So when you think of John Milton, what's the
first image that comes into your head? Oh, it's
the bust. The stone bust. That's always the bust,
isn't it? The one you see in a dusty university
library. He's old. He's blind. He looks incredibly
severe. Right. He's encased in marble. He looks
like homework. Like, he is the absolute definition
of English lit that you're supposed to respect,
but, you know, maybe don't actually enjoy reading.
Exactly. He feels like a statue. And, uh... Our
mission for this deep dive is to basically take
a hammer to that statue. It's a tragedy, really,
that that's the version of him that survives.
Because if you actually dig into the sources,
the biographies, the court records, his own pamphlets,
that statue just crumbles. It shatters. The man
underneath is not boring. He's actually terrifyingly
radical. That's the word. He has more in common
with a modern revolutionary firebrand than some
tenured professor. Right. This is a man who spent
years publicly arguing that the English people
had a moral and religious duty to execute their
own king. A guy who wrote these scandalous pamphlets
defending divorce that got him branded a heretic.
And that central tension. That's what we're exploring
today. How does this guy, this dangerous regicide
defending politician, end up writing Paradise
Lost, the greatest religious epic in the English
language? How do you go from being the enemy
of the state to being supposed to be? Supposedly
the voice of God. To figure that out, we have
to go right back to the beginning. The raw material.
We're on Bread Street, London, 1608. He's born
into a pretty well -off family, but it's a specific
kind of well -off. His father, John Milton Sr.,
was a scrivener. Which is sort of a mix of a
lawyer, a notary, a moneylender. A bit of everything.
But the key thing about his father, he was also
a serious musician. A composer. And that's not
just a fun fact, is it? That musicality is absolutely
core to understanding Milton. It's non -negotiable.
His father's music, it wired Milton's brain for
rhythm, for sound, for cadence. When you get
to Paradise Lost later, you're not just reading
words on a cage. You're hearing a symphony. But
the father also gave him something else. A kind
of model for rebellion. That's right. The grandfather
was a devout Catholic. And he disowned Milton's
father for becoming a Protestant. So the lesson
young John learns right from the start is you
stick to your convictions, even if it costs you
everything. And he took that lesson, that intensity,
and just... aimed it at books. The accounts of
his childhood are, frankly, a little frightening.
Yeah, his brother Christopher left a record.
He did. He claimed that from the age of 12, John
basically never went to bed before midnight,
sometimes one in the morning. As a 12 -year -old.
Just reading. Yeah. By candlelight. Yeah. For
hours and hours. And you can't help but think,
you know, that's the origin story. Of the blindness.
Exactly. That eye strain, night after night for
decades. He was in a very real way burning his
own eyes out for the sake of knowledge. So eventually
he gets to Cambridge, Christ's College, and you'd
think, okay, a guy this brilliant, he must have
been the star of the show. Not exactly. The sources
give us this amazing, slightly petty detail about
his social life there. The nickname. The nickname.
The other students called him the Lady of Christ's
College. And was that just about his looks? Because
I read he was, you know, fair complexioned. It
was partly that. He was described as having light
brown hair, very fair skin, kind of delicate
features. He didn't have that sort of rough masculine
look of the era, but it was also an insult about
his personality. He was haughty. He was incredibly
arrogant, very chaste. He just thought he was
better than everyone else in there. you know,
college drinking games. And he clashed with authority
pretty much immediately. There's that story about
him being rusticated or suspended. Yes, after
a huge fight with his tutor, a man named William
Chappell. And there are even rumors from John
Aubrey's brief lives that Chappell might have
actually whipped him. Can you imagine? The future
author of Paradise Lost getting caned like a
schoolboy. It had to be a huge moment of humiliation
for him. You can see it in his own writing. He
talks about how much he hated the fools he went
to school with, how he mocked them for acting
in silly comedies. Because in his mind, he was
already set apart for something greater. He was
destined. He believed he was chosen by God to
write a great English epic, a poem that, in his
words, the world would not willingly let die.
That level of self -belief is just staggering.
And it explains his next move. Because most people
graduate, they get a job. Milton graduates and
moves back home with his parents. For six years.
For six years. It sounds like a total failure
to launch, right? But it was actually a self
-designed, hyper -intense PhD program. reading
systematically reading everything i mean everything
the entire classical canon church history philosophy
theology and not just in english and latin greek
hebrew italian french he was building an arsenal
inside his own mind he wouldn't let himself start
writing his masterpiece until he felt he knew
everything worth knowing and once he felt like
the uh the hard drive was full he set off on
the grand tour 1638 France and then Italy. And
this isn't a vacation. This is where he finally
finds people he considers his intellectual peers.
He absolutely thrived. He'd go to these academies
in Florence, which were basically intellectual
fight clubs. And the Italians were just stunned
by this young Englishman who could recite Latin
poetry better than they could. But the real moment,
the one that echoes through everything that comes
after, is his visit to Galileo. It's just so
cinematic, isn't it? It is. You have the young
Milton, full of potential, his eyesight still
perfect. And then you have the old Galileo, already
blind and under house arrest by the Inquisition.
A martyr for the truth. Precisely. Galileo had
used his telescope to discover the truth about
the cosmos. And for that, the church, this huge
authoritarian power, had silenced him. Milton
never, ever forgot that. He saw firsthand what
happens when a government tries to censor reality.
And in a deeply ironic way, he's also looking
at a version of his own future. A blind genius,
politically isolated, but still speaking truth
to power. He wanted to stay in Italy, didn't
he? So he had to cut the trip short. He did.
He gets word of sad tidings of civil war in England.
And this sense of duty just kicks in. He basically
says, I can't be traveling abroad for my own
pleasure while my countrymen are fighting for
liberty. So he turns around and heads straight
for the storm. And in true Milton fashion, the
first thing he does is walk directly into a personal
storm of his own making. The marriage. The marriage.
Yeah. It is such a baffling disaster. A complete
train wreck. He's 34 years old. He's one of the
most well -read people on the planet. And he
marries Mary Powell, who's 17. 17. And from a
royalist family. The political opposition. What
could possibly go wrong? Everything, apparently.
It lasted, what, a month? About a month, maybe
a bit longer, before she just packed up her bags
and went back to her parents. She apparently
found his lifestyle too quiet, too. Philosophical.
I mean, you can kind of see her point. Being
married to a man that intense must have been
like living in a library where you're not allowed
to make any noise. But here's where Milton is
just different from other people. A normal person
gets left, they feel sad. Maybe they drink. That's
right. Milton decides that if his marriage is
a failure, then the entire legal and theological
concept of marriage in England must be fundamentally
wrong. And he's going to fix it. Which kicks
off his career as a pamphleteer. The divorce
tracks. You have to understand how radical this
was. In the 1640s, marriage was a sacrament.
You were locked in for life. The only exception
was adultery. And even then, you could separate,
but you couldn't remarry. But Milton's argument
isn't about adultery at all. It's surprisingly
modern. He's talking about incompatibility. He
is. But he gets there through a very theological
route. He goes back to Genesis, to the creation
of Eve. He says God made her to be a helpmeet
for Adam, a suitable companion. A meeting of
minds. A meeting of minds. minds and souls. And
his argument is if that companionship is impossible,
if the couple is totally incompatible, then the
marriage has already failed its core biblical
purpose. He has that brutal line about it. The
one about chaining a living soul to a dead corpse.
That's the one. It's visceral. And the reaction
was just as visceral. The Presbyterian clergy,
who were supposed to be his allies against the
king, they turned on him instantly. They called
him a heretic, a libertine, a divorcer. This
must have been a huge betrayal for him. It was.
It's where he learns that these religious authorities
don't actually want freedom for everyone. They
just want to be the ones in charge. So when they
try to shut him up by passing this licensing
order, demanding all books get pre -approved
by the government. Milton just goes nuclear.
And this gives us one of the most important texts
ever written on the subject of free speech. It
gives us Areopagitica, a speech for the liberty
of unlicensed printing. It is, and I'm not exaggerating,
the foundational document for freedom of the
press in the entire English -speaking world.
But his argument isn't the one we hear a lot
today, is it? It's not this sort of secular,
I can say whatever I want idea. It's deeply religious.
That's the key nuance. His whole argument rests
on God. God gave humanity reason and free will.
And for that free will to have any meaning, you
have to be able to choose between good and evil.
You can't be virtuous if you've never been tempted.
Exactly. If you censor all the bad books, if
you protect people from every wrong idea, you're
not making them virtuous, you're just keeping
them ignorant. It's his famous line, I cannot
praise a fugitive in cloistered virtue. Virtue
that hasn't been tested isn't real virtue. It's
just innocence. And that's why he says, he who
destroys a good book kills reason itself. It's
just so profound. Yeah. But while he's fighting
these intellectual wars, The real war, the Civil
War, is coming to a head. The king, Charles I,
is captured. He's defeated. And in 1649, the
radical faction in Parliament does something
that no one thought was possible. They put their
own king on trial for treason. And they cut off
his head. And you just cannot overstate the shockwave
this sent across Europe. The king wasn't just
a ruler. He was seen as God's anointed deputy
on earth. To execute him was a form of sacrilege.
The English Republic was basically a pariah state.
Completely. And they desperately needed an intellectual
defender, someone who could justify this act
to a horrified world. And John Milton steps up.
He's appointed secretary for foreign tongues.
Which sounds like he's just a translator, but
really he was the minister of propaganda for
the new government. The intellectual gladiator.
That's a good way to put it. His job was to fight
with his pen. When the royalists put out this
hugely successful book, Icon Besselike, painting
Charles I as a saintly martyr. Milton was ordered
to destroy it. And he wrote. Iconoclasties, the
image breaker, just tearing it apart. Then he
wrote his great Latin defense, the Defensio Pro
Populo Anglicano, defending the English people
for the act of regicide. And he literally worked
himself blind doing it. He did. His eyesight
had been failing for years, a result of all that
childhood study. But the doctors gave him a clear
warning. They said, if you keep doing this intensive
reading and writing for the government, you will
lose your sight completely. And he just chose
the work. He saw it as a test. a sacrifice for
the cause he kept writing by candlelight using
these harsh medical treatments that probably
just made it worse and by 1652 at the age of
44 it was gone total darkness total irreversible
blindness and you can just feel the despair in
that sign he writes when i consider how my light
is spent he's asking this profound question doth
god exact day labor Light denied. How can God
expect me to serve him when he's taken away my
ability to see? It's a moment of absolute crisis,
but... He doesn't quit. And this is just the
core of who he is. The resilience is incredible.
This starts dictating. He dictates. He hires
assistants, amanuenses. He continues to be the
voice of the English Republic, even when he can't
see the paper in front of him. He is the blind
champion of the revolution. Until the revolution
itself fails. Until it all comes crashing down.
1660, the restoration, the monarchy is back.
The son of the king they executed, Charles II,
is invited to take the throne. The game is over.
And at that moment, John Milton is arguing. the
most wanted man in England. Absolutely. Other
than the men who actually signed the death warrant,
he's public enemy number one. He's the guy who
wrote the official justification for killing
the new king's father. So everyone else is running
for cover, trying to get a pardon, switching
sides. And what does Milton do? This is what
just defines him for me. As the royalist ships
are literally sailing back to England, he publishes
one last desperate pamphlet. Ready and easy way
to establish a free commonwealth. It's like a
political suicide note. It is. He's screaming
at the English people, calling them fools for
running back to the yoke of monarchy. It was
completely futile, a total lost cause. But he
refused to be silent, even with the executioner
basically at the door. He has to go into hiding.
There's a warrant for his arrest. His books are
publicly burned by the hangman. He's eventually
caught and imprisoned. And it's frankly a miracle
he wasn't executed. Hanged, drawn and quartered.
He had friends who spoke up for him. Andrew Marvell,
the poet. Yes. Friends like Marvell managed to
get him pardoned and released. But he emerges
from this a completely broken man. He's blind.
He's poor. Most of his money is gone. He's suffering
from gout. And the great political cause that
he sacrificed his sight for is dead and buried.
And here's the great irony of his life. If he
had died a successful politician or if he had
been executed in 1660, we probably wouldn't be
talking about him today. Not in the same way,
no. But because he was defeated, because he was
cast out and forced into this quiet, impoverished
retirement, he finally had the time. He finally
had the time to write the poem he had promised
himself he would write since he was a boy. He
starts Paradise Lost. And the way he composed
it is the stuff of legend. It's almost mythic.
He couldn't see, he couldn't write, so he had
to compose these long, complex stretches of verse
entirely in his head, usually at night. And then
dictate them in the morning. Yes, he talked about
waking up and needing to be milked. He'd have
40 or 50 lines of perfect poetry stored in his
memory, and he was desperate to get them down
on paper before he forgot them. Dictating to
whoever was there, an assistant, sometimes even
his daughters. That relationship with his daughters
is... It's a complicated and kind of sad story.
He apparently taught them to read his source
texts aloud in Greek and Latin, but didn't teach
them the languages. So they were just sounding
out words they didn't understand. For hours,
it must have been an incredibly tense household.
But out of all that darkness and tension comes
this monumental poem about the creation and fall
of humanity. So let's get into the poem itself,
because for a supposedly orthodox religious epic,
it is packed with some really... Heretical and
political ideas. Oh, it is absolutely a political
document. He takes the basic story from Genesis,
Adam, Eve, the serpent, and he maps the trauma
of the English Civil War right onto it. And the
character that everyone for centuries had been
drawn to is Satan. Of course, because in the
first two books of the poem, Satan sounds less
like the devil and more like a defeated Republican
general. He sounds like a revolutionary. He's
the one fighting against an all -powerful monarch
in heaven. He gives these incredible speeches
about liberty. Better to reign in hell than serve
in heaven. It's one of the most famous lines
in all of English literature. It's so magnetic.
And for centuries, poets like William Blake and
Shelley, they argued that Milton was, in their
words, of the devil's party without knowing it.
They thought his real subconscious sympathies
were with the rebel. Because Milton was the rebel.
He knew what it felt like to lose a war against
a king. He gave Satan all the best lines, the
most persuasive arguments. It's a trap, isn't
it? It's a brilliant trap because as the poem
continues, you start to see that Satan's idea
of liberty is a complete fraud. It's all about
ego and pride and narcissism. He doesn't want
freedom. He just wants to be the one in charge.
So Satan becomes a tyrant himself. He does. And
you can see Milton working through the failure
of his own revolution. He's asking. What went
wrong? Why did our good old cause fail? And the
answer in the poem is that just getting rid of
the king isn't enough if you're still a slave
to your own sin and ambition. The politics are
incredible, but the theology might be even more
radical. You mentioned earlier that the boring
statue, Milton, hides some wild stuff. Let's
talk about monism. Okay, this is one of my favorite
deep dive facts about Milton. So traditional
Christianity draws a hard line between spirit
and matter. The soul is good. the body is base
and corrupt milton didn't believe that he was
a monist or you could even say materialist he
believed that everything in the entire universe
from a rock on the ground to a human soul to
an angel all the way up to god himself is made
of one single material substance wait hold on
so you're saying in milton's universe god is
physical Meat of stuff. In a way, yes. It's just
an infinitely purer and more refined form of
matter, but it's all on the same continuum. That
is. Wild. And that has to have some weird implications
for this story. It has huge implications. It's
why in Paradise Lost, the angels get hungry,
they fly down to Eden, and they sit and eat lunch
with Adam and Eve. They actually eat food. They
eat, they digest, they have a whole conversation
about angelic digestion, and they also have sex.
The angel Raphael explains to Adam that when
angels embrace, because their substance is so
pure, they don't need to bother with specific
body parts. They can just merge. He writes, Total
they mix. Wow. OK, but why? Why is this idea
so important to him? Because it's a deeply humanist
idea. If angels and humans are made of the same
basic stuff, it means we can aspire to be like
them. There's no unbridgeable gap. He's elevating
the status of the human body in the physical
world, saying that matter isn't evil, matter
itself is divine. Which is a pretty optimistic
take for a poem about the fall of man. And he
slips other heresies in there too, right? Like
Arianism. Yes, his portrayal of the son of Jesus
suggests that he's a created being subordinate
to the father, not co -eternal with him. That's
a major heresy. Honestly, if the church censors
had been paying closer attention to the theology
instead of being swept away by the poetry, the
book might never have been published. And we
have to talk about that poetry, the sound of
it. He famously despised rhyme. He loathed it.
He called it the invention of a barbarous age
and a troublesome and modern bondage. There's
that political language again. Rhyme is bondage.
Exactly. For him, blank verse unrhymed iambic
pentameter was ancient liberty. It was the freedom
of the classics. He wanted the poetry to sound
like a great orator, to flow without what he
called the jingling sound of like endings. And
in doing that, he basically broke the English
language open for poetry. He showed that you
could create this incredible rolling symphonic
momentum without needing rhyme to hold it all
together. He creates a new voice. And the romantics,
a century later, they just picked up that voice
and ran with it. He's their spiritual father
without Milton's blank verse. You don't get Wordsworth's
Prelude. You don't get Keats' epics. He invented
the instrument they all played. And they were
completely obsessed with his themes, too. I'm
thinking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Oh,
Frankenstein is almost a sequel to Paradise Lost.
The creature literally learns about the world
by finding a copy of Milton's poem. And he sees
himself in it. He sees himself as Adam, the lonely
first creation. But when his creator abandons
him, he starts to see himself as Satan. Evil,
be thou my good. The entire novel is a wrestling
match with Milton's ideas about creation, rebellion,
and what a creator owes to his creation. It's
just incredible. A 17th century Puritan poem
becomes the blueprint for one of our greatest
science fiction monster stories. And it's still
happening. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.
The title is a direct quote from book two of
Paradise Lost. Right. His Dark Materials to Create
More Worlds. Pullman is basically retelling the
story, but from the devil's party's point of
view. He's still playing in Milton's sandbox.
We all are. I want to jump to the very end of
his life. He's written the great epic. He's blind.
He's old. He's a political pariah. But he writes
one more masterpiece. Samson Agonistes. For me,
this is the most personal and moving thing he
ever wrote. It's a drama, but it's meant to be
read, not staged. And it's about the biblical
hero Samson. And you just think about Samson's
story. A champion chosen by God. Gifted with
incredible strength. And was defeated, betrayed,
and has his eyes gouged out by his enemies. A
blind hero held captive by the Philistines. It's
not subtle. No. Milton's is Samson. It's pure
autobiography. Samson in the play is mocked.
He feels abandoned by God. He feels useless.
But at the very end, his strength returns for
one last act. He pulls down the pillars of the
temple. He pulls the temple down on himself and
all his enemies. It is. It's a revenge fantasy
in a way. But it's also a statement of faith,
isn't it? It's a final assertion of spiritual
victory. He's saying, you can defeat me politically,
you can burn my books, you can blind me, but
you can't defeat the truth. And in the end, truth
will bring the whole corrupt structure crashing
down. It's his final defiant roar. Which brings
us all the way back to that core idea from Areopagitica,
the free marketplace of ideas. His belief that
if you just let truth and falsehood grapple,
truth will always win. It's a beautiful and deeply
optimistic idea. But I have to ask the final
provocative question. Does that idea still hold
up today? Milton's marketplace was one of pamphlets
and books. We live in a world of social media
algorithms, AI -generated content, and echo chambers,
where falsehood often travels much faster and
further than truth. Right. Because it's more
engaging, it gets more clicks. Exactly. If Milton
saw our modern world, Would he still be so confident
that truth would win in a fair fight? That is
the big uncomfortable question, isn't it? Milton's
whole argument is based on a faith in human reason.
He believed that, ultimately, people could and
would discern truth from error. He didn't foresee
a world where the very technology of communication
could be engineered to bypass reason and appeal
directly to our most basic emotions and biases.
So what do you think he'd say? You know, I think
he would be horrified. But I don't think he would
change his mind. I think he would double down.
He would say that all this chaos, all this misinformation,
that is the test. That is the dust and heat he
talked about. And the alternative, censorship,
is still worse. The alternative is always worse.
He would reject any ministry of truth. He would
tell us that the answer isn't to be protected
from lies. The answer is to get better at spotting
them, to sharpen our own reason. He doesn't want
a passive reader. He demands that we do the work.
He demands that we be worthy of the liberty he
fought for. He said he wanted a fit audience,
though few. He wants you to wrestle with the
ideas. That's a high standard, but a pretty powerful
one. So for anyone listening, maybe that's the
challenge. Don't let it be a statue. Go read
just book one of Paradise Lost. Go read Satan's
speeches. See the fire for yourself. It's not
easy reading but the reward is immense. Well
thank you for taking this deep dive with us into
the mind of a true revolutionary. A pleasure.
We'll see you on the next one.