The End of Learning: Milton and Education (review)

Thomas Festa's The End of Learning: Milton and Education provides a thoughtful and creatively conceived analysis of John Milton's educational thought by reaching well beyond Of Education and Paradise Lost. The introduction articulates the core of his argument: "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" (3). This broad definition of Miltonic education allows Festa to pursue interesting connections across the writer's oeuvre. At times, however, the generality of his guiding question leads to a looseness of argument that prevents him from realizing the full potential of these connections.

The introduction draws on Of Education and other texts to set up Milton's overlapping pedagogical projects of the "imitation and love of God" and the formation of virtuous citizens. The following four chapters explore these intertwined goals, proceeding chronologically. Chapter 1 historicizes education by examining Milton's own reading processes through his marginal annotations in Paulus Stephanus's edition of Euripides. Arguing that Milton understood his emendations to be part of both his own reading process and that of his students, Festa shows how "By scripting their own transmuting exchanges with and within books, readers participate in an on-going textual conversation" (44). Festa connects this material evidence of active reading to Areopagitica's insistence upon "provisionally repairing the ruins of our imperfect and fallen knowledge" (44). The second chapter also traces Milton's engagement with texts, this time through an investigation of his scriptural interpretation in the divorce tracts. Describing the poet as a "Christian Hebraist," Festa argues that "for Milton the reasonable power of the Mosaic Law derives in effect from historicizing the teaching of Christ within the tradition of Hebraic interpretation" (57).

The heart of the book, however, is the last two chapters. Chapter 3 begins with Samuel Johnson's 1779 attack on Milton's educational failures and ends with Thomas Jefferson's 1786 celebration of Milton's rejection of the bondage of rhyme, using these eighteenth-century readers to contextualize the political nature of Miltonic education. The intervening discussion placing Milton's radical humanist education in relation to both the English Civil War and the Restoration is solid and insightful, though a bit unwieldy. It ends with a reading that extends the historical reach of Milton's famous comment about the bondage of rhyme in his note on the verse of Paradise Lost. Though this interesting point underscores the political project of Milton's epic, Festa does not make its relevance to education clear. Chapter 4 reaffirms the radical inwardness of Paradise Lost through a consideration of learning and teaching. Discussing both the educational scenes represented within the poem, primarily Adam's encounters with Raphael, Michael, and God, as well as the poem itself as an educational scene, Festa argues that "learning how to be, in Miltonic education, means remembering what is already within the human mind and spirit through the mediation of the messiah" (156). Thus, Festa reads the epic as exploring the revolutionary potential of education Milton described in his prose.

The most compelling and original thread in this book is not Milton's reading process, his Christian Hebraism, his radical humanism, or the "inward archives" of Paradise Lost, but the common theme of temporality that Festa has identified in these disparate elements of Milton's work. For this reason, the book would have benefited from a more traditional conclusion. The coda with which the study concludes sharply debunks a simplistic reading of Christ's rejection of classical learning in Paradise Regained through both a close reading of the text and a note on the publishing history of the poem, which Jacob Tonson bound with Of Education. A fuller synthesis, however, of the issues of temporality at the heart...