밀턴의 산문에 나타난 자유사상 = Milton's Idea of Freedom in His Prose

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

While Milton s great longer poems written in his last days illuminate the sublime and universal entirety of human history, his polemical prose works show how he responded to his contemporary socio-political situation, usually called the English Revolution. Milton's radical idea of freedom propelled him to turn his eyes to the contemporary political and religious circumstances, laying aside his poetic ambition, and led him to
write more than forty polemical tracts for about 20 years from 1641 to 1660.
In the initial stage of his polemical career, Milton attempted to liberate Christians from the episcopal hierarchy, so as to complete the Reformation. He argues that each Christian believer should be free from the prelatical hierarchy adopted by the Church of England, since the English bishops are now corrupted by their "new-vomited Paganisme of sensual1 Idolatry." In of Reformation, Milton shows a kind of religious democracy, when he argues for the free election of the minister by the lay members of each individual church. He resists and denies the system of prelacy that controls or defines each Christian believer's private judgment. Of Prelatical Episcopacy is Milton's response to Ussher whose recent pamphlet has supported bishops' authority over common presbyters. If episcopacy is a human invention, Milton argues, freeborn English people can exterminate its authority. Thus, this pamphlet reaffirms the freedom of each individual believer s religious conscience. Animadversions, which is Milton's intervention in the controversy between Archbishop Hall and Smectymnuus, shows him employ all kinds of polemical methods in order to attack his opponent, which anticipates his later justification of any political decision, including even regicide, to build a free nation. In this pamphlet Milton attempts to set free each minister's reason and judgment from the authority of the Church of England, and then extends that freedom to common 'believers. In The Reason of church Government, common believers are requested to participate into church government by using their free private judgment and spiritual conscience.
Milton's pursuit of religious freedom led him to advocate for the freedom of writing and speech, as shown by Areopagitica, which is one of the world's greatest defenses for the freedom of the press. Here, Milton bases his argument upon the human condition in which good and evil are intermingled together. In this condition, man cannot be absolutely free from evil but he can only escape from vice. So, Milton concludes that all kinds of books can be either valuable or harmful according to the individual reader's free judgment or conscience. Truth cannot be obtained or given by any external oppression or licensing procedure. Toleration should be allowed to all church sects, since freedom alone opens a way to new truth.
Though the Restoration of Charles Ⅱ in 1660 led Milton to deep disappointment and despair, it enabled him to fulfill his long-cherished dream, that is, to write his last great poems. Though his present reputation is ascribed to his great poetry rather than his polemical prose, it can be argued that his idea of freedom in the prose could prepare for and shape all his other ideas full-blossomed in his later great poems. And, though his struggle for freedom by means of polemical tracts seems to have failed during his life time, the later progress of English history since his death has justified and valued his idea of freedom. In conclusion, Milton's idea of freedom in his prose derives from his Christian humanism, a paradoxical concept which in turn derives from the spirit of Renaissance humanism and the Protestant concept of Christian liberty.