[Milton-L] angelic knowledge

[John Geraghty]

I came across a page that anyone interested in learning more on Milton and Angels in PL might find useful. It's  "Angelic Nature in Paradise Lost"

http://www.tcnj.edu/~graham/angelicnature.html

 

I'd add Thomas Heywood's "Hierarchie" (1635), and Causabon's publication " A True & Faithful Relation"  (1659) to the list of Milton's contemporaries writing about angels on listed on the page.   

 

-John

 

H  e drew not nigh unheard, the Angel bright, 
E  re he drew nigh, his radiant visage turnd, 
A  dmonisht by his eare, and strait was known 
T  h' Arch-Angel URIEL, one of the seav'n 

 

In medieval mysticism Uriel is represented as the source of the HEAT of the day in winter, and as the princely angel of Sunday, the first day of the week  http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=49&letter=U

 

 

 


Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:08:32 +0000
From: f.mohamed00 at gmail.com
To: milton-l at lists.richmond.edu
Subject: [Milton-L] angelic knowledge

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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