Professor John Rogers:
We've looked at Milton's earliest poem,
or what Milton wants us to think of as his earliest poem,
from a couple of different perspectives.
So you remember our examination on Monday of the Nativity Ode,
which I took to be an early poetic achievement in Milton's
career, and which Milton himself took
to be an early poetic achievement in his career;
but we also looked at the Nativity Ode as a poem or
a kind of statement about the very nature of an early poetic
achievement, and about Milton's sense of the
nature of a poetic career in general.
And I think this can be said: this is true of a number of
Milton's earliest lyrics. The early poems are not merely
brilliant literary exercises in and of themselves,
although of course they are that.
The early lyrics are also instances, moments,
in Milton's life-long meditation on what it is to be a
poet. And I think it's fair to say
that Milton's reconceptualization of the role
of the poet permanently altered the way in which later
generations, especially later generations of
writers and poets, would imagine the work of
poetry and imagine the power of the poet.
In this respect Milton's contribution to the Western
literary imagination is really unparalleled.Milton
represented himself as a poet more often and with more care
and attention than any English poet before him.
And in fact it often strikes us that Milton's poetry seems so
absolutely new and so original because he's really the first
poet who, in a number of ways,
in a number of different registers, seems often to be
doing little more than describing himself,
justifying himself, or accounting for himself.
And it's this procedure of self-accounting that I want to
focus on today as we look at Milton's amazing sense of his
vocation as a poet and Milton's sense of poetry-writing as an
example of what he calls in one context an example of "credible
employment."Now Milton never writes a formal autobiography.
But Milton's body of poetry and his substantial body of prose,
most of it polemical prose -- this stuff is littered with what
are clearly, recognizably,
and explicitly autobiographical passages;
and the degree to which you find yourself having some sort
of affinity with this poet, with Milton,
will probably correspond to the degree to which you find
yourself enjoying or having some kind of tolerance for Milton's
propensity for self-representation and
self-accounting. I think one of the most
striking experiences of reading Milton's prose works -- and
they're typically polemical, political tracts in nature --
is the recognition of this writer's willingness to insert
himself, to insinuate his own private
meditations and self-reflections,
into the otherwise public and often political concerns of the
treatise. So Milton will continually be
saying in his prose tracts, "Oh!
I just had an idea. Dear reader,
before I go on, perhaps I should say something
about myself. I need to explain something to
you about where I'm coming from. You wonder who I am to tell you
this? Let me give you an account of
myself and let me establish the reasons why you need to go on
listening to me and why you should believe my position on
this or that political or ecclesiastical topic."It's
this drive to constant self-definition that becomes the
characteristic feature of Milton's work for later
generations. The Romantic poets like Blake
and Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats in the nineteenth century
are continually looking back to just those moments in Milton,
Milton's method of self-justification and
surprising self-assertion, because it was precisely in
Milton's exercises in autobiographical writing that a
crucial element of literary practice gets established:
and that's the element of the poet's meditation on the meaning
of his vocation as a poet. Milton is magnificently free of
the pressures of modesty and reticence.
And that freedom, the liberation from that
burden, also becomes an enormous part of his appeal for later
generations of writers. It's just a fact that Milton is
shockingly unembarrassed about making public all of his highest
literary ambitions. There's every indication that
Milton believed, as I had mentioned before,
at an unconscionably early age, that poetry was his vocation.
And he's continually willing to make that belief a public
one.By "vocation" I'm not merely thinking of a job,
although certainly the modern sense of vocation as a form of
employment is certainly one that's available to Milton and
certainly present in his thinking about the vocation;
but I also mean vocation in its earlier,
more etymologically pure sense, the literal sense of the word:
vocation as a calling, from the Latin vocare.
One's vocation is that to which one has been called -- called
presumably by God -- to perform. So you have two rather
competing senses of the word "vocation" here,
vocation as employment and vocation as a calling,
and they're constantly for Milton bleeding into one
another, these two senses of the word,
and often struggling with one another or competing with one
another. Milton was always wrestling
with the problem of vocation in all of its meanings,
and the problem of what a calling actually is and how one
actually knows one has a calling is a problem that pulsates
somewhere beneath most of the lines of poetry that Milton
writes.The most stunning of all of the anticipatory career
narratives that I had mentioned in the last class appears in the
passage of The Reason of Church Government that you
read for today, so I'm going to ask you to turn
to your Hughes editions and look at the top of the left-hand
column of page 668. This is where Milton describes
the outpouring of enthusiasm that he received for his poetry
from a number of learned Italians during his recent
travels to Italy. This is the top of the
left-hand column on 668. Milton:
…I began thus far to assent both to them and
divers of my friends here at home,
and not less to an inward prompting which now grew daily
upon me, [and think about this inward prompting:
is it the self's own prompting or is this a prompting
experienced internally, a prompting of God,
a vocation?] that by labor and intent study
(which I take to be my portion in this life) joined with the
strong propensity of nature, [I agreed with all of these
voices that] I might perhaps leave something
so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly
let it die. Now it's clear here that Milton
is imagining this future work, the work that "aftertimes will
not willingly let die," as the fulfillment of a
professional career. We certainly don't here have an
image of a poet whose poetry is being written effortlessly or
easily as the young Milton seems convinced that Shakespeare's
poetry had been written. In "L'Allegro" and in
"Il Penseroso," which you'll be reading soon--or especially in
"L'Allegro," Milton is able to say
that Shakespeare simply "warble his…
Wood-notes wild." He was able to produce all
those magnificent plays simply by instinct: a kind of natural
urge produced and generated all of that poetry.
But Milton portrays himself as a laborer here,
a poet who by labor and intense study actually has to work to
produce the great poem. Milton's divine vocation,
his calling, seems in this light to be
something like a vocation in the modern sense:
it's a job that exacts work or labor.Now look at page 671
again on the top of the left-hand column.
Here Milton is elaborating on the details of his anticipation
of his undying fame. This is a polemical tract about
a new way in which the Anglican church government should be
organized. What in the hell is all of this
doing here? Milton's reporting to the
English people how he imagines his future literary fame.
It's extraordinarily and wonderfully inappropriate.
Milton's not making just any idle suggestion that he will
write a poem that future generations will find themselves
incapable of forgetting. This is the left-hand column on
671: Neither do I think it
shame to covenant with any knowing reader,
that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward
the payment of what I am now indebted,
as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth,
or the vapors of wine, like that which flows at waste
from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher of fury
of a riming parasite…
Out of nowhere you get this sense of anger on Milton's part
and this kind of contempt that he feels and he will feel for
the rest of his life: his contempt of his poetic
competitors, his contemporary poets -- all
of whom are vulgarians in this characterization.
…nor to be obtained by the invocation of
Dame Memory and her Siren daughters,
[these are all forms of poetic inspiration that Milton is
declaring he is rejecting here -- Milton's work,
the great work will emerge instead from]
…devout prayer to that eternal spirit who can enrich
with all utterance and knowledge,
and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar,
to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases.
It's an amazing passage. You have at the end of this
sentence that same -- and you'll remember this -- that same image
of prophetic preparation with which Milton had begun the
Nativity Ode, but you'll remember that line,
"from out his secret Altar touched with hallow'd fire."
Like the old Hebrew prophet Isaiah, Milton will be inspired
to write his great work when the iniquity of his lips is purged,
when the eternal spirit touches with hallowed fire the lips
of whom he pleases. Milton is going to be a great
poet because it has pleased God to have chosen him,
because God has called Milton to serve as a human conduit for
the conveyance of divine knowledge;
and so according to this concluding image here of this
sentence, Milton's imagining himself more or less in the
traditional image of the great biblical prophets,
the passive vehicle through which the Deity transmits His
awe-inspiring message.But this pious subservience that you
have ending this passage -- and certainly it's consonant with
that image from the Nativity Ode -- nonetheless,
I think it's safe to say that it comes as quite a shock when
you consider the sentence as a whole.
Milton had begun the sentence not with calm,
prophetic certainty about his divine vocation.
He began it with a far more secular set of images,
a set of images that comes from the world of business.
It's a set of images that couldn't be more foreign or more
alien to the prophetic mode of the Old Testament prophets.
Milton begins by saying that he was going to write a great work
because he's "indebted," because he owes the
English people something after all of their patient waiting:
" do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing
reader, that for some few years yet I
may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now
indebted." And according to this image of
the vocation of the poet, Milton isn't claiming divine
inspiration at all. He's making a deal.Milton
makes a covenant with the reader.
It's as if he's signing a contract because he's asking for
credit here. "Please let me borrow…"
-- what on earth would the readers of this polemical tract
care about Milton's literary future?
He's no one to them except a political polemicist,
but nonetheless this is a remarkable logic -- "Please give
me a little more time, patient readers,
as I prepare to write the great English epic."
And like any shrewd borrower, Milton promises that the credit
extended will prove an excellent investment.
Milton will leave something "so written to aftertimes,
as they should not willingly let it die."So think about
this sentence with its combination of commercial
rhetoric and prophetic language, making explicit the competing
models really for the production of the great poem.
So the first model is that the poem will be the result of the
poet's labor, his hard work,
the expense of which will be assumed by the reader's credit.
That's the secular, the economic image.
And the second model is that the poem will be the consequence
of the poet's humble prayers to the eternal spirit,
a spirit who doesn't inspire the poet who works the hardest
but simply the poet whom it pleases the spirit to inspire.
And so in the sentence that we've just looked at at some
length now we have embodied in the form of a shifting argument
-- a really slippery argument -- the two senses of the word
vocation: vocation as a job and vocation
as a divine calling. And I'd go so far to say that
most of the really, truly memorable moments in
Milton's poetry and prose have been generated by some version
of just this conflict. Milton's poetry is always
emerging from the gap between the competing meanings of a
particularly important and weighty concept like that of
vocation.Now to some extent we shouldn't find ourselves
surprised that we see at the heart of Milton's statement
anticipating his future greatness something of a
contradiction concerning the idea of a vocation.
It's just this uncertain status of a whole raft of ideas
associated with vocation that really fissured and fractured
the spiritual lives of countless seventeenth-century puritans.
Milton is inheriting here an enormously rich tradition of
thought on this subject. According to the
sixteenth-century Protestant theologian Jean Calvin -- a
Swiss theologian, or actually French but he lives
in Geneva -- God chooses us, God elects us for salvation and
damnation. We ourselves,
of course, have no choice whatsoever in the matter.
And this belief that's called Calvinist predestination is
really at the heart of mainstream English Puritanism at
this point. Our salvation is entirely in
God's hands.But it seemed to a lot of followers of Calvin
that it was a matter -- and you can imagine why -- it was a
matter of some urgency and a matter of some importance to
know whether one had actually been elected by God for
salvation. We need some proof of our
salvation simply to get up in the morning actually,
when you think about it, and the only proof for so many
of Milton's contemporaries seemed to lay in the degree of
visible success that they seemed to have enjoyed.
And so then, much as now,
one of the most obvious signs of success was,
of course, financial. The means by which we could
discern whether God had called on us to join the elect was by
discerning the profitability of our vocation -- vocation
in the secular sense of employment -- and so you can
probably see something like the strangely perverse logic that
could begin to attach itself to the puritan belief in God's
predestination of all human beings either to salvation or
damnation.It's generally understood that this is not at
all what Calvin had intended, but it's what happened
nonetheless: one felt that one had to prove to others,
and maybe more importantly to prove to oneself,
that one has already been predestined by God.
For salvation one has to be successful, and the only way to
assure one's success is to labor,
of course: to work hard, to achieve through effort that
success which one secretly feared should already have been
achieved by means of predestination.There's an
irrational inversion of cause and effect here,
and it's a magnificent paradox: God chooses us based on no work
of our own, but we find ourselves working
as hard as we possibly can in order to demonstrate to
ourselves that we have, in fact, already been
chosen.According to the German sociologist Max Weber --
the founder of the discipline of sociology who pioneers the study
of the sociological impact of Protestant theology at the
beginning of the twentieth century -- it is precisely this
backwards and cruel logic that's responsible for what he -- and
it's an enormous claim, essentially insupportable,
but it's this backwards, crazily inverted logic that's
responsible for the economic progress of the northern
Europeans -- for what Weber calls the emergence of the
"Protestant work ethic." So historians can and in fact
have many times taken issue with a lot of Weber's historical
claims. But he's invaluable,
as the critic John Guillory has argued, for our purposes in the
understanding of Milton and of a lot of the cultural business of
the seventeenth century in general.The assumption among
a lot of reformation Protestants in Milton's day was that what
God commands above all else is our labor,
our investment, and God expects after our labor
and investment that we have something to show for it at the
end -- it makes sense - that we have in some way profited.
And so it's here at this intensely awkward point at which
Protestantism and capitalism, two seemingly disparate spheres
of activity and thought and being -- at this strange point
at which these two things converge -- it's at this
intersection that we find John Milton.To understand the
concerns of Milton's poetry, it is important to
understand this massive conjunction of economic and
spiritual thought that's really at the heart of English
Protestantism. But that's just a part of the
story. There's also a more specific,
a more local, reason for which our John
Milton was susceptible to this profit-and-loss rhetoric of
Calvinist puritan theology. Milton was the son of a banker.
(Technically, banks didn't exist at this
point in the seventeenth century.
It's not until the Dutch invent banks late in the seventeenth
century.) Milton is the son of what is the equivalent of a
modern-day banker. He's what would have been
called in the seventeenth century a scrivener or a
goldsmith. A goldsmith was an early money
lender, and it was a perfectly respectable profession as far as
bourgeois professions go, and John Milton,
Sr. has a pretty good living.
But in practice it's actually much more analogous to what a
modern-day pawnbroker does: you would leave with John
Milton, Sr., the goldsmith, a portion of gold and on the
basis of that collateral -- this is all the business of
collateral loans, pawnbroking -- on the basis of
that collateral, John Milton,
Sr. would lend you a sum of money
for which you would pay him interest.
At the end of the loan upon your payment of the principal
and of sufficient additional interest,
John Milton, Sr., the goldsmith,
would return to you the gold that you had entrusted to
him.Now Mr. Milton took some risks when he
separated himself from his cash and lent money to his clients,
or lent more money to his clients than the collateral,
the gold, was actually worth. And the motive for that risk,
of course, the motive for that investment, was the expectation
of a profit. It's just this economic pattern
of risky investment and the expectation of a profit that
forms something like the thematic paradigm of profit and
loss that really is at the heart of Milton's representation of
his future literary greatness, his conception of himself as a
poet. Milton seems to have inherited
from his father a language of commerce, a language that he was
able so easily and effortlessly to transpose from his father's
vocation as a goldsmith to his own anticipated vocation as a
poet.Milton owes his father this whole lexical world of
lending, of borrowing and of profit.
But also Milton owes his father more than that,
more than merely a set of metaphors and images drawn from
the world of his father's money lending.
To understand exactly what it is that John Milton,
Jr. owes John Milton,
Sr., we have to look at the Latin poem that Milton writes to
his father in 1637. So let's look at that now.
This is page 82 in the Hughes edition and the poem is "To My
Father (Ad Patrem)." Milton expresses his debt of
gratitude for his father's support.
Milton graduated with an MA from Cambridge University in
July of 1632. He had studied hard obviously
and had supposedly been preparing himself for his future
career, and that would have been the career of a clergyman.
Milton's younger brother, Christopher,
was already entering law school at this time,
and it was clear, I guess, to everybody that John
Milton, Jr. was not suited to a profession
in the law. (Although I'm actually not sure
why that's the case. Court records show that our
poet was exceedingly litigious. He brought suit against dozens
and dozens of people throughout his entire life,
attempting to address a wide range of grievances through the
use of the legal system.)But the vocation to which Milton
Junior seemed to have been most suited,
to everyone around him, was a life in the ministry.
His reading, his learning,
his talents as an orator -- all of these assets pointed to one
potential career, and in fact nearly everyone in
the MA class in which Milton graduated turned to a career in
the church. This is what a master's degree
could do for you in the early seventeenth century.
Now we know, or at least we have a
retrospective inkling from our reading of poems like the
Nativity Ode and other early poems,
that Milton on some level was imagining his vocation to be
that of a poet -- but then,
just as now, one could obviously not be a
poet by profession. You can't make a living writing
poetry. No one's ever made a living
writing poetry who hasn't been patronized or given a lot of
money by someone who's much richer than he or she is.
Maybe Rod McKuen in the ‘60s made money writing
poetry.. With that exception,
I think very few people have actually, certainly in Milton's
day, profited from the selling of their poems.
Milton's father would obviously have found unsuitable the idea
that seven years of expensive university education that he had
invested in his son would result in nothing more than a career --
in what? In poetry?!
Maybe some of you all too easily can imagine the arguments
that might have taken place within the Milton household:
"Why don't you become a lawyer like your brother,
Christopher? Why can't you get a job like
everybody else?"I'm going to ask you to imagine the domestic
situation in the Milton household in 1632.
Milton has just returned home after seven years at the
university, a university education so generously financed
by his father who was actually now 70 years old,
and John Milton, Jr. was just turning twenty-four.
Twenty-four is the canonical age at which young men were
received for admission into the priesthood.
It's like joining the army at eighteen;
at twenty-four, that's what you do if you have
an MA from Cambridge. You enter the Anglican
priesthood. And a twenty-four-year-old
Milton, after seven years of education, simply decides not to
go. Instead of joining the
ministry, Milton instead returns home and he stays at home
without any means of supporting himself for six years.
So with the financial support of his father Milton stays at
home and reads. He studies.
And it's in these years after his graduation from college that
Milton embarks upon what is essentially a systematic study
of all available knowledge. He commands a mastery of just
about the entire canon of Western literary and historical
learning. He prepares himself for what
his father is still imagining will be the priesthood but for
what Milton is probably imagining will be his future
career as a great English poet.It's little wonder that
one of the subjects of his meditations during this period
is the problem of vocation -- the twin problem of what it is
one is actually doing on the one hand,
and what it is on the other hand that the father has called
one to do. In Milton's poem to his father,
to his earthly father -- and it becomes a confusion throughout
Milton with respect to which of Milton's fathers,
the heavenly or the earthly, is calling him to do what -- in
Milton's poem to his father, you have the poet's attempt to
justify himself before the man who seems to be asking him to
define his vocation. So we have to assume that the
occasion for this poem is some kind of question posed by John
Milton, Sr., a question like, "To what end am I supporting
you, Son? And if it's a poet that you
want to be, to what extent can the writing of poetry be
considered respectable work?"Look at pages
eighty-two and eighty-three in the Hughes.
Milton's expressing a dutiful degree of filial piety
and gratitude, and this may seem familiar,
too. "I could never repay you," he
writes: …you have an
account of my means, and whatever [and now we're on
page eighty-three] wealth I possess I have
reckoned up on this paper, for I have nothing except what
golden Clio has given and what has been the fruit of the dreams
in a remote cavern and of the laurel groves of the sacred wood
and of the shadows of Parnassus.
"I have nothing to show for all of your investment but my
learning, all of that which golden Clio has promised me --
Clio the muse of history. I have also my aspirations,
my dreams of becoming a great poet because I dwell among these
highly literary -- the sacred wood in the shady groves on
Parnassus." Now Milton explains that he has
nothing now, of course, to show for his father's
investment, but he will. Look at the last stanza.
This is at the top of page eighty-six in the Hughes.
Milton turns to address his own poetry.
This is how he concludes this poem, "Ad Patrem":
And you, my juvenile verses and
amusements, if only you dare hope for immortality and a life
and a glimpse of the light beyond your master's funeral
pyre, and if dark oblivion does not
sweep you down into the throngs of Hades, perhaps you will
preserve this eulogy and the name of the father whom my song
honors as an example to remote ages.
Milton's essentially making a covenant.
This is a contract with his father in this passage.
He's engaging his father in to a contractual situation just as
he will engage the entire English people (as we've already
seen) in The Reason of Church Government.
If his father continues to support him -- this is the
magnificent logic here -- if the father continues to support him,
he will repay his father with his own future fame,
a name that his fellow Englishmen will not willingly
let die. Milton's fame will preserve his
father's name; and of course,
it has throughout the ages. Needless to say,
the satisfaction of John Milton, Sr.
will have to be postponed to the great hereafter.
He will not be able to reap the profit of his investment in his
son's study until not only after his own death,
but of course after his son's death as well.
That's Milton's logic here. But then who would understand
better than John Milton, Sr.
the importance or the value of a long-term investment
strategy?There's a tone of self-assuredness and a
confidence and certainty in this poem that,
I have to say, isn't always matched in the
other works that Milton's writing in this same period.
In most of the other writings that you have looked at for
today, the weird Calvinist logic surrounding the idea of divine
predestination makes it impossible for Milton to be that
comfortable or that confident about the idea of a true poetic
vocation. How can Milton know that he was
really and truly called by God to be a great poet until he
writes something -- it's not a bad question -- until he has
something actually to show for his talent?
And how can Milton have anything to show for his talent
until he has -- this is the logic -- until he has patiently
waited for God to inspire him to write?
He can't know until he's been inspired to write,
and he can't of course start writing until he's been inspired
-- it's a peculiar but familiar double bind.
It's a puzzle that proved infinitely anxiety-producing for
the young Milton, and it's really the productive
engine that keeps this extremely anxious poet going in the early
years.It's just this double bind of vocation that's the
subject of Sonnet VII, "How Soon Hath Time."
That's the sonnet in which Milton laments the fact that he
has turned twenty-three years old and has yet produced nothing
that would indicate a shining poetic future.
In that poem, as in the other things that you
read for today, Milton is attempting to
understand the problem of vocation through the specific
lens of scripture, and that's what we're going to
look at now. Nearly every conceptual problem
available and that was puzzled over in the seventeenth century
could be processed and then understood in some way in terms
of a related problem in the Bible.
Every conflict and contradiction within an
individual or within the society at large could be interpreted by
means of a related conflict, or a related contradiction,
culled somewhere from the writings of scripture.
For puritans such as Milton there were some especially
important moments in scripture that could be used to tackle the
problem of vocation. There were particular moments
in the Bible that seemed best suited to answer this question,
the question, "What is it that I'm supposed
to do and what does it mean actually to do anything?
What does it mean to do anything in a world in which God
seems to be so entirely in control of all of our doings and
of our actions?" Those passages of the Bible
that seem to have been particularly useful for this
dilemma were two parables from the New Testament,
and those are represented in the packet: the parable of the
talents and the parable of the workers in the vineyard.
You will soon be seeing innumerable ways in which these
parables continue to creep up in Milton's verse.
The language -- we could also think of it as the ideology --
of these parables is constantly surfacing in Milton and provides
something like a divinely authorized focal point for what
I had mentioned earlier: this strange intersection of
spirituality and economics. I know it's a little difficult
to read, but I included nonetheless in the packet the
Geneva Bible (that's the great sixteenth-century Calvinist
Bible) -- that version of these two parables written before the
King James because it provides all of those glosses,
those marginal annotations on the side, those incredibly
mean-spirited and dark Calvinist interpretations of the Bible.
I'm convinced that those glosses, those annotations,
drove Milton absolutely mad and so much of his own rewriting of
the Bible essentially in Paradise Lost is a
response to a lot of the annotations of the Bible that he
grew up reading.So the first parable that we have to look at
is the one that without question instilled the most anxiety in
Milton, and that's the parable of the
talents from Matthew 25. So this is the parable of the
talents. A master distributes his wealth
to his servants and the wealth is distributed in the form of a
coin, and the name of the coin is
translated in English with the word talent.
It's precisely the word here for this coin that gives us our
modern word, our modern word talent,
which means "a skill," of course or "a predisposition."
Now think about it. That our word talent has
its origin in this parable should give you a sense of the
extraordinary cultural weight that this parable has
assumed.Okay. To one servant the master gave
five talents. You remember this story.
To one servant the master gave five talents,
to another he gave two, and to a third servant he gave
one talent. When the master returns from
his journey, he learns that the first two servants had wisely
and piously invested their talents,
and they had doubled their money.
They had profited and the master praises them.
But the servant who had been given only one talent hid the
talent in the earth so as -- perfectly understandably -- so
as not to risk the only talent [laughs]
that he had been given. I think the genius of this
parable hinges on the fact that the servant who was only given
one talent seems to be acting so perfectly reasonably -- with a
laudable form of caution and hesitation,
you could actually say. And so he explains to the
master: I knew thou was't an hard
man which reapest where thou sowedst not and gatherest where
thou strawest not. I was therefore afraid and I
went and hid thy talent in the earth.
Because the servant had not been willing to spend the only
talent that he had been given, the master instructs him to
give his one and only talent to the man who now has ten.
And the master concludes with an imperative that is surely one
of the most terrifying utterances in the entire Bible:
Cast therefore that unprofitable servant into utter
darkness. There shall be weeping and
gnashing of teeth. The conclusion of this parable
seems so violent perhaps because the lesson to be learned from
the parable is so uncertain. Milton seems to have been drawn
to the parable as a way of understanding the expectations
placed upon him by his master -- actually his two masters,
or his two fathers. There is first the earthly
father, John Milton, Sr., who had given Milton the
talent of an expensive education and then six years of additional
heavily subsidized study; and there is also the Heavenly
Father, who had given Milton his rhetorical gifts and expected
him to use them in some way for God's benefit -- presumably to
use them in some way beneficial to the church (the most obvious
way being naturally the vocation of the ministry).
And the parable is a horrifying one because it places such an
unspeakable pressure on the interpreter to produce
something, to show something for himself
at the end of the day. And for Milton,
whose temperament up to this point inclined him obviously to
hesitation, to postponement,
and to merely the anticipation of profit, the pressure applied
by this parable of the unprofitable servant may very
well have seemed utterly unbearable.But there was
another parable, another of Jesus' parables that
also treated the problem of vocation.
And like the parable of the talents, it provided what seemed
to be a model for a kind of pattern of action,
or actually the trajectory of a career: and this is the parable
of the workers in the vineyard. Here a householder looks for
laborers that he will pay a penny a day.
The laborers who began to work at dawn earn a penny,
the laborers hired in the third hour earn a penny and the
laborers who stood idle in the marketplace until the eleventh
hour -- who were asked to do nothing until the last possible
moment -- they also received a penny for their pains at the end
of the day, "their pains such as they
were."Now when asked by the hardest workers why "each of the
laborers received every man a penny,"
the householder replies, "Take that which is thine own
and go thy way. I will give unto this last as
much as to thee." So in this parable,
which has suggested to generations of readers something
like socialism or a form of communism,
the amount of labor actually expended is immaterial,
so that the latecomer to the job is rewarded the same as the
worker who was there from the very beginning and working from
the very beginning. As a model of economic activity
or as a kind of vocation guide, this parable couldn't be more
opposed -- or to some wouldn't seem more opposed -- to the
parable of the unprofitable servant.
The men who stood around and did nothing until they were
called to act earned precisely the same amount as those who had
been laboring in the vineyard all day.
They're not punished for their unprofitable expectation.
They're not punished for just waiting around to be called to
work. They're not bidden to be cast
out in to utter darkness where there's weeping and gnashing of
teeth. They're rewarded for
their waiting.This parable may seem, I think,
to be a little more compatible with Milton's general
temperament in the years of his studious retirement.
As a young man consumed with anxiety about his failure yet to
do anything, whether to gain employment as a clergyman or to
produce somehow some great work of literature -- Milton's
continually seeking assurance that the latecomer (and this is
how he's thinking of himself) will be rewarded,
that the latecomer will be actually able to produce
something when he is called to produce something.
For Milton these two parables were locked in a powerful
dialectical relation to one another.
The "parable of the talents" rewards hard work and
investment; and it's satisfying because it
does that, but it also instills an anxiety
about non-productivity. The "parable of the vineyard"
assures us that God rewards us regardless of our hard work and
investment, but only if we're called,
only if God chooses us. And so you can see the strange
dialectic developing here: the anxiety aroused by one
parable necessitates the consolation that's offered by
the other one, but the consoling parable soon
arouses its own anxieties, which only can be quieted by
recourse to the other parable.The result,
needless to say, is mind-spinning.
We're all familiar with at least a version of this.
All of us just as human beings, all of us want to be rewarded.
We want to be loved for our hard work, and we're all working
really hard here. But of course,
we also want to be loved -- we want to be rewarded
unconditionally without any contingencies whatsoever.
On some level that's just the human condition.
And Milton uses the language of these two parables to get at
this problem that has resonances in every conceivable
sphere.Now shortly after Milton composed the sonnet "How
Soon Hath Time," he wrote a letter to a
friend in which he enclosed this poem, the sonnet.
This is in the packet after the parables.
We don't know the intended recipient of this letter,
and we actually have no idea whether Milton actually sent the
letter; but a couple of drafts of this
letter actually exist in Milton's own hand,
and the letter is clearly a document that Milton had devoted
some energy and some time to. We need to look at it.
The unnamed friend sounds quite a bit actually like
Milton's disapproving father. The friend has obviously chided
Milton for not doing anything with his life.
Milton has shown so much promise.
He possessed so many obvious talents that could be poured
into the profession for which he was so clearly suited -- the
profession of the ministry -- but Milton was remaining at his
father's house in what seemed like a perpetual state of
humiliating self-infantilization.
He seems to have been doing nothing but reading,
acquiring more knowledge and really essentially just learning
for the sake of learning. And so Milton responds to what
he takes to be this objection. He responds in the second
paragraph of the letter in the left-hand column of the packet
to this criticism that he's doing so little.
Milton acknowledges that the course he's chosen for himself
may not be a natural one: Nature herself pushes a
young man to begin a family and to seek credible employment
[Milton writes]. The natural desire for fame
seated in the breast of every true scholar usually pushes him
to make haste by the readiest way of publishing and divulging
conceived merits. But it's just this making haste
toward publication -- writing something really great right now
-- that Milton's resisting here. He claims to be studying and
learning rather than producing right now;
and there's a problem with just studying and learning,
and it's a problem that Milton can't avoid.
It's possible that in merely reading and in merely amassing
more and more knowledge, Milton's doing little more than
the unprofitable servant in Matthew 25.
It's possible that he's hiding his talent or burying his
conceived merits deep within the earth,
and it's this frightening possibility that Milton forces
himself to engage head on -- the implications of this
parable.Look in the packet at this letter near the top of
the right-hand side of the page. Milton claims that his love of
learning might seem to contradict the parable of the
talents. The master had commanded his
servants, of course, to do something -- to show a
profit in a due and timely fashion,
but Milton wants his friend here to know that there's,
of course, nothing to worry about.
This is how Milton's mind is working overtime here.
This is the argument: Milton's pursuing his learning.
He's postponing his publication because it's his job really to
consider the master's great commandment all the more
closely. The point of the parable,
Milton explains -- this is an unbelievable misreading of the
biblical test -- the point of the parable is not that the
servant should have invested his one talent just anywhere.
The servant's problem was that he didn't take enough time.
He didn't carefully consider the command, because a careful
consideration of the master's command, and I'm quoting here:
…does not press forward as soon as may be to
undergo but keeps off with the sacred reverence and religious
advisement how best to undergo, not taking thought of being
late so as to give advantage to be more fit.
Unbelievable. You look at a passage like that
in complete astonishment. Milton has invoked,
of course to his own detriment -- what was he thinking?
-- the parable of the unprofitable servant,
the parable of the talents. But he invokes it to show that
if one really reads it carefully enough, one can see that the
lesson to be drawn has nothing whatsoever to do with the due
and timely investment of one's talent.
What this parable really teaches us is that we do best to
wait, we do best to consider the command,
to consider all of the possible investment strategies.
Maybe we want to go into the ministry, maybe we want to go
into poetry. Perhaps we want to write like
Shakespeare, maybe we want to be a writer like the great Old
Testament prophet Isaiah. But the last thing we should be
burdened with, Milton's suggesting here,
is the fear of being late.Now I don't have to
tell you that Milton has done a powerful violence to this
parable in Matthew. Now God only knows what this
parable actually means. It's perfectly inscrutable as
far as I'm concerned. But I think I can say with
absolute certainty that one of its possible significances
cannot be that the unprofitable servant should have waited to
make his investment. Now think of it:
if Milton had been the servant, he wouldn't even have made it
to the stage of burying the stupid coin in the earth.
He would be consumed with the consideration of whether to bury
it here or whether to bury it there -- or should he bury it
two feet under, or maybe he should bury it six
feet under?Okay. I'm going to stop there.
There's a lot more to say about the parable of the talents and
the parable of the laborers in the vineyard,
but we have run out of time.
