John Milton and Isaac Newton, arguably the two greatest minds in seventeenth-century England, provide a study in contrasts and similari- ties. 1 Milton, who never held public of fce, offered running commentar- ies on the great public questions of his day; though twice Member for Cambridge, Newton, according to a telling anecdote, spoke only once in Parliament, to ask an usher to close a window. 2 Newton published only reluctantly, fearing that his time would be wasted and equanimity disrupted by the correspondence and controversy that publication would attract. Milton published regularly and eagerly, at the end of his life scouring his desk drawers for works to be sent to the printers. Milton shaped his conception of the relation of God and human beings on his fundamental belief in the freedom of the will, the Son of God’s as well as our own; Newton shaped his conception on his bedrock belief in God’s unlimited power. This last difference, of course, points to a simi- larity. Theology was central to the system of each. Each considered him- self a prophet, privy to divine wisdom by virtue of his diligent labors and moral rigor. 3 Both denied the natural immortality of the soul. For similar reasons they shared an Arian antitrinitarianism still dangerous to its adherents in the second half of the seventeenth century. 4 They both, moreover, exhibited Socinian tendencies. They staunchly opposed Roman Catholicism and called for broad toleration of Protestants of different denominations. In this essay, I will be concerned with their converging views on the relation of body and spirit, a subject related in both obvious and subtle ways to their theological speculations. 5 Milton developed an idiosyncratic form of animist materialism in response, as I argued some time ago, to the threat to belief in the freedom of the will posed by competing metaphysical models in the mid- seventeenth century. 6 Exploration of Newton’s writings on the nature of body and spirit, and particularly his alchemical works, has led me to revisit my thesis, correcting some overstatement of Milton’s idiosyncracy and reversing my earlier argument for Milton’s dismissal of alchemy. I have found that Newton’s ambivalent relation to the mathematical ab- straction of space and bodies, as expressed most visibly in his alchemical writings, recalls in surprising ways Milton’s idiosyncratic views on body 9 John Milton, Isaac Newton, and the Life of Matter Stephen M. Fallon Martin, Catherine. Milton in the New Scientific Age : The Revolution to Newton, Routledge, 1936. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ndlib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5748920. Created from ndlib-ebooks on 2019-12-19 09:15:46. Copyright © 1936. Routledge. All rights reserved.