MAURICE KELLEY OBSERVED that Milton “enlivens his argument” by introducing “opposing voices engaged in spirited dialectic” ( Yale, 105). He cites Milton saying that “opponents adduce Malachi 3:1 [but] I reply” (At inquiunt qui adversantur […] Respondeo). Kelley assimilates another such exchange to “catechistic form”: Quis iam nunc misit? Filius, ut placet Placaeo. cuius ante faciem? filii. Ergo his filius sese alloquitur.” This “spirited dialectic” connects with Milton's training in disputation at Cambridge, and of course with his voluble pugnacity in the official Latin Defences. For though he came to deplore the disputations, its habits were ingrained: these were what Thomas Hobbes's Behemoth deplored in Milton's own exchange with Salmasius. Rather than deplore the dialectic, however, I take it as central to Milton's mind at work. He comes to life in the fight itself. Dialectical needs release the imaginative Milton as well as the partisan one. In fact, interpersonal expression—often also “personal” in the further sense of derogatory attack—points us to the typical vitality of De Doctrina.

It connects to the Latin prose medium. This naturally suits a European readership brought up on the university exercises. Moreover, Protestant theologies of this type were routinely composed in a Latin descended from philosophic Ciceronian, interlarded with Scholastic terminology. Milton plays the same game. But his Latin goes both lower and higher in its registers; from the functional Latin of the teeming citations from the Protestant Latin Bible, to a plain expository Latin for definitions and explanation; to a stern and surging hypotacticism of exposition, rising higher to argumentation (but lower into knockabout satire) and higher again to the dialectical interrogations on which Kelley remarked. The higher and lower registers are where we find most passion, both personal and interpersonal.

This chapter charts the last two together by heeding Milton's Latin pronouns, so as to connect grammatical personhood with the work's whole personal dimension.

Grammar and Idioms

It is true that the inflectedness of Latin verbs shows the person or agent without needing to use pronouns for the task.