John Milton

John Milton (1608–1674)

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, in Bread Street, London, the son of a prosperous scrivener and composer who had been disinherited by his own father for abandoning Catholicism. The household was Protestant, musical, and bookish, and the elder Milton spared nothing on his son's education. A private tutor came first, then St. Paul's School, then Christ's College, Cambridge, where Milton matriculated in 1625. He took his B.A. in 1629 and his M.A. in 1632. He was clever, fastidious, and not always comfortable at Cambridge; an early quarrel with a tutor appears to have led to a brief rustication. He had been intended for the ministry, but by the time he left the university he could not accept what that vocation required. In a later account he wrote that he had been "church-outed by the prelates," unwilling to subscribe to the discipline of Archbishop Laud's Church of England. Poetry, which he approached as a sacred calling, would be his priesthood instead.

From 1632 to 1638 he lived at his father's house in Horton, Buckinghamshire, in a self-directed course of reading in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, theology, and history. The period produced Comus and Lycidas. In 1638 and 1639 he traveled to France and Italy, meeting Hugo Grotius in Paris and, in Florence, the aged Galileo, whom he would later recall as a prisoner of the Inquisition. News of the gathering conflict between king and Parliament brought him home. He taught pupils, including his nephews, and in 1642 married Mary Powell, a royalist's daughter of seventeen. She left him within weeks to return to her family. The abandonment prompted his tracts on divorce, among them The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which argued that incompatibility of mind was grounds for ending a marriage. The tracts scandalized the Presbyterian clergy, and Milton found himself denounced by the very party he had written for in the antiprelatical pamphlets of 1641 and 1642. Mary eventually returned, and they had four children; she died in 1652 after the birth of the last.

In 1644 he published Areopagitica, his argument against licensing of the press, which had no immediate effect on the law. By then his theology had begun to drift from Reformed orthodoxy toward Independency and finally toward no church at all. In 1649, after the execution of Charles I, he defended the regicide in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, composing Latin correspondence and polemic for the Commonwealth. His eyesight, always weak, failed completely by early 1652. He continued in office with assistants, dictating, and wrote his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano against the royalist scholar Salmasius. His second wife, Katherine Woodcock, died in 1658 within months of childbirth, and the infant died too; he commemorated her in a sonnet.

The Restoration of 1660 put him in real danger. He was briefly arrested, his regicide tracts were burned, and he was spared from execution partly through the intercession of friends, including the poet Andrew Marvell. He retired into obscurity, blind, with the Great Fire of 1666 and the plague of 1665 shadowing his years in London. He married a third time, in 1663, to Elizabeth Minshull, who looked after him until his death. His relations with his three surviving daughters were strained; tradition holds that they resented being made to read to him in languages they did not understand, and the record of their later accounts is not flattering to the father.

Milton died on November 8, 1674, probably of gout, at his home in Bunhill, London. He was buried beside his father in St Giles Cripplegate. He had come to no settled church, had held no pulpit, and had paid heavily for the convictions he refused to retract.

His Writing and Its Influence

Milton began writing verse as a schoolboy, with paraphrases of Psalms 114 and 136 composed around the age of fifteen, and he came to Cambridge already formed as a poet in English, Latin, and Italian. His early reading ran through Spenser, the classical epic poets, and the Bible in its original tongues, and these sources never left him. The prose of the 1640s was something he regarded as a detour, a left-handed labor undertaken because the times demanded it. He said as much himself, and he also said that the poem he truly wanted to write would take years of preparation and "devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge." He spent the decades of public controversy waiting to write it.

Paradise Lost was composed after the Restoration, in blindness, and published in 1667, with a revised twelve-book edition appearing in 1674. His own stated aim was to "justify the ways of God to men," and the poem does so by dramatizing the fall of Satan, the temptation of Adam and Eve, and the promise of redemption on a scale that no English poet had attempted. Paradise Regained and the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes followed in 1671. Both were written by a man who had seen a godly cause collapse and had been left to ask what faithfulness looks like after defeat.

His theology was the matter of his gravest controversy, though it came to light late. The treatise De Doctrina Christiana, a systematic work in Latin, lay in manuscript until its discovery in 1823 in the State Paper Office, and it was published in 1825. It revealed a man who held views far from Reformed orthodoxy: a subordinationist understanding of the Son that most readers have judged Arian or close to it, a doctrine of creation out of the divine substance rather than from nothing, a conditional view of the soul's death and resurrection, and a firm insistence on free will against Calvinist predestination. Scholars have disputed the authorship and the dating of the work, and some of the argument has been over how far the poems agree with it. The question remains open, and it is part of what makes him difficult to place within any confession.

His influence on English literature was immediate and permanent. Dryden wrote that Milton's was the greatest and most elevated genius of the modern poets. The eighteenth century made Paradise Lost a standard of the sublime, and the Romantics, Blake and Shelley above all, argued over whether he had been of the devil's party without knowing it. Blake's remark that Milton was "a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it" is among the most quoted and most contested judgments in English criticism. Meanwhile Areopagitica became a founding text for arguments about free expression, and the divorce tracts, which met only hostility in their day, were taken up by later reformers.

His reception among believers has been uneven. Evangelical readers of the nineteenth century often treated the epic as scripture's poetic companion, and his Arminian and anti-Trinitarian leanings were slow to be noticed or admitted. C. S. Lewis defended the poem's orthodoxy of intention in A Preface to Paradise Lost, while others have found that its Satan is more vivid than its God. The disagreement does not settle easily, and the poem is stronger for it.

Who should read Milton: Readers who want theology rendered as imaginative experience, and who are willing to follow a mind that is learned, proud, and sometimes at odds with the churches that claim it. He is especially suited to those wrestling with the problem of evil, the freedom of the will, and the meaning of obedience after defeat. He is not for readers who need doctrinal tidiness, who find dense syntax and classical allusion a barrier, or who expect devotional warmth in the manner of the plain-style Puritans. He asks for patience, and he repays it slowly.