Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad’st it pregnant.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, on the Spirit of God
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad’st it pregnant.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, on the Spirit of God
In Whitehead’s philosophy, the Abyss may be understood as Creativity—not a field of potential awaiting form, but the pure activity of becoming, the ultimate metaphysical reality of which all things are expressions. Creativity is not a substance or container, but the universal process through which all actual entities arise and of which they are expressions. Within this ultimate activity, God functions as its primordial ordering principle, offering to each emerging occasion a lure toward value, order, and novelty. God does not control Creativity but works within it, enabling the universe to take form through freedom and relation. God, too, is an expression of Creativity. It's primordial expression.
Milton, centuries earlier, gives poetic expression to this processual reality. In Paradise Lost, the Spirit of God is described as brooding upon the Abyss—not commanding it, but making it pregnant. This image suggests not imposition but creative intimacy: a divine presence that evokes form from within the depths of activity itself. Chaos, in this vision, is not an enemy to be subdued, but a generative matrix stirred into expression through relational presence. In this way, Milton’s mythic imagery anticipates Whitehead’s metaphysical vision: a world continuously emerging through the interplay of divine lure and the living dynamism of Creativity. These connections were not apparent to Whitehead, but they can be to us.
Milton, centuries earlier, gives poetic expression to this processual reality. In Paradise Lost, the Spirit of God is described as brooding upon the Abyss—not commanding it, but making it pregnant. This image suggests not imposition but creative intimacy: a divine presence that evokes form from within the depths of activity itself. Chaos, in this vision, is not an enemy to be subdued, but a generative matrix stirred into expression through relational presence. In this way, Milton’s mythic imagery anticipates Whitehead’s metaphysical vision: a world continuously emerging through the interplay of divine lure and the living dynamism of Creativity. These connections were not apparent to Whitehead, but they can be to us.
Milton Before the Scientific Avalanche
In Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead reflects on the theological confidence of John Milton, writing:
“Milton, though he is writing after the Restoration, voices the theological aspect of the earlier portion of his century, untouched by the influence of the scientific materialism.”
Whitehead contrasts Milton’s assured invocation of divine purpose—“to justify the ways of God to men”—with the growing gap between “the materialistic mechanism of science and the moral intuitions which are presupposed in the concrete affairs of life.” He sees in Milton’s poetry a kind of prelapsarian worldview—not in the biblical sense, but philosophically: a moment before the spiritual and moral imagination was fractured by the rise of a mechanistic, disenchanted cosmos. “We note,” Whitehead writes, “the assured volume of confidence, untroubled by the coming scientific avalanche.”
A Monistic Vision of Reality
And yet, Whitehead may underappreciate just how radical—and how resonant—Milton’s cosmology truly is, especially for a thinker like Whitehead himself. For all of Milton’s theological orthodoxy, he was no dualist. In both Paradise Lost and his theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana, Milton articulates a monistic vision of reality in which matter and spirit are not opposed but interpenetrating modalities of divine substance. All created beings—from angels and humans to the physical world itself—are variations of spiritual density, expressions of divine creativity unfolding in form.
Creation as Living and Self-Organizing
Milton’s cosmos is not a closed, static machine but a living, self-organizing whole—charged with purpose yet unfolding dynamically. In Book V of Paradise Lost, the angel Raphael tells Adam that even the celestial bodies—the sun and stars—are “self-moved,” not puppets of divine manipulation but agents within a harmonious order. Creation, in Milton’s hands, is alive: ordered yet improvisational, hierarchical yet relational. There are, in places, unmistakable hints of autopoiesis—of beings forming themselves through inner principle and dynamic relation, rather than existing as passive recipients of imposed form.
Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism
Whitehead’s own metaphysical scheme—the “philosophy of organism”—likewise rejects the mechanistic worldview. In his universe, reality is composed of “actual occasions,” each a moment of self-constituting process, influenced by the past but not determined by it, lured by possibility, and feeling its way into becoming. This view, like Milton’s, envisions a cosmos not of inert matter but of creative advance—a universe of entities internally related and spiritually textured.
Poetic Metaphysics and Speculative Philosophy
In this sense, Milton prefigures Whitehead. His monism is not the flat materialism of Enlightenment mechanism but a vision of a cosmos saturated with spirit, ordered by Providence yet alive with self-expression. His poetic metaphysics resists the bifurcations that would come to dominate modern thought: mind versus matter, freedom versus determinism, science versus spirit. Milton’s world breathes with a processual vitality that anticipates, in theological and poetic terms, what Whitehead would later frame in speculative metaphysics.
Satan's Early Suggestion
This resonance deepens when we consider other motifs in Paradise Lost that align with Whitehead’s vision. One is Satan’s early suggestion—later complicated and ultimately rejected—that God may not be omnipotent. In his defiant speech to his fellow fallen angels, Satan speculates that they may yet “overcome this dire calamity,” implying that divine power is not irresistible. Though Milton ultimately affirms God’s justice and supremacy, this early doubt introduces the possibility of divine limitation—a theme central to Whitehead’s understanding of God as persuasive rather than coercive, and as deeply involved in the world without overriding its freedom.
Maternal Spirit
Another suggestive parallel, already alluded to above, lies in Milton’s depiction of the creation of the world. In Book I, the narrator describes how the Spirit of God
“with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss, / And mad’st it pregnant.”
This vision of the divine as a brooding, impregnating presence—coaxing order from chaos—resonates with Whitehead’s idea of creativity as the ultimate metaphysical principle and God as the lure toward order and novelty, the primordial activity by which creativity becomes a co-creative world. For both Milton and Whitehead, chaos is not mere disorder or evil; it is the fertile matrix from which novelty emerges. Creation is not the imposition of form upon inert matter, but the evocation of potential into actual expression—a co-creative act rather than a unilateral command.
A Different Stream of Modernity
Rather than simply standing on the threshold of the scientific revolution, Milton may belong to a different stream of modernity—one that flows through Romanticism and process thought, imagining a world in which science and spirit, freedom and order, are not opposites but partners in the unfolding drama of existence. His poetry, read in this light, offers not only a theological vision but a metaphysical provocation, opening paths that Whitehead would later walk with philosophical rigor.
Milton as Poet and Politician:
A Scholarly Discussion
Melvyn Bragg examines the literary and political career of the poet John Milton. If it wasn't for the poet Andrew Marvell we wouldn't have his later works; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Milton spent the English Civil Wars as a prominent politician and right hand man to Oliver Cromwell. When the Monarchy was restored in 1660 it was only Marvell's intervention that saved Milton from execution. By then, Marvell argued, Milton was old and blind and posed no threat to Charles II. But as a young man Milton had been an activist and pamphleteer extraordinaire. Allegedly inspired by a meeting with Galileo he wrote in passionate defence of Liberty. He detested the Church's insistence on empty ritual. And most dramatically for his time he demanded that the state serve its people rather than the people serve the state. How then should we remember Milton - as poet or politician - as an idealist or an apologist for a revolutionary yet intolerant regime? And was he a man at one with the people or an elitist who preached to the masses but lived his own life only in the most rarefied of circles? With John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London and Honorary Fellow of King's College Cambridge; Blair Worden, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Sussex.
Richard Strier on Paradise Lost
University of Chicago
William D. Kolbrener on Paradise Lost
Bar Ilan University
John Rogers
Yale University