Milton the Athlete

Milton writes in Areopagitica that a man may be a "heretic in the truth" if he believes something only because others tell him to (261). What he believes may indeed be true, but if he didn't labour, sweat, and suffer to discover this truth for himself, then the Truth is, in an odd sense, not really true for him.

Reading Milton's prose is a strenuous activity, and perhaps this is partly because Milton himself was so much in favour of strenuousness. Milton famously writes, also in Areopagitica,

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where
that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
(247-48)

The images here are taken from athletic competition. You need to train for the truth, and Milton sees himself as one of Truth's athletes. He explicitly offers this tract to Parliament "from the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studious labours" as if that is a kind of guarantee of its truth (239). It’s not only in his prose that Milton likes to point out how hard he works. In “Lycidas” too he makes clear that the poet’s lot is to “scorn delights, and live laborious days” (l. 72).

The strange thing about the training recommended by Milton is that it deliberately includes things that are bad for the athelete. The training for truth should include lies, which one would think is bad for truth. Bad books should be printed mainly so that good men can use them for resistance training. Similarly, Milton's recommended training for virtue includes vice, since Adam and Eve's explusion from Paradise seems to have meant that ever after humans must discover what is good painfully, by slogging through the bad: "Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary” (248).

Milton's Pagan Christianity

As came up in class discussion today, Milton's relationship to the pagan world can seem puzzling. On the one hand, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" seems most certainly to be the poem of a devout Christian, meditating on a central mystery of the Christian faith, the Incarnation. In his Latin Elegy 7, written to his friend Charles Diodati around December 1629, Milton says that he is composing a birthday gift for Christ. This is one Christian poet writing to another devout young man.

On the other hand, the same elegy refers (in Latin) to the baby Jesus as the "peace-bearing king of heavenly race," almost as if he might be one of a pantheon of gods. The association is all the easier to make, as this description of Jesus as a "king of heavenly race" occurs immediately after Milton's thoughts on the sacred vocation of the poet: "Truly the bard is sacred to the gods; he is their priest, and both his heart and lips mysteriously breathe the indwelling Jove." (Truly JM? Do you mean that the pagan Roman god Jove dwells within you, or do you mean Jehovah?)

The Nativity Ode's image of the infant Jesus strangling the pagan snake gods just like the infant Hercules reinforces this striking representation of the Christian Messiah. He doesn't just replace the pagan gods or show that they don't count or were never real: baby Jesus subdues them, makes them his victims, giving them a reality on the same plane as his own. And in the process, the poet shows just how deeply immersed he is in details of the ancient pagan cults -- with the lars, lemures, and flamens of Roman religion (stanza XXI), or the ceremonies of the cult of Osiris (XXIV).

Because he chose to be a Christian poet and not a Christian priest, Milton can -- in his learnedly allusive figurative language -- play with the expressive possibilities of syncretism, which is the attempt to reconcile two different, even conflicting, systems of belief and thought. This is what he does too with the image of the shepherd in "Lycidas." The shepherd places the poem squarely within the poetic genre of pastoral inherited from Greek and Roman writers, but it simultaneously suggests the Christian sense of a 'pastor' of a congretation

Light on Milton

Welcome to English 344 and to this blog on John Milton and the radical seventeenth century.

The title of the blog comes from the first book of Paradise Lost, which we'll be reading in its entirety this term. In Book I, Satan finds himself in a horrible flaming dungeon, having lost his war against God:

... yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe (PL 1.62-64)

As we'll see, Satan perceives his new domain as if it is a photographic negative: darkness becomes light, and light darkness. This seems to me a fitting image for our course, which aims to test the idea of a 'radical Milton', a poet and thinker who himself liked to test and sometimes topple orthodoxy.

I'll be using this space for short postings (like the above) in response to our readings and class discussions, and also to point out useful resources.

See you tomorrow!