JOHN MILTON: REVOLUTIONARY

Press, 12 August 1978, Page 17

JOHN MILTON: REVOLUTIONARY

Milton and the English Revolution. By Christopher Hill. Faber and Faber. £ p ' Bibi ‘ography and index. *29.50. (Reviewed by Mark Francis) Christopher Hill is a distinguished Oxford historian and his "Milton and the English Revolution” is a great book. wou ld be wrong, however, to think he has written a great historical work. This Milton is meant for the twentieth century, and Hill, though careful with historical evidence, is concerned with expounding the revolutionary importance of "Paradise Lost” and “Samson Agonistes” to the twentieth century. Like Blake and Shelley, Milton was a politically-committed intellectual poet and this was used to undermine his reputation earlier this century. Literary critics, led by F. R. Leavis, suggested that if Milton could not be understood without the antique theological lumber which accompanied his poems, then it was better to do without both. Though Leavis and his unholy crew failed to dismiss Milton from the canon of English literature, the attempt means that a new, and, perhaps, half-secular Milton was needed, and this is the task to which Hill has set his hand. Milton’s religious views, his mortalism, antinomianism, and antitrinitarianism, are heresies beyond the interest of the twentieth-century reader. Yet the reasons why he developed these views are still important and Hill does not pretend that Milton did without theology by transmuting God into human love as his contempararies, the Diggers, did. Milton’s God was distant from the human beings who were striving for perfectibility, but He had not abdicated. Milton and his fellow radicals believes that human perfectibility would result in God appearing in the saints or the chosen people. This result could come about from human struggle, not from Christ descending. Milton’s earth and his heaven were material places which followed natural laws. On earth men were partly good and partly evil because Adam had biologically transmitted his sin to his descendants. Angels were physical beings who bled, ate, digested, and interpenetrated sexually. Neither men nor angels had a soul separate from their bodies. Man was throwm out of paradise and he could not regain it by contemplation or by excising his soul. Milton was out of sympathy with the passivity of the Ranters and Quakers. They ignored the world as it really .was in all its brutality; "they were fundamentally unserious, as selfregarding as a modern hippie.” In Milton’s poems, the fall of man was a material and physical disaster as well as a spiritual one, and the recovery would come about by human effort in this world.

His poetry, then, is still relevant to men and women who believe the world needs transforming even though the task looks hopeless. Milton did not surrender when the English revolution failed, nor did his heroic angel, Abdiel, surrender when surrounded by Satan’s hosts. Both stood by their principles in spite of threats. Milton’s principles were not simplistic and easy. The author of "Areopagitica” did not announce that his principles were individual licence or the absolute right to free speech. This would ignore the needs of society, and would be excessively rationalistic. He did not hold with the syllogistic logic used by seventeenth century academics, but attempted to deal with problems in a broad, synthetic way which would hold the conflicting parts of human nature together. Like Hegel and Marx, Milton thought in a dialectic. Individual liberty was essential for the elect, the small body of saints in England, and discipline was essential for society as a whole. Milton’s problem of combining liberty with discipline is similar to Rousseau’s probiem of justifying the chains by which society restrains the freedom of individuals. The free individual has to live in a society composed of other fallen individuals who may also claim an absolute liberty. The solution to Milton’s paradox was self-discipline or internalised standards for those who could discipline themselves. They would achieve the paradise within. However, for the masses of the unregenerate, discipline was required lest they betray everyone to the Stuart kings or to the Pope. This is not a liberal solution by twentieth century standards, but Hill believes that it is

basically progressive. Milton's view of the elect was not a strict Calvinist one; one could choose to regenerate and to join the elect. His view of discipline allowed for “selfdevelopment, and for the flowering of those extraordinary capabilities which exist in greater numbers of ordinary men and women than was traditionally allowed fqr in seventeenth century thinking.” Paradox, or tension between ideas, seemed to run through all of Milton’s thought. Reason and passion were both necessary, yet they were in conflict. Milton admired each in turn. Satan uses arguments from "Areopagitica” wmen tempting Eve. “What, is faith, love and virtue unassayed Alone, without exterior help sustained.” “If what is evil Be real, why not known, since easier ■shunned.” Reason fails here, but passion is an equally frail guide. Satan’s destruction, in the opening books of “Paradise Lost,” was caused by passion and by a failure to follow his reason which told him that defeat was inevitable. Adam refuses to listen to the voice of his reason, and abandons all for Eve and follows her into sin. This conflict has no solution in Milton’s writings, and man seems doomed to always be torn between reason and passion. Hill’s book is not a single integrated view of Milton, but a series of rich and changing tableaux in which different Miltons step out of the historical background and speak. This is a great literary achievement, but not a perfect one. Occasionally there is a clang of a brass coin as it drops into the heap of silver and gold. Hill, in his eagerness to rescue Milton, sometimes overreaches himself and interpolated one of his own hopes and judgments in the very way that, he has criticised some literary critics, such as William Empson, for doing. Occasional flaws do not obscure the brilliance of Hill’s Milton. He both explains and justifies the almost paltry ending of “Paradise Lost” in which Milton could see no solution to man’s problems beyond concentrating on small things in the hope that the great may come to them when God gives the sign. When Hill writes at the end of his book that Milton would not want his personal fame to be separated from his Good Old Cause, the English Revolution, he has succeeded. Milton has not suffocated, in a net woven of theological controversy; he has been rescued as a revolutionary philosopher. (Dr Mark Francis is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Canterbury. His special interest is the history of political thought).