Reason is a Choice

by Christopher Michael Luna

= Introduction =

What follows is an excerpted, rewritten selection from my Division III entitled Reason is a Choice. The initial thesis examined the works of John Milton, William Blake and other romantic English poets, to deal with a rather broad range of topics centering around the relative authority of reason and poetry in political and religious discourse in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Rather than present a single chapter of the initial work, I have distilled some of the strongest arguments into a shorter paper. A notable omission is that you will find no Blake in this version of the thesis. Rather than compare two poets, I have focused this selection from my thesis on Milton’s conception of poetry as God-given prophecy, set against his conception of an especially valuable but fallible human reason. In the larger thesis, I dealt extensively with Blake’s conception of reason by exploring a great deal of his poetry including The Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Urizen, America: A Prophecy, and centrally, Milton: A Poem. My discussion of Blake was particularly centered around the later poet’s reading, rewriting and redemption of Milton. I used Milton’s conception of reason as choice to shed light on Blake’s conception of reason as a comparative act, and explored how that conception played out in his poetry. In addition to the close study of Blake’s poetry, the initial thesis had a long section that considered the various “reasoners” of Milton’s Paradise Lost (God, Satan, Adam, the narrator, and the reader) in light of Blake’s critique of reason. Some of the arguments from this latter section have been preserved in this rewritten excerpt, where I discuss moments where the reader is invited to choose, compare and reason within Paradise Lost.

I have chosen to preserve what I have as it demonstrates some of my most compelling primary and secondary research into Milton’s historical context, and because that context presents an engaging frame for the in-depth religious and literary analysis of Milton’s prose and poetry which follows.

Looking back after a year and a half, this thesis seems as important as when I first wrote it. As science and reason gain increasing authority in modern Western society, it is ever more important to understand not only their role, but their history— and this was one of my central motives for writing this thesis. Reason is a loaded word with a long and changing history, and yet it is a word of profound authority even to those who little understand its evolution.

Contemporary caricatures of religion would have us believe that the man who has prophetic visions and who is suspicious of reason must be a theocratic oppressor at heart— that such a man is unable to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellows. Reason is set against the authority of ecstatic religious traditions as both more sensible and more liberating. But the truth is altogether more complicated. Not only does modern American secular society carry within it, often unconsciously, the long heritage of Protestant imagery, but visionary, prophetic religious thinkers have used the authority of their visions to argue for freedoms that may seem unintuitive given contemporary stereotypes of religion and reason. It may be startling to realize that one of the seminal tracts written in defense of the free press against a kind of theocratic censorship was written by a man wary of human reason and convinced in the ultimate authority both of scripture and of prophetic visions. How could a man use his suspicion of human reason and his unswerving belief in the authority of visionary religious experience to argue in defense of free speech and religious toleration? The idea seems almost antithetical to the modern thinker, and yet John Milton, writing in seventeenth century England, did just that.

Sometimes theologian, often politician, and above all poet, Milton’s understanding of liberty and the limited authority of human reason was strongly influenced by his times. Seventeenth century England was a whirlwind of religious and political rebellion that, in the course of a single lifetime saw the overthrow of the English monarchy, the rejection of English Catholicism, the establishment of a Parliamentary government, the failure of that same government, the return of the monarchy, and eventually the return of English Catholicism. If that is not dramatic enough, the entire progression was seen in the most religiously fervent terms. The English rebels believed themselves to be the agents of God, fighting for Christ against the forces of the Antichrist to establish a Kingdom of Heaven that would endure for eternity. They literally believed that the end of an old world was nigh, and that their rebellion was ushering in a new chapter in the history of God and man.

Milton was as fervent and passionately Protestant as his contemporaries, but his politics and his conception of the English rebellion were markedly different. In order to understand how Milton could ultimately use a rejection of the authority of human reason to justify religious toleration and redeem man’s right to choose freely between whatever goods and evils were set before him, we will examine first the apocalyptic political-religious vision of his radical Puritan contemporaries. We will then turn to Milton’s conception of reason first in politics, and then in theology. Finally, we will examine Milton’s understanding of poetry as divinely inspired prophecy. To clarify this understanding we will examine the early paired poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso before turning to his most famous work, the great epic Paradise Lost, in which Milton retells the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation by Satan and fall from grace. This exploration is imbued with the drama both of Milton’s time and of his particular vision— and it will take us from the apocalyptic end of the world, back to the beginning.

= The End of the World =

Set against more proscriptive elements of the Puritan English government of the seventeenth century who argued that, given divine inspiration, human reasons could agree with one another and justify religiously proscriptive law, Milton believed that human reason was but a tool that man wielded in his individual struggle between good and evil. Where the radical Puritans of the English revolution, like Henry Burton and William Sedgwick saw the revolutionary English government as heralding a new epoch in time in which the world would be perfected, Milton saw the potential of the revolution differently. Milton envisioned a Christian state based on the tolerance and liberty that he saw as essential to the ideology of the Protestant Reformation, and more specifically to the English Puritan rebellion.

It is hard to overstate the passion of the religious imagery with which radical Puritans conceived of their government. Their struggle with and eventual victory over King Charles was seen in the most epic, religiously ecstatic terms— as the political, and thus worldly, manifestation of the religious revolutions begun with Luther. The Protestant narrative of a spiritual struggle against the Antichrist had finally been brought full into the world, and for the radical Puritans of the seventeenth century, this heralded a new chapter in human history. The end of the world was coming at last, and England would be the site of the “new Jerusalem,” in which Christ would come down to live among men as their King.

This intermingling of civil and religious rebellion was unique. More than a century before the English Civil War, Luther responded to a group of rebellious peasants demanding Christian equality with their masters by condemning violent political rebellion, claiming that “Christ says that we are not to resist any evil or wrong, but always yield, suffer it, and let things be taken from us.” While Luther saw the Reformation as a forerunner of the apocalypse at the end of time, he believed that true Christians ought to abstain from civil matters and make peace with their faith. The Puritans, however, saw their political and religious rebellion as being inextricably intertwined. Although both Luther and the Puritans believed that, in the image of the Apocalypse of John, Christ would establish a Godly Kingdom upon his immanent return, the Puritans imagined the perfected Christian Church to be, at least to some extent, synonymous with Christ ; quite literally they were active as a part of Christ in the establishment of this Kingdom, a civil incarnation of the church in which they placed their faith. John’s Apocalypse served Puritans as a model for their revolutionary government, and set the tone of religious discourse in the Parliament by way of the sermons that Puritan ministers preached before the government on religious holidays and fasts.

Indeed these “fast sermons,” as they were called, are replete with apocalyptic imagery directly likening the English revolutionary government to the new Jerusalem of Christ’s Kingdom. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, for example, Henry Burton preached before Parliament, who he referred to as the “worthies of our Israel.” He lamented England’s ecclesiastical bondage under the influence of the Bishops who were “all for the Pope, and the Ceremonies” and expressed profoundly his “hope that wee shall have good Lawes made for the punishing of all [Church] abuses,” imploring the government that they might “labour to throw all offensive things out of the Church of God.” Here, Burton begged the civil authority of the state, invoked under the name of “Israel,” to use its power to intervene in religious matters and impose by civil law the righteousness of a true Christian religion.

Shortly after the outbreak of civil war, William Sedgwick preached that the Parliament should “labor for holy Laws, holy worship, holy Sabbaths, holy families,” and that by so doing they might better anticipate that time when “the Tabernacle of God [Christ] is coming down to dwell with men.” Through unceasing prayer and the government’s absolute devotion to the establishment of an all but theocratic state, Sedgwick preached that the English Parliament literally had the ability to move God so that he would “at last establish and make Jerusalem [here, England] a praise in the earth.” This millenarianism was exceptionally prevalent in the Puritan sermons to Parliament. The overwhelming religious narrative of the time was that the civil war was the beginning of the end of time when Christ, “the Tabernacle of God,” would return to earth and when a new Jerusalem, in this case a true Christian state established in England through revolutionary reformation, would be created.

If we examine the religious imagery that the Puritans invoked, some of the anxieties and impossibilities of this approach begin to surface. In John’s Apocalypse, the new Jerusalem is described as a Kingdom of the utmost purity and religious harmony: ...nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life... But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever.

The new Jerusalem of the Apocalypse is an image wrought of absolutes; the concern is for a kind of holy cleanliness, cohesion, and order that will last for eternity. Its invocation in the political sphere may be hard for the modern reader to conceptualize, but for the Puritans a project of such absolutes was not only necessary, but essential as the proof that their revolution was a divinely sanctioned success.

It was not enough for the Puritans to accomplish a segregated religious rebellion, but rather they had to enact that rebellion in the civil sphere as well, enforcing their “true” Christian church on the English state. In the new Jerusalem of England, God’s Law would be canonized as English law. Historian Michael Walzer characterizes the Puritan project in similarly strong terms, noting that: "The ministers suggested the literal possibility of “opting out” of the world of idleness and confusion... But they wished also... to create a society in which godly order would be the rule, and sin not a possible activity. The Puritans sensed in themselves... the strength and energy to control human wickedness even as they transcended the world of sin..." But of course, such purity was impossible for the revolutionary government to unanimously define, let alone achieve, and the failure of Puritan factions to unify on the question of what constituted Godly Law led to powerful anxieties surrounding disunity and doctrinal disputes.

These disputes were particularly troubling given the combination of millenarianism and the role of scripture in Protestantism. The Puritan understanding of Christianity was based strongly on a supposedly “plain and clear” interpretation of the scripture— that, as true Christians, they had access to a special kind of revelation from God that would literally illuminate the true meaning of scripture. In light of this passionate belief and in the throes of successful rebellion, it is easy to see why the Puritan movement could fracture and collapse under the necessity of unifying a set of intensely personal and visionary biblical interpretations. In his analysis of this visionary rhetoric, historian John Knot attempts to make clear the personal nature of this struggle for ideological coherence: "The living temple [of the scripture] was an elusive yet irresistible ideal. To achieve it those who felt the power of the Word most strongly, shaping them to take their places in the communion of the elect and perfecting the Reformation in England, seized upon texts that pointed the way to their particular version of the ideal..." These ministers “who felt the power of the Word [scripture] most strongly” emerged from their scriptural communion daily into the political realities of their time, when the unthinkable overthrow of monarchy had already been accomplished and everything seemed possible; and they emerged with intensely personal ideologies drawn from their understanding of the scripture.

That these ideologies refused to conform with one another produced the gravest of anxieties. Here, we might compare the Puritan project to the similar project of John Calvin. In his discussion of John Calvin’s theological and social anxieties, William Bouwsma has also touched on this tension between the desire for very personal visionary interpretations to cohere and the disorder this desire was wont to yield. Although he speaks particularly of Calvin the man rather than any group of Protestants as a whole, his remarks are illuminating to the common problem of establishing a Protestant Christian society, especially one as heavily influenced by Calvinist thought as Puritan England was. Noting a strong connection between Calvin’s discussion of good and evil and his discussion of order and disorder, Bouwsma draws our attention to the fact that “salvation often presented itself to [Calvin] less as blessedness or the recovery of personal righteousness, than as a reassuring restoration of order.” The sense of righteousness for ministers in a personal communion with the Holy Spirit comes from within; but the salvation that the ministers hoped for in the civil state, which would in turn justify their sense of communion with God, could only be achieved with the establishment of an ordered society that fit their eschatological model.

= The Beginning of the World =

Understanding both the sense of epic potential that was created by locating the English civil war at the end of the world, and the resulting frustration and anxiety that arose from Puritan attempts to legislate man into a sinless state, we can turn to Milton. We should be immediately attentive to the fact that Milton’s vision of good Christian government is almost always preoccupied not with the literature of apocalypse and the utopian end of time, but with the literature of Genesis and the sinful beginning of time. Both Milton and his more proscriptive peers shared an epic, visionary sense of their time and the potential placed before the English government; and both styled their notion of the perfect Christian state off a model of God’s governance. The difference between them was not in looking to God for a model, but in where to look to God for a model. In a redeemed and recreated world, one would expect God’s law to be for the good and, though proscriptive, adherence to it would not require compulsion. Everyone who might have objected to God’s law would have been put cleanly out of the way in the apocalyptic battle with the forces of the Antichrist. But in a fallen world, Milton had a different vision of God’s governance, the main and recurring example of which was God’s relationship to Adam’s disobedience. Milton’s emphasis on the literature of Genesis is itself a tacit message to his peers. Where they paint England as a new apocalyptic creation, Milton places the Englishman alongside Adam: he is, and remains for the time, fallen. Milton’s wariness of fallen man thus translates into wariness of a state whose laws are written by Englishmen, and to wariness at the notion that English subjects can be governed into an unfallen state.

Thus, when Milton writes in opposition to the censorship that the revolutionary government would impose, he frames his argument in terms of Adam’s relationship to God, rather than the redeemed and perfected church’s relationship to God: "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. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill?" Rather than forbid man the knowledge of evil through censors, governing the possibility of evil out of the world, Milton argued that the English government should do as God did, giving its subjects the same liberty that God’s permissive will gave to Adam: the liberty of his reason. Milton argues that “when God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing,” and implies that to deny the English people the same liberty on the basis that they might then choose wrongly is tantamount to a “complain[t] of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress.” Rather than seeing the potential of a true Christian government to perfectly realize God’s will in civil law, Milton saw its potential in its Godly ability to tolerate man’s fallen and often stumbling struggle to discern good from evil and win or lose his righteousness on his own terms.

Where Milton juxtaposes his conception of a divinely tolerant English state against the Puritan conception of a divinely proscriptive English state, so too does he juxtapose his conception of the fallibility of human reason against the radical Puritan understanding of reason. Reason occupied a strange place in the minds of radical Puritans, bound up in the paradox of their demand for coherence. In his discussion on Change and Continuity in 17th Century England, Christopher Hill has already noted the precarious position that the concept of reason held, renounced in favor of an unquestioning faith by some radical Puritans, and invoked by other radical Puritans, who often spoke of the shared authority of reason side by side with the inviolate authority of the scripture. Most Puritan preachers called the arguments for their interpretations of scripture “reasons,” and elaborated upon the reasons that they gave with a tone of assumed agreement. Reason gained its authority in most circumstances on the assumption that men’s reasons should agree with one another. If true Christians, in the Puritan view, should share inspiration and agree on scripture, then reasonable men should share a common human reason and agree on what was reasonable.

When Milton wrote of human reason, he gave it a similar authority; but instead of assuming agreement, he acknowledged its variability. Thus, when Milton wrote against the establishment of a religiously proscriptive law, he did so on the basis that human reason could lead men to “various understandings” without special revelation from God, “which no man can know at all times to be in himself, much less to be at any time for certain in any other.” Milton believed that revelation from God as well as human reason were required for a true understanding of scripture, and acknowledged how tricky it can be to rightly discern whether or not another man is truly inspired by God. These beliefs led Milton to conclude that “clearly that no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other men’s consciences but their own.”

Strangely, though, this defense of liberty against the tyranny of particular men’s reasoning is based, in part, upon the authority of the “dictate of reason:” "Whence I here mean by conscience or religion that full persuasion whereby we are assured that our belief and practice,... is according to the will of God and his Holy Spirit within us, which we ought to follow much rather than any law of man, as not only his word everywhere bids us, but the very dictate of reason tells us..." When asserting the variability and ultimate unreliability of human reason as an authoritative judge, one might expect Milton to call on a higher source of authority than the very reason he indites. But Milton’s strategy is quite the opposite: he undermines reason by calling upon its authority, even upon its “dictate.” This is because for Milton, human reason was a faculty by which man might discern and debate the difference between good and evil, but it was never a faculty which could justify religious or civil compulsion. When a decision was not a matter of personal revelation, man’s reason was a source of authority not because it was perfect, but because it was the best that men could do. The struggle to discern good from evil with an imperfect reason was not, for Milton, simply a problematic hurdle of mortal existence to be overcome by a new creation, but the very definition of the Christian religion.

This simultaneous insistence on the variability of human reason, and the insistence on maintaining the liberty of reason was, for Milton, the fundamental social position of the Christian religion. Where the radical Puritans were concerned mainly with the soon-to-come, and thus pleaded for Godly laws and unifying doctrines, Milton’s emphasis was on the Christian struggle. He was preoccupied with the “mean-time” in which men lived, and his concern in politics and religion was focused on the interim. Thus where Christopher Hill, writing on the poet in relation to the English revolution, claims that Milton should be placed side by side with more radical and millenarian Puritans like Sedgwick, the quote that he uses to illustrate this similarity should draw our attention to the great difference between Milton and his more radical contemporaries. Looking forward to an England in which ideological unity was realized, Sedgwick preached that “when we have more light we shall consent quickly.” Sedgwick eagerly awaited that time of a little more light when Puritans would agree and form the perfect laws; for him, the new Jerusalem could happen at any moment, and the English revolutionary government should be modeled after it. But for Milton, the end times would be “Last in the Clouds of Heav’n to be reveald;” no one knew when the end of days would come, not the angels in heaven and certainly not a group of well-meaning but imperfect mortal men.

In Milton’s view, man should respect the scripture as the sole source of inviolate authority over the traditions or interpretations of other men, even men who believed themselves to be divinely inspired. There was something about the human struggle to discern good from evil, that struggle of the “mean time” before the apocalypse, that God sanctified: "He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d &amp; unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race... 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." The true wayfaring Christian cannot live in the garden well-tended and free of all temptation. The desire to remove all evil through proscriptive law is an evil not only because any such law would be muddled by human reason and thus proscribe what it should not, but also because the struggle to reason and try to choose the good is itself what saves man. Milton did not see the mean time of mortal history as a desolation, but itself as part of God’s providence. A Christian social and religious order had to be based on a reverence for the liberty to struggle that God had given man rather than the law that would keep temptation at arm’s length. Indeed, it was only when he struggled that a Christian was justified in his faith, so that no one could be satisfied “who hath not liberty to serve God, and to save his own soul, according to the best light which God hath planted in him to that purpose.” If reason was, as Milton argued, a choice exercised between good and evil, then allowing one man’s reason to be arbiter over another was the same as allowing one man to choose between salvation and damnation for another.

= The Idolatry of Theology =

Milton rejected and critiqued this imposition of the theologian’s will on the will of the people through civil authority in the most hostile of terms. After the failure of the English revolution and the return of King Charles II, Milton looked back on the failure of the rebellion. In Milton’s portrait of that failure we can see his vision of the revolutionary government’s attempt to usurp God’s authority. In a final plea to the English people not to submit again to the tyranny of a King, Milton likened the failure of the revolution to the hubris of Babel: "Where is the goodly tower of a commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overthrow kings and be another Rome in the west? The foundations indeed they lay gallantly, but fell into a worse confusion, not of tongues, but of factions, than those of the tower of Babel; and have left no memorial of their work behind them remaining but in the common laughter of Europe." It is telling that when Milton wrote of the failure of the revolution, he remembered the curse of Babel. Babel was a recurring and important image for Milton, especially after the failure of the revolution. In his great epic Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael describes the event for Adam. In this telling, Babel is described as an “Empire tyrannous” whose Lord, Nimrod, is named after the Hebrew word for ‘rebellion.’ It is Nimrod’s ambition, in this telling, that drives men to aspire to build a tower to heaven, and “get themselves a name... / Regardless whether good or evil fame.”

If, in Paradise Lost, God curses Babel because of the vanity and rebellion of its Lord, is it not probable that Milton saw something of the curse in the failure of the English revolution? The words that Milton chose in his telling of the story in Paradise Lost are particularly damning; the Lord of Babel, a rebel who seeks to build his way to heaven by his own imposition, is particularly like Satan, and the rebellion in question a curious sort of self-idolatry: through his “Empire tyrannous” he attempts to place himself on the throne of God. If Milton believed that no man had the right to compel another man’s liberty, then what was the exhortation to Godly law? Who could write Godly law but God? By pleading that one interpretation or another might be enacted as God’s law to be enforced upon a population, wasn’t this to aspire to put one’s self on God’s throne?

Milton, too, had desired a cohesive state; but for Milton, this cohesion had to be based upon two key principles: the liberty of Christian men to reason about scripture, or theologize, for themselves, and the ultimate authority of the precise language of scripture. Milton’s cynicism of human reason as arbiter only increased in the years following the failure of the rebellion, so it is not surprising that Milton’s later work expresses an increasing distaste for theology, the art of reasoning about scripture, as anything other than a forum for discussion. As a forum for discussion, theology could be fruitful and could lead men’s reason aright, in time. As an endeavor to craft proscriptive doctrines, theology was dangerous and particularly prone to the curse of confusion. The year before his death, Milton wrote a pamphlet imploring English Protestants to put aside their differences and unite against the toleration of Catholic worship; to Milton, this freedom from the oppressive presence of what he viewed as the Catholic “heresy” might have seemed the last vestige of the success that the revolutionary government had won.

Unlike Sedgwick, who had preached for a little more light to bring agreement, Milton begged his fellow Protestants not to be anxious about doctrinal agreement, but rather to put aside their disputes and to come together under their commonly shared beliefs: the first, that the only religious authority was scripture, and the second, that it was not permissible for one Protestant to practice intolerance against another, no matter what their differences of doctrine. “And if all Protestants, as universally as they hold these two principles, so attentively and religiously would observe them,” Milton wrote, “they would avoid and cut off many debates and contentions, schisms, and persecutions which too oft have been among them...” It was too great a trust in human reason that drove good Christians, who might otherwise cooperate, apart: They insisted on the preeminence of the reasons for their interpretations of scriptures against those of their fellows. Indeed, if one were to offer their own reasons for interpretations of the scripture as insurmountable ones, reasons to be adopted by the commonwealth as-is, then what difference was there between Protestant and Catholic?

This conception of reason and compulsion preoccupied Milton’s vision of traditional theology. There is something in the tone of resentment and mistrust with which Milton referred to theologians that suggests he blamed them, in no small part, for the confusion of sects and divisions which fell upon Protestants. In part, this mistrust can be seen in the particular doctrines that Milton denounced or defended. Milton’s criteria for approval of a doctrine rested, in large part, on its root in particularly biblical language. Thus, the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation he called an error, as well as the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, while he defended Arians and Socinians in their denial of the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis that “terms of trinity, triunity, co-essentiality, tripersonality and the like, they reject... as scholastic notions, not to be found in scripture.” Milton disparaged the establishment of doctrines in extra-biblical language, as though, to the theologians that espoused them, the words of scripture were not good enough. Mocking the “sophistic subtleties” which made mysteries out of plain doctrines by weaving strange webs of words, Milton laid the blame for Protestant contention largely on the doctrines which had a long heritage in tradition and had been given names not to be found in scripture. Indeed, there is something of the iconoclast in his treatment of these doctrines, suspicious always that some scholastic summary of the scripture was to be set up against the Word of God. The men who would impose their doctrines on one another were guilty of a sin of pride, and they consequently made idols of their doctrines.

Christ’s rebuke to the Pharisees who attempted to teach the Messiah their customs could not have been far from Milton’s mind: “And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.” By establishing complicated doctrines which drew off human reason and used human words rather than the words of God, theologians risked establishing traditions that could confuse men as to the meaning of the scriptures. It is little surprising, then, that the only specifically theological treatise Milton wrote should criticize human opinions in matters of theology. There is a certain irony in titling a work De Doctrina Christiana, “On Christian Doctrine,” and then proclaiming that he will “fill [his] pages even to redundance with quotations from Scripture, that so little space as possible might be left for [his] own words, even when they arise from the context of revelation itself.” This is almost tantamount to saying that the only good Christian doctrine is the scripture, and that the opinion of the theologians who “have been wont to fill whole pages with explanation of their own opinions, thrusting into the margin the text in support of their doctrine” is incidental.

It is the scripture which has authority in De Doctrina, both for the reader and the author, and this low view of theology as a discipline is reinforced throughout. In the introduction Milton claims that, upon reading the theologians of history, he: "...discover[ed] in many cases adverse reasonings [to the doctrine being propounded] either evaded by wretched shifts, or attempted to be refuted, rather speciously than with solidity, by an affected display of formal sophisms, or by a constant recourse to the quibbles of the grammarians; while what was most pertinaciously espoused as the true doctrine, seemed often defended, with more vehemence than strength of argument, by misconstructions of Scripture, or by the hasty deduction of erroneous inferences." Not only did this mean that “neither [his] creed nor [his] hope of salvation [could] be trusted to such guides,” but also that the project as a whole seemed wanting, at least as a method for establishing the proscriptive guidebook. He particularly denounces those that made “names” of heresies and who believed that “they should stamp with the invidious name of heretic or heresy without trying the doctrine by a comparison with Scripture testimonies.” Those who do so are, for Milton, “unjust and foolish men” who breed contention within the church and will be regarded themselves as heretics at the end of days; instead, Milton exhorts his readers to remember that Christian liberty is to sift through and choose to agree or disagree with every piece of interpretation. For Milton, rather than the espousal of personal opinions, projects like the Doctrina were meant as either mnemonic aides for their authors, or the beginnings of larger conversations with those who read them; but even in his own work of theology he exhorted his readers to “suspend [their] opinion on whatever points [they] may not feel [themselves] fully satisfied, till the evidence of Scripture prevail, and persuade [their] reason into assent and faith.”

= The Alternative of Poetry as Prophecy =

Milton’s view of theology reflected not so much a suspicion of human reason as a whole as it did a suspicion of the project of imposing one man’s reason upon another. Despite his extensive theological treatise and political prose, however, Milton did not consider himself primarily a theologian or a politician, but a poet; and it is in poetry that Milton found the proper form for the discussion of those religious matters that seem mysterious without divine inspiration. In an autobiographical interlude to one of his tractates, Milton compared the Biblical text to various forms of classical poetry. He refers to the book of Job as a “brief model of an epic,” the Song of Songs as a “divine pastoral drama,” and the Apocalypse of Saint John as “the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.” Not only are various books of the Bible likened to various poetic genres, but for Milton they are seen as some of the best poetic writing in existence, so that “those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets... not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear over all the kinds of lyric poetry to be incomparable.” Certainly there are the laws of the Bible, but if we look for a moment at this source of supreme authority for Milton through his own eyes, we will see it as a collection of the greatest poetry and drama ever to be composed.

Not only does Milton claim a great deal of the Bible as poetry, but he also declares the special role of the poet, calling the talent for poetry “the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed” and often abused. It is not merely meant for entertainment, but it is also a position of “power, beside the office of the pulpit.” True poetry does not concern itself with proscriptive truths, but with exhortations and condemnations; and true poetry can also teach men by painting out and describing “all that is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man’s thoughts from within.” Milton saw the art of poetry as tapping into that transcendently revealed vision of God. It should not impose a proscriptive law upon its reader or its listener, but give its reader and its listener new visions of the truth that they might reason upon. Poetry stood in a class of its own, outside of theology but still profoundly religious and ultimately more useful. Poetry could ardently explore alternative truths with a vision, where theology could only dryly speculate on them; poetry could give life to a vision, and by giving it that life, it could be a new kind of revealed truth, not equal to the scripture in its importance and authority, but in the same class.

A prime example of the exploratory potential Milton saw in poetry are the early paired poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. First published in 1645, these poems are meant to stand side by side. L’Allegro, a celebration of the “active life” begins “Hence, loathed Melancholy” and ends with the couplet “These delights, if thou canst give, / Mirth with thee, I mean to live.” Il Penseroso, a celebration of the “pensive life” begins “Hence, vain deluding joyes” and ends with the couplet “These pleasures Melancholy give, / And I with thee will choose to live.” Milton may or may not lean toward the “pensive life” as a more worthy alternative, but he is not insincere in his celebration of the “active life.” The joys of L’Allegro are compellingly written rather than spurned, and readers may be further convinced of the poet’s sincerity in exploring the “active life” as a viable alternative by the invocations of virtues defended in other of Milton’s poetry and prose. When he writes in L’Allegro of “Laughter holding both his sides. / Com, and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastick toe, / And in thy right hand lead with thee, / The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty” we are instantly reminded of Milton’s passionate concern with liberty. His image of Liberty in L’Allegro, while specifically that of a Mountain Nymph, and perhaps implying a specifically sylvan liberty to wander and roam, is not extolled in a tone of insincerity. The light-heartedness of the poem should not be taken as an indictment of its subject-matter.

Quite the contrary; the lightness of L’Allegro is an example of the form and rhythm of the poetry reflecting its content and topic. If it had been Milton’s intention to use L’Allegro as a refutation of one sort of liberty, or laughter, or any number of potential virtues that Milton explores in the poem, we might expect to find a ‘true’ liberty represented in the companion poem Il Penseroso; but the word “liberty” does not occur in Il Penseroso, suggesting instead a division of valued virtues between the two poems. That Milton does not discuss the “active life” in the words or tone of a man living the “pensive life” is further evidence of the sincerity of his exploration. For that is what L’Allegro is: an exploration of one mode of living, taken with an open mind and given its due. It is an exploration for the author, offered up to the reader for his own exploration, and it is placed side by side with the exploration of an alternative. These two alternatives of life are held side by side, and the question of choice is left open, both to the author and the reader. L’Allegro offers fancy, liberty and laughter; Il Penseroso offers sagacity and holiness, and freedom from “this fleshy nook” in higher contemplation. Milton, as author of these poems, has left his readers free to choose their preference; and one can imagine that most readers would choose both, straying between these alternatives at different moments.

In both content and form, then, Milton began to grapple with the problem of choice in some of his earliest poetry, with more freedom than he could have in theological prose. In the theological realm, a man’s opinion necessarily boiled down to his doctrines, which, from Milton’s perspective, were only sound if they contained very little of himself and an abundance of scripture carefully and insightfully interwoven. Poetry, on the other hand, could explore the alternatives— an active or a pensive life in the case of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso— without condemning or advocating one over the other. In his examination of what he called Milton’s Poetry of Choice, Leslie Brisman has advocated that the moments where the reader must choose in Milton’s poetry open up a kind of interpretive space. This interpretive space has an almost mystical quality for Milton. As the inspired gift of God, poetry allows Milton the opportunity to communicate his transcendent vision of the world to his readers; by giving his reader a choice, Milton has given the reader something to reason upon, and discern between, literally giving them a visionary battleground upon which to struggle between good and evil. Here, Milton is able to act as an intermediary to God, without the risk of becoming the usurper of God’s authority.

In the case of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, he has given the reader something to reason upon that does not necessarily have a morally right or wrong answer. A man’s salvation does not seem to hang in the balance between his approval of the active or the pensive life. The alternatives in these paired poems are not black and white, not true doctrine and false heresy, but rather preferences that could be mingled and interchanged. Milton’s inspired link to God is little put to the test in this light exploration, but it would be tested later in his life, when he authored that great epic for which he is most well-known. If L’Allegro and Il Penseroso offer light alternatives, Paradise Lost offers some of the most profound and terrible alternatives. In Paradise Lost, the readers’ salvation really does seem to hang in the balance; for on the one side we have Satan, the great tempter, and Milton does not shy from making him an alluring and appealing character; and on the other side we have Milton’s God who seems almost tyrannical at times. In the center, we have Adam and Eve threatened with temptation by Satan, as Milton puts his theory of poetic inspiration to the test and attempts to “justify the ways of God to men.”

= Choice in Paradise Lost =

In the third book of Paradise Lost, in his discussion of man’s forthcoming fall, God claims that “Reason also is a choice.” Many years prior to writing Paradise Lost, in the “Areopagitica,” his famous political tract opposing religious censorship, Milton wrote that “reason is but choosing.” In the latter case, Milton was defending man’s right to reason and to choose for himself; in the former case, we should be attentive to the fact that Milton placed almost the very same words, an equation between reason and choice which at first glance may seem an odd one to make, in the mouth of God.

This speech takes place when we are first introduced to God, before we have ever met Adam and Eve; God speaks of man’s fall as if it has already happened, running his sentences about man’s fall that is yet to be in with sentences about Satan’s fall which has already happened. Explaining the situation to the heavenly hosts, God remarks first on Satan’s unswerving desire for revenge so that, “through all restraint broke loose he wings his way / Not far off heav’n... / ... with purpose to assay / If [man] by force he can destroy, or worse, / By some false guile pervert...” Here, God is speaking about an action which, to the reader’s perspective, happens in the present. The end of the second book has just left the reader with the image of Satan flying through Chaos to reach Earth. But when God completes his sentence, he switches tenses, foretelling the main action of the poem. The hypothetical “If [man] ... By some false guile pervert...” is turned to a certainty: “and shall pervert.”

The confusion in this speech continues, as Milton’s God explains that “man will harken to his [Satan’s] glozing lies, / and easily transgress the sole command...” continuing to speak of man’s fall as a certainty. But when he continues, he seems to have run Adam and Satan together, so that when he claims he has made Adam “Sufficient to have stood though free to fall,” his next sentence begins “Such I created all th’ ethereal Powers / And Spirits, both them who stood and them who failed.” It seems as though God should still be talking about Adam, but without transition he is referring again to the fallen Angels, the “ethereal Powers” who fell. Within the course of a few lines, God has moved from the present, to the future, to the past, and between Satan, man and the fallen angels, nearly confusing the subjects of his speech and certainly running them together in his discussion of the consequences of their disobedience.

Although much has been said of the unsatisfying nature of Milton’s God, let us look at this speech, in which time, place, subject, and object all seem to shift indiscriminately, as the frame around which this firm assertion is positioned: “Reason is also a choice.” The convolution of God’s speech is so great that all readers stand confused. We are forced to stop, to try to work out who God is referring to at each point, and who he is ultimately talking to, and in what time. In this moment of Paradise Lost that so seems to break down time and space, God seems rather frustratingly to stand outside the poem spatiality and temporally. For a moment, it is almost as though God has broken the fourth wall of the poem, and begun to speak to the reader. Reason is a choice, and how you interpret this poem, whether Satan is righteous or villainous, that too is your choice: so reason carefully.

It is telling, then, that throughout the poem Milton preserves moments of choice for the reader reflected both in structure and content, and in so doing invites the reader to exercise or restrain his reason as he sees fit. Structurally, these moments of choice are presented as paired alternatives or comparisons, similar to his work with L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Indeed, there are whole stanzas marked off by elaborate postulates joined together with comparative conjunctions, all in the voice of the narrator. Astronomy is a common motif for these forays into often tangled comparison, no doubt due to the religiously controversial nature of revisions to the Aristotelian model of the universe. While Catholics and Protestants made a religious issue out of proposed modifications to the old astronomical model, Milton places such questions outside the purview of religious truth. For example, when Satan first arrives in the realm of the earth and makes his way to land upon a sun spot: “There lands the Fiend, a spot which like perhaps / Astronomer in the sun’s lucent orb / Through his glazed optic tube yet never saw.” It would have been an easy matter to assert that Satan was like the spots which Galileo saw, and yet Milton qualifies this statement with a “perhaps,” distancing his vision of the sun from the vision in an optic glass.

While this is but a simple example, the poetry has many more complex ones, as when God orders the heavenly hosts to throw the world into disarray as punishment for Adam and Eves’ sins: "Some say he bids the angels turn askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more From the sun’s axle; they with labor pushed Oblique the centric globe: some say the sun Was bid turn reigns from equinoctial road... ...to bring in change Of seasons to each clime; else had the spring Perpetual smiled on earth with vernant flow’rs... ...else how had the world Inhabited, though sinless more than now, Avoided pinching cold and scorching heat?" Here, Milton the narrator has proposed two possibilities. “Some say” the earth was tilted to create seasonal change, while “some say” the sun was steered from her course to produce this change and the hardships that come with it; and both of these possibilities are justified with the two alternatives. If the heavens did not change, then we would still be in perpetual spring, or how would Eden have avoided the seasons? Of course, it is not clear from the poem whether the “else”s of the stanza are still under the influence of the “some say”s. Is Milton saying that some say one thing, and some say the other, and one of them must be true, otherwise how can we account for the seasons? Or is he saying that some say one, some say the other, and those same people say what they do because they believe that seasons are indicative of a fallen world? It is impossible to say from the poetry, but the matter of these comparisons have been safely bracketed out of the ‘reality’ of the poem. They are a tangent of hypothetical speculation. This hypothetical speculation, these “perhaps”es, and “some say”s have been bracketed off throughout Paradise Lost, and whenever they are thus bracketed out they are always the product of human reason rather than the accounts of scripture. Be it Galileo’s report of what he has seen in his telescope, or the Christian theories of pre and post lapsian astronomy, be they stories of Greek gods, or doctrines of an Eden without intercourse.

In addition to this structural bracketing, the content of the poem deals directly with this sort of comparative choice, this speculation between alternatives, twice. The first time, as an off-handed insult to the demons who sit in hell philosophizing, Milton the narrator describes them as entertaining their contests and debates as a distraction from their torment: "Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate— Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argued then, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and apathy, and glory and shame: Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!— Yet, with a pleasing sorcery, could charm Pain for a while or anguish, and excite Fallacious hope, or arm th’ obdured breast With stubborn patience as with triple steel." Here their vain comparisons are nothing but mazes, and mazes in some ways strangely akin to the webs of conjunction and qualification with which Milton safely ensconces the opinions of others within his poem. There is something profoundly ironic about demons in Hell sitting and debating “foreknowledge absolute” and “free will,” arguing with each other about whether God knew that they were to be damned from the beginning, or whether they were free. Their conversation ought to be all but irrelevant by the time they find themselves in Hell. By having his demons engage in this particular debate, Milton may be drawing the reader’s attention to theologians of his own time who argued over the very same theological issues, often at the expense of what Milton saw as Christian unity.

More interestingly and more directly than with the demons, Milton allows the Angel Raphael to deal with this issue of comparisons in his conversation with Adam. When Adam expresses his wonder at the seeming excess of the heavens to spend so much in light and beauty and movement just to bring illumination to two humans on the earth, Raphael chides him gently for his speculation: "To ask or search, I blame thee not; for Heaven Is as the book of God before thee set, Wherein to read his wonderous works, and learn His seasons, hours, or days, or months, or years: ... the rest From Man or Angel the great Architect Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge His secrets to be scanned by them who ought Rather admire; or, if they list to try Conjecture, he his fabrick of the Heavens Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide Hereafter; when they come to model Heaven And calculate the stars, how they will wield The mighty frame; how build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances; how gird the sphere With centrick and eccentrick scribbled o’er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb: Already by thy reasoning this I guess" Raphael describes reasoning in a particularly comical light. A messenger from God, Raphael would have Adam believe that his speculation about the heavens is useless, especially given the peril he is in with the threat of temptation by Satan. Raphael’s chiding is a foreshadowing of the Angel Michael’s assertion that Adam’s knowledge of Christ as his redeemer is “the sum / Of wisdom” and his warning that Adam should “hope no higher, / though all the stars / Thou knewest 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.” Although Michael here does not offer a comparison, he claims that those objects of Adam’s comparison are insignificant compared to his acceptance of and faith in his salvation; indeed, that Adam’s hope for some “higher” knowledge would be distracting from the salvific knowledge of Christ.

In both these cases, and in the cases of Milton’s structural bracketing and qualification, Milton attempts to distance the reality of the poem from doctrinal proscriptions and traditions. Man’s conjectures about how Adam and Eve might have reproduced had they not fallen, about if and why the stars have what seems an imperfect course are bracketed out of the poem both through the direct exhortations of the narrator and the angels, and structurally through use of comparative stanzas of poetry. In the context of the fall of man, these reasonings and conjectures are robbed both of their authority and their importance. Certainly Milton will place authority in scripture throughout Paradise Lost, but is there any additional source of authority? If Milton does not place authority in the doctrines of others or in the observations of astronomers, then where in his poem does Milton place authority?

To answer this question, we will turn to a moment in Paradise Lost when Milton has qualified his retelling of a Greek myth. In the beginning of the poem, Milton relates that one of the demons who has helped to build the palace in Hell is the creature that “men called Mulciber.” As he takes readers through the story, he qualifies this retelling of the Greek tale, calling it an error: "Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell From Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day, and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star, On Lemnos, th’ Aegaean isle. Thus they relate, Erring; for he with this rebellious rout Fell long before; nor aught availed him now To have built in Heaven high towers; nor did he scape By all his engines, but was headlong sent With his industrious crew, to build in Hell." The Greek tale is an error, but the story that Milton invents to follow it is even more of a fancy. It has no precedent in the Biblical stories, nor is it a traditional story about Mulciber; Milton envisioned it, and yet this vision is presented within the poem as truth.

In a recent lecture at Smith College, Paul Albers drew attention to this particular passage as what he called Milton’s “mythologizing.” While Albers was more concerned with focusing attention on the imaginative space that Milton opened in the poem by placing it outside of a tradition, what concerns us here is the authority that Milton gives these passages. For Milton, the imaginative vision of the poet has more authority than the efforts of human reason to distill truths from scripture or the book of Nature. It is no mystery that the Biblical stories should be given a sort of authority in Milton’s poetry, but what is more noteworthy and mysterious is the fact that Milton puts the authority of his own poetic vision on par with the authority that he gives scripture, at least within the poem.

Indeed, Milton’s “mythologizing” is nothing more than an interweaving of his own poetically inspired vision of the events of the Bible with text almost cribbed from it. While he is careful to bracket out and qualify the assertions of the classical authors and his contemporaries, his own fancies have the same authority in the poem that the Scripture has: both are narratively represented as true. This kind of imaginative authority is striking given Milton’s cynicism about man’s ability to reason proscriptively on Scripture. But for Milton, poetic authority has its special value because it allows the author, like the God of Paradise Lost, to look out through the poem and allow the reader to make of it what he will. It cuts through the potential tyranny of reason by circumventing it, offering up to the reader a vision which evokes a response. If the vision is honest and true, if it carries authority, then the response will be a reflection of the reader, not the poet.

Even in moments of totally original composition that have no scriptural or traditional foundation, Milton’s Paradise Lost manages to carry a qualitatively similar authority to scripture— something that theology could never do. Rather than craft an instruction manual on how to be a righteous Christian, Paradise Lost serves to complicate man’s faith, giving him a glimpse of Satan in all of his glory and allowing him to contemplate the justice of Satan’s fate under the illusion that this contemplation is confined to the poem. But this poem, from Milton’s perspective, carries with it true visions, becoming an extension of the reader’s experience, and the reader must remember the warnings of narrator, Angels, and even God in his encounter with the most compelling and tempting of all sinners.

= Authority of Reason and Poetry =

Milton defended man’s right to choose freely between good and evil for himself with an undeniable passion, reflected in his political prose, theological treatise, and his poetry. But the source of this passion was his visionary relationship with his faith. If we set Milton the visionary against contemporaries who professed and believed in the power of human reason we find that, in this case, the visionary prophet is the champion of freedom, and the “reasonable” men the ideological oppressors. This image is certainly complicated by the restraint that Milton would have placed on religious freedom— for Milton, of course, religious freedom meant Christian and Protestant freedom— but it is hard to say how his vision of tolerance and his fervent respect for each man to be arbiter of his own conscience might have played out against modern conceptions of religious tolerance and censorship.

Regardless, the result is a compelling critique of reason as a source of authority, and a compelling alternative source of authority in the form of visionary, non-proscriptive poetry. It is telling that readers are more likely to respect Satan than to hate Paradise Lost— so perhaps there is something to this conception of the authority of visionary poetry. We may take from it what we will because it does not compel us one way or another. Instead, it presents us with a vision that, in some very tangible way, becomes a part of our experience and our own moral journey.

The purpose of examining Milton’s critique here is not, however, to undermine the authority of modern science or modern reason, but rather to acquaint us with the history of this authority and propose alternative forms of authority that may not be as antithetical to liberty as modern caricatures would have us believe. The visionary religious imagery of the English Puritans remains with us in modern Western culture, manifesting itself in new forms. The modern narrative of the utopian potential of reason and science to liberate men and transform the world can be seen in a new light when we look back on Puritan attempts to transform the world into a utopia. The Puritans used a story of apocalypse and utopia to overthrow monarchy and attempt to create a Godly kingdom on earth. Milton, on the other hand, used an equally passionate vision of prophecy even more divorced from human reason to argue for a kind of religious toleration that would not be put into practice for almost a century after his death. It is not that these images should be suspect, but that we should understand their power to motivate humanity towards seemingly impossible ends.

What is it about the image of apocalypse, the image of purity, the image of destiny, and the image of man’s fallen nature that so continues to drive Western, and particularly Anglo and American thought? How is that sense of destiny preserved and altered in light of various forms of secularization? These are pressing questions, and by understanding the heritage of both the religious imagery and the various forms of authority invoked to support it, we may be all the better prepared to frame answers to those contemporary questions in which the future of good and evil, tyranny and freedom, still seem to hang in the balance.

= References =