SOURCE: "Milton," in The Renaissance and English Humanism, University of Toronto Press, 1939, pp. 101-29.

[In the following essay, Bush analyzes the influence of Christian humanism on Milton's poetry.]

It may be more candid than diplomatic to acknowledge at the start that admirers of Milton have always been, consciously or not, on the defensive. They certainly must be nowadays, when for the first time since the seventeenth century Milton has ceased to be an active force in poetry. We may think that modern poets could still learn something from him, and if the poets thought so too we might be spared some headaches. But, so far from being an influence in contemporary work, Milton is damned as the man who crushed the fruitful metaphysical movement and kept poetry in bondage for three centuries. Mr. Eliot has even complained of Milton's obscurity. One may have, as I have, a great admiration for Mr. Eliot's writing in both verse and prose and still find a certain pleasure in visualizing the author of The Waste Land as he struggles with the meaning of Paradise Lost.

Among the various reasons for Milton's unpopularity doubtless the chief one is that in his major poems he treated on a heroic scale, and with a too confident simplicity, themes and problems which seem remote and no longer of vital concern to us. We think in purely human terms and know that

Instead of Milton, who expounds a lofty faith in God and human reason, we prefer a smaller poet like Donne, whose sceptical uncertainties and staccato realism are more congenial to a generation which has lost its way. Milton is too big, too sternly strenuous, to allow us to feel at ease in his presence; he could never be taken under the maternal wing of Christopher Morley. Like Dante, Milton is not what P. G. Wodehouse would call a "matey" person. Put beside Chaucer or Shakespeare, with their crowd of human characters, with their benevolent interest, half humorous, half divine, in the stuff of common life, Milton seems cold, inhuman, an unapproachable Jehovah of poetry.

But this discourse is not supposed to be an arraignment of Milton. I am merely indicating a consciousness of these and all the other charges, old and new, and if some are damaging to Milton, some are damaging to the reader. My purpose is to outline the growth and the main principles of Milton's thought, with reference to our general theme. I say "main principles" because there are many subtleties and ramifications which must be neglected, at the risk of making his mind appear more simple than it was. I shall not, therefore, be discussing Milton's poetry as poetry, and in discussing his major ideas and attitudes I shall have to incur the guilt of repeating commonplaces both about him and about Christian humanism. There is no other way of showing that he is the last voice of an essentially medieval tradition, that, with due allowance for the lapse of five centuries, Milton stands shoulder to shoulder with that twelfth-century humanist—and defender of tyrannicide—John of Salisbury. Yet Milton appears at a moment when Christian humanism is succumbing to such internal and external enemies as have been described. In England and Europe generally, in the troubled period of Milton's lifetime, humanism has grown less religious and religion less humane. We shall try to see in him the normal fusion and the occasional friction of classical and Christian elements. We shall try to see also what a noble anachronism the old humanistic faith has become in an increasingly modern and scientific world.

Milton's ardent study began in childhood and, no less than Bacon, he took all knowledge for his province. It was partly as a young Baconian, partly as a young Platonist, that he attacked the sterile Aristotelianism of the Cambridge curriculum and pleaded for genuine and fruitful examination of man's outer and inner world. What might be called Milton's academic valedictory, on the theme that learning brings more blessings to men than ignorance, at first sight seems only a tissue of Renaissance platitudes. But it also sets forth an intensely personal faith, the boundless optimism and ambition of a young idealist of genius who feels himself standing on the threshold of a new era, who sees no obstacle in the way of man's conquest of nature and of all individual and social problems. And he aspires, with a half-concealed but proud self-confidence, to be one of the makers of that new era, to be the oracle of many nations, whose home comes to be visited as a shrine. When we follow the course of Milton's life and work, we can measure the depth of his later pessimism only by appreciating the sublime and, as we cynically say, the unrealistic optimism of his earlier years.

That is one aspect of Milton's youthful humanism. We have other aspects in his Latin poems. These too are outwardly conventional—as long as bishops and beadles were subject to mortality Milton did not lack a theme—but in the personal pieces the obscurity of a learned language encouraged the young poet to express his own moods with more spontaneous frankness than he allowed himself in his native tongue. It is springtime and Cupid is busy everywhere. The young man's pulses are stirred by the awakening life of nature and by the beauty of girls in the parks, yet they are no Corinnas or Circes, and Milton's sensuous paganism is quite innocent. Indeed, lest he give a wrong impression, he assures his friend Diodati that, like Ulysses, he clings to the magical herb moly, by which he means Christian virtue. Thus the young Renaissance artist and the young puritan live in happy harmony together and, while Milton is finding that he cannot subscribe slave by taking holy orders, he has conceived of heroic poetry as a not less but more sacred and exalted calling. No other English poet has so earnestly and so repeatedly dedicated himself to the classical office of poet-priest, and most of his important poems may be regarded, directly or indirectly, as successive spiritual stock-takings.

We may read "L'AIlegro" and "Il Penseroso" simply as tone poems, two ideal moods of a bookish and high-minded young man in the country, as lovely expressions of a serene tranquillity which their militant author never again enjoyed. But these companion pieces, written probably during Milton's later days at Cambridge, we may take also as an ave atque vale, a half-unconscious good-bye to carefree youth and an embracing of a life of mature seriousness. Keats, surveying Milton's work as a whole, discerned in him a conflict between the pleasures and the ardours of song, a conflict which is writ large in Keats himself. In Milton's twin poems there is no conflict as yet, but we who know what is to come can foresee possible discord between two modes of art and life. In fact he had already, in his sixth elegy, contrasted the irresponsible singer of wine and gaiety with the ascetic poet of truly heroic themes. And in the sonnet on his twenty-fourth birthday, written, it would seem, after the two lyrical pieces, Milton pledges himself to a religious life:

Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.

In this solemn acceptance of the divine will we are accustomed to hear the puritan note, the sense of personal responsibility to God, but these lines are also a partial echo of one of the most religious of ancient poets, Pindar.

When we look forward five or six years to the most elaborate and impassioned of Milton's earlier self-examinations, namely "Lycidas," we find that the cheerful and the thoughtful ideals are no longer complementary but antagonistic. "L'Allegro," we might say, raises his voice for the last time to ask:

Alas! what boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely, slighted, shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?

But Milton has put away childish things, and "Il Penseroso" replies, in a sterner mood than his earlier self had felt:

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights and live laborious days….

If the whole passage on the heavenly reward of the virtuous and arduous life, for all its classical ornament, suggests that Milton's Hebraic zeal is drying up his aesthetic sensibility, we may remember the letter written to Diodati in the same year as "Lycidas." In it Milton declares his God-given passion for beauty in all the forms and appearances of things. The words are both an aesthetic and a religious affirmation.

The conflict in Milton has more than one aspect. He felt keenly both the charms of contemplative retirement and the duties of the active life. But that conflict did not become a reality until he returned from abroad in 1639. A more immediate problem for a young poet of the Renaissance was the conflict between the sensuous and the ethical impulses in his nature. There was never, of course, any question of an actual lapse from his own high stan dards of personal conduct, but it was more difficult for him, with his temperament and in his age, than it had been for Spenser to reconcile the two motives in his poetry. Three years before "Lycidas" he had written Comus. The traditional masque glorified youth and love and jollity; Comus is a sermon on temperance. With all the sensuous passions of a young man and a poet, Milton still holds the precious moly and has not stooped to sensual gratification. Comus is allowed to plead the case for "natural" license, but his arguments—like Satan's—betray their own speciousness; he is the representative, not of true freedom, but of slavery. And the Lady, meeting him first on the level of the natural reason, rises with "sacred vehemence" to the religious defence of "sun-clad" Chastity. If her or Milton's ideal seems at moments negative, there is a far more powerful positive impulse which we can understand if we look back a little into his spiritual evolution. In a pamphlet of 1642, defending himself as usual, Milton recalled some of his earlier reading. At first he had been captured by the smooth elegiac poets of Rome, but their fleshliness was less satisfying than their art. He had passed on to the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura. There grew the belief that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things…." From Dante and Petrarch, Milton was led to the fables and romances of knighthood, and such works proved, not the fuel of loose living, but incitements to virtue. Next came Plato, with his lofty idealism, his conception of the Eros which leads to divine knowledge and beauty. And, finally, there was St. Paul, with his ultimate claim that "the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." The ideal of chasity in Comus, then, is not merely negative, it is a positive and all-embracing way of life. And the best evidence is found, not in the exposition of Pauline or Platonic or Spenserian moral ideas, but in that indefinable purity of tone which instantly possesses and elevates us when we begin—

Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
My mansion is….

Milton returned from his prolonged continental travels to maintain himself as a private schoolmaster and to follow with eager interest the course of events which was soon to issue in civil war. But in such a time it was reserved only for God and angels to be lookers-on, and Milton was not God nor, except at rare moments, an angel. With mingled zeal and reluctance he plunged into pamphleteering. The heroic poem which was to win immortal fame had to be indefinitely postponed for the writing of prose tracts which are now, except for scholars, mostly dead. But we need not lament the twenty years Milton gave to prose and public affairs. He would not have been Milton if he had not been able to sacrifice his hopes to the claims of public duty. He belongs to that great tradition which stretches back through Spenser and Dante to the writers of Greece and Rome, the tradition of the poet who is an active citizen and a leader of his age. To Milton the romantic notion of the artist as an isolated or anti-social figure would have been not only reprehensible but unintelligible. Further, though he knew the magnitude of his sacrifice, since poetry was his right hand and prose his left, yet he had always desired the fame of a great leader, an oracle of nations, and his work as a publicist, if in one sense a forced betrayal of his destiny, was also an integral part of its fulfilment. It consoles him in his blindness to recall his defence of liberty, "Of which all Europe talks from side to side." Finally, the poetry itself was not altogether a loser. The noble sonnets on public men and events are close in spirit to the patriotic odes in which Horace reminded decadent Rome of the old Roman virtues. And the major poems were strengthened by their author's experience in the arena. As he says in one of his apologies for delaying his appointed task, the truly heroic poet must have, among other things, "insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs." To echo Gibbon, the secretary to the Council was not useless to the historian of Pandemonium.

Most of us, if we have any radical instincts at all, manifest them in youth, and then our arteries harden and our heads soften. The circumstances of Milton's early life might well have made him a contented conservative, but the older he grew the more radical he became. I can barely mention the chief battle-fronts on which he served.

First in importance among his prose works stands Areopagitica, the most eloquent defence of individual liberty and the power of truth in the language. The tract is a vivid reminder of its author's double affiliations. In form it is a classical oration, but it grew out of a puritan controversy over the rights of religious minorities. While for the modern reader it stands alone, at the time it was unheeded by the host of other pamphleteers.

Milton's early notoriety was especially due to the treatises in which he pleaded for divorce on the ground of incompatibility. I will say just three things about these works. First, modern research has freed Milton from the odium of having begun the series during his honeymoon; we know now that he began it a year later. Secondly, his plea for easier divorce was based, not on a week-end view of marriage, but on a high conception of its sanctity, of that marriage of minds which the Bible and the law did not recognize. Thirdly, notwithstanding the common prejudice against Milton's "Turkish contempt of females," he did not ignore the right of women as well as men to release from unworthy mates. If Milton always regarded man as the superior being, so did everyone else; how many men really think otherwise now?

To proceed with the main ideas of the prose tracts, in religious faith Milton moved from trinitarianism toward Arian and other heresies—though in essentials the theology of Paradise Lost remained orthodox enough to darken Sunday afternoon for many generations of evangelical readers. Milton's huge treatise on Christian doctrine, which was not published till 1825, was an attempt to define his own beliefs and, apparently, to provide a fundamental creed which all Christians might accept. As for religion on its external or institutional side, he changed from Anglicanism to Presbyterianism; then, seeing that the Presbyterians did not want religious freedom but only wanted to be top dog, he became an Independent with a capital "I"; his final position was independency with a small "i." Milton himself declared: "I never knew that time in England, when men of truest religion were not counted sectaries"; and, as Sir Herbert Grierson says, "he was a sect."

In politics, the supporter of monarchy became the defender of the regicides, a champion of a free republic who observed Cromwell's growing power with uneasiness.

In education, Milton damned the logical studies of the universities as an asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles, and urged a more practical and certainly a more heroically comprehensive curriculum. His letter on education is the last of the long series of humanistic treatises which had begun nearly three hundred years before, and it has all the main features of the tradition. It is aristocratic. It aims at training the ablest young men to be useful and cultivated citizens, not scholars. In substance the programme is mainly classical, though less predominantly literary than that of most earlier humanists, for Milton recognizes the study of nature and science generally. His emphasis on religion and virtue, on the discipline of the moral judgment and the will, is no special mark of puritan zeal, for that had been the chief end of Christian humanism in all ages and all countries.

When we survey Milton's whole body of writing in prose and verse, we see that his various ideas and principles start from a passionate belief in the freedom of the will. There, of course, he breaks utterly with Calvinistic doctrine. Over a century earlier Erasmus had challenged Luther on just that ground. No humanist who had learned from the ancients the dignity of human reason could accept predestination and the depravity of man. In all problems, divorce, religion, politics, education, censorship of the press, Milton goes where reason leads him. No ordinance, he declares—in words which from a religious man at that time are rather bold—no ordinance, human or from heaven, can bind against the good of man. People have a way of associating the classics with mellow Toryism, but for Milton the classics were a trumpet and a sword. While Milton the artist learned his art chiefly from the ancient poets, to Milton the humanist and publicist Athens and Rome were the nurseries of individual and republican liberty. No wonder that Hobbes, recoiling from the chaos of the times to plead for absolutism in government, exclaims, with men like Milton in mind:

And by reading of these Greek and Latin authors men from their childhood have gotten a habit, under a false show of liberty, of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their sovereigns, and again of controlling those controllers; with the effusion of so much blood as I think I may truly say there was never anything so dearly bought as these western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues.

At the same time we should remember the Protestant conception of "Christian liberty" which Professor Wood-house has emphasized, that aristocratic distinction between the regenerate and the unregenerate which in Milton coalesces with the aristocratic principle of classical humanism. And, to echo Professor Woodhouse further, Milton's classical humanism sets him apart from merely religious puritans and leads him to interpret the regenerate state in humanistic, that is, in rational and ethical terms.

Dr. Tillyard remarks that if Milton had been stranded in his own paradise, he would have eaten the apple and immediately justified the act in a polemical pamphlet. We need not query a cheerful epigram, but we may notice that romantic idea which is still to be met, outside universities—namely, that Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it, that Satan was his real hero. Certainly the Satan of the first two books of Paradise Lost would not be the splendid figure he is if Milton himself had not been a rebel against authority, yet we are intended to see that from the very beginning Satan's heroic strength is vitiated by a fatal taint. For Satan is an example, on the grand scale, of perverted reason and perverted will, and the later books record his progressively shameful degradation. Milton never fought for the right of the individual to do as he pleases. While the traditional orthodoxy of the humanistic creed was modified by Milton's vigorous individualism, none the less he conceives of liberty as the right of man's disciplined reason to self-government, and one who loves liberty must first be wise and good. Hence the supreme importance of education, above all in the sacred and humane writings which provide ethical as well as intellectual training.

It is no accident that Milton's four long poems deal with one great theme, the human will confronted by temptation. Among the various motives inherent in, or read into, the chosen fables, perhaps the most obvious and recurrent are the sensual. Such emphasis is partly puritan and partly Miltonic. Milton's first marriage, apparently, gave a shock to his self-confidence which reverberates in the poems composed many years later. If he, a man elect, had not allowed his senses to betray his reason, he had at least shown a terrible lack of discernment. However large or small the personal factor, and in our days it is only too likely to be exaggerated, it is clear in the first place that Milton's ethical doctrine was not a copy-book abstraction but a vital reality which was proved on his pulses. In the second place, and this is what concerns us here, Milton's various treatments of the theme of temptation are as much classical as Christian. The battle is not merely between the love of God and the sinful flesh, it is between reason and unreason, "knowledge" and "ignorance." Milton uses the ethical psychology of Plato which had contributed so much to the rational framework of Spenser's moral allegory. Plato's thought, as Professor Hughes says, is built into the ethics of Milton's poems as substantially as some parts of the Bible are built into their plots. (One may sometimes wish for more gleams in Milton of that white light of Platonism which glows in Vaughan or Browne, but in the main the humanistic tradition had been unmystical.) If one may venture, in these days of psychological laboratories when moral responsibility has been shifted to defective glands, to recall again the naïve ideas of ancient thinkers, the kernel of the matter is that reason, the highest and most human of human faculties, should control the irrational passions and appetites.

Here I must quote those eloquent and familiar sentences from the central passage of Areopagitica which explain the ethical substance and purpose of Milton's major poems, explain indeed the whole character of his Christian humanism. It may be observed that his conception of God's plan that human virtue should prove itself by resisting evil is a favourite idea of Lactantius, and Milton quoteshim in his Commonplace Book:

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. 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. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guyon, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain….

Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress; foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue? …

This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he commands us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us even to a profuseness all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety.

This last sentence, with its verbal anticipations of Paradise Lost, is a particular reminder of Milton's method of justifying the ways of God to men. He distorts the biblical fable in order to put it on a humanistic and rational basis. Adam and Eve do not simply disobey an arbitrary decree, they allow their reason, their faculty of moral choice, to be overruled by their passions and appetites. Coming to Paradise Regained, the uninstructed reader might naturally expect the subject to be the crucifixion and redemption, but the doctrine of vicarious atonement, though central in traditional Christianity, is distasteful to Milton; he accepts it, of course, but in a dryly legal way. For him paradise is regained when Christ, the personification of ideal human reason and will, conquers the conqueror of Adam.

But if Milton's ethical scheme is always rational, it is not always equally human and humane. In Comus, beautiful as the writing is, the ethical sermon, despite its Platonic and Christian radiance, has the unrealistic, inflexible assurance that goes with the exalted idealism of youth. In Paradise Regained, as Professor Rice has made clear, Milton is consciously trying to show Christ's human humility and constancy of faith; yet his hero is perfect and cannot sin, and the poem, as the presentation of a moral struggle and victory, is relatively unreal and cold. In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are at first artificial beings in an artificial world, but they are humanized by sin and suffering, and their author is too when he contemplates them. In dealing with the fall itself Milton turns from epic narrative to intimate drama, and the deep sympathy manifested there culminates in the marvellous close. The great cosmic and supernatural background, the epic war between God and Satan, which had been rendered with such heroic pomp and circumstance, with such sweep of imagination—all this, in Professor Stoll's words, gives place to a twilight picture of two human beings alone in the world:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Milton is an unfailing master of the classical quiet ending, but here, as in Greek drama, quietness means serenity only to those who miss the mingled tragedy and hope, irony and pity, in a symbolic picture of life itself reduced to its elemental terms. And if in Paradise Lost the theological frame melts away, no such frame obtrudes at all in Samson Agonistes. This, the one great English drama on the Greek model, is the most deeply humanized treatment of Milton's perennial theme, and it remains, not the most beautiful, but the most wholly alive, the most permanently moving, of all his works. Samson is a completely human being in a completely real world, a great man who has lived greatly and sinned greatly. If he differs from his Greek counterparts, Heracles, Prometheus, and the aged Oedipus, through his faith in the God of Israel, what we feel most is the tragic drama that goes on in Samson's own soul.

There is profound pessimism in the later books of Paradise Lost, and it reaches its depth in Samson, where the hero's triumphant martyrdom scarcely mitigates the effect of Milton's arraignment of God. The sheltered idealist had grown up thinking that England was full of John Miltons who had only to be shown the right way to follow it. In Areopagitica his optimism runs high. When God is beginning a new and greater reformation, "what does He then but reveal Himself to His servants, and, as His manner is, first to His Englishmen?" Among the first to be informed of divine intentions would be John Milton, who craved an honourable share in the great work. Now the fields are white for harvest; there can be no lack of reapers.

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam, purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance….

Sixteen years later, when the wheels are moving rapidly to bring back Charles Stuart, Milton makes a last appeal for a free republic. But with all its detailed plans this tract is an admission of defeat. The vision of a noble and puissant nation has faded into the light of common day, and men worthy to be for ever slaves are rushing to put their heads under the yoke. The good old cause is dead, and the work of a large part of Milton's life is undone. While he seems, outwardly, to have had a fairly cheerful old age, the stress and stimulus of composition heightened his realization of heroic past and ignoble present. He can declare himself still able to sing with voice unchanged,

but his voice is changed, even in these very lines.

Milton had never been a democrat in the modern sense of the word. He did not believe that one man's opinion was as good as another's. But, both as humanist and as puritan, he had believed passionately in the collective wisdom, inspiration, and effectual power of the best men, whether Platonic philosopher-kings or puritan "Saints." There is little of that faith left in his later works. Samson, God's chosen hero, is now "Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves." Milton tries to find a basis for hope in the scroll of future history revealed to Adam, but Adam hears no such story of national courage and triumph as Aeneas heard from Anchises:

Milton's hope of a new reformation, then, will be realized only at the day of judgment, when the evil world is cleansed by fire, and that is small comfort here and now. But if his old faith in men has proved vain, something can still be done by individual man; he can at least rule himself. So when Adam has learned the rational and Christian virtues, he has no need of an earthly paradise, he has a paradise within him, happier far. So Christ, man's perfect model, maintains his integrity against the allurements of the world. So Samson, resisting selfish and sensual temptations, achieves an inner regeneration which makes his outward fate of no account.

There are two special topics, both related to Milton's Christian humanism, with which we may end. When we think of his lifelong devotion to the classical authors who taught him his craft, who inspired alike his love of liberty and his love of discipline, it cannot be other than a painful shock to come upon that violent denunciation of Greek culture in Paradise Regained. And the shock is all the greater for the eulogy of Hellenism which precedes it:

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,
City or suburban, studious walks and shades.
See there the olive-grove of Academe,
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long….

And so on. But this beautiful evocation of Athens and her legacy to the world, written from the heart if ever anything was, is put in the mouth of Satan, and in an almost strident voice Christ answers with a repudiation of the vain philosophy, oratory, and poetry of Greece, which cannot approach the sacred truth of Hebrew writings.

It is painful indeed to watch Milton turn and rend some main roots of his being, but we must try to understand him. His harsh condemnation is relative rather than absolute; we know that his favourite authors up to the end were ancients, and this very poem owes much to them. Yet, with a strenuous and disappointed life behind him, Milton has come more and more to hold fast to ultimate things. If he, a warfaring Christian, must choose between the classical light of nature and the Hebrew light of revelation, he cannot hesitate, whatever the cost. For if our supreme task in this world is the conduct of our own lives, then Christ comes before Plato. It would be wrong to say simply that in old age the puritan has conquered the humanist. What is true is that Milton holds the traditional attitude of the Christian humanist with a more than traditional fervour inspired by the conditions of his age and by his own intense character.

The place of the Bible and the church in the humanistic tradition we have seen, and Milton himself had always put the sacred writings first, even if his own reason had sometimes strained their elasticity. So this outburst in Paradise Regained, uniquely elaborate and vehement though it is, contains nothing essentially new. One could trace a consistent attitude from the beginning. We have seen how his conception of love and chastity rose from Ovid to Plato and finally St. Paul. Though the classics form the staple of his educational programme, Milton expressly puts the Bible on a higher level. In apologizing, as a pamphleteer, for the postponement of that heroic poem he is going to write, he affirms its superiority to the ancient epics, not because he is a greater artist than Homer and Virgil—as artist Milton is humble enough—but because he is a Christian. His epic is not "to be obtained by the invocation of dame memory and her siren daughters; but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his ser aphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." The claim is repeated in those several invocations in Paradise Lost which, outwardly imitations of classical addresses to the Muse, are really prayers. And while throughout the poem he employs mythological allusions, many of them among the most beautiful things he ever wrote, so sternly does he feel that the highest truth must be kept pure that again and again he takes pains to label these myths pagan fiction. Such facts testify to the sincerity and consistency of Milton's Christian faith. They testify also to the dilemma facing a puritan bred in the tradition of Renaissance classicism.

The second and last topic involves a similar question of apparent inconsistency. Along with temperance in the moral sphere Adam learns the necessity of temperance in the pursuit of secular and scientific knowledge. This is not an incidental but an integral part of Milton's subject, and we may ask how such a position can be taken by the man who had been receptive to Baconian ideas, who had given science an exceptional place in his educational scheme, and who had written with such power in defence of free inquiry. A partial answer to this question has, I hope, already been given. We have seen that from the Middle Ages onward the Christian humanists, under the banner of Cicero, Plato, and Christ, attacked the various tribes of Aristotelians because neither logic nor natural science, however good in themselves, taught the right conduct of life. For that highest wisdom, they said, one must go first to the sacred, secondly to the classical, authors. Like all intelligent men Milton was interested in the new astronomy, but, like all Christian humanists, he feared the danger of confusing wisdom and knowledge, law for man and law for thing. In 1642, for instance, he had distinguished between "that knowledge that rests in the contemplation of natural causes and dimensions, which must needs be a lower wisdom, as the object is low," and "the only high valuable wisdom," which is the knowledge of God and the true end of man's life.

In the following decades it might well seem that the rising tide of science and scientific philosophy threatened to sweep away religious and humane values altogether, and a consciousness of that movement, along with larger and sadder experience of life, would only intensify Milton's religious and humanistic reaction. Even if individual scientists retained their Christian faith, the implications of science seemed plain. For Milton as for Christian humanists of all ages (including the Cambridge Platonists), the physical and metaphysical world is a divine order with a divine purpose, and man is a being endowed with divine reason and divine will. For the scientific philosopher, such as Hobbes, the universe is a purely mechanical system of bodies moving in time and space. God and man alike have been pushed out of the real world, for real knowledge is mathematical knowledge. God is the initial cause of motion. The human faculties, which for the humanist are all that matters, have become mere bundles of secondary qualities which cannot be measured. The human mind is a blank wall which receives physical sensations. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is decayed sensation. The will, for Milton the helm of man's ship, is only the last, the effectual, appetite. Is it any wonder the Christian humanist believes that free speculation has undermined fundamental values, that Adam is taught to check the roving mind or fancy, which lures men into philosophic mazes, and to recognize that the prime wisdom is that which illuminates the moral problems of daily life?

The inevitable and basic antithesis which Miss Nicolson has pointed out between Milton and Hobbes is the same as that between Petrarch and the Averroists—or between Arnold and Huxley. The end of all learning and eloquence, said Erasmus, is to know Christ and honour Him. Of the two definitions of education in Milton's prose tract the less familiar but not less Miltonic one is this:

The end, then, of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest, by possessing our souls of true virtue, which, being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection.

Nearly a quarter of a century later that definition is expanded, one might say, in Milton's final summing-up of the lesson of Paradise Lost. If in his early days he had had some Baconian dreams of the conquest of nature, now, in his age, he has no thought of an earthly paradise; Adam-to repeat that all-important line-has a paradise within him, happier far….