VAIN WISDOM AND FALSE PHILOSOPHY

The Ancients were darkened by an immovable cloud. For all their often admitted genius, they were pagans and thus by theological imperative were inferior to the Christians who superseded them. This imperative sometimes was neglected during the Renaissance, when exuberant syncretism could merge the Christian with the pagan. Such blending also evoked its opposite, as in Milton's already commonplace insistence in Paradise Lost (1667) that the wisest ancient learning is “Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophic!” (2: 565). By Paradise Regained (1671) classical arts become one of the futile temptations of the devil, which the Son labels “false, or little else but dreams, / Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm” in contrast to the “Light from above” that supplies the only needful doctrine (4: 291–92, 289–90). Indeed, were the Son to please or “instruct” Himself with music, poetry, and lessons of wisdom, He would turn to “our native Language” (4: 332) – Hebrew, but perhaps by a reader's extension English – in which God and man are “prais'd aright” (4: 348). There one finds “better teaching / … Than all the Oratory of Greece and Rome” (4: 356, 360).

This wisdom, drawn in part from St. Augustine and the Church fathers, made more of an impression upon the defeated devil than on Milton's later contemporaries, for it wanted frequent repeating.

Christian anti-classicism takes several forms, one of which amplifies the Son's preference for inspired Hebrew rather than misguided classical discourse.