There is thus practically not one philosophical trait in Milton which is not to be found in the Zohar. Does this mean that Milton derived all his ideas from the Kabbalah? That cannot be reasonably asserted. It seems to

me:

1. That he obviously derived from the Zohar such peculiar conceptions as are found nowhere else, e. g., the idea of "retraction," his most fundamental idea;

2. That some ideas coming to him from other sources were strengthened by the Zohar into a maturity and importance they would not otherwise have reached;

3. That again he found in the Zohar confirmation of other ideas which belonged to a much wider tradition.

But it is perhaps practically impossible- and it is of no real utility to try to work out this division in the detail of the ideas. What conclusions then are we to draw from the main facts?

The first is that Milton has used the Zohar; I see no other hypothesis covering the range of correspondences I have hardly done more than point out here.

The second is that Milton's originality as a thinker is practically reduced to the working of his intellect or feelings upon outside material which he appropriates and only arranges. Yet he remains a great thinker, because he is still the representative of the modern mind in presence of the tremendous chaos of impossible ideas, puzzling myths, and grotesque conceptions of the Zohar. Milton has chosen warily; he has drawn from this confusion practically all the original or deep ideas that were acceptable to the cultured European. He has never been swept away by the element of intellectual and sentimental perversity which plays so great a part in the Zohar. In the

presence of this (for it) new world rising on the European horizon, an undeniable greatness of character and of intellect was needed to maintain such an attitude; few of those who dealt intimately with the Kabbalah were able to do so.

In the light of these data-Milton now appearing, not as the creator, but as the stage-manager only, of his philosophical ideas - the problem of the poet's thought is transformed and becomes: Why and how did Milton come to adopt such ideas? Why did he give up the orthodox tradition of his time and adopt this kabbalistic tradition?

The answer is to be found in the historical and psychological study of his life, of the evolution of his feelings and character, a study of which I have tried to lay the foundations in Part I.

Milton's original value may thus be diminished, but his historical significance becomes much greater. He is not an isolated thinker lost in seventeenth-century England, with predecessors or disciples. He becomes, at a given moment, the brilliant representative of an antique and complex tradition which continues and widens after him; for the problem becomes larger. "Milton among the kabbalists"- this is, as it were, a gap blown into the very fortress of English literature, and much may here come in: for example, the inexplicable relationship of Blake to Milton becomes clearer for this common light;" Blake himself in many points is less of a puzzle; and this current broadens into the nineteenth century from Shelley to Whitman. But here it is no longer simply Milton and only the Zohar that are in question;

47 See on this my Blake and Milton (Paris, Alcan, 1920, and New York, Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press, 1924).

other influences are at work, and on others besides Milton. It becomes necessary to trace a whole stream of semioccult ideas, flowing through the whole of modern literature and taking in much of Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche, much of Lamartine and Hugo."

48 See on this point my article in the Revue de littérature comparée, III (1923), 337-68.

A

CHAPTER II

ROBERT FLUDD (1574-1637)

STUDY of Fludd is indispensable to a proper

understanding of the evolution of ideas in the

seventeenth century in England. His contemporaries held him in high esteem. Selden is known to have thought highly of him. Gassendi devoted two treatises to a courteous refutation of his ideas. His works are an encyclopedia of Kabbalism, Neo-Platonism, Hermetism, and of all sciences and arts of his time, from astrology and even astronomy, to the construction of musical instruments.

His system is extremely complicated, and it can be said at once that Milton has not adopted it, nor even probably been influenced by it except on some particular points which I shall examine in detail. That Milton knew Fludd I take for granted; every educated man of the time knew Fludd; to his great reputation as a philosopher he added celebrity as a medical practitioner and a somewhat scandalous notoriety for his independence towards the medical authorities, who, on several occasions, had to admonish him severely.

Of his general system of ideas, it is enough to say that practically all the kabbalistic conceptions which we went over in our last chapter are found in his works. It is therefore needless to prove the general similarly between Milton's philosophy and Fludd's.

There is, however, one particular doctrine which must be investigated more closely, because it can be said not

to exist explicitly in the Kabbalah (though many kabbalists derive it from their principles) and it is common to Milton and Fludd: the doctrine of materialism. Both derive their materialism from a pantheism: God is everything; the original matter from which everything is made is part of God. Fludd also knows of the retraction.1 But Milton's use of pantheism to justify physical passion is not paralleled in Fludd, who despises the body. Also of Milton's use of the retraction theory to prove man's liberty and therefore to justify the ways of God, I find no traces in Fludd, who seems to be disturbed by no doubts or questionings relative to the justice of God. Thus Milton's chief preoccupations are foreign to Fludd.

But in the cosmology there are more precise analogies. For Fludd, the original matter, part of God, from which everything has been made, is light, of which fire is a grosser form. There might seem to be an influence of Stoicism here, and probably the Neo-Stoicism of the Renaissance has left traces in Fludd; but the only authorities Fludd quotes in support of the theory, so far as I have seen, are Zoroaster and the Kabbalists. However that may be, one passage of Fludd must be compared with Milton's hymn to light at the beginning of Book III of Paradise Lost:

Concludimus igitur, lucem esse vel increatam, scilicet Deum omnia naturantem (nam in ipso Deo Patre est vera lux, deinde in Filio ejus illustrans splendor et uberans, et in Spiritu Sancto ardens fulgor superans omnen intelligentiam) vel ab ea increata creatam.2

1 Though I have not been able to find in Fludd the passage of the Tikuně Zohar I quote in the previous chapter, I will not go so far as to say it is not there, as Fludd's complete works are a real cosmos, in which it seems to me impossible to say that something is not to be found. 2 Fludd, De macrocosmi historia, I, I, Caput VI, p. 28.