Milton and Cavendish: Faithful Realists :: Paradise lost Blazing World

Milton and Cavendish: Faithful Realists Inquiries regarding the nature and acquisition of knowledge, coupled with the monumental question of whether human beings are capable of accruing knowledge–the philosophical study of epistemology–has roots buried in antiquity: Genesis, to be exact. Great thinkers of the Western tradition have both accepted and rejected components of Old Testament lore; Platonic and Aristotelian philosophers have indeed battled for centuries over the way in which reality is understood. Following Aristotle’s teachings, the empiricists and Enlightenment thinkers regarded the processing of sense and experiential data as the surest way to unlock truth. Plato’s adherents, however, figures such as Immanuel Kant, deemed the human intellect a leaky and misguiding faculty, not quite efficient in comprehending truth. John Milton and Margaret Cavendish, the reigning theological epistemologists of the 17th century, pondered the nature of divine reality, the role of human rationality in understanding God’s master plan, and the means by which that plan is (and should be) grasped by the human race. Both Milton and Cavendish have declared in their works, Paradise Lost and The Blazing World, that reason as a means to arrive at ultimate truth is insufficient; in the end, faith is the only tool with which human beings acquire proper knowledge. After an initial reading of The Blazing World, one would assume Cavendish ranked reason above faith, parting ways with Milton; the Empress in the tale is nearly obsessed with scientific inquiry. Upon close analysis of the text, however, it becomes evident that Cavendish’s message is complementary to Milton’s. This is not to say that either Milton or Cavendish were pure theologians in their world view, placing no value on science or logic; rather, both found a measure of importance in the findings of contemporary science and consequently instilled in their literary protagonists curiosity about the laws of the universe. It was just such cosmic curiosity that plagued thinking individuals of the Renaissance period. As Europe slowly developed a flavor for scientific inquiry, well guarded theological dogmas were threatened; the mid 1600s was indeed a time of questioning long established religious and political doctrines. While grappling with the emerging debate of reason versus faith, Milton and Cavendish offered philosophical fictions heralding the supremacy of the latter. Characters in the authors’ works discover that reason, untempered by belief in divine truth, is dangerous. Cavendish’s Empress of the Blazing World, for example, is a tyrannical ruler who demands that her subjects uncover the secrets of the natural world.