642.” The title,
like the premise, relies upon what is in all likelihood a fictitious appeal to the
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66 The End of Learning

MPs of twenty years earlier—a context established to lend the irony of its
Restoration publication more bite: “Your Tragedies more really are exprest, /
You murder men in Earnest, wee in Jest.” When the player describes the actions
of Parliament, the setting shifts momentarily away from the playhouse:

Now humbly, as we did begin, Wee pray,

Dear School-masters, you’d give us leave to play
Quickly before the King come, for we wou’d
Be glad to say y’ave done a little good
Since you have sate, your Play is almost done,
As well as ours, would have it ne’er begun;
For we shall see e’re the last Act be spent,
Enter the King, Exeunt the Parliament.7

The Long Parliament, depicted here as an assembly of overweening schoolmas-

ters, has prevented the “play” of state that the king will restore. The “tragic scaf-
fold” erected for the execution of the “royal actor” outside Whitehall in
Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” (Poems AM, p. 276) has now become the stage for a
comic triumph—a counterbalancing performance of power that Jordan cele-
brates: “up go we, who by the frown / Of guilty Consciences have been kept
down” (ll.77–78). Jordan’s comparison of stern MPs to “School-masters” bears a
close resemblance to the aspersions cast on Milton by Peter du Moulin in Regii
Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos (1652; The Cry of
the Royal Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides), later recycled by Dr.
Johnson in his censure of the “acrimonious and surly republican.”
In his own response to the cry of the royal blood, Milton fired back
with his Second Defense of the English People (1654): du Moulin had accused
Milton of being “some starveling little schoolmaster, who would consent to
lend his corrupt pen to the defence of parricides” (YP 4.1:607).8 Characteris-
tically incensed by the accusation of insincerity and corruption, Milton
responded with some of his most moving prose, in which, ironically and
unfortunately, he dismantled the reputation of the wrong man.
For the duration of the commonwealth and protectorate, the critical
dimension of education remains, in Milton’s prose, the moral fitness of the
polity. The entire basis of liberty, as opposed to license, is to be found in the
moral health of the commonwealth. “For, my fellow countrymen,” as Milton
says in the Second Defense,

your own character is a mighty factor in the acquisition or retention of

your liberty. Unless your liberty is such as can neither be won nor lost
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 67

by arms, but is of that kind alone which, sprung from piety, justice,
temperance, in short, true virtue, has put down the deepest and most
far-reaching roots in your souls, there will not be lacking one who will
shortly wrench from you, even without weapons, that liberty which you
boast of having sought by force of arms. (YP 4.1:680)

Hence the emphasis on the political function of education arises from the
interrelated obligations of the citizens within a republican polity—the
mutual dependency of the meritorious upon each other. No doubt, the
republican implications of Milton’s educational proposals, as much as the
educational implications of Milton’s republican projects, occasioned John-
son’s withering sarcasm about his success. Theoretically, the position advo-
cated by Milton has at times surprising modern corollaries in the
philosophies of education advanced by thinkers as diverse as Louis Althusser
and John Dewey.9
The connection between the system of education and the polity it was
designed to promote became clear in seventeenth-century England in a way
that it had not before. In particular, given education’s power to influence reli-
gious opinion, the subject concentrated political thought during Milton’s
lifetime. Although the implications that pedagogy held for the formation
and maintenance of social order had occupied a central place in political phi-
losophy since at least The Republic, the role of government in religious indoc-
trination took on new significance with the advent of radical sectarian
dissent in the early modern era. Many of the most distilled political formula-
tions of the seventeenth century therefore center on the power of education
to alter the course of the nation’s development. After the tumultuous years of
civil war and faction, everyone understood that education had played a cru-
cial part in the ideological ferment. Therefore, according to that part of the
Clarendon Code called the Act of Uniformity (1662), schoolmasters as well
as clergymen were forced to declare that taking arms against the king was
illegal, to swear conformity to the Church of England, and to disavow the
Solemn League and Covenant.10 Both republicans and royalists consistently
saw education as the cornerstone of the polity. As Marchamont Nedham put
it, “Children should bee educated and instructed in the Principles of Free-
dom.”11 Both before and after the establishment of the protectorate, the spe-
cific commitments of educational reformers revolved around the dream of a
“universal reformation” attainable by educational means.12
Reformation, personal and social, is at the heart of Milton’s educational
project as well as those of his friends in the Hartlib circle, even though (as we
saw in the Introduction) they frequently disagree about the specific curriculum
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68 The End of Learning

to achieve this end. In his preface to Parliament, added to the second edition
of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton approaches the public
dimension of reformation by returning to the first principle of education:
“For no effect of tyranny can sit more heavy on the Common-wealth, then
this houshold unhappiness on the family. And farewell all hope of true
Reformation in the state, while such an evill as this lies undiscern’d or unre-
garded in the house. On the redresse whereof depends, not only the spiritfull
and orderly life of our grown men, but the willing, and carefull education of
our children” (YP 2:230). Milton registers the vital political stakes involved
in the “carefull education of our children.” The two senses of domestic gov-
ernment merge here: “houshold” economy functions as a metaphor for the
Houses of Parliament. Education becomes the byword for nothing less than
the ongoing viability of revolutionary ideals, though it represents somewhat
disproportionately the connection between generational inheritance and
“Allegiance” to the Long Parliament, between what is “unregarded in the
house” and in the House. Thus Milton claims in the famous analogy from
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, “as a whole people is in proportion to
an ill Government, so is one man to an ill mariage” (YP 2:229). England, he
argues, ought to return to its historic role as the initiator of the Reformation,
though it had been thought of as “the Cathedrill of Philosophy” by other
nations since long before that (YP 2:231). “Let not England,” he says, “for-
get her precedence of teaching nations how to live” (YP 2:232).
As a political strategy, therefore, Milton and his fellow republicans were
fundamentally committed to reforming the moral constitution of the people
(or at least of the meritorious few who would govern) rather than instituting
a specific political constitution. Indeed, the movement toward a more edu-
cated polity can be seen as a general development in seventeenth-century
English government. As Helen Jewell has recently shown, “Government was
increasingly by the educated”: in 1584 only 219 of 460 MPs (48 percent)
had attended university or the Inns of Court, whereas in 1640–42 the total is
386 of 552 MPs (70 percent).13 (So in referring to members of the Long Par-
liament as “School-masters,” Thomas Jordan was, ironically, not far from the
mark.) This increase in the educational level of the parliamentarians may be
the result of a “bulge in university entrants” in the late sixteenth century,
though enlargement of the matriculating student body in the highest reaches
of English education did not of course imply vast improvements in educa-
tion for the poor or middling sort. In 1642 in the countryside, 70 percent of
men on average were unable to sign their own names.14 Nonetheless, the
commitment to a morally indoctrinated constituency was surely stronger
and more consistent than republican attachment to any specific institutions
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 69

that would be established and stabilized by reforming government, despite

the occasional proposal, such as Milton advanced with increasing despera-
tion in The Readie and Easie Way, to inaugurate a perpetual senate.
Specifically ethical education was important to republicans because, as
Jonathan Scott says, “in general republicanism defined itself not in relation
to constitutional structures but moral principles.”15 For Milton in particular,
as Blair Worden observes, “there can be no true political reformation which
is not also a reformation of manners and morals, of the household, of educa-
tion.”16 As Milton says in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: “For indeed
none can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but
licence; which never hath more scope or more indulgence then under
Tyrants” (YP 3:190). The constitutive politics of personal reformation, cen-
tral to Milton’s argument on behalf of the regicide much as it had been in the
earlier antiepiscopal and divorce tracts, remained a persistent emphasis even
as his preoccupation with specific forms of political remedy changed.17
English national character, or the settled disposition of the populace as
Milton perceived it, evinced a disturbing consistency that had disastrous
political implications, though it was perhaps rectifiable by means of worldly
education.18 This indigenous weakness provided the basis for Milton’s
uncompromising critique of the Long Parliament and the bitter pronounce-
ment on the English people in the manuscript digression in The History of
Britain, one of the darkest parts of that gloomy book: “Valiant indeed, and
prosperous to win a field; but to know the end and Reason of winning, unju-
dicious and unwise: in good or bad Success alike unteachable” (YP 5.1:450).
Milton cannot have meant this claim “quite literally,” as David Norbrook
says, “for he was proposing a programme of republican education which he
clearly believed could bear fruit if there were only time.”19 Thus in The
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton defines his task precisely as an expe-
dient pedagogical one, demanding that the mercurial (he would say “hypo-
critical”) Presbyterians, and others who had turned loyalist, embrace
parliamentary rule:

Another sort there is, who comming in the cours of these affaires, to
have thir share in great actions, above the form of Law or Custom, at
least to give thir voice and approbation, begin to swerve, and almost
shiver at the Majesty and grandeur of som noble deed, as if they were
newly enter’d into a great sin; disputing presidents, forms, and circum-
stances, when the Common-wealth nigh perishes for want of deeds in
substance, don with just and faithfull expedition. To these I wish better
instruction, and vertue equal to thir calling; the former of which, that is
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70 The End of Learning

to say Instruction, I shall indeavour, as my dutie is, to bestow on them;

and exhort them not to startle from the just and pious resolution of
adhering with all thir [strength &] assistance to the present Parlament
& Army, in the glorious way wherein Justice and Victory hath set them.
(YP 3:194; brackets=added 2nd ed.)

Milton sought above all to inculcate fortitude in a nation fearful of the reper-
cussions of killing a king. As Milton diminished the significance of appeals
to precedents and specific forms of governance, he worked to separate an
intrinsic morality of just action from a set of political circumstances. The jus-
tice or injustice of an action must be accountable first and foremost to the
good of the many. Nonetheless, when The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
sets up a relationship between the leadership of the country and the people,
Milton refrains from equating freedom with the “parricide” of which he was
accused by his opponents. Teaching the public the meaning of “deeds in sub-
stance” entails teaching them the name of action, and the semantic distinc-
tion between a king and a tyrant therefore features prominently in Milton’s
argument.20 Once a king becomes a tyrant, action on behalf of the public
good becomes not simply just, but necessary in a state founded upon liberty.
At the same time, Milton knew that the divines who had taught the laity and
provided a coherent rationale for political action in the early 1640s had by
1649 long since abandoned the policy that allowed Parliament to unite dis-
parate factions against monarchy. Yet the most effective argumentative strat-
egy would always falter before an unswerving commitment to the ethical
principle that must underlie just action: “To teach lawless Kings, and all who
so much adore them, that not mortal man, or his imperious will, but Justice
is the onely true sovran and supreme Majesty upon earth” (YP 3:237).
A people “endu’d with fortitude and Heroick vertue,” as the regicides
themselves had been, would redefine the very notion of heroism to match
the “matchless valour” of the army under Cromwell’s command (YP 3:191,
233).21 Contrary to the “the tongues and arguments of Malignant backslid-
ers,” Milton advocates a civic republicanism along the lines of the great clas-
sical republicans, who provide exemplary instances of a more heroic ideal:
“The Greeks and Romans, as thir prime Authors witness, held it not onely
lawfull, but a glorious and Heroic deed, rewarded publicly with Statues and
Garlands, to kill an infamous Tyrant at any time without tryal: and but rea-
son, that he who trod on all Law, should not be voutsaf ’d the benefit of Law”
(YP 3:222, 212). By implication, in the regicidal tracts, as in his earlier trac-
tate Of Education, Milton’s educational proposals thinly veiled “a deep anxi-
ety about the malaise afflicting the parliamentary cause and a conviction that
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 71

the only cure for it was, in effect, a New Model education.”22 Milton envi-
sioned his political pedagogy more consistently than has been generally recog-
nized, and as late as the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way he was
still rallying for “the heroic cause” of liberty, which he claimed to have cele-
brated “in a written monument,” his First Defense of the English People (YP
7:420–21). The phrase is especially poignant in the face of the Good Old
Cause’s all but certain defeat, since Andrew Marvell, both as a student and
friend of Milton, had praised the achievement of Milton’s defense as a monu-
ment of learned triumph so worthy of admiration that “I shall now studie it
even to the getting of it by heart.” Echoing the conclusion of the Second
Defense, Marvell writes, “When I consider how equally it turnes and rises with
so many figures, it seems to me a Trajans columne in whose winding ascent
we see imboss’d the severall Monuments of your learned victoryes. And
Salmatius and Morus make up as great a Triumph as That of Decebalus.”23

MILTON AND INTELLECTUAL HEROISM

The heroism associated with Milton, from his early Whig admirers down to
the young Wordsworth, was consistent in emphasizing the strenuous intel-
lectual combat at which he excelled, and the exemplary vigilance that his life
represented:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness.24

When John Toland defended his life of Milton, he underscored Milton’s char-
acter (and his own) in novel-like terms: “SINCE therefore it was equally lawful
for me to write whose life I pleas’d (when my Hand was in) the first Charge
against me, one would think, should have bin, that I had not fairly represented
my Hero.”25 In Milton’s Defenses, there can be little doubt that educators—
and, by extension, the educational process itself—have come to occupy heroic
roles in the foundation and establishment of the commonwealth. It may be
that, by the time he completed the Second Defense, Milton was, as Stephen M.
Fallon has argued, “not merely a participant in heroism, or equal to those
heroes who broke the yoke of tyranny; he is the lone heroic figure left.”26 Cer-
tainly the newfound heroism of the teacher figures prominently throughout
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72 The End of Learning

Milton’s Defenses, such that heroism itself appears reconstituted or at least

reconceived in order to include pedagogues. As he asserts in the Second
Defense, “He alone is to be called great who either performs or teaches or
worthily records great things” (YP 4.1:601). To teach the public how to
praise, as well as how to recognize deeds worthy of praise or blame, is to
rearticulate the classical ideals of ethical virtue.
If Milton’s “learning has the effect of intuition,” as Hazlitt says, Mil-
ton’s intuition unfailingly leads him back to his learning when he narrates
the events of his own life.27 In keeping with his lifelong commitment to the
moral fitness of the orator as an index of the justness of the orator’s participa-
tion in public debate, when Milton seeks to defend the republic, he must
also defend the rectitude of his character while he answers for the rightness
of his cause. In this, Milton follows the ideals of the ancient Roman rhetori-
cians, particularly the ethical system as it was expounded in the Institutio
Oratoria of Quintilian: “Surely every one of my readers must by now have
realized that oratory is in the main concerned with the treatment of what is
just and honourable [aequi bonique consistere]? Can a bad and unjust man
speak on such themes as the dignity of the subject demands?”28
In advocating an ethical principle of judgment upon which to base the
analysis of political discourse, Milton elevates the heroism of the moral agent
to a level “above heroic.” At the same time, as has often been remarked, the
direction of Milton’s thought can be observed in the drift of his Defenses’
titles: from the first and second defenses of the English people, to a defense
of himself. Nonetheless, when defending himself, Milton rises to the chal-
lenge of rhetorical combat. As he puts it, the English people had accom-
plished “the most heroic and exemplary achievements since the foundation
of the world” (YP 4.1:549); subsequently he himself had slain the great
Salmasius in single combat, a sublimated and ironic transformation of the
classical aristeia as much as an appropriation of chivalric heroism for intellec-
tual ends: “When he [Salmasius] with insults was attacking us and our battle
array, and our leaders looked first of all to me, I met him in single combat
and plunged into his reviling throat this pen, the weapon of his own choice.
And (unless I wish to reject outright and disparage the views and opinions of
so many intelligent readers everywhere, in no way bound or indebted to me)
I bore off the spoils of honor” (YP 4.1:556). The Miltonic aristeia evidences
not merely virtue or excellence of the warrior, but also the election of the
godly. “There are,” as Cicero argues in De officiis, a work extremely influen-
tial in the development of Milton’s thought, “instances of civic courage that
are not inferior to the courage of the soldier.”29 And Milton’s victory recipro-
cally confirms the righteousness of the nation, as England’s defender has yet
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 73

once more repelled the incursions of what he styled in The Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates an “outlandish King” (YP 3:214). Again, Milton figures
intellectual debate through a metaphor of single combat, a trope that had a
long history in humanist literature. Petrarch had depicted the pursuit of
virtue as the destruction of a tyrant through valiant humanistic battle. In fol-
lowing the dictates of “sacred friendship,” he would, like “Gophirus” in
Herodotus, “stab with the point of my pen, even through its own breast, the
impious grudge” that the tyrant envy was “clutching in its bosom in unequal
embrace.”30 In essence humanistic combat, Milton’s Defenses rearticulate the
tropes of heroic literature as a means of conveying the scope and endurance
of his, and the nation’s, achievements.31
Milton repeatedly presents his decision to defend the commonwealth
against royalist propaganda, in spite of the loss of eyesight that would ensue,
as an act of epic heroism:

The doctors were making learned predictions that if I should undertake

this task, I would shortly lose both eyes. . . . I seemed to hear, not the
voice of the doctor (even that of Aesculapius, issuing from the shrine at
Epidaurus), but the sound of a certain more divine monitor within.
And I thought that two lots had now been set before me by a certain
command of fate: the one, blindness, the other, duty. Either I must nec-
essarily endure the loss of my eyes, or I must abandon my most solemn
duty. And there came into my mind those two fates which, the son of
Thetis relates, his mother brought back from Delphi, where she
inquired concerning him. (YP 4.1:588; CM 8:68)

Never one to shrink from self-mythologizing, Milton presents his choice as

parallel to Achilles’ choice. The common denominator is greater and subtler
than it first appears. Between Milton’s dilemma and the passage in Homer,
there is the striking similarity of a decision to be made between duty and
health, length of life and glory.
For Milton, the duties of the left hand (as he had said of his interven-
tion in the pamphlet wars in The Reason of Church Government) out-
weighed the privilege of the right, so that prose called him away from
poetry, just as civic duty had called him away from studious retirement. He
expresses his recognition by referring to Achilles’ famous speech in Book 9
of the Iliad:

I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,

if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,
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74 The End of Learning

my return home [nostos] is gone, but my glory [kleos] shall be everlasting;

but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.32

Milton’s decision neatly allows for parallels between the self-sacrifice of two
heroes, himself and Achilles, on behalf of the public good: the one fighting
in military combat, the other a pamphlet war. Milton is spurred on by right-
eous self-assertion—if not self-righteous assertion—by the confidence he
voices in the sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, despite his loss of sight in both eyes:
“What supports me, dost thou ask? / The conscience, friend, to have lost
them overplied / In liberty’s defence, my noble task, / Of which all Europe
talks from side to side” (Poems, p. 347, ll.9–12). But the rhetorical warfare
that stands for civic duty—which Milton transforms in this passage from the
Second Defense into a narrative of epic heroism—also provides a way for Mil-
ton to graft his autobiography onto the myth of the maker. Thus Milton’s
sacrifice of his eyesight on behalf of the Good Old Cause likens him not only
to Homer’s hero Achilles, but also to “blind Maeonides” himself (PL 3.35).
Milton’s blindness therefore signifies the insight—commensurate with
participation in epic writing and epic warfare—gained by the choice of los-
ing external sight, which is in turn like the loss of life. (Death in the Iliad is
always “dark”: “a mist of darkness clouded both eyes / and he fell as a tower
falls in the strong encounter” [Iliad, 4.461–62]). For Milton, the emphasis
upon choice in this passage must have been paramount, and therefore the will
of Achilles must be knowingly to commit to his brief but glorious life: to give
up just as much of his present life, as it is figured in his nostos, or homecom-
ing, in exchange for kleos, or everlasting glory or fame. And this is precisely
what modern commentators see as the educational thrust of the Iliad, as
when Cedric Whitman says that Achilles “is learning all the time. He is
learning the meaning of his original choice, mentioned in his great speech in
the Embassy of Book IX, learning, in fact, how really to make it.”33 Milton
can relate this myth to his own life because he has gone blind, like the poet
who sang Achilles’ fame, thereby becoming the subject of his own myth in
the process of favoring the vita activa over the vita contemplativa.34 And Mil-
ton’s intellectual heroism, which transcends the merely active life of the war-
faring hero, places his efforts on a level with “the epic poet,” as he says in the
conclusion to the Second Defense, fulfilling his civic duty “to have celebrated
at least one heroic achievement of my countrymen” (YP 4.1.685).
The structure of the Iliad leaves no doubt, from the first word, menin,
that the “specifically divine wrath” of Achilles is divinely sanctioned—that,
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 75

in effect, “the will of Zeus” is coextensive with the plot of the poem. 35 For
Milton, “The more veracious a man is in teaching truth to men, the more
like must he be to God and the more acceptable to him” (YP 4.1:585; CM
8:64). If Achilles proleptically figures the choice he will make when he reen-
ters combat to avenge Patroclus—even as he offers to the Embassy in Book 9
the most extraordinarily damaging critique of the heroic code to which he
will soon give his life—so, too, Milton wants to hedge the aggrandizement of
his claim to heroism with a knowing critique. Milton goes so far as to con-
cede: “although I should like to be Ulysses—should like, that is, to have
deserved as well as possible of my country—yet I do not covet the arms of
Achilles. I do not seek to bear before me heaven painted on a shield, for oth-
ers, not myself, to see in battle, while I carry on my shoulders a burden, not
painted, but real, for myself, and not for others to perceive” (YP 4.1:
595–96). Milton makes his remarks about divinely sanctioned soothsay-
ing—what he calls “the sound of a certain more divine monitor within” (YP
4.1:588)—self-consciously as he adduces his list of blind worthies, among
them Phineus the blind Thracian king, whom Apollonius of Rhodes depicts
in the Argonautica:

he had no scruples about revealing

to men, precisely, the divine will of Zeus himself.
So Zeus afflicted him with interminable old age,
and took the sweet light from his eyes.36

Upon these lines Milton comments: “Because of no offence, therefore, does

it seem that this man who was godlike and eager to enlighten the human race
was deprived of his eyesight, as were a great number of philosophers” (YP
4.1:585; CM 8:64). No offence? While the Argonautica, by showing the
readers of the poem the veracity of Phineus’s prophecy, opens a new context
for interpreting Phineus’s situation—against, that is, the interpolated myth
of his blinding—the Thracian king functions in Milton’s narrative as an
oddly less compelling example than Milton overtly states. After all, unlike
Achilles (and, by extension, Milton in his comparison), Phineus does not
abbreviate his plight but rather prolongs it by delivering his truth to men,
“while I drag on a weary old age / whose end eludes me.”37 Phineus, unlike
Achilles, makes his choice, if that is what it is, almost unwittingly, and ironi-
cally he suffers disfavor in the eyes of Zeus for his soothsaying. Unlike
Achilles, Phineus will be condemned to a long and bitter life, tormented per-
petually by the harpies until he is relieved by the Argonauts. Thus Phineus is
an especially bad example of the righteous blind, afflicted as he is by divine
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76 The End of Learning

wrath, and his blinding ought to serve as an ironic and cautionary tale for
the kind of heroic truth-telling that Milton evokes in the Second Defense.
Rather than serving as an admonition against the kind of critique that royal
propagandists would have leveled against Milton, the example seems to
undercut the structurally symmetrical narrative with which Milton ends the
list of heroes, that of Achilles’ choice.38 Milton introduces Phineus’s tale
ironically to show that he is aware of the danger of assuming that his trial is
over, that his suffering has been deferred and that he has found divine favor
simply because he has sacrificed his eyesight in order to defend an unpopular
truth.39
Like the micronarratives of heroic struggle that the passage allows
Milton to bring into focus as he allegorizes his life, this episode in the Sec-
ond Defense suggests something of the depth of Milton’s engagement with
the ethos of epic, the extent to which he internalized these tales and read
their implications into his own lived experience. Milton employed the
Phineus episode repeatedly, obsessively returning to the passage as his own
eyesight gradually gave way. The crucial pattern that this use of Apollo-
nius exposes in retrospect is the reluctance—or, better, the flat out unwill-
ingness—of Milton to acknowledge the accursed condition of the blind
seer, who foretold in an almost Promethean defiance the truth that the
gods wished to keep from mortals. Indeed, Milton always revises the
Phineus episode in Argonautica Book 2 in the direction of divine sanction
or benediction. As Milton put it in his ode to the librarian of the
Bodleian, John Rouse, Ad Joannem Rousium (1646 or 1647), which he
included with a replacement copy of his “twin book” (Gemelle . . . liber),
the 1645 Poems:

Modo quis deus, aut editus deo

Pristinam gentis miseratus indolem
(Si satis noxas luimus priores
Mollique luxu degener otium)
Tollat nefandos civium tumultus,
Almaque revocet studia sanctus
Et relegatas sine sede musas
Iam pene totis finibus Angligenum;
Immundasque volucres
Unguibus imminentes
Figat Apollinea pharetra,
Phineamque abigat pestem procul amne Pegaseo.
(ll. 25–36, Strophe 2, Poems, pp. 303–4)
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 77

[If only some god or god-begotten man, moved to pity by the native tal-
ent of our ancient race—if we have made sufficient atonement for our
past offenses and the degenerate idleness of our effeminate luxury—will
take away these abominable civil wars and summon back our nourish-
ing and sacred studies, recall the homeless Muses, now banished from
nearly the entirety of England to the borders, and transfix with the
arrows of Apollo the filthy birds, and drive Phineas’s plague far from the
river of Pegasus. (My translation.)]

Thus the divine wrath with which Phineus has been afflicted becomes the
wrath of Apollo, god of poetry and prophecy, with which some god or god-
like man shall, in Milton’s optative subjunctive clause, drive away the
harpies. Again, this revises Apollonius in the direction of divine favor, since
it was in fact the Argonauts who drove the harpies away from the blind
seer. The interjection of lines 27–28 suggests, further, the sacred context
within which this pagan tale has been transposed. The verb luere—here
luimus—means “to atone for,” Milton’s diction therefore suggesting a par-
ticularly reciprocal relationship between divinity and humanity. Although
the sacral connotation of the word, in conjunction with the notion of dis-
cipline in the following line (Mollique luxu degener otium), suggests our
responsibility for the plight which befalls us, the civil wars are nefandos,
which carries a semantic range inclusive not only of “abominable,” as I
have translated it above, but also “impious.” The point here is that Milton
employs the Phineus myth in order to suggest the overwhelming role of
divine judgment in every human action, whether the action finds favor or
brings retribution. Even more significantly for our purpose, Milton
chooses this episode—revised to suit his meaning—as a way to champion
the return of sacred studies (studia sanctus) to England, thus ending the
civil broils with which the native talent has been afflicted.40 The sacred
studies represent the active life, or negotium, of the poet favored by a
benevolent deity.
Thus Milton again imposes the Achillean choice—the active life of
civic duty versus the impiously contemplative retreat from it (otium)—only
this time with the avowed intention of bringing about a reversal, a return of
the “wandering Muse” of “At a Vacation Exercise” (l.53, Poems, p. 80). The
rising poet of the 1645 collection has become the deliverer of the people of
England, as Milton so explicitly would frame the issue in the Second Defense,
though in Ad Joannem Rousium the remarkable difference is that poetry itself
springs forth with the force of Apollo’s arrows (which of course Book 1 of the
Iliad sets up as a structural analogue, as well as precipitant cause, of Achilles’
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78 The End of Learning

wrath). The change suggests that the will of the gods was not to punish
Phineus so much as to rescue him.
The revision in the ode to John Rouse is clearly in line with another
astonishing transformation that Milton brought about by way of the exam-
ple of Phineus in the Argonautica, in a familiar letter concerning his blind-
ness that dates from some three months after the Second Defense.41 Milton
tells his friend Leonard Philaras to seek the expert opinion of the Parisian
physician Thévenot on his behalf, despite the fact that Milton is clearly dubi-
ous of the idea that he might regain his eyesight: “I shall do what you urge,
that I may not seem to refuse aid whencesoever offered, perhaps divinely”
(YP 4.2:869).42 Milton again quotes lines from Apollonius, explaining that
the effects of blindness made him “often think of the Salmydessian seer
Phineus,” this time selecting a passage drenched in pathos, concerning the
experience of blindness itself (i.e., Argonautica 2.205–8). Milton uses the let-
ter as an occasion to ask himself rhetorically, “If, as it is written, man shall
not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of God, why should one not likewise find comfort in believing that he can-
not see by the eyes alone, but by the guidance and wisdom of God” (YP
4.2:870)? Over the course of the letter, however, Milton switches his identifi-
cation from Phineus to Lynceus, who, according to Apollonius, not only
“excelled in sharpness / of eyesight—if the report be true that this hero could
easily discern even what lay underground,” but also was notoriously “over-
confident” in his “mighty muscles.”43 Instead of a damned prophet awaiting
rescue from his torment by the heroic Argonauts, Milton makes himself an
Argonaut, his quest a metaphorical journey across “The mind, that ocean
where each kind / Does straight its own resemblance find” (“The Garden,”
ll.43–44, Poems AM, p. 157). He bids Philaras farewell “with a mind not less
brave and steadfast than if I were Lynceus himself.”44 Hence Milton returns
full circle to his valorization of the humanistic employment to which he had
been called by Parliament as a form of epic heroism, revising and allegorizing
the struggles of epic protagonists in order to bestow divine favor upon
them—even where their original contexts had urged quite the opposite.
Movingly, the blind poet revises his predecessors to bring the narrative he
wishes to tell about himself in line with a reading that, if not unproblemati-
cally, nevertheless recurrently holds out for evidence of providential design
by reading divinely inspired trial into private struggle.
In fact, in the Second Defense, Milton clung to the idea that the English
people had themselves received an education unparalleled in its divine prom-
ise: “Being better instructed and doubtless inspired by heaven, they overcame
all these obstacles with such confidence that although they were indeed a
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 79

multitude in numbers, yet the lofty exaltation of their minds kept them from
being a mob” (YP 4.1:552). Royalists serve as a counterexample, so that Mil-
ton figures the revolution itself as a battle between rival educators: “He who
teaches this right [i.e., that whatever is a king’s pleasure is his right] must
himself be most unrighteous, the worst of all men, for how could he become
worse than by taking on the very nature which he imposes and stamps on
others?” (YP 4.1:562).

MILTON’S RADICAL HUMANISM

In contrast, Milton was the conscious proponent of a system of education

with a political dimension, and his last works together comprise a tradi-
tional and systematic approach to such education. This paradigm, which
was his direct inheritance from the humanists of the Italian Renaissance,
above all from republican Florence, was referred to then as the studia
humanitatis, from which the term “humanism” and its diminutive contem-
porary form “the humanities” etymologically derive. The studia humani-
tatis, as Renaissance teachers would have understood it, comprised a set of
practices that were eventually codified into an established cycle of educa-
tional programs inclusive of five parts: poetry, rhetoric, history, moral phi-
losophy, and grammar. Not surprisingly, Milton himself published works
specifically devoted to each of these genres in the last decade of his life:45
Accidence Commenced Grammar (1669); The History of Britain (1670); Pro-
lusiones and Epistolae Familiares (1674); Paradise Regain’d, to which is added
Samson Agonistes (1671), which was hailed by Milton’s great eighteenth-
century editor Thomas Newton as being “full of moral and philosophical
reasonings”;46 and, of course, Paradise Lost (1667; 2nd ed. 1674) as well as
the reissue of Poems upon Several Occasions together with a brief tractate Of
Education (1673).
The conceptual framework within which Milton received and commu-
nicated his republican ideas—namely humanism—requires a few words of
explanation at this point. The emergence of English republicanism “was a
consequence of the conjunction of events with the classical inheritance of
humanism, and its popularity a result of the imaginative opportunities that
parliamentary supremacy in the 1640s, and then a genuine republic in the
1650s, presented to educated people.”47 By the end of Milton’s life, such a
method of education—once on the cutting edge of educational reform—was
fast becoming outmoded. Particularly with the rise of new scientific con-
cerns, the epistemological foundation of Renaissance “humanism” had come
under attack, especially for its insistent elevation of rhetoric over dialectic.48
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80 The End of Learning

Milton appropriated this (somewhat) antiquated paradigm, then, with a spe-

cial appeal to the political motivations encoded in its method. The endur-
ingly political intention of Milton’s humanism makes Addison’s
comments—in the pages of the very newspaper in which he so beautifully
defended Milton’s classicism—doubly ironic; a Whig’s desire to inoculate
himself, and securely to partition the literary from the political, surely under-
lies the following aside of 1711:

Among those Advantages which the Publick may reap from this Paper,
it is not the least, that it draws Mens Minds off from the Bitterness of
Party, and furnishes them with Subjects of Discourse that may be
treated without Warmth or Passion. This is said to have been the first
Design of those Gentlemen who set on Foot the Royal Society; and had
then a very good Effect, as it turned many of the greatest Genius’s of the
Age to the Disquisition of natural Knowledge, who, if they had engaged
in Politicks with the same Parts and Application, might have set their
Country in a Flame.49

If the Royal Society is imagined here as having fostered endorsement for the
monarchy, or as having quelled the more radical elements within the society
and neutralizing them into all but passivity, then the opposite principle holds
true for the social response to learning that Milton endorsed.
By way of example, we might consider in this connection between Mil-
ton’s politics and humanism the inclusion of his tract Of Education in the sec-
ond edition of his minor poetry, the Poems upon Several Occasions (1673).
Critics have, mistakenly, supposed that this publishing event merely served a
practical end, in that the gatherings of poetry needed the tract’s added bulk to
fill out the slender octavo volume. This act of “republication” represents the
fruition of a longstanding commitment to educational reform. When Of Edu-
cation appeared at the end of the 1673 collection, it began with a headnote
that—like the more famous headnote added to “Lycidas” (first pub. 1638) for
its republication in the 1645 Poems—historicized the reissue in a way that
would have been unimaginable at its initial moments of composition and
publication. When the tract appeared in 1673, the comment “Written above
twenty Years since” appeared on a separate line, between the title and the text.
The importance of the decision to include this extraneous and factually inex-
act information cannot be overstated: for Of Education was actually first pub-
lished in June 1644, and was written closer to thirty years before its reissue in
1673. This published date misleadingly implies, as the headnote to the text
published with the Poems of 1713 spells out, that Of Education was “Written
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 81

about the Year 1650.”50 The moment in history to which the headnote
alludes, then, does not coincide with the actual time of its composition, but
rather the height of republican ascendancy in England. In other words, Mil-
ton, or perhaps more likely his publisher, fudges the dating to refer his read-
ers to the period “above twenty Years since” because it had been almost
exactly twenty years since the adoption of Lambert’s Instrument of Govern-
ment (1653) and Cromwell’s consequent installation as Lord Protector.
Therefore, “above twenty Years since,” in 1673, puts readers in a frame of
mind to consider the tract as a product of the period between the execution
of Charles I (1649) and the founding of the protectorate (1653)—an event
that had dashed the hopes of the more radical faction of the republican
movement—thus rewriting the tract’s publication history to inscribe its
humanist agenda as an act of political radicalism.
Milton’s educational agenda, if anything, became more assertively
humanist following the Restoration. Because I have been employing the
term “humanism” in a rather restricted sense, and since the term itself has
often been misused in an anachronistic and inexact way—at least in relation
to its origin and subsequent development in Renaissance Italy—by literary
critics seeking in the twentieth century to rehabilitate Milton’s achievement,
a brief rehearsal of the historical meaning of the word and concept may be in
order. The view of “humanism” that I attempt to counter here is the one
promulgated in the vague and conflated sense of “Christian humanism,”
which jumbles the philosophical meaning of the term “humanism” with the
historical one in a way that became common in France in the second half of
the eighteenth century.51
The term “humanism” has definite origins that, to a large degree, limit
the range of its historical reference and, consequently, determine its signifi-
cance for Milton and his predecessors. As I mentioned earlier, the origin of
our word for “humanism” is the Latin studia humanitatis.52 The most signifi-
cant classical proponent of this program of “cultural studies” or “learned pur-
suits,” as the expression may be translated, was the republican Cicero, who
used it in three orations that have direct bearing on its changing meaning. In
Pro Murena 61, Cicero flatters his aristocratic audience: “And since my
speech is to be given, not before an ignorant crowd or in some gathering of
country folk, I will speak with a little more boldness of cultural pursuits [de
studiis humanitatis] which are known and cherished by both you and me.”53
The refining function of literary study distinguishes the acculturated,
equates the urban with the urbane, the literate with the literary. To know (or
even to know of ) these cultural pursuits, implies Cicero, is to cherish them
for their superior humanizing influence. In his oration Pro Caelio, Cicero
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82 The End of Learning

employs the term in a context that lends it a more ambiguous and, perhaps,
broadly construed significance. He refers, in a brief digression, to “Titus and
Gaius Coponius, who were saddened more than anyone by the death of Dio,
who by his pursuit of learning and humane refinement [doctrinae studio
atque humanitatis] as much as his hospitality were bound to him.”54
These allusions hint at the range of meaning and the cultural cachet
that the expression, and the studies to which it refers, claimed in antiquity.
The most important usage for our purposes, however, occurs in the Pro
Archia (62 B.C.E.)—an oration which had a powerful influence on Milton’s
Seventh Prolusion—in which Cicero clearly identifies the studia humani-
tatis with classical scholarship, fusing the connotations of its usage in the
Pro Murena and the Pro Caelio. Here, Cicero defends Archias the Greek
poet, an occasion that furnishes him with an opportunity to recall his own
education at the Academy in Athens and to play up the association of
refinement with Hellenic classicism: “But I beg of you an indulgence that
is fitting in my client’s case and that will not, I trust, inconvenience you: as
I am speaking on behalf of a most distinguished poet and erudite man,
before a court where such learned men are assembled, where the jury is so
humane, where this magistrate sits on the bench, give me leave to speak
somewhat of cultural and literary pursuits [de studiis humanitatis ac litter-
arum].”55 The syntactic parallelism in the key phrase provides our clue to
the practices to which Cicero refers. The study of classical texts produces a
distinctly humane ethical faculty in the members of the senatorial class.
Cicero’s clear implication is that the jury members should regard this
Greek poet as a kind of living monument and that, based on their good
taste, they ought to spare someone so close to the classical tradition, which
Romans know they ought to prize. When Cicero depicts the cultural
milieu of Archias’s childhood, he caustically suggests the relative provin-
cialism of the capital in his simultaneous use of a passive construction and
the rhetorical figure litotes: here in Rome, he says, because of the respite
from civil strife, the study of the arts and disciplines of the Greeks were not
neglected [non negligebantur (3.5)]. In times of peace, as when Marius and
Catullus held the consulships (i.e., 102 B.C.E.), the study and admiration
of Greek antiquity flourished. Cicero equates the study of Greek literary
culture with the very business of peaceful civilization. By placing Roman
culture—or that which distinguishes the acculturated member of Roman
society—at one remove from present-day Rome and locating the distin-
guishing characteristics of learning and, indeed, ethical humanity in the
remote Greek past, Cicero constructs what will become the locus classicus
for the idea of belatedness inherent in republican humanism.
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 83

No humanist of the Italian Renaissance represented the pathos of this

classical nostalgia more poignantly than Petrarch, whose character Ratio
wonderfully uses the condition of the bibliophile as a metaphor for the infi-
nite regress of ancient learning in his dialogue De Librorum Copia: to possess
many books is “a troublesome but delightful burden and a pleasant diversion
of the mind.”56 Petrarch discovered the Pro Archia at Liège in 1333 and
copied it out in his own hand, carefully marking the passage I quoted above,
which he would adapt and incorporate into his own writings. “If it is true
that Italian humanists had no expression closer to ‘classical scholarship’ than
studia humanitatis,” as Michael D. Reeve has recently argued, “then Pro
Archia provided classical scholarship in the Renaissance with its charter of
foundation.”57 In a famous letter to his friend Tommaso da Messina, which
probably dates from the year of his discovery of the speech for Archias,
Petrarch’s use of the word for “human” (humanus) in a context where he
clearly means “literary culture” (humanitas) diverges from Ciceronian usage:
“Therefore let us be in good spirit: we do not labor in vain, nor will they
labor uselessly who will be born after many epochs right up to the end of the
aging world. It is rather to be feared that men will cease to exist before, by
the effort of humanistic studies [humanorum studiorum], they break through
to the most secret mysteries of truth.”58 This is precisely the sense in which
Milton used the term in the autobiographical asides to his Second Defense:
“My father destined me from boyhood for the study of humane letters
[humaniorum literarum studiis].”59 Neither Petrarch nor Milton, therefore,
honored the philological distinction that other Renaissance humanists found
in Cicero. John Veron’s English edition (1552) of R. Stephanus’s Latin dic-
tionary defines humanus as “gentle, appertainyng vnto man, that happeneth
vnto men, benygne, gracious, courteous, bounteous” and humanitas as
“man’s nature, the duetye that a manne ought vnto an other by the law of
nature, bounteousnes, courtesy, the knowledge of the lyberall artes.”60
Given the traditional humanist training Milton received at St. Paul’s
school in London, and the preference his Prolusions exhibit for this earlier
educational experience over the more scholastically influenced cycle of stud-
ies at Cambridge, Milton’s return to this educational philosophy toward the
end of his life probably reflects his actual practice as a schoolmaster and tutor
as well as his theoretical program. To the extent that Milton’s own studies
have been reconstructed—especially in Donald Clark’s John Milton at St.
Paul’s School but also, less coherently, in H. F. Fletcher’s The Intellectual
Development of John Milton—they are available for specific comparison with
the projects of the continental humanists that inspired them.61 To this extent
at least, James Holly Hanford was right in claiming that “Milton’s peculiar
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84 The End of Learning

contribution to the cause and philosophy of humanism” emerged from “a

conscious and consistent endeavor to harmonize” what many saw as the
“contradictory and irreconcilable motives” of Reformation and Renaissance.
The mistake of those who see Milton’s motives as “contradictory and irrecon-
cilable” stems, argued Hanford, from a misinterpretation of “the character of
the change in viewpoint of his later years” and a failure “to perceive that
instead of passing farther from the Renaissance he had moved nearer to its
central truths.”62 Among those truths, as Milton and other republicans such
as Harrington would have understood them, were the lessons of the Venetian
and Florentine Republics, which fostered humanistic learning as a form of
responsive participation in civic life.
Hanford’s special pleading ought, however, to remind us of the context
in which Hanford defended Milton, during the so-called “Milton Contro-
versy” that raged in literary circles and then classrooms through the first half
of the twentieth century. (“The Milton Controversy” evokes the self-impor-
tance of some of its participants: after all, when was Milton not at the center
of controversy?) Hanford’s intervention should remind us of the politics of
his adversaries in the debate over Milton’s position in the canon of English
literature, the politics in particular of the self-proclaimed royalist and Anglo-
Catholic T. S. Eliot. Contrary to popular belief, it was often the royalists who
in fact recognized the essential relationship between politics and culture. As
Eliot put it in a pithy but damning essay, “Modern Education and the Clas-
sics” (1932), in which he also insists, “the hierarchy of education should be a
religious hierarchy”: “It is only within a particular social system that a system
of education has any meaning.”63 But critics, following the important work
of such scholars as Hanford and Bush, have often held the humanism of Mil-
ton’s late period to signify a retreat from politics.64 I would argue that to set
the two in a false opposition is to enact a seriously anachronistic misrepre-
sentation of the humanistic activity of the Renaissance and its afterlife in the
seventeenth century. Such a concern for the propagation of dutiful yet
learned and godly citizens became, if anything, more urgent as the Restora-
tion became inevitable.65

EDUCATORS AND LEGISLATORS

Of course, Milton was not the only educational theorist forcefully to advance
politicized programs in the Interregnum period. For royalists, the parliamen-
tary victory and the institution of the republic made clear the need for an
educational agenda that could indoctrinate the people with a counterrevolu-
tionary ideology. “I.B., Gent.,” who as “one of the most Heroick Cavaliers”
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 85

chose to remain partially anonymous, published his treatise Heroick Educa-

tion in order that, body and mind educated, the English public might “avoid
that interior combat, which disturbs the peace and tranquility of our life.”66
The author’s advice assumes the form of an aphoristic conduct book for
teachers or “governours,” and it participates in this way in a common genre
that thrived throughout the Renaissance, having in the previous generation,
for example, an analogue in Robert Dallington’s Aphorismes Civill and Mili-
tarie (London, 1613), which the author rather urgently dedicated to the
future King Charles I just after the death of Prince Henry. If, as “I.B.” con-
tends in Heroick Education, “The mind and will are absolute Monarchs and
will have us observe the same circumstances and ceremony toward them,”
then it is logical that “the will is a Prince which commands, but is neverthe-
lesse counseled by his servants, the Orders and Edicts are made in his name,
but his servants lay the plots and projects.”67 As in the poetic manifestoes
produced by royalists in exile, Heroick Education seeks to inculcate the will-
ing few: “Affection is a Character which penetrates through the heart, opens
the door it selfe, and makes a deep impression. ’Tis a Prince which obtains
an Empire so much the more absolute, by how much the obedience is more
voluntary.”68 As we shall see in the literary criticism of Davenant, Hobbes,
and Dryden, these martial metaphors combat republican politics on the edu-
cational battlefield: “Those who conduct them [the young], must by their
prudence, imitate the wisdome of a brave Commander, of Armies, who not
willing to hazard a Battell, endeavour to ruine their enemies by cutting off all
sypplyes, and provisions, dividing their forces, wearying out their souldiers
by continuall alarmes, and handsomely avoiding all their dangerous
attempts.”69
A good point of comparison can be found in Harrington’s The Com-
monwealth of Oceana, published in the same year as Heroick Education, and
no less insistent upon the vital necessity of education for the polity. As Lord
Archon says in “The Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana”: “Now the
health of a government and education of the youth being the same pulse, no
wonder if it have been the constant practice of well ordered commonwealths
to commit the care and feeling of it unto public magistrates; a duty that was
performed in such manner by the Areopagites as is elegantly praised by
Isocrates.”70 Harrington believes that schools should be erected throughout
the commonwealth, and in the “twenty-sixth order” of the government he
insists upon mandatory education for boys from the age of nine to fifteen.71
Lord Archon fleshes out this order, saying that despite the fact that “some
man or nation, upon equal improvement of this kind, may be lighter than
some other . . . certainly education is the scale without which no man or
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86 The End of Learning

nation can truly know his or her own weight or value.”72 A direct cultural
connection exists between republican prudence and its literary manifesta-
tion, and so Harrington puts forth the university as repository of what he
calls “good literature,” a primary vehicle by means of which the common-
wealth shall perpetuate rem publicam in the minds of subsequent genera-
tions: “Of this I am sure, the perfection of a commonwealth is not to be
attained unto without the knowledge of ancient prudence, nor the knowl-
edge of ancient prudence without learning, nor learning without schools of
good literature; and these are such as we call universities.”73
Although he shared Harrington’s concern for educating the common-
wealth, Milton nevertheless fiercely advocated the disestablishment of the
universities.74 In the ongoing debates over tithing and training for the min-
istry during the 1650s, Milton proposed again, as he had in the 1640s, the
foundation of small local academies. Miton’s friend Roger Williams, in The
Hireling Ministry None of Christs (8 April 1652), had argued that “the
churches and assemblies of the saints” are “the only schools of the prophets
appointed by Christ Jesus.”75 In his own pamphlet on the subject, Considera-
tions Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659), Milton concurs
with Williams: “The whole gospel never sent us for ministers to the schools
of Philosophie, but rather bids us beware of such vain deceit” (YP 7:319).
The universities—the object of Milton’s scorn since at least his Elegia Prima
(1626)—propagated a trivial disputatiousness, a merely formal oratorical
style without substance: “those theological disputations there held by Profes-
sors and graduates are such as tend least of all to the edification or capacitie
of the people, but rather perplex and leaven pure doctrin with scholastical
trash then enable any minister to the better preaching of the gospel” (YP
7:317). What, then, is required to make a man into a minister according to
Milton? What sort of education ought to be provided in order to ensure the
fitness of the godly? “What learning either human or divine can be necessary
to a minister, may as easily and less chargeably be had in any private house”
as a it may in a university—an arrangement, as we have seen, put into prac-
tice by Milton in his own home during the 1640s (YP 7:316). Therefore, the
establishment of private academies, like that idealized academy described in
Of Education, would be among the foremost uses to which the revenues
saved by permanently disestablishing church education could be put:

To erect in greater number all over the land schooles and competent
libraries to those schooles, where languages and arts may be taught free
together, without the needles, unprofitable and inconvenient removing
to another place. So all the land would be soone better civiliz’d, and they
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 87

who taught freely at the publick cost, might have thir education given
them on this condition, that therewith content, they should not gadd
for preferment out of thir own countrey, but continue there thankful for
what they receivd freely, bestowing it on thir countrey, without soaring
above the meannes wherein they were born. (YP 7:319)

Milton persistently viewed education as the way to acculturate the nation,

even to render the English people more cosmopolitan, as he writes in Propos-
als of Certaine Expedients for the Preventing of a Civill War Now Feard, & the
Settling of a Firme Government (1659), proposing “the liberty to erect
schooles where all arts & sciences may be taught in every citty & great
towne, which may then be honoured with the name of citty whereby the
land would become much more civilized” (YP 7:338). If the nation were to
be “urbanized” through the institution of schools, the commonwealth would
stand on the most secure foundation possible. Humanistic learning, in Mil-
ton’s classical republicanism, is the fundamental condition for the existence
of humane civil society: the two are mutually enabling as well as reinforcing.
History would prove, however, that the backsliding nation could not
sustain the effort necessary to ensure its own freedom. In February 1660,
after General Monck’s army had entered London—just before 21 February
1660, when the Rump recalled the Presbyterian members to Parliament who
had been excluded in Pride’s Purge nearly twelve years earlier—Milton wrote
The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. The pamphlet
was quickly printed and circulated early in the final week of February.76
Meanwhile, hope among the republican minority sank as the population of
London waited “for Monke to pull off his last hood.”77 Much to the dismay
of the republican faction, the Long Parliament dissolved itself on 16 March
1660. In the weeks that followed, Milton prepared a heavily revised second
edition of The Readie and Easie Way, which appeared in print by the first
week of April. Charles II returned to England on 25 May, little more than
two months after the dissolution of Parliament, and entered London in tri-
umph on 29 May 1660.78
The two editions straddle the final days of the Long Parliament, and so
the problem facing Milton was twofold. On the one hand, the massive insur-
gence of popular support for the return of a Stuart monarch ensured the
futility of Milton’s local aims in the pamphlet. In short, as the prospect of
parliamentary rule diminished and General Monck revealed his irenic dispo-
sition toward the exiled monarch, avowed republicans fled the scene of gov-
ernment. Willful association with the Good Old Cause became dangerous.
Even the title pages of the two editions bear witness to this phenomenon, in
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88 The End of Learning

that, unlike the first edition, the second records neither the names nor the
initials of the printer and bookseller, claiming only to have been “Printed for
the Author” somewhere in London.
Moreover, pamphleteers antagonistic to Milton’s cause in 1660 began
to accuse him of employing aloof and grandiose Ciceronian rhetoric in the
service of a disingenuous, self-interested politics. Cavalier polemicists such
as Roger L’Estrange and Samuel Butler portrayed Milton’s high-styled
appeal for a republican meritocracy governed by a permanent legislature as
an outmoded relic of 1640s and 1650s propaganda, and his idealism con-
sequently became vulnerable to representation as the metaphorical correla-
tive of his physical disability, his “blindness” to the imperatives of an
increasingly commercial society.79 In the first edition, the orator directs his
plea to a distinctly characterized collective: “that part of the nation which
consents not with them, as I perswade me of a great number, far worthier
then by their means to be brought in to the same bondage, and reservd, I
trust, by Divine providence to a better end; since God hath yet his rem-
nant, and hath not yet quenched the spirit of libertie among us” (YP
7:363–4). In the same passage in the second edition, the orator less hope-
fully addresses “that part of the nation which consents not with them, as I
perswade me of a great number, far worthier then by their means to be
brought into the same bondage” (YP 7:428). The godly “remnant” and
indeed the “better end” have disappeared. The logic of the metaphor pro-
posed by the two editions neatly illustrates the assumptions underlying a
hoary cliché of Milton criticism: if the second edition betrays the idealism
of Milton’s jeremiad by making legible a pattern of retreat, then his virtual
silence after his imprisonment in the early 1660s, followed by the publica-
tion of his poetry in the late 1660s and early 1670s, reveals a circumspect
(maybe even penitent) radical effecting an “inward turn” toward private
devotion and quietist solidarity with fellow regicides who escaped persecu-
tion under the new regime.80
It is true that after the publication of the two editions of The Readie
and Easie Way, Milton himself published nothing until the first edition of
Paradise Lost (1667)—with the exception of a ten-year-old sonnet used as a
commendatory poem for Sikes’s The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane, Kt
(1662).81 Of course, practical necessity forced Milton not to publish during
the early 1660s. It is well known that, acting on a request of the House of
Commons, Charles issued a proclamation resulting in the September 1660
confiscation and burning of Milton’s First Defense (1651 and 1658) and
Eikonoklastes (1649) as well as John Goodwin’s The Obstructours of Justice
(1649) by the common hangman at the Sessions House in the Old Bailey.82
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 89

Despite the apparent contradictions and expedient revisions con-

tained in his outline for a free commonwealth in The Readie and Easie Way,
Milton held fast to the abstract principle of education as an exigent means
for the public to reconstitute its faltering commonwealth. Characteristi-
cally, he advocated the practical implementation of his scheme to establish
private academies, even when the precise connection between this plan and
the governmental paradigm for which he was risking his life seemed, at
best, tenuous.83 Because “the whole freedom of man consists either in spir-
itual or civil libertie,” the institutions of the commonwealth would require
that an active citizenry understand its liberties better than the backsliding
populace seemed to in April 1660 (YP 7:456). Above all, this entailed a
polity aware that the very premise of their empowerment was liberty of
conscience. In connection with the spiritual freedom to follow the dictates
of conscience rather than established, state-sponsored forms of religion,
“The other part of our freedom consists in the civil rights and advance-
ments of every person according to his merit: the enjoyment of those never
more certain, and the access to these never more open, then in a free Com-
monwealth” (YP 7:458). Milton’s assessment, I think, implicitly guarantees
a commercial benefit to society—and political advancement for the few
who merit the right to govern—as a rhetorical enticement to follow his
spiritual agenda.
However, as Steve Pincus has pointed out, “Milton was convinced that
civic virtue, not material consideration, was the basis of political and martial
power.”84 Both civil liberty and religious freedom are, ultimately, dependent
upon the educational apparatus that will ensure their propagation. Milton
suggests that education is the social equivalent of the circulation of blood
throughout the body politic—or perhaps, as John Rogers has argued, the
vital warmth thought to have infused the created universe and given all
things form:85

They [local districts] should have heer also schools and academies at thir
own choice, wherein thir children may be bred up in thir own sight to
all learning and noble education not in grammar only, but in all liberal
arts and exercises. This would soon spread much more knowledge and
civilitie, yea religion through all the parts of the land, by communicat-
ing the natural heat of government and culture more distributively to all
extreme parts, which now lie numm and neglected, would soon make
the whole nation more industrious, more ingenuous at home, more
potent, more honorable abroad. To this a free Commonwealth will eas-
ily assent; (nay the Parlament hath alreadie som such thing in designe)
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90 The End of Learning

for of all governments a Commonwealth aims most to make the people

flourishing, vertuous, noble and high spirited. (YP 7:460)

The emphasis upon locality, or a more decentralized form of judiciary and

educational authority, serves as a quasi-constitutional check against the cen-
tripetal pull of monarchy.86 Monarchical regulation of normative modes of
civil indoctrination must be protected against at all costs, and so Milton’s
aim is to set up dissenting academies not unlike those that were in fact made
necessary by the institution of the Clarendon Code a few years later.
”To make the people fittest to chuse, and the chosen fittest to govern,”
argues Milton, “will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education, to teach
the people faith not without vertue, temperance, modestie, sobrietie, parsi-
monie, justice, not to admire wealth or honour; to hate turbulence and
ambition; to place every one his privat welfare and happiness in the public
peace, libertie and safetie” (YP 7:443). But of course “the chosen” would not,
in Milton’s model, be subject to the rotational model to which Harrington
remained committed. Rather, the perpetual senate would ensure, perhaps
paradoxically, the continuance of the people’s fundamental liberties, above all
else their liberty of conscience. Ultimately, a little over a century after The
Readie and Easie Way was written, James Madison would advance a related
argument when he called, in The Federalist No. 10 (1787), for “the republi-
can principle” as a protection against “pure democracy”; the “delegation of
the government” to “a small number of citizens” would ensure that “the pub-
lic voice” was “pronounced by the representatives of the people” and there-
fore would prove “more consonant to the public good”—and less likely to
decay into the “mischiefs of faction”—“than if pronounced by the people
themselves convened for the purpose.”87 More immediately, however, “the
public peace” mandated the return of the king, which led in turn to the edu-
cational project of Milton’s great poems.

POETS AS EDUCATORS: HEROISM AND EPIC FORM

How does this new emphasis on the heroism of humanistic education alter
the forms of the heroic poem, which represented heroism more directly and
self-consciously than any other literary genre in early modern culture? Tradi-
tionally held to be the highest of poetic genres, epic has always commanded
the awareness of its readers, whether critics or admirers, as an educative
medium. Homer was, according to Plato and Xenophanes, “the educator of
Hellas,” and it is hardly surprising to students of antiquity that “there was no
separation between ethics and aesthetics” in ancient Greece; indeed, as
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 91

Werner Jaeger has argued, “The educational content and the artistic form of
a work of art affect each other reciprocally, and in fact spring from the same
root.”88 Of course, the chief objection Socrates launches against Homer, even
as he awards the poet with a kind of heroic epithet, is a critique of the dan-
gerous political influence that Homer’s corrupting myths introduce into the
republic. But this perceived danger also bore witness to epic’s power to grant
the imaginary an active political force. The political implications of epic edu-
cation arise from a complex and reciprocal interchange of ideologies, in
which, as Sir Henry Wotton wrote to John Donne, “men do often learn
when they do teach.”89
Whether acknowledged or, as Percy Bysshe Shelley contends, “unac-
knowledged legislators of the World,” poets were, in the early modern
period, undoubted legislators of the word.90 Thomas Hobbes understood
this potency of epic, and in his famous answer to Davenant’s preface to
Gondibert (1650/1), the philosopher manages to reinforce the idea that “the
vertues you distribute there amongst so many Noble Persons, represent (in
the reading) the image but of one mans vertue to my fancy, which is your
own.”91 If the ennobling gesture creates a window into the psychology of the
epic poet, the psychomachia is nevertheless to be conveyed in modern ratio-
nalist terms: “Time and Education begets Experience; Experience begets
Memory; Memory begets Judgement and Fancy; Judgement begets the
strength and structure; and fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem.”92
Hobbes promotes the rational constriction of the educated intellect, which
derives its principles of composition (in a process of intellectual abstraction)
from nature, as opposed to the wild and (to him) uncultivated inspiration of
the puritan and republican advocates of the sublime furor poeticus.93 For
Hobbes, the poet ought to exemplify the same nobility of mind that poetry
encourages in readers.
Davenant insists upon the political education of the princely caste as
the primary aim of epic, as religion, arms, politics, and law have been made
“weak by an emulous war amongst themselves: it follows next, we should
introduce to strengthen those principal aids (still making the people our
direct object) some collateral help; which I will safely presume to consist in
Poesy.”94 Throughout the royalist theories of epic and of education during
the Interregnum and after the crisis of the English republic, one finds the
metaphors of “emulous” civil strife and factional warfare used to describe the
displacement of political functions onto the arts. Political motivations for
epic in particular appear as a displacement precisely because of the self-con-
sciousness induced by defeat. More critically, the martial metaphors and the
fractious polity do not simply mirror each other. Instead, the vehicle and
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92 The End of Learning

tenor of such metaphors circulate by means of a cultural synergy expressive

and constitutive of a new public space to be resisted, enabled, or regulated.
For Davenant, the “multitude” is “that which was anciently call’d a Mon-
ster”—not unlike the gargantuan body politic as depicted in the several
issues of the frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan—and its political manipula-
tion depends upon a mimetic chain that begins with the poet’s inculcation of
the nobility:

I may now believe I have usefully taken from Courts and Camps, the
patterns of such as will be fit to be imitated by the most necessary Men;
and the most necessary Men are those who become principal by prerog-
ative of blood, (which is seldom unassisted with education) or by great-
ness of minde, which in exact definition is Vertue. The common Crowd
(of whom we are hopeless) we desert, being rather to be corrected by
Laws (where precept is accompanied with punishment) then to be
taught by Poesie; for few have arriv’d at the skil of Orpheus, or at his
good fortune, whom we may suppose to have met with extraordinary
Grecian Beasts, when so succesfully he reclaim’d them with his Harp.
Nor is it needful that Heriock Poesie should be levell’d to the reach of
common Men: for if the examples it presents prevail upon their Chiefs,
the delight of Imitation (which we hope we have prov’d to be as effec-
tual to good as to evil) will rectifie by the rules which those Chiefs
establish of their own lives, the lives of all that behold them; for the
example of life, doth as much surpass the force of Precept, as Life doth
exceed Death.95

Davenant takes the Aristotelian conception of mimesis to a new degree of

elitism: not merely is the poet to depict those of higher station and more
noble composition than the audience, but epics are to exclude the people
altogether, since the orphic charming of the beastly public can be abandoned
in favor of punitive laws.96 The nobility will lead by example, and the public
will follow the cavalier caste, those “most necessary men” who comprise Dav-
enant’s ideal audience.97
The political valence of genre theory intersected with actual poetic
writing in complex and apparently contradictory ways after the Restora-
tion, when the supporters of the republic had to accommodate their con-
cept of poetic form to disempowerment and persecution. Milton’s note on
the verse of Paradise Lost—added to the fourth issue of the first edition
(1668)—participated in a vigorous, politically charged debate about the
proper form of the Heroic Poem in English, a debate that had most recently
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 93

flourished in the letters of Davenant and Hobbes, though it had in fact

begun during the reign of Elizabeth in an equally contentious setting. While
Milton argues forcefully against rhyme, Paradise Lost does rhyme as a part of
a broader political strategy to educate his “fit audience . . . though few.”
Rhyme was, according to Milton, “the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set
off wretched matter and lame Meeter.”98 Most early modern histories of
English versification agree about rhyme’s “barbarous” origin if not effect; this
is equally true among champions of unrhymed quantitative verse such as
Roger Ascham and advocates of rhyme such as John Dryden, newly made
Charles II’s Poet Laureate in 1668. Milton’s note on the verse of Paradise Lost
is most immediately a polemical response to Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic
Poesy, which had appeared earlier in the same year. Dryden explains,
“[W]hen, by the inundation of the Goths and Vandals into Italy, new lan-
guages were brought in, and barbarously mingled with the Latin, of which
the Italian, Spanish, French, and ours (made out of them and the Teutonic)
are dialects, a new way of poesy was practiced; new, I say, in those countries,
for in all probability it was that of the conquerors in their own nations. This
new way consisted in measure or number of feet, and rhyme.”99 Dryden’s
tale of the “conquerors in their own nations”—a political paradox with spe-
cial resonance for the “restored” Stuart king—chronicles the invention of
rhyme by the “Barbarians,” who could not observe the rules of classical versi-
fication because these were not “suitable to their tongues.” The invasions of
the Goths and Vandals caused languages to be, as Dryden says, “barbarously
mingled,” in turn creating modern prosody.
The same historical fusion inaugurates the tragic shift, from republi-
canism centered on senatorial governance to absolutism centered on monar-
chical prerogative, in the writings of republican political theorists. In
Oceana, Harrington says that the rise of Julius Caesar “extinguish[ed] lib-
erty” by bringing about what he calls “the transition of ancient into modern
prudence.” Like the author of “Nostradamus’s Prophesy,” Harrington pre-
ferred “Venetian Libertye” to the machinations of the contemporary
despotic monarchies, the “modern prudence” of which Harrington was so
critical.100 Although it was Caesar who ultimately accomplished this “transi-
tion,” the concept of absolutism was, according to Harrington, “introduced
by those inundations of Huns, Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Saxons which
. . . deformed the whole face of the world with those ill features of govern-
ment which at this time are become far worse in these western parts.”101
Depicting the “inundations” as a process of governmental miscegenation,
Harrington asserts that the Roman polity was, in Dryden’s phrase, “bar-
barously mingled,” in effect producing the absolutist European monarchies.
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94 The End of Learning

So the historical transition from parliamentary rule to dictatorship coincides

with the invention of rhyme.
After the collapse of the English Republic, a wave of rhymed propa-
ganda dependent upon an analogy between Roman and British empires
welcomed the restored monarch. In his celebratory poem of 1660, Astraea
Redux, Dryden returns to the Roman imperial conquest of Britain as an
allegory for the accession of Charles II to the throne. The rulers of the
Commonwealth become the “lesser Gods” of an Interregnum who “owned
a lawless salvage liberty, / Like that our painted ancestors so prized / Ere
empire’s arts their breasts had civilized.”102 Dryden characteristically
equates “liberty” with the “salvage,” “arts” with empire. These “arts” are of
course the civilizing arts imposed by the Romans upon Britain—”arts” that
Marvell had cautiously memorialized in the final lines of “An Horatian
Ode”: “The same arts that did gain / A pow’r must it maintain” (Poems
AM, p. 279). Marvell’s ode equivocally celebrates this “pow’r” by holding
its “arts” up to critical scrutiny, whereas, for Dryden, “empire’s arts” are
mutually and positively reinforcing. The Romans have “civilized” the
Britons by quelling the rebellion in their “breasts.” Already the position
Dryden would voice in Absalom and Achitophel (1681) was clear: “never
rebel was to arts a friend” (l.873).
Military conquest, Dryden’s poems contend, rhymes with pacifying
cultural conquest. Thus the analogy extends to the particular form of the
poem. The implicit argument Dryden makes throughout his celebration of
the restored monarch finds structural, metaphoric expression in his use of
rhyme: “O happy age! O times like those alone / By Fate reserved for great
Augustus’ throne!” (ll.320–1). The Restoration is “like” the age “reserved” for
Roman imperial ascendancy, during which the “barbarians” who ultimately
established the modern European monarchies were first “civilized” by Augus-
tan imperial culture. The connotation lodged in the rhyme is that the two
times are joined as a result of monarchy—the single, metonymic “throne,”
which they “alone” share, since both began with the collapse of republics.
The remote colony of Rome has become the center of a transatlantic naval
empire equipped to spread what Dryden calls the “wealthy trade” of British
mercantile interests across the globe in “the joint growth of arms and arts”
(ll.304, 322). It is therefore, in Dryden’s conceit, poetic justice that the pax
Britannia should complement the pax Romana. The translatio imperii, the
westward translation or transferal of empire, has made rhyme indigenous to
the “Imperial Arts” of the new Rome, as in Anchises’s prophecy to Aeneas in
Dryden’s translation: “But, Rome, ’tis thine alone, with awful sway, / To rule
Mankind; and make the World obey.”103
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 95

So far, the histories are remarkably consistent, though interpretations of

the events tend to line up like warring factions. In both republican and royal-
ist accounts, the genealogies of the vernacular poetic traditions and of the
contemporary despotic monarchies began with the “inundations” of the “bar-
barians.” Among zealous protestant commentators, this history suggestively
linked the rise of rhyme with, as the first published commentary on Paradise
Lost put it, “the times of Monkish Ignorance,” or the ascendancy of that other
Rome, the Catholic Church.104 Declaiming against rhyme’s “vexation, hin-
drance, and constraint” in antimonarchical and anti-ecclesiastical terms, Mil-
ton concludes his preface to Paradise Lost with a rousing boast: “This neglect
then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect . . . that it rather is to be
esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to
Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.” Like-
wise, as Milton claims in the The Readie and Easie Way, “the thraldom of king-
ship” is “a new slaverie” (YP 7:422). The “modern bondage of Rimeing,”
endemic to monarchic epic and romance, is the formal correlative of abso-
lutist rule against which Milton defines his ideal of “ancient liberty.”
By contrast, the “ancient liberty” of a republic is to government what
blank verse is to “Heroic Poem” as a genre. “Ancient liberty” had commonly
served as a rallying cry in republican political writing, from the ancient
Roman historians through Machiavelli’s Discorsi, from which Milton copied
out 17 passages for his Commonplace Book (see YP 1:512). In Eikonoklastes
(1649)—one of the official defenses of the regicide that Milton wrote at Par-
liament’s behest—Milton urges the public to recall “how great a loss we fell
into of our ancient liberty” by agreeing in the Triennial Act to limit how often
Parliament could meet.105 In this context, Milton appeals to the unwritten
basis of the Anglo-Saxon polity before the Norman Conquest—invoking, in
effect, a new history of English Common Law that was variously constructed
in the period to decentralize the institutions of monarchy.106
The concept is crucial for understanding Milton’s note on the verse. If
the earliest beginnings of rhyme were to be found in the “inundations” of the
barbarians, then the ascendancy of rhyming epic in England was contempo-
raneous with the Norman Conquest.107 Thomas Warton, the late eigh-
teenth-century editor and author of commentaries on Milton and Spenser,
took “the Norman accession” as the ideal point of departure for his massive
History of English Poetry because, he said, it “produced that signal change in
our policy, constitution, and public manners.”108 In the opposition between
“modern bondage” and “ancient liberty,” Milton compresses three analogous
moments of decline: the Gothic invasions of the Roman Empire, the Nor-
man invasion of England, and the Restoration of Charles II. These phases of
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96 The End of Learning

history and literature share a paradigmatic collapse of “ancient liberty”—the

fall of a “republican” or “mixed” polity—as well as a corresponding prefer-
ence for verse that rhymes. The two are symptomatic of the same intellectual
decline. In the recovery of an ancient mode of poetic composition, Milton
argues, the poet urges a return to the “ancient liberty” of a republic.
Political theorists from across the spectrum voiced arguments about the
power of ancient literature to instigate radical political action. Harrington
and Hobbes concurred about the uses of literature in ancient society, though
they expressed radically different appraisals of its value. Hobbes attributes
the motive that underlies such indoctrination of the populace to a perni-
cious, ingenuous supposition deriving ultimately from the Athenians, who
“were taught, (to keep them from desire of changing their Government,) that
they were Free-men, and all that lived under Monarchy were slaves.” Hence,
deference to the authority of the classics, Hobbes contends, has educated
men at a great cost to society: “by reading of these Greek, and Latine
Authors, men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a falseshew of
Liberty,) of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of
their Soveraigns; and again of controlling those controllers, with the effusion
of so much blood; as I think I may truly say, there was never any thing so
deerly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek
and Latine tongues.”109 Literature unleashes the illusion that the condition
of tumult is natural under a monarch. Knowing that “it is an easy thing, for
men to be deceived, by the specious name of Libertie; and for want of Judge-
ment to distinguish, mistake that for their Private Inheritance, and Birth
right, which is the right of the Publique only,” Hobbes reasoned that “when
the same errour is confirmed by the authority of men in reputation for their
writings in this subject, it is no wonder if it produce sedition, and change of
Government.” Ancient treatises stir up their readers, who become politically
insolent because they falsely attribute authority to authors who derived their
theory of government not from rational observation of “the Principles of
Nature,” but instead from pre-existing forms of government—in other
words, from “the Practise of their own Common-wealths, which were Popu-
lar.” This methodological error corresponds to the way in which modern
(here, read “republican”) political theorists seek justification and precedence
for a system of government in books rather than in natural philosophy, just
“as the Grammarians describe the Rules of Language, out of the Practise of
the time; or the Rules of Poetry, out of the Poems of Homer and Virgil.”110
The political valence of Milton’s 1668 note on rhyme was clear enough
to the poem’s most immediate audiences. In 1673, Richard Leigh referred to
Milton as “this Schismatick in Poetry . . . nonconformable in point of
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The English Revolution and Heroic Education 97

Rhyme.”111 The essence of the matter was, for Nathaniel Lee in his “To Mr.
Dryden, on his Poem of Paradise” (1674?), that Milton “rudely cast what
you [Dryden] could well dispose,” partly because “He roughly drew on an
old Fashion’d Ground, / A Chaos.”112 In “An Ode By Way of an Elegy on . . .
Mr. Dryden” (June 1700), Alexander Oldys elaborates the political nature of
prosody further, putting Tory praise of Dryden in a repentant Milton’s
mouth:

A double share of bliss belongs to thee,

For thy rich verse and thy firm loyalty;
Some of my harsh and uncouth points do owe
To thee a tuneful cadence still below.
Thine was indeed the state of innocence,
Mine of offence,
With studied treason and self-interest stained,
Till Paradise Lost wrought Paradise Regained.113

The titles of Milton’s epics themselves become for Oldys a trope to

illustrate how Dryden’s salvaging of Paradise Lost was its salvation. The prob-
lem remained for many eighteenth-century critics the one on which John
Clarke harped in An Essay Upon Study (1731): “The Negligence of the
Author with respect to the Smoothness of his Verse, which is sometimes
scarce distinguishable from Prose.”114 The schoolmaster’s objection to Mil-
ton’s prosody represents a tacit rejoinder to the polemical regicide, whose
prose had been republished (occasionally in rewritten form) since the end of
the seventeenth century by Whigs seeking vindication for their various posi-
tions on monarchy.115 Like twentieth-century royalist T. S. Eliot, Clarke
issued his prosodic, stylistic corrective on the grounds that “the rectifying of
Mistakes in the Conduct of a Poet, of Milton’s Fame and Authority, is a
Means to prevent others from being misled into an Imitation of his
Faults.”116 However, royalists were not to be the only commentators on Mil-
ton’s prosody in the eighteenth century. In 1786, just a decade after author-
ing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson commented in his
“Thoughts on English Prosody” upon the “most esteemed” form in English
verse, the pentameter. For, Jefferson argues,

it is the only one which has dignity enough to support blank verse, that
is, verse without rhyme. This is attempted in no other measure. It con-
stitutes, therefore, the most precious part of our poetry. The poet, unfet-
tered by rhyme, is at liberty to prune his diction of those tautologies,
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98 The End of Learning

those feeble nothings necessary to introtrude [sic] on the rhyming word.

With no other trammel than that of measure he is able to condense his
thoughts and images and to leave nothing but what is truly poetical.
When enveloped in all the pomp and majesty of his subject he some-
times even throws off the restraint of the regular pause.117

Jefferson rhapsodizes, for one of the only times in what amounts to a rather
turgid and dry exposition of the basic principles of accentual-syllabic meter,
upon the “liberty” induced by throwing off poetic “restraint.” He follows this
praise of blank verse with two quotations from Paradise Lost: the first is from
the invocation to the first book (1.1–10); the second is from the description
of creation and the circumscription of the universe with God’s golden com-
passes (7.224–30). Jefferson looked to the start of Paradise Lost, together
with Milton’s depiction of the universe’s inception, as the exemplary
instances of poetic “liberty.”
The form of the poem discloses a more profound concept of liberty
than this, however. Even on the level of poetic form, the story the poem tells
is far more complex than is sometimes realized: for the epic employs rhyme
at significant moments.118 More integral to the design on narrative and
philosophical levels, contradiction emerges out of Milton’s fundamental con-
victions about the nature of true liberty, which must, like creation itself, be
“Won from the void and formless infinite” (3.12). At the core of such liberty
as Milton fights for in his epic is the recognition that, in this world and per-
haps also in heaven, time will bring out the contradictions and fractures
within any notion of freedom. In order to reconcile humanity to the
inescapable paradoxes of this condition, whether it becomes manifest in vol-
untary submission to God’s power or involuntary repetition of the struggle
against God’s authority, Milton embeds the contradictions of his political
consciousness within the myth of creation.
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Chapter Four
The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost

In the aftermath of a revolution, more than at any other time, educational

reform ought to take on the characteristics of the political scene from which
it emerges: such was the considered opinion, as we have seen in the previous
chapter, of philosophers and statesmen in England during the Interregnum
and then once again after the Restoration. Perhaps revolutionary moments
afford a special opportunity for appraising the relationship between an indi-
vidual’s intellectual development and social consciousness more generally. In
a series of lectures delivered in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian
psychologist L. S. Vygotsky addressed the moral content of education from a
social perspective. According to Vygotsky, “Criminal behavior in children
does not at all point to a low overall development of the individual,” but
rather, contrary to expectation, “childhood offences . . . are bound up with
and are quite compatible with considerable overall giftedness.” Far from
indicating “any sort of defect in the child’s psyche,” putatively antisocial
behavior

points often to a certain strength, the capacity to rebel, considerable

freedom, and the capacity for powerful feelings. . . . Moral offenses not
only do not point to an inability in the child for the acquisition of social
skills or his incapacity for social relationships; on the contrary, very
often such a child will exhibit an extraordinary degree of guile, cunning,
ingenuity, true heroism, and, what is most important, the greatest devo-
tion to a special morality of his own, whether of street thieves or pick-
pockets, who have their own morality, their own professional ethics,
their own concept of good and evil.1

Sociologically speaking, such actions as adults would judge to be criminal

in children arise from a conception of justice that may even manifest

99
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100 The End of Learning

other valorized traits like “true heroism” in a greater degree than more con-
ventionally accepted behavior. In any case, Vygotsky argues, adults must own
up to the fact that behavior unconstrained by social conditioning will even-
tually conform to some system of ethics—however unconventional it might
seem. An immoral act is to be differentiated from an amoral one; immoral
behavior is not precisely the same as unprincipled action. To deem behavior
unethical is not to deny its power as a variety of belief to which another may
subscribe. Nor is it to minimize the social force of an unconventional belief
system as a principle of order in part of society. Indeed, the existence of alter-
native moral codes can teach us important things about the way the rest of
society structures its commonplace assumptions about morality. Ultimately,
adherence to even a thieves’ code of “professional ethics” will lead children
toward “their own concept of good and evil.”
What observation of children makes especially visible, according to
Vygotsky, about the complex relationship between morality and education
is only magnified when viewed through the lens of the Fall of Man. “The
first education of man,” William Kerrigan reminds us, “evokes the lived
education of all men.”2 As an etiological tale of the origin of good and evil
(and much else), the story of the Fall is, after all, a myth of the childhood
of humanity. Like most traditional etiologies, the myth of the Fall offers an
explanation for human suffering. By providing a means of reflection upon
the primal loss of bliss and sanctification, the narrative itself serves as a
form of compensation, however inadequate that might be. Vygotsky’s lan-
guage vividly recalls how Milton poses the problem of evil. As a narrative
exposition of this philosophical and theological problem, Paradise Lost
articulates its theodicy first of all as an interrogation of the formulaic
norms of “true heroism” and their literary conventions, most memorably as
these are distorted by Satan. Over the course of the epic, theodicy assumes
the attributes of an educational problem, with the result that Paradise Lost
confronts the complacent pieties of Milton’s time with an assault on the
myth of origin in its orthodox form.3 An omnipotent and omniscient God
cannot exculpate Himself by simply saying, “they themselves ordained
their fall. / The first sort by their own suggestion fell, / Self-tempted, self-
depraved” (3.129–31). If “man falls deceived” and “therefore shall find
grace”—and God’s logic stands or falls with that signal “therefore”—then
the problem of evil (for human beings) must consist largely in perception,
in having to see events unfold in succession without the benefit of seeing
them as God does, synchronically. Viewed from an educational perspec-
tive, the problem of evil becomes, ultimately, a problem of moral percep-
tion in time.
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 101

This implies that human beings are innately gifted with a capacity to
transform their consciousness by educating their minds and spirits, a process
the epic represents through the ethical paradoxes upon which Milton
prompts his readers to meditate.4 The actions of Satan, Eve, and Adam lead
to separate occasions for educational discourse in the epic, and yet God’s
effort to indoctrinate each of them is not identical to the process of angelic
education and correction that they will have undergone by the end.5 At
times the two processes—the larger thematic pattern of a character’s spiritual
regeneration, and the immediate didactic narrative context—appear to be at
odds. As a kind of narrative discordia concors, however, the appearance of
structural discontinuity between context and theme may in retrospect have
been complementary all along.6 Because the didactic thrust of Milton’s
theodicy depends upon recognition of the difference between these discur-
sive layers, the poem requires readers to develop what Jeffrey Shoulson terms
“the ethics of interpretation.” In a way that Shoulson finds analogous to
midrashic creativity, Milton inculcates the kind of fine tuning in his readers
that will enable them to disentangle literary art from ontology in their con-
ception of the deity, with profound and jarring consequences for the epic’s
mode of representation:

Each textual transition, change of course, or narrative shift functions to

instruct the reader by temporarily undermining her or his confidence in
translating landscape into character, character into concept, action into
statement, and so on. The kind of theodicy produced in this heteroge-
neous discursive mode is predicated on a narrative didacticism that does
not yield a set of theological principles so much as an act of reading that
is itself an enactment of the text’s theology.7

As a description of the poem’s way of meaning, this comment explains how

Milton’s epic is itself a product of the tensions within scriptural interpreta-
tion. The language of education enters into the explanation of the text as a
means of grounding the poem’s theological project. In this regard, Shoulson
is surely right to emphasize the distinction between “narrative didacticism”
and “theological principles.” Because development is necessarily diachronic,
in experience as in narrative, one would expect the process of education to be
represented by a change in Milton’s characters over time. Yet when observing
such a change requires our coming to terms with the transformation from a
state of blessed innocence to the experience of sin and exile, we must wonder
what interpretive assistance the vocabulary of educational progress might
supply. It may be that memory, if not regression, is to hold the key to Adam
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102 The End of Learning

and Eve’s, and therefore humanity’s, future enlightenment. Nonetheless, as

we shall see, inherent in Milton’s design is the possibility that the Archangel
Michael’s promise of a “paradise within” stands for a higher and more radi-
cally visionary form of consciousness, which becomes available to humanity
only after the Fall. The question whether any such development would have
been necessary or possible had humanity not fallen is hardly obviated by
Raphael’s prelapsarian suggestion that “perhaps” human “bodies may at last
turn all to spirit, / Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend / Ethereal”
(5.497–99).
Yet when rebellious transgression is regarded instead as revolution,
whether in history or myth, the occasion permits the unique vantage so ele-
gantly described by Walter Benjamin: “a conception of the present as ‘the
time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.” Rec-
ognizing “the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening” within the psycho-
logical experience of history, there emerges, according to Benjamin, “a
revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”8 History turns out
to be a dialectical conflict between the oppressive past and the utopian possi-
bilities of the future, but this movement of history becomes clear only with
the achievement of a revolutionary “cessation of happening.” Whether in
this literal effort to bring about time’s fruition, or in the more deeply figura-
tive expulsion from paradise after Adam and Eve partake of the fruit itself,
the seeds of beatific cessation are to be found amid the catastrophe of failed
rebellion and tragic defeat.
The prophetic vision that flows into political utopias also has a strong
retrospective countercurrent.9 Meditating on the experience of exile, on the
distance from humanity’s lost origin in Eden, Paradise Lost discovers a sense
of messianic potential by rehabilitating the memory of the narrator and read-
ers alike. In this sense, the feat of memory enjoined is indeed, as Regina
Schwartz has argued, an act of sacred commemoration, in which “ritual rep-
etition becomes part of the event itself.”10 On another, more local level, Mil-
ton works back to the perception of the failed English revolution as a
momentary prophetic glimpse of that promised future—a revolutionary
present, as Benjamin says, “shot through with chips of Messianic time.”
Paradise Lost dramatizes the narrator’s confrontation with the messianic
prophecies contained within and emitted by the text of Genesis in light of
the discrepancy between the promised end and the present reality.11 The
poem examines the emotional and intellectual strain placed on the narrator’s
efforts to measure the experience of England after the return of the Stuart
monarchy, by the standard of the poet’s own earlier hope for “that day when
thou the Eternall and shortly-expected King shalt open the Clouds to judge
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 103

the severall Kingdomes of the World” and “shalt put an end to all earthly
Tyrannies, proclaiming thy universal and milde Monarchy through Heaven
and Earth” (Of Reformation, YP 1:616). For Milton the messianic prophecy,
which sacred Scripture records from its beginning, exerted a continual force
over history down to his own moment. The poet apprehends a prophetic
depth that unifies the text of the Bible, but he is always alive to the density of
historical record it lies beneath. “To the prophet,” as Abraham Heschel says,
“no subject is as worthy of consideration as the plight of man.” The prophet
attends and answers to the particularity of his present moment because, in
Heschel’s view, “History is where God is defied, where justice suffers defeats.
God’s purpose is neither clearly apparent nor translatable into rational cate-
gories of order and design. There are only moments in which it is
revealed.”12 The revelation of God’s just anger at human defiance becomes
the substance of the prophetic utterance, so that, for the prophetic poet, the
multiple layers of reference in a given proof-text together form a sacred
archive of history and prophecy converging on the narrator’s present. Such a
perspective would have been familiar to all practitioners of typological inter-
pretation.13 From this vantage the Christian Bible, as Northrop Frye argues,
manages to communicate a “vision of misery” that is “ironic rather than
tragic.” An extended historical record, the scriptural archive prefigures a
simultaneous metaphoric order from the beginning: “The Genesis myth
starts with what Aristotle would call the telos, the developed form toward
which all living things grow, and the cycle of birth and death follows after.”14
This is at least in part because traces of a messianic presence are, as Jacques
Derrida says, indigenous to the very concept of the archive: “The archive: if
we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to
come. . . . A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and
ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experi-
ence of the promise.”15 In Paradise Lost, the “promise” that gives order to the
action, and structure to human history, is irreducibly textual. Both at its ori-
gin in sacred Scripture, and in its manifestation during the action of the epic
poem, the prophecy, like the representation of the divine being who
expresses it, tends to be represented by a discursive figuration rather than
sensual data or mystical vision. As the final books of the epic show, these ver-
bal anticipations require their recipient to undergo instruction in the proper
methods of interpretation.
Belief in the presence of the messianic prophecy, or protevangelium,
within Genesis was a cornerstone of evangelical interpretations of the
Hebrew Bible. This “oracle” (10.182) foretold the coming of Christ through
a “verbal sacrament” or “scripture within scripture.”16 The textual promise
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104 The End of Learning

was the archive of “mysterious terms” (10.173) that the Reformation tradi-
tion taught readers to interpret by means of text and faith alone (sola scrip-
tura; sola fide). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an exegete in the Lutheran tradition,
lucidly explained in the introduction to his commentary on the first three
chapters of Genesis, “The Church of Holy Scripture—and there is no other
‘Church’—lives from the end. Therefore it reads all Holy Scripture as the
book of the end, of the new, of Christ.”17 Paradoxically, the prophecy antici-
pated the Christian salvation myth from within the pronouncement of the
curse upon humanity, in which the Lord God says to the serpent, “I will put
enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it
shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15, KJV).
Again, Bonhoeffer’s commentary is profoundly instructive: “In the destroyed
world between God’s curse and his promise man is tempted. He does not
receive the Word of God in peace and tranquility, he becomes aware of it
when the religious question is asked in the wrong way. Man does not adhere
to God in peace but in enmity and conflict.”18
Taking upon ourselves simultaneously the burden of the curse and the
gift of the promise exemplified, for Bonhoeffer, the struggle by which God
allowed humanity to live. Maintaining the proper interpretive attitude
means becoming aware of the Word of God as a question asked “in the
wrong way.” The text of the curse becomes exemplary precisely because it
requires interpretation in the wake of the Fall, of which the curse is the pri-
mary consequence. Milton reproduces the text of Genesis 3:15 almost verba-
tim in the epic (10.179–81).
After the Fall, then, the provisional status of all knowledge—enacted so
aptly in Derrida’s conditional clause, “if we want to know what that will have
meant”—must give way to something else, a hermeneutic logic that is as ruth-
lessly circular as it is self-affirming. The Geneva Bible’s gloss on the curse at
Genesis 3:15 makes the promise explicit, yet in doing so arguably gives voice to
the instability that asserting such an interpretive control implies—particularly
in a sacred text which, as a consequence of the Fall it represents, articulates the
origin of the human condition of exile, enmity, and suffering: “Satan shall
sting Christ and his members, but not ouercome them. The Lord comforteth
Adam by the promise of the blessed seede, and also punisheth the body for the
sinne which the soule should haue been punished for, that the spirit hauing
conceived hope of forgiuenesse, might liue by faith. 2 Cor. 14. 34.” According
to this version of the creation myth, the primordial falling out of grace, “man’s
first disobedience,” ruptured the bond between the creator God and His cre-
ation and brought about a corresponding loss of interpretive transparency. This
marginal gloss, which pretends to an authoritative transparency itself, actively
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 105

rewrites the text as it allegorically interprets it: although God punished the
bodies of Adam and Eve through the imposition of their respective forms of
“labor,” the “soule should haue been punished.” Moreover, such access to
grace as remained, from the commencement of human history on, would
be intractably textual in nature—as, in the commentary quoted above, the
direct appeal to the supporting text from Paul’s second epistle to the
Corinthians suggests. The text that Adam has to learn to interpret in Par-
adise Lost is the messianic prophecy conventionally believed by Protestants
to inhere in Hebrew Scripture, and yet this text alone cannot stand for the
promise deemed implicit within it. A further paradox inheres in this teach-
ing, a task given to the Archangel Michael in the epic: faith consists in the
construction of a perspicuous context within which to interpret the
Hebrew text, although faith is also discovered through an interpretation of
Scripture that locates the prophecy by extending this context through allu-
sion and citation.
For readers of Milton, the prophecy is an archive present in a recon-
structed vision of the past. Yet it is an archive always open to doubt because
the interpretive strategy requires faith as its condition of possibility. In the
world of the poem, of course, all readers’ pasts (and, more problematically,
the narrator’s), are Adam’s future. In this respect, then, the struggle for
exegetical legitimacy involves coming to terms with history. “Bible commen-
taries,” as Hegel notes, “do not so much acquaint us with the content of
Scripture as with the mode of thought of their age.”19 And yet, as Lacan says
in a comment on Erasmus, “The slightest alteration in the relation between
man and the signifier, in this case in the procedures of exegesis, changes the
whole course of history by modifying the moorings that anchor his being.”20
Taken together, these two representations of the exegetical process comprise
the hermeneutic circle as it emerged in the philosophical imagination in the
wake of the Protestant Reformation.21 This conceptual vocabulary is one
powerful and enduring legacy of the Reformation, a dichotomous idea
about history’s place in hermeneutics—on the one hand, Hegel’s notion of
the pervasive dialectic of history impressing itself upon all efforts at interpre-
tation, and Lacan’s idea, on the other, of the shifting linguistic “moorings”
that forge history as all writing. What is at stake in gaining interpretive
authority over Scripture is the power to write (sacred) history in the service
of a political vision.22
Milton builds the “great argument” of his poem out of biblical materials
that, by their very nature, contain contradiction and unyielding multiplicity
(1.24). There are, for example, the two accounts in Genesis of the creation of
Adam and Eve, which traditions with distinct ideological programs have
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106 The End of Learning

sought to reconcile.23 This chapter argues that Milton’s poem of origins over
time reveals the fractures in the maker’s intention as a means of describing,
albeit obliquely, an exemplary stance toward the materials of human mem-
ory. If these materials record the trauma of exile from God, they also para-
doxically contain the seed of the salvation narrative when read aright. For the
belated poet, intoning to his muse, “what in me is dark / Illumine, what is
low raise and support” (1.22–23), the “great argument” can only ever arise as
a function of history. Yet God will eradicate this history, unwritten in the
narrative present of the epic, in the messianic future that the prophecy fore-
tells, when Jesus shall “bring back / Through the world’s wilderness long
wandered man / Safe to eternal paradise of rest” (12.312–14). The poet
must, therefore, continually teach—and in teaching, learn—to read and re-
read the archive of sacred sources that contain messianic prophecy. Yet
because of his chosen mode of representation, the bard must also discover
the truth value of poetic traditions, just as the author must make sense of the
experience of politics in his own time. In this task, the poet is no different
from those who read his poem. Readers become writers of their internal
myth of salvation.

INWARD ARCHIVES

As we have seen in Chapter Two, Milton derived his complex habits of

appropriating Hebrew Scripture and much of his hermeneutic method from
Reformation attitudes toward reading the Bible. A few more details about
the relationship between these interpretive practices and the role of
mnemonic techniques in historical theology will help clarify Milton’s idea of
the complex harmonies and dissonances of the archive as orchestrated in Par-
adise Lost. Out of the rich ferment of medieval memorial culture—against it
to a degree—Luther articulated new relationships among reading, memory,
and the identity of the self. The classic formulation is vividly represented in
William Tyndale’s 1526 English translation of Luther’s preface to Romans
(1522), which begins with the following sentence: “For as much as this pistle
ys the principal and most excellent part of the newe testament, and most
pure evangelion, that is to say gladde tydinges and that we call gospel, and
also a lyghte and a waye in unto the whole scripture, I thinke it mete, that
every christen man not only knowe it by roote a[n]d with oute the boke, but
also exercice hym sylfe therein evermore co[n]tinually, as with the dayly
bredde of the soule.”24 To know Paul’s letter by rote and “with oute the boke”
requires a feat of memory that most readers today would consider extraordi-
nary, although, as Mary Carruthers has shown, such powers of recall may
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 107

well have been expected of anyone who was educated in the medieval uni-
versity—an expectation which continued beyond the arrival of print cul-
ture.25 As we have seen in the discussion of Milton’s recollection of Homer,
Ovid, and Euripides in Chapter One, Milton himself reputedly possessed
just such a memory. And he was not alone. Heinrich Bullinger reports that
Huldrych Zwingli, while serving as the parish priest at Einsiedeln from
1516–18, memorized the entire Greek New Testament.26 To “exercice hym
sylfe therein evermore co[n]tinually,” as Tyndale puts it, a Protestant would
need to have learned the text by heart and internalized its significance.
Moreover, as the Epistle to the Romans is, in Luther’s powerful conception,
a synecdoche of the entire New Testament, the self-scrutiny afforded by its
internalization in readers will thereby provide “a lyghte and a waye in unto
the whole scripture.”27
As a matter of course, then, for Tyndale as for Luther, the internaliza-
tion of the book depends upon the critical act of disencumbering the text
from its bondage to traditional commentary. So that interpretation may
show “a lyghte and a waye,” the text must first be opened, “for it hath bene
hetherto evyll darkened with glooses and wonderful dreames off sophisters,
that noman cowde spye oute the entente and meaning off it, which neverthe-
lesse of itsylfe, is a bryghte lyghte.”28 Resistance to the Catholic Church’s tra-
ditions of interpretation, which have left the received text of Scripture
“darkened with glooses,” is in the counter-tradition of the Reformers a mark
of the critical intelligence of the true believer. The method, in turn, reveals
the archive of true faith to be within the individual reader, rather than on the
page or in the church. This is why, in George Herbert’s practical manual A
Priest to the Temple, the chapter entitled “The Parson’s Library” says so little
about books: “The Countrey Parson’s Library is a holy Life. . . . the Parson
having studied, and mastered all his lusts and affections within, and the
whole Army of Temptations without, hath ever so many sermons ready pen-
n’d, as he hath victories.”29 For Herbert, as for Milton, the theology of this
internal storehouse of experience yields a theory of poetic composition. Her-
bert wittily plays off the idea of inspiration from within in a poem com-
monly known today as “Jordan (II).” In the manuscript bearing emendations
in his own hand, the poem is called “Invention.” In the final lines, he echoes
the internalized concept of the parson’s library: “There is in Love a sweetnes
ready pennd / Coppy out that: there needs no alteration.”30 Just as the par-
son’s diligent study within his conscience renders external stimuli moot as
sources of inspiration for sermons which arrive “ready penn’d,” so the poet
need not seek out external confirmation of the inner compulsion of the Holy
Spirit, which delivers poems “ready pennd.”
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108 The End of Learning

But how can poets be certain that what they “Coppy out” in fact
“needs no alteration”? Herbert ironically signals this dilemma in his pun on
inventio, the rhetorical term for the discovery of argument. The need to
invent in both senses of the word—that is, to create and discover the
resources of argumentation—led Milton to develop strategies of appropria-
tion that, taken to their logical extreme, put him at odds with the Reformers
whose writings taught him the way to construct his controversial authority.
Maintaining fidelity to sacred Scripture has always posed a special diffi-
culty for writers seeking to appropriate the text for their own use. This vexed
issue is, indeed, intrinsic to the New Testament’s relationship to Hebrew
Scripture. Very early in the history of Christian exegesis the problem arose:
how should an interpreter maintain fidelity to the holy writings, especially
when they seem contradictory? And how may interpreters gauge the sanctity
of their appropriations? In his De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine conceived
of charity as the great harmonizer of scriptural passages which seemed ini-
tially to contradict one another; the creative intellect of human beings, not
to be trusted in Augustine’s scheme, would be subsumed in the elucidation
of obscure places in the text through the plain and open places granted by
the Holy Spirit to modulate meaning.31 Moreover, according to the systems
of early medieval expositors, interpreters had to develop their sensitivity to
the style of the text in order best to comprehend the rhetorical register on
which God intended for the text to be read. Late Latin Father Gregory the
Great, advocating a threefold method of exegesis, compared the divine word
to a river that is both shallow and deep (planus et altus), in which a lamb may
walk and an elephant may swim (in quo et agnus ambulet, et elephas natet).32
One must therefore alter the profundity and creativity of one’s interpretation
to suit the context of the passage.
Since at least the thirteenth century, auctoritas had signified a scribe’s
moral authority as a copier and thus channel of divine intention, on the one
hand, and the writer’s literary creativity, style, and form, on the other.33 The
advent of Renaissance humanism, and its afterlife in the seventeenth-century
schools, may justly be said to have intensified the politics of this conflict
within authors, especially if, as Mary Thomas Crane has argued, “English
humanists imagine a subject formed not by a narrative history of personal
experience but by an assimilated store of texts that seek to forestall and
replace such experience.”34 The humanistic conflict between personal narra-
tive and the accumulated authority of a lifetime’s reading animates Paradise
Lost, though the scope of this animus enlarges to fit Milton’s “vast design,” as
Andrew Marvell describes it in his commendatory poem “On Mr Milton’s
Paradise Lost” (l.2; Poems AM, p. 182).35 Emboldened and enabled by the
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theological tensions believed to inhere in creativity, Milton’s exegetical

dilemma in Paradise Lost unfolds as a dramatic representation of the ways in
which creative discovery and recuperative allusion clash in the effort to dis-
cern the truth “left in those written records pure, / Though not but by the
Spirit understood” (12.513–14).

“SCARCE TO BE LESS THAN GODS”

To give a concrete example of how exegetical creativity nourished Milton’s

conception of the epic, it will be useful to look at a couple of poems from the
Commonwealth period, translations of psalms which Milton undertook in
August of 1653. These show Milton characteristically grappling with and
modifying Scripture along thematic lines. That Milton dated them so pre-
cisely implies he meant for them to have a contemporary application. In the
months before Cromwell assumed the office of Lord Protector, the Rump of
the Long Parliament was dissolved, and the Barebones assembly was nomi-
nated. A motion to abolish tithes had recently been defeated, and the Lev-
eller John Lilburne had again been arrested. A breach having formed
between the Independent republicans and other parliamentarians, royalist
hopes once again flourished. As when Milton translated Psalms 80–88 in
April 1648—most likely responding to royalist translations that circulated
just before the outbreak of the Second Civil War—the principle of selection
for the 1653 translations seems to have been guided at least in part by their
emphasis on political protest and outrage. Beyond that, however, specific
topical application of these psalms for a political purpose cannot be estab-
lished with any certainty.36
In other words, in the translations of August 1653, Milton responds to
the political moment obliquely. But we must recall the central importance of
the metrical Psalms to church services, as well as the relationship between the
formal sonic qualities of the Psalms and the ongoing debate in the period over
enforcement of set forms of worship.37 The formal variation introduced in Mil-
ton’s later psalm translations, according to Mary Ann Radzinowicz, demon-
strates his masterful grasp of the style of the Hebrew originals, with their
tendency toward the binary structuring of figures inherent in parallelism.38
Moreover, psalm translation allowed for considerable exploration of generic and
tonal modalities.39 Most importantly, the results of such experiments evince a
personal interpretive struggle to lay claim to the archive of biblical source mate-
rial in the period just before Milton began dictating Paradise Lost.
Illustrating habits of thought inherent in Milton’s hermeneutical
approach to Scripture, the psalm translations also suggest the pedagogical
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110 The End of Learning

direction his thought took as he shaped the plot of his epic. Milton
embroiders the originals so that a clearer narrative thread stands out from
the immediate lyric context. Because it is precisely by such narrative means
that the educative effect of the poem extends beyond mere depictions of
teaching, looking at Milton’s augmentations of the Psalms will reveal how
Milton finds and exploits a prophetic context within which to appropriate
the Hebrew original. As in Paradise Lost, the assertion of prophecy opens
the scriptural archive to interpretation and thus, in turn, to Milton’s narra-
tive expansion. Discovering the New Testament’s anticipation within the
Old Testament text and reconciling these two archives—Hebrew prophecy
and Christian fulfillment—entails creating a narrative that will link the
two resources.
The psalms I will discuss also share a common intertext in the Epistle
to the Hebrews, where key “messianic” verses are reworked in order to show
the Word of God as prefigured in Old Testament prophecies. Explaining the
“general proposition of this Epistle,” the Geneva Bible’s gloss on Hebrews
1:1, calling Jesus a “teacher,” puts the matter baldly: “The Sonne of God is in
deede that Prophet or teacher, which hath actually now performed that that
God after a sort and in shadowes signified by his Prophets, and hath fully
opened his Fathers will to the world.” Here, the presence of the Son is itself
educative, in that the existence of Jesus Christ instructs readers in the mean-
ing of the Hebrew prophecies. The complex drive to affirm the Son as Logos
in Hebrews has led one modern exegete to claim that the writer of the epistle
is “the theologian who, more diligently and successfully than any other of the
New Testament writers, has worked at what we now describe as hermeneu-
tics,” by which he means the practice of explaining “how we may conceive
the Word of God” as “being subject to historical processes and yet remain-
ing, recognisably, God’s Word.”40
In his translation of Psalm 8 dated 14 August 1653, Milton employs
diction that resounds through the epic, some of which represents a bold revi-
sion of the original. Like pieces in a mosaic, Milton’s translations from the
period through their shape and coloring imply the larger design of the “great
argument” that will appear in Paradise Lost. By means of prosody and style,
moreover, the poem creates sonic effects that are unprecedented in English
translations, as in verse two:

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou

Hast founded strength because of all thy foes
To stint the enemy, and slack the avenger’s brow
That bends his rage thy providence to oppose. (Poems, p. 340)
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 111

What makes this translation so Miltonic is the particular connection he

draws between prophecy (figured in “babes and sucklings”) and adversity
(embodied in “the avenger”). The link between infancy and prophecy is rein-
forced throughout Scripture, Hebrew and Christian, as when Jesus rejoices
in spirit and says, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that
thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed
them unto babes” (Luke 10:21, KJV). But earlier English translations of
Psalm 8 do not offer Milton’s dramatic entwining of providence and the rage
of the enemy. In fact, they make no mention of “providence” at all. Nor is
there any precedent for the imagistic association between the delicacy of the
prophetic infants’ mouths and the relaxing of the defeated “avenger’s brow.”
The King James Version reads simply: “Out of the mouth of babes and suck-
lings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou might-
est still the enemy and the avenger.” All of the vivid physicality of the
opposition is abstracted out; by comparison, Milton’s version is almost cine-
matic. And then there is the jangling musicality of the Sidneyan Psalms:

From sucklings hath Thy honour sproong,

Thy force hath flow’d from Babie’s tongue
Whereby Thou stop’st Thyne Enemy’s prating
Bent to revenge and ever hating.41

Although the Sidney version’s metrical smoothness would be more con-

ducive to singing in church services, its use of a so-called feminine rhyme
(prating / hating) lowers the tone significantly. It is as if Sidney would reduce
the force of the adversary’s rage to chiming ridicule, where Milton makes
adversity integral to the salvation narrative. Milton’s voice emerges from
amidst a cacophony of rattling consonants—the alliterations of “slack” and
“stint,” “brow” and “bends,” “founded” and “foe” stand out. But Milton
fully exemplifies the prophetic voice only with the improvised theological
elaboration. When he adds “providence” to the end of the second verse, his
diction suggests a narrative embellishment—and this looks forward to a
larger framework within which to understand the conflict with the Adversary
who opposes God’s providential design.
Similarly, following the question (“what is man?”) the psalm asks a par-
allel question (“or the son of man?”), which is given a messianic interpreta-
tion in Hebrews 2:6–7 and in the Gospels. Milton expresses his theology in
the sinewy twists of his rhetoric and, again, in an augmentation of the text of
verse four. “O what is man,” he asks, “or of man begot / That him thou vis-
it’st and of him art found?” Milton’s embellishment is readily apparent when
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112 The End of Learning

placed beside a flatly modern rendition of the verse: what are “mortals that
you care for them?” (NRSV). Milton’s “of man begot” stays close enough to
the meaning of the Hebrew ben adam while varying it away from the for-
mula “son of man” employed by Miles Coverdale, the King James Version,
and the Geneva Version. Furthermore, the diction of Milton’s verse activates
a key word from the central books of Paradise Lost—as we shall see, the
meaning of “begot” becomes a focal point of the dispute that ends in the
War in Heaven—for to have been begotten rather than created was held, in
the tradition of the author of the Epistle to Hebrews, to signify the ontologi-
cal superiority of the Son to the Angels.42 The theological sophistication of
the parallel phrasing here raises questions about the prophecy as Milton
articulates it: in what way precisely can it be said of the Son in relation to
man “of him [thou] art found”? If the locution found of him is productively
ambiguous—suggesting alternative genitive and possessive phrasings such as
“found among man, belonging to man, part of man, like man”—Milton’s
additional phrase, “of him art found,” edges the psalm closer to the represen-
tation of the begetting of the son in Paradise Lost by introducing a partial
narrative. The tense of the participle “found,” like the interpolation of “prov-
idence” in verse two, suggests a larger narrative context thrust into the pres-
ent. The syntactic parallel in Milton’s addition grammatically links the
begetting of the son and the finding of him among humanity; the mysterious
agency of the action (found by whom? when?) implicitly draws a parallel
between the adversarial conflict and the providential design of history.
The details of Psalm 8 are ultimately directed toward a celebration of
God’s choice of humankind to rule over creation. As Milton puts it in answer
to the question, “What is man?”: “Scarce to be less than gods, thou mad’st
his lot / With honour and with state thou hast him crowned” (Poems, p.
340). Despite the dominion granted humanity over the rest of the created
world—the “honour” and “state” bequeathed in this symbolic coronation—
the psalm neither differentiates among human beings nor stratifies them in
an analogous hierarchical order. In this, the celebration of human dignity
recognizes ontological difference, just as the begetting of the Son marks the
categorical difference between the Son and the angels, but does not justify
the presumption of monarchical authority vested in one human being over
others. Coronation represented a thematic puzzle, so much so that Milton
made a related coronation scene derived from the Psalms the point of origin
for the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost. Yet the puzzlement induced by this
disanalogy between ontological levels is precisely the point, in that it serves
as a ward to prevent the assumption of a license for human beings to think of
themselves as too godlike. To be sure, although we “can never forget the
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 113

monarchism in Milton’s portrayal of God and the Son,” Milton was, as Nigel
Smith has argued, “monarchist in heaven, republican on earth.”43
Establishing the setting for his epic, Milton employs the tropes and for-
mulae of the prophetic tradition, particularly as he found them in the
Prophetic Psalms. Psalm 2 was among the most frequently cited Psalms in
the De Doctrina Christiana, and Milton marked part of it in the margin of
his own Bible.44 Following the tradition of reformers like Luther and Calvin,
Milton gave pride of place in the epic to the coronation poem Psalm 2,
which he translated on 8 August 1653. Milton’s particular interpretation—
for which there is no precedent in the Hebrew original—is evident from
what seems at first a casual aside in the midst of verses 6–7:

but I saith he
Anointed have my king (though ye rebel)
On Sion my holy hill. A firm decree
I will declare; the Lord to me hath said
Thou art my Son I have begotten thee
This day. (Poems, pp. 334–35)

It is again instructive to compare the King James Version: “Yet have I set my
king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said
unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” The King James
Version, as Charles Dahlberg first noted, does not include Milton’s paren-
thetical “though ye rebel.” The introduction of the parenthesis, Dahlberg
observed, “shows that as early as 1653 Milton associated the idea of rebellion
with the idea of elevation to kingship.”45 But precisely what form of associa-
tion does Milton mean to suggest? Again marshaling the effects of an
implied story, which he achieves by means of resonant diction and syntactic
elaboration in Psalm 8, Milton has woven a narrative thread into the fabric
of Psalm 2 that connects it to the larger Christian salvation myth. In this
way, he is teaching his readers the significance of the Hebrew poem when
interpreted as a prophetic revelation of Christ.
There was, of course, scriptural precedent for this revision. Reading
back from the pseudo-Pauline Epistle to Hebrews (1:1–6), the subordination
of the angelic host becomes the complement of the ascription of divinity to
the Son. The author, according to Craig Koester, discloses the Christological
significance of interlocking Hebraic texts “so that the claims about the Son’s
divinity could be seen as an extension” of his coronation; nonetheless, there
is little to suggest “that the quotations in the middle part of the catena
(1:5–12) had been understood in a messianic sense prior to the writing of
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114 The End of Learning

Hebrews.”46 Among the links in this chain, the author of Hebrews quotes
the promise of Psalm 2:6–7 in a way that connects it to a series of selectively
quoted proof-texts from the Old Testament. These extracts seek to equate
Jesus’ coronation with the promise of the everlasting Davidic kingship (2
Sam. 7:12–16) and the creative and immortal powers of the deity. All of this,
in the second chapter of Hebrews, is given dramatic expression when the
passage from Psalm 2 is woven together the quotation from Psalm 8.
Through the symbolic paradox engendered by Jesus’ sacrifice, Christ’s eternal
elevation over the angelic host is causally connected to his having been
brought temporarily “lower than the angels.” While the context of Psalm 8
suggests that “being made ‘lower than the angels’ and being ‘crowned with
glory and honor’ are parallel . . . Hebrews takes them to be opposite. Final
glory must be considered in the light of the lower status that precedes it.”47
Scarcely less than God or the angels (the Hebrew word is elohim), humanity
is nonetheless crowned; by being lowered beneath the elohim, the Son
redeems humanity and is therefore elevated above the angelic host.

FIRST DISOBEDIENCE

Milton transforms Psalm 2 through the commentary in his translation then

applies his interpretive changes to the layers of epic action when he fills out
the narrative during Raphael’s account. This moment in Book 5 marks the
first chronological event in the action of the epic. The proof-text, we recall,
appears in the first invocation through a compressed allusion as the poet
muses “or if Sion hill / Delight thee more” (1.10–11), thus proleptically link-
ing the epic’s narrative and chronological beginnings.
God the Father begins his decree surrounded by symbols of crusade
and kingdom dangerously reminiscent of the “tinsel trappings” of chivalric
romance, against which the narrator inveighs in the proem to Book 9 (line
36). He is surrounded, that is, by “Standards, and gonfalons” that “Stream in
the air,” as well as “glittering tissues” that “bear imblazed / Holy memorials”
(5.589–93). We might well ask what these memorialize (future martyr-
dom?), since this is the earliest point in the epic action, yet Milton has
warped the temporality such that we recall the limitations of our ability to
comprehend the deity’s logic from our perspective:

Hear all ye angels, progeny of light,

Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,
Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 115

My only Son, and on this holy hill

Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your head I him appoint;
And by myself have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in heaven, and shall confess him Lord:
Under his great vicegerent reign abide
United as one individual soul
For ever happy: him who disobeys
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place
Ordained without redemption, without end. (5.600–15)

The tone of the declaration is, to say the least, provocative. As we shall see
again when we turn to the education of Adam by divine instructors, the
didactic potential of a divine utterance cannot be easily contained in the
“process of speech” by which ontologically superior beings relate intellectual
matter to beings lower in the cosmic hierarchy (7.178). In other words,
God’s speech gives the appearance of unintentional duplicity, of a dualistic
vocation.
The very speech act itself has the effect of calling forth the Adversary,
eliciting the motive for civil war in heaven. In his brilliant analysis of Book 5,
Neil Forsyth has recognized that the Father’s proclamation

packs into one line around a powerful caesura the whole duality of his-
tory, and even contradicts itself: “For ever happie: him who disobeys”
(5.611). The problem is there: at the very moment the Son is said to be
begotten in order to make everyone happy forever, God’s word also calls
Satan into being, not as Lucifer, his earlier name, but as the rebel, the
disobedient one. . . . Like action and reaction, God’s word creates or
begets both Son and Satan at the same moment.48

The Father proclaims the Son to have been “begotten,” which seems to indi-
cate that he has been procreated, and yet the word is supposed to mean more
figuratively that the Son has been begotten in office or elevated. The matter is
treated at some length in the De Doctrina Christiana, where, seeking to disprove
the contention that the Son is of “the same essence as the Father,” Milton
argues that “nowhere in the scriptures is the Son said to be begotten except . . .
in a metaphorical sense” (YP 6:210). The anointing of the messiah transforms
the universe into a viceregency with a subordinate monarch governing. This
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116 The End of Learning

occurs at the revolution of the “great year,” but God, being omniscient
and omnipotent, is not constrained by the limitations of temporality and
therefore knows, as Milton’s readers also do because he told them in Book
3, that the Son will prove to be “By merit more than birthright Son of
God” (3.309).
The paradoxical relation of temporality and chronology to the narra-
tive ordering of the epic’s books conveys just this information, in the process
dramatizing the selfless offering of the Son as the ultimate moral sacrifice to
the highest principle of order in the universe. Applying the epic convention
of beginning in medias res, Milton represents the typological interpretation
of Hebrew prophecy as a distortion of linear narrative. As a corollary to the
theological proposition offered in Christian texts such as the Epistle to
Hebrews, then, Milton manipulates the temporality of his narrative argu-
ment. A further effect of this subtle theological distortion—or clarification,
according to Christian belief—is to render the actual discourses in which
God sets forth His design comparatively abstruse and legalistic. As Alexander
Pope wittily claimed, “God the Father turns a School-Divine”49 when He
unpacks the future implications of the sacrificial exchange:

because in thee
Love hath abounded more than glory abounds,
Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy manhood also to this throne;
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign
Both God and man, Son both of God and man,
Anointed universal king; all power
I give thee, reign for ever, and assume
Thy merits; under thee as head supreme
Thrones, princedoms, powers, dominions I reduce . . . (3.311–20)

The list of “hierarchies, of orders, and degrees” (5.591) is virtually identical in

both of God’s proclamations, in Books 3 and 5, a formulaic application which
provides a clue that the two speeches are meant to reflect one another as a
structuring principle in the epic architecture. Yet the action reveals the differ-
ence between the two contexts while relating them by means of analogous sce-
narios and verbal catchphrases. In Book 3 the Father complicates the
coronation scene of Book 5 by proclaiming the exaltation of the Son’s “man-
hood”—perhaps his humanity—in addition to His being. God speaks in Book
3 in the language of causality (“because,” “Therefore”) instead of the heavily
temporal vocabulary of Book 5 (“This day,” “now,” “that day,” “without end”).
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To an extent, this discrepancy may be attributed to the fact that Raphael

mediates the discourse of Book 5, while God speaks directly in Book 3,
though this explanation leaves the relatively explicit narrative significance
unexplored. Where strictly causal explanation abounds, the elevation of the
Son is persistently cast in futurity, depicted as a future consequence of the
love He has shown by His offer and the humiliation He will experience when
“to the cross he nails thy enemies” (12.404). In Book 5, by contrast, the ele-
vation is depicted as a fait accompli, and the causal explanation is occluded
and replaced by the flat assertion of a cosmic change to be instituted from
then on.
The paradox generated by this narrative structure is worth contemplat-
ing further. The explanation of Book 3 must logically precede the apparently
arbitrary move in Book 5 so that readers will grasp the sense of the Son’s
begetting, but the Father’s effort to elucidate in Book 3 must take place later
than the proclamation in Book 5 that provokes Satan’s revolt—which in turn
causes God in Book 3 to ask for a sacrificial remedy. The epic thus builds a
complex and self-referential series of modifications and qualifications into its
scenes. We cannot begin to know the meaning of one scene without the
other, and in juxtaposing the two we begin to reflect upon the intentions
that underlie each action in a more comprehensive light.
At times Milton articulates the enigmatic truth behind God’s decrees
by means of a blunt contradiction that, once unraveled, opens up a vast the-
ological puzzle. For example, a great deal rides on the precise meaning of the
word “merit” in God’s two decrees from Books 3 and 5. The poem intro-
duces the concept at crucial junctures as a means of justifying God’s ways, so
the virtually opposing meanings of the word sabotage efforts to reduce the
causal problem of the Son’s superior “merit” to a simple solution. In the pas-
sage from Book 3 quoted earlier, God grants “all power” to the Son, saying in
parallel phrases to the Son, “reign for ever, and assume / Thy merits”
(3.17–19). We learn from God’s logical exposition in Book 3 that Christ’s
martyrdom is to be the model of ethical purpose in action: the Son is “by
merit more than birthright Son of God” (3.390). Looking forward to
Raphael’s tale of the messiah’s anointing, we recall that Satan had resisted the
elevation of the Son, in reaction to which he rebelled. Following Romans
5:17–19, Christ’s atonement for Adam’s sin and the sins of humankind
springs from the same source: “thy merit / Imputed shall absolve them who
renounce / Their own both righteous and unrighteous deeds” (3.290–92).
To take the Son as a model of “merit” implies an ethical distinction, a
sense of “merit” derived from purposeful action, and so the word is used
where merit seems in opposition to birthright. In these moments, Milton
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118 The End of Learning

employs the sense attributed to him somewhat loosely by the OED (def. 4a),
which adduces Paradise Lost (3.290) as evidence that the word means “Good
works viewed as entitling a person to reward from God; (also) the righteous-
ness and sacrifice of Christ as the ground on which God grants forgiveness to
sinners.” But in Book 5, as we have seen, to the extent that God explains the
coronation of the Son at all, it is on the basis of His having been “begotten.”
This implies, in the tradition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that His eleva-
tion is a result of His ontological difference from the angels, which makes
the Son’s merit and birthright appear more closely united. Compounding
this sense, the Messiah “by right of merit reigns” (6.43). To expose the para-
dox more plainly: the merit that God has used to justify the coronation of
the Son is, according to this definition, the effect of an action for which it is
also the sole cause—Satan’s revolt and, consequently, the Fall of Man. The
remedy has provoked the disease. Moreover, when Christ intervenes on
behalf of the fallen yet contrite Adam and Eve, His “merit” will “perfect” or
fulfill the good works of man, but His “death shall pay” for man’s sinful
works, which would seem to place the offer of sacrifice in opposition to an
intrinsic quality of merit (11.34–36). In the epic, two competing ideas of
merit coexist: the natural merit of faith, which is the entitlement of birth and
election and therefore resembles grace in its unbidden effects; and the earned
merit that comes from good works.50 The effect of all this is to push us
toward a deeper consideration of the nature of the Son as an example of
merit that human beings may imitate, to force upon us a further questioning
of how merit relates to educability. Is our merit something we can change
about ourselves, or is it an essential and immutable aspect of our being?
Similarly, to trace key words, such as “begotten,” through to the claim
of Satan to be “self-begot,” entails questioning the legitimacy of such articu-
lations and discovering their primal meanings.51 In this way, Milton teaches
his readers to regard the claims of various agents with a skepticism attendant
upon interpretation and discloses the manipulations of truth that camou-
flage self-interest in the language of ethical conduct. When Satan retires with
Abdiel and the rebel angels to the North (perhaps glancing at Charles in
Scotland), he performs his sinful imitatio Dei by employing the same formu-
laic invocation of hierarchy as Milton placed in both of God’s decrees,
though now evincing merely “counterfeited truth” (5.771). Satan begins his
political career saying:

Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,

If these magnific titles yet remain
Not merely titular, since by decree
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 119

Another now hath to himself engrossed

All power, and us eclipsed under the name
Of king anointed . . . (5.772–77)

And of course to ask “If ” is to suggest “not”—just as the poet’s deliberating

“or” in the invocation to the first book implies a doubt about the foundation
of his knowledge as well as the source of his identity. It is worth remember-
ing, in connection with the figurative eclipse of the Son in this passage, that
Paradise Lost was according to Toland almost suppressed “for imaginary Trea-
son” by Thomas Tomkins, Charles II’s Episcopal censor, because of the lines
that connected solar eclipse with subversive political commentary: “dim
eclipse disastrous twilight sheds / On half the nations, and with fear of
change / Perplexes monarchs” (1.597–99).52 Satan had previously, in Book 2,
opened the parliament of hell “High on a throne of royal state,” where he sat
“exalted” as “by merit raised / To that bad eminence,” with a similar formula:
“Powers and dominions, deities of heaven . . .” (2.1–5, 11). With one rhetor-
ical gesture, Satan confers upon himself the right from above to discriminate
between the ranks of angels. His impropriety in this self-aggrandizing eleva-
tion is clear enough from his effort to mimic the chronologically earlier
proclamations of the heavenly king—a dramatic irony that the narrator
emphasizes when enjambment undercuts the notion of Satan’s being “raised”
by “merit.” Like earthly kings who fraudulently arrogate the right of the
divine king as a divine right of kings, Satan seeks to elevate himself above his
equals as if he, too, were capable of parthenogenesis. Satan employs the plu-
ral “deities” as if to say that God has begun an unstoppable process of prolif-
erating godheads.
Yet the passage contains irreducible contradiction, as when Satan seems
inadvertently to admit the sameness or identity of the Father and the Son,
saying, “Another now hath to himself engrossed / All power” (5.775–76).
“To himself,” he says, even though we have seen that it was the Father and
not the Son who made the proclamation. It is a persistent quality of Satan’s
rhetoric that he refers to the instability of the entire discursive register within
which he proclaims his own moral imperative as a self-willing agent. As
William Walwyn said in a Leveller pamphlet of 1649, “Satan’s chief agents”
are themselves “made up of Contradictions. . . . In a word, observe them
well, and you shall see Christ and Belial, God and Mammon, in one and the
same person.”53 Satan speaks so insistently of his intentions that one cannot
help but question them. In Satan’s diction, Milton has interwoven an irreme-
diable conditionality, a kind of endemic subjunctive mood; we recall, in
reading Satanic grandiloquence, that he is the type of all doubters, and that
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his first word in the epic is “if ” (1.84). God is arguably at his most satanic
when the omniscient deity, however improbably, removes himself from
responsibility for the Fall in the dyspeptic outburst: “if I foreknew, / Fore-
knowledge had no influence on their fault, / Which had no less proved cer-
tain unforeknown” (3.117–19). Moreover, in Satan’s chronologically earliest
example of oratory, at his “royal seat/ High on a hill,” in which he has ques-
tioned “If these magnific titles yet remain / Not merely titular,” the Adver-
sary further asks: “But what if better counsels might erect / Our minds”
(5.77–74, 786–87)? “If ” is a satanic word, in that it riddles his speeches and
operates as a synecdoche for his enterprise. It is hardly surprising that his
questioning of the stability of public rhetoric should hinge upon his own
duplicitous nature, which he assumes immediately following the first
chronological moment depicted in the epic: “So spake the omnipotent, and
with his words / All seemed well pleased, all seemed, but were not all”
(5.616–17). This effect of Satan’s is particularly apt, not least because, “Won-
derfully,” we may say with George Steiner, “the Satan in Job suggests the fig-
ure of the critic. He is acidly intimate with the Deity as critics too often are
with artists. His role may have been seminal: Satan may have provoked God
into creating.”54
As his name implies, Satan is both inwardly and outwardly divided; ha
satan signifies adversity wherever it appears in the Hebrew Bible, as in Job or
at Numbers 22:22, where the term refers to an adversary angel sent, on
account of God’s wrath being kindled, to oppose the path of Balaam.55
When the narrator interjects a comment, following Satan’s first speech in
Book 1, Milton’s tactical deployment of caesurae reproduces the sense of
internal division: “So spake the apostate angel, though in pain, / Vaunting
aloud, but racked with deep despair” (1.125–26). In these lines, the choppi-
ness of the verse serves to undercut the heroic boast; the Homeric “Vaunting
aloud” is diminished as it is surrounded by suffering rather than doing, loss
instead of victory. So Satan is both inwardly divided and outwardly divisive.
Just as Satan willfully manipulates the notion of the public good for
self-serving ends, so he adduces the language of resistance to tyranny to
advance his own tyrannical bid for power. Feeling himself to have been
“eclipsed” by the Son, who according to the devil masquerades “under the
name / Of king anointed,” Satan employs the incendiary rhetoric of the rev-
olution: “what if better counsels might erect / Our minds and teach us to
cast off this yoke?” (5.776–77, 785–86) When Satan claims to “teach” his
fellow angels that their freedom will be born in resisting the tyranny of
heaven, Milton teaches his readers to decode the rhetorical duplicity of
tyrants. Only by recognizing the diabolical contradictions in this political
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speech can we come to understand the discrepancy between legitimate merit

and illegitimate ambition. In exposing the first disobedience of Satan as a
calculated political act founded upon lies and deception, Milton undermines
the conceptual justification for disobedience to God even as he inculcates the
skepticism necessary to resist tyrants who arrogate God’s logic as their own.

“THE TYRANT’S PLEA”

As the angelic choir sings God’s praise after creation, the heavenly spheres
ring like church bells. By Milton’s inverted logic, to emphasize the uncere-
monious rhymes and even the ritualistic iconography of heaven is to contrast
the Church of England’s crude institutional hierarchy. And yet, at the very
moment of creation—before the song in celebration of “the imperial throne
/ Of godhead” is finished—the angelic choir accidentally suggests that, until
the end of time, God’s plan will suffer a cosmic flaw. The angels ask what
they mistakenly think is a rhetorical question: “Who can impair thee,
mighty king, or bound / Thy empire” (7.585–86, 608–9)? The answer is
Satan, who will “impair” the deity and “bound” at least this much of His
empire. When He creates humanity, God introduces the idea of His earthly
empire changing hands—Adam and Eve are to exercise dominion over the
rest of creation. Having foreseen the Fall of Adam, however, God relin-
quishes the concept of empire that governed the freshly created universe.
Milton undermines the imperial idea by exposing it as an evil ambition when
Satan transfers the world to the dominion of Sin and Death.56 Obfuscation
of motive in the transfer of empire may be said to serve as a trope for the
unrecoverable origins of the created world. The conceptual justification of
imperial expansion changes its valence as creation, “The addition of [God’s]
empire” (7.555), falls into the hands of Satan.
Satan’s despotic pretension becomes clearest after he perversely opposes
genuine merit, slippery as that concept is, and enlivens its fraudulent double,
as seen in Satan’s “sense of injured merit” and the “monument / Of merit”
constructed by Sin and Death (1.98; 10.258–59). We witness the way Satan
frames his ambition as an ethical achievement when the narrator shows us
Satan’s tight control over apparently open debate; what we see as the parlia-
mentary council of hell turns out to have been arranged beforehand by Satan
and Beelzebub and is thus the outcome of political manipulation: “Thus
Beelzebub / Pleaded his devilish counsel first devised / By Satan, and in part
proposed” (2.378–80). In this passage, Milton is making a central political
point about the nature of consent in government, affirming the distinction
between the public good and public reason—also referred to in the period as
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122 The End of Learning

“necessity,” or “reason of state.” Satan becomes a figure very much like

Sulla—the object of Milton’s scorn in the epigraph added to the second edi-
tion of The Readie and Easie Way, an adaptation of Juvenal, who makes Sulla
the embodiment of ambition: “I too have given advice to Sylla, now let me
give it to the people [et nos / Consilium dedimus Syllae, demus populo nunc].”57
If Satan exhibits classic attributes of a tyrant, then he is rhetorically even
more like Emperor Tiberius, whose diction, according to Tacitus, “by habit
or by nature, was always indirect and obscure, even when he had no wish to
obscure his thoughts”; and who, in Tacitus’s withering account of the
emperor’s rhetorical manipulation, “organized the state, not by instituting a
monarchy or a dictatorship, but by creating the title of First Citizen [prin-
cipis nominee constitutam rem publicam].”58 Tiberius’s kind of equivocation—
which has a clear analogue in Charles’s use of the “Jesuitical slight,” Milton’s
term for rhetorical duplicity in Eikonoklastes (1649, 2nd ed. 1650; YP
3:526)—comes so naturally to Satan that he perpetuates his deception even
in soliloquy.
Milton scorns the calculated ambiguity of this false niceness of dic-
tion as a tool of political coercion, for instance when Satan finesses the dif-
ference between “Beseeching or besieging” God as he tries to persuade the
angels to join his rebellion (5.869). Milton also shows us this aspect of the
devil—in his attempt to rationalize “conquering this New World”—to
undermine Satan’s claim that “public reason” or reason of state “compels”
him (4.389; 391).59 He acts, of course, on behalf of no public good. Satan
always sheds responsibility for his evil deeds, presenting the illusion that he
has no choice, whereas it is precisely the allowance of his freedom of choice
that has enabled his rebellion.60 Satan’s claim finds its corollary in the
dense nexus of rhymes connecting his putative rationale with tyranny and
the Tree of Life, a symbol of all that will be lost in the effort to analogize
human with divine power:

So spake the fiend, and with necessity,

The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.
Then from his lofty stand on that high tree
Down he alights . . . (4.393–6; my italics)

In Paradise Lost, rhyme’s conspicuous appearance triggers our recognition of

the dangers of mellifluous rhetoric—the “tyrant’s plea” couched in the seduc-
tive rhetoric of political “necessity.” In Satan’s appeal to “public reason just”
as a rationale for his pursuit of “Honour and empire with revenge enlarged”
(4.389–90), the devil shows himself to be, as Marvell put it in The First
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Anniversary, “mad with reason, so miscalled, of state” (l. 111; Poems AM, p.
291).61
Like Alcibiades in Thucydides’ history of The Peloponnesian War—
especially when Alcibiades advocates the disastrous Sicilian expedition—
Milton’s Satan continually tries to persuade the other angels, Eve, and even
himself, of the necessity for preemptive and expansive conquest. “Nor is it in
our power,” says Alcibiades in Hobbes’s translation, “to be our own carvers
how much we will have subject to us; but considering the case we are in, it is
as necessary for us to seek to subdue those that are not under our dominion,
as to keep so those that are; lest if others be not subject to us, we fall in dan-
ger of being subjected unto them.”62 Alcibiades’s logic resonates with Beelze-
bub’s proposal for “Some advantageous act” against humanity in Book 2, as
it does with Sin’s suggestion that she and Death “try / Adventurous work,”
and a similar line of reasoning is implicit when Satan complains that Adam
and Eve have advanced “Into our room of bliss” (2.363; 10.254–55; 4.359).
Certainly such examples of immoral sophistry underpin the simile that pre-
cedes Satan’s impassioned praise of the Tree of Knowledge to Eve:

As when of old some orator renowned

In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence
Flourished, since mute, to some great cause addressed,
Stood in himself collected, while each part,
Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue,
Sometimes in height began, as no delay
Of preface brooking through his zeal of right.
So standing, moving, or to height upgrown
The tempter all impassioned thus began. (9.670–78)

Satan actually believes that he acts under political compulsion—in

expedient redress of an unfair imbalance in cosmic power. As the type of all
future tyrants, Satan’s special pleading will resurface in Michael’s critical
commentary on the decay of “Rational liberty” with the rise of Nimrod and
the tower of Babel:

know withal,
Since thy original lapse, true liberty
Is lost, which always with right reason dwells
Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being:
Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,
Immediately inordinate desires
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124 The End of Learning

And upstart passions catch the government

From reason, and to servitude reduce
Man till then free. (12.82–90)

The “government” of the passions, according to the psychology of the

passage, confers political freedom upon the agent, but indulgence and
intemperance render the transgressive agent an enslaved subject. Reason may
have been “obscured” by the Fall, but, owing to preventable human short-
comings like the lack of virtuous self-discipline, it will fail to be “obeyed.”
Inordinate and upstart, the irrational chaos of desire will “catch the govern-
ment” off-guard, as when Macro in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus explains how to
thrive in government: “Men’s fortune there is virtue; reason their will; / Their
licence law; and their observance, skill.”63 The polity’s “outward freedom”
will be “undeservedly” enthralled, since, as Michael laments, “tyranny must
be, / Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse” (12.95–6). On the other hand,
just as the Father had commanded at the elevation of the Son that the angels
“confess him Lord: / Under his vicegerent reign abide / United as one indi-
vidual soul” (5.608–10), so right reason “hath no dividual being” apart from
“true liberty.” Willful subordination to God is therefore seen as liberty’s con-
dition of possibility, whereas the immoderate satanic desire of the appetite
overthrows the powers of ratiocination that consent to be governed by the
deity.
By this principle, the “government” of the passions does not imply that
they are stamped out altogether, only that they need to be moderated, like
unruly subjects, by a temperate and prudent ruler and by obedience to the
law. By associating Satan with the tyrants of antiquity, Milton reveals how
much is at stake historically in the effort to discipline the will of the public—
a message he had tried to drive home to the backsliding English populace on
the eve of the Restoration. The characteristics of life under a tyranny remain
the same, and as we witness the effects of the triumph of will over reason
throughout the epic, we see the political implications of libertinism. To this
end, when the poet implores Urania to “drive far off the barbarous disso-
nance / Of Bacchus and his revelers” (7.32–33), Milton clearly alludes to the
contemporary tyranny of Cavalier drinking culture and its political counter-
part in the court of Charles II. The echo of The Readie and Easie Way is
unmistakable: “Let our zealous backsliders forethink now with themselves,
how thir necks [are] yok’d with these tigers of Bacchus” (YP 7:452). Drunk
with the expectation of her newfound power, Eve eats the forbidden fruit
and is likewise “heightened as with wine, jocund and boon” (9.793). Wine
and the human will, in the moral writings of Petrus Berchorius and others,
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were seen as synonymous, particularly as each signified the loss of rationality

and the burning of desire.64 Demonstrating the inextricable link between
libidinal irrationality and the lust for political power, Milton trains his read-
ers to exercise a political sensitivity that will prevent them, as individuals and
as citizens of a commonwealth, from being ruled by their passions. Thin and
illusory as the rhetoric that couches it, the leadership of Satan the dema-
gogue is the political equivalent of his overpowering will to rule heaven. In
the failure of Satan to master his own appetite, Milton foreshadows the
enduring consequences of the tyranny that, in Michael’s ominous words,
“must be” (12.95).

“WHAT MEANT THAT CAUTION JOINED”?

As we have seen, the character of Satan provides a means for Milton to

exploit the didactic potential to refine moral discriminations and to sharpen
the perception of distinctions in political rhetoric. Yet, time and again, we
are left to wonder if it is an intrinsic feature of divine instruction to intro-
duce the idea of disobedience. After all, God the Father at the elevation of
the Son threatens punishment for an act of disobedience—which only God
can foresee. The provocation is lodged in the ostensible effort at its preven-
tion. An identical ethical problem is present when the logic of temporality
makes Raphael the conduit by which Adam first imagines sin; there is again
an aura of inadvertency surrounding the introduction of the concept of dis-
obedience, as there had been during God’s anointing decree. Raphael’s
propaedeutic tale of the War in Heaven and of Creation commences in
response to the suggestion of disobedience. Another way of putting this
would be to say that, in Paradise Lost, the notion of rebellion everywhere
spawns a narrative reaction.
Arriving in Eden, the “Divine instructor” tells Adam how human
“bodies may at last turn all to spirit, / Improved by tract of time” (5.546,
497–98),

If ye be found obedient, and retain

Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progeny you are. Meanwhile enjoy
Your fill what happiness this happy state
Can comprehend, incapable of more. (5.501–5)

Having ordered Raphael to “advise [man] of his happy state, / Happiest in

his power left free to will, / Left to his own free will,” God had set up the
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126 The End of Learning

encounter so that Adam would understand the consequence of disobedience,

“Lest willfully transgressing he pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished, unfore-
warned” (5.234–36, 243–44). What, we might ask, are the deity’s motives
for delegating such a tremendous responsibility? God’s assumption that the
angel will be an effective teacher proves to be deeply problematic. This is
unquestionably so unless we misunderstand—and Raphael likewise miscon-
strues—just what it is that God has sent him to teach. In the event, it might
almost be said that Raphael has come to Eden to run Adam through the
machinations of a fallible intellect.
Some confusion about the content of the lesson is natural, since God’s
laconic instructions to the angel are not explicit about the best way to teach
Adam the meaning of transgression: “such discourse bring on / As may
advise him of his happy state,” and so on (5.234–35). How precisely is Adam
to beware “deceit and lies” when he may not be able to discern “Hypocrisy,
the only evil that walks / Invisible, except to God alone, / By his permissive
will” (5.243; 3.683–85)? In response to Raphael’s instruction, Adam shows
he has learned how human beings should contemplate “sensible things,” very
much as Milton had described in Of Education (YP 2:368). Adam has
grasped the proper method for comprehending sensory data, but the angel’s
moral teaching has failed where the mechanical method for understanding
has prevailed. For in the next breath, Adam insinuates that Raphael has pro-
duced the conundrum which God sent the angel to prevent:

O favourable spirit, propitious guest,

Well hast thou taught the way that might direct
Our knowledge, and the scale of nature set
From centre to circumference, whereon
In contemplation of created things
By steps we may ascend to God. But say,
What meant that caution joined, If ye be found
Obedient? Can we want obedience then
To him, or possibly his love desert
Who formed us from the dust, and placed us here
Full to the utmost measure of what bliss
Human desires can seek or apprehend? (5.507–18)

The speech shows Adam’s growing confusion over the two kinds of
“knowledge” acquired through scientific inquiry and moral questioning—
one of which, he learns, is sanctioned and the other forbidden. At times in
human experience, moral and scientific knowledge mingle, as when nature’s
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beauty “instructs” Adam and Eve to be generous and hospitable upon

Raphael’s arrival (5.320). The confusion goes deeper, however, as a result of
Raphael’s instruction. The idea that Adam might “want obedience”—per-
haps hinting through a pun that he does not “want” to be obedient at all—
and that human desires may surpass what he can “apprehend” at this
moment seems first to occur to Adam in response to Raphael’s caution.
That satanic “if ” keeps cropping up as an invitation to transgression. To be
sure, we may wonder how much Adam can know of any “utmost measure”
when his experience has remained unvaryingly blissful. Likewise, the threat
of mortality can hardly be effective to beings who do not possess an ability
to imagine death—“what e’er death is,” says Adam (4.425). Is it too much
to suggest that Raphael has just created in Adam the possibility of falling by
telling him that angels have already fallen? This warning was supposed to
“advise him of his happy state,” where perhaps the only definition possible
would be by negation. The promise of higher or lower forms of existence
for humanity introduces the instability of the status quo and registers as
uncertainty and confusion. The “bright consummate flower” promised in
Raphael’s grand speech about ontological upward mobility for humankind
has occasioned the planting, instead of Raphael’s intended piety, of a seed
of doubt.
Thus Milton introduces the very structure of theodicy implicitly in
these remarks that preface Raphael’s cautionary tale. The suggestion of dis-
obedience triggers the recognition of the existence of evil; doubt spreads,
intensifying as the need for justification of God’s ways; and instruction fol-
lows, in the form of the exemplary narrative. God’s logic here spurs Adam on
toward recognition of the problem of evil, a problem Adam had known of
but not fully realized. Perversely, God’s response to the disorientation of a
human being in the face of inscrutable providence smacks of the Stoics’ par-
adoxical denial of theodicy. As Seneca says in his moral essay On Providence,
“It is not possible that any evil can befall a good man,” even though “Disas-
ter is virtue’s opportunity” (calamitas virtutis occasio est).65
As we have noticed in discussing the relationship between God’s
decrees in Books 3 and 5, Milton foregrounds the problem of how narration
relates to chronology.66 In the beginning of Book 5, Eve tells of her dream,
and Satan is her “guide” (5.35–94). When a new narrative enters into the
poem, Satan is there goading on the plot. In this respect there is, as Neil
Forsyth says, a certain “likeness of Satan” in the structure of “the poem
itself.” If the entire action hinges on his transgressions, then it is no exagger-
ation to claim that Satan’s role is to be “the one who motivates the plot, who
drives the story into motion.”67 The salvific plot, in this view, requires the
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sacrifice of not one, but two beings. Even at this level, the providential
design, reaffirmed by the interpolated commentary of the narrator, emerges
first as one of Satan’s musings:

If then his providence

Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labor must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which oft-times may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not . . . (1.162–67)

Satan plots confidently within what begins as a delusive syllogistic frame-

work, moving from “If then” to “if I.” Satan asserts that he possesses free will,
even as his rhetoric hedges his agency in, his doubt posing as narrative sus-
pense (“may succeed”; “as perhaps”; “if I fail not”). Satanic plotting thus
begets the confirmation of that providential logic which the fiend has set out
to deny.
The heavy alliterations in the narrator’s subsequent comment point
ahead to God’s alliterations in the anointing of the Son, where, says the
Father, I “on this holy hill / Him have anointed, whom ye now behold / At
my right hand; your head I him appoint” (5.604–6). More in the manner of
a discomfiting parity than a simple parody, Milton forges a sonic bridge
between these two inaugural passages. The narrator interrupts himself to
remark, as if bestirred by wisdom’s sudden emergence (or Athena’s allegorical
double in Sin’s birth):

So stretched out huge in length the arch-fiend lay

Chained on the burning lake, nor ever thence
Had risen or heaved his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enraged might see
How all his malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness . . . (1.209–18)

The narrator’s imprecation answers to the reiterative quality of satanic con-

sciousness. The alliterative “dark designs” are a sad pastiche of the open vista
brought forth in “Infinite goodness,” just as “Heap on himself ” and “heaved
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his head” deflate the image of the holy hill on which the Son becomes the
“head” of the universe. The elevation of the Son is preceded in the narrative
(but followed in time) by Satan literally raising his head. The inversion spelled
out by the narrative voice bends the verse back on itself in an imaginative
example of unintended consequences: the narrator’s irresistible urge to pun
satanically on “at large.” Satan is “at large” because, for now, his assumed
shape compares to that of Leviathan, while, at the same time, he is “at large”
as a result of God’s permitting him to rise from the lake. At the end of Book
1, the infectious pun has spread, such that the narrator deploys a verbal ana-
logue for the vertiginous shift in perspective when the devils “to smallest
forms / Reduced their shapes immense, and were at large” (1.789–90). This
variety of Miltonic wordplay, so ably recuperated by Christopher Ricks, opens
up the tonality of the poetry to greater scrutiny, if only because it invites con-
sideration as a calculated “lapse” that Milton would attribute to his narrator.68
At the very moment in which the narrator seeks to enforce dogma, the
tone of the poetry subtly undermines the doctrinaire application of its mean-
ing by identifying the narrator with a rhetorical characteristic that the poem
associates elsewhere with Satan. Again Milton deepens the pun by extending
it through the architectonics of the epic: the phrase eerily resurfaces later
when Adam attempts to demonstrate that he has learned the most important
lesson Raphael has to teach him, saying,

apt the mind or fancy is to rove

Unchecked, and of her roving is no end;
Till warned, or by experience taught, she learn,
That not to know at large of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle, but to know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom. . . . (8.188–94; my italics)

Adam’s dogmatic musings ironically promote “wandering thoughts,” sug-

gesting his identity with the pilot who mistakes Leviathan for an island. His
pun, like the narrator’s puns in the first book of the epic, is spatial and per-
spectival, employing the figurative language of antithesis—things small
because “remote” need not be known up close or “at large” because they lack
utility. Does Adam know the aptitude of his own “mind or fancy,” terms that
are curiously equivalent in his formulation, like warning and experience? As
when the Ghost, finding Hamlet “apt,” prompts the latent fantasy of
vengeance that already inhabits Hamlet’s “prophetic soul,” Adam betrays his
natural cast of mind when he speaks axiomatically.
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130 The End of Learning

Raphael courteously but nervously reminds Adam that God has estab-
lished boundaries around moral knowledge and that crossing these and per-
haps other barriers to godhead symbolizes apostasy. If Raphael ultimately
fails as a pedagogue, it is not for lack of trying. To counteract Adam’s wan-
dering and naturally rebellious fancy, Raphael frequently offers reminders of
his presence as narrator. Repetitions of narrative markers intrude in order to
ensure that the mediation of the divine instructor’s storytelling stays con-
stantly in view. This aspect of reported discourse in the epic serves to keep a
certain distance between the author and the text. Taken structurally, the nar-
rative becomes pedagogical. But as in the epic voice’s interjections, narration
provides not so much a corrective medium catechistically scolding readers, as
an oblique medium through which Milton explores the theological perplexi-
ties that beset signification. We are, of course, at two removes at least from
the events depicted when the narrator recounts Raphael’s tale, and at an even
greater remove when we are forced to rely upon Raphael’s memory of the
speeches of God, Satan, or Abdiel. Milton endows Raphael with self-con-
sciousness about this narrative function and the intrinsic difficulty it presents
for his educational task. The element of surprise, so crucial to the reader-
response paradigm, assumes inattentiveness on the part of readers as much as
it presumes an early moment in the first reading of the poem—after several
books, is anyone still “surprised”?69 The evidence of early readers such as
Jonathan Richardson (father and son) has been adduced in support of the
idea that the Miltonic voice magisterially upbraids the reader, whereas the
following rhapsodic description conveys almost the opposite notion, that
Milton gives his readers too much credit:

a Reader of Milton must be Always upon Duty; he is Surrounded with

Sense, it rises in every Line, every Word is to the Purpose; There are no
Lazy Intervals, All has been Consider’d, and Demands, and Merits
Observation. . . . he Expresses himself So Concisley, Employs Words So
Sparingly, that whoever will Possess His Ideas must Dig for them, and
Oftentimes pretty far below the Surface. if This is call’d Obscurity let it
be remembered ’tis Such a One as is Complaisant to the Reader, not
Mistrusting his Ability, Care, Diligence, or Candidness of his Temper
. . . if a Good Writer is not Understood ’tis because his Reader is Unac-
quainted with, or Incapable of the Subject, or will not Submit to the
Duty of a Reader, which is to Attend Carefully to what he Reads [sic].70

Richardson places the burden entirely upon “the Reader,” who must “Submit
to the Duty” of attending “Carefully to what he Reads”: the presumption,
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common enough in the period, is that there is a meaning which inheres in

the text and that can be excavated, “that whoever will Possess His Ideas must
Dig for them.” Unearthing the intention that underlies the vagaries of
obscure diction entails a hermeneutic process best compared to interpreta-
tion of Scripture.71 The comparison is instructive in its qualification of what
Richardson means by “edification,” and it also hints at the danger associated
with textual interpretation gone awry. Narrative induces an immediate
awareness of the distance between the intention of the writer and the dis-
course to be interpreted, just as an interpreter’s explanation is the product of
a dialectical interaction with his or her understanding of the text.72
Implicitly, the form of Raphael’s narrative exposes the poem’s regressive
points of origin as a pedagogical device. Throughout the poem, Milton
inserts reminders and qualifications that call attention to the difficulty and
the presumption of his own “Sad task and hard” (5.564). Narrative media-
tors such as Raphael and Michael function pedagogically in that, through
their failure to teach at key moments, they demonstrate a more profoundly
edifying truth beyond the reach of superficial didacticism. Although he has
been instructed by God to tell the tale of Satan’s fall, Raphael still wavers in
his concern for the propriety of explaining what the poet terms, in the invo-
cation to Book 3, “things invisible to mortal sight” (3.55). Even before the
Fall, Raphael worries about the unintended consequences and unforeseen
effects of human language upon his lesson when he converts the divine truth
into his tale. Angels receive “intuitive” information most often, which differs
“but in degree” from human linguistic faculties (5.487–90). But the fear of
overstepping an unspoken boundary by translating from intuitive to discur-
sive reason suddenly becomes palpable when the discursive register shifts
from expository to narrative modes:

how shall I relate

To human sense the invisible exploits
Of warring spirits; how without remorse
The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfect while they stood; how last unfold
The secrets of another world, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? (5.564–70)

The basic premise of accommodation, or “likening spiritual to corporal

forms” (5.573), cannot inoculate even an angelic narrator against the dangers
that attend evoking the deity and equating the two books of nature and of
God. Raphael’s use of anaphora, a common trope of biblical rhetoric, suggests
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132 The End of Learning

the problem of accommodation, even as it looks forward to the appearance

of sacred Scripture as God’s solution to the problem of communication with
fallen humanity.73
Divine instruction requires that the boundaries which separate the lev-
els of the cosmic hierarchy be breached without the loss of proper decorum.
If conversation with a being lower on the ontological ladder entails the
sophistication—even the confounding—of the discursive register on which
the interaction is to transpire, then angelic or divine teaching will saturate
the verse with polysemous diction and rhetorical mutivalence. The doctrine
of accommodation—which provides a means for explaining the appearance
of the divine word in human systems of signification—cannot fully account
for the way a poetic utterance acquires its multiplicity in Raphael’s speech.
But the angel introduces this representational quandry into the unfallen
world as a problem associated with expressing intentions in an educative dis-
course. From Lucifer-Satan’s first speech onward, the language of education
ironically forms the primary rationale for disobedience—the need to test and
to learn by experience. Even the good angels cannot quite figure out how to
reconcile properly the disparate ontological status of humankind to the
larger providential order. After all, like the narrator of the epic in his procla-
mation of his theodicy, Raphael too wants to “inquire / Gladly into the ways
of God with man” (8.226).
Subtle poetic effects are instrumental to Milton’s pedagogy and lead to
startling questions about the nature of the scenes in which they occur. In
Raphael’s colloquy with Adam, when he tells his epic tale of arms and the
greater man, who is learning from whom? At the end of the lesson, the offer-
ing of mutual congratulations by Adam, the narrator of the epic, and even
the archangel, can only function as dramatic irony, given what every reader
knows about the coming Fall. Adam thanks Raphael for conveying “Intelli-
gence of heaven” (8.181), but not before his belated response calls into ques-
tion the success of his teacher’s didactic approach. Milton depicts the
instability of the angel’s message as an almost magical property of the verse:

The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear

So charming left his voice, that he awhile
Thought him still speaking, still stood fixt to hear. (8.1–3)

This does not instill confidence. Adam may think himself “cleared of
doubt,” but moral matters will become far more ambiguous before long,
which implies that the doubt he facilely dispenses with has been the very
thing keeping him pure until now (8.179). The incantation of the angelic
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 133

bard has failed to convey a proper appreciation of the seriousness of the situ-
ation in which tempted humanity is about to find itself. The rhyme of “ear”
and “hear” jingles, the poetry thus sounding an alarm to warn that ancient
liberty is at risk.
Human forays into didactic speech also expose cracks in the founda-
tion of knowledge, even before the arrival of Raphael. For example, Eve’s
dream occasions an exchange where we are invited to witness Adam’s self-
righteous disquisition on the nature of evil, of which he has apparently no
more experience than he has, so far, of death. When Adam, reiterating the
church fathers’ punning Latin, unde malum, says, “nor can I like / This
uncouth dream, of evil sprung I fear; / Yet evil whence?”—an unfallen being,
we recall, is already inquiring about the origins of evil, something he cannot
understand.74 Still, Adam feels confident enough to lecture Eve ponderously
on the topic of “Reason as chief ” among the faculties—clearly fancying him-
self as Reason and Eve as Fancy personified, since “She forms imaginations,
airy shapes” (5.102–5). His limited knowledge, experience, and imagination
mitigate his assertions, and so his speculations beg the question when he
speaks gnomically: “Evil into the mind of god or man / May come and go, so
unapproved, and leave / No spot or blame behind: which gives me hope”
(5.117–19). The two halves of that last line heavily qualify what follows.
Adam’s hope—that what Eve dreamt she never will consent to do—is simply
self-deluding because he speaks either from some very strange assumptions
about the mind of God, or he has already encountered evil in such a way that
he may no longer be aware of its manifestation within himself. The lines sug-
gest that Adam believes he knows what God thinks or is capable of thinking,
and also assumes he comprehends Eve because he recognizes evil.
The “Intelligence of heaven” God wishes to bestow upon created man
necessitates an ontological and representational coup of sorts, a logic which
can only be articulated by opening a vertiginous perspective on what it
means to “know to know no more” (8.181; 4.775). The ironies of this situa-
tion are nowhere more evident than when Adam reports his request to God
for a mate. Adam requites Raphael’s tale and satisfies the archangel’s curiosity
through an explanation perilously resonant with Satan’s inquiry into origins:
“For man to tell how human life began / Is hard; for who himself beginning
knew?” (8.250–51).

DIVINE MAIEUTICS

In Book 8 of Paradise Lost, Adam reports that in his first speech-act, he could
already “feel that I am happier than I know” (8.282). Human consciousness
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134 The End of Learning

begins with this curious disjunction, with the first man’s intuition of the dis-
crepancy between his perception and his capacity to conceive reality. The
ironic disparity is essential to Milton’s design, no less than his God’s. For the
ethical dilemma that deepens Adam’s self-sacrifice for Eve is born with him in
that distinction between what he feels and what he knows. Insufficient as his
tragic choice may seem, it will in the fullness of time be answered by Christ’s
sacrifice for love. And, as Michael promises, the fallen Adam may still “possess
/ A paradise within . . . happier far” (12.586–87). In Adam’s first words, Mil-
ton ironically telescopes the whole human drama of sin and salvation.
Human consciousness is born with the observation of an anthropo-
morphic detail: “all things smiled,” says Adam (8.265). The strangeness of
the analogy relates to the immeasurable distance between a human being
who can, with “sudden apprehension,” grasp the substance of another crea-
ture and speak that being’s essence, and a fallen desire to tailor perception
so that it fits a fallible understanding (8.354). Unaccommodated man no
longer can expect unmediated access to the higher registers of ontology.
From the start, no answer awaits the first man’s immediate queries about
his own nature and origin, but sleep comes over him quickly: “Pensive I sat
me down” (8.287). Adam believes that he is “passing to my former state /
Insensible” until “suddenly stood at my head a dream” (8.290–92). Adam
first becomes sensible of his own precognitive state in such a way as to
allow a prelapsarian taste of mortality. The phenomenology of the dream
state also forecasts the theophany that is about to follow. In man’s first visit
with his maker, the movement toward consciousness out of “the dream”
that “lively shadowed” the encounter with the deity warps chronology in
order to convey the paradoxes of a priority that is ontological as well as, in
the moment of experience that he seeks to represent, phenomenological. In
other words, as Adam relates to the sociable spirit Raphael, the dream cre-
ates an “inward apparition” that he says “gently moved / My fancy to
believe I yet had being, / And lived”—which of course Adam has and does
(8.293–95).
The effect of all of this is to enfold Adam’s narration in a series of per-
ceptual confusions that dramatize the jarring experience of theophany. The
dreamlike quality of Adam’s description serves to create a conspicuous buffer
between human representation of the theophany and the actual deity that
appeared. As the dream becomes manifest reality, God admonishes Adam
not to eat the fruit—as if, to compensate for answering the prototype of all
prayer, God needed to set up the rules and limitations of divine and human
interaction. What follows is the naming of the animals in an act of division
and classification, after which Adam asks for a mate.
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 135

The foregoing summary cursorily overlooks the rich details of the

poetic language in order to lay bare a critical point about the structure of the
interaction. In the first theophany represented in Paradise Lost, the rhetorical
mode changes from admonition, to division and classification, and ulti-
mately to dialogue proper. Adam’s request for “Collateral love, and dearest
amity” (8.426) engenders God’s discursive ascent from injunction to dialec-
tic, which in turn arouses the rational faculty, the “image of God” in unfallen
Adam, by allowing Adam to realize, and then actualize, an “other self.”
God decides to test Adam before granting his wish. In the process, Mil-
ton depicts what must be the most significant educational scenario in the
epic, since it is here that humankind reaches its first perfection, and it is also
here that Adam first learns. God created Eve, as the gloss on Genesis 2:22 in
the Geneva Bible says, “Signifying that mankind was perfite, when the
woman was created, which before was like an vnperfite building.” God tests
Adam by creating a situation in which the discrepancy in their knowledge
allows Adam to realize the concept of rational love and formulate a way of
expressing it. To this end, then, God plays the role of a Socratic interlocutor
with Adam. In an important sense, both God and Socrates induce the same
effect in the mind of the person on the receiving end of their “irony.”75 Mil-
ton depicts the theophany of Book 8 as an extraordinary, yet recognizable,
form of Socratic education—a divine maieutics. Before Adam literally gives
birth to Eve, he first gives birth to the idea of Eve in his dialogue with God.
What God is teaching Adam is crucially and inextricably linked to the way
God is teaching him.
I have referred to this process as “Socratic” with the thought in mind of
the specific description of “method” in Plato’s dialogues. The dialectical con-
tent of the theophany in Book 8 of Paradise Lost is aptly paired with a dia-
logic structure, and the most relevant paradigm for this remained what
Socrates calls, in the Theaetetus, his art of maieutics, or “midwifery.” 76 The
metaphor has a special relevance in this context, and a deeper and more con-
sequential irony, especially when we consider that God actually is playing
midwife to the first human birth, and that, as by the odd inversion of the
philosopher, it is a man who is giving birth instead of a woman. It is not
enough, however, to recognize the aptness of the metaphorical borrowing;
nor is it enough to suggest, with Irene Samuel, that the subject of the dis-
course, the rationality of ideal love, evokes passages in praise of the philo-
sophical ascent in The Symposium.77 The depth of Milton’s reading of Plato
has gone, I think, largely unnoted.78 This is especially unfortunate given the
centrality of pedagogy to the epic, and given the importance of dialogue to
Milton’s educational design, as Barbara Lewalski has observed: “God himself
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136 The End of Learning

takes on the role of educator as he engages in Socratic dialogue with his Son
about humankind’s fall and redemption (3.80–343) and with Adam over his
request for a mate (8.357–451). Adam and Eve’s dialogues with each other
involve them in an ongoing process of self-education about themselves and
their world. The Miltonic Bard educates his readers by exercising them in
rigorous judgment, imaginative apprehension, and choice.”79 Some rehearsal
of the fundamentals of Platonic education may, therefore, be in order, so that
the instruments Milton employs in the scene where God educates Adam will
become more evident.
There are several passages from the dialogues that will help elucidate
the “method” I am attributing to Plato (who was in fact the creator of the
word methodos).80 In the Sophist, Plato differentiates between sophistry, or
the rhetorical education then in vogue in Athens, and Socratic dialectic. As a
preliminary to the more central discussion of the relation between being and
not-being—also of relevance in the context of Adam’s tale—the Eleatic
Stranger acts out a refutation of the implicit connection between Socrates’s
method and the so-called art of the sophists. Like Socrates in the Gorgias, the
Eleatic Stranger will reveal rhetoric to be a mere eidolon, “an insubstantial
image of a part of politics” (463d).81 In the Sophist, the elenchic refutation
first involves an extended daiaretical paradigm—a division and classification
of the two kinds of arts, creative and acquisitive, into their proper subsets.
Then the Stranger goes about differentiating mere rhetorical training—
sophists being “merchants of the learnings of the soul” (231d)—from dialec-
tical education, “the greatest and most authoritative of purifications”
(229a-230e).82
First, the Stranger purges education of its primitive sense (as mere
admonition), “an old-fashioned and paternal kind, which fathers used to
apply specially on their sons” (229e); as the Stranger says, with special signif-
icance, for our purposes, in relation to God’s ultimately ineffective admoni-
tion to Adam: “With a lot of effort the admonitory species of education
accomplishes little” (230b). The Sophist moves through the various stages of
dialectical argumentation in the Socratic method: elenchus (short answers
refuting a thesis believed to be true by the interlocutor); daiaresis (division
and classification producing an analytical paradigm of relations); and, less
directly and effectively in the Sophist, maieusis (realization or birthing of
ideas).
The exposition of the concept lies elsewhere in the Platonic corpus. In
the Phaedrus, Socrates explains the relations between dialectic and the need
for multifarious investigation (e.g., 273e). There Socrates also famously com-
bines speeches about love and an extended discussion of the differences
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 137

between speech and writing, in which Socrates prefers speech as a means of

begetting legitimate thought in the mind of the listener (276a-277a). Con-
trary to the art of rhetoric, Socrates argues, the “art of dialectic” provides the
key to human happiness: “Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal
and renders the man who has it as happy as any human being can be”
(277a).83
For Plato, immortality is itself the process of birthing, or, as Diotima
puts it, according to the speech delivered by Socrates in The Symposium,
“begetting in beauty, in respect to both the body and the soul” (206b).84 The
definition of love, or Eros, is the desire to possess the good for itself forever
(206a). If the object of love is to possess the good forever, and that object
must be recognized in the soul of a mortal, then immortality can only be
achieved in reproduction—the compensation for mortality, both in body
and in soul. Socrates explains that beauty impregnates the soul, which occurs
when the particular body of a beautiful person is observed, and this is the
first step up the ladder of love (210a). A philosopher is not made by another
philosopher: a philosopher is impregnated in the observation of beauty, as
Adam will be in his realization of the beauty of “rational delight”: “There are
those . . . who are still more fertile in their souls than in their bodies with
what it pertains to soul to conceive and bear” (209a).
The role of the philosopher, who in this case corresponds to Milton’s
God, is to induce awareness on the part of the impregnated soul, to allow the
neophyte to realize that he is pregnant. The philosopher, like a midwife,
helps the impregnated to realize that he is pregnant with ideas. The philoso-
pher asks questions that show the interlocutor that he’s expecting, and thus
the “midwife” helps the person give birth to the immortal, which is the Idea
of Beauty itself (210e-212a). Beauty is the immortal Form that gets repro-
duced by the lover in love, which, in Paradise Lost, correlates the image of
God with the rationality Adam expresses in seeking “Collateral love.”
The most extended articulation of the Socratic method is in Plato’s
Theaetetus, where Socrates refers to “my art of midwifery,” which “midwifes
men and not women” and “examines their souls in giving birth and not their
bodies” (150b).85 According to Socrates, “whoever associate with me
undergo this same thing as women in giving birth do. They suffer labor-
pains and are filled with perplexity for nights and days far more than women
are, and my art is capable of arousing this kind of labor pain and putting it to
rest” (151a-b). Teaching, in this scheme, does not involve demonstrative
exposition or explicit logical proof on the part of the teacher. To teach, as
Lewis Campbell says in his commentary on this passage, “is not to put some-
thing into the mind but to evolve something out of it, or to turn the mind
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138 The End of Learning

from darkness to light.”86 This is precisely how Milton’s God teaches Adam.
God allows him to evolve, bodily and spiritually, by creating a context in
which Adam learns by recollection—recalling, that is, the nature of the
divine image with which he has been endowed. 87
Implicitly Milton follows St. Augustine in this scene. The doctrine of
anamnesis was reclaimed for Christianity most influentially in the Confes-
sions, where the idea of learning as recollection is connected to an allegorical
reading of the creation of Eve. For Augustine, learning means piercing
through the realm of accidents, or “insubstantial” events, in order to gather
up scattered recognitions of the eternal within the temporal: “The process of
learning is simply this: by thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas
which memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concen-
trating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in
the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered, and neg-
lected.”88 As we have seen, in the evangelical interpretation of Scripture, the
archive of messianic prophecy is always already present within the text of the
curse in Genesis or the coronation in Psalm 2. Faith is the instrumental
power by which the spirit awakens this dormant repository of knowledge
and allows the intellect to collate and reassemble the fragments retained in
memory. This accounts for the psychology, but not the theology, of anamne-
sis. Augustine laments that he is “scattered in times whose order I do not
understand” (11.29.39), though God’s “vision of occurrences in time is not
conditioned.” Recollecting the divine origin of human consciousness and
thus extricating the mind and spirit from superficial, temporal perception,
the rational light becomes, according to Augustine’s later formulation in De
Trinitate, “the indwelling Teacher.”89
The analogy extends much further. For Augustine, the exercise of rea-
son entails recognition of the likeness between human intelligence and God’s
image. This likeness allows humanity to assert dominion over the animals,
just as reason constructs a coherent context within which to subordinate
action to prudent moral reflection. The rational mind surrounds all such
deliberation with the memory of the origin of human authority in the divine
likeness:

We see the face of the earth adorned with earthly creatures and human-
ity, in your image and likeness, put in authority over all irrational ani-
mals by your image and likeness, that is by the power of reason and
intelligence. And as in his soul there is one element which deliberates
and aspires to domination, and another element which is submissive
and obedient, so in the bodily realm woman is made for man. In mental
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 139

power she has an equal capacity for rational intelligence, but by the sex
of her body she is submissive to the masculine sex. This is analogous to
the way in which the impulse for action is subordinate to the rational
mind’s prudent concern that the act is right. (13.33.47)

Women have “an equal capacity for rational intelligence,” though the gen-
ders are not equal, according to Augustine’s misogynist logic, because of
Adam’s physical priority. Thus Adam was created first and Eve was “made
for” him. The political sense of gender relations has been determined for
Augustine by this second account in Genesis. But the salient point for the
theory of learning by recollection is that both men and women remember
the nature of their relative authority, which is exercised in prudent action
and derives from their ability to recognize likeness to God. In early modern
England, Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning rehearsed this connection
between hierarchy of authority and learning as remembering. According to
Bacon, King James was the best example “of Plato’s opinion, that all knowl-
edge is but remembrance, and that the mind of man by nature knoweth all
things, and hath but her own native and original notions (which by the
strangeness and darkness of this tabernacle of the body are sequestered) again
revived and restored.”90
In Book 8 of Paradise Lost, Adam’s tale of his request for a mate operates
according to just this logic. Adam learns by recognizing his likeness to his
maker, though God also enjoins him not to forget their immeasurable distance.
In giving birth to Eve, Adam provides the answer to the question Fulke Greville
had asked in A Treatie of Humane Learning: “Who those characteristicall Ideas /
Conceiues, which Science of the Godhead be?”91 In order to produce the right
circumstances to evolve love out of the mind and body of Adam, God alters the
effect of his omniscience and plays the role of the Socratic educator.
Unlike Raphael—or, perhaps, Socrates—God has all the answers. The
profession of ignorance, the disavowal of knowledge or foreknowledge,
becomes therefore the special condition for God’s test. In this, God’s posture
is not altogether different from the whirlwind of questions that answers Job’s
lament, though that theophany, of course, reflects a postlapsarian condition
that differs as radically as can be from the friendly interaction between God
and newly created man. The rhetorical questions in the Book of Job, as Mai-
monides explains, ultimately expose the condition of fallen humanity in
order to mark and preserve the distinction between creatural and divine
senses of providence.92
Adam, relating his tale to the archangel, expresses an awareness of the
“presumptuous” nature of his own request (8.367). And this is surely part of
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140 The End of Learning

God’s lesson—to draw a line sharply between man and his maker, to induce
a perception of the difference as well as the similarity between them. God
facetiously asks, “What call’st thou solitude?” and goes on to claim that the
animals “reason not contemptibly,” so that Adam has an opportunity to
assert his need for “All rational delight” and to differentiate between the spe-
cial, ontological superiority of humankind and the lower status of the beasts
(8.391). Adam implores, “Hast thou not made me here thy substitute, / And
these inferior far beneath me set?” and God responds in kind with a further
illustration of the “infinite descents” that separate the creator from the cre-
ated (8. 381–82, 410). God reasserts the distinction between the heavenly
and the earthly orders because the logic underlying the admonition not to
eat of the forbidden tree needs some elaboration and analogical illustration.
To teach the first and most important lesson that humanity will ever
learn, God dissembles. In the lucid retrospect of narrative, Adam articulates
an awareness of the difference between what God knew and what God said.
So Adam structures his tale around an awareness of this difference, which also
allows him to recognize his likeness to God by means of the human dominion
over the animals, precisely in the way that Augustine described: “with these
[the animals] / Find pastime, and bear rule; thy realm is large. / So spake the
universal Lord, and seemed / So ordering” (8.374–77). God “seemed” to
Adam to be saying one thing—“ordering” is a playful pun, since God, like
Adam, performs speech-acts for which there is no correlative in postlapsarian
language, at once commanding and accomplishing the placement of every-
thing in its proper order. But, as Adam is about to learn, God was all the while
inducing a gradual awareness of something quite other than the explicit
“order” of the admonition not to eat the fruit, a consciousness not available
on the epistemological level of naming by “sudden apprehension”:

Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleased,

And find thee knowing not of beasts alone,
Which thou hast rightly named, but of thy self,
Expressing well the spirit within thee free,
My image, not imparted to the brute,
Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee
Good reason was thou freely shouldst dislike,
And be so minded still; I, ere thou spak’st,
Knew it not good for man to be alone,
And no such company as then thou sawst
Intended thee, for trial only brought,
To see how thou couldst judge of fit and meet . . . (8.437–48)
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God describes His intention in withholding from Adam His understanding

that Adam had need of what God, echoing Aristotle’s term for friendship,
heteros autos, calls “thy other self ” (8.450). God allows Adam to exercise “the
spirit within thee free / My image” so that, charged with the rational, benev-
olent, and sanctioned task of future propagation, Adam begins to conceive
his beloved.
So far Adam has encountered the experiential grounds for faith and
hope, but he awaits the opportunity to discover charity, a necessarily social
virtue. Adam relays his understanding:

But man by number is to manifest

His single imperfection, and beget
Like of his like, his image multiplied,
In unity defective, which requires
Collateral love, and dearest amity. (8.422–26)

Alone in mysterious seclusion, God is according to Adam’s paradoxical phrase

“Best with thyself accompanied,” though for solitary man neither such pleni-
tude nor such “secrecy” can exist (8.428). The need for “solace of his defects”
causes an “emboldened” Adam to pursue conceptual begetting just before he, in
fact, begets Eve (8.419, 434). God thus leads Adam toward cognizance of his
likeness and unlikeness to the deity. The analysis and identification appear to
have emerged from Adam’s own cognition, but it is in fact the divine spark (the
synteresis) within Adam that ignites his mimetic desire to create. Adam speaks of
his inability to humanize the beasts, yet he does so in terms of God’s having
“deified” him through their colloquy, whether “union or communion” (8.431).
Adam’s first thought of Eve, in the moment just before he asks God for a mate,
emerges as a shock of “apprehension” in the other sense, when the sudden
awareness of a lack accompanies the freeing up of his “emboldened” and even
presumptuous tongue: “I found not what methought I wanted still” (8.355).
“By withholding Eve,” as Marshall Grossman says, “God insures that Adam first
conceives her as absent, as what he wants.”93 Thus the scene is proleptic, antici-
pating already the irruption of loss, absence, and lack that Adam will face as he
decides to fall with Eve. The symmetry is striking. “With thee / Certain my res-
olution is to die” (9.906f): not only will Adam’s certitude and commitment to
obey God die as he chooses to become mortal, but his “resolution” (from the
Latin, resolvere) or the very possibility of his “untying,” “releasing,” or “loosen-
ing” from Eve will die as he acknowledges his bond to her.
The Socratic education Adam undergoes in Book 8 of Paradise Lost has
its tragic counterpart. For this, Milton could easily have found a precedent in
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142 The End of Learning

the Book of Genesis itself. After the Fall, Adam and Eve hide themselves
from God out of shame for their nakedness: “And the Lord God called unto
Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in
the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he
said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree,
whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” (Gen. 3:9–11,
KJV). This, the pendant scene to the theophany in day six of the creation
story, may have suggested to Milton the interrogative “trial” that prefaces the
creation of Eve. At this moment, there is no question that the omniscient
deity knows what Adam has done and seeks to teach erring humanity the
meaning of its apostasy. God obviously knows where Adam is, and so pro-
vokes Adam to reveal his shame through the attempt to hide his nakedness.
As E. J. Speiser notes, God speaks to Adam “as a father would to his child,”
which is especially appropriate because the Yahwist “has thus evoked . . . the
childhood of mankind itself.”94
Moreover, God is not content to leave this mode of instruction there;
God insists on the recognition, so significant for Christian interpretations of
the episode, that Adam has tasted disobedience because of a failure of his
own conscience. As Luther puts it:

The words “Where are you?” are words of the Law. God directs them to
the conscience. Although all things are plain and known before God
(Heb. 4:13), He is speaking according to our way of thinking; for He
sees us considering how we may withdraw from His sight. . . . He wants
to show Adam that though he had hidden, he was not hidden from
God, and that when he avoided God, he did not escape God.

The point, for Luther, is that Adam “hears from the Lord his very
thoughts”—that is to say, his own thoughts. “But while he is reflecting on
these thoughts,” Luther continues, “he is forced to accuse himself, and
within him he hears his conscience convicting him of a lie and charging him
with sin.”95 One obvious consequence of the divine accommodation to
fallen human thought is that, allowing a deepening awareness of the
inevitable judgment that must follow, God provokes the consideration of
accountability in Adam. In Paradise Lost, the matter is not as straightforward
as it is in Luther’s comment, for Adam deliberates prior to his eventual
acceptance of guilt, in fact requiring Eve to become heroically humble before
he does; that is, she falls repentant at his feet, which is the first step the cou-
ple takes toward contrition and prayer (10.909–13).96 Never before the Fall
did Adam invoke heaven as if in a lament or curse:
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 143

O heaven! In evil strait this day I stand

Before my judge, either to undergo
Myself the total crime, or to accuse
My other self, the partner of my life . . . (10.125–28)

The second theophany, therefore, forms the tragic counterpart to the

first dialogue between God and man. Indeed, just before pronouncing the
curses, God relates the Fall to a fatal disruption of the sociability between
Adam and God. The “Presence divine” now attributes a loss of pleasure to
Adam’s defection, God recalling in his own experience of “solitude” the same
lack of companionship that led Adam to plead for Eve:

Where art thou Adam, wont with joy to meet

My coming seen far off? I miss thee here,
Not pleased, thus entertained with solitude,
Where obvious duty erewhile appeared unsought:
Or come I less conspicuous, or what change
Absents thee, or what chance detains? (10.104–7)

God does not “come . . . less conspicuous,” except insofar as he wants to

provoke in Adam an acute realization of “what change / Absents” him
from his creator. Although we know from God’s subsequent battery of
questions that Adam “oft hast heard” the divine voice (10.119), the only
point of reference in the epic is the previous dialogue of Book 8. It may be
that the postlapsarian moment of God’s rhetorical questioning, attested to
in chapter 3 of Genesis, provided Milton with the template for the
Socratic lack of divine disclosure in Book 8, in which case the structural
principle in effect would be retrospective. We may, in passing, recall how
this pattern is integral to the epic as a whole. After all, we see Satan in
action before we see God, and we often witness the satanic effort at parity
first—which means this effort cannot properly be parody until we later see
the divine model that Satan imitates. Moreover, this is the structure of a
fallen reader’s experience—in which our experience belies the syntax so
that the order of our perceptions is best conveyed first as loss, then as
remembrance of what we have lost—lost . . . paradise, rather than paradise
. . . lost.97 The title itself in this way reorders our pedestrian perceptions
and allows an internal reorientation toward the historical narrative rather
than the self ’s circumscribed experience of exile. The awareness that in the
instance of the curse, as in the generative love that begets Eve, God con-
veys his message of rational love by means of “holy irony,” is central to the
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144 The End of Learning

patterning of Milton’s ultimate pedagogue.98 Recognizing this providential

design in the divine maieutics, Adam first gives birth to the very form of
beauty.
Whereas the hidden nature of God’s intent had previously disclosed
Adam’s proximity to God, the same technique now becomes an ironic means
to communicate Adam’s dissimilarity as a result of his apostasy. The Son’s
tragic use of dramatic irony teaches Adam how unlike God he became in his
effort to analogize the human and the divine. Transgressing the one Law, the
first covenant between God and humankind, the image of God in Adam has
suffered the same change as the rest of fallen nature, as when Eve ate the fruit
and “Earth felt the wound.” God’s irony induces an awareness of the pain of
loss, where it had, in the dialogue that led to the creation of Eve, bodied
forth pleasure as wholly rational love.

THE SWORD AND THE WORD

God’s rhetorical questions to Adam in Book 10 show Milton reforming the

ironic or Socratic structure of Adam’s first education. After the fatal calamity,
learning by recollection means taking cognizance of human alienation from
God, this melancholy task replacing at first the memory of unfallen man’s inti-
macy with his creator. Milton therefore builds a structural homology into the
educational method by which Michael instructs Adam: just as the narrator
interjects interpretive commentary in the midst of the epic action, so Michael
repeatedly alerts Adam to his misinterpretations before guiding him toward the
truth. But parity in the local method of corrective instruction does not consis-
tently extend to similar tones of voice in Michael’s interjections and those of the
narrator. In insisting upon the difference between the voices of the epic’s various
pedagogues—and in claiming that the discrepancy between the narrator’s occa-
sionally hectoring voice and the poetry’s contextual meaning forms one of Mil-
ton’s key educational methods—I contend that Milton’s overall intention to
educate his readers is grounded in the critical wisdom of the humanist tradition,
a “Rational liberty” hard won (12.82).99 Much as the cultivation of learned and
virtuous attention had proved to be the goal of humanist argument in the polit-
ical tracts during the Civil War and Interregnum, Milton in the final books of
the epic shows how interpreting the consequences of the Fall is a strenuous act
of the critical intellect, demonstrating in the faltering perceptions of Adam and
the patient instruction of Michael a model of the internal operations of the
spirit when trained upon ethical action and redemption in Christ.
The education of Adam, ultimately an exercise in biblical hermeneu-
tics, is supposed to lead Adam to the recognition of God’s providential
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 145

design, to make legible the “mysterious terms” in which God inscribes his-
tory (10.173). In the pedagogy of the final two books, Milton differenti-
ates between pre- and postlapsarian modes of representation in a way that
is commensurate with Adam’s fallen abilities, but it is not surprising that
Adam nevertheless has some difficulty comprehending the implications of
his disobedience. Milton reveals the distortions that infuse human con-
sciousness after the Fall in the encounter between Adam and Michael, the
“heavenly instructor” sent by God to teach what He has foretold, “the final
victory of his Son” over Sin and Death, “and the renewing of all things”
(11.418; 10.Arg, p. 539). The fallenness of Adam only compounds a prob-
lem of communication that has already interfered, when Raphael tries to
warn and instruct him before the Fall. It is now up to Adam’s last angelic
“teacher” Michael to accomplish the educational transformation that will
allow Adam and Eve and their progeny to engraft themselves in their
redeemer (11.450). As the Son, presenting the prayers of Adam and Eve to
the Father, says in an analogy so simple it is hard to grasp: “with me / All
my redeemed may dwell in joy and bliss, / Made one with me as I with
thee am one” (11.42–44).
In that breathless last line, Milton requires us to perform analogical
operations that are likely to elude our ability to conceptualize the meaning of
the unity expressed through the similitude “as I with thee am one.” At each
point in fallen Adam’s education, the work of the intellect is to stretch the
memory back so that a future union with Christ will be recognizable. In each
individual lesson, the archangel will remind Adam of the internal archive of
past experience by which he can catch inspired glimpses of what future unity
in Christ will mean for humankind. God tells Michael:

If patiently thy bidding they obey,

Dismiss them not disconsolate; reveal
To Adam what shall come in future days,
As I shall thee enlighten, intermix
My cov’nant in the woman’s seed renewed . . . (11.112–16)

Michael is to communicate the subsequent history of the human race to

Adam “As” God “shall . . . enlighten” him. The intermixing, which seems for
a moment’s hesitation at the line break to be the method of man’s enlighten-
ment, is ultimately reserved for “My cov’nant in the woman’s seed renewed,”
but the implication is also conveyed imagistically, since the intermingling of
god and humanity in “the woman’s seed” will produce the new covenant.
Moreover, because the adjective “renewed” can modify either the “woman’s
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146 The End of Learning

seed” or the “cov’nant,” God’s syntax here follows a paradigm of calculated

ambiguity that shadows the verse increasingly after the Fall.
Although, as we have seen, the shift from intuitive to discursive logic
shrouds the language of Raphael’s teachings with distortion and inadvertent
duality, God sets Michael the task of introducing to human awareness a sus-
pended and doubtful grammar that requires retrospective faith in order to
resolve itself in the fallen mind. In the hermeneutic mode that Michael
teaches Adam, analogy must give way to actuality, and the accommodation
of the divine intention to its scriptural traces must be shown to be a strik-
ingly accurate proportional representation. The ratio at the heart of the doc-
trine of accommodation, as Milton proposes, is to be taken quite seriously.100
As Milton had written in the Animadversions (1641): “Wee shall adhere close
to the Scriptures of God which hee hath left us as the just and adequate
measure of truth, fitted, and proportion’d to the dilligent study, memory,
and use of every faithfull man, whose every part consenting and making up
the harmonious Symmetry of compleat instruction, is able to set out to us a
perfect man of God” (YP 1:700). Such adherence is, however, fraught with
the complexities of the grammar through which God conveys His word.101
As Milton says in the De Doctrina Christiana, “one often has to take into
account the anomalies of syntax, as, for example, when a relative does not
refer to its immediate antecedent but to the principal word in the sentence,
although it is not so near to it” (YP 6:582–83). In this exegetical precept,
Milton provides a clue for interpreting his practice in the epic as well. Milton
continued to adhere to the Analogy of Faith as the ultimate adjudicating fac-
tor in scriptural interpretation, a conviction about the nature of postlapsar-
ian consciousness that the epic allows us to experience along with Adam in
the lesson taught by Michael. The “Protestant bias” of Milton’s thought, as
H. R. MacCallum contends, “consistently caused him to emphasize the
inward and spiritual nature of the antitype” and “the apprehension of the let-
ter through faith and charity.”102 The core reliance upon faith as an inner
compulsion affects our interpretation of the sense encoded in the grammar
and rhetoric of history. Yet the historical sentence under construction in the
final two books of the epic is not only exile, “the sad sentence rigorously
urged” (11.109), but also the one fated to end “at the world’s great period”
(12.467).103
Embedded in a resilient textual archive, the prophecy is already placed
at one remove from the deity when Michael instructs Adam in its meaning.
In the event, Michael will through repetition and mnemonic assistance teach
Adam to interpret the covenant in its connection to God’s promise to Abram
(12.147–51), the giving of the Ten Commandments (12.232–35), and the
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 147

everlasting Davidic throne (12.325–28). Along with Adam and Eve, readers
of the epic have already heard the substance of the great argument in the
Son’s pronouncement of the curse on the enemy:

Between thee and the woman I will put

Enmity, and between thine and her seed;
Her seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel. (10.179–81)

The narrator immediately interprets “this oracle” typologically and proclaims

it “verified / When Jesus son of Mary second Eve / Saw Satan fall like light-
ning down from heaven . . .” (10.182–84). Christ’s resurrection is quickly
interpreted as his victory over Satan, “Whom he shall tread at last under our
feet; / Even he who now foretold his fatal bruise” (10.190–91). At this very
moment in the action, as Jason Rosenblatt has argued, the protevangelium
“devalues peremptorily the literal Torah as authoritative source of the law and
history, turning it into the Old Testament” and constricting it to typological
prefiguration for the duration of the epic.104 The common source for this
interpretation of the curse was Romans 16:20; Milton here echoes the diction
of the Geneva Version: “The God of peace shall treade Satan vnder your feete
shortly.” Over the course of Michael’s instruction, Adam must learn to inter-
pret the messianic prophecy in the way that the narrator does.105
As the archangel descends, Milton reminds us of the pedagogical force
of these interjections into the narrative, as if to say that with the Fall, the
need for a new kind of didacticism, more like that of the epic narrator, is
now required. Adam observes the “double object in our sight”—the “mute
signs in nature” which portend violence, expulsion, and enmity—the “bird
of Jove” stooping to hunt “Two birds of gayest plume” (11.185–201). One
“further change” symbolically hinted at in this emblematic tableau as await-
ing Adam’s discovery is the idea of duplicity, like the “two twins cleaving
together” in Areopagitica (YP 2:514). The vagueness of Adam’s perception
emphasizes his degraded sensitivity to the supernatural when he mistakes the
angel’s descent for a natural phenomenon “with something heavenly fraught”
(11.207). The narrator then obtrudes, encoding the theological significance
in the postponed syntactic resolution:

He erred not, for by this the heavenly bands

Down from a sky of jasper lighted now
In Paradise, and on a hill made alt,
A glorious apparition, had not doubt
And carnal fear that day dimmed Adam’s eye. (11.208–12)
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148 The End of Learning

The verb mood does not resolve until the final clause, a revisionary syntactic
structure that underscores the allusion to last things in the apocalyptic “sky
of jasper” (Rev. 4:3, noted by Fowler, p. 609). More immediately, this quali-
fication may serve as a reminder of the similarity between the diminished
capacity of fallen Adam and the metaphysical perplexities endemic to the
world Adam will leave his progeny. It is possible to regard the syntax of the
sentence as conditional throughout—retrospectively reformed by the addi-
tion of the last clause. In this reading, it would mean something like “Adam
would not have erred if doubt and carnal fear had not dimmed his eye, for
the apparition descended,” instead of the more indicative phrasing, “Adam
was not wrong, because there was a glorious apparition, if only he could have
seen it without the doubt induced by his carnal fear.” Either way the clarity
that Adam had taken for granted before the Fall has become double vision,
creating doubt, and Milton has embodied this realization in the syntax of the
description. Our linguistic perception tracks Adam’s interpretation of the
visible scene. Just as the need for empirical verification had underpinned the
sinful act itself, so the duplicitous intent evinced by our first parents mani-
fests itself as an inability to cling to the evidence of things not seen.
Using inadequate experience, rather than faith, as the criterion for
interpretation had been Eve’s downfall: “For good unknown, sure is not had,
or had / And yet unknown is as not had at all,” she rationalizes just before
falling (9.756–57). Eve falls prey to Satan’s deception, though Milton, fol-
lowing St. Paul (1 Tim. 2:14), allows that Adam elects to fall “Against his
better knowledge, not deceived” (9.998). “Let none henceforth,” says Adam
after the Fall, as he renews his protracted and self-serving accusation of Eve,
“seek needless cause to approve / The faith they owe; when earnestly they
seek / Such proof, conclude, they then begin to fall” (9.1140). In the desire
to found moral knowledge upon experience, a form of idolatry arises; drawn
down into the state of fallen nature, Adam and Eve become idolatrous as a
sign of their apostasy. For Milton, as for Luther, apostasy is instigated by
credulously weighing alternative sources of pedagogical authority to God’s,
as Eve “casts aside the Word of God and offers her whole self to Satan as his
pupil.”106 The Fall enacts a contest between pedagogues in which the satanic
schoolmaster teaches self-possession, pursuit of “side-long” self-interest by
“tract oblique” (9.510), and literalistic interpretation of freedom.
Satan’s habitual literalism leads to his conveniently self-serving exegesis
of the protevangelium. “A world who would not purchase with a bruise?” he
asks, which is sensible enough if the curse is reduced to bare physicality
(10.500). Following a pattern established early in the first book, Milton
structures the action so that we see Satan literally misinterpreting the
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 149

prophecy that Adam must learn to comprehend figuratively. In this way,

Satan inverts theodicy, wondering why God created human beings and gave
them Paradise, and his questioning dovetails with an emphasis on experience
as the most valued teacher. Mental reliance on experience, shown throughout
the epic to be a most fallible guide, engenders the satanic insistence, often
repeated, upon “proof.” It must be conceded that even obedient saints resort
to the category: “by experience taught we know how good” God is, Abdiel
says (5.826). Whereas Satan inverts the theodical structure by deriving a
need for empirical evidence from theological doubt, however, theodicy oper-
ates in precisely the opposite direction, moving from the experience of suf-
fering toward an attempt at resolving doubt through the rational explanation
of the ways of God. Precisely this paradoxical countermovement to empirical
experience informs the defense of God’s justice that Leibniz mounts in the
Theodicy (1710): “It is true that one may imagine possible worlds without
unhappiness . . . but these same worlds again would be very inferior in good-
ness. I cannot show you this in detail. For can I know and can I present
infinities to you and compare them together?”107 As is suggested by the
antithesis in the title of John Hick’s classic modern treatment of “soul-mak-
ing theodicy,” Evil and the God of Love, the lived experience of evil makes
necessary a defense of the idea of divine benevolence.108 Paradise Lost also
manages to imply the ambiguity that would result if we reversed the terms of
Hick’s antithesis: The God of Love and Evil. If evil brings forth good,
according to the providential plot—as in the description, “Knowledge of
good bought dear by knowing ill” (4.222)—then it is perhaps also true that,
from the perspective of created creatures, good brings forth evil.
The cosmic struggle is, at any rate, intelligible to human beings only
backwards, which leads to Lactantius’s important but—as Milton realized
long before writing the epic—inadequate formulation: “Why does God per-
mit evil? So that the account can stand correct with goodness. For the good
is made known, is made clear, and is exercised by evil. As Lactantius says,
Book 5. chapter 7, that reason and intelligence may have the opportunity to
exercise themselves by choosing the things that are good, by fleeing from the
things that are evil. lactan de ira dei. chapter 13. however much these things
fail to satisfy” (YP 1:363). When Milton entered these thoughts in his Com-
monplace Book, he added the comment to the end of the passage that
acknowledges how (intellectually) unsatisfying such blatant rationalization
is. As an emotional response to the conceptual shortcoming of simple justice,
these remarks help us to understand the relative effects of Milton’s God
and Milton’s Satan upon generations of readers, from Dryden to Blake to
students today. As we have seen in the discussion of free will in Chapter
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150 The End of Learning

One, justifications of God’s ways tend toward a rectification of the soul by

making evil instrumental to salvation. This permission of uncertainty and
doubt allows for a profound and genuine assertion of faith, a greater good
that would not have been possible without the element of free will and
choice. In this sense, the Son’s decision to sacrifice Himself for humanity
springs from the free will granted to all beings and serves as a model
choice of obedience.
Milton’s great argument requires that readers witness an evolving
process of argumentation that is indirect, multifarious, and open to chal-
lenge on political, spiritual, and experiential grounds. This, I submit, is how
Paradise Lost responds to the dissatisfaction Milton himself found in Lactan-
tius’s solution to the problem of evil. Milton’s theodicy is rhetorical before it
is logical and therefore defies, even thwarts, the effort to reduce it to a propo-
sitional form. This is why Adam needs above all, as Michael tells him, “to
learn / True patience” (11.360–61), so that he may “believe, and be con-
firmed” in his faith (11.355). Calling to mind a pendant scene of instruc-
tion, Michael commences with an allusion to the birth of Eve and thus to the
Socratic method by which God taught Adam to conceive rational love: Eve
will sleep “while thou to foresight wak’st, / As once thou slepst, while she to
life was formed” (11.369–69). Michael instructs Adam in the meaning of his
having been granted time before death (11.255–57); tells Adam what he will
teach him and what he will need to learn (11.355–66); and places three
drops from the well of life on Adam’s eyes, which pierce “Even to the inmost
seat of mental sight” (11.418).
To accomplish the transformation of his understanding and to bring
about a consciousness of charity as the means to imitate the paragon of
virtue, the Son of God, Michael teaches Adam through trial and error to
interpret history faithfully, as a sacred text. Adam, as Michael tells him, must
understand what he sees in the most “mysterious terms” (10.173):

So law appears imperfect, and but given

With a purpose to resign them in full time
Up to a better covenant, disciplined
From shadowy types to truth, from flesh to spirit,
From imposition of strict laws, to free
Acceptance of large grace, from servile fear
To filial, works of law to works of faith. (12.300–06)

Learning patience means learning the meaning of the Passion, moving from
“shadowy types to truth,” comprehending “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4).
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In typical Reformist fashion, Milton filters his Pauline text through a stric-
ture against the doctrine of works (encoded as “works of law”) in favor of the
“Acceptance of large grace” (described as “works of faith”). The Law appears
imperfect owing to Adam’s transgression against the first law of God, and
therefore, in St. Paul’s account of the bondage of the spirit in Romans 7, the
Law was given: to increase sin. Spiritually, says Paul, “I delight in the law of
God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring
against the law of my mind, and brining me into captivity to the law of sin
which is in my members” (Rom. 7:22–23, KJV). Because Michael guides
him through the consequences of his apostasy, the implication for “the olde
man” Adam is essential so that he may gain greater knowledge of himself and
thereby aspire to become the first “inward man” rectified by the Son, “one
greater man” (see the Geneva gloss). Condensing several verses from the
Epistle to the Romans (esp. 2:20–23), Luther in Tyndale’s English unites the
comprehension of the Law with the development of charity, the central tenet
of the new covenant, in a way that illuminates Michael’s speech on typology
in Paradise Lost: “Thou teachest another ma[n], but teachest not thy sylfe, ye
thou wotest not what thou teachest, for thou vndersto[n]dest not the lawe
aright, how that it can not be fulfylled and sastified, but with inwarde love
and affectio[n], so greatly it can not be fulfilled with outeward dedes and
werkes only.”109 Tyndale captures the sense of increasing interiority that Mil-
ton grants the hermeneutic task at the heart of Adam’s education.
Adam’s understanding takes a turn from primitive animism, to espousal of
the doctrine of works, to avowal of idolatry that explicitly alludes to Cain’s
response after he is cursed in the primal episode of postlapsarian idolatry: “as
from [God’s] face I shall be hid” (11.316; cf. Gen. 4:14). In the debate with Eve
that leads to their first show of contrition, Adam recalls the promise spoken at
the curse. Responding to Eve’s suggestion that they commit suicide, Adam does
not yet understand its figural dimension. As when Adam chooses to fall with
Eve, mention of self-slaughter again activates the most profound resonances of
Christ’s self-sacrifice, the true paradigm of charitable human action:

let us seek
Some safer resolution, which methinks
I have in view, calling to mind with heed
Part of our sentence, that thy seed shall bruise
The serpent’s head . . . (10.1028–32)

Adam’s recollection of the promise marks the intellectual shift toward regener-
ation, but Milton demonstrates the pervasive infection of literalism when
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152 The End of Learning

Adam glosses the prophecy in the satanic manner: “to crush his head / Would
be revenge indeed” (9.1035–36). Adam’s facile optimism, here as so often dur-
ing his subsequent tutelage by Michael, betrays an overconfident reading of the
prophecy, which neglects the tragic suffering for which he is responsible.
Through all its iterations in the last two books of the epic, we watch as the
prophecy becomes ever more intractably textual—even though it precedes, in
the temporality of the epic action, its future scriptural embodiment—which
transforms the promise into an object urgently awaiting interpretation.
As becomes increasingly evident through Michael’s lesson, Adam usu-
ally thinks he grasps the text rather on the model of his former, prelapsarian
gift of “sudden apprehension” than on the new, strenuous model of Christian
liberty in fallen nature (8.354). Thus Michael, correcting Adam’s interpretive
error, must help him shed his inflexible understanding of the “their fight / As
of a duel, or the local wounds / Of head or heel: not therefore joins the Son /
Manhood to Godhead . . .” (12.387–90). The imagery of repairing, regain-
ing, and restoring imbues Milton’s writings on the education of the spirit,
and so Michael likewise directs Adam’s awareness away from literal and out-
ward senses of meaning toward inward healing and reformation: humanity
must in the present reality that follows the first disobedience suffer “death’s
wound: / Which he, who comes thy saviour, shall recure, / Not by destroying
Satan, but his works / In thee and in thy seed . . .” (12.392–95). Hence his
constant misunderstanding, which Milton underscores by drawing out the
elaborate irony of his self-assertions: “O prophet of glad tidings, finisher / Of
utmost hope! Now clear I understand / What oft my steadiest thoughts have
searched in vain . . .” (12.375–77). Adam persists relentlessly in his narrow
interpretation of what Michael puts before him: “Needs must the serpent
now his capital bruise / Expect with mortal pain: say where and when / Their
fight, what stroke shall bruise the victor’s heel” (12.382–85). Recapitulating
the misplaced physical heroism of ancient martial epic, Adam reveals the
limitation of his fallen intellect by applying the wrong standard of interpreta-
tion, much as Satan had done in the early books of the epic.
Adam’s realization about the spiritual nature of the Son’s victory over
Satan is therefore analogous to the gradual recognition—encouraged by Mil-
ton in his readers—of the limitations of the epic genre’s violent heroism.
Christ’s new heroism demands articulation in a new conceptual vocabulary.
To represent “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom”
(9.31–32), Michael must insist upon suffering rather than combat as the
medium for spiritual victory over Satan. Spiritual heroism thus undermines
the tendency in epic since Homer “to nourish that sanguinary madness in
mankind, which has continually made the earth a theatre of carnage.”110
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Michael tells obstinate Adam over and over to watch for the spiritual signifi-
cance of what was “obscurely then foretold” (12.543).
In response, Milton endows Adam with a tendency toward what might
be termed ironic theodicy, since such a reaction falsely bears witness to
redemption without acknowledging the enormity of its cost. Whereas Adam
spins out, in the manner of the narrative interjections in Book 1, the facile
implications of an ironic theodicy—

Oh goodness infinite, goodness immense!

That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! (12.469–73)

—Milton roundly denounces the unqualified optimism of such expressions

of untested faith:

Full of doubt I stand,

Whether I should repent me now of sin
By me done and occasioned, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring . . . (12.473–76)

Michael therefore inevitably returns to the “mortal taste” of martyrdom, the

suffering of Christians down through the ages, as a remedy for Adam’s hasty
oversimplifications. Adam’s form of theodicy is precisely the one that has led
thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas to be dismissive of theodical reasoning
as an ethical lapse derived from an inattention to the Other: “The justifica-
tion of the neighbour’s pain is certainly,” Levinas argues, “the source of all
immorality.” In this view, theodicy itself is a temptation to diminish the suf-
fering of others for social utility, “the grand idea necessary to the inner peace
of souls in our distressed world. It is called upon to make sufferings here
below comprehensible.”111

EDUCATION AND THE “PARADISE WITHIN”

Although Adam’s angelic pedagogues have served “to render man inexcusable”
for his fall (5.Arg, p. 281), Milton’s God designs the tragic expulsion from
paradise to represent the enigmatic comfort of the regenerate soul, “the peace
of God, which passeth all understanding” (Phil. 4:7, KJV). In preparation for
exile, Michael teaches Adam to see that God by means of the Holy Spirit will
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154 The End of Learning

arm him “against such cruelties / With inward consolations recompensed”

(12.494–95). Yet, against Adam’s difficulty countenancing the ever-deep-
ening wound of human suffering and loss, Milton reveals a glimpse of the
self-transcendence of the blessed. In the memory of such loss begins the
responsibility to create within ourselves the conditions for true theodicy in
the recognition that the tragedy contains the seed of salvation. In this
sense, at least, Louis Martz is right when he says that “the action moves
from the world we know toward the inward light by which man is enabled
to see a Paradise that lies within the center of the poem and within the cen-
ter of the mind and memory.”112 It is, nevertheless, important that Milton
does not depict this feat of memory that the poem describes. That this final
lesson should be, in effect, lost on Adam until the last moment in paradise
is crucial to the epic’s pedagogical design, for only through time will the
full acknowledgment of suffering lead to a radical inwardness.113 Such
inward attention, Milton suggests, may initiate a transformation of fallen
humanity’s predicament, a new politics born of the highest ethical conduct
and manifest in the deepest compassion and love for fellow human beings.
A renewed polity, sprung from a new commitment to spiritual education,
begins as a development fundamentally within individuals “happier far”
for their loss, and this development may then radiate outward to society
(12.587).
Despite his erring, Adam finally attains a serviceable understanding of
Michael’s teachings. Even though he is not yet able to perform unfailingly
the paradisal hermeneutics required after the expulsion, Adam repeats the
moral of the long human story dutifully:

Henceforth I learn that to obey is best,

And love with fear the only God, to walk
As in his presence, ever to observe
His providence, and on him sole depend,
Merciful over all his works, with good
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak
Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek . . . (12.561–69)

Inculcated in his faith, Adam has at last worked out the basic pattern of virtuous
living that begins in obedience to God and thereby unlocks the paradoxical
force to subvert worldly power. “Taught this by his example whom I now /
Acknowledge my redeemer ever blest” (12.572–73), Adam stands prepared
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 155

to observe God’s providence and receive Michael’s final consolation. Con-

cluding his tutelage of Adam, Michael describes the possibility of redemp-
tion much in the way that Milton, in his earlier Art of Logic, had explained
the reciprocity of descriptive language: “just as definition can be argued by
the thing defined . . . so also description can in turn be argued from the
thing described” (YP 8:315). Milton’s example of logically consistent attrib-
utes from the treatise applies in this case especially well; as he says, “man is a
mortal animal, capable of being instructed” (YP 8:315).
Never relinquishing the pedagogical method by which he intends to
enlighten Adam, Michael replies to the man’s humility:

This having learned, thou hast attained the sum

Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the stars
Thou knewst by name, and all the ethereal powers,
All secrets of the deep, all nature’s works,
Or works of God in heaven, air, earth, or sea,
And all the riches of this world enjoyedst,
And all the rule, one empire; only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love,
By name to come called charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far. (12.575–87)

As befits his pedagogical strategy throughout the epic, Milton gives the last
word of the lesson to the angelic teacher, not his pupil, with the stipulation
of an onward promise that remains enigmatic, accessible to Adam only
“With meditation on the happy end” (12.605). Milton seasons Michael’s
exhortation with further ironies, as in the rhetorical stretch that begins with
“only add”—as if what follows would be the simplest task of the human
will—and ends with a syntactic bridge to the inward paradise that looks
ahead both logically and temporally, then.
Yet Milton implies that there remains within human time both a
causality of and plausibility for the inner sanctum of paradisal redemption.
We recall that Milton effects the unity of educative pursuits in the social and
political realms of human experience precisely through the critical and ethi-
cal intellect in the famous sentence from Of Education: “The end then of
learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God
aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him,
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156 The End of Learning

as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being
united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection” (YP
2:366–67). Insofar as it is within their receptive capacity to unite with heav-
enly grace, human beings may achieve “the highest perfection.” The template
of Christ’s behavior is within Adam, just as Jesus proclaims in the Gospel of
Luke: “behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (17:21, KJV). In postlap-
sarian futurity, Adam and his descendants must remember this not merely by
the kind of trial and error that has led him through Michael’s lesson, but by
the awakened sense of Christ as the creative principle of the universe, that
which will teach humankind how to possess “our souls of true vertue.”
Learning how to be, in Miltonic education, means remembering what is
already within the human mind and spirit through the mediation of the
messiah. In the accretion of consciousness by means of “Deeds to thy knowl-
edge answerable,” the reinvention of paradise occurs within each individual
human being, and so “the ruins of our first parents” may be repaired by
means of ethical and compassionate action, “charity, the soul / Of all the
rest” (12.81, 84–85).
In these key passages from the epic and Of Education, Milton refers to
the enlightened recognition on the part of the human as the individual’s pos-
sessing paradise and virtue. Repairing the ruins of our first parents begins
with their re-pairing. By owning the ethical obligation to act charitably—for
which the actions of the Son of God provide the ultimate model, according
to Milton—each human being undergoes an inspired transformation, a
rebuilding of paradise inside human consciousness that promises a more
compassionate political world for all. Milton’s radical inwardness therefore
projects a politics that I would argue is not quietist but revolutionary.114 The
hermeneutics of paradise with which Michael ends his lesson and Milton
concludes Paradise Lost evinces a special logic that is destined to appear circu-
lar if one stands outside of belief. To find the “paradise within,” Milton
implies, we must comprehend the hermeneutic circle. Internalizing the
archive of human loss as recorded in sacred Scripture, he urges us, as he had
from the divorce tracts on, to use our understanding of Christ Himself as the
interpretive principle, the wholeness of history that we must employ to grasp
the significance of each part.
The goal of education is to be like God, Milton says in Of Education, but
this is bound to prove a confusing injunction when we perceive the Son as the
Word embodied, and therefore as the archive itself through which we may gain
access to the deity. For Milton, education is the illumination of this archive of
human experience, and Christ serves as the ultimate figure for the learning that
we must persistently relearn through memory. Failure of memory becomes a
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The Inward Archives of Paradise Lost 157

metaphor for our inability to conceive of the whole simultaneously, as in the

allegory of Truth’s injured body with which this book began, and therefore we
experience the memory of our connection to God, in the wake of the Fall, as
the dismembered totality. For Milton, learning becomes the attempt to
recover wholeness, to restore integrity. We imitate the messiah in seeking edu-
cation without end, since at the end of all is learning.
The stark shift when Adam and Eve reach “the subjected plain” neces-
sarily counteracts the cheerfulness of Adam’s acceptance of Michael’s dogma:

In either hand the hastening angel caught

Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappeared. (12.637–40)

Adam has indeed been “greatly instructed,” as he maintains (12.557). With-

out yet grasping his own culpability, however, Adam cannot comprehend the
depth of his humanity. The sons and daughters of Adam and Eve will be left
to locate the paradise within, but their consolation will henceforth be strenu-
ously achieved, a rational liberty that emerges as the end of learning which
“Our lingering parents” have only just begun (12.638).
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Coda

Perhaps it is true, as Aristotle claims at the start of the Metaphysics, that by

nature all human beings desire to know. Aristotle held that, in general, “it is
a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know, that the
former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than
experience is; for artists can teach, and men of mere experience cannot.”1
The artist in this conception is a person whose rational faculty has deduced
universal principles from a class of particular experiences, but experience
itself does not yield universal judgment. If a longing drives the pursuit of
knowledge, and reasonably manifests itself in the ability to teach, the same
desire does not necessarily produce wisdom, and this realization formed a
critical distinction within and throughout Milton’s works.
Others more proximate to Milton’s era and episteme meaningfully
clung to a similar distinction. The mind, according to Montaigne, is a per-
petual motion machine, and ambiguity is our nourishment. As a conse-
quence, thought is naturally, in one sense, without end: “There’s more adoe
to enterpret interpretation, than to interpret things: and more bookes upon
bookes, then upon any other subject. We do but enter-glose ourselves.”2 Of
this charge all literary critics are to some extent invariably guilty; yet it is
equally true that knowledge endures in the memory and therefore as a recon-
struction enabled by the interpreting of interpretations. Thus Francis Bacon
plotted the trajectory of studies toward the fashioning of a universal wit:
“Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact
man.”3 It is natural that “most men fail in one or another of the ends pro-
posed,” Samuel Johnson confessed in an essay on intellectual life that begins
by misquoting Bacon’s axiom; “it is, however, reasonable to have perfection
in our eye; that we may always advance towards it, though we know it never
can be reached.”4 But knowledge, as Sir Thomas Browne remarked, “is made
by oblivion; and to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must

159
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160 The End of Learning

forget and part with much we know.”5 Learning is equally the product of
remembrance and forgetting, and it is within this push-and-pull that the
motion, whether it is deemed advancement, preservation, or regression,
inheres.
Likewise, Milton construes the end of learning as an act of recupera-
tion, an effort to reconstruct an edenic mentality or a “paradise within.” His
educational project is, as I have sought to show, spiritual as well as rational—
two parallel pursuits whose vanishing point lies in Milton’s ethical insistence
upon charity. But the indirectness of Milton’s educational theory, when
taken beyond practical pedagogy, has at times caused it to be greatly misun-
derstood.6 Probably the passage most responsible for the tendency of critics
to diminish Milton’s view of human beings’ educative potential—upon
which Milton insisted throughout his writings—is the famous disavowal of
classical learning by Jesus in Paradise Regained. But as I have endeavored to
show throughout this book, disavowal is one of Milton’s favorite ways of pro-
moting the opposite of that which he has claimed. Heuristically considered,
disavowal is only the challenging gesture that prompts further reflection:

Think not but that I know these things, or think

I know them not; not therefore am I short
Of knowing what I ought: he who receives
Light from above, from the fountain of light,
No other doctrine needs, though granted true. . . . (PR 4.286–90)

The odd internal rhyme of “not” and “ought” draws our attention to the
chiseled epigrammatic quality of Jesus’ sentence. Its symmetry and balance
are set against the bias toward classical culture that Satan introduces in his
temptation. Christ’s judgment need not mean what it seems to say, for Jesus
has studied pagan culture enough to insist that it is derivative of Hebraic
knowledge, and He tells Satan not to think that He has not learned what He
needs to know.7 Euhemerism, as we have seen in the chapter devoted to the
divorce tracts, provided the most widespread commonplaces about the rela-
tion between things pagan and things Christian; in fact, Christians through-
out the Renaissance were constantly triangulating pagan and Christian with
Hebraic, so that the Christian interpretation could be seen as the true origi-
nal of which all mythology formed a mere shadow.
Of course, in Paradise Regained, the Son of God is in the process of dis-
covering that He has a very different relationship to the “Light from above”
than the rest of us. The temptation of Athens, we do well to recall, depends
upon the lure of knowledge not adequately tempered by a properly spiritual
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Coda 161

end. It is also, like the other temptations, carefully meted out in classically
perfected verse; the disavowal of Athens was published in a volume that
included Samson Agonistes with its neoclassically informed preface. Therefore
we need not share the agony over this passage so eloquently expressed by
Douglas Bush: “It is painful indeed to watch Milton turn and rend some
main roots of his being, but we must try to understand him.”8 Milton puts
words in Jesus’ mouth that echo Ecclesiastes 12:12: “Of making many books
there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” Jesus warns,

However many books

Wise men have said are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge;
As children gathering pebbles on the shore. (PR 4.321–330)

Milton opposed this potential for shallowness in his readers throughout his
writings; nowhere does he encourage idle learning, or intellectualism
divorced from the ethical commitment to virtuous living. To read Paradise
Regained as an endorsement of anti-intellectual attitudes, however, is crudely
to misrepresent the rhetorical environment, the context, the artfulness of
Jesus’ strategies for destabilizing and vanquishing Satan’s ploys.
A further point about the brief epic requires clarification. By the eigh-
teenth century, the innovative publisher Jacob Tonson had arrived at what was
to be the most successful formula for marketing the volume of 1671, Paradise
Regain’d . . . To which is Added Samson Agonistes. Tonson’s strategy was to sell
the book as an essential work of moral education in the humanist tradition.
Beginning with the fifth edition (London, 1713), publishers of the volume
began to bundle these late works together with the minor poems and with
Milton’s tract Of Education. This combination was issued 27 times during the
eighteenth century, passing gradually out of favor only when the addition of
Thomas Newton’s annotations from 1752 created a more readily marketable
edition. Clearly this was the “minor poems” volume to accompany prestigious
editions of Paradise Lost for readers who wanted the poetical works of Milton.
The minor poems were offered as a “supplement”—but the educational trea-
tise was carried over along with them from the 1673 publication of The Poems
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162 The End of Learning

upon Several Occasions. Publishers only separated the tract from the shorter
poems when the variorum commentary became popular in the editions by
Newton and Todd. Readers throughout the eighteenth century were there-
fore encouraged not only to read the poems as a fulfillment of the educa-
tional project advocated in the brief tractate, but also to read the tractate as a
gloss of sorts on the poems, including Paradise Regained. Yet even this recep-
tion history will not exhaust interpretation of the disavowal of learning that
so troubles readers of what is probably the last poem Milton wrote.
Nor should it. Throughout this book I have argued that the “end” of
learning for Milton comprises both the aim and limitation of reason. Milton
characteristically finds ways to ask those questions that, according to a more
orthodox conception of the human capacity for curiosity, simply ought not
to be asked. However, as Hans Blumenberg maintains, “The questions that
cannot be asked confront reason with its impotence more pitilessly than
those that do not need to be asked.”9 Milton is most characteristically drawn
to precisely these questions—questions regarded by Blumenberg as epoch-
making in the way they reoccupy theoretical positions that were established
by an earlier worldview. The problems, instead of the proposed solutions to
those problems, are what survive in this model of intellectual continuity.
Consideration of the period to which Milton belongs has always been
endemic to the field of Milton studies.10 Is he a belated interloper in the
emerging early modern world, a holdout for a nostalgically beheld but ulti-
mately fictitious Renaissance ideal? Or is he more forward-looking, his com-
mitments legible as proleptic signs pointing toward increased liberty for the
political subject? As I have just formulated the problem, no useful answer
would seem to be forthcoming. The contradictions in his thought, as well as
the continuities, teach us much about the culture of which he was a part. In
his poetry, as much as his prose, Milton taught his readers to respect the
God-given abilities made possible by human reason, but he also reminded us
that every effort at understanding must finally give way to devotion.
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Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Nathan Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984).
2. This of course depends entirely upon how one defines “virtue,” a question
radically reframed for modern political thought by Machiavelli, especially in
The Prince. For a concise account of the traditional view in Plato and Aris-
totle, against which Machiavelli’s treatment of the relation between knowl-
edge and virtue should be measured, see Werner Jaeger, Paedeia: The Ideals
of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1943–45), esp. 2:235, 2:239, 3:227–28, 3:341n93.
3. Thomas Hobbes, “A Review and Conclusion,” Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck,
rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 491.
4. John Amos Comenius, The Great Didactic (1657), trans. M. W. Keatinge,
2nd ed. (1910; reprint New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), p. 56.
5. Jean Piaget, “The Significance of John Amos Comenius at the Present Time,”
John Amos Comenius on Education, ed. Lawrence A. Cremin (New York: Teach-
ers College Press, 1967), pp. 1–31 (at 9). For more on Comenius’s influence
upon seventeenth-century English thinkers, see Robert Fitzgibbon Young,
Comenius in England (London: Oxford University Press, 1932).
6. My account of allegory in this and the following paragraphs is indebted to
Victoria Kahn, “Allegory and the Sublime in Paradise Lost,” in Milton, ed.
Annabel Patterson (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 127–52; Gordon Teskey,
“Allegory,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 16–22; idem, Allegory and Violence
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 70–72; and Catherine
Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis
of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
7. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936;
reprint London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 52.

163
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164 Notes to the Introduction

8. The standard scholarly account remains Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale:

les quatre sens de l’écriture, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64). For a helpful
explanation of the impact of medieval hermeneutics on Reformation
thought, see Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European
Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 148–66.
9. For Milton’s recollections of the Moralia, see, e.g., Prolusion 7 (YP 1:303),
the Nativity Ode ll.173ff., and the preface to Samson Agonistes (Poems, p.
355). For other possible sources and analogues, see Douglas Bush, Mythol-
ogy and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1937), p. 269n52.
10. Plutarch, “Isis and Osiris,” 351–52, Moralia, ed. and trans. Frank Cole Bab-
bitt, 14 vols., LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1927–1936), 5:9.
11. Plutarch, Moralia, 5:47 and 87.
12. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Écrits: A Selection, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 288, articulates the con-
cept of the phallus as the symbol of the signifier and the association of the cas-
tration complex with aporias inherent in signification: the phallus “can play
its role only when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency with
which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function
of signifier. The phallus is the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inau-
gurates (initiates) by its disappearance. That is why the demon of Αιδωζ
(Scham, shame) arises at the very moment when, in the ancient mysteries, the
phallus is unveiled.” Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 210–11, elucidates this key
passage: “the phallus is itself the ultimate veil of absence . . . it is the signifier of
desire—that is, in Lacan’s terms ‘the signifier of the signified,’ ‘for it is the sig-
nifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified.’” Slavoj
Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 91, explicates the uncanny effect of
the “phallic stage” of signification thus: “Nothing is what it seems to be,
everything is to be interpreted, everything is supposed to possess some supple-
mentary meaning. The ground of the established, familiar signification opens
up; we find ourselves in a realm of total ambiguity, but this very lack propels
us to produce ever new ‘hidden meanings’: it is a driving force of endless com-
pulsion. The oscillation between lack and surplus meaning constitutes the
proper dimension of subjectivity.”
13. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The
Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Trauma: Explo-
rations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995), pp. 158–82 (at 176).
14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 295.
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Notes to the Introduction 165

15. See Christopher Grose, Milton and the Sense of Tradition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988).
16. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 277.
17. Deborah Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and
Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 9.
18. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), p. 4.
19. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), Books 1 and 2, lays out the theory of signification
against which I define Milton, although, as I show in Chapter Two, Milton
retained key hermeneutic strategies that derive from Augustine’s exegetical
practices.
20. In this assertion, I believe I am in agreement with Victoria Silver, Imperfect
Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001). Silver allies Milton with an alternative tradition of “formative
dissenters” in that Milton “requires an effort to grasp the position and
motive behind a species of expression which invites, even insists, upon the
acknowledgment of its eccentricity, indecorum, and sheer difficulty” (p.
193). If Milton’s representational technique is, as Silver argues, an “antipa-
thetic medium of transfigured understanding,” then it is clear that his “vir-
tuosic use of convention . . . tends rather to efface what he actually does
with it” (pp. 192–94). Silver analogizes a dazzling array of Reformation the-
ologians and antifoundationalist philosophers to show “the speaker’s
recounting—that is, the operation of grace upon his speech—as somehow
elucidating but not remedying his situation” (p. 196). This Silver sees as a
way to address indirectly questions of God’s justice or injustice. Less proba-
bly, Silver pictures Milton “having his speaker impersonate himself ” by
revising his own writings, thus distancing the speaker’s presumption from
himself (p. 195). While I concur with the description of “a methodically
intransparent expression” in Milton’s major writings, I find that I differ with
Silver’s interpretation of Milton’s inheritance from Reformation theology
(p. 285).
21. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979), pp. 5–6, 357–65.
22. Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1992), p. 9.
23. This concern with the boundaries of periods, in theory much maligned in
literary and cultural studies, has remained a recalcitrant feature of the field,
both in the syllabus and the historical narratives of surveys. Periodization is
less the problem here than the sense of historical rupture deemed intrinsic
to modernity, which calls into question both the principle of selection in a
critical study such as this one and its relevance. For a useful précis of the
New Historicist attitude toward historiography, principles of selection, and
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166 Notes to the Introduction

exemplarity in evidence and argumentation, see Catherine Gallagher and

Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 1–74.
24. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990;
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
25. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the relationship between
logic and rhetoric in Leviathan, see Robert E. Stillman, “Hobbes’s
Leviathan: Monsters, Metaphors, and Magic,” ELH 62 (1995): 791–819.
26. For an explanation of this distinction, see Lisa Jardine, “Humanist Logic,”
in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt
and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.
173–98. For a long view of the debate between rhetoric and philosophy, see
Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp.
148–213.
27. Donald L. Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1948).
28. Milton’s quotation from Dante is especially inspired, and the fuller context
is revealing. Charles Martel explains his natural political philosophy to the
pilgrim: “And if the world there below would give heed to the foundation
which Nature lays, and followed it, it would have its people good. But you
wrest to religion one born to gird on the sword, and you make a king of one
that is fit for sermons; so that your right track is off the road.” The Divine
Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1975), 5:93 with commentary further located at 6:152–60.
29. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1180b, trans. and ed. Roger Crisp (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 202.
30. Erasmus, De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis; Richard Sherry, trans., A
Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), in English Humanism: Wyatt to Cowley,
ed. Joanna Martindale (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 54. The text goes
on to ask: “What is a greater inconvenience than beasts, that be without rea-
son, to know and remember their duty to their young, man, which is
divided from brute beasts by prerogative of reason, not to know what he
oweth to nature, what to virtue and what to God?” (p. 57). For Milton, the
theological distinction becomes less meaningful, which renders the harsh-
ness of the natural metaphors of acculturation correspondingly less abrasive.
31. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour (1531), ed. Henry Her-
bert Stephen Croft, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, 1883), 1:38. Compare
Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. Vir-
ginia Cox (London: Everyman, 1994), p. 71: “maisters shoulde consider
the nature of their scolers, and taking it for their guide, direct and prompt
them in the way that their witt and natural inclination moveth them
unto.”
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Notes to the Introduction 167

32. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Char-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia), p. 35.
33. On the politics of the English humanists, see Fritz Caspari, Humanism and
the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1954). For a critique of the nationalism of Milton’s project, see Gauri
Viswanathan, “Milton and Education,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision,
ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univer-
sity Press, 1999), pp. 273–93.
34. Stephen Jay Gould, “Father Athanasius on the Isthmus of a Middle State:
Understanding Kircher’s Paleontology,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man
Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlin (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp.
207–37, suggested to me the nature of the problem with approaching Mil-
ton from the perspective of the historian of education. The histories of edu-
cation, like those of paleontology critiqued by Gould, tend to minimize if
not devalue altogether the contribution to intellectual history by a figure
like Milton because of their implicitly evolutionary view of progress. This
view, in turn, leads to a reductive streamlining of the thought of such a fig-
ure, which dwindles to a systematic paradigm for which the thinker
becomes representative. In the case of Milton, the coexistence of several
competing philosophies of education often proves to be incompatible with
his biography or with an anachronistic and limiting idea of his religious
views. For an insightful refutation of the standard line on “puritans,” which
shows the multifarious ways that Protestants could ask questions that might
seem preempted by their faith, see John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan
Attitudes toward Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).
35. For more information on their project, see Samuel Hartlib and Universal
Reformation, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
36. For the debate on the Comenian reformers, see Foster Watson, The English
Grammar Schools to 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908).
Watson’s views are ably critiqued by Ernest Sirluck in his introduction in YP
2:185ff. A serviceable, if brief, comparison between Milton and earlier edu-
cational theorists—which is finally more balanced than the judgment Sir-
luck offers—can be found in O. M. Ainsworth, Milton on Education (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), pp. 1–47. Ainsworth details Milton’s
connections to the mainstream of traditional humanist thought in his intro-
duction and then gives copious selections from Milton’s writings to illus-
trate the effect of the theory more broadly on his thought.
37. See Timothy Raylor, “New Light on Milton and Hartlib,” Milton Quarterly
27 (1993): 19–31.
38. For the Comenian perspective, see chapter 25 of The Great Didactic, pp.
231–48.
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168 Notes to the Introduction

39. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), in The Oxford Authors:
Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),
p. 123.
40. Bacon, Advancement, p. 125.
41. Bacon, Advancement, p. 146.
42. Bacon, Advancement, p. 124; on the principle of segregation, see p. 168:
“But it must be remembered . . . that in probation of the dignity of knowl-
edge or learning I did in the beginning separate divine testimony from
human.” It is perhaps worth comparing, in this context, the reservations
expressed in Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York:
MLA, 1955).
43. See Vickers, ed., The Oxford Authors: Francis Bacon, pp. 584–85, 608–9.
These analyses were prepared by W. A. Wright for his edition of The
Advancement of Learning, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873).
44. William G. Riggs, “Poetry and Method in Milton’s Of Education,” Studies in
Philology 89 (1992): 445–69, shows how the transcendental force of poetry
dislodges and contradicts the apparently systematic method of education in
the tract.
45. Bacon, Advancement, p. 173.
46. B. Rajan, “‘Simple, Sensuous and Passionate,’” Review of English Studies 21
(1945): 289–301, rightly stresses the superiority of poetry over rhetoric in
Milton’s educational scheme, in which preference of course Milton differs
from thinkers such as Bacon and Cicero, with whom he agreed in many
other respects. For more on Milton and Bacon, see Sirluck’s introduction to
YP 2: 204–5, 215.
47. Bacon, Advancement, p. 165.
48. Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” Basic Philosophical Writings, ed.
Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 169.
49. Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton’s Classical Republicanism,” in Milton and
Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 11.
50. See The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, YP 3:199ff.
51. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward
an Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–86, attacks modern schools as
instruments of specifically capitalist ideology. His emphasis upon education
as one of the primary sites in which the subject is interpellated or “hailed”
by the state is structurally useful for a discussion of Milton’s overt ideologi-
cal definition of education, even if the specific contextual application of
Althusser’s structure is irrelevant.
52. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1998), p. 19.
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Notes to the Introduction 169

53. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 56–57.
54. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost,” 2nd ed. (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 341.
55. See Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “The Politics of Paradise Lost,” in Politics of
Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed.
Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), reprinted in John Milton, ed. Annabel Patterson (London:
Longman, 1992), pp. 120–41, quotations at pp. 122–23, 140n8. For a
complementary view of Milton’s humanism, see also Joan S. Bennett, Reviv-
ing Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1–32.
56. Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p.
460.
57. Fish, Surprised by Sin, p. 1 (emphasis added).
58. For a judicious and thoroughgoing critique of the assumptions that govern
the reader response model, with a detailed history of literary-critical para-
digms in their reliance upon or resistance to intentionality, see David Scott
Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1999),
pp. 23–70.
59. Fish, Surprised by Sin, pp. 130, 4, 9, 44, 70 and ix-lxix. The model of cate-
chism brings to mind what may remain Fish’s most convincing and useful
book, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1978), in which the model of determinism in theol-
ogy seems possibly more apt. Michael Allen, “Divine Instruction: Of
Education and the Pedagogy of Raphael, Michael, and the Father,” Milton
Quarterly 26 (1992): 113–21, perpetuates the opinion that Milton’s educa-
tional model is “catechetical” (120n1). But compare the learned and devas-
tating critique launched in A. D. Nuttall, “Everything is over before it
begins,” Review of How Milton Works, by Stanley Fish, London Review of
Books, 21 June 2001, 19–21.
60. For an excellent summary of the problems associated with reader response
theory, see the trenchant criticism by Thomas N. Corns in his review of
Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, Modern Philology
94 (1997): 530: “While Achinstein historicizes the reader as a developing
and shaping presence, she neither adduces evidence for the distribution or
reception of specific texts nor identifies who read them and why. Of course
such an investigation would be difficult and calls for skills rather different
from those of a literary critic, but until it is done, ‘the reader,’ revolutionary
or otherwise, is an ahistorical abstraction.” For an example of just this kind
of historical work, see the learned journal articles Nicholas von Maltzahn
has published in recent years: “Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: an Early
Response to Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 29 (1992): 181–98; “Wood,
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170 Notes to Chapter One

Allam, and the Oxford Milton,” Milton Studies 31 (1994): 155–77; and
“The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667),” Review of English Studies,
new series, Vol. 47, No. 188 (1996): 479–99.
61. John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 28, 149, 37. See further p.
45.
62. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso,
1974), p. 74.
63. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd ed. (New York:
Harper and Row, 1960), p. 27.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1. Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries, under the topic Autodidaktos, in
[Works], ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 8:563.
2. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Com-
munities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Roger
Chartier, The Order of Books, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994), chap. 1.
3. Plato, Symposium, 177a, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991), p. 116. The irony is even further complicated by the narrative
situation: Plato is telling us that Apollodorus reports Aristodamus recalling
Eryximachus citing Euripides. Moreover, the remainder of the line, not
quoted by Eryximachus, looks forward to Diotima’s configuration (208e-
209b) of education as reproduction: “Mine is not the tale; my mother
taught me” (quoted in Allen’s note on 177a). On the relations between edu-
cation, the transmission of knowledge, and the problematic of textual tradi-
tion as intellectual property as seen by Renaissance readers of the
Symposium, see Kathy Eden, “Friends and Lovers in the Symposium: Plato
on Tradition,” Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual
Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2001), chap. 2. Since Milton made several specific references to the Sympo-
sium throughout the divorce controversy, we may be sure he had the text in
mind in the period under discussion in this chapter. See, for example, YP
2:252, 522, 589.
4. My thinking about this crucial distinction in Milton’s thought has profited
most immediately from related remarks made by William Kerrigan con-
cerning the place of “argument” and “proposition” in Milton’s works, partic-
ularly the general assessments of “Milton’s Place in Intellectual History,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd ed., ed. Dennis Danielson (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 253–66 and The Prophetic
Milton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974), pp. 6–7, as well
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Notes to Chapter One 171

as the more specific treatments of the philosophical use of contradiction in

The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), passim. Dayton Haskin, Milton’s
Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1994), has had a formative influence on my understanding of the shift in
Milton’s conception of biblical hermeneutics in the 1640s.
5. Milton’s copy of Euripidis Tragoediae, ed. Paulus Stephanus, 2 vols. (Geneva,
1602) is now housed in the Bodleian Library, shelfmark don. d. 27, 28.
When citing the marginalia, I have provided where possible the translations
found in the Columbia Milton (CM), though for the sake of future
researchers I provide citations to the volume and page number of ET in the
text, for reasons that should become clear.
6. The Columbia Milton does not differentiate between the states of Milton’s
hand and offers only a select transcription of the marginalia. First-hand paleo-
graphic analysis makes the distinction between the two states of Milton’s hand-
writing more evident than mere verbal description can. Nevertheless, the most
apparent distinguishing features that differentiate earlier from later markings
are as follows: the size of the inscription (the later writing being almost invari-
ably larger); the quality of the ink employed and how it has faded over time
(the later tends to be lighter in color, more sepia tone showing); the particular
features of the lettering, in particular the lower case letter “e” (Milton prefers
the Greek epsilon “e” in the earlier, an Italian “e” in the later) and of the non-
verbal supralinear and marginal markings “*” (earlier) “x” (later). The argu-
ment from paleographic evidence for dating the two states of Milton’s
handwriting, based on comparison between Milton’s hand in the Trinity Man-
uscript and the Commonplace Book, was made by Helen Darbishire, “The
Chronology of Milton’s Handwriting,” The Library, 4th ser., Vol. 14 (1933):
229–35, a refinement and corroboration of the suggestions made earlier by
James Holly Hanford, “The Chronology of Milton’s Private Studies,” PMLA
36 (1921), reprinted in John Milton, Poet and Humanist (Cleveland: Western
Reserve University Press, 1966), pp. 75–125. It is, however, important to keep
the limited quantity of evidence in perspective. Peter Beal, Index of English Lit-
erary Manuscripts, Volume II: 1635–1700, Part 2: Lee-Wycherly (London:
Mansel, 1993), pp. 78–81, argues that the provenance of only seven annotated
books from Milton’s library can be proven genuine “by virtue of the presence
of his authentic signature, inscription or annotations” (79). See also John T.
Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: University of Ken-
tucky Press, 1993), pp. 282–84, for further useful information on Milton’s
handwriting as an aid to dating his reading.
7. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press Press, 1905), 1:154.
8. Euripidis Quae Extant Omnia: Tragoediae nempe XX . . . , ed. Joshua Barnes
(Cambridge, 1694). According to the index, Milton is only credited with
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172 Notes to Chapter One

one emendation, an omission to improve the meter at Phoenissae 962 (sig.

V2r). Two modern accounts of Milton’s Euripides marginalia provide criti-
cal points of departure for any examination of the books, Maurice Kelley
and Samuel D. Atkins, “Milton’s Annotations of Euripides,” JEGP 60
(1961): 680–87; and John K. Hale, “Milton’s Euripides Marginalia: Their
Significance for Milton Studies,” Milton Studies 27 (1991): 23–35. Kelley
and Atkins helpfully compare Milton’s “some 560 annotations” with Bent-
ley’s emendations to Horace, remarking that although Bentley “offered over
700 conjectures to the text . . . only one or two have found general accept-
ance” (p. 686n27, p. 687). For an evaluation of Barnes’s use of Milton’s
marginalia, see Hale, “Milton’s Euripides Marginalia,” p. 25.
9. William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the
English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p.
89.
10. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance
Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 153.
11. Stephen Orgel, “Margins of Truth,” in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing,
Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000), p. 107.
12. William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2nd ed., ed. Gordon Campbell, 2
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press Press, 1996), 1:186; cf. 2:836.
13. Parker, Milton, 1:248.
14. Parker, Milton, 1:286, 299; J. Milton French, ed., The Life Records of John
Milton, 5 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58),
2:128. Edward Phillips, “The Life of Mr. John Milton” (1694), in The Early
Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Constable, 1932), p. 68.
15. Parker, 2:882, 837, 922–25.
16. Phillips, “Life,” pp. 67, 66.
17. Quoted in Parker, Milton, 1:312. For persuasive evidence of a more complex
and longstanding relationship between Milton and Hartlib than biographers
have often supposed, see Timothy Raylor, “New Light on Milton and
Hartlib,” Milton Quarterly 27 (1993): 19–31. For more general appraisals of
the impact of their intellectual relations see Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton and
the Hartlib Circle: Educational Projects and Epic Paideia,” in Literary Milton:
Text, Pretext, Context, ed. Diana Treviño Benet and Michael Lieb (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1994), pp. 202–19; and Nigel Smith, “Areopagit-
ica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–5” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Mil-
ton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 105–7ff.
18. Phillips, “Life,” p. 60. For a discussion of Milton’s Latin curriculum in the
context of his teaching environment, see Richard J. DuRocher, Milton
Among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 1–18, 171–75.
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Notes to Chapter One 173

19. Milton’s philological achievement has been the subject of an astute study by
John K. Hale, Milton’s Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), esp. pp. 74–80.
20. See Steven Zwicker, “Reading the Margins: Politics and the Habits of
Appropriation,” in Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the
English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven
N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 101–15.
21. See for example Euripides: Hippolytos, ed. W. S. Barrett (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1964), pp. 134, 349; Euripidis fabulae, ed. James Diggle, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–84), 1:251; and Euripides, [Works], ed.
and trans. David Kovacs, LCL, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1994–2002), 2:220–221.
22. On the hermeneutic tradition of accommodation and its origins in ancient
rhetorical practice, see Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradi-
tion: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and its Humanist Reception (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 1–19.
23. Hippolytus, trans. David Grene, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David
Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1959), vol. 3.
24. Hence we may observe the continuity between Hippolytus and Pentheus,
the self-destructive moralizer of Euripides’ later masterpiece, The Bacchae.
Milton’s emendation may have come to mind because of the prominence
accorded to epaggellein and its cognates in later Greek, especially the New
Testament, where epaggelia and epaggellomai are used to signify announce-
ment or promise. See A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and
Other Early Christian Literature, ed. Walter Bauer (5th ed., 1958), trans.
W.F. Arndt et al., 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), svv.
25. Milton also cites books referred to in the printed commentaries accompany-
ing his text (cf. Kelley and Atkins, 684). Although (post-1638) Milton
refers to Scaliger’s Manilius for the work’s authority on a particular question
of astronomy, the reference nonetheless shows that he had read and consid-
ered one of the editions (1579, 1600, and, posthumously, 1655). Scaliger’s
Manilius would have provided Milton with an exemplary model of textual
criticism, since “Scaliger began by trying to correct the text” and ended up
devising an “exegetical method” that “turned out to be one of his most orig-
inal creations.” See Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History
of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–93),
1:180–226, esp. 186, 192 (quoted above), 207–8 (on Euripides). For an
estimation of the importance of the Astronomica to Milton’s tutorial and
writing, see DuRocher, Milton Among the Romans, pp. 98–129.
26. Milton’s copy of Aratus, Phainomena kai diosaemia, ed. Guillaume Morel
(Paris, 1559) is held in the British Library Department of Printed Books,
shelfmark C.60.L.7 (at p. 1).
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174 Notes to Chapter One

27. Maurice Kelley and Samuel D. Atkins, “Milton’s Annotations of Aratus,”

PMLA 70 (1955): 1098–99, 1102.
28. Phillips, “Life,” p. 60.
29. The relative scarcity of copies makes this almost certain. Aratus was not
published in England until the Oxford edition of 1672. Consultation of
union catalogues has turned up twelve continental editions in Greek, other
than that read by Milton, available prior to the Oxford edition.
30. Along with other quotations Paul made before the Areopagus (Acts 17), this
verse became one of the most eagerly proffered means of articulating Chris-
tianity’s relation to pagan classics. See, for example, St. Augustine, City of
God, 8.10, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p.
312. In the English Renaissance, apologists for poetry such as Thomas
Lodge alluded to the passage to counter “that shamelesse GOSSON”: “let
the Apostle preach at Athens, he disdaineth not of Aratus authoritie” (Eliza-
bethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith, 2 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1904], 1:71; cf. Sidney, Apology, 1:191).
31. The sources for this story are admittedly sketchy. As Dr. Johnson tells it,
“The books in which his daughter, who used to read to him, represented
him as most delighting, after Homer, which he could almost repeat, were
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Euripides” (Lives, 1:154). A composite of earlier
biographies, the story draws upon John Toland, “The Life of John Milton”
(1698), in Early Lives, p. 179, for the bit about Homer, though Johnson
may have come across relevant details in one of Newton’s editions. In addi-
tion to recycling the remark about Milton’s knowledge of Homer from
Toland, Newton says of Deborah Milton, “As she had been often called
upon to read Homer and Ovid’s Metamorphosis to her father, she could
have repeated a considerable number of verses from the beginning of both
of these poets, as Mr. Ward, Professor of Rhetoric in Gresham College,
relates upon his own knowledge: and another Gentleman has informed me,
that he has heard her repeat several verses likewise out of Euripides.” See
The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Thomas Newton, 5th ed., 3 vols (Lon-
don, 1761), 1:lxix, lxxvi.
32. See Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 106–8. The most immedi-
ate context for Milton’s tract was the response by Presbyterians to the first
edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), which appeared
exactly one month after the Westminster Assembly had begun to meet. Mil-
ton was condemned by orthodox critics such as Herbert Palmer, William
Prynne, and Ephraim Pagitt, among others, including the anonymous
author of An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce. See Arthur E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641–1660
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), pp. 63–97; and William Riley
Parker, Milton’s Contemporary Reputation (Columbus: Ohio State University
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Notes to Chapter One 175

Press, 1940), pp. 73–75ff. For an account of the way the tract appropriates
the discourses in play in its context as a central technique of its effort to per-
suade the Erastians in Parliament not to support the Order, see Smith, “Are-
opagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–5,” pp. 103–22.
33. Poems, p. 355. Carey notes that, although the maxim is actually from
Menander’s Thaïs, not Euripides, “the fragment in which it survives is
found in editions of both Euripides and Menander.”
34. The scriptural passage in question is Ecclesiastes 12:7 by way of Job
34:14–15 (KJV). The interpretive strategy I attribute here to Milton may
be, it is true, a subtle variation on the instruction spoliabitis Aegyptum.
The Church Fathers referred to God’s command that the Israelites plun-
der the Egyptians (Exodus 3:22, 11:2, 12:35) as a way of justifying the
incorporation of the pagan liberal arts into Christian teaching. Pagan
“precepts concerning morals” and “even some truths concerning the wor-
ship of one God” were, according to Augustine, “their gold and silver,
which they did not institute themselves but dug up from certain mines of
divine Providence.” (On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr.,
Library of Liberal Arts 80 [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958], 2.40). By
the first half of the twelfth century—according to E. R. Curtius, European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 466–67—Conrad of Hirsau had
broadened interpretation of the passage so that “by the gold and silver of
Egypt is meant litteratura saecularis.” For a history of the spoliatio Aegyp-
tiorum from Patristic origins to the Renaissance, see Eden, Friends Hold
All Things in Common, pp. 8–32.
35. Quoted and reproduced in photographic facsimile in David Norbrook,
Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politcs, 1627–1660 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 128.
36. See John K. Hale, “Areopagitica’s Euripidean Motto,” Milton Quarterly 25
(1991): 25–27, responding to David Davies and Paul Dowling, “‘Shrewd
books, with dangerous Frontispieces’: Areopagitica’s Motto,” Milton Quar-
terly 20 (1986): 33–37. It is a telling irony that modern critics, fixated on
the question of Milton’s fidelity to the Greek original, have often missed the
tract’s other “vigorously productive” appropriations. On Milton’s purposeful
modifications of source material, see Christopher Grose, “Trying all Things
in the Areopagitica,” Milton and the Sense of Tradition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988), pp. 85–103.
37. Milton’s exordium, like the rest of the speech, employs the conventions of
classical oratory, particularly in its emphasis on the ethos of speaker and
audience. The conventional captatio benevolentiae is described, among other
places, in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, 1.4.7–1.5.8, trans. H. Caplan, LCL
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. 12–17. Cf. Brian
Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 69.
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176 Notes to Chapter One

38. Philip Melanchthon, “Oration On Occasion of the Funeral of Doctor Mar-

tin Luther,” Orations on Philosophy and Education, trans. Christine F.
Salazar, ed. Sachiko Kusakawa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 257.
39. Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation,
trans. and ed. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson, Library of Christian
Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), p. 49.
40. Stanley Fish, “Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton’s
Areopagitica,” in Re-membering Milton, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W.
Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 234–54, esp. 236 = How Milton
Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 187–214,
esp. 190–91.
41. See Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 9th Expostulation, ed.
Anthony Raspa (Montreal: Queen’s-McGill University Press, 1975), p. 49;
and Browne, Religio Medici, 1.16, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 78–81. Both Donne and Browne remark
upon the expression of the divine image in the Book of Nature as well as the
Book of God, which would by Fish’s standard equate their thought, too,
with idolatry. Logically, any creation within Nature—anything created as a
secondary function of God’s creation—may bear the image of an order that
is beyond human conception, even when it derives most immediately from
a human mind. This is the point of Vaughan’s modification of the common-
place in “The Book,” where God’s “knowing, glorious spirit” is invoked in
the final stanza: “Give him amongst thy works a place, / Who in them loved
and sought thy face” (The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum [Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1976], p. 310).
42. See Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, chap. 3.
43. Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1:23; cf. 2:235 (premises
1–3). See also Milton’s refutation by superior knowledge of the context
from which Salmasius quotes Maimonides, First Defense (YP 4.1:354; CM
7:102). Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: Free
Press, 1952), pp. 23, 192n, offers a valuable context for juxtaposing the
two.
44. John Pearson, An exposition of the Creed (1659), 3rd ed. (London, 1669), pp.
115–17, interprets Genesis 1:26 in relation to John 1:1–3, bringing Paul’s
epistles (esp. Col. 3:10 and Eph. 4:23) to bear: “The apostle chargeth us to
be renewed in the spirit of our mind, and to put on the new man, which after
God is created in righteousness and true holiness; and which is renewed in
knowledge, after the image of him that created him.” This “renovation,” which
as Pearson notes “is called by Paul a ‘metamorphosis’” (Rom. 12:2), consists
in “a translation from a worse unto a better condition by way of reforma-
tion; by which those which have lost the image of God, in which the first
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Notes to Chapter One 177

man was created, are restored to the image of the same God again, by a real
change, though not substantial, wrought within them.” In this, Pearson like
Milton differs from Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.15, trans.
Henry Beveridge (1845; reprint. Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1995), p. 165:
“as the image of God constitutes the entire excellence of human nature, as it
shone in Adam before his fall, but was afterward vitiated and almost
destroyed, nothing remaining but a ruin, confused, mutilated, and tainted
with impurity, so it is now partly seen in the elect, in so far as they are
regenerated by the Spirit.” Calvin seeks to debunk Augustine, City of God,
11.26, in particular to eradicate the Trinitarian emphasis on the faculties of
the intellect.
45. Cf. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 68b; Posterior Analytics, 71a-72b, 99b-100b;
Nicomachean Ethics, 1139b.
46. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 3.25, Selected Writings, trans.
Ralph McInerny (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 264.
47. For the most notable example, see the magisterial study by Brian Stock,
Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpreta-
tion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
48. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1.5, The Major Works, ed. Patrides, p.185.
49. Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, A Discourse opening the Nature of that Episco-
pacy which is Exercised in England (1641), 2nd ed. (London, 1642), p. 13.
For Greville’s debt to the Smectymnuans, see Barker, Milton and the Puritan
Dilemma, pp. 54, 56.
50. Greville, Discourse, pp. 26, 25, 31.
51. Greville, Discourse, p. 13. And see Robert Greville, The Nature of Truth, its
Union and Unity with the Soule, which is one in its essence, faculties, acts; one
with truth (London, 1640).
52. Plato, Republic, 505d; Gorgias, 467a ff., 499e, Protagoras, 358b-d. Compare
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.3. For an incisive critique of the common-
place expression of the Socratic paradox, see the commentary in Ion, Hip-
pias Minor, Laches, Protagoras, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996), pp. 159–61.
53. On the interrelation between knowledge and virtue, see Plato, Meno, 87c-
89a; Phaedo, 69a-c; Protagoras, 351b-360e. My discussion of Milton’s epis-
temology is greatly indebted to Edward W. Tayler, Milton’s Poetry: Its
Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), esp.
pp. 185–213, 261n15, 262n26; and “Milton’s Grim Laughter and Second
Choices,” in Poetry and Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic
Knowledge: Papers from the International Poetry Symposium, Eichstätt, 1983,
ed. Roland Hagenbüchle and Laura Skandera (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich
Pustet, 1986), pp. 72–93.
54. The concept of substance disclosed in this passage maintains its central
structural importance in Milton’s thought throughout his writings, at least
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178 Notes to Chapter One

through the completion of the epic. See John Peter Rumrich, “Milton’s
Concept of Substance,” ELN 19 (1982): 218–33.
55. Browne, Christian Morals, 3.15, The Major Works, ed. Patrides, p. 461.
56. Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. and trans. Rupp and Wat-
son, pp. 73, 48, 50. In Areopagitica’s insistence that choice present a moral
dilemma to the reasonable will of a human being, Milton approaches Kant’s
proposition that “all theodicy should truly be an interpretation of nature
insofar as God announces his will through it” (“On the Miscarriage of All
Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George di Gio-
vanni [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], pp. 17–30, at 24).
Although we cannot sincerely claim to comprehend God’s will, we must
nevertheless be able to aspire to what Kant considers a Jobean “negative wis-
dom,” knowing to know no more (p. 23). This is especially true “if this dis-
missal . . . is a pronouncement of the same reason through which we form
our concept of God—necessarily and prior to all experience—as a moral
and wise being. For through our reason God then becomes himself the
interpreter of his will as announced through his creation” (p. 24). When, as
Abdiel says, “God and Nature bid the same,” both freedom and omnis-
cience prevail (PL 6.176).
57. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.37, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1: The Apostolic
Fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donald-
son, rev. A. C. Coxe (1885; reprint Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), p.
520. Free will, as Irenaeus goes on to say, ensures that education ascends to
devotion: “having been rationally taught to love God, we may continue in
His perfect love: for God has displayed long-suffering in the case of man’s
apostasy; while man has been instructed by means of it.” For a useful survey
of thought about the “trilemma,” see Mark Larrimore, ed., The Problem of
Evil: A Reader (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), esp. pp. xviii-
xxiv, xxix.
58. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press,
1942), p. 7. The sense of good and evil will always be in this world mutually
dependent and reciprocally defining, like the two twins conjoined and sun-
dered by the polar meanings embedded in the pun “cleaving.” As Victoria
Silver, Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 2001), has persuasively argued, “what Milton suggests
is that we apprehend the one in the other, by an interpretive sense of their
distinction which requires good and evil to be reciprocally present” (p. 96).
Therefore, “In Milton’s theodicy, when the true and false, good and evil, are
not understood to be practically contingent meanings but instead separate
and exclusive, we peremptorily render ourselves incapable of recognizing
any of these values” (p. 101).
59. Tayler, Milton’s Poetry, p. 194.
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Notes to Chapter Two 179

60. While the most commonly cited reference to the Cadmus episode—or to the
analogous moment in Jason’s story—is Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.103 and 7.102
(vipereos dentes), the fullest collection of materials pertaining to Cadmus is to
be found in Apollodorus, The Library, trans. J. G. Frazer, 2 vols., LCL (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), 3.1.1, 3.4.1–2, 3.5.2, 3.5.4.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1. Tracts Relating to the Jews, 1608–1724, British Library shelfmark 482.b.3
(1–21). See also the bound collection assembled by Francis Hargrave, Tracts
Concerning the Jews, etc. 1752–53, British Library shelfmark 1123.c.30
(1–7).
2. For a lively discussion of Milton’s views on toleration, see Elizabeth Sauer,
“Religious Toleration and Imperial Intolerance,” in Milton and the Imperial
Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1999), pp. 214–30.
3. See Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2001), p. 63; and, further, the stimulating discussion of paral-
lels between pagan and Jewish antiquity in Milton’s thought, pp. 80–89.
4. E. A. Speiser, “Introduction,” Genesis, The Anchor Bible (New York: Dou-
bleday, 1962), pp. xviii-xx.
5. But see John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000), p. 90. Against traditional readings of Paul’s letters, Gager
believes that the original context for such remarks should be seen as limiting
their application only to the Gentiles. The history of their reception is,
however, another and, for our concerns more important, matter.
6. For an excellent account of the word and its cognates in the Bible, see G.
Bertram’s entry in Gerhard Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951–76), 5:596–625. The word paidago-
gos compounds paidos and agogos; see H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-Eng-
lish Lexicon, rev. ed., ed. Sir Henry Stuart Jones et al. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1925–30), 2:1286b. The classic treatment of the concept of pedagogy in
the ancient world remains Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture,
trans. Gilbert Highet, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943–45).
Intriguingly, the character of the pedagogue also appears in midrashic
meshalim as a figure for the interpreter of Scripture who engages in midrash;
see David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Litera-
ture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 41–42.
7. See David J. Lull, “‘The Law Was Our Pedagogue’: A Study in Galatians
3:19–25,” Journal of Biblical Literature 105 (1986): 481–98.
8. Martin Luther, “A Sermon . . . concerning them that be vnder the Law, and
them that be vnder Grace,” Special and Chosen Sermons, trans. W. G. (Lon-
don, 1578), p. 315.
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180 Notes to Chapter Two

9. [Edmund Ferrers], An Abstract of a Commentarie By Dr. Martyn Luther, upon

the Galathians (London, 1642), sig. C3r.
10. John Donne, Sermons, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10
vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), 8:351.
11. Stanley Fish is especially good on the ironies of this idea of self-sufficiency.
See “Wanting a supplement: the question of interpretation in Milton’s early
prose,” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David
Loewenstein and J.G. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), pp. 41–68 = How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2001), pp. 215–55.
12. Luther, A Commentarie . . . vpon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galathians,
anonymous trans. (London, 1575), fol. 164r.
13. John Milton, An Apology Against a Pamphlet call’d a Modest Confutation of
the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against SMECTYMNUUS (Lon-
don, 1642), sig. D1r.
14. The “insuls rule” to which Milton alludes may be the list of variants in the
Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim, 37b, the tractate Soperim (6:8–9), or the
tiqqune hasoperim, “the eighteen cases in which scribes are said to have ‘cor-
rected’ expressions which might seem disrespectful to God.” See E. J. Rev-
ell, “Masorah,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. D. N. Freedman et al. 6
vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 4:593.
15. Milton, An Apology, sig. H2r. In Milton’s friend George Thomason’s copy,
E.147.(22), which features the insciption “Ex dono Authoris” on the title
page, the erratum is not corrected on sig. D1r. Nor is it corrected in the
copy I examined at the Folger Shakespeare Library. This stands out, in
part, because of the manuscript corrections appearing in other tracts that
Milton presented to Thomason in the period. For example, Of Reforma-
tion (London, 1641), British Library shelfmark E.208.(3), features man-
uscript alterations that bring the text in line with the errata sheet, as that
on p. 7, which appears to be in Milton’s hand. Thus the question of
authorial intent can only further complicate the irony of this revision to
the text of An Apology: the “correction” could not have been introduced
until after the printing of that portion of the body of the text was com-
plete, since the usual stop-press correction did not occur. Consequently,
we may deduce either that the compositor failed to notice a marginal
correction in Milton’s hand when first setting the type, or that Milton
made the change late in the printing of his tract, as “one so copious of
fancie” (YP 2:532).
16. Luther, Commentarie . . . vpon . . . Galathians, fol. 164r.
17. The opposition between the “marginall Keri” and “the textual Chetiv”
appears in Areopagitica (London, 1644), where the distinction serves a simi-
lar ironic purpose. There, Milton critiques the rabbinic editorial tradition
on the page facing the emendation of “wayfaring” to “warfaring.” See the
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Notes to Chapter Two 181

copy (frequently reproduced in facsimile) of the first edition in the British

Library, shelfmark C.55.22.(9), pp. 12–13.
18. Revell, “Masorah,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 4:592.
19. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis
and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), esp. 1.35.39–1.37.41 and 3.10.15.
See Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 53–63; also H. R. MacCallum, “Milton
and Figurative Interpretation of the Bible,” University of Toronto Quarterly
31 (1962): 397–415.
20. See the excellent account of this method in Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden
of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); see
also Peggy Samuels, “Dueling Erasers: Milton and Scripture,” Studies in
Philology 96 (1999): 180–203.
21. Nehemiah 8:8; 2 Esdras 14:20–48. See Gerald L. Bruns, “Midrash and
Allegory,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank
Kermode (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 625–46.
22. E. J. Revell, “Masoretes,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 4:594.
23. Subsequent early modern English comparativists give a similar impression,
despite their antipathy toward sectarianism, independency, and nonconfor-
mity. Among the more consequential are John Lightfoot, Horae Hebraicae et
Talmudicae, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1658–77); John Spencer, De Legibus
Hebraeorum Ritualibus et earum Rationibus (Cambridge, 1685), which
influentially set Jewish practices in the context of other Near-Eastern reli-
gions, esp. in Lib. 3, Diss. 7, “De Urim et Thummim,” pp. 851–988; and
John Edwards, Polypoikilos Sophia: A Complete History or Survey of all the
Dispensations and Methods of Religion, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1699).
24. An Endeavour after the reconcilement of that long debated and much lamented
difference between the godly Presbyterians, and Independents; About Church-
government. In a discourse touching the Jews Synagogue (London, 1647/8),
sig. M4r.
25. Hugh Broughton, A reuelation of the holy Apocalyps ([Middelburg], 1610),
p. 295.
26. A similar impetus may be seen to motivate Thomas Fuller, A Pisgah-Sight of
Palestine (London, 1650), as well as other works of antiquarian chorography,
historiography, and architecture of biblical places, including John Lightfoot,
The Temple; especially as it stood in the dayes of our Saviour (London, 1650). For
other references, close to the circle of Milton’s acquaintance, see Richard H.
Popkin, “Hartlib, Drury, and the Jews,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Refor-
mation, ed. John Leslie, Mark Greengrass, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 118–36.
27. See Lightfoot, Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae, 1:79–84, esp. 83, where he
seeks to quell anxiety concerning the suspicion that the text of the Law was
not preserved perfectly. The “jot and tittle” to which Jesus alludes, therefore,
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182 Notes to Chapter Two

must not be confused with the issue raised by qere / ketib variants (variae lec-
tiones), which preserve the sacred text in its fullness, since they record the
collated variants for the two most authoritative copies of the Torah at the
time of post-Exilic canonization.
28. Broughton, A reuelation, p. 297.
29. Hugh Broughton, Daniel his Chaldie visions and his Ebrew (London, 1596),
sig. Kijr.
30. Broughton, A reuelation, p. 297.
31. An Endeavour after the reconcilement of . . . Presbyterians, and Independents,
sig. M3v.
32. Broughton, A reuelation, p. 297.
33. An Endeavour after the reconcilement of . . . Presbyterians, and Independents,
sig. M3v.
34. See Nigel Smith, “The Uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution,” in Lan-
guage, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and
Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 51–71, esp. 56–7 and 63,
for a discussion of the use among Independents and Baptists of “Hebrew
originals and translations from them in order to control their own interpre-
tation of the text and to enter into a literal understanding of Hebraic iden-
tity and meaning, as represented in the language.”
35. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature,
trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), pp. 56, 57. For
compelling evidence of the ways in which typology influenced Milton’s
major poems, see Edward W. Tayler, Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979). For a massively docu-
mented account of the widespread practice of typological interpretation as it
relates to the poetry of the period, see Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics
and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979), esp. pp. 111–44. For an excellent account of the paradoxes
induced by typological rendering of history, see Thomas H. Luxon, Literal
Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
36. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 45.
37. William Guild, Moses Vnuailed (London, 1620), explains typology “To
confirme the CHRISTIAN, and conuince the IEVV: very profitable and
full of comfort.” The layout of the manual is telling: the pages consist of
parallel columns (separated by a rule) in which an anticipatory passage
from the Hebrew Bible is “unveiled” in a fulfilling or answering passage
from the New Testament, followed by a synoptic paragraph describing “the
Disparitie.”
38. William Robertson, Epistle Dedicatory, The Hebrew Text of the Psalmes and
Lamentations but Published (for to encourage and facilitate Beginners in their
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Notes to Chapter Two 183

way) with the Reading thereof in known English Letters (London, 1656), sigs.
a2r–a3r.
39. “The Translators to the Reader,” The Holy Bible [KJV] (London, 1612), sig.
B3v.
40. On the centrality of biblical interpretation to the radical sectarians, see
Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993); on Milton’s relations to the sectarians,
see the excellent survey in Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New
York: Viking, 1977), esp. chaps. 6–8; and now see David Loewenstein, Rep-
resenting Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and
Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001).
41. An Endeavour after the reconcilement, E.432.5, dated by Thomason 14
March 1647/8. The Petition of the Jewes For the Repealing of the Act of Parlia-
ment for their banishment out of ENGLAND (London, 1648), E.537.17,
dated by Thomason 6 January 1648/9. Edward Nicholas, An Apology for the
Honorable Nation of the Jews, and All the Sons of Israel (London, 1648),
E.544.16, dated by Thomason 21 February 1648/9.
42. Menasseh ben Israel, To His Highnesse the Lord Protector of the COMMON-
WEALTH of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1655), sig. Dv [p. 26].
43. Nicholas, An Apology, p. 4.
44. Nicholas, An Apology, pp. 8, 11.
45. Thomas Edwards, Gangræna, 2nd ed. enlarged (London, 1646), pp. 14–15
(Milton at 34).
46. Edwards, Gangræna, p. 183. False teachers are “the greatest displeasure of
God to a Church” (p. 182).
47. Jason P. Rosenblatt has found the source for this assertion in Selden’s trea-
tise, De Synedriis; see Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost” (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1994), p. 19.
48. Matthew Biberman, “Milton, Marriage, and a Woman’s Right to Divorce,”
SEL 39 (1999): 131–53, provides a helpful summary of the philological
grounds of the exegesis and an interesting commentary on the gender-
related aspects of Milton’s argument.
49. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, chaps. 1 and 2, has written eloquently and per-
suasively on this subject.
50. Cf. Rosenblatt’s illuminating discussion of Milton’s interpretation of Paul’s
schoolmaster, Torah and Law, pp. 32–35.
51. The word “classic” of course refers primarily to the structure of Presbyterian
church government, which groups congregations as Presbyteries or
“Classes,” as explained by E. A. J. Honignmann, Milton’s Sonnets (London:
Macmillan, 1966), pp. 36, 199 and Carey, Poems, p. 299 (and OED 7). Sec-
ondarily, the word meant, as it does principally today, “Of the first class, of
the highest rank or importance; approved as a model; standard, leading”
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184 Notes to Chapter Three

(OED 1, from 1613) and “belonging to the standard authors and literature
of Greek and Latin antiquity” (OED 2, from 1628).
52. Auerbach, “Figura,” pp. 11–76, counterposes Tertullian’s historicism to Ori-
gen’s extreme allegorizing. Paul himself equated castration with circumci-
sion (Gal. 5:12), so that circumcision could be condemned as falsely
entrusting rites and fleshly signs over faith in grace, prioritizing the institu-
tions of the church over the operations of the spirit. See J. Louis Martyn,
Galatians, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 478.
53. On the semantic range of such terms as “Judaizer” and “Judaizing,” espe-
cially as they were pejoratively applied to religious radicals in seventeenth-
century England, see David S. Katz, Philosemitism and the Readmission of the
Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 16–42.
54. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
vol. 1, chap. 15, n. 96, as quoted by Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A
Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 2.
55. Martin Dzelzainis, “Authors ‘not unknown’ in Milton’s Tetrachordon,” Notes
and Queries, new ser., Vol. 45, No. 1 (March 1998): 44–47, ironically
points out the imprecision of some of the Yale editor’s annotations to this
section.
56. For more on this topic, see the richly suggestive essay by Stephen M. Fallon,
“The Spur of Self-Concernment: Milton in his Divorce Tracts,” Milton
Studies 38 (2000): 220–42; also Annabel Patterson, “No meer amatorious
novel?” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics, ed. Loewenstein and Turner,
pp. 85–101.
57. William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville: University of Vir-
ginia Press, 1974), p. 172.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:98–101. Boswell provides some very
revealing details that put Johnson’s remarks about Milton’s “wonder-work-
ing academy” in perspective. In 1736 Johnson set up a “private academy” of
his own, which failed miserably, despite having had so remarkable a student
as David Garrick. See James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman,
rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 69–73.
2. Johnson, Lives, 1:156–57.
3. Francis Blackburne, Remarks on Johnson’s life of Milton. To which are added,
Milton’s Tractate of education and Areopagitica (London, 1780), sig. B8v.
4. Blackburne, Remarks, sig. C3r.
5. Blackburne, Remarks, sigs. A3r-v.
6. Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 384.
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Notes to Chapter Three 185

7. Thomas Jordan, “The Players Petition to the Parliament,” in Poetry and

Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse, 1625–1660, ed. Peter
Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), No. 233, pp. 309–311,
ll.65–66, 69–76.
8. I cite the accusation from Milton’s own tract; for a fuller context, see the
selections from Regii Sanguinis Clamor printed as appendix D in YP
4.2:1042–75. Milton’s quotation is from the passage at YP 4.2:1050. Du
Moulin also conventionally depicted the regicide as a drama in his dedica-
tory epistle to Charles II (YP 4.2:1042).
9. For a penetrating analysis of educational paradigms by means of a struc-
turalist-Marxist approach, see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1971), pp. 127–86. For a systematic educational agenda within a demo-
cratic polity, with roots in Christian traditions, see John Dewey, Democracy
and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916).
10. Helen M. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England (Houndmills, Bas-
ingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 4, 37.
11. Marchamont Nedham, Mercurius Politicus, No. 104 (27 May-3 June 1652),
p. 1.
12. See Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation, ed. Mark Greengrass,
Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
13. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England, p. 32.
14. Kenneth Charleton and Margaret Spuford, “Literacy, Society and Educa-
tion,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed.
David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), pp. 24, 29, 48.
15. See the illuminating discussion in Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seven-
teenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 317–24 (quotation at 317).
16. Blair Worden, “English Republicanism,” in The Cambridge History of Politi-
cal Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 456.
17. See the elegant discussion of The Readie and Easie Way in William Kol-
brener, Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 30–40.
18. See Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s “History of Britain”: Republican Histori-
ography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.
189–91.
19. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, p. 191.
20. On the conundrum of naming as it relates to the regicide or tyrannicide, see
Joad Raymond, “The King is a Thing,” in Milton and the Terms of Liberty,
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186 Notes to Chapter Three

ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp.
69–94.
21. For a brilliant and suggestive analysis of the new figuration of epic heroism
in the regicide pamphlets, see Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in Eng-
land, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), chap. 7.
22. See Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton’s Classical Republicanism,” in Milton and
Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–24 (quotation at p.
11).
23. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2nd ed., 2
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 2:293 (letter 2). Compare YP 4.1:685.
Although Margoliouth (2:349) speculates that the book must have been the
Second Defense because of the dates of the letter and the publication, the
context of the letter implies another possibility. Marvell’s inclusion of
Salmasius in his comments suggests that the presentation copies he is dis-
cussing may have contained the First Defense and the Second Defense bound
together. Decebalus, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon
Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), s.v., was the shrewd and dangerous military leader of Dacia
who, after several campaigns against Rome (A.D. 85–89), made peace with
Domitian. Trajan subsequently went to war with Decebalus, and Decebalus
committed suicide after his capture in A.D. 105. The allusion is apt particu-
larly because of the circumstances of Salmasius’s death prior to his promised
response to Milton’s First Defense.
24. William Wordsworth, “London, 1802,” ll.1–6, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest
De Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 244.
25. John Toland, Amyntor: or, a Defence of Milton’s Life (London, 1699), p. 3. As
evidenced by the Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost by
Jonathan Richardson, Father and Son (London, 1734), Milton’s life and
works compelled rather extensive speculation about his character in novelis-
tic terms. For an interesting speculation that Milton’s self-scrutiny, as an
integral part of his Christian pedagogy, participated in the emergence of the
narrator of the English novel out of spiritual biography, see Michael McK-
eon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 95–96.
26. Stephen M. Fallon, “Alexander More Reads Milton: Self-representation and
Anxiety in Milton’s Defences,” in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Gra-
ham Parry and Joad Raymond, p. 122. Fallon continues: “By setting so rar-
efied and exalted a mark, a mark difficult for anyone to reach, Milton
inevitably purchases anxiety, an anxiety that emerges in the mid-1650s in
moments of surprising candor, vulnerability, and even querulousness.”
27. For Hazlitt’s comment, see Lectures on English Poets (1818), “Lecture III:
On Shakespeare and Milton,” in The Romantics on Milton, ed. Joseph A.
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Notes to Chapter Three 187

Wittreich Jr. (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970), p.

381.
28. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 12.1.8, ed. and trans. H.E. Butler, 4 vols.,
LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1922), 4:360–61.
29. Cicero, On Duties, 1.23 (78), ed. and trans. Walter Miller, LCL (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1913), p. 81.
30. Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others, in Renaissance
Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Her-
man Randall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 50–51.
31. On the political implications of Milton’s humanism in these years, see Martin
Dzelzainis’s fine introduction to Milton’s Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzai-
nis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. pp. x, xix-xxv.
32. Homer, Iliad, 9.411–16, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 209. All translations of the Iliad are taken from
Lattimore’s translation. Greek quoted from Homer, Iliad, trans. and ed. A.
T. Murray, rev. W. F. Wyatt, 2 vols., LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 1:424.
33. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958; reprint New
York: W.W. Norton, 1965), p. 188. Among more recent commentators,
Seth Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s “Iliad” (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), pp. 90–110, is especially good on this
subject. Milton felt very strongly the volitional aspect of Achilles’ heroism.
We therefore need not be concerned about the contradiction between what
Achilles says at 9.410–16 and at 16.50–51, where he claims that “there is no
word from Zeus my honoured mother has told me” (16.51); for interpretive
issues surrounding the contradiction, see Malcolm M. Willcock, A Com-
panion to the Iliad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 103–4,
177–79.
34. For Neoplatonic allegories of Homer’s blindness as contemplative inward-
ness (by way of Plotinus and Proclus), see Robert Lamberton, Homer the
Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tra-
dition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 200. We may be
sure that Milton was familiar with the twelfth-century allegorical commen-
tary on the Iliad by Eustanthius, Archbishop of Thessalonia, first printed in
1546, since Milton mentions the commentary in his Euripides marginalia
(see CM 18:304–5). The comments of Eustanthius on the passage are to be
found in the Comentarii ad Homeri Iliadem Pertinentes, ed. M. van der Valk,
4 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 2:746.
35. I rely here, as in my use of the phrase “specifically divine anger,” on the
interpretation of menin in Richard Sacks, The Traditional Phrase in Homer
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), pp. 3–4, 7–9, which lists all of the Homeric
attestations as well as several corroborating instances in other early Greek
sources.
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188 Notes to Chapter Three

36. Apollonios Rhodios, The Argonautika, 2.181–84, trans. Peter Green (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 84. In his excellent introduc-
tion, Green appositely remarks, “Phineus demonstrates the inadequacy of
human prophecy, the ineluctable force of divine vengeance” (p. 39). Again,
I quote from an accessible modern translation rather than the Latin transla-
tion printed with the Greek in the first edition because it is uncertain
whether the Latin translation is Milton’s own.
37. Argonautika, 2.221–22, trans. Green, p. 85.
38. For a helpful explanation of the rhetorical contest and the royalists’ use of
Milton’s blindness as a sign of divine retribution, see Nicholas von
Maltzahn, “From Pillar to Post: Milton and the Attack on Republican
Humanism at the Restoration,” in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the Eng-
lish Revolution, ed. Ian Gentles, John Morrill and Blair Worden (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 265–85.
39. For an astute discussion of the theological implications, see Silver, Imperfect
Sense, pp. 153–207.
40. Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993), pp. 244–50, brilliantly traces the motif of the elusive heroic life and
the “goal that flees” Milton as he pursues a career in the early poems—
namely “the desirable and unattainable fact of becoming a poet writing a
romance which is not quite a romance” (250). See also his essay, “Poems
1645: The Future Poet,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd ed.,
ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.
54–69.
41. The letter to Leonard Philaras is dated 28 September 1654; the date in
Thomason’s copy of the Second Defense is 30 May 1654, and Milton pre-
sented a copy of the Second Defense to the Bodleian on 11 June 1654. See
Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (London and Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1997), pp. 153–54.
42. “Si modo accepteris a me unde is causas equidem quod hortaris, ne oblatam
undecunque divinitus fortassis opem repudiare videar” (CM 12:66).
43. Argonautika, 1.151–55, trans. Green, p. 47.
44. “Teque, mi Phiara, quocunque res ceciderit, non minus forti & confirmato
animo, quam si Lynceus essem, valere jubeo” (CM 12:70–71).
45. This idea forms the central preoccupation, and the sharply defined telos, of
Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), esp. pp. 489–538.
46. The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Thomas Newton, 5th edn., 3 vols.
(London, 1761), 3:188. The quotation is from the final note on Paradise
Regain’d, which begins as a gloss on 4.624. Newton writes: “As Mr.
Elwood informs us, Milton did not so much as think of it, till he was
advanced in years, and it is not very likely, considering the troubles and
infirmities he had long labor’d under, that his studies had been much
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Notes to Chapter Three 189

employ’d about that time among the sprightly Italians, or indeed any writ-
ers of that turn. Consistent with this supposition we find it of a quite differ-
ent stamp, and instead of allusions to poets ancient or modern, it is full of
moral and philosophical reasonings, to which sort of thoughts an afflicted
old age must have turned our author’s mind.” Compare Newton’s comment
on the final two lines of Samson Agonistes: “This moral lesson in the conclu-
sion is very fine, and excellently suited to the beginning. For Milton had
chosen for the motto to this piece a passage out of Aristotle, which may
show what was his design in writing this tragedy, and the sense of which he
hath expressed in the preface, that ‘tragedy is of power by raising pity and
fear, or terrour, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, &c.’ and
he exemplifies it here in Manoah and the Chorus, after their various agita-
tions of passion, acquiescing in the divine dispensations, and thereby incul-
cating a most instructive lesson to the reader” (3:305).
47. Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 178.
48. This general reaction of the humanists should, however, be viewed in rela-
tion to the professional academic context created by the scholastic insistence
on formal or verifiable logic still common in the universities of the time. See
Jardine, “Humanist Logic,” p. 175: “A humanist treatment of logic is char-
acterised by the fundamental assumption that oratio may be persuasive,
even compelling, without its being formally valid (or without the formal
validity of the argument being ascertainable).”
49. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965),
2:519 (No. 262).
50. John Milton, Paradise Regain’d . . . To which is added Samson Agonistes. And
Poems upon several occasions. With a tractate of education (London, 1713), p.
371.
51. Vito R. Guistiniani, “Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of ‘Human-
ism,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 167–95, seeks to historicize
and thereby clear up the twentieth-century confusion arising from the sev-
eral inexact applications of the term by means of a meticulous philological
method, and Erik Petersen, “‘The Communication of the Dead’: Notes on
Studia humanitatis and the Nature of Humanist Philology,” in The Uses of
Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, ed. A. C. Dionisotti, Anthony Grafton,
and Jill Kraye (London: The Warburg Institute, 1988), pp. 57–69, histori-
cally situates the philological method itself by tracing concept of the studia
humanitatis through usage of the term.
52. There are many excellent surveys of the field, but in particular I would iden-
tify three as the most formative to my study: Renaissance Humanism, ed.
Albert Rabil, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988);
P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1979); and The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance
Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
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190 Notes to Chapter Three

53. “Et quoniam non est nobis haec oratio habenda aut in imperita multitudine
aut in aliquo conventu agrestium, audacius paulo de studiis humanitatis
quae et mihi et vobis nota et iucunda sunt disputabo.” (Cicero, Pro Murena
61, ed. Louis E. Lord, LCL [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1937]). All translations from the Latin are my own unless otherwise noted.
54. “Titus Gaiusque Coponii, qui ex omnibus maxime Dionis mortem
doluerunt, qui cum doctrinae studio atque humanitatis tum etiam hospitio
Dionis tenebantur.” (Cicero, Pro Caelio 24, ed. R. Gardner, LCL [Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958]).
55. “Quaeso a vobis, ut in hac causa mihi detis hanc veniam, accommodatam
huic reo, vobis, quem ad modum spero, non molestam, ut me pro summo
poeta atque eruditissimo homine dicentem, hoc concursu hominum lit-
erastissimorum, hac vestra humanitate, hoc denique praetore exercente
iudicium patiamini de studiis humanitatis ac litterarum paullo loqui
liberius . . .” (Cicero, Pro Archia, exordium, II.3, ed. N.H. Watts, LCL
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1923]).
56. Petrarch: Four Dialogues for Scholars, ed. and trans. Conrad H. Rawski
(Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1967), p. 31.
57. Michael D. Reeve, “Classical Scholarship,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Renaissance Humanism, pp. 20–46, at 22. Reeve’s excellent survey empha-
sizes the transmission of manuscripts and the traditions of textual criticism,
commentary, philology, and translation that this process of transmission
occasioned.
58. “Bono igitur animo simus: non laboramus in irritum, non frustra lab-
orabunt qui post multas etates sub finem mundi senescentis orientur. Potius
illud metuendum est, no prius homines esse desinant, quam ad intimum
veritatis archanum humanorum studiorum cura perruperit.” (Petrarch, Le
familiari, 1.9, ed. V. Rossi and U. Bosco, 4 vols. [Florence: Sansoni,
1933–1942], 1:47]).
59. “Pater me puerulum humaniorum literarum studiis destinavit”; compare his
claim: “ab adolescentulo humanioribus essem studiis, ut qui maxime dedi-
tus” (CM 8:10).
60. Robert Estienne, Dictionariolum puerorum, tribus linguis Latina, Anglica &
Gallica, trans. John Veron (London, 1552), s.v.
61. See Donald L. Clark, John Milton at St Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient
Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1948); Harris F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton,
2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956–61). For the best intro-
duction to the concept of “Christian humanism” as it pertains to Milton,
see Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1939); a recent effort to reassert the value of seeing
Milton in relation to the thought of Renaissance humanists can be found in
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Notes to Chapter Three 191

William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Balti-
more and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
62. J. H. Hanford, “Milton and the Return to Humanism,” Studies in Philology
16 (1919), reprinted in John Milton, Poet and Humanist: Essays by James
Holly Hanford (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1966),
pp. 161–84, at 183.
63. T. S. Eliot, “Modern Education and the Classics” (1932), in Selected Essays
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), pp. 452–60 (quotations on
452 and 459). It is surely extraordinary to find one of the leading “mod-
ernists” advocating “the revival and expansion of monastic teaching orders”
(p. 460).
64. A learned exception to this legacy of Bush’s idea of “Christian humanism”
can be found in Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian
Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989). Bennett’s emphasis is placed more upon the “Christian” con-
text than that of the classical humanist; see pp. 6–32.
65. See the brief but suggestive comparison between Milton’s changing educa-
tional schemes and those advocated by John Hall and particularly Marcha-
mont Nedham, A Discourse Concerning Schools and School-Masters, Offered
to publick Consideration (London, 1663) in Joad Raymond, “Where is this
goodly tower? Republican Theories of Education,” Critical Survey 5 (1993):
289–97.
66. “I.B., Gent.,” Heroick Education (London, 1656), sig. B4V.
67. Heroick Education, sigs. C7v, B8r.
68. Heroick Education, sig. C6r.
69. In this passage, at sigs. B2r-v, as in many others throughout Heroick Educa-
tion, the author closely follows the Pseudo-Plutarch, “The Education Of
Children,” Moralia, ed. and trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, LCL (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1927), esp. 4b-c, 7b-10c (pp. 19, 33–57).
70. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J. G. A. Pocock
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 190.
71. Harrington, Oceana, p. 191.
72. Harrington, Oceana, p. 206.
73. Harrington, Oceana, p. 199.
74. Blair Hoxby has suggested to me that Milton’s attack on the centralization
of learning in the universities is best seen in relation to the metaphorical
economy of his antimonopoly stance. For more on the relationship between
the emerging economic theory of the liberal market and the circulation of
knowledge, see Hoxby, “The Trade of Truth Advanced: Areopagitica, Eco-
nomic Discourse, and Libertarian Reform,” Milton Studies 36 (1998):
177–202; and, further, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the
Age of Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
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192 Notes to Chapter Three

75. Roger Williams, The Hireling Ministry None of Christs or A Discourse touch-
ing the Propagating the Gospel of Christ Jesus (London, 1652), p. 17. Quoted
by Arthur E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641–1660
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), p. 231.
76. John T. Shawcross, Milton: A Bibliography For the Years 1624–1700 (Bing-
hamton, NY: MRTS, 1984), pp. 71–78; Campbell, A Milton Chronology, p.
188.
77. Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower (1660–62), ed. A.B. Wor-
den, Camden Fourth Ser., No. 21 (London: Royal Historical Society,
1978), p. 85.
78. For an excellent survey of the historical situation in which the two editions
of The Readie and Easie Way were composed and published, see Laura
Lunger Knoppers, “Late Political Prose,” in A Companion to Milton, ed.
Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 309–25.
79. See von Maltzahn, “From pillar to post.” On the politics of Milton’s use of
Cicero, see Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and the Limits of Ciceronian
Rhetoric,” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed.
Neil Rhodes (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 1997), pp. 203–226; and idem, “Mil-
ton’s classical republicanism.”
80. Laura Lunger Knoppers critiques similar assumptions of figures as diverse as
David Masson, Arthur Barker, Don Wolfe, Douglas Bush, J. H. Hanford,
Donald Daiches, among others in Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and
Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994).
81. At its first appearance, the sonnet was printed “with the information that it
was sent to Vane by Milton 3 Jul. 1652” (Poems, p. 329). I should qualify
my description of Milton’s publication history by adding that it is uncertain
whether the Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon, which replies to a sermon
preached by Matthew Griffith on 25 March, was published before or after
the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way. Milton’s poem on Shake-
speare was also reprinted in the Third Folio (1664). See Campbell, Chronol-
ogy, pp. 189, 200.
82. Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in
Britain, 1660–1663 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 208.
83. See Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 194.
84. Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individual-
ism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Common-
wealth,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 705–36 (at 713).
85. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age
of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 138.
86. I dissent from the opinion of Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 25, that Milton, in
restricting “elections to those of a ‘better breeding’” and not committing all
to a democratic polity, is “thereby undermining the educational vision he
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Notes to Chapter Three 193

was groping for.” This seems to me rather seriously to misrepresent Milton’s

“educational vision” as evidenced by his writings throughout his career, not just
in The Readie and Easie Way. This mischaracterization of Milton’s political
agenda(s) continues in her discussion of the tractate Of Education, although the
discussion of the reception of Milton among eighteenth-century transatlantic
intellectuals is useful (see pp. 29, 36). The “liberall exercises” Patterson wishes
to locate in Of Education finally have more to do with her commendable if mis-
placed advocacy of liberalism than with Milton’s liberal arts curriculum (see YP
2:385); the phrase does not, as she contends, indicate that Milton “must have
recognized that a liberal education in 1644 could be designed only in a free
society, politically speaking” (p. 62). The problem inheres in the difference
between what Patterson and Milton think constitutes freedom, and for whom.
87. James Madison, Writings, ed. Jack N. Rakove (New York: Library of Amer-
ica, 1999), pp. 163–65. The comparison was suggested to me by Lydia Dit-
tler Schulman, “Paradise Lost” and the Rise of the American Republic (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1992), p. 88. Schulman, emphasizing the
educational commitments of several key figures, provides a helpful account
of the complex relationship between Milton’s works and the intellectual fer-
ment that resulted in the American Revolution.
88. Plato, Republic, 595c, 606e; compare Phaedrus, 245a. Xenophanes (Diehl,
frag.10). Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert
Highet, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943–45), 1:35, 36.
89. The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse, ed. Alastair Fowler
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), No. 81, l. 30, p. 75.
90. “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman
and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 508.
91. Thomas Hobbes, “An Answer of Mr Hobbes to Sr William D’avenant’s
Preface Before Gondibert,” in Davenant, Works (London, 1673), p. 27.
92. Hobbes, “An Answer,” p. 23.
93. For an extensive argument that the rhetorical force of republican writing
emerged in relation to a renewed conception of sublimity, see Norbrook,
Writing the English Republic, passim.
94. Davenant, “The Author’s Preface to his much Honour’d Friend Mr. Hobs,”
Works, p. 17.
95. Davenant, “The Author’s Preface,” p. 6. The trope of the mob as monster
was a commonplace of renaissance humanism; see, for example, Erasmus,
The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1979), p. 40: “Such trifles as these [i.e., fables] have an effect on that
enormous and powerful monster, the mob.” The identification was prover-
bial in England: see M. P. Tilley, The Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1950), M 1308.
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194 Notes to Chapter Three

96. Aristotle, Poetics, 48a, , trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1967), pp. 17–18; see also the relevant observations in the
useful survey by Joshua Scodel, “Seventeenth-Century English Literary
Criticism: Classical Values, English Texts and Contexts,” in The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism: Volume 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 543–54, esp. 548–49;
and, more generally, on the political implications of mimesis in Aristotle’s
thought, see Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Psychology of Aristotlelian
Tragedy,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. A. O. Rorty (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1992), pp. 1–22, esp. 16–18.
97. On Hobbes and Davenant, see Smith, Literature and Revolution, pp. 214,
240; see also Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Poltics and Literature in
England, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp.
20–21: “The Preface is an example not of aesthetic language covering a
polemical position but of an intellectual structure in which aesthetics argues
a polity.”
98. I quote the note on the verse from Milton’s Complete Poetical Works Repro-
duced in Photographic Facsimile, ed. H. F. Fletcher, 4 vols. (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1943–48), 2:204–5.
99. Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Essays, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1900), 1:96–97.
100. The poem is sometimes attributed to Andrew Marvell; see Poems and Let-
ters, 1:170, quotation at l.56; and see Poems AM, p. 460.
101. Harrington, Oceana, p. 8.
102. Astraea Redux, ll.46–48, The Poems of John Dryden: Volume One,
1649–1681, ed. Paul Hammond (London: Longman, 1995), p. 40. Quota-
tions of Dryden’s poems are taken from this edition.
103. John Dryden, Virgil’s Aeneis (1697), 6.1177, 1173–74, in The Works of John
Dryden: Volumes 5–6, ed. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 5:566.
104. P[atrick] H[ume], Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London, 1695), p.
4.
105. YP 3:399; emphasis added. Milton uses the phrase “ancient liberty” in one
other place: “I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs / By the known
rules of ancient liberty” (Sonnet 12, the second on the detraction which fol-
lowed Tetrachordon). In this context, of course, “ancient liberty” refers to the
domestic freedom of divorce, according to the “known rules” of Mosaic
Law. In 2 Henry VI, Jack Cade stirs up the “base peasants” who are his fol-
lowers by calling upon the same sentiment: “I thought ye would never have
given out these arms till you had recovered your ancient freedom”
(4.7.167–9, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. [New
York: W. W. Norton, 1997], p. 275). For more on the Triennial Act and its
future implications, see G. E. Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? England from
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Notes to Chapter Three 195

Civil War to Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp.

17–18.
106. The “ancient constitution” was a new history of the effect of common law on
the polity of England, which assumed the antiquity of rights and liberties
“ranging from freedom of speech in parliament to its regular meetings and,
after the civil war . . . , even legal rights concerned with parliamentary represen-
tation and the role of the House of Commons in law making.” See C. C.
Weston, “England: Ancient Constitution and Common Law,” in The Cam-
bridge History of Political Thought, pp. 374–411 (at 374). In addition to
Weston’s article, the seminal works on the subject include J. G. A. Pocock, The
Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987) and G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution
(London: Macmillan, 1992). For Milton and the ancient constitution, see von
Maltzahn, Milton’s “History of Britain,” pp. 166–67, 177, 198–223.
107. In his provocative history of the rise of the vernaculars, Auerbach observes
that “it is among the high Norman nobility that we discern the first indica-
tions that a new literary public was beginning to take form” for the first
time in five hundred years in Western Europe, a development “brought
about by the conquerors in the twelfth century.” See Erich Auerbach, Liter-
ary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages,
trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon, 1965), p. 269.
108. Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 3 vols. (London, 1774–81),
1:vi. Warton traces the development of the language and poetry together
from the Norman Conquest. The first volume reprints specimens of
rhyming poetry from “just after the conquest” to 1200 with commentary
on the developing style (1:7–36).
109. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 149–50. Dzelzainis explores the implications of
a parallel passage in Hobbes’s Behemoth, or The Long Parliament in “Milton’s
Classical Republicanism,” pp. 3–9.
110. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 149–50.
111. Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. John T. Shawcross, 2 vols. (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1970–72), 1:78.
112. Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, 1:83. On the politics of Milton’s represen-
tation of the origins of Creation in Chaos, see Rogers, The Matter of Revolu-
tion, pp. 103–76.
113. Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, 1:124.
114. Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, 1:264.
115. See von Maltzahn, “The Whig Milton, 1667–1700,” in Milton and Repub-
licanism, pp. 229–53.
116. Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, 1:264.
117. Thomas Jefferson, “Thoughts on English Prosody,” Writings, ed. Merrill D.
Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 594–622 (quotation at
96710_Festa_05 04.qxp 5/4/2006 2:33 PM Page 196

196 Notes to Chapter Four

618). For a richly suggestive account of Jefferson’s lifelong interest in Mil-

ton, which first alerted me to the existence of “Thoughts on English
Prosody,” see Hugh Jenkins, “Jefferson (Re)Reading Milton,” Milton Quar-
terly 32 (1998): 32–38.
118. A nearly complete list of rhymes can be found in John S. Diekhoff, “Rhyme
in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 49 (1934): 539–43. Frank Kermode offers some
preliminary suggestions for interpretation of these and similar sonic clusters
in thematically rich moments of temptation in “Adam Unparadised,” The
Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1960), pp. 96–98.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1. L. S. Vygotsky, Educational Psychology, trans. Robert Silverman (Boca
Raton, Fla.: St. Lucie Press, 1997), p. 231.
2. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise
Lost” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 210.
3. To an extent, the epic may even be said to question and ultimately reject the
orthodox version of Christian morality so despised by P. B. Shelley in A
Defence of Poetry, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 498: “Milton’s
poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system of
which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular sup-
port.” In agreeing with this proposition as a principle of criticism, however,
I should say that I do not wish to endorse Shelley’s more notorious com-
ment just a few sentences later: “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far
superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has
conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in
the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge
upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent
of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him
to deserve new torments.” What Shelley gets right, in my view, is the sense
of moral outrage, which is perfectly fit to the scale of human ethics; what he
gets wrong is Milton’s theology, which emphasizes how misapplication of
this scale to God forces humanity to construct theodicy. Only when human
beings take full cognizance of the sacrifice offered by the Son, as we shall see
according to the logic of Milton’s great argument, can the apparent incom-
mensurability between God and humanity be in any way “justified.”
4. That being said, it seems to me essential not to foreclose the investigation of
Milton’s multifarious ethical paradoxes by taking recourse in the abrupt
solutions offered by Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Milton and the Paradox of the
Fortunate Fall,” ELH 4 (1937), reprinted in Critical essays on Milton from
ELH (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 163–81. The
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Notes to Chapter Four 197

“happy ending” Lovejoy foresees as intrinsic to the theology of the poem

must, in my view, be weighed against the enormity of the losses suffered to
ensure this eventual conclusion. While the tidiness of Lovejoy’s explanation
is attractive, even tempting, I think the poem demands a more rigorous chal-
lenge to its formal assertions of doctrine. To streamline the poem’s inquiry
into the conditions of human existence in this way entails undervaluing the
sacrifice responsible for the poem’s expansive vision of faithful human con-
sciousness in the wake of the Fall. Compare William Kerrigan, The Prophetic
Milton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974), p. 270.
5. Two recent articles have helpfully explored the epic’s scenes of pedagogy.
Ann Baynes Coiro, “‘To repair the ruins of our first parents’: Of Education
and Fallen Adam,” SEL 28 (1988): 133–47, claims that the two stages of
learning (concrete or experiential and abstract) depicted in Of Education
“correspond to the division of Adam’s education between Book XI and
Book XII” (134). Coiro shows these correspondences in the curriculum as
they relate to the shift from vision to narration and emphasizes the original-
ity of Milton’s representation of Michael as a teacher (144). Michael Allen,
“Divine Instruction: Of Education and the Pedagogy of Raphael, Michael,
and the Father,” Milton Quarterly 26 (1992): 113–21, exploring education
in the poem but not by it, briefly analyzes the differing approaches to
instruction in the epic without sufficiently explaining the connections
between theology and pedagogy, between Milton’s task and the educative
tasks of his characters. See also George Williamson, “The Education of
Adam,” Modern Philology 61 (1963): 96–109, reprinted in Milton: Modern
Essays in Criticism, ed. Arthur Barker (London: Oxford University Press,
1965), pp. 284–307, still valuable for its account of the way “the education
of Adam becomes both a structural element in the epic plot and a didactic
element in the meaning of Paradise Lost” (p. 285).
6. For a subtle interpretation of this principle’s literary implications, see Geof-
frey Hartman, “Milton’s Counterplot,” ELH 25 (1958): 1–12. On the the-
matic range of Milton’s use of discordia concors, see Don Cameron Allen,
The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton’s Poetry, enlarged ed. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); William Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring
Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), pp. 133–35 and passim; and David Norbrook, Writing the
English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 444, 448, and esp. 473.
7. Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001), p. 107. For another penetrating look at Milton’s employment
of exegetical models related to midrash, see Sanford Budick, “Milton and
the Scene of Interpretation: From Typology toward Midrash,” in Midrash
and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 195–212.
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198 Notes to Chapter Four

8. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed.

Hannah Arendt, trans. Henry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), p.
263.
9. For more on this point, see Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The
Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, 1957), p.
207.
10. Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in “Par-
adise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 3.
11. For more on the speaker of the epic and the effects of prophecy upon the
poetic voice, see my article, “Place, Source, and Voice in Paradise Lost,”
ELN 44.1 (March 2006): 57–66.
12. Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (1962; reprint. New York: Perennial /
HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 6, 214.
13. See Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton, esp. pp. 12, 33–37, 173, 184–86.
14. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Har-
court, 1982), pp. 73, 106–107.
15. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 36.
16. Georgia Christopher, “Milton and the Reforming Spirit,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999), p. 195.
17. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, trans. John C. Fletcher, Two Biblical
Studies (1959; reprint: New York: Touchstone / Simon and Schuster, 1997),
p. 10. The commentary comprises lectures delivered in the winter semester
of 1932–33 at the University of Berlin, originally published in German in
1937.
18. Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, p. 94.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1824), trans. R. F.
Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 123. I have mod-
ified the translation slightly.
20. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason
Since Freud” (1957), Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 174.
21. Recent influential proponents of this view include Gerald L. Bruns,
Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991), pp. 139–163; and Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and
Biblical Hermeneutics” and “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action
Considered as a Text,” From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans.
Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1991), pp. 89–101 and 144–67.
22. The interplay between these two positions may be seen as arising out of the
English Reformation(s). There are precedents in the opposition between
William Tyndale and Thomas More. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance
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Notes to Chapter Four 199

Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1980), pp. 74–114.
23. See James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations
in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Mary Nyquist, “The
Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost,” in
Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and
Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 99–127.
24. William Tyndale, A Compendious Introduccion unto the Pistle to the Romayns
(Worms, 1526), sig. aii recto. Tyndale translates Luther’s preface to the
Romans, which is readily available in modern (though less powerful) Eng-
lish translation in Martin Luther, Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dil-
lenberger (New York: Anchor / Doubleday, 1962), pp. 19–34.
25. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Cul-
ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
26. Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd
ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 49.
27. On this process as it relates specifically to exegetical techniques, see Brian
Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 57–79. See also Donald J.
Wilcox, In Search of God and Self: Renaissance and Reformation Thought
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 288–306, for a concise account that
places Luther’s emphasis on inwardness in the context of the intellectual his-
tory of the period.
28. Tyndale, Introduccion unto the Pistle to the Romaynes, sig. aii recto.
29. George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson, chap. 33,
Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson, corrected ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1945), p. 278.
30. Dr. Williams’s Library, Gordon Square, London, Jones MS. B 62, fol. 74r;
available in facsimile as The Williams Manuscript of George Herbert’s Poems,
ed. Amy M. Charles (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints,
1977).
31. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.37–38 and 2.6, trans. D. W. Robert-
son, Jr. (New York and Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), pp. 30–31, 38.
32. Gregorius Magnus, Moralia, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris,
1849), vol. 75, col. 515a. I quote from the fourth chapter of the epistle ded-
icatory of Gregory’s exposition of Job.
33. A. J. Minnis, “The Significance of the Medieval Theory of Authorship,” in
Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, ed. Seán Burke (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 1995), pp. 23–30.
34. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-
Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 162.
35. Marshall Grossman, “Authors to Themselves”: Milton and the Revelation of
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), treats this theme
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200 Notes to Chapter Four

with great depth and sensitivity. See also the perceptive remarks in his “Mil-
ton and the Rhetoric of Prophecy,” The Cambridge Companion to Milton,
ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp.
pp. 176–77.
36. For the historical details, I am indebted to Christopher Hill, The English Bible
and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Allen Lane / Penguin, 1993),
pp. 381–83. Hill adduces helpful context in the service of a rather too straight-
forwardly topical reading of the Psalm translations as antiroyalist poems. See
also the further contexts provided by Margaret Boddy, “Milton’s Translations
of Psalms 80–88,” Modern Philology 64 (1966): 1–9.
37. The implications of this historical fact for religious lyric in the seventeenth
century are vast; see Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution, 1640–1660
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 260–76.
38. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 204.
39. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Reli-
gious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 31–53, shows
that the Psalms were regarded as representing “a compendium of lyric
kinds” (p. 45).
40. Graham Hughes, Hebrews and Hermeneutics: The Epistle to Hebrews as a
New Testament Example of Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), p. 3.
41. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962), p. 278.
42. For a thorough historical explanation of this point, see Neil Forsyth, The
Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 183.
43. Nigel Smith, “Paradise Lost from Civil War to Restoration,” in The Cam-
bridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 263.
44. The underlined verse is Ps. 2.12. Milton cites verse 2.6 at YP 6:207 and 435
(twice) and verse 2.7 at YP 6:166, 206, 207, 235, 266, and 277, according
to Michael Bauman, A Scripture Index to John Milton’s “De doctrina chris-
tiana” (Binghamton: MRTS, 1989), p. 48. See CM 18:560–61 for evidence
of Milton’s underlining, bracketing, and miscellaneous marks in his copy of
the 1612 KJV. See also Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics, pp. 200–9, for com-
mentary on Milton’s favorite Psalms.
45. Charles Dahlberg, “Paradise Lost V, 603, and Milton’s Psalm II,” Modern
Language Notes 67 (1952): 23–24.
46. Craig R. Koester, Hebrews, The Anchor Bible (New York: Anchor / Double-
day, 2001), p. 199.
47. Koester, Hebrews, p. 222.
48. Forsyth, The Satanic Epic, pp. 174–75. Forsyth’s analysis of Satan’s rebellion in
Paradise Lost, pp. 167–87, can be profitably supplemented by the magisterial
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Notes to Chapter Four 201

analysis of the motif as it recurs in ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and

Hebrew mythologies down to the Church Fathers in Forsyth’s first book,
The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1987).
49. “The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated” (1733), l. 102,
The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al.,
11 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939–69), 4:203.
50. For more on the theological perplexities, see Dennis Berthold, “The Con-
cept of Merit in Paradise Lost,” SEL 15 (1975): 153–67.
51. On the implications of contradictory and reversible etymologies in usage
and representation, see Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Pri-
mal Words,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-
mund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al., vol. 11 (London: The Hogarth
Press, 1957), pp. 155–61. For a freshly illuminating discussion of the evil
represented in Milton’s Satan’s claim of self-generation and independence,
see Steven Batchelor, Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2004), pp. 35–38.
52. John Toland, The Life of John Milton (1698), in The Early Lives of Milton,
ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Constable, 1932), p. 180. For more on
Tomkins, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, “The First Reception of Paradise Lost
(1667),” pp. 480–87.
53. For an excellent overview of this quality of satanic rhetoric, see David
Loewenstein, “The Radical Religious Politics of Paradise Lost,” in A Com-
panion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp.
348–62, esp. 350–53. Loewenstein quotes Walwyn, The Fountain of Slan-
der, on p. 350.
54. George Steiner, The Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), p. 49.
55. Compare 1 Chronicles 21:1, the only place in the Hebrew Scripture where
a figure named Satan, without the definite article preceding his designation,
“stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel” (KJV). See
the discussion in Forsyth, The Satanic Epic, pp. 37–38.
56. See Janel Mueller, “Dominion as Domesticity: Milton’s Imperial God and
the Experience of History,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachan-
dra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1999), pp. 35–36.
57. The translation is that of John Carey, in Poems, p. 349. Juvenal (1.15–16)
reads: “Et nos / consilium dedimus Sullae, privates ut altum / dormiret.”
58. Tacitus, Annals, 1.11, 1.10, ed. and trans. John Jackson, 2 vols. LCL (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), 1:260–65.
59. Like the blanket use of the lex maiestatis for which Tacitus attacked Tiberius,
“reason of state” (from the Italian ragione di stato and the French raison d’é-
tat) came in the Renaissance to symbolize a monarch’s assumption of
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202 Notes to Chapter Four

absolute rule, transcending the customary allowance of the law. See Tacitus,
Annals, 1.72, pp. 366ff. For an important cautionary note concerning the
topicality of Tacitus’s critique of Tiberius as an encoded censure of Domit-
ian’s abuse of the lex maiestatis, see R. Syme, Tacitus, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1958), 1:422. Peter Burke, “Tacitism, Scepticism, and
Reason of State,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought,
1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), pp. 479–98, provides a useful if overly general sur-
vey of Tactitus’s reception in the broader European context; see also Mal-
colm Smuts, “Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c.
1590–1630,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin
Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp.
21–43, which argues that the appeal to Tacitus’s authority in the English
Renaissance often provided a cover for advocacy of Machiavellian statecraft.
60. See Keith W. F. Stavely, “Satan and Arminianism in Paradise Lost,” Milton
Studies 25 (1989): 125–39.
61. I do not mean, by citing this poem, necessarily to concede that Milton’s
depiction of Satan ought to be read after the fashion of a roman à clef,
though there has recently been a great deal of speculation about the possible
identification of Satan and the Lord Protector. I want to resist the urge to
put too much specificity into the literary Satan, though I think, following
some very perceptive criticism on the part of David Norbrook (Writing the
English Republic, pp. 442, 446, 453–4, 477), that Milton may very well
have had Cromwell’s more imperialistic designs and monarchical trappings
in mind when he was representing Satan. On the possibility of the identifi-
cation, see also Merritt Y. Hughes, “Satan and the ‘Myth’ of the Tyrant,”
Ten Perspectives on Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp.
165–95, esp. 174–75, where he shows that Vondel, Lucifer, “had
Cromwell’s rise to power as a kind of objective correlative for the action of
those first three acts”; in his edition, Hughes, p. 287n., relates that, in
Adamo caduto 5.2, “Salandra has Satan tell the devils that they are going to
corrupt mankind by inventing ragione di stato.” John Leonard, in his edition
of The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 765, insists
that “‘necessity’ was really Cromwell’s word,” an essential part of Cromwell’s
vocabulary in his various public relations campaigns against Charles I, the
Levellers, the Rump, and the Barebones Parliament. Much the best treat-
ment of the relations between the Lord Protector and his Secretary of For-
eign Tongues is that of Blair Worden, “John Milton and Oliver Cromwell,”
in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution, ed. Ian Gentles,
John Morrill, and Blair Worden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), pp. 243–64; though Worden does not specifically discuss Paradise Lost
there, his earlier essay, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,”
in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and
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Notes to Chapter Four 203

Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.

225–45, contains many important insights about Milton’s commitment to
the principles of mixed government as derived from Aristotle and Polybius
and the implications of this commitment for Milton’s relationship with
Cromwell (e.g., p. 228). While I have learned much from Worden’s evolving
interpretation of Milton’s politics, I think he is mistaken when he dismisses
the potential for political intent in the later poetry, as on p. 244: “Milton does
not merely return to his right hand, from prose to poetry: he withdraws from
politics into faith.” To argue thus is to disregard the fact that political truths
have their place, too, amongst what Worden calls “eternal verities.”
62. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Thomas Hobbes (1628), 6.18,
ed. David Grene (1959; reprint Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), p. 388. Alcibiades, also like Satan, epitomizes self-interest in his
leadership of the oligarchic coup of 411 B.C.E.; see Thucydides, 8.48
(Hobbes, p. 530).
63. Ben Jonson, Sejanus His Fall, ed. Philip J. Ayres, The Revels Plays (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 3.740–41. Perhaps the best
illustration of “reason of state” in the literature of the English Renaissance,
the whole of Macro’s speech (3.714–49) provides an excellent comparison.
In fact, Jonson was one of the first in English to translate the idiom, as in
Cynthia’s Revels (1599), 1.1, and Volpone (1605), 4.1, though it was also
surely gaining in currency as a result of Bacon’s usage of the Italian in The
Advancement of Learning; see The Oxford Authors: Francis Bacon, ed. Brian
Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 128.
64. See Fowler’s note to the passage (p. 516), which adduces Porphyry and St.
Bernard as well as Berchorius.
65. Seneca, On Providence, sections 2 and 4, trans. M. Hadas, The Stoic Philoso-
phy of Seneca (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958). I owe this reference to Pro-
fessor Walter Englert of Reed College.
66. Fowler’s groundbreaking schematic discussion of chronology is still the best
help for untangling the difficulties; see his recent modification in the intro-
duction to his second edition, pp. 29–33. For a discussion of some unre-
solved problems of chronology in Paradise Lost that challenges the tidiness
of Fowler’s scheme, following the suggestions of Newton and other eigh-
teenth-century readers of the poem who thought that the chronology was
flawed, see Anthony Welch, “Reconsidering Chronology in Paradise Lost,”
Milton Studies 41 (2002): 1–17.
67. Forsyth, The Satanic Epic, pp. 6, 26.
68. Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963),
pp. 15, 66–75.
69. Contrary to Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost,” 2nd
ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 148, I do not
believe that most readers “forget” Raphael’s mediation as narrator, so that
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204 Notes to Chapter Four

“The reader is alone with God and with all the thought he has brought with
him from the experience of the poem.” See Raphael’s intrusions into his
own narrative, at, e.g., 5.628–29, 5.658, 5.751ff., 5.760ff., 6.74ff., 6.91,
6.200, 6.217–20, 6.373ff., 6.501ff., 6.571ff., 6.769, 6.893–912, 7.296,
7.493f., 7.535ff., 7.561, 7.635ff.
70. Jonathan Richardson, father and son, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1734), in Early Lives, ed. Darbishire, pp. 315–16.
71. See Richardson, in Early Lives, p. 326.
72. The hermeneutic paradigm I am attributing to Richardson is, in fact, a
deeply traditional one, which Augustine promotes in On Christian Doctrine
and which has been influentially reintroduced in modern theory by
Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,”
From Text to Action, pp. 144–67.
73. I have treated the significance of Milton’s use of anaphora more fully in
“Place, Source, and Voice in Paradise Lost.”
74. The question seems to have been posed first by Tertullian, Adversus Mar-
cionem, 1.2.2, as David Scott Kastan notes in the introduction to his revised
edition of Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., Paradise Lost (Indianapolis and Cam-
bridge: Hackett Pubishing, 2005), p. xxii. The phrasing gets taken up by
other church fathers as well, perhaps most influentially by Augustine: “et
quarebam unde malum, et malum quaerebam, et in ipsa inquisitione mea
non videbam malum.” The Confessions of Saint Augustine, ed. J.J. O’Donnell,
7.5.7. O’Donnell has made his authoritative 1992 Oxford edition, with its
excellent commentary, available online, now at <www.stoa.org/hippo>. This
passage, in which Augustine laments that he neglected to see the evil way of
his own search for the origin of evil, employs the Vulgate’s term for “evil,”
malum, which also signifies “apple.” The pun, from which the identification
of the fruit of the forbidden tree with the apple originally derives, can be
found throughout early Christian literature on the problem of evil, but Mil-
ton makes the allusion to the fruit as an apple specific to Satan, as shown by
Forsyth, The Satanic Epic, p. 196.
75. For a thorough and informative discussion of the topic in Plato, see Gregory
Vlastos, “Socrates’ Disavowal of Knowledge,” Philosophical Quarterly 35
(1985): 1–31. Though Vlastos discourages easy resolution of the paradoxi-
cal disavowal of certainty, and instead asserts the uncertainty of metaphysi-
cal knowledge as opposed to the moral truths, my emphasis is on the effect
of the Socratic dialogues upon Socrates’ interlocutors rather than Socratic
epistemology.
76. The dialectical interaction, as I show in the following paragraphs, is in
structure thoroughly Platonic, pace Hugh MacCallum, Milton and the Sons
of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1986), p. 135: “Adam establishes his identity, not by intro-
spection, but by engagement with the world around him. In this, Milton’s
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Notes to Chapter Four 205

treatment seems more Aristotelian than Platonic, at least in the sense those
terms held for the seventeenth-century reader.”
77. Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1947), discusses the dialogue at 8.364–451, though she remarkably fails to
consider the implications of the divine dissembling, preferring instead a
somewhat unsystematic comparison between the idea of love in Paradise
Lost and that propounded by Diotima in The Symposium (see pp. 162–68).
Discussing the development of Adam’s knowledge, Samuel states the belief
that the sophistical structure of argumentation is merely a satanic appurte-
nance (see pp. 110–23, esp. 118 and 123). It is surprising, given her empha-
sis on the way in which the great poems have “a function other than, yet not
unconnected with, the revelation of the Beautiful, a work to be done in the
realms of true doctrine and social good as well,” that Samuel has neglected
to analyze the forms in which Plato conveyed his thought. Instead her read-
ing is largely thematic and unphilosophical.
78. Thomas H. Luxon, “Milton’s Wedded Love: Not about Sex (As We Know
It),” Milton Studies 40 (2001): 38–60, is a notable exception, though his
primary focus among the dialogues remains Symposium.
79. Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p.
460.
80. See Gregory Vlastos, “The Socratic Elenchus,” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy 1 (1983): 27–58, which provides useful working definitions of
all the key terms and lucidly explains the structural significance for each
form of Socratic argumentation.
81. Plato, Gorgias, 463d, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias, Menex-
enus, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 248.
Henceforth quotations from Plato will be cited by Stephanus page numbers
parenthetically.
82. Plato, Sophist, trans. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986). Subsequent quotations will appear in the text.
83. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato:
Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hack-
ett, 1997), pp. 506–56.
84. Plato, The Symposium, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991). Subsequent references to this translation will appear in the text.
85. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986). Quotations from this translation will appear subsequently in
the text.
86. Lewis Campbell, ed., The Theaetetus of Plato with a Revised Text and English
Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), ad loc (= pp. 30–31).
87. For the connection between the method of education expounded in
Theaetetus 148e-151b and the theory of anamnesis, or learning by recollec-
tion, best explained in the Meno, see the commentary in F. M. Cornford,
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206 Notes to Chapter Four

Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The “Theaetetus” and the “Sophist” of Plato trans-
lated with a running commentary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1935), pp. 27–28. Cornford shows that Socrates in the Theaetetus is quot-
ing Meno’s complaint that Socrates is merely reducing others to a state of
perplexity (79e). For a thorough revaluation of the Socratic method as
evinced in the Meno and elsewhere, see Alexander Nehemas, Virtues of
Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), pp. 3–82.
88. Augustine, Confessions, 10.11.18, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), p. 189. Henceforth I will cite this translation par-
enthetically by section number in the text.
89. Augustine, De Trinitate, 14.30, as quoted in Louis L. Martz, The Paradise
Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1964), pp. xviii-xvix. Martz provides a serviceable sketch of the
impact of Augustinian teachings upon the design of Paradise Lost on pp.
102–67. Although I differ in my interpretation of the nature of Augustine’s
theory of anamnesis, which I see as more integral to the later theory of
Augustine, and thus to Milton’s inheritance of it, than Martz claims, much
of value remains in his treatment of the epic. My position on Augustine is
finally closer to that of Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-
Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1996), esp. chap. 8, “Memory, Self-Reform, and Time,” pp.
207–42.
90. The Oxford Authors: Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers, p. 120.
91. Fulke Greville, A Treatie of Humane Learning, 25.1–2, in Poems and Dra-
mas, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1945), 1:160.
92. See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 3.23, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2
vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 2:496–97: “But the
notion of His providence is not the same as the notion of our providence;
nor is the notion of His governance of the things created by Him the same
as the notion of our governance of that which we govern. The two notions
are not comprised in one definition, contrary to what is thought by all those
who are confused, and there is nothing in common between the two except
the name alone. In the same way, our act does not resemble His act; and the
two are not comprised in one and the same definition. Just as natural acts
differ from those of craftsmanship, so do the divine governance of, the
divine providence for, and the divine purpose with regard to, those natural
matters differ from our human governance of, providence for, and purpose
with regard to, the things we govern, we provide for, and we purpose. This
is the object of the Book of Job as a whole; I refer to the establishing of this
foundation for belief and the drawing attention to the inference to be
drawn from natural matters, so that you should not fall into error and seek
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Notes to Chapter Four 207

to affirm in your imagination that His knowledge is like our knowledge or

that His purpose and His providence and His governance are like our pur-
pose and our providence and our governance. If man knows this, every mis-
fortune will be borne lightly by him.”
93. Marshall Grossman, “The Rhetoric of Feminine Priority and the Ethics of
Form in Paradise Lost,” English Literary Renaissance 33 (2004): 424–43 (at
431).
94. E. J. Speiser, ed. and trans., Genesis, The Anchor Bible (New York: Double-
day, 1964), pp. 24–25.
95. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al.,
55 vols. (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1958–76), 1:173, 176.
96. But see Richard Strier, “Milton against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in
Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 258–86, esp. 272–273,
which argues that the transformative moment is not the emotional and dis-
tinctively Christian humility of Eve so much as the classically rigorous intel-
lectual clarity of Adam’s rebuke.
97. Here I agree with Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin, that the historical particu-
larity of the postlapsarian context within which a given reader would experi-
ence the representation of paradise would, inevitably, be common to all who
could conceivably read the poem.
98. “Holy irony” is a term used in Order and Disorder (1679) to describe God’s
reaction to the transgression, “Whence man the folly of his pride might
see.” See Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 5.293–94ff. (at p. 74).
99. I therefore disagree with the position of Stanley Fish, which sees all didacti-
cism in the poem as stemming ultimately from a voice of authority. See the
remark in Fish’s recent preface to the second edition of Surprised by Sin, p. x:
the poem’s method “is to provoke in its readers wayward fallen responses
which are then corrected by one of several authoritative voices (the narrator,
God, Raphael, Michael, the Son).”
100. Though not, as the additions to the Artis Logicae suggest, without a certain
degree of skepticism. For the implications of the Ramistic use of argumenta-
tion by “similars” for Miltonic simile in Paradise Lost, see Christopher Grose,
Milton’s Epic Process: “Paradise Lost” and Its Miltonic Background (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 123–87, esp., on the skepticism, pp. 128–35.
101. For more on this topic and its impact on the religious writing of the early mod-
ern period, see Geoffrey Hill, Style and Faith (New York: Counterpoint, 2003),
esp. pp. 21–70. See also Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation.
102. H. R. MacCallum, “Milton and Figurative Interpretation of the Bible,”
University of Toronto Quarterly 31 (1962): 407, 412.
103. It should be clear that I am not entirely convinced by the effort to devalue Mil-
ton’s consideration of the Analogy of Faith in Georgia Christopher, Milton and
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208 Notes to Chapter Four

the Science of the Saints (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp.
4–14 and passim. In my reading, Christopher has overstated the difference
from traditional exegetical methodology. It is not so much the technique or
means, I think, as the end to which such means were put that differentiates
between the “evangelical” and scholastic uses of allegorical interpretation.
For more on the relationships among Michael’s pedagogy, typology, alle-
gory, exegesis, and the structure of the last two books, which “must be seen
as almost geometrical in its exactness,” see Edward W. Tayler, Milton’s
Poetry: Its Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1979), pp. 71–72ff.
104. Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost” (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), p. 42. Rosenblatt further argues that “Before the
Fall, the Miltonic bard had diplomatically excluded from paradise the
reader’s determining knowledge of fallen history, thus preserving our first
parents’ freedom and dignity” (ibid.).
105. There are several good treatments of the exegetical task in Books 11 and 12,
but probably the most influential interpretation of Milton’s reliance upon
Reformation messianic glosses on Gen. 3:15 is that of Christopher, Milton
and the Science of the Saints, esp. pp. 138–40, which explains the specific
strategic importance of the fact that the Son delivers the protevangelium in
Book 10.179–81 as a representation of the Reformers’ sacramental connec-
tion “between Christ and the verbal promise about him.” Another very
learned source for information on the subject is C. A. Patrides, “The ‘Prote-
vangelium’ in Renaissance Theology and Paradise Lost,” SEL 3 (1963):
19–30, as well as the more condensed treatment in his Milton and the Chris-
tian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 123ff.
106. Luther, Lectures on Genesis, Works, ed. Pelikan, 1:162.
107. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard, in The Problem of Evil: A
Reader, ed. Mark Larrimore (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 198.
108. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (1966; New York and San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1977).
109. Tyndale, A compendious introduccion . . . to the pistle off Paul to the Romayns,
sig. aiii verso.
110. William Hayley, Conjectures on the Origin of the ‘Paradise Lost,’ appended to
The Life of Milton, 2nd ed. (1796), facsimile ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich,
Jr. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), p. 276. Mil-
ton’s indictment of the use of force as a lesser form that reveals a greater
form of heroism may be illuminated through an intuitive link to that of
Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (1939), in War and the
Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review Books, 2005),
pp. 3–37.
111. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” trans. Richard Cohen, in The Prob-
lem of Evil, ed. Larrimore, pp. 371–80 (quotations at 378 and 376).
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Notes to the Coda 209

112. Martz, The Paradise Within, p. 115.

113. I find much to agree with in Anthony Low, “The Fall into Subjectivity: Mil-
ton’s ‘Paradise Within’ and ‘Abyss of Fears and Horrors,’” in Reading the
Renaissance: Ideas and Idioms from Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Marc Berley
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), pp. 205–32, which argues
that both a darker internalization and a redemptive interiority become pos-
sible after the Fall.
114. For a more topical reading of the “paradise within” as an antimonarchical
challenge to the “spectacle of state,” see Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historiciz-
ing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: Uni-
versity of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 10. For an excellent contextual account
of the religious history, see N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconfor-
mity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1987), chap. 6.

NOTES TO THE CODA

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a, 981b, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard
McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 689, 690.
2. Montaigne, “Of Experience,” Essayes, trans. John Florio (1603; reprint.:
New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 967.
3. Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” Essays (1625), The Oxford Authors: Francis
Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 439.
4. Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, No. 85 (28 August 1753), The Oxford
Authors: Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984), p. 273. Johnson’s quotation reads “conversation” in place of
Bacon’s “conference,” p. 269.
5. Sir Thomas Browne, “To the Reader,” Pseudodoxia Epidemica, The Major
Works, ed. C. A . Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 165.
6. This debate attracted a great deal of attention in Milton criticism. See in
particular G. F. Sensabaugh, “Milton on Learning,” Studies in Philology
43 (1946): 258–72; and Irene Samuel, “Milton on Learning and Wis-
dom,” PMLA 64 (1949): 708–23. Francis C. Blessington, “Paradise Lost”
and the Classical Epic (Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1979), p. xii, ably deflects the attack on classical contexts for interpreting
Milton’s epic.
7. For more on this aspect of Paradise Regained, see my entry, “John Milton,”
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. David Scott Kastan et al. 5
vols. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3:505–15.
8. Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1939), p. 125.
9. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wal-
lace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), p. 163.
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210 Notes to the Coda

10. On the problem of locating Milton within conventional periods of intellec-

tual history, see most recently Jack Lynch, “Betwixt Two Ages Cast: Milton,
Johnson, and the English Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61
(2000): 397–413. The climax of Renaissance culture, as William J.
Bouwsma has argued, may be seen as having been simultaneous with the
decline of that same culture. See The Waning of the Renaissance 1550–1640
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
96710_Festa_05 04.qxp 5/4/2006 2:33 PM Page 211

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Index

A Argonauts, 75, 77, 78

Absalom and Achitophel (Dryden), 94 argumentation, 108, 136, 150
absolutism, 93 aristeia, Miltonic, 72
accommodation, 131–132, 142, 146 Aristotle, 10, 43, 92, 103, 141, 159
Achilles, 73–75, 77–78 Ascham, Roger, 12, 93
Act of Uniformity, 67 Astraea Redux (Dryden), 94
Adam, 36, 40, 42, 104–105 auctoritas, 49, 108
angelic pedagogues and, 144–157 Auerbach, Erich, 54
divine maieutics and, 133–144 Augustine, St., 138–139, 140
Raphael’s cautionary tale to, 125–133
Adorno, Theodor, 20–21 B
The Advancement of Learning (Bacon), Bacon, Francis, 2, 13–16, 139, 159
13–15, 139 Bard, Miltonic, 18–19, 136
aides-mémoire (annotations), 27 Barnes, Joshua, 24
Alcibiades, 123 Barry, Richard, 25
allegory, 4–8, 55, 57–58, 133, 138, 157 Berchorius, Petrus, 124–125
Anglo-Saxon polity, 95 The Bible: Authorized King James Version
Annotations (Milton’s), 24, 26–28, 30–31 with Apocrypha (KJV), 50, 55,
antiquity, 82, 90–91, 124 58, 111, 112, 113
Aphorismes Civill and Militarie (Dallington), Blackburne, Francis, 64–65
85 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 104
Apollonius, 75–78 Britain, 45, 94
An Apology for the Honorable Nation of the Broughton, Hugh, 53
Jews, and All the Sons of Israel Browne, Sir Thomas, 34, 39, 41, 159–160
(Nicholas), 56 Brownlow, William, 25
Aquinas, 36, 38 Bucer, Martin, 60
Aratus, 30–31 Bullinger, Heinrich, 107
Areopagitica (Milton) Butler, Samuel, 88
allegory of Truth, 4–5 Buxtorf, Johann, 34
freedom of choice, 40–41, 42
interpretation, 40 C
Order for Printing and, 31 Campbell, Lewis, 137–138
Argonautica (Apollonius), 75–78 Carruthers, Mary, 106–107

231
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232 Index

Catholic Church, 95, 107 Death, and Sin, 5, 121, 145

Chaos, 5 De officiis (Cicero), 72
charity, 51–52, 60, 62, 141, 150, 151 De Librorum Copia (Petrarch), 83
Charles II, 87, 93, 94, 95, 119, 124 dictatorship, 93–94
Chartier, Roger, 23 didacticism, 101, 147
Christian Morals (Browne), 41 Diotima, 137
Christians Discorsi (Machiavelli), 95
figuralism, 54 Discourse (Greville, Robert), 40
forced conversion and, 56 divorce, 45–62
fulfillment of Old Testament types, 54, female pride, 58, 59
110 Jewish obstinacy, 58, 59
Hebraists, 53, 62 law, 50–51, 54, 57
hermeneutics, 38 learned succession and, 46, 59
interpretation, 54, 142, 160 masculinist stereotyping, 58
liberty, 17, 152 “parity of wisdome,” 58, 60
salvation myth, 104, 113 rabbinic tradition, 49–54
succession from Hebraic culture, 52–54, toleration and, 46, 56–57
59 Donne, John, 34, 48
tradition, 34, 47, 59–60 Dryden, John, 93–94, 97
Church of England, 67, 121 du Moulin, Peter, 66
Cicero, 72, 81–82 Dury, John, 16
Civil War; see also English Revolution
Milton’s teaching efforts during, 63 E
as political education, 65–71 education; see also Of Education (Milton)
Clarendon Code, 67, 90 acculturation, national, 87
Clark, Donald, 83 defined, 1, 16
Clarke, John, 97 ethical, and republicans, 69
Collateral love, 135, 137, 141 hermeneutic understanding, 7–9
Comenius, John Amos, 4, 12–13 heroic, 63–98
The Commonwealth of Oceana (Harrington), instruction, divine, 125, 132
85, 93 Miltonic, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 18, 22, 156
Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictio- Milton’s theory of, 1–2, 7, 12
nary (OED), 3, 51, 118 pedagogue, Hebraic, 45–62
Conscience, liberty of, 89–90 political function of, 67
consciousness schoolmasters, 46–50, 66
human, 17, 20, 133–134, 138, 145, 156 schools, 85–86, 87, 89, 108
individual, 41 universities, 4, 86
coronation, 112–114, 116, 118, 138 educators
Custom, as allegorical figure, 5, 57–58 and legislators, 84–90
Crane, Mary Thomas, 108 poets as, 90–98
Cromwell, Oliver, 8, 56, 70, 81, 109 Edwards, Thomas, 56–57
Eliot, T. S., 8
D Ellwood, Thomas, 25
Dahlberg, Charles, 113 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 11, 12
Dallington, Robert, 85 English Revolution, 8, 12, 62, 63–98, 102;
da Messina, Tommaso, 83 see also Civil War; Interregnum
Davenant, Sir William, 91–92, 93 epic; see also Argonautica; Iliad; Paradise Lost
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Index 233

heroism, 73–74, 78, 90–98 Grafton, Anthony, 25

Milton’s, 18–19 Gregory the Great, 108
monarchic, 95 Greville, Fulke, 139
rhyming, 95 Greville, Robert, 40
epistemology, 2, 5, 20, 24, 29, 36, 39, 79, Grossman, Marshall, 141
140 Grotius, Hugo, 60–61
Erasmus, Desiderius, 3, 10–11, 42, 105 Guide of the Perplexed (Maimonides), 34
Essay of Dramatic Poesy (Dryden), 93 Guild, William, 54
An Essay Upon Study (Clark), 97
Euripides, 23–32, 35f, 37f H
Euripidis Tragoediae (ET), 26, 27, 28, 30 Hanford, James Holly, 83–84
Eve, 105, 123–124, 127, 133–151, 157 Harrington, James, 84, 85–86, 90, 93–94, 96
evidence, Milton’s use of, 21–22, 50–51, Hartlib, Samuel, 13, 16, 25, 64, 67
57–58, 60–62, 70–71, 73–79 Heath, Richard, 25
evil, problem of, 100–101; see also theodicy Herbert, George, 107
Evil and the God of Love (Hicks), 149 hermeneutics, 7–9, 38, 39, 105, 144, 154,
exegesis, 55, 102–109 156
Heroick Education (“I.B., Gent.”), 84–85
F heroism
Fall of Man, 16–17, 100, 118, 142–148 epic, 73–74, 90–98
Fallon, Stephen M., 71 intellectual, 62, 71–79
The Federalist No. 10 (Madison), 90 spiritual, 152, 155–156
The First Anniversary (Marvell), 122–123 Hicks, John, 149
Fish, Stanley, 17–20, 23, 33–34 Hill, Christopher, 65
Fletcher, H. F., 83 Helena (Euripides), 26
Forsyth, Neil, 115, 127 Hippolytus (Euripides), 28–30, 35f, 38
free will, 40–42, 150 The Hireling Ministry None of Christs
(Williams), 86
G historiography, 9, 54
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 7–8 The History of English Poetry (Warton), 95
Gangræna (Edwards), 56 Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 10, 91–92, 93, 96, 123
Gardiner, Thomas, 25 Homer, 30, 31, 43, 73, 74, 90–91
Genesis, Book of, 102–105, 138, 139, 142, “An Horatian Ode” (Marvell), 66, 94
143 humanism, 73, 79–84
Geneva Bible, 47, 104, 110, 112, 135, 147,
151 I
God; see also Paradise Lost (Milton) “I. B., Gent.” 84–85
and freedom of choice, 41–42 Iliad (Homer)
Image of, 33–34, 36, 38–39, 138–139, Achilles, 73–75, 77–78
141, 144 death in, 74
knowledge of, 14, 36, 133–144 Embassy (Book IX), 74–75
Law of, 142, 144, 151 Milton’s life compared to, 73–76
Word of, 104, 110, 148 Second Defense of the English People and,
Gondibert, preface to (Davenant), 91 74, 76, 77–78
Good Old Cause, 74, 87 Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian), 72
Goodwin, John, 88 instruction, see education
Gospel, 47–49, 53, 57 Instrument of Government (Lambert), 81
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234 Index

The Intellectual Development of John Milton Lee, Nathaniel, 97

(Fletcher), 83 legislators, and educators, 84–90
Interpretation, 38–40; see also exegesis; Leigh, Richard, 96–97
hermeneutics L’Estrange, Roger, 88
allegorical, of Scriptures, 6 Leviathan, 129
political, 18 Leviathan (Hobbes), 92
reader response paradigm, 21 Lewalski, Barbara, 18–19, 135–136
Interregnum, 84, 91, 99, 144; see also Lewis, C. S., 6, 43
English Revolution liberty
Irenaeus, 42 ancient, 95–96, 133
irony, 59, 133–144 Christian, 17, 152
“civill,” 33
J of conscience, 89–90
Jaeger, Werner, 91 poetic, 98
Jefferson, Thomas, 97–98 rational, 123, 144, 157
Jewell, Helen, 68 struggle for, 62–67
Jews, 45–46, 56–57 true, 98, 123–124
John Milton at St. Paul’s School (Clark), 83 Licensing Act of 1643, 31, 44
Johnson, Samuel, 24, 63–67, 159 The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane, Kt
Jonson, Ben, 23, 124 (Sikes), 88
Jordan, Thomas, 65–66, 68 The Life of Milton (Johnson), 24, 63, 64
The Judgement of Martin Bucer (Bucer), 60 Lilburne, John, 109
Locke, John, 2
K Long Parliament
Kermode, Frank, 54 dissolution of, 87
Kerrigan, William, 100 Order for Printing, 31
knowledge “The Players Petition to the Long
of ancient prudence, 86 Parliament after being long
of God, 14, 36, 139–142 silenc’d, that they might play
moral questioning, 43–44, 63, 159–162 again. 1642” (Jordan), 65–66
pansophy, 4 rule of, 69–70, 87, 93–94
scientific inquiry, 13–14 Lucretius, 30–31
Koester, Craig, 113 Luther, Martin, 33, 106–107, 142, 148, 151

L M
Lactantius, 149, 150 MacCallum, H. R., 146
Lambert, John, 81 Machiavelli, 95
Law maieutics, divine, 133–144
English Common, 95 Maimonides, 34, 38, 139
of God, first, 142, 144, 151 marginalia; see also annotations; reading
Mosaic, 45–53, 57–60 cross-referencing notes, 30–31
learning Euripides, 25, 27
end of, 41, 155, 160, 162 Milton’s, 24, 28, 30, 31
humanistic, 55, 82–84, 87 Martz, Louis, 154
Milton’s depiction of, 43 Marvell, Andrew, 66, 71, 94, 108, 122–123
patience, 150 Masoretes of Tiberias, 52
by recollection, 138–139, 144, 156 metaphysics, 8–9, 14
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Index 235

Metaphysics (Aristotle), 159 Prolusiones and Epistolae Familiares,

Michael (Archangel), 105, 123–124, 11–12, 79, 83
144–147, 150–157 Proposals of Certaine Expedients for the
Milton, Deborah, 31 Preventing of a Civill War Now
Milton, John; see also Milton, John, works of Feard, & the Settling of a Firme
on censorship, 3, 39, 43 Government, 87
corrections to printed texts done by, 18, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a
28, 30 Free Commonwealth, 69, 71, 87,
educational theory of, 1–2, 7, 12 89, 90, 95, 122, 124
eyesight, loss of, 24, 31, 65, 73–76, 88 The Reason of Church Government, 32,
intellectual heroism and, 65, 71–79 34, 47–49, 57, 65, 73
on Jews, 46 Samson Agonistes, 161
on learning, 11 Second Defense of the English People, 66–67,
on liberty, 17 71–72, 74, 76, 77–78, 83
Psalm translations, 55–56 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 17,
radical humanism of, 79–84 69–70, 73
on soothsaying, 75 Tetrachordon, 34, 52, 61
students of, 25–26 Works, 30
Truth, allegory of, 4–8 “The Milton Controversy,” 84
Milton, John, works of; see also Areopagitica Miltonic education, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 18, 22,
(Milton); Of Education (Mil- 156
ton); Paradise Lost (Milton) Milton Unbound (Rumrich), 20
Accidence Commenced Grammar, 79 modernity, philosophical, 9
Ad Joannem Rousium, 76, 77 Moralia (Plutarch), 6
Animadversions, 49, 146 Moses Vnuailed (Guild), 54
An Apology Against a Pamphlet , 40
“At a Vacation Exercise,” 77 N
Commonplace Book, 10, 11, 12, 95, The Nature of Truth: its Union and Unity
149 with the Soule (Greville), 40
Considerations Touching the Likeliest Nedham, Marchamont, 67
Means to Remove Hirelings, 86 Newton, Thomas, 79, 161
De Doctrina Christiana, 11, 32, 36, 39, Nicholas, Edward, 56
41, 108, 113, 115, 146 Norbrook, David, 69
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 5, Norman Conquest, 95
34, 50, 60, 68
Eikonoklastes, 88, 95, 122 O
Elegia Prima, 86 The Obstructours of Justice (Goodwin), 88
First Defense of the English People, 71, 88 Of Education (Milton)
The History of Britain, 69, 79 education, defined, 16
A Maske, 24 goals, of education, 156
Observations on the Articles of Peace, 46 Milton’s marginalia and, 30–31
Paradise Regain’d, to which is added Sam- Milton’s politics and humanism and,
son Agonistes, 79, 161 80–81
Paradise Regained, 21, 97, 160, 161, 162 publication of, original, 12–13
Poems, 1645, 76, 80 Oldys, Alexander, 97
Poems upon Several Occasions, 79, 80, “On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost” (Marvell),
161–162 108–109
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236 Index

On Providence (Seneca), 127 Plutarch, 6

Orgel, Stephen, 25 poetry
Overton, John, 25 invention and, 107–108
Ovid, 31 liberty and, 98
poets, as educators, 90–98
P rhyme, invention of, 93–94
paidagogos (servant or slave), 47 Powell, Mary, 25
Paradise Lost (Milton), 17–22, 79, 99–157 Powell, Richard, 25
allegorical figures in, 5 Presbyterians, 31, 34, 48, 55, 56, 59, 69,
archives of, inward, 106–109 87
chronology of, 116, 127, 134 A Priest to the Temple (Herbert), 107
divine maieutics, 133–144 Pro Archia (Cicero), 82, 83
education, and paradise within, 153–157 Pro Caelio (Cicero), 81–82
first disobedience, of Adam and Eve, Pro Murena (Cicero), 81, 82
114–121 prophecy
preface, and rhyme, 95 Anchises’s, to Aeneas (Virgil), 94
prophecy, 110–113 Hebrew, 110, 116
Psalm translations and, 109–114 messianic, 103, 105, 106, 138, 147
Raphael’s cautionary tale, 125–133 Phineus’s, 75
sword and the word, 144–153 protevangelium, 103, 147, 148–149
“the tyrant’s plea,” 121–125 Prophets, 44, 53, 103, 110
War in Heaven, 112, 115, 125 Protestants, 38, 53, 55, 59, 105, 107, 146
parallelism, syntactic, 82, 109 psalms
patience, 150 prophetic, 113
Paul, St., 31–32, 46–47, 58 Sidneyan translation, 111
Pauline theology, 36, 58, 113, 151 Milton’s translations of, 109–114
pedagogue, Hebraic, 45–62 Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Browne), 39,
pedagogy, see education 159–160
The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 123
The Petition of the Jews For the Repealing of the Q
Act of Parliament for their banish- qere / ketib variants, 49–50
ment out of ENGLAND, 56
Petrarch, 73, 83 R
Phaedrus (Plato), 136 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 18, 109
Philaras, Leonard, 78 Raphael, 125–133
Phillips, Edward, 25–26, 31 Rawls, John, 17
Phillips, John, 25 reading; see also marginalia
Philosophy, 9–10, 133–144, 159–162; annotations, 23–32, 96
see also epistemology matter, 41
Phineus, 75–78 “by Proxy,” 26, 31
Piaget, Jean, 4 reader response model, 19, 21
Picard, Jeremy, 25 Renaissance, 24–25
Pincus, Steve, 89 reason
Plato, 23, 135, 136, 137 Adam as, 133
“The Players Petition to the Long Parliament exercise of, 36, 39, 138
after being long silenc’d, that they might freedom of choice and, 42–43, 44
play again. 1642” (Jordan), 65–66 godly, 38
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Index 237

interpretation, as act of, 40–41 Hebrew, 46–47, 49, 52, 57, 105, 106,
Milton’s conception of, 33–34 108
obscured, 123–124 interpretation of, 39–40
public, 121–122 secretarians, 55, 56–57, 67
will and, 124 Sejanus (Jonson), 124
“recta ratio,” 40 Seneca, 127
Reeve, Michael D., 83 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 91
Reformation, 8, 44, 67–68, 104, 105 Sherman, William, 24
regicide, 69, 95, 97 Shoulson, Jeffrey, 46, 101
Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Shuger, Deborah Kuller, 8
Parricidas Anglicanos (du Sikes, George, 88
Moulin), 66 Sin, and Death, 5, 121, 145
religion Skinner, Cyriack, 25
charity, 60 Skinner, Quentin, 10, 17
freedoms, 89 Smith, Nigel, 53, 113
government and, 67 Socrates, 135–137
Renaissance, 79–85, 162 Some Thoughts Concerning Education
republicanism, 63–65, 69, 70, 79, 87, 93 (Locke), 2
Rhesus (Euripides), 30 Sophist (Plato), 136
rhetoric, 108 Speiser, E. J., 142
Ciceronian, 88 Stephanus, Paul, 24, 38
philosophy and, 10 Stephanus, R., 83
science and, 9–10, 15 studia humanitatis (humanism), 79–84
of tyrants, 119–120, 122 succession, learned, 46, 59
Richardson, Jonathan, 130–131 Suppliants (Euripides), 28, 30, 32, 37f
Ricks, Christopher, 129 Surprised by Sin (Fish), 17–18, 20
Robertson, William, 54–55 The Symposium (Plato), 23, 135, 137
Rogers, John, 89 Synagogue of Ezra, 52
Rome, 82, 94–95
Rorty, Richard, 9 T
Rosenblatt, Jason, 147 Talmud, 49, 50, 52, 53, 62
Rouse, John, 76, 78 teacher, 55–56
A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (Jordan), 65 pedagogue, Hebraic, 45–62
royalists, 64, 67, 79, 84–85, 97 Temple of Solomon, 43
Rumrich, John, 20 temporality, in poetry, 114, 116, 125, 152
Theaetetus (Plato), 135, 137
S theodicy
St. Paul’s School (London), 10, 83 evil, problem of, 41, 42
Salmasius, 72 ironic, 153
Samuel, Irene, 135 in Paradise Lost, 100, 101, 127, 150
Satan, 118–130, 147–149, 152 soul-making, 149
Scaliger, Joseph, 30 Thévenot, 78
schoolmasters, 46–50, 66 “Thoughts on English Prosody” (Jefferson),
schools, 85–86, 87, 89, 108 97–98
Schwartz, Regina, 102 Thucydides, 123
Scott, Jonathan, 69 Tiberius, 122
Scriptures Toland, John, 71, 119
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238 Index

Tompkins, Thomas, 119 V

Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost” Vaughan, Henry, 34
(Rosenblatt), 147 Veron, John, 83
Toulmin, Stephen, 9 Vygotsky, L. S., 99–100
Tracts Relating to the Jews (compendium of
pamphlets), 45 W
translatio imperii (westward translation or Walwyn, William, 119
transferal of empire), 94 Warton, Thomas, 95
A Treatie of Humane Learning (Greville), Whigs, 71, 80, 97
139 Whitman, Cedric, 74
Triennial Act, 95 Williams, Roger, 86
Truth, allegory of, 4–8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 21
Tyndale, William, 106, 107, 151 Worden, Blair, 69
tyranny, 32–33, 68, 69, 70, 124–125 Wotton, Sir Henry, 91

U Z
universality, 13 Zeus, 75
universities, 4, 86 Zwingli, Huldrych, 107