Theological Relationship Between Milton & Augustine
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Beginning as early as seven years of age and continually, throughout his education, Milton was exposed to the teachings of the Church Fathers, specifically those of St. Augustine. As a result and not surprisingly, interwoven into the tapestry of John Milton's Paradise Lost is the theology of St. Augustine. Substantially, Milton's version of the "Fall" is that of St. Augustine, and a reader can find several similarities between Milton's Paradise Lost and St. Augustine's City of God. In fact, clearly Milton depends on Augustine's detailed account of the Creation and the Fall of man to compose Paradise Lost. According to Potter, this relationship is explained in Augustine's conclusion that the serpent in Genesis, which Augustine calls the Devil (Augustine XI 13), was part of the group of angels that fell "from their original perfection" (Potter 68). Augustine describes the Devil's refusal "to be subject to his creator" to explain the biblical statement in 1 John 3,8 that "the Devil sins from the beginning" of creation.But it would be incorrect to make too much of the theological relationship between Milton and Augustine. Indeed, Potter says (65), Milton was tolerant of all religious sects except Roman Catholics. The fact that Augustine was a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church and Milton a Puritan advocate of Parliament during the Cromwell period accounts for certain differences of theological outlook in Paradise Lost and City of God. For example, Augustine's view that the D
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ir content. How does Augustine know, for example, that the Devil merely longs to injure God's saints when the evidence of evil in the world is that God's saints and more besides are injured all the time? He infers it, logically, as he thinks. Elsewhere Augustine refers to the "apparent" evil in the universe, which he concludes is not really positive evil but rather the "privation" of good in God's eternally good creation on one hand and the scale of goodness from most to least spiritual on the other (Augustine XI.22).
Milton explains what Augustine does not. He repeatedly turns to these issues in Paradise Lost, drawing heavily from Augustine when clarifying why God even with foreknowledge would create those that will voluntarily turn to evil. But Milton's method is not abstract philosophic discourse. Rather, it is by means of infusing personalities, behavior, and episodes of action and motivation into the aftermath of the Creation as Augustine describes it, more or less poetizing Augustinian philosophy, that Milton also seeks to clarify or comment on its content. Personality and psychology of both Satan and Adam allow Milton to look at details of the problem of evil and the paradox of divine foreknowledge and the behavior of free
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Approximate Word count = 4765
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)
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