Milton’s Scriptural Theology: Confronting De Doctrina Christiana 9781641893404, 9781641893411

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MILTON’S SCRIPTURAL THEOLOGY

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BORDERLINES Borderlines welcomes monographs and edited collections that, while firmly rooted in late antique, medieval, and early modern periods, are “edgy” and may introduce approaches, methodologies, or theories from the social sciences, health studies, and the sciences. Typically, volumes are theoretically aware whilst introducing novel approaches to topics of key interest to scholars of the pre-modern past.

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MILTON’S SCRIPTURAL THEOLOGY CONFRONTING DE DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA by JOHN K. HALE

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The cover’s Latin words and phrases are chosen equally from Milton’s topics and his personal style in examining them. The prevailing monochrome suggests print and bibles, academic and preaching garb, or the pen and ink of a controversial manuscript. Polemic is suggested in the lineation, by jagged diagonals, tilting and criss-crossing.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library © 2019, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94–​553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.

ISBN: 9781641893404 e-​ISBN: 9781641893411

www.arc-​humanities.org Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Foreword: Milton’s Personal Best . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Acknowledgements and Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Preliminaries: Authorship, Medium, Audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. The Address to Readers: A ​ Close Reading of Milton’s Epistle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

PART 1: MATERIALS 2. Axioms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3. The Biblical Citations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 4. Working from Wollebius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 5. Named Theologians as Interlocutors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

PART 2: ARTS OF LANGUAGE 6. Philology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 7. The Pagan Allusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 8. Person to Person—​How Pronouns Contribute. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

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Contents

PART 3: TRINITY

9. Milton’s De Filio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

10. Theologies Compared. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Appendix 1. Further Etymologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Appendix 2. Hobbes and Dryden. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

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ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Milton DDC  De Doctrina Christiana, with reference to each book and chapter, for instance, as II.3 for Book 2, Chapter 3 MS Kew, National Archives /​Public Record Office [PRO], Manuscript S/​P 9/​61

Texts and Translations of De Doctrina Christiana

Oxford  The Complete Works of John Milton, 13 vols. Edited by Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell, vol. 8: De Doctrina Christiana. Edited and translated by John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Yale  Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. Edited by Don M. Wolfe et al., vol. 6: ca. 1658–​ca. 1660 [De Doctrina Christiana]. Edited by Maurice Kelley with translation by John Carey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). All references are to vol. 6 unless otherwise indicated

Studies

MMsDDC Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Bibles

JTB KJV

Junius–​Tremellius–​Beza (1623–1624) King James Version or Authorized Version

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FOREWORD: MILTON’S PERSONAL BEST

THIS FOREWORD TELLS how I  began my twenty-​five years of research into Milton’s “best possession,” to help explain the meaning and range of its phrasing, and why I refer to it as his “Personal Best.” To speak of your “personal best,” be it in throwing the javelin or finishing a crossword puzzle, is to measure yourself by some wider standard so as to take satisfaction in your own prowess when at maximum extension, whilst recognizing that that best is not the world’s best. Milton spoke of De Doctrina as “this my best and most precious possession” (haec, quibus melius aut pretiosius nihil habeo). So he is not making quite the same claim, not taking pride in performance or prowess. Recognizing his due humility, I nevertheless take the surviving work as his “best” contribution to theology, and in many senses “personal.” For one thing, its theology is distinctive in several unorthodoxies, and their zestful advocacy; also in some orthodoxies, like his measured account of Predestination. At the least, De Doctrina is his one and only worked-​out Credo. And it figures, albeit belatedly, in histories of the great mid-​century Trinitarian debate: it is on the wider map of theology; it counts. As to its being his “personal” best, Milton’s Epistle declares it personal, his very own excogitation from scripture, since “whoever wants to be saved must have a personal faith of their own” (MS 1f). Also, he had to complete the compilation “if I did not want to be unfaithful to myself”:  nisi mihimet forte infidus esse volebam—​strong language, emphasizing his selfhood (mihimet). Thus De Doctrina is personal as being appropriative and self-​directed, potentially even self-​centred. For my study, I heed his words, reading the original Latin words themselves, in order to probe the personality and selfhood which argument and style reveal to close reading. These close readings are extended to include the perspective of the readership Milton envisaged. By several means, I move to assessment of the work and its aim, its degrees of success, and its by-​products, as these reveal Milton at his “personal best.” The further implications of that phrase are addressed, in that while to a candid appraisal—​or to historians or methodologists of theology—​his best might not seem the very best ever, this work remains unutterably precious to Milton, and reveals to close reading the passion and energy of his mind in its acts of thought. Thus to understand the personal dimension of his theology is to understand, and to evaluate, his mind in action.

Getting to Know De Doctrina

In 1993, in the aftershock of William Hunter’s 1991 impugning of Milton’s authorship of De Doctrina, I was invited by Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns to join their multidisciplinary inquiry into the manuscript, as its Latinist.1 Did the Latin style resemble 1  Hunter, Visitation Unimplor’d.

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Milton’s elsewhere? Did it do so in whole, or in part, or hardly at all? I looked for words which a right-​minded humanist would have abhorred (as grounds for disauthenticating), and I examined word-​frequencies. In the upshot, though I did find words which had been blacklisted by purists of Milton’s time, they tended to be ones occasioned by theologians he was refuting, or by topics which had generated technical terms, usually from Greek into Latin, like hypostasis or blasphemare. And as for the word-​frequencies, they crystallized something for me about the mind behind the manuscript. Just below the most frequent words (et, sed, and so forth) came a bunch of logical connectives which delimited: duntaxat and synonyms meaning “only,” and double negatives like non nisi. These I found used habitually and insistently. Reading them in context showed that in their incidence quality matched quantity. Now while such locutions had thrived at least since Doubting Thomas, and are certainly not unknown in theological Latin, I could only acknowledge that they had special force in De Doctrina, both numerically and when I was examining its most animated passages. I had become convinced Hunter was wrong. That conviction remained muted in the multidisciplinary inquiry’s first reports, among other reasons because mine was a supporting role. It became more central to the inquiry’s eventual book, Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana.2 My own portion (Chapter 6) builds duntaxat into a much wider gathering of linguistic evidence for single authorship, namely Milton’s. Meanwhile, in 2000 or thereabouts, Campbell and Corns had invited me to edit De Doctrina for their proposed Oxford Complete Works of John Milton. This task occupied me increasingly till 2012, though it did also enable me to write papers and essays on the spadework: especially translation, but also style. All the same, I obeyed the imperative to preserve editorial detachment and impersonality. I postponed publishing on matters of opinion, and did not record where immersion in the original Latin, and the original manuscript, had suggested views and responses of my own. These, with the teeming detail which occasioned them, are now receiving expression. After all, to return now to that personal dimension, though I am a theological amateur, so was Milton. In writing personally at last, I am approximating to Milton’s stance as declared in the opening Epistle.

The Personal Element

That personal element (to be defined in a moment) is confirmed by the quirks and twists of his argumentation, for the close reader of his actual words. At times, indeed, changes to the manuscript pages demonstrate his discovering mind, in the moment of intervention, addition, or, occasionally, revision. For often enough, his mind moves eagerly onward in the direction already taken. How could it not, since he prides himself on working

2  By Gordon Campbell, Thomas N.  Corns, John K.  Hale, and Fiona J.  Tweedie (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007). See, for instance, Conclusions (155–​61) and the chapter on “Latin Style”; henceforth abbreviated to MMsDDC. Further observations lie dispersed in earlier reports and conference papers, and subsequently in the notes of our Oxford edition, De Doctrina Christiana, vol. 8 of The Complete Works of John Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); henceforth abbreviated to Oxford.

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out his beliefs from collecting then collating scripture? Only then, if at all, a paragraph or section continues into addressing what professional theologians had said. In these circumstances, when he has laboured hard and long in the vineyard of scripture for himself, he finds them nearly always wrong. But, as he declares, it was from the outset some dissatisfaction with the “lengthy volumes of theologians and their Systemata” which had made him systematize scriptural beliefs for himself. I have been experiencing a similar dissatisfaction with Milton’s lengthy theology, not with its length but with the certainty by which he moves to conclusions, some of which feel foreknown. The closed fist is often felt in an ostensibly open-​handed inquiry. Hence, naturally, the personal character of my own product. Hence too my sense of having belatedly qualified myself to have an opinion on issues arising, opinions gained from travelling the same route, over the many years of the authorship inquiry and then of editing and translating De Doctrina. The route was that of Milton’s chapters, the eventual reader’s route. Yet it had not been his route of composition, though the scheme of topics was there from early on. For one thing, by the nature of a commonplace book you enter your evidence according to topic, in its allotted place (topos = “place”) in the traditional scheme of Topica, and your reflections likewise. You work all over. Manifestly too the manuscript pages show an older state of the fair copy in the chapters which we read later, in much of Book 2—​something unavoidably back-​to-​front is embedded. The chapters we read sooner because of their numbered sequence tend to be the ones later finished, with the fifth chapter of the fifty arguably the latest of the fifty. As a close reader of everything in the manuscript I began by transcribing it all in its numerical sequence. I did it three times in succession. This gave me the experience, which I imagine to be unusual, of reading Milton’s best possession in its Latin original, in manuscript, in its entirety, and closely. It has been a privilege. Despite some risk of distortion through myopia, the value is that of very close encounter. It brings a serious pleasure in reading this Latin from appreciating Milton’s energies, and so a pleasure of appreciating the work, pleasures found independently of theological propositions. Translation and annotation, on the other hand, were shared with Donald Cullington: their strength belongs at least equally with him, as an impartial outsider to Milton studies, unburdened by the element of personal engagement. He feels no need to wrestle with Milton, or to take him personally, whereas I do. In accordance with my own trajectory, my studies move from the original impulse of the authorship debate, to the fruits of transcription like a sense of strata, to the organization, to source studies, to linguistic or philological investigations like Milton’s etymologizing, to questions of Latin style. These each contribute something to my personal impressions, whether in the form of an answer to an existing question or the framing of a new one. Finally, I attempt a response of my own to Milton’s eager advocacy on matters of scholarship and faith, by way of his magisterial chapter on the Trinity, and a fresh view of the relations obtaining between De Doctrina and Paradise Lost. I want to link the personality on view in the do-​it-​yourself theologian of the Latin with the supreme epic poet of the English. I want to “use or not use” his thinking, in the spirit of his challenge.

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The chapters use a varying sense of what is “personal” in Milton’s style and mind: individual, quirky, eccentric; impassioned, irascible, scathing; interpersonal, ad hominem; partisan, opinionated, irreducibly the outcome of choice or axiom within the protestation of believing only what scripture can avouch. Further forms of this work’s personality (which differs from that of Paradise Lost) are proposed in the course of examining passages. I depend throughout on linguistic and literary methods of inquiry, as suggested by the too rarely visited Latinity of De Doctrina, Milton’s own original dictated words. Now it might be felt that the “personal” and “passionate” engagement in De Doctrina is simply Milton’s incessant subjectivity. That which in his verse makes for the “egotistical sublime” which Keats identified, and in his English prose works appears as a fiery one-​sided partisanship, or in his Latin Defences as advocatorial propaganda for the Interregnum regime, appears in De Doctrina too, as a systematic preference for his own elucubrations from scripture. The continuities with these works do reappear from my study of its topics and Milton’s treatment of them. Nonetheless, for Milton himself the stakes are higher than for his other prose. He claims that salvation depended for him on excogitating from scripture alone what it is “safe” to believe (nihil mihi tutius neque consultius visum est, Epistle line 51)—​“if I did not want to be unfaithful to myself” (nisi mihimet forte infidus esse volebam, line 54), which shows an anxiety both puritan and existential. This is an unusual mixture of anxiety with confidence, not found in his other works, which is what strikes me as personal, and having a unique passion, and worth examining for its own sake as well as to fill a lacuna in Milton studies. It is a peculiar passion, both through its remote but alluring strangeness, and because it is peculiar to Milton in De Doctrina. And if anyone suspects him of sales talk, of talking his subject up as usual, I would reject this jaundiced view as improbable and perhaps anachronistic, for he toiled at this work for years and years, before and during his blindness, into an enormous manuscript, which demonstrates the prolonged revision of a treasured work. “I have laid up for myself a treasure”: not a monumental futility, but (for this devout and unusual person) a safe stronghold, ein feste Burg. Magnum me subsidium fidei […] vel thesaurum reposuise.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND DEDICATION

The approach in this volume to understanding De Doctrina had a first sketch in Milton Studies as “Peculiar and Personal: Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana.” I am grateful to colleagues who have discussed parts of the undertaking with me, especially Gordon Campbell, Donald Cullington, Christopher Holmes, Jason Kerr, and Jeffrey Miller. I received help in preparing the manuscript from Sarah Entwistle. The dedication records the wider debt to my family, especially my grandchildren (Lucas, Juliet, and Harry), born during the years I was working on this book. John K. Hale, Litt. D. University of Otago, December 2018

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PRELIMINARIES: AUTHORSHIP, MEDIUM, AUDIENCE BEFORE COMMENCING THE studies of Milton’s personality in action in the main chapters, I need to ground them in certain indispensable contexts. Did Milton author the work? Why is it in Latin, and of what sort? What readership, and kind of reading, does the work require?

The Authorship Question

William Hunter made much of discontinuities and differences between De Doctrina and Milton as known from his life and other works, and between one part of De Doctrina and another. Accordingly, if I am to describe the “personal” dynamic of the work, and Milton’s “personality” expressed within it, we need to be sure that Milton was indeed its author, throughout. Fuller accounts, written by others and/​or myself, can be found in MMsDDC: here, at whatever risk of repetition in later chapters, I summarize the things which stand out, and dwell on the linguistic matters which are my chief concern. Three main possibilities confront us:  first, De Doctrina was composed in full by Milton; second, it was composed in part by Milton; third, it was not composed by him at all, whether by a single unknown or several. Hunter suggested one or two names for the third possibility: none drew support. The second possibility complicated proceedings. He observed, for instance, that Book 1, Chapter 10 used the three different Latin words for “marriage.” But Donald Cullington demonstrated that the three words have distinct meanings, which Milton differentiates here just as classical Latin had done.1 Indeed, within the headlong reverie of Chapter 10, divided authorship is singularly unlikely. It repeats so many of Milton’s published arguments about divorce. To tell the truth, while we must thank Hunter for calling such attention to De Doctrina in its original Latin, he did at times resist the natural, obvious, first explanation. If we start afresh, on the other hand, we find Milton’s authorship quite secure unless and until one undertakes to suspect everything. The MS carries his name, at the beginning and on page seven where the first substantive chapter begins. Although it is not written in his own hand, he was blind, and could not have penned it even if he had wanted to. The name, though written in a different lettering from that of the first 196 pages, is written in the same hand, only in uppercase letters: this scribe, Daniel Skinner, wrote all the rest of the 196 pages, and corrections or additions on many later pages. He signs off at the end in the same hand and UC/lc variation as at the outset. My own readings of the text produce one characteristic feature after another. To name a few:

i. The author of De Doctrina is working from England, as reference to the expulsion of the bishops “olim” shows (Oxford, 1246, MS 732). Other allusions to church–​state 1  Cullington, “The Latin Words for ‘Marriage’ in De Doctrina Christiana, bk. 1, chap. 10,” 23–​37.

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arrangements fit only England. One scribe forgets himself and begins a note on the MS in English. The author has published other work or works advocating divorce reform (Oxford, 392, ut nos alias ex aliquot scripturae locis et Seldenus idem docuit [“as we have shown elsewhere from several passages of scripture, and as Selden has also shown”]). This points to Tetrachordon especially but not only. De Doctrina has the same organization as Artis Logicae, two books, fifty chapters in all, divided 33:17. To get this arrangement, changes have been made from that of the chief model of either work, respectively Downham’s Ramus and Wolleb’s Compendium. Similarities occur of wording and choice of examples between the Logic and De Doctrina, like the intrusive imperative, Evigilent hic politici: “Here let the theologians awake.”2 Compare a kindred moment in De Doctrina, Politicis etiam atque etiam legendum (“to be read again and again by statesmen,” Oxford, 1242). Another (Oxford, 220) is the shared reversal of orthodox opinion in tempora omnia praesentia non sunt (“[to God] all times are NOT present”); since as Campbell says, “the simplest explanation [of the repetition] would be that Milton recycled his own phrase.”3 The author of De Doctrina alludes to several known favourite ancient writers of Milton’s, especially Euripides and Homer, and, among Romans, Horace. His regular practice in texts, and the witness of the early Lives, agree with the showing of these poets (and ancient poets generally) in De Doctrina. See also Chapter 6. Two of the theologians who inform De Doctrina, Amesius and Wollebius, are known from an Early Life of Milton to have been regularly used in his study, by his pupils.4

What is more, a prolonged reading of Milton’s Latin, such as for the Oxford Defences volume, will uncover more resemblances. To give a recent example, in translating the Second Defence recently for the Oxford Milton, Cullington and I found that Milton uses the rare word ventilare, to winnow, paired with excutere (copytext 155). The same metaphor appears, in the same pairing, in De Doctrina (MS4i). And so on. Taken singly, these features read like Milton. Moreover, when taken together, and when I add to them the general tenor and feel, and indeed the whole vibrant personality which this Latin exudes, and shares with Milton’s other mature prose Latin, to doubt his authorship becomes uneconomical, in fact unreasonable, at least till weighty new counterevidence is discovered. To put it bluntly, how many libertarian Latinists living in Interregnum England, with a taste for Euripides in thought and phrasing, combined 2  MMsDDC, 103; Oxford.

3  Campbell, “The Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana,” 129–​30.

4  See Early Lives of Milton, 61. “The next work after this, [in the pabulum of Milton’s pupils] was the writing from his own dictation, some part, from time to time, of a Tractate which he thought fit to collect from the ablest of Divines, who had written of that Subject; Amesius, Wollebius, &c. viz. A perfect System of Divinity, of which more hereafter.”

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a predilection for Latin phrases of limitation with heterodox views of the Trinity and strong opinions on tithes, and had published pamphlets in favour of divorce? Who are the other candidates with the requisite variety and accomplishments in their linguistic and literary repertoire?

The Latin Medium

When Hunter began his campaign, Milton scholars apart from Maurice Kelley had not thought much about the Latin of Ramist theologies. On the other hand, the work of Leo Miller on the State papers had provided a test of Milton’s preferred Latinity there. Milton preferred a more Roman way of designating and entitling, which his masters would then remove for clarity of recognition (Status Generales offended Milton’s Latinity, but to practical people it referred more unmistakably to the Dutch “States General”). Milton tended also to cavil at unclassical Latin, by inserting such phrases as ut vocant (“as they call it”)—​like a scare quote. Did De Doctrina use any such words or phrases which might disauthenticate those portions of the work, or the whole work? When I examined the candidates, namely words not found in classical Latin dictionaries, or marked there as “late” or “ecclesiastical,” all expressed concepts which Milton had perforce to discuss, from their use in theologians he was reading for rebuttal. (This is setting aside the Latin of the Protestant Latin Bible which he used for the citations, these being indeed in a different Latin, but not Milton’s anyway.) In fact, theological Latin employs many technical terms, whether deriving from the original languages of the Bible itself, or from doctrinal discussions. Milton may take up the Latin version or inspect its Hebrew or Greek original, or both. But this belongs to his analyses, not to his personal style. The main definitions and distinctions in every chapter, and the discussions which follow each body of scriptural citations, are composed in the Latin normal for these theologies. Often enough Milton’s formulations begin with the words he read in his model or matrix, Wollebius. And we make much of that fact, since we can pinpoint moments when the Latin quoted from Wollebius becomes his own appropriation (see Chapter 4). These moments hold greatest interest when he parts company. Often, we note an increase in animation and heterodoxy, yet not always: occasionally, Wolleb waxes scornful where Milton does not, but either way, Milton is his own man within the norm of this Latin style, the genre of this neo-​Latin discourse. But there is no change in the norm of the Latin itself. Intellectuals of all kinds used the same Latin, for exposition of ideas, presenting evidence, and dealing with rival opinion. It was classical, and broadly Ciceronian, the lucid expository Cicero of the philosophical works, punctuated when occasion arose by the more oratorical Cicero, partisan and advocatorial, deploying crooked arguments too to win his case. But its lexis went far wider than Cicero, into any “Golden” Latin, and a good deal more, in that conglomerated eclectic Latin which purported to be timeless, and was undiachronic. De Doctrina is a fine example. Its individuality oscillates, as for any author, to be recognized by the usual means, like stylistic register or imagery. Protestant theology was written in Latin and printed, the two things together making for ease of access by Europe. Milton models his theology on that of his predecessors, in

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all sorts of ways. Even while spurning their Systemata as scholastic and interminable, he wields scholastic thought-​forms freely, in the course of composing what is by far his lengthiest work. This was how his age did its thinking: so did he. And even while such Latin can seem uniform, and unvaried and certainly inelastic by comparison with Greek or English, Milton’s has its own energy, variety, and expressiveness, as I again show, in chapters on some of their clearest manifestations.

Readers and Reading

Milton’s manuscript opens with an elaborate address to readers. It explains his work’s personal origin and importance—​to himself, and so to them. He does it in what, although not so named, is helpfully termed the “Epistle.” For it is aligned with the epistles of the New Testament, by its forthright epigraph (“To all the churches of Christ”), launching the address in a style even higher than the Ciceronian. He speaks of a form of publication which must mean print:  “I now make these things public (palam facio) […] I share [my work] as widely as possible (quam possum latissimè)”—very emphatic, since quam latissimè by itself would imply possum. Likewise, the epigraph sounds its trumpet to “all who profess the Christian faith anywhere among the peoples (ubicunque Gentium).” This ubiquity can only mean print, which he had regularly used to spread his ideas. And print in Latin aims at educated believers across Europe. The desire to get the widest attention possible, even though we soon learn that only Protestant readers are envisaged, is manifested by the address to Universis Ecclesiis, for “universal” entails coverage or extent, as still felt in “the universe.” Qualifications then follow, as “purer” religion is specified, as to be found only in scripture. And cautions follow, and anxieties. Not every reader is going to like this book, but in a bold and sincere voice Milton will risk it for the greater good. Thus the epistle intends an international readership of an already Protestant persuasion, yet perhaps equally of believing Christians who are not committed to a particular church. Reading is an individual, personal activity. The epigraph insinuates this by greeting not only churches, all of them,5 but also (nec non), at greater length of phrasing, any believer anywhere:  omnibus Fidem Christianam ubicunque Gentium profitentibus. The latter invitation contains more words, is emphasized by the amplitude of the litotes nec non, and gets the last word of the eleven-​word dative phrase of the dedication. If the appropriating of New Testament and Pauline epigraphs is felt, then a distinctive widening of address is felt too—​from localized particular gatherings in a city or region (Corinth, Galatia) to confessional churches unlocalized, and to Reformation Europe. Such a close reading of the exact Latin words may seem like a priori squeezing. At least it has the interest of novelty, and suggests serious new understanding. It is supported by another unfamiliar testing, of reading aloud (as we would of course do for 5  May Universis include geographical thrust, lacking from omnibus, as in “the universe” “wherever you turn,” and hence a glance at the potential ubiquity of a printed book?

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Preliminaries: Authorship, Medium, Audience

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Milton’s English poems). Taken together, these things alert us to the personal, and interpersonal, the emphasis which is my theme. The interpersonal is clearest in the epistle—​ so much so, indeed, that our first substantive chapter looks hard at the Epistle to show how embedded, indeed constitutive, is this personal drive, here and then throughout De Doctrina. Milton’s hopes, but also fears, are to be felt; first hopes, then tensions and anxieties, integral to the whole undertaking; hopes set high then modified; fears disallowed yet re-​entering willy-​nilly.

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Chapter 1

THE ADDRESS TO  READERS: A ​ CLOSE READING OF MILTON’S EPISTLE WITH THE DECISION to publish De Doctrina, the personal and emotional drive behind the whole undertaking has become interpersonal and interactive. The Epistle seeks either to mould the desired interaction into the one Milton wants, or else to preclude ones he does not want. Milton polarizes the responses he envisages. A  good reading heeds his declared intention—​to share the spirit of personal search for the truth of scripture as sole authority—whereas a bad one rejects by prejudging. In the present chapter, we follow the steps of his persuading the putative readership, to bring out his individuality and idiosyncrasy, that personal and passionate underlay of the measured gravitas. He is himself in all of this. Its autobiographical and circumstantial beginning explains this. Then latterly in the reasoning of its final paragraph we see not only the personal urgency and high seriousness of it all, but how his mind in action sways and bends the occasion to antecedent wishes. So much is at stake. Those steps of persuasion can be seen at a glance on the pages, being the divisions into paragraphs and sentences. They are heard, with much of rhythm too, in reading aloud.1 I follow them through one by one, to bring out the structuring, reasoning, and some key points of the Latin. (Navigation is enabled by Milton’s paragraphing, assisted when the paragraphs lengthen by the Oxford edition’s giving line numbers, a beneficial anomaly for the Epistle only.) A good reading of the Epistle itself should be of his own words, by close reading; if that becomes personal and risks bias, well, he did appeal for such a reading of the whole work. Let us begin this whole study at the work’s own beginning.

The Seven Paragraphs (Short Version) These paragraphs could be compressed thus:

i. Why am I writing yet another book on doctrine? (lines 8–​16) ii. Is it for selfish reasons? (17–​21) iii. No, God demands we have a personal faith. (22–​28) 1  Those who wish to feel these rhythms, and the rise and fall of the voice, can try them out. What we inevitably do for his English verse, but seldom for his Latin and his English prose, we could do for the Epistle in its polished Latin: read it aloud for ourselves, or at any rate hear it aloud. I am putting my own rendering online, for others to assess and to do better. Reading aloud is like translating: there is no hiding place. You are compelled to identify and to weigh up the points of emphasis, and of pause, and to identify the tone of expressive phrases. I know that for many who care about Milton this is (as one reviewer said of my work on Milton’s multilingualism) “rubbing my nose in what I know I don’t know.” It will prove worth the effort if the sound of his voice is registered.

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iv. So I worked mine out, on every point, working between scripture and other people’s theologies—​only, however, to be disappointed by the latter. (29–​46) v. So I did it all again for myself from scratch, thereby gaining a great treasure. (47–​67) vi. Now I am sharing this treasure, emphasizing scripture, even in the crowding of the citations on my pages—​doing this in the sincere hope that it may be of use to other seekers after truth. (68–​95) vii. Last, I deny being heretical, and appeal in all sincerity for a fair and open reading. (96–​133)

Baldly summarized like this, the Epistle is quintessentially personal, all about Milton himself in his endeavour, but calm and reasonable, candid and almost innocuous. But when paraphrased into its detailed reasoning, including the syntax of the embedded argument and the original wording, it becomes personal in the further sense of impassioned, agitated, anxious, and indignant. To use Erving Goffman’s distinction, it is Expression of self, both consciously and involuntarily, in the course of Impression upon readers, persuasively.2 Nonetheless, the personal in the form of the interpersonal of the Epistle’s transaction, namely persuasion, remains the prime focus, if only because the primacy so stands out within De Doctrina. The two aspects of its personal combine here, in the urgent desire to be read, to have his say, and to have an influence.

The Units of the Persuasion: The Seven Paragraphs

Whereas the seven paragraphs look equal in bulk and alike in tone as just summarized, it is the differences between paragraphs which further illuminate Milton’s purpose. In length, apart from the question-​and-​answer of the second and third paragraphs, the paragraphs grow steadily longer. In swelling, however, their sentences become more numerous yet shorter. The effect is of urgency, tension, and climax of the appeal for a reading of an open, personal spirit. I follow this now in an expanded reading which moves between the thought and its Latin. (The Epistle is too long to quote in its full original, let alone with its English needing even more words.) First Paragraph

Cum ab ineunte superior saeculo […]] The first paragraph comprises a single sentence. “Since 1500 religion has undergone purification, and theological publications have proliferated:  so why do I now publish yet another, and expect to succeed if all others (omnes) have failed?” A  summary of contexts poses a two-​pronged question on a vital matter. “Purer religion,” the reform of the Reformation itself, receives emphasis by repetition of puritas after contrast with 2  The distinction is propounded by Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I have used it elsewhere to explain Milton’s multilingual flair, especially in Milton’s Languages, 19, 83, and passim.

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“contamination”—​well and good. Theologies proliferate accordingly, which should be a good thing, but not if done unsuccessfully (parum foeliciter). Why, then, am I not deterred: cur Ego […] ipse ab eodem incoepto non sim deterritus? The uppercasing of Ego does not in itself emphasize the pronoun (any more than it does for English /​I/​), but ipse following it begins to. Already this theology sets itself over against all predecessors. Second Paragraph

Equidem3 si dicerem […]] Milton’s new single-​sentence paragraph makes the apparent concession, that “if I were writing my book because Christian religion expels slavery and fear, my initiative could be impugned as being from no religious motive but self-​interest (maximis vitae commoditatibus).” The curious charge is not really concessive, but more of a straw man; for if religion brings well-​being, why not choose well-​being? So the praise of belief is subordinated to the unwelcome counterfactual consequence, “I could be accused of writing out of mere self-​regard.” Third Paragraph

Verùm cùm aeternae salutis viam] That short second paragraph has only a single sentence. So too the third one. This short but decisive paragraph is again odder than it might be. “Since, however, salvation comes solely (non nisi) from having a personal faith, I must work out my own faith from understanding scripture for myself, on every single point.” He takes the Protestant axiom that belief may not come from others’ faith (disallowing “implicit faith,” implicita fides). And he stretches the general need for a personal faith into his own “resolve” to think out every point of belief in detail. Personal faith is a Protestant dogma, based on texts like 1 Peter 3:15: “[Be] ready always to [give] an answer to every man that asketh a reason of the hope that is in you.” But on “every single point”?! Then scrutiny begins to note the insistent phrasing: non nisi, “not unless” = only if. Also note propriae cuiusque fidei (“each person’s individual faith”) and how the pronoun is singular and individualistic, not a communal plural, like omnes. To repeat, this assumes that a personal faith consists of individual, itemized beliefs, hundreds of them. It bypasses the essential simplicity of the conversions and statements of belief which are dramatized in the New Testament. (Lord, I  believe, Help thou my unbelief.) Milton glides from the universal need for a personal faith to his individual, personal resolve to understand “every single point, by my very own care”—​unumquodque habere cognitum. It implies a possible exhaustiveness; every point is to be perpended with the utmost diligence (quam diligentissime perpensa). He undertakes completeness, doing it all himself, for himself: pronouns redouble, mihimet 3  The opening word Equidem is emphatic. It is inadequately rendered “indeed.” Its -​quidem component does mean “indeed,” but E-​quidem may have begun life as Ego quidem. Though this has been doubted, equidem does tend to appear in first-​person utterances, with some tone of “I for my part.”

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ipsi, meaque ipsius opera exploratum. The spirit of the search is becoming self-​confident through anxiety, presuming energy and leisure, and certainly individualistic and sui generis. The overriding impulse comes from the person confronting the task and feeling the need of it. Nothing else exists but scripture, or God in his revealed word, and himself. Exists when? When did he “make this resolve” (statui, Oxford, 4 line 24)? Now, at the time of writing the Epistle which declares the intention to publish? Or earlier, whenever it was that he became aware of the impasse within the Reformation? His next paragraph, “I began therefore” (Coepi igitur), suggests it is both, then and now. Or does “therefore” also summarize all the contextual and argumentative considerations named so far? I am reluctant to choose or rank among these. Not only is it left unclear; responding inclusively sounds the right note, of single-​minded lifelong constancy. Fourth Paragraph

Coepi igitur Adolescens […]] Now Milton needs a longer paragraph (of eighteen lines after 8, 5, and 7) in two sentences. In the first sentence:  “So I  began in my youth both to study scripture assiduously (perlegendos assiduus incumbere) in its original tongues, and to go carefully through (percurrere) some shorter Theologorum Systemata.” He dwells on his own assiduity in both cases, as if to forestall facile rejection as an amateur: strong verbs are chosen, which repeat the intensive per-​as prefix. Not merely read, but read “through/​thoroughly.” Citations, the findings, the biblical passages which this method had extracted, he arranged topically, under “appropriate subject-​headings.” The locution cum […] tum seems not to have temporal, sequential force (scripture, then Systems), but rather takes the two “times” together,4 presumably from the Bible to the interpreters, but more in order of importance—​much as we see on the pages of the MS, and especially its earliest pages, the ones least worked over. In the second sentence he moves on to “ampler volumes of the theologians and to controversial questions.” Growing in confidence he finds “with great regret” (sane dolens) that they abounded in bad reasoning—​shifts, logic-​chopping, empty jargon, “greater vehemence than validity,” misinterpretations of scripture or false inferences from it, and “truth attacked as error and heresy, and error and heresy taken for truth.” In short, many arguments were “valued more from habit and partisan zeal than from the authority of the scriptures.” He says all this without giving any examples (or any mitigating bouquets), in a spirit of “great regret,” but “no less candidly than freely” (lines 37–​38). First Interjection

We need to pause on this. “Candour” conveys the spirit or motive of the saying, while “freely” looks more to the content. Let not the freedom alienate readers, since it is done in a sincere, truth-​seeking way. Milton often talks like this. Just as it has been said that 4  In some occurrences, “the conjunctions are co-​ordinating rather than subordinating,” says Woodcock, A New Latin Syntax, 241, §289.

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people at a church meeting shudder or duck when one member promises to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15), because they know they are going to hear something unwelcome, so here Milton’s reader can expect to be offended by some things he will say. If there were any doubt about this, it would vanish by the end of the sentence in which he faults the authors of theological systems, for it grows from faulting “many” arguments evaded, to “whatever” side of a question is being defended, and truth and error “at times” reversed: multa, quam partem, nonnunquam. In calm reflection, we may accept that Milton is not faulting all systems all the time. In rhetoric, however, the sentence is crowding the mental landscape with forms of bad thinking. It is time to think for oneself, rejecting and accepting as one reads according to each thought expressed. (As you do; as my own reader does here and now.) But Milton decides instead it is time to start all over again. He is making another jump, after writing antagonistically. It sounds a little like the “partisan zeal” he attacks at the close of the sentence, since a candid reading would detect a partiality to his own views within a “tooth and nail” vehemence (mordicus) equal to that for which he faults the unnamed “many” theologies. (Which are the exceptions?) What’s the difference, then, between these partisans and Milton? Wait and see. Fifth Paragraph

Cum itaque his ducibus […]] At any rate, by studying appropriately with persistence he grows to confirm that he must do it all again, by himself. He “diligently persevered in this project for a number of years”: per aliquot annos. Note the near tautology in “diligently persevered (attentissime perseverassem)”:  how can one be diligent without persevering? Does the translation even miss the superlative degree in attentissimè? And the verb has yet another per-​ prefix. This stylistic overkill may come from genre, from mannerism of style, from the need for plea, or from all three in vigorous deployment. He is encouraged on one hand that the danger from Rome is receding (55–​56, satis munitam), which sounds like the 1650s. On the other hand, reform is neglected or poorly defended “in many other directions” (caeteris in locis compluribus). He sticks to his announced program of reading, because “more things than I first realized remained to be scrupulously measured by the criterion of the scriptures.” Moreover, he trusts himself now “to have distinguished between matters of faith and matters of opinion only.” Second Interjection

Let us stand back again, to consider how far the address has come, the linkage of the units of the sense. This fifth paragraph grew causally out of its predecessor, itaque, as did the fourth by its igitur. The seven paragraphs show the shape of the entire meditation in their logical connectives: Since […] Indeed […] But because […] I began therefore […] Since therefore […] and onwards to If I now publish these things […] and Last I intend […]. And just

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as the paragraphs increase in length with Coepi, fourth, so they grow in intensity and conflictedness, until the final one has thirty-​seven lines, broken into seven sentences of twist-​and-​turn, topping even its predecessor (of twenty-​seven lines and five sentences). The reader is being compelled by syntax and style to wrestle in thought with the writer’s. Milton welcomes the engagement itself and expects disagreement, but hopes to do it all on the intended terms—​his own, not those of others’ prejudgments or commitments or habits. Some hope! What readers would he win over thereby? Assuredly none who had written a Systema themselves, who would suspect they were being included in his slashing critique, which by not naming names lends itself to a more sweeping rejection. So readers are sought among seekers, any other earnest, troubled, currently dissatisfied, urgently Protestant, Latin-​reading seekers. Printing will locate them, seek them out, then persuade them. Fifth Paragraph (Concluded)

That fifth paragraph is the first of two fundamental ones of self-​explanation. It sets out the initiating impulse, the self-​informed discontent. Growing now into three sentences (after two in the fourth), it reiterates it while restating the historical context as favourable to Milton’s own undertaking, and as well based for confidence and comfort to himself in matters of belief, indeed a stored treasure (thesaurum reposuisse). The Oxford notes remark (13n.xii):  “Scriptural metaphor, as in Matt. 6:19–​20. The biblical words for treasure connote abundance and collection. The image continues in ‘brought to light’ [line 86]: the awkward truths are treasures.” In his mind, communicated by style in the trope, he is likening himself to the householder in Jesus’ parable, himself making public the good news in print. This may seem like over-​interpreting, but consider the apt and dramatic placement, here at the climax and crisis, the point of Milton’s narrative where he has found treasure and seeks to share it. Sixth Paragraph

Haec si omnibus palam facio […] And so now5 Milton alters the direction of attention—​directly to readers, at the very moment of “sharing these things,” be they (haec) writings, or thoughts—​he does not categorize or distinguish the end product, he just wants to speak them out! Good 5  As earlier, we may wonder when is this “now”? If the question is asking for a date, it is hard to say. But within the years of composition, if work stopped in 1660, the Epistle and the decision to publish seem earlier than that to me. First, the Epistle speaks of pages crammed and crowded with citations. But, second, the longer and more developed chapters include less, not more, of such bombardment by citation. And, third, the chapter De Filio, which seems the most developed of all, being both far the longest and warranting a fresh address to the reader (Praefatio), departs most from the prediction of persuasion by bombardment.

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vagueness of Latin idiom. He marks the change of address by a change in the units of his utterance, paragraphing, and sentence. The new paragraph has twenty-​eight lines, after paragraphs of nine, five, seven, seventeen, and twenty lines, but now moving up to fully five sentences. The change of gear in the syntax shows growing excitement, tension, interactivity, and agitation. Instead of narrating, he wants something now. He wants to persuade readers to a right stance of reading. He appeals, more excitedly, more person to person. He pleads for a right spirit, for some contract or memo of understanding. The Latin lays it on thicker, though without becoming merely oratorical—​for example, he refrains from rhetorical questions. Imperatives too are withheld until the final farewell, into which he inserts the all-​important injunctions. “Use these things, or indeed, do not use them unless fully persuaded.” The awkward fact is that within these matters, within Christian doctrine, the devil lurks in the detail. The Epistle never delves into detail, but raises the opening plea to the higher level and register of spirit, and of brotherliness: I share these things “with brotherly and friendly feelings towards all people as I call God to witness: fraterno (quod Deum testor) atque amico erga omnes mortals animo” (lines 68–​69). Well and good, but the sentence ends ominously: my friendly offering will “seem to reveal many things which conflict with some received opinions” (71–​72). The Latin, unlike the English rendering, tucks these more anxious subordinate clauses away before the final main clause: that clause, somewhat apotropaically by now, requires of the reader a kindly, not prejudiced disposition. i. “Let not truth-​lovers clamor” (ne clamitent, frequentative verb, Pauline echo) “that the church is being thrown into confusion by this liberty of speech and enquiry.” Truth gives light to the church, if we explorare omnia (1 Thess. 5:21). The “many things” which will upset “some received opinions” will disturb the waters; he wields scripture itself and avoids details to keep instead to the high ground, to spirit. ii. After all, any upset will be as nothing to the disturbance of “the Gentiles by the first proclaiming of the Gospel.” (Hardly relevant or consoling, this!) All Milton does is to propose ideas without coercion:  readers should “withhold assent until” scriptural evidence prevails and “induces their reason to assent and belief.” That is, the freedom of speech extends to freedom of assent, as a sort of fairness and contract. But this sentence works through a less exalted spirit now, of equity and good sense. iii. Next comes an element of excuse or even special pleading. “I seek no hiding-​places” (another claim to open dealing, but now more abrupt). “I propose these things with far greater confidence to all the learned (doctioribus quibusque) than to the naïve (rudioribus).” That is, naïve believers are vulnerable, not so the learned. Or if the learned are not always (non semper) the best judges of these matters, I propose them to “people who understand intimately the teaching of the gospel.” Though the two exclusions together may be for practical reasons, they do reduce the universality of the epigraph, which had greeted “all the churches, and all believers anywhere.” He now seems to envisage some middle ground of readership, neither ignorant nor pedantic (though Latin reading).

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iv. Similarly in the next sentence.6 It promises not to emulate the most prolific writers by pushing the scriptural evidence out into the margin as numerical references, while filling the pages with their own opinions. No, he will fill his with scriptural evidence, leaving “as little room as possible […] for my own words, weaving the passages together” (94–​95). He is mobilizing readers against longwinded systematists, and claiming credit for a better fullness, in the scriptural witness that alone counts. However, considering the length of De Doctrina, and its development towards the exegesis of single words and rebuttal of opposing views, one cannot find that he complies with his promise, but must rather suppose the Epistle was composed some time earlier than longer chapters like those on predestination (I.4), the Son (I.5), or polygamy and divorce (I.10), in which the proportion of Milton’s words to scripture’s tilts far the other way.

Seventh Paragraph

Up until now, I have been finding this sixth paragraph somewhat miscellaneous, tendentious, and more defensive than any before it. But the final paragraph, increasing again to seven sentences, returns to the high ground and remains there.

i. It reaffirms purpose—​Id denique ago, ut—​in seven sentences charged with contrasts and tensions. That purpose is to make all understand “just how crucial for the Christian religion” (quanti intersit religionis Christianae, line 99) is the freedom to “probe each doctrine, and winnow it in public, but also to think and indeed write about it, in accordance with each person’s firm belief” (99–​101). “Without that freedom there is no religion, only violence, tyranny, and slavery”: inhumanae tyrannidi servienda, “we must be slaves to inhuman tyranny.” The emotive extremism recalls the opening, where Christian religion had rid us of “slavery and fear, those twin loathsome pests” (line 18), but now equally what had been inflicted on Protestants by the intense regulativeness of the church of Laud and Thorough. The strong language reverberates. Milton’s conviction is felt. Oxford (14n.xviii) notes that “Though the sentence is long, its clauses are unusually short. The MS punctuation helps the effect of an impassioned staccato.” Inhumanae tyrannidi servienda: wonderful passionate loathing! ii. Having declared what is now needed and spelt out the catastrophic alternative, he expects the opposite from his readers, “candid and wise people (ingenuis et cordatis (106).” Far be it from such to react like “certain unjust and irrational people” who “calumniously condemn” (per calumniam damnent) whatever in their opinion “deviates from traditional doctrine,” crying Heresy and Heretic. As usual, only two responses are mentioned. Perhaps polarizing will shift readers to a middle ground, where Milton desires them to read him. More likely by mental 6  The sentence begins /​Cumque/​, whereas Oxford notes the suffix /​-​que/​ is a slightly weak or inelegant connective. Did Milton wish to move forward from some thin ice by skating rapidly? He sounds more confident in the next claim, though as it transpires it raises doubts of a different kind.

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iii.

iv.

v.

vi.

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habit he sees an issue in black and white and believes his own rhetoric:  he is warming up nicely. The shorter sentence next follows up hard, denouncing such a caricature of truth-​ seeking thought, as if by “branding (inussisse) someone out of hand,” the stiflers think to “finish him off” by the “single blow” of naming him a heretic (solo nomine haeretici […] quasi uno ictu confecisse). The metaphorical verbs are wielded with power: inussisse, confutasse, incusso, confecisse, rich in sibilant scorn. Milton replies with vehemence:  Quibus Ego […] respondeo, with these words straddling the sixty-​seven-​word sentence. He replies by a pugnacious brief word history of heresy and heretic. Not that he goes back to pagan Greek to insist that hairesis meant simply “choice” (central to Aristotle’s Ethics, for example). He declares its denotation to be Pauline: “in the time of the Apostles, when the Evangelical books did not yet exist […] the only heresy was what contradicted the Apostles’ teaching as orally transmitted (doctrinae viva voce traditae).” A heretic, correspondingly, was one who caused dissidia et scandala praeter doctrinam Apostolicam, as stated in Romans 16:17–​18 (“disagreements and offences contrary to the Apostolical teaching; not serving our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly.”) On this basis, the next sentence argues that because he teaches only what is in scripture he can be no heretic. This omits mention of haeretikos in the pejorative sense at Titus 3:10 (“A man that is an heretic, after the first and second admonition reject”), which pushes back into the Apostles’ time the alternative, opprobrious usage. He clings, however, to his point: “By the same reasoning, then, I answer that after the Evangelical books had finally been put together in writing, nothing can rightly be termed heresy except what conflicts with them.” The style now becomes firm and declarative in short clauses. These make an opening positive, then supported by following correlative negative, which become more elaborate for completeness of forswearing. Milton likes declaring by negatives, just as for him a double negative affirms more strongly than a bald positive. Thus the sentence may appear to straggle after its bold beginning. He would see it the other way, as teeing up the even stronger credal confession of the sequel: Hoc si haeresis est, fateor equidem cum Paulo. This time, I give the Latin in full, with translation, to make these points good: De me, Libris tantummodo sacris adhaeresco (“As for me, I cleave to the holy writings alone”). /​De me/​insists on himself, his own position: personal. The only parallel so far has been /​Equidem/​in the second paragraph. Another equidem, in the next sentence, will reinforce the personal, existential standpoint, the personal possession of the “treasure.” It’s a “Here I stand, I can do no other.” His strong main verb comes last in the six-​word claim: adhaeresco, I stick, cling, cleave. If an aural echo of haeresis is heard (Oxford, 12n.vi), the effect is “so much for talk of heresy”: this pugnacious retort becomes dominant in the next sentence, when he aligns his “haeresis” with that of Paul. “I follow no other heresy or party-​line […]. I had read no books by the heretics.” The denial of outside influence highlights that his theology is his own handiwork, from scripture alone. He is claiming unique possession under God. This might fend off some charges, but might offend more not less, if the heresy too is all

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his own. No matter! It is All My Own Work, and for this he now challenges the errors of the “self-​styled orthodox” (qui orthodoxi audiunt). He does not pause or need to explain their travesty, whereby orthodoxa in its Greek means “correct thinking.” It’s fighting talk! He reaffirms, now naming Paul. Here I stand: I stand with Paul! And no updating either, no acknowledging the developing doctrines of the first centuries (hence, no Trinity). Only Paul’s “law and prophets,” to which he adds “the evangelical books.” This is the quintessential stance of “the whole church of Protestants”—​where “church” = ecclesia has its Greek meaning, those “called out” to make a loose assembly, not any mere local bunch or scattered denomination. Words mean what he wants them to mean, and he is not explaining as he goes! Strong stuff, becoming stronger. vii. The final sentence is the envoi which matches and completes the initial epigraph (“To all the churches of Christ”). This preface has been a letter, and now he reminds us of its function. But the envoi farewells the recipients as fratres, brothers. That recalls how he has appealed to them in a “brotherly” spirit (fraterno […] animo, lines 68–​69), hinting that they should respond in the same spirit. He exhorts them to “cultivate the truth with charity” (veritatem colite cum charitate). The command sounds lofty. The stance smacks of superiority though the thought is brotherly. More to the purpose, he echoes the closing of several New Testament epistles, adding Peter and John to Paul. The sequel too demands that “these things” be read “according to the spirit of God guiding you,” which suggests an open and pious receptivity. Then, however, comes an appeal as between equals:  “use” them with me (cum, echoing cum Paulo: join our gang) “or indeed do not use them, unless I have persuaded you with full conviction by the clarity of the Bible.” After the high ground, he closes on equality and a blessing, to live and thrive “in Christ our Savior and Lord.” Although the alliterated imperatives vivite ac valete take some attention away from nostro, “our,” we still notice that within the interplay of pronouns “I” and “you” become a mild “we.” The finale is claiming common ground in the high ground, the spoudaiotes of Protestantism: cum universa Protestantium ecclesia has modulated into fratres. The final sentence, in turn, moves from Dei spiritus to Christo Servatore ac Domino nostro, the two of the Trinity that distinguish Christianity among religions. And the sentence dwells on persuasion, dwelling for our purposes on its own rhetoric, for if Aristotle correctly saw persuasion as the outcome of logos (reasoning), ethos (character of speaker), and pathos (emotion produced in audience), Milton so concludes as to wield all three together. The logos we have been examining throughout this chapter:  at the end it is summed up as open, free choice. Ethos has been Milton’s first subject; it is continuously felt and emphasized latterly as sincere and now brotherly. As for pathos, alongside the sentence’s progression through truth and charity to the “guiding spirit of God in you” and candid pursuing of faith into action, I claim for Milton’s Latin the resounding peroration of a moving, pleasing clausula. The clausula moves and pleases in order to persuade, at least to the extent of giving him a hearing:  In Christo denique Servatore ac Domino nostro vivite ac valete. No one

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can miss the alliterated imperative at the close. It embodies further figures like assonance and isocolon. If we were hearing and not merely reading it, we would be stirred by the disposition of rhythm: In Christo [molossus] denique [dactyl] Servatore ac Domino [molossus and choriamb] nostro [spondee] vivite ac valete [changing from the solemnity of mainly long syllables to the animation of trochees, a dance of syllables for valediction]. The trochees enact the invigoration of the blessing, to “live and thrive in our Lord.” Not every Latinist would hear all these effects just as I do, and nothing could become more lost in translation! Believe me, nonetheless, that (on top of conviction or suspension of disbelief) Milton wants the Latin to please and to satisfy, and in so doing to raise the register back towards the exaltation of the epigraph, onto the highest ground possible. Surely, but for the contingent obscurity of its being in Latin, this epistle would belong on a list of greatest opening addresses, with those of his poems, or the Prelude, or indeed the letter to the Hebrews. Insofar as “the style is the man,” Milton contrives to open De Doctrina from his heart and soul; he begins as the work itself goes on, with Latin of a personal passion.

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Chapter 2

AXIOMS THE THOUGHT FORMS of Ramist systematic theology, which Milton used, made many assumptions in order to launch discussion and to organize the whole thing into a structure. It has been compared to the skeleton of a carp,1 in which the fish’s every bone divides in two. It resembles a wiring diagram, in that the mains power is seen dividing many times across the page, from left to right, or some large river entering its delta. The fundamentally binary structure proceeds by division and definition, privileging an abstract thinking by either-​or. It begins with God and divides faith from worship and charity (in two books), then in Book 1 works from God’s nature (Chapter 2) or efficiency (Chapter 3), which is internal or external, and the external is general or special (which latter distinction turns up several more times later). Oxford sets it all out in four charts, on pages lxvi–​lxxiii. These dispositions, and their inherent division and its either-​or, constrain the findings and the discussions themselves. This overriding constraint puts everything in its place, and has a place for everything that counts—​or so we have to hope. It does make for ease of exposition, by a basic pigeonholing and clear placing of the definitions and divisions. How it will deal with ragged or suppositious material, or with evidence from cases which are mixed, I cannot see. This did not trouble Milton. He was used to it. What should concern us, however, within the general reliance on this method of thought are his particular presuppositions or axioms. Within the systemic binarism, these are individual, personal, his own choices. Why does he innovate, and what results? In this chapter I examine first the broad question then the particular ones to bring out the first of Milton’s methodological idiosyncrasies.

Unstated Assumptions

One unexamined assumption is that a personal faith can be itemized according to a Ramist, bifurcating arrangement, laid down at the outset and unchanged as the work proceeds. What if the findings turned out to require a different sequence? Why does Milton organize his subjects into fifty chapters, proportioned 33:17 between the two books? Why does a theology based on scripture discuss scripture in the thirtieth chapter, not the first? To the first question I would answer, his personal convenience. Milton saw little need to alter his first arrangement of topics, since for a long time the work remained a commonplace book, arranged by topics, and for his own personal use. He moved familiarly around within it.2 Though some topics proved more important than others, and very often (despite 1  The example, used in MMsDDC, 98, derives from Thomas Fuller.

2  Milton would know his scheme as he had laid it down, and when his scribes worked on any chapter they would find it bound separately, which would mitigate any difficulties caused by his blindness.

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the boast in the Epistle, MS 4i, Oxford, 9) the citations ceased to dominate in bulk as he began defending and arguing his points—​to the degree that Chapter 5, De Filio, became a separate essay with a preface of its own, and hence clearly meant for publication as well as for his original personal purposes—​he saw no need to rearrange it for print.3 It remained his personal credo: “the safest and wisest thing” for his hope of salvation.4 On the second question, about the work’s arbitrary arithmetic, I  suspect personal convenience or habit. He did much the same in his Art of Logic: two books, fifty chapters, its Chapter 30 being (thanks to a little rearrangement) its chapter on Definition.5 Moreover, this apparently minor question leads to a major one: why scripture as a whole is not explained until Chapter 30. It is reasonable to wonder why a work based solely in scripture so delays exposition of its originating witness, and why scripture is not first to be established as the word of God, and in what sense, degree, and so forth. What did other such systems do about the problem? Was Milton in enlightening company? Wollebius, whose arrangement Milton mostly follows, was among the “numerous Renaissance theologians [who] discuss this subject at the beginning of their works. Gomarus […] explains this practice by comparing the theologian to the wise architect, who first prepares a firm foundation for the edifice” (Yale, 126n6). However, “like Amesius, Milton reserves discussion until late in his treatise,” Chapter 34 in Ames’s case. Though Ames is an important exception, he remains an exception. Milton’s placement results in scripture being examined between the Visible Church (29) and Particular Churches (31), making a cogent sequence less cogent.6 Furthermore, it would have strengthened the attack on the doctrine of the Trinity in De Filio (I.5) as unscriptural if the reader had been braced by a preceding rationale of scriptural authority: evidence for the Trinity may lie latent in scripture, without the overt doctrine.7 All in all, then, this feature of his arrangement seems to be in some sense personal, the dimension which is our present concern. Further unexamined assumptions include the medium and audience:  Milton is writing in Latin, and relying for most (yet not all) business on the Protestant Latin 3  Signs of rethinking and revision seem to be for reasons of theology, not print: Oxford, 310n.xiii, 313n.l, with Yale, 278–​79n190, 343n.xix, with Yale, 335n24, 938n95. See esp. Oxford, Introduction xxxvii–​xliv, on bk. 1, chap. 14 to 19. 4  Epistle, MS 2m, Oxford, 5f.

5  See Hale, “Two Notes on the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana,” 136–​38.

6  Indeed, Book 1, Chapter 31 (I.31) runs straight on from Chapter 29, with the words, “So much for the universal visible church. A particular church is … ” (Oxford, 825, italics mine). The placing as Chapter 30 is more like a parking place than a natural home. 7  That “Trinitarian theology is intrinsically connected to Christology” is stated as common ground to contemporary theologians on page 2 of The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity. Cambridge agrees with Oxford: “Today writing on the Trinity has become something of a cottage industry, and the trinitarian mystery is unquestionably enthroned at the heart of Christian theology,” says Peter C. Phan, in “Systematic Issues in Trinitarian Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, 13–​19 at 13. It has long been so. Milton expunges the whole idea of the Trinity because he abhors the metaphysics of hypostasis which had explained it.

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translation of the Bible.8 Milton simply posits that in writing in Latin and going into print he is both expressing his own thought to himself and opening it to “all Christians” (“To all the churches of Christ, and also to all who profess the Christian faith anywhere among the peoples” [Oxford, 3]). That access through a Latin systema is for “all” makes a large assumption or unwarranted hyperbole, but the point is again a personal choice.9 Similarly with Milton’s choice of biblical translation. He never names the one he mostly uses, by Junius–​Tremellius–​Beza, just as he never indicates when instead he uses the Vulgate or does a translation of his own.10 He has made his main choice, within which choice he sometimes chooses differently, and all this choosing is personal, his own means to his personal end. He does not need to explain his working habits to himself in working out each belief. All he does to explain his mind to readers, when his intention and audience change, is to write his Epistle. The state of the MS shows no sign of adjustment to help readers. And whatever is written down after the Epistle, is mainly dictated on the original principles. An element of take-​it-​or-​leave-​it continues: this challenge or invitation establishes the personal, peculiar stance. He has composed the work for himself; may it help others, if they now look into the “quick forge and working-​house of thought.” The obvious exception is De Filio, Chapter 5. This has its own preface, addressed to readers and earnestly persuading them until near the end—​persuading them of his own critique of Trinitarian orthodoxy. The doctrine lacks logic; scriptural exegesis does not warrant it. That everything points the one way, he argues with his utmost energy and passion. And so, while a readership is felt more than elsewhere, the personal and peculiar force of the “quick forge and working-​house” become more, not less, dominant. It is a pitiless demolition job, done from a prior commitment to axioms. True, it is helped along by reductiveness in exegesis, but that is reached from axioms in the preface and the opening pages.

Protestantism

Whereas these were unstated assumptions, Milton states others overtly. He aligns himself with the Protestant tradition, over against any other tradition or any mixture of 8  See Oxford, Introduction, section 6, “Translating the Biblical Citations,” xlvii–​li. Instances of Milton’s own translating are noted and discussed in Oxford’s commentary. One is analysed in chap. 6 of the present book.

9  Although the epigraph and envoi imply that his work lies open to all believers, he does elsewhere admit that it is not milk for babes: Christianae doctrinae haud plane ignaris, sed mediocriter scientibus haec scribimus (“we are writing these things not for those utterly ignorant of Christian doctrine, but for the moderately knowledgeable,” 322ff.). As our note observes (343n.xv), it is a “contrast with the Epistle’s universality of address, Universis, omnibus.” Milton speaks to occasion, moving from the spirit and openness in a flourish to an almost opposite appeal to be received on terms of superior understanding. Though Aristotle did say that we should not expect more accuracy than the subject matter allows, Milton’s variations seem like special pleading, that is, another form of axiom. 10  See also Oxford, Introduction, xlvii–​li.

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authorities. He speaks of Reformati and Protestantes in friendly tones, at MS 48. He names the Roman church as radically opposite.11 He does not consider mixtures of traditions, probably deploring any “bifold authority.” He tends to think either/​or. Thus he never names the Church of England: he thinks it unreformed, or contaminated by mixing scripture with tradition, or by compromising itself through its systemic enmeshing with the power structures of the land. He does all this without becoming fundamentalist. For one thing, he subjects scripture itself to logic and to his own reasoning powers. For the most part, he harmonizes, seeking some highest common factor of citations on a point. This advances the seeker’s mind above the letter of a devout literalist. His method is greatly assisted by citing many of his thousands of citations shorn of context. Though he recognizes the problem of apparent contradictions within scripture (see later in this volume regarding hell), and explains the usual way to reconcile them (through collocatio locorum and analogia fidei),12 he does not systematically confront the problem in his practice. In collocating passages shorn of context, he avoids the problem of (for example) a changing meaning for the same word (changing over time, writer, place of writing, or biblical genre). Similarly, his division of topics makes him agree with one or another particular church (on adult baptism with Baptists, with Arminians against election, with Independents on church government, and so on) to reach a mixture of doctrines not upheld, but differently prioritized, by any church. This eclecticism helps to make him a Christian in a church of one. How can there be an ecclesia (assembly) of one? On the Trinity, Milton labours to show that the Son (being a Son, “begotten not created” as the Christmas carol has it) could not have the same being as the uncreated Father. Beginning or becoming diminishes being? The Son is made immutably lesser than the Father, contrary to Trinitarian formulations of this (surely unknowable!) mystery. Two quirks in Milton’s handling help to bring out the persistent idiosyncrasy and personality. Simply stated, these are, first, Milton disallows development within Christian doctrine. Second, the New Testament does not try or need to set out any doctrine of the Trinity—​which underwent development in response to subsequent questionings.13 Hence, however, Milton debars the doctrine. Having also debarred tradition as any sort of authority (tarring it anticlerically as “churches” or “the churches”14), he downplays what scripture does have to offer on the Trinity. Scriptural evidence for the Trinity 11  Preface to I.5 De Filio: “If I were […]. [But I’m not].” The tone here is more respectful. Not that he would allow the Roman church to be the Roman Catholic church, because it has lost its unitary status (long ago, when the Eastern churches went their own way). But elsewhere he speaks of Pontificii and Papistae, making the partisan assumptions that Romans owe allegiance to the pope instead of to Christ. 12  On these, see respectively Oxford, 14n.xix, 821n.viii, and 673n.x.

13  Scripture has arguable inklings, like Matthew 28:19, the Great Commission. The whole matter is discussed further in chap. 9. 14  We can’t tell which, as Latin has no definite or indefinite article: Latin ecclesia (as distinct from Greek) could mean church, the church, or a church.

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comes from scriptural details and from scripture’s emphasis. In scripture, the emphasis falls on the elevating of the status and the being of the risen Christ. Equality of being is at times affirmed, especially by Paul, in doxologies or in the hymn of Philippians 2.15 That is, the evangelium urges on its hearers the divinity as well as the humanity of Christ. It is not, as Milton is, concerned to place Christ on a step lower than the Father. It dwells on companionship, essential kinship of being, forms of surprising equality—​“to the Greeks foolishness, to the Jews a stumbling-​block.” In looking over his shoulder at theological formulations, Milton misses the developing of doctrine, the striving or aspiring tendency in the explorations of godhead by the early church, including not least Paul. Though Paul is Milton’s hero, exemplar, and model for much of De Doctrina, he ignores his pull towards equalizing. Indeed, it looks rather as if Milton does not find potential for Trinitarian orthodoxy because he chooses not to. That is both because he has not assembled citations in that light and from a spirit of resistance to the Roman doctrine, while the Trinitarian orthodoxy of all the other mainstream confessions is disallowed because it is a mixture and a compromise, not providing sole authority and the yearned-​for certainty. With mixtures, one goes on having to choose and to prioritize.

The most individual of these axioms are those concerning the Trinity. Just as some form of Trinity most distinguishes Christian revelation from other religions—​Jesus as fundamentally more than another prophet—​so Milton’s dismantling by axiom most distinguishes his elaboration of Christian doctrine. So we return to this axiom in the chapters of Part 3. Meanwhile, to show how his theology is not always so constrained by presupposition, by what he cannot conceive to be otherwise, and to watch how he chooses a whole other way of discovery, let us consider his first substantive chapter, on the nature of God, before ever he launches into efficientia or decreeing. The discussion is freer of the Ramist bifurcation, and indeed exemplifies an alternative, more inductive approach to the building up of a scriptural theology. He assembles and explains God’s names in scripture, then his nature as seen in attributes (nine of them, many embedded in the names), then the attributes of his strength and power, “typifying the idea of Life, or intelligence, or will,” whereupon he lists some four attributes of God’s will. After “pure and holy” comes “blessed” (beatus), then “truthful and faithful” before “just.” The foursome is surprising, as blessedness (summe beatus) seems alien to will. The citations which follow stress benignus, not beatus. On the other hand, “pure and holy,” preceding, seems akin to beatus. Did Milton himself collapse his listing, or did the scribe misread? At all events, the ordering is original, personal, and devoid of bifurcation. It proceeds by a different way of axioms and has problems of its own. 15  Sample also readings for Trinity Sunday, like Galatians 4:6 and 5:1–​5 or John 16:12–​15. The three-​in-​one-​ness expresses interactivity and shared energy within equality and exchange. Milton is obeying a need to divide, arrange, and rank; the effect is reductive, through essentialist and either/​or reasoning. These points are extended in chap. 9.

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Then let us try to think out Milton’s classification after him. First, name, then (second) nature, then (third) strength and power, then power subdivides into (i)  life, (ii) intelligence, and (iii) will, whereupon life is expounded briefly, omniscience more fully, and will in four branches (1–​4). The attributes indeed move towards activity, just as Chapter 2 will be followed by a series on God’s efficiency, the series of decrees (God’s acts as set out in scripture) which run to the end of Book 1. Though Milton is not using Ramist bifurcation at this point, the attributes have been given a comprehensible, well-​ chosen sequence. I  find here an attractive, unfinished contemplation, even adoration, equally arbitrary, perhaps, but inductive and unconstrained, altogether fitting to the subject. Milton does not allow himself, or does not choose, to do the same for the other two persons of the godhead, not even though that seems to me the purpose of passages like the gospel of John (1 or 13–​17). It is the riddle of De Doctrina, in fact, making it seem to lack what irradiates Paradise Lost. Hail, holy light […]. I return to this in Chapter 9. At all events, the chapter does not close on enumerations of divine almightiness in decreeing. These tend to diminish the human freedom which Milton is at pains to affirm.

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Chapter 3

THE BIBLICAL CITATIONS IN SEEKING TO be assured, then, Milton is making rules of his own, by unstated or declared assumptions. They are personal choices. Some were chosen by others of his time, though none match his completely. My points taken together may appear to be truisms, or anachronistic critique. After all, we start from where we are and how we are made. Every personal theology must be eclectic and include the contingent, in short, that personal element which runs strong in Milton yet was hidden from him—​“what something hidden from us chose.” And though Milton is an early modern in much of his thinking, he does not ask the questions, such as Hobbes did,1 which led to the foundation of scriptural theology. What nonetheless gives De Doctrina life is its passionate and personal quality, engrossing to more than simply Milton scholars. Everything matters. The engaged style makes it matter. Accordingly, I next show this quality by examining some of the mental acts that govern Milton’s systematizing of scripture into doctrine. The Bible being his sole authority, his source throughout, how does he treat its materials—​by what acts of omission, selection, change, and addition? For his own protestation enables us to approach his thought through these customary categories of source criticism. If source study works from a text to its sources in order to establish what these were, source criticism works from the known sources to the text in order to find what it did with them. Few works have such declared and binding sources as those of the Bible for De Doctrina. “I have preferred that my pages’ space should overflow with scriptural authorities assembled from all parts of the Bible, even when they repeat one another, and that as little room as possible be left for my own words, though they arise from the weaving together of the passages” (Epistle, 9).2 To the contrary, the present inquiry maintains that (whether or not his disclaimer was superseded but left standing in subsequent composition) his actual practice is less modest, and illuminates his seeking mind, its spirit—​in a word, personality—​seen in his acts of avoidance, insistence, reiteration, and modification, for they show what he wants and how he thinks he knows.

Citing Scripture

In gauging how Milton cites scripture, then, we sample what he omits, selects, changes, or adds. This method, though humdrum, illuminates the practice of older poets, and

1  How could Ezra have “dictated” the books of the law of Moses (2 Esd. 14:19–​48)? See Noel Malcolm in Aspects of Hobbes.

2  Oxford, 14n.xvii:  “M’s stated intentions here are not wholly fulfilled. Many citations are left cryptic or truncated; and the visible paramountcy of scripture is modified in many places by a need to refute opposing theologians. Presumably the Epistle was composed early on in things, and not revised.”

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especially Shakespeare when working over a story or plot; it reveals his acts of judgment and imagination, both small and great, pointing together at design and purpose, in a case where no working papers survive.3 How much more, then, should this approach reveal for Milton in De Doctrina, where he claims that scripture is to justify and govern his every topic, and the extant manuscript shows the work’s many stages of composition. All four practices go on, not least (despite protestations) change and even addition: what he adds is himself, his mind and preoccupations, and in short the personhood which we are investigating. Personal motives are paramount, undeclared.

Omissions

In declaring he will affirm only beliefs which scripture underpins, Milton does not undertake to believe everything found in scripture, only that he will not believe what is not found there. So, simply enough, we do not find every name, regulation, ritual, or subject. More doubtfully, nothing is found there except in his own sense of “finding.” Thus our category of omissions could become undiscriminatingly large. Nonetheless, so long as caution and common sense are being exercised, some absences do point to the personal and peculiar: they look striking, intriguing, or revealing. For a Protestant theology the absence of any belief, practice or key text invites attention. Such absences compose a range, from pretermissions small and great to avoidances and exclusions. They suggest Milton is wielding scripture in a personal way, and not least in what he leaves aside. To illustrate, relying mostly on absences from Bauman’s Citation Index: he does not cite Luke 18:25, about the camel’s eye and the kingdom of heaven. He does not cite the centurion’s words, “I am not worthy thou shouldest come under my roof” (Matt. 8:8, Luke 7:6).4 No doubt these verses seemed irrelevant because they do not enunciate particular beliefs, but they do express the essence and simplicity of the first preaching, as given in the first sermons of Acts. The simplicity is what makes them confessional and decisive. Nor does he explain the paradox that the clarity of scripture needs more than 100,000 words to explain it to himself, then to others. Milton is just made this way. When exercised by some problem of life or of the mind, he writes a book about it. It is his mind inquiring, his personality in action. He is an intellectual, a systematizer, a bookish Protestant. He is using a Ramist scheme of topics which was well worn when he began work on De Doctrina and outworn by 1660. When he uses other theologians, sporadically, it is mainly to rebut them after he has made up his mind by gathering then systematizing citations. He works under the personal impulse, to think things out for himself, and so to see what he thinks by writing it down, by evidence then reasoning. Thereby, however, he loses the passionate simplicity of his mentor, Paul (1 Corinthians 1:23–​24: “We preach Christ crucified, unto 3  For Shakespeare, see Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, and Hale, The Shakespeare of the Comedies, 21–​65. 4  Scriptural texts not cited from DDC itself are cited in the English of the King James Version.

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the Jews a stumbling-​block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”). I find it significant that Milton quotes this resounding verse only once, in II.2, and then only in the context of wisdom as a cause of good works, and in a paragraph to show that “human wisdom is also folly.” He offers no analysis or discussion. In general too he seems to have favourite texts (which turns some other candidates into potential un-​favourites)—​as of course we all do. And this is the individual, personal dimension again. Other omissions include a moment when he dismisses a passage, giving reasons. Malachi 2:15, often cited to forbid polygamy, is reinterpreted to forbid incest (marriage to a wife’s sister), but in the course of his argument Milton disqualifies Malachi himself as a prophet and an authority, for he comes “late and behindhand,” or post-​Exilically.5 Malachi is cited for other points, nonetheless, and the concept of “lateness” is inverted, in that Malachi being the latest of the prophets might have had value as coming last before the Baptist and the Incarnation. The potential bridge between the two dispensations is viewed solely as coming long and late after the first, that to Moses, who sanctioned polygamy and divorce. Milton’s synchronic and primitivist axioms are left free from any sense of development or canon, for the sake of a local argument about conduct, on which antecedently he held strong and published views. Sometimes, the more reasons we give against some course of action, the more we are expressing antecedent, rooted dislikes.

Selections

Milton’s selecting from scripture might seem to have no limit in De Doctrina, being a theology which boasts of having pages where the citations swamp the theologizing. But a simple instance shows how the selecting is indeed selective, not a shapeless engulfing, and instead serves personal purposes. He asks where is hell: down below us at the centre, or away out at the edge?6 In his opening paragraph citations point to both locations.7 In his second paragraph he finds that “Hell’s location seems to be outside this world,” citing Luke and Revelation and assorted theologians. In his third paragraph he gives reasons of his own, not from theologians. He closes these with a sardonic quip of his own [I.33, MS 456]: if hell is at the centre, it will burn up when the world does, which would let the damned off the hook: “But if this happened, it would be a really splendid finish for the damned!” (Quod si fieret, praeclarè sane cum damnatis actum esset). His quick and personal retort closes off the topic. Given the antecedent need to locate hell for his epic of Adam Unparadis’d, since he had settled on this subject for an epic by 1640–​41, we may suppose that Milton had 5  MS 147f, Oxford, 368–​69, with 403n.xl: Satis sero is quidem et postliminio, in a fine yoking of a simple adverb with a thunderous neologism. 6  MS 456, I.33, “On Complete Glorification,” Oxford, 893.

7  Matthew 10:28, 22:13, and 25, for example, against Luke 16:23 “and elsewhere” or Revelation 9:1. The whole preceding paragraph is on “the place of punishment,” and concerns Topheth, Gehenna, and Hades, all localized as on or under the earth in the passages cited. Milton brushes this aside in the next two paragraphs, which argue for “outside this world.”

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decided the matter for poetic purposes as well as for scriptural fidelity, since he ducks the whole puzzle of scripture’s self-​contradiction on the point.8 He is being selective indeed, since if the matter is important, he ought to resolve the puzzle, in the particular as well as in general. In fact, the discrepancy points to the plural authorship of scripture, its long evolution, the element of arbitrariness within its canon, how we all emphasize some books or passages more than others, and the merits of a more anthropological exegesis. By contrast, Milton’s lack of interest is not just axiomatic, but shows his overriding imaginative needs, one of the few clear signs in De Doctrina that his personality bound together a homespun theologian with a transcendent poet. Or let us take a more worldly, topical, and pressing matter, payment for clergy: I.31, MS 406–​14, Oxford, 828–​39. There is to be no pay for clergy, just as there is to be no established Church of England and no bishops in unscriptural symbiosis with the ruling power. Milton (more than once) reaffirms his own views published elsewhere, just as he does with divorce. Accordingly, he must address the scripture passages which declare that “the labourer is worthy of his hire,” Matthew 10:10, along with four passages of Paul. He does it by granting in a longish concessive clause that remuneration of ministers is “equitable and not only just in itself but also sanctioned by God’s law and the authority of Christ and his apostle [Paul].” This would be enough for most believers! But Milton heralds it all with a tametsi (“notwithstanding that,” one of his and Latin’s more resounding signals of a concessive clause), which makes us wait for the countervailing tamen (“nevertheless”) consisting chiefly of the example of Paul, who is being cited on both sides. The turnaround is handled quite temperately, but proves vital in the sequel, where he berates the paid clergy of his own time. I return to this at the close, because the strategic selectivity is needed for the sequel, a most passionate, personal advocacy.9

Changes and Additions

It is mainly for heuristic purposes that we distinguish selecting from changing or adding, as convenient for analyses. We can relax the distinction between changing and adding for Milton’s most impassioned chapter of all, even more so than for the chapter De Filio. On divorce he was well known—​at his most original, public, and absolute. In many English works he pleads his case, on grounds of reason, experience, and scripture.10 When, why, and how does he revisit now for his personal credo these more secular pamphlets which had made him notorious? It is done crabwise, in a chapter (I.10) which ostensibly addresses other things, in order to argue that scripture too abhors the current orthodoxy by rebutting the main scriptural texts. 8  It is as likely that Milton had set hell outermost in his first thinking about Paradise Lost as that he decided the matter for DDC and on that basis rejected underground for outermost (contrary to Kelley’s inferred sequence in composition). 9  See further the note on the Latin at Oxford, 850n.i.

10  Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (first published in 1643), Judgment of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce (1644), Tetrachordon (1645), and Colasterion (1645).

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I take these points seriatim:  the additiveness or willed digressiveness, the adversarial revisions of orthodoxy, the analysis of key citations, these again being grounded in acts of selection and change, and also of placement and recombination. Two topics dominate the long chapter, polygamy and divorce, yet it ostensibly addresses “the special governance of man before the Fall: and also on the Sabbath and Marriage,” in between chapters concerning “the special governance of angels” and “the Fall of our first parents and of Sin.” The original scheme had Chapter 10 as one of a pair addressing “special governance,” then at some point (no longer identifiable11) the chapter added the Sabbath, and then marriage, by way of a perceived need to discuss sacraments, to settle whether any sacraments preceded the Fall (MS 142f–​44). The candidates are the tree of knowledge, marriage, and the Sabbath. Answer, no, not the first two, and not the Sabbath. Milton spends longest on the last, and with that momentum (MS 144f) reaffirms that marriage is not a sacrament either, from which point he rams home the non-​sacramental nature of marriage by assembling witness from the Bible of an allowed or even virtuous polygamy, whereupon—​in the same breath, so to speak—​he argues that scripture did not disallow divorce either. The afterthought is hinted in the titling (Ubi etiam, “where also”). This fundamentally additive nature of the chapter is further seen in the coverage and the transitions. A short passage expounds the official topic, then a longer one discounts that the special governance was any sort of covenant or involved any sacraments. In particular, neither the tree of knowledge nor marriage were sacraments before the Fall, nor yet was the Sabbath, though the Sabbath became one afterwards, at some point during the time of Moses: exactly when, he adds in a rambling dismissal, is not clear from scripture (MS 143). The impression is that it doesn’t matter very much. And then, ticking off his topics, he returns to marriage, defining it in a single sentence and adducing a single text, before the paragraph settles down to saying what marriage is not—​not a law or commandment, and especially not the union of one man with one woman. All so far takes him just over three pages of the manuscript. There follows a consideration of polygamy, the opposite of the supposedly orthodox (sacramental and perhaps also prelapsarian) monogamy; this takes him eight densely argued and evidenced pages.12 While the allowed practice of polygamy supports the announced denial that marriage was a prelapsarian sacrament, there is no mistaking the zest and eager dedication of the discussion itself. Nor, to an uncommitted gaze, can one doubt that this is driving the inquiry. Nor can a neutral observer doubt the reason for such uneven coverage, and the sidelong entry upon it. For after polygamy he returns to the larger subject of coniugium (still, it will be recalled, not the original or official main subject of the chapter), which takes him a single concise page. He rattles off such matters arising as agreement of parents 11  Not determinable within the long development of De Doctrina, let alone datable. The manuscript, which on many later pages does show precisely the developing of Milton’s thought in successive alterations made by successive amanuenses, comes to us in I.1–​14 as a tidy posthumous transcription by Daniel Skinner, preparing the work (as he hoped) for publication. 12  At MS 152 he has finished his exposition, then to make sure he unloads a further set of texts.

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to marriage, happiness of marriage, incest, the desirability of partners’ agreement as to religion, and (last, and equally briskly!) the Aristotelian form and end purpose. But next he slows right down again, to the topic of indissolubility: marriage is not absolutely indissoluble. The grounds of divorce then occupy one-​third of the chapter, seven full pages of the manuscript. This passage is the chapter’s climax. It is, or becomes, its prime purpose. For as to polygamy, if allowable, it precludes monogamy and indissolubility. Omitted is any sign that the two Testaments might differ on any of these points. Milton’s view of scripture is axiomatically synchronic, not developmental, except where the new dispensation explicitly replaces the old one. In all of this, Milton’s theology shows its personal, temperamental insistence. He wants scripture to allow divorce, because he wants scripture to concur with the evidence from reason, law, compassion, and widespread human practice. Why does he want this, when scripture might differ, and on the usual understanding does so still? Milton is being driven by the desire to convince his readers on every possible ground, not solely the practical or reasonable ones. Is this because he enjoys rhetorical overkill, a personal strength of his fluency but a weakness too, since the signs of over-​persuasion reduce conviction in the recipient more than enhancing it? That he is protesting too much becomes clearer from the chapter’s ending. He refers to his own other works advocating divorce. And twice he adduces the work of Selden. In doing that, he distorts Selden, from the combination of fluency and overeagerness. To quote Selden’s biographer:13 One would hardly guess from Selden’s discussion of divorce in England that it was currently a matter of considerable dispute. He mentions (619) only works published half a century earlier by John Howson and Thomas Pye […]. Selden himself obviously wished to avoid controversy. He expressed his own view (620) that it is prudent to restrain freedom of divorce, for reasons of public policy, including the prevention of dissolute behaviour and matters of inheritance. [but Milton is imprudent?] The phraseology, although cautious enough, is notable for the absence of any reference to the church and its doctrines. The penultimate sentence of the whole work invites the reader to draw his own conclusions on the topic from what Selden had already laid before him. There can be little doubt that, for Selden himself, these would be that every human government has the right to legislate on marriage and divorce as it sees fit, and that Christian states are not bound to the pronouncements of Jesus on divorce in the Gospels, which were directed towards Jews governed by Mosaic law.” [Emphases mine.]

Thus Milton takes Selden too for his own purposes, ignoring Selden in order to persuade opponents by all means. Whether my own readers find these liberties high-​handed or allowable, natural or wilful, does not matter, if they agree it is deeply characteristic of Milton, a personal 13  Toomer, John Selden, 2:690–​91.

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aspect of this chapter and its scholarship, and consistent with a wider tendency in his writing to know the answer before he discusses the question. He is being himself. The whole man informs each idea and each part. Personality is subjectivity, a prosaic side-​ branch of his egotistical sublime. It explains what he is continually adding to his source material. It explains how he selects and arranges it, and nowhere so clearly as in this chapter, where he sends an electricity of his own through a topic which was uncontroversial until he altered its coverage. And thus he ensures a much earlier placement for a favourite topic, which one might expect to find less conspicuously in Book 2, among the numerous and humdrum chapters about our various duties to other people (Chapter 8 to the end). In short, the chapter omits and selects in accordance with prior convictions. It changes and adds too—​changing the plain sense of gospel teachings, adding the eccentric criteria of prelapsarian governance and of the paralleling of the Sabbath, and substituting for a special purpose the priority of Mosaic teaching, against the grain or development of Christian doctrine.

Additions

I found I  had to combine changes with additions for Chapter 10, to bring out its volatility and energetic eccentricity. More often, however, one can distinguish a change from an  addition. Palpable examples of each lie visible on the later manuscript pages (MSS  197  to the end, 737). A  scribe deletes and alters a word or phrase. Or he adds something, be it (as often) merely further citation, or a ranging into a fuller explanation, rebuttal, or (less often) rethinking. Short additions are put in above the text by a caret. Larger ones are keyed into the broad left margins. One excellent example could be found in I.17–​18, on Renewal and on Regeneration, since they embrace the range of alterations, all the way up to drastic rethinking.14 Another is II.7, which Jeffrey Miller has examined,15 on the hot topic of Sunday worship (Milton was against it, denying special Sunday ordinance). Here, instead, let us watch his mind (and dictating voice) rethinking small and great matters together on page 308, since this is the sole page which exists in two versions—​in the smooth, clear transcription by Daniel Skinner, and in its turbulent accretive original by as many as four hands.16 The paragraph is being composed to compare the situation of Jews and Gentiles before Christ’s intervention. The big change is in its caption: was the law a “written ordinance of many precepts, [meant] for the Israelites alone” (Israelitis duntaxat) or for them “especially” (potissimum, as first stated), twice over? While Israel’s position is in no doubt, Milton is rethinking the Gentiles’. Being ignorant, are they without guilt, 14  See Oxford, 1130n.i on the Latin; and especially Kerr and Hale, “The Origins and Development of Milton’s Theology.” See also chap. 3 in the present work. 15  Miller, “Milton, Zanchius, and the Rhetoric of Belated Reading,” 199–​219.

16  See illustrations in Oxford, lxxxiv and lxxxv, or MMsDDC, 42–​43. Detailed record of the variants at Oxford, 678–​81, analysis at 686–​87, Latin n.i.

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or guilty nonetheless? The single word by which he makes this change is duntaxat, repeated by the scribe as Duntaxat. This is the original scribe, ‘M,’ not Skinner transcribing. It is a favourite word of Milton’s, to clarify, distinguish, and insist. Unique opportunities are provided by pages 307a/​308, to watch Milton thinking the main change through. Oxford considers most of them. Another, considered here, shows Milton interacting with scribes to get things just the way he wants, the interpersonal aspect of his revisiting a theological question in his blindness (so that we may recognize, for the record, that not every question involves any partisanship or a priori, though naturally the ones which do so help more with our main thesis). Paul told the Ephesians (who are in the second-​person plural) in Eph. 2:12 that ete to kairo ekeino choris christou apellotriomenoi: ἦτε ἐν τῷ καιρῷ ἐκείνῳ χωρὶς Χριστοῦ ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι. The Junius–​Tremellius–​Beza Latin version, which Milton mainly used, renders the passage thus:  (Beza, from the Greek) Vos inquam, illo tempore fuisse absque Christo alienos a republica Israelis, but (Tremellius, from the Syriac) Et eratis in illo tempore sine Christo, & alieni eratis a conversatione Israelis. Milton, however, wants alienatae fuerant, not as a translation but as a summary in his own words: ante hunc solutum gentes alienatae ab omni foedere fuerunt (“before this [wall of partition’s] destruction gentiles were alienated from the whole covenant”). A curious tense, not the classical pluperfect, “had been alienated” but more subtly Greek “had been put into a state of alienatedness,” until Paul’s “now,” in which Christ has broken down the wall of partition. Milton is striving to make the Latin more precisely convey the situation of the gentiles. Before, after, or during his wrestling with Potissimum versus Duntaxat, he is working out the difference between Jews and Gentiles. He sums it up in those adverbs; he also works out its detail in how he understands the verbal detail of Paul in Ephesians.17

Predestination

The intricacy of these last revisions gives a compelling miniature of Milton thinking out his personal beliefs on a page where we can watch him revising. In this case too he does 17  A fuller record of the copying of 307a would include the following. The scribe wrote alienae, then with a caret changed it to alienatae. Another hand wrote (or had written) alienatae in a blank area of the page away to the left. This was crossed out, by whom we cannot tell. Discussion is going on in the think-​tank. Then on the rewritten page (308) Daniel Skinner wrote alienatuae, which is incorrect Latin, but suggests he was having trouble reading the mazy state of his original (307a). All this activity around variants in the scriptorium points to Milton himself present, dictating, and hearing back, and so thinking out the best Latin for Paul’s thunderous Greek. He was weighing alienae (adjective, “belonging to someone else”) against alienatae (the participle, with its greater verb force, “having been alienated”). He was coming to the unusual Latin verb phrase alienatae fuere, which was not the reading of either column of the Latin Bible (kept handy for consulting). The exactness of the eventual wording has not been noticed: “the gentiles were in the state of having been alienated.” It means the state which resulted and then continued from their having first been divided by Paul’s “wall of partition.” A decisive originating act causes a separateness which continues until the decisive second action removes the partition.

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not emerge as personal in any of the senses of “arbitrary.” We see him hard at work, responsively. Now since in previous cases we have dwelt on what is axiomatic or a priori, but yet our point is less to dismiss them accordingly than to uncover the personal drives and method in how he thinks, we go next to a chapter in which he shows neither heterodoxy nor short-​circuiting. In the chapter on Predestination (I.4), he speaks as Boethius or Augustine could have done, and any mainstream believer. Not for him the (convenient and self-​promoting) libertarianism of the sects. God’s power, though he delights to enlarge it in other regards, does not reduce human responsibility. Election means something else. In short, personal ruminations on scripture can sometimes lead away from unorthodoxy. Their pattern is more eclectic than unidirectional. This finding, opposite to previous examples, only goes to confirm the personal dimension. For when he agrees with the orthodox, including Arminians, it is by a route and by reasons of his own. The autonomy of the argumentation is felt, for example, in the balance of citations to exegesis, or the stylish conclusion, up to the final flourish of Homer’s Zeus speaking ex cathedra. God’s decree is conditional:  scripture, reason, and experience concur. Milton’s strong chapter preserves freedom and responsibility together. This exception tests the general sense of the essentially personal theology which Milton derives solely (or “not unless”) from scripture. What joins the exception to the rule is the personal, and furthermore his declared purpose in promulgating his thoughts, which is to invite, possibly challenge, any reader to “use [my] thoughts with me, or indeed not use them unless fully persuaded.” Wherever, then, one is not fully persuaded, and will not be using them, what has happened is that his personal theology has prompted or provoked, another one. For example, because I have never drunk deeply of Trinitarian theology, Milton’s rebuttal of it from scripture makes me see how it did come out of scripture. His arithmetical reasoning in particular is shown from scripture as reductive. One whole trend of his theology is to reduce complexity to an either-​or or a non-​est. And this trend is found in much of philosophy, to erect one part of a living whole into the essential element, or the only one that counts (to the logician)—​as Hobbes makes motion, motus, his ruling principle. The personal element which guides Milton’s scriptural theology makes one think out how it dissatisfies. Not always, or in a single way, but often enough. This response may lessen interest in his system for the study of theology and its history. On the other hand, his ubiquitous subjectivity ensures that his views provoke and so define those of others, if taken seriously, and if not thwarted by prior positions or lack of interest.

Eloquence

In its Latin prose medium, moreover, the theological Milton rises above the cheeseparing logician of some chapters. The diatribe on tithing or clergy income (I.31, MS 406–​13) is a case in point, since it concedes, pleads, and rebukes in a fine style. A whole succession of varying speech acts makes it a passionately personal document, one to treasure. Faced with a clergy of complacent placemen, he does not simply rebuke (as if Lycidas had not done that sublimely). He must think it all out afresh. This is where only the Latin can demonstrate the unforgettable eloquence of Milton’s thinking.

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The pages should be read as a whole, too lengthy to reproduce here. We end instead with the exhilarating concluding blast. After tametsi […] tamen[…] he unleashes a long series of ample citations; then contrasts hodierni ministri (408f, “today’s ministers”), and so can berate compulsion by the magistrate. As if one could enforce rectitude or gratitude! So we hear the first climax: “O you of little faith!” (411i). To speak with Jesus’ own words is the highest available register in this context. Milton denounces the current clergy in a style which becomes personal in several more senses of that term: interpersonal (through pronouns of cajoling), personal in accusations, heartfelt and name-​calling. The interpersonal intensity shows in the irruption of personal pronouns; normally absent from De Doctrina, they too show how the temperature rises. What is more, after vos of little faith, some typical tu undergoes rebuke, at the conclusion (MS 412–​13), where the incumbent paid pastor is presented taking his flock to law for lack of payment of tithes: [C]‌um grege (id quod apud reformatos nusquam nisi apud nos fieri solet) cum grege inquam vel suo vel re vera non suo litigare? si suo, quam avarum ex re sacra tam cupide quaestum18 facere? si non suo, quam iniustum? Quam deinde importunum docere velle qui abs te doceri nolit? Quam violentum, docendi mercedem exigere ab eo, qui doctorem te respuat? Quem tu discipulum quoque nisi lucri causa aeque respueres? Mercenarius enim. (John 10:12–​13)19

Contemptuously Milton pictures the priests of a national church as greedy hirelings, disgracefully lining up in court to extract their fees from victims who reject their religion as false. And he still hasn’t finished! One final paragraph rebuts the possible retort, the collective bleat of the placeholders, “What shall we live on [if not the tithes]?” Dices, unde ergo vivemus? undenam vivetis? unde prophetae olim atque apostoli, facultatibus propriis, artificio aliquot aut honesto studio prophetarum exemplo […] exemplo Christi, qui et ipse faber fuit, Marc. 6:3; Pauli, Act 18:3.4; qui cum in optimis esset artibus ac disciplinis proprio sumptu educatus, non tamen ex euangelio reficiendas impensas educationis suae, ut ministri solent hodierni, clamitabat.20

18  Because the litigious cleric hopes to recover costs or to raise the amount owing?

19  Oxford, 837: “litigate with his flock (a procedure which is customary nowhere among reformed nations except among us)—​[and] with his flock, I say, which is either his own or, in strict truth, not his own? If it is his own, how avaricious is it so greedily to make a profit from a sacred practice? If it is not his own, how unjust is it? Next, how self-​seeking is it to wish to exact payment for teaching from the person who spurns you as his teacher?—​whom you would equally spurn as your pupil, too, were it not for the sake of lucre? For ‘the hired man, whose sheep are not his own’ [etc. as] John 10:12–​13].” See also the commentary at Oxford, 851nn.x and xi. 20  Oxford, 837: “You [tu] will say, ‘What shall we live on?’ What, [I ask you] will you [vos = tu and others like you] live on?! What the prophets and apostles of old [lived on]: on their own resources,

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Milton is enjoying himself, and making his wrath enjoyable. Prophets, Christ, and Paul make a triad of exemplars, with Paul last and most forceful, with a force gained by the dig at clergy who complain that their education has been expensive. Milton spits out hodierni, repeated from 408f, and placed after its verb solent for pungent emphasis; the climactic iterative final verb is clamitabat, “kept on shouting”—​not thinking or reasoning, just mindless shouting of slogans. What a thrilling diatribe: righteous, sincere, prophetic, peculiar, and, above all, personal. He is taking it, in every sense, personally. What is more, this eloquent passion has the same value for theology that Wordsworth’s has for philosophy. It has long been recognized that while his Prelude often stumbles after the lost light of his youthful imagination, when he does recover it in memory (emotion recollected in tranquillity, ethos transformed into pathos), he shows philosophers cognition in action. As W. B. Gallie put it, he is not a philosopher but philosophical. Likewise Milton, not a theologian, waxes theological. At times like his denunciation of Anglicans queueing up at the law courts to sue their parishioners for tithes, Milton shows a righteous zeal like Peter’s or Paul’s. He finds the words to cleanse the temples. When he puts it as he does here, or on Peter’s lips in Lycidas, who can help being moved to agree that a Stuart bishop in his pomp, doing the state’s dirty work for high pay, merits rebuke and needs a dose of the beatitudes? Milton’s theological thinking holds attention by its spirit and energy, its how and why more than its what. Remembering Wordsworth again, I  risk this closing epic simile. As when a leech gatherer, garnering leeches indomitably despite the obsolescence of this curious way to healing, becomes for the candid onlooker in his own times of stress and despondency an emblem of steadfast courage, so might one say that Milton, assembling citations under top-​down Ramist headings and (despite cranks and obsessions) defending his findings with fiery eloquence in the name of gospel simplicities, embodies the spirit of inquiry into fundamentals, with resolution and independence.

on some trade or respectable pursuit, after the example of the prophets, who were well-​versed both in hewing wood and in building their own houses, 2 Kgs 6:2; after the example of Christ, who also was a craftsman himself, Mark 6:3; [and after the example] of Paul, Acts 18:3–​4, who, though schooled in the noblest arts and disciplines at his own expense, nonetheless did not keep bawling that the costs of his schooling should be defrayed from his gospel-​preaching, as today’s ministers habitually do.” His next words, Hactenus de ministris, “So much for ministers,” must be read as neutrally marking the start of a new topic: might there be also a subtext of scornful dismissal?

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Chapter 4

WORKING FROM WOLLEBIUS DE DOCTRINA BEGAN life from a system of topics modelled on the orthodox one of Johannes Wollebius (Johann Wolleb, 1589–​1629), a Swiss theologian based in Basel. In addition, Milton often starts individual discussions from this source’s exact words. The indebtedness actually clarifies Milton’s originality and purposes because it pinpoints just where and how Milton’s wording moves away from Wolleb’s. Patterns are suggested, as with the biblical citations in Chapter  3, by a linguistic source study of how Milton omits, selects, changes, and adds. Sometimes, mid-​sentence, the very moment is seen at which Wolleb’s wording changes into Milton’s imperious appropriations, orthodoxy becoming idiosyncrasy. And in one rare instance, Chapters 17 and 18 of Book 1, Milton works for a certain distance using a distinction found in Wolleb, only to find it untenable: the manuscript shows precisely the steps by which he decided to redefine the distinction after all, and to collapse another. The personal aspect here does not consist, as it often does elsewhere, of polemic heat or scorn in eager pursuit of a position foreknown from scripture or predilection. It consists of an uncertain deciding about divine agency, on an issue which troubled all theologians and which continued to exercise Milton in Paradise Regained.

Doctrina Doctrina in Latin means both “teaching” and the “knowledge” which is to be imparted. Our work’s namesake by Augustine intended its “doctrina” to keep the first and main sense of the root verb, docere, to teach, since it taught preachers how and what to teach their congregations. Similarly Wollebius, though from a Reformed perspective, sets out orthodox beliefs, received tenets, before giving reasons or initiating small-​print adjustments and extensions of his own. In Milton’s compilation, however, the “teaching” sense of doctrina is reduced, since he is writing it for himself first and foremost. It is a working out of doctrina or knowledge based solely on scripture, an elucubrating which was followed at some stage by the (aborted) intention to publish. Milton’s emphasis is seen again when he says that “we and Selden” both docuit the true sense of fornicatio in the oriental languages (MS 159, Oxford, 392). In the opening chapter, “Quid sit Doctrina Christiana,” he defines Christian doctrine as “that which Christ imparted in all ages by divine communion,” in practice (next paragraph, without addition or qualification) “the scriptures, from which we have taken these things.” So Milton is working out for himself alone in the first instance, whereas Wolleb had assembled givens from other writings or church practice, to be taught to the community of Reform or Protestantism. No wonder Milton travels varying distances from his model. No wonder either (given how often he absorbs the organization and opening words he has read in Wollebius) that we can pounce on the points of his departures. He is working it out all afresh in things

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personal to him. These can be curiosities or quirks—​things from his own life experience, the energetic working through to a reductio ad absurdum of something which the orthodox Wollebius had casually summarized, or emphases which imply a ruling idea or governing mind-​set—​as well as the unique moment when he works out an idea from Wollebius, only to discard it. Our case studies show these five types of personal intervention in turn.1 As final preliminary, let us see Milton at his closest and most dependent, not only to show that despite never naming Wollebius he really did begin from his system, but to distinguish its small, verbal deviation from the more substantial departures which form the bulk of the chapter.

Simple Intensification

On imputed righteousness, Wollebius has a mild dig at the Catholic view, that it is as absurd (absurdum videtur) to impute justification from another person’s justice “as that anyone seems learned through another’s learning.” How inconsistent, then, to be “loath to impute Christ’s justice to themselves although they do not flinch from concluding that the justice of dead men and monks is imputed to them.” Ad haec Christi iustitiam sibi imputari nolunt cum non vereantur statuere hominum mortuorum et monachorum iustitiam sibi imputari.2 Milton turns the sentence into Interim pro absurdo non habent quod est absurdissimum, mortuorum et monachorum iustitiam aliis imputari (“at the same time they do not realize the palpable absurdity of their own doctrine that the righteousness of the dead, or of monks, can be imputed to other people.”) He sharpens up the alliterated phrase to mortuorum et monachorum by omitting hominum. He exacerbates Wolleb’s mild opening absurdum, echoing the words of Catholic disputants, into a superlative absurdity of Catholic hagiography. Sharper or shriller? Both, and personal too, for Milton makes us hear the word “absurd” three times, not one: he builds it into a “surge of rhetorical scorn, a whole new tone of voice” from that of Wollebius (129). Personal appropriation is here seen mainly in wording and tone—​more of a “surge” beyond Wollebius in expressive voltage than any “departure” in substance.

Quirks

In contrasting Reformed practice of the Eucharist, point by point, with the Roman way, Wollebius remarks that the celebrant of a mass “murmurs his five words downwards:” in Missa corpus Christi demum creatur a Sacerdote, quinque verborum demurmuratione, & quidem ex pane (I. XXV. xix. V, 134, my emphasis). The verb from which his noun of action comes, demurmurare, is colourful, classically correct, and, indeed, pungent, since 1  The first four examples draw on my work published in Reformation 19: “Points of Departure”). For the evidence in DDC, see chaps. 17–​18 and its theological importance I use work published with Jason Kerr: “The Origins and Development of Milton’s Theology.” 2  MMsDDC, 128–​30, with Oxford, 626 and Latin note ii.

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Ovid uses it (once) for a magician’s spell.3 Liturgically, however, the priest is obliged to “murmur downwards,” because he is speaking reverently to God over the bread and the wine, not out loud to the congregation. But from the hostile standpoint of Wollebius, “de” connotes “inaudibly” and “all the way through.” Milton takes the pungent word over, though too rapidly for us to know whether it is for derogation. But the “five” words become “four.” The celebrant does actually say five words: “hoc est enim corpus meum,” and then “hoc est enim sanguis meus.” The liturgy has smoothed the scriptural syntax by adding “enim,” appropriating the parataxis into reasoning. Milton’s four (MS 362, Oxford, 762) may come from counting up the words in Paul’s version of the words of institution, as set out in 1 Corinthians 11:23–​30, in the Latin translation which Milton employs (MS 353, Oxford, 750). Does Milton use Paul’s wording simply because he has argued from it earlier, by carry-​over of that recollection—​that is, from momentum of argument or habit of self-​consistency? Or is he insisting that he is using scripture alone? Or is he diverging from Wollebius? Or does he think the priest says four words because he himself had never heard a mass or read a missal? Or simply from remembering the Latin version of the 1560 Book of Common Prayer, as heard at his school or college?4 While we cannot say, I  find the departure intriguing. Wollebius knew something which Milton did not. In general too, after a century of Reformation, how well did the two sides know each other’s spirituality, as distinct from the dogmas and rhetoric? Did Milton ever go to hear a mass? For his discussions of Catholic belief or practice (as distinct from the doings of the papacy), where did he get his information apart from Protestant critiques? The tiny verbal discrepancy touches on the larger issue, of what we don’t know.

Personal Experience

In discussing usury (II.14; MS 680–​82, Oxford, 1180–​825) Milton relies heavily on Wollebius, whether we examine its positioning or its lead-​in, its first few short theses or its longer closing section, its stance or its tone or its citations. For example, he takes over without ado Wolleb’s orthodox view of multilingual aspects of biblical usury (“from Hebrew nesheq, a morsu, from biting”). And he closely follows Wolleb’s conclusion, the double negative that usury is “not unlawful,” except that both deplore usury when pursued “solely for gain” (“lucri solius studio”).6 (As if a lender would charge interest except 3  Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIV.58, carmen demurmurare, “to mutter a set of words through” (perhaps even to chant a spell).

4  This is the suggestion of the volume’s reader, citing http://​justus.anglican.org/​resources/​bcp/​ Latin1560/​Communion_​Latin1560.htm.

5  Wollebius’ Latin is most conveniently found in Kelley’s commentary to MS pp. 681–​82, Yale, 778–​ 80nn3–​7. Inconsistently, Kelley sometimes quotes from the English translation by Alexander Ross, The Abridgment of Christian Divinitie (London, 1650). For the present discussion the relevant further quotations are found in Oxford, Yale, or Hale, “Points of Departure” as indicated. 6  Milton does endorse usury. He adds his characteristic duntaxat and a defining or qualifying nunc to the blanket thesis that usury is not prohibited (non damnanda in Milton, non illicita in Wollebius).

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“for gain”!) The exception reads like a relic of the formulaic Aristotelian substrate of the chapters on ethics, which lay out the excess, deficiency, and mean state of successive moral qualities, the how and when and how much. Standing out from these mundane ruminations is the addition by Milton of an opposite imbalance. From the usury itself, he says, the lender has less advantage than the borrower. Four added7 words read “[accipienti mutuo quam] danti fructuosior esse solet”:  Usury “is apt to be more profitable [to the borrower than] to the lender.” Presumably he means that the lender is risking more and has to monitor the loan and to collect principal and interest at the end. But since many more people have to borrow than to lend, I  am reminded that Milton Senior lent out moneys, that Milton himself sometimes collected them on his father’s behalf, and that Senior lent in particular to the improvident Powells—​all part of the grief of Milton’s first marriage. His marriage resulted from a loan-​collecting visit to the Powell household.8 The remark could be read as personal in the sense of rueful.

Reductiveness

Comparing Wolleb with Milton at the points where he diverges alerts us to the divergence of personal tone and tone of voice. Often, placid orthodoxy becomes Milton’s animated originality. But here too we find instructive exceptions. Because Wollebius gives orthodox Protestant doctrine, his tone becomes scornful or indignant mainly when contrasting it with Catholic doctrine or practice, where that signally differs. At such times, he treats us to sarcastic wit. Milton does this too, but at other times—​not when following Wollebius, for at least in the places I have noticed, he neither echoes nor outstrips his model’s scorn. If anything, where he agrees, he shortens the agreement into summary and appropriates it swiftly in words of his own. He is more interested in these. In the two instances chosen here, because he disagrees with Wolleb about confirmation, he spares us the latter’s scorn of the Catholic ritual. In the second, on transubstantiation, he agrees but has new reasons to give, and a whole reductio ad absurdum, with a climax all its own. On confirmation, Wolleb terms the Catholic ritual excrementum non sacramentum, “not a sacrament but an excrement.”9 Even if excrementum could mean “excrescence” not “ordure,” it had the more offensive meaning in classical Latin and would have been read as a gross pun. Milton ignores it. More than that, he accepts confirmation or laying on of hands, if not as a sacrament, as a “symbol of blessing” done by the patriarchs and by Christ (MS 363). Moreover, as with the mass, Wolleb brings in a detail of the Catholic rite, where Milton stays silent: the bishop gives the candidate a “cuff” (alapam) to remind him 7  The whole sentence is added by scribe “B” to Picard’s fair copy. And the last four of the seven were rewritten by Daniel Skinner, because of late arrival or illegibility or for some other reason.

8  On the loan see, for instance, Campbell and Corns, John Milton. Life, Work, and Thought, 40, 150–​51. 9  I. xxii, VI.124; see Hale, “Points of Departure,” 75.

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or her to avoid Satan’s temptations (contra Diaboli tentationes). This is again symbolic, like putting salt onto a baby’s tongue at a christening to symbolize rejection of Satan—​so that the baby (hopefully passive rather than already screaming) will make a perceived reaction to the celebrant’s actions. Although such symbolic actions and responses can be made to look inept if their intention is downplayed, the interesting point here is twofold: Wolleb knows something else about the Catholic practice (for the cuffing continues, as a friendly gesture by the officiant, perhaps akin to the sign of peace), and Milton ignores Wolleb, in both substance and tone. As for transubstantiation, however, Milton will have none of it, and takes time and pains to scotch it. He reduces Wolleb’s seven numbered contrasts between the Lord’s Supper (Sacra Coena) and the popish mass (“Missa Papistica”) to a numbered six, of which the sixth is one all his own. The mass dishonours Christ’s body, he reasons, because “after all its sufferings, then exaltation” it must undergo further humiliation, “crushed […] ground up […] digested [and] ejected into the latrine (frangendum […] excoctum […] in latrinam extrudit). The literalism is a gross reductio ad absurdum, or ad obscoenum: Milton calls it “shocking to tell” (dictum horrendum est), presumably to imply that the offence lies in the doctrine, not in his own mind. Judging by the scathing tone of the stoutly orthodox Protestant Wolleb on Catholic sacraments, Milton is playing to the same audience here, or, more likely, thinking out a thought of his own to himself, to a conclusion which shows yet again that Catholic difference will be wrong-​headed. I find it perverse because it is manifestly unwilling to look for the intention or to think symbolically, just what he did do for confirmation, predisposed perhaps to approve the intention, of informed consent unlike the baptism of infants. So these examples continue the individuality which peeps through in spasmodic or quirky form when Milton is appropriating Wolleb. Our next example shows something about it which is not quirky but (once probed) concerns fundamentals, and indeed not less but more so if Milton was changing Wolleb unconsciously. Accordingly, this time I give a fuller exposition, from my essay published in Reformation.

Unconscious Emphasis: Prudence and Prohairesis

The following extended passage, on the theme of Christian prudence, shows Milton’s mind on the move. A first paragraph appropriates then improves on his source. A second applies his original’s maxim idiosyncratically. The Compendium had said: “Prudentiae est, in malis culpae nullum, in malis poenae minus eligere.”10 Milton at first dictated to his scribe Jeremy Picard: “Huc illa regula referri solet: malorum culpae nullum, malorum poenae minimum esse eligendum.” (Oxford’s bolding here represents the large-​hand which Picard uses to make something stand out 10  “It is prudence, in the evils of sinne to choose none, in the evils of punishment to choose the lesser” (Ross, Abridgment, 247). Presumably this means that where punishment or penalty is certain, the offender would prudently prefer the lesser, on the principle of “the lesser of two evils is better.” Neither author elaborates, and Milton concerns himself only with the first half of the “Rule.”

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from the main discussion.)11 This manifests an overall dependence on Wollebius, within which several changes of wording and nuance emerge. Then he dictated the further change, of “malorum” (twice) to “ex malis.” What is Milton thinking out in these two steps? And how much does it matter? It matters, first, because the changes may not show up in an English translation, or not among the other alterations made to achieve idiomatic and readable English. More to the point, it shows steps or stages by which Milton was making up his own mind. Grammatically, in taking over Wollebius’ topics and categories, distinction and figure of isocolon (and much else), Milton at first saw fit to change the prepositional phrase “in malis,” “in” or “in the case of” evils, to a simpler genitive, malorum: “the evils of culpability” and “the evils of punishment.” Then, on hearing it read back, he returned the contrast to a prepositional phrase, only not the same one: “ex malis,” “out from among,” not to Wolleb’s “in malis.” Palpably, then, while Milton took over the arrangement and the ideas, he made the wording his own. This might be because he just preferred his own Latin or thought his own Latin style better, in a humanist world where such things mattered terribly. But if we focus on the Latin, which after all is to do Milton the favour of reading his actual chosen words on their own terms (not plumping for gists or approximations), we can glimpse his mind as he composed. We may seize something of his style and hearing and sense. To substantiate from further evidence:  first, the vague contextualizing phrase “in malis” is shortened to the bare genitive, where “of” means much the same as “among” or “in the case of.” A more stylish brevity is gained, for a thesis sentence which is a well-​ known maxim: maxims in Latin aspire to the fewest words possible (“de gustibus non disputandum,” “quot homines, tot sententiae,” “cogito ergo sum”). But then, we may infer as we inspect the MS, both wordings appeared too vague. Ex malis clarifies what is at stake: how to choose, eligendum. We choose “from among” evils “none” in the first case, “the least” in the second case. Milton’s revisions deflect the emphasis a little from the official topic of prudence. Instead of equably ticking it off his agenda for the chapter, namely virtues which promote good works, they shift the Latin words onto the central idea in the thesis itself. That idea is choice, a paramount theme song of Milton’s. If we slow our reading down to these tiny changes of wording, we notice other such changes of detail, and we notice the sense also changing. Wolleb had said “it is prudence […] to choose,” “eligere.” Milton makes this become esse eligendum, more categorically “one should choose.” The change is not mere emphasis. The syntactical adjustment interiorizes, from flat predication to obligatory gerund. The infinitive of the gerund is being used because Milton has prefaced the whole pronouncement with words which Wollebius had launched as an indisputable generality, one of his teeming “canones,” Ross’s “Rules,” but without examining or qualifying. It is Milton who adds the ontology: “Huc illa regula referri solet; “to this principle, [that prudence is a seasoning 11  “To this [principle] is that celebrated maxim customarily referred: of the evils of culpability, one should choose none: of the evils of punishment, [one should choose] the least” (MS 483, Oxford, 933).

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(condimentum) of every virtue] is that celebrated maxim customarily referred.”12 Oxford stresses the “illa” of “illa regula” as “that celebrated regulation,” a usual idiom of Latin. It could also or instead refer to Ross’s “Rules” and the Compendium’s “Canones,” with “illa” a glancing reference to his source at the moment of moving from consulting it to flying with his own wings. A different independence is seen in the sequel, the continuation paragraph in which Milton applies the maxim. His application diverges from that of Wollebius revealingly. “Hoc de malis culpae si verum sit”: “If this be true concerning the evils of culpability.” Only if the maxim says true (and since Wollebius uses subjunctive “sit” not indicative “est,” it may not be more than a mere maxim). The previous interpreters may be wrong. Milton veers into denunciation of the wrongheaded ones: we hear “quam inepte”—​“how ineptly!”—​the opponents reason, though it turns out to be a subordinate clause, not a main clause: “anyone can easily perceive how ineptly.” He is not really relenting, because his concluding concessive (“although the law”) is an understated appeal to an overriding principle, that the law can never tolerate vice. “Cum non magis concedere lex aut tolerare vel minimum vitiorum quam bonus quisquam eligere possit.”13 Thus the unnamed opponents (“doctores”) are in final effect denounced, as not knowing the first thing about divine law. They are root-​and-​ branch wrong after all. Notice the appeal to a secular “good man,” as if believers must not put themselves into wrong company. Notice especially that Milton returns, at the end of his whole supplementary thrust, to the issue of choice: “eligere possit.” Wollebius applies the second part, that evils of punishment are to be minimized. Milton ignores that, in order to work with the first part, evils of culpability. And he applies it to three matters on which doctors (“doctores”) have ineptly interpreted the law:  “usury, divorce, polygamy and the like.” The law is the English law, wrong when interpreting the law of Moses. It is wrong on matters where Milton had long had his own views, as witnessed by the Commonplace Book. Divorce and polygamy coalesce around marriage, as in I.10, “ubi etiam de […] Coniugio” (“and also on […] marriage”). We should ask why, in this departure from his Wollebian script, he joins them to usury and puts usury first. All three things belong in dealings with a neighbour (“proximus”) and are contractual, not ordained from on high as sacraments. In one direction, usury was once thought a sin; in another, marriage is still thought a sacrament; but no, says Milton’s present collocation, all three belong among contracts and simply need regulating. That is clearer, however, for usury than for the other two, because Milton’s world had accepted usury. So rhetorically, its placing here propels the reader towards the more controversial two, with a tacit momentum. They too are allowed by scripture. To reiterate, finally, Milton ends the paragraph with choice. Prudence, Christian or Aristotelian, hinges on choice, prohairesis: “eligere possit.” Just so too Milton has been 12  In the Abridgment, “IV. It is prudence, in the evils of sinne to choose none, in the evils of punishment to choose the lesser.” Milton intensifies minus, “lesser,” to minimum, “least.”

13  “[A]‌lthough the law can no more concede or tolerate even the smallest of vices than any good man can choose it” (MS 484, Oxford, 933).

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choosing how to work with Wolleb—by what changes to lead his wording into original thoughts of his own, thoughts prioritizing choice, and a contractual, not sacral view, of daily living.

Working It Out, Then Shrugging It Off (I.17 and 18)

Previous examples have concerned liturgy and conduct, which Milton has treated with assurance. Let us close with the opposite, a doctrinal matter, where Milton wrestles and remains somewhat uncertain. Again, it concerns choice, or calling; “agency within conversion, whether human or divine.”14 Book 1, Chapter 17 is “On Renewal and also on Calling,” Chapter 18 “On Regeneration.” The two are at first distinguished by being, respectively, “external” and “internal.” Now that distinction had begun in Wolleb’s discussion of calling, where calling happens “outwardly [extrinsecus] by the Word of the Gospel; but inwardly [intrinsecus] by illuminating the mind and changing the heart” (Kerr and Hale, “The Origins and Development of Milton’s Theology,” 185). But Milton relocates the distinction to renewal, to think out the “relationship between calling and election before deciding that election is the same as regeneration” (ibid.). That is, election and regeneration are both of divine agency, or (as he comes to rephrase the distinction) not “internal,” but “supernatural.” Or perhaps calling is the human side, while election is God’s side in a cooperating agency. This is how I would try to make sense of the rather splintered analysis of what is narrated more simply in the gospels. Personally, I  am bewildered by these classifications and reclassifications, the proliferating entities. The point is that Milton himself got into a spin. At the end of it, he abandons the schematic simplicity of external /​internal, replacing it with natural /​supernatural. (The MS correction [221] gives supernatural a pious, and also helpful uppercase /​S/​.) Calling and election or regeneration have turned out to be the same thing for Milton: he has concluded his cancelled paragraph on externa ratio with the words idem cum regeneratione est; proinde locum hic non habet—​“it is the same as regeneration; hence it has no place here.” Accordingly the entire paragraph is crossed through.15 Working with Wolleb’s distinction, but this time changing its placement and application, he decides to lump, not split, and significantly to alter the terms of the distinction. He tries again, dividing the natural from the supernatural, what is man’s part and what is God’s in the agency. I do not know why “natural” appeared any clearer and became final here. His “natural” is not Paul’s “natural man, of the earth earthy.” Jason Kerr explains it as expressing Milton’s Arminianism—​giving elbow room for human effort and a role 14  The phrase comes from the full essay on the chapters by Jason A. Kerr and myself, “The Origins and Development of Milton’s Theology,” 182. The division of labour was in the main that I supplied the evidence of the MS while Jason gave the theological background and interpretation. Where necessary, I distinguish our contributions here. 15  Daniel Skinner, by this point copy-​editing rather than transcribing the MS, makes sure of the large correction by inserting in the margin of MS 222 Deleantur haec usque ad—​Qua Deus (“Let these words be deleted up to ‘By which God’ ”), the start of the new paragraph on 223i.

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for choice. And that sounds likely, because it accords with Milton’s measured account of predestination in I.4. What emerges from the present less lucid chapter? In Paradise Regained, where the Son ponders his calling (unique but by definition human too), Milton revives the distinction of within from without, only to blend them: “the Spirit leading,/​ And his deep thoughts” (1.189–​90). The crucial word is “and.” However Milton conceives of the spiritual agency, he is now combining rather than dividing. More evidently mysterious is the statement at 2.111 that the Son “into himself descended.” The continuing uncertainty does not lessen the importance of Wollebius, as point of departure, since not only do Spirit and entering into the depth of himself remain part of Milton’s understanding, but they contribute to a beneficial uncertainty. Helped rather than held back by the openness which has replaced the earlier urge for closure, the debate continues. I return to this in Chapter 10.

Departing from Wolleb

It is at the points where Milton departs from Wollebius that we gain unmistakable insights into personal, passionate aspects of Milton’s theology. Often we find him departing into some unorthodoxy. It may instead be a fresh emphasis or way of thinking. It may in a few brief flashes uncover personal experience, something rare in De Doctrina. Alongside the strange reflection that usury involves the lender in more pain than the borrower, we have found cause to speculate that Milton had preserved a scrupulous ignorance of how a mass was conducted. More certainly, he alludes to particular English events, the interference in religious liberty by “bishops formerly and now magistrates” (episcopi olim et nunc magistratus, Oxford, 1246).16 An intriguing sidelight is thrown on his engagement with Wollebius when the latter’s insulting excrementum non sacramentum is not taken over by Milton, who reserves his stronger image of excremental for the close and climax of his account of where the Host really ends up. Milton turns Wolleb’s incidental swipe into a rhetorical and rationalizing reductio. If one thing is clear, it is this: further comparison, such as we have done, will reveal many more such highly individual, personal appropriations by Milton at his points of departure from Wollebius.

16  See Hale, “Points of Departure,” 80.

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Chapter 5

NAMED THEOLOGIANS AS  INTERLOCUTORS FOR HIS MATERIALS, Milton relied overwhelmingly on biblical citation, and pervasively on Wollebius. And yet, despite his avowed independence of theologians and their systems, he often moved beyond findings accumulated from the first two sorts of material, into discussion with named theologians. For our present inquiry these are like interlocutors, people whom he engages with, in ways which range from a bare mention or quiet agreement to animated disagreement. We consider them as a group, mostly of those who are named, but also two who are unnamed but presupposed. The gathering up is timely: the theologians in De Doctrina amount to something more than a bunch of theologi to be lumped and dismissed by Milton. They merit appraisal in our own terms, thinking beyond the sobriety of Kelley’s invaluable glossing into relationships that may be dialectical. The bare fact of naming deserves attention. By identifying persons, it moves beyond category thinking and broad impression to particular books which Milton used, whether reading while he had his sight or hearing them read out to him, and whether met in original or secondary works. All were in Latin. Most were professional divines, writing from a university—​hence trailing the clouds of Milton’s general disapproval, but nonetheless voices heard speaking in De Doctrina. My gathering must dwell on variety, the variety within the European professionals, and likewise within the reading Milton gave to them, and in the uses he makes in response. The engagements, if we imagine a thermometer registering animation, range from cool to hot, and from tiny to large if we measure words quoted and words of reply, from oncers to ten or more allusions if we count up, from unknowns to big names like Seldenus, and so on. And since “variety” as a theme may look vague or useless, we address it at the close, after setting out the evidence.

The Listing

I list and assess the individual interlocutors, A–​Z, in the hope of gathering them all for inspection, because otherwise they tend to become lost in the length of De Doctrina, or diluted among the names listed in the index of an edition. The list gives name and place(s) of occurrence in De Doctrina, with references to page in the MS and in the Oxford text. Thereafter, however, the interlocutors are discussed in the order of first mention in the fifty chapters in reading order. Each is first briefly identified and described. Where a writer has been used more than once, his appearances are discussed together, through the chapters again. Naturally, a different order of presentation could be imagined, from alphabetical order of names to each occasion of allusion as Kelley’s commentary already does. But my order has some advantages. It keeps each person’s contributions together. It keeps Milton’s own initial sequence of topics in view, a sequence which he held to from beginning to end of composition. And we meet the interlocutors first in the most developed of the chapters, especially in the most developed chapter of them all, De Filio, where indeed major interlocutions congregate.

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Amesius Oxford, 1040 (MS 570i) in II.7 (Amesius noster)

Beza Oxford, 148 (MS 60i); Oxford, 174 (MS 73m); 190; Oxford, 268 (MS 109m) and/​but 270 (MS 109f, ipse Beza, re Johannine Comma), 374; 460; 812 (MS 396f and 397m)

Bucerus, Calvinus, Martyr, Musculus, Ursinus, listed A–​Z, then an inserted Gomarus: Oxford, 1054 (MS 582), at end of II.71 Calvinus: see under Bucerus

Camero Oxford, 712 (MS 330i)

Ludovicus Capellus Oxford, 976 (MS 578f) in II.4

Erasmus Oxford, 148 (MS 60i); Oxford, 174 (MS 73m) and 176 (MS 74m); Oxford, 458 (MS 180f); corroborative; 812 (MS 396f) Gomarus: see under Bucerus

Junius Oxford, 192 (MS 82 with 239n) Oxford, 366 (MS 146m) in I.10 also Oxford, 370 (MS 148i) and Oxford, 388 (MS 157m) again I.10; Oxford, 884 (MS 447m); Oxford, 1154 (MS 661i) pia fraus Lutherus Oxford, 892 (MS 456m) with Chrysostom Musculus: see under Bucerus

Placaeus (3) namings in I.5, at Oxford, 188, 194, 196: a running battle re angelus Polanus Oxford, 714 (MS 331i and m) = twice in I.27

Seldenus [included as a scriptural exegete, not a theologian] Oxford, 392 (MS 159), named twice in quick succession (compare Placaeus?) [Tremellius] not named: cited under “Beza” Ursinus: see under Bucerus

Vermigli (Peter Martyr): see under Bucerus Wollebius [See Chapter 4]

Zanchius Oxford, 478 (MS 189f) in I.14, Oxford, 700 (MS 321i), and 712 = same ch, I.27 (MS 330i); Oxford, 870 (MS 433f)

1  These are not discussed in the chapter, as being corroborative names (cited from an intermediary) rather than interlocutors in my sense.

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Frequency and Incidence

Mere frequency of mention could mislead us, since some theologians are quoted unnamed, all the way up to Wollebius, who is quoted or used everywhere yet is not once named. On the other hand, a single naming may alert us to an influence not otherwise accredited, like Calvinus or Lutherus. And a series of mentions within a single passage tells us to look harder, not least when Milton has thought it worth his while to disagree visibly. Despite these and other qualifications, the listing prompts good provisional inquiries. For instance, long stretches of De Doctrina name no secondary reading whatever: is Milton doing as he promised in the Epistle, relying solely on his own study of scripture? Some chapters show a clear surge in Milton’s animation:  do we find further signs of eager interlocution, and are they for scotching, or do they enlist corroborators? Is Book 1 the same as Book 2 in this regard? Do we find a tendency within a chapter for one of these interlocutors to be named solely in the course of an argument, or as it closes, that is, dialectically or for calm corroboration? Does incidence vary with topic or more with phases of development in Milton’s thinking, and can we recover any of these from the Latinity and states of the manuscript (successive entries made over time)? Or do we see in glimpses only? Answers cannot have statistical or final force: they will be personal, like the acts of naming themselves. For by examining these named attributions in sequence we can fairly detect the varying senses of the personal element which gives this whole inquiry its title and its locus. Milton has consulted all these people, some directly and some at second hand, some in discernible groups, some by reason of his own modus operandi, some idiosyncratically, some uniquely, and so on. I have called them as a group “interlocutors,” in that he spoke with each after some fashion. And there are important exceptions, people whom he does not name, but whose presence and influence need inclusion: Wollebius was one, another is Isaac Tremellius. In themselves as in the manner of their mention, these theologians are an idiosyncratic collection, eclectic, in fact, personal.

Erasmus and Beza

Milton cites Erasmus2 some five times, with impersonal sobriety; he cites Beza3 more often, and in a varying, more personal way. The difference shows when he mentions them together, though still well short of his treatment of Placaeus, next. 2  Erasmus hardly needs identification, except to say that Milton relies on his In Novum testamentum Annotationes (1642) at several key moments: see for example Oxford, 235, 237, and 238—​respectively, on the Johannine Comma, on logos translated as sermo not verbum, and on the ambiguity resulting from Greek usage of the definite article. 3  Beza was also widely influential, both as Calvin’s successor at Geneva and as the translator of the New Testament. His Greek–​Latin Bible (1598) used the Vulgate text of the Latin. He too relied on the work of Erasmus, though sometimes his tone exceeds Erasmus’ temperate one: see Oxford, 237–​38n.lxvii.

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Erasmus is cited as a New Testament scholar, usually about the evidence of manuscripts: “one [manuscript] does not read ‘God’ here, as Erasmus again witnesses (teste rursus Erasmo)” (176). In his Chapter 30 of De Scriptura sacra, Milton confirms this particular approbation in more general terms:  “Consequently, from the diverse handwritten codices, the learned men Erasmus, Beza, and others published what seemed to them most genuine” (viri docti quod sibi germanissimum est visum ediderunt)” (812–​13). So Erasmus and Beza stand together as scholars (docti). But at first mention, again together, we read this, concerning the Johannine Comma, 1 John 5:7—​a verse often cited by Trinitarians. It reads:  “There are three who bear witness in heaven; the Father, the word, and the holy Spirit; and these three are one” (Oxford, 149). But the verse is lacking in many manuscripts, including the Syriac, and (says Milton) “not only did Erasmus see the verse means unity of agreement and testimony,” but “even Beza recognized it, albeit reluctantly; one may consult these writers themselves.” No personal coloration is given to Erasmus,4 whereas Milton is aiming a shaft at Beza: sed Beza etiam vel invitus. Not that Erasmus is not anti-​Trinitarian, but that his position as an eirenic Catholic says nothing for Milton, here or elsewhere.5 So Milton sometimes puts distance between himself and Beza. Doctus though he was, and used widely as a scholar and a translator, Beza was also a theologian, Calvin’s successor, entrenched at Calvinist Geneva. We find variations and gradations of reservation. At 268 Beza “rightly refutes” (merito refellit) the view that the “seven” spirits before the throne at Revelation 1:4–​5 can be “reduced to one holy spirit and his sevenfold grace.” To do so would serve those who want a “triple enumeration” to conceal “the doctrine of three persons” on an equality. However, at 270 “Beza himself (ipse Beza), an otherwise doughty defender of the Trinity, understands are one [1 John 5:7, in the Johannine Comma again] as agree upon the one thing.” At 190–​92, furthermore, regarding angels in Revelation, Beza is “reduced” (eo redegerunt) to thinking that book late and less than canonical—​“needlessly,” (nihil necesse erat), if he had simply understood with Milton that angels may take on the name of the person whose message they bear (190).6 At 374, again, battling to argue that scripture sanctions divorce, Milton undertakes to correct Beza’s understanding regarding King David’s two harems: Beza had forgotten, 4  Not even though he was claimed for anti-​Trinitarianism by some partisans (Kelley, Yale, 52f–​53 and esp. notes 30 and 31). He did change his mind about the Comma, accepting it into his third edition of the Greek text (1522). For further discussion, see Chapter 9.

5  Similarly at 174 he cites Erasmus to establish a negative, that “in Hilary and Cyprian ‘God’ is not read (Deus non legitur), nor in numerous other [church] fathers either, if Erasmus has any credibility (si qua Erasmo fides).” The proviso reads as scrupulous, not tendentious, else it would weaken Milton’s own argument.

6  The Yale translator, John Carey, renders redegerunt as “led,” more neutrally than Oxford’s “reduced.” My sense of re-​digerunt with eo ut, “led or drove back to the extent that,” is that Milton is personally pushing to obviate Beza’s special hypothesis as too complex or special pleading. He is challenging Beza.

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oblitus erat. Beza found David “guilty of incest” with the wives of his fathers-​in-​law, but it was the harem of virgins, not of concubines, “as in 1 Kings 1:4.” This final example being such a curious byway of exegesis, it typifies Milton’s polemical drive to refute every possible argument against polygamy. He does so not impolitely and with only a mild irony. Contrast Placaeus, who is cited three times in quick succession, also regarding angels.

Placaeus

Milton’s sobriety of tone towards Erasmus, and mild spasmodic irony towards Beza, change with another theologian in De Filio, Placaeus,7 into ridicule and reductio ad absurdum. He becomes personal, in the sense of the phrase “personal remarks.” First, Placaeus doubts that Jehovah would merely commission an angel, to bear his name (act with his full authority), for thus he would be merely “a sort of masked Jehovah [personatum quendam Jehovam], and like an actor on the stage [quasi in scaena histricum].” Milton summarizes Placaeus’ sarcasm before retorting. Milton cites Exodus 23:20–​21, “Behold, I am sending an angel before you.” This is what angels, angeloi, Greek for messengers, are for. It will not help Trinitarians, but perhaps personatum Jehovam absorbs some of his disdain for their “personhood,” personalitas (see Oxford, 54, personalitatum illud totum drama, “that whole drama of personalities”). Then Milton vents a fuller ridicule (194), arguing that Placaeus confuses the originator with the deliverer of a divine utterance. “Malachi 3:1, ‘I am going to send my angel who is to prepare my path before me’ with Matthew 11:10, ‘I am sending my messenger [the Baptist] before your face.’ Well now, who was it that sent? The Son, as it pleases Placaeus. Before whose face? The son’s. So the son is addressing himself […] an utterly strange and unheard-​of thing.” Placaeus is exposing himself to a retaliation which uses the same sloppy equating. Placaeus thinks elastically: Milton stretches the elastic until it snaps. So when Milton scornfully puns on the name “Placaeus, ut placet Placaeo,” he is reducing the man to his own name, name as nature, in his illogic he is “pleasing himself.” (QED!) Milton is manifestly enjoying his reductions. To whom, though? Only himself, or with readers now in mind? This chop-​logic belongs in the university schools or in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. A word about tone of voice here will help us to recognize other forms elsewhere. In this case a pun on the name shows scorn in a putdown. With Beza, a different nuance was felt in etiam and ipse. Such words tend to be ignored when we focus on the train of thought, but they convey nuance and tone of voice (possibly in the dictating). In the case of Placaeus, the little modifying quendam and quasi are not a thunderous putdown, but a dry hint or a knowing whimsy: personatum quendam Iehovam sic esse, et quasi in scaena histricum—​not offensive, 7  Placaeus: Josue de la Place (1602–​55) taught theology at Saumur with Amyraldus and Capellus. He wrote an orthodox reply to the anti-​Trinitarian Crellius. Other works of his are sampled by Kelley for his Yale commentary at places where he is not named by Milton.

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because it is a denial that Jehovah can be thus, and so is obeying the rules of the game.8 Like the Greek particles, though sparser and less flexible, such Latin words lift the prose towards the conversational, making it person-​to-​person—​sometimes too, as here, about a person. And “conversational” is the literal translation of Greek dialektike [lexis]: Socratic “dialogues” have the same tone, fluid and persuading, putting a point of view as you do to an interlocutor, a little vehemently, but vehemence is not merely emphasis (that is, not like people who do talk only in capital letters), being rather more of an eager, person-​to-​person urging.9 Milton wants readers, and wants a reader to follow along, to read to the end, with a patient goodwill. We see this urge again, next, with Junius. Furthermore, where one is gauging tone, it is easy (especially when I am, as far as I know, first into the field) to overemphasize or mistake the tone of irony, or other form of distancing. Not all are alike. In Greek, an armoury of nuances would be available; in Latin, less so, including Milton’s. We must work from context too. And pardon my own overemphasis, which is merely part of directing attention to something underdeveloped in discussions of Milton. After all, he was “of a satiric disposition,” prone to use the “growling letter, littera caninis [R]‌,” and I am finding him the same on occasion in De Doctrina (another mark of authorship?) We must seize on Milton’s raising of a sardonic eyebrow at Beza without misreading it as the more severe mocking of Placaeus, let alone his outright denunciation of greedy tithers, as “ye of little faith.”

Junius in De Filio

When Milton names Junius,10 he may be referring to Junius as translator and commentator of the Bible or (as with Beza) to Junius as a theologian in his own person, but now comes the complication, that “Junius” in the Latin Bible may rather be his senior partner, Isaac Tremellius. Tremellius did the lion’s share of the work on the Hebrew Bible, and on the Syriac of the New Testament. Only with the Old Testament Apocrypha was Junius the sole or leading contributor. And while the Old Testament commentary includes work by Junius, the recent biographer of Tremellius cannot distinguish the handiwork of one from the other.11 It is possible in any collaboration that the joint work is better than the work of either alone, but that would warrant Milton’s disagreement with “Junius” on the Old Testament less, rather than more, than if he were refuting Junius alone. For

8  Similar effects are found when he speculates on the Host travelling through the body, in latrinam (chap. 3), or concerning Mary’s womb (MS 189f): any irreverence lies not in Milton’s words, but in the opponent’s misunderstanding. Irony disowns. 9  The infuriating gadfly (“oestros”) Socrates of Plato’s dialogues is often arguing ad hominem, seizing on some rash definition, to strangle an opponent; with much either/​or, like Milton.

10  Franciscus Junius (1545–​1602) translated the Bible into Latin with Isaac Tremellius (1510–​80), chiefly when based in Heidelberg. Junius orchestrated the work as a whole and brought it to publication. It is known as the JTB, because the Junius–​Tremellius version of the Old Testament (1579) was continued with Beza’s New Testament in 1593. Further information about Milton’s usage is found in Oxford, e.g. xlvii–​li. 11  Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism.

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Tremellius was a truly formidable Hebraist, so formidable indeed that Milton (whose Hebrew lagged behind his Greek) tends simply to absorb and apply the scholarship which Tremellius wields, without any question. We have to ask, therefore, why Milton names only “Junius.” Was the joint Latin Bible of Junius, Tremellius, and Beza (now usually abbreviated as “JTB”) simply known as “Junius” in Milton’s time? Junius did become known as its organizer and the person responsible for additions and corrections after Tremellius died. He was well known in other capacities by the middle of Milton’s century, and indeed Milton knew Junius Senior more personally through knowing his son, Junius Junior, so to speak, the Old English scholar. Just the same, for our present purposes, Milton’s bald shortening must be expanded in some places to “Junius or more likely Tremellius, or possibly both,” and we may find that his briskness resembles temerity, or a fixed idea. Returning accordingly to De Filio, we consider Milton’s handling of what “Junius” perceives in the commentary to Judg. 2:1. “Nonnunquam enim et personam et verba ipsa Dei prae se fert angelus, etiam sine nomine vel Jehovae vel Dei, sed duntaxat angeli, immo hominis, ut sentit Iunius in Iudic. 2.1 &c.” (“For at times an angel exhibits both the person and the very words either of Jehovah or of God, but only with that of an angel or even a man—​as Junius himself perceives in Judg. 2:1, etc.”) Oxford, 192–​93. The verse reads in JTB: “Quamvis ascendisset nuntius Iehovae (“And an angel [ = nuntius] of the Lord came up [from Gilgal to Bochim” etc.] The commentary there reads: “sive fuerit propheta extra ordinem vocatus, sive sacerdos Pinchas. Hominem non angelum fuisse apparet, quod locus unde venerit exprimitur, neque disparuisse legitur, ut de aliis angelis narratur” (“whether he was a prophet called extra ordinem, or the priest Pinchas. It is clear that he was a man not an angel because the place whence he came is expressed, nor do we read that he disappeared, as is [indeed] narrated about other angels”). Carey translates the key phrase “as Junius himself admits,” responding to ipse in the Latin (Yale, 256). Oxford has it “as Junius himself perceives.” What exactly is the tone of ipse? Why is Junius (not Tremellius) mentioned? In context (MS 78–​82, Oxford, 182–​92) Milton is arguing that since Jehovah may be present in other persons as emissaries, be they angels or even humans, the Son as emissary has no equality with Jehovah himself. Junius is not mentioned in these pages, but many Old Testament passages are adduced to show Jehovah in action by this means. So Junius “himself” means that for Milton the same Junius as translator confirms this subordination of angels as annotator, and although Carey’s implication (“admits”) may be felt, it is clearer elsewhere. The note itself has the admirable succinct pointedness of Tremellius’ handiwork. This “angel” is translated nuntius, and the note insists he is human, since he “comes from” another place and after giving his message does not disappear as Old Testament angels are wont to do. There would be no need at all for ipse if Milton had been alert to Tremellius’ role in the Hebrew scholarship, or had not been preoccupied with Junius. This is a minor example, then, of a certain tendency in De Filio towards overkill. In the next mention of Junius, however, concerning polygamy in the equally passionate context of divorce, Junius is tackled head on. Milton first accuses him of changing the Hebrew text of Leviticus 18:18 as well as its interpretation and translation (366, MS 146m),

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then second (370, MS 148i) of tendentiously forcing his interpretation onto a very obscure passage of Malachi, 2:15. Fighting talk! And third, regarding divorce now (388, MS 157m), he thinks Junius twists the ambiguity typical of prophetic style to suit an unprecedented sense, since “all before Junius” (omnes ante Iunium) took dimittat to mean “let [the husband] dismiss [his wife] whom he hates” instead of “[God] hates dismissing.” Without rehearsing the technicalities of the Hebrew text, which remain obscure and contentious (and are summarized in Oxford’s notes), I conclude as follows. First, Milton mentions “Junius” only in order to refute him. Second, he does not distinguish Junius from Tremellius. Third, on divorce in particular he knows he has a formidable opponent (Tremellius wrote lengthily himself about the Malachi passage). Fourth, winning the argument about polygamy will help him to win the more important one about divorce (since both deny that the law requires one wife for life): Junius is wrong on both. Fifth, the passionate quality of the reasoning becomes visible in the charge made against Junius, that his interpretation is unprecedented. Why does Milton, of all people, object to a new or revisionist interpretation? De Doctrina itself is being thought out on that very principle! Sixth, the topic itself was highly contentious. Tremellius too wrote a lengthy note on this verse.12 Milton gives the refutation all he has, including the rather feeble and ad hominem argument that “Junius” is thinking for himself. The argument that the text and passage are obscure would have sufficed. Seventh, Milton’s main reasoning from scripture holds well: he had thought long and hard about this, and he is on his mettle in tackling the Hebrew—​witness the numerous notes at Oxford, 405–​7.13 Eighth, while we may detect partisanship in his handling of the scholarship, and he invites this by adding weak arguments to good ones, and while too one regrets that he names only Junius as opponent and not that scholar’s more authoritative collaborator, Tremellius, Milton does recognize where to put the effort of his advocacy. Ninth and last, the glimpses of his passionate involvement with the opponents on this subject so dear to his mind and heart make the chapter more, not less, vivid. It shows up the personal dimension on which this whole book puts focus.

Seldenus

It is hardly accidental, then, that as we read onwards in the chapter now reached, I.10, the remaining person whom Milton names in this most distinctive chapter is John Selden.14 Seldenus,15 named twice in quick succession, both times in the scribe’s large-​hand, 12  Oxford, 407n.xcvi.

13  Amongst more important dubieties, they show that Beza changed his mind about another passage, 1 Cor. 9:5: see Oxford, 383–​85, with 406n.lxxv.

14  This is saying (for whatever it may be worth) that Selden has equal weight with Junius in the chapter, and that no other theologian besides Junius has been named between De Filio and this passage. Junius at first mention has been followed by the differently toned rebuttal of theologi, as if they all thought alike on the main point, and were all wrong about it—​Milton versus the rest.

15  John Selden (1584–​1654), the eminent jurist and orientalist, wrote his Uxor Ebraica (1646) on Jewish marriage law. Milton cites him with equal respect in Tetrachordon.

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comes near the climax and conclusion of Milton’s advocacy (Oxford, 392, MS 159i)—​in support, to clinch. Even the uniqueness of his not being a theologian or strictly a biblical scholar, but a comparativist lawyer and an orientalist, points to his decisive status near the climax of proof. Though the passage is familiar from the authorship controversy, let us see what tonal markers we find in it, so as to defamiliarize it and to add to the emphases of typography and positioning. In full, it reads: But the word “fornication,” if it be examined according to the normal usage of the oriental languages, will mean not only adultery, but perhaps whatever [vel quicquid] is called “some base thing” [res turpis aliqua dicitur], perhaps the lack of something [vel rei defectus]16 which could justifiably have been required of a wife, Deut. 24:1 (as Selden, principally [ut cum primis Seldenus], has demonstrated in his Hebrew Wife by many testimonies of rabbis), perhaps whatever [vel quicquid again] is found stubbornly contrary to love, fidelity, help, and companionship—​that is, to the first intention—​as we have shown elsewhere from several passages of scripture, and as Selden has also shown [ut nos alias ex aliquot scripturae locis et Seldenus idem docuit].

Milton does not discuss, in fact never cites, the next verse, which protects the rejected wife’s interests (somewhat). Neither do we learn what authority the rabbis have, for purposes of De Doctrina. Milton lays weight instead on the authority and unspecified evidence of Seldenus. Then he cross-​refers to his own published work and then to its congruence, again, with Selden’s. The repeated name weighs heavily, all the more so because no previous theologian up to this point has been named in support, let alone twice. Selden does receive a similar endorsement elsewhere in Milton’s prose, in the Second Defense, in more expanded epithet:  “Our distinguished fellow-​countryman Selden” (Yale, 673, clarissimus vir Seldenus noster, copytext p. 91i). Here in De Doctrina he is not claimed as noster, whatever that means: perhaps the double honorific mention seemed enough. Equally tantalizing, to one who has worked minutely over the Latin in its manuscript, does Skinner copy the large-​hand of his original, which was often kept for personal names as such (like Solomon, twice, at 388 = MS 157)? Or did Milton himself in dictating bestow this emphasis on Selden, among selected names? We cannot know. But Milton’s reliance on Selden in support for his evidence, his linguistic credentials, and his considered view is unique in De Doctrina. Note that Selden supports Milton in several different ways. He is adducing as many kinds of reason together as he can, as the long-​ awaited climax of the passionate sidelong chapter is felt approaching. The tone, in short, is serious and plain, so that Selden can add weight and momentum, once the complications and doubts have been argued aside by different means and tone. One notes too that each time Milton names Selden after making it plain that he had come to his own conclusions. Selden is a distinguished corroborator. His name adds clout, but the key word is “adds.” Milton is in command. 16  KJV has “some uncleanness,” with the note “Heb. matter of nakedness,” all of which meanings Milton discusses.

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*** De Filio is intense throughout: Chapter 10 rises to intensity. Both express central and heterodox convictions for Milton; both name some names. Where he is less heterodox, from Predestination to Usury, he names few names or none. For the most part, the temperature and the passion and the ad hominem are all lower. If so, the exceptions should interest us, in ways of their own, hitherto not seen.

Zanchius

Zanchius,17 who is the next named theologian, stands out as occurring four times, making four distinct contextual impacts. His approval ratings come almost in reverse order, from dismissal as Scholastic, to virtually warm encouragement. For Zanchius exemplifies unequivocal and Scholastic Trinitarianism, set forth in a huge volume, “as engrossed in the niceties of the doctrine as the scholastics whom Thomas à Kempis, Erasmus, and Melanchthon had deplored” (Kelley, in Yale, 53, and n33). At Oxford, 478 (MS 189) Milton quotes Zanchius on “what in the schools is called the Hypostatic Union.” He then devotes a paragraph to ridiculing Zanchius’ reasoning, as unscriptural, then as presumptuous (claiming to know what happened in Mary’s womb as if he had been there: nec minus audacter […] quam si in utero Mariae ipse […] interfuisset). Here too, he may be twitting Zanchius on his overuse of the pronoun ipse (491n.xviii). Zanchius thus typifies Scholasticism, and soon Milton is enjoying himself wielding an Occam’s razor on his proliferation of unwanted entities, essentia, subsistentia, personalitas, existentia substantialis, not to mention hypostasis itself. Personalitas in particular, the key concept of Trinitarianism, “is nothing more than a word twisted from its proper meaning to patch up a Theologian’s checkmate” (479)—​vox ab signifatione propria ad incitas Theologorum sarciendas detorta. The scorn is felt in the violent mixed metaphor, joining tailoring to a board game. His next paragraph continues the demolition of persona and personalitas and hypostasis, without naming Zanchius, and more calmly in expression. Nonetheless, at this first appearance, we might think the name of Zanchius would be doomed to silence or return for further ridicule. Not so! For next, though he is named in order to stand corrected again, it is now for his only partial understanding of the abolition of the Mosaic law (700, MS 320f). Milton says, “not just in the ceremonial code—​as Zanchius on this passage claims (ut hic vult Zanchius)—​but in the whole Mosaic law, Jews were separated from Gentiles, who of course were ‘alienated from the citizenship of Israel, and outsiders as regards the promise of the covenants’ ” in Ephesians 2:12. It is true, though, that as quoted by Kelley (Yale, 527n9), Zanchius spoke with a different nuance, saying enmity (inimicitae) arose cumprimis [“especially”] ex caerimoniis legibus. At all events, Milton lets Zanchius down more lightly this time. 17  Zanchius, born Girolamo Zanchi (1516–​90), left Italy and Catholicism under the influence of Peter Martyr Vermigli. He settled in Heidelberg. He was a prolific, orthodox writer.

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And Milton lets Zanchius down more lightly still later on in the same chapter (I.27, Oxford, 712, MS 330), on a wider aspect of this recent topic. I quote his words in full, since he seldom speaks so kindly and calmly of another theologian. “When, having pooled the illumination of so many texts, I was thinking that I had affirmed this truth against the view of almost all [omnium ferè] the Theologians whom I had read—​[people] who deny that the whole Mosaic law was abrogated—​I happened to find [fortè reperi] that Zanchius, commenting copiously [fusè scribentem] on Eph. 2, shared my view.” It is curious that they shared a view, since just before Milton had been at pains to demur. Notice too that Milton “happened” to find the passage: did he read Zanchius looking for something else, or did he only happen to read theology? This absorbing passage continues: [H]‌e [Zanchius] adds, and indeed rightly [et rectè quidem], that “a very large part of Theology depends on the explanation of this question: and not even the scriptures can be properly understood, especially their teaching [doctrinam] about justification and good works”—​I would actually say, the whole gospel [totum evangelium ego quidem dixerim]—​“unless this point, about the abrogation of the law, be understood.” And he proves his case accurately enough, but is not energetic enough in using what he has proved [sed probatis non strenuè utitur]; getting entangled indecisively [involutus et fluctuans] in many subsequent exceptions, which leave a slightly less attentive reader rather uncertain.

Milton’s own reading is nothing if not “attentive,” also strenuous and decisive! Notice also that he abhors uncertainty. And next, just as he “happened” to be reading Zanchius, he recalls something similar:  “Cameron’s view [expressed] somewhere is also the same regarding the abolition of the whole law.” This must be from memory, recollecting his use of Cameron for Tetrachordon (Oxford, 726n.xxvi): he reads theologians for his own purposes—​not casually, not for fun, but without awe, and he’s in charge. Last, “The father alone knows the day and the hour of Christ’s coming.” Milton briskly recommends Zanchius for further reading on this topic: “Zanchius’ book De Fine Seculi, Volume 7, will also furnish very useful reading matter on this point.”18 The sentence has been “added by JP [Jeremie Picard], squeezed in after paragraph end.” Presumably this teacherly afterthought reflects Milton’s own reading, as well as his comparative lack of interest in the topic. The chapter itself, “On Complete Glorification,” is lengthy yet not complex or intense. It resembles the original commonplace-​book manner, seen likewise in I.9 on the governance of angels, and more often in Book 2. The proportion of citation to analysis goes much higher in these chapters than in the ones where Milton gets his teeth into a topic or 18  Oxford, 870n13, concerning MS 433f: /​Poterit etiam de hac re legi utilissimus liber Zanchii de fine seculi, tom 7/​(“Zanchius’ book De Fine Seculi, vol. 7, will also furnish very useful reading matter on this point”).

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an opponent. Can we reasonably infer that this allusion to Zanchius was composed first of the four, though we meet it last in reading the chapters in their numbered sequence? Might we infer too that the four allusions were composed in reverse order, from dutiful to amicably interested to mild correction, to the scathing caricature about hypostasis? Does prolonged reading of Zanchius make Milton disagree more and more with him? Or do his tone and manner of engagement become harsher in proportion to the interest of each topic? Neither view quite matches a straight line. Many such things about the composition and development of De Doctrina suggest themselves, only to tantalize when pressed. And whereas we see palpable development in the states of the MS, we do not know if the changes took years or only days to be worked out. Zanchius, nevertheless, gives intriguing clues and some secure inferences. One speculates, only to be tantalized. But at the least, as Jeffrey Miller shows, the Zanchius passages reveal to us that Milton’s protestations of “belated reading” are not mere rhetoric.19

Cameron

After the careful quoting of Zanchius about abrogated law (712), the allusion to “Cameronis” sounds additional and perfunctory. Who was he, this Scottish near-​ countryman of Milton’s? John Cameron (ca. 1579–​1625) was a moderate Calvinist who taught at Saumur, and taught the great Amyraldus there. He had replaced Gomarus, of whom more soon. Milton must have read him more thoroughly for Tetrachordon (where he is named several times) than for De Doctrina. The tone of the allusion is afterthought or overspill, in a passage where he has been unusually courteous to Zanchius. Nothing more can be securely said.

Polanus

But in the same chapter, I.27, on the next page, while continuing the important theme of “the Gospel and Christian freedom,” Milton lays into our next theologian, Polanus,20 twice, by name, to launch successive paragraphs of animated rebuttal (Oxford, 714). He is following up his approval of the position of Zanchius and Cameron—​that the whole law, with the obligation to obey it, has been abrogated—​by tackling other theologians, who (as in “that doctrine of the believing Pharisees,” dogma illud Pharisaeorum credentium) retain some role for the Mosaic law. Not so: we learn the will of God from “the actual teaching of the gospel, the guidance of the promised spirit of truth, […] and God’s law written on the hearts of the faithful” (713–​15). And not only that, but (new paragraph) “Polanus insists,” Instat Polanus. The paragraph, unusually, puts the main verb first. Instat means “he presses upon” us. The wording gives the idea weight:  we feel the pressure of Polanus upon the hard-​won right view preceding, upon us. “Christians […] no longer owe obedience to the law, but 19  Miller, “Milton, Zanchius, and the Rhetoric of Belated Reading,” 199–​219.

20  Polanus was Amandus Polanus von Polandsdorf (1561–​1610), ending his career as a professor of the Old Testament at Basel.

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something else: namely, that they are no longer bound to absolutely perfect fulfillment in this life of God’s law.” Polanus’ dilution of Galatians 4:4–​5 is then rebutted by Milton, in the name of perfectibility, Polanus’ four lines by Milton’s seventeen. He turns things around by an indignant rhetorical question: Quod quis non videt longè aliter se habere? “Who does not see that the situation is far otherwise?” The tone then stays equable, urgent without heat or animus. Milton keeps his eye on the verse and his point. We see no fireworks of the kind we saw in De Filio. Why not? I take it that in the chapter as a whole, the important topic is treated with more light than heat, and speculate that this was Milton’s manner and method in chapters composed early; not so early that they comprised only definitions and citations, but earlier than the ones where he had gained confidence and girt up his loins for more overtly personal, impassioned rebuttals. I hope this is a benign, not vicious circle of inference.

Luther and Calvin

In saying this, I grant that the whole work contains too few named allusions, too scattered, and too different in length and force, to allow secure conclusions. Those which remain to be discussed exemplify these grounds for caution. One is a minor use of a major name, Luther. The third is a list of names, like a bibliographical entry, including Calvin. Both are read at second hand. Only the second is a full-​blooded interlocution, and at long last we engage more fully with a name we would expect to hear, that of Amesius (one of “the ablest of divines” whom Edward Phillips identifies as part of Milton’s studying of scripture). All in all, surprisingly miscellaneous. For this is how Luther, the biggest gun of all in Reformation theology, appears on 892, in the long chapter I.33: “This same view [that hell is far outside the earth, not in its bowels] is said to be [esse fertur] that of Chrysostom, and of Luther and other more recent thinkers”—​and of Milton himself. Kelley (Yale, 630n32) takes fertur to mean Milton “is drawing on a secondary source which I have still to locate.” So Milton’s sole encounter with Luther is at second hand, as well as on a topic of secondary importance (for did not Chrysostom, with whom he is lumped, say, “We search not where [hell] is, but how we may flee it”? Calvin, similarly, appears within an alphabetical list, in another secondary source, on another secondary subject, Sunday observance (1054, II.7, MS 582). This time, Milton closes his discussion with the list: “I see, too, [Atque] that this was more or less the view [in hac ferme sententia] held by all the most learned theologians—​Bucer, Calvin, [Peter] Martyr, Musculus, Ursinus, Gomarus, and others.” It is an offhand remark, since these are surely not “all the most learned” of theologians! They are set out alphabetically like a simple list of authorities, not Milton’s manner at all until this moment. The alphabetical arrangement was upset when the scribe added Gomarum after Ursinum. So though the witness has its rhetorical aspects, it is also an afterthought, not engaging personally with any of these writers (and sidelining the most formidable, Calvin).21 21  Not to deny that some of these theologians contribute to Milton elsewhere, notably Bucer on divorce (whom Milton translated) or Gomarus on that subject; similarly with Camero.

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Ludovicus Capellus

Louis Cappel (1585–​1658)22 may have been still living when Milton wrote his paragraph (Oxford, 977, MS 517f–​18) about covering or uncovering the head during worship. Capellus held, like Milton, that churches should heed “the reason for a command, not its letter” (rationem not litteram), or in Capellus’ wording, mentem, & rationem qua nititur (“intention, and the reason on which it relies”). Capellus learnedly showed this (eruditè ostendit) “more than the others who discuss this passage” (praeter caeteros in hunc locum). Thus Milton approves of his exposition of 1 Corinthians 11:4, according to which men should uncover their heads when praying or prophesying (though women are to do the opposite). But, says Milton, times have changed (nunc verò). Men are to prophesy with head covered as a sign of authority, and to hear prophecy thus also, “because that now befits (nunc decet) mature and freeborn sons [of God].” It seems to me at least a circuitous denial of scripture as Milton elsewhere understands it (non nisi ex scriptura), and a guideline by which changing custom might have been allowed to revise other scriptural injunction (monogamy and divorce, a whole road of thought which Milton did not take in I.10). Capellus makes more sense, appealing to the need to stay upright and conscious during worship when the arctic weather compels it, to which Milton adds when extreme heat compels it. These are reasons of compulsion by “inconvenience or downright impropriety” (incommode vel indecenter admodum), in a world known to be larger than the Mediterranean. How idiosyncratic that Milton cites the pragmatic Hebrew scholar of Saumur for this alone: Cappel had questioned the integrity of the Hebrew text and duly outraged Protestantism, but Milton does not mention or does not know this.

Amesius

It is thus a relief to reach our final person, Amesius, taken slightly out of sequence for emphasis because this name erupts into life and good questions. Some are addressed in Chapter 8, since Amesius is named noster Amesius, which places him in that chapter’s further discussion of Milton’s interpersonal dialectic as seen in his pronouns. Ames is invoked by name to take the secondary topic of Sunday worship back to an underlying principle; only then, as the chapter goes on, for his view to be disputed—​a more vital engagement indeed than the ones with Luther, Calvin, and the bunch! Accordingly, reserving full discussion to Chapter 8,23 I claim that the most exciting thing about the mention of Ames is this:  he is ours, noster. Whatever company this affirms, it sounds a note unheard in any previous interlocution. It must mean something; it may mean several things at once. I  hear (a)  companionship of some sort, the most natural being nationality; (b) respect, especially in the main allusion; and (c) tact in the 22  He taught at Saumur, with Placaeus and Amyraldus, whither Milton’s young correspondent Richard Jones was going to study when Milton wrote Letter 25.

23  William Ames (1576–​1633) was once a Fellow of Milton’s college and known from Edward Phillips’s Life of Milton as among those “ablest of Divines” from whom Milton had his pupils collate extracts for a “Tractate” (The Early Lives of Milton, 61).

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anonymity of the subsequent difference of opinion. It lets us conclude on the diversity of the gathered interlocutors.

Conclusions

Variety or diversity remains dull as a concept. “So what?” is the natural retort. In reply (because working on De Doctrina makes you instinctively think in terms of dialogue and dispute, objection and reply), I have found both the gathering and the resultant diversity enlightening. For one thing, I relish the thought of Milton taking time off, from defining and text gathering, to argue about their purport with other people. Second, the gathered throng may not share any further commonality, yet subgroups do. He argues at varying length, by varying rhetoric. He agrees or disagrees variously. His valuable personal animation relieves the grey industriousness. For anyone with a feeling for the disputatiousness of intellectual training in those times, he provides choice specimens. Nor does he get it all his own way. Some of the disputants answer back. Moreover, in the context of this book, each exchange prompts or provokes me to make responses of my own, just as he said he wanted. In that regard, considering the size of De Doctrina one might better speak of the infrequencies than the frequencies in these interlocutions. This isn’t quibbling: Milton begins the work by claiming not to rely on theologians and their systems (“too long”!); yet he finds a need (despite long, quiet stretches) to engage with them after all, for particular occasions. So gathering them up, and considering each as personal exchange within a chapter, has rarity value, is overdue, and is thus worthwhile. Differences can then legitimately interest us, and not least when they are of length, tone, animation, good or bad temper, and the other characteristics which we have been eliciting. Crucial to that has been their original, Latin words, both the intriguing individuality of Milton’s excellent Latin, his second mother tongue, and its person-​to-​person manifestations, showing the dialectical or disputational qualities embedded in his personality. These “interlocutors” betoken later composition, in a range and even a sequence we can just glimpse—​ranging from the adding of mere corroborations at the end of chapter or section, to taking issue within a chapter (Ames, U-​turn), to major refutation on a passage or point, to central in the most major (Junius to Selden in I.10). Selden strikes me most of all: in a very developed chapter, on a subject dear to Milton’s heart, he adduces the scholarship and views of a luminary from his own time—​bucking the usual trend towards independence and acrimony. I take this departure to show how strongly he feels about divorce, and perhaps how conscious he is of being out on a limb—​not so much in advocating companionate marriage as when wresting scripture to his own purposes, in the absence of any idea of a developing revelation within scripture. All alike strike a spark of some sort, to be made his own or wrestled down gladiatorially.

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Chapter 6

PHILOLOGY IN MILTON’S “BEST possession,” founded on scripture alone, the words that matter are the words of scripture, the Word itself, normally as given in the Latin of the Protestant Latin Bible. As part of this undertaking, however, particular expressions in Hebrew or Greek or Latin are subjected to philological scrutiny, usually etymology, sometimes grammar. For what purposes—​to win what arguments—​and how does he deploy his philological expertise? By grammar, including syntax, I mean the study of form and function in the twists and turns of ancient usage. Although questions of grammar in extinct languages are hard to bring to life, they were passionately discussed until recently by philologists—​of the same order as Milton’s quarrels with Salmasius over false quantities (mispronunciations) in Latin versification. Perhaps it is the passion itself which can keep these arcana alive. At any rate, the passionate eristic of Milton’s deployment makes this chapter’s subject. Thus it is for etymology in particular. The name etymology means “true account” or “truth about a word,” which originally meant its origins (as far as recoverable), then derivation (metaphor from rivers, rivus being Latin for a stream). So, if you know the linguistic history or componentry of a word, you may think you can pontificate about its idea, or narrow its applications, because you know the origin. Such conduct of inquiry tends to ignore units larger than the individual word, like phrases and clauses, and to narrow the sense of complex words unacceptably. Still, it happens. It happens when in the course of argument we wish to insist or to redirect. If I  said, “abrupt must mean something is broken off, because it comes from Latin abrumpere, to break off,” I would be arguing for the sake of truth in the form of historicity, no great issues, only a piffling pedantic phialetheia. But if I said to a domineering Pantisocrat that Pantisocrats do, or ought to, be “equal in everything,” he or she would smell trouble. Must all Senators be senes, old men? The examples1 of Milton’s philology in action are chosen to illustrate his diverse, local purposes. They are shown, mostly, in order of occurrence. They range from negative to positive and from simplicity to tortuosity, these qualities often measurable by length or by stylistic shrillness.

Haeresis and Haereticus (Epistle, MS 4, Oxford, 8)

In his opening Epistle, which appeals to readers for self-​restraint and a fair hearing, Milton does not take the etymological road, of saying that in Greek heresy (haιresis) originally meant simply “choice.” He does not disarm, reduce, or stand on philology. He does not do what he does do in Of Civil Power. 1  Further examples can be found in Appendix 1.

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In that work he declares:

They should first interpret to them, that heresie, by what it signifies in that language, is no word of evil note; meaning only the choise or following of any opinion good or bad in religion or any other learning:  and thus not only in heathen authors, but in the New testament it self without censure or blame. Acts 15:5. certain of the heresie of the Pharises which beleevd. and 26.5 after the exactest heresie of our religion I livd a Pharise. In which sense Presbyterian or Independent may without reproach be calld a heresie.2

By contrast, in the Epistle of De Doctrina he does not tackle definition head on. Instead, because his tone is eirenic, he lets Paul do the defining for him. “Libris tantummodo sacris adhaeresco; haeresin aliam, sectam aliam sequor nullam […] Hoc si haeresis est, fateor equidem cum Paulo, Acts 24:14.” (“I cleave to the holy writings alone; I follow no other heresy, no other party-​line […]. If this is heresy, I for my part confess, with Paul, Acts 24:14.”) Milton’s disavowal of heresy invokes Paul’s similar one at Caesarea, and shelters behind Luke’s wording of it:  “But this I  confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy (secundum viam illam quam sectam dicunt) so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and the prophets.” The claim may be similar yet not quite the same. Milton’s updates the “law and the prophets” (which would exclude the third part of the Old Testament, the “writings” like Psalms) to the two Christian Testaments, so as to include Paul, couched in his typical double negative. So far at least, the contrast with the tactic of Civil Power suggests that local purpose may govern Milton’s deployment of etymology and, more widely, philology. Mind you, if the purpose of avoiding definition was eirenic, it cannot have lulled the touchy or the fully persuaded. Churches, as distinct from individual readers, had long-​established senses of heresies. Indeed, the pejorative sense of heresy and heretic (“those who are choosy”) was already usurping the main sense and thriving in the New Testament:  1 Corinthians 11:19, Galatians 5:20, 2 Peter 2:1, and more. Accordingly Milton’s sheltering behind Paul might alert individual readers, if not whole churches, by protesting too much.3 Moreover, such readers would be left speculating which chapters of the huge work would most require heresy-​hunting.

Invalidations

Whereas, prudently, Milton withheld his philological weaponry in broaching the subject of heresy in his Epistle, we can watch him wielding both grammar and etymology to refute. In the cases of natura and fatum he argues that both words originate in an originary Deism, to refute scepticism (therewith upholding orthodoxy). Then, twice, grammar, not etymology, is adduced to scotch as facile the argument from plural forms in 2  Yale, VII.247: “heresie” here is Greek hairesis, αιρησις, in the root sense of “choice.”

3  The etymologizing is further discussed by Hale and Cullington in “Universis Christi Ecclesiis,” 3–​15.

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Hebrew to crypto-​Trinitarian deity: these negations foreshadow his most salient unorthodoxy, in De Filio.

Natura and Fatum

In Book 1, Chapter 2 (MS 9, Oxford, 25–​26) we read: Nonnulli naturam aut fatum supremum quoddam in rebus esse argutantur: sed natura natam se fatetur […] et fatum quid nisi effatum divinum omnipotentis cuiuspiam numinis potest esse? (“Some people babble that nature or fate has supremacy over events, but nature [the word natura] declares that it was born [nata] […]. And what can fate [the word fatum] be but the divine decree [effatum] of some almighty deity?”) Natura declares by its root, natus from nasci, that nature the thing was “born,” so it had a beginning, so cannot itself be the supreme being. By the same reasoning fate, fatum, is a product, of speaking. The verb for, fari means “to speak,” and the noun form is what has been effatum, “spoken out” as divine decree.4 The etymologies are not separate as proofs but indications from language of Milton’s surrounding more deductive arguments for the existence of God and for divine purpose in creation. These arguments from derivation contribute to the understanding of De Doctrina. First, the supremacy of God is being established, by reference to pagan philosophers such as the Stoics: commentaries suggest Seneca.5 Second, with reference to the question of Milton’s authorship, commentaries note parallels (found also in Paradise Lost) with Artis Logicae: “fatum sive decretum Dei.”6 Third, a foundation is being laid for rebutting Trinitarian arguments later, with reference to the Son in I.5, who—​since he has a beginning and the name and status of “Son” both entail a beginning—​cannot be supreme God. So the derivations of natura and fatum help Milton’s claim of God’s supremacy over the Son in power, in being, and in efficacy by utterance. These, as yet without mention of the Son, recur in Milton’s clustering, next, of Hebrew etymologies.

Elohim

Not to overstate polemical intent, we notice Milton’s wider linguistic interest in divine names. He observes that names make statements or promises, according to the grammatical person used of or by God. Yahweh is the third person; the first person is Ehyeh. He notes that Ehyeh has the imperfective aspect. God both was, Yahweh, and is or will be, ehyeh; est vel erit idem; energetic in both the perfective and the imperfective aspects. Similarly, God is named in the first person as well as the third: “I am,” which connects with the idea of promissory agency. 4  The cognate Greek word given in Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary and Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary is θέσφατον, thes-​phaton, familiar from Homer. Fate is “god-​speaking,” from the root verb phemi, phasi etc. 5  Kelley, Yale, 31 and 31n3.

6  Kelley, Yale, 31n5. Ong as well as Kelley now (see earlier in this chapter and in chap. 5).

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But still he pounces on the plural form (only) in Elohim (MS 52i, Oxford, 40–​43). “And the name ’elohim [‘gods’], although it may in Hebrew be plural, is nevertheless used of the one God: Gen. 1:1: ’elohim bara [‘God created’]; Ps. […] 86:10 ’elohim lebaddeka and frequently. But also ’eloah [‘god’] is used in the singular: Ps. 18:31.” The point is a theological commonplace. It is clearest of all in ’elohim lebaddeka, “God, you alone,” where ’elohim is plural in form but singular in meaning; lebaddeka is singular in both respects, making the phrase as a whole a singular. Milton’s surrounding paragraph dwells on the orthodoxy with thoroughness and glee.

Singulars and Plurals Continued (I.5, MS 69i, Oxford, 166–​67)

And yet this is no comfortable orthodoxy. Whereas Chapter 2 affirmed the being of one sole God without overtly diminishing the Son’s, Chapter 5 drives a wedge between the two. It contrasts the God of the Pentateuch (from which come all the Hebrew names Milton discusses) and the Son of the New Covenant. To do this, he repeats that the plural form of some names for God does not imply any plurality of being or of personhood as in orthodox Trinitarianism. “Name, attributes, and works, and finally the divine honour of God are always ascribed [in scriptural texts] to the one and only God the Father […] if anywhere these things are ascribed to the son, it is done in such a way as to make it readily intelligible that they all ought principally and properly to be ascribed to the father alone” (MS 68i, Oxford, 165). He continues (MS 69i, Oxford, 167): The same rationale applies to the Hebrew word ‘adonim, the Lord, which is indeed plural in number but is singular in meaning, and has plural affixes in the Hebrew manner […]. These matters have usually been annotated sedulously by the Grammarians and Lexicographers themselves, as also regarding the Hebrew word ba‘al when used of a species […] for even among the Greeks the word δεσπότης, that is, Lord, is commonly so used with plural number but singular meaning, presumably to show respect and give honour.

While Milton does not explicitly invoke etymology, he names “Grammarians and Lexicographers,” overlapping classes. His urgency and insistence are felt in “themselves,” the grammarians and lexicographers ipsis, for who else but these professionals would know the usage? Yet the urgency leads him to adduce an apparent parallel from Greek, and pagan Greek at that. If true, then, the idea would begin to seem universal. However, although an intensifying plural or “plural of majesty” is well known for Hebrew, praising God or kings by pluralizing them while they remain a single being, the idiom is less secure for the Greek. As David Norbrook concluded, the Euripides quotations “are not, modern classicists would consider, very persuasive in proving their point. The author of the treatise could not find any parallel for the Hebrew intensive plural in New Testament Greek, where despotes is always singular when used of God.” Besides, Milton does not consider whether any correspondence between a Greek idiom and a Hebrew one (from unconnected language families) would be analogy rather than

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connection.7 So when the stakes of argument are high and Milton enlists it, it is a dubious etymological analogy. On the main point, then, he continues to disallow the false etymology8 which would derive a plural being from a plural grammatical form, when the case is that of Hebrew names for God. On the immediate point of De Filio, however, he wields philology both strenuously and tendentiously. We shall find a similar urge towards total victory in a less central, and so equally illuminating instance. And so, with apologies for the lengthy quotation and tedious but needful technicality, to another hobbyhorse, mortalism.

Analusai (I.14, MS 179i, Oxford, 456–​57)

After giving other reasons for mortalism, the heterodox idea that body and soul both die, including two more statements from the Greek of Euripides that “each dissolved part returns into its own origins” (MS 178f),9 Milton argues the same position when he tackles Paul’s words in Philippians 1:23:  “desiring to be dissolved and to be with Christ”—​cupiens dissolvi et cum Christo esse. The Greek verb is ἀναλῦσαι, whose form is not passive but active, hence probably in function intransitive. Milton says he will “pass over the uncertain and differing translation of the word analysai, which means nothing less than ‘to be dissolved.’ ” What he “passes over” in this instance is the point at issue, for as Oxford comments (465n.xxi), “Among the various meanings of analysai [infinitive of the present tense and active voice, like the paradigmatic verb λυειν] are dying and loosing a ship’s moorings.” The former meaning, of “dying,” is a general word, in which the root idea of “loosing” is no longer felt. The latter occurs frequently for going on a journey, hence for dying (like English “to pass away”). Elsewhere, Paul refers briskly to his departure, ἀναλύσεως, at 2 Tim. 4:6. Translators of Paul’s fervent passage opt for “departure,” since Paul is not thinking about the process of dying at all. The whole passage in the KJV runs: “Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour; yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you” (vv.20–​24). The whole sense and drive of Paul’s dilemma suggest nothing about dissolution. What was Milton thinking of, then? He says, “ut taceam,” the uncertain translation of analysai, “to pass over.” Is he almost saying he will ignore etymology? What does “nothing less than” to be dissolved mean—​“simply and solely” that, or the exact opposite, “anything but” that? The same ambiguity in Milton’s use of nihil minus quam and comparable phrases is found in several passages. Kelley thinks Milton must mean his “general argument concerning the middle state of the soul” (Yale, 409n22, emphasis mine). 7  Norbrook, “Euripides, Milton, and Christian Doctrine,” 38 and 40n6. (Further discussion in chap. 7.) 8  Found in e.g. Polanus, see Kelley in Yale, 234n75.

9  Norbrook, “Euripides, Milton, and Christian Doctrine,” 37.

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But because Milton so often prefers a strenuous, immoderate expression, the phrasing occludes his argument. I conclude that he will not let etymology spoil his main point, that he would like to shelve it if he cannot force it, and that he is saying these things to himself more than to any readers. The curious confusion returns a moment later, when he argues that dying and being with Christ may be a long wait, since “there is no time without motion.” Thus “someone about to sail desires to cast off and to be in port, [but] makes hardly a mention of the journey in between.” Sic navigaturus cupit solvere et esse in portu, where solvi means the same as analysai, to set sail. Zanchius commented on Phil 1:23 that sailors, “nautas, […] simpliciter etiam analusai dicuntur. Sic Chrysostomus, sic Syriacus, sic Beza, & alii” (Yale, 409n21) (‘[…] allusion being made to sailors, who loose their ship [transitively] when they are setting off from some port, and are said also simply [intransitively] to analusai.” In taking up the rejected sense to prove a different point, Milton shows he did not want to address the etymology and currency, and multiple signification, of analusai. “Ut taceam” indeed: he is simply dismissing an obstacle, like a literary critic who “brackets off” unwelcome evidence. In both cases, while this may irk the disinterested philologist, the reason is that the main line of argument has overriding importance. Thus etymology may vary in use between a minor support and a minor objection. In the case of analusai, because of the recurrence in the avoided sense nearby, we get closer to the process in Milton’s mind and style: he finds a new use for what he has kept silent (taceam).

Persona (I.5 and I.14; MS 54 and 190–​91; Oxford, 138–​39 and 480–​81)

We can now turn from a minor aspect of a lesser hobbyhorse, to a major aspect of the greatest of all, persona, in Milton’s dismantling of the doctrine of the Trinity. His account of persona differs from the disallowing ones, and from the somewhat arbitrary one of analusai. He pins his reasoning to a derivation which he now accepts and limits, in order to dismiss the orthodoxy which redefined the older sense. While he gives little space to the etymology of persona (having many weightier logical or numerical objections to the Trinity), he does address the derivation briskly, twice. The first we read in sequence is a sarcastic quip. The second declares the origin of persona in the “masks” of drama. The first presupposes the standard definition-​by-​derivation. The second enunciates it. There is no discussion, no ramification. At MS 54 he says: “[L]‌et us solely follow what divine scripture teaches. Let no one therefore wait for me to prefix here a long argument from metaphysics, and to call in [advocem] that whole drama of personalities”—​personalitatum illud totum drama (Oxford, 138–​39). The entire phrase encourages hostile inspection. Placed first in its phrase, personalitatum is an abstract, late coinage. Illud implies “that well-​known,” hence trite and dismissible abstraction. Totum means that nothing whatever of value lurks in it. Drama, accordingly, hints at fiction. The etymological component is delayed to the close of the phrase, mere “drama.” At MS 190m he says: “But in fact subsistence is absolutely nothing beyond substantial existence, [while] ‘personhood’ (personalitas) is nothing more than a word twisted

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from its proper meaning to patch up a theologian’s impasse—​ab significatione propria ad incitas Theologorum sarciendas.” Milton powerfully mixes metaphors here, joining this allusion to a board-​game [calces] with the tailoring term sarcire (‘to patch up’). Finally (MS 190f), in the wake of this dismissal, he declares that “ ‘Person’ is a term transferred from the theatre into the Theologians’ schools to mean the same as any one individual being—​persona est vox a scena in scholas theologorum traducta, ut idem significet quod unum individuum.” Very clearly, then, the etymology is a subordinate or confirmatory part of the proof. It is used reductively, as if only the oldest surviving sense of a word counted. It remains an unexamined sense. What has Milton ignored or does not know? First, Latin persona translated Greek prosopon, for the “face” seen on a stage, and the character or personage it helps to represent. Second, prosopon is a different synecdoche or image, in that persona does not mean “face” but (at least as was thought in Milton’s time) the actor’s voice which “sounds through” the mask—​per-​sonat—​a voice or voicing. Third, there are many other senses of the Greek word, in the Septuagint for instance:  they run for columns in Lampe’s lexicon, including the Septuagint (an earlier, more disinterested Greek, long before talk of the Trinity). A whole spread and history of development preceded the “schools of the Theologians”; what and when are these “schools” which Milton lumps together? So in this pivotal discussion, etymology amounts to a self-​serving snap definition, a snapshot within a long process. By taking the Latin at face value, and ignoring its connections with its primary Greek, his etymological powers remain underemployed.

Incompatibles: Onah versus Res Turpis Onah

When Book 1, Chapter 10 discusses Hebrew derivations regarding polygamy, and then grounds for divorce, Hebrew scholarship is exercised, indeed foregrounded, more so than for Latin and Greek etymologies so far. At MS 149, discussing “the power of a wife with regard to her husband’s body,” he says: “That power was in fact called ‘onah in Hebrew, Exod. 21:10, and means appointed time (statum tempus); and the same power is in this chapter named due goodwill (debita volentia); but as to what is due the Hebrew word is quite outspoken (Hebraea vox non tacet).” Yet the Oxford notes (404n.xlix) find that the “due goodwill” of the Latin and Greek could “hardly be less specific.” Much hinges on the Hebrew, then, but that too is uncertain: witness the opaque entry of Brown, Driver, and Briggs in their Hebrew Dictionary entry at 773 column i.10 Despite Milton’s eager urging, it is chiefly the context in Exodus 21, 10  “n.f. cohabitation (N H time, LO = B H; poss. response or correspondence, commerce […] or else euphemist., specific time […] i.e. her marriage rights” (Francis Brown, S.  R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1906, corrected 1951), 773 col. I). This and further complexities are explained in Oxford, 372–​73 and nn. ad loc. Milton is inferring the basic form or taking it from a dictionary.

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of sexual access for wives (plural) to a single husband, which makes the meaning plain. Considered purely as etymology, therefore, Milton’s reasoning has something of delicacy and more of advocacy, or he is talking to himself or assuming some knowledge of Hebrew in his readers—​most likely some combination of these. Res Turpis

In any case, the grounds of incompatibility for divorce matter more than these details of polygamy, like this ordinance by which every wife got her due turn at the marriage bed. The key term comes from Deuteronomy 24:1, yet not explicitly. The Hebrew term, ‘ervat dabar, does not appear. Is Milton being delicate again, or thinking it out to himself, or consciously avoiding a full etymologizing? His words and his long discussion of divorce have received prolonged attention. Yet I suggest he does not do the obvious and delve into ‘ervat dabar. Let readers judge: “Tertius locus est Deut. 24:1. Si duxerit quis uxorem, maritusque fuerit eius, eritque ut non inveniat gratiam in oculis eius, quia invenit in ea nuditatem rei, sive rem turpem, scribet ei labellum repudii, tradetque in manum eius, dimittetque eam domo sua. Hic, si causa vera est, non ficta, quae potest esse cordis durities?” (“The third passage is Deut. 24:1: if anyone has married a wife and been her husband, and it happens that she does not find favour in his eyes, because he has found in her some nakedness, or a base thing, he shall write her a bill of repudiation and deliver it into her hand, and he shall send her away from his house. Here, if the cause is true, not feigned, what hardness of heart can there be?” Oxford, 386–​87.) What follows is not etymology. It is almost the opposite:  not the delving into the original words or their context, but instead a survey of later usage and its applications and extensions over centuries—​rabbinic interpretations of “nakedness” and “base thing,” what C. S. Lewis would call successive “speaker’s meaning” rather than “words’ meaning.” To repeat, it is striking and puzzling, that instead of insisting on a word’s oldest or original usage (like natura from nasci) Milton slights that usage in favour of a prolonged account of later, developing usage. To offer some explanation in terms of etymology, we find so far that Milton’s etymologizing in De Doctrina is not frequent or systematic in application and varies in scope and intent. The particular specimen here concerns a matter which he had decided for himself long since, and had published his views several times. Thus the present content is self-​summary: he is reiterating. Etymology is not discovery or excogitation, except insofar as we discover more about his mind engaged in persuasion.

What Else?

Without examining every instance of etymologizing, we can conclude by saying they range from simple to complex, from straightforward whether corroborating or rebutting, to self-​advantaging and partisan. (Further examples are listed and discussed in Appendix 1 for anyone interested to pursue.) The extremes of the range are seen in two examples of Hebrew words enlisted for his impassioned argument for divorce in I.10. One exposition pins everything down, in

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the enlisting of Old Testament polygamy to support Christian divorce. The other does the opposite, enlarging and extending the denotation of the key concept, because some rabbis had extended it. In the one case, etymology reduces sense to the first writing. In the other, it considers semantic development—​and most unusually at that, since Milton does not even cite the operative Hebrew words. Onah is handled in a way quite opposite to the vague res turpis. It would be unjust, by isolating this pair of words, to say Milton plays fast and loose with etymology. It would be fairer to say his handling is arbitrary, in the double sense of “erratic” or “inconsistent” and “consequent on his own judgment,” with the further implication of prior judgment, advantaging by his fluctuating local operation some main line of argument. Some principle or axiom is argued with passion, philology included. As to axioms: just out of reach lies some axiomatic bonding in his thinking about grammar and about scripture: deity and grammatical agency are single because he thinks numerically. Better to create a class having only one member, the Son as generated not created, than to join and so blur the aspects of divine agency. As to principles or fixed convictions: divorce is so necessary, for compassion’s sake and for reason’s, that surely scripture endorses it, or at least cannot deny it. Thus etymology, in the scriptural languages, must be enlisted, so that this “truth of words” shall corroborate conviction.

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Chapter 7

THE PAGAN ALLUSIONS SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGIES WRITTEN in Latin, of the kind to which De Doctrina belongs, could bring in classical allusions at will, because they were normal in a Latin discourse, and useful locally to assist an argument or to sound an educated grace-​note. But they deserve comment within Milton’s theology for two reasons. First, they are few, despite his exceptional classical attainments and his masterly appropriation of pagan antiquity for other genres. Secondly, however, we might expect there to be none at all, in a work which insists that only scripture is to count as evidence: pagan witness should cut no ice. Putting the two comments together, therefore, may help us to understand his mind at its work in this his “dearest possession,” quibus melius aut pretiosius nihil habeo. By examining the pagan allusions we may see if they have special effect, and if so, what sorts of effect; also to what extent they are involuntary or incidental, or reveal something idiosyncratic. Greeks outnumber Romans, and on the whole are more striking. They are more diverse too, taken from more centuries and genres, prose and verse alike. They comprise: Aristotle (five times), Euripides (twice), Homer (twice), Plutarch, and Thucydides. Rome contributes the three main Augustan poets, Virgil (twice), Ovid, and Horace. Being more numerous, the Greek writers are taken first, in order of frequency. Among Romans, the reliance on poets hints that for Milton they stood out from the staple or medium of theological Latin prose.

Aristotle

As a general point, first, we note that Aristotle is cited, in Latin, not quoted in his original Greek (like the Bible itself). Presumably his works were normally read in translation, being familiar, so to speak the air which humanists like Milton breathed, for thought forms, distinctions, and method. Coming to particulars, in I.2 [MS 15] we find Aristotle cited for being wrong or ill-​ judged (“non ita commode”). Milton says: Hinc non ità commodè, actus purus, ut solet ex Aristotele, dici videtur Deus; Sic enim agere nihil poterit, nisi quod agit; idque necessario; cum tamen omnipotens sit liberrimèque agat. (“Hence it does not seem so suitable for God to be called ‘pure actuality’ [actus purus], as—​on Aristotle’s authority—​he usually is; for he will then have power to do nothing except what he does do, and he will do that of necessity, even despite the fact that he is all-​powerful and has total freedom of action.”)1 So Aristotle’s emphasis on action (in the Ethics and elsewhere) does not suit 1  Aristotle, Metaphysics, Q, 6–​7 (1048a25–​1049b3). The Scholastics interpreted Aristotle’s energeia (“actuality”) as in God’s case excluding dynamis (“potentiality”); Milton rejected this view as part of his anti-​Trinitarian stance (Kelley in Yale, 145n47).

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Milton’s God’s eighth attribute, omnipotence. God must be free to do or not do. Aristotle is not so much part of Milton’s argument as an obstacle to it. On the four other occasions when he is adduced, he does appear in support, not for rebuttal; it is again in Latin and in summary. Now he is a minor corroborator or explainer. Thus he is enlisted from the Metaphysics again in Milton’s chapter on Creation, I.7; also from the peri psyches there, and the peri kosmou, and from the Physics in I.13, on corporal death. It deserves notice that in a work based on scripture alone, which derides as Scholastic obfuscation the arguments of several opponents, Milton needs Aristotle enough that he names him the most of all ancient authors. He and his Scholastic followers (diluters, distorters) are a felt presence in the local argumentation of De Doctrina. Yet he does not speak in his own voice or tongue. Similarly, but now unnamed, Aristotle’s structure of thought in the Nicomachean Ethics informs Book 2. An occasional Greek word of his appears, like epichaerekakia (schadenfreude): Oxford, 1120 and 1130n.ii. A diluted Aristotelian schema, of opposed vices and virtues, organizes most of Book 2. There is less about Aristotle’s mean state (to meson), and the scheme is second-​ hand, derived through Milton’s models like Wollebius. All in all, Aristotle is present in an assimilated form, but not as individual witness or voice.

Euripides

Quite the opposite is the case of Euripides: he is cited in his own words, in Greek, and with marked respect. He was a lifelong favourite author of Milton’s. This is known, because the early Lives tell us so, because Areopagitica cites Euripides on its title-​page, because Milton read and emended every page of his Stephanus copy (which survives), and because his own tragic poem Samson Agonistes exudes Euripides, in every sententia or stichomythia, that dry quick epigrammatizing which Milton adored. It is on view in De Doctrina too. In the first specimen, Milton is explaining that God is one, notwithstanding that two Hebrew names for God are plural in form, ’elohim and ’adonim. Being names, appellative sumpta, “when used of a species,” the plural form has a singular meaning, sensu singulari. The very same thing is found et apud Graecos, “also among the Greeks.” The word despotes, “master,” is customarily used in its plural with singular meaning, “namely to express reverence and honour.” And “so in Euripides Iphigen. In Aulid. lian despotaisi pistos ei, pro despote” [MS 69i, Oxford, 166, with 236nn.xliv–​xlv]. Context makes clear that the speaker of the words is addressing them to a single person as “master” despite the plural despotaisi (which incidentally ensures the metre). Another line of that play does the same thing, “despoton for despotou.” Two other plays are adduced, Rhesus and Bacchae, “in the messengers’ speeches.” Being messengers, they naturally speak with “reverence and honour” to royal protagonists. Milton is correct in all this, the usage having the name for Hebrew of the “plural of majesty,” perhaps to be compared to the “royal We” in English. The underlying appeal is to linguistic usage (usurpari solet), and the likelihood that one language can illuminate another, regardless of time and place, let alone sacredness. Philological knowledge and acuteness serve Milton well in De Doctrina, but especially in his Greek. He uses philology

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to do major battle for his interpretations of New Testament words, like heresy or presbyter or church.2 His other allusion to Euripides packs a different punch. On corporal death, again, Milton’s view is correct because “Euripides even unawares” has correctly interpreted this passage [Job 34:14–​15] for us, in Supplices [532] (MS 178f, Oxford, 454–​55 with nn68–​69 and 465n.xviii). This support is strategically positioned, not at the close of a typical listing of biblical citations in biblical order, but halfway through it, before he has even quite finished with Old Testament witness. Notice the exclamatory argumentativeness, Quanto rectius Euripides, “How much more accurately Euripides […].” The name is thrust forward, it carries weight. What weight? The unconscious weight of saying what Job says. “Even unawares” (vel insciens) may include “even a pagan,” or “even one who knows not Job.” Either way, it seems, an unwitting, involuntary witness can be trusted. He is quoted in the full syntax, two and a half lines of Greek, rammed home by an exegesis. For good measure, the following citation from Ezekiel confirms Euripides—​returning the compliment. Ezekiel should have superior weight to Euripides, being scriptural, yet he does not; if anything, he has less. In a work which bases belief on scripture alone the allusion is strikingly personal, a glimpse into Milton’s mind at its work, habitually relying on a favourite Greek poet to think with.

Homer

Another such glimpse, or say rather disclosure, comes as the conclusion of Milton’s chapter (I.4), on Predestination. For this subject, dear to his heart and central to politics as well as religion in his day, Milton hands over the entire climax to Homer. He can do this because the passages quoted from the Odyssey are themselves guiding or governing for that whole poem, and convey Milton’s final point with resounding authority. Human sinners blame divinity for their destruction, when it is self-​destruction. The emphasis falls on the pronouns, “they […] themselves.” Zeus speaks from Olympus to a council of the gods much as the Father speaks to the council of heaven in Book III of Paradise Lost. (Indeed, curiously, both lay down the law to a conclave at which the most obstructive celestial is absent; Poseidon, visiting the Aethiopes; Satan already absent in hell, lurking dissident in Book V.) Milton’s chapter concludes (Yale, 202, Oxford, 116–​19): Haec qui attenderit, facile perspiciet, in hac potissimum doctrina esse toties offensum, dum poena obdurationis à decreto reprobationis non distinguitur. iuxta illud Prov. 19:3: stultitia hominis pervertit viam ipsius, et adversus Iehovam indignatur animus eius. Accusant enim3 revera Deum, tametsi id vehementer negant: et ab Homero etiam ethnico egregiè redarguuntur, Odyss. I.7:

2  See chap. 6 and the Appendix.

3  Enim, “for,” is mirrored in the γαρ of both the passages of Homer which follow. It returns in several more passages quoted from Greek tragedy. While authors naturally quote to enlist authority and give reasons, the Greek ones when correctly and aptly quoted have extra clout for humanists. Beyond that, I suggest that Milton shows an especial flair and affinity in his use of Greek poets in his argumentative prose.

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Αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο. Suis enim ipsorum flagitiis perierunt. Et rursus, inducta Iovis persona:     Ὦ πόποι, οἷoν δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται!     Ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ᾽ ἔμμεναι. Οἱ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ     Σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε᾽ ἔχουσιν. Papae, ut scilicet Deos, mortales accusant! Ex nobis enim dicunt mala esse: illi vero ipsi Suismet flagitiis, praeter fatum, dolores patiuntur.

[Translated into English:

A person who heeds these things will easily discern that in this doctrine in particular offence has so often been caused when the punishment of hardening is not distinguished from a decree of reprobation. According to that verse, Prov. 19:3: man’s folly twists his way, and against Jehovah his spirit protests. For they actually accuse God, although they strenuously deny it; and they are superbly confuted even by pagan Homer, Odyssey, I.7:     For by their own personal outrages they perished.     And again, when the character of Jupiter has been brought in:     Oh dear! how indeed mortals reproach gods!     For they say that evils come out of us, yet they themselves     By their own outrages suffer sorrows beyond fate.]

The reliance on Homer at such a climax is the single most striking pagan allusion in De Doctrina. Homer the pagan proves my own point by an a fortiori, for it is clear etiam Homero ethnico, “even to the pagan Homer.” The strategy resembles that for the preceding allusion, to the witness of the “unconscious Euripides,” but even greater force is now given to pagan wisdom. This normative, exemplary force of the Odyssey (possibly exceeding that of the Iliad) is plain from Milton’s other Homeric allusion in De Doctrina. Discussing womanliness, he hands over a smaller climax to this simple line concerning Penelope: [1080: “Such was women’s respectfulness (mulierum verecundia) among the Gentiles too (etiam): witness Homer describing Penelope, Odyssey, Book I: “she stood by the threshold of the [finely built] mansion, etc.” The point is not laboured; this time, it is a sort of “enough said.” His love of Homer was touch and go with his love of Euripides, to judge by the Early Lives. But it may need adding here that her womanliness is implied, not stated:  she appears on the “threshold” of the world of the besieging suitors, dressed for her role in the gunaikeia, the women’s apartments. She keeps away, virtuously, from a hubbub which as a woman she is not expected to quell.

Greek Prose

We have seen so far that Aristotle is cited in Latin, for the thought or the gist, whereas two favourite poets are cited in Greek at some length. Milton quotes the poets because

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he loves them, they think finely, and might help to clinch his argument. What about the two prose writers quoted in Greek, Plutarch, and Thucydides? The allusion to Plutarch [Oxford, 90–​91 with 123n.xxviii] is hardly a full allusion, more a passing reference or gloss. In I.4 again, Milton urges that the biblical word tetagmenoi in Acts 13:48 does not mean “ordained” [to eternal life, MS 35] but intransitively, “well disposed, fit,” Latin compositi or idonei, and “so it is found in Plutarch, in his Life of Pompeius (ut apud Plutarchum in Pompeio).”4 The Thucydides allusion contrasts with this puny gloss. Arguing for the justice of Adam’s sin being visited on his descendants, Milton adduces families and nations which have suffered collectively for the offence of one, through the Old Testament. Homines etiam iustissimi, like Noah, have found this fair (aequum). “However, the same principle of divine justice in avenging acts that demand atonement has been seen neither as unknown by other races nor as ever unfair. So Thucydides, [Book] I. [126]; because of this both they and the race born of them were called accursed and offenders against the goddess” [Oxford, 418]. It was not the belief of Thucydides, who is merely narrating exchanges between Athens and Sparta to justify war; he distances himself from the manoeuvring. What is more, Milton is joining this evidence from Thucydides with a key passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, where theodicy is overtly being questioned (to be considered jointly with it in a moment). Milton is skating on thin ice when he claims that such reprisals are a widely known “same principle of divine justice” (eadem divinae iustitiae ratio)—​and that “the same point is easy to demonstrate by means of very many other testimonies and examples from Pagan authors.” Christian and rationalist might well say, so what? It is often linked with punitive coercion or manoeuvring by those in power, more human nature than divine. This once, a pagan allusion from Greek prose is joined with one from a Roman poet, Virgil (Aeneid I.39–​41): —​Pallasne exurere classem/​Argivûm, atque ipsos potuit submergere ponto,/​ Unius ob noxam—​? (Could Pallas burn up the Argives’ fleet/​And drown the men themselves in the deep,/​Because of one man’s wrongdoing?)

One goddess, Juno, is protesting at another (Pallas Athene). Virgil returns to such questions, usually as questions, theodicy among plural deities. So although the idea of collective punishment is well known (from the Assyrians to the Nazis, and beyond), we must wonder why Milton needs to establish its prevalence, without question. Does he mean that pagan or human practice sanctions it? Or is he assembling precedents for a perennially sticky topic? Is he aiming to survey or to convince? In this instance, I would prefer that he was following his own philological practice in the collecting,5 but this expository or imaginative motive does creep towards justification. It would go less well 4  Plutarch wrote Phusei gar en sophron kai tetagmenos tais epithumiais, “for he was by nature prudent and fit in his appetites.”

5  Just as one of his Euripides marginalia explains—​to himself—​the thinking behind human sacrifice, which he abominated in Moloc.

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to convince the open-​minded rationalist or believer: Milton once again gives no sense of development in belief or morality. In a way too he is addressing the issue of pagan witness itself. Maurice Kelley’s note to the passage (Yale, 387n27) quotes William Ames, known as a favourite theologian of Milton’s, as deploring “humane testimonies whatsoever they be, nor Histories known only to the learned.” Ames upholds Paul’s practice of only rarely citing “heathen poets.” Milton might wish to follow Paul in this as in any good thing.6 And he might retort that his own score of ten Greek allusions is citing only rarely. Yet Ames allows some exceptions: “unlesse very seldome […] when urgent necessitie or certaine hope of fruit doth seem to require such a thing.” And many though not all of the allusions examined here could plead such urgency. Milton tends to be urgent as soon as he argues. This can also be the case when he tends to marshal corroborative witness, yet some of it may be force of habit, the commonplace-​book habit. He does not sound like Ames here or (as we see in what follows) when the satirical habit takes over.

Virgil Continued

Another allusion to Virgil is more glancing. At MS 155, just where Milton moves from marriage to divorce, he declares the purpose of marriage: what it is, then what it is not. It is what God has joined together (Matthew 9:6), glossed as what is “companionable, suitable, good and honourable” (sociabile, idoneum, bonum, honestum). It is not “the joining of gryphons with horses” (non [coniiunxit Deus] gryphes equis) (Oxford, 384). This image or byword for incompatibility is drawn from Virgil, Eclogue 8.26–​27. Though rapid, it is also striking, not only in itself and its suddenness but also from its sequence.7 Only after discharging Virgil’s bon mot out of evident distaste does Milton follow up with the expected series of opposites, the listed adjectives which antithesize sociabile, idoneum, and so on: turpe, miserum, infestum, calamitosum. The second list has more sting than the first. It goes on too, on and on, into the angry climax: hoc vis, aut temeritas, aut error, malusque genius, non Deus coniunxit—​“[it is] violence, or else rashness, or else error [which] has joined this together, and an evil genius, not God!” Consequently, the surprising irruption of a classical allusion between the two unequal lists signifies that Milton’s advocacy of divorce for incompatibility, at the transition or the hinge, enlists the vivid and accepted wisdom of Virgil to help to persuade the reader at a dangerous transition. Milton’s allusion appeals to one shared value, the

6  Milton had considered the question in his Commonplace Book (Yale, I.376), noting the practice of Paul and “the most venerable Church Fathers.” To these Kelley adds “Peter Martyr, Calvin, Zanchius, and Polanus,” all of whom appear in DDC (see chap. 6). 7  How striking it is can be seen from Carey’s translation, “God has not joined chalk with cheese” (Yale, 371). Its homely tang is accurate and smuggles in a similar appeal to shared speech values. But it lacks Virgil’s prestige, vividness (because it is a cliché), and most of its surprise value. Its register is not so far from the surrounding biblical homiletic. It brings in no second, corroborative high-​culture value. By contrast, Virgil’s Latin is like the Homeric allusions:  it validates a biblical opinion by a cultural one.

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prestige of Virgil, to help his redefinition of another one (marriage not a sacrament, nor lifelong). As advocacy, this Virgil tag has great force, rhetorically, in critique of a perceived inhumanity.

Ovid

In its context (the Fall and Sin, I.11) Milton follows up his first Virgilian allusion with one to Ovid, but he does not name him. He is just poeta, “the poet” or “a poet” (Latin does not distinguish by definite and indefinite articles). One did not recommend Ovid in devout company. But if so, why use him at all? Milton shows his abiding affection for the poet of his youth, and appreciation of his exemplar in verse composition. This line is a fine specimen of Ovid’s art, in the balancing three-​part line from the Fasti. Mars videt hanc, visamque cupit, potiturque cupita. At MS 165f, Milton is discussing sin, and distinguishes between evil desire and the evil deed. He says: Nec inscitè sane Poeta ille hoc idem expressit: Mars videt hanc, visamque cupit, potiturque cupita.

Ovid (Fasti III.21) is describing Mars as he takes advantage of the slumbering Rhea Silvia, a Vestal, and begets Romulus and Remus. Milton, however, is working from the letter of James: Jas. 1:14–​15: each individual is tempted, as he is beguiled and allured by his own desire: then desire, after it has conceived, gives birth to sin. And very cleverly indeed has the well-​known Poet expressed this same idea [of cause and effect]: “Mars sees her, and desires her when seen, and possesses her when desired.”

The pastoral letter of James stands in a strange relation to this slick one-​liner, and also (for our present inquiry) to the sombre Thucydides and Virgil; for Ovid is as usual enjoying his own dexterity. During the many published comments on the young Milton’s use of an erotic elegy for his epitaph on Lancelot Andrewes, responses varied between moral and aesthetic disapproval. Now in De Doctrina he does it again. This time, I would think it is involuntary, a succumbing to a pointed parallel, obedience to an earworm.

Horace

We arrive, last, at the other most admired Augustan—​Golden Latin—​poet, Horace. Horace in one of his satirical Epistles (I.1.90) ridicules an unphilosophical inconsistency. In I.5 at MS 64m (Oxford, 156) Milton argues concerning the supposed hypostatic union of the Son with the Father that: Qui unionem, quam vocant, hypostaticam arbitratu suo divellunt, nihil profecto sincerum sermonibus aut responsis Christi relinquunt; ambigua et incerta, vera et non vera omnia, non Christum, sed pro Christo nescio quem, nunc hunc nunc illum sermocinantem nobis exhibent; ut Horatianum illud in eos probè conveniat

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Quo teneam vultus mutantem Protea nodo?

“Those who tear asunder this hypostatic union (as it is called) at their own discretion are leaving no sincerity whatever to the speeches or replies of Christ: they are displaying to us ambiguities and uncertainties, true and false at the same time; not Christ but some vague proxy for Christ, now one person, now another discoursing—​so that the words of Horace well suit them, “By what knot am I to bind Proteus as he keeps changing?”

Milton, like Horace, berates false reasoning in an opponent by comparing him to the shape-​changing Proteus (like a quick-​change artist). We remember that Milton, John Aubrey said, was “of a very satiricall temper.” It is an opponent whom Milton is mocking, not any part of his subject, but such derision is one of the recurrent notes of De Doctrina. In its present company, taken strictly as an allusion, the application to the internal relations of the Trinity comes as a surprise. Yet it is not as startling as the Ovid allusion, since Horace is being used to ridicule an opponent in argument, on grounds of logic and consistency—​which was exactly why Horace had resorted to this myth. This allusion appeals to logic as much as to authority. An image is enlisted to sum up and dismiss a shaky proposition. Can we add anything to this sense of a pagan author coming to Milton’s theological mind to clinch a satirical argument in a well-​remembered dictum? First, Horace was a favourite author. No matter that Horace was an urbane epicurean, worldly and middle of the road: he spoke finely, from the high ground of educated discourse and from the centre of the moral scale. Horace thereby kept Milton in touch with many of the like-​ minded, with neutrals, though not the ardent Protestantism which was another part of his mental make-​up. Second, this affinity goes quite deep. It suits Milton’s purposes to speak in the voice of a rational and moderate persona. But this is not put on. Just as in his daily life and regimen he ate and drank sparingly, and relished the harmless otium of music, so might the voice of reasonable moderation, mind unswayed by emotion, be (not a persona but) part of his essential personality. Though mind, or rather axioms plus argumentation, could impel him into extreme positions (like saying how fair Mosaic polygamy was to wives) or glaring inconsistencies (like taking citations literally or tropically according to needs of argument), he could be thought a passionate moderate or a feeling intellectual, and certainly one who had taken an overdose in his early years of disputatious eloquence.

Conclusions

To summarize, first: pagan, classical allusions in De Doctrina are few and substantial, and thus are compatible with the theory of Ames and the practice of Paul.8 The provenance of the allusions mainly reflects Milton’s literary taste. Greeks outnumber Romans. Homer and Euripides were favourite authors of his, lifelong. Aristotle 8  Paul cited Aratus, at Acts 17:28; Menander at 1 Cor. 15:33.

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contributes more to the thinking, to the subject and to its organization, than to the style and passion of persuasion. It may be a fair comment, that just as Milton decries Aristotle’s successors, the Schoolmen, he relies on their originator, and that he finds Aristotle easier to employ than Plato, whom he does not use or mention. As to the Romans, he cites poets only, and among them the main three Augustans only. But the most intriguing of the four allusions may be that to Ovid. He is not named, because to enlist the lewd Ovid by name would stretch any theological a fortiori past breaking point—​too provocative altogether, for an author who does practice or commend tact on occasion. At the same time, Milton could not resist the dense force of the one-​liner about imperious desire. If this seems too personal or quirky to befit Milton theologizing, we should ask again, why is it there at all in a theology “based on scripture alone”? I persist in seeing it as involuntary, bubbling up from his rich awareness of literature and experience, in the same way as his second Homer allusion, to the fit womanliness of Penelope. Both allusions have aptness: both are welcome surprises, and as I see it, involuntary flourishes. Milton is thinking it out to himself, first, and his glee in adept expression is sometimes felt by the reader. Summary is by now yielding to inference of my own. All the other allusions have more obvious weight, the weight being acknowledged by the naming of names. This weight may be appropriateness, as in the case of linguistic usages (Euripides, Plutarch). The weight may be evidential (Thucydides), or that of authority, as for Aristotle most of the time, and when allusion is for the sake of demurring, with the clear sense that Aristotle is worth disagreeing with—​worth correcting. The length of an allusion indicates the weight of the authority. So does the language by which Milton introduces it, the two features often matching. Thus a short allusion can come with a simple ut: a long one tends to explain its appearance, as an a fortiori (even Homer) or an exclamation (“How much more accurately [than my opponents] has Euripides, perhaps unwittingly, interpreted this passage”). Alongside aptness and weight, these allusions invite us to consider Milton’s direction of thought, his gaze. Allusions call attention to a secondary world and to other experience. This must be so in a scriptural theology when it adduces pagan writers. The risk of distraction or heterodoxy is slight, given that the work is in Latin, in Ciceronian prose, for readers having the same classical education as Milton. Their gaze is being eased, not impeded. They can therefore reflect on the effect and purpose, locally, as we have been doing globally. This may be why the Greeks preponderate, in number and length and as explicit witness (et ab Homero etiam ethnico egregiè redarguuntur). Possibly Greek witness being in Greek aligns it better with the Greek of scripture, or Milton thought Greeks were better thinkers, or Latin was too mixed up with deplorable continuities of tradition from ancient Rome into the Roman church. More likely, he valued Greek literature more highly, and so for him it carried more weight, being originary and formative for all Latin genres except satire—​exemplifying “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” Finally, after such speculations, some securer negatives. What is not the case about these allusions that we have gathered up for inspection? First, being few, they cannot have the impact of routine glossing. Next, they are not all special, local effects

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either: some are quiet or brief, perhaps involuntary. For third, they are not all of equal weight or of the same kind of weight. Thus their diversity, which our cataloguing should help to show, may confirm that sense of De Doctrina as the work of many years, which grew with Milton. The triviality of the second Homer allusion feels akin to the contextual sense of earlier strata within Book 2. By contrast with this compiling, the clustering of allusions in Milton’s argumentative chapters confirms the general sense of later strata. The clinching finality given to his most extended allusion, at the end of his forceful chapter on Predestination and divine decree, shows him enlisting Homer for a fully considered opinion, a credal axiom that pulsates through Paradise Lost equally. The whole man is giving us the whole weight of a convergent testimony. Thus the personal voice of Milton in arguing his theological positions is regularly enlisting his lifelong companions and counsellors from antiquity—​not as embellishing afterthoughts, but as a living part of the thought itself. These were good minds and great poets:  how could they not support his convictions? And they kept harmony with his positions, not just by habit or in his own mind, but in reality. For if conversion comes from outside us in the world and written word, virtuous pagans will bear witness. And in an Arminian position, such that although we do not work our passage to salvation, we must nonetheless do good works (as a necessary though not sufficient condition of election), we are helped by the articulate effort of Greeks in especial, from Aristotle (il maestro di color chi sanno) to the revered Homer, to the asperities of Euripides, and to the fluency of the too-​much-​loved Ovid.

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Chapter 8

PERSON TO  PERSON—​HOW PRONOUNS CONTRIBUTE MAURICE KELLEY OBSERVED that Milton “enlivens his argument” by introducing “opposing voices engaged in spirited dialectic”1 (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.2 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. For amare (the grammars’ tired paradigm verb) the single

1  Yale, 105, in the introductory section “III. Observations”: “Well now, who was it that sent? The Son, as it pleases Placaeus. Before whose face? The son’s. So the son is addressing himself, and sends himself before his own face—​an utterly strange and unheard-​of thing.” Kelley refers to John Carey’s translation in the same Yale volume, but Oxford’s more literal English (VIII.197) brings out the tone of voice, sarcastic in punning on Placaeus’ name—​he is “pleasing himself,” so to speak.

2  “They are very good Latin both […] and both very ill reasoning […] like two declamations pro and con, for exercise only in a rhetoric school.” The passage is discussed in my study of Milton’s Cambridge Latin, chap. 5.

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word Amo means the two-​word sentence “I love.” Or in Milton’s world of cogitation, redarguerunt means “they have refuted” without any need for subject word or pronoun, since the ending-​erunt signifies “they have […]-​ed.” One effect is that both redarguerunt and amo keep the emphasis on the action more than on the agent. This has the merit everywhere of making Latin rely on its verbs, their muscularity or leverage. But by the same token to say Ego amo is saying something further and particular about the loving and the agency. Again, whereas the uppercasing of “I” in written English was devised to avoid its blurring into words on either side of it, the uppercasing of “Ego” in Milton’s Latin alerts us to its intrusion, while nos (lowercased) is available for quieter functionings of the first person. When Ego and nos appear in the Latin, they call attention to something about Milton’s mental agency, be it contrast, defence, conviction, or individuality. We have seen this already in the Epistle (Chapter 1). Similarly with nominatives of the second person, tu or vos. These have the added benefit that the Latin pronouns distinguish singular from plural: English “you” cannot do this. And tu addresses its referent always in some particular way, some tone or emotion, be it accusation, scorn, or rebuke—​someone is about to get a lecture. Third-​person pronouns, which may also fade in translation into unemphatic “he” or “they,” likewise have greater variety and coloration in Latin: ille, ipse, iste, and their plurals; hi, “these,” often set off against illi. Beyond these in Milton’s usage lie pronouns for categories of persons, like clergy or theologians in groups, whether expressed as plurals, or by such categorizing singulars as quicunque (“whoever”), quisque (“each one”), or quilibet or quivis or quispiam, quotusquisque (each distributive differing in tonality). Latin has a rich array. Milton wields them with the grain of Latin, with vigour and discrimination. Not only can the disengaged Latinist enjoy their supple deployment: the pronouns keep the reader close to Milton’s activity of mind and to how he addresses doctrines through people who uphold or expound them. Two idiosyncrasies of Latin help us to take the opportunity to travel closely with Milton. First, when a situation involves several persons and their pronouns, Latin likes to collocate the pronouns. Its inflectedness goes easily with hyperbaton. Hoc tibi pro ea nunc do: “This I  to you on her behalf now give.” Since the inflectedness allows one to vary word order, that variety favours collocations which might seem artificial (or olde-​ poetical) in English, but in Latin heighten the awareness of Milton hard at it, as he makes us hear interpersonal transactions.3 Second, the inflectedness of Latin allows adjectives to function like nouns and pronouns. Masculine nostri often means “our men”; neuter haec can mean “these things.” Such details tend, indeed, to be ignored by translators. The present inquiry brings to light again such hidden nuances as the fact that Milton calls De Doctrina “these things,” plural haec, not these “writings” or (in the unitative singular) “this account.” This gives 3  This usage goes well with the strength of the sense of a verb in Latin; not muffled as in English by auxiliary verbs to express tense or mood, but solidified by containing tense and mood within the one word. Evigilent politici: “politicians, Let them watch out!”

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the reader greater freedom in “using or not using” them:  their spirit not their detail? Some but not all, piecemeal, ad hoc? Such signals are muffled in English. (Italics for pronouns are a crude device, with diminishing returns for overuse.) It is time to give them their due here, by successive examples of the pronouns and related idioms in action. Though it can feel pedantic and pernickety to unravel these matters of regular grammar or idiomatic usage, the method is heuristically valuable. It contributes secure findings for our wider inquiry.

Pronouns as Voices in the Chapters: Second-​Person Fictions

When Milton adds argumentation to support some belief which he has just elicited from scripture, his Latin style moves up through the registers. And within the higher registers, we hear the heightened animation of his voice when he introduces a pretended interlocutor, in grammatical second person, a tu or a vos. He does both, close together, in the chapter where he discusses the vexed question of a paid clergy and the tithing which paid them, in I.31, “On Particular Churches” (MS 406–​13, Oxford, 828–​36). He held strong views on this and had put them into print more than once.4 Lycidas did this by artful figuration. Denunciation came from the lips of St Peter, no less, accusing the greed of the “blind mouths.” Peter as third person denounced a second-​ person plural, reduced to their appetites, within the first-​person monody of a shepherd, who at the close became a third person, to distance. The complicating of the personhood gives great force. On the same topic, here in De Doctrina, Milton again enlists grammatical personing. Less artfully but still with the help of art, Milton works among texts, then persons, to another “dread voice”—​“O vos exigua fide, O ye of little faith.”5 This is heard at 834, after three long paragraphs on the topic, and more still to come. We work towards this moment of emphasis in what follows. To do this, Milton first must reason aside the awkward texts which say that “the labourer is worthy of his hire” (Matt. 10:10, Oxford, 828). He does it by a giant concessive clause, tametsi […] praestabilius tamen: “while this is equitable, just, and sanctioned by God’s law and the authority of Christ and his apostles”—​a combination which would satisfy him for most cases!—​“nevertheless […] it is preferable and more perfectly fit for imitation and for avoiding all offence and suspicion” to serve God’s church free of charge. More citations follow, especially ones quoted lengthily from Paul. Nonetheless, Paul, like Jesus, had said things bearing on both sides of the question.6 Milton’s next paragraph contains no concession, only attack, on “today’s ministers” (hodierni ministri), a very broad third-​person group, lumped pejoratively if a contrast is felt with the original, evangelical ministri. If they themselves cannot attain the more perfect way, let them rely on their “willing flock,” and not on “the edicts of magistrates” to enforce tithes (Oxford, 832). Four times as many paragraphs denounce today’s pastors 4  Lycidas, Reason of Church-​Government, of Prelatical Episcopacy. 5  See also Oxford, 852n.ix.

6  For example, 1 Corinthians 9:14, adduced by Milton (Oxford, 828f).

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as have addressed the fundamental dilemma. Milton’s second paragraph leaps onto the high moral ground: “O ye of little faith!” he quotes: O vos exigua fide, in a translation of his own7 of Matthew (8:26, 14:31, and 16:8), where Jesus rebuked his disciples.8 The vos are the modern clergy, timorous or venal.9 Milton has more to say:  pronouns help him to say it. In the next paragraph, from a quieter beginning the register rises again, from a certainty (certè) to an exclamation of disgust when clergy take their flock to court about tithes (quam turpe est, MS 411f, Oxford, 834f). The excoriation fastens onto such a cleric in the third-​person singular (suo grege, 836i, repeated), who at once becomes the second person of an angry repeated te, then tu, “How avaricious, how self-​seeking, how aggressive for such clergy to teach for money those who spurn you as teacher (837, abs te doceri, doctorem te respuat, tu discipulum quoque respueres.) You are the “hireling shepherd,” mercenarius, of John’s rebuke (10:12–​13). This is what goes on “among us,” apud nos, where alas! Nos (837i) means England, “alone among reformed nations.” The sense of belonging is reproachful and rueful (reproach to the tithers, regret at belonging to the same nation). It gives the denunciation more kinds of emotion. Milton has been carried along by his deep conviction that “we” are untrue to the gospel. He has moved beyond the sense that labourers are, or at least may be, worthy of their hire. A great passage, if but only if we prioritize its passionate commitment to one view. Thereupon, in a new paragraph of scorn, the timorous cleric in the dock is for a moment allowed to make the defence of need:  Dices, unde ergo vivemus? This person speaks as an individual about himself and his clerical colleagues (vivemus, plural)? “What shall we live on?” No pronouns, but a change of first persons, maybe to make a meek reply weaker. Milton has a thunderous reply: live as the prophets, as Christ lived, and Paul. The last of these “did not keep bawling [clamitabat] that the costs of his schooling should be defrayed from his gospel-​preaching, as today’s ministers habitually do”—​ut ministri solent hodierni, bringing back hodierni ministri (in a delayed chiasmus) to wrap up the whole admonition. Hactenus de ministris: “So much for ministers” may express dismissal too. As we observed, Milton has forgotten his opening concession (MS 406, Oxford, 828m), that pastors need payment to stay alive. The “more perfect counsel” has taken over, and so has rhetoric, just as if Milton knew the answer before he examined scripture to find it out. Milton’s first answer was a twofold one, but not this conclusion. It is adversarial contesting, with and without pronouns: he lets fly at the sort of Anglican clergy he

7  Milton’s O vos exigua fide has omitted the praediti which Beza in JTB had added to all occurrences of Christ’s rebuke (“endowed” with little faith):  see Oxford, 852n.ix. Tremellius, rendering the Syriac, had pusilli fide, “weak in faith” for the single compound Greek adjective, oligopistoi (ὀλιγόπι στοι). Milton’s ablative may be fusing the two elements again. 8  Oxford, 852 n.ix and MMsDDC: Luke and Paul added to enhance.

9  The same attack is made more obliquely at MS 391 in I.30, to insist that every believer has the right of publicly interpreting scripture, not only professors: (Oxford, 805) de quibus illud vere dici haud raro queat, Luc. 11.52, vae vobis Legis interpretibus: “Of these people it could often truly be said. Luke 11:52, woe to you interpreters of the Law” (emphases added).

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abominated as self-​serving or careerist. They are a disgrace and a burden to “us,” apud nos. And now the nos has become “we English” or “we Christians,” maybe both.

Second-​Person Fictions (Continued)

Second-​person fictions, usually objections to be imagined and forestalled, do not have to involve the pronouns tu and vos. We saw that imperatives tend not to need them, being forcible by nature. Another form Milton uses is the defective verb inquam, “I say,” paired with second-​person forms: “you say, but I say.” Grammarians term a verb “defective” when only a few of its possible modifications are found in use. Inquam, as a paradigmatic present tense, even looks odd, (or rather archaic; final /​m/​s are elided before an open vowel throughout Latin verse). In the normative Golden Latin usage it is used (fossilized) more as a parenthesis or interjection, not as a verb of saying which follows with a clause of reportage, saying what was said. Within this limitation, inquam itself abounds in Milton’s address to his topic, as a formula of insistence to an imagined audience. Milton likes this way of strengthening his utterance.10 All the four instances of inquies,11 “you will say,” receive a retort in kind. Three begin with the objection word at. Two are rebutted by Milton’s own at, while the other two receive Respondeo. The future tense of inquies shows Milton imagining what “you will say” and ready already: putting words into an opposition mouth to stopper it at source. The glib manner would soon pall, but (besides evoking the relevant world of law court and debate) Milton seems to take care to vary the wording of his forestalling—​which too suggests imaginative vigilance, as well as tension or urgency. However, tu remains the strongest of the second-​person devices. Thus it reappears in dispute on another hot topic, towards the close of the discussion about God’s general decree (I.3, MS 23f, Oxford, 64–​65). This time, the opponent is less characterized, as if by the norms of disputation. If God “foreknows all that will happen but has not decreed it absolutely, for fear that all sins be imputed to God,” can necessity be reintroduced by the back door? Milton imagines the opponent smelling a concession: tu hoc arripis satisque concessum putas quo evincas (“You seize on this and think enough has been conceded for you to succeed in proving”) that either God does not foreknow all or else all comes about through necessity. The vigorous verb arripere shows that Milton imagines and dramatizes a disputation, in its interrogative portion, where the Opponent attacks particular arguments in the Proposer’s main speech. The sentence hinges on its opening 10  See Oxford, 820n.vi. Inquam is used in the Latin of the biblical citations too, since the Bible likewise includes plenty of vehemence, but there are about twice as many in Milton himself. Inquies, the second-​person future form, occurs four times in Milton, never in the citations. Inquis, the second-​ person singular present tense, scores 5:1 in favour of Milton. Inquiunt, “they say,” scores 17:1, usually in the revealing phrasing At Inquiunt, “But, they [opponents] say.” Inquimus, inquiet, inquiebat and remoter forms, listed in Glare’s Oxford Latin Dictionary, do not appear in DDC at all: interesting that “we say” is not found. Did no occasion for it arise for agreed or group assertion? 11  Oxford, 94, 180, 190, 888.

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pronoun, tu, and the threefold second-​person-​singular verbs of the persona’s mental acts. The tone is again forceful.12

Intermingling of Third-​Person Expressions

Yet on a topic where he felt equally strongly, divorce (I.10), Milton does not deploy this impassioned second person. Can we say why not? Did he feel a greater need for tact, in that his previous publications on divorce would arouse greater opposition among his natural allies than when denouncing tithes? Whereas he might have hoped to shame the clergy out of self-​interest into agreement about tithing, did he foresee a deeper antipathy or rooted principle to overcome on divorce, and so appeal rather to reason and compassion than to overt scorn? Let us test these speculations on the passage advocating divorce which closes I.10. Its expressions of person, whether pronouns or other, are tabulated as they occur, to reprise some previous findings about person and to propose new ones. i. After defining marriage and affirming its dissolubility, the second paragraph begins:  Atqui urgent, “And yet they [my opponents] insist” on Matthew 19:6, “what God has joined together, let man [homo] not separate.” “They” are not named or described: translators add “opponents” to get the tone of Atqui (“but nevertheless”), contradicting a statement just made. ii. Now comes a first-​person pronoun, nos, this one authorial, “we” who are proposing grounds of divorce. Nos are then contrasted with opponents who object (obiiciunt), as before contained within the third-​person verbal inflection. Against them Milton adduces God, Deus, who has concessit and sanxit divorce (“not merely allowed divorces on various grounds, but also in part sanctioned them, in part very strictly enjoined them” 384f). iii. But “they” object again, now by an inquiunt (386i). Milton retorts: “On the contrary, I say,” At enim inquam. Forms of inquam again foreground the opposing of views. iv. Persons then recede from view in favour of rhetorical questions:  “What could have been fairer?” Quid potius esse aequius? This wording, learnt from Euripides and used on the title-​page of Areopagitica, adds to the arsenal of persuasive locution, varying it as the third-​person pronoun becomes neuter, quid. v. Then a quis non? Quis non summam humanitatem videt? “Who does not see the supreme humanity.” Quis non, “who not,” uses a favourite third-​person idiom for winning over somebody, since nobody doesn’t means everyone does. The interrogative negative implies a plural, of universal reasoned agreement (!)13

12  Arripere contributes to the dialectical or forensic tone, for similarly when he is arguing that the Trinitarians’ “prize passage” of scripture proves Milton’s point, not theirs, we hear arripere again; the point is roundly rejected as “being seized on too hastily” (properè nimis arripi). 13  Some good insights in this area are set out in Annabel Patterson, Milton’s Words; also in Paul Hammond, Milton’s Complex Words:  Essays on the Conceptual Structure of Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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vi. The paragraph is swelling hugely by now, and the assorted expressions of person swell too. We meet two first-​person plurals (putemus, repudiemus), “we” who think about wives and may divorce them. This “we” takes a male, litigious viewpoint. vii. Then after this “we” Milton’s own equidem begins a new sentence, agreeing: equidem non attribuerim (“I for my part would not ascribe hardness of heart to him who sent such a one away”) (389i). viii. This occurs on the way to a big named person, “Solomon14 himself or rather the very spirit of God which spoke through Solomon” (Oxford, 388i):  nec ego solus attribuerim, sed ipse Solomon vel ipse potius Dei spiritus per Solomonem loquutus; prov. 30:21–​23. The misogynistic verses berate as intolerable “an odious woman when she marries” (because then she reveals her real character). Solomon is known from the Bible for his wisdom—​qualified there, however, by some of his numerous marriage choices. The idea that God’s spirit informs the particular citation, which is picking out the wife from four varied examples of unbearable over-​promotion, is inflating the status of Proverbs, which is an anthology of anthologies of accumulated lore attributed, circularly, to the wise Solomon. Since its Chapter 30 actually comes from the words of “Agur son of Jakeh,” Milton is repeating the tendentious name-​ dropping of his Tetrachordon selections from 30.21 and 23.15,16 ix. A different strategy is felt when (again twice) he names John Selden (392). Selden is adduced after the massive paragraph has opened Et ipse Christus (“allowed divorce for the cause of fornication”). The pronoun ipse as emphasizer seems to mean, not that Christ went against his own usual teaching, but that he was and is the overmastering authority, as in the phrase ipse dixit. Selden in his Uxor Hebraea will then show that the Hebrew word translated “fornication” goes wider than unlawful copulation. Selden is an expert witness, so to speak; authoritative and disinterested. He is being cited, however, for a view or emphasis which in Chapter 4 we have shown to be over-​ interpreting Selden and distorting him, so as to get the Son of God and the greatest modern jurist to vindicate his own interpretation together. x. Milton argues with the same heated eagerness through to the finish. Quis tam prono tamque porcino animo? (396m) (to isolate and to invalidate the opposing group, as porcino, “swinish,” subhuman). All in all, this survey of person-​based locutions does not support our opening speculation. Tact is absent. Indeed, Milton is seldom known for it. For opponents to read that

14  Solomon appears bolded because sometimes names are thus written in large-​hand by Milton’s scribes. In speaking here of “big names” like Solomon and Selden it seemed worthwhile at the risk of overstatement to give them some of their visual emphasis from the MS, rather than to understate by modern assimilative convention. 15  Yale, II.375nn64 and 65.

16  Further locutions hereabouts include:  amaris oderis (= general you, anyone—​second-​person impersonal, like English “one”); also non possis “you”  =  anybody; quis, qui 390f (collectives, for thinking about others thinking); Dicet aliquis (“Someone will say”), 394f Respondeo; then plerique (“most people say”), 394f (type-​response in the third person, countermanded by Atqui and “I”).

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they are “of swinish mind” will hardly change their minds. Despite any lowering of the temperature that might come from not haranguing opponents by tu or vos, Milton does not compromise his attitude from the divorce tracts, which he reprises. Rather, his appeals to reason work through an agreeable array of wordings, with something of personal release, expressing the usual personal animus. I see the absence of second-​person harangue as tactical or accidental:  he is hitting the opposition with many other hectic locutions, involving a widening array of concepts of personhood.

Questions of Belonging

To conclude, we return to the first person and to controversial uses of its plural forms, nos and its inflections, and similarly for the adjective noster: Who are “we” and “our”? Who does the Miltonic Ego belong among? Who does he see himself as a member of? For whenever these forms express belonging, the in-​group entails an out-​group, an Other of some sort, possibly also some “othering” of individuals or groups, which Milton may see as repugnant vested interests. But we shall find that the boundaries of belonging keep changing and can be porous. Tithe-​takers are tu, vos (so not a “we”), but then you and I are all we, English. Further examples are to be found, equally though differently animated. Thus at MS 451f (Oxford, 888) it is persons, including nos, who organize a paragraph of rebuttal: At inquies […]. Respondeo […]. Nobis hoc semper licebit (“ ‘Yet,’ you will say […]. I answer. This will always be allowed us: not to say of Christ what scripture does not say.”) The concluding pronoun, Nobis, means three things here: Milton himself; the “we” of “our” side in the disputation; and a more general “we” of thinking and devout people, or (if that is not synonymous) of the “Reformed,” of whom more in a moment. So “Nos” has varying force. Besides the nos which merely varies or mutes an ego which might become annoying, and the general nos of “my side of the present argument,” we meet a nos which aligns Milton with those who think like himself, basically, and yet not in detail—​Protestants, Reformed, those who rely most on scripture. A usefully inexact grouping; truth-​seekers, perhaps. Alongside forms of nos we find the half-​adjective half-​pronoun nostri. (Nostri will be all too familiar for anyone who learnt their Latin out of Caesar’s Gallic Wars: Nostri, “our men,” those incessant winners.) Nostri now become “our side” in the conflicts of Christendom. And so it is that regarding justification (I.22, Oxford, 620–​23) Milton begins a vital, divisive branch of the topic with these words: Gravis hic agitatur quaestio acerrimis utrinque adversariis, Soláne fides iustificet? Nostri affirmant; et opera quidem effecta esse fidei non causa iustificationis, Rom. 3:24, 27–​28, Gal. 2:16, ut supra: alii non sola fide iustificari disputant, freti illo loco Iacobi, cap. 2:24 (“Here an important question is debated by very fierce contestants on both sides, Whether faith alone justifies? Our own [theologians] say Yes, and hold that works are indeed the effects of faith, not the causes of justification, Rom. 3:24, 27–​8; Gal. 2:16, as above. Others contend that justification is not by faith alone, relying on that passage of James 2:24.”) Though nostri has been translated as “our [theologians],” it is not until the third mention that Milton has specified “our theologians” (theologis nostris). When he does,

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he says “I am amazed” (miror) that “our theologians” (theologis nostris) saw conflict between the two passages. There may be the nuance, therefore, that the Reformed or Protestant side inclined to solafideism whether theologians or not, but that he is surprised at the theologians, as if they ought to have known better. Sola fides certainly became a defining issue within Protestantism (agitatur), but for present purposes we note that he sides with the solafideists in general (since they are nostri, repeated), while alii—​“others”—​sound like third-​person outsiders. Yet these others get this one right. Milton separates himself from both groups, but shakes his head at nostri, more in sorrow than in anger. He reaffirms membership while disagreeing. He finds himself in a similar position on predestination in I.4. Pronouns thereby mark a vague enduring allegiance, with spasmodic differentiation. “Our” Religion

This nos stands out even more in its adjectival form when Milton affirms that in “our religion […] Faith alone justifies” (MS 275m, Oxford, 620–​21 with 633 note xiii). “religionis nostrae” has been added superscript to hoc caput, “this head of our religion.” Soon after we read of theologis nostris, where nostris is likewise added superscript. The Oxford edition comments that “Nostri, repeated several times here, implies membership if not adherence to a theological group; perhaps simply Reformed, rather than Calvinist or Arminian.” Milton proceeds to put “our” side under cross-​examination. It is not at all clear how far the pronoun extends or what degree of brotherhood is being assumed. The uncertainty is blatant when Milton attacks “our modern clergy,” noster, si diis placet, clerus hodiernus (MS 379m, Oxford, 786–​87 with 792 Latin n.  iii). This “our” could cover any and every church order which arrogates to its clergy17 “this privilege of teaching the faith,” which in the context of I.31, “Of Particular Churches,” means churches which have a paid clergy at the time of Milton’s writing. In any event, Milton queries and problematizes his own adjective noster. Not (now) any church which Milton could approve or belong to, but rather the opposite, because the classical phrase si diis placet is “ironic or contemptuous” (792 Latin n. iii).

Amesius Noster

These uncertainties bring us to the most-​discussed example of noster, in II.7 at MS, 570: “Amesius noster, l[iber]. 2. c. 13 Med[ulla]: Theologiae: non est, inquit, Charitatis.” Milton has required his scribes, Picard and scribe “M,” to revisit his first version, at least once, to make three insertions—​two above the line with caret, one below with reversed caret. The first as read is Picard’s addition of /​noster/​. The next, by “M,” is the title of Ames’s work, /​ Med: Theologiae/​. The third, again by “M,” is /​inquit/​. From our present perspective, /​noster/​makes us ask: why did noster need adding, and what difference does it make in isolation (for tone, argument, or method)? 17  “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.”

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Adding the title looks more like a simple omission: scribe or dictator made the local reference secure but forgot the title (Ames wrote other books). The third insertion seems needless, because even if context had not entailed this, for this quoting of words from Ames the small hand used by Picard shows it is quotation. Does the slight superfluity in alluding show Milton and scribe trying out a method together? For whereas the three changes go in different directions individually, if taken together they suggest how Milton is composing and revising, and may show an early stage of this. Not so early as to precede the massive expansion beyond collation of texts under headings, but early in the stage when chapters or (in this case) paragraphs underwent discussion involving other theologians. If so, Milton had not yet solidified his subsequent practice with referencing, nor with acknowledging, nor with Inquit.18 Nor with noster. “Our own” does not put Ames (yet) among coreligionists who err in the present case, for he is not (yet) being quoted for an opposite opinion, rather invoked for a higher principle which Milton will use to settle the squabble about Sunday worship. Yet in the end he is not of “our” view either. He does not appear in the list of those who are—​Bucer and five more names at the close of the chapter. These are “all the most learned theologians”: Ames is now on the outer. From our present standpoint, the insertion of /​noster/​ points to the personal quality of the writing and tantalizes us because (like nos) noster can mean a shifting allegiance. As Milton selects and varies his “we,” so perhaps his readers may “use or not use” his thoughts on individual topics?

Amesius is /​noster/​ because Milton knows his work well and because he is English. Ames is one of the two theologians whom the early biographer names as regular reading for Milton:  “a Tractate which he thought fit to collect from the ablest of Divines, who had written on the subject; Amesius, Wollebius, &c.”19 Although Hunter rightly notes that Milton does not go far with “collecting” material from theologians, since of course he does it from the Bible, Edward Phillips did still recall the regular resort to Ames, and the MS shows him doing it to collect and to quote. He is “noster” because he is known from consultation and familiarity for Milton’s research team. Moreover, because he happens to be an Englishman (the only one besides Selden and Milton himself who is named in De Doctrina), he is noster in an echo of the more usual Roman military sense, nostri, “our men.”20 Without adding the idea of Ames as an ex-​Fellow of Milton’s own college, 18  The chapter in MS has many signs of addition and revision to the main doctrine. Jeffrey Miller discerns some four stages in the MS states and the thought together, as Milton abrogates Ames’s strict sabbatarianism. The small changes around noster may be part of this, and though to correlate these three with Miller’s four would defy certainty, the two sets of revision do suggest something formative in the chapter, with intriguing echoes in the meaning of noster. As with nostri theologi, Milton is separating (even) from coreligionists, being as Miller calls him “abrogative”; noster admits some ambivalence. I am grateful to Dr Miller for exchanges on II.7. 19  Hunter, Visitation Unimplor’d, 26, citing Edward Phillips from Early Lives of Milton, 61.

20  Compare the strange chummy English phrase, “X of ours,” meaning “our college or school”; or the phrase “Dobbin of ours,” our regiment, in Vanity Fair.

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who went from it into exile for theological reasons, Ames would be “ours” in a personal sense. “Ours” for many reasons, variously personal. The work was written in England (1094n105); it discusses matters of church and state unique to England; and the title-​ page and MS, 7 proclaim the author as Anglus. All in all, this noticeably inserted noster21 points to the convergence of things which make Milton belong with Ames: religious orientation, nationality, intellectual situation, educational background, and reading practice. The convergence in turn combines with the unique content and handwriting of the allusion to suggest a date when Milton was still collecting supporting authorities, just before his method and confidence hardened, a process seen in the MS of II.7. Milton disagrees with him in other places, including this present chapter!22 That’s the spirit, that’s our man!

Conclusions

Milton’s ways with pronouns and other idioms of person are thus found to serve his eager persuasion of himself and then of his readers. Thanks to Latin, and to the rhetoric of disputation, they enable Milton to enliven his thinking, sometimes to the point of dramatizing it. These habits make it personal, both in itself, expressively, and as directed from person to person, for persuasion. While Kelley observed a “spirited dialectic” in De Doctrina, he could have said a “dialectical spirit,” in the sense that the work is at its most spirited—​indeed most itself—​when being dialectical and interpersonal. This interpersonal belongs within the whole personal quality which we are examining in these studies.

21  See the photograph of this page of the MS at Oxford, Introduction, lxxxix.

22  As Oxford concluded (1056, Latin n. i ad fin): “While the attitude which occasions the tone is uncertain, perhaps even ambivalent, noster [and especially its superscript insertion in the MS] fixes attention on Ames, and his words regarding the issue at hand. It tells us at the least to ‘Wait and see’; and more likely, to look out for a developing demolition.”

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Chapter 9

MILTON’S DE FILIO TO SHOW MILTON’S personal theologizing of scripture at its most characteristic and fullest, in De Filio on the Trinity, we scrutinize his original Latin words, at some length, from varying aspects. The style is the man, his mind thinking theologically. First, however, I attempt an alternative account of scripture itself, using recent summaries of biblical scholarship for perspective and contrast. After all, since scripture is Milton’s own authority and yardstick for doctrine, it should surprise us whenever he bypasses or downplays it—​in his selection of evidence, arrangement of evidence, and mode of argument. Such surprises point to the dominance of prior conviction, and to the decisive influence of the “personal” dimension which is my focus.

Scriptural Evidence: The Road Not Taken

As regards the Trinity, one passage stands out, what is known as the “Great Commission” of Matthew’s gospel. At Matt. 28:19 the disciples are enjoined to teach all nations, “baptizing into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”1 As Simon Gathercole remarks:  “[T]‌he name here is singular even though it has three owners. Neither Father, Son, nor Spirit exhaust the divine identity; rather each shares it.” And whenever Jesus is “sharing the name of YHWH” we reflect that “a name is so obviously concerned with identity.” In two more places of Matthew (18:20, 7:22), we find “the substitution of the name of YHWH with the name of Jesus […] not ‘exclusive substitution’ but ‘inclusive substitution’ […] the incorporation of Jesus.” Other scholars writing in the Oxford Handbook of the Trinity adduce passages from John’s gospel, the epistles of John and Paul, and Hebrews which, without formulating a doctrine of threefold godhead, provide examples of that way of thinking, examples which in the following centuries supported the developing orthodoxy. In short, the idea of the Trinity came out of scripture and referred back into it, even to the Old Testament (Book 1, Chapter 2). Certainly during the formation of the canon, there is a kind of reflection on the three persons of the Trinity and their multiple relations and connections, with attempts beginning to express them in terms of “Trinity” and “persons.” That is why one may speak of Milton’s emptying out the baby (Trinitarian godhead) with the bathwater (Trinitarian doctrine as explained by Scholastic metaphysics, of hypostasis and so on). De Filio demolishes the explanation, but at times manhandles the scriptural evidence for the orthodoxy, as if the two were the same thing. This is a very serious kink in a theology which seeks safe belief solely in scripture. What are we to make of it? The present chapter argues that his personal and passionate method, and its 1  Since Latin has no definite article, I give the Greek, which does, making it clearer that the three genitives have a single “name” (εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ καὶ τοῦ ἁγίου πνεύματος).

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Latin style too, while jeopardizing objectivity, show Milton’s mind at its most engaged and fiery, warts and all. Each time the Latin becomes impassioned, he deviates into being most himself. Before we examine this passion, our own proper inquiry, in the Preface and other key passages, let us for the record exemplify Milton’s “manhandling” of Matthew 28:19 (aka the Great Commission), so as to bring out some typical eccentricities of his method in De Filio. First, he does not tackle it head on, but only later in the context of baptism (MS 93i), with a promise of “more about this in the following chapter.” So then, second, late in the chapter on the Spirit (MS 107m), as the fourth attribute accorded to the Spirit by scripture (“Divine honours”), he does at last tackle “into the name of.” And so he limits it, by two manoeuvres: “into” merely means “belief in” (as with baptism “into Moses,” 1 Cor. 12:13), and “the name of” means “into those blessings and gifts which we received through.” He dwells on the receiving believer, not on the giver(s) or ownership of the name. He says, third: “from all these texts it is obvious (palam est) that we are baptized ‘into the name of’ the father, the son, and the holy spirit, not so that we may be reminded of what the inherent or relative nature of those three is, but only of what at baptism they each accomplish in those who believe, namely:  the Father, eternal salvation; the son, redemption; the spirit, sanctification—​the Father indeed acting of his own accord, the son and the spirit with power received from the father.” Milton defers, relegates, and limits; splits where he might lump; and resolutely keeps focus on the receiver, not the giver. It bears repeating that where scripture itself had affirmed a single name (identity, ownership, shared being, or whatever we can call it neutrally, the single something), Milton is declining to follow scripture—​letter or spirit—​ where it invited follow-​up. I  mean the follow-​up which scripture itself had begun, for example by linking the three; and in the unitative passages of John’s gospel. But Milton has made up his mind from other passages and from the laws of his own mind, and also in the name of free and open-​minded inquiry, as his Preface proclaims.

The Preface

De Filio is unique in several major ways—​length, passion, organization, and more—​but most plainly in having its own address to readers. This resembles the opening Epistle, in appealing for a free-​spirited, open-​minded reading, despite or is it because of containing ideas counter to orthodoxy. Our own analysis of that Epistle in the introduction and in Chapter  1 will not need repeating. To bring out differences instead, I dwell on the Preface’s opening gambit, then on words chosen to cushion his most risky conclusions, and last on places where the chapter subordinates what scripture says on his subject, to disprove orthodox dogma. The Preface begins with a slantwise move, the counterfactual supposition that if he were Roman Catholic he would acquiesce in the orthodox dogma, of triple personhood within deity, because his Roman allegiance would require him to. This move of course means that, being free from subservience to Roman command, he might believe in the Trinity on the better ground of free persuasion. For lack of scriptural evidence, however, he will not have to believe it; the Romans have got this one right, albeit by a wrong route.

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Thus the Preface (wittily, almost satirically) surprises readers, making them pause and jolting them into reflection on a tenet which might otherwise seem to be one which united if not defined Christianity. Not so! Wait and see! Then (modulating from ironic to eirenic2 in tone) comes anticipatory cushioning. He detaches himself from Rome by the opening counterfactual conditional, “if I professed myself a nursling of the Roman Church,” si profiterer, past subjunctive. The detachment entails that the Romans remain more basically misguided, so aligning Milton with the “name of Protestant or Reformed” (MS 39f)—​his usual way of entering on a religious subject, as Thomas Corns has shown, to join with brethren, as an “us.”3 He then appeals to readers to “weigh each individual point with a mind” eager for truth and free of prejudice; he will be refuting, not the authority of scripture (“inviolable”) but “human interpretations.” To which now he will add his own, “by the same method and path.” What is fairer (quid est aequius) than now following Milton’s “diligent research and free discussion”? I call this partly “cushioning” because of its somewhat reticent wording:  he has not said outright that scripture contains no evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity, and he implies that it is the doctrine (hodie receptam, recepta opinio) which offends him. To “weigh each individual point” is to fragment the inquiry and to impose his own sequence of argument. To contrast scriptura (sacrosancta) in the singular with multiple interpretations (interpretationes, plural) is to split up the opposition while also lumping them pejoratively, even while he is claiming to reach different conclusions by their own, same methods. Quid est aequius? is his usual wording of a protestation that he writes in a benevolent and free way, as in the epigraph to Areopagitica. Nonetheless, people who say “I can’t say fairer than that” tend to be pushing for victory rather than bargaining. Expect a free and fresh inquiry, then, but also a bumpy ride. The third contrast between the Preface and the Epistle is that the Preface gives primacy to refuting a received doctrine, over amassing the scriptural evidence. De Filio by no means crowds out his own thoughts on the page with overflowing scriptural citations. Certainly the chapter will address abundant scriptural evidence. But it begins and continues as an attack on doctrine, and handles the citations from that perspective. The shift is seen by reading its later pages, where the older method remains on view. Of course the two emphases, doctrine and evidence, do belong together. In the writing, nevertheless, and so in the reading itself, refutation is seen coming uppermost. Something individual and passionate keeps taking over.

Generation

It can be seen taking over, in the course of the opening pages on generation, from 49 to 58. For one thing, De Filio Dei is at once set out as consequential, subordinated to the 2  Kelley’s word: Yale, 204n5.

3  In his chapter “Roman Catholicism, De Doctrina Christiana, and the Paradise of Fools” in Milton and Catholicism.

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scheme of chapters on God’s decreeing: (a) Internal: (i) general (I.3) and (ii) special (I.4, on Predestination); whereupon we now (MS 49m) reach (b) External, which subdivides into (i) Generation, (ii) Creation, and (iii) Governance of all things. A glance at Oxford’s chart of the Ramist arrangement shows that the divisions are binary except here, for Generation. Milton has opted to begin with decreeing, and to place the Son as external to God; not apud se, but extra se. He creates a special category, Generatio, to facilitate this. He adopts the usual top-​down arrangement of ideas, to emphasize decreeing4 and efficientia, but then innovates. Second, whereas at this point in many other chapters, he embarks on scriptural citation, to explain their ideas and their division, De Filio now plunges instead into supporting argument—​straight into an exercising of logic. Into this (at MS 50m) citations make a delayed entry—​delayed until after he has begun to attack the theologians (theologi) for thinking the Son can be both an “emanation” from the Father and “a different person” (MS 50i, persona altera). Eagerness and tension peep through the businesslike reasoning. This intensifies. For example, at 54m he appears to change tack:  “let us renounce reason in sacred matters; let us solely follow what divine scripture teaches” (MS 54m). Milton now grants that he has begun more from reasoning than from scripture. But he does this for a local and polemical purpose, to skip “a long argument from metaphysics, […] that whole drama of personalities,” dismissed as “incredible and outlandish” (incredibilia et nova). And by the time (MS 58i) he begins detailed refutation by prolonged analysis of citations, Milton has not merely lumped together all who disagree, and thwacked their arguments and evidence, he is calling them names—​writing for himself and to himself more than winning over the well-​disposed uncommitted readers whom his Preface claims to seek. He is warming to his work; the chapter grows and grows. When the Preface seeks to disarm and placate, that comes from justified misgivings. These opponents “argutantur” (“prattle,” MS 50i); now (58i) they deal in “disgusting quibbles (not to say trickeries),” putidis argutiis, ne dicam praestigiis. These expressions are pejorative. “Not to say” trickeries is of course to say them anyway. Why is it necessary, or how has it become so pressing, to lump the orthodox together as mere prattlers? Milton is dismissive, becoming derisive. And a little flustered too? When he finally addresses the scriptural evidence, he finds “only two passages” requiring demolition. Duo duntaxat loci. “Only two passages”! Yet then he keeps finding more. We should ask what is occasioning this restart. He may have been reading more of rival scholarship: this often occasions additions to the MS in chapters where we can see the additions arriving. He does not often re-​word an original overstatement (though a few instances do occur). He does not back down. In the present case, above all, he does not separate his two targets, the orthodox doctrine and the scriptural texts. When he adds more texts, it is to disallow both baby and bathwater. 4  At a cursory glance, Milton’s stress on decreeing seems to exceed that of his model, Wollebius, and likewise that of Amesius. If so, it would help him to insist, when tackling Trinitarian orthodoxy, on the Father’s originary supremacy and on godhead as power relations.

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How Style Contributes

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To do this, Milton draws on the energies of his Latin style, in the ways we have distinguished in earlier chapters, but enlisting new ones, such as wordplay, repetition, and (to generalize these) eristic. Theologians (Chapter 5), named or grouped, appear in many dialectical exchanges. As a matter of course, theologi are berated as a group misapplying logic, with a special place (the wooden spoon) for Placaeus. Etymology (Chapter 6) points to a wider deployment of multilingualism in the chapter, where Greek and Hebrew are called in witness. A comparative etymology corroborates a point of argument, about grammatical number and person (is he sounding theological overtones to these terms?) Euripides offers a kindred “plural of Majesty.” Pagan allusions (Chapter  7) comprise two of Milton’s special favourites (further confirming his authorship). Apart from Euripides (most argumentative of the tragedians), we twice hear from Horace. Milton consorted with Horace as his norm of sanity. Horace alludes to Vertumnus (198), and to Proteus (157), both allusions being made in attack on opponents for changing their ground (or definition), for faults of logic. Pronouns of cross-​examination (Chapter  8) feature less than elsewhere, perhaps because Milton now names more names. The landscape of persons is sketched in the third person, groups in the plural, as if all thought and erred alike, and singular for individuals. These are scholars: Erasmus, Beza, and Junius, with only one theologian singled out for ignominy, Placaeus. The reason seems to be that Erasmus has clout, and Beza too, testifying for Milton against his own position: a cunning ad hominem twist. Junius gets similar treatment (MS 82). Only Placaeus (MS 83 and 84) is named as theologian rather than scholar, and Milton subjects him to scornful wordplay. Ut placet Placaeo, “as it pleases Placaeus” (84i): he is pleasing himself, since his position embodies self-​ contradiction, in that “the son sends himself before his own face,” se mittit ante faciem suam. To such absurd effect, Milton claims, does a Trinitarian like Placaeus juggle with the concept of person, imposed upon scripture (MS 83). All these features of the chapter recur from our own earlier studies of the personal in Milton’s thought and style. I repeat and foreground them for several reasons. They are usually left in the background, muted by English translation. As flourishes, they do not seem to advance or deepen the thought, until we see how personally Milton writes. He writes with strong individuality. He takes the thinking of his opponents personally (as offenders against truth and scripture). We hear the reasoning personality in all the senses which are gathering from my examination. Wordplay De Filio adds a new feature or figure, wordplay. He indulges and exploits its wit, to enlist and persuade. Wordplay places the entertainer in the foreground, a lone but versatile voice, which through much of the chapter rivals scripture. To substantiate, it is surely no accident that the chapter draws more comment than others in the Oxford edition concerning wordplay. Wordplay occurs when the Latin requires or encourages two or more senses. Though the senses may be found within a

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single word or expression, I focus on a fuller example, which extends in a threefold series, making it exceptional but fruitful. It centres on ratio—​“reason,” whether as Reason or as particular reasons, or as reasoning, or logic, or method, or again the battery of words which English has taken from Latin ratio direct (not through French raison):  “ratio,” “ration,” “rational,” “rationality.” So Milton’s Latin ratio needs many English equivalents, more than most in fact: it grounds a huge piece of Milton’s case against the Trinitarians’ reliance on Person. They go against ratio. He piles up rationes. While these rationes depend on his own rigid axioms, they bring out the personal intensity of his case and proceedings. We must observe ratio in action, since translation dismantles the repetitions and wordplay. Early on (MS 53f/​54i Oxford, 137) Milton lays one of his logical traps. “Quite foreign to all reason” (ab omni ratione alienissima), he says, some who “think themselves rather sharp-​witted” have the notion that the Son, “although personally and numerically another (quamvis persona atque numero alterum) is yet essentially one with the Father, and is likewise the one God.” As against this, Milton urges that “[o]‌ne and another cannot be of one essence (unius essentiae); God is one being (unum ens), not two; one essence belongs to one being, and so does one subsistence (subsistentia), which is nothing else than substantial essence (essentia substantialis); if you should give two subsistences or persons to one essence, you would state contradictions (repugnantia dixeris): that the essence is one and not one.” The passage is quoted rather fully to prepare for the wordplay which picks up the crucial criterion, ratio, reason, to which the opposition are alienissimi. Milton relies, he says, on reason; treating of the same issues in his Artis Logicae (Yale, 212n30 and 212n31). And then, emerging from “all these points” together, he taxes the opposition in righteous fury with: “quibbles, obscurantism, false props, ridiculous paradox” (MS 57f, Oxford, 145). So he must move to their evidence instead: “let reason be given no reasoning,” rationis igitur nulla ratio habeatur. The pun dismisses ratio altogether. The ironical, aggressive dialectic carries on into inspection of the evidences, in scripture. It carries on by means of wordplay in something like a series. The Oxford notes identify it in At per Deum immortalem nihil temere agamus de Deo (MS 58m, Oxford, 144), saying that for the play on Deum /​ Deo “the tone is less certain” (than in rationis […] ratio just before). Can we say more now? First, there is no need for any wordplay here, for the invocation or asseverative per Deum immortalem contributes nothing to the sense or argument. Second, the tone is indeed uncertain in that the oath itself is hardly a conventional piety. If anything, it exemplifies the temerity which it purports to forgo. Milton is warmed up, and he risks this to keep his opposition on the run. Third, the warrant for it comes, of course, from the rashness of the orthodox. For they interpret John 10:30, ego et pater unum sumus, to mean unum essentia, “essentially one.” Not so: “there is not just one way in which two things can be called one.” The tone is hardly that of piety or charity, but Milton is indignant on behalf of God, which is what licenses his vow, “by immortal God.” To sum up, the tone is not as obviously scornful as in rationi ratio. But neither does the repetition of “God” achieve theologically meaningful polyptoton, as it indeed does in the Creed, Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine (a strong summation, paradox with a purpose). Rather, it is release of some feeling, since

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it is an oath, “by God, the ever-​living”—​for some personal purpose, some emotional effect. A witty and well-​shaped exasperation? Wordplay shows him in full cry, as witness the wordplay of the immediate sequel, third in the series: rationis […] ratio; per Deum […] de Deo; and now (re-​emerging from byplay into main theme) Non uno modo unum duae res dici possunt. “There is not just one way that two things can be called one.” We expect mention of unum on this topic. It rings like a tolling bell through the sequel, in comments or citations where “one” does not mean one in essence, until the sole passage where it does: the “notorious Johannine Comma” (1 John 5:7), which he argues against Beza but with Erasmus is inauthentic—​ absent, as he says, from many of the manuscripts. Repetition

If wordplay involves repetition, then repetition—​with or without such figures as punning or polyptoton—​is strident in the decisive proofs. Take ratio again, with its inflections and cognates:  it becomes even more of a tolling bell in the pages just examined. It appears ten times in the paragraph where Milton’s ire peaks at ratio rationem parit, non notiones absurdas et ab omni intellectu remotissimas (MS 60m, Oxford, 148f): so much for the brains of those who formulated and upheld Trinitarian orthodoxy. Because ratio translates as “logic” or “reasoning” or sometimes “method” and “rationale,” the English may miss the belabouring insistence of the Latin. I have to insist a bit myself. Milton is staking a claim to reason, appropriating it to his side of the question. Witness the dismissive hyperbole after ratio rationem parit: “reason produces reason, not ridiculous ideas which are far removed from human intelligence.” He is angry, offended, crusading for the right use of Mind. He detests other people’s overstatements. Opponents of his logical reductivism would feel that he can’t, or won’t, get his head round the idea, the possibility of interpenetrating identity; that he doesn’t try, he doesn’t see what the orthodox thought—​that scripture (without making definitive theses like the ones which De Doctrina likes) did tend (and increasingly over time) towards expressing some equality and sharing of life between Son and Father. I come back to this, later in the chapter, and in the chapter on Milton’s poems.

Eristic

Meanwhile, as an amateur in theology, and not much of a logician either, I tend to notice rather how Milton handles his opponents and how he wields his rhetoric. For instance, he does not give Beza’s reasons or most of what Erasmus had said. He puts words into the mouth of some representative, unnamed second-​person antagonist:  “You [singular] will flatly deny that there are three Gods: tres Deos esse pernegabis.” More usually, opponents are an unnamed “they,” as in the next paragraph, beginning At inquiunt. “They say,” that although scripture “does not distinctly lay down that Father and Son are one in essence, reason, arising from this and other passages of scripture, is still conclusive and convincing on that point” (MS 60i, Oxford, 149m). No! Reason reappears on Milton’s side, personified: ratio voce maxima reclamat (“reason protests with a very loud voice”). Milton’s counter-​assertion (not proof) adduces ratio three more times, in two

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more short sentences. By means of reiteration, reason is shouting the irrationals down. “Surely reason produces reason, not ridiculous ideas which are far removed from all human intelligence.” Thus “this opinion is grounded neither in scripture nor in reason.” Milton manhandles reason in thus repeating its name as a weapon. Loud repetition of a word, even the word ratio, or especially ratio, is not a rational way to persuade.

The Rhetoric

At times, then, the pleasures of rhetorical fluency take over. Wordplay is only one kind of heightened or patterned speech which Milton indulges. For the reader of the Latin, or anyone who can enjoy the force of language at full stretch, the compensation from watching Milton operating at below his own intellect is the personal engrossment, the headlong, impetuous commitment to his own “Christian fury.” That paradoxical phrase from Dryden5 (from his own personal quest in Religio Laici) described Athanasius. Milton can sound rather like this Trinitarian opponent when replying to him, in the righteous zeal and zest of refutation which pervades De Filio. In saying this, I do not mean to disparage De Doctrina, any more than to patronize it from a safe distance, but to understand it, by appreciating the art and zest of Milton’s original words. Milton is felt omnipresent in it, his “best possession.” At the same time, the mind and self which so reveal themselves in his Latin have a strangeness which translation (literal or freer, both) must muffle. From his liking for litotes (non nisi ex scriptura), or for delimiting expressions (duntaxat), all the way up to that mind-​set which in full cry sounds like Doubting Thomas, Milton is the same man, seeking what even he cannot doubt, in order to believe “safely,” not seeing that this will be reductive because he makes no allowance for his own axioms or for the different ones in scripture (and its exegetes).6 Three further examples of the peculiarity of his energy must suffice here:  one to demonstrate how effective its more austere application can be; one to show how passion can enter in; and one to suggest why the more open theology of the poems contrasts with the delimitativeness. The first example concerns the notorious Johannine Comma. The second refutes his opponents’ Palmarius locus, or “champion proof-​text.” In the third, a local contrast produces an inadvertent Trinitarian glimpse, the thing, without the name or its jargon. The Johannine Comma (MS 59m, Oxford, 149)

This “interpolated verse” (Oxford, lix) of 1 John 5, on which the Trinity “rested centrally,” is dispatched by Milton by means of three sentences, one long (130 words) and two short. 5  Lines 220–​22: “[…] Arius to confute/​ The good old man, too eager in dispute/​ Flew high; and, as his Christian Fury rose/​ Damn’d all for Hereticks who durst oppose./​” In his Preface too Dryden declines to retract or to moderate his paradox. Is Athanasius picking the wrong fight, as well as overstating his case? And might one see the same in DDC? 6  I have examined the style in these terms more fully for MMsDDC, chap. 6.

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The first sentence is unusually hypotactic, even for him, yet clear and elegant, and, if anything, understated. Too long to quote in full here, it is sampled in its cool, powerful steps. First, the passage “is commonly thought to be the clearest evidence”: the qualifying phrases “ut putatur” and “vulgo,” as elsewhere, sow doubt. Second, the “received opinion about the essential unity of the three persons” is based (fundatur) on this passage. To demolish it, then, is to demolish one half of the “only two passages” (Duo duntaxat loci sunt, MS 58i), though in the event there are “many more than the original ‘only two’ ” (Oxford, 237n.xxviii). Third, some texts of scripture do not include the passage, these being all the three Oriental versions, and “most ancient Greek codices”: this proof would suffice in itself. Fourth, Milton is equally laconic in ramming home that there is great variety of wording in texts which do contain the Comma. All four points so far are expressed in subordinate clauses, tucked in after praeterquam quod (“apart from the fact that [first]–​[fourth]”). Now comes the clincher:  fifth, the passage no more proves that the “three who bear witness in heaven” are “one in essence” than that the paralleled three of verse 8 are one, they who “bear witness in earth, [being] the spirit, and the water, and the blood.” The negative phrasing “no more proves […] than” demolishes the text itself, dry hypotaxis countering naïve parataxis. Surely, sixth, the wording—​“if indeed” John says this (subsidiary doubt cast here)—​points to “unity of agreement and testimony,” not unity of being. Two big names saw this, “not only Erasmus,” “but even Beza, albeit reluctantly.” With greater confidence now and with shrewd placing, he adds to the disinterested Erasmus “even” the committed Trinitarian Beza, unwilling witness, as if forced to agree with the five points Milton has made for himself. And so seventh and finally, the rhetorical question, “who exactly (quinam) are those three?” Not “three Gods” (pushing the meaning in one unacceptable direction), but rather (pulling sense back from the precipice) to the safe and sure ground of three witnesses who agree about the witnessing. They are of one mind, and that’s all. So the total effect is of calm confidence, not needing animation or figures or histrionics. Even so, there is a felt momentum. And that propels the discussion beyond its present purpose, to discount the Comma, to the underlying proposition, that “he who is not essentially one with God the Father cannot be equal to the Father” (that is, Jesus who is “one with the Father,” as John’s gospel reiterates, is not unus essentia). Milton ends by promising more on this passage later (infra amplius, in I.6 De Spiritu, [MS 109–​10]). If one felt that this paragraph had proved its point beyond doubt, the promise of more (positioned in the run-​up to the whole discussion of godhead) might seem to mute the impact here. It suggests rather, how much proof Milton has, and that his inquiry into the Spirit can only have the same trajectory. It makes a masterly proof, more by its density (including the concatenating syntax) than by rhetorical skills. Though these do not disappear entirely, they are reined in, as if mind were sole controller. Accordingly I infer the converse: when Milton has less confidence, in his powers of persuasion if not in his conclusions from the evidence and from reason, he becomes more advocatorial, eloquent, dramatic, shrill, and manifestly personal—​more openly persuading. Even if he thought like this in his mind, and on his own tongue to amanuenses and himself and whoever was within earshot, the Latin register rises. Here, it is cool, and (apart from the latent energy of the syntax) the style is plain.

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The Prize Passage: Locus Palmarius Notice, first, that in the manuscript Palmarius is written in heavy large-​hand, for emphasis and tone, rather than as a mere caption: the scribes do not use large-​hand for captions within this stretch of exegesis, still less for an adjective unless to make some point. Did Milton, explicitly or by tone of dictating voice, insist on the unusual large-​hand? Oxford (231n.xxiv) observes: “The tone is ironic, says Kelley [to himself in his annotated copy], and the sarcasm is confirmed by the immediately deflating ut putatur [as it is thought],” which phrase echoes but more tartly his cavil when discussing the Comma. Without expecting reverence of tone, we might wonder about the ironic ridicule of adversaries pulling out their “prize” citation. Kelley’s note suggests he is responding to the tone of Beza and Calvin (Yale, 242n115): “And lest the impious carp about some feigned god, John went farther, saying: ‘He is the true God, and eternal life.’ ” The irritation is interpersonal, a disputational heat. A certain ironic tetchiness continues, to the point where “common sense itself clamours” on behalf of Milton’s understanding of the passage. Ipse enim sensus communis flagitat. Common sense is invoked, almost personified, not merely as “speaking” but also as “demanding.” The passage reads (1 John 5:20): “And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life” (KJV: hic est verus ille Deus et vita aeterna, in JTB). What would common sense “demand” of such a mystical statement? Probably not a restrictive reading, but a more open, multivalent one. This is the root of the matter, as our next example also suggests. That Milton is addressing his reasoning to an opposition, like Beza and Calvin but without naming them, becomes clearer as the paragraph goes on. He uses a form of imperative, conferatur, “Let John 17:3 be compared.” Some opponent replies: At, inquies […], “ ‘Yet,’ you will say […]” But no: “I answer (that the idea is seized on too hastily)”—​ Respondeo (id prope nimis arripi). He comes to the underlying principle: “This will always be allowed us: not to say of Christ what scripture does not say.” Nobis hoc semper licebit non dicere de Christo quod scriptura non dicit.7 “Allowed us” is oddly temperate. Carey renders it more insistently: “It is never permissible for us to say of Christ what scripture does not say.” This changes the tense and the word order, to take non with licebit (Yale, 248). But the MS word order fits better with the corollary, that “Scripture calls him God; it does not call him ‘that true God.’ ” At this point, therefore, Milton is urging that he does not have to enlarge 1 John, so he won’t. Equally, however, he might have done. He chooses not to. His tone becomes quieter, as he makes a choice of his own. Nothing now about “common sense demanding,” although the considerations which were advanced against the Palmarius Locus (from 1 John) do not apply now (in John’s gospel).

Glimpsing the Alternative

Milton almost allows for alternative emphases. Of another such glimpse, Oxford observed (241n.cxvii), “The sentence expresses a momentary Trinitarian perception.” At MS 95i,

7  So MS 76f.

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Milton’s De Filio

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Milton declares that Quam enim gloriam filio dat pater, ab se non alienat. “For the glory that the father gives the son he does not alienate from himself; for the son everywhere glorifies the father. John 13:31: now has the son of man been glorified in him; and Chapter 8:50: but I do not seek my own glory; there is one to seek it and judge it.” Glory is increased by sharing it. Mind you, in this so-​called Trinitarian glimpse Milton has a different purpose, of contrasting recipients of divine glory. Isaiah 63:5 declares, in a typically Old Testament monotheism, that “my glory I will not give to another, or my praise to idols.” Indeed, even though “the son is ‘another’ than the father” (on the usual anti-​Trinitarian premise), the father does not give the glory away from himself. The son is alius but not alienus. The glory is not taken away, since filius patrem ubique glorificat. Whatever “glory” actually is, it remains one and complete. Presumably that is what orthodoxy upholds, that the Trinity is (or are) blessed because their life is lived in one another, thereby increasing the blessedness. It points to happy poetical paradoxes, like those of love’s usury in Shakespeare or Donne, or Spenser’s dance of the three Graces on Mount Acidale. The trouble begins with the words which try to express it. Mostly, Milton keeps busier demarcating; in I.2, God’s almightiness; in I.4, God’s freedom, and so on. It thus escapes his notice that potential for this three-​ness is found in scripture itself, from which grow the Creeds, even including the early (preferred) Apostles’ Creed. At 2 Cor. 13:14 Paul bids farewell to the Corinthians in the words: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” Milton (MS 107m) declares this a blessing, not an invocation invoking the Spirit as a person. He says nothing about the fact of the threesome, or the sequence (unusual, in not being the order of the Creeds or of Milton’s chapter sequence), or the assignment of gifts to distinct givers. What was Paul wishing the Corinthians, if not triple gifts from a single source? The three-​ness is not denied or disparaged by the fact that Paul is thinking it out, rather than knocking it into doctrinal shape. Paul is delighting in it, not formulating, let alone reiterating. This is why C. A. Patrides declared that the theology of De Doctrina is “closed,” precisely to contrast it with the “open” theology of Paradise Lost. (To the extent that he is right, it is a mistake to gloss the poem from De Doctrina.) Our final chapter addresses the contrast.

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Chapter 10

THEOLOGIES COMPARED THE EXAMPLES EXAMINED in Chapter 9 occasion some misgiving about Milton’s theology. General misgiving was expressed long ago by C.  A. Patrides. Patrides claimed that Milton’s theology in Paradise Lost surpassed the overt and explicit theology of De Doctrina, because in the former it was “open,” but in the latter it was “closed.”1 He did not elaborate. I have begun doing so, and hope now to understand the “closed” quality in De Doctrina better by sampling its opposite in the poem. For certainly contrast is felt when we move from De Filio into the invocation of Book 3, “Hail, holy light […]”

Hail, Holy Light […]

“Open” theology appears with the poem’s narrative of heaven, its glimpses of the life imagined there for the three aspects (or agents, or images, and so on) of Milton’s godhead. We meet the three in turn. First, we hear of Holy Light then Father and Son converse. Let us try, despite the besetting controversies, to absorb the poem’s theology from passages: Hail [,]‌holy light, offspring of heaven first-​born, Or of the eternal co-​eternal beam May I express thee unblamed? Since God is light, And never but in unapproachèd light Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate. Or hearst thou rather pure ethereal stream, Whose fountain who shall tell?

The Holy Light is “offspring of heaven first-​born,” that is, the first-​born offspring of heaven. The words bring to view Genesis 1:1–​3. “In the beginning, God […] said Let there be light.” God comes first, in every sense. Then, however, the poet’s next word is “or.” Whatever nuance of “or” this may be, the fact of the alternative itself allows for difference and for choice for the reader of how to think. Even exclusive alternatives still allow choice. But this “or” is not either/​or, what with two more to come. Are they “or rather”? Or “or as well”? The second option now offered might incur “blame,” but the invocation goes ahead with it. Syntax, and the question form (“May I express thee unblamed”), are leaving at least the matter of expression open. “May I?” Maybe, maybe not; but he does, he is doing it. If I pause to wonder who would “blame” such high and reverend God-​talk, it would be only the most rigid of the orthodox, or indeed the hierarchical-​precisian logician who makes the rules of debate in De Doctrina. But the syntax drives on, answering 1  Patrides, “On the Language of Paradise Lost,” 105.

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the question with an implied yes (like Latin nonne, “May I not?” = “surely I may”). So far, the invocation strikes the note which Patrides calls openness. This is not closure or definition, but an intent or spirit which eagerly interprets a key text of scripture, in search of as much meaning as possible, not a minimum. Consider too the modality of the following sentence, a third “or.” Or hearst thou rather […] (“Would you rather be called […]”). The speaker offers and seems to relish the choice of appellation—​not because it doesn’t matter, but because of delight in the plurality of facets and effects of Holy Light. The reverential fluency is not bound by dusty scholastic terms, or by its own rigid definitions either. Milton is trying out a new image for the Holy Light, that of “stream” and “fountain.” For this imagery commentators gloss Lactantius or Dante, not scripture. Perhaps there are rivers of light somewhere in scripture. Nonetheless, Milton’s reader is invited to think of the spirit of God in more and more ways, with the suggestion that we as well as the spirit may have a preference. In all of this, the epic is opening up, and freed from delimiting definitions and logical minimalism. A key word is “or.” These imaginings are not Trinitarian, of course. They are open, all the more so because Milton is not raising the issue. Does the scenario do it elsewhere? Certainly the almighty Father insists at full length on his own almightiness; here it becomes natural to gloss epic and treatise from each other. But consider the equality which the Father sees in the Son. Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss Equal to God, and equally enjoying Godlike fruition, quitted all to save A world from utter loss. (III.305–09 [emphases mine])

Consequently, I find Alastair Fowler’s glossing intrusive in the present case: “Milton veils his Subordinationism in biblical words” (1996) compressing his earlier note (1968), “Milton prefers a wording that on the one hand is Biblical, on the other open to Arian interpretation.”2 There could be no such “openness” of ambivalence for readers in 1667. The passage’s “openness” is seen in its different direction and intention. There is no “veiling.” If he is insisting, it is in the direction of the Son’s merit: which is also Paul’s reason for the hymnodic rapture of the source passage, Philippians 2. Moreover Milton is at his most Pauline here, absorbing the spirit as much as the letter of Paul into an ardour of his own.3 It is true that the openness does not apply in every utterance, but at times like these it matches the whole direction of the New Testament, that radiant discovery of Jesus as Christ, so as to elevate his humanity into divinity. Not 2  Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, 185, shortened from The Complete Poems of Milton (1971), 578.

3  We know this because elsewhere he overgoes Paul in other directions. In Book 3, when he stipulates with Paul (III.321–​22) that “every knee should bow” to the Son, Paul’s “things under the earth” becomes “them that bide/​ […] under earth in hell.” (Curious too, since Milton thought hell was outside earth, not under it.) Or again, at 611–​13 he spells out the penalties of disobedience, with the didactic ferocity familiar from De Doctrina. See Hale, “Voicing Milton’s God,” 214–​15.

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so De Filio: it systematically reduces the application of scripture in the details, forfeiting its spirit. Patrides was essentially right to contrast the two theologies.4

Actions and Theses

Of course, the poems affirm beliefs differently, by varying mode and grammar. De Doctrina begins each topic by a thesis, baldly stated, then defined, evidenced, upheld, or refined. That basic structure brings with it a typical syntax. The poems do not have to do this. Take Paradise Regained, where (in Chapter 4) we showed how it revisits the cancelled passage about Renovation. It relies now on verbs, not abstract nouns: And now by some strong motion I am led Into this Wilderness, to what intent I learn not yet, perhaps I need not know; For what concerns my knowledge God reveals. (I.290–​93)

As Earl Miner observed, “three of the four lines end with verbs […]. The faithful Jesus […] does not know why he is in the wilderness, and he does not speculate on who he is.”5 A strong faith need not be explicit. Verbs of action, including cognitive action, may say more than derived or splintered propositions. These few but indicative examples show how the theology expressed in or underlying the poems departs from the views in De Doctrina.

Contrast Not the Only Relation

Not that contrast is the only relationship to emerge from comparison of theologies. In one example, the Father in the epic sounds quite as intransigent in supremacy as the Father of the treatise, and this, moreover, in Book 3, where I have just been noting contrast. Epic and treatise do not simply contrast. Let me elaborate a little, through further specimens of the relation. 4  There are some signs of this openness in DDC too. At MS 95 Milton adopts the passage in Philippians on the Son’s “equality” as follows: Cum haec omnia à patre acceperit, et in forma Dei esset, rapinam non duxit hoc aequalia esse cum Deo, Philip. 2:6, Nempe quia id dono acceperat, non rapto (“Though he received all these things from the father, and was in the form of God, he did not think this equality was a plundering, Phil. 2:6, doubtless because he had received it as gift, not as plunder”). Presumably plunder is for exploitation, maximal profit, because harpagmon means “a prize to be grasped,” yet Milton sees no need to gloss Paul’s contrast itself or to explain how a divine being could ever be “emptied.” Paul’s hyperbole poses logical problems enlisted in De Doctrina, but here they are not hinted at. What Milton does, is to dwell on the equality, which in the treatise he had taken pains to translate for himself: ta isa (Oxford, 241n.cxxi) rendered aequalia, neuter and impersonal. It is the equality which counts, without any hairsplitting about degrees or conditions within equality, or separateness of essence required as between equals. The Subordinationist is off duty—​until the following paragraph, which reaffirms rank over equality. 5  Miner, The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden, 273–​74.

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Though Milton’s Argument to Paradise Lost is worded to accord with his view of hell’s location, it allows for the different understanding in some passages of scripture itself. “Which action passed over, the poem hastes into the midst of things, presenting Satan with his angels now fallen into hell, described here, not in the centre (for heaven and earth may be supposed as not yet made, certainly not yet accursed) but in a place of utter [outer] darkness, fitliest called chaos.”6 One key word is “here”—​for present purposes. Other purposes might exist. Another key phrase is “may be supposed,” contrasted with “certainly.” The modality is of thought among alternatives, not of argument or insistence. Milton argues with force for hell’s being far outside this world and prior to it, despite how some passages of scripture envisage it. The Argument does not repeat the trumpeting finality of I.33, which on this point comes complete with a list of supporting authorities. In a more complicated instance, the intransigence of Milton’s God is heard in full force in Book 5, the War in Heaven. Possibly this derives from its Homeric fashioning, but still, who would not feel rebellious after hearing this voice of the Father thus declaring the Son his deputy, interpreting Psalm 2 in terms of coronation or succession? “Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand” (V.602). “Unrevoked” makes ear and mind register revoking. And “mark you his absolute ‘shall.’ ” Then as the close (V.611–​15): “him [the Son] who disobeys/​ Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day/​ Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls/​ Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place/​ Ordained without redemption, without end.” A  provocative rasp is added to the calm displeasure of the psalm. Certainly the additions dramatize challenge, though they make one wonder about foreknowledge. Abdiel, later, can speak more reasonably amid his “flame of zeal.” Comparable extensions and fluctuations for the sake of epic could be observed in the paramount exegesis in expansion of the opening chapters of Genesis. Further signs of contrast can be seen in the pages of commentaries, for instance in the Penguin edition of John Leonard. He notes of “co-​eternal beam” (III.2) that “Milton in CD i.5 denies that the Son is co-​eternal with the Father.”7 Or again at III.119–​20: “ ‘Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,/​Which had no less proved certain unforeknown’: this statement can only damage God’s (and Milton’s) theodicy, for it inadvertently concedes that the certainty (not just the possibility) of the Fall is grounded in something other than divine foreknowledge” (p. 747). Perplexities remain after Milton’s fine chapter on Predestination (I.4) had seemed to wrap it up. All in all, where the poem moves into heaven in Book 3, its theology has a varying relation with its counterparts in De Doctrina—​not always in being more open, but sometimes in re-​opening speculations.

John Creaser’s View

The diagnosis by John Creaser is illuminating here. He contrasts Milton’s reasoning in De Doctrina and his other prose with that in his epic, by powerfully linking his misgiving with Milton’s style: “This ‘irritable’ writing for victory is not only pragmatically 6  Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, 55–​56. The location of hell is discussed in DDC I.33, and in chap. 5 in the present work. 7  Milton, The Complete Poems, ed. Leonard, 745.

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questionable—​because it leaves Milton preaching to the converted—​but, as the expression of a closed and dogmatic mind, is also at odds with the openness of his fundamental insights. Consequently, it leaves him claiming the moral high ground but lacking the moral poise that shapes his greatest writing” (175).8 By contrast, Creaser finds it “striking how rarely the verse […] is infected by the aggression and dogmatism that emerge from Milton’s too ready immersion in the simplicities of controversy.” Does “simplicities of controversy” apply only to the political apologetics, for the theology of the Trinity hardly seems “simple”? First, to reduce religious ontology to either-​ or by logic is to over-​simplify, Paul in particular. Second, Creaser addresses De Doctrina itself in the same terms (173–​75): “Milton’s division of impulses is manifest at length in De Doctrina. His faith in the individual quest and the toleration of differences is explicit. Yet the urge to say the last word and close off debate is frequently apparent, and the pugnacity of tone is all too familiar.” He quotes MS 57f–​58i: “But it is amazing what nauseating subtlety, not to say trickery, some people have employed in their attempts to evade the plain meaning of these scriptural texts [using Yale,  218].” Creaser’s whole essay captures the impulse for the present inquiry.

The Underlying Question

Agreeing with Patrides and Creaser, I  am considering the underlying question. Why does Milton bring a priori or arbitrary or warped reasoning to his chosen task? What is driving these habits? And where—​if he manhandles scripture in a theology grounded solely on scripture—​does his theology’s value lie? Milton emerges as an early modern reformist, where the emphasis falls on “early.” He carries to one sort of extreme the Protestant insistence on a personal faith. He ignores or is unaware of the influence of traditions and of any authority beyond what he can personally endorse. If his personality prevents him seeing some of the light, he denies its existence or importance. Contrariwise, he distorts the importance of his own repugnancies. Despite his radical restart, he still wants to harmonize scripture, in a naïve believer’s way, as if scripture said only one thing per topic, and did not disagree with itself, and must be read as one single synchronic and canonical whole. He does not think developmentally like such contemporaries as Hobbes or Spinoza, or anticipate the advancers of biblical studies, like Richard Simon (who triggered different reflections of the near-​ contemporary Dryden in Religio Laici). Milton’s harmonist, unchronological, or anti-​ chronological bent, is accentuated by the non-​publication of De Doctrina in his lifetime. When the King came back, and the manuscript went into hiding, it missed its moment for influencing the mainstream.

The Personal Impetus

Apart from the quarrel with Trinitarian orthodoxy too, Milton’s theological energies aim where the shoe pinched most, namely, personal and civic liberties. Witness the 8  Creaser, “ ‘Fear of Change,’ ” 161–​82.

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long digression on divorce, whose placing (under Prelapsarian Governance) remains unexplained except as personal emphasis or convenience. And where scripture allows differing beliefs, he chooses to insist that one outweighs another: in the case of a paid clergy, he follows Paul’s individual choice to pay his way, so as to disallow to clergy that “the labourer is worthy of his hire,” notwithstanding that gospel word of Christ. The promoting of what is an option slides into disallowance of other views. The personal impetus dominates, because (instead of eliciting scripture’s ambivalence) he is swept away in repudiation of his own nation’s impure and compromising clergy. Naturally, but inconsistently. Without claiming that Milton distorts habitually or often, a personal commitment stands out (by length or vehemence or both at once) on particular topics, just as on others he has nothing unusual or emphatic to offer. Divine governance of angels (I.9)  does not trouble the waters:  divine governance of prelapsarian mankind (I.10)  does. Similarly, marriage receives less attention than polygamy or divorce, as if unorthodoxies count more by nature than orthodoxy. What has this proportioning to do with safety of belief, except the self-​assurance which (wherever it comes from) makes him bring scripture into line with his mind (and not the reverse choice)? And why too does he rely on a systematizing of topics which is rendered contingent by working from Old to New Dispensation, Law to Grace, deductively not inductively, without giving reason? The length and vehemence show how much he desires to make scripture agree with him. These idiosyncrasies give De Doctrina its most distinctive quality. Milton himself is that quality, from beginning to (intended) publication. First, he knows the questions beforehand, and many of the answers too. Second, he knows them before as well as during his gathering of the scriptural evidence. Third, these axioms supply dogmas, and these—​through emphasis and length and prioritizing—​make the whole work to that extent personal. As a consequence he is eclectic, and so again personal. Isolating what scripture says on one topic or another, whether by prioritizing or by affirming all discoveries alike, he isolates himself into a church of one. Individuality in this way isolates him and personalizes his theses. If his theology had been published and dissected by others (as he wished), and if he had then absorbed or modified, this personal might have become inter-​personal—​valuably, before the conditions of debate changed irrevocably with the historic and non-​harmonizing study of the Bible. The personal aspect can be seen in his arbitrariness, if we take the word in its original sense—​not the dismissive one of “negligible,” but of that which one judges to be “right or best.” This involves setting reason, or his own judgment or priorities, above those of scripture or tradition. When Milton sets the spirit of scripture above the detail, he is making himself the judge of how the spirit speaks—​again, a personal judgment. He says the scriptures are “perspicuous and complete in themselves” (MS 387f); “scripture […] contains supreme light and is self-​sufficient” (388f); but other cases “should be sought […] from the same [original] spirit, working within ourselves through faith and charity” (MS 393m). Given the confusion of interpretations unleashed by the Interregnum and by printing, how could Milton expect agreement or enlightenment? Is it the “charity,” the

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toleration, which he most of all desires? Yet his chapter on scripture, and the work as a whole, do not advocate that as its main aim: he writes for victory, as elsewhere. As things stand, among other consequences he has armed himself against surprise, change of mind, self-​doubt, or the thought that he might be wrong. His self-​confidence (at least to persons who are made differently) is breath-​taking, enviable, and at times a hindrance. How can we know these many ineffable things? How can we agree on an order of importance among them? How does Milton know that he is doing his best yet the orthodox are not?

The Person within the Theology

But finally, is Milton more personal in these things than anyone who advocates solutions to theological questions, or more strictly any scriptural exegete? In what ways does he stand out in this company? I  would say, he stands out through a partisanship which engages personal emotions: liking, preference, dislike, aversion, wish fulfilment, scorn, indignation, and more. He stands out in the fervent, committed tone of his Latin. Often, this is more than his routine rhetorical Latin of argument. It shows in the syntax, in the sentence length, in figures like litotes, in rhetorical questions, and in the wielding of pronouns, the tu and vos and iste who enter into the supposedly private thinking. It shows, most simply, when we read the Latin aloud and feel the register and temperature rising. This test of reading aloud works for Paradise Lost, as all know who have tried it out. It would equally be common knowledge for De Doctrina, his “best possession,” but for the regrettable paucity of Latin readers. As for the less regrettable disuse of scholastic disputation in our own universities, the problem is exacerbated by the inert and bookish way in which those who do have some Latin were taught it. All in all, Milton comes to life in De Doctrina when his impassioned voice is being heard—​in arguing, appealing, refuting, expostulating, condemning, revising, and many another speech act. Ancillary and subsequent to the positions he has taken up, which in turn have been taken up by a set of preconceptions which we have shown here, these speech acts give us the best of the man in this work, the most alive, urgent, dramatic, and self-​expressing. Things are back-​to-​front: the beliefs which he advocates and which should sustain life, his own and (as he hopes) the lives of others, these beliefs fall flat by comparison with the advocacy. Thus without intending to patronize (for how could anyone patronize so formidable a personality), I  think we all enjoy De Doctrina most when it is brought to life by its rhetoric. Then we pay attention. Enjoyable or not, however, the work moves continually from definition and division, through amassing of citation, to an argumentation which is inherently rhetorical. Milton thinks like this, to himself and then aloud to others. His Latin prose style, on issues which matter deeply to him, is rhetorical, advocatorial, and, in a word, personal. What’s more, this personal and passionate quality of his Latin thinking goes well with the times when he short-​changes reason in the name of reason, or berates all seekers but himself. The two things humanize him. There can be a theology which stays open entirely and where passion (because the stakes are high) does not need to cloud philaletheia, zeal for truth. More often philaletheia finds itself energized by the zeal

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component (prominent in the gospels and in Paul alike). Zeal communicates. Zeal says, I’m serious, hear me. On a good day, it says, “Truth is larger than my sense of it,” without losing momentum. In any case, zeal engages the reader by humanizing the writer.

The Man in the Style

Though it is a cliché that “the style is the man” (le style c’est l’homme), clichés tend to contain some shared truth. This one has nowhere more force than with Milton “in” De Doctrina. The basic idea was an agreed axiom of ancient literary criticism. Cicero or Longinus would describe an author by his or her name and assign characteristics, as if speaking of them as persons or personalities: Sallust, Homer, Thucydides, Tacitus, Lucan […]. And we still do it, especially when comparing one author with another, as encountered in their writings. It is only mildly a figure of speech when we say we “keep company” with Shakespeare or say that Keats is a “good companion.” We know them at their best there, like a close friend. And while the phrase remains a cliché, and literary interpretation in these terms can sound belletristic, the fact is that Milton himself and his readers thought like this, from their classical upbringing. Milton writes in these terms when discussing historians in his letter to De Bras. Most certainly in De Doctrina he berates the named theologians in these terms:  they are obtuse, unreasonable, mindless, bereft of intellectual virtue. For on vital matters like belief, to think amiss is to set up obstacles, and somehow dangerous. Moreover, this is deeply characteristic of the Milton of De Doctrina, censorious but urgent. In charting this engaged, passionate personality in action through the large work (and sometimes seeing and even hearing it in the dictating voice of the more tempestuous pages of the manuscript), I will not have rescued its theological propositions from neglect. But I hope to have interested more than just specialists within Milton studies. As we watch a gifted amateur mulling over scripture, and closely follow his impassioned exegesis, the human searcher is seen in his zeal, eloquent with incandescent refutation. The original, Latin words rise in register, whenever occasion demands, to a unique obstinate brilliance.

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Appendix 1

FURTHER ETYMOLOGIES Semper esse (I.2; MS 14i, Oxford, 36) Discussing divine attributes after divine names, Milton moves from Hebrew to New Testament Greek, in explaining God’s fourth attribute as everlastingness. Clariora sunt novi foederis testimonia, eo quod vox Graeca semper esse significat. (“The witness of the New Covenant is clearer, because the Greek word means everlastingness.”) This Greek word is aionios, which means “ever existing.”1 He does not, however, give the Greek word or etymologize it. Aionios is formed adjectivally from aion, “age,” cognate with Latin aevum. So etymology is underdone or at least short-​circuited. This need not surprise us if he is working it out for his own use alone, but would need spelling out for readers upon publication. He does spell it out in his Artis Logicae, where he sometimes uses theology as source for a point of logic, reversing the procedure whereby theology argues from logic. Yet even the Logic does not hammer the etymological point, if it is saying that aionios comes from or means aiei on. Deo tamen aevum sive aeternitas, non tempus attribui solet:  quid autem est aevum proprie, nisi duratio perpetua, Graece αἴων, quasi αἴει ὤν, semper existens.”2 With what degree of finality does quasi (“as if”) mean that aionios derives from aei wn? Or what is the exact relation? Does Milton quite know, since quasi asserts both resemblance and difference? Is Milton in De Doctrina writing a note to himself, or reminding himself of a previous rumination? From our present standpoint, we do not meet etymology head on after all. This sort of near miss will recur. But at least we meet the same uncertainty in De Doctrina as in Artis Logicae, which points to shared authorship. At all events, we are assembling a diversity of his uses of etymology. Having skirted round etymology for haeresis, and used it straightforwardly for the names of God, he uses it obliquely and self-​referentially for aionios.

Satan (I.9)

In I.9 Milton records Satan’s titles:  Antipalos (“antagonist”); and in a little volley as the chapter closes, “diabolus, i.e. calumniator” and κατήγορος τῶν ἀδελφῶν (accuser of the brethren) in Revelation 12:10; then “et Abaddon, Apollyon, I  e, perdens. Apoc. 9.11.” All straightforwardly gloss the Greek into Latin. The last also quotes Beza’s edition of 1623, as Oxford observes (357n.xv). Milton is summarizing and appropriating John’s own gloss in Rev. 9:11: “the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.” So 1  See Oxford, 49n.viii.

2  See Yale, 143n36, and n37 citing Artis Logicae I, xi, p. 33.

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although Book 1, Chapter 9 naturally enough attracts attention for its gathering of Satan materials, Satan being necessarily of interest to readers of Paradise Lost, from our present viewpoint it looks more straightforward and glossarial than the preceding examples. Such simplicity may not betoken special interest so much as an early, more dutiful stance towards definition and etymologizing. Earlier composition than the first dozen or more chapters is indicated by its higher proportion of biblical citation to Milton’s own  thought. On my count, 60 percent of the chapter comprises citation:  Chapter 8 scored  50  percent, no other until Chapter Fifteen comes near. By contrast, the more strenuously argued chapters, like 2 and 5, contain less citation than rebuttal or itemized argumentation. Accordingly, this example of disinterested exegesis by lexicography provides  a useful contrast with others which harness etymology to argumentative purpose.

Pepoithesis (MS 250f/​251i, Oxford, 584, in I.20)

“Faith is also called πεποίθησις [in Greek], that is, ‘confidence,’ in the same sense: 2 Cor. 3:4: we have confidence through Christ before God.” Milton is adding to his main definition of faith as plena persuasio, “full conviction,” the nuances of confidence, trust, hope—​less of the things believed than the state of believing; more fiducia than fides. After lengthy exposition of Paul and the gospels which cites no original Greek, Milton cites pepoithesis to signal his change of emphasis from faith to “its effects or as it were degree” (effectum potius aut gradus quidam fidei). The Greek word is adduced for straightforward exegesis, rather than any further purpose.

Ekklesia (MS 366i, Oxford, 770)

Beginning his chapter on the Visible Church Milton says, “Vocatorum coetus est visibilis ecclesia.” The bolding in Oxford represents the scribe’s large-​hand, used for definitions and emphases. Thus the thing to be defined comes last in the definition. Like the large-​ hand, word order conveys emphasis. It links the first word with the last, Vocatorum with ecclesia. That in turn summons the Greek root of ecclesia, from ekkaleo, “I call out.” Milton is making the homiletic point by etymology, that God (and not ecclesiastics) does the calling. Repeatedly in the later part of De Doctrina Milton labours to minimize church order and ecclesiastical officialdom. Here, he defamiliarizes the name of ecclesia in order to reappropriate it to the “choosing” God, from intrusive clergy, to reclaim ecclesia for God and his people. (See next item, clerus.) Is he saying this to readers by this hyperbaton, or to himself? It is true that he follows up with cajoling:  “Vocatorum, inquam, in communi, sive regeniti sint sive non:  Matt. 3:12”; “I mean ‘of the called’ indiscriminately, whether they be reborn or not: Matt. 3:12.” He would be less likely to say inquam to himself than “I say to you.” However, the etymology comes so early in its chapter on the church that it suggests definition and private rumination, yet inquam often expresses emphasis and insistence to some other person (see Chapter 7).

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Clerus (I.29, MS 380, with Oxford, 788–​89 with 793n.xi, and also MS 417m, Oxford, 842–​43, with 853n.xv) Clerus in the same chapter works to similar effect. A word’s sole scriptural usage is the one and only right use:  “Again, 1 Pet. 5:2–​3:  [you presbyters […] shepherd God’s flock […] willingly] and not as lording it over those who are the heritage. Here, if there is any meaning in that word clerus, which since then ecclesiastics have wanted to be granted to themselves alone, the ‘clerus’ [heritage] is the whole church”—​tota ecclesia est clerus. But this is not quite etymology. It is more reliance on a single isolated word of scripture because it is scripture. Kleros, “what is allotted,” is many things in Greek usage, including that of the Septuagint. As differentiating sign, a kleros is opposed to whatever is not “allotted,” so it can differentiate priests and presbyters together from episkopoi, or believers from the world. Milton’s etymology in De Doctrina seldom concerns itself with other usage, even where a usage is hapax in scripture. What counts is the reasoning which etymology will or will not support, and how much an interpretation is important, heterodox, or both. So kleros in 1 Peter, though an isolated use and furthermore taken out of context, chimes with a belief dear to Milton’s heart. Etymology is applied selectively, and wider word history is ignored. For the record, so is church history. Milton says clerus was arrogated sibi solis by ecclesiastici, postea. When does postea refer to? Sumner wrote (Prose Works of John Milton, 4:435n5 ad fin.), “Milton seems to intimate that the distinction between clergy and laity is of modern date, whereas it was known in the time of Clemens Romanus” (pope circa AD 96). If so, the distinction goes back almost to New Testament times. But clerus was used to distinguish presbyters and priests together from episkopoi, a different matter. It is presbyters, presbyteroi, whom Peter is exhorting as a sunpresbuteros kai martus (“I am also an elder and a witness”). The lines of demarcation were mixed indeed, but Milton does not take the opportunity for word history (which would have to include usage in the Septuagint).

Iusiurandum

At MS 540 (II.5, on oath-​taking, Oxford, 1003) Milton argues that it cannot be right (ius) to fulfil an oath which entails wrongdoing (indignum), quod et ipsa vox iusiurandi a iure ducta significare videtur; “as the word iusiurandum itself, deriving from ius, ‘right,’ seems also to indicate.” Is Milton being naïvely logical, in the way that Ben Jonson was when he criticized Shakespeare for Caesar’s boast, “Caesar doth never wrong but with just cause”? Or ought we to stress Milton’s main verb, videtur: the derivation (ducta) only “appears to” involve a self-​contradiction? Given the fondness of his stylistic model Cicero for forms of videri, and the contextual support of oath-​taking, Milton’s “seems” may not imply any misgiving. In that case he adheres to the argument from etymology, and trusts the word’s presumed origin.

Blasphemia, Blasphemare (MS 561, II.6, Oxford, 1028–​29)

We come to a passage which hinges on energetic etymology, in all three languages. The passage in De Zelo on cursing God, “commonly termed blasphemy” (vulgo ex Graeco βλασφημία) comes as the opposite of zeal for God. The chapter is concerned

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with conduct towards God, and thus placed well before the chapters which deal with people. The placing tacitly makes the point which the passage makes vociferously and multilingually—​that reviling God is to be separated from reviling of human individuals or groups. Let not priests or presbyters, especially, arrogate to themselves the naming rights, to label as blasphemers (or heretics and so forth) those who criticize them in the higher name of God and the sincere moving of the spirit. How does Milton make philology do his persuading for him? The Oxford note summarizes thus: “It is a fact that all Greek writers, sacred as well as profane, generally mean by the word ‘blasphemy’ any kind of curse against anyone whatever, as also do Jewish writers by the corresponding Hebrew words.” So, second, “I think that [those people] acted inappropriately and heedlessly who introduce the foreign term ‘blasphemy’ into the Latin language, and limited its general sense to curses against God alone, and yet widened the limited sense so that, when meanwhile the laity does not understand what ‘blasphemy’ is, they themselves denounce out of hand as blasphemy just about every opinion about God or religious matters provided it differs from their own.” They have arrogated the detestation of sacrilege, to their self-​serving redefinition of sacrilege. Milton fulminates. The length of the sentence, the detail of the learned anger, the vigour of the verbs, all bespeak over-​insistence. To cap it, he aligns these twisters of language with those who said Christ himself had blasphemed in saying to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven you” in Matthew 9:2–​3. What strikes me most in the present context is the fullness of the examples, which come from both scriptural languages and enlist secular writers too. He wants abundance of evidence, to overwhelm the hijackers. For good measure [MS 563f] he objects to a certain violence being done to language in transferring a word from Hebrew to Greek and Greek to Latin whilst widening its coverage: “But if ‘blasphemy’ is to be evaluated by the Hebrew sense, and to be [so] translated in Latin, it will extend very wide indeed” [Oxford, 1031]. If we apply this from languages to change of time and place, it resembles what he himself does with res turpis as the grounds of divorce. Should we explain the inconsistency as rhetorical, indicating a need to persuade readers, who will not be reading the two strategies together, conflicting? Or is Milton thinking it out to himself at white heat, as kindred infringements of the liberty for which man was created? I  suggest the latter, not only from “charity of interpretation,” but because that is what he says he is doing throughout De Doctrina—​working out his own beliefs, from scripture, for himself, trusting in his own abilities with scripture and its languages (and the Latin of theological discourse). The urgent desire to persuade others, which is often found subjective and self-​serving and alienates a conscientious reader, attests the urgent spirit in which he tackles his self-​imposed task. This passage on zeal shows zeal. At all events its multilingual etymologizing, albeit not declared as a method but here seized as an opportunity, vindicates our own perspective.

Sabbath (MS 573i, II.7, Oxford, 1044)

Milton urges that Sabbath observance is abrogated under the gospel. He adduces Paul in Colossians 2:16–​17, telling the Colossians they are not condemned in respect of food

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or drink, festival, new moon, “or Sabbaths,” plural. “But if anyone argues that it is not the Sabbath of the seventh day which is here being abrogated but solely those septennial [Sabbaths],” that person is wrong. Errors would include misunderstanding the plural, “Sabbaths,” but more the insistence on the sabbatical (fallow) years of Exodus 23:10–​11. I have italicized day and septennial to bring out the crucial contrast. It is less clear in the MS, in fact condensed: the word septennalia is not explained (or found in dictionaries). From our own viewpoint, two things stand out. The two senses are listed separately in dictionaries, as meaning respectively “weeks” in the plural and “Sabbath feast.” Now Milton omits to say this. Instead, he dwells yet again on the error of taking a plural form as necessitating plural meaning. He explains the countervailing grounds. Who, then, is being addressed? “Anyone” who may adduce Exodus 23. If we knew who had done this, we would know what Judaizing expositor Milton had been reading. The four MS pages 571–​74 have been re-​transcribed by Daniel Skinner. (He slightly miscalculates how to fit the original four pages onto his own.) The fact of his transcription means we do not see how Milton modified his thought, but makes it likely that he did so, to rebut someone he read after expounding the main point from Paul. To do so, he condenses etymological explanation in order to argue as elsewhere about idiom and grammar, the function trumping the form of grammar. We would not expect Sabbath to mean a Sabbath of anything but days, because the seventh day is foundational and a Sabbath of years is by comparison secondary and rare. Milton’s thought is unremarkable enough that he surely means the usual seventh-​day sense. So these are notes to himself, with the reasoning still elliptical (not the sort of lesson or demonstration which a strict or teacherly etymology would use).

Usury (II.14, MS 681i, Oxford, 1182)

The three Greek examples demonstrate how widely Milton’s etymologizing fluctuates, between bold correctitude for ecclesia and arbitrariness for analysai and clerus. He works more quietly in Book 2 when adducing a Hebrew metaphor to explain the usual practice of usury. Usury is not forbidden, only its excess, as we should expect from the son of a financier. Excessive usury is in Hebrew neshek. The orthodoxy of the etymology is underlined by its being in his matrix, Wollebius (see also Chapter 4). Moreover, unlike the names of God in I.2, the Hebrew gloss is taken almost unchanged from Wollebius: neshek, a morsu, “from biting.” A lack of interest in this derivation is underlined by Milton’s definite interest in usury, measured by the additions he does make to Wolleb on usury, arriving in the MS as additions or changes, as I have shown elsewhere.3

3  Hale, “Points of Departure.”

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Appendix 2

HOBBES AND  DRYDEN Chapter  10 mentioned that Milton defined his faith by different methods from those of Dryden or Hobbes. The two notable men were his intellectual equals, having a similar education to his, one younger and one older than him. Appendix 2 develops the comparison (without implying any connection, since De Doctrina lay hidden after 1660, and the mutual aversion of Hobbes and Milton is a given) in order to illuminate Milton’s theology by contrasts. These are three laymen, sharing a rooted dislike of entrenched clergy and their “priestcraft,” who seek to think out for themselves what to believe—​what makes most sense to them of spiritual things. Of course, the comparison cannot avoid being both limited and lopsided. Hobbes has left everyone, including philosophers, guessing whether he died believing or acquiescing or agnostic. Milton’s highly detailed and explicit beliefs lay hidden until 1825, so that although his religious beliefs might smell of heterodoxy by linkage with his politics, his own age did not know him through them. Dryden, in a third way, leaves us guessing in Religio Laici (1682): his engaging verse essay gives sparse detail about his doubts of scripture’s accuracy, and about those “essentials” of faith which, as a layman, laicus, he will uphold. All the same, we can lay the three texts alongside, to note how they respond to the same essential, confessional task—​to define core beliefs and basic stance in a time of new disputes and doubts.

Hobbes

Hobbes did not see how Moses could be the sole author of all five books of the Law. Hobbes reasoned from internal and linguistic evidence, or logic and common sense. To go no further than the summary in Martinich’s biography.1 First, Moses did not write the account of his own death and burial in Deuteronomy 34. Second, Genesis 12:6 records that when Abraham passed through to Sichem “the Canaanite was then in the land.” The word “then” shows the Canaanite was no longer in the land, which had to be at a time after the death of Moses. Third, Moses is referred to in the third person, and in terms a man of God would not use of himself (“unequalled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him,” Deut. 34:11 and elsewhere). Fourth, Numbers 21:14–​15 quotes from a written source which is otherwise unknown, the “Book of the Wars of the Lord.” It may be significant that Milton does not cite, let alone discuss, any of these passages. Similarly, Milton does not examine the role of Ezra the scribe in redacting the scriptures after the return from exile in Babylon. Yet Ezra was at the centre of the critical understanding of the text of the Law, and not only in Hobbes, but around him and 1  Martinich, Hobbes. A Biography, 247–​51.

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before.2 By “Ezra” here is meant Ezra the scribe of the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras, who is represented as miraculously rewriting the scriptures after they had perished in the destruction of Jerusalem. (Ezra says to God: “For thy law is burnt, therefore no man knoweth the things that are done of thee […]. But if I have found grace before thee, send the Holy Ghost into me, and I shall write all that hath been done in the world since the beginning, which were written in thy law”; subsequently, filled with the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, Ezra dictates non-​stop to five scribes for forty days).3 Hobbes thinks historically and developmentally, whereas Milton sees no signs of development within the Old Testament (except once, to dismiss a text he dislikes as “late and post-​exilic”). In the New Testament, by contrast, Hobbes does see historicity in scripture, since the New Testament authors did live in “less than an age after Christ’s Ascension and had all of them seen our Savior or been his Disciples, except St Paul and St Luke.” In other words, apart from a few local fidgetings, Milton takes both testaments as timeless and sacred, synchronic and authoritative, while at the same time believing as an axiom that they lie open to his own scrutiny as independent, autonomous reader. The two men do ask some of the same questions, like where is hell? Yet from the same scriptural evidence, as carefully laid out, they arrive at different conclusions. For Hobbes, hell will be on earth, as heaven will be—​just as Christ’s kingdom is to come on earth. Hell, in scripture, is the usual translation of “gehenna,” the rubbish dump outside Jerusalem, where fires often burned. Eternal fires would punish the wicked in a second death. And Hobbes’s three-​person Trinity, albeit not the orthodox one, is not Milton’s either. He develops “person” to mean that Moses, Jesus, and his church successors are three persons who are owned by God and through whom he works.4 “God who has been Represented (that is, Personated) thrice, may properly enough be said to be three persons” (Leviathan, chap. 42, 339). All in all, while both men worked from scripture in accordance with rules of evidence and of reason, and in willed isolation from ecclesiastics and from their traditions and communities, they differed greatly in what they believed would pass these tests. Hobbes seems the more accepting and inclusive, despite his contemporary reputation 2  See Noel Malcolm’s magisterial study, “Hobbes, Ezra, and the Bible: The History of a Subversive Idea,” in his Aspects of Hobbes, 383–​431. A modern summary of the evidence about Moses and Ezra and of the whole change from sacral or untouchable to a historical and critical exegesis is that of J. Alberto Soggin, Introduction to the Old Testament. From Its Origins to the Closing of the Alexandrian Canon (London: SCM Press, revised ed. translated, 1976). Simon’s work is mentioned on pp. 6, 10, and 80, laconically: “It is evident, however, that these are isolated positions, and those who adopted them were soon more or less openly accused of heresy. A discussion of the traditional theory never followed.” Though this opinion looks different after Malcolm’s essay and the writers he discusses, it brings out the originality of Hobbes and Simon, and the alertness of Dryden to the significance of Ezra’s reputed role. 3  Malcolm, “Hobbes, Ezra, and the Bible,” 389 and 389n3. 4  Springborg, “Hobbes on Religion,” 360–​62.

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as an “atheist” (i.e., heretic):5 this conformism, outward or inward, fits better into his political theory, which dominates his religious views as much as Milton’s religious views do his political ones.

Dryden

Dryden in Religio Laici, despite sharing the other two men’s mistrust of clerics, gives no impression of isolatedness when he thinks about allegiance. Not only does his choice of genre and exemplar presuppose civilized exchange, his medium being “fittest for discourse, and nearest prose6” (454). He wants to belong to a confession and to choose among possibles (though more so in the Hind and the Panther). He opts to “speak plain” while “to my own mother church submitting still” (319)—​either the Church of England or the universal church. He seeks to restate the essentials of faith: “The things we must believe are few and plain.” The word “plain” echoes through the later paragraphs. Now so it did in Milton’s Epistle and thereafter, making the reader wonder how the plain truth could be so complex and contentious. Not so with Dryden’s plain truth, since he does not go into detail, affirming that “the’ unlettered Christian […] /​Plods on to heaven, and ne’er is at a loss:/​ For the strait gate would be made straiter yet/​ Were none admitted there but men of wit” (322–​25). That is well said, and fortuitously welcome to anyone who has worked through De Doctrina or imbibed it. After all, why did Milton persist with his initial, elaborate Wollebian scheme of topics? How much of it all could he have supposed to be “essential” to faith? Dryden’s contrasting emphasis is the more scriptural, in the sense that it echoes the question iterated in the gospels—​“What shall I do to be saved?”—​and always answered very simply there. It suggests by contrast several personal things about Milton. Milton enjoyed the task itself, as first set before him, knowing he had the linguistic equipment. He liked to finish what he had started. He obeyed some need to dot the Is and cross the Ts. The need is interior, part of what I have called the “personal.” Dryden, on the other hand, wants to think out the relations of reason to revelation, in those terms. He seeks a method by which to work between them. His thinking is impelled and given sharp focus by the recently translated critical study of Father Richard Simon. I take these points seriatim now. Reason

“Reason” needs defining. He proclaims the limits of reason. But it is reasonable for reason to see this and so to look beyond itself. To amplify:  Dryden grasped one limitation in Milton’s method of demolishing the Trinity when he asked, “How can the less the greater comprehend/​ Or finite reason reach infinity” (lines 39–​40)? On some matters, reason is “a borrowed beam” (line 1) or 5  Springborg, “Hobbes on Religion,” 348.

6  Sermoni propiora, using Horace’s phrase (Sat. I.4.41), “closer to conversation.”

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a “glimmering ray” (5)—​or, to move out of metaphor, reason will be reductive on some questions and not see its own limits. In particular, Milton’s arithmetical reasoning is not well suited to the scriptural evidence for the peculiar, if not constitutive Christian view of godhead. Dryden’s metaphor of the “reach” of “reason” goes to the heart of the matter. “Revealed religion first informed thy sight,/​ And reason saw not till faith sprung7 the light” (68–​69). Paul

As for where reason may be led to look beyond itself, a good instance is Dryden’s discussion of the fate of virtuous pagans, those to whom salvation should not be barred although they have not received revelation (for otherwise divine mercy would be made ridiculous). He gives this old dilemma his best shot, equably satirizing the “good old man Athanasius” who rose high in oxymoronic “Christian fury” against Arius, to insist that only believers in the Trinity could be saved. The point mattered to Dryden, in his whole argument. He reaffirmed it, under challenge, in his Preface (“dwelling longer on the subject than I had intended,” line 176 in Hammond). Why does he insist, and how does he resolve the question? He insists, as I see it, because of present comparisons, in order to exemplify how faith finds itself: by reason, “reaching” beyond itself, to align with revelation. In short, to align with Paul in Romans 2:14–​15. Dryden’s poem puts Paul’s words into verse, to indicate which the key lines (200–205) are italicized in the 1682 edition. Here are the two passages:8 But more the great apostle has expressed: That if the gentiles (whom no law inspired) By nature did what was by law required, They who the written rule had never known Were to themselves both rule and law alone; To nature’s plain indictment they shall plead, And by their conscience be condemned or freed. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, not having the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.

Dryden’s is a lucid, reasonable, compassionate declaration. Moreover, he returns to the question (and to Athanasius) in his Preface, though no such amplification would suit the poem at this point, which has far to go and must keep momentum. However, his habit of writing Prefaces allows him to fill in his evidence and method.9 7  “Caused to appear,” OED s.v. sense 17, says Hammond ad loc.

8  Quoted (except for the italicizing of the paraphrase of Romans 2) from The Poems of John Dryden, 121. This edition is used for the poem’s Preface.

9  See Hammond’s edition, pp.  88–​94, lines 40–​184. To answer a friend’s recommendation to review his words in the poem “I have dwelt longer on the subject than I had intended.”

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And so we can compare Milton’s address to the same question, which just happens to be done on the precious page of the MS which appears twice over, and shows the process of his thinking-​out. The law of Moses applied “especially” (potissimum) to the Jews becomes “only” (Duntaxat, with a capital D) to the Jews. See Oxford, lxxiv, Figure 9, for MS 307A (and Figure 10 for Skinner’s fair copy). Milton goes on to explain the point, in the usual exegetical paragraph which takes up words or phrases from the first enunciated whole thesis, but with less emphasis. True, he is not writing an apologia for religion or for dialogue with other religions, but working out what is safe for his own belief. At the same time, the undiscussed change of adverb implies a great deal for theodicy, which he does uphold elsewhere. Dryden, however, perceives its importance and relies on Paul to say it for him. He puts Paul into his own verse, a very fine appropriation, of one of the big essentials. Father Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament

Dryden’s confessional, then, is general and amateurish compared with Milton’s tireless energy and professional density. This was to be expected, but has produced an unexpected Pauline centrality from one comparison. We move to something both central and obvious, for the occasion of Dryden’s poem bespeaks hindsight, the awareness of a revolution in scripture scholarship. Dryden summarizes this, and this time his Preface does not go into more detail. I  select the point he makes about Ezra, to illustrate the chief impact of Simon’s book on biblical interpretation.10 Dryden addresses the second Objection, that if the long transmission of the text of scripture has “Let in gross errors to corrupt the text,/​ Omitted paragraphs, embroiled the sense” to the point where “th’ original scripture has been lost,” then either “Christian faith can have no ground/​Or truth in church tradition must be found” (265–​66, 278–​80). Dryden replies, Such an omniscient church we wish indeed […] But if this mother be a guide so sure As can all doubts resolve, all truth secure, Then her infallibility as well Where copies are corrupt can tell. Restore lost canon with as little pains As truly explicate what still remains; Which yet no council dare pretend to do, Unless like Esdras they could write it new. Strange confidence, still [constantly] to interpret true, Yet not be sure that all they have explained Is in the blessed original contained. (282, 284–​94)

Though syntax and exact meaning are not pellucid here, I take the point to be about the canon. Knowing that parts of the Old Testament have been lost, corrupted, or (in the 10  For a summary of the last half of Dryden’s poem, lines 224–​451, which leads from Simon’s book to the “safest way” of the “clearest scriptures” and “authoritative tradition,” see Hammond’s edition, 84.

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case of Esdras) redacted, church tradition cannot claim to possess and know the whole of scripture—​to know what the whole of it consists of. “For Esdras could not re-​establish those Books, which […] had been corrupted in time of Captivity, but [except] in quality of Prophet or publick Writer.”11 As a “prophet” Ezra would either be in the shoes of the priests of the Delphic oracle’s ravings, a prophetes or decoder, or a latter-​day expositor like anyone else. For him to “write it new”12 places heavy stress on “new.” It could mean “anew,” as in the narrative of 2 Esdras: re-​writing, “restoring lost canon,” miraculously. But Dryden is deploying irony: to act “like Esdras” is to do what “yet no [church] council dare pretend to do.” A  sort of “not even,” at a time where “new” was not a commercial buzzword positive but more likely here to mean “new-​fangled,” with a whiff of the Roman sense of “innovation” overturning the foundations of society. Dryden feels the pinch of a quandary. This is the offhand quip of a most perceptive man. He reads a book which challenges rooted orthodoxy. He thinks about it, then makes a probing poem about it. In the course of thinking it out he compares the councils of the church, which had had to express the belief of Christendom to itself some centuries after direct revelation had ceased, with the meaning of whatever it was that Ezra had done for the scriptures of ancient Israel after the Exile to Babylon. What a leap of imagination and of understanding. For good measure, he parallels the two, not to equate them but to rank probabilities across unreachable centuries. What the successive councils did not attempt, Ezra—​we are told—​did do. What is one to think? Dryden is in a state of awestruck uncertainty, to say the least. If so, then one cannot know exactly what Moses contributed to the books of the Law, and a blurring would follow in the authority of New Testament writers when citing the Old. For Milton, relying solely on what is in scripture, uncertainty must follow in particular cases about what was in scripture (not from Ezra). More and more would be left, by his default procedure, to the “spirit” guiding us as we read. Which would add to the pre-​existing divergence of interpretations and emphases, which is the problem Milton tried to solve for himself. The situation of a do-​it-​yourself believer is worse than first thought—​unless, like Dryden, the seeker goes seeking for the essentials, searching amongst the many things (of varying truth value) that have come down to us as “scripture.” “Scriptures,” plural, would better reflect the situation. Indeed, plurality confronts us in more than this one way.

11  Hammond’s note to line 291, quoting the Critical History, 23.

12  “Write it new,” with stress on “new,” is the focus of debate in Malcolm’s survey. Ezra writing parts of the Pentateuch is what makes the study of it historical and human, not the contemplation of a fixed sanctity.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Texts Bibles Junius–​Tremellius–​Beza (1623–1624). King James Version or Authorized Version. Dryden, John

The Poems of John Dryden:  Vol. 2, 1682–​1685. Edited by Paul Hammond. London: Longman, 1995. The Early Lives of Milton. Edited by Helen Darbishire. London: Constable, 1932. Milton, John

De Doctrina Christiana, Kew, National Archives (formerly Public Records Office or PRO, MS S/​P 9/​61). Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. Edited by Don M. Wolfe et al., vol. 6: ca. 1658–​ ca. 1660 [De Doctrina Christiana]. Edited by Maurice Kelley with translation by John Carey. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. The Complete Works of John Milton, 13  vols. Edited by Thomas N.  Corns and Gordon Campbell, vol. 8: De Doctrina Christiana. Edited and translated by John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. The Prose Works of John Milton, 5 vols. Edited by J. A. St. John, vol. 4, A Treatise on Christian Doctrine, translated by Charles R.  Sumner. Bohn’s Standard Library. London:  Bell, 1878 (repr. of editio princeps, 1825).

Poems

The Complete Poems. Edited by John Leonard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Paradise Lost. Edited by Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. London:  Longman, 1998 (shortened from The Complete Poems of Milton. London: Longman, 1971). Shakespeare, William

Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Edited by Geoffrey Bullough, 7  vols. London: Routledge, 1957–​75.

Secondary Texts

Austin, Kenneth. From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (c. 1510–​1580). Farnham: Ashgate, 2007. The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity. Edited by Peter C. Phan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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INDEX

allusions, pagan, chap. 7, 107 Amesius, 2, 22, 50, 62–​63, 82, 84, 95–​97 analusai, 71–​72 Apostles’ Creed, 113 Aristotle, 15, 16, 42, 77–​78, 85, 86 Arminianism, 34, 46, 86 Athanasius, 110, 132 Aubrey, John, 84 Augustine, 39 authorship, xi–​xii, 1–​3, 54, 57, 69

Beza, 50, 51, 52–​53, 56n13, 109 Bible, translations, 23 bishops, 1, 47 blasphemare, xii, 125–​26 Bucerus, 50, 61

Calvinus, 50, 61 Camero, 50, 59, 60 Campbell, Gordon, xi, xii, 1, 2 Capellus, Ludovicus, 50, 62 Cicero, 3, 85, 122 clergy pay, 30, 35–​37, 88–​90, 92, 95, 120, 124, 125 clerus, 125 choice, 44–​46 Corns, Thomas, xi, xii, 105n3 Creaser, John, 118–​19 Cullington, Donald, 1, 2, 68n3 decreeing, 106 divorce, 30–​32, 45, 73–​75, 92–​94 doctrina, 39 Dryden, John, 110, 119, Appendix 2 duntaxat, xii, 34

ecclesia, 16, 24n14, 125 elohim, 69–​70

England, 1–​2, 45, 47, 97 equidem, 9n3 Erasmus, 50, 51–​52, 107, 109 eristic, 109 Etymology, chap. 6, 107, Appendix 1 Eucharist, 40–​41, 42–​43 Euripides, 2, 70–​71, 77, 78–​79, 85, 92 Ezra, 129–​30, 133–​34 Filio, De, 99–​101, chap. 10 Fowler, Alastair, 116 generatio, 106 Goffman, Erving, 8 Gomarus, 22, 50, 61

haeresis, haereticus, 67–​68 Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 87, 119, Appendix 2 Homer, 35, 70, 79–​80, 85, 86 Horace, 77, 83–​84 Hunter, William, xi, 1, 96 hypostasis, xii, 22, 58, 60, 100, 103

inquam, 91, 124 ipse, 55, 70, chap. 8 iusiurandum, 125

Johannine Comma, 52, 109, 110–​11 Junius, 50, 54–​56, 62 Justification

Kelley, Maurice, 3, 30n8, 41n5, 58, 61, 69, 70, 71, 77, 82 and n6, 87, 105n2, 112 Kerr, Jason, 33n14 Leonard, John, 118 Lutherus, 50, 61

140

140

Index

Martyr, Peter, 50, 61 Miller, Leo, 3 Miller, Jeffrey, 33n15 Milton, John, senior, 42 Musculus, 50, 61 natura and fatum, 69

onah and res turpis, 73–​74 orthodoxi Ovid, 77, 83, 85, 86

Palmarius, locus, 112 Patrides, C. A., 113, 115 Paul (apostle), 4, 13, 15, 16, 25, 36, 84 and n, 89, 131 Pepoithesis, 124 persona, personalitas, personatus, 53, 55, 58, 72–​73, 100, 130 Placaeus, 50, 53–​54, 87 and n, 107 Plutarch, 77, 81, 85 Polanus, 50, 60–​61 Polygamy, 30–​32, 45, 55–​56, 75 Powells (family), 42 pronouns, chap. 8, 107 prudence, 43–​46 Ramist systems, 21, 23, 25 ratio, 101, 108–​9, 109–​10 repetition (as figure), 109 rhetoric, 110 Roman Catholics, 11, 24, 40–​41, 42–​43, 104–​5

Sabbath, 126–​27 sacraments, 31 Satan, 119–​20 scribes ‘B’, 42n7 ‘M’, 34 Picard, Jeremie, 59, 96 Skinner, Daniel, 1, 31n11, 33, 42n7, 45n15, 57 Seldenus, 2, 19, 32, 39, 50, 56–​58, 62, 93 semper esse and aionios, 123 Shakespeare, William, 28, 113, 125 Simon, Richard, 119, 130n2, 131, 133–​34

singulars and plurals, 70–​71

Theologi, 19, 49, 58, 73, 94, 107 Thucydides, 77, 81, 85 Toomer, G. J., 32 topoi, xiii transubstantiation, 43 Tremellius, 50, 51, 54–​56 Trinity, 3, 22, 24, 52, 53–​54, 70–​71, 72–​73, 99–​101, chap. 10 Unitarians, 101 Ursinus, 50, 61 usury, 41–​42, 45, 127

Virgil, 77, 82–​83

Wollebius, 2, 3, 19, 22, chap. 4, 51 Wordplay, 107–​9 Wordsworth, William, 37 Zanchius, 50, 58–​60, 72

Milton: De Doctrina

Manuscript, 1 Epistle, xi, xiv, 4, chap. 1, 22, 23n9, 27, 88 I.1, 9 I.2, 25, 69–​70 I.3, 91–​92 I.4, 79–​80, 81, 118 I.5, 12n5, 22, 23, 49, 54–​56, 70–​71, 72–​73, 83–​84, 87, 99–​101, chap. 10, 130 I.6, 104, 124 I.9, 59, 120, 123–​24, 129 I.10, 29–​33, 73–​74, 82–​83, 92–​94, 120 I.11, 81, 83 I.14, 58, 72–​73 I.17–​18, 33, 39, 46 I.22, 40, 94–​95 I.26, 33–​34 I.27, 58, 60 I.28, 40–​41 I.29, 124, 125 I.30, 22, 52, 90n9, 120–​21

141



I.31, 35–​37, 89–​90, 95–​37, 120 I.33, 29, 59, 61, 94 II.2, 43–​46 II.4, 62 II.6, 125 II.7, 61, 62, 95, 126–​27 II.9, 80 II.14, 41–​42, 127

Milton: other works [A-​Z]

Artis Logicae, 2, 22, 69, 108, 123 Defensio Secunda, 2, 57, 87 Elegia III, 83 Ep. Fam., 122 Lycidas, 35, 37, 89 Of Civil Power, 67–​68 Of Prelatical Episcopacy, 89n4 Paradise Lost, xiii, xiv, 26, 29, 79, chap. 10 Paradise Regained, 47, 117 Reason of Church-​Government, 89n4 Samson Agonistes, 78 State Papers, 3

Biblical passages discussed Gen. 1:1–​3, 69, 115 Gen. 12:6, 129 Exod. 21:10, 73–​74 Exod. 23:10–​11, 127 Exod. 23:20–​21, 53 Num. 21:14–1​5, 129 Lev. 18:18, 55 Deut 24:1, 57, 74 Deut. 34, 129 Deut. 34:11, 129 Judg. 2:1, 55 1 Kings 1:4, 53 Job 34:14–​15, 79 Ps. 2, 118 Ps. 18:31, 70 Ps. 86:10, 70 Prov. 30:21–​23, 93 Isa. 63:5, 113 Mal. 2:15, 29, 56

Index

Malachi 3:1, 53, 87 Matt. 3;12, 124 Matt. 6:19–​20, 12 Matt. 8:8, 28 Matt 7:22, 103 Matt. 8:26, 90 Matt. 9:2–​3, 126 Matt. 10:10, 89 Matt. 11:10, 53 Matt. 14:31, 90 Matt 16:8, 90 Matt. 18:20, 103 Matt 19:6 Matt. 28:19, 24n13, 103, 104 Mark 6:3, 36 Luke 7:6, 28 Luke 11:52, 90n9 Luke 18:25, 28 John 8:50, 113 John 10:12–​13, 36, 90 John 10:30, 108 John 13:31, 113 John 16:12–​15, 25n15 John 17:3, 112 Acts 13:48, 81 Acts 15:5, 68 Acts 17:28, 84n8 Acts 18:3–​4, 36 Acts 24:14, 68 Acts 26:5, 68 Rom. 2:14–​15, 132 Rom. 3:24–​28, 94 Rom. 16:17–​18, 15 1 Cor. 1:23–​24, 28–​29 1 Cor. 9:14, 89 1 Cor. 11:4, 62 1 Cor. 11:19, 68 1 Cor 11:23–​30, 41 1 Cor. 12:13, 104 1 Cor. 15:33, 84n8 2 Cor. 3:4, 124 2 Cor. 13:14, 113 Gal. 2:16, 94 Gal. 4:4, 61 Gal. 4:6, 25n15, 25 Gal. 5:20, 68 Eph. 2:12, 34, 58, 59

141

142

142

Index

Phil. 1:23, 71–​72 Phil: 2, 24, 116 Phil. 2:6, 116 Col. 2:16, 126–​27 1 Thess. 5: 21, 13 Tit. 3:10, 15 Jas. 1:14, 83 Jas. 2:24, 94

1 Pet. 3:15, 9 1 Pet. 5:2–​3, 125 2 Pet. 2:1, 68 1 Jn. 5:7, the Johannine Comma, 52, 109, 110–​111 1 Jn. 5:20 (locus Palmarius), 112 Rev. 1:4–​5, 52 Rev. 12:10, 123–​24