I am 60 years old now, and maybe I'm going through a regression stage of wanting to be young again (but not at all like I was when I was young - I despise that person), and suddenly had the urge to develope my miniscule libido.

Well, intellectual aesthetic appreciation of women has increased but other than just that in the libido department, the stress and depression seem to have gone away to a large degree. I guess it was getting to me even worse than I thought it was. reading Christopher Hill about Milton has been an iconoclastic thrill also. I have always loved Milton, but his traditional image is bleak to say the least. This radical Protestant Christian theological prognosis of shedding old ideas that had been imposed by force over centuries down to a materialist, atheistic rockbottom core is thrilling. Milton is different from both Thomas Hobbes and David Hume in that he has little to no fear of revolutionary chaos as Hobbes and Hume did. He may not have been as great a philosophical thinker as they were, but the very dialectic of his real inner personality against the tremendously changing external social forces reveals a man seeing new vistas of fleshy human opportunity. He always expresses himself in Christian language, but it is a language turned inside out to his own desires, a process much similar to Hume's in the DIALOGUES ON RELIGION where he takes the side of the mystic essentially to make God disappear from meddling in human affairs. Milton has some of the "enthusiasm" Hobbes and Hume condemn as disorderly, but the only irrationality is in the traditional language and thought patterns he was brought up in. But he demonstrates, like Newman changing from a fundamentalist evangelical Anglican to a rationalist and causuistically sceptical Catholic, than a person can fundamentally change by turning the old world completely upside down by pursuing Newman's principle of, after establishing first principles you believe are true, going to the bitter end of the chain of logical consequences of those first principles.

Milton does exactly the opposite of Newman by becoming the "liberal" he attacks predominately in his later life. But really what Newman hated in "liberals" was that they were wishy-washy, that all thoughts and beliefs were equal. But this certainly does not apply to Milton. He had decided and long lasting hatreds, and he acted upon his beliefs. Hobbes and Hume considered established Churches a necessary evil to be preferred to the chaos Milton lived in. Milton loved chaos. His language must be seen from the same purview as Hobbes' language. Hobbes is more conscious of the problem but still finds it is the social and political situation he must live with. And considering what both actually said, it is a miracle that Milton or Hobbes survived the Restoration of Charles II. There were certainly individuals that wanted both of their heads on the executioner's block. I am going to work on the sonnet commentary and include Hobbes' analysis of the nature of angels (of they have place they must be material, if they don't have place they don't exist) which he directly and dangerously relates to the nature of inspiration from reading scripture, a killing point for evangelical Protestants. That also shows up Newman's demand for an external, rational authority to determine the consistency of the whole of Christian doctrine, that private inspiration is an irrational and dangerous act -- as I well know from present-at-hand fundamentalist Christians in my life.