Milton's Victory

...Some historians argue that Hill has overestimated the importance of fringe thinkers, whose numbers were small and whose program was not ultimately accepted...

...Cromwell effectively quashed this and other forms of millenarianism...

...In The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (Viking, 342 pp., $20.00), the celebrated English historian Christopher Hill examines the despair true believers felt after the Restoration and compares their initial fervor to the ecstasy of liberal-minded men and women in the early stages of the French Revolution...

...Not until generations after their suppression did Levelling notions prosper...

...Bishoprics were abolished...

...In this book, the author documents his contention that when Milton issued his well-known defense of divorce, or denied Jesus' equality with God the Father, or expressed his faith in free speech, he was acting as a particularly eloquent spokesman for a movement...

...Its collapse] therefore called into question either God's goodness or his omnipotence, or their understanding of God's will...

...As the Regicides, the signers of Charles I's death warrant, were brought to trial, scoffers jeered, "Where is your Good Old Cause now...

...While the Levellers and Diggers at least claimed that the Bible was their foundation, Ranter Abiezer Coppe declared that "Scripture is not the Word of God, and any church is superfluous because God works through people...

...The World Turned Upside Down (1972) discussed several leading mid-17 th-century radicals and Milton's role, allegedly large, in formulating and promoting their convictions...

...jl n their own day the Levellers spawned yet more radical and ineffectual revolutionary cliques...

...Milton, vanguard intellectual as well as sensitive poet, seems to me essential for our understanding of the English Revolution...

...For the first time, a Western nation deposed and executed its reigning king (Charles I) by due process of sorts...

...Digger writings helped shape Milton's thought, and later influenced early Socialists, including Marx...

...True Levellers," or Diggers, carried egalitarianism to the point of rejecting private property...

...Milton had no intention of preaching the certainty of failure or acquiescence to tyranny...

...Cromwell died in 1658...

...Like most modern historians, he believed the Puritan Revolution had confirmed the collapse of medieval society and established a monied oligarchy in its place...

...Multitudes believed that God was at last setting up his reign of saints in an England where class privilege would give way to liberty and justice for all...

...The eventual collapse of the regime "he had believed to be God's cause, and to which he had given up the best years of his life, was a shattering blow...

...Toleration was briefly extended to such extremists as the Levellers, the Diggers and the Quakers—sects that challenged not only the authority of the clergy but the very concept of an established church...

...His commitment to relatively egalitarian values, human freedom and the spiritual strengths of art became a powerful legacy to the Romantics: Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and their heirs...

...The three great poems of his last years [Paradise Lost in 1667, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in 1671] represent, among many other things, his attempt to come to terms with this defeat: to rethink his whole position in order to 'Assert eternal providence/And justify the ways of God to men.'" The Experience of Defeat completes the author's trilogy...

...Pragmatic, worldly philosophies of the kind Harrington offered, says Hill, were a common response to defeat: "Men had believed that their Cause was invincible because it was God's...

...but the people of England for whom Milton was writing might one day do better,' let but them I Find courage to lay hold on this occasion.'" Hill rightly reminds us that Milton saw England as a "nation of prophets" calling God's people to action...

...Quite a few literary critics, moreover, insist that Milton did write in what is here scornfully called'' a timeless vacuum," developing an unorthodox theology independently of any party...

...The Restoration government silenced Harrington, but Marvell wittily used some of his views to defend Milton's support of Cromwell—and got away with it...

...All three reactions could be subversive of traditional ideas of God...

...History," remarks Hill, "indeed looks different when you know the end of the story: the defeat of Israel [in Samson A gonistes], the apostasy of the early Christians [foretold to Adam in ParadiseLost], But both of Milton's poems are allegories for his own time rather than histories [where] the end is closed...

...More important, Hill demonstrates that defeatism about the capacity of literature to change our lives diminishes our understanding of poetry's role...

...The most important of them, Gerrard Winstanley, devised a 17th-century version of Liberation Theology aimed at establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and rejected the historical Jesus in favor of the "Christ within" each person...

...In art [everything] is open...

...It has become fashionable to think of the Puritan Revolution as a mere civil war generated primarily by the decline of a technologically primitive agrarian society in the face of economic and social progress, rather than by political or religious beliefs...

...Milton and the English Revolution (1978) charted the decline of the poet's political hopes and his attempt to salvage his spiritual ideals through poetry...

...Even Cromwell soon discovered that he could unfailingly distract attention from the shortcomings of his administration by denouncing the subversive Levellers...

...Thomas Jefferson used to quote their most famous aphorism: "None comes into the world with a saddle upon his back, neither any booted or spurred to ride him...

...Other scholars in the field have resisted many of Hill's theories...

...Milton in the 1640s," wearetold, "shared much of the Wordsworthian excitement of those days when it was bliss to be alive, but to be young was very heaven...

...Harrington argued that the 16th-century shift in landownership from Crown to Church, on the one hand, to the gentry and yeomen, on the other, had upset the underpinnings of England's traditional social order, especially the monarchy and the nobility...

...Our own disillusionment with the imperfect world we inhabit has seduced us into the error that art alone, not current events, can inspire art...

...Since no strongman emerged to fill the shoes of the late Lord Protector, a cabal of political leaders and generals united to arrange the return of King Charles II in 1660...

...They further objected to prayer and to preaching, since God obviously no longer interfered with his creations— witness the state of the Good Old Cause itself...

...The Muggletonians denied the Trinity altogether—as, in a more moderate way, did Milton...

...Prominent among them were the Levellers, "democrats who could never have been returned to power by any possible electorate—or only after a long period of freedom to propagate their views...

...Writers were allowed to publish their works without submitting to clerical censorship...

...Winstanley appears to have died an adherent of Quakerism, which survived thanks to its willingness to compromise...

...Samson's destruction of the Philistine aristocracy and clergy, the Son of God's triumph over Satan, opened up possibilities which in the past were not acted upon...

...Hill makes a convincing case that 17th-century sectarians influenced one of the greatest poets in our language and were in turn influenced by him...

...The future stability of such a commonwealth would, Harrington proposed, require colonial expansion to enlarge the opportunities available to Englishmen...

...John Milton and Andrew Marvell had served that cause and lavished their talents on defending its leader...

...Beaumarchais and Stendhal...

...Significantly, suppression of the democratic advocates produced a flowering of ultra-extremists...

...In the long run, the most influential ideologue of the Puritan Revolution was James Harrington, a protopolitical economist rather than a theologian...

...Against the spreading utilitarianism of the day he argued that God acts through the works of the faithful, who might be unblessed by mundane success yet witness to Christ's love, to His obedience to the Father's will...

...Often we forget that they, too, were political poets...

...Clarkson in 1659 had heard men say that God was a devil and a tyrant...

...Democracy seemed too dangerous for all except the most advanced minds of the 17th century: Anglicans and Calvinists, Cavaliers and Parliamentarians detested and persecuted Leveller chief John Lilburne, an early civil libertarian and the author of spirited pleas on behalf of religious toleration, the abolition of tithes, equality under the law, and political freedom...

...Ownership, not heredity or ecclesiastical privilege, would henceforth constitute the source of power...

...How should we understand the French Revolution without Rousseau...

...Where would our understanding of the Russian Revolution be without Chekhov and Gorky, without Blok's The Twelve, in which [Gerrard] Winstanley' s 'head Leveller' Jesus Christ leads the advancing revolutionary soldiers...

...Hill demonstrates that other religious and political speculators shared Milton's outlook and were hardly less intriguing...

...Literature, Hill notes, has always revealed more about the human reaction to events than state documents possibly can...

...This dream quickly soured: The military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell took control of the legislature, and the Cal-vinist clergy proved no friendlier to sectarians than Anglican bishops had been...

...he hath done that he cannot make good.' They openly preferred 'a money-God.'" This disillusioned audience, Hill contends, spurred Milton to write his great poems...

...Harringtonianism fared better in the 18th century and found a fervent disciple in our own John Adams...

...The Ranters struck at the root of theological conceptions of society's basis...

...It also did away with the House of Lords and entrusted its affairs to an elected House of Commons...

...within months, the country was tired of Army rule...