Milton and idolatry

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2003 by Barbara K. Lewalski

Noting Milton's frequent identification of himself as Ikonoklastes, idol-breaker, this essay traces his very broad concept of idolatry throughout his poetry and prose. While his Puritan contemporaries thought of idolatry chiefly as pagan or Roman Catholic practices that offer an affront to God, Milton saw idolatry as the disposition to attach divinity or special sanctity to any person, human institution, or material object, and early to late he sought to eradicate that disposition in his readers. His focus is on the way idolatry debases and enslaves human beings and their societies. If worship and absolute obedience are offered only to the transcendent God and if his image is seen to reside in all human beings simply as such (not popes, kings, bishops, institutions, or sacred material objects) then the concomitants must be, he thought, civil and religious liberty and a republic.

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In 1649, when he undertook to answer a book purporting to be by the just-executed king Charles I, Milton chose for his work, and for himself, the title Eikonokiastes, the iconoclast. In choosing this title, Milton was assuming, he explains, the chosen surname of many Greek emperors who "after long tradition of Idolatry in the Church, took courage, and broke all superstitious Images to peeces." (1) Eight years earlier, in one of his tracts against the Laudian prelates, Animad versions, Milton had excused his fierce invective by placing himself in the line of iconoclastic Hebrew prophets who were "transported with the zeale of truth to a well heated fervencie," citing the example of Daniel destroying the image of Nebuchadnezzar and Elijah destroying the statue of Baal. (2) His choice of persona was appropriate, given that idolatry was a central concern for Milton from his first major poem, the "Nativity Ode," through many prose tracts written during the Civil War and Protectorate, to his profound engagement wit h that issue in his greatest poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

The prohibitions in the decalogue against the worship of other gods and the making of graven images (Exod. 20:3-5) form the starting point for controversies over idolatry throughout Judeo-Christian history. For ancient Jews and early Christians, the referent for idolatry was the pantheon of pagan deities worshiped in the Near East, Greece, and Rome; for Byzantine Christians it also encompassed three-dimensional statues used in religious worship. For many Reformist Protestants, who identified Roman Catholicism with the Antichrist, idolatry meant especially the accoutrements of Roman Catholic worship: the mass, clerical vestments, religious statues and images, paintings of the Virgin Mary and the saints, and sometimes church music. For Milton's Puritan contemporaries, the term extended even beyond the pagan deities and Roman Catholic worship to embrace as well those features of the Church of England that, especially under Archbishop William Laud, were seen to approach Roman Catholic usage: the liturgy, high alt ars, vestments, stained glass windows, religious art, and rule by bishops. The Puritan response to contemporary idolatry found extreme expression during the English Civil War, especially in the winter of 1643-44, when William Dowsing and Francis Jessups led regiments of the army on a campaign of wanton destruction of religious statuary and stained glass in English cathedrals and churches, in accordance with a decree of Parliament (26 August 1643) that "all Crucifixes, Crosses, and all Images and Pictures of Saints . . . shal be taken away and defaced." (3)

Like his Puritan contemporaries, Milton understood idolatry as pertaining to the worship either of "a representation of the true God or of some false god," and, as Thomas Brennan points out, he understood it, as they did, to have both an internal and an external dimension. (4) Also like those Puritan contemporaries, Milton had no empathetic understanding of the Roman Catholic or Laudian sense that sacredness might inhere or be invested in particular persons, places, institutions, ceremonies, or objects. But unlike Oliver Cromwell's soldiers, Milton Iconoclastes did not lop off the heads of saints in cathedrals, or repudiate church music, or break stained glass windows; nor did he urge or defend such practices. He sought rather to topple idols with his pen, by unmasking and denouncing their evil. Moreover, Milton's conception of idolatry was much broader and more far-reaching than that of his Puritan contemporaries, who directed their ire primarily toward the affront offered to God by idolatrous worship. That was also John Calvin's emphasis: "[God] does not will that his lawful worship be profaned by superstitious rites," either by "daring to subject God, who is incomprehensible, to our sense perceptions or to represent him by any form" or by worshiping "any images in the name of religion," pagan or Roman Catholic. (5) Milton, however, insisted that anything could be made into an idol, and he believed that the disposition to attach divinity or special sanctity to any person--pope, king, or prelate--or to any human institution, or to any material good, was idolatrous. Miltonic iconoclasm is therefore a relentless effort to eradicate that disposition in his readers. For Milton, and for his God, the only objects worthy of reverence on earth are human beings themselves, as bearers of God's image. The great evil of idolatry is that it invites humans to offer implicit faith and special devotion to some person, institution, or object that is not God, thereby debasing and enslaving themselves along with their societies. O nly by worshiping a God who is transcendent, and rejecting all such material embodiments of the sacred, Milton supposes, can humans attain and preserve their proper freedom and dignity.