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From Epithet to Logic: Miltonic Epic and the Closure of Existence 7 In 1672, two years before his death, John Milton published a logic textbook which he had written, it is quite certain, sometime in the years 1641-1647, and most probably sometime during the years 1645-1647, when he was teaching his two nephews and some other boys. The work is in Latin, as textbooks in all subjects normally had always been in Western Europe from classical times. Milton's concern with logic, evinced by this book, shows itself throughout the corpus of his writings, as many modern studies have made clear.l Nowhere perhaps does this concern show itself more than in Paradise Lost. It is to certain questions raised by this fact that the present chapter addresses itself. I About Milton as logician, one thing can readily be said: he contributed nothing to the internal development of logic, directly or indirectly. Ioannis Miltoni Artis logicae plenior institutio ad Petri Rami methodum concinnata (London, 1672), despite its title styling it ... Milton's ... Logic ... , is essentially no more than an edition of Ramus' Dialectica or Logica incorporating minor Miltonic idiosyncrasies and a commentary which is largely George Downame's. And Ramus' Dialectica itself was 1. Modern studies of Milton's use of logic and of his references to logic in his various works are too numerous to mention here. I have reviewed most of them in the Introduction to the forthcoming English-language edition of Milton's Logic (the short English title here used for Milton's Latin work) referred to in n. 4 below. Questions concerning the dating of the Logic are also treated in this Introduction. 190 Closure and Print scientifically uneventful. To the internal development of logic Ramus had contributed only "random simplification," as Jennifer Ashworth has neatly put it.2 And yet Ramus' logic, and with it Milton's, is highly significant in the evolution of consciousness, which is to say in the extension of consciousness into the areas of life formerly preempted by the unconscious and subconscious. More than most logics, Ramist logic satisfied an inarticulated desire for closure, for order subject totally to the surveillance of consciousness. Ramist logic was in effect the perfect closed system: for it contained "method" as one of its parts, and method prescribed how the logic that contained it was to be organized and consequently how all thought was to be organized "logically" as a collection of closed fields separated from one another by "Solon's Law," invoked by Ramus for noetic organization though devised originally for plotting real estate in ancient Greece.3 Milton is at one with Ramus in situating method within logic. He is more explicit than Ramus in making clear that the "one and only method" of proceeding from the more general to the more particular applies properly to the interior organization of knowledge after it has been discovered and not to discovery as such, and he leaves to orators and poets rather than to logicians the study of the reversals and other concealments of method (crypsis methodi ) which are warranted by audiences not entirely amenable to logic! But method is as integral a part of Milton's as of any other Ramist logic. In Milton's case, Ramist logic is particularly significant because of its juncture in Milton's own sensibility with the epic tradition, which itself serves as an important index of the evolu2 . E. J. Ashworth, "Some Notes on Syllogistic in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 11 (1970),20. 3. Petrus Ramus, Scholarum rhetoricarum libri XX, in Scholae in liberales artes (Basel: E. Episeopius et Nicolai fratris haeredes, 1569), eols. 255-256, also in cols. 237-238, 292, etc. 4. Artis logicae plenior institutio, lib. ii, c. xviii, in The Works 0/ John Milton, ed. and trans. Allan H. Gilbert (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), IX, 474, 484. A new edition in new English translation by Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger is scheduled for publication soon by Yale University Press in vol. 8 of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. From Epithet to Logic 191 tion of consciousness. The original oral epic derives from and registers an oral noetic economy, in which knowledge was conceived , stored, recalled, and circulated largely through narratives about "heavy" or heroic figures. Heroic figures, as Havelock's work suggests, are typical not simply of epic as such, but of oral cultures as such.5 To store...

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