Critics nagged away at the problem of how a ‘Puritan’ could also be a humanist. Modern studies of Puritanism have abolished this problem by abolishing the killjoy concept of Puritanism: there was nothing abnormal in a seventeenth-century Puritan loving music, song, wine and plays, or defending, as Milton did, elegance, fine clothes, dancing, theatres, bagpipes and fiddles, ale-houses. Passions and pleasures, he declared in Areopagitica, if ‘rightly tempered, are the very ingredients of virtue’.2 Sexual austerity was at least as likely to be associated with Catholicism in seventeenth-century opinion: radical Protestants were thought to be more sexually indulgent.3 Milton was a ‘roundhead’ whose portraits show him with long hair. It was Archbishop Laud who insisted on undergraduates cutting their hair short: long hair luxuriated in Oxford after the victory of the ‘roundheads’. Milton was not unique in choosing as a symbol of strength and virtue the long flowing locks of Samson.1 The stereotype of the dour Puritan seemed applicable to Milton so long as it was believed that he wrote his first divorce pamphlet within a month of marrying Mary Powell. But historical research long ago disproved that myth.
I believe that other problems can be dissolved by a historical approach. Take the question of the sources of Milton’s ideas. Critics obsessed with the poet’s great reputation and great scholarship tend to look exclusively to literary sources for his ideas – to the Greek and Roman classics, to the early Christian Fathers. There are useful works on Milton and Plato, Milton and Origen, Milton and Lactantius. More to my point, there have been studies of Milton and Servetus, Milton and Ochino, Milton and Du Bartas, Milton and Boehme. My not very daring suggestion is that Milton got his ideas not only from books but also by talking to his contemporaries. As Saurat put it, ‘to take up a thread at the beginning of human culture and follow it up till it reaches Milton is a pure illusion, a mere abstract fabrication of the academic mind.’2 It is a prevalent donnish assumption that ideas are transmitted principally by books. But ‘Marxist’ and ‘Freudian’ ideas are held to-day by people who never opened a book by Marx or Freud. How many of those whom we call ‘Arminian’ in seventeenth-century England had read Arminius? Milton had; but his learning was exceptional. Ideas which scholars solemnly trace back to the fifth century B.C. or the third century A.D. were commonplaces to seventeenth-century Baptists, Levellers, Diggers, Seekers, Behmenists, Socinians, Ranters, Muggletonians, early Quakers and other radical groupings which took part in the free-for-all discussions of the English Revolution. The ideas had previously circulated only in the heretical underground: now they could suddenly be freely discussed. Milton celebrated this ferment in Areopagitica. I see him in permanent dialogue with the plebeian radical thinkers of the English Revolution and I see him drawing on the same traditions as they drew on-traditions which include Servetus, Ochino and Boehme, but which also include Hermeticism, whose rediscovery in the fifteenth century gave new life to many ideas from classical antiquity.3
Milton’s relation to this underworld of thought has not yet been properly investigated. Fifty years ago M. Saurat seized on Milton’s radical heresies but put us on the wrong track by attributing them to Jewish sources. We need more specific studies of Milton and his links with this radical background. The best to date is N. T. Burns’s Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton, which sets the poet against a century and more of underground heretical thought in England. There is also Leo Miller’s Milton among the Polygamophiles, which relates some of Milton’s views on marriage to previous history; but a wider study of Milton and preceding ideas about the relation of the sexes is needed. There are general histories of Unitarianism and of Socinianism in which Milton’s name occurs; but no study of his ideas in the light of this tradition, also strong in the English underground. There is no work on Milton and contemporary millenarianism, antinomianism, materialism or Hermeticism. Despite Saurat’s pioneer work, quite recently very respectable scholars could assume that the Milton who read Cicero and Virgil could not possibly ‘have given his serious attention to the naive and superstitious Robert Fludd’, or to ‘the vulgar astrological flimflam of Dr. John Dee’.1 But John Selden was a great admirer of Fludd, and Sir Isaac Newton took very seriously thinkers who seem by twentieth-century standards to be no less irrational than Dee and Fludd. Our understanding of the seventeenth century has been greatly enriched of late by scholarly work which has restored Dee and Fludd to the predominance which contemporaries gave them.2 There is a book to be written on ‘Milton and Fludd’ which will be far more important than any studies of Milton’s classical or patristic sources. But whoever writes it will need both more courage and more Latin than I possess.
I believe that the historian’s approach can help by trying to explain how Milton came to hold the views he did at the time he held them; and perhaps to explain changes in his views over time. Milton was not an original thinker, in politics or theology. Almost every one of his ideas can be paralleled among his radical contemporaries. He is unique only in the way he combined their ideas and related them to the Bible. If we restore him to the seventeenth-century context we shall no longer see originality where none exists. For instance, Milton’s notorious ‘He for God only, she for God in him’ is one of the few of his statements which would have been totally acceptable to the orthodox among his contemporaries. Similarly, there is no need to make a pother about Milton’s climatic theories once we appreciate that the belief that northerners were stronger than but intellectually inferior to southerners was the stalest of chestnuts in the seventeenth century.1 Where commentators have supposed that Milton was strikingly original he is often only fusing with the orthodox Puritan tradition ideas from the Familist/Hermeticist tradition which I shall be investigating.2
Milton, wrote J. H. Hanford, ‘contemplated no activity as a poet which did not involve an intimate relation with the currents of life and thought in which he lived’.3 By replacing Milton in history we shall be able to catch in his writings echoes of discussions and controversies which meant much to him and to those for whom he wrote, but which lose this resonance when they are treated in isolation. Milton like many of us, combined traditional ideas unquestioningly accepted with others which were, by the standards of his day, highly unorthodox. That is why each critic can create his own Milton. C. S. Lewis, an old-fashioned authoritarian Christian surviving into the twentieth century, found some of the more traditional aspects of Milton’s thought congenial and expounded them very effectively for his time. Empson, a dashing modern atheist, has more sympathy for those aspects of Milton’s thought which were wildly heretical in the seventeenth century, though they were perhaps not quite so positively anti-Christian as Empson wished to think.
But Milton was neither a twentieth-century authoritarian Christian nor a twentieth-century atheist. He has more in common with a Ranter like Laurence Clarkson than with Lewis and the neo-Christians; but he also has more in common with Lodowick Muggleton, who believed he was one of the two Last Witnesses, than with Empson.4 Whilst keeping Milton in the seventeenth century we must recognize that in the sixteen-forties and -fifties there was an outburst of radical thinking in England which transcended the orthodoxies of the day, and with which in some respects we still have not caught up.
When the orthodox in the seventeenth century heard the ideas of the radical underground they called for the whip and the branding iron. When Milton heard them he said they reminded him of the early Christians, and that the way to truth was through fearless discussion. It was only the strength of the radical movement, and its vigorous defence by brave men like Milton, which gave the ideas a dozen or so years of uniquely free discussion before orthodoxy got the lid back on again. If a twentieth-century neo-Christian had met John Milton in the flesh he would not have liked him. The dislike, I suspect, would have been mutual.1
Milton scholarship, in my view, has been put on a wrong track by W. R. Parker’s Milton’s Contemporary Reputation of 1940. Parker argued that little notice was taken of Milton’s pamphlets of the sixteen-forties, and that he was virtually unknown until he was invited to undertake the defence of the English republic (in Latin for a continental audience) in 1649. Parker looked in the wrong places for Milton’s reputation. The orthodox, the good and the great, either ignored Milton’s ideas of the sixteen-forties, or dismissed them with a snide comment. But the radicals, I suspect, read them
