Animadversions upon Cancel Culture, or Thoughts on Reading Poet of Revolution, The Making of John Milton (2020), by Nicholas McDowell

I doubt whether the contemporary relevance of Milton’s critique of episcopal censorship was uppermost in Nicholas McDowell’s mind when he wrote his intellectual biography of the early Milton (up to 1642; a second volume is to follow). Nevertheless, as we shall see, relevant it is to our age of cancel culture with its stifling effects on the cultural life of the West. At least one reviewer of the important book (Paul Krause—see below) noted the parallels between the intellectual inquisition then and now and how what Milton had to say in the early 1640s in England about the pernicious effects of such censorship is no less pertinent today.

McDowell’s book addresses a key question in Milton scholarship: How did the minor poet of seemingly conventional political and religious views emerge in 1641 (the year he published “Of Reformation,” the first of his anti-prelatical tracts) as a fiery and formidable prose polemicist for the Parliamentary cause, who would in 1649 defend the execution of Charles I? Did he harbor radical Puritan views all along, as Christopher Hill, Barbara Lewalski, and other 20^th-century scholars contended, placing him on the spectrum of radical sects of what Hill and others deemed a “third culture” in the English polity? Or was the youthful Milton a religious and political conservative, in sync with the ideas and policies of Charles’s Archbishop Laud, who underwent a sudden conversion to the radical Puritan cause, as Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns contend in a biography that appeared in 2008, the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth?

Instead, McDowell argues that Milton’s outlook, poetic ambitions, and ultimately political actions all were shaped by his emersion in the Erasmian humanist tradition that was still alive in England. He makes his case persuasively through an exhaustive exploration of Milton’s early writings—principally, academic poetry composed while at Christ’s College, Cambridge, his Maske, and early poems such as the “Nativity Ode” and “Lycidas,” as well as the entries in his commonplace book. Starting with his education at St. Paul’s School in London, whose curriculum had been designed for the school’s founder, John Colet, by Erasmus himself, Milton followed an intensive course of reading in classical and modern languages which continued through his self-directed “post-graduate” study at Hammersmith and Horton after he had left Cambridge. Central to this tradition was the notion that a nation’s flourishing depended on the free flow of ideas and that any kind of censorship had a deadening effect. From early on it was Milton’s explicit ambition to follow in the footsteps of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to become his nation’s epic poet, once he had absorbed the universal learning necessary to do so.

McDowell’s thesis explains why Milton was ready and eager to join the anti-episcopal cause with the Presbyterians in Parliament in 1642. His aversion to censorship by the Laudian religious authorities was in his DNA, so to speak; it threatened both the cultural health of the nation and his own ambition to follow the path of universal learning to become an epic poet (study that included such forbidden texts as Dante’s De Monarchia, burned by the papal Inquisition as heretical for its arguments in favor of a balanced relationship between civil and clerical authority, and several of the sonnets of Petrarch critical of the papal court at Avignon). His tour of Italy in 1638-39, which Milton tells us included a visit to Galileo, under house arrest for his heliocentric views, confirmed his fears of how an inquisitorial regime could destroy a once vibrant culture such as Renaissance Italy.

McDowell’s thesis also explains why Milton’s anti-prelatical tracts are full of allusions to humanist Catholics such as Dante, Petrarch, and Paolo Sarpi (He saw them as proto-Protestants!), and why he focuses on the issues with which he and the Presbyterians were in agreement—the Laudian church’s materiality and its usurpation of civil power—but not on a theological issue upon which he had profound differences with them: Calvinist predestination. (Inserting his views on free will in the tracts would likely have confused matters as one of the Presbyterians’ chief criticisms of Laud was his espousal of the Arminian free will position.) Demonstrating his ecumenicism, Milton freely cited classical texts as well as the Bible, and when in the 1650s he expounds his views on theology in De Doctrina Christiana, it is Homer whom he cites to confute the doctrine of predestination: Zeus’s complaint in the opening book of the Odyssey that mortals blame their bad outcomes on the gods when it is their own doing that brings evil upon them. A striking endorsement of free will by two poets across the centuries!

Free will and its relationship to true virtue will, of course, be central to Paradise Lost: “I made him just and right,/Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. . . . Not free, what proof could they have given sincere/Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love.” McDowell identifies Areopagitica (1644) as “Milton’s first public defence of a free will theology, grounded in a moral philosophy of virtuous and rational choice,” but he emphasizes that it is a “public formulation of long-held beliefs,” not a transition from Calvinist predestination to a free will soteriology.

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercized and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without heat and dust,” Milton writes in what was a tract against prepublication licensing: censorship of the kind he personally witnessed on his visit to the once great culture of Italy. Good and evil are inseparably entwinned. Reason is but choosing. Even bad, heretical books have a place in the strengthening of individual virtue and the pursuit of truth.

Which brings us back to Milton’s contemporary relevance. As Paul Krause writes in his review of Poet of Revolution, “No doubt Milton would have much to say on the destruction of our own intellectual progress today as we slip into our own era of intellectual inquisition and cultural backsliding precisely because of the clamping down on intellectual inquiry and the destruction of humanist education in favor of imposed dogmas.” The satirist in Milton might even have enjoyed directing his barbs against speech codes, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and all the monstrosities of the cancel culture.