souls form one Unity with the essential soul." And although the Zohar does not give up, as Milton does, the idea of a soul distinct from the body, yet it adopts this other idea, which bridges the difference, that there is no essential distinction between the body and the soul. This last is a Miltonic thesis also.

M. Karppe sums up the doctrine of the Zohar as follows: 29

The aim of the kabbalists being not to bring the En-Sof into direct contact with the Finite, it becomes necessary that the Crown (the first Sephira) be able to replace the En-Sof, and contain along with the spiritual principle the potentiality of the material-Matter is for the Zohar a degradation of the spiritual substance the Crown is the whole of that substance, with its full potentialities.

That is all Miltonic thought.

Spirit being the more excellent substance, virtually and essentially contains within itself the inferior one, as the spiritual and rational faculty contains the corporal, that is, the sentient and vegetative faculty (T. C. D., p. 181).

The original matter of which we speak is not to be looked upon as an evil or trivial thing, but as intrinsically good, and the chief productive stock of every subsequent good; it was a substance, and derivable from no other source than the fountain of every substance (God). (T. C. D., p. 179.)

This divine origin of the substance of which all beings are made has the same consequence in psychology and ethics, for Milton and for the Zohar: the physical instincts of the body are good and legitimate and, especially, sensuality is good and legitimate: both the poet and the Kabbalists find it in God himself, as we have seen. We need not therefore develop the point, beyond marking the extreme limit, common to both.

The Zohar proclaims several times that it is a sin to abstain from lawful sexual intercourse; 30 Milton is just as positive, with his

Who bids abstain,

But our destroyer, foe to God and man?

And Milton has shown us the example of physical love, in a passage which causes Raphaël himself to blush, among the angels also:

29 P. 375.

Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy'st

(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy. (VIII, 618.)

30 Vol. I, p. 290, П, 340, 642, etc.

But there is an evil sensuality, which in both systems is associated with the Fall. "Sexual desires" says the Zohar "are good or evil according to the spirit that prompts them." 31 The whole argument of Milton on the subject in the treatises on Divorce is based upon that very principle.32 Therefore the history of the Fall is the same: the Zohar reads like a commentary on the IXth book of Paradise Lost:

The woman saw that the fruit was good to eat—she took and ate thereof. Those words refer to the first union of Adam and Eve. At first, Eve consented to the union solely because of her reflections on the usefulness of conjugal cohabitation," and also because of the pure affection that bound her to Adam. But as soon as the serpent came into it, Scripture says "and gave thereof to her husband" their intercourse was no longer inspired by a pure affection-but she roused in him carnal desires."

All these elements are in the Miltonic tale of the Fall: the purity of sexual relationship before the Fall, the fruit considered as an aphrodisiac, sexual corruption following immediately upon the Fall, the first manifestation of it.35

And the Zohar like Milton, can rise to generalisation from these facts: it has the great theory of the opposition between passion and reason, and derives it also from reflection upon sexual passion.

"Man," says Rabbi Yehouda," "has three guides: Reason, inspired by the holy soul, passion, inspired by evil propensities, and the instinct of self-preservation, common to all men. Note that the evil Spirit can only act upon the last two guides. The guide called passion does not even wait for the Tempter-it runs to meet him, and it is this second guide which perverts the third by nature inoffensive."

This third guide Milton calls "desire" or "will," which is "by nature inoffensive." The poet describes the effects of sensuality on Adam and Eve:

For understanding (the 1st guide) ruled not, and the will (the

3rd guide)

Vol. 1, p. 142.

32 La Pensée de Milton, p. 68 and p. 181.

"Let us note here another trait common to Milton and the Zohar:

an occasional colossal lack of sense of humor.

"Zohar, vol. 1, pp. 287-288.

La Pensée de Milton, p. 164 gives the Miltonic texts.

On the daughters of Loth, Vol. II, p. 691.

And again:

Heard not her lore, both in subjection now
To sensual appetite (the 2nd) *

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed (1st)
Immediately inordinate desires (3rd)

And upstart passions (2nd) catch the government
From reason.38

Consequently, Milton's attitude to woman is much the same as that of the Zohar. For both, man without woman is an incomplete being. The Zohar frequently asserts the fact: 89 "The male form alone and the female form alone are each only onehalf of a body." (The basis of these ideas is in the theories on primitive hermaphrodism; traces of which can thus be found in Milton's thought also.) Thus Adam explains to the Archangel that God

from my side subducting, took perhaps More than enough "

-man without woman is an incomplete being, hence his weakness before her. Then, woman, being the instrument of passion, is not so directly as man in relationship with God:

He for God only, she for God in him.

says Milton, and the Zohar:

Women do not possess the light of the Law, which is reserved to men, but they have the candle of the Sabbath, which brings them rewards.“

But quite a special dignity is given woman, in many passages. For the Zohar, woman remains on earth the expression of the Matrona "small in her exile, but powerful," 42 "the house is hers, and man is to consult her for all matters relating to the household; ""the union of man and woman must be voluntary on both sides." 48 Woman must never be considered as the passive instrument of pleasure; her consent must be obtained "by words. of friendship and tenderness." 43

This attitude of superiority mixed with respect and tenderness is quite precisely Milton's attitude to woman.**

If we pass on to Milton's more particularly religious ideas, the conception of the "greater Man," of Christ, who is the whole. body of the elect, of the intelligent, the problem becomes wider, it is a larger tradition than that of the Zohar which comes down to Milton. I have pointed out two main links in the chain in Plato and Origen.*5 But the tradition is in the Kabbalah also: the heavenly man, Adam-Kadmon, who is One, the prototype and also the whole of mankind, may have helped Milton towards his idea of the greater Man, Christ. In any case, there is harmony.

This parallel could be carried on ad infinitum. I shall only add here the mere statement that among others, the following Miltonic conceptions are also found in the Zohar:

That original sin takes place in each of us, and not once for all in Adam;

That, in God's intention, our bodies were to become spirits without having to go through death;

That there is in the Fall much that is good;

That there exist mysteries which it is fatal to unveil;

That God reveals himself to men according to their powers and not such as He is;

That the Holy Scripture has many meanings;

That external events, although real in themselves, are yet in a way only symbols of spiritual events, etc.

There is practically not one philosophical trait in Milton which is not to be found in the Zohar.

Does that mean that Milton derived all his ideas from the Kabballah? That cannot be reasonably asserted. It seems to me:

1. That he obviously derived from the Zohar such peculiar conceptions as are found nowhere else, e. g. the idea of “retraction,” his most fundamental idea.

2. That some ideas coming to him from other sources were strengthened by the Zohar into a maturity and importance they would not otherwise have reached.

3. That he found in the Zohar confirmation of again other ideas which belonged to a much wider tradition.

"La Pensée de Milton, Part II, chap. III.

Ibid., p. 185.

It is perhaps practically impossible-and it is of no real utility -to try to work out this division into the detail of the ideas. What conclusions are we to draw from the facts?

The first is that Milton has used the Zohar; I see no other hypothesis covering the range of correspondences I have hardly done more than point out here.

The second is that Milton's originality as a thinker is much diminished and, indeed, practically reduced to the action of his, intellect or feelings upon outside material which he appropriates and only arranges. Yet he remains a great thinker because he is still the representative of the modern mind in presence of the tremendous chaos of impossible ideas, puzzling myths and grotesque conceptions, of the Zohar. Milton has chosen warily; he has drawn from this confusion practically all the original or deep ideas that were acceptable to the cultured European. He has never been swept away by the element of intellectual and sentimental perversity which plays so great a part in the Zohar. In the presence of this new world rising on the European horizon, an undeniable greatness of character and of intellect was needed to maintain such an attitude; few of those who dealt intimately with the Kabbalah were able to do so.

Considering these new data, and Milton now appearing not as the creator but as the stage manager only of his philosophical ideas, the problem of Milton's thought is transformed and becomes:

Why and how did Milton come to adopt such ideas? Why did he give up the orthodox tradition of his time and adopt this kabbalistic tradition? The answer is to be found in the historical and psychological study of his life, of the evolution of his feelings and character, such as I have tried to lay the foundations of in my Pensée de Milton.

Milton's original value may thus be diminished, but his historical significance becomes much greater; he is no longer an isolated thinker, lost in seventeenth century England, without predecessors or disciples. He becomes at one given moment, the brilliant representative of an antique and complex tradition, which lasts and widens after him. For the problem becomes larger. Milton among the Kabbalists, that is a sort of gap blown into the very fortress of English literature, and much may here come in: the inexplicable relationship between Blake and Milton becomes