The Atheist Milton

Michael E. Bryson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317040958
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Basing his contention on two different lines of argument, Michael Bryson posits that John Milton-possibly the most famous 'Christian' poet in English literary history-was, in fact, an atheist. First, based on his association with Arian ideas (denial of the doctrine of the Trinity), his argument for the de Deo theory of creation (which puts him in line with the materialism of Spinoza and Hobbes), and his Mortalist argument that the human soul dies with the human body, Bryson argues that Milton was an atheist by the commonly used definitions of the period. And second, as the poet who takes a reader from the presence of an imperious, monarchical God in Paradise Lost, to the internal-almost Gnostic-conception of God in Paradise Regained, to the absence of any God whatsoever in Samson Agonistes, Milton moves from a theist (with God) to something much more recognizable as a modern atheist position (without God) in his poetry. Among the author's goals in The Atheist Milton is to account for tensions over the idea of God which, in Bryson's view, go all the way back to Milton's earliest poetry. In this study, he argues such tensions are central to Milton's poetry-and to any attempt to understand that poetry on its own terms.

Chapter 1
Atheism by Any Other Name

Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

—Euripides

If Milton were alive today, he would be an atheist.

Probably the most famous “Christian” poet in the English literary tradition (Donne and Herbert are wonderful, each in their way, but neither is of Milton’s stature in the literary world, or fame outside it), the author famously associated in the public imagination with Heaven and Hell, God and Satan, Adam, Eve, and the Fall of Man, would be—and by the definition I will argue for in this book, already was—an atheist.

Milton did not believe in the God of William Laud—the increasingly royalist archbishop who lent himself, his theology, and his politicized conception of God to the Stuart regime as a prop to its power—nor the God of preachers like Robert Elborough or Thomas Vincent, two common hacks who each explained the calamities of plague and fire in mid-1660s London as the judgment of the deity on the wicked sinners of the city. Milton did not believe in a God who was an adjunct to the purposes, the petty political opinions and rivalries, the hatreds of priests and politicians whose Gods always seem to be created in their own images.

Milton did not believe in our God(s) either. Someone who forgives us for our “sins,” with whom we have a “personal relationship,” who is in our corner, on our side, who sent his only begotten son into the world to die a horrible death at the hands of imperial torturers because he just loves us so much. No, Milton did not believe in this straw-man deity, though to use the description “straw-man” is inaccurate, because belief in that very conception of God is alive and well and on display in shopping mall gift shops around the United States of America. I imagine Milton browsing the aisles of a “Christian” gift store and being appalled at what he finds there, but also quietly satisfied with the artistic decisions he had made in his last, and greatest, poems. A trip through Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes is a trip through, and past, the troubled pieties of an (over)-confident theism (God is in his Heaven, but something is not quite right with the world), through a redefinition of deity in nearly Gnostic terms (God is only to be found within), to a radical and quite literally a-theist doubt about God’s activity, purpose, and existence. It is a trip from belief to doubt, from being with God to being without God, from theism to atheism.

In contemporary terms, Milton was closer to both Spinoza and Hobbes than to Richard Baxter or William Laud or even the Presbyterian ministers of his day. In modern terms, Milton—the poet of Heaven and Hell—would be closer, much closer, to such figures as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens than to the Pat Robertsons and Franklin Grahams, or even—to pick from those who are a great deal more intellectually respectable—the Alister McGraths or Hans Kungs of our time. In his late poetry, Milton is doing the kind of thinking that helps lay the groundwork for what is traditionally recognized as the beginnings of modern atheism in the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century (Baron d’Holbach, Diderot, Hume, and even Jefferson and Paine). Just as the Romantics can rightly look back to Milton as having anticipated many of their political commitments, so can atheists, from the eighteenth century to today, look back to him as a forefather.

In Milton’s day, there are three basic features that can be identified within the various intellectual positions that get labeled as “atheism.” The first is Arianism, a theological development of the fourth century CE that denies what later became the “orthodox” doctrine of the Trinity, insisting on the primacy of the Father over the Son. The second is Materialism, the idea that all of reality can be explained in terms of matter, material causes and effects—this idea goes all the way back to the pre-Socratics, and extends into Milton’s day in the ideas of Spinoza, Hobbes, and Milton himself. The third, which is in many ways a subset of Materialism, is called Mortalism—the belief that the soul is not fully and simply immortal, but either dies with the body or merely sleeps until the resurrection at Judgment Day.

Each of these ideas had already been put on display in the infamous trial and execution of Michael Servetus (1511–1553). Servetus, “who first put forward the theory of the lesser circulation of the blood in a small section of his theological work, The Restoration of Christianity (1553), [...] reject[ed] the doctrine of the Trinity. He denied that the Son was co-eternal with the Father, and he was of the view that the Holy Spirit was the breath of the Deity, a pneuma pervading the atmosphere and the whole world.”1

Servetus had been publicly arguing against the orthodox formulation of the Trinity for over 20 years (having published De Trinitatis Erroribus in 1531) by the time he appeared in Geneva at the trial that would result in his death. At his trial, he argued that “those who maintain that there are three substantial persons or hypostases in God, insinuate three Gods, equal by nature [... and] this is the highest blasphemy and impiety.”2 Servetus also appears to have subscribed to an early version of the materialism that Spinoza would be famous for in the following century, when he claimed that the natural, vital, and animal spirits in the human body are one and the same:

It is said that in us there is a triple spirit from the substance of three higher elements, natural, vital and animal. Aphrodisaeus calls them three spirits. But they are not three but once again of the single spirit (spiritus).3

Such a view “implied that man was wholly mortal, the soul both identical to and perishing with the body, and this heretical implication of his system was charged against Servetus at his trial by Calvin.”4 Even more provocatively, Servetus argued that the material of the body (specifically the blood) was itself the spirit of God, thus implying that God was material:

The vital spirit is that which is communicated through anastomoses from the arteries to the veins in which it is called the natural [spirit]. Therefore the first [i.e. natural spirit] is of the blood, and its seat is in the liver and in the veins of the body. The second is the vital spirit of which the seat is in the heart and in the arteries of the body. The third is the animal spirit, a ray of light, as it were, of which the seat is in the brain and the nerves of the body. In all these there resides the energy of the one spirit and of the light of God.
[...]
The material of the divine spirit is from the blood of the liver by way of a remarkable elaboration of which you will now hear. Hence it is said that the divine spirit is in the blood, and the divine spirit is itself the blood [...] as is taught by God himself in Gen. 9, Levit. 7 and Deut. 12.5

Over a century after Servetus is burned at the stake by Calvin,6 John Milton is demonstrably a subscriber to all three of the ideas for which Servetus was charged and executed. In De Doctrina Christiana, a theological treatise that he never published (it was not published until over 150 years after his death), Milton clearly expresses his disdain for what he regards as the intellectually incoherent doctrine of the Trinity. Elsewhere, in the same unpublished-in-his-lifetime document, Milton argues that the soul dies with the body and that the material basis of creation is the material essence of God, arguments closely aligned with those of Servetus in the sixteenth century and with those of Spinoza and Hobbes, two prominent thinkers of Milton’s seventeenth century who were each accused of being atheists.

But for most readers, Milton is of interest for his poetry—especially for the late work that cements his reputation as one of the world’s greatest poets. His poetry is some of the most passionate, dramatic, and intense verse that has ever been written. He takes on multiple aspects of the human condition: the experience of coming into one’s own in terms of development and talent, the experience of aging and having not reached one’s potential, of watching one’s ideas be mocked and misunderstood, of losing the sense of sight and the independence that sense always provided. He takes on all of human history, Heaven, Hell, and one of the most violent and problematic of the ancient Biblical heroes. But perhaps most poignantly, he gives the reader a window into his intellectual and emotional struggles with God.

But how can this be, given that Milton—in both his poetry and prose—writes of God incessantly? I would turn the question around, reframing it to ask the opposite: how could this not be? The consistent trajectory Milton follows through his entire intellectual life, from less knowledge to more knowledge, from less freedom to more freedom, inevitably runs into a wall—and that wall is called “God.” In Milton, God is less a subject to be understood than a problem to be solved. The great “task-Master” of Sonnet VII, under whose all-seeing eye not only Milton, but all of humanity lives and moves and has its being, is an intolerable figure, one that Milton is constantly trying—and failing—to come to comfortable terms with. In the three great works with which Milton ends his poetic career, he pushes against this figure with astounding force, moving from what a modern theologian like Paul Tillich would describe as “theological theism” to something that looks very much like a forerunner to modern atheism. Tillich describes this movement as a necessary process, because the theist’s God

deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. I revolt and make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity. He is equated with the recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control. He becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications.7

Tillich’s description is incredibly apt, down to the emotional level of the desperation involved in the struggle, the revolt against an “invincible tyrant.” It is precisely this “tyrant,” this “all-powerful and all-knowing” figure that Milton struggles with in his poetry, from his early sonnets to his late epics, before he finally abandons the figure, refusing him any representation in the play that caps his career as a poet. Milton’s poetry is a road map of his journey from faith to doubt, from theism to atheism, from the certainty of what Blake would later call the “mind forg’d manacles” of religion to the exhilarating uncertainty of facing l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: An Unexpected Journey
• 1 Atheism by Any Other Name
• 2 The Apophatic Milton
• 3 The Gnostic Milton
• 4 The Atheist Milton
• Bibliography
• Index