The Use of Debates in John Milton’s Poems: Rethinking the Conventions of Scholastic and Humanist Dialectics

摘要

Echoes of two main lines of thought persist during Milton’s time: Scholasticism (a theological system prominent in medieval universities and based on Aristotelian logic) and Renaissance humanism (an anthropocentric and pragmatic response to Scholasticism), both of which influence Milton in different ways as it is apparent in two of his early poetic works:?Lycidas?and?Comus. By comparing both poems it will be shown that both texts share concerns with regards to the tensions produced by this dual influence, because at the same time each dialectical doctrine is committed to diametrically opposed understandings of what it means to debate. On the one hand, Scholasticism stressed the importance of the ‘theory of proof’ as an epistemological tool. The ‘theory of proof’ was a procedure, often used by scholastic teachers, by which to exhibit the conditions under which a given proposition is true or false. By contrast Ramism, a branch of Renaissance humanism developed by Petrus Ramus, valued the role of nature to the same end and suggested that the human subject had within oneself the capacity to access the truth.