More On Milton (For Some Reason)

Thanks to The Politician, who sent me my first christmas card ever. He broke another record, in fact, by sending the first christmas card ever to have a rhetorical "burn" inside.

I know I�ve gone on about this before, but I�ve been thinking a bit more about the temperance vs. abstinence argument.

As those of us who�ve taken �Milton and the 17th Century� well know, my man Milton famously said �I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.�

In Areopagitica (from which the above quote was taken), Milton argued for complete freedom of the press (or near-complete- you can�t have those Catholics saying whatever they want), noting that truth had better be able to defend itself if it�s worth anything at all.

In Comus: A Mask, Milton tells the story of a virtuous girl who resists temptation even though she is surrounded be it.

And Paradise Lost is unusual in its depiction of prelapsarian [before-the-fall] Adam and Eve: the couple quarrels, feasts, and enjoys sex well before that nastiness with the apple.

His point, you see, is one I wholeheartedly agree with. My papist-hating friend thought that there was something inherently suspicious about any virtue that is afraid of vice.

This all adds up to temperance. Temperance is desire under control; abstinence is desire denied. We all have to eat, so everyone is either temperate or gluttonous. We don�t all have to have sex, so everyone is either abstinent, temperate, or lustful.

The traditional view (at least, the one I grew up with) was that abstinence is better than temperance; completely denying temptation is better than try to live with it.

But for Milton, abstinence is the hiding place for every �fugitive and cloistered virtue.� For example, beliefs (would-be truths) that are sheltered from serious argument, and the monks (the would-be chaste) who are sheltered from feminine society before they understand what they�re missing: both represent a kind of cowardice hiding behind a veneer of respectibility.

Anyone who gives up something they don�t really understand/appreciate is being abstinent, taking the easy way out. It�s one thing to swear off alcohol, it�s quite another thing to choose to not to drink after having a Desperado, the greatest beer ever made. Yes it is.

Milton chooses temperance. A temperate drinker could be someone who drinks in moderation, or it could be someone who has drank in the past and now chooses not to or someone who knows, somehow, the joys of drinking. The point is that the temperate man understands the whole story- his decision is harder, and therefore more commendable, because he knows exactly what he�s giving up.

The whole argument is basically an old-school approve to the maxim �don�t knock it before you try it,� but since it's 350 years old, it sounds a little better.