Dialogue about astronomy in Milton's poem "Paradise Lost". Philosophical and religious views

John Milton - the famous English poet, publicist, thinker, politician - was born in London on December 9, 1608. His father was a successful notary, a versatile educated man, who nevertheless adhered to Puritan views, raising his son in the spirit of asceticism and religious worship. John Milton was a well-educated man. After studying at home and at St. Paul in 1625, he became a student at Christ's College, Cambridge University, from which he graduated in 1632 with a Master of Arts degree.

Having made a difficult choice, Milton abandoned his career as a clergyman and went to his father’s estate, located near the capital, for six years, where he continued to study independently. At the beginning of 1638, he went on a trip to France and Italy, during which he met many celebrities, in particular, G. Galileo. In 1639 he urgently returned to England due to rumors of an approaching civil war.

John Milton's early poetic works - the short poems "Merry" and "Thoughtful", the dramatic pastoral "Comus" - are a reflection of his bright mood and inner harmony. Other periods of his biography were far from so cloudless. Having settled in London after his trip, Milton founded a private educational institution, in which he taught his nephews, but soon became interested in social and journalistic activities. In 1641, the first prose pamphlet dedicated to the English Reformation was published. Subsequently, Milton, being an outspoken supporter of the revolution and an enemy of the monarchy, would write a number of political pamphlets on the topic of the day, eloquently demonstrating his oratorical gift, rich imagination and indifference to the fate of his homeland.

In 1642, the poet married Mary Powell, a young girl with whom he had very little in common. After a month of living together, the newly-made wife went to her parents and returned only in 1645, depriving Milton of peace during this entire time. During 1645-1649. he became much less involved in public affairs, most likely delving into preliminary work on the history of Britain. The execution of Charles I in January 1649 forced him to abandon his seclusion and burst out with a bold pamphlet, “The Duties of Princes and Governments.” In March 1649, Milton was appointed secretary of the State Council, whose duties were to correspond with foreign languages.

The 50s became a real black streak in Milton's life. In February 1952, he completely lost his sight, in May his wife died during childbirth, and in June his little son died. The second wife, with whom he tied the knot at the end of 1656, died at the beginning of 1658. Until 1655, blind Milton continued to work as a secretary with the help of assistants - scribes and readers.

In the period 1660-1674. Milton, as a human being, was completely alone: ​​his relationship with his remaining two daughters did not work out. After the accession of Charles II to the throne, he fell into disgrace. His poignant political pamphlets were burned, he had to sit in prison, even his very life was in danger and was saved only thanks to influential friends. However, it was during this difficult time that he wrote his best works on biblical themes - “Paradise Lost” (1667) and “Paradise Regained” (1671), as well as “Samsonbreaker” (1671), which became a worthy end to his literary journey. On November 8, 1674, John Milton died in London.

John Milton is one of England's greatest poets, a major publicist and figure in the Great English Revolution.

Milton got very a good education- first at home and at the school of St. Paul, and then at Cambridge University (1632, Master of Arts). After completing the course, he spent five years with his parents in the small town of Gorton (near London), immersed in self-education and self-improvement. This first youthful period of Milton's life ended in 1637 with a trip to Italy and France, where he met Galileo, Hugo Grotius and others famous people that time.

In contrast to most great people, Milton spent the first half of his life in complete spiritual harmony; suffering and spiritual storms darkened his mature age and old age.

The bright mood of young Milton corresponds to the character of his first poems:

* “L’Allegro” (“Merry”) and “Il Penseroso” (“Thoughtful”), where Milton paints a person in two opposite moods, joyful and contemplative-sad, and shows how nature is colored for the contemplator with the change of these moods. Both short poems are imbued with direct feeling and a special gracefulness that characterizes the lyrics of the Elizabethan era and is no longer found in Milton himself.
* "Lycidas" ("Lycidas") gives subtle descriptions of idealized rural life, but the mood itself is deeper and reveals the patriotic passions hidden in the poet's soul; the fanaticism of the Puritan revolutionary is strangely intertwined here with melancholy poetry in the spirit of Petrarch.
* "Comus" ("Comus"). This is one of the most brilliant dramatic pastorals for which fashion had not yet passed.

From 1639 to 1660 the second period in life and activity lasts. Returning from Italy, he settled in London, raised his nephews and wrote a treatise "On Education" ("Tractate of Education, to Master Samuel Hartlib"), which has a mainly biographical interest and shows Milton's aversion to any routine.

In 1643 he married Mary Powell - and this marriage turned his previously serene existence into a series of domestic disasters and material adversities. His wife left him in the first year of his life, and with her refusal to return, she drove him to despair. Milton extended his own unsuccessful experience of family life to marriage in general and wrote a polemical treatise, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.

In his old age, Milton found himself alone in the close circle of his family - his second wife (the first died early, returning to her husband’s house several years before her death), completely alien to his spiritual life, and two daughters; He forced the latter to read aloud to him in languages ​​they did not understand, which aroused in them an extremely unfriendly attitude towards him. For Milton, complete loneliness came - and at the same time, a time of greatest creativity. This last period of his life, from 1660 to 1674, was marked by three brilliant works: “Paradise Lost”, “Paradise Regained” and “Samson Agonistes”.

Milton and politics

Having joined the ranks of the "Independent" party, Milton devoted a whole series of political pamphlets to various issues of the day. All these pamphlets testify to the strength of the poet's rebellious soul and the brilliance of his imagination and eloquence. The most remarkable of his defenses of popular rights is devoted to the demand for freedom of the printed word ("Areopagitica" - "Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England").

Of the remaining 24 pamphlets, the first ("Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it") appeared in 1641, and the last - "A ready and easy way to establish a free Commonwealth" in 1660 ; thus, they cover the entire course of the English revolution.

With the advent of parliamentary rule, Milton took the place of government secretary for Latin correspondence. Among the other commissions Milton carried out during his secretaryship was a response to the anonymous royalist pamphlet "Eikon Basilike", which appeared after the execution of Charles I. Milton wrote the pamphlet "The Iconoclast" (“Eikonoklastes”), in which he wittily defeated the arguments of the anonymous author. Less successful was Milton's polemics with other political and religious opponents, Salmasius and Morus.

In 1652, Milton went blind, and this had a serious impact on his material resources, and the Stuart restoration brought him complete ruin; Even more difficult for Milton was the defeat of his party.

The name of John Milton (John Milton, 1608–1674), a poet, thinker and publicist who inextricably linked his fate with the events of the great English Revolution, is rightfully considered a symbol of the highest achievements of literature in England in the 17th century. His work had a lasting, profound influence on the development of European social thought and literature of subsequent eras.

Milton was born into the family of a wealthy London notary close to Puritan circles. The poet's father, a man of varied interests, a keen connoisseur of art, managed to give his son brilliant education. After graduating from one of the best London schools, Milton entered Cambridge University. In 1629 he received a bachelor's degree, and three years later a master of arts. The young man spent the next six years on his father’s estate in Gorton, devoting himself entirely to poetry and scientific studies. He was fluent in Latin and Italian, read Greek and Hebrew authors in the original, and had a good knowledge of the literature of antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

In 1638–1639 Milton visited Italy. A deep knowledge of the country’s culture and language contributed to the poet’s rapprochement with Italian writers and scientists. The meeting with the great Galileo made an indelible impression on him. Milton also thought about traveling to Greece, but news of the brewing civil war in England prompted him to rush home. “I believed,” he later wrote, “that it would be low of me to carelessly travel abroad for the sake of personal intellectual development while at home my countrymen were fighting for freedom.”

The first period of Milton’s creative activity, including the years of “study and wandering,” coincides with the pre-revolutionary decades (20–30s). During this period, the formation of a poet occurs, his tastes and beliefs are formed. Milton tries his hand at lyrical and dramatic genres: he writes poems “for the occasion”, solemn elegies for Latin, sonnets, poems on religious themes, small mask plays.

main feature the creativity of young Milton - a combination of motifs from the cheerful, colorful poetry of the Renaissance with Puritan seriousness and didactics. In Puritanism, he was attracted by the preaching of asceticism, spiritual fortitude, criticism of the licentiousness of the court and royal tyranny. However, the hostility of the Puritans towards art and theater was alien to Milton. In the poem “To Shakespeare,” he praises the genius of the great playwright, thereby emphasizing his spiritual connection with his legacy.

The influence of the traditions of the Renaissance and at the same time the duality of perception of the world and man, not typical of Renaissance artists, are clearly manifested in the “twin” poems - L’Allegro (“The Cheerful”) and Il Penseroso (“Thoughtful”). In this philosophical and lyrical diptych, Milton contrasts two states of mind and, more broadly, two ways of human life. “L’Allegro” depicts a cheerful and carefree young man who enjoys the pleasures of rural and city life equally. The young man’s soul is full of desires, he longs to feel the fullness and joy of being.

“Il Penseroso” paints an image of a serious, solitary person who is drawn to the thorny path of knowledge. He is ready to devote his whole life to the study of sciences and arts. The author of the diptych seems to be at a crossroads, pondering which of the two ways of life to give preference to. The young, cheerful spirit of “L’Allegro” is not alien to Milton, but his inner mood is closer to the thoughtful and serious attitude to life of “Il Penseroso”.

By the end of the 30s, Puritan tendencies were noticeably increasing in Milton's work; At the same time, his works acquire important social implications. In the masque play Comus (1637), the author praises the virtue typical of the moral rigor of the Puritans. The evil spirit Comus tries in vain to seduce a young Lady lost in the forest. The forest in the play symbolizes the intricacy of human life. Comus represents vice. The Lady, the embodiment of chastity, firmly resists the Temptations and charms of Comus and emerges victorious from the duel.

In the image of Comus one can discern that primordial vitality that was inherent in the poetic element of the Renaissance. But the author’s sympathies in the play belong not to Comus, but to the Lady. Contrasting strict morality with an unbridled thirst for pleasure, Milton opposes what the Renaissance ideal in noble society had practically degenerated into, becoming a justification for rude sensuality, contempt for moral values. The theme of "Comus" - the theme of the test of virtue, the eternal rivalry between good and evil - sounds with renewed vigor in the poet's later works.

In the last major work of the first period - the elegy "Lisndas" (1638) - Milton, grieving the untimely death of his friend, Edward King, reflects on the frailty of life and his fate - the fate of a man who chose the difficult path of a poet. Sadness for the deceased is combined in an elegy with an invective: into the mouth of the Apostle Peter, who accepts King’s soul into heaven, the author puts an angry philippic against the Episcopal Church, which can serve as a kind of epigraph to his treatises of the 40s.

The moral pathos of Milton's works, his inherent didacticism, the severity of the ideals he put forward, the classical clarity of verse, significantly distinguish him early poetry from the sophisticated and complicated mystical works of “metaphysicians” and from the mindlessly hedonistic poetry of “gentlemen”; they allow us to speak about the predominance of classicism tendencies in him during this period.

In the second period of his work, covering the 1640s–1650s, Milton, almost abandoning poetry dear to his heart, acted as a revolutionary publicist. After England was declared a republic, he was appointed Latin Secretary of the Council of State. In this post, for several years he conducted diplomatic correspondence with foreign powers. Milton's vision weakened from intense work, and in 1652 he became completely blind. But even blind, the writer continues to serve the republic, dictating his works.

All of Milton's treatises and pamphlets are permeated by the idea of ​​freedom. The author distinguishes three main types of freedom - in religious, private and civil life. In his first journalistic works (“On the Reformation”, “On the Episcopate”, etc.), written in 1641–1642, Milton declares war on the Church of England, advocates for freedom of faith and conscience, and for the separation of church and state. Even James I, emphasizing the inextricable connection between the episcopate and the monarchy, succinctly remarked: “If there is no bishop, there is no king.” The overthrow of the authority of bishops and the debunking of the dogma of the divine origin of church power in Milton's pamphlets dealt a serious blow to church-based absolutism.

Milton devotes the next group of pamphlets to the problems of freedom in private life, including among the issues under consideration “the conditions of marriage, raising children and the free expression of thoughts.” In a series of treatises on divorce (1643–1645), decisively departing from the sanctimonious morality of the Puritans, the author puts forward an unheard-of provision for his time on the right of spouses to divorce if there is no love and consent in the marriage.

In his treatise “On Education” (1644), speaking out against the “uneradicated scholastic ignorance of barbarian ages,” Milton reflects on ways to educate a virtuous, comprehensively developed personality, capable of “performing properly, skillfully and with all his soul any duties - both personal and public, both peaceful and military.” Milton's pedagogical system has many common features with the teachings of the outstanding Czech teacher Jan Amos Comenius, who visited London in 1641. The treatise “On Education” is an important milestone in the history of humanistic pedagogy.

A special place among Milton's pamphlets is occupied by Areopagitica (1644) - a brilliant speech in defense of freedom of speech and the press. According to the deep conviction of the writer, knowledge is not capable of desecrating true virtue; virtue, which must be protected from bad books, is worth little. Even the danger of the publication of Catholic and atheistic literature does not justify in the eyes of the author the existence of the institution of preliminary censorship. “To kill a book,” he writes, “is the same as killing a person... He who destroys a good book kills the mind itself...”

The development of revolutionary events in England at the end of the 40s entailed a deepening of the radical sentiments of the thinker. All of Milton's journalistic speeches of this time were devoted to the problems of political power. In the pamphlet “The Rights and Duties of Kings and Governments” and in “The Iconoclast” he defends the ideas of the revolution, substantiates the theory of the “social contract” and the right of the people to tyrannicide. Debunking the feudal doctrine of the divine origin of royal power, Milton argues that power originally belongs to the people, who vest it in a certain person under certain conditions. If the social contract is not respected, if the monarch, "ignoring the law and the common good, rules only in his own interests and in the interests of his clique," he is a tyrant. The people have the right to judge, depose and execute a tyrant.

During the years of the fierce pamphlet war unleashed by supporters of the monarchy after the defeat, Milton’s famous treatises “Defense of the English People” (1650) and “The Second Defense of the English People” (1654) were born. Both treatises are written in Latin and addressed to the entire educated world. In them, reflecting the attacks of enemies on the policies of the republican government, the writer develops the ideas of democracy and expresses the belief that the English republic will show others the path to freedom. Exalting the people of England, Milton likens them to Samson, who has risen from an age-old sleep, next to whom the authors of slanderous works look like insignificant and pitiful pygmies. In the XVIII–XIX centuries. Milton's combat pamphlets more than once inspired leaders of European revolutions in their struggle against absolutism.

Cromwell's dictatorship thoroughly shook the hopes that Milton had placed in him, which he had associated with the young republic. In the sonnet “To Lord General Cromwell” and in both “Defenses” the author glorified the leader of the Independents as a talented commander and statesman, but, anticipating the impending changes, he warned him against encroaching on the freedom won with such difficulty. Convinced that his admonitions were in vain, the writer became silent and in subsequent years did not utter a word about Cromwell.

Only after the death of the Lord Protector did Milton again take up the pen of a publicist. In the last group of pamphlets, created on the eve of the Restoration, he appeals to his compatriots to join forces in the fight for the republic. The author is convinced that the restoration of the monarchy will lead to the revival of tyranny and will deprive the people of their democratic gains. “A free republic without a king and a house of lords,” he writes, “is the best form of government.”

Milton's journalism cannot be comprehended without the author's living connections with the era, with its freedom-loving spirit. The contradictions of the ideology of the new class were reflected in the writer’s mind with extraordinary vividness. On the one hand, he led a nationwide movement against the monarchy, against the cruelties of the feudal world order, on the other, he was limited by the religious ideas of his time and sought in the Holy Scriptures a theoretical justification for the fight against absolutism.

Social and political thought of England of the era bourgeois revolution rested largely on the interpretation of the Bible in the spirit of the ideals of early Christianity: it was seen as preaching the equality of people before God, a protest against despotism in any form. Milton, as an ideologist of independence, was close to the iconoclastic pathos of Protestant teaching. However, the dogmatism and fanaticism of the most ardent champions of Puritanism remained alien to the writer. His religiosity was akin to the religiosity of the great scientists of the Renaissance - Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More, who embodied the ideas of so-called “Christian humanism” in their work.

Combining religious beliefs with humanistic ones, Milton, like More and Erasmus, was never a blind adherent of church dogma, he fought against scholasticism and for new methods of education. Like them, he refused to take on faith every word of the Holy Scriptures, believing that a person, through reason, must himself determine what is true and what is false in Scripture. Finally, following the humanists, Milton put forward his practical activity as the main criterion for assessing a person and could not come to terms with the condemnation of a person, supposedly predetermined by heaven. Rejecting the Calvinist dogma of absolute predestination, the writer insisted that man, endowed with reason and free will, is the master of his own destiny.

At the end of the 50s, Milton made an attempt to present his religious, philosophical and ethical views, his understanding of the Bible, in the form of an integral, complete system. This is how the treatise “On Christian Doctrine” appeared - an extensive theological and ethical work in Latin, first published only in 1825. The author’s worldview was not consistent and did not form a coherent system. On the one hand, as a religious man, Milton believed that God created the world and life, and proclaimed him to be an absolute, infinite and unknowable being, on the other hand, moving closer to pantheism, he declared the whole world material and was ready to recognize matter as part of the divine substance .

The ideological roots of the writer’s worldview stretch to the spontaneous materialism of the Renaissance. Materialistic tendencies are clearly evident in Milton's understanding of human nature. Disagreeing with medieval thinkers, he argues that man "was not created or composed of two separate or distinct elements of nature, such as soul and body." Recognizing the unity of spiritual and material substances and believing that everything that comes from the hands of the creator is perfect, Milton thereby comes to the rehabilitation of the flesh and sensual nature of man. However, feelings, in his opinion, must be unconditionally subordinated to reason: the dominance of passions is the source of all evil in the world.

The second book of the treatise “On Christian Doctrine” is devoted to ethical problems. It is characteristic that in constructing his ethics, Milton relies not only on the authority of the Bible, but also on the philosophy of antiquity, which once again demonstrates his commitment to the ideas of humanism. The main task of morality for Milton is to curb evil passions and cultivate virtues. He sees the duty and happiness of a Christian not in passive humility, but in active service to the public good.

This work by Milton testifies to the painful fluctuations in the religious and philosophical thought of the author, who contradictorily combined elemental materialism with elements of idealism, adherence to Puritan beliefs with fidelity to the ideals of the Renaissance, devout faith in biblical wisdom and an inquisitive spirit of research, knowledge of the laws governing the Universe.

Milton's prose occupies an important place in his creative heritage. It helps to better understand the historical uniqueness of the religious and political struggle of his time, to understand the most important features of his best poetic creations. Over a twenty-year period, from 1640 to 1660, Milton, caught up in the turbulent flow of political events, created only 16 sonnets and set several psalms into verse. But these years were by no means in vain for Milton the poet: the experience of a publicist, a participant in the historical battle of the era, was of great importance for him and was reflected in a unique form in the works of art of the third and final period of his work.

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was perceived by Milton as a disaster. “Evil days” came for him: many of his comrades were executed, others languished in prison; he himself was persecuted and subjected to a large fine; the most daring of his pamphlets were consigned to the flames. However, Milton's spirit was not broken. Persecuted and blind, in the last fourteen years of his life he created works that have glorified his name for centuries: the poems “Paradise Lost” (1667), “Paradise Regained” (1671) and the tragedy “Samson the Fighter” (1671).

Everything Milton wrote over half a century, despite his undoubted mastery, pales next to his masterpiece - the poem “Paradise Lost”. Even during his student years, the poet decided to create an epic work that would glorify England and its literature. Initially, he intended to glorify the legendary King Arthur in the epic. However, at a time of fierce struggle against the monarchy, the concept of “Arturiad” became unacceptable to him.

The author drew the plot of “Paradise Lost,” as well as two later works, “Paradise Regained” and “Samson the Fighter,” from the Bible. Milton’s very appeal to the source from which the English people borrowed “language, passions and illusions” for their bourgeois revolution was filled with deep meaning: in the context of a victorious reaction, the poet seemed to be declaring that the spirit of the revolution had not died, that its ideals were alive and well. indestructible.

The Old Testament myth of the fall of the first people, which forms the basis of Paradise Lost, attracted writers even before Milton. The same myth was used in their writings by the French Protestant poet Du Bartas, the Dutch author Hugo Gretius, and the famous Dutch writer Joost van den Vondel. All of them influenced the English poet to one degree or another.

But no matter how much Milton owed to his predecessors, his majestic epic poem was an undeniably original phenomenon: it was the product of a different era, different historical conditions; The tasks, artistic, moral, social, that the poet set for himself were different, and his talent was different. “Paradise Lost” summed up the author’s many years of thoughts about religion and philosophy, about the fate of the homeland and humanity, about the ways of its political and spiritual improvement.

What is striking first of all is the cosmic grandeur of Milton's poem. The dramatic events of Paradise Lost are played out against the backdrop of the vast expanses of the Universe. Its theme is sacred history, and its heroes are God, the Devil, the Messiah, Adam and Eve. The whole world and human history appear in the epic as the arena of a centuries-old struggle between Good and Evil, as a lists of divine and satanic principles. In the poem, Milton paints impressive scenes of the battles of the heavenly legions and glorifies the victory of God over the Devil, narrates the fall of Adam and Eve and the temporary triumph of Satan, prophesies about the future salvation of people and their difficult but steady path to perfection. Thus, using “language, passions and illusions borrowed from Old Testament", he comes to an optimistic conclusion about the inevitable triumph of Good in the world, a conclusion that is especially relevant in the “evil days” of the Restoration.

Milton's plan formally corresponded to the biblical legend, according to which the futile litigation between Satan and God should end in the complete defeat of Satan.

The executor of the good plans of the Lord of the World is, in Milton’s depiction, God the Son. The hero appears in the poem in a variety of guises: he is the angry Messiah, casting the rebellious angels into Hell, he is the creator beautiful world, he is the intercessor of Man before God the Father, and, finally, he is the God-Man, the son of God and Man, the king of the universe. Each of the acts of God the Son should reveal some new facet of his appearance. It embodies certain moral principles that were dear to the poet: submission to the will of God the Father, mercilessness towards enemies, mercy towards the lost, readiness for self-sacrifice. The overt didactic orientation of the image, its schematism and declarative nature significantly reduce its artistic merits.

Satan is also the son of God, but a son who chose the path of evil, rebelled against the will of his father and is therefore rejected. Milton traditionally explains the spiritual death of the once beautiful Lucifer-Satan by his exorbitant pride. Pride is interpreted by the poet as an unjustified desire of an individual to violate the boundaries set for him by nature, to rise above his allotted place in the great chain of being. Pride blinds, subjugates the mind, and then base passions, freed from shackles, enslave the personality, forever depriving it of freedom and peace. Satan is destined to carry eternal hell in his soul.

An unquenchable thirst for power and compassion for the angels who fell through his fault, hatred of God, a thirst for revenge and attacks of repentance, envy of people and pity for them torment the tormented soul of the rebellious Devil. Hell is everywhere. “Hell is myself,” Satan confesses. According to Milton, the mighty mind of Satan, blinded by pride, is doomed to eternally serve vice and destruction. The mind of God creates the World and Man, the mind of Satan erects Pandemonium, invents artillery, and tells him how to seduce the first people.

It is clear that in Paradise Lost Milton intended, in accordance with religious ideals, to sing of submission to a good and merciful God and to condemn Satan. However, for more than two hundred years now, critics have discovered elements in the poem that clearly prevent it from being an expression of an orthodox religious point of view. “Milton’s poem,” Shelley wrote in “A Defense of Poetry,” “contains a philosophical refutation of the very dogmas for which it ... was supposed to serve as the main support. Nothing can compare in power and splendor with the image of Satan in Paradise Lost... Milton so distorts the generally accepted beliefs (if it can be called a distortion) that he does not attribute to his God any moral superiority over Satan.

Indeed, the image of the Devil in Milton’s epic, contrary to its biblical interpretation, looks so majestic and attractive that next to him all the other characters in the poem become lost and dim. The titanic passion of Satan's nature, his proud and rebellious spirit, love of freedom and strong will, courage and stoicism almost invariably aroused the admiration of readers and critics. On the other hand, God, called to become the embodiment of Reason and Good, appears in the poem as an insidious and vengeful monarch, who, according to Satan, “alone reigns like a despot in heaven.”

A witness and participant in a grandiose social revolution, Milton, creating an epic poem, was inspired by the atmosphere civil war, which, in his opinion, was a reflection of the universal collision of Good and Evil. Painting scenes of a fierce battle between the forces of Heaven and Hell, the poet used the colors that the era of revolutionary disruption supplied for his palette, and, willingly or unwillingly, filled the poem with its heroic spirit. This so transformed his original plan, so undermined its very foundation, that the entire edifice of the author's conscientious religious abstractions tilted dangerously. “Milton’s poetry,” Belinsky wrote, “is clearly a product of his era: without suspecting it, he, in the person of his proud and gloomy Satan, wrote the apotheosis of rebellion against authority, although he was thinking of doing something completely different.”

Working on the epic during the years of reaction, Milton considered it necessary to depict the Evil that destroyed the revolution in all its royal splendor and dangerous attractiveness: a caricature of the Evil Spirit as a repulsive and weak creature, distorting the truth, could, in the poet’s opinion, harm the reader’s virtue.

According to Milton, Satan, who dared to oppose the omnipotent God, could not help but be a titanic figure. Wanting to paint a vivid and convincing portrait of Satan, the poet relied on the tradition of depicting tragic heroes - “villains with a powerful soul” - characteristic of the Elizabethan playwrights, Marlowe and especially Shakespeare. Like the humanists of the Renaissance, Milton believed that Good and Evil are so closely intertwined that they are sometimes difficult to distinguish from each other. This also influenced the characterization of the Archenemy, whose greatness so insidiously obscures the Evil embodied in him.

It would be wrong, of course, to see in Paradise Lost an allegorical history of the English bourgeois revolution, to draw direct parallels between the revolt of the fallen angels in Milton's poem and the “great rebellion” of the Puritans. In accordance with Christian ideals, Milton conceived the poem as a justification of the ways of God, but the letter of biblical teaching caused him, like the best representatives of his class, certain doubts; It was they who led to the fact that Satan, who rebelled against God, although condemned by the author, is not deprived of his sympathy and absorbs the features of a brave Protestant against the world order. Paradise Lost is the work of a great rebellious spirit. It could not help but express a man who devoted his whole life to the fight against despotism.

There is no doubt that it was psychologically easier for the revolutionary poet, who experienced the bitterness of defeat during the Restoration, to “get used to” the role of a defeated angel rather than the image of a victorious God. Drawing the appearance of a lost battle, but not a conquered Spirit, the author sometimes endowed him with traits - and, moreover, the best - of his own nature. Is it not because the speech of Satan addressed to his comrades in the poem sounds so heartfelt because the thoughts and feelings of the hero were well known to his creator?

...We are unsuccessful

They tried to shake his throne

And they lost the fight. So what?

Not everything died: the fuse was preserved

Indomitable will, along

With immense hatred, thirst for revenge

And courage - not to give in forever.

The presence of a rebellious principle, rebellious to despotism in Milton’s worldview, humanistic traditions in his work, colored by the political experience of his turning point, allowed him, instead of the conventional figure immortalized by biblical tradition, to create in the person of Satan a bright and living individuality, in which, at the same time, the typical features of his contemporaries were unmistakably discerned poet. The militant individualism of Milton's hero had something undeniably beneficial on its flip side: an unwillingness to blindly obey authority, seething energy, an eternal search and dissatisfaction.

Another part of the Old Testament legend, dedicated to the first people, also acquired a new, unusual sound under the artist’s pen. The myth of Adam and Eve serves as Milton's starting point for philosophical and poetic reflections on the meaning of life, the nature of man, his desire for knowledge, his place under the sun.

Man is depicted in Paradise Lost as a being standing at the center of the universe: on the “ladder of Nature” he occupies a middle position between the sensory, animal world and the world of angels. He is the highest of earthly beings, God’s deputy on earth, he brings together the lower and higher spheres of existence. A bright path of spiritual elevation opens before Adam and Eve, while a dark abyss opens up behind them, threatening to swallow them if they betray God. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, growing in the heart of Eden, is a symbol of the freedom of choice granted to the first people. Its purpose is to test people's faith in the Creator.

Organically included in the general indestructible order, Man becomes a point of refraction of opposing influences emitted by powerful cosmic forces. The poet places his heroes - both spatially and in life-ethical terms - in the very center of the Universe, halfway between the Empyrean and Hell. According to Milton, people themselves are responsible for their own destiny: endowed with reason and free will, they must choose every moment of their lives between God and Satan, good and evil, creation and destruction, spiritual greatness and moral baseness.

According to the poet, Man is initially beautiful. It was created by an all-good and all-wise deity; there are no and cannot be any flaws in it. Adam is the embodiment of strength, courage and profundity, Eve - feminine perfection and charm. The love of Adam and Eve is the perfect combination of spiritual intimacy and physical attraction. The life of the first people in the earthly Paradise is simple, abundant and beautiful. Generous nature abundantly gifts them with everything they need. Only by violating God's commandment by eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve are deprived of the immortality and bliss given to them at creation, and doom the human race to severe trials.

It is easy to see that the images of the first people were conceived by Milton as the embodiment of a religious and humanistic ideal, that is, as ideal images of people, since they appear as inhabitants of paradise obedient to God. However, in the end, in the poet’s portrayal, they turn out to be more humane, closer to the humanistic norm, precisely after the Fall and expulsion from the heavenly abode.

The serene picture of the existence of the first people in paradise is expressively contrasted in the poem with the picture of a stormy, confused, dramatically shocked world. Adam and Eve, in the role of sinless inhabitants of Eden, are unknown to contradictions, enmity, and mental torment. They do not know the burden of overwork and death. But their bliss is based on submission to the will of God, involves the rejection of the temptations of knowledge and is inextricably linked with the limitations of the heavenly idyll. The idyllic world collapses as soon as Satan invades it.

In the tempting speeches of Satan and in Eve’s doubts regarding the sinfulness of knowledge, echoes of the author’s own doubts are heard:

What did he prohibit? Knowledge! Banned

Good! Forbade us to gain

Wisdom…

...What's the point?

Our freedom?

Milton, a humanist thinker, was convinced of the benefits of knowledge and could not reconcile the biblical legend with his attitude towards knowledge: for him it is not a sin, but a blessing, although sometimes one has to pay a high price for it.

Notable in the poem are the motives for the first people’s disobedience to the right hand of God: Eve’s insatiable thirst for knowledge prompts her to taste the forbidden fruit. Adam takes the fatal step out of compassion and love for Eve, although he is aware that by his action he places the “human” above the “divine.” No less selflessly, Eve, after Adam’s fall, offers to fully take upon herself the punishment that threatens the two of them. The first people are truly great at that moment when, on the eve of the tragic changes that await them, in splendid isolation they confront all the forces of Heaven and Hell. While depicting the scene of the Fall with sympathy, Milton comes close to justifying the actions of his heroes, which are not consistent with the church concept.

Adam is not afraid of the trials that await him in a new, unknown life. His image is undoubtedly heroic. But unlike the epic poets of the past, who portrayed warrior heroes, Milton depicts on the pages of his poem a hero who sees the meaning of life in work. Labor, hardships and trials must, according to the poet, atone for the “original sin” of man.

Before the expulsion of the first people from the paradise monastery, Archangel Michael, at the behest of God, shows Adam the future of humanity. Pictures of human history unfold before the shocked hero - needs, disasters, wars, catastrophes. However, as Michael explains to Adam, the atoning sacrifice of Christ will open the path to salvation for people, the path to spiritual perfection. Man can ultimately become even better than he was before the Fall.

Through the mouth of Adam, an unwitting spectator of the formidable “film of the centuries” (V. Ya. Bryusov), Milton condemns the social disasters that corrupt the human soul: wars, despotism, feudal inequality. Although the poet, describing the prophetic visions of the hero, formally remains within the framework biblical legends, he essentially develops in the last books of the poem his concept of the historical process - a spontaneous process, full of tragedy and internal contradictions, but steadily making its way forward.

Milton puts his philosophy into a religious form, but this should not obscure from us the novelty and historical and literary significance of his concepts: the poet was the closest predecessor of the Enlightenment in glorifying work as the main purpose of human existence, and in defending the rights of reason and the pursuit of knowledge, and in affirming the ideas of freedom and humanity. For many generations of readers, “Paradise Lost” has become a philosophical and poetic summary of the dramatic experience of a person who, in agony, finds his true nature and moves, among disasters and catastrophes, towards spiritual enlightenment, towards the cherished ideals of freedom and justice.

Milton's poem was the largest and perhaps the most talented of the numerous attempts of writers of the 16th–17th centuries. revive the epic in its classic form. The epic poets of antiquity - Homer and Virgil - served as the highest example for Milton. Following them, the author sought to paint in “Paradise Lost” a universal picture of existence: battles that decide the fate of nations, the sublime faces of celestial beings and human faces, as well as various everyday details. The poet scrupulously reproduces the composition of ancient examples, widely uses the techniques of hyperbolization characteristic of epic, constant epithets, and extended comparisons.

The grandeur of the plot corresponds to the sublime structure of poetic speech. The poem is written in blank verse, which sounds sometimes melodious and smooth, sometimes energetic and passionate, sometimes stern and gloomy. Milton gives his speech the solemn intonations of a rhapsodist and at the same time the pathos of a biblical prophet.

“Paradise Lost” was created in an era separated by many centuries from the “childhood of human society,” along with which the spontaneity of the worldview characteristic of the creators of the ancient epic, their sincere, unreasoning belief in the otherworldly, irrevocably receded into the past. Having decided to glorify the events of the Old Testament legend in the form of a heroic epic, Milton deliberately doomed himself to insurmountable difficulties. “Such a poem,” according to Belinsky, “could only have been written by a Jew of biblical times, and not by a Puritan of the Cromwellian era, when a free mental (and, moreover, purely rational) element entered into belief.” This “rational element” determined the artificiality of Milton’s religious epic.

We must not forget, however, that the same “free mental element” gave Milton’s work a philosophical depth and scope inaccessible to the epic of antiquity. We must not forget that when creating “Paradise Lost”, the poet was inspired not only by literary examples, but also by the heroic atmosphere of his turning point - the time when the edifice of the feudal monarchy, which had been built over centuries, was thrown into the dust.

Unlike his teachers, Homer and Virgil, the poet wanted to create a work that was not limited to specific historical themes, but had a universal, universal scale. In this regard, Milton's plan was consonant with the plan of his other predecessor - the great Dante, like him, who worked at the turn of two eras, who, like him, devoted his life to struggle and poetry. Like the author of the Divine Comedy, the poet sought to give his work the character of a comprehensive symbolic image suitable for all times of what was, is and will be.

Features of the so-called “literary” epic and glimpses of a philosophical poem are combined in Paradise Lost with elements of drama and lyricism. The very plot of the poem is dramatic, as is the nature of its numerous dialogues and monologues. Also noteworthy is the lyricism manifested in the introductions to the books that make up the poem: in them the personality of the poet himself emerges, blind and persecuted, but even in the “evil days” he retained the inflexibility of his soul. Although the epic beginning is predominant in Paradise Lost, it appears in a complex relationship with the dramatic and lyrical; Thus, Milton's poem in terms of genre is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon.

The creative method underlying the poem is no less complex and original. Its versatility reflects the diversity of artistic and aesthetic trends in English literature of the 17th century. The author's attraction to the rationalistic regulation of poetic form, the desire for harmony and orderliness, and a stable orientation towards the ancient heritage unmistakably testify to Milton's classicist sympathies. On the other hand, the author’s passion for depicting dramatic collisions, for dynamics, the abundance of contrasts and dissonances in the poem, the antinomy of its figurative structure, emotional expressiveness and allegorical nature bring “Paradise Lost” closer to Baroque literature.

The poem thus combines baroque and classicist tendencies. It is their synthesis, and not one of these that dominated in the 17th century. artistic systems, was most adequate to Milton’s creative needs and mindset in the difficult years for him, preceding and contemporary with the writing of the poem. The poet's synthesizing literary method, formed during the period of revolutionary disruption, most fully corresponded to the spirit of the era that gave birth to it. The cosmic scope of Paradise Lost, its monumentality and philosophy, civic spirit and heroic spirit, tragic pathos and optimism, dynamics and severity of form, richness and brightness of colors testify to the effectiveness of the author’s creative principles.

Milton's second major creation - the poem "Paradise Regained" (1671) - is to some extent related to the themes of the previous poem, but differs unfavorably from it in its abstractness and religious-moralistic intonations. The titanic heroism that inspires Paradise Lost is almost absent here. The poem is based on the Gospel legend about the temptation of Christ by Satan, according to which the duel between the heroes ends with the complete defeat of Satan: Christ without hesitation rejects the honors, power and wealth that the insidious tempter promises him.

Satan in Milton's new poem only vaguely resembles the proud rebel from Paradise Lost; his image loses its former attractiveness. The interest is centered on the person of Christ; his appearance embodies the author’s ideas about an ideal human citizen who, despite loneliness and general misunderstanding, finds the strength to resist the evil reigning in the world and does not deviate one step from his principles. In this sense, the story of the temptations of Christ is a parallel to the position of Milton himself and his associates, who remained faithful to republican ideals during the years of reaction.

Paradise Regained makes clear Milton's disappointment not in the revolution, but in the people who, in his opinion, betrayed the revolution by easily reconciling themselves with the Stuart restoration. “The tribes languishing in chains,” he concludes bitterly, “subjected themselves to this voluntarily.” After the collapse of the republic, the poet comes to the conclusion that the path to freedom runs through long-term spiritual improvement, and sets as his goal

Conquer people's hearts with words

And to enlighten their lost souls,

Who don't know what they're doing.

(Trans. O. Chumina)

While asserting the need for painstaking educational work to prepare people for new, intelligent forms of life, Milton by no means renounces tyrant-fighting ideas. A remarkable confirmation of this is the tragedy “Samson the Fighter” (1671) - the poet’s last creation, which with exceptional strength of passion expressed the freedom-loving spirit of Milton the fighter, his hatred of despotism.

The tragedy of Samson is to a certain extent autobiographical: like Milton, his hero, blind, alone in the camp of enemies, having been defeated, does not lose courage. He fights to the end and, dying, takes revenge on his oppressors. Along with personal motives, the image of the mighty Samson rising “to tame the rulers of the earth” embodied the hopes that Milton had long placed on the English people. The image of a heroic people awakening from an age-old sleep had previously appeared in his pamphlets. Now, after the defeat of the revolution, the poet again turns to biblical symbolism in order to loudly declare that the spirit of the revolution has not died.

Imbued with tyrant-fighting pathos, Milton's tragedy was an example of highly civic art and opposed the flow of dramatic works of the Restoration era, which were emphatically entertaining in nature. Of great interest are Milton's views on the art of drama, formulated in a short preface to Samson the Fighter. In his understanding of tragedy, the author relies on Aristotle. Proclaiming the tragic genre as “the most serious, moral and useful of all other genres,” Milton was the first English writer to put forward Greek tragedy as a model and call Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides his teachers. Referring to them, the author introduces a chorus into the tragedy, commenting on what is happening, and strictly observes the unity of time, place and action, although, paying tribute to Puritanism, he does not intend his drama for stage implementation.

Milton's creative path - from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained and then to Samson the Wrestler - is characterized by the author's gradual departure from the principles of Baroque art. As the poet manages to overcome the mental crisis he experienced during the years of the collapse of the republic, his works become less controversial and at the same time lose the universal scale, epic scope and emotion characteristic of his masterpiece. And yet, inferior to Paradise Lost, Milton's last works remain significant phenomena in the literary life of England. Glorifying the spiritual steadfastness of Christ, as well as the warfare of Samson, at the cost own life liberating the people from the yoke of the Philistines, the poet, as before, calls for heroism in the name of truth and freedom.

In Milton's last two works, Baroque tendencies recede into the background under the pressure of classicist restrictions. Strict adherence to classical canons in “Paradise Regained” and especially in “Samson the Fighter” allows us to speak of the predominance of “civil” classicism tendencies in these works in its specific national English form.

Milton had a truly lasting influence on the development of English literature. Classical writers (Addison, Pope, etc.) especially appreciated in his poetry the combination of stern didacticism with the grace of poetic form. In Paradise Lost they saw a role model almost as perfect as the epic poetry of antiquity. Sentimentalist poets also imitated Milton.

However, Milton's most significant influence was on Romantic literature. Almost all romantics felt themselves to be his spiritual heirs. Coleridge declared Milton a romantic. Wordsworth creatively assimilated his artistic principles. Keats learned from him the art of being a citizen poet. Blake, Byron and Shelley were especially close to the iconoclastic spirit of Milton's poetry. The family ties between Byron's Lucifer (“Cain”) and Milton's Satan are quite obvious. The gloomy grandeur of the mystery "Heaven and Earth" would be impossible without Milton's epic. Milton's example inspired Shelley to create the lyrical drama Prometheus Unchained.

Milton's influence spread to the literature of other countries. In France, Vigny and Lamartine experienced his influence, in Germany - the author of the Messiah, Klopstock.

Milton's significance for Russian literature is great. The poet's moral height, his hatred of tyranny, and admiration for the heroism of the liberation struggle found warm sympathy among Russian writers. The poem “Paradise Lost” enjoyed constant popularity in democratic circles of Russian society. Radishchev mentioned the name of Milton next to the names of “Omir (Homer) and Shakespere.” Pushkin repeatedly spoke with admiration of Milton in his articles and notes.

A. A. Chameev DIALOGUE ABOUT ASTRONOMY IN JOHN MILTON'S POEM “PARADY LOST” The picture of the world that Milton paints in “Paradise Lost” is based on the cosmological doctrine of Ptolemy, modified in the Middle Ages. At the center of the universe is the Earth; it is surrounded by ten moving spheres: the spheres of seven planets - the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; circle of fixed stars (firmament); a crystalline (or crystalline) vault filled with water, and a sphere of the prime mover (Primum Mobile), which imparts movement to the internal spheres. The entire system is enclosed in a solid, light-proof, motionless shell, washed from the outside by Chaos 1. Milton's universe has many common features with the picture of the universe that Dante painted. However, there are some differences between them. For example, following the Arab commentators of Ptolemy, Milton introduces an additional crystal sphere into his cosmological system, which was supposed to explain the irregularities and deviations in the movement of the planets. Only nine spheres are mentioned in the Divine Comedy; The tenth Heaven (or the Heaven of Heavens) fills, in Dante's image, the entire infinite space beyond the visible world. In addition, the Protestant poet naturally refuses to depict the Catholic “purgatory”. Finally, diverging from his predecessor, he places Hell not in the center of the Earth, but “in the region of pitch darkness,” in the depths of Chaos. Following the theologians of the Reformation, in particular Luther, Milton believes that the rebellion of Satan preceded the creation of the world and man; Hell was created before the Earth and, therefore, could not be within its boundaries. 1 For a detailed diagram of the structure of Milton’s Universe, see: ; see also: . In addition to these generally insignificant differences, it is much more important to note something else: Milton’s worldview no longer differed and could not differ in the certainty and stability that was characteristic of Dante’s worldviews. “Paradise Lost” captures in a unique form the process of disintegration of the old, traditional model of the universe, the old stereotype of the worldview - a process that began in the 16th century and continued with particular intensity during the time of Milton. Back in 1543, the cosmological system of Aristotle - Ptolemy was shaken to its core by the discoveries of Copernicus: the Earth was no longer perceived as the immovable center of the Universe. Following this, Bruno expressed a bold hypothesis about the infinity of nature and the countless worlds. The discoveries made by Galileo using the telescope he designed clearly confirmed the brilliant ideas of Copernicus and Bruno. Milton was well acquainted with the latest astronomical theories. In 1638, during his stay in Italy, the poet visited the aged Galileo and subsequently proudly recalled this meeting in Areopagitica. The name of the “Tuscan sage” is mentioned twice in “Paradise Lost”, and the descriptions of the mysterious distances of the Universe given here indirectly indicate that the author had the opportunity to observe the starry sky in Galilean “optical glass”. The epic names all the outstanding discoveries of the Italian scientist: the topographic characteristics of the surface of the Moon, spots on the Sun, the stellar composition of the Milky Way and the satellites of Jupiter. The poet was also well aware of Bruno's hypothesis about the boundlessness of space. As is clear from individual lines of the poem, Milton admitted the possibility of the existence of other inhabited planets and even other inhabited worlds. The dialogue between Adam and Raphael about astronomy occupies an important place in Paradise Lost. The characters' discussions about the structure of the Universe contain direct echoes of the teachings of Copernicus. Adam questions the truth of the geocentric picture of the world, citing the fact that it does not fit well with one of the basic laws of nature. “Wise and thrifty nature” does nothing in vain; How can we explain in this case that the “noblest heavenly bodies” are forced to revolve around the Earth at incredible speed just to illuminate this tiny, motionless speck of dust day and night? After all, the same effect is easily achieved by moving the Earth “along a much smaller circular path.” It is noteworthy that Archangel Raphael, although he recognizes the initial premises of Adam’s reasoning as insufficient, does not deny the validity of his final conclusion. He rather agrees with him, setting out - albeit in a questioning and hypothetical form - the main provisions of the heliocentric concept: “What if the Sun is in the center of the world / Is...?” What if the Earth is a planet? “In appearance / motionless, she / moves in three ways, unnoticed by herself, / accomplishes?” . Without condemning the curiosity of his interlocutor, Raphael urges him, however, to refrain from unraveling the hidden secrets of the Universe, to learn humility, to think about himself and his existence, to be content with the knowledge that God has given to man, the knowledge he needs in life. Everyday life . “For this knowledge it is all the same: / The earth rotates or the firmament...”. Adam, having listened to Raphael’s instructions, readily admits that wisdom lies not in understanding things “foggy, abstract and from us / Far away, but in the knowledge of what / What we see before us every day...”. The characters’ discussions about the essence of “permissible” and “forbidden” knowledge in the VIII book of “Paradise Lost” constitute a sharp contrast to the impressive picture of the conquests of the human mind that the poet painted in his time in university speeches - the so-called “Oratorical Preludes” (Prolusiones Oratoriae)2 , and undoubtedly testify to the limitations of Milton’s epistemological ideas. It would, however, be hasty and unlawful on this basis to accuse the poet of “obscurantist utilitarianism, hostile to any inquisitiveness of thought that does not seek benefits, to any study of unresolved problems of the world order,” as does the prominent American philosopher and historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy. Most critics, without denying the well-known limitations of Milton's philosophy of knowledge, propose to take into account, at the same time, two factors that are very significant for its historically correct interpretation and assessment. Even David Masson, in his classic biography of Milton, analyzing the dialogue on astronomy, emphasized that it reflected the poet’s polemics with the followers of speculative philosophy: in agreement with the ideas of Bacon, Milton spoke here against the sterile scholastic knowledge. American researcher G. Schultz, in a book specifically devoted to the study of Milton’s epistemological theory, notes, in addition, that in the analyzed passage the poet called not so much for limiting knowledge, but for focusing on its ethical side, for self-knowledge (understood as knowledge of oneself in God) , in other words, continued the traditions of the so-called “Christian Socratism”. The dialogue between Raphael and Adam is one of the ideological centers of the poem and, naturally, attracts the attention of many researchers of creativity 2. Records of these speeches have been preserved and were first published in 1674. “Let your thought,” Milton said at one of the university debates, “not be limited to the boundaries of this world, but soar beyond the boundaries of the Universe, and let it finally learn (this is the highest task! ) to know yourself..." . The young Baconian concluded another speech with the words: “The human spirit... will spread everywhere until it fills the whole world and the space beyond with its divine greatness. Then, finally, most of the accidents and changes in the world can be understood so quickly that with those who own this fortress of wisdom, it is unlikely that anything unforeseen and accidental will be able to happen in life." Milton, but from points of view fundamentally different from stated above, they do not express. For example: . Meanwhile, there is, in my opinion, one more circumstance that is important for understanding this widely discussed dialogue: it can be assumed that Milton, advocating reliable knowledge limited to the circle of earthly needs, followed not so much directly Baconian ideas as earlier traditions, on which these ideas were based on. The birth of the empirical method was preceded, as is known, by a long struggle that the humanists of the Renaissance waged against scholasticism, dogmatism and speculativeness in science and philosophy. Erasmus of Rotterdam, ridiculing the adherents of speculative knowledge, scientists “revered for their long beard and wide cloak,” wrote in “Praise of Folly”: “How sweetly they rave, erecting countless worlds, calculating the sizes of the Sun, stars, Moon and orbits; as if measured by their own span or string, they talk about the causes of lightning, winds, eclipses and other unexplained phenomena and they never doubt anything, as if they were privy to all the secrets of the creator nature and had just returned from the council of the gods. But nature laughs haughtily at all their guesses, and there is nothing reliable in their science.” Milton, through the mouth of Raphael, in the poem “Paradise Lost” expresses largely similar ideas. According to the archangel, the Great Architect has provided the entire universe... Those who like guesses, perhaps, will want to laugh at them, At the pitiful superstition of men of Science, at the fruitless futility of Their opinions of the future, when they Calculate the stars, they will begin to create Models of speculative heavens And invent many systems , Replacing one another... . Both Erasmus and Milton, paying tribute to religious ideology, recognize the claims of the human mind as exorbitant and its capabilities limited3. However, the meaning of the passages cited here is by no means reduced to this: it is quite obvious that both thinkers in them speak out against scholasticism and speculativeness, and advocate for accurate knowledge verified by experience. Milton's epistemological position becomes even more understandable in the context of the famous discussion about “astronomy without hypotheses,” which began in the second half of the 16th century. by the outstanding French scientist Peter Ramus. For more on this discussion, see:. The discussion erupted after the publication of Copernicus’s famous work “On the Rotation of the Celestial Spheres.” In the preface to this work, compiled, as it later turned out, by the Lutheran theologian A. Osiander, the Copernican theory was presented as a new hypothesis that did not claim to be true. Ramus categorically rejected the right of a scientist to introduce into science any artificial hypotheses that do not reflect reality. It was not the ideas of the Polish astronomer, with which Ramus obviously sympathized, that were criticized, but the main points expressed by the author of the preface. The great Newton later recalled the discussion that the French scientist began, proudly declaring: “I do not invent hypotheses.” The works of Ramus were well known to Milton4 and, undoubtedly, 3 Contrasting the possibilities of the human mind with the boundless, truly boundless nature, many thinkers of the 16th–18th centuries, according to the deeply correct observation of N.V. Motroshilova, were convinced that “only infinite, i.e. divine mind. The latter “knows” everything in the world and knows it immediately, instantly, that is, he knows the world not gradually and always relatively, as a person does, but absolutely and simultaneously. It seemed that the conversation was only about the relationship between human and divine reason.” In fact, the problem of social and individual knowledge was posed in theological form. 4 In 1672, Milton published a textbook, The Art of Logic, created “by the method that influenced him. It is important to emphasize that the struggle against astronomical hypotheses, which the poet, following the Ramists, wages on the pages of his work, does not at all mean for him (as it did not mean for Ramus before) rejection of the Copernican theory. Having captured in the poem the traditional picture of the world, which has long become an anachronism, Milton does not at all try to perpetuate it as the only possible and indisputable reality; on the contrary, he emphasizes its conventionality, refusing it, so to speak, the sanction of heaven: Archangel Raphael does not want to unconditionally recognize the authenticity of this picture, even if it seemed real to Man, the earthly observer. According to K. Svendsen, author of the book “Milton and Science,” the poet introduced a dialogue about astronomy into “Paradise Lost” only to emphasize the ambivalence of Adam’s situation: the hero was faced here with another dilemma, attempts to solve which, along with many others , the dilemmas and alternatives that confronted him turned him into a deeply divided being long before the Fall. In general, as the researcher is trying to prove, Milton gave preference to the Ptolemaic concept. One can hardly agree with this. Behind Adam's perplexed questions and Raphael's evasive and vague answers stood, of course, the doubts and hesitations of the author himself, the uncertainty of his own ideas about the structure of the universe. Milton apparently recognized that of the two systems competing with each other, the advantage was on the side of the Copernican theory: it was no coincidence that he left the last word in the poem, putting it into the mouth of a celestial being. At the same time, despite his familiarity with the astronomical discoveries of modern times, despite the sympathy that he felt for the most daring cosmological ideas and hypotheses, the poet chose to preserve in the epic a deeply traditional picture of the world, “placing orbits within orbits” and enclosing the entire system in Peter Ramus." Other about this see: . hard spherical shell. The poet's choice was obviously due to the fact that the familiar Aristotelian-Ptolemaic world better suited his artistic and ethical goals than the world of Copernicus and the boundless world of Bruno. “The main objection that Milton, as a natural philosopher, put forward against Ptolemy’s astronomy,” writes the English researcher M. Mahood, “was that this astronomy postulated an implausible speed of rotation of the outer spheres relative to the “fixed point” - the Earth... But as a poet, Milton used the geocentric model of the Universe in the epic precisely because it had a stationary center and a frantically moving periphery. Another foreign researcher E. Gardner, noting that the hero of “Paradise Lost” is Man, not without reason says that the geocentrism of Milton’s universe was intended to emphasize the homocentrism of the poem. Having based the epic on the biblical legend of the fall of the first people, Milton sought to portray Man as the point of refraction of opposing influences emitted by powerful cosmic forces, and placed his hero at the very center of the universe - just halfway between the Empyrean and Hell, between the abode of God and a dark prison rebellious Satan. The most valuable evidence of the general state of scientific, philosophical, religious thought of his time, Milton’s poem speaks of the greatness of the artist, who was limited by the ideas of the era, but, despite this historically conditioned limitation, was able, like the author of the “Divine Comedy,” to defeat time, creating an incomparable monument of human aspirations and aspirations. References 1. Milton, John. Areopagitica. A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc"d Printing // The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. In 8 vols. Vol. 2: 1643−1648 / Ed. Ernest Sirluck. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959. 2. Milton , John. Private Correspondence and Academic Exercises / Translated from Latin by Ph. B. Tillyard. Cambridge, 1932. 3. Camé J.-F. Les structures fondamentales de l'univers imaginaire miltonien. 1−2 t. T. 2. Lille, 1975. 4. French J. M. Milton, Ramus and Edward Philips // Modern Philology. Chicago, 1949. Vol. 47. No. 2. 5. Gardner H. A Reading of “Paradise Lost” (Oxford, 1965. 6. Hanford J. H. John Milton, Poet and Humanist: Essays (Cleveland, 1966) 7. Hanford J. H. A Milton Handbook, 3rd ed. New York, 1941. 8. Lewalski B. K. Innocence and Experience in Milton's Eden // New Essays on “Paradise Lost” / Ed. by T. Kranidas (Berkeley, 1969) 9. Lovejoy A. Milton's Dialogue on Astronomy // Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600−1800 / Ed. by J. A. Mazzeo (New York; London, 1962) 10. Masson D. The Life of John Milton. In 7 vols. Vol. 6. Cambridge, 1880. 11. Mahood M. M. Poetry and Humanism. New Haven, 1950. 12. Reinhert F. “Against his better knowledge”: A Case for Adam // English Literary History. Baltimore, 1981. Vol. 48. No. 1. 13. Schultz H. Milton and Forbidden Knowledge. New York, 1955. 14. Svendsen K. Milton and Science. Cambridge, 1956. 15. Milton, John. Lost Paradise / Transl. Arc. Steinberg // Milton J. Paradise Lost. Poems. Samson the fighter. M.: Publishing house "Fiction" (BVL), 1976. 16. Matvievskaya G. P. Ramus. M., 1981. 17. Motroshilova N.V. Cognition and society: From the history of philosophy of the 17th–18th centuries. M., 1969. 18. Erasmus of Rotterdam. Praise for stupidity. M., 1960.