“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632Invoking the Ciceronian triad – to delight, instruct, and persuade – he argues
that Scholastic philosophy cannot delight because its “dry and lifeless” style is tedi-
ous and boring; it cannot instruct because its topics are empty quibbles with “no
existence in reality at all” and its arguments merely “shed deep darkness over the
whole question”; and it has no power to “incite to noble acts” (CPW I, 241–6).
Then, turning from invective to praise, he exalts and passionately urges study of the
humanistic subjects that do fulfill those criteria: “divine poetry” which raises the
soul aloft to heaven, rhetoric, which “captivates the minds of men,” and history,
which evokes tears and mournful joy – that last surely evoking in the audience
memories of the Dorislaus affair. He also commends geography, natural science of
all sorts, astronomy, and moral philosophy. His parting ironic advice to his hearers
- to follow Aristotle “who is already your delight” (CPW I, 247) – taunts them for
making him their only authority, but also points them to all the subjects in his
corpus that are ignored in a curriculum focused on the Organon.
Some part of that final undergraduate year was given over to meeting degree
requirements. Prolusions IV and V, which defend highly technical theses based on
Scholastic physics and metaphysics, may have been the two Responsions required
for Milton’s Baccalaureate degree. These are logical disputations on topics of the
kind Milton denounced in Prolusion III and burlesqued in “De Idea Platonica”;
and they are remarkable for the brio and skill with which Milton makes these
exercises display their own sterility even as he performs them. Milton’s polemic
bent and resistance to authority are by now well honed. Prolusion IV, “In the
Destruction of any Substance there can be no Resolution into First Matter,” was
delivered in the college.^57 In it, Milton cites numerous authorities, lists contradic-
tory opinions, and makes subtle distinctions, intermixing them with complaints
about the confusion and boredom all this is causing him and his audience. He also
places the argument proper within an ironic frame allegorizing the combat of
Truth and Error; Truth at length flies to Heaven leaving Error to control the
schools, and Milton wittily aligns himself with the flight of Truth as he offers to
“beat a retreat” so as “to spare you boredom” (CPW I, 256). Prolusion V, “There
are no Partial Forms in an Animal in Addition to the Whole,” was delivered in the
Public Schools. In it Milton offers ironically to cite “weightiest authorities; for it is
not to be expected that I should add anything of my own” (CPW I, 259). But he
soon breaks off his list of authorities and his argument, surely surprising his audi-
ence by devoting half his speech to Roman history (with Dorislaus fresh in memory)
and to another allegory of the struggle of Truth and Error, casting himself as a
warrior for Truth.
During Lent term Milton supplicated for his degree and was awarded it on March
26, 1629, after signing the three required Articles of Religion: that the king is the
only head of the church in England, that the Book of Common Prayer is lawful to use,
and that the Thirty-nine Articles contain nothing contrary to the Word of God.^58
Evidently he had no serious objection to that gesture. His was the fourth name on