This article explores Milton’s thinking about matter in Paradise Lost and reassesses the applicability of terms such as “materialism” and “vitalism” to Milton’s poetic. While Milton’s ostensible “monist materialism,” or belief that all substance is reducible to matter, has become a critical commonplace, this essay suggests that matter in Milton is not simply construed in terms of natural philosophy but is described in distinctly metaphysical terms and that the vitalist elements that invite one to read matter as a self-animating substance should not occlude the verse’s strong sense of final causation and divinus concursus (or divine concurrence, in which God cooperates in efficient causation, or the actions of created things). The poetry thus returns both final and efficient causation to God. By thinking about matter in terms of Milton’s intellectual heritage, this article emphasizes how the “Renaissance Aristotelianisms” Milton encountered helped to shape his thinking and how his poetry richly plays on the resulting paradoxes and discontinuities.
