From: colin cartwright [colcris@dircon.co.uk] Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 5:52 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Cc: colcris@dircon.co.uk Subject: Re: Milton, Toleration & Catholicism I thought I would try and give a little extra background to this lengthy discussion on toleration. It is a little-known fact that in 1612, Thomas Helwys, an early Baptist leader published 'A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity' in which he appealed directly to King James I to allow freedom of religion, not only for Baptists but for Jews and 'Turks' too. Needless to say he was imprisoned and died three or four years later. It is more than likely that Helwys derived this radical view from his earlier stay on the continent with Mennonite Anabaptists. The Anabaptists had long made a point that they would not fight 'the Turk' because of their non-violent stance but also because they held that no earthly authority had the right to command in matters of faith. Helwys makes no mention of toleration for Catholics though - either because that is simply assumed (because of who he is appealing to) OR alternatively because he, like Milton later, perceived the Papacy as the greatest threat to religious liberty. It might be argued that for Helwys to have appealed for toleration for the Catholic faith, would be akin to a Jew, having escaped from Nazi Germany, appealing for Nazis to be free to practise their beliefs. Now, please do not get me wrong. This is not in any way meant to liken Catholicism to Nazism, but it might help in us trying to get into the mindset of sixteenth century radical Protestants like Milton. Hope this helps rather than hinders ! colcris@dircon.co.uk From: Norman Burns [nburns@binghamton.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 9:47 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Counterdiscourses of Toleration / was Re: Skinnerean Mythologies This message uses a character set that is not supported by the Internet Service. To view the original message content, open the attached message. If the text doesn't display correctly, save the attachment to disk, and then open it using a viewer that can display the original character set. From: Steve Fallon [fallon.1@nd.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 7:29 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Milton, Toleration, and Catholicism I take Robert Appelbaum's point. In my parenthetical "most" I was acknowledging that there are countries where religious toleration is not the law. I probably should have said "by almost all Western Hempisphere and European nations." I'm not sure how the count would go if one were to include Asian and African nations. I agree that legal intolerance and persecution are serious and living human rights questions. Steve Fallon My > I don't wish to intervene in this long long and very intelligent >discussion except to make a note about our own contemporary context. Steve >Fallon writes: "Today, all religions are tolerated by (most) governments; >when we speak of toleration in this context we are usually thinking of >moderating the effects of prejudice by refraining from verbal or physical >harrassment." This statement is probably untrue. What religions are >"tolerated" by Indonesia, China, Egypt, etc.? Which religions are not? I >join Professor Fallon in his remark that talk in a Western democracy is >cheap. (As Phillip Roth once said, "In America, anything can be said, and >nothing counts.") But we are living in a world where human rights are >making few advances--and where religious affiliation still counts. > > From: Margaret Thickstun [mthickst@hamilton.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 9:14 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Rose Williams' most recent comment Picking up on Rose Williams's correction to the suggestion that people who couldn't face the pressure in England "ran to America," may I add, as a person who studies Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic, that coming to the new world did not mean abandoning the old: the Massachusetts Bay experiment intended to establish a model state to show the old world how a Christian state should be conducted and, ideally, to effect the reform of Europe through its example. And many who did emigrate returned to England when the wars broke out--it looked as if their experiment was bearing fruit. All of the important "New England divines," as well as "our" first poet, Anne Bradstreet, published in London. Most of them had been born and educated in England. The son of William Bradford, founding member of the Plymouth Colony and its long-time governor, returned to England later in his life (with the manuscript of "Of Plymouth Plantation"). Increase Mather, born in Dorchester, Mass, in 1639, graduated from Harvard, then studied for his MA at Trinity College, Dublin (1658), and served as a chaplain under Cromwell. The family appears to have planned for him to pursue a career in England in the Puritan government. With its collapse, he returned to Massachusetts Bay; at that point many others who had not left earlier England chose to do so. I recently heard a conference paper about why Oliver Cromwell did not emigrate (and how close he was to people who did). Wouldn't that have changed history? Our perception of "us"/"them" or "here"/"there" is a 20th (21st?) century misunderstanding that we need to work harder to correct. Margaret Thickstun Department of English Hamilton College 198 College Hill Rd Clinton, NY 13323 (315)859-4466 From: Carol Barton, PhD [cbartonphd@earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 4:56 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light I chose Norm's post for this response not to slight Robin or Rose or Jameela or Ann or Richard (and precedent), but because his seems most in line with Milton's thinking in _Animadversions_, when he writes that " in matters of religion, there is not anything more intolerable than a learned fool, or a learned hypocrite: the one is ever cooped up at his empty speculations, a sot, an idiot for any use that mankind can make of him, or else saving the world with nice and idle questions [how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?], and with much toil and difficulty wading to his auditors up to the eyebrows in deep shallows that wet not the instep: a plain unlearned man that lives well by that light which he has, is better and wiser and edifies others more towards a godly and happy life than he." I think all of us, when puzzled or troubled by a particularly thorny problem, have experienced a sense of illumination (the sort that makes one shout "Eureka!") at least once in our lives, and indeed, it is very much like a sunbeam flooding the brain with its radiance, almost a rapture. In very simple terms, it seems to me that the light of spiritual inspiration, by which one sees with a clarity that removes all uncertainty or confusion, is the "inner light" meant in all of these passages; here, Milton suggests that even one whose candle doesn't burn with the brilliance of the bush on Mt. Sinai can still teach his brethren whatever his smaller taper allows. Best to all, Carol Barton ----- Original Message ----- From: "Norman Burns" To: Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 4:24 PM Subject: Re: Inner light > Kate Narveson's post usefully advances the discussion while > capably suggesting some of the rocks and shoals in the debate that made it > so difficult to be both lucid and simple about the mode by which it was > thought God illuminated the understandings of the faithful. > I would like to venture a few thoughts on how Christians could > agree that all believers need the illumination of the Spirit to perceive > the Truth, and yet be deeply divided about how that Light came to > believers. Let me attempt a sketch of the divisions in 17th C. England. > Most people believed that Christ had left behind a Church to be > the means or conduit by which saving guidance or light came to its > members. The Church established a qualified clergy, who rightly conducted > the Sacraments and truly preached the Word--all these elements were means > that God had chosen to bring people to saving understanding. The true > Church mediated the grace that deficient humanity needed. The struggles > about what was the polity and nature of the true Church were unending, and > worth fighting for; if, for example, the Lord's Supper were not truly > administered, the recipients would not get the spiritual benefits intended > by Christ. > A Church constituted as Christ intended could also, by means of > the preaching that came to be increasingly emphasized as the episcopal, > ceremonial system lost favor, guide the members in the true understanding > of the Holy Scripture. It follows that the system by which men were > ordained to preach was vitally important. Presbyterians, who favored a > learned clergy who could deduce coherently and work with the scriptural > languages, had bottomless contempt for the "mechanic preachers" common > among the sects. The sectarians were not about to be bullied, so, in turn, > they denounced those who preferred humane learning to divine inspiration > and supported opinions like those of the cobbler Samuel How when he urged > _The Sufficiencie of the Spirit's Teaching without Humane Learning_. > So, broadly, one could favor the idea that the Spirit worked to > the benefit of humankind mediated through institutions, or unmediated > through direct communication with the minds and hearts of individuals. The > second way of the Spirit's operations was immediately seen to be > unverifiable and hence uncontrollable, and was usually thought of as a kind > of disease--"enthusiasm." Swift and others had much fun with > "enthusiasts," but the approach had considerable staying power, becoming > very nearly institutionalized and stabilized in the Society of Friends. The > Friends had no established clergy, no Creed or catechism, no sacraments, > no liturgy, no "prayer book" or order of worship to direct their meetings. > The orthodox knew this was not a church recognizable as such; they were > very clear that after biblical times God had ceased all immediate > revelation to individuals because, the Church having been established, the > direction of the Spirit came through the Church and its ordinances. The > Quakers sat in their meeting and waited to speak until the Spirit moved a > member personally, but the orthodox thought the Friends ridiculous for > having repudiated the church that was designed by Christ to deliver the > Spirit more reliably to the faithful. > Since virtually all groups paid deference to the inerrant Holy > Scriptures as the foundation of spiritual truth, it might appear that they > would be a unifying force, but difficulties of interpretation proved > disruptive. George Fox and other Friends cited Scripture and made their > writings a pastiche of scriptural phrases, but Fox also liked to denounce > his opponents for being mired in the Letter and being without access to the > Spirit who inspired the Letter and was superior to it, superior at least to > what his opponents could grasp by their literalism. > I have presented a rather polarized schematic here, but the truth > on the ground was that opinions about institutionalized churches and how > the Spirit directs believers was in most cases a continuum, with > individuals and groups often shifting their positions between the poles as > situations varied. Fox and the Friends professed a high regard for > Scripture, but scorned the scripturalism of their opponents, often seeming > to urge its replacement by the purer illumination of their inner light. > What was Milton's position on these matters? Hard to say. It was > doubtless unstable, but I will venture a few generalizations and invite the > list to correct me. > Milton, in his poems and prose (I include _DDC_), shows little > interest in communal, public worship or in the organization of such (the > discussion in _DDC_ is slight and passionless, once he establishes that the > polity must be congregational; his treatment of the two sacraments is > casual, to be administered by the head of the household--nothing to suggest > that they are essential conduits of saving grace). Churches are there to > be married in, perhaps to be buried in, but nothing suggests that he viewed > communal worship as vital to the Christian experience. He never mentions a > church or sect with favor, never says a favorable word for an English > clergyman or sectarian leader (setting aside as special cases his good > words for his tutor Thomas Young and the exercise in elegy for the Bishop > of Ely), not even for the formidable (and one would think somewhat > attractive) presences in the same government--Peter Sterry and John Owen, > or for his fellow in condemnation John Goodwin. Toland says Milton > attended no church in his later years; do we know of any he attended, even > earlier? I do not think there is any evidence that he saw the church as a > conduit of the Spirit he sought. > Milton has Michael promise our parents a Comforter who shall dwell > in them, write the law of faith in their hearts, guide and strengthen them > (perfectly orthodox and scripturally grounded, but lacking reference to a > role for the Church does this not shade toward Enthusiasm on the > continuum?). A little later the "written Records pure" are introduced, but > they are only to be understood with the assistance of the Spirit (a widely > acceptable formulation, though Fox would have agreed because it leaves open > the claim for the primacy of the Spirit). Milton throughout his prose > insists that belief must be built on Scripture alone, but it was common to > speak of Scripture as "a nose of wax" that can be wrested to fit one's > argument (Milton gave it a few good tweaks when necessary), so the Spirit > gets very important if you don't depend on the authority of a Church. In > DDC Milton insists that God allowed monkish hands to corrupt the > transmission of the text in order to show us that the Spirit had primacy > over the ink and paper of Scripture. > On the whole, I find Milton tending toward the Quaker end of the > continuum--having no interest in set forms of public worship, unconcerned > about establishing churches, anticlerical, unwilling to appeal to the civil > power in spiritual matters, persuaded that his own conscientious > understanding of divine things is the only standard of belief. Not that I > think Milton was a Friend despite his relationship with Isaac Penington and > Ellwood--he had something like this position on the continuum long before > he met them. There were lots of people at that end of things--Seekers, > General Baptists, many of those who people Edwards's _Gangraena_ (1646) and > Samuel Rutherford's _Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist_(1648). Toland > made inquiry and couldn't find anybody who knew of Milton's church > affiliation, nor do I have any specific evidence on the question. Like > Toland, I think I know some of Milton's attitudes. > Sorry to be so windy, Kate, in attempting the contextualization > you ask for. Even so, I'm sure I'll get in trouble for oversimplifying > these matters. > --Norm Burns > > At 01:56 PM 2/18/01 -0600, you wrote: > >It's been a while since I worked in this area, and I hope someone will > >supplement these comments with a more substantive of how the issues relate > >to Milton. But here is a start at defining the context of a phrase like > >"inner light": > > > >The phrase emerges from English Calvinist attempts to explicate how fallen > >humankind could obtain divine truth. To what extent can reason be rectified > >by the holy spirit, is there further revelation, in what ways are > >experiential metaphors more adequate, etc? One common metaphor was that > >reason is benighted and the holy spirit must be present as that which sheds > >light so that reason may see. But others stress reason's blindness, and the > >need for the restoration of the "visive" power by the work of the Holy > >Spirit. Usually, the spirit is seen as providing the light, so that "inner > >light" for moderate Calvinists is not the person's own possession. John > >Morgan has a chapter in "Godly REason"---though he only goes up to 1640, it > >sets the context for later discussions, and is good in indicating where > >Perry Miller was overly rationalistic. > > > >Nathaniel Culverwell's "Learned and elegant discourse of the Candle of the > >Lord" reflects mid-century efforts at the universities to defend the > >Calvinist understanding of reason's limitations from incipient > >latitudinarianism and Cambridge Platonism. (The comparison of reason to the > >candle of the Lord is in Proverbs somewhere---I don't have the right books > >with me.) > > > >The issue moved front and center during and after the interregnum, as > >moderate nonconformists tried to counter the enthusiasm of the radical sects > >on the one hand and preserve a Calvinist emphasis on the fallenness of > >reason vs the rationalist C of E stalwarts on the other. The moderate > >nonconformist cause was complicated by the fact that establishment > >polemicists misrepresented Calvinism as enthusiasm, so congregationalist > >conservatives like John Owen were fighting a battle on two fronts, and > >statements made against one side were picked up and used against him by the > >other. This is the context for Owen's massive systematization of > >Congregationalist pneumatology (still respected by theologians now) and for > >Theophilus Gale's attempt to use ancient history to prove the fallenness of > >reason (in "the Court of the Gentiles). > > > >In short, terms like "inner light" and "right reason" were immensely > >controversial, and any particular author's use must be carefully set in the > >context of his/her works and sectarian associations. Geoffrey Nuttall's > >book on the holy spirit in puritanism remains the best study I > >know---recently reissued by Chicago with an intro by Peter Lake. > > > >Has someone done this contextualization for Milton? Is there sufficient > >evidence? It sounds like perhaps it needs to be given more systematic > >attention. I'd love to hear more. > > > >Best, > >Kate Narveson > > > >At 08:11 AM 02/15/2001 -0500, you wrote: > > > > > >Dear Derick, and list, > > > > > >Yes, I was teasing all of us, whenever we use easy phrases like "inner = > > >light" (I was sure that Derick could back it up, as he did, with solid = > > >evidence), but I had some serious issues in mind. Why doesn't Milton = > > >himself use the exact phrase "inner light?" Why does he beat around > that = > > >bush but say the same thing, as Derick and others have already shown? = > > >Does that make him a Quaker? > > > > > >If I am remembering correctly from having read Thomas Ellwood's > > autobiograp= > > >hy over again about a year ago, Ellwood doesn't use the phrase "inner = > > >light" either. It would be interesting, to me at least, to see where = > > >Ellwood and Milton differed or agreed, about divine inspiration. Would = > > >they have talked about Milton's Muse? > > > > > >Best to all, > > > > > >Roy Flannagan > > > > > > > > > From: AntiUtopia@aol.com Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 9:36 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Counterdiscourses of Toleration / was Re: Skinnerean Mythologies This message uses a character set that is not supported by the Internet Service. To view the original message content, open the attached message. If the text doesn't display correctly, save the attachment to disk, and then open it using a viewer that can display the original character set. From: Cobelli@aol.com Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 9:46 PM To: Milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: inner light Emblem books of the period (Wither, Quarles, Montenay, Hugo, Arwaker) often contain emblems of the soul or Christ (usually a child-like figure) holding a candle or with a halo of light around the head. For example, in Quarles Hieroglyphes II, 6-9, and Montenay's Emblemes, the Christ-child figure is shown lighting an extinguished candle. I could name some more specific examples but don't have access to the books at the moment. Wasn't there a common phrase in England during the Commonwealth about man being the "candlestick of the Lord?" Scott Grunow Editor-in-Chief Office of Publications Services University of Illinois at Chicago scottgr@uic.edu "But felt throughout this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness." --HENRY VAUGHAN, "The Retreat" From: Roy Flannagan [roy@gwm.sc.edu] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 1:23 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Fwd: [METAVIEWS] 012: Galileo's Troubles, by Aritgas, Martivez,and Shea Sender: owner-milton-l@richmond.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: milton-l@richmond.edu So, Galileo was also in trouble for saying that sense impressions are = subjective! Roy Flannagan Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 10:49:07 -0600 From: Melissa Ford Subject: Fwd: [METAVIEWS] 012: Galileo's Troubles, by Aritgas, Martivez, and Shea Sender: "FICINO: FICINO Discussion - Renaissance and Reformation Studies" To: FICINO@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA Reply-to: "FICINO: FICINO Discussion - Renaissance and Reformation Studies" Message-id: Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by oak.cats.ohiou.edu id LAA466750 Cheers, Melissa Ford mford@hotmail.com M.A. student, Theology The University of the South Sewanee, TN +++++++++++++++ Metaviews 012. 2001.02.25. Approximately 1905 words. Below is an article on some new archival research about Galileo=B9s troubles with the Church. The article is written by Mariano Aritgas, Rafael Martivez, and William Shea. There has been a lot of recent scholarship, which puts into question the story of Galileo as a martyr for science. The piece below contributes to this demythologization of the Galileo affair with an interesting discovery in the Vatican archives. Included below is a short essay, a copy of the Latin document in question, and an English translation of the Latin document. Mariano Artigas is a professor of philosophy of science at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. He is the author of 13 books, most recently THE MIND OF THE UNIVERSE (Templeton Foundation Press 2000: www.templeton.org). Artigas discovered the new document discussed below in the Vatican archives and is the author of the brief essay on it below. . Rafael Martinez is a professor of philosophy of science at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome. He is author and editor of several books. He has transcribed the document from the original Latin and collaborated with its interpretation. . William Shea is director of the International Academy of History of Science, professor of history of science at the University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France. Shea is the author of the often quoted THE INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION OF GALILEO. He is collaborating with prof. Artigas on a new book on Galileo, including study of the new document, with the support of the Templeton Foundation Press. . The full study of the document below will be published in a few months by "Acta Philosophica" (Rome). -- Billy Grassie =3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D= -=3D-=3D-=3D From: "Mariano Artigas" Subject: Revisiting Galileo's Troubles with the Church A SHORT ESSAY by Mariano Artigas and William Shea It may seem incredible, but a previously unknown 17th-century document on Galileo has turned up. At the beginning of November 1999, Mariano Artigas, a distinguished philosopher and theologian, was working in the Archives of the Holy Office in Rome, just next to Saint Peter's, and in the very building where Galileo was interrogated and condemned for writing about the motion of the earth. Artigas was writing a book with William Shea, an historian of science, and he decided to check up on a document that was discovered by Pietro Redondi in some twenty years ago. What is curious about this document is that it contains a criticism of Galileo, not for advocating Copernicanism, but for subscribing to atomism, which the anonymous author thought incompatible with Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist. The Council of Trent which ended in 1563, a year before Galileo's birth, decreed that Christ's words at the Last Supper, "This is my body; this is my blood", were to be understood in a realistic way, and that after their repetition at mass Christ becomes once more present because the substance of the bread and wine are changed into the substance of his body and blood. What is left are the secondary qualities of colour, taste, odour and so on. The Council of Trent did not intend to explain away the mystery of the Eucharist but to emphasize the presence of Christ among the faithful. Theologians tended to use Aristotelian categories to interpret the decree and this gave rise to debates that were often acrimonious. In the Saggiatore that he published in 1623, Galileo argued that our perceptions of sound, colour, flavour, etc, are not objective properties that belong to external objects but our subjective response to atoms that impinge on our sense organs. Some zealous theologians saw this as subversive of the doctrine on the Eucharist, and the document by Redondi, usually referred to as G3, is one such denunciation. The Archives, which were once closed to the public, are now accessible to anyone who wishes to consult them, and Artigas was presented with the volume that contain G3. To his surprise, he found another Latin document next to it. Neatly folded it has escaped the attention of scholars! It also deals with the problem of primary and secondary qualities and it written by a consultant of the Congregation of the Index. We are pleased to publish it today along with an English translation. A detailed analysis of the content and a quest for the identity of the author is being conducted by Mariano Artigas, Rafael Martinez and William Shea. ACDF, Index, EE, f.291r-v Transcription made by prof. Rafael Martinez, Rome [f.291r] Vidi discursum Lyncei et agnovi Philosophiam esse eius hominis qui nunquam non verae philosophiae imposuit, sive errore, sive ignorantia, semper temerarie. Errat in primis negando qualitates primas et secundas etiam in iis corporibus quae agunt in materiam externam, velut cum negat calorem inesse igni, qui in nos agit calefaciendo. 2. Errat dicendo non posse conceptu separari a substantiis corporeis accidentia modificantia, velut quantitatem et quae ad quantitatem consequuntur; quae opinio est absolute contra fidem, exemplo Eucharistiae, ubi quantitas non solum realiter distinguitur a sua substantia, sed etiam separata existit. 3. Errat cum dicit saporem, odorem, colorem, esse pura nomina, et quasi denominationes extrinsecas a corporibus sentientibus, quibus sublatis ipsa quoque huiusmodi accidentia tolli et annihilari, praesertim si sint distincta a primis veris et realibus accidentibus. Ex quo errore duo alii consequuntur: 1. Corpora eandem quantitatem et figuram habentia habere eosdem sapores, odores etc. 2. Corpora amittentia odorem et saporem, amittere etiam quantitatem et figuram, a quibus sapor, odor etc. non distinguuntur in phantasia Lyncei. 4. Errat quod sensationes in corpore animalis vocet actiones, cum patitur ab obiecto extrinseco, velut cum titillatur a penna aut alio corpore. Sed hoc condonandum ruditati philosophi. 5. Errat cum eandem velit esse rationem odoris et saporis, ac titillationis causatae ab agentibus extrinsecis; haec enim sentitur in passo iuxta dispositionem corporis organici, ad cuiusmodi sensationem per accidens se habet hoc vel illud agens in individuo: at sapores et odores etc. oriuntur ex qualitatibus obiectorum, ratione mixtionis hoc vel illo modo temperatae; ad quod viceversa per accidens se habet hoc vel illud organum sensationis in individuo, unde iuxta varias dispositiones, unus altero plus vel minus sentit. 6. Errat cum dicit, ferrum e. g. candens tantum califaceret animalia sensu praedita; nam quodvis corpus appositum igni, dummodo sit mixtum et non quintae alicuius essentiae recipit calorem . Idem dico si iuxta ponatur quodvis aliud corpus cuivis agenti per species sensibiles, a quo recipit easdem qualitates. [f.291v] 7. Recte deducitur ex opinione huius authoris, non manere accidentia in Eucharistia sine substantia panis. Patet, agunt enim in organum sensationis resolutione minimarum partium, quae cum sint heterogeneae a quantitate, alioqui[n] non afficerent nisi sensum tactus, erunt substantiae, non nisi ex substantia panis, quae enim alia potest assignari, proinde habetur intentum. Idemque sequitur non minus evidenter in ea sententia quae ponit partes substantiae entitativas, distinctas a quantitate dimensiva, nec distinctas realiter a substantia. 8. Recte etiam deducitur non manere alia accidentia in Eucharistia nisi quantitatem, figuram etc. nam sapor odor, sunt pura vocabula si non habeatur relatio ad sensum, in opinione scilicet erronea Lyncei; proinde absolute non sunt distincta accidentia a quantitate figura etc. Si author per partes minimas intelligat species sensibiles, habebit patronos quosdam ex philosophia Aboriginum, sed plura cogetur asserere absurda nec salva in fide. Interim sufficiant ista ex quibus ulterior inquisitio fieri potest coram S. Officio. ____________________________ ACDF, Index, EE, f.291r-v ENGLISH TRANSLATION by prof. William Shea I saw the discourse of the Lyncean and I realized that it was the philosophy of someone who does not stick to the true philosophy. Whether this be through error or ignorance, it is always rash. He errs in the first place, in denying primary and secondary qualities even in bodies that act on external matter, as when he denies that heat inheres in the fire that acts on us to warm us. 2. He errs when he says that it is not possible to conceptually separate corporeal substances from the accidental properties that modify them, such as quantity and those that follow quantity. Such an opinion is absolutely contrary to faith, for instance in the case of the Eucharist, where quantity is not only really distinguished from substance but, moreover, exists separately. 3. He errs when he says that taste, smell, and colour are pure names, or are like extrinsic denominations taken from bodies that can have sensations, so that if these bodies were destroyed the accidental properties would also removed and annihilated, especially since they are said to be distinct from the primary, true, and real accidents. >From this error two other follows: 1. That bodies that have the same quantity and the same figure will have the same taste, smell, etc. 2. That the bodies that lose their smell and taste will also lose their quantity and their figure, which, in the Lyncean's imagination, are not distinguished from taste, odour, etc. 4. He errs in calling actions the sensations of a living body which is acted upon by some external object, for instance when it is tickled by a feather or some other body. But this can be excused by the philosopher's lack of sophistication. 5. He errs when he claims that the cause of smell and taste is the same as that of tickling, which is caused by external agents since tickling is felt by the patient according to the disposition of his organic body, so that the sensation is accidentally related to whatever acts on the individual. But tastes and smells proceed from the qualities of objects and result from the way they are mixed. Likewise the organ of sensation in a given individual is accidentally disposed in this or that way so that one person feels more or less than another one according to these different dispositions. 6. He errs when he says, for example, that a heated iron can only warm sentient beings, for any object, placed before a fire, will receive heat as long as it is a "mixed" body, and not composed of some fifth essence. And I say that the same happens whenever a body, placed next to a substance that acts by sensible qualities, receives the same qualities as that substance. 7. It immediately follows from the opinion of this author that in the Eucharist the accidental properties do not remain without the substance of the bread. This is evident for the accidental properties are said to act on the organ of sensation by being divided into very small particles which, since they are not the same as quantity (otherwise they would only act on the sense of touch) must be parts of the substance. And this can only be the substance of bread, for what else could it be? The same follows no less clearly from the statement that posits that the parts of the substance are distinct from dimensional quantity but not really distinct from the substance 8. It also follows immediately that in the Eucharist there remain no other accidental qualities beyond quantity, figure, etc., because taste and smell are mere words if they are not related to the senses, as the Lyncean erroneously believes. Therefore the accidental properties are absolutely not distinct from quantity, figure, etc. If the author understands the smallest particles as sensible species, he will find some supporters in ancient philosophy, but he will have to affirm many things that are absurd and contrary to the Faith. This seems enough for now and, in the light of this, matters could be further investigated by the Holy Office. =3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D= -=3D Footer information below last updated: 1999/12/10. Meta is an edited and moderated listserver and news service dedicated to promoting the constructive engagement of science and religion. Subscriptions are free. For more information, including archives and submission guidelines, go to . There are now four separate meta-lists to which you can subscribe: is commentaries and bookreviews posted three to five times per week. is announcements and news and is posted as frequently as needed. is a monthly digest. is a higher volume discussion list which is lightly moderated. You can subscribe to one or all of the meta-lists. If you would like to unsubscribe or change your subscription options, simply go to and follow the links to subscribe or unsubscribe. Note that all subscription changes entered on the web forms, requires your confirmation by email. Copyright 1999, 2000 by William Grassie. Copies of this internet posting may be made and distributed in whole without further permission. Credit: "This information was circulated on the Meta Lists on Science and Religio= n ." _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From: Yaakov Akiva Mascetti [mascety@012.net.il] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 4:29 PM To: Milton List Subject: Straw-men Greeting to all. I would like to relate to the challenging reply received from Dan, after my long "introduction" to Skinnerian methodology. Dan's criticism is a powerful and erudite one, but there are still many indications of critical positions I truly do not agree with. Despite my email, or "remark," may be interpretable as "little more than an illocutionary performance," ça va sans dire that my intention was to ignite a discussion on the problematic aspects underlying in the comments of literary critics who prefer to concentrate more on the "text in-and-of-itself" than on the "context." The historical labor of reconstruction of the contextual "language-games" (and I use the Wittgensteinian expression on purpose) in the midst of which the author made his or her "move" is not the same as reconstructing a vaguely conceived zeitgeist, a "whole cultural context." I do agree with Dan's powerful reply, that we must not discard concepts like "world-picture" or "historical moment"; but I am also quite dubious of the utility of these conceptual monoliths. This said, it seems to me clear that my long email was more of an argumentation in favor of Skinnerean contextualization, than a "demagogic" attack on New-Criticism. Despite the fact that, alas, I am not the "assiduous student of history" which Dan generously defined me as, I see myself as one of those "tardy" scholars which T.S. Eliot referred to in Tradition and the Individual Talent, whose work is destined to be founded on the study of the discourses in which the text was written. The work of an historian like Natalie Zemon Davis, is surely not as "hopelessly subjective" as the nostalgic overtones of the passage quoted from Brooks. There is scarse probability that Brooks was giving voice a post-Derridean skepticism with respect to the critic's interpretation of the text: as he says, he is talking about the adoption of qualifications as "good" and "bad". The critic, and here I respectfully retire out of this dispute (which I leave to you, my collegues), in order to construct a more compelling understanding of the possible intentions of the author in making a specific textual move, is required to delve into the discourses active in his or her context, and to train his or her ear to detect the author's "parole" as a response to the contextual "langue". The supposed "inauspicious ci[r]cumstances" which led me to stress the point of Skinnerean methodologies are the priorities of a scholar whose interpretational effort is directed towards the understanding of the text in its context. Not the text as the product of a zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, but the text as a response to specific and contingent problematics which the author addressed, and to which he or she reacted to. Best, Yaakov From: Robert Appelbaum [r_appel@yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 5:00 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Milton, Toleration, and Catholicism I don't wish to intervene in this long long and very intelligent discussion except to make a note about our own contemporary context. Steve Fallon writes: "Today, all religions are tolerated by (most) governments; when we speak of toleration in this context we are usually thinking of moderating the effects of prejudice by refraining from verbal or physical harrassment." This statement is probably untrue. What religions are "tolerated" by Indonesia, China, Egypt, etc.? Which religions are not? I join Professor Fallon in his remark that talk in a Western democracy is cheap. (As Phillip Roth once said, "In America, anything can be said, and nothing counts.") But we are living in a world where human rights are making few advances--and where religious affiliation still counts. Steve Fallon wrote: A few remarks related to Jim's useful, thought-provoking post (copied with some elision below). Tolerance is a good thing, but it is also a relative thing. I think that the discussion of tolerance has been bedevilled by an indiscrimate mixing of various meanings of the term. Today, all religions are tolerated by (most) governments; when we speak of toleration in this context we are usually thinking of moderating the effects of prejudice by refraining from verbal or physical harrassment. In speaking of physical harrassment, we are referring to actions that are already illegal. Milton's context is entirely different. There is no state sanction for the practice and preaching of all religions or for all denominations of Christianity. Milton's argument for toleration, to repeat myself, is founded on his conviction that civil meddling in religious matters is pernicious because it coerces what should be free actions, and because it inserts a human authority between the action of the spirit and the individual. One can agree with Milton on this, and one can call it a form of toleration. One can also note that this is not a majority opinion in Milton's time and praise him for articulating principles that would come eventually to seem self-evident (though it is good to remind ourselves always that all things self-evident to us are not necessarily right). And, moreover, one can do this noting and praising of Milton on toleration without making the leap to the claim that Milton is arguing for universal toleration. He very clearly and explicitly is not doing that. There seems to be a straw man in the debate: 1) Milton is praised for toleration. 2) People who do that praising must think that Milton advocates universal toleration. 3) Milton doesn't advocate universal toleration. 4) Therefore the praise is invalid. What I'm not sure of is whether the objection is based on a misreading of the praise, or a misreading of Milton. Is anyone arguing that Milton poses as an advocate of toleration while hypocritically limiting toleration to people like himself? This argument, if anyone is proposing it, won't fly. Milton is arguing for the toleration not of religion but of "true religion." He is not coy about this. To tolerate Catholicism would be in his view to tolerate false religion. It doesn't disturb me because, unlike irrational prejudice against a race or an ethnic group, it is based on reasoned argument and on a plausible reading of the political realities of his time. We've been reminded, appropriately, of the Guy Fawkes incident. Wars were fought over Protestant/Catholic differences. To propose that Milton could have argued for toleration of Catholics is naive, I think. As I remarked in my last post, the Catholic church, with its requiring an implicit faith and with its substituting of authority of an institution for the guidance of the Spirit in the individual (and, yoked with these, its political ambitions), could be taken plausibly as a threat to the very principles at the foundation of Of True Religion. It represents for Milton the limit case of what he describes in Areopagitica as the error of making one's religion over to another, of "finding himself some factor to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion" (Hughes 740). The rest of that passage is very funny. In On Liberty Mill writes that "The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale." The first sentence describes Milton. Some will argue that he does not wish to grant Catholics that very freedom of conscience, but Milton did not invent from whole cloth his notion that Catholicism in his time and place denied its adherents freedom of conscience, or his fear that its spread would mean for him fewer believers with that freedom (which for Milton would mean fewer believers at all). Mill's second sentence might give us pause if we want to be self-congratulatory for having gotten past Milton. I'm emphatically not arguing for the renewal of state intolerance, but I'm wondering if our talk, if more inclusive than Milton's, is cheap. I agree with Jim that we need to avoid cozy self-congratulation by selective reading. "Qualified praise" by all means, but there is also a danger of condescension in the language of "praise that recognizes he was working within historical limitations." Who isn't? Steve Fallon >Perhaps I'm being dim, but if it's self-righteous and anachronistic to call >Milton's intolerance of Catholics "wrong", does it not follow that to call >Milton's tolerance of other denominations, his republicanism or his belief >in liberty "right" or "admirable" is equally self-righteous and >anachronistic? If we can't make moral judgments on the past, then why are >these beliefs held to be a good thing, and why have many people on this list >been talking about the need to commemorate them? > >Incidentally, I do agree that it's silly to compare his anti-Catholicism to >anti-Semitism. But, as a Catholic, I do find his anti-Papism more troubling >than Steve Fallon does. >Jim wrote: >I tend to define self-righteousness (emphasis on self, here) in more >negative terms, because it seems to require a judgment on others to support >one's own righteousness. Taking Milton out of context and condemning his >anti-Catholicism as if he were writing today is self-righteous, in my opinion. > >But I can see how it could work the other way as well. We praise those for >holding a specific moral stance in the past usually because they agree with >us, or anticipated us, in some way :). We're great, so they must be >too. Self righteousness. > >I think this line of reasoning will eventually shut down all moral dialog, >however, and I think we can affirm that tolerance is a good thing, that >freedom of expression and religion is a good thing, without making any >great moral leaps or patting ourselves on the back all that much. >From >that standpoint Milton deserves qualified praise, praise that recognizes he >was working within historical limitations. > >Course, if you Don't think tolerance is a good thing, I'm open to that >discussion too. :) . . . > . . . Steve Fallon wrote: > > >By 17th-c standards, Milton is remarkably tolerant, and our disappointment > >that he did not advocate toleration of Catholics is anachronistic; > Perhaps I'm being dim, but if it's self-righteous and anachronistic to call >Milton's intolerance of Catholics "wrong", does it not follow that to call >Milton's tolerance of other denominations, his republicanism or his belief >in liberty "right" or "admirable" is equally self-righteous and >anachronistic? If we can't make moral judgments on the past, then why are >these beliefs held to be a good thing, and why have many people on this list >been talking about the need to commemorate them? > >Incidentally, I do agree that it's silly to compare his anti-Catholicism to >anti-Semitism. But, as a Catholic, I do find his anti-Papism more troubling >than Steve Fallon does. > Robert Appelbaum English Department University of San Diego San Diego, CA 92110-2492 Visit my home page: www.geocities.com/r_appel/Robert.html And please forgive the commercial intrusion below: --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Personal Address - Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. From: Rose Williams [rwill627@camalott.com] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 8:53 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Skinnerean Mythologies >Milton's position was reflective of a larger whole in >which _each group_ aggressively, and sometimes violently, staked out its >own territory and defended it from genuine outside threats. >Within this context Milton can still be disappointing -- in the sense that >he didn't rise above all this while some did (and ran to America, no? Is >there virtue in that? Are they a real counterdiscourse if they remove >themselves from the political pressures that everyone else is >facing?). I believe that all these men fought their battles in perilous territory and under the threat of death. I would point out that in the seventeenth century no one "ran to America." The boats were small, the trips slow and dangerous, the travel conditions often as appalling as those in which desperate Asians today sometimes try to come to the West. If they survived the trip (and many did not), many would not survive their first winter. (Leaving the seventeenth century out of it, I am not sure that I could survive a New England winter in THIS century). In Virginia, which has a milder climate, their chances were still none too good. John Smith left a colony of 100 men in Virginia; when he returned with supplies, it numbered 38. Sir Walter Raleigh's similar colony disappeared entirely while he was gone for supplies; we still do not know that happened to his settlers, but it was probably nothing pleasant. Those who came to this continent may have left danger behind, but it loomed over them here, too. When they arrived in the colonies, political pressure still came to bear on them, as the story of Roger Williams shows. I think they deserve admiration for rising to their challenges to the best of their abilities under pressures that we of the Western World who are under 70 years of age can scarce imagine. Rose Williams From: Robin Hamilton [robin.hamilton2@btinternet.com] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 12:53 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light From: Carl Bellinger; lp3 > What does Whichcote's phrase "Lightening us _to_ God" mean here? Not that, > "to God," the man is more clearly visible, illuminated by this candle?? And > not > that, to a man, God is more clearly seen, with the aid of this candle? What > kind of candle could illuminate God, or what kind of God would have need of > any candle? Perhaps my anachronistic view of a candle as a small, flickering > light, along with my lack of Latin, is tripping me up... > > Carl Bellinger > > The _Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the lord_; Lighted _by_ God, and > > Lightening us _to_ God. _Res illuminata, illuminans_. Only my own opinion, but I'd read this as drawing us towards God. Behind it (I'd guess) lies the Platonic or Plotinian image of the deity as a sun, and the spirit of man (in this context, reason) a reflected beam of this sun, drawing us back towards it (God). In some contexts the image could be a beam of light, in others a candle, but in both cases the contrast would be between the (all) encompassing Light of the deity and the (much smaller) light of man. (The context doesn't help, I'm afraid -- I quoted the complete aphorism, and the selection in C.A.P. doesn't include the aphorisms immediately before and after.) Robin Hamilton From: Dan Knauss [tiresias@juno.com] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 11:48 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Counterdiscourses of Toleration / was Re: Skinnerean Mythologies Jim, regarding whether or not any contemporary counterdiscourses (of toleration) were on Milton's map at all, I think there must be some quite close to him. Williams and Erasmus would probably be less immediately relevant for the reasons you mention, but what about Richard Baxter, 1615-1691? Baxter was a Puritan divine who served as a chaplain in the parliamentary army. His combined writings would amount to about 60 octavo volumes. According to one Maurice Roberts, "[Baxter] was at times a rather controversial figure — a strong advocate of unity and comprehension for at least 40 years. I may say that too much is sometimes made of this point in that some modern ecumenists claim him for themselves. He was not slipshod, however, in doctrine and deeply lamented the divisions in the church of his day, and it would be not at all fair to equate him with the spirit of modern ecumenism. However, he did plead, certainly, for what he called 'mere Christianity'; that is, he was an advocate of a minimal rather than a maximal creed, and he was for ever saying that he would have been content to unite the churches on the basis of the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer. In this he was virtually alone among Puritan leaders and perhaps just as well because they would not by any means agree to so insufficient a basis of union. With many others, he was ejected in 1662 and suffered in a notorious manner at the hands of judge Jeffreys during that fearful time when Nonconformists in England and Scotland were being assaulted for their faith." Roberts clearly find Baxter to be more tolerant than he is himself in 1991. The whole text of this speech comes from Fire and Ice: Puritan and Reformed Writings [.pdf, Word, .zip] at http://www.puritansermons.com/. The latest SCOUT report reviewed this site, which may be of interest to listmembers. -Dan Knauss SCOUT report review: "Created by Bill Carson, a Michigan pharmacist, as a spare time hobby, this site aims to make the works of Puritans, Scottish Divines, and other Reformed authors more widely available to the general public. Carson focuses on shorter extracts of "practical, devotional, and experiential works because they are so needed today." True to his purpose, the site is well organized, allowing readers to access works via a table of contents (with new additions noted as such), a site map, a fast index, and a search engine (this last, run via a Java applet, may cause some browsers difficulties). The site is shaped by Carson's contemporary outreach efforts and, no doubt, his taste, and so visitors may be surprised to find, for example, Edwards' "How To Know If You Are A Real Christian" but not "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Nonetheless, the site is a good place to browse or to send students looking for further writings by the Puritans and Reformed authors, though note that very few American Puritans are represented here. The works are complemented by poetry, biographical and historical information, a Puritan quote of the week, and a brief quiz. The whole site can be downloaded as a .zip file, and Carson has even thought to add downloadable packs of sermons for Palm Pilot users in need of inspiration on the go." [TK] On Fri, 23 Feb 2001 10:26:33 EST AntiUtopia@aol.com writes: > Good argument -- you've vocalized something that we need to keep in > mind > always -- but even "contemporary counterdiscourses" need to be read > in > context as well, context that included a Catholic Church that was as > > oppressive and politically active (and certainly not above intrigue) > as any > group in England. Milton's position was reflective of a larger > whole in > which _each group_ aggressively, and sometimes violently, staked out > its > own territory and defended it from genuine outside threats. > > Within this context Milton can still be disappointing -- in the > sense that > he didn't rise above all this while some did (and ran to America, > no? Is > there virtue in that? Are they a real counterdiscourse if they > remove > themselves from the political pressures that everyone else is > facing?). But at the same time he's not **evil,** his > counterdiscourse was > not a pluralistic humanism that takes for granted a high degree > freedom of > expression for all groups guaranteed by the highest courts and the > rule of > law. > > His larger whole was a real political enemy employing similar > tactics. > > Jim > > << > Concentrating on texts in context is necessary, but this will never > do > away with or delegitimize the "unnerving" aspects of a case like > Milton. > "Disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks..." is not > anachronistic > if we read Milton in the context of contemporary counter-discourses > of > toleration (e.g., Williams, Erasmus, etc.) Failing to admit the > existence > of contemporary views that differ substantially from Milton's and > register disappointment with his attitudes leads to bad historical > and > literary interpretation. At worst it closes him off in an imaginary > world > defined by his own standards as if these are not part of a larger > whole. > Can there be such things as propaganda and polemic without the > existence > of contemporary counterdiscourses? I think not. -Dan Knauss > > On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 17:48:22 +0200 "Yaakov Akiva Mascetti" > writes: > > If Seb Perry finds Milton's anti-catholicism unnerving, I can > understand him, but > > it really contributes nothing to the understanding of Milton's > claims > > in Areopagitica, or OTR. As Prof. Fallon has clearly explained > to us, > > the disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks on the > Ecclesia > > Romana, is truly anachronistic. > > > > Let us concentrate more on the text in its context, and less on > > ourselves and our beliefs. Skinner docet! > > > > Yaakov Mascetti ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. From: Rose Williams [rwill627@camalott.com] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 8:24 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light Res illuminata, illuminans This phrase literally translates "the thing which has been illuminated (or lighted) now illuminates (or lights) Rose Williams > What does Whichcote's phrase "Lightening us _to_ God" mean here? Not that, > "to God," the man is more clearly visible, illuminated by this candle?? And > not > that, to a man, God is more clearly seen, with the aid of this candle? What > kind of candle could illuminate God, or what kind of God would have need of > any candle? Perhaps my anachronistic view of a candle as a small, flickering > light, along with my lack of Latin, is tripping me up... > > Carl Bellinger > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Robin Hamilton" > > The _Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the lord_; Lighted _by_ God, and > > Lightening us _to_ God. _Res illuminata, illuminans_. From: Jameela Lares [jlares@ocean.otr.usm.edu] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 8:23 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light On Sat, 24 Feb 2001, Carl Bellinger; lp3 wrote: > What does Whichcote's phrase "Lightening us _to_ God" mean here? Not > that, "to God," the man is more clearly visible, illuminated by this > candle?? And not that, to a man, God is more clearly seen, with the aid > of this candle? What kind of candle could illuminate God, or what kind > of God would have need of any candle? Perhaps my anachronistic view of a > candle as a small, flickering light, along with my lack of Latin, is > tripping me up... At the risk of being abecedarian, I think the underlying issue here is basic to any Christian discussion of soteriology--i.e., Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox--although I can really only speak to the Protestant version and perhaps others can supplement the other two. The issue is that a human must first be convicted of sin before being willing to accept God's free offer of forgiveness of sin through Christ's propitiatory death. It would thus be the conscience's role--God moving the candle (some translations say "lamp"; the Vulgate has "lucerna"; I'd want to know the Hebrew from which the Authorized Version is working) through the "inward parts" of a person to reveal the sinfulness within that person. By synecdoche of partial effect for the whole, that lighting would show one's need for grace and thus move one toward God. I can't be sure, however, if this is what Whichcote means in that passage, although it does work with the Latin tag, _Res illuminata, illuminans_ ("the illuminated thing illuminates"). Perhaps Robin Hamilton will illuminate us further? I do think, however, that most commentators would find the flickering candle apt for the conscience, which is never perfect at best. Jameela Lares Associate Professor of English University of Southern Mississippi Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5037 +(601) 266-6214 ofc +(601) 266-5757 fax From: Ann Gulden [a.t.gulden@iba.uio.no] Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 8:42 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light I see the phrase 'lightening us to God' as a description of process rather than as a unilateral description of some kind of status quo. It describes a state in flux, or process of change in constant movement. To me it signifies (as does so much of Milton's poetry) a reciprocity between God and man: we are aided by an inner light which in turn further enables us to take in more illumination from 'above'. The more we are able to receive, enabled by some kind of latent or innate ability, the more we will be able to receive. The phrase ' us to God' can be read as an equation, or a pair of scales with 'to' as the fulcrum. The whole phrase seems to point both ways: both upwards + downwards. The choice is ours to take it or give it or both. We are free to be enlightened by God but freer if we already have a kind of smallish inner flame or glow which may be revived, or blown upon, a bit like the way Aslan blew on the four humans in Narnia. Ann Torday Gulden At 15:38 24.02.01 -0500, you wrote: >What does Whichcote's phrase "Lightening us _to_ God" mean here? Not that, >"to God," the man is more clearly visible, illuminated by this candle?? And >not >that, to a man, God is more clearly seen, with the aid of this candle? What >kind of candle could illuminate God, or what kind of God would have need of >any candle? Perhaps my anachronistic view of a candle as a small, flickering >light, along with my lack of Latin, is tripping me up... > >Carl Bellinger > > >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Robin Hamilton" >To: >Cc: >Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 9:26 AM >Subject: Re: Inner light > > > > From: Jameela Lares > > > > > I also > > > remember that the Cambridge Platonists had a version of "inner light" > > > based on the proverb that the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. > > > > C.A.Patrides has several pages on this image in the Introduction to his > > edition, _The Cambridge Platonists_ (1969), pp. 11ff. His index (but cf. > > Reason, perhaps?) gives relatively few examples in the texts he provides, > > but this from Benjamin Whichcote's _Moral and Religious Aphorisms_ (no. >916) > > would seem to be pertinent: > > > > The _Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the lord_; Lighted _by_ God, and > > Lightening us _to_ God. _Res illuminata, illuminans_. > > > > Robin Hamilton > > > > > From: AntiUtopia@aol.com Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2001 1:12 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: RE: Skinnerian Methodologies Thanks for the introducti= on to Skinner. =A0I didn't feel I was reading anything=20 particularly new -- rather, I think I was reading a very careful articul= ation=20 of a very old methodology. =A0Michelson's _Biblical Interpretation_ (ear= ly=20 60's) and Osborne's _The Hermeneutical Spiral_ (early 80's) pretty much=20 outline this type of approach, but I feel Skinner's methology progresses= with=20 a bit more of an awareness of the problems involved. The real catch to this approach, however, I see in the following line: the general historical background It's that word "general" that's the problem. =A0See, a "general" histori= cal=20 background **never** influences our reading of a text. =A0Modern critics= ,=20 especially the modern critic following Skinner's methology, bring a Spec= ific=20 historical background into the text. =A0Very specific, consciously or=20 unconsciously including some details as relevant and other details as=20 irrelevant. =A0 It's _that_ process that carries with it the problem of a historical=20 approach. =A0But before I get into this in more detail, let me direct yo= u to=20 Stanley Fish. =A0Stanley Fish in _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech_=20 critiques New Historical approaches (and all historical approaches) by s= aying: "The first is an action in the practice of producing general (i.e.=20 metacritical) accounts of history, the practice of answering such questi= ons=20 as, 'Where does historical knowledge come from?' or 'what is the nature=20= of=20 historical fact?'" He later observes that "'the conflict between New Historicists and their= =20 critics' is not a conflict between textualists and true historians, but=20 'between different theories of textuality'", concluding that "there is n= o=20 such thing as history in the sense of a referential ground of knowledge.= "=20 (Fish 246). It's all text. Even our history is text. Authorial intention is co= mmunicated=20 via text or not communicated at all. What we're engaging in by fol= lowing a=20 Skinnerian methodology (as if it were his) is constructing a specific=20 relationship between one type of text and another -- between the texts w= e use=20 to develop this "general historical knowledge" and the text in question. The next point, mentioned above, and I think raised by Fish but also a=20 concern of mine, is that we do in fact work with specific historical "fa= cts"=20 at the exclusion of others whenever we're conducting an exegesis of a te= xt.=20 =A0What is the basis of our choice here? =A0Our choices are very difficu= lt to=20 justify most of the time, and impossible the rest of the time. =A0 I tend to see texts as spaces created by the author and his audience in=20= which=20 a "meaning event" (just made it up) occurs. =A0Both authors and audience= s bring=20 a historical consciousness into their participation in the "meaning even= t,"=20 some of which is shared, but not all. =A0When we talk about authorial in= tent=20 we're really talking about how the author read his or her text as a memb= er of=20 the first audience, the primal audience. =A0But we can't know that that=20 particular member of the first audience (the author) read his or her tex= t=20 quite the same way as other members of that first audience. Are we then going to privilege the audience or the author? =A0Are we goi= ng to=20 privilege one particular member of the audience over another? =A0Because= each=20 individual experiences their history a bit differently -- when Queen=20 Elizabeth saw one of Shakespeare's plays performed (let's pretend she di= d)=20 she undoubtedly got something a little bit different out of it from the=20 washer woman down in the pit in another performance, and from the noblem= an=20 watching it as well. I suspect, in fact, that Elizabeth's reading=20= of Ophelia=20 and the queen mother in _Hamlet_ is quite pointedly different from=20 Shakespeare's reading, from the reading of the manager of the theater, a= nd=20 from the actors depicting those characters. We can try to hide ourselves from this difficulty by using the word=20 "general," but the fact is we're creating a specific individual historic= al=20 consciousness, envisioning a particular individual, when we create this=20 metacritical view of history. =A0The imagined individual member of the f= irst=20 audience that we create, I suspect, is very much like the critic doing t= he=20 reconstruction. =A0 Don't get me wrong; I myself prefer historical readings of texts to=20 ahistorical and probably value Skinner's approach (as if it were his) ov= er=20 others. =A0But I think there are some real problems that I haven't seen=20= anyone=20 address yet, Skinner included. Jim =A0=A0 From: AntiUtopia@aol.com Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 10:27 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Skinnerean Mythologies Good argument -- you've vocalized something that we need to keep in mind always -- but even "contemporary counterdiscourses" need to be read in context as well, context that included a Catholic Church that was as oppressive and politically active (and certainly not above intrigue) as any group in England. Milton's position was reflective of a larger whole in which _each group_ aggressively, and sometimes violently, staked out its own territory and defended it from genuine outside threats. Within this context Milton can still be disappointing -- in the sense that he didn't rise above all this while some did (and ran to America, no? Is there virtue in that? Are they a real counterdiscourse if they remove themselves from the political pressures that everyone else is facing?). But at the same time he's not **evil,** his counterdiscourse was not a pluralistic humanism that takes for granted a high degree freedom of expression for all groups guaranteed by the highest courts and the rule of law. His larger whole was a real political enemy employing similar tactics. Jim << Concentrating on texts in context is necessary, but this will never do away with or delegitimize the "unnerving" aspects of a case like Milton. "Disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks..." is not anachronistic if we read Milton in the context of contemporary counter-discourses of toleration (e.g., Williams, Erasmus, etc.) Failing to admit the existence of contemporary views that differ substantially from Milton's and register disappointment with his attitudes leads to bad historical and literary interpretation. At worst it closes him off in an imaginary world defined by his own standards as if these are not part of a larger whole. Can there be such things as propaganda and polemic without the existence of contemporary counterdiscourses? I think not. -Dan Knauss On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 17:48:22 +0200 "Yaakov Akiva Mascetti" writes: > If Seb Perry finds Milton's anti-catholicism unnerving, I can understand him, but > it really contributes nothing to the understanding of Milton's claims > in Areopagitica, or OTR. As Prof. Fallon has clearly explained to us, > the disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks on the Ecclesia > Romana, is truly anachronistic. > > Let us concentrate more on the text in its context, and less on > ourselves and our beliefs. Skinner docet! > > Yaakov Mascetti ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. >> From: AntiUtopia@aol.com Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 1:01 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Skinnerian Methodology Thanks for the introduction to Skinner. I didn't feel I was reading anything particularly new -- rather, I think I was reading a very careful articulation of a very old methodology. Michelson's _Biblical Interpretation_ (early 60's) and Osborne's _The Hermeneutical Spiral_ (early 80's) pretty much outline this type of approach, but I feel Skinner's methology progress with a bit more of an awareness of the problems involved. The real catch to this approach, however, I see in the following line: > the critic must thus come to know > It's that word "general" that's the problem. See, a "general" historical background **never** influences our reading of a text. Modern critics, especially the modern critic following Skinner's methology, bring a Specific historical background into the text. Very specific, consciously or unconsciously including some details as relevant and other details as irrelevant. It's _that_ process that carries with it the problem of a historical approach. But before I get into this in more detail, let me point to Stanley Fish. Stanley Fish in _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech_ critiques New Historical approaches (and all historical approaches) by saying: "The first is an action in the practice of producing general (i.e. metacritical) accounts of history, the practice of answering such questions as, 'Where does historical knowledge come from?' or 'what is the nature of historical fact?'" He later observes that "'the conflict between New Historicists and their critics' is not a conflict between textualists and true historians, but 'between different theories of textuality'", concluding that "there is no such thing as history in the sense of a referential ground of knowledge." (Fish 246). It's all text. Even our history is text. The next point, mentioned above, and I think raised by Fish but also a concern of mine, is that we do in fact work with specific historical "facts" at the exclusion of others whenever we're conducting an exegesis of a text. What is the basis of our choice here? Our choices are very difficult to justify most of the time, and impossible the rest of the time. I tend to see texts as spaces created by the author and his audience in which a "meaning event" (just made it up) occurs. Both authors and audiences bring a historical consciousness into their participation in the "meaning event," some of which is shared, but not all. When we talk about authorial intent we're really talking about how the author read his or her text as a member of the first audience, the primal audience. But we can't know that that particular member of the first audience (the author) read his or her text quite the same way as other members of that first audience. Are we then going to privilege the audience or the author? Are we going to privilege one particular member of the audience over another? Because each individual experiences their history a bit differently -- when Elizabeth watched one of Shakespeare's plays (let's pretend she did) she undoubtedly got something a little bit different out of it from the washer woman down in the pit in another performance, and from the nobleman watching it as well. We can try to hide ourselves from this difficulty by using the word "general," but the fact is we're creating a specific individual historical consciousness, envisioning a particular individual, when we create this metacritical view of history. The imagined individual member of the first audience that we create, I suspect, is very much like the critic doing the reconstruction. Don't get me wrong; I myself prefer historical readings of texts to ahistorical and probably value Skinner's approach over others. But I think there are some real problems that I haven't seen anyone address yet, Skinner included. Jim From: AntiUtopia@aol.com Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 10:31 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Milton, Toleration, and Catholicism Thanks for the post, Steve...I have tried to point out that we're working within our own set of limitations (by questioning if we'd really adopt a position that different from Milton's were we living back then)...but it can't be emphasized enough. Jim From: Carl Bellinger; lp3 [carlb@shore.net] Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2001 3:38 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light What does Whichcote's phrase "Lightening us _to_ God" mean here? Not that, "to God," the man is more clearly visible, illuminated by this candle?? And not that, to a man, God is more clearly seen, with the aid of this candle? What kind of candle could illuminate God, or what kind of God would have need of any candle? Perhaps my anachronistic view of a candle as a small, flickering light, along with my lack of Latin, is tripping me up... Carl Bellinger ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robin Hamilton" To: Cc: Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 9:26 AM Subject: Re: Inner light > From: Jameela Lares > > > I also > > remember that the Cambridge Platonists had a version of "inner light" > > based on the proverb that the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. > > C.A.Patrides has several pages on this image in the Introduction to his > edition, _The Cambridge Platonists_ (1969), pp. 11ff. His index (but cf. > Reason, perhaps?) gives relatively few examples in the texts he provides, > but this from Benjamin Whichcote's _Moral and Religious Aphorisms_ (no. 916) > would seem to be pertinent: > > The _Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the lord_; Lighted _by_ God, and > Lightening us _to_ God. _Res illuminata, illuminans_. > > Robin Hamilton > From: Creamer, Kevin [kcreamer@richmond.edu] Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2001 9:25 AM To: 'Milton-L@Richmond.edu' Subject: FW: Group for Early Modern Studies (GEMCS) Conference (1/1/01; 11 /15/01-11/18/01) -----Original Message----- From: Meg Powers Livingston [mailto:mpl10@psu.edu] Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 5:41 PM To: "GEMCS '01 List" Subject: CFP: Group for Early Modern Studies (GEMCS) Conference (1/1/01; 11/15/01-11/18/01) PLEASE POST AND CROSS-POST FREELY * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * G R O U P F O R E A R L Y M O D E R N C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S ( G E M C S ) http://www.english.fsu.edu/ gemcs * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * NINTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE, PHILADELPHIA, PA NOVEMBER 15-18, 2001 "A SPACE ODYSSEY" The Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies invites submissions for its ninth annual conference. Speakers should plan to speak for ten minutes and participate in a discussion period afterwards. GEMCS was formed in 1993 to promote the study of culture from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century (and sometimes later), in its various forms and across disciplinary boundaries. We are comprised of people working in a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to literature, history, art history, music, and film, and we welcome a wide variety of disciplinary approaches, promoting and providing a forum for the exchange of ideas among junior as well as more senior scholars. This year's conference theme is "A Space Odyssey." We seek proposals dealing with material, ideological, social, economic, aesthetic, sexual, philosophical, artistic, political, racial, and gendered manifestations of space. We are particularly interested in work that not only demonstrates the existence of such manifestations, but examines how they were expressed culturally and reveals how cross-disciplinary investigations can elicit a range of provisional and thought-provoking answers to questions of historical context and historiographical authenticity. Possible topics might include: o "domestic space/public space" (in early modern texts, genre paintings, etc.) o "theatrical space, staged space" o "interiority and subjectivity" o "the staging of 17th and 18th century opera" o "early modern etiquettes of space" o "early modern utopias and travel literature" o "liminal spaces" o "the gendering of early modern space" ... and so forth. Not to mention astronomical and astrological topics! We strongly encourage proposals for pre-constituted panels or workshops of _no fewer than four_ and _no more than five_ participants, and in order to allow the greatest possible amount of discussion, will ask that presenters in these panels limit their comments to _ten minutes_ each. ****In the interest of promoting alternative format panels and cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas, we will offer for the first time four open sessions designated as "works in progress" sessions for scholarship devoted to 16th-, 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century topics relating to the conference theme.**** In addition, we welcome proposals for individual presentations (10 minutes limit) in open sessions, pedagogical workshops, and other works-in-progress sessions. We will gladly arrange for links from our website to information pertinent to sessions with prepared readings or other materials for discussion. Panel chairs looking for panelists or workshop participants are encouraged to post calls for submissions to the GEMCS listserve [GEMCS-L@Hofstra.edu] 3-4 weeks before the submission deadline. (For sample pre-constituted panels and open subscription panels, scroll to the bottom of this email.) One-page abstracts for individual talks must include talk title, presenter's name, complete mailing address, institutional affiliation (if any), and email address; proposals for panels must include a designated panel chair, titles for each talk, and one-paragraph abstracts for each presenter along with his or her name, complete mailing address, institutional affiliation (if any), and email address. Again, panels or workshops of four or five participants will be given preference. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Address all submissions BY MAY 1, 2001 to: POSTAL SUBMISSIONS EMAIL SUBMISSIONS Professor Chris Orchard picturingwomen@earthlink.net Department of English Indiana University of Pennsylvania Indiana, PA 15705 Please submit either postal OR email proposals (NOT both). ATTENTION: DO NOT E-MAIL SUBMISSIONS BY HITTING THE REPLY BUTTON. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * For further information -- or to fill out a 2001 Pre-Conference Questionnaire -- visit our website at http://www.english.fsu.edu/ gemcs (It should be up and running soon!) SAMPLE PRE-CONSTITUTED PANEL: Session Title: "Sequestered Spaces?: The Etiquette of Cultural Space In 17th- and 18th-Century England" o Susan Shifrin (Independent Scholar), Chair o Julia Marciari Alexander, Yale Center For British Art: "As if through a Kaleidoscope: Viewing The Picture Gallery at Althorp" o Robert Bucholz, Loyola University, Chicago: "Drawing Room Manners and Backstairs Influence: The Etiquette of Public and Private (?) Space at the Later Stuart Court" o Elizabeth Chew, Monticello: "Purselin and Pantadoes: Spaces of Exoticism in Lady Arundel's Tart Hall" o Andrew Walkling (Independent Scholar): "The Theatre of the Court and the Space of Theatre in Restoration England" SAMPLE WORKS-IN-PROGRESS SESSION: (This panel is composed of works still in progress-NOT completed papers. The presentation style will be rather informal, even by GEMCS standards. This panel is looking for one or two more participants working on similar topics.) Session Title: "Conceptualizing Performance Space(s)" o Meg Powers Livingston, Penn State Altoona, Chair o Nova Myhill, Boston University: "The Place of Execution: Locating and Dislocating Public Punishment on the London Stage" o Meg Powers Livingston, Penn State Altoona: "Changing Spaces/ Changing Plays: Revising Early Jacobean Plays for Indoor Performance Venues" o Joanne Rochester, University of Toronto: ""The Conceptual Space of Performance in Caroline Drama" SUGGESTED PEDAGOGICAL WORKSHOPS: (These suggestions are ideas; no one has yet stepped forward to organize such workshops.) o "The Classroom as SPACE: How to make best use of a 'bad' classroom?" o "Is Your Classroom a Performance Space?: Performance Aspects-for both teachers and students-of Good Teaching" PLEASE POST AND CROSS-POST FREELY From: Dan Knauss [tiresias@juno.com] Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 11:46 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Cc: tiresias@juno.com Subject: New Critical Mythologies / Re: Skinnerian Methodology On Fri, 23 Feb 2001 00:49:25 +0200 "Yaakov Akiva Mascetti" referred to: > ...the waning New-Critical-like tendency to read the texts of specific historical > figures alone, without any reference to the more general historical and > cultural context in which the specific texts of political ideas were > produced... Yaakov, There are valid critiques to be made of the New Critical project, but unfortunately I can't say I have ever read one that isn't loaded with towering straw-men, like your remark here. What you wrote is little more than an illocutionary performance warning readers that New Criticism occupies a a position of ignominious error outside the gardens of acceptable post-structuralist/neo-historicist orthodoxy. While this sort of performance has become a standard means of demagogic "pedagogy," I am surprised to see it coming from an assiduous student of history like yourself. I must assume that inauspicious cicumstances are responsible for bedevilling what would normally be carefully reached conclusions about the New Critics' purposes and methods. Viz.Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Preface, Understanding Poetry, 3rd edition (Holt, 1960): "Form, of course, does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an abstraction. In thinking of form we should keep in mind the following matters that relate to its context: 1. Poems are written by human beings and the form of a poem is an individual's attempt to deal with a specific problem, poetic and personal. 2. Poems come out of a historical moment, and since they are written in language, the form is tied to a whole cultural context." (xiv) Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, "Litterary Theory, Criticism, and History," Chapter 4, Theory of Literature, 3rd edition (Harcourt, 1956): "Within our 'proper study', the distinctions between literary theory, criticism, and history are clearly the most important. . . . These distinctions are fairly obvious and rather widely accepted. But less common is a realization that the methods so designated cannot be used in isolation, that they must implicate each other so thoroughly as to make inconceivable literary theory without criticism or history, or criticism without theory and history, or history without theory and criticism." (39) Rene Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (McGraw-Hill, 1966): "The book here reprinted tries to be a contribution to the self-awareness of every student of literature and literary history. Methodological clarity can be achieved not only by abstract speculation but by immersion in the history of a discipline of learning. Literary history--deeply involved as it is in general historiography, in the history of criticism and intellectual history in general--surely deserves to be studies also historically. The past illuminates the present, as the present illuminates the past" (vi). . . . . "I am chiefly concerned with the programs and theoretical reflections of those engaged in literary history and, beyond those explicit avowals, with the underlying methods, ideals, and conceptions that governed the actual writing of English literature" (viii). Cleanth Brooks, "Criticism, History, and Critical Relativism," Appendix 1, The Well Wrought Urn (Harcourt, 1947): "The preceding chapters obviously look forward to a new history of English poetry (even though, quite as obviously, the discussions of poetry which they contain do not attempt to write that history). Indeed, the discussions may very well seem to take history too little into account. . . . I certainly have not meant to imply that the poet does not inherit his ideas, his literary concepts, his rhythms, his literary forms--that he does not inherit, in the first place, his languiage itself . . . . But I insist that to treat the poems discussed primarily as poems is a proper emphasis, and very much worth doing. For we have gone to school to the anthropologists and the cultureal historians assiduously, and we have learned their lesson almost too well. We have learned it so well that the danger now, it seems to me, is not that we will forget the differences between poems of different historical periods, but that we may forget those qualities which they have in common. We are not likely to ignore those elements which make the great poems differ from each other. It is entirely possible, on the other hand, that the close kinship that they bear to one another may be obscured--those qualities that make them *poems* and which determine whether they are *good* poems or *bad* poems. I am thoroughly aware that the terms *good* and *bad* are suspect . . . . we have ben taught [they] are meaningless terms when used absolutely. They must refer to some standard of values, and values, we know, are hopelessly subjective. . . . [E]ven assuming that such criteria exist, we feel that no critic could know and apply them without a certain egotism: how is a critic, who is plainly the product of his own day and time, hopelessly entangled in the twentieth century, to judge the poems of his own day--much less, the poems of the past--sub specie aeternitatis!" (215-16). &c. Dan Knauss Department of English, Marquette University daniel.knauss@marquette.edu - tiresias@juno.com From: Yaakov Akiva Mascetti [mascety@012.net.il] Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 5:49 PM To: Milton List Subject: Skinnerian Methodology On Feb. 22nd, Jim thus responded to my email on the skinnerian mythologies:"Does the writer anywhere acknowledge the difficulty of Really entering into a different mindset?" My feeling is that, after Foucault, De Man and Derrida, there really is no way for us to claim that there may be a way of "really entering the mindset of the writer." But let us go in order. In this email I will present a few notes that may elucidate the possible methodological procedures to follow in order to construct a compelling understanding of the text in its context. In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner includes as one of the three major aims or concerns in writing his two-volume book, the exemplification of "a particular way of approaching the study and interpretation of historical texts." Evidently working against the waning New-Critical-like tendency to read the texts of specific historical figures alone, without any reference to the more general historical and cultural context in which the specific texts of political ideas were produced, Skinner claims to have "tried not to concentrate so exclusively on the leading theorists" and to have focused more "on the [..] general social and intellectual matrix out of which their works arose." This agenda has, though, the obvious danger of inducing the critic to impose on his reading of the text the model he has formed of the historical period in which it was written, creating thus an aprioristic hermeneutic deformation. Skinner’s solution to this problem is, it seems to me, to find a middle-way between what he calls the importance of the "ideological super-structures" and the single texts produced in this frame, between the "normative vocabulary available at any given time" and the "ways in which particular questions come to be singled out and discussed." To re-phrase this, we could say that Skinner’s attention widens from a close-reading focus on the texts in-and-of-themselves, to the construction of a "general framework" within which the works themselves were written. The critic, or in Skinner’s case the historian of political thought, must thus construct the super-structural image of the cultural frame, or "game," within which the writer or thinker of a specific period operated. In order to attain a closer and more compelling knowledge of a specific writer, the critic must thus come to know the general historical background, and construct for himself the hermeneutic instruments that will permit him to "locate" the text within the "appropriate context." As a model of historiography, Skinner uses the methodology of those who, willing to contruct a closer-to-reality comprehension of earlier societies, try to "recover" the multiple series of cultural games being played in a certain historical and geographical context. The use Skinner makes of the word "recover," in place of the more artificial and subjective connotations of the term "reconstruct" is, in my view, a clear indication of the historian’s conception of hermeneutics: recovering the "different mentalités" active in a specific historical context, in "as broadly sympathetic fashion as possible," the critic works with the archaeologist’s care to uncover the inner interstices of meaning and intention hidden in the text. Skinner’s hermeneutic model appears to be based on a conception of the author of the text as of an "actor" or "agent" who is "anxious to engage in a particular course of action which he is also anxious [...] to exhibit as legitimate." The author of the text or, as Skinner labels him, the "political actor," is an individual whose textual production is conceived as the result of an interaction with a contextual fabric of ideological disputes or discussions. The ideas which he weaves into his text are thus one of the "particular course[s] of action" possible in such a social and cultural context, expressed and formulated in a language that may be not only comprehensible but also "legitimate." In order to be part of the game, the actor is thus required to formulate his own "course of action," his own ideas, in a language common and comprehensible to the community of actors in a specific context. In Skinner’s words: [...] the problem facing an agent who wishes to legitimate what he is doing at the same time as gaining what he wants cannot simply be the instrumental problem of tailoring his normative language in order to fit his projects. It must in part be the problem of tailoring his projects in order to fit the available normative language. The "terms of the normative vocabulary" which are available to the author of the text, or better to the agent, indicate "one" of the "constraints" on the formulation of his personal ideas. [...] in order to explain why such an agent acts as he does, we are bound to make some reference to this vocabulary, since it evidently figures as one of the determinants of his action. [...] To study the context of any major work of political philosophy is not merely to gain additional information about its aetiology; it is to equip ourselves ... with a way of gaining a greater insight into its author’s meaning than we can ever hope to achieve simply from reading the text itself ‘over and over again’ as the exponents of the ‘textualist’ approach have characteristically proposed. The Skinnerian methodology of contextualization allows the scholar to study the text as a locution interacting with other locutions within the frame of an ideological discussion. The agent’s locution acquires, in this perspective, an active power, by means of which it acts on its context, with the aim of influencing the on-going disputes and dialogues. What exactly does this approach enable us to grasp about classic texts that we cannot grasp by simpy reading them? The answer, in general terms, is I think that it enables us to characterise what their authors were doing in writing them. We can begin to see not merely what arguments they were presenting, but also what questions they were addressing and trying to answer, and how far they were accepting and endorsing, or questioning and repudiating, or perhaps even polemically ignoring, the prevailing assumptions and conventions of political debate. We cannot expect to attain this level of understanding if we only study the texts themselves. In order to see them as answers to specific questions, we need to know something about the society in which they were written. And in order to recognise the exact direction and force of their arguments, we need to have some appreciation of the general political vocabulary of the age. Yet we clearly need to gain access to this level of understanding if we are to interpret the classic texts convincingly. For to understand what questions a writer is addressing and what he is doing with the concepts available to him, is equivalently to understand some of his basic intentions in writing, and is thus to elicit what exactly he may have meant by what he said ­ or failed to say. When we attempt in this way to locate a text within its appropriate context, we are not merely providing historical ‘background’ for our interpretation; we are already engaged in the act of interpretation itself. Before elucidating the linguistic mechanisms of Skinner’s "history of speech" or "history of discourse," as J.G.A. Pocock calls it, it will be interesting to take into consideration what seems to me an example of this research methodology. Debora Shuger, in her Habits of Thought, places herself within the "new-historicist critique of traditional formulations of English Renaissance thought." The traditional critics, belonging to a strictly historicist perspective, describe the ideological paradigms of a specific age and culture as "monological," and thus assume that the same beliefs were shared by "the entire literate class or indeed the entire population." The classical model which the traditional historicist critique conceives is thus one of a "dominant ideology" or "orthodoxy," clearly distinct from a host of "subversive, marginalised voices, whether those of the oppressed or the skeptical." Shuger’s "attempt" is directed, though, to "reconstruct" not a "monologic yet nonexistent ‘world picture’ shared by all literate persons" but the "dominant culture of the period between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War, between, that is, the consolidation of this dominant culture and its dissolution," is a clear example of the critical and methodological dicta defined by Skinner. Defining the dominant culture of Renaissance England as "religious," Shuger claims that religion, during the limited period she analyzes, supplied the "primary language of analysis." Renaissance religious discourse does not merely focus onto "specifically religious concerns," but is to be regarded as the veritable "cultural matrix for exploration of virtually every topic." Subjects of fundamental importance for Renaissance scholarship such as selfhood, marriage, rationality, language, ethics, are not "masked by religious discourse" but rather "articulated in it." Shuger thus coins the term "habits of thought" in order to find a novel formulation of the dominant ideology of a particular historical and social period, skeptically distancing herself from the absolutist overtones of E.M.W. Tillyard’s monologic "world picture," and undertaking the reconstruction of "a culture’ s interpretive categories and their relations, which underlie specific beliefs, ideas and values." "Professor Skinner," as Pocock calls him, has made "two pronouncements" on the primary objectives which a historian of political discourse or speech should pursue. In the first of these, he claims that it is the historian’s duty to recover the intentions of the author in a particular text. Pocock argues that the considerable objections that have been made to this methodological proposal "have not destroyed it" but have rather pointed out the necessity to "move beyond it." For example it has been asked whether we can recover the author’s intentions from his text without becoming imprisoned in the hermeneutic circle. The answer is that this may indeed be a danger when we have no evidence regarding the intentions other than the text itself; in practice, this is sometimes the case but not always. There may be evidence, unreliable and treacherous but still usable, from the author’s other writings or his private correspondence; [...] The more evidence the historian can mobilize in the construction of hypotheses regarding the author’s intentions, which can then be applied to or tested against the text itself, the better his chances of escaping the hermeneutic circle, or the more circles of this kind his critics will have to cnstruct in order to dismount him. Another objection, more "penetrating" and problematic, is the one that reformulates the skinnerian methodology with its own linguistic terminology, pointing to the theoretical weak-point: the critics thus inquired Whether a mens auctoris can be said to exist independently of his sermo, that is, whether a set of intentions can be isolated as existing in the author’s mind, to which he then proceeds to give effect in writing and publishing his text. Do the intentions come into being only as they are effected in the text? How can he know what he thinks, or what he wanted to say, until he sees what he said? Self-knowledge is retrospective, and every author is his owl of Minerva. Evidence of the kind mentioned [like personal letters and other biographical documents] ... can still be mobilized, on occasion, in order to point out what an author of whom enough is known can be said to have had before him a number of possible actions, giving effect to a variety of intentions, and that the act he did perform, and the intentions to which he did give effect, may have differed from some other act he could have performed and may even have meditated performing. But the objection with which we are dealing cuts deeper than this. It asks not only whether intentions can exist before being articulated in a text, but whether they can be said to exist apart from the language in which the text is to be constructed. The next part is of fundamental importance for the comprehension of the history of political discourse: The author inhabits a historically given world that is apprehensible only in the ways rendered available by a number of historically given languages; the modes of speech available to him give him the intentions he can have, by giving him the means he can have performing them. At this point the objection has raised the question of langue and well as parole, of language context as well as of speech act. Despite the fact that, as some have said, this method does not take into consideration the realm of unconscious intentionality (which, in my opinion, is even more limited to the obscure realm of hermeneutic speculation), we do agree with Pocock’s defense of Skinner when he argues that his "insistence on the recovery of intentions had been to some degree destructive in its purpose." Skinner’s primary aim was to eliminate "from consideration those intentions an author could not have conceived or carried into effect, because he lacked the language in which they could have been expressed and employed some other, articulating and performing other intentions." Skinner’ s methodological dicta impel the hermeneut to recover the habits of thought, the "author’s language," together with his possible intentions, his own personal use of those habits of thought and his own contribution to the changes in the habits of thought; the author is thus treated as a thinker that inhabits "a universe of langues that give meaning to the paroles he performs in them." This by no means has the effect of reducing the author to the mere mouthpiece of his own language; the more complex, even the more contradictory, the language context in which he is situated, the richer and more ambivalent become the speech acts he is capable of performing, and the greater becomes the likelihood that these acts will perform upon the context itself and induce modification and change within it. At this point the history of political thought becomes a history of speech and discourse, of the interactions of langue and parole; the claim is made not only that its history is one of discourse, but that it has a history by virtue of becoming discourse. Again, emphasizing the interaction implied in Skinner’s concept of history of discourse, Pocock focuses on the double role of the author within the cultural and linguistic context in which he or she acts, performs utterances: an author is himself both the expropriator, taking language from others and using it to his purposes, and the innovator, acting upon language so as to induce momentary or lasting change in the ways in which it is used. But as he has done to others and their language, so shall it be done to him and his. The changes he has sought to bring about in the linguistic conventions surrounding him may not prevent language continuing to be used in the conventional ways he has sought to modify, and this may be enough to nullify or distort the effects of his utterance. Furthermore, even when an author has succeeded in innovating, that is, in uttering speech in such a way as to compel other to respond to it in some sense not hitherto conventional, it does not follow that he will succeed in ruling the responses of others. They may ­ they usually will ­ impute to his utterance and his innovation consequences, implications, and entailments he may not have intended or wish to acknowledge, and they will respond to him in terms determined by these imputations, maintaining or modifying those conventions of speech they see as directly or indirectly affected by his real or imputed utterance. The concept of reciprocal interaction between the meaning of the text and the contextual matrix in which it is produced is, to conclude, re-defined in the erudite exemplification of Pocock’s introduction to Virtue, Commerce and History: Languages display continuity as well as change; even when modified by their use in specific contexts, they outlive the contexts in which they have been modified, and they impose upon actors in subsequent contexts the constraints to which innovation and modification are the necessary and unpredictable responses. The text, furthermore, preserves the utterances of the author in a rigid, literal form, and conveys them into subsequent contexts, where they compel from respondents interpretations that, however radical, distorting and anachronistic, would not have been performed if the text had not performed upon the respondents. What an author "was doing," therefore, includes evoking from others responses the author could not control or predict, some of which would be performed in contexts quite other than those in which he was doing that which he could possibly know he was doing. Skinner’s formula defines a moment in the history of the interactions of parole with langue, but at the same time it defines that moment as open-ended. A few notes on "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas" In 1969, Skinner published in History and Theory the first of the articles which we will be looking at. As Pocock says of him, there seems to be no doubt "that the focus of attention has moved in some measure from the concept of intention toward that of performance." "Meaning and Understanding" is evidently one of the pioneering articles in Skinner’s contribution to the "correction" of the hermeneutic methodologies applied in the history of political thought. Despite the considerable length of the article, Skinner’s language remains undeniably clear and structured. The first objective of the historian is to define a series of hermeneutic mythologies, which obstruct the research into the meaning of "a poem, a play, a novel," "a work of philosophy," or "some exercise in ethical, political, religious, or other such mode of thought." The basic question to be asked in such a case is the following: "what are the appropriate procedures to adopt in the attempt to arrive at an understanding of the work." The historian then defines the two "current" orthodox answers to this basic question. 1 ­ "The first insists that it is the context ‘of religious, political and economic factors’ which determines the meaning of any given text, and so must provide the ultimate framework for any attempt to understand it. 2 ­ "The other orthodoxy, however, insists on the autonomy of the text itself as the sole necessary key to its own meaning, and so dismisses any attempt to reconstitute the ‘total context’ as gratuitous and worse." The article is thus conceived on the one hand as the in-depth analysis of the basic inadequacies of both orthodoxies, explaining the "philosophical mistakes" implied in the "assumptions they make about the conditions necessary for the understanding of utterances"; on the other hand, as Skinner explains, the "critical and negative" assertions made in the article, rest on the critic’s "belief that [they] can be shown to yield much more positive and programmatic conclusions. Having highlighted the "conceptual muddles and mistaken empirical claims" implied in the acceptance of either orthodoxy, Skinner believes that such confusions "can be avoided" with an appropriate set of caveat in mind. The textualist methodology is the first to be analyzed, being, in 1969, the set of assumptions governing "the largest number of studies" and giving rise to "the largest number of confusions." Claiming that the historian should concentrate his research on the text in-and-of-itself, and that the ideas contained in it must be "timeless elements" formulated in the shape of "universal ideas", fragments of a "dateless wisdom," this methodology creates the conditions for a hermeneutic dilemma: how is it possible for any observer to consider his interpretative activity free of personal preconceptions? If the observer, given the "dateless" nature of ideas in history, necessarily recognizes the ideas in the text analyzed as "familiar" to him, then there is the danger of falling into the temptation of reading the text with one’s own preconceived parameters of judgement. As Skinner argues, it will "in fact be impossible" for the observer "simply to study what any given classic writer has said (especially in an alien culture) without bringing to bear some of one’s own expectations about what he must have been saying." The common psychological mechanism according to which the human mind judges, understands and classifies the "unfamiliar in terms of the familiar," creates the "mental set" of the observer, preparing the mind to "perceive or react" in a certain personal way. The perpetual danger, in our attempts to enlarge our historical understanding, is thus that our expectations about what someone must be saying or doing will themselves determine that we understand the agent to be doing something which he would not ­ or even could not ­ himself have accepted as an account of what he was doing. The "illusionism" fostered by the "priority of paradigms" does not allow the observer to acquire a close comprehension of what the author was really arguing in his or her text, but forms a treacherous hologram, image of the observer’s expectations. Skinner’s procedure, in the first part of "Meaning and Understanding," is to "uncover the extent to which the current historical study of ethical, political and religious, and other such ideas is contaminated by the unconscious application of paradigms the familiarity of which, to the historian, disguises an essential inapplicability to the past." It is thus that the observer, instead of "studying simply what the classic writer says" will inevitably lapse into historical absurdities, enwrapping the text in a series of "mythologies." a.. Mythology of Doctrines: a most persistent lapse, this type of mythology is "generated when the historian is set by the expectation that each classic writer will be found to enunciate some doctrine on each of the topics regarded as constitutive of his subject." This paradigm creates the ideal conditions for a dangerous hermeneutic short step, by means of which the observer finds "a given author’s doctrines on all the mandatory themes." a) An example of this paradigm is the habit some critics have of picking "some scattered or quite incidental remark by a classic theorist" and converting it into the author’s "doctrine on one of the mandatory themes." b) Another example, this time tainted by a "sheer anachronism," is another habit some critics have of "discovering" in the writings of a given author, on the basis of "some chance similarity of terminology," views and opinions on some specific subject to which he couldn’t have possibly been referring to. The critic thus credits the writer with a meaning he could not have intended to convey, since that meaning was not available to him. c) Another example of this mythology is provided by those histories of ideas "in which the aim is to trace the morphology of some given doctrine ‘through all the provinces of history in which it appears.’" The point of departure is thus the choice of an ideal type of a given doctrine ­ be it the "doctrine of equality, progress, Machiavellism, the social contract, the great chain of being, the separation of powers, etc. b.. Mythology of the Absent Doctrines: "here a classic theorist who fairly clearly does fail to come up with a recognizable doctrine on one of the mandatory themes," is criticized for his failure to do so. The main version of this mythology consists in supplying single classic theorists with doctrines which "are agreed to be proper to their subject, but which they unaccountably failed to discuss." It is thus that Aquinas, despite he "may not have pronounced [his opinion] on the subject of foolish ‘civil disobedience,’" the critic pushes the theologian into his myth, and claims that he surely would not have approved. These exercises may appear to be simple exaggeration, but most obviously conceal "a means to fix one’s own prejudices on to the most charismatic names, under the guise of innocuous historical speculation." c.. Mythology of Prolepsis: "it is rather easy, in considering what significance the argument of some classic text might be said to have for us, to describe the work and its alleged significance in such a way that no place is left for the analysis of what the author himself meant to say, although the commentator may still believe himself to be engaged in such an analysis. [...] Such confusions arise most readily, of course, when the historian is more interested ­ as he may legitimately be ­ in the retrospective significance of a given historical work or action than in its meaning for the agent himself." In this perspective, Machiavelli is said to be the "founder of the modern political orientation;" in other cases, reading Machiavelli, we "stand at the gateway of the modern world." The surest symptom of this mythology is that the discussions which it governs are open to the crudest type of criticism that can be levelled against any teleological form of explanation: the action has to await the future to await its meaning. Conclusion a.. The understanding of texts presupposes the grasp both of what they were intended to mean, and how this meaning was intended to be taken. b.. To understand a text must be to understand both the intention to be understood, and the intention that this intention should be understood, which the text itself as an intended act of communication must at least have embodied. c.. In studying any given text, the question we confront is what its author, in writing at the time he did write for the audience he intended to address, could in practice have been intending to communicate by the utterance of this given utterance. d.. Any attempt to understand the utterances themselves must be to recover this complex intention on the part of the author. e.. An appropriate methodology for the history of ideas must be to delineate the whole range of communications which could have been conventionally performed on the given occasion by the utterance of the given utterance, and then to trace the relations between the given utterance and the wider linguistic context as a means of decoding the actual intention of the given writer. f.. Any statement is inescapably the embodiment of a particular intention, on a particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem, and thus specific to its situation. I hope this helps to explain my allegiances. When doing research in my field, I always try to keep in mind Eliot's motto: "Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it." Sweat, footnotes, and years in archives is the only chance the tardy have to construct compelling readings of texts belonging to the past. So, yes Jim, not an easy thing to be done, but there really is no alternative. Or better, there is always the possibility to continue debating on the religious intollerance of Milton's writings, and on his anti-catholicism compared to our religious sensibility. Yaakov Mascetti From: Steve Fallon [fallon.1@nd.edu] Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 10:54 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Milton, Toleration, and Catholicism A few remarks related to Jim's useful, thought-provoking post (copied with some elision below). Tolerance is a good thing, but it is also a relative thing. I think that the discussion of tolerance has been bedevilled by an indiscrimate mixing of various meanings of the term. Today, all religions are tolerated by (most) governments; when we speak of toleration in this context we are usually thinking of moderating the effects of prejudice by refraining from verbal or physical harrassment. In speaking of physical harrassment, we are referring to actions that are already illegal. Milton's context is entirely different. There is no state sanction for the practice and preaching of all religions or for all denominations of Christianity. Milton's argument for toleration, to repeat myself, is founded on his conviction that civil meddling in religious matters is pernicious because it coerces what should be free actions, and because it inserts a human authority between the action of the spirit and the individual. One can agree with Milton on this, and one can call it a form of toleration. One can also note that this is not a majority opinion in Milton's time and praise him for articulating principles that would come eventually to seem self-evident (though it is good to remind ourselves always that all things self-evident to us are not necessarily right). And, moreover, one can do this noting and praising of Milton on toleration without making the leap to the claim that Milton is arguing for universal toleration. He very clearly and explicitly is not doing that. There seems to be a straw man in the debate: 1) Milton is praised for toleration. 2) People who do that praising must think that Milton advocates universal toleration. 3) Milton doesn't advocate universal toleration. 4) Therefore the praise is invalid. What I'm not sure of is whether the objection is based on a misreading of the praise, or a misreading of Milton. Is anyone arguing that Milton poses as an advocate of toleration while hypocritically limiting toleration to people like himself? This argument, if anyone is proposing it, won't fly. Milton is arguing for the toleration not of religion but of "true religion." He is not coy about this. To tolerate Catholicism would be in his view to tolerate false religion. It doesn't disturb me because, unlike irrational prejudice against a race or an ethnic group, it is based on reasoned argument and on a plausible reading of the political realities of his time. We've been reminded, appropriately, of the Guy Fawkes incident. Wars were fought over Protestant/Catholic differences. To propose that Milton could have argued for toleration of Catholics is naive, I think. As I remarked in my last post, the Catholic church, with its requiring an implicit faith and with its substituting of authority of an institution for the guidance of the Spirit in the individual (and, yoked with these, its political ambitions), could be taken plausibly as a threat to the very principles at the foundation of Of True Religion. It represents for Milton the limit case of what he describes in Areopagitica as the error of making one's religion over to another, of "finding himself some factor to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion" (Hughes 740). The rest of that passage is very funny. In On Liberty Mill writes that "The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale." The first sentence describes Milton. Some will argue that he does not wish to grant Catholics that very freedom of conscience, but Milton did not invent from whole cloth his notion that Catholicism in his time and place denied its adherents freedom of conscience, or his fear that its spread would mean for him fewer believers with that freedom (which for Milton would mean fewer believers at all). Mill's second sentence might give us pause if we want to be self-congratulatory for having gotten past Milton. I'm emphatically not arguing for the renewal of state intolerance, but I'm wondering if our talk, if more inclusive than Milton's, is cheap. I agree with Jim that we need to avoid cozy self-congratulation by selective reading. "Qualified praise" by all means, but there is also a danger of condescension in the language of "praise that recognizes he was working within historical limitations." Who isn't? Steve Fallon >Perhaps I'm being dim, but if it's self-righteous and anachronistic to call >Milton's intolerance of Catholics "wrong", does it not follow that to call >Milton's tolerance of other denominations, his republicanism or his belief >in liberty "right" or "admirable" is equally self-righteous and >anachronistic? If we can't make moral judgments on the past, then why are >these beliefs held to be a good thing, and why have many people on this list >been talking about the need to commemorate them? > >Incidentally, I do agree that it's silly to compare his anti-Catholicism to >anti-Semitism. But, as a Catholic, I do find his anti-Papism more troubling >than Steve Fallon does. >Jim wrote: >I tend to define self-righteousness (emphasis on self, here) in more >negative terms, because it seems to require a judgment on others to support >one's own righteousness. Taking Milton out of context and condemning his >anti-Catholicism as if he were writing today is self-righteous, in my opinion. > >But I can see how it could work the other way as well. We praise those for >holding a specific moral stance in the past usually because they agree with >us, or anticipated us, in some way :). We're great, so they must be >too. Self righteousness. > >I think this line of reasoning will eventually shut down all moral dialog, >however, and I think we can affirm that tolerance is a good thing, that >freedom of expression and religion is a good thing, without making any >great moral leaps or patting ourselves on the back all that much. >From >that standpoint Milton deserves qualified praise, praise that recognizes he >was working within historical limitations. > >Course, if you Don't think tolerance is a good thing, I'm open to that >discussion too. :) . . . > . . . Steve Fallon wrote: > > >By 17th-c standards, Milton is remarkably tolerant, and our disappointment > >that he did not advocate toleration of Catholics is anachronistic; > Perhaps I'm being dim, but if it's self-righteous and anachronistic to call >Milton's intolerance of Catholics "wrong", does it not follow that to call >Milton's tolerance of other denominations, his republicanism or his belief >in liberty "right" or "admirable" is equally self-righteous and >anachronistic? If we can't make moral judgments on the past, then why are >these beliefs held to be a good thing, and why have many people on this list >been talking about the need to commemorate them? > >Incidentally, I do agree that it's silly to compare his anti-Catholicism to >anti-Semitism. But, as a Catholic, I do find his anti-Papism more troubling >than Steve Fallon does. > From: Dan Knauss [tiresias@juno.com] Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 1:34 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Skinnerean Mythologies Concentrating on texts in context is necessary, but this will never do away with or delegitimize the "unnerving" aspects of a case like Milton. "Disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks..." is not anachronistic if we read Milton in the context of contemporary counter-discourses of toleration (e.g., Williams, Erasmus, etc.) Failing to admit the existence of contemporary views that differ substantially from Milton's and register disappointment with his attitudes leads to bad historical and literary interpretation. At worst it closes him off in an imaginary world defined by his own standards as if these are not part of a larger whole. Can there be such things as propaganda and polemic without the existence of contemporary counterdiscourses? I think not. -Dan Knauss On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 17:48:22 +0200 "Yaakov Akiva Mascetti" writes: > If Seb Perry finds Milton's anti-catholicism unnerving, I can understand him, but > it really contributes nothing to the understanding of Milton's claims > in Areopagitica, or OTR. As Prof. Fallon has clearly explained to us, > the disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks on the Ecclesia > Romana, is truly anachronistic. > > Let us concentrate more on the text in its context, and less on > ourselves and our beliefs. Skinner docet! > > Yaakov Mascetti ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. From: Robin Hamilton [robin.hamilton2@btinternet.com] Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 9:26 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Cc: jlares@ocean.otr.usm.edu Subject: Re: Inner light From: Jameela Lares > I also > remember that the Cambridge Platonists had a version of "inner light" > based on the proverb that the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. C.A.Patrides has several pages on this image in the Introduction to his edition, _The Cambridge Platonists_ (1969), pp. 11ff. His index (but cf. Reason, perhaps?) gives relatively few examples in the texts he provides, but this from Benjamin Whichcote's _Moral and Religious Aphorisms_ (no. 916) would seem to be pertinent: The _Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the lord_; Lighted _by_ God, and Lightening us _to_ God. _Res illuminata, illuminans_. Robin Hamilton From: Robert Appelbaum [r_appel@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 3:29 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Skinnerean Mythologies An interesting post--and highly pertinent. Especially as, in early modern literary studies, Milton remains the last outpost of the Great Man theory of letters and ideas. Yaakov Akiva Mascetti wrote: On Feb. 12th, Jim thus wrote on anti-catholic Milton: "Truth is, many Catholics today would have been antiCatholic in Milton's time, even if they still held to the doctrines of transubstantiation, the authority of the church, etc. Their rhetoric would be a bit different (certainly not as rabid as Milton's, and yes, he did seem especially mean about it), but their stance -- perhaps not." I would like to relate to the ongoing debate on Milton's Toleration. I remember reading something by Quentin Skinner, once, that went more or less like this: "For I take it that political life itself sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to apear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate. This is not to say, however, that I treat the ideological superstructures as a straightforward outcome of their social base. I regard it as no less essential to consider the intellectual context in which the major texts were conceived - the context of earlier writings and inherited assumptions about political society, and of more ephemeral contemporary contributions to social and political thought." Why do I quote these words of the Regius Professor in relation to our ongoing debate? Let me continue quoting: "One dissatisfaction I feel with the traditional 'textualist' method is that although its exponents have generally claimed t be writing the history of political theory, they have rarely supplied us with genuine histories. It has rightly become a commonplace of recent historiography that, if we wish to understand earlier societies, we need to recover their different mentalités in as broadly sympathetic a fashion as possible. But it is hard to see how we can hope to arrive at this kind of historical understanding if we continue, as students of political ideas, to focus our main attention on those who discussed the problems of political life at a level of abstraction and intelligence unmatched by any of their contemporaries. If on the other hand we attempt to surround these classic texts with their appropriate ideological context, we may be able to build up a more realistic picture of how political thinking in all its various forms was in fact conducted in earlier periods." There has been a tendency, surely in Miltonists but also in other fields of literary criticism, to address the texts of a specific author from the point of view of the critic. This has provoked, as a direct consequence, distress and dissatisfaction with some disappointing and unnerving moves made by the author: the critic expects, and the author's texts must give. "My main reason, however, for suggesting that we should focus on the study of ideologies is that this would enable us to return to the classic texts themselves with a clearer prospect of understanding them. To study the context of any major work of political philosophy is not merely to gain additional information about its aetiology; it is also to equip ourselves, I shall argue, with a way of gaining greater insight into its authour's meaning than we can ever hope to achieve simply from reading the text itself 'over and over again' as the exponents of the textualist approach have characteristically proposed." It will lead the literary critic or historian of political thought nowhere, from the point of view of the need for a further understanding of the text, to judge the ideas propounded from his or her point of view. If Seb Perry finds Milton's anti-catholicism unnerving, I can understand him, but it really contributes nothing to the understanding of Milton's claims in Areopagitica, or OTR. As Prof. Fallon has clearly explained to us, the disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks on the Ecclesia Romana, is truly anachronistic. Let us concentrate more on the text in its context, and less on ourselves and our beliefs. Skinner docet! Yaakov Mascetti Robert Appelbaum English Department University of San Diego San Diego, CA 92110-2492 Visit my home page: www.geocities.com/r_appel/Robert.html And please forgive the commercial intrusion below: --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - Buy the things you want at great prices! From: Louis Schwartz [lschwart@richmond.edu] Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 5:48 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Announcement FOR ANYONE WHO FINDS THEMSELVES IN THE VICINITY OF CENTRAL VIRGINIA ON THE WEEKEND OF MARCH 2nd and 3rd: On Friday March 2nd and Saturday March 3rd, University of Richmond students and interested members of the community will hold marathon, all-night readings of the Iliad (March 2nd) and Paradise Lost (March 3rd). The event will benefit Richmond's Reading is Fundamental program. RIF is the largest children's and family literacy organization in the country. It purchases high quality children's books from distributors at a nominal cost and makes them available to children at city-wide distribution events that celebrate the benefits and joys of reading. At these events, each child is allowed to select at least three free books of his or her own choosing. The next distribution will take place on March 2 (which is both Dr. Seuss's birthday, and the first night of our marathon). This year, Richmond applied for and received a grant that permits distribution of books to 16,000 children from preschool up through the fifth grade, including students with special needs. Participating schools must, however, come up with 25% of the cost of the books, and this is beyond the means of some schools. University of Richmond students and members of the community are encouraged to help in the effort to raise these funds by finding sponsors who will contribute money for each hour of participation, as reader or audience, in the marathon readings. The readings will begin at 7:30 on both Friday and Saturday nights in the Whitehurst Living Room, Whitehurst Hall (near the Richmond College Dorms), and will conclude around dawn. All are welcome to participate in either reading (or in both!) and whether or not you have collected pledges (a donation box will be set up at both readings for those wishing to make contributions). Please feel free to join the readers' circle, or just to listen, and to stay for all or just part of the night. For more information, or if you are interested in helping with the fund-raising, please contact Dr. Louis Schwartz (289-8315) or Dr. Julie Laskaris (289-8734) at the University of Richmond (Richmond, VA). ======================================= Louis Schwartz English Department University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173 (804) 289-8315 lschwart@richmond.edu From: James Dougal Fleming [jdf26@columbia.edu] Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 9:56 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light Sender: owner-milton-l@richmond.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: milton-l@richmond.edu > Apparently the leaven reacts to the flame. Symbolically, leaven is sin, > so if the conscience is becoming aware of sin, perhaps this proverb is > indeed being read soteriologically in the seventeenth century. That is, > that the conscience is being used by God to locate sin. In _RCG_ M calls the conscience "God's secretary" -- so I guess (depending on the filing system) your suggestion is exactly right! JD Fleming From: AntiUtopia@aol.com Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 8:42 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Skinnerean Mythologies > the > disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks on the Ecclesia Romana, is > truly anachronistic. > > Let us concentrate more on the text in its context, and less on ourselves > and our beliefs. Skinner docet! > > Very good quotes, Yaakov...very much to my point. Does the writer anywhere acknowledge the difficulty of Really entering into a different mindset? I've encountered this with moderns reading Homer's Odyssey, for example. I keep saying (to myself or to them), "No no no. You're assuming 2000 years of Christianity reading it that way. And Judeo-Christian sexual mores. What would you think of the text without that background?" Not an easy thing to do :) Jim From: melsky [melsky@email.msn.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 10:59 PM To: MILTON-L Subject: Correction: CUNY Renaissance Lecture date correction [with apologies for cross-posting] CUNY Graduate School 365 Fifth Avenue (34-35 Streets) New York City The Renaissance Studies Certificate Program in collaboration with the=20 Italian Specialization in the Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature Thursday, FEBRUARY 22, 2001 6:30-8:00pm Room C201/C202 Lauro Martines Cruelty in Renaissance Florence: A Bloody Tale Admission is free and open to the public For further information, contact Martin Elsky, Coordinator, CUNY = Renaissance Studies Certificate Program melsky@gc.cuny.edu From: Norman Burns [nburns@binghamton.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 4:24 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light Kate Narveson's post usefully advances the discussion while capably suggesting some of the rocks and shoals in the debate that made it so difficult to be both lucid and simple about the mode by which it was thought God illuminated the understandings of the faithful. I would like to venture a few thoughts on how Christians could agree that all believers need the illumination of the Spirit to perceive the Truth, and yet be deeply divided about how that Light came to believers. Let me attempt a sketch of the divisions in 17th C. England. Most people believed that Christ had left behind a Church to be the means or conduit by which saving guidance or light came to its members. The Church established a qualified clergy, who rightly conducted the Sacraments and truly preached the Word--all these elements were means that God had chosen to bring people to saving understanding. The true Church mediated the grace that deficient humanity needed. The struggles about what was the polity and nature of the true Church were unending, and worth fighting for; if, for example, the Lord's Supper were not truly administered, the recipients would not get the spiritual benefits intended by Christ. A Church constituted as Christ intended could also, by means of the preaching that came to be increasingly emphasized as the episcopal, ceremonial system lost favor, guide the members in the true understanding of the Holy Scripture. It follows that the system by which men were ordained to preach was vitally important. Presbyterians, who favored a learned clergy who could deduce coherently and work with the scriptural languages, had bottomless contempt for the "mechanic preachers" common among the sects. The sectarians were not about to be bullied, so, in turn, they denounced those who preferred humane learning to divine inspiration and supported opinions like those of the cobbler Samuel How when he urged _The Sufficiencie of the Spirit's Teaching without Humane Learning_. So, broadly, one could favor the idea that the Spirit worked to the benefit of humankind mediated through institutions, or unmediated through direct communication with the minds and hearts of individuals. The second way of the Spirit's operations was immediately seen to be unverifiable and hence uncontrollable, and was usually thought of as a kind of disease--"enthusiasm." Swift and others had much fun with "enthusiasts," but the approach had considerable staying power, becoming very nearly institutionalized and stabilized in the Society of Friends. The Friends had no established clergy, no Creed or catechism, no sacraments, no liturgy, no "prayer book" or order of worship to direct their meetings. The orthodox knew this was not a church recognizable as such; they were very clear that after biblical times God had ceased all immediate revelation to individuals because, the Church having been established, the direction of the Spirit came through the Church and its ordinances. The Quakers sat in their meeting and waited to speak until the Spirit moved a member personally, but the orthodox thought the Friends ridiculous for having repudiated the church that was designed by Christ to deliver the Spirit more reliably to the faithful. Since virtually all groups paid deference to the inerrant Holy Scriptures as the foundation of spiritual truth, it might appear that they would be a unifying force, but difficulties of interpretation proved disruptive. George Fox and other Friends cited Scripture and made their writings a pastiche of scriptural phrases, but Fox also liked to denounce his opponents for being mired in the Letter and being without access to the Spirit who inspired the Letter and was superior to it, superior at least to what his opponents could grasp by their literalism. I have presented a rather polarized schematic here, but the truth on the ground was that opinions about institutionalized churches and how the Spirit directs believers was in most cases a continuum, with individuals and groups often shifting their positions between the poles as situations varied. Fox and the Friends professed a high regard for Scripture, but scorned the scripturalism of their opponents, often seeming to urge its replacement by the purer illumination of their inner light. What was Milton's position on these matters? Hard to say. It was doubtless unstable, but I will venture a few generalizations and invite the list to correct me. Milton, in his poems and prose (I include _DDC_), shows little interest in communal, public worship or in the organization of such (the discussion in _DDC_ is slight and passionless, once he establishes that the polity must be congregational; his treatment of the two sacraments is casual, to be administered by the head of the household--nothing to suggest that they are essential conduits of saving grace). Churches are there to be married in, perhaps to be buried in, but nothing suggests that he viewed communal worship as vital to the Christian experience. He never mentions a church or sect with favor, never says a favorable word for an English clergyman or sectarian leader (setting aside as special cases his good words for his tutor Thomas Young and the exercise in elegy for the Bishop of Ely), not even for the formidable (and one would think somewhat attractive) presences in the same government--Peter Sterry and John Owen, or for his fellow in condemnation John Goodwin. Toland says Milton attended no church in his later years; do we know of any he attended, even earlier? I do not think there is any evidence that he saw the church as a conduit of the Spirit he sought. Milton has Michael promise our parents a Comforter who shall dwell in them, write the law of faith in their hearts, guide and strengthen them (perfectly orthodox and scripturally grounded, but lacking reference to a role for the Church does this not shade toward Enthusiasm on the continuum?). A little later the "written Records pure" are introduced, but they are only to be understood with the assistance of the Spirit (a widely acceptable formulation, though Fox would have agreed because it leaves open the claim for the primacy of the Spirit). Milton throughout his prose insists that belief must be built on Scripture alone, but it was common to speak of Scripture as "a nose of wax" that can be wrested to fit one's argument (Milton gave it a few good tweaks when necessary), so the Spirit gets very important if you don't depend on the authority of a Church. In DDC Milton insists that God allowed monkish hands to corrupt the transmission of the text in order to show us that the Spirit had primacy over the ink and paper of Scripture. On the whole, I find Milton tending toward the Quaker end of the continuum--having no interest in set forms of public worship, unconcerned about establishing churches, anticlerical, unwilling to appeal to the civil power in spiritual matters, persuaded that his own conscientious understanding of divine things is the only standard of belief. Not that I think Milton was a Friend despite his relationship with Isaac Penington and Ellwood--he had something like this position on the continuum long before he met them. There were lots of people at that end of things--Seekers, General Baptists, many of those who people Edwards's _Gangraena_ (1646) and Samuel Rutherford's _Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist_(1648). Toland made inquiry and couldn't find anybody who knew of Milton's church affiliation, nor do I have any specific evidence on the question. Like Toland, I think I know some of Milton's attitudes. Sorry to be so windy, Kate, in attempting the contextualization you ask for. Even so, I'm sure I'll get in trouble for oversimplifying these matters. --Norm Burns At 01:56 PM 2/18/01 -0600, you wrote: >It's been a while since I worked in this area, and I hope someone will >supplement these comments with a more substantive of how the issues relate >to Milton. But here is a start at defining the context of a phrase like >"inner light": > >The phrase emerges from English Calvinist attempts to explicate how fallen >humankind could obtain divine truth. To what extent can reason be rectified >by the holy spirit, is there further revelation, in what ways are >experiential metaphors more adequate, etc? One common metaphor was that >reason is benighted and the holy spirit must be present as that which sheds >light so that reason may see. But others stress reason's blindness, and the >need for the restoration of the "visive" power by the work of the Holy >Spirit. Usually, the spirit is seen as providing the light, so that "inner >light" for moderate Calvinists is not the person's own possession. John >Morgan has a chapter in "Godly REason"---though he only goes up to 1640, it >sets the context for later discussions, and is good in indicating where >Perry Miller was overly rationalistic. > >Nathaniel Culverwell's "Learned and elegant discourse of the Candle of the >Lord" reflects mid-century efforts at the universities to defend the >Calvinist understanding of reason's limitations from incipient >latitudinarianism and Cambridge Platonism. (The comparison of reason to the >candle of the Lord is in Proverbs somewhere---I don't have the right books >with me.) > >The issue moved front and center during and after the interregnum, as >moderate nonconformists tried to counter the enthusiasm of the radical sects >on the one hand and preserve a Calvinist emphasis on the fallenness of >reason vs the rationalist C of E stalwarts on the other. The moderate >nonconformist cause was complicated by the fact that establishment >polemicists misrepresented Calvinism as enthusiasm, so congregationalist >conservatives like John Owen were fighting a battle on two fronts, and >statements made against one side were picked up and used against him by the >other. This is the context for Owen's massive systematization of >Congregationalist pneumatology (still respected by theologians now) and for >Theophilus Gale's attempt to use ancient history to prove the fallenness of >reason (in "the Court of the Gentiles). > >In short, terms like "inner light" and "right reason" were immensely >controversial, and any particular author's use must be carefully set in the >context of his/her works and sectarian associations. Geoffrey Nuttall's >book on the holy spirit in puritanism remains the best study I >know---recently reissued by Chicago with an intro by Peter Lake. > >Has someone done this contextualization for Milton? Is there sufficient >evidence? It sounds like perhaps it needs to be given more systematic >attention. I'd love to hear more. > >Best, >Kate Narveson > >At 08:11 AM 02/15/2001 -0500, you wrote: > > > >Dear Derick, and list, > > > >Yes, I was teasing all of us, whenever we use easy phrases like "inner = > >light" (I was sure that Derick could back it up, as he did, with solid = > >evidence), but I had some serious issues in mind. Why doesn't Milton = > >himself use the exact phrase "inner light?" Why does he beat around that = > >bush but say the same thing, as Derick and others have already shown? = > >Does that make him a Quaker? > > > >If I am remembering correctly from having read Thomas Ellwood's > autobiograp= > >hy over again about a year ago, Ellwood doesn't use the phrase "inner = > >light" either. It would be interesting, to me at least, to see where = > >Ellwood and Milton differed or agreed, about divine inspiration. Would = > >they have talked about Milton's Muse? > > > >Best to all, > > > >Roy Flannagan > > > > From: Yaakov Akiva Mascetti [mascety@012.net.il] Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 10:48 AM To: Milton List Subject: Skinnerean Mythologies On Feb. 12th, Jim thus wrote on anti-catholic Milton: "Truth is, many Catholics today would have been antiCatholic in Milton's time, even if they still held to the doctrines of transubstantiation, the authority of the church, etc. Their rhetoric would be a bit different (certainly not as rabid as Milton's, and yes, he did seem especially mean about it), but their stance -- perhaps not." I would like to relate to the ongoing debate on Milton's Toleration. I remember reading something by Quentin Skinner, once, that went more or less like this: "For I take it that political life itself sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to apear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate. This is not to say, however, that I treat the ideological superstructures as a straightforward outcome of their social base. I regard it as no less essential to consider the intellectual context in which the major texts were conceived - the context of earlier writings and inherited assumptions about political society, and of more ephemeral contemporary contributions to social and political thought." Why do I quote these words of the Regius Professor in relation to our ongoing debate? Let me continue quoting: "One dissatisfaction I feel with the traditional 'textualist' method is that although its exponents have generally claimed t be writing the history of political theory, they have rarely supplied us with genuine histories. It has rightly become a commonplace of recent historiography that, if we wish to understand earlier societies, we need to recover their different mentalités in as broadly sympathetic a fashion as possible. But it is hard to see how we can hope to arrive at this kind of historical understanding if we continue, as students of political ideas, to focus our main attention on those who discussed the problems of political life at a level of abstraction and intelligence unmatched by any of their contemporaries. If on the other hand we attempt to surround these classic texts with their appropriate ideological context, we may be able to build up a more realistic picture of how political thinking in all its various forms was in fact conducted in earlier periods." There has been a tendency, surely in Miltonists but also in other fields of literary criticism, to address the texts of a specific author from the point of view of the critic. This has provoked, as a direct consequence, distress and dissatisfaction with some disappointing and unnerving moves made by the author: the critic expects, and the author's texts must give. "My main reason, however, for suggesting that we should focus on the study of ideologies is that this would enable us to return to the classic texts themselves with a clearer prospect of understanding them. To study the context of any major work of political philosophy is not merely to gain additional information about its aetiology; it is also to equip ourselves, I shall argue, with a way of gaining greater insight into its authour's meaning than we can ever hope to achieve simply from reading the text itself 'over and over again' as the exponents of the textualist approach have characteristically proposed." It will lead the literary critic or historian of political thought nowhere, from the point of view of the need for a further understanding of the text, to judge the ideas propounded from his or her point of view. If Seb Perry finds Milton's anti-catholicism unnerving, I can understand him, but it really contributes nothing to the understanding of Milton's claims in Areopagitica, or OTR. As Prof. Fallon has clearly explained to us, the disappointment felt in reading Milton's attacks on the Ecclesia Romana, is truly anachronistic. Let us concentrate more on the text in its context, and less on ourselves and our beliefs. Skinner docet! Yaakov Mascetti From: Tmsandefur@aol.com Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 12:20 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: errant message On the issue of dated email, a thought. A lot was made by Thomas Jefferson's biographer of certain misogynistic passages from literature which he copied down into his commonplace book. Many biographers assumed he did this in reaction to his failed romance with Rebecca Burwell, his first love. But as Willard Sterne Randall pointed out in his biography of Jefferson , there really is no way to know exactly when these were written down (although some scholars have used some clever tricks with handwriting similarities and so forth). Anyone who's ever actually KEPT a commonplace book, as I have, knows that sometimes you don't write down stuff right away, but instead you write it down even years after you first encounter a passage you like--and other times you copy down something that in reflection you don't think was that great after all. So it is interesting how the inferences with regard to this timing can lead to all sorts of conclusions, many of which may not be warranted. Milton, of course, kept a commonplace book too, but not knowing enough about the biographical studies, I don't know if any incorrect inferences have been drawn from similar circumstances in Milton's case. Timothy Sandefur From: Norman Burns [nburns@binghamton.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 9:30 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: errant message Clearly Steve Fallon has entered _The Twilight Zone_. Or is it a Stephen King novel? Is he the first of us Miltonists to do so? --Norm Burns At 03:48 PM 2/19/01 -0400, you wrote: >The date on the one I teceived was 31/12/1969 and my computer stacked it >accordingly in the folder. dw > >Steve Fallon wrote: > > > .... I noticed when it > > arrived this morning that the date was wrong (January 1, 1904). Ahead of > > my time, or computer challenged? This note is to direct anyone who might > > be interested to that date in the in-box. > > > > What will happen in the future when scholars comb e-mails as we now comb > > letters? .... From: Jameela Lares [jlares@ocean.otr.usm.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 8:03 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light The proverb Kate Narveson and I have quoted regarding the Cambridge Platonists is "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly," Proverbs 20.27. I hadn't thought of this before, but based on what Kate has said about the role of this "candle" in the redemption process, it may indeed be that the search with a candle has to do with the search for leaven that the head of a house performs before Passover, as in Zephaniah 1.12, "I will search Jerusalem with candles." Apparently the leaven reacts to the flame. Symbolically, leaven is sin, so if the conscience is becoming aware of sin, perhaps this proverb is indeed being read soteriologically in the seventeenth century. That is, that the conscience is being used by God to locate sin. Jameela Lares Associate Professor of English University of Southern Mississippi Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5037 +(601) 266-6214 ofc +(601) 266-5757 fax On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Jameela Lares wrote: > > Thanks to Scott Grunow for explaining some of the early history of "inner > light" in Quaker circles. I agree from what I've seen of early Quaker > tracts that their terminology is "fluid" rather than fixed. I also > remember that the Cambridge Platonists had a version of "inner light" > based on the proverb that the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. > > Jameela Lares > Associate Professor of English > University of Southern Mississippi > Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5037 > +(601) 266-6214 ofc > +(601) 266-5757 fax > From: AntiUtopia@aol.com Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 3:34 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Milton, Toleration, and Catholicism I tend to define self-righteousness (emphasis on self, here) in more negative terms, because it seems to require a judgment on others to support one's own righteousness. Taking Milton out of context and condemning his anti-Catholicism as if he were writing today is self-righteous, in my opinion. But I can see how it could work the other way as well. We praise those for holding a specific moral stance in the past usually because they agree with us, or anticipated us, in some way :). We're great, so they must be too. Self righteousness. I think this line of reasoning will eventually shut down all moral dialog, however, and I think we can affirm that tolerance is a good thing, that freedom of expression and religion is a good thing, without making any great moral leaps or patting ourselves on the back all that much. From that standpoint Milton deserves qualified praise, praise that recognizes he was working within historical limitations. Course, if you Don't think tolerance is a good thing, I'm open to that discussion too. :) Jim << Jim wrote: >1. Milton was a "religious xenophobe" of some sorts and his actions are >inexcusable. Two wrongs don't make a right (this seems terribly >self-righteous and assumes we transcend history in our own moral >judgments >today. Take my word for it -- we don't. History will tell). Steve Fallon wrote: >By 17th-c standards, Milton is remarkably tolerant, and our >disappointment >that he did not advocate toleration of Catholics is >anachronistic; Perhaps I'm being dim, but if it's self-righteous and anachronistic to call Milton's intolerance of Catholics "wrong", does it not follow that to call Milton's tolerance of other denominations, his republicanism or his belief in liberty "right" or "admirable" is equally self-righteous and anachronistic? If we can't make moral judgments on the past, then why are these beliefs held to be a good thing, and why have many people on this list been talking about the need to commemorate them? Incidentally, I do agree that it's silly to compare his anti-Catholicism to anti-Semitism. But, as a Catholic, I do find his anti-Papism more troubling than Steve Fallon does. Seb. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com >> From: Hardin, Richard F [rhardin@ukans.edu] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 3:30 PM To: 'milton-l@richmond.edu' Subject: RE: Inner light Two early studies of Milton in relation to Jakob Boehme and the Quakers are respectively(from Hanford)Margaret L Bailey, _Milton and Jokob Boehme: A Study of German Mysticism in 17th-century England_ (Oxford, 1914) and Alden Sampson, _Studies in Milton_ (NY, 1913). Bailey's book, though brief, is better on the period than on Milton himself (as I recall). Dick Hardin -----Original Message----- From: Cobelli@aol.com [mailto:Cobelli@aol.com] Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2001 12:07 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light In a message dated 2/16/2001 7:06:48 AM Central Standard Time, jlares@ocean.otr.usm.edu writes: I had always thought that "inner light" was a term "belonging"--if anything can be said to do so--to the Quakers. It would appear from the discussion that the idea of inner illumination was much more generally current in the seventeenth century. But can anyone illuminate the Quaker history of the term? The basic reference book in the bibliographies on this subject and its relation to Puritanism I have checked appears to be Nuttall, Geoffrey, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Practice, Oxford: Blackwell, 1946. There's also a bibliography in the Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings, New York: Paulist Press, 1984, which has a generous selection of writings by Quakers on the subject. The crystallization (if that can be the case in such a fluid approach) of the concept seems to start as a reflection on Fox's initial somewhat Boehmian (Jacob Boehme) experiences (I believe Fox had some contact with Boehme's writings, can this be verified?) in contemporaries of Fox such as Francis Howgill, Isaac Penington, and Alexander Parker. It is important to note that the imagery and approach is fluid: terms like the Light of Christ, inner light, Seed, and Spirit are used interchangeably without much theological definition in the traditional sense. Here's an early statement by Howgill, one of Fox's earliest companions: "and God, out of his great love and great mercy, sent one unto us, a man of God ... to instruct us in the way of God more perfectly; which testimony reached unto all our consciences and entered into the INMOST PART OF OUR HEARTS, which drove us to a narrow search, and to a diligent inquisition concerning our state, through the LIGHT OF CHRIST JESUS." (emphasis in all caps is mine). In the writings of later Quakers such as Caroline Stephen and Thomas R. Kelly is the inner light more specifically defined, but again the approach is more experiential. Note the linking of the light concept which can too often turn into a kind of an over-optimistic quietist wallowing in special favors to a traditional evangelical process of salvation from sin: "When questioned as to the reality and nature of the inner light, the early Friends were accustomed to return to ask the question whether they did not sometimes feel something within them that showed them their sins, and to assure them that this same power, which was made manifest, and therefore was truly light, would also, if yielded to, lead them out of sin. This assurance, that the light which was revealed was also the power which would heal sin, was George Fox's gospel. The power itself was described by him in many ways. Christ within, the hope of glory, the light, life, Spirit, and grace of Christ; the Seed, the new birth, the power of God unto salvation ..." This may be a simplistic statement, but it seems to me that the inner light of Quaker spirituality and in similar radical Protestant movements seems to taking the old Augustinian-Neoplatonist topos (filtered through John and Paul) to its "furthest" expression in Christianity. I say furthest to mean furthest from both Roman Catholic orthodoxy structures, both internal and external. Light and seed images of course appear quite often in the works of Vaughan and Traherne, the late Commonwealth and early Restoration periods, the same time as the beginnings of the Quaker movement. Traherne in particular shares something of this sensibility in both the poems and the Centuries. Scott Grunow Editor-in-Chief Office of Publications Services University of Illinois at Chicago scottgr@uic.edu From: Dan Knauss [tiresias@juno.com] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 10:49 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: errant message I'm sure that this sort of problem will keep some scholars happily employed working out the corrections. The Columbia ed. of Milton's works misdates some of his letters, and althought the variorum commentary pointed this out in the early 70s, that hasn't stopped critics from taking the wrong dates at face value. -Dan Knauss On Fri, 16 Feb 2001 09:33:33 -0500 Steve Fallon writes: > > What will happen in the future when scholars comb e-mails as we now > comb > letters? A smaller date error could have interesting consequences > on the > reconstruction of time lines. > > Steve Fallon ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. From: Carol Barton, PhD [cbartonphd@earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 3:50 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light To second Scott's and Jameela's posts, briefly: _The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church_ says "the religious tenets of the Friends are set out in the classic work of R[obert] Barclay [1648-90] . . . _Theologiae Verae Christianae Apologia_ (1676). Their central doctrine is the 'Inner Light' [the English version was _Apology for the True Christian Religion, as the same is set forth and preached by the People called in Scorn 'Quakers' (1678)]; its possession consists chiefly in the sense of the Divine and direct working of Christ in the soul, by which man is freed from sin, united to Christ and enabled to perform good works; its visible effects are mostly of a moral character, viz., simplicity, purity, and truthfulness . . ." Oxford mentions a second "old classical work on the Society of Friends [of Truth]: W. Sewel's _The Increase and Progress of the People Called Quakers_ (1717). Best to all, Carol Barton > In a message dated 2/16/2001 7:06:48 AM Central Standard Time, > jlares@ocean.otr.usm.edu writes: > > I had always thought that "inner light" was a term "belonging"--if > anything can be said to do so--to the Quakers. It would appear from the > discussion that the idea of inner illumination was much more generally > current in the seventeenth century. But can anyone illuminate the Quaker > history of the term? Scott Grunow comments: ----------------------- > The basic reference book in the bibliographies on this subject and its > relation to Puritanism I have checked appears to be Nuttall, Geoffrey, The > Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Practice, Oxford: Blackwell, 1946. > > There's also a bibliography in the Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings, > New York: Paulist Press, 1984, which has a generous selection of writings by > Quakers on the subject. The crystallization (if that can be the case in such > a fluid approach) of the concept seems to start as a reflection on Fox's > initial somewhat Boehmian (Jacob Boehme) experiences (I believe Fox had some > contact with Boehme's writings, can this be verified?) in contemporaries of > Fox such as Francis Howgill, Isaac Penington, and Alexander Parker. It is > important to note that the imagery and approach is fluid: terms like the > Light of Christ, inner light, Seed, and Spirit are used interchangeably > without much theological definition in the traditional sense. > > Here's an early statement by Howgill, one of Fox's earliest companions: > > "and God, out of his great love and great mercy, sent one unto us, a man of > God ... to instruct us in the way of God more perfectly; which testimony > reached unto all our consciences and entered into the INMOST PART OF OUR > HEARTS, which drove us to a narrow search, and to a diligent inquisition > concerning our state, through the LIGHT OF CHRIST JESUS." > > (emphasis in all caps is mine). > > In the writings of later Quakers such as Caroline Stephen and Thomas R. Kelly > is the inner light more specifically defined, but again the approach is more > experiential. Note the linking of the light concept which can too often turn > into a kind of an over-optimistic quietist wallowing in special favors to a > traditional evangelical process of salvation from sin: > > "When questioned as to the reality and nature of the inner light, the early > Friends were accustomed to return to ask the question whether they did not > sometimes feel something within them that showed them their sins, and to > assure them that this same power, which was made manifest, and therefore was > truly light, would also, if yielded to, lead them out of sin. This assurance, > that the light which was revealed was also the power which would heal sin, > was George Fox's gospel. The power itself was described by him in many ways. > Christ within, the hope of glory, the light, life, Spirit, and grace of > Christ; the Seed, the new birth, the power of God unto salvation ..." > > This may be a simplistic statement, but it seems to me that the inner light > of Quaker spirituality and in similar radical Protestant movements seems to > taking the old Augustinian-Neoplatonist topos (filtered through John and > Paul) to its "furthest" expression in Christianity. I say furthest to mean > furthest from both Roman Catholic orthodoxy structures, both internal and > external. > > Light and seed images of course appear quite often in the works of Vaughan > and Traherne, the late Commonwealth and early Restoration periods, the same > time as the beginnings of the Quaker movement. Traherne in particular shares > something of this sensibility in both the poems and the Centuries. From: Derek Wood [dwood@stfx.ca] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 2:49 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: errant message The date on the one I teceived was 31/12/1969 and my computer stacked it accordingly in the folder. dw Steve Fallon wrote: > .... I noticed when it > arrived this morning that the date was wrong (January 1, 1904). Ahead of > my time, or computer challenged? This note is to direct anyone who might > be interested to that date in the in-box. > > What will happen in the future when scholars comb e-mails as we now comb > letters? .... From: Steve Fallon [fallon.1@nd.edu] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 10:38 AM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Milton, Toleration, and Catholicism Please excuse me if you've already received this. I sent it last week after reading only a few messages in the thread (and not the first few, at that), but the date was wrong (Jan 1, 1904). If you've already received, please discard. Steve Fallon *************** Interesting question, perhaps especially for a Miltonist who is a Catholic. It makes a good deal more sense, if one has to choose, to present Milton as a patron saint of liberty than as analagous in his anti-Catholicism to a racist or anti-semite. One obvious difference, and far from an extrinsic one, is that anti-Catholicism can have little to do with race or ethnic group. As Richard himself notes, Milton's family was Catholic. It may well be true that Milton's views on toleration were informed by his own 'heretical' beliefs, but the fact that a position may have been influenced by what he calls "the spur of self-concernment' does not by itself preclude the possibility that the position is held on reasoned principle. If it did, ML King, Jr., would not be a patron of liberty, nor would gays and lesbians arguing against anti-gay discrimination. I don't think that Tmsandefur is right in suggesting that we have a case here of a radical picking his battles or getting a half loaf when he can't get the whole. It would have been inconsistent for Milton to have advocated toleration of a religion that called for and promoted implicit faith and reliance on authority. It would have been odd if Milton, who pushed the priesthood of all believers as far as one might, then turned around and supported toleration for a church that required and enforced the opposite. One might object that Milton did argue for toleration of various Protestant groups with whom he had disagreements , but his argument assumes the sharing of essential and fundamental principles (e.g, again, the priesthood of all believers, the reliance on Scripture and Spirit and the rejection of tradition and authority as normative). Milton moreover saw Catholic doctrine as explicitly endorsing and instituting idolatry. If some Protestant churches flirted with the dangers of idolatry, at least they did not make it a matter of doctrine. We should remember that Milton in OTR is arguing for toleration of "true religion," and that he does not argue for toleration for Moslems or Jews. We should also remember that, as the subtitle tells us, he writes OTR as a bulwark in the defense against popery. It is not as if Milton argued for universal toleration and then omitted illogically or from private prejudice. Conrad Bladey reminds us wisely that Catholicism was not merely viewed as having political foundations and expansionist aspirations, but did in fact have them. One needs always to be cautious in making role models or villains of historical figures by measuring them against our standards, as Richard acknowledges. Recasting them in our terms will always involve adjustment and analogy that we should not overlook. That said, we can in good faith compare one historical figure with others of his or her period on questions like toleration, republicanism, heresy, etc. By 17th-c standards, Milton is remarkably tolerant, and our disappointment that he did not advocate toleration of Catholics is anachronistic; it ignores the argument for why toleration should be instituted--so that the spirit can work in the individual believer, unhampered by civil power. As a Catholic who, however paradoxically,agrees with Milton on many of his arguments, I've never been disturbed by his failure to include Catholics. (NB I'll admit to being a "cafeteria Catholic." The sense of the faithful is far more compelling to me than the decisions of the hierachy, from the pope all the way down to the parish priest. Most of the Catholics with whom I find common ground are the kind whose flourishing was predicted by Tocqueville in Democracy in America, deeply skeptical about hierarchy and disinclined to follow it.) On the question of inner light, the responses to Roy's question have been excellent. I've long found very useful Geoffrey Nuttall's The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, where Milton and the Quakers, vocal advocates of the inner light, converge as the limit cases of the unfolding of Puritan imperatives. Steve Fallon >I'm not trying to judge Milton by today's standards of religious >toleration - I'm simply whingeing about academics who trumpet him as the >patron saint of religious liberty. I think his support for increased >toleration was partly motivated by concern about his own status as a >heretic. What's more, he hated catholicism: narrow grounds, I would argue, >for his canonisation by 21st century critics of religious bent. > >I agree with Derek Wood about Milton disliking the way Catholics thought (or >didn't think) about religion, but I've always felt there's something more >than that in his anti-catholicism. Especially given his family history, >i.e. his father being disinherited for turning protestant. I think it's >possible Milton was, unfortunately, brought up to despise catholics in a way >comparable to modern anti-semitism or racism. > >Again, I'd like to stress that it's not Milton or the views of C17th >Englishmen I'm complaining about; it's the consequences of taking those >views and presenting them to modern readers as admirable in some way. As I >tried to argue with reference to Roger Williams, even by C17th standards >Milton was no saint, though no doubt more enlightened than many. > >Richard >----- Original Message ----- >From: < >To: < >Sent: Monday, February 12, 2001 4:51 PM >Subject: Re: Milton and the Common Law > > > > Yep, there's no question Protestant states in Milton's time could often be > > just as oppressive as any other state, and there's no argument against the > > fact that Catholics in England suffered an unfortunate level of > > oppression. My point isn't so much to elevate either Catholicism or > > Protestantism, but to see Milton's attitudes as the products of, and > > response to, his time, rather than seeing his attitudes as being as > > radically divisive as they would be today. > > > > Each group in each area would tend to fear for its own freedom should > > opposition groups rise in influence. It would also seem reasonable for a > > largely Catholic area to fear the rise of Protestantism given the state of > > Catholics in England at times... > > > > Jim > > > > <<<< > > I wasn't suggesting that pre-Vat2 Catholicism offered some sort of > > libertarian utopia; my point was that Milton wasn't offering one either. I > > do hope this isn't going to start a thelogical flame-war, but I think it > > takes a pernicious blindness to look back on history and see Catholicism >as > > the summit of oppression, censorship and intolerance without noticing that > > non-Catholic states were guilty of exactly the same things. I also can't >see > > why Milton's religious/political thinking should earn him such >hagiography: > > the 'liberty' he believed in was clearly not what we mean by the word. > > *Pace* Popper, perhaps we should remember that two wrongs don't make a > > right. > > > > Seb Perry. > > > > > > > > >From: Tmsandefur@aol.com > > >Reply-To: milton-l@richmond.edu > > >To: < > > >Subject: Re: Milton and the Common Law > > >Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 10:37:34 EST > > > > > >"Anti-Utopia" is exactly right. Check out the interesting review of the >new > > >book on Yeats at www.reason.com, which I just happened to be reading > > >yesterday, which has some interesting passages on Yeats' experiences >with > > >the theocratic controls in early 20th Century Ireland. > > > > > >We may think Milton intolerant, what with our experience of the Vatican >II > > >church. But in his own day, Catholicism was a great threat to liberty >and > > >toleration, and Milton was not inconsistent when he argued that >Catholicism > > >should not be tolerated in the free state. This is the "paradox of > > >toleration" which Karl Popper refers to in THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS > > >ENEMIES--the tolerant state can not tolerate intolerance. > > > > > >Timothy Sandefur > > > > > > > _________________________________________________________________ > > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > > > >> > > > > From: Jameela Lares [jlares@ocean.otr.usm.edu] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 2:01 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Inner light Thanks to Scott Grunow for explaining some of the early history of "inner light" in Quaker circles. I agree from what I've seen of early Quaker tracts that their terminology is "fluid" rather than fixed. I also remember that the Cambridge Platonists had a version of "inner light" based on the proverb that the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. Jameela Lares Associate Professor of English University of Southern Mississippi Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5037 +(601) 266-6214 ofc +(601) 266-5757 fax From: Cynthia A. Gilliatt [gilliaca@jmu.edu] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 12:36 PM To: Milton-l list Cc: Milton-l list Subject: Re: Plagiarism A collegaue of mine has a required conference before the major paper is due and - reading through the draft with the student, asks for explanations, further examples, etc. This evidently prevents a lot of problems. Cynthia On Fri, 16 Feb 2001 09:27:23 EDT whunter wrote: > It has been many years now, but besides assigning quite specific essay > areas I warned classes that in reading their papers I might sometimes > question their originality. If so--just to ckear up my mind--I would call > the individual in to define a few words he or she had used, or to > paraphrase an idea in an important paragraph. It worked. > > W.B. Hunter > -- JMU SAFE ZONES PARTICIPANT Cynthia A. Gilliatt English Department MSC 1801 James Madison University Harrisonburg VA 22807 gilliaca@jmu.edu http://raven.jmu.edu/~gilliaca/ 540-568-3762 or 6202 From: owner-milton-l@richmond.edu Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 6:57 AM 2001 11:14:04 PST Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 11:14:04 -0800 (PST) From: Scott Alt Subject: Re: writing assignments/plagiarism To: milton-l@richmond.edu In-Reply-To: <4.2.2.20010217130503.00ad06c0@mail.sxu.edu> Sender: owner-milton-l@richmond.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: milton-l@richmond.edu Related to this thread, I might mention for those who aren't aware, there is a web site that allows you to submit the full-text of suspicious papers. Within two days, you'll receive by email an "originality analysis" that documents internet sites from which passages have been lifted. I believe this was reported in _The New York Times_ a few weeks back. Just go to http://www.turnitin.com and see what resources are available to professors. Scott Alt Adjunct Professor of English Goldey-Beacom College 4701 Limestone Road Wilmington, DE 19808 sealt69@yahoo.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From: AntiUtopia@aol.com Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 3:43 PM To: milton-l@richmond.edu Subject: Re: Milton and the Common Law While I also voiced disagreement with the post you're responding to, it seems to me you're being a bit anachronistic yourself. Are the only relevant categories Protestant and Catholic? What, do all Protestants look alike? There were serious disagreements among Protestant groups in England -- sometimes violent ones -- so Milton's advocacy of free speech among the various Protestant groups was a pretty forward thinking move. He does deserve credit for that. No, he wasn't forward thinking enough to include Catholics in his dialog, but he did take some forward strides... Jim << My point is that when a modern critic praises Milton for being tolerant of religious difference he/she is ignoring his hatred of catholicism. Either you're tolerant of religious difference or you're not; to say that Milton tolerated people like himself and didn't tolerate people unlike himself is to say nothing.>> From: Cynthia A. Gilliatt [gilliaca@jmu.edu] Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 1:06 PM To: Milton-l list Cc: Milton-l list Subject: Re: Milton and the Common Law One would certainly want to handle Paisley's page with tongs - for some relief from religious bigotry, try the funny send-up of Fred Phelps & his minions of nastiness at Phelps, of course, requiring tongs and an asbestos suit, is probably still in business at his usual website, which I will not dignify by publicizing. Speaking as a Christian, and as an Episcopal priest, seriously now, religious hatred and bigotry crucify Christ all over again, and make me ashamed. Cynthia -- JMU SAFE ZONES PARTICIPANT Cynthia A. Gilliatt English Department MSC 1801 James Madison University Harrisonburg VA 22807 gilliaca@jmu.edu http://raven.jmu.edu/~gilliaca/ 540-568-3762 or 6202