It is curious that even in Augustine, whose name and influence have been weighty on the opposite side, Milton may have found authority for his belief in free will. Whatever others may have seen in Augustine-whatever Augustine himself may have really thought - Milton was sure to be impressed only by what he agreed with. And one of the chapters of the De civitate has for its subject: That man, created innocent, was lost only through evil use of his free will." For both, sin is foreseen by God, and provided for. Augustine has a chapter On prevaricating men and angels whose sin does not disturb the order of divine providence." "0 God could have prevented the fall of both angels and men, but he preferred to let them follow their will, in order to show what his divine grace was capable of." These very considerations comfort Adam in his fall." 63 62 In the account of the creation of man, the resemblances are also striking: Augustine devotes as much attention as Milton to the text " and man became a living soul." And the Father proves at length that the passage does not refer to man's immortal soul, and that the word "soul" in Scripture applies to animals. This is only a secondary point in Augustine, who believes in the dualism of soul and body, but becomes all important for Milton. The coincidence of interpretation is all the more notable. The conception of Christ is also very similar in both systems. For Augustine, Christ is the Second Man, the Father of the Elect; his spiritual body comprehends all men who have received grace "to be together one and the same Christ." This is Milton's Greater Man. For 59 XIII, 14. 60 XIV, 27. 61 XIV, 27, in fine, and XIV, 11. 62 P. L., XII, 470 ff. 66 both, Christ is Man regenerated by triumph over passion.65 Let us note also in the De civitate that the terrestrial life of Christ occupies but little room, but two chapters in Book XVIII (49 and 50). We have seen that this is also the case with Milton. And the De civitate speaks but little of the Crucifixion, as little as Milton: Man's regeneration is brought about by the advent of Christ in Man. And Augustine thinks also 6 that there were men, outside the Hebrew people, and before the coming of Christ, that belonged already to the divine body. Yet both believe literally in the Gospel; but they have the same methods of interpretation, and Augustine speaks for Milton when he says: "Such allegorical explanations are very good, as long as one believes at the same time in the very exact truth of the historical account." 67 Lastly, they agree in politics. Augustine admirably expresses Milton's views when he writes: "It is through sin that man is subject to man that only happens through the judgment of God." 68 Men not free in themselves by their triumph over passion are submitted to external servitude; but "It was not God's will that man should reign over men." "9 We have studied Milton's texts: 69 But man over men He made not lord: such title to Himself But justice, and some fatal curse annexed, 65 Ibid., XIV, 2: live according to the Spirit"; XIV, 4: "according to truth and not to lies." 66 XVIII, 47. 67 XIII, 21. For Milton, see above, pp. 204-05. 69 Ibid., XIX, 15. 68 De civitate XIX, 15 ff. 70 P. L., XII, 69–71, 99–101. To sum up, all the differences between Augustine and Milton can be reduced to one essential one: for Augustine, God created matter out of nothing," and consequently matter tends towards evil, being radically void, and nothing, from its origin. For Milton, matter has been drawn from God himself and is good and divine. This is Milton's central idea, the idea that makes of him a modern man. Let us study in our next section, the intellectual milieu from which he imbibed that conception. 71 De civitate XIV, 11. N SECTION II CONTEMPORARY SOURCES AND M INFLUENCES ILTON'S relationship to movements of his own time may be summed up thus: roughly speaking, the whole of Milton's philosophy is found in the Kabbalah,' except his materialism; his materialism is found in Fludd, except his mortalism; and his mortalism is connected with the ideas of the contemporary English Mortalist group. The three stages are connected and form developments, one from the other: Fludd starts from the Kabbalah, and the Mortalists have their general principles in common with Fludd, and probably derived them from him. 1 Renaissance Neo-Platonism may be counted as a parallel influence; in popular exposition of theories, the two practically coincide; only many things in Milton are in the Kabbalah and not in Neo-Platonism proper. Besides, I agree with those who maintain that the chief differences between Renaissance Neo-Platonism and ancient Neo-Platonism are mostly due to the influence of the Kabbalah. For instance, the new theory that matter, the flesh, and nature are good, not a degradation but an expression of the Divinity, is first brought forward properly by Pico della Mirandola, in his Heptaplus, as derived from the Kabbalah. J T CHAPTER I THE ZOHAR AND THE KABBALAH HE Zohar was put together in Spain in the Some of the material used probably goes back centuries earlier. From the beginning of the Renaissance, its influence on European thought was considerable. It was printed at Mantua and Cremona in 1559-60, another edition coming out at Lublin in 1623. The most celebrated commentators of the Zohar, Cordovero and Loria, belong to the middle of the sixteenth century. Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, and Agrippa had, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prepared the scholars of Europe to receive kabbalistic ideas and had made known many of the principles of the Kabbalah. In 1635 Joseph Voysin published in Paris a Latin translation of some passages of the Zohar. Father Kircher published his study of the Kabbalah in Rome from 1652 to 1654. In England, Robert Fludd (1574-1637) gave to the public the most interesting among the kabbalistic conceptions, and, as we shall see, there are many striking resemblances between Fludd's and Milton's ideas. Last of all Henry More, who belonged to the same Cambridge college as Milton, published in 1654, in London, his work on the Kabbalah. Such facts must here suffice to show that Milton could not be ignorant of the existence of the Kabbalah. Unani |