ABSTRACT
John Milton’s God is purely, unmediately present as spirit in his “material” deeds; but he is so only from the standpoint of eternity. To justify the ways of God to men; for the transcendental signifier has apparently withdrawn aloofly from his own handiwork, leaving behind him a tormentedly ambiguous historical text which must be laboriously scanned for signs of his presence and purpose. To blame Marxism for these conditions is then somewhat akin to blaming God for the failure of seventeenth-century revolutionary hopes. To blame God in this way, Milton sees, can mean only one thing: that the Puritan bureaucrats, opportunists and careerists are then let comfortably off the moral and political hook. John Milton, son of a prosperous bourgeois, emerged by a laborious process of self-production to become the organic intellectual of the English revolution, so placed within the traditional intellectual culture as to revise, reject, assimilate and appropriate its contents in the cause of his own people.
