Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.31

And when Adam yields,

Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan.3

32

Disorder and death come into the whole of Nature: disorder of inanimate things, death of animate. This is one of the grandest passages in Milton. Death and Sin begin their work:

...

they both betook them several ways,

Both to destroy or unimmortal make

All kinds, and for destruction to mature
Sooner or later.33

Then God gives orders and his ministers change the natural order of things:

The sun

Had first his precept so to move, so shine,
As might affect the earth with cold and heat
Scarce tolerable; and from the north to call
Decrepit winter; from the south to bring
Solstitial summer's heat;

to bring in change

Of seasons to each clime; else had the spring
Perpetual smil❜d on earth with vernant flow'rs,
Equal in days and nights, except to those
Beyond the polar circles; to them day
Had unbenighted shone, while the low sun
To recompense his distance, in their sight
Had rounded still th' horizon, and not known
Or east or west; which had forbid the snow
From cold Estotiland; and south as far
Beneath Magellan. . . .

31 P. L., IX, 782-84. 32 Ibid., IX, 1000-01. 33 Ibid., X, 610-13.

. . . Thus began

Outrage from lifeless things; but Discord first
(Daughter of Sin) among th' irrational,

Death introduc'd through fierce antipathy:

Beast now with beast gan war, and fowl with fowl,
And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving,
Devour'd each other; nor stood much in awe

Of man, but fled him; or with count'nance grim
Glar'd on him passing.3

34

But once matter was submitted to the curse, man had to die wholly; he had no soul to survive.

the whole man dies. . . . For . . . what could be more absurd, than that the mind, which is the part principally offending, should escape the threatened death; and that the body alone, to which immortality was equally allotted, before death came into the world by sin, should pay the penalty of sin by undergoing death, though not implicated in the transgression?

It is evident that the saints and believers of old, the patriarchs, prophets and apostles, without exception, held this doctrine.36

the soul (whether we understand by this term the whole human composition, or whether it is to be considered as synonymous with the spirit) is subject to death, natural as well as violent.36

...

The... text "the spirit shall return unto God. must be understood with considerable latitude. Euripides .. has, without being aware of it, given a far better interpretation of this passage than the commentators. . . . That is, every constituent part returns at dissolution to its elementary principle. This is confirmed by Ezek. xxxvii. 9: "come from the four winds, O breath"; it is certain therefore that the spirit of man must have previously departed thither from whence it is now summoned to return.37

Thus the soul, like the body

since there is no dif

ference- returns to the elements at death. But "no

created thing can be finally annihilated." "8 God's plans would be frustrated by the destruction of his work:

God is neither willing, nor, properly speaking, able to annihilate anything altogether. He is not willing, because he does everything with a view to some end, but nothing can be the end neither of God nor of anything whatever. . . . Again, God is not able... because by creating nothing he would create and not create at the same time, which involves a contradiction.39

... the covenant with God is not dissolved by death.40

And Milton adds the (to be) Kantian argument of practical reason:

.. were there no resurrection, the righteous would be of all men the most miserable, and the wicked who have a better portion in this life, most happy; which would be altogether inconsistent with the... justice of God.11

41

Resurrection is indeed the only hypothesis left. Death is a sleep. And Milton adds the further consolation that, in the state of death, time does not exist, because time "is the measure of motion " 42 and in death there is no motion. Therefore the interval between death and resurrection, however long the living may consider it, does not exist for the dead:

If... it be true that there is no time without motion, which Aristotle illustrates by the example of those who were fabled to have slept in the temple of the heroes, and who, on awaking, imagined that the moment in which they awoke had succeeded without an interval to that in which they fell asleep; how much more must intervening time be annihilated to the departed, so that to them to die and to be with Christ will seem to take place at the same moment? 48

Therefore, at the end of the world there will take place the resurrection of the dead, proved by "testi

38 Treatise, IV, 181.
39 Ibid., IV, 181-82.

40 Ibid., IV, 480-81.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid., IV, 185.
43 Ibid., IV, 280.

monies from Scripture" and "several arguments from reason." 44

Thus the plans of God and the destiny of individual beings will be accomplished-beings formed of divine matter and rising gradually by a progressive scale, reaching a consciousness of their Unity with God," of their communion with the whole of Being. Thus will be realized fully those possibilities that were latent in the Infinite before creation, and which God made conscious by making them free. Those possibilities first formed matter, then all things and beings made of it, rising to life and intelligence, reaching perfection "in their kind" in this mortal life, and disappearing, washed of all their faults and failings, in death; but the covenant was not broken, God had created them in order to add them to himself; in the day of final glorification, he rouses them from that sleep of death into which each being had fallen in his turn and unites them all, in the total, perfect, and endless life which replaces the solitary and latent life of the Pre-Creation.

44 Ibid., IV, 480.

45 Ibid. See also IV, 276, and the whole of Chapter XXXIII.

T

CHAPTER III

PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS

HE conception of the Fall comes into Milton's cosmology as disturbing the order established

by God. In Milton's psychology, the Fall is the dominant conception, and this part of our study will be an analysis of the state of Fall and of the normal or regenerated state opposed to it. Milton's conception of man and his consequent conception of ethics-are organized around these two ideas.

I. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL AND THE DUALITY OF MAN

The origin of evil is a redoubtable problem for the deist, and still more for the pantheistic deist, Milton. For everything comes from God. Therefore Milton

dared to say:

Evil into the mind of God or man

May come and go, so unapproved, and leave

No spot or blame behind.1

Evil exists as a possibility in God himself. This allows us to understand that when God "retires," abandons certain parts of himself to their latent impulses, evil is expressed, owing to free will.

What does this "evil" consist in?

The study of the Fall teaches us that for Milton man is a double being, in whom co-exist desire and intelligence or passion and reason. The two powers ought to be in

1 P. L., V, 117-19.