Arminianism and Antinomianism: Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Construction of the Modern Conscience
Introduction
Milton’s unique synthesis of contemporary ideas, especially Arminian and Antinomian principles, is evident throughout his life’s work, and determines much of the action of Paradise Lost. This synthesis replaced pre-modern a priori assumptions concerning the nature of morality in English culture, generating new forms of religion, as well as the legitimization of agnosticism and atheism in Western culture. The themes that dominate Paradise Lost, though arising from the events surrounding the English Civil War, are not primarily political or ideological, but rather metaphysical and epistemological. His beliefs, stated in his prose or implied in his poetry, identify him as a unique thinker rather than as the adherent of a particular religious sect or political faction. His ideas, nevertheless, represent the resolution of the conflicts of the English Civil War which emerged as the characteristic mindset of the modern Englishman.
David Quint, Christopher Hill, and Joan Bennett, share the view that Milton is responding to the events of the Civil War and Restoration in his last three poems. They also agree that, contrary to an earlier school of thought, Milton is not repudiating his former regicidal position in Paradise Lost, but working within an atmosphere of repressive censorship to make recent historical events consistent with his religious faith and moral convictions, to “justify the ways of God” both to himself and to his fellow Englishmen.
Quint includes a chapter on Paradise Lost in his book on Epic and Empire, in which he shows the historical relationship between the genre of epic poetry and the rise and fall of political states. His focus is therefore on Milton’s political agenda, and even when he addresses themes of theology and morality, his interest in them is as the ideologies of winners and losers in the struggle for political power.
Christopher Hill’s interest is in radical politics, and he therefore also attempts to identify Milton’s position among various revolutionary party factions. Because these factions invariably based their political convictions upon theological arguments, Hill attempts to identify the theological themes in Milton’s poetry in order to locate him among political parties and thereby infer his political ideology. While Hill makes a thorough examination of theological and moral issues, both political and metaphysical, his study originates and concludes in political movements. If Milton can be seen as redefining the idea of individual morality, the significance of this redefinition for Hill lies not in changing modes of human psychology, but in the way that new moral ideas reinforced the class distinctions that emerged following the Restoration.
In Joan Bennett’s chapter on the antinomianism of the separation scene in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, she interprets the conflict between Adam and Eve (which Milton introduced without biblical authority) as an allegory through which Milton places the failure of the Civil War in the larger historical context of Man’s fall and redemption. This failure is not defined merely as a political failure, nor as a failure of ideology or any particular theological model, but ultimately, as a failure of the English people to develop the system of rational morality necessary to replace illegitimated modes of authority and to sustain civil liberty.
Some critics have read Paradise Lost as reflective of Milton’s withdrawal from the public political sphere into a focus on the private morality of the bourgeois individual and family.
Adam’s speech toward the end of Book 12 of Paradise Lost, when he and Eve are to be expelled from Eden, appears, if translated into Milton’s biographical context, to affirm a withdrawal from collective political action to individual acts of piety and peaceful resistance, whose master model will be the passion of Christ. (Quint 268)
To separate public and private spheres is to impose a distinction that was not yet fully defined in English culture. Milton simply turns from a focus on government and theology to a focus upon individual epistemology. Because Milton ultimately traces the failure of the English republic to errors in the epistemology of the individuals entrusted with its genesis, the private realm is no less political than the public.
Milton’s metaphysics do not follow from his political convictions or affiliations, but rather his political convictions proceed from his metaphysics. The separation of church and state (an idea for which Milton may deserve some credit) was not an a priori principle of the episteme of seventeenth century England. If we separate elements of the poet’s thought which were for him conflated, we must apply a distorted understanding of his politics to the interpretation of his poetry.
We have inherited a political tradition in which personal moral conviction is often compromised in the interest of party politics. Whether or not this dissociation was actually present in the political realities of the English Civil War, it is not the light in which Milton and his contemporaries viewed the process in which they were engaged. Since the Tudor Reformation (and perhaps much longer), English politics and English theology had been thoroughly merged, so that arguments about forms of state government depended upon metaphysical as well as utilitarian justification.
It is possible to abstract Milton’s political ideology from the totality of his thought, and to argue that, regardless of propaganda to the contrary, the forces which determined seventeenth century ideology were not theological or ethical, but rather what is understood in the modern sense as political and economic, and that it is the political and economic consequences of Milton’s ideology which are relevant to modern history. The assertion that Milton’s last great poems contain intentional political statements, however, assumes these statements to be made in the political language of the poet, rather than that of the critic. It is the critic, therefore, who is obliged to learn the language of the poet, ideological as well as aesthetic.
II. Quint
Quint argues against the interpretation of Milton’s Satan as a caricature of Cromwell, an intention which would indicate, in Paradise Lost, Milton’s repudiation of the English Revolution. He argues instead that for the most part, Satan, in Paradise Lost, represents Charles I, the poet’s ambiguity of reference being imposed by the conditions of censorship. Quint’s method is: first, to address Paradise Lost as an example of the genre of epic poetry, and second, to examine its political relevance to the emerging British Empire. His conclusions are, therefore, more purely political than those of Hill and Bennett.
He begins by defining a sort of Bloomian model of anxiety of influence, whereby Paradise Lost takes an approach to the Carolingian Restoration in response to a short epic poem Milton had read in his youth: Phineas Fletcher’s The Apollyonists, whose theme was the gunpowder plot of Guy Fawkes. Quint detects in Paradise Lost a “pattern of political reference” to this old poem, and he thereby largely reduces the epic to a political statement. Quint argues that Milton saw the Restoration as a successful Catholic plot for which the Gunpowder plot had been an unsuccessful foreshadow. The return of England to the stability of monarchy (favorably compared to the anchoring of the floating island of Delos in the earlier poem) is represented by Milton as the completing of Satan’s causeway across the sea of chaos binding mankind to sin and death.
The causeway of Sin and Death is also compared to the pontoon bridge by which the Persian king Xerxes sought to yoke the liberty of Greece, and it is easy to see here a similar enslavement of England’s free Commonwealth to the royal tyranny of Charles II…(Quint 271)
Quint shows that Paradise Lost is a reversal of the terms of Fletcher’s
Apollyonists and, as such is concerned with public matters and matters of state.
This close borrowing from The Apollyonists reinforces the political topicality of Paradise Lost. Fletcher’s poem describes the failed attempt of the devil and his Roman Catholic agents to subdue a British isle that is likened to Eden. (278)
By describing another event which
seems to have had an impact on Milton, the
“Fatal Vespers” (281), Quint seems to attribute providentialist motives to Milton’s poetry. On the date which the new Catholic Gregorian calendar designated as November fifth, the anniversary of the recent Gunpowder Plot, a Catholic Chapel in Blackfriars collapsed during mass, killing a hundred worshippers. Milton wrote a poem, In Quintum Novembris, on the event, which, for Quint, stands as evidence of Milton’s view of the role of poetry as an expression of the providential nature of contemporary history.
Quint argues that Milton’s final trilogy is the In Quintum Novembris of his mature invention, treating of the theme of the apparent triumph of chaos over providence followed by God’s own vengeance.
…reciprocity, moreover, gives a shape to Milton’s larger career, and locates in his poetry a continuous political strain derived from a tradition of militant Protestantism. He began and ended that career with the Gunpowder Plot, and by the end, he had envisioned a heroic response that would, as the Fatal Vespers had done, turn the tables on his and England’s enemy. In Quintum Novembris, written forty-five years earlier, turned out to have been prophetic, for in the Gunpowder Plot Milton had found the recurring plot of history itself. (281)
The second part of Quint’s argument moves from the public realm of English politics to a discussion of Adam and Eve’s psychology. Quint acknowledges that Milton’s Adam and Eve are engaged in a subtle dispute over the psychology of Arminianism, but he sees this dispute as Milton’s way of blaming Calvinist political factions for the failure of the revolution and as an attempt to “disclose the true, diabolical nature of the restored monarchy.” Quint’s concern is less with individual psychology than with the “…kingly tyranny over the ‘outward freedom’ of men and women” that Milton views as “a divine punishment for the inner ‘servitude’ of reason to the passions that is the result of original sin.”
It is by virtue of the poet’s expressions of monumental political movement, “the Iliadic war, the Odyssean voyage, and the combination of these two Homeric plots in a third, Aeneas’s founding of empire” (281), that Quint locates Milton in the epic tradition. While he acknowledges the locus of Miltonic struggle as the individual conscience, he is primarily concerned with its political consequences. The dispute over Arminianism had placed the most powerful republican factions at odds during the interregnum, and it is because of his political priorities that Quint’s focus is upon the apparently Arminian position of Milton’s poetic voice. For Quint, Adam’s prelapsarian understanding of his condition as being secure from a fall is a reflection of the Calvinist error of predestination, whose complacency Milton is largely blaming in Paradise Lost for the failure of the republic.
Despite his concern with the conflict between Calvinist and Arminian political factions, Quint acknowledges that Milton’s Fall is essentially an epistemological process: “…Adam gives up in Eve’s presence the discursive reason that is the highest human faculty—and, in degree rather than kind, the source of his real superiority over her…” (291). For Quint Milton’s fall of man illustrates the failure of superior discursive reason over the inferior passions, however, unlike Joan Bennett (who focuses on antinomian doctrines), Quint sees the cause of this failure as the doctrine of the insufficiency of reason promoted by Calvinism.
…it was those men and women who were fearfully unsure of themselves who paradoxically asserted their assurance: orthodox Calvinists…They thus avoided the contingent responsibilities of a will that, according to the Arminian positions of both Goodwin and Milton, is free to accept or reject the gift of grace extended to all human beings…(293)
Rather than viewing the separation scene as a continuation of this allegory of individual epistemology, Quint sees it as shading into an argument “about religious and finally civil politics” (294), concerned with a husband’s governance of his wife and with the church’s governance of its congregation (296).
For Quint, the Calvinist position translates into an advocacy of strong Church government, and Milton’s poem denotes a statement of political opposition to Presbyterianism. Quint’s argument seems to make Milton an early advocate of a state based on freedom of religion (in a form similar to that written into the American Constitution). It was such a state that Milton envisaged for the British commonwealth, and he blamed the Calvinists for its capitulation to ready and easy monarchy. “…the surest way to fall was to look for some final guarantee or fixed condition—whether godhead or self-abjecting despair—that would enable them to drop their constant vigilance against sin, to give up, in short, the exercising of their freedom” (300).
Quint concludes his discussion of Paradise Lost by demonstrating the ways that the public Virgilian realm of God and Satan and private Lucanian realm of Adam and Eve exemplify traditional categories of the epic genre. But, as he views this genre as a rhetorical instrument of the construction of political empire, he continually returns to the poem’s political themes.
For Quint, the insulation of Adam and Eve in Eden is an expression of a traditional “in-between ground of romance,” whose “political ramifications” allow
the poem to enact—at the level of its narrative structure—an Arminian middle way that avoids the all or nothing extremes of Calvinist orthodoxy and preserves the liberty of its human protagonists …The romance retreat of Eden is the site—and the figure—of psychological inwardness and of contingent choices of conscience… (302)
As a continuation of the Lucanian “loser’s epic” genre, the significance of this contingency is to identify Milton with the “Puritan fomenters of disobedience to ecclesiastical authority” (322). If Quint acknowledges Milton’s emphasis on inward, spiritual choice, this emphasis is shaped not by the poet’s attempt to write a psychological poem, but “partly…as a defense of the individual against the state, against its instruments of surveillance and control” (324).
III. Hill
In his introduction, Hill classifies Milton as a “radical Protestant heretic,” who “…rejected the Trinity, infant baptism and most of the traditional ceremonies, including church marriage; he queried monogamy and believed that the soul died with the body” (3). Hill sees Milton as a poet of ideas which must be restored to their historical context in order to be properly understood. He shares Quint’s view that Paradise Lost is about the Restoration and argues that Milton’s politics are “much more radical than has been accepted” (4).
Although, like Quint, he places Milton’s poetry in the context of an ideological opposition to the Carolingian Restoration, rather than reducing this ideology to a theological debate between the two major moderate republican political factions, Hill identifies Milton’s ideology with the entire spectrum of contemporary radical thought, most of which was metaphysical and theological, rather than, in the modern sense, political.
Like Quint, Hill recognizes in Paradise Lost a debate over Arminianism and Predestination, but for Hill (as for Bennett), the question of free will implies the more fundamental question of antinomianism. If man is free to choose grace or to fall, to what authority can he look for an interpretation of God’s law to obey or disobey? “Milton’s Arminianism, his acceptance of adult baptism, his political libertinism and his perilous path on the fringes of antinomianism, all derive from the Protestant emphasis on the religion of the heart” (306). For Hill and Bennett, the separation scene of Paradise Lost is an exploration of the perilousness of the antinomian path.
For Hill, Milton’s antinomianism identifies him with the most radical of political factions of the English Revolution. Some radicals like Lawrence Clarkson, believed that the idea of sin itself had been invented by the ruling class to oppress the poor. Milton’s antinomianism did not imply that true Christians were exempt from any moral law, but rather he argued that true Christians had internalized God’s law, and it was this internalized law alone to which they were subject.
Along with the denial of ecclesiastical law went mortalism and the denial of a geographic heaven or hell. “Milton… skirted very near to the radical doctrine which saw heaven and hell merely as internal states, but he never denied their geographical existence, for which the Bible was his authority.” However, he did share the belief of Richard Coppin, Winstanley, Fox, and other radicals that, on earth, man “can reach ‘a far more excellent state of grace and glory’ than that from which he fell’ (311).
While Milton did not join explicitly in the radical denial of a geographic heaven and hell, Hill infers such a denial from the expression at the end of Paradise Lost of an internalized heaven and hell. His doctrine of an internally inscribed moral law likewise implied the antinomian rejection of not only the ceremonial law but of the entire Mosaic law (314).
For Hill, Milton’s antinomianism bore a largely political significance. The specter of hell was to a large extent a superstition oppressive to human liberty, but while Milton’s personal convictions seemed to imply antinomian assumptions, he feared the social consequences of the acceptance of antinomianism by the lower classes. Milton’s “insistence on the authority of the Bible was necessary to protect the institutions of society against the anarchy of individual consciences...” (315).
Although he is concerned with the dynamics of class consciousness, Hill, like Bennett, sees part of Milton’s project in Paradise Lost as an attempt to reconcile the radical implications of his antinomian convictions with a moderate bourgeois social order. In order to do so he places Milton’s account of the Fall of Man into the context of both an historical event and an allegory of British history. “Events which occur in time…are examples of the archetypal happenings in heaven and hell before history began. England in 1659-60 re-enacted as macabre farce the tragedy of the Fall” (344).
For Hill this archetypal relationship is more than poetic metaphor, but stands in a long tradition of providentialist exegesis of the Bible in terms of contemporary and eschatological history. Rather than identifying the cause of the Fall with Adam’s false sense of Calvinist assurance as does Quint, however, Hill’s Milton blames the Fall primarily on Eve as a type of Ranter intellectual arrogance.
‘They who but of late were extolled as great deliverers and had a people wholly at their devotion’ so discharged their trust that they ‘did not only weaken and unfit themselves to be dispensers of what liberty they pretended, but unfitted also the people, now grown worse and more disordinate, to receive or to digest any liberty at all’. ‘For liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands. (Milton qtd in Hill 349)
This failure of the godly Republican movement in the public sphere, pushed Milton into a focus on the “reconstruction of individuals as a necessary preliminary to the transformation of institutions,” a move “away from political solutions to inner change.” Eve, as a symbol for the Ranter leadership, had attempted to achieve godlike power without the discipline necessary for true knowledge.
This is something we can learn to understand and correct, by putting right the inner man. Men can be regenerate on earth: that is the theme of PR . then God will show ways in which political problems, which now seem insoluble, can solve themselves: that is the theme of SA. (352)
Milton’s Fall, therefore, remains fortunate. It remains for Bennett, however, to elucidate the details of Milton’s prescription for the “putting right” of the “inner man.”
IV. Bennett
For Joan Bennett, the conflict between Milton’s personal antinomian convictions and his political conservatism (advocacy of a republican state governed by a Puritan elite) is the consequence of a Christian humanism that “shares with Marxism…a commitment to see the private good as definable only in the public, or community’s good” (2). What both Quint and Hill, along with many other critics of Paradise Lost interpret as reflecting the poet’s retreat from public politics and from his position as ideologue and official of the interregnum state, to the private world of poet and bourgeois individual within the bourgeois family, Bennett sees merely as a sense of “fatigue and depoliticization” in a “radical Christian humanist” context in which the public and private spheres had always been present, centered in what Frederic Jameson identifies as the religious community.
For Bennett, the poetic expression of Milton’s politics in Paradise Lost must be understood in the context of a radical Christian humanism for which the political community and the religious community are identical. This humanism involves a “post-empiricist and post-cartesian” idea of the recta ratio. Bennett’s Milton envisions a religious community based on a pre-enlightenment rationalism. His radical politics extend from his rationalist epistemology rather than generating it. In contrast to Quint and Hill, Bennett’s discussion of Paradise Lost concludes not with the poem’s political contexts, but with “the operation of individual character’s free reason in situations that are simultaneously ethical and political…in the context of Milton’s humanistic and antinomian Christian radicalism” (5).
Rather than separating the personal and private sphere from the public and political, although such a duality could connect Paradise Lost with a similar duality both in the epic tradition and in Milton’s biography, Bennett’s Milton locates the private in the political and the political in the private. For Bennett, the separation scene is an allegory in which Milton discusses a number of moral, political, and metaphysical issues. “…what is at stake in this scene, as in the whole epic, is the meaning of human liberty” (95). There is a parallel to the ideas Bennett ascribes to Milton in Aristotle’s Politics:
For the soul rules the body with the rule characteristic of a master, while intellect rules appetite with political and kingly rule; and this makes it evident that it is according to nature and advantageous for the body to be ruled by the soul, and the passionate part [of the soul] by intellect and the part having reason, while it is harmful to both if the relation is equal or reversed… Further, the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled. (****)
In Bennett’s exegesis (citing Fredson Bowers) of the separation scene, Adam and Eve primarily represent intellect and appetite in the individual human soul (perhaps Eden can be read as the body whose excesses need continual attention), and their dialogue and separation represent the reversal of their natural relationship resulting in harm to both. Bennett sees the specific threat, against which Milton cautions, as the peril of his own antinomian beliefs.
In approaching the discussion of Milton’s antinomianism, Bennett begins by defining his concept of the law of God. The power of Milton’s God is expressed in creation, but His goodness is demonstrated in the law he inscribes into the heart of Man. God tells Adam: “first: I made you; and second: there are my commandments” (64).
According to Bennett, Milton, like Hooker and Goodwin, believed that “the physical and spiritual nature of creation contains within itself the rules of its own operation” (65). God’s law, therefore, was discoverable through knowledge of creation whose obedience to the law Milton believed to be utterly consistent. This consistency is the basis of the depiction in Paradise Lost of “God’s own government of both angels and humans,” as well as his ideal for an English government based “on the rule of law, of ‘reason abstracted as much as might be from personal errors’” (66).
Milton’s God himself is bound by the same natural law governing creation. This theological conviction is the basis for Milton’s belief that the prerogative of the English Crown had to be “bound absolutely to law” (68). The king whose execution Milton had defended in his prose treatises had claimed a prerogative above all law, a prerogative greater than that claimed by Milton’s God. “That prerogative which God stands upon in the Scriptures, and claims to Himself as a royalty annexed to the crown of heaven and earth, . . . standeth not in any liberty claimed by Him to leave what persons He pleaseth to ruin [or salvation] . . .” (Milton qtd in Bennett 69).
In addition to the religious community, Bennett sees marriage as an arena which for Milton binds the private to the public self (96). It is significant, therefore, that Milton was occupied with tracts on the subject of divorce “in the midst of his campaign for ‘true Reformation in the state’” (95). Although Milton condemned radical antinomianism in his sonnet 12:
‘License they mean when they cry liberty’ …for Milton, as for the most radical sectary, no law had to be obeyed by a Christian simply because it was a law: as Christ could break the Sabbath to heal the sick, so Christians could break any of the commandments in the spirit of Christ. (97)
Bennett reads the separation scene “in the light of Milton’s answer to the epistemological question that faced ethical and political antinomianism” (97). She goes on to define antinomianism as it was advocated by the radical factions of the English revolution among whom Hill has placed Milton.
…all manifestations of antinomian belief…did share two points: a common belief in the abrogation of the whole law, and a common underlying motivation for this belief in a reaction against the frightening, inscrutable picture of the deity preached by powerful branches of seventeenth-century Scottish and English Calvinism. (98)
Milton’s interest in this issue was generated by the failure of the revolution which he blamed on the dispute between his (and Goodwin’s) form of humanist antinomianism and the more radical voluntarist antinomianism of the Calvinists, Saltmarsh, Dell and the Ranters. “Milton differed from Saltmarsh in that he did not accept the doctrine of predestination or ‘perseverance’” (100).
The radical voluntarist antinomianism of Lawrence Clarkson which led him to “act out all behavior that had been called sinful” (104) was based on the belief that (as Milton quotes from St. Paul in the Christian Doctrine) the written law was a “schoolhouse” meant to bring men to grace by true Christian faith, after which it was to be put away as “childish things.” Although Milton and Goodwin accepted this principle, their humanism included both a rejection of Calvinist ideas of predestination, and the combination of Arminianism with antinomianism to construct a system that (I would argue) most resembles modern epistemology.
Milton and Goodwin followed a typical Puritan radical’s development in their progression from an unexamined Calvinism that had been inspired by the courage of the reforming Presbyterians, to an Independency based initially on a reaction against Presbyterian intolerance, and finally to individually posited heretical views. (106)
The problem for the humanist heresy was to make its rejection of the apparent anarchist implications of its antinomian foundation compatible with its assertion of free-will. If a human being is not predestined to salvation or damnation and is free to choose to stand or fall, in the absence of strict adherence to the written law, to what authority is he to apply for guidance? Bennett attributes to Goodwin the idea that natural law as it is discoverable in the workings of nature should be used for this purpose.
In Milton’s view, right reason (recta ratio) must be applied to nature, human history, holy scripture and the individual conscience in order to discern the natural law of God.
The combining of this antinomian sense of God’s goodness with the Christian humanist concept of natural law as the embodiment of that goodness brought a return to the roots of individual freedom and the source of social change. This combination was achieved most consciously by John Milton, who articulated both a belief in “general predestination, that is, free will, and a belief in the abrogation of the moral law, that is, the ethical dimension of antinomianism. (108)
Bennett argues that humanist antinomianism differs from the voluntarist beliefs of the “Ranters and, to a lesser extent, the Calvinist Army preachers and Levellers,” in that the former inserts the structure of reason between the will of the inner Christ and the individual’s actions. For the voluntarist, Christ acts directly through the believer so that a true Christian is free to do as he chooses; for Milton and Goodwin, Christ acts upon the reason, and the reason, being free, is free to fall in translating Christ’s will into action. The proper working of right reason in this context requires the proper ordering of the hierarchy of rational (and irrational) principles at work in the human soul as defined by Aristotle.
It is this hierarchy of reason that Bennett sees as the subject of the separation scene. Adam and Eve, while representing the human soul as divided between reason and passion, simultaneously represent human reason “…on the noetic and dianoetic level of reasoning from axioms alone; and on the level of…the syllogism and its extensions—what we call discursive reasoning” (109). Adam is capable of noetic and dianoetic reasoning which identifies his kinship to the angels. His discourses with the angels can be seen, therefore, as the operation of human noetic reason in discovering spiritual truths. Eve is capable of reason but only of the discursive sort. Her rational processes must therefore take instruction from Adam as Adam takes instruction from the angels.
In order to construct an antinomian system, opposed to the idea of unquestioning obedience to ecclesiastic authority, without justifying moral anarchy, Milton developed an idea of the Law of God which he describes in Areopagitica in terms of the myth of Osiris, as a unified whole which exists in fragmented form on the level of human reality. It is man’s responsibility to reconstruct its unity (as do Isis and Horus) using the right reason that God has instilled in his soul.
…while Christians should not unquestioningly obey the law, as codified by Moses, or Archbishop Laud, or the Westminster Assembly, in the blind faith that God will somehow make the whole cohere, they also should not irrationally abandon the positive laws altogether, as the Ranters did… The liberated reason bears the responsibility for perceiving God’s order… (110)
The existence of such an absolute order means that it is not only unlawful to “act out all behavior that has been called sinful,” but even the sincere conscience of a Christian is insufficient, because it may contradict the express will of God. Eve, being deceived by the serpent, may have eaten the apple in good conscience. According to Bennett’s reading of the separation scene, Milton blames the Fall primarily on Eve’s syllogistic discursive reasoning acting apart from, or superseding Adam’s noetic guidance in interpreting God’s law. They do not sin at first, but, working in harmony until this point, at the separation scene they “lose their balance in particularly antinomian ways…” (111).
Bennett sees Adam as meeting the conditions of noetic reason put forth in Artis Logicae, both in his appeal to love against Eve’s appeal to efficiency (acknowledging the natural hierarchy of truths) and in his axiomatic intuition over her syllogistic logic. Bennett’s Milton equates the imbalance of this hierarchy of rational processes with the voluntarist antinomianism of the Ranters. It is Adam’s noetic license to Eve’s syllogistic justification of their separation that puts them into peril of the Fall.
I believe…that Milton’s understanding of the inner light as right reason means that Adam fails as Eve’s governor when he “lets” her go, because by giving his permission when he does, he substitutes his own authority for her truly free decision. (112)
Right reason would not imply the simple affirmation of Adam’s sovereignty by a refusal to allow Eve to go, but his convincing her to choose to stay through noetic guidance of her syllogistic reason.
He must use the rhetorician’s patience as well as the logician’s rigor to bring her to the point where, not the authority of his testimony or his permission, but his right reasons enable her right reason to understand the whole picture that her balancing choice will perfect. (114)
The function of Adam’s rational sovereignty is not to bestow or deny license, but to keep the dialogue open between his right reason and Eve’s so that the liberty of both is preserved. The model for this relationship is Raphael’s tutelage of Adam.
Eve, like the radical antinomians confuses liberty with security from the Fall. By succumbing to his desire for her approval and consenting to her desire for separation, Adam appears to lend his noetic endorsement to her belief. “Eve’s rationalization for declining Adam’s collaboration illustrates the process by which the radical antinomian view could veer from its precarious course, surrendering total freedom to an appearance of freedom that actually leads into captivity” (115).
Conclusion
I agree with Quint, Hill, and Bennett that the cultural conflicts surrounding the English Civil War are deeply inscribed in Paradise Lost. I tend to follow Hill and, primarily, Bennett in perceiving these conflicts as political in a particular historical context that is more concerned with individual epistemology than with collective structures of governance and doctrine. I would add that, of the many doctrinal systems that were proposed during the unprecedented freedom of expression of the interregnum, it is Milton’s that best resembles the a priori principles of modern Anglo-American culture.
Whether it is accurate to attribute modern epistemology entirely to Milton is an impossible question. I would like to try to draw an analogy with his contemporary, Newton, to suggest a possible place for Milton in relation to modern culture. I would guess that more contemporary Americans have read Paradise Lost than Principia Mathematica, but Newton’s ideas are far more universally acknowledged as foundational within our culture. It is not, therefore, necessary to read Newton in order to be influenced by him. His ideas are disseminated throughout the culture by way of many media, beginning with a handful of readers of his works in particular social positions. What Milton conveys in his poems, however, is not, like Newton, a set of theories and formulas, or even a set of ideas and beliefs about the world. It is rather an internalized authority principle which had been needed to replace an obsolete set of external authorities.
I think that another analogy can be drawn between Newton’s Platonism and Milton’s theism. It is probable that no modern Newtonian would embrace the Neoplatonic mysticism that characterizes much of Newton’s approach to physical laws. The cultural world view into which a science based on Newton’s laws has been incorporated is usually understood to be at odds with mysticism and Platonic metaphysics. Newton’s laws of motion and his reduction of physical behavior to masses and forces proved to have a much greater cultural longevity than his ontological conclusions. Milton’s combination of antinomianism and Arminianism (what Bennett calls radical Christian humanism), a belief in the application of the right reason of the individual to the laws of God manifest in his works are reflected in the European enlightenment as well in the principles of the American republic.