Sanctification in Milton's Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in Of Education and the Pedagogy of Paradise Lost
By the time John Milton published Of Education in 1644, many educational theorists had already suggested varying goals for education,1 but few had suggested such an explicitly theological purpose. Early in the tract, Milton states “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection” (2: 366-67). Education's central purpose is the reapprehension of the knowledge of God, which was lost through the Fall. However, after discussing second-language acquisition, Milton announces another, quite different, purpose: “I call therefore a compleate and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war” (2: 377-79). Milton's two stated purposes have generated a wide variety of explanations over the years. Some readers have argued his theological purpose is ancillary to his civil purpose, while others view the two purpose statements as fundamentally incompatible. As early as 1922, Murray Bundy described Milton's spiritual purpose as postlapsarian and his civic purpose as prelapsarian, thus making the two goals impossible to achieve at the same time (128-29). In 1944 Tyrus Hillway argued Milton's spiritual purpose was the means by which to achieve his civic purpose (377). A decade later, M. G. Mason contended that “ ‘to know God aright' is the spiritual call, which, in an interesting passage reminiscent of Plato, [Milton] then translated into more concrete terms. One way to Godliness was, he stated, through an education ‘which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war’” (214; emphasis added). Mason believed, as would others later, that Of Education sees spiritual development as a result of intellectual development. In contrast, John F. Huntley argued in 1964 that Milton's spiritual purpose, unlike his civic goal, is not achievable through education (45). More recently, Martin Dzelzainis's brief discussion of Milton's theory of education does not even mention the first statement of purpose, but skips directly to the second, claiming that Of Education“begins with a grandiloquent statement of his ideal,” one that appears almost a third of the way through the text. In another recent assessment, Gauri Viswanathan asserts a fundamental conflict between the two and privileges the civic over the spiritual purpose: “Having decided that the object of education was to make good citizens of the state, Milton put his intellectual weight behind national consolidation rather than individual salvation” (348, 351). Still other critics have seen Milton's two purpose statements as complementary. In 1928 Oliver M. Ainsworth pointed out that “some persons have been confused by Milton's twofold definition of education, supposing its two parts to be unrelated or even inconsistent” (15). But, these aims, combining as they do the classical spirit with the Christian, are of the essence of humanistic educational doctrine. They look, indeed, respectively to the inner and the outer aspects of the same individual, normally developed. Milton, like other genuine humanists, cared little for virtue apart from practice, or for talent without principle. (15)2 Likewise, in 1951 George Sabine maintained that the two purposes are complementary: The end of education is defined as equally “to know God aright” and to fit men “to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously” all the duties of public and private life; the essence of Milton's thought lay in the presumptions that these purposes are identical. Hence education must be comprehensive, addressed to the physical, intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and religious faculties. (vii) While Sabine did not elaborate on the relationship between the two statements, Michael Lieb, in a 1985 essay, developed a detailed argument in which he showed that bodily fitness and the practice of virtue—the moral “fitness” necessary to lead a household or a nation—are inextricably linked to repairing the ruins of the Fall: “Implicit in this postlapsarian view is a process of transformation by which ruins are repaired and knowledge regained as the soul, possessed of true virtue and heavenly grace, achieves a fully spiritualized form” (247). For Lieb, as for Ainsworth and Sabine, Milton's two statements of purpose are complementary. Most recently, Margaret Olofson Thickstun has argued that Milton's educational philosophy, as articulated in Paradise Lost, has what she calls “moral adulthood” as its aim, although she does rely on the implicit assumption that Milton's ultimate pedagogical purpose is “ ‘to repair the ruins of our first parents' ” (2). While some critics see Milton's two purpose statements as unrelated or even antithetical, I follow Ainsworth, Sabine, Lieb, and Thickstun in arguing that Milton's first, theological statement of purpose is indeed his ultimate purpose of education, and I argue further that his second, civic statement of purpose is an observable consequence of the fulfillment of that initial spiritual goal. Because many critics have misunderstood this sequential relationship, they have tended to misapply the principles and curriculum in Of Education to Paradise Lost. Actually, the two works help to elucidate each other, Of Education setting out the goals that drive the teaching scenes in Paradise Lost, and Paradise Lost providing working examples of Milton's educational plan as outlined in the brief prose tract. Milton's statements of purpose are very similar to a standard lesson plan format used by many professional teachers today. A typical lesson plan uses two purpose statements, one concerned with a general goal, the other with a concrete objective. The goal states what the student is to know or understand when the lesson is finished, and aims for a change in the student's thinking, feeling, or knowledge. The objective, on the other hand, states what observable action the student will perform in order to demonstrate that the goal has been met. Robert F. Mager, an educational theorist who popularized the use of objectives in curriculum development, defines an objective as “a description of a pattern of behavior (performance) we want the learner to be able to demonstrate” (3).3 The objective provides criteria with which the teacher can evaluate student behavior in order to determine whether goals have been met. Therefore, a good lesson plan states both what students should know and what they should be able to do after the lesson. Two purpose statements, a goal and an objective, must be listed because the fulfillment of a goal, unlike the fulfillment of an objective, is not directly observable or measurable.4 This is something like what Milton is doing when he proposes two distinct purposes for education. Milton states a goal, knowing God; he also states an objective, producing competent leaders for the home and the state. The objective of becoming a competent leader is observable evidence that a student has met the goal of knowing God. In fact, the language in which Milton originally casts each purpose statement suggests such a relationship between the two. In the spiritual goal, Milton explicitly uses the language of ultimate purpose when he refers to “The end then of learning” (2: 366). Then, when he states his practical objective, he uses not the language of ultimate purpose but of consequence and effect: “I call therefore a compleate and generous Education that which . . . , suggesting that the fitting of men for public office has resulted from meeting the spiritual goal (377-78; emphasis added). Thus, Milton believes education facilitates the accomplishment of both spirituals goals and practical objectives. Today's teachers are often encouraged to combine their goal and objective in a single sentence, and a similar single-sentence purpose statement for Milton's Of Education can easily be constructed: students will regain correct knowledge of God, so that they will perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the private and public offices of peace and war. Thus, I will refer to Milton's first stated purpose, “to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright,” as his spiritual goal, and I will refer to the second stated purpose, “that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war,” as his practical objective. While it would certainly be anachronistic to project contemporary educational practice on Milton's work, the comparison is useful because it provides a familiar, modern example of an educational procedure that uses two connected purpose statements.5 If a modern lesson plan can use two distinct but interrelated purpose statements, the fact that Milton's work also has two purpose statements should not automatically lead to the assumption that the two statements are incompatible or antithetical. The difference between a goal and an objective is complicated by the fact that while the goal is the primary purpose of any educational program, the objective is achieved after the goal has been obtained so there is always the possibility that the objective will be taken to be more important than the goal. This is the mistake that Tyrus Hillway makes when he constructs this single-sentence purpose statement for Milton's work: “In order to fit a man for the performance justly, skilfully, and magnanimously of all the offices both private and public of peace and war, education must help him to repair the ruins of our first parents by teaching him to know God aright . . .” (377; emphasis added). Hillway makes Milton's spiritual goal a means to achieve his practical objective, suggesting that educators must repair the ruins of the Fall for the purpose of fitting a person for public service. Hillway makes the same mistake that many teachers today make of “teaching to the test,” thinking that fulfilling the behavioral objective is the one true aim of the educational process and forgetting that the real educational goal is knowledge, understanding, and character formation, not specific behavioral outcomes. Part of this confusion comes from thinking that reaching an educational goal insures the achievement of an educational objective, a sequence Milton does not have in mind. For him, obtaining an objective is tangible evidence that the more important goal has been met. To put it another way: the fact that a student becomes fit for public office is evidence that the student is learning to know God rightly, but the knowledge of God is not a mere means to being fit for public service. It may strike a reader as odd that, while Milton's stated goal is spiritual formation, the program outlined in Of Education does not seem to emphasize spiritual studies. Indeed, G. F. Sensabaugh observes that the tract “dismisses religious studies chiefly to times after the evening repast and to Sundays, when the mind is ripe for moral instruction, and is devoted almost entirely to describing the materials and methods by which gentlemen's sons might secure a ‘compleat and generous Education’ ” (263). Indeed, a cursory survey of Milton's curriculum reveals less study of Scriptures and theology than his spiritual goal might suggest it should. Early on in the curriculum, students study subjects such as arithmetic and geometry during the day, but “After evening repast, till bed time their thoughts will be best taken up in the easie grounds of Religion, and the story of Scripture,” specifically studying the ethical principles to be found in “David, or Salomon, or the Evangels and Apostolic scriptures” (2: 387, 397). Religious studies, at least at first, are relegated to collateral reading; the study of classical literature and natural sciences apparently receives the students' freshest attention in the morning. When Milton next mentions religious studies, the students have progressed from hard sciences to ethics and political science, and at this point, he recommends that they study “law, and legal justice; delivered first, and with best warrant by Moses; and as farre as humane prudence can be trusted, in those extoll'd remains of Grecian Law-givers . . .” (398). Students should study the Torah as a divinely-inspired legal code and compare it to the less-perfect classical legal writers. For the most part, the study of Scriptures and theology occurs on weekends and evenings: “Sundayes also and every evening may be now understandingly spent in the highest matters of Theology, and Church History, ancient and modern” (399-400). These passages are essentially the only explicit mention of strictly religious studies in a curriculum supposedly driven by the goal of knowing God. It seems strange that such a spiritually minded goal would produce a curriculum that appears to push explicitly religious studies to the margins of the program. Sensabaugh concludes that “Milton apparently had not, in 1644, thought through the implications of repairing the ruins of our first parents” (262) and proceeds to argue that Milton must have undergone a radical change of mind between the 1640s and the 1670s, since Of Education, published in 1644, proposes a liberal arts education grounded in the classics, while Milton's later poetry, especially Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, includes stern warnings against the dangers of speculative science and classical learning. By overlooking the fact that Milton republished Of Education in 1673, Sensabaugh leaves himself vulnerable to Irene Samuel's thorough refutation of his argument. Samuel analyzes the rhetorical context of each passage from Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained that he cites, showing that in each instance, Milton is merely warning against pursuing knowledge as its own end (722). Milton had always valued education, but only insofar as it produced virtuous people who behaved ethically (713-15). Thickstun has recently confirmed Samuel's position: For Milton, the purpose of language study—of all education—is a knowledge that embraces and fosters greater appreciation of God and the Creation. Although the tone of the pronouncements may modulate in light of the audience and context of their utterances, his position doesn't change much from his exhortation in the seventh Prolusion to Raphael's advice in Paradise Lost. . . . (110) Education for Milton was always a purely instrumental good, never something to be sought for its own sake, but only for the sake of becoming a virtuous and knowledgeable Christian. Milton's spiritual goal does suggest that religious studies should be a priority in his academy, and if Of Education appears to marginalize religious subjects, in reality the curriculum prioritizes them. First, if students spend most nights and weekends studying the Bible and theology, they will spend almost as much time studying specifically religious matters as they will spend studying all other subjects combined. Furthermore, it is anachronistic to presume a clear distinction between religious and secular course materials in Milton's proposed school. If Milton believes that his entire curriculum is designed to ultimately fulfill a spiritual goal, he probably assumes that studying things other than Scriptures and theology will help students attain that goal. Viswanathan claims that in connecting the study of the natural world with spiritual formation, “[Milton] makes the inexplicable leap of arguing that mastering these subjects better equips one to contemplate moral good and evil” (2: 358). But Milton's connection is neither a leap nor inexplicable. For Milton, not only the Bible, but natural science, mathematics, classical literature, political philosophy, and rhetoric can lead to “possessing our souls of true vertue” by teaching truth. Just after he states his spiritual goal for education, Milton says that “because our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessary to be follow'd in all discreet teaching” (367-69). Thus, a student learns to know God not just from studying Scriptures and theology, but from studying the physical world of sensate objects.6 There is no strict division between “secular” and “sacred” knowledge; in education the most important difference is between what is true and what is false. Milton relies implicitly on St. Augustine's maxim that “every good and true Christian should understand that wherever he may find truth, it is his Lord's” (2.28). If all truth belongs to God, then increasing one's knowledge of any truth, whether of concrete objects or of ethical principles, will increase one's knowledge of God.7 However well this process works in theory, putting it into practice involves certain logistical difficulties. Students might very well increase personal knowledge of God and thus begin to repair the ruins of the Fall, but it is difficult to demonstrate that this goal is being achieved in every person in a student body of 130 young men.8 The problem inherent in any educational goal, and in Milton's spiritual goal especially, is the difficulty of empirically verifying its fulfillment. An algebra teacher can devise a test to measure how much algebra students have learned, but it is much harder to measure the extent to which students are “[repairing] the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright.” The fulfillment of such a goal can be measured only indirectly by observing how the students eventually perform at a concrete task, in this case the effective execution of public offices or estate management. Thus, if Milton's graduates fulfill the duties of certain offices justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, that is evidence, though not entirely conclusive evidence, that they have also progressed in their knowledge of God, just as students' passing of an algebra is evidence, though not conclusive evidence, that they have met the course goal of learning from students' behavior in the physical there is no way for to what those students know or have As Ainsworth Milton's spiritual goal and practical objective indeed, respectively to the inner and the outer aspects of the same individual, normally (15). Milton must rely on the observable the practical objective of good public to demonstrate that his students are meeting his spiritual goal. As Milton himself understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible (2: This is true for both the student and the the student learns only through and the teacher also only through that the student has of confusion in Milton's spiritual goal to his practical objective is the sequence of in the of an individual student and the of the state. As the individual achieves Milton's spiritual goal, he also to the practical objective as a and while the spiritual its primary only the practical is However, the by a Milton's students have met their practical objective and leaders in a just state, the process would almost met the practical objective should a political that is to other people the spiritual goal because Milton's will be of and intellectual This is articulated in in which Milton the for providing greater intellectual than have other he to it is the and which own and have which is the of all this is that which and our like the of this is that which and up our he the to to and to argue to all For Milton, of the purpose of the is to a for intellectual the of which may a person greater knowledge of God, out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection” Education Thus, the fulfillment of Milton's practical objective in individual students to a political that the fulfillment of his spiritual goal in other The process is A student learns to know God, which fits him for public service. As a public he intellectual which other people to to know God these people also fit for public and the But as the it can difficult to which of the is the real goal for education. is Milton early in Of Education that the true end of education is learning to know God The project of Milton's spiritual goal to his practical objective might be if we neither the goal nor the objective as Milton's in Of Education, but rather for his in his first “I since that to or and no purpose or should then the love of God, and of (2: The some to a modern in which an in the its purpose for Milton's statement his goal and objective in a that at the of To know God is to to love God, which the and to as a public or a leader is to love one's which the second These two first of God and of one's in a way Milton's spiritual goal and practical objective. God is the most important a person can and that love of God love of a love that remains inferior to the love of God, although it is often the more visible of the two. most important goal is to to know God, and while that knowledge effective the political remains inferior to the spiritual purpose of know God, to repair the ruins of the Fall, and to the student in the becomes only when we between sequence and Two important implications follow from the relationship between Milton's two statements of purpose. The first is that both the goal and the objective refer to the Christian of the process by which the Christian learns to Milton's of the by the Fall, it is to view his educational goal as describing the Christian of the of and with God that result from a of grace by It would then be to that Milton education to be a necessary to a has to suggest that not to be to men without or to of any for Milton's academy, in this is a . . .” If Milton's educational goal then would have to whether Milton believes is for the But his to that Milton's general goal and practical objective aspects of and he priority to Milton's the over such as to know God our souls of true and suggest that Milton is describing the process of rather than the of While Milton's does emphasize the the if from its context in the of the sentence, its relationship to is Actually, the the has little to do with for the of in the Fall is not by Paradise Lost, for educational in which are in virtuous and as has such how can be regained through the process of For and are by their and faith at the end of when they and so that Michael can at the end of that he can A . . .” a process by the ruins of the Fall been repaired by Michael would of the of a as a not as a This regaining of is the result of over in Milton's brief if the spiritual that in Paradise Regained is to the of the then the that is by in the brief is the practice of rather than the of Paradise Regained is an example of a of the through as Of Education In the tract, Milton assumes that his students are who have already been but as for all Milton's students to a process of as they to a of faith and to a passage of the is by grace through faith and cannot be by Thus, education cannot produce though a good education will to the process of Milton's educational goal and objective also a the educational scenes in Paradise Lost. There are such first, and then the just after is and Michael after the Fall. principles from Of Education to these scenes in Paradise Lost, Murray Bundy and Michael on the between and and postlapsarian education but in and purpose. Because Milton's of education with education and after the Fall is not between and regaining knowledge of God, between and regaining that students have the to and The in all of and is the knowledge of God, which in a postlapsarian world will begin to the of the Fall. But even in they must to know God and to understand such knowledge is not or but God is learning to know him becomes an In and postlapsarian students with of and while pedagogical methods the Education after the Fall is more difficult because students are to though of education the Fall is because the students true knowledge, although they are of In all educational in the the goal and objective stated in Of Education In each and the knowledge of God and their own on In each instance, the or Michael in the process of by character and to This process is at work when comes to and the he as in his works and that follow from those when for more how the was . . . such from I have to Of knowledge To nor own not which in To in or is to and that God is and that he has to certain to and because of this not to into the
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