The Last Stages of Education: Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes

The civil and scientific revolutions of seventeenth-century England propelled many upheavals in educational theory and practice, and fundamentally redefined the aims of educational institutions. Early Modern educational institutions saw large-scale changes in the make-up of the student population, which was increasingly a mixture of aristocrats, gentry, merchants, and artisans. While they formerly had been “fountains of the ministers of the gospel,” the universities found themselves training a diverse student population for a greater number of occupations, which included not only the standard offices of governors, clergy, lawyers, and medical practitioners but also those which had been previously relegated to apprenticeships: schoolteachers, tradesmen, estate administrators, and scientists (Dell 403). ¹ Additionally, even the traditional professions were undergoing major transformations. The perplexing difficulties which students faced within educational institutions and in the professional domains that awaited them created a crisis of definition which was especially conspicuous in the last stages of education.

Many of the early poems of John Milton read as paradigms for the immobilization that these widespread changes in education produced in individual scholars. In his self-reflective sonnets, Milton grieves over the delay of his “inward ripeness” but promises that he will present a “true account” of his talents through literary production (“Sonnet VII” 7; “Sonnet XIX” 6). ² At the age of 30, in his Latin poem “Ad Patrem” (1637), he asks his father for his continued indulgence and financial support to prepare for a literary profession which lies still in the future. In the same year, Milton portrays a figures on the verge of graduating from student (or apprentice) to teacher (or master) in “Lycidas” (1637). The “uncouth Swain” departs for a new pastoralism in still undetermined “fresh Woods, and Pastures new” (186, 193). Even in his mature poem, Paradise Lost (1667), Milton does not provide a model for crossing the bridge between education and practice: he portrays a devastatingly truncated education in which the students, Adam and Eve, are “expell’d . . . into a World / Of woe and sorrow” (8.332–333).

It is in his final two works, Paradise Regained (1671) and Samson Agonistes (1671), written at the height of the English Scientific Revolution, that Milton represents figures who succeed in crossing the bridge from educational preparation to clearly-defined practices. The narratives begin at the “Miltonic moment” at which the heroes, Jesus and Samson respectively, are on the brink of moving from education to practice and end with their first steps in their chosen vocations (Evans 1). Given concerns about vocational preparation in general and Milton’s anxiety in particular, we might expect caution and hesitancy to govern the construction of these graduating students. Instead, however, Milton exhibits through these characters a deep confidence in the ability of a full education and personal talent to prepare students for a diverse set of vocations in due time. He creates two distinct yet compatible models of educational maturity in these last poems by reaffirming the prescripts that he set down for a “noble and generous education” in his early tract Of Education (1644) and by employing the most useful innovations of the English Scientific Revolution.

In Of Education, Milton advocates an educational course that progresses from broad-based book studies to similarly broad experiences in order to perfect individual genius. He recommends a didactic grand tour as the last step in educational preparation. The tract proposes that travel would “try all [students’] peculiar gifts of nature; and if there were any secret excellence among them, would fetch it out and give it fair opportunities to advance itself” (CPMP 639). Over thirty years later, in Paradise Regained, Milton restates his belief in personal abilities and life experience to catalyze text-based studies into personal and civic advancement:

  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 unsettl’d still remains, Deep verst in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys, And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge; As Children gathering...