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