Milton and Free Will

An Essay in Criticism and Philosophy

William Myers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429639333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

First published in 1987. Milton and Free Will is an incisive, ambitious and comprehensive analysis and defence of the concept of free will, using Milton as an example and exemplar. Written with passion, and out of a lifelong engagement with the poetry of Milton and the philosophical and theological problems it encompasses, the book will illuminate both Milton studies and philosophical debate. The author engages with all the major currents of the free will debate, starting with Aristotle and Aquinas and considering arguments advanced by Hume and Kant as well as those of a number of modern philosophers including Polanyi, Kenny, Parfit, Plantinga, Swinburne, Dennett and Davidson. He pays particular attention to the Marxist formalism of Bakhtin, the Catholic phenomenology of Pope John Paul II and the evolutionism of Monod and Sober. He concludes with a rebuttal of the deconstructionism of Barthes, Derrida and Foucault.

He claims that all the major difficulties faced by defenders of free will can be overcome if a notion of willing implicit in the work of Milton is properly understood. Freedom as Milton represented and understood it, he suggests, is a condition of mind arising out of inter-personal awareness and not a property or consequence of practical reasoning. He finds supporting evidence for this view in the writings of Newman and in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, which he reads as a narrative structurally reversing Milton's representation of the fall of Eve in Paradise Lost. The author systematically analyses and reanalyses key passages in his texts in the light of the many arguments for and against free will, seeking thereby to affirm the validity in principle, and the personal and political importance in practice, of the Christian humanist tradition of which he sees Milton, Newman and the Pope as important (if sometimes misleading) spokesmen.

1

Milton and Free Will

1. The priority of free will in Milton’s conception of God. 2. The priority of God in Milton’s conception of man. 3. The priority of the individual in Milton’s conception of the church 4. Difficulties in Milton’s account of the generation of the Son 5. Difficulties in Milton’s account of the incarnation 6. Milton’s personal involvement in the problem 7. The radical disorder in Milton’s thought 8. Milner’s reading of Milton 9. Milton’s perception of ideology 10. Correcting ideological distortion 11. Proto-marxist aspects of Milton’s thought 12. Ideology in Milton’s hell 13. Ideology and consciousness 14. Ideology and bad faith 15. The case against deliberation 16. The ideology of helplessness 17. The ideology of self-control 18. The legitimacy of pursuing the argument further.

1. The question I address in this essay is whether we can sensibly regard human beings as intelligently free agents. For a number of reasons I find the best answer to this question in the works of Milton. It was a subject about which he wrote extensively and from a position of philosophical literacy. In fact he was obsessed by it and on such a topic obsession matters. The truth or falsity of the proposition that God exists is in no way affected by the quality of my acceptance or rejection of the argument from design, whereas if my enthusiasm for certain arguments about free will shows evidence of being compulsive, the doctrine itself may well be at risk. Ultimately I shall make considerable claims for the quality of Milton’s commitment to human freedom in the fullest possible sense. But a poet obsessed is a poet exposed, and I shall first have to consider whether the quality of Milton’s interest in freedom is evidence against it. The two possible ways of accounting for this interest which suggest that it is, one psychological, one ideological, are dealt with in this chapter. This leads to a more general consideration of whether the free will problem can usefully be discussed at all.

My first task, then, is to examine the place of free will in Milton’s thought. It was apparently the governing idea of his life. He rejects the scholastic teaching that God is Actus Purus, for example, because he holds it to be incompatible with what he believes about willing. Without latent powers, he argues in Christian Doctrine, God ‘could do nothing except what he does do, and he would do that of necessity, although in fact he is omnipotent and utterly free of his actions’ (146). A similar motivation explains Milton’s anti-trinitarianism. His theory of the generation of the Son is explicitly grounded in convictions concerning the Father’s freedom. For, he argues, if freedom necessarily involves the actualisation in time of latent potentialities, then the generation of the Son must have occurred ‘within the bounds of time’ (209). Consequently the Son is not co-eternal with the Father and is not therefore one in substance with him.

God [Milton writes] could certainly have refrained from the act of generation and yet remained true to his own essence, for he stands in no need of propagation. So generation has nothing to do with the essence of deity … [He] could not have begotten the Son except of his own free will and as a result of his own decree.

This is an argument echoed by Immanuel Kant in a note in The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783):

The idea of freedom [he writes] finds a place solely in the relation of the intellectual as cause to the appearance as effect. Hence we cannot … find a concept of freedom appropriate to pure beings of the understanding [purely rational beings], e.g. God, in so far as his activity is immanent. For his activity, although independent of outer determining causes, is yet determined in his eternal reason and in the divine nature. Only when something is to begin through an act, and the effect is to be encountered in the time sequence, consequently in the world .of the senses (e.g. the beginning of the world), does the question arise, whether the causality of the cause must also itself begin or whether the cause can start an effect without its causality itself beginning. (109–110)

Committed to the view that the generation of the Son is a free act of the Father’s, Milton, in line with the logic of this argument, represents God’s trinitarian life as having ‘ to begin’, and the generation of the Son as ‘the beginning of the world’.

Subordinationism has for him the added advantage of clarifying the Son’s freedom as well as the Father’s, for it is as a created being, he suggests, in Christian Doctrine, that the Son is able to act independently of the Father and ‘VOLUNTARILY’ (416) to perform his office as universal redeemer, imputing ‘our sins to himself, and of his own free will [washing] them away’ (486). Milton was a subordinationist, therefore, largely because he believed that subordinationism strengthened the free-will thesis, which, before all others, he sought to uphold.

2. The figure of God, finally alone so that he can be free, becomes the premiss of everything else in Milton’s thought, and in particular of his conception of human willing. As he points out in The Art of Logic, Only God does all things with absolute freedom’ (227); angels and men, who ‘do things through reason and deliberation’, act freely only ‘on the hypothesis … of the divine will, which in the beginning gave them the power to act freely’. But granted this hypothesis, human freedom is incontestable and obvious. In Christian Doctrine, therefore, he represents God’s first and most fundamental act as the issuing of his General Decree ‘by which HE DECREED FROM ETERNITY, WITH ABSOLUTE FREEDOM, WITH ABSOLUTE WISDOM AND WITH ABSOLUTE HOLINESS, ALL THOSE THINGS WHICH HE PROPOSED OR WHICH HE WAS GOING TO PERFORM … singly and by himself’ (153–4), a distinction between God’s proposals and his performances which is only necessary because from eternity God has envisaged creaturely freedom. Hence the line in Paradise Lost describing the Father bending

down his eye,

His own works and their works at once to view

(III 58–9)

Hence also Milton’s insistence that divine foreknowledge does not compromise the moral accountability of created intelligences. Moreover, once granted, freedom is never finally withdrawn: even in the corruption of the fall, Milton asserts in Christian Doctrine, free will is not ‘entirely extinct’ (396), and accordingly he makes large assumptions about the day-to-day autonomy of human beings. ‘The end … of learning’, he writes in Of Education

is to repair the ruins 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. (366–7)

This distinction between ‘true vertue’ and ‘heavenly grace’ implies a capacity for self-realisation on which Milton’s entire system of education depends. Not that we are saved by such self-realisation. Salvation is an effect of Grace. But as Michael tells Adam in Paradise Lost, even Grace requires our ‘free/Acceptance’ (XII 304–5), a formula which preserves the autonomy of fallen human beings in the work of salvation itself. This is why Milton can assert in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates that, ‘No man … can be so stupid as to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself’ (198).

3. Creaturely freedom, then, has to be willed by God, but what God wills is very strong indeed — it is the central fact of the christian dispensation. Liberty, Milton writes in Of Civil Power — ‘the state of grace, manhood, freedom and faith’ (259) — is ‘the fundamental privilege of the gospel’ (262); ‘our beleef and practise, which comprehend our whole religion, flow from the faculties of the inward man, free and unconstrainable of themselves by nature’ (256). It is this, he asserts in Christian Doctrine, which makes christians ‘GROWN MEN INSTEAD OF BOYS’ (537). ‘In controversies there is no arbitrator except scripture, or rather, each man is his own arbitrator, so long as he follows scripture and the Spirit of God’ (585). ‘The pre-eminent and supreme authority … is the authority of the Spirit, which is internal, and the individual possession of each’ (587). Consequently to deny liberty of opinion within the church is to seek to undo the work of Christ: without it ‘there is no religion and no gospel. Violence alone prevails’ (123). It is for this reason, Milton declares in Of Civil Power, that ‘all true protestants account the pope antichrist, for that he assumes to himself this infallibilitie over both the conscience and scripture’ (244).

Freedom, then, is not a corrollary of christian faith and practice for Milton, but their essence. Hence his identification of authentic christianity with heresy, a word, he points out, which ‘only means the choise or following of any opinion good or bad in religion or any other learning’ (247). He applies this principle of unqualified liberty even to a christian’s relations with God. Discussing the authority of ‘testimony’ in The Art of Logic, he writes:

testimony does not argue anything of itself and by its nature but rather by the assumed force of some artificial argument …

So when the exact truth or nature of things is more carefully investigated, testimony has a very meager force. (318)

And, he insists, ‘this appears to apply to divine testimony as well as human’ (319). Thus he requires proof as well as testimony even from God, and he leaves individuals to make up their own minds, in the Spirit, about the satisfactoriness of those proofs.

4. The very passion with which Milton attaches himself to the notion of freedom, however, can incite him to ride roughshod over the logical difficulties into which it occasionally leads him. Some of these difficulties are connected with his subordinationism. Free acts, he argues, can only take place in time. ‘There is certainly no reason’, he writes in Christian Doctrine, ‘why we should conform to the popular belief that motion and time … could not … have existed before this world was made’ (313–14). Milton’s God, in other words, unlike the God of the scholastics, is time-bound, a position which makes his unqualified assertion of divine omniscience and creaturely freedom difficult to sustain. A God who exists outside time, after all, can contemplate past, present and future as on a map or landscape laid out before his immutable consciousness. Such a God would appear logically to have certain advantages over a timed God, particularly if he is also deemed to be the creator of free beings. Swinburne (1977) believes that this is why

the scholastics adopted the doctrine of timelessness …[:] it allowed them to maintain that God is omniscent in … [a] strong sense … God outside time can be said never not to know our free actions, even though they may sometimes be future from our point of view. (219)

Like other recent philosophers in this field Swinburne agrees with Milton that the Boethian conception of God is incoherent. He therefore rejects a conception of divine omniscience which includes the future actions of any free being; Swinburne’s God cannot even make certain predictions about himself. Milton, however, would have found such a conception of God thoroughly offensive. He has therefore to defend both positions, complete divine knowledge of the future and absolute freedom of the will, divine and human.

Another problem arising out of Milton’s doctrine of divine freedom in time relates to the first of God’s actions. Swinburne’s God, and Milton’s, has always existed and will always exist. We might find such a life ‘tedious, boring and pointless’, Swinburne suggests (211), but an omnipotent being could ensure that it was not so. But how? By doing things? A God who has been doing things in time from eternity would always have done an infinity of things already (or infinitely repeated a finite number of things) if doing things were his resource against tedium. This is nonsensical: a backwardly eternal God must have fullness of life in himself, independently of any acts he might perform. This is especially so for Milton since in Christian Doctrine he envisages God acting for the first time when he implements his ‘first and most excellent SPECIAL DECREE’ (166), the generation of the Son. But why does God choose time t for the performance of this act? Swinburne has an answer to this, since he includes God’s own future choices among the things which he cannot predict in spite of his being omniscient. But Milton requires us to envisage God making a general decree from all eternity, and then, after an eternity of inactive contemplation of these irreformable intentions, suddenly, and at an eternally foreseen moment, acting on the first of them.

A third difficulty connected with Milton’s subordinationism was represented by William Empson as a particularly unpleasant component of Milton’s theology. Within the Boethian and trinitarian Deity there is presumably a recognition from all eternity by Father, Son and Holy Spirit, of the need for a redemptive intervention in human affairs and an acceptance of how that intervention is to be effected. In Milton’s scheme, however, the bloody sacrifice of the Son is the task of a subordinate. It is admittedly a voluntary action, and the subordinate in question has a ‘filial’, and not a merely ‘creaturely’, relation to the Father. Nevertheless, he is drawn into a drama not of his making and takes upon himself (as the Father, of course, has always known he would) a brutally painful role to satisfy a rigorous principle of abstract justice. The distinctness of the Son from the Father may be necessary, in Milton’s view, to secure the voluntariness of his offer to be that sacrifice, but it considerably increases our anxieties about the moral standing of the Father’s choices and providences in the poem.

5. Similar inconsistencies characterise Milton’s account of the incarnation. In abandoning orthodox trinitarianism, he also abandons the distinctions between nature, person and substance which had been developed to express it. The ‘essence of God’, he argues in Christian Doctrine,

… allows nothing to be compounded with it, and the … word hypostasis, Heb. i. 3, which is variously translated substance, subsistence, or person, is nothing but that most perfect essence by which God exists from himself, in himself, and through himself. (140–1)

But these distinctions are also important in expressing the doctrine of the incarnation, and Milton’s rejection of them makes for difficulties, since he has to argue that there is ‘in Christ a mutual hypostatic union of two natures or, in other words, of two essences, of two substances and consequently of two persons’ (424). Yet he also insists that ‘one Christ, one ens, and one person is formed from this mutual hypostatic union of two natures’ (423). But, logically, that person must be identical either with the Son, or with the nature and person of the human being who would have been instantiated had the incarnation not taken place, or with a person constituted in the union of the two natures and so not identical with either. But the first case requires the obliteration of the human nature and person assumed by the Son, the second the obliteration of the Son in the human nature and person united to his, and the third the obliteration of both in a new kind of being and new person, the God-man. But we have seen that Milton rejects the first two cases, while the third means either that the Son’s act of becoming man and not the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is the means of mankind’s redemption, in which case the Passion and Ressurection are unnecessary, or that the obedience of Jesus unto death is not attributable to the will of the preincarnate Son, and he ceases to be the universal mediator. In the light of these difficulties it is not surprising that Milton had to resort to the expedient of asserting that while we cannot explain the incarnation coherently, ‘it is best for us to be ignorant of things which God wishes to remain a secret’ (424).

6. Milton’s is thus a confused theology, and it is so largely because of his uncritical commitment to the idea of free will. Why should this have been so? A long line of critics has supplied answers to this and similar questions in terms of Milton’s personality, and specifically in terms of what they have seen as his compulsive self-preoccupation. John Carey (1969) puts the matter succinctly: when Milton was agitating for liberty, he suggests, he was really demanding ‘liberty for himself’ (64). Milton’s obsession with free will is thus no more than the theoretical component of a larger preoccupation with his own autonomy and power. Notoriously, Milton seems to have interested himself in such issues as divorce, the liberty of the press and political liberty only when they affected him personally, and numerous figures in his writings — the Father, the Son, Abdiel, Noah and Satan in Paradise Lost, Jesus in Paradise Regain ’d, Samson in Samson Agonistes and even Ramus in The Art of Logic — have been identified...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Milton and Free Will
• 2. The Acting Person
• 3. Reasons in Eden
• 4. Reasons in Europe at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• 5. Cor ad cor loquitur
• 6. Social Determinism and Moral Laws
• 7. Evolution and Transcendence
• 8. The Law of Freedom
• 9. The Spirit of Différance
• 10. Freedom and History
• References and Quotations
• Index