Milton as Human Being

In ramping up my reading on Milton in preparation for teaching Paradise Lost starting this week, I have finally begun reading Dennis Danielson's Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy. This title and author kept cropping up several years back when I was writing my thesis on Milton but it never seemed entirely germane to the topics about which I was writing. And, as Robert Frost famously says, "way leads onto way" and here I am six years later finally picking it up.

I couldn't be more pleased thus far. I have long intuited that creative works have more theodical value than theological or philosophical tracts. Theodicy is basically a way of giving justice to God. Theos of course refers to God. Dike is the Greek goddess who personified justice. So, a theodicy is a work that attempts to justify God, what we more commonly today call apologetics.

Milton's entire project in Paradise Lost is theodical. The poem presents his attempt to "justify the ways of God to men." Since my first reading of the poem, I have felt that Milton did a far better job through the story-form and within the conventions of epic poetry of completing this justification project than any works of apologetics with which I concerned myself in my post-adolescent can-this-all-be-true seeking stage.

But before I get into any of that, I wanted to pause over a passage in the introductory chapter, "The Contexts of Milton's Theodicy," where Danielson argues for something very near and dear to my reading of Milton: the fact that, insane intelligence and 400 year gap aside, Milton is a human being. I'll quote Danielson at length here:

Now the fairly naive recognition that Milton was a person like you or me actually encourages an intellectual-historical model less naive than one often encounters in studies of Milton. For ourselves, I believe, we generally posit unity of mind and creative personality; and we should therefore be wary of radically distinguishing Milton the poet from Milton the thinker. . . We would also surely deny that a recognition of the sources and parallels of our own thought and expression somehow explained it all away, and we must likewise avoid thinking that, once we have presented analogues or demonstrated influences of Milton's thought, we have "said it all." 

Danielson here lucidly describes a problem I had while working on my thesis: so many of the Milton critics I read seemed more concerned with elucidating his influencers as a means to explain him away than they did with appreciating his work. Further, they denied so many other factors that determine the intellectual and spiritual life of a human being--which Danielson helpfully reminds us Milton was--that exist beyond the books we read. He continues: 

While admitting that we ourselves are influenced, moreover, do we not also recognize that our conceptual and pistic landscape is like a patchwork stitched together from various scraps of conversation, reading, experience, and disposition, the dye from each scrap bleeding into the one adjacent to it in the quilt, so that the hue of the each is subtly altered by virtue of its now integrated relation to the whole? [If we accept this picture as true for ourselves] it might curb the academic urge to treat written texts (especially written texts available to us) as if they were the only sorts of things by which Milton could have been influenced. 

Danielson goes on to conclude that while texts may be all we have now to go by, an awareness of the "nontextual background" will both make us more humble and sophisticated as readers of Milton.

I can't tell you how much I resonate with this. Danielson isn't nullifying historically-justified speculative work, studies of influences and forebears, or dismissing historical criticism more broadly. Indeed, his whole project as he readily admits is a historical, theological, and literary view of Paradise Lost. What he is saying is that humans are vastly more complex than some literary critics would have us believe. Have I been shaped by the books I read? Undoubtedly. But I have also been shaped, and this perhaps moreso, by the conversations I have had about those books with other people. If someone were to write an intellectual history of my life (and, dear God, I can't imagine being that poor sucker), they could go by the books on my shelves and the ways I have marked them up, but there is simply no way to be privy to the conversations, to the thinking I do while running, driving, or taking a shower. 

I love the metaphor Danielson uses of our lives as a quilt, where the dye from each square bleeds into the next. We are not intellectual beings or spiritual beings or rational beings or emotional beings or instinctual beings but intellectual-spiritual-rational-emotional-instinctual beings. We cannot pull apart these threads without unraveling that whole quilt. It is good to be reminded of this, if not merely out of charity, in the way we read and approach others.

The Purpose of Apologetics

Nathan Schneider, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently profiled the Christian philosopher/apologist William Lane Craig. I have never read Craig’s work, but the article seemed to present him fairly evenhandedly, considering the author’s clear lack of agreement with Craig on many issues. The broader thrust of the article is to give witness to the renewed Christian emphasis on philosophy as a discipline, of which Craig represents a prominent figure, and the fact that fairly orthodox Christians can now be found at posts at prestigious universities and not just the orthodox hotbeds. While it smacks of a certain “barbarians at the gate” warning to the Chronicle’s more liberal-minded audience, overall it represents the movement in conservative Christianity with some nuance.

But the question that I kept puzzling through as I read the article, and something I have thought about for some time in reading apologetic works, is pretty elemental to the whole endeavor: who is apologetics for? The article, I think, rightly points to the ways in which the more prominent Christian apologists seem to believe that their work will do more to encourage the flock than to save the lost. In other words, apologetics does not stand at the vanguard of Christianity’s efforts to convert the world, but as a rearguard action designed to keep the kids from leaving. Craig debates Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens not in order to convert them or the Freethinker members in attendance, but to encourage the Navigators in the audience that the Christian religion is not without reason.

This is not to demean apologetics in the least. It is vital to give children raised in the church some sense of the intellectual viability and robustness of the tradition in which they have been raised. To encourage them to not be afraid of science or history or theology. Amen for that. In the final lecture I gave to my classes at Kansas State I encouraged the Christians that I had taught, specifically, to really dive into intellectual exploration while at the university and seek out the Christian thinkers who have come before them when they feel challenged, and to not be afraid of a university system which can very often appear to be at odds with their faith. I pray that my encouragement struck a nerve for some of them.

Why I highlight this question of the audience for apologetics is because I used to believe that the skillful use of apologetics was the most effective form of evangelism, that one could quite literally argue a lost soul into the kingdom (and many lost souls unfortunately had to endure these efforts of mine). Now I find this to be ridiculous. It’s appeal to argumentative and academically-minded people like me is unassailable but it does not match the actual lived experience of many.

Most people, even very smart people, who come to faith in Christ do so not because they became convinced of the integrity of the New Testament canon and have studied the historical evidence for the resurrection, but because someone really loved them who was a Christian and the irresistible grace of God stirred them to declare that Christ was the risen Lord. Which is simply to say that our conversion is not a matter primarily of the mind, but one of the heart. Christianity is not about assenting to a list of propositions in the style of Aquinas’ Summa Theologia, but having an encounter with the crucified and resurrected Christ. Reading books about the canon and the resurrection and even Aquinas is great practice once you make the step of faith, but the movement usually goes in that direction.

So I applaud the work of men like Craig and eagerly read books that give testimony to the veracity of the Christian faith, but I try to remember always that it is God that saves, God that makes the heart new, replacing the heart of stone with a heart of flesh. It is not our arguments, our facility at debate, or the prestige of our degrees.