Milton, You Should Be Living at This Hour

Late one night at a Beech Lane pub in August of 1790, a few congregants of St. Giles-without-Cripplegate decided to dig up John Milton's corpse. Entombed within their parish some 116 years before, it was only then that a monument was planned for the most celebrated interment. But first the drinkers thought it necessary to confirm it was really Milton in that grave. The following morning, the Beech Lane regulars arrived at St. Giles—a Medieval gothic stone structure in London that is today surrounded by the brutalist Barbican Centre—and proceeded to disentomb Milton. Upon discarding rotten wood and cracking open the lead coffin, the exhumers revealed the shrouded remains of the poet, who claimed he had accomplished things “unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” in Paradise Lost (1667), his epic retelling of Revelation's War in Heaven between Lucifer and God and the Genesis account of the fall of humanity.

The vandals discovered that Milton had decomposed except for the long, curly, chestnut hair that still clung to his scalp—"these redundant locks,” as Milton had described his titular character in Samson Agonistes (1671). The grave robbers fell into a frenzy, akin to those medieval accounts in which the pious paw apart the body of a saint still in the process of dying. It was a “most sacrilegious scene,” the pamphleteer Philip Neve wrote a few days later, "a transaction which will strike every liberal mind with horror and disgust." Some of the interlopers pried teeth from Milton's mouth or grabbed a loose jawbone or pulled from his pate long strips of hair that had once earned him the cheeky nickname "The Lady of Cambridge." Poet William Cowper denounced the "wretches who have dared profane / His dread sepulchral rest."

Ironically for a committed anti-papist such as Milton, bits of his bone and hair were sold in London pawnshops, evoking the trade in sacred relics that he decried in Paradise Lost as the "sport of winds," all of those "beads / Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls." "The fate of his body," Joe Moshenska writes in his excellent Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton (Basic Books, 2021), "feels curiously apt." Just as Milton's corpse was divided, so, too, has his thought been sundered; he comes to us now as a poet of dueling antipathies. There is Milton the consummate Protestant and the Italophile who dined with Jesuits, the staunch Puritan and the non-conformist heretic, the misogynistic prig and the celebrant of conjugal divinity, the incendiary pamphleteer and the erudite scholar, the English nationalist and the polyglot cosmopolitan. Milton is "encountered as a series of scattered moments and encounters which do not … add up to a cohesive whole," Moshenska writes.

Milton remains more respected than read. For all his canonicity, he lacks the cultural cache of his compatriots Chaucer, Dickens, Austen, and, of course, Shakespeare. Moshenska contends that Milton is "a national monument rather than a national treasure … there was no Milton museum, no gift shop selling Paradise Lost tea towels or 'Lycidas' lollipops." I would add that no adaptation of "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" follows television broadcasts of A Christmas Carol. Colin Firth has never risen like Lucifer from Pandemonium in a BBC miniseries; the National Theatre has never staged Milton’s masque Comus. There are reasons for Milton's relative marginality: he requires knowledge of Christian theology that most readers in our current secular age lack, and his sticky syntax, complicated grammar, baroque diction, and obscure allusions do not reward casual readers, even if his Lucifer is the most riveting dramatic character ever rendered.

Milton is often maligned, from Dr. Johnson's appraisal in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779) that Paradise Lost is a book that the "reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again" to, in the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s quip that "judging by the ordinary standards of likeableness in human beings, Milton is unsatisfactory." Johnson and his fellow monarchist Eliot acknowledged the poet’s greatness but saw nothing to recommend in the pamphleteer who unrepentantly advocated for the decapitation of a king and then worked steadfastly in the government of those who performed that decapitation; Johnson called Milton an "acrimonious and surly republican." British approaches to memorializing Milton are threaded with ambivalence. He is by far the greatest national epic poet, verily God's Englishman, yet his republicanism makes him a difficult candidate for an official monument (St. Giles settled on a modest bronze statue in 1904).

The parable of Milton's plundered corpse suggests an equivalent story about how he is everywhere. Just as in the days after his posthumous evisceration a rib might be hawked at Bartholomew Fair or a tooth at Old Spitalfields Market, Milton has appeared in reams of scholarship over the centuries. There is C.S. Lewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), William Empson's radical Milton's God (1961), Barbara Lewalski’s Milton’s Brief Epic (1966), and Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967). The journal Milton Quarterly has been published for more than 60 years, and Milton Studies has been published for more than 50; the Milton Society of America currently has 575 members. As of this writing, a search for "John Milton" at the scholarly digital archive JSTOR returns an astounding 20,092 results. It’s fair to ask: What else could possibly be said?

A lot, apparently. In just the past two decades, there have been several notable biographies, including Anna Beer's Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (2008); John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns (2008); and Nicholas McDowell's Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton (2020). Milton’s prodigious pamphleteering makes his opinions much clearer to discern than those of earlier figures, such as Shakespeare, and the complexities of his writing—he’s a thinker cleaved “between orthodox and radical, learned and popular, cloistered and worldly” as Moshenska writes—ensures that he remains a fascinating figure for modern scholars.

Moshenska's book provides a chronological overview of Milton's well-known particulars: he was the upwardly mobile son of a money lender and rigorously educated in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He studied at Cambridge, went on a grand tour of Italy and met Galileo, and returned home and advocated for the Parliamentary cause and justified Charles I's regicide in 1649. He became a functionary in the Commonwealth government and narrowly escaped execution upon Restoration. He composed Paradise Lost, the brilliant Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes, in addition to exemplary lyrics in English, Italian, and Latin. He spent his final two decades in total blindness, dictating his work to various amanuenses and solidifying his reputation as a prophetic bard.

Darkness Made Visible does something different than other recent biographies, as Moshenska provides an account of his individual experience as a reader of Milton. By drawing on the contemporary critical school of New Historicism, Moshenska considers questions such as what kind of clock young Milton might have been familiar with and what role corporal punishment played in his poetry; in the process, Moshenska reinvents literary biography. As a secular Jew, Moshenska is aware that the English academy often treated those like him as outsiders, and though Milton is sometimes seen as the ultimate Protestant poet, Moshenska sees in him a kindred spirit because Milton, despite his greatness, is so often viewed with unjust suspicion. Moshenska is honest about how reading is "always affected by a wider social context, by quirks of individual personality and facts of family background, as well as by sheer happenstance." By analyzing not just poetry (there are several adept close readings) but also how Milton's works impact readers—how meanings shift and mutate over the years; how the cadence of individual lines is rendered, which varies depending on when in their life readers encounter the words; how a sense of the places that perhaps inspired him alters interpretations—Moshenska demonstrates that there is much more to be said. Endlessly more, in fact.

***

"John Milton should be judged by the standards of the twenty-first century," David Hawkes writes in the provocative John Milton: A Hero of Our Time (2009). Meanwhile, the scholar Nigel Smith sees the long-dead poet as someone with whom people can "think through … contemporary dilemmas" as he argues in the audaciously titled Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? (2008) Correspondences between the 17th century and today seem only more pertinent in this age of sectarianism, factionalism, and civil strife. When reading about Parliament’s order in 1647 to demolish and behead Hubert Le Sueur's equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, it’s natural to think about the recent toppling of Confederate monuments across the US. Or when reading about Thomas Hobbes's claim that universities were "the core of rebellions" that were to "this nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans," it’s hard to not hear echoes of today’s conservative fulmination. Such affinities risk a misleading presentism. It’s easy to write editorials that glibly draw such comparisons—I've done so myself—but reductionist as well because often-violent 17th-century arguments about the sacraments, salvation, and episcopacy have no easy contemporary corollaries.

But if a work is pertinent solely to the past, there is scant reason to keep reading it. Only scholars peruse 17th-century almanacs, broadsheets, and pamphlets, but many of us still turn to Paradise Lost. Milton has nothing to directly say about "cancel culture" or reactionary assaults on critical race theory, but in his celebrated tract Areopagitica (1644), he writes, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." Paradise Lost offers no tangible prescriptions for rectifying climate change, but Milton does offer a theory of evil. Few poets have written so eloquently about eternity, precisely because Milton drew inspiration from his heavenly muse. As McDowell writes, Milton was "struck by his almost overwhelming awareness of his divine gifts," and "daemons are everywhere in his poetry." Each of these subjects—liberty, evil, and eternity—are related to one another, impossible to disentangle across Milton's works.

Smith claims that Milton is the "literary embodiment of so many of the aspirations that have guided Americans," and the republican Milton has long felt better suited to a revolutionary American context than to an imperial British one. Traces of his rhetoric are obvious in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, for example. "No man … can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free," Milton avers in his civil war political tract The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), written 127 years before The Declaration of Independence, albeit in a pricklier vernacular. Partisan of liberty that he was, Milton was the morning star of the American Revolution, even while his own vision was arguably stranger and more radical than anything Jefferson advocated. After all, the latter merely declared independence, but Milton celebrated regicide: "Be he king, or tyrant, or emperor, the sword of justice is above him, in whose hand soever is found sufficient power to avenge … so great a deluge of innocent blood.”

If there is any project with which Milton is associated, it's the cause of free speech. Moshenska describes the poet’s Areopagitica—written in response to the Licensing Order of 1643, which facilitated pre-publication censorship—as the most "electrifying and famous prose that he ever produced." Certainly, outside of Paradise Lost, it's Milton at his most quotable. "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are," Milton writes (with modernized spelling), for "as good almost kill a man as kill a good book … he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself." As with all historical paeans to free speech—whether by Milton, Voltaire, or Jefferson—modern readers selectively quote to transform the author into a good, contemporary liberal. What Milton denounces isn't necessarily the censoring of books after they've been published but the restriction on certain titles from being published in the first place; furthermore, he countenances no tolerance of some religious minorities, particularly Roman Catholics.

Transforming Areopagitica into a mission statement for the ACLU misses much of what's truly radical in Milton, however. When he writes that "a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit," it's neither conceit nor metaphor but a statement of metaphysical reality. True to the ethos of the inspired prophet-poet that he is, Milton understands words to be conscious energies. His defense isn't reducible to either of the two major arguments advanced today: the strategic claim that speech shouldn't be restricted because one day our adversaries might censor us and the moral claim that speech is an inviolate right regardless of its content. Milton, instead, asserts that "Good and evil we know in the field of this world grew up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil" that he "cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed." If wicked, vile, and offensive words are banned, ignorance of evil means people have no knowledge of its contrary, so there is only "knowing good by evil." It’s telling that the apocryphal apple in Genesis came from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and that Milton believed the heterodox doctrine of Felix culpa, the "fortunate fall." Before the fall, Adam and Eve couldn't really be good because they never could have been bad; the same principle applies to ideas.

Milton's approach to evil is one of the most remarkable aspects of his thought. Areopagitica is of a piece with Paradise Lost, and if readers are to think of Milton as a revolutionary figure—and they should—his approach to evil differentiates him from the Enlightenment thinkers who followed. Perhaps because Milton was more influential in the US than in France, the latter revolution affirmed a Utopian commitment to the perfectibility of society through reason, a notion dangerously ignorant of evil's endurance. Arguably the last Renaissance man, Milton hardly disparaged reason, yet he is wary of wicked "words clothed in reasons garb," as he describes the self-serving arguments of the demon Belial in Paradise Lost. What makes Luciferian rhetoric so dangerous is that it's persuasive, which is Milton's critique of instrumentality and positivism. As Fish argues in Surprised by Sin, Milton's poem is neither encomium for Satan nor doctrinal agitprop but rather demonstrates to readers their fallenness so that "What in me is dark / Illumine."

Obviously much of this is a conventional statement about original sin, however cleverly rendered. Yet any close reading of Paradise Lost will attest that little of Milton's theology is orthodox, particularly when read in light of his treatise De Doctrina Christiana, an explication of his religious beliefs that was rediscovered in 1823 at the Old State Paper Office in London and published two years later. In terms of political allegiances, Milton was a Puritan, but theologically he was closer to the Dissenters in the army and the working class. Not enough scholarly work has been done to identify the Enlightenment's origins in the non-conformists of the 17th century, which included groups such as the Levellers, the Ranters, and the Muggletonians and more recognizable denominations, such as the Quakers and the Baptists, with Milton the most celebrated representative of this diverse group of schismatics.

Based on Nicene definitions, Milton was scarcely even a Christian by the time he wrote Paradise Lost. According to De Doctrina Christiana, he had dismissed the Trinity, rejected the predestination of Calvinism, and was an ardent materialist. As a pamphleteer writing against monarchy and episcopacy, Milton engaged in a vociferous anti-Catholicism, mocking Eucharistic "gods made of bread" and joking that the faithful defecate the body of Christ. As a lapsed Catholic myself, it can be a bit much. But as standard as such rhetoric is for early-modern Protestants, Moshenska argues that Milton's distance from the Reformation was as great as the distance between the Reformation and the medieval Catholic Church. Tellingly, Milton uses the loaded term transubstantiate when describing the breaking of bread between the archangel Raphael and Adam. "Milton uses the word," Moshenska writes, "because the process of mere matter becoming divine … is not banished in Eden but generalised, made into the rule rather than the miraculous exception." The poet's issue with the Church wasn't that Catholics believe that the wafer and wine literally transform into the body and blood of Christ; his issue was that all of reality is forever turning back and forth into God. Milton wasn't a Protestant—he was a pantheist.

"Each generation … rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe,'" writes Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972), and Milton's conception of an all-pervasive evil capable of corrupting the good isn't Christian superstition but an Enlightenment warning to those who think that wickedness is merely a rounding error, something that can be eliminated with careful planning. Paradise Lost is thus an ethical poem, not because it's didactic but because it acts as a mirror, keeping readers honest about this "Dungeon horrible, on all sides round.… No light, but rather darkness visible." Milton's own work between 1649 and 1660 as the Secretary of Foreign Tongues for the authoritarian and genocidal Oliver Cromwell is evidence of how darkness can creep into even the trained soul.

Paradise Lost is a guide for the fallen, instructions on exile for all of us embodied selves cursed with death's finality, regardless that Genesis is a myth. "Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit.… Ethereal, as we … in heavenly paradises dwell," as Raphael says, a description of what Moshenska describes as a "world that thrums with potential, a world of constant becoming," where the "very divisions that structure the universe—between the human and the angelic, between Earth and Heaven—will shrink to irrelevance." The epic may envision a prelapsarian state in which matter and spirit, mind and soul are equivalent, where all of existence can transubstantiate, but Paradise Lost was also written to intimate eternity. Canonicity is a boring curricular issue that may or may not have to do with quality and craft, but truly great work—and Milton produced great works—speaks not from its own moment but from timelessness. Great works are singularities, they are portals, defined by being unplumbable and endlessly regenerative.

Milton's poetic difficulty is the point. All of that serpentine syntax, awkward word order, baroque foreignism, and convoluted narrative exists to make Milton's verse alien and to push consciousness toward the transcendent. Milton is an eternal poet because he willed himself into eternity; Paradise Lost evokes a tense beyond past, present, or future. The poet invokes a muse that is "heavenly born, / Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed," which, as Moshenska explains, makes Milton "first and last, Alpha and Omega " because “his muse came first, and, if Paradise Lost is largely hers, then Milton came first; his poem is the first epic, the only true epic, as well as the last." In that space, there is the paradise that Milton sings of, for the poem is a heaven of words, but when readers finish, they are like Adam and Eve, for whom the "world was all before them.… They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way." Their exile is in completion, but like the original couple, readers are indelibly made different, strange, and beautiful for having dwelled, even briefly, in Eden. That's the spirit in which Paradise Lost must be read, as an autonomous present, a room of eternity.