“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665good.”^127 Nevertheless, created beings remain free and evil remains possible be-
cause, after matter went forth from God, it was detached from him and became
mutable and corruptible, subject to the mind and will of the devil or of humans.^128
Milton repudiates the Neoplatonic dualism common to most seventeenth-century
Christians – and to Milton himself in his early poems – which posits two distinct
substances, matter and spirit, and the immortal soul as pure spirit, trapped in a gross,
material body. He urges the soul of the dead bishop of Ely to escape the “sordid
prison” (“foedum... carcerem,” l. 46) of the body and in the Nativity Ode terms
the body a “darksome house of mortal Clay” (l. 14).^129 By the early 1640s he moves,
albeit incompletely and inconsistently, toward monism as he insists that a married
couple can only become one flesh if their minds and spirits are united.^130 De Doctrina
Christiana sets forth a fully developed monist ontology in which spirit and matter
differ only in degree of refinement of the one corporeal substance derived from
God, of which everything is created.
Milton no doubt felt constrained to work out this issue by the powerful impact
of Hobbes’s materialism and rigid determinism, which explained everything in the
universe in terms of matter in motion, and the choices of the human will as simply
“the last Appetite in Deliberation.”^131 Milton would have been aware of efforts by
the Cambridge Platonists – some of them based in his own college, Christ’s – to
work out an alternative system in which spirit as incorporeal substance organizes or
interacts with bodies.^132 But he worked out an original synthesis, an “animist mate-
rialism” or vitalism close to that of his contemporary, Ann (Finch) Conway, whom
he probably did not know but who argued, as he did, that “a Body is nothing but
a fixed and condensed Spirit, and a Spirit nothing but a subtile and volatile Body.”^133
The monism of De Doctrina Christiana became the ontological ground of Paradise
Lost, evident in the descriptions of Chaos and in Raphael’s lecture (PL 5.469–500)
in which he describes matter as produced originally from God’s own substance and
then, by the will and choice of other beings, able to be disposed toward greater
“spiritous” refinement or toward grosser corporeality.
Other elements of Milton’s discussion of Creation also find their way into Para-
dise Lost: that God before creating the visible universe produced the highest heaven
where he “dwells in unapproachable light” and “reveals himself to the sight of
angels and saints (insofar as they are capable of seeing him)”;^134 that the creation of
the angels and their apostasy took place before the first beginnings of the world; and
that time – understood as the measure of motion and as involving the concepts of
before and after – existed (contrary to common belief) before the Creation. In
describing angels as spirits, Milton means that they are of ethereal substance (“Sunt
natura aetherea”); man, he explains, is of a denser but still single substance, “intrin-
sically and properly one and individual, not compound or separable, not, according
to the common opinion, made up and framed of two distinct and different natures,
as of soul and body” (CM XV, 34, 40–1). Milton denies any form of pre-existence
of the soul and gestures toward mortalism – the death of the soul with the body