Exhibit A: Milton was an adherent of ex deo creation. Quite a Spinozan view. Chaos consists of God's “dark materials to create more worlds”... Hence the title of Philip Pullman's trilogy.
Exhibit B: Raphael's conversation with Adam in Paradise Lost. Don't worry too much about things outside of Eden, says Raphael. Who knows, up there there may be all kinds of alien worlds, inhabited by all kinds of extraterrestrial life, maybe even conscious life—maybe there's an alien Raphael and an alien Adam having this same conversation. But don't worry about it...
Don't think of a pink elephant! (I talk about this part of Milton a bit in The Ecological Thought chapter 1.) Isn't “amplitude immense” a beautiful phrase to describe the Universe?
Nathan Brown has a very good essay on SR in Descartes and Hume coming out (“Absent Blue Wax”). Could Milton be another forerunner?
2 comments:
I wouldn't say that Milton is a precursor so much as his influences would be. I'm thinking here of Jakob Böhme who was a tremendous influence on Romanticism, particularly the work of F.W.J. Schelling (Romanticism having much in common I think with SR, Schelling especially). If you read Schelling's Freheitsschrift and Weltalter and compare them with Böhme's theogony, you'll find they are virtually identical. Schelling's early naturphilosophie is also remarkably Böhmian, albeit with Nature in place of God or Spirit. The real influence on the latter however is less likely Böhme himself and more likely Herder's Böhmian reading of Spinoza found in "God, Some Conversations" as well as the anti-Leibnizian, theological vitalist work of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. Back to Milton though, there's actually a book on Böhme and Milton, using the Anglo spelling, called "Milton and Jakob Boehme" which clarifies this relationship.
Very interesting Michael. I'm checking with my friendly Miltonist from Princeton to find out more about this.
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