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

Preface

PREFACE Criticism has frequently viewed John Milton as having a mind that never changed, not over time, not according to any subject, not for any reason. Unrealistic as that view is, it quite often underlies the reading of both his poetry and his prose, as well as whatever biographical correlation might arise. In this study I look at the pertinence of that idea in personal matters, political ideas, religious and theological worlds and beliefs. While some change occurs, a more accurate term for the differences that Milton’s mind entertains over time is “development,” in this case “conceptual development.” I do not find an unchanged mind except and only in his always-present, never-rejected faith in God. There may be some questioning of why life turns as it does, why failures happen and unjustified oppositions succeed, but all things continue for Milton “as ever in [his] great task-maisters eye.” God has so provided for humankind —rescuing the faithful even in the height of greatest cataclysm—thatallGod’swayscanbejustified.Providence lies in the Son, in the Christ, whose whole being is charity, love, agape. This belief emerges in Milton’s earliest days and never subsides; it may, with reflection, with adverse experience, with the rise of unrighteousness in the world, vii be challenged, but it endures and through such crises becomes stronger, indeed thus “develops.” In other venues the development is such that thought and attitudes and externals are changed, yielding different life experiences , other and more definitely defined political thought, attitudes toward the visible church and its administrators , and even basic beliefs in a theology that drives his unchanging faith. This study follows upon three previous volumes: John Milton: The Self and the World (1993), “The Arms of the Family”: The Significance of John Milton’s Relatives and Associates (2004), and Rethinking Milton Studies: Time Present and Time Past (2005), as well as three books devoted individually to the three major poems. I try to present Milton and his thought and attitudes: I do not present my own. I fully recognize that Milton’s prose is usually polemic (even his De doctrina Christiana, which should be devoid of real argumentation as an investigation into Christian doctrine drawn from Scripture alone is not entirely without such disputation), and that his poetry, especially Paradise Lost, is fiction. Unfortunately, much criticism of his prose seems to ignore audience and occasion in its argumentation, thus deriving most explicitly what is alleged as Milton’s belief. His depiction of God the Father, particularly within the dramatic plot of the epic, seems to represent Milton’s theological belief without the least hint of the fictionality of the character, who becomes a kind of allegoric figure. Sin and Death, too, are allegories, and obviously then Satan, as part of his daughter and son’s allegory, must also be allegoric. Milton appears to believe in the existence of Satan, adversary to God, but the figure and his actions in the poem are made up, drawn from references in the Bible but still in fictionalized narrative and psychology to explain what human beings experience in life and the world, and why. The Milton that emerges may not always be the model, complete thinker, totally admirable person that centuries of readers have deemed him to be. But I must risk the hostility of my reader and viii Preface present the less-than-perfect person—rather, the human person—whom I find. Sadly, it is evident that some readers need to be reminded that translations of the Bible are not always the words and therefore not the meanings of the Bible that they believe were communicated by God. The Hebraic, Aramaic, and such language forms that are the Old Testament and the Greek that is the New Testament do not always appear in the translations—and these erroneous forms often appear in a number of significant places. The same problem occurs with translations of Milton’s Latin (and some Greek and Hebrew) in De doctrina Christiana; translations even alter his quotations of the Bible, although such quotations are themselves Latin translations of the original texts. The translations are not what Milton wrote. In addition, we must remember that the Bible had many transcribers, underwent recessions at different historical times (for example, Isaiah), and at times had words supplied by later writers where disjunctions (omissions, παραλειπψες) exist in the original received texts (for example...