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 " 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:

But man over men

He made not lord: such title to Himself
Reserving, human left from human free.

But justice, and some fatal curse annexed,
Deprives them of their outward liberty,
Their inward lost. . . .70

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.

M

SECTION II

CONTEMPORARY SOURCES AND

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.

T

CHAPTER I

THE ZOHAR AND THE KABBALAH

HE Zohar was put together in Spain in the thirteenth century as a compendium of all the non-orthodox Jewish traditions. 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

mous tradition and even the statement of the poet himself leave us no doubt that he was able to read the Aramean text of the Zohar; 1 and we know Milton sufficiently well to be sure that, if once he became interested in the Kabbalah, he would go straight to the main text with his usual contempt for commentators, since the text was accessible. In such circumstances the proof that Milton knew the Zohar and derived ideas from it must come from a comparison of the two systems of thought and a precise investigation of texts.

I do not mean to maintain that Milton was a kabbalist in the sense that he accepted the Zohar as a revealed book in any other way than any other great book. His mind was much too clear and exacting for that. Besides, the Zohar is full of contradictions, owing to the way it was put together or transmitted. Milton evidently took only what suited him from that chaos of ideas. But Milton used the Zohar, found there abundant confirmation of his general ideas, and drew thence many of the ideas whch seem at first sight most particularly his own.

Many of his general conceptions belong to a traditional stock, common to the Zohar and to other Jewish or Christian lines of development. But some of Milton's most original notions are found only in the Zohar; and the most striking fact of all is that in the Zohar can be found all Milton's ideas, whether apparently peculiar to himself or not. With one reservation only, it can be stated

1 Cf. Apology for Smectymnuus (Prose Works, III, 131), where Milton quotes the targoumists; Of Education (III, 473), where he recommends the study of Aramean; and Phillip's statement (quoted in Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, Oxford, 1905, I, 145).

2 The idea of the non-existence of the soul; and even in this case all the ideas on which Milton bases this notion are in the Zokar: pantheism, matter as a divine substance, transformation of matter into spirit, unity between matter and spirit, vindication of sex-passion, etc. Milton only