The Development of Milton's Thought: Law, Government, and Religion

One. Milton and Constancy of Thought

1 ONE Milton and Constancy of Thought Critical attitudes have long held that John Milton was unwaveringly aware of his thinking about his career and vocation, social life, government and politics, and religion in both doctrine and discipline. It has been alleged that his thinking was always constant, unchanged by time or event—somewhat like Satan’s boast. In Paradise Lost 1.252–53, Satan calls himself “One who brings / A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.”1 The concept becomes more horrendous as we think about it and about all the circumstances of changed venue (or context) and progression of time that might alter any thought the mind might engage—ever. What Milton the literary artist is doing in this line, of course, is depicting the psychology of this antihero who attempts to justify his unjustifiable actions to himself, not a hero who knows that his course of action 2 The Development of Milton’s Thought is valid. Milton is certainly not praising the “unchanged mind.” The Satan who continues in the poem repeatedly changes his mind about many things, even to admitting that “Pride and worse Ambition threw me down / Warring in Heav’n against Heav’ns matchless King” (4.40–41; my emphasis). Certainly if God is “matchless,” revolt against him is irrational, and if this is to be construed only as a post hoc realization, then it shows a “mind” that has been changed by time and event. The inadequate reading of the self-deceptive Satan since John Dryden until today need not be reprised here. One example of this claim of constancy is Edward Le Comte’s publication of three essays under the title of Milton ’s Unchanging Mind.2 The first, “Milton versus Time,” relates time and Milton’s career; the second, “Areopagitica as a Scenario for Paradise Lost,” studies the relationship between remarks in Areopagitica involving the Adam and Eve story and the Fall and in Paradise Lost as well as the aborted Arthuriad. The third reprints “Milton as Satirist and Wit.” The first is a clear example of William Riley Parker’s comment about the “legend” of Milton’s career, quoted below. For Le Comte, repetition and echo of language or image verifies an “unchanging mind.”3 In the first essay, recurrent attitudes toward unrelenting time define Milton’s “consistency.” The second essay indicates Milton’s epic ambitions expressed in 1638–39 concerning an Arthuriad that gave way (was “changed,” that is) to contemplation of a telling of the familiar and frequent biblical story in 1640–42 (and pursued intermittently thereafter until about 1665), and the evidential use of that story in 1644. The third offers satiric and witty examples of Milton’s writing over a number of years, with nothing indicating a lack of change. The first set of language examples does not support the idea of an ambitious/career/conceptual constancy. The second is an important contribution to understanding what Milton was thinking about in 1644 when he wrote Areopagitica and employed the story of Milton and Constancy of Thought 3 the Fall to argue humankind’s need to undergo “triall” to achieve true virtue, while Milton was at the same time writing a dramatic version of the loss of Paradise as told in Genesis.4 That need offers a theological and moral concept that pervades Milton’s thinking. Le Comte’s third essay is simply not relevant to the subject at hand. In his foreword to Milton’s Unchanging Mind, Douglas Bush relates the echoes of that book to Milton’s adaptation ofHorace’s“Epistles,”1.11.27,inCountCamilloCerdogni’s album when Milton was in Geneva on June 10, 1639: “Cœlum non animu[m] muto du[m] trans mare curro” (I change the sky but not my mind when I cross the sea). The point in adding this line to the last two of Comus (“—if Vertue feeble were / Heaven it selfe would stoope to her”) when he was in Geneva, the seat of Protestant theology, is to confirm Milton’s concordant belief in a benevolent God who looks out for the faithful, and notably in reference to the potential harm that his sea voyage and unfamiliar surroundings might have brought up. We can imagine Milton feeling that this “Calvinist” position sustained him during his experiences, social and religious, when in Roman Catholic Italy. The lines from Comus...