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Milton on Learning and Wisdom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Irene Samuel
Irene Samuel*
Affiliation:
Hunter College
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Extract

The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond fashion, with many facets answering to the many-planed aspects to the world about them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a single flat surface. … People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.” But a great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a truth, and many often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face and its profile often do.

—Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

The rose-diamond cut of Milton's thought often disconcerts his reader, but perhaps nowhere so completely as in his views on learning. After the high enthusiasm for unrestricted inquiry, after all the “intent study” which he took as his own “portion in life”, in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the ripe products of his learning, he gives to Raphael, Michael, and Jesus speeches that seem a wholesale repudiation of studies of all sorts. The three passages are too well known to quote. In the first (P.L., viii, 66–178)1 Raphael disparages Adam's inquiries about astronomy, but answers them, and then comments, “Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid.” In the second (P.L., XII, 575–587) Michael commends Adam for the inference he has drawn from his preview of universal history (that “to obey is best, / And love with fear the only God”), and admonishes him, “This having learnt, thou hast attain'd the sum / Of wisdom; hope no higher.” In the third (P.R., iv, 286–364) Jesus spurns Satan's offer of Greek learning, with an analysis of the defects of Greek philosophy and literature and a thrust at learning in general: “Many books / Wise men have said are wearisome.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , September 1949 , pp. 708 - 723
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949

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References

1 All references to Milton's poems are to the edition by Merritt Y. Hughes. In quoting I have omitted italics used in the text.

2 Ed. P.L. (Cambridge, 1929), ii, 555. Yet Verity (p. 413) contrasts P.R., iv, 286 ff., “where Greek philosophies are sneered at”, with Comus, 476 ff.

3 “Milton's View of Education in Paradise Lost”, JEGP, xxi (1922), 127–152.

4 “Milton on Learning”, SP, XLIII (1946), 258–272.

5 I have considered some of the questions involved, as they bear on Milton's Platonism, in Plato and Milton (Ithaca, 1947), pp. 101–129. Of the various scholars who have dealt with the three passages, either alone or in general studies of Milton, Douglas Bush has come closest to making this paper unnecessary. See The Renaissance and English Humanism (Toronto, 1939), pp. 125, 128–129; Paradise Lost in Our Time (Ithaca, 1945), pp. 33,51–52; English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 375–378. But Bush finds in the later poems “anti-pagan scruples”, an “old and disillusioned Milton” (Eng. Lit., pp. 387, 392), an “increasing realization of the weakness of the human reason and will”, a repudiation of humanistic self-sufficiency (P.L., pp. 51–52, 54–57), a “profound pessimism” in the later books of Paradise Lost, and a shift from the hope for an improved lot for man on earth (Ren., pp. 120–123, 129)—all of which seems to me to stem from a view of the three passages different from the one here set forth.

6 Defensio, in the Columbia Ed., Works of Milton, vii, 307. All quotations of Milton's prose are from this edition, although in quoting from his English prose I have normalized the spelling and punctuation except where there seemed good reason for keeping the original.

7 Thus Milton says in Christian Doctrine (xiv, 25), “Obedience and love [charitas] are always the best guides to knowledge”, evidently meaning that they lead to the knowledge that can be absorbed into the way of life. And it is the way of life that counts, as he makes clear in his comment on those who “are slow of understanding and inapt to learn, but who nevertheless believe according to the measure of their knowledge, and striving to live by faith, are acceptable to God” (xv, 397).

8 Cf. “tie true lore of religion or moral virtue, which two are the best and greatest points of learning” (R.C.G., iii, 273); and note the passage in the Seventh Prolusion, where Milton declares: “For one who lacks knowledge every approach to a happy life is seen to be cut off” (xii, 255), but goes on to make self-knowledge the highest mode of human wisdom and to distinguish the real, valuable learning from “the foreign, the superfluous, the useless” (xii, 279). It is because the principles listed above are, even in this early prolusion, implicit in Milton's thought that he can say: “If therefore knowledge be for us the guide and introducer to happiness, if commended and approved by a most powerful divinity and combined especially with his praise, certainly it is not possible for its devotees not to attain a high degree of happiness” (xii, 257).

9 The first three lines in the speech of God (P.L., xi, 84–89) are clearly ironical in the light of the condition of Adam and Eve at the time they are spoken. The rest of the speech is Milton's considered opinion of the value of experiencing evil. Cf. James Ussher in A Body of Divinity (London, 1649), pp. 125–126:

“What did the tree of knowledge of good and evil serve for?

“Both for tryall of obedience, and also for a warning of their mutability, and of what would follow upon sin; so sealing death and damnation in case of disobedience. Not as though the tree was able to give any knowledge; but that by tasting of it contrary to God's command, they should have experimental knowledge of evill in themselves, which before they had of good onely; and by wofull experience should learn, what difference there was between knowing and serving God in their integrity, and being ignorant of him by their sinne …

“What happiness did man injoy thus placed in Paradise?

“It was partly Inward, partly Outward.

“Wherein did the Inward appeared

“First, in his wonderfull knowledge, whereby he made use of all the creatures of God, as the greatest Philosopher that ever was.”

10 In Animadversions (iii, 163) he makes a typical comment on the proper effect of studies when he speaks of the scorn of riches always felt by “a soul enlarged to the dimensions of spacious wit and high knowledge,… it being the greatest honor, the greatest fruit and proficiency of learned studies to despise these things.”

11 E. M. Pope, in her highly useful study, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem (Baltimore, 1947), takes the exemplary nature of Jesus under temptation as not of Milton's primary intention (p. 29). She seems to me not to have taken due account of how Milton adapts traditional material in working out the temptations and their rejection by Jesus. The elaborate discussions of each offer can be explained only if the arguments Jesus advances are to be taken as universally applicable. Surely Hanford is more nearly right when he says, “The elaborate review of the things of the world considered as objects of desire applies to all mankind.” See “The Temptation Motive in Milton”, SP, xv (1918), 181. And cf. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, p. 391. Miss Pope offers no help on the temptation of knowledge except to suggest that Milton added it to the tradition because he knew it to be his own danger (pp. 66–67). Is it not safer to assume that he knew it to be a common human danger?

12 Cf. Milton's own statement of his debt to Greece in the letter to Philaras (xii, 65).

13 Ed. Poetical Works (London, 1882), iii, 410. And cf. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1942), p. 4.

14 From the argument in Areopagitica (iv, 312, 315) and from Milton's whole handling of Scripture in De Doctrina Christiana it is clear that he thought the Bible could be a compendium of all truth only to the man who read it with a sufficient spirit and judgment. We must still assume such a reader when we find Milton saying in Animadversions (iii, 139–140) : “Every rule and instrument of necessary knowledge that God hath given us ought to be so in proportion as may be wielded and managed by the life of man, … and such a rule and instrument of knowledge perfectly is the holy Bible …, the just and adequate measure of truth, fitted and proportionate to the diligent study, memory, and use of every faithful man.” Cf. R.C.G. (iii, 181–182).

15 In this emphasis on the inner light or “right reason” Milton was in agreement with other Christian humanists before and in his time. See Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism, pp. 101–134; Paradise Lost in Our Time, pp. 38–42; and the chapter on “Religion and Religious Thought” in English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, especially section 7, pp. 340–349. Cf. Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, and W. C. De Pauley, The Candle of the Lord: Studies in the Cambridge Platonists.

16 Jeremy Taylor speaks similarly of the wise heathen philosophers who retained natural reason. See TheGreat Exemplar (New York, 1859), i, 62.

17 Here evidently is the reason why the Bible may be regarded as a compendium of truth for those who read aright. Cf. n. 14.

18 Milton commonly links the words wise and learned (as in Of Ref., iii, 48, 51; Of Prel. Ep., iii, 88; Animad., iii, 164–165; R.C.G., iii, 186; Tetra., iv, 229; Def., vii, 88; Doct. Christ., xvi, 254), but regularly enough comments on false or empty learning to show his opposition to those who think that only the learned can be wise. He scorns not only “learned scraping in antiquity” (R.C.G., iii, 220–221), but the whole common association of wisdom with learning, as when he asks: “Who is there almost that measures wisdom by simplicity, strength by suffering, dignity by lowliness … ? Yet God when he meant to subdue the world and hell at once … made choice of no other weapons … to save or to destroy” (R.C.G., iii, 243). The same belief is the basis of his view that the clergy need not be university-trained, though doubtless his scorn of the state of learning in the universities entered too.

19 Cf. R.C.G. (in, 250) : “men … weakly or falsely principled, what through ignorance and what through custom of license.”

20 That the word prying does not imply a prohibition of knowledge we may be sure from an analogous passage in James Ussher's A Body of Divinity. In the outline prefixed to his work (“The Connection of these Points together, and dependence of them one upon another”) Ussher wrote: “In Christian Religion we are to consider the ‘Eternall decree: which men must not curiously pry into,/but content themselves with what is made manifest.‘ ” And again, in almost the same scheme as Milton's, he opposes to knowledge of God three kinds of ignorance (simple, “retchlesse”, and willful) and a “failure by excess”: a “curious searching into the secrets of God” (p. 215). Yet Ussher everywhere takes knowledge as good and the tree of knowledge as anything but knowledge-giving. See above, n. 9, and n. 21 below.

Jeremy Taylor has a similar comment on prying curiosity in Holy Living, iv, 1 : “Avoid all curiosity of inquiry into particulars and circumstances and mysteries: for true faith is full of ingenuity and hearty simplicity, free from suspicion, wise and confident, trusting upon generals, without watching and prying into unnecessary or indiscernible particulars. No man carries his bed into his field, to watch how his corn grows, but believes upon the general order of Providence and nature; and at harvest finds himself not deceived.” See Holy Living and Dying (London, 1856), p. 166.

21 Again compare Ussher (p. .133) : “What observe you of that it is said, She [Eve] saw that it [the fruit] was desirable for knowledge? That was onely her errour.”

22 Cf. Of Civil Power (vi, 41): “Pomp and ostentation of reading is admired among the vulgar; but doubtless in matters of religion he is learnedest who is plainest.” But lest we take him to be counseling ignorance, note the sentence in Hirelings (vi, 96) : “Neither speak I this in contempt of learning or the ministry, but hating the common cheats of both.”

23 Cf. the comment on people who are “always learning and never knowing” in Hirelings (vi, 100).

24 The same equation of virtue, likeness to God, and the wisdom needed for all the offices of life is made in Of Reformation (iii, 37).

25 Perhaps we should apply to Jesus' argument with Satan what Milton said of his own with Salmasius: “My contest with Salmasius was no more about Greek learning than the Greek Calends .... You could, in truth, have invented nothing more absurd, more inconsistent, than that I held Grecian learning in contempt” (Pro Se Def, ix, 289–291). Or perhaps a more applicable passage is the one commonly quoted from Tetrachordon (iv, 141) : “The manner of these men [in Matthew xix. 3] coming to our Savior, not to learn, but to tempt him, may give us to expect that their answer will be such as is fittest for them, not so much a teaching as an entangling.”