Milton

By the way, if you have an Ipod, this link will take you to an Itunes free podcast of some English class reading Milton.

I haven't listened to it yet, but it's free!

I'm also listening to Professor Seth Lerer's Teaching Company lectures on "The Writings of Milton." I got them several years ago when I decided my next great project would be to read Paradise Lost. I grounded out at 5 minutes into the 4th lecture (of 12) and the first one Paradise Lost, so I had to start from the beginning and have just got back to Lecture 4.

Now I remember why I grounded out where I did. Either Lerer has the ability to suck the interest from the subject or I am not equipped to appreciate the cascading similes of Milton.

I think I'm beginning to side with Samual Johnson, who said of Paradise Lost, "none wished it longer." I almost feel the same way about Milton's life at Lecture 4.

Something I will be watching for that Lerer points out: apparently, Satan speaks in similes and God doesn't.

Also, Lerer doesn't point this out, but I notice from simultaneously reading Gillespie's "The Theological Origins of Modernity", which has a chapter on Thomas Hobbes, that Hobbes and Milton were contemporaries (along with Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650).)

Hobbes was born in 1588 and lived to sometime in the 1680s - so much for life being "nasty, brutal and short" - and Milton was born in 1609. They were on opposite sides of the Royalist-Parlamentary struggle since Milton was Cromwell's "Secretary of Foreign Languages" and Hobbes' was a Royalist sympathizer who had to hightail it to the Continent at various times when Cromwell was in power. Both Hobbes and Milton were Calvinists, and Hobbes was very much into Calvinist predestinationism, which was a basis for his science and philosophy.

Given the divine voluntarism and nominalism that forms the basis of Calvinism, I think it would be interesting to see how much of that view is incorporated into Paradise Lost.

At least, that's one of the things I will be looking for.