![]() The emergent materialism of English philosophy was stripping the world of love, of passion, of eros, and turning it into a bland world of causality and motion without any zest. Thomas Hobbes had also recently published his Leviathan, which, among other things, continued the materialization of philosophy and denied Transcendent Morality altogether, strongly promoting (especially in the first part) a mechanical philosophy of causality. Francis Bacon had just published his Novum Organum and New Atlantis which charted out the modern scientific-materialistic outlook that would give birth to mechanical philosophy and utilitarianism. The intellectual currents in philosophy are also important-if not overriding-for us. This is all reflected in his poem, which presents a theodicy of free will. Milton was a devoted nonconformist, an enemy of the “Popish” aspects of the Anglican Church but also a heterodox nonconformist rejecting the deterministic supralapsarianism of Cambridge Calvinism exemplified by men like William Perkins and William Ames. ![]() Why, however, does Milton choose to write such a poem, and to whom, or what, is he writing and responding?īy the time Milton was composing Paradise Lost, the Caroline era had come to a violent end in the English Civil Wars and the Restoration under Charles II was under way. From the visual imagery to the very descriptive language Milton uses to portray his lively scenes to us, there is no escaping the reality of the life force which moves his poem. Milton’s grand epic is an intense poem, a passionate poem, an erotic poem. So while I will use the terms somewhat interchangeably, know that the eros which I speak of is an ecstatic intensity of passion which the word eros more fully embodies and implies than does the word passion. Moreover, at the end of Paradise Lost the love which the archangel Michael explains to Adam is more in line with the classical tradition concerning the connectivity of eros and theoria, which I shall return to at the end of this essay. However, passion and passionate fail to capture that august lebenskraft which eros and the erotic do. One might ask, then, why not consider Milton’s cosmos as “passionate” instead of “erotic”? To be sure, passion and passionate are more neutral terms that are not loaded with the potential negativity of eros and the erotic. We might better understand eros, then, as the passionate life force that moves affective creatures into “madness” or ecstasy-from which the intensity of the passions manifest themselves in sexual or non-sexual ways. At various points in the Iliad, Homer employs eros in non-sexual and sexual settings, and Thucydides incorporates eros in purely non-sexual ecstatic political contexts (especially in the Funeral Oration and Alcibiades’ speech advocating the Sicilian Expedition). While eros does mean love, in ancient Greek from Homer down through Thucydides and Plato, eros could better be understood as the intensity of the passions which produce ecstasy-both sexual and non-sexual. While claiming to “justify the ways of God to men,” Milton’s remarkable poem is not only a window into the battles of early modern English civilization, it is a gateway into the mind of a prescient man who served as a precursor to the English Augustan age-an age that confronted the sterile mechanicalism and materialism of the emergent “Enlightenment” philosophy, an era duly remembered as the “Age of Passion.”Įros, in Greek, does not singularly mean sexual passion as it does through our deracinated English inheritance. Is John Milton a man for our time or all time? The blind and pugnacious, indeed, radical, English poet arguably wrote the greatest epic in the English language. Why, however, did Milton choose to write such a poem, and to whom was he writing and responding? From the visual imagery to the descriptive language Milton uses to portray his lively scenes, there is no escaping the reality of the life force that moves his poem. John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is an intense, passionate poem, and erotic poem.
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