ABSTRACT
Milton’s usual conceptions of deity, though they are mutually incongruous, are, at any rate, elevated and edifying. Milton’s position is pragmatic, in the most vulgar sense of that ambiguous term, the sense in which it designated an obscurantist utilitarianism hostile to all disinterested intellectual curiosity and to all inquiry into unsolved problems about the physical world. The argument being a commonplace of the Copernican polemic, Milton might have learned it from any of a number of previous writers. More noteworthy is the fact that Milton shows a manifest inclination towards the belief in other inhabited planets and even in the plurality of inhabited worlds. Milton is naively mixing astronomy and eschatology. A singularly detestable being was the God in which even such a Christian humanist of the seventeenth century as Milton could sometimes believe.
