The Scholar Studying Alone at Night: Secrecy and the Subversive in Milton’s “Il Penseroso”

The image of a solitary scholar studying in the night has resonated across works of literature for centuries. My two favorite examples stand at the beginning and end of more than 200 years of English history; at one end is Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, at the other is Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. Both characters were fashioned by their creators at periods of intense conflict over the function of knowledge as a tool of human perfection and the epistemological endeavor as a whole. Both characters are identified with a secret, subversive form of learning; their subjects of learning are taboo and banal, their practices are apocryphal, sacrilegious, impious and unholy. In particular, the entire thrust of this image, and the aura surrounding it, is directed against the bedrock principles of the Catholic Christian Church. Both Faustus and Frankenstein, as well as their real and fictional compatriots, indulge in practices which are traditionally forbidden by the Catholic Church and are counter-pointed with the “holy” miracles performed by saints and their relics on which the Church so confidently validated itself during the Middle Ages. Both men studied and were inspired by the vision of power offered by a conglomeration of Greek, Hebrew and Egyptian learning; ancient, arcane and esoteric, which came into prominence during the late Middle Ages and on which the Renaissance Magus fashioned himself. This New Learning, acting in opposition to the accepted canon of the Catholic Church, can be thought of as a quasi-scientific discipline which became the target of much persecution by the Church in the Counter-Reformation period.

How does John Milton fit into this neat world picture? Milton was born in 1608 and died in 1674, which means he lived through the reign of Charles I, the English Civil War, the Protectorate and the Restoration of Charles II. I choose to emphasize this obvious historical fact to bring attention to the turmoil and flux that permeated his life span. Granted, in the entire period of English history from the Norman Conquest to the Glorious Revolution there has never been a time of particular stability, but in Milton’s era the religious and political strife became so fierce that a king got beheaded as fallout. Milton’s position in this denominational spectrum has never been very clear, I wonder if he was sure of it himself all his life. One thing can be said with reasonable certainty however; he disliked the entire system of episcopacy, which was identified with Catholicism.

The Anglican Church has never been a very well-defined establishment, ever since Henry VIII’s separation from Rome in 1534. Everybody agreed that the head of the Church was the monarch of England, but nobody was very sure as to actual doctrine and discipline. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1558 called the Church both Catholic and Reformed, which complicated the matter nicely. In the early years of Milton’s life, before the war broke out, the Anglican Church adhered in the main to the Lutheran-Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and thus was a Reformed Church. As regards the system of administration however, the episcopacy was not only flourishing exactly as the Catholic Churches of Europe, it had also become inextricably linked with royal power due to the system of patronage in electing church officials. Thus, James I realized early on that there would be “no Bishop, no King, no nobility”, they all rose and fell together. The Church also held sovereignty over several aspects of the individual’s life. Church attendance was compulsory, everybody had to pay the tithe for the livelihood of a parish priest whom they had no say in electing and the church courts could fine or torture at their own behest. There was growing dissatisfaction with this system which the Puritans identified as little short of popery, and matters came to a head in the thirties under Archbishop Laud, chief minister of Charles I. Under patronage from the King, he gave the clerics greater administrative power, emphasized on rituals and polyphonic music and ended up by rejecting the doctrine of predestination. The Puritan Revolution was in the main carried out by members of the landed gentry below the rank of peers, which included the mercantile classes. These men were in the main chaffing against the “meddling” of both royalty and prelacy in every aspect of their economic and social lives.

Milton was of course against the Laudian Church; he believed he had been kept away from a Church career because he could not agree with the system— “church-outed by the prelates.” He wanted the entire system of episcopacy dissolved; “blind mouths” he calls them in Lycidas, another poem written during this time. What is significant in the context of this paper is that Catholicism is identified with the Church having supreme power over the individual, deciding among other things what he should study. And indeed, the Catholic-prone system of the Anglican Church made education an ecclesiastical monopoly; Oxford and Cambridge were restricted to clerics and nobody could teach in a school or a private family unless authorized by a bishop. Censorship assumed draconian proportions in Caroline England, and this was the first time when the High Commission was as powerful as the Star Chamber in banning books and arresting their writers. In 1626, Charles I issued a royal proclamation forbidding “writing, preaching, printing” of “opinions concerning religion.” Several books like The Spy and The Geneva Bible had to be published abroad and smuggled in due to ecclesiastical licensing. Milton, an outspoken defender of free speech (witness his Areopagitica), wrote in 1641 of “this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish.”

The image we’re looking for across centuries of literary work can be found in “Il Penseroso”, in the following lines;

Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in som high lonely Towr,
Where I may oft out-watch the Bear,
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear
The spirit of Plato to unfold
What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold
 The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook:
And of those Dæmons that are found
In fire, air, flood, or under ground.

Milton, “Il Penseroso”

Not only do these lines incorporate the image of the scholar studying in the night in its most potent and concentrated form, it also carries several other implications interesting for us to observe. Complicating the image is the fact that Milton is here talking about a kind of scholastic process long since outdated. While it is true that a Hermetic-Cabbalistic discipline was the progenitor of modern science, it is also true that in Milton’s time the neo-platonic ideas were largely dismissed by the 17^th century empirical philosophy, which held that the only truth was that demonstrable by experience. At the time of writing “Il Penseroso”, the Royal Society had disproved the magical theory of the spontaneous generation of maggots, the magical animism of Robert Fludd and the idea that magnetism and electricity were the products of occult influences. The short lived partnership of religion and science, based on a common thirst for the unknown and the use of experimentation to acquire it, was coming to an end. Why then would Milton use such an arcane image as the fulcrum of his celebration of scholarly endeavor?

Perhaps the answer can be found in the relation with of both magic and science with respect to Catholic Christianity; during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Counter Reformation. In order to fully understand this relation, we must take ourselves back to the origin of Hermetism, its rediscovery in the Late Middle Ages and the effect it had on the succeeding intellectual movements.

Hermetism as a branch of mystical philosophy had existed through the Middle Ages, but it was revived in the year 1463 when the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino translated into latin a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum under the orders of Cosimo de’ Medici. As Dame Frances Yates has shown, the enthusiasm around the Hermetic philosophy was based on a colossal error in the dating of the Hermetica, the authoritative text of the Hermetic philosophy. The Hermetica was ascribed to an all-knowing Egyptian saint called Hermes Trismegistus; who lived in remote antiquity and from whom all the ancient pagan prophets, notably Moses and Plato, were said to have derived their knowledge. In reality, the Hermetica was written between the 1^st and 3^rd centuries A.D. (Isaac Casaubon’s redating of the Hermetica in 1614 started the decline of magical learning) by several unknown Greek authors and expressed the dominant Greek philosophy of the time, with a smattering of Egyptian, Jewish and Persian influences.

The apocalyptic historicism of early Christianity accepted Hermes as a real person, one of the first Gentile prophets to foresee the coming of Christ. Thus the name of Hermes Trismegistus carried an enormous amount of reverence and awe for the learned men of the Middle Ages, notably Paracelsus and Roger Bacon, who called him the “Father of all philosophers.” Natural Philosophy is an art of constant purification and refinement, and Hermetism became the practice through which divinity could be drawn into physical inanimate objects, or the human soul could become incorporated into the all-encompassing divine. The characteristics of substances which we now understand as their physical property were taken to be occult influences of talismanic magic.

Hermetism as a practical discipline had three branches; mathematics, alchemy and astrology. All three exercised tremendous influence on the magi-scientists of the Renaissance, all of whom had read the Hermetica. Ficino incorporated the neo-platonic metaphysics into his medical treatise Libri De Vita, and since astrological movements were thought to influence human physiology, his work has distinct evocations to Hermetic talismanic magic. The Catholic Church’s suspicion of magic during the Middle Ages meant that this modern magical philosophy had to be incorporated into the Christian doctrine, and Ficino constantly refers to symbols and images commensurate with Christianity (the neo-platonic triad, creation of the Word, foreseeing the Flood etc.) to reconcile the two. Pico Della Mirandola, the younger contemporary of Ficino, throws into this esoteric broth his Jewish Cabbalistic philosophy, to show how both were imperfect preceding forms of the Christian truth. Michael Servetus, the first European to correctly describe the circulation of blood in the body, was a profound Hermetic scholar and was burned at stake for heresy. The daimones whom Milton refers to in the poem are the thirty-six gods of the zodiac in Egyptian philosophy, which greatly influenced mathematicians of the time. “What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold” can be read as an explicit reference to the doctrine of the infinite universe and multiple worlds, championed by Bruno and feared by the Church.

Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium celestium in 1543, the “epoch-making hypothesis” of the heliocentric system.  Although he reached his conclusions based not on magic but on mathematical calculations, it is significant that he couches his theory in religious terms, the sun’s centrality in God’s universe being a tenet of the neo-platonic faith. Thus the intense emphasis on sun worship in Hermetic and neo-platonic doctrine both influenced and gave weight to the groundbreaking astronomical system.

The neo-Platonic humanists like Ficino and Mirandola were followers of a natural religion with focus on spirituality and learning. They were devout Christians who believed that the ancient Egyptian and Greek texts they studied merely predated the truth which reached perfection in Early Christianity; in their discipline magic, religion and science progressed together towards the ultimate truth. Several of their beliefs came into conflict with the established Catholic Church, but since they concentrated on the path of salvation being on individual reform, they could work within its fold. It took the ruthless evangelism of Martin Luther to shake the establishment of the Catholic Church down to its roots; and spark off the Protestant Reformation. The Counter Reformation which occurred as a response did not differentiate between the Catholic neo-platonic humanist and the anti-Catholic Protestant, clubbed both as “heretics” and placed under the Index Librorum Prohibitorum hermetic, scientific and Protestant books.

The Counter Reformation is marked by a lot of burning, both of books and actual people. One such scholar to come under its pyrofilia was Giordano Bruno, of especial interest in the context of Hermetism.  Bruno was a deeply religious hermetist and an outspoken member of a movement which Paul Johnson calls the third force, whose pioneers were a number of learnt men tired of Catholic-Protestant factionalism and seeking to reunite the various warring denominations of Christianity under a universal discipline. The foundational values of this discipline are very similar to the Erasmian doctrine of learning, in which natural philosophy, mysticism, spiritualism and metaphysics all come together to take faltering steps towards what later became empirical science. Prominent advocates of this third force included besides Bruno the English magician John Dee, the Florentine humanist Francesco Pucci and the late neo-platonist Tommaso Campanella. All these men came under the persecution of the Catholic Inquisition; Bruno and Pucci were burnt, John Dee was saved as he lived in England and Campanella saved himself by writing propaganda for the Catholic mission. The third force was manifested in a secret republic of learning flourishing across Europe underneath all the repression, an important example of which is the Rosicrucian Order. Coming into prominence during this time, it influenced several mathematicians and astronomers like Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe and gave rise to the Invisible College, which had distinct connections with the later Republic of Letters and the Royal Society of England.

The third force could never become an official order, as the fear of being charged with heresy relegated several of these so-called enlightened men to pursue their learning and empirical observations in secret. Following along the lines of Bruno was the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, whose observations proved beyond a doubt the veracity of the Copernican model. He was investigated by the Roman Inquisition, and his writings were found contrary to scripture. In 1633, three decades after the burning of Bruno, he was found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, forced to recant and thereafter placed under house arrest until his death.

In such a climate of fear and persecution, it is evident that the scholar dabbling in this “New Learning” would be forced to pursue his art in secret. The image of a scholar studying in the night thus takes on a different coloring when we consider the political and social background to this literary image. Of course, this is given its most subversive form in Doctor Faustus, the first scene of which shows Faustus alone in his study, launching a diatribe against the traditional canon of learning. He calls Divinity ‘unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile’ and then disappears into the night to ‘practice magic and concealed arts.’ And lets not forget Faustus's identification with Simon Magus, founder of the gnostic philosophy, who tried to buy from apostle Peter the Catholic miracle of conferring the Holy Ghost. Faustus with his vast learning, interest in the unknown especially astrology, and use of magic to gain inordinate power becomes the representation of the fear and suspicion with which the Catholic Church regarded this learning which it did not control. Marlowe like Milton lived at a time of intellectual upheaval, when the old neo-Platonic optimism came into conflict with Protestant and Calvinist determinism. Faustus’s aspirations and his subsequent damnation make him the quintessential figure around which such debate could be carried out.

My other example, that of Victor Frankenstein, also comes at a moment of crisis and questioning, when the mechanistic philosophy of 17^th century England was waning due to the incumbent organic philosophies from Germany. As Faustus is a subversive form of the Renaissance Man, so is Frankenstein (an initial admirer of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, it should be remembered) that of the Romantic Man. Both men possess a scintillating acumen which makes them go beyond the accepted canon of learning of their time. Both men venture into the unknown, indulge in taboo practices and are consequently damned. Both men work at night.

Milton was a man of vast and versatile learning, who spent much of his life as a scholar. Il Penseroso was probably composed in the years after he left Cambridge, when he was in scholarly exile in his father’s home at Hammersmith, amassing a great deal of knowledge in the classics as well as scripture. By his own account of his childhood, he frequently studied through the night and it is unlikely that he gave up the habit in his youth, which might have accelerated his blindness. Is it very hard to believe that he might have thought himself a descendant of the third force, a late neo-platonic humanist whose learning becomes the means through which his “immortal mind” forsakes “Her mansion in this fleshly nook”?

As mentioned before, the Anglican Church was never a very well-defined Church. This is why an enormous amount of suspicion was attached to anyone who took his Anglicanism loosely, because no one was sure where Anglicanism ended and Catholicism began. Archbishop Laud’s censorship of anti-Arminian books, his insistence on ceremonies like railing the altar as well as administrative decisions like taking back the land from the Scottish laity which had originally belonged to the Church; made people suspect that the Church under him was gravitating towards Catholicism. Milton might have participated in this suspicion. Perhaps his image is an admonitory reference to the persecution and censorship going on in the Continent at this time; which was also going on in his own country in full gusto. This was the climate of control and totalitarianism that forced scholars to study in secret at night, when their taboo activities would not come under the notice of the surveying authority. The reference to Hermetism and various facets of the neo-platonic theory combined with the ideas associated with studying during night-time, add a feature of secrecy and subversiveness to this image in a poem normally read as a praise of the individual scholarly endeavor. 

Bibliography:

Christopher Hill: The Century of Revolution

Frances Yates: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

Cyndia Susan Clegg: Press Censorship in Caroline England

David Masson: The Life of John Milton

Paul Johnson: A History of Christianity

Andrew Milner: John Milton and the English Revolution 

F.E.Hutchinson: Milton and the English Mind

Ashavari Bhattacharya

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