John Milton: "The end then of Learning . . ."

Adam, Eve, and Archangel Michael

Illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost
Gustav Doré

Guardian

Jessica Martin has a somewhat interesting, four-part series in the Guardian on Milton's epic, Paradise Lost, and in her first of the four, she quotes a statement from Milton's 1644 essay Of Education that caught my attention -- though her hyperlink is to the wrong text (so I'm linking here and for other of Milton's texts to Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, January 2012):

The end then of Learning is to repair the ruines of our first Parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

With the right hermeneutic key, one sees that Milton is applying an Arminian understanding of human effort together with divine grace as both together cooperating to bring the individual into a right knowledge of God. Indeed, given the temporal sequence of learning followed by assisting grace -- whether prevenient or soteriological -- as reflected in the verbal sequence of clauses, the careful hermeneut could be forgiven in concluding that for Milton, human effort comes first and is completed (possibly rewarded?) by grace, as though deserved! I therefore suspect that we are to read the following passage from Milton's 1643 essay on the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as subtly indicating agreement with the Jesuit position on Middle Knowledge and the views of Arminius, which seem derived from those Jesuit teachings:

The Jesuits, and that sect among us which is nam'd of Arminius, are wont to charge us of making God the author of sinne in two degrees especially, not to speak of his permissions. 1. Because we hold that he hath decreed some to damnation, and consequently to sinne, say they: Next, because those means which are of saving knowledge to others, he makes to them an occasion of greater sinne. Yet considering the perfection wherin man was created, and might have stood, no decree necessitating his free will, but subsequent though not in time yet in order to causes which were in his owne power, they might, methinks be perswaded to absolve both God and us.

Why do I suspect subtle agreement? Because Milton slyly remarks "they might, methinks be perswaded to absolve both God and us"! I therefore also think that Milton was even signaling suble agreement with the Jesuits and Arminius through his reference to their views in his 1644 essay Areopagitica:

But of our Priests and Doctors how many have bin corrupted by studying the comments of Jesuits and Sorbonists, and how fast they could transfuse that corruption into the people, our experience is both late and sad. It is not forgot, since the acute and distinct Arminius was perverted meerly by the perusing of a namelesse discourse writt'n at Delf, which at first he took in hand to confute.

Admittedly, one has to read Milton's words here as ironic, but I think that we should, for we know from other writings that Milton soon came to express open agreement with Arminius, and Maurice Kelley tells us that even in Areopagitica, Milton "at least tacitly accepted the Arminian position on free will" ("Introduction," Christian Doctrine, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume 6, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973, page 82). But did Milton know of the Jesuit views on Middle Knowledge? I've not yet found any obviously smoking gun in Milton's works to support this for certain.

I strongly suspect it, however, and Benjamin Myers book on Milton's Theology of Freedom makes the possibility even more plausible, for he notes the widely known debates over Middle Knowledge in the mid-seventeenth century.

John L. Heilbron: Galileo

John L. Heilbron

(Image from UC Berkeley)

This year is the 400th anniversary of Galileo's Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), and in celebration of this date, my old history-of-science professor John Heilbron has published his biography of Galileo, fittingly titled Galileo, though I've only just discovered this fact today by reading yesterday's International Herald Tribune. The historian of science Owen Gingerich reviews the book in that paper, but the same review appeared earlier as his New York Times article "Starry Messenger" (December 24, 2010) and has mostly positive things to say:

Heilbron, an emeritus professor of the history of science at Berkeley, is . . . fine-grained in his approach, leavening his account with wit and irony.

That sounds like Heilbron.

Readers who make it through the occasional eye-glazing geometrical digression in J. L. Heilbron's "Galileo" will not be surprised to find that the author’s extensive output includes a fresh explication of Euclid.

That sounds like Heilbron, too, but it's a good thing. And glazed eyes aside, if only Galileo himself had been as attentive to such detail, or at least more careful in whom he ridiculed and whom he outraged, for he needn't have been placed under house arrest for views that weren't especially unorthodox:

Heilbron . . . makes no big issue of any religious unorthodoxies on Galileo's part beyond his Copernicism, though surely there must have been some . . . . [H]e doesn't see any secret unbelief underneath the public Catholicism, noting in passing that when Galileo, near the end of his life, was under a strict house arrest on charges of heresy, Urban VIII granted him special permission to attend Mass at a nearby church.

Everyone agrees that Galileo was an incorrigible egotist, so full of himself that he repeatedly misjudged his ability to persuade the authorities of his own opinions. His attempt via the Jesuit astronomers in 1615-16 to convince the Vatican backfired . . . . Heilbron [is] . . . sharply critical of Galileo's unnecessary alienation of the Jesuits, and . . . in particular highlights Galileo's scientific fumbles, both in the debates with the Jesuits and later in his controversial "Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems" (1632). As he wryly comments, "It was not Galileo's style to accept corrections from others."

Heilbron himself, for all his formidable knowledge and intellect, never places his own views above the reach of critical reason. As he says in a different context, quoting Ludovico Antonio Muratori: "Humility, humility, humility" (at 49 minutes, 5 seconds into the video). As for Heilbron's views on the Jesuits, I recall from several of our conversations his admiration for Jesuit intellectual rigor. Studying under him was a bit like learning under Jesuits, and his writings are not an easy read:

Heilbron's [biography] has . . . rich . . . scientific detail, and will no doubt become the standard, comprehensive biography. Early in the book, Heilbron has a serious mathematical discussion of Galileo's Paduan period. In one of his most inventive sections, he creates a Galilean dialogue on issues of algebra and geometry. Though not easy to read, it brilliantly expresses the ambiguities and blind alleys as Galileo wrestled with the conceptual difficulty of introducing a non-geometrical quantity -- time itself -- into the proportions. These issues did not find their final formulation until the end of his life, when he raced to complete "Two New Sciences" and smuggle it to Holland for publication.

He creates a Galilean dialogue? Irony of ironies! Heilbron, author of science fiction! Well, he always was an 'instrumentalist' on the issue of truth. At any rate, I must go out and obtain a copy of this lively biography! More seriously, concerning Galileo's use of geometry, if I recall correctly, even Newton struggled to express his hard-won views on the unity of celestial mechanics and terrestrial dynamics not in the calculus that he had invented in developing his views, but in the language of geometrical proportion. I'm no expert on that, however, and may have a faulty memory about the point.

Anyway, hats off to John Heilbron for his new book. I'll raise a glass in his honor at midnight tonight as this anniversary year passes. Let's not forget Galileo, either, as his Sidereal year passes by. "Time just gets away from us," as Mattie Ross says in the penultimate line to her tale in True Grit, but it won't get away tonight without a toast in passing.

Small World...

The Small World of Academia

'Coincidence City' . . . a bit like Jung's Synchroni-City

(Image from Fantastic Fiction)

Some readers may have noticed the blogroll links to several of my papers and may have even clicked on a few. Eventually, I'll post copies of these papers at my academic homepage, but only when I've figured out all of the quirks there.

A couple of papers that I'd really like to post there are currently online at the Catholic Resources website of Felix Just, a Jesuit and scholar of Johannine studies who was a student of beginning Greek with me at the Graduate Theological Union back during my Berkeley days.

That website is where Professor Barzilai of Hebrew University recently stumbled across a paper, "'Ethical' Dualism of Food in The Gospel of John," that I presented at the 1999 SBL Conference, back when I still had high hopes of a career in religious studies.

Anyway, I received an email from Professor Barzilai inquiring about this paper:

I have just read your interesting paper on "'Ethical' Dualism of Food in the Gospel of John" as it appears on the Internet. Your research on the uses of vinegar in early Judaic and Christian sources is highly relevant to my current work, and I would very much like to mention it. Has the paper appeared elsewhere in print form? If so, I would appreciate information about where I could locate it.

Receiving such requests is always profoundly gratifying to obscure gypsy scholars such as myself because we also receive at least fleeting confirmation that our writings are not completely in vain and that better scholars than ourselves sometimes even read the stuff.

I responded with alacrity, of course:

What a surprise that someone would be interested in that paper. And a coincidence, too, for I'm presenting an updated version this coming Saturday at a historians' seminar here in Seoul, where I live and teach. I haven't yet published that article, mainly because just as I was getting started on reworking it, I had to relocate to Korea -- where I could at least teach English -- because I couldn't get anyone interested in offering me a position in religious studies.

I've been reworking it slowly, and presenting it at conferences (e.g., St. Andrews in Scotland, the SBL international conference in Singapore, now here in Seoul). I even presented an early version of it in Jerusalem when I was a Golda Meir Fellow (1998/9).

I can send you the updated version -- and the AAR paper as well [i.e., "Gift-Giving Across the Sacred-Profane Divide: A Maussian Analysis of Heavenly Versus Earthly Food in Gnosticism and John's Gospel,"] from that same year, 1999 -- but the exotic fonts won't come through, I fear, for I've got some technical difficulties related to being here in Korea. But you'll easily overcome that limitation by checking sources that Hebrew University will have. The papers aren't much different, but I believe that I've reworked them a bit in a more theoretical direction.

I see that you are in the English Literature Department at Hebrew University. That's the sort of thing that I'm doing these days, but mostly with Medieval and Renaissance literature. I've worked on Beowulf, the Gawain Poet, and Langland, but I do a lot of my work on Milton because I can use my religious studies background to great effect on his epic poem, Paradise Lost, and actually have an advantage over many other scholars.

I happen to know Sanford Budick, by the way, but only by email. He did send me a signed copy of his book The Dividing Muse several years ago when I was at Hanshin University (outskirts of Seoul) and just getting started in Milton studies. I was trying to look into the rabbinical tradition as background to Paradise Lost and was attempting to track down the dove as Holy Spirit present at creation but found that Golda Werman had gotten there before I did.

Anyway, if my two papers are of any use, you may cite them as unpublished articles, works in progress, or as variants of my online versions at Felix Just's website.

I'd be very interested in your own work. If you'd like to have a reader of it at some point, I'd be happy to help out.

Incidentally, I see that you've done a lot of work on Lacan. One of my colleagues here is working on a book manuscript on Lacan and Taoism, Lao Tzu, and similar material. I don't know that this sort of approach would interest you, but just in case...

Professor Barzilai -- struck by some of the intriguing coincidences -- sent a friendly reply entitled "Small World!" (possibly an allusion to the David Lodge novel of the same title):

What an amazing series of coincidences you describe . . . . Of course, I stumbled on your paper quite accidently while looking for something else. If I had searched deliberately, I doubt I would have ever found it.

I'll be glad to cite your updated version if it suits my parochial interests as well as your 1999 version because -- odd as this may sound -- I was fascinated by your discussion of vinegar due to my work on the Bluebeard story and some of its ancient variants. So I truly learned a lot from your discussion.

But to imagine that you actually presented it here in Jerusalem several years ago -- to top the unlikelihood of our mutual interest in . . . vinegar, it just seems altogether too implausible. I'm still in the process of writing and so my essay is not yet presentable or digestible.

As for my interests in Lacan, although I've inevitably internalized many of his psychoanalytic theories, I'm not working in that direction any longer. My book on Lacan seems to have exhausted what I had to say. One of my colleagues at Tel Aviv University recently completed a dissertation (400 pp. or so) in Hebrew on Lacan and Christian theology. He's planning to have it translated into English with a view to publication.

And a last coincidence for the day: my daughter is currently writing her Ph.D. dissertation in Comparative Literature at Berkeley.

Fascinating stuff . . . for the likes of me, anyway. For all I know, Dear Reader, you may be bored stiff, but why -- in that case -- are you still reading? Instead, go read something more interesting, like the David Lodge novel mentioned above: Small World: An Academic Romance.

Here's a 1989 Raymond Thompson interview with Lodge about Small World and its links to Medieval romance.