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

Critics have raised a number of questions about the materiality of the human
soul proposed by Milton and his use of natural philosophy to support his case. While
Svendsen simply argues that Milton’s natural philosophy is Aristotelian and thus dated
by the standards of science in the mid seventeenth century, William B. Hunter has
argued that Milton’s Aristotelian world view is fundamentally conventional in its
dualism of form and matter. 108
John Rogers, in contrast, has located in Paradise Lost a
focus upon notions such as fermentation, thus suggesting a much more contemporary
scientific influence in the politicised vitalism of the poem’s natural philosophy. He does
supply a refreshing corrective to the conclusions drawn by critics such as Svendsen
though his description of Milton’s radical vitalism requires closer examination.
Interestingly, much of the argument he makes for the radical dissonance between
Milton’s materialism (and its political connotations) and his theology repeats, in a
different register, the claims made by contemporary commentators and modern critics:
that is, that living, active matter must not need – and must therefore preclude the
existence of – divine power. This assumption that one ‘natural’ mode of operation must
exclude the (divine) other is something of a tautology in that it repeats uncritically the
premises of dualism – sometimes, in the case of modern critics, as they seek to celebrate
Milton’s monism.
It is perhaps naïve to assume that Milton is unaware of the equation made by
contemporary commentators between materialist philosophy and atheism. One moment
in the Christian Doctrine in which he makes the equation between natural and divine
causality is in his direct defence of traducianism. Indeed Milton deals directly with such
a possible dissonance in a passage in which, despite the powerfully argued rejection of
Creationist theories of ensoulment, he concludes his discussion with a series of
references to various biblical texts which state that it is God who forms the human in
the womb. In one of his most eloquent interpretations he asserts that God “did not
merely breathe that spirit into man, but shaped it in each individual as a fundamental
attribute, and separated its various faculties, making it beautiful and orderly, Zech xii. 1:
forming the spirit of man within him.” 109
This interpretation of biblical text is rich in the
language of the body offered by contemporary natural philosophy, but it simultaneously
108
William B. Hunter, ‘Milton’s Power of Matter’, Journal of the History of Ideas 13. 4 (1952), 551-562.
109
CPW 6: 317. Other passages noted are: Job 10: 8-10; Psalms 33: 15; Isaiah 44: 24. Fundamental
attributes can be defined as “The fundamental and permanent properties of substance, so-called by
logicians in contradistinction to accidents, which are modifications representing circumstantial properties
only” (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=A&artid=2101 [30.12.08]).
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