[Milton-L] angelic knowledge

[f.mohamed00 at gmail.com]

There's little to add to Joad Raymond's excellent summary below, though it  
is worth emphasizing that Milton seems less Thomist still than Lawrence who  
avers that angels are 'simple formes' (_Our Communion and Warre_ 13). In  
the Thomist logic, no substance means no senses, and thus no place for  
discursive reason and its interpretation of sensory input. Raphael suggests  
that the angels employ both discursive reason and intellection (5.486-90),  
which is consistent with those decidedly un-Thomist instances in the epic  
where the angels learn through experience, and with Milton's suggestion  
that they do indeed have a spiritous substance.

The largest debt to Wollebius in Milton's angelology, I think, is the  
principle that the upright angels must continue to display obedience and  
are not fixed in beatitude. That is a rare position indeed. That the fallen  
angels retain their capacity for high intellection but are cut off from  
revelation, and especially the full significance of the Son's role in  
Redemption and Judgment, is a more common view rooted ultimately in  
Augustine's _De Genesi ad litteram_.

This is all a run-up to a shameless plug for my recently released _In the  
Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton_  
(Toronto 2008).

Best,
Feisal Mohamed


Joad Raymond <joadraymond at googlemail.com> to John Milton Discussion List  
<milton-l at lists.richmond.edu>
11/7/08

Milton's unfallen angels also learn through experience -- for example,  
about pain in the war in heaven. Commentators adopt various positions on  
this topic, emphasising intuition or experience or continuing revelation.  
For example, Milton's friend Henry Lawrence says there are four grounds of  
angelic knowledge: i) natural; ii) revelation; iii) experience; iv)  
supernatural. Having no senses angels know by species infused into them,  
but they also know by reasoning, which they perform with speed and accuracy  
beyond human comprehension. Thus their modes of knowing are much more like  
ours than Aquinas suggests. John Salkeld adopts a more Thomistic position.  
But it's worth noting that there are a range of positions on this topic  
expressed in C17th Europe, and Milton probably writes expecting us to be  
familiar with these debates.

There's even more on the varieties of knowledge possessed by fallen angels.  
Wollebius writes: "There remained also in them no small knowledge, and a  
sagacity also of searching out future things, having these helps. 1. Their  
natural knowledge. 2. Their long experimental knowledge. 3. Astrologie. 4.  
The knowledge of Scripture, chiefly of the Prophets. 5. Extraordinary  
revelation, so often as God makes use of the service of these torturers."  
Milton's Satan also knows things in several ways.

Joad Raymond
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