What at first looks like a straight version of the Scholastic dualism Milton inherited gives way to a more complexly entangled ecology; a simple theory of the mind as a container gives way to a more nuanced sense of thinking as an ecologically embedded activity. This shift, in the course of the poem, parallels Milton’s own intellectual development, over the course of his life. Milton arrived at an integrated sense of the intellect as an emergent entity, what Stephen M. Fallon calls his “ontological integrity.”99 The critical passage in defense of this mature monism also appears in Paradise Lost; unlike the dualist system put in the mouth of Adam, this passage has also become an important one in establishing a prehistory of ecological writing, the so-called greening of Milton.100 It is Raphael speaking, offering a metaphysical system. The world is:
… one first matter all,
Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refined, more spirituous, and pure,
As nearer to Him placed or nearer tending
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airy, last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding, whence the soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being.…101
The image Milton settles upon is appropriate to Adam’s garden, but this is not, in itself, what marks this as an ecological thought. The path that Milton traces here, from substance to spirit, is the clearest articulation of Milton’s monism; Adam and Raphael are bound to one another by their shared substance, differently “refined” according to the different “spheres” to which they have been “assigned.” No matter, no spirit: only the complex mutual dependencies of “one first matter” differently “indued.” As Milton puts it, in his De Doctrina, “Man is a living being, intrinsically and properly one and individual. He is not … produced from and composed of two distinct and different elements.” This is a rejection of the classical dualism of the Schools, the commonsense position he is at pains to complicate. “On the contrary,” Milton concludes, “the whole man is soul, and the soul man: a body, in other words, or individual substance: animated, sensitive, and rational.”102
The pressure of Raphael’s speech to Adam, the sense it produces, is multiply upward, and looks in this sense to be a different route to the upward pressure Locke calls “abstraction”; it borrows from an embodied vocabulary to describe the passage from cruder forms of matter “up” to spirit in its greater refinement. And it repeats this pressure in an image, a stalk bursting upward into fruit, from earth to matter and qualities more rare. Like the “spirits … breathe[d]” by the flower, so the things of the world give gradual way to things intellectual. This is what Milton calls “aspiration,” the relentless drive of things more grossly material toward more “vital spirits.” The sublimation of thing to thing, root to stalk to flower to spirit, may in fact be more subtle than even the simile suggests; it seems that precisely the spirit expressed by the flower, though naturally “indued” with different form, becomes “spirits … intellectual,” the stuff of reason and the soul. Adam and Eve tend the garden; it repays them with the substance of mind. Here, then, lies the kernel of something formally like the system Locke worked up out of the stuff of his library; “reason,” he reminds us, “becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.” The difference is that Raphael has no particular interest in developing a dualist system out of his embeddedness in his ecology. Reason, the stuff and substance of the soul, is in this sense linked immediately through sublimation to the (flower) bed in which it finds itself.
But if the pressure of the passage is upward, drawing in the end from the observed tendency of spirits and steams to rise, the movement of the passage is nevertheless equally, reciprocally downward, not only because the eye follows it down the page. Milton begins with an idea—or, let’s say, an inspiration; this idea is a monistic system linking flower and beast to angel and God, drawn upward by the aspirational love of Christian piety. But the passage does its work twice, once tracing out the system of things, and again putting it in a complex image. Raphael puts it this way: when it comes to matters of universal law, of truths that “surmount … the reach / Of human sense,” Raphael’s linguistic resources are the same as the resources available to the Muse who visits Milton in his bed. Such matters, which after all evade the immediate evidence of the eye, must be “delineate[d] … / By likening spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best.” Milton captures here the basic Renaissance faith in the equivalence between the visible and invisible worlds, the way in which, as one scholar puts it, “every kind of representation … has a twofold semantic status, a literal and a transcending, tropical one.”103 The earth is “the shadow of heav’n,” and “things therein / Each to other like” (5.571–76). But he has bent this Renaissance theory of correspondence towards his own sense of a monistic plenitude. As Lana Cable puts it, speaking of Milton’s “paradoxical … commitment” at once to the affective content of sensory materials and the rhetorical exploration of concepts, “even apparently nonsensory language depends on a linguistic construct of ‘dead’ metaphor”; it is the work of Milton’s poetry and prose tracts, what Cable calls his “carnal rhetoric,” continually to rediscover and to revivify the dead metaphors that turn up, revenant-like, everywhere in Milton’s verse. Milton has, in the words of Phillip Donnely, “present[ed] his monism within the poem so that a dualist orthodox reading of the epic is still possible.”104
But this is an incomplete account of Milton’s commitment to a fully articulated monism, in much the same way that we have already seen dualist accounts fail to capture their more profound entanglements with their material models. For Milton, concepts emerge not as the abstractions of sensory impressions but as the linguistic aspirations of sensual experience; “inspiration” is the name for the spiritual fullness that kicks the process back along its reverse vector. Poetry, like Creation, runs metaphor in reverse, downward from idea to image, returning “spiritual” to “corporal.”105 This is why Milton sees fit to put his poetic system, this monism stretching from root to fragrance, matter to spirit, in the mouth of an angel. “Angel,” Locke remembers, means “messenger,” and it is Raphael that can carry inspiration back to its figures, putting the idea in words. Like Aristotle or Locke after him, Raphael turns to a more embracing metaphor to provide the explanatory framework of language itself—that is, “expression”—for what is “corporal … expression” but a bodily breathing out, a turn to carnal shapes to bear or to imply spirit? When Raphael insists that he must “liken spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best,” what is he doing but breathing out (“expressing”) what he has already breathed in (“inspired” or “aspired … spirit”)? We may better, therefore, say that Milton provides here one sense of poetry as the native articulation of a complex ecological entanglement,