ABSTRACT
The English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was the first modern attempt to reorder the political affairs of an entire nation, while simultaneously reforming the consciousness of its citizens. John Milton, the official propagandist for Cromwell’s revolutionary government, was compelled to enlist ancient and medieval ideas in the service of political innovation, just as Machiavelli had done in Renaissance Florence. Milton’s work combines the Platonic dichotomy between ideal and material spheres with the Aristotelian concept of custom to offer an explanation of why people collude in their own oppression. For a time, Milton believed that by purging monarchy and prelacy out of the Commonwealth it might be possible to build a reformed society, and to people it with virtuous citizens. Milton was convinced, to use the twentyfirst-century vernacular, that the personal was political. In ‘The First Defence of the English People’, he saw an indissoluble connection between the spiritual condition of the individual and the political condition of the state:
Like most revolutions from above, however, the Cromwellian state soon foundered on the rocks of popular conservatism, and the monarchy was restored in 1660. The revolutionary regime’s intellectual apologists were thus faced with the weary task of comprehending ‘an inconstant, irrational and Image-doting rabble’. How was it possible to account for people who, as it seemed, voluntarily chose slavery over freedom? The most readily available explanation was the Christian myth of the Fall, and in Paradise Lost Milton undertakes a long meditation on the nature of the post-lapsarian mind. Milton’s epic endorses the common assumption that Adam and Eve’s alienation from God had obscured humanity’s oculus intellectualis, or ‘eye of understanding’. Their posterity is therefore doomed to reverse the Platonic hierarchy, and allow their fleshly appetites to dominate their intellect. As they are being expelled from Eden, Adam and Eve are informed that this mental error will result in political oppression:
Paradise Lost represents this false consciousness as a universal human trait, and this doubtless reflects Milton’s pessimism after the Restoration. But such a universal false consciousness could not account for the political and religious divisions within the English nation. How could it be that some people were quite able to perceive what Milton took to be the moral and godly way to organize Church and state, while others were so utterly
deluded? In the speech quoted above, Milton has the archangel Michael inform Adam that mankind is condemned to live under tyranny because ‘inordinate desires’ and ‘upstart Passions’ will usurp the place of reason in the human mind. In Paradise Lost these disruptive forces are identified primarily with sensual appetite and undisciplined emotion. However, the work Milton produced during the more hopeful days of the Commonwealth indicates that his understanding of sensuality has a political dimension which extends far beyond any censorious exhortations to an austere personal morality.
