Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Individual Assignment

While researching, I found a book called The Matter of Revolution by John Rogers. This book had some background on the English Revolution, but it mostly focused on Milton, a few other key writers, and "the Vitalist Movement." The book speaks of William Harvey, whose main contributions were to medical science, Margaret Cavendish, another writer who was eventually compared to Milton's idea of Eve in Paradise Lost, and Andrew Marvell. These three other authors seem to have affected Milton or the time in which Milton was writing.
Harvey, giving a vitalist understanding of the difference between body and soul. "'Life cannot consist without a Vital Spirit. Therefore when the Vital Spirit is distributed in and with the Arterious Blood to the solid parts through the Arteries, and these parts do suck in that Blood into their substance, it comes to pass, that the said parts are co-united with the Vital Spirits, and so they participate of the Nature of Life' (page 100)" (page 106). These new developments in medical science affected how people thought about their bodies, and also about their faith, since they believed the two were connected in some way. Milton published a political document called the Defense of the English People, following another theory of the body politic, stating that rational men organize themselves even without the centralizing pressures of an absolute monarchy. He however backed away from his stance in this document not long after it was published. “We have seen the generally liberal impulses behind the idealist philosophy of popular sovereignty marking Milton’s Defense. Not long after its publication, however, Milton edged away from the faith, expressed (however haltingly) in his treatises of the Vitalist Movement, that God had invested the power of self-determination in the “people.” He began instead to forward a more authoritarian vision of a state governed not by the people but by a parliament and, finally, by an even more select and limited council of the nation’s ablest and most rational citizens” (page 110). Here, it is shown that Milton wanted to get rid of the government that was present, just like Satan did, and was even willing to use military force against the “unruly majority” that most likely would have rebelled. Milton begins to see himself as divine, just as Satan did in Paradise Lost. Milton seems to exibit some of the same characteristics that Satan does, which eventually caused him to fall.

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