“His Footstep Trace”: The Natural Theology of Paradise Lost

No man ever taught, that Adam’s fall (which was a breach of his religious duty towards God) was a deficiency from the study of Experimental Philosophie: . . . as if Natural and Experimental Philosophie, not Natural Theology, had been the Religion of Paradise.

— Henry Stubbe, A Censure upon the history of the Royal Society, 1670

Much recent work on John Milton has emphasized the harmony between Paradise Lost and the methods and aims of modern science. These studies have more than corrected the misimpression — imputed to a 1956 book by Kester Svendsen — that Milton was “part of a popular cultural lag, an old order not yet superseded in either common imagination or the literature of science.”¹ Instead, scholars have shown that Milton was aware of contemporary work in natural history, cosmology, and physics; and, what is more, he employed in his own poetic effort the same collaboration-dependent method that was the hallmark of the new science.² One or two voices have warned against taking these claims too far,³ but on the whole the new critical consensus is that Milton, like many early modern Protestants, moved things forward rather than backward, scientifically speaking. Yet while these critics carefully avoid homogenizing the “New Science,” there is still a strand of scientific reform that needs to be extricated and brought into our understanding of Milton’s relationship to science: a Baconian suspicion and marginalization of natural theology. Although Milton was not the reactionary Svendsen argued he was, his epic demonstrates an awareness that science could be directed to nontheological ends, a redirection that he epideictically decries. Taking instead the view of those scientific reformers who practiced natural theology, Milton works out in his poem a rubric for applying human science to theological understanding while resisting the anthropocentrism and modern notion of reason underlying many contemporary prose works of natural theology.

Milton among the Natural Theologians

When Milton wrote in On Christian Doctrine that God “has left so many signs of himself in the human mind, so many traces of his presence through the whole of nature, that no sane person can fail to realize that he exists,” he was rehearsing a commonplace.⁴ Natural theology, the application of human reason (as distinct from revelation) toward knowledge of the divine, was inferred from the writings of Saint Paul and justified the practice of philosophy during medieval Christendom. In the seventeenth century, the enterprise changed in response to new understandings of how human reason best operated: the old ontological and cosmological demonstrations of God’s existence were transformed into the Cambridge Platonists’ midcentury attacks on Hobbesian materialism and the increasingly popular works of physico-theology that proliferated in the latter half of the century. Making use of the growing body of discoveries in cosmology, natural history, and physics, authors of physico-theology argued that the world was too intricately designed to be the result of necessity or chance. The movement of the stars, the structure of the human eye, and the generation of a fetus had long been known to be wondrous, but nobody knew how wondrous until natural philosophers had unfolded the process in unprecedented detail.⁵

Natural philosophy thus continued to be motivated by the imperative to gain theological insight even as its methods came to rely more and more on phenomenological observation of the natural world.⁶ But some scientific reformers were concerned about the legitimacy of inferring theological precepts from their discoveries. A distaste for natural theology is discernible in Francis Bacon, who had argued for excluding investigation of final causes from the practice of natural philosophy for pragmatic reasons (a battle that his side eventually won, at least as far as the Royal Society’s provenance was concerned). Bacon insisted that divine things were more important than worldly things, and even conceded that natural theology was useful toward correcting pagan superstition and as “an effectuall inducement to the exaltation of the glory of God,” but he lamented a misallocation of intellectual resources. What natural theology could show — that there is a God and that pagan superstition is wrong — it had...