Medical Science and the Anatomia Animata in Milton's Paradise Lost

ody as to an enemy, imprisoned, innocent and unarmed, with blinded
intellect and with will enchained, quite deprived, in other words, of
the strength which is needed to resist the body’s vicious tendencies –
to do all this would argue injustice as much as to create them impure
would argue [God’s] impurity. 70
A soul newly or directly created by God could not be impure or fallen, for that would
impugn God’s own purity, and the infusion of innocent souls into ‘contaminated and
vicious bodies’ would equally impute to God a cruel injustice. The harsh truth of evil,
suffering and death that Milton lays at the door of the Fall must not be imputed to God’s
direct action, therefore the rational soul itself must emerge from the natural, material
process of generation. Repeatedly, Milton insists that “if sin is transmitted from the
parents to the child in the act of generation, then... the original subject of sin, namely the
rational soul, must also be propagated by the parents.” 71
The arguments made by Cudworth, as well as less complex ones made by
lesser figures such as Burton, assume that the material is ontologically deficient because
it grows, changes and corrupts. Milton, in contrast, attributes to matter an originary
purity because of its necessarily divine origin, and thus retains a certain amount of
changeability within the category of the divine itself. 72 Matter cannot have been a prior
factor independent of an infinite creative God, and the corruptions to which it is subject
are not part of its essence. Instead, when it “has become the property of another, what is
there to prevent its being infected and polluted, since it is now in a mutable state, by the
calculations of the devil or of man... which proceed from these creatures themselves.” 73
Matter that is not under the direct control of God is vulnerable to pollution, infection
and misuse, but free will is a mutable state since it demands that God should not directly
control material ontology. Yet material ontology originates with God as all things do; in
one aside, Milton declares that “God is as truly the Father of the flesh as he is of the
spirits of the flesh.” 74
There is no other, immaterial realm dividing matter from God;
consequently spirit and flesh are not the dual ontological categories for Milton that they
are in all areas of contemporary orthodoxy.
70
CPW 6: 321.
71
CPW 6: 321.
72
See chapter 2 and chapter 6 for Milton’s rejection of the scholastic notion of God as Actus Purus.
73
CPW 6: 309.
74
CPW 6: 324.
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