Freedom, Virtue, and Society -- Paradise Lost

[QuikSand]

As I previously mentioned in the Life Syllabus thread, I am taking a seminar at St. John’s college, covering a number of great books and dealing with Freedom, Virtue, and Society. After four sessions (covering Huckleberry Finn, two Greek classics, and the opening chapters of Genesis) I now have a decent sense of what to expect… and I’m now trying to get the most out of my next reading.


Our next reading is from Milton's Paradise Lost. I haven't done any online scouring to dig up resources, so for now I'll see if anything starts without prompting. My recollection is that albionmoonlight made reference to this earlier, so i hope he (or Mrs. A) will have some contributions.

Thanks to everyone who has contibuted to these threads so far -- you have enriched this experience for me a good deal, and have made me a good deal more confident heading into each discussion session.


[This space reserved for future resource links]





For background reference (or if you just missed them), here’s a link to the previous threads, discussing:

Plato’s Meno

Aristotle’s Politics

Book of Genesis

[MrBug708]

Freedon?

[albionmoonlight]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

As I previously mentioned in the Life Syllabus thread, I am taking a seminar at St. John’s college, covering a number of great books and dealing with Freedom, Virtue, and Society. After four sessions (covering Huckleberry Finn, two Greek classics, and the opening chapters of Genesis) I now have a decent sense of what to expect… and I’m now trying to get the most out of my next reading.


Our next reading is from Milton's Paradise Lost. I haven't done any online scouring to dig up resources, so for now I'll see if anything starts without prompting. My recollection is that WSU Cougar made reference to this earlier, so i hop he (or Mrs. Coug) will have some contributions.

Thanks to everyone who has contibuted to these threads so far -- you have enriched this experience for me a good deal, and have made me a good deal more confident heading into each discussion session.


[This space reserved for future resource links]





For background reference (or if you just missed them), here’s a link to the previous threads, discussing:

Plato’s Meno

Aristotle’s Politics

Book of Genesis

Hi, this is Mrs. A -- I have done a lot of work with Milton, and Mr. A said you might be interested in some thoughts on Milton and freedom/liberty. I don't think you'll find anyone who disagrees that this issue is absolutely central to Milton's thought and writing. It's the whole reason that evil is allowed to enter the Garden of Eden in PL. It's helpful to think of it in terms of another of Milton's most famous works, the anti-censorship essay he wrote named "Areopagitica." In AP, he writes that one essential reason that people should not be "protected" from controversial writing is that untested virtue is not virtue at all. People have been given free will by God, and the only way to become virtuous is to have that free will tested and to overcome this test -- if you just sit around not facing evil, you aren't virtuous, you're just innocent, untested. It's good -- more than good, absolutely necessary -- for people to face and overcome evil -- the excercising of free will is essential to being human and acting human. It is in this aspect of our nature that we are like God -- it is our greatest priviledge, but it comes with baggage. The catch is, the danger is real (in AP he seems less certain about the danger of being exposed to evil through books, but in PL he seems to me to be pretty certain.) If you are to achieve real virtue, you MUST face real danger. That's the whole reason that Satan is allowed in the Garden in the first place -- innocence isn't good as a permanent condition -- VIRTUE is what you want to achieve. But the devil is a real enemy, and the danger in the process of attaining it is real. So to summarize, free will and the exercising of free will -- the liberty to choose evil -- is fundamental to Milton's concept of what it means to be human. His ideas about liberty extended into pretty much everything he wrote -- from his tracts on people's right to divorce if they choose to do so to his absolute rejection of what he saw as the tyranny of King Charles I. In politics, in religion, and in civil activities, Milton saw the freedom of human beings to exercise their reason as absolutely essential. The difficulty, of course, is identifying the difference between tyranny and legitimate power (the legitimate power of God to tell us what to do, for example, versus the illegitimate power of the king to tell us what to think.) This is a difficulty that Satan utilizes to the best of his ability, which is fun to read. I hope you enjoy PL; I find it extraordinarily interesting.

[albionmoonlight]

This is albion again. (I'll leave as an exercise for the reader whether this post is a dola.)

I will say only one thing in this thread concerning virtue--the truest path to happiness is to marry a beautiful woman who is way smarter than you are. I am very lucky to have somehow stumbled into this happiness.

[QuikSand]

Sorry for the earlier confusion, since corrected.


And I need to be in a firmer frame of mind to try to put together Mrs. A's comments, so for now I'll just say thanks, with more to come.