Synthesizing Imaginations

Milton’s engagement with Selden’s natural law theory is a factor in the transformation that occurs between his earlier anti-prelatical tracts and the later treatises on divorce, freedom of the press, and the citizens’ right to depose any ruler. In his poetry, despite his Christian doctrinal preference, Milton’s non-hierarchical aesthetic attests to the amplitude of his vision. This derives in part from his exposure to Selden’s method of giving a fair hearing to all his pagan, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sources. But the same passage in the Areopagitica that demonstrates Selden’s influence becomes, in the latter part of the chapter, a point of entry into the different ways that a scholar and a poet-polemicist view the same object. Selden recognizes the importance of mediated experience, whether scientifically, through a telescope, or religiously, through tradition. Milton distrusts “the glass of Galileo, less assured,” and believes only in sola scriptura and immediate experience.