Milton in the Puritan Revolution

516 Pages·1963·36.949 MB·English

by  Don M. Wolfe

M I L T O N
IN THE
P U R I T A N R E V O L U T I O N

M I L T O N
IN THE
P U R I T A N
R E V O L U T I O N
by
DON M. WOLFE
1963
Humanities Press
New York
First published in 1041
Copyright 1963 by
Humanities Press, Inc.
by special arrangement
with die author
PrmttJ in US-A. by
NOBLE OFFSET PRINTERS, INC.
NEW YORK 3, N. Y.
TO
A N N I E C U N N I N G H A M
AND
M A R Y S T O R M O N T

e lived at one of the most memorable eras in the history of
mankind, at the very crisis of the great conflict between
Oromasdes and Arimanes, liberty and despotism, reason
and prejudice. That great battle was fought for no single genera­
tion, for no single land. The destinies of the human race were staked
on the same cast with the freedom of the English people. Then were
first proclaimed those mighty principles which have since worked
their way into the depths of the American forests, which have
aroused Greece from the slavery and degradation of two thousand
years, and which, from one end of Europe to .the other, have kindled
an unquenchable fire in the hearts of the oppressed, and loosed the
knees of the oppressors with an unwonted fear. . . .
He never came up in the rear, when the outworks had
been carried and the breach entered. He pressed into the forlorn
hope. . . .
There are a few characters which have stood the closest scru­
tiny and severest tests . . . which have been declared sterling by
the general consent of mankind. . . . These great men we trust
that we know how to prize; and of these was Milton. The sight of
his books, the sound of his name, are pleasant to us. His thoughts
resemble those celestial fruits and flowers which the Virgin Martyr
of Massinger sent down from the gardens of Paradise to the earth,
and which are distinguished from the productions of other soils, not
only by superior bloom and sweetness, but by miraculous efficacy
to invigorate and to heal. They are powerful, not only to delight, but
to elevate and purify. Nor do we envy the man who can study either
the life or the writings of the great poet and patriot, without aspir­
ing to emulate, not indeed the sublime works with which his genius
has enriched our literature, but the zeal with which he laboured for
the public good, the fortitude with which he endured every private
calamity, the lofty disdain with which he looked down on tempta­
tions and dangers, the deadly hatred which he bore to bigots and
tyrants, and the faith which he so sternly kept with his country and
with his fame.
—Macaulay, “Milton”
The outstanding effect of the study of Milton’s philosophy as
embodied in his poetry and prose, and of the endeavor to
relate him more closely to his English predecessors has been
to minimize the importance of his theology in the narrower sense,
and to exalt in its place, not merely his art and eloquence and
imagination, but those elements of insight and reflection which he
holds in common with Spenser, Hooker, Shakespeare, and Bacon—
men in whose work the northern and southern currents of the age
are fused in that richer and profounder creative humanism which
b the special contribution of the Englbh Renaissance. The essential
character of that humanbm b its assertion of the spiritual dignity
of man, its recognition of the degree to which hb higher destinies
are in hb own hands, its repudiation of the claim of hb lower nature
to control hb higher or of any force or agency external to hb own
mind and will to achieve for him salvation. This humanbm is
sharply and irreconcilably at odds with mediaeval thought. It db-
cards, first of all, the ascetic principle and releases for enjoyment
and use all the agencies of self-realizing perfection. It proposes,
moreover (and this is its essential character) to achieve its goal
through the study not of God but of man and it trusts the human
reason as well as intuition and revealed truth as the instrument of
its knowledge. It turns, therefore, to Scripture for the best record
of man’s nature in its relation to the God of righteousness and love,
then to the litterae humaniores of antiquity, where it finds a wider
revelation of man as an individual and a citizen, thb latter source
constituting no denial but a completion of the data afforded by the
former.
—James Holly Hanford, "Milton
and the Return to Humanism.'*
PREFACE
For some years readers of Milton have felt a need for a com­
prehensive analysis of Milton’s social ideas other than that
found in Masson’s exhaustive Life. This book attempts to
meet that need, orienting Milton’s political beliefs with both the
historical events and the social ideas of his influential contempora-
ries^That Milton and his fellow rebels spoke for more than his gen­
eration is more than ever apparent today, when the most elementary
freedoms for which they struggled are more sharply debated than
in any decade during the past century.
The source literature interpreted, consisting mainly of the pam­
phlets of the Thomason Collection of the British Museum and the
McAlpin Collection of Union Seminary, falls almost exclusively
between 1640 and 1660. I have made little attempt to trace either
the origins or the influence of Milton’s political beliefs; each of
these topics deserves separate and thorough consideration. In treat­
ing the main threads of Milton’s social thought, I have found it
necessary to retrace with differing emphasis the same sequence of
events in several chapters, a procedure inevitable, as I see it, in any
thorough examination of ideological topics. Since the prose contains
the clearest statements of Milton’s sociological beliefs, it was with
some hesitation that I concluded the book with a brief analysis of
the political implications of Paradise Lost, an analysis which cannot
be construed, of course, as an unfavorable judgment of the poem
as a whole. Milton was so many sided that any ultimate judgment
of him requires many qualifications. Of this no man who has spent
years with Milton can be unaware. Like most readers of Milton
I subscribe in the main to that still timely and revealing essay,
“Milton and the Return to Humanism,” by James Holly Hanford
(Studies in Philology, 1921). No book on Milton’s politics can show
him, however, always at his truest and his best, that is, when his
is