routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Contexts and conditions
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Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and
removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the
face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society;
and which is worse of all, continual fear, and danger of violent
death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
(The Leviathan)
Later, Hobbes will stress the notion central to Augustan thinking, the
binary of passion and reason:
The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Fear of Death; Desire
of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a
Hope by their Industry to obtain them. And Reason suggesteth
convenient Articles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to
agreement. These Articles, are they, which otherwise are called
the Laws of Nature.
(The Leviathan)
After the upheavals of the Commonwealth, there was a strong
affirmation of religion and a return to traditional beliefs. In such a
context, Milton’s Paradise Lost (completed in 1667) was read not as a
Renaissance text about free will and freedom, but as a commentary
on God’s supremacy, ‘to justify the ways of God to men’. It was read
in order to confirm an image of God as the period demanded God
should be. Questioning of religious values was not part of the age;
once Protestant supremacy had been established after 1688, religious
dissent was stifled. Paradise Lost took on the authority of a quasireligious
text – an imaginative representation of the beliefs contained
in the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common
Prayer, from which these extracts are taken:
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done;
And we have done those things which we ought not to have
done; And there is no health in us.
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord.
The pomps and vanity of this wicked world.
Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.