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Milton and Plato's Timæus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edward Chauncey Baldwin
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Extract

The Platonic origin of certain ideas in the seventh and eighth hooks of Paradise Lost has been ignored by Milton's critics. In Raphael's account of creation (Bk. VII, ll. 621-622), speaking of the stars, he calls them

      Numerous, and every star perhaps a world
      Of destined habitation …

And again (Bk. VIII, ll. 148-152) :

      … and other suns perhaps
      With their attendant moons thou wilt descry
      Communicating male and female light,
      Which two great sexes animate the world,
      Stored in each orb, perhaps with some that live.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , 1920 , pp. 210 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1920

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References

1 It may be noted that in two poetic passages (P. L., iii, 1. 390, and P. L., vii, ll. 192 ff.) and in the Christian Doctrine (Chap. vii) Milton, also, relying for authority upon three passages in the New Testament (I Cor. viii, 6; Col. i, 16, and Heb. i, 2), represents God as delegating the actual work of creation to Christ—a conception quite un-Hebraic and wholly alien to the spirit of the author of Gren. i.

2 The theory attracted Spenser also. See the “Hymne in Honour of Beautie,” ll. 99 ff.

3 Besides the rational soul, a diluted remnant from the cosmic soul, and hence immortal, each individual was thought of as equipped with a mortal soul located in the trunk of the body. This was divided; the better part placed in the heart, and the worse in the abdomen.

4 As has been pointed out by James Adams in The Vitality of Platonism (pp. 66-67), we may easily be misled by Plato's use of intellectual terminology into forgetting that he always conceives of the reason or intellect as having to do with the good.

5 “Mind is that culminating and most precious part of the sou] which is Deity” (Convito, iii, c. 2).

6 The idea here expressed of matter passing from a lower to a higher plane through the successive stages of a spiritual evolution, particularly the idea of the final stages of such an evolution—the complete spiritualization of the human body—was a favorite one with Milton. See, for example, Comus, 459-463. We find also the converse of the idea—that the soul by self-indulgence may gradually be debased to body. See Comus, 463-469.

7 See Aristotle, Phys., ii, 6-9.

8 This is the meaning of according to Jowett in his Introduction to the translation of the Timœus.

9 See, also, Ps. 102, 25 and 121, 2; Jer. 10, 12; Is. 42, 5, and 45, 7-9; Ecclus. 15, 14; II Macc. 7, 28.

10 It is significant that the Platonic and Aristotelian word occurs also in this passage.

11 Though Plato does not in the Timœus discuss the origin of evil, he elsewhere clearly states his belief. In the Theœtetus he says: “Nay, Theodorus, evil can neither perish—for there must always be something opposed to the good—nor can it be situated in the heaven; but of necessity it haunts our mortal nature and this present world.” In the Laws he affirms the existence of two world-souls—an evil and a good contending against each other.