¿D'you know, I'm something of a Milton scholar--

I've read Ad Patrem. I can recite the beginnings of Paradise Lost and Lycidas from memory. I even know pretty much what Areopagitica is about. I'm deeply conscious of the contents of our poet's travelling case when he got back from Italy. And  of course I am ravished by the doric delicacy of Comus, maybe even more than I am captivated by the Rape of the Lock. 

But what I still don't get, quite, is why he (John Milton Jr.) was a Christian. I have to conclude that maybe he wasn't. I'm not, ça va sans dire. And yet--funny thing--the first piece of real music I ever wrote (and probably the last thing that I shall ever write as well, if I get cracking on that Striker Requiem), was a motet in the Neo-Tallis mode which is, apparently, my native idiom. And, as I have tried to explain to Sister Rose, this is not insincerity on my part, nor at all even a deviation from my revolutionary queer-atheist agenda, but is simply a matter of artistic integrity: Real composers (like John Milton Sr., and me), of real music, can, as required, write religious music that gives no offense to the faithful--it's part of the job. So it might have been with John Jr., I'll allow. We know him to've been an arrant Arminian and a Monist, virtually a Unitarian--and that is but a degree from complete disbelief in the Trinity.

Flashback: I'm in Perugia, twenty years ago, in the refectory of a thousand-year-old way-station, built (of stone) by the Knights Hospitalers (with arrow slits), and a sour, but polite, Italian priest telling me, in Italian, that Caravaggio was a "troubled" man.