Ask someone what Milton's religion was and the immediate answer will be "Puritan." Just what a Puritan was is confused, of course, and has frequently been the subject of historical study that has pointed out the "purifying" etymology of the name. Puritans were people who wished to remove such traces of Roman Catholicism remaining in the new state church, the Anglican church as it was soon to be called, as vestment, kneeling, certain rituals, and hierarchic positions that persisted between the Godhead and the believer. The Puritan was Calvinist, but just how extreme or liberal his attitude was concerning election, predestination, biblical interpretation, and the like is not measurable since the term included many people of varying attitudes about such matters.

Largely the name, as limited from the broader Protestant, derived from reforms of practice, externals, and the church, not from differences of opinion about theology. The liturgy and its uses also sparked differences among the various Protestant groups. Much of the reason for these early puritanic enjoinders was the nebulous change that occurred in the latter half of the sixteenth century when Elizabeth and her advisers moved England out of the Roman Catholic fold into another. While the break with Rome that Henry VIII had precipitated was made firmer under Edward VI, with a backsliding under Mary, it was through the actions of the Elizabethan government that strong change occurred. Yet that change was not so firm as to deter Roman Catholic upsurges under James I, Charles I and Henrietta Maria, Charles II, and, of course, James II. Milton and his religion are a product of those years from January 1559, when Elizabeth, two months after her ascent to the throne, asserted an intention to break with Rome, through the 1670s.

In 1559 and for a couple of decades thereafter there were varying groups of Catholics: those who harked back to the medieval church, fairly unchanged; those middle-of-the-roaders who maintained adherence to the faith and yet did not defy the state church; and the recusants, few at first but dominant among the Catholics by the time of Elizabeth's death. "By 1603 the rigours of Elizabethan government policy had eliminated Catholicism within the Elizabethan church, so that Catholicism was now a distinctive, separated religion."¹ That "separated" religious body expanded during the seventeenth century. At the time Milton was beginning to emerge as an author in print with the five antiprelatical tracts, 1641-42, the tension of anticatholicism had generated into a political issue. "Alarm over the papists spread on an unprecedented scale; the five major cities in England … were declared to be centres of popish conspiracies; so too were many other towns and villages."²

It is no wonder that Milton's sense of toleration in Of True Religion, Hæresy, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery (1673) did not include Roman Catholics: in his formative years and in the years when he was specifically faced with the issue of church administration—not theological precept, let it be noted—the Catholic thrust beckoned a return to formerly rejected practices. Further, of course, was the political force that Catholicism still posed in the early 1670s, despite the Thirty Years' War and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. It still exerts significance in sociological and hence political power through its influence over its members' minds. And further, and even more important, an acceptance of Roman Catholicism on a personal level denied Milton's father and his father's rebellious action against his father.³

Milton's grandfather, Richard Milton, was one of the recusants from Oxford during Elizabeth's reign. He was excommunicated in May 1582, and there are records of recusancy fines in later years. Milton's father, John, is reported to have quarreled with his father over religion, apparently leaving home at least by 1583 and becoming active as a scrivener by 1590. Early accounts report that he was disinherited because of this quarrel and that he proceeded to London for his livelihood. Is there a residue of Milton's father's rebelliousness against his grandfather in Satan's rebellion against God, and its sublimation in his loving accedence to his father in the Son's functioning as surrogate for the Father? "Ad Patrem" emboldens that suggestion. In Samson we have a nonunderstanding son who tries to conform to the wishes of God the Father but who is able to proceed only when he can deflect the desires and counsel of his father, Manoa. And one way of looking at Paradise Regain'd is to see it as resolving the dilemma of how to achieve using the energy of Father/Son through the function of anima (the mother archetype), which supplies the determining form.⁴ The psychological picture of the poet that keeps emerging is of a son much dedicated to his father, emulating him and growing up to discharge, psychologically at least, those concerns that were seen as the father's⁵: artistic achievement, middle-class "political" advantage, and the true religious belief in a protestant god.

Milton was raised an Anglican, trained to become an Anglican minister, and remained an Anglican through the signing of the subscription books of Cambridge University in both 1629 and 1632, which demanded allegiance to the state church and its Thirty-nine Articles. But Anglican carried no clear denotation of beliefs or theological precepts: Milton would have been generally Calvinistic, he may or may not have entertained attitudes that smacked of Arminianism (as in Sonnet 7), and he knew (and literary research has shown employed knowledgeably⁶) the liturgy. But whether prior to 1632 he fostered separatist views or had a strong position on baptism or on other sacraments, we cannot be sure. There seems to be no change discernible through the middle 1630s with his writing of "Comus," except perhaps in some implications for the religious Anglican establishment in the Lady's lines denouncing an aristocratic world and economy. But were these, perhaps, part of the 1637 alteration that has been alluded to before?⁷ With the events of 1637, if my reconstruction in Chapter 4 is correct, came a realization of argument against the Church of England, whose hierarchical system was little reformed from its Catholic source. Such realization could have remained submerged until the events of 1637 made the way things were crystal-clear. His recognition of his disability as sermonist is evident in the Letter to an Unknown Friend, and a nonconformity of thought has usually struck most people about Milton, although there is no certain evidence of it up to this point in time. Lines in "Lycidas" have often been excerpted as a digression on the clergy, but they are, rather, a statement of this realization that the church establishment in rule and authority was tainted with Catholicism and, second, an integral part of the growth of the poet, the uncouth swain.

Perspective on Milton always points to an anal retentive personality, one not only who is self-disciplined, acquisitive, and obstinate, but one who is not given to airing his accomplishments or being fully satisfied with them once they have been aired. Note, for example, the alteration of the text of Comus in 1645 after its first publication in 1637, of the "Nativity Ode" in 1673, and so significantly of Paradise Lost in its second edition. But the prose too is revised: the second edition of The Doctrine and Disciplines of Divorce (1644) is almost double the length of the first (1643); Eikonoklastes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates have additions, for the most part unimportant, however, in 1650 printings; and The Ready and Easy Way, within a month's time in March/April 1660, almost becomes two different books. With Parker we may remark that "Milton not only strengthened his main proposal and brought it up to date, but also amplified his attack on monarchy, reminding his readers of things they had perhaps forgotten, such as the wastefulness and corruption of court life";⁸ and we can construe the first edition as being hurried into print because the Restoration was upon him. Yet there is that dissatisfaction with self that is so typical of the anal personality. And with the publication of Paradise Lost in 1667, Milton finally was able to release a number of items for publication well after they had been written: Accedence Commenc't Grammar (1669), The History of Britain (1670), Artis Logicce Plenior Institutio (1672). Other works that saw print long after composition were Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (probably from 1653 in rebuttal of William Prynne's A Gospel Plea, but not published until 1659 in promised complement to A Treatise of Civil Power), and the posthumous Character of the Long Parliament (1681), A Brief History of Moscovia (1682), A Letter to a Friend, Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth and The Present Means, and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth (1698), and De doctrina Christiana (1825). The last, of course, may not be quite as he might have wanted it, since the manuscript indicates numerous alterations of the text over some years. This record is easily assignable to the kind of personality I suggest, and helps make cogent the career and religious convictions that finally emerged in 1637. Milton seems consistently to lag behind the "more timely-happy spirits" of his world, coming to realizations and decisions well after we might have expected another in similar circumstances to have acted. And, indeed, the continuance of the shell of his world in the 1630s demarks that personality, though inwardly there had been change.

Over the years of the 1630s, then, we see a change in Milton's attitude toward the church, from a seemingly straightforward Anglicanism to an antiprelatical position. He had been "church-outed," but there is no evidence of change in belief. Once questioning in one sector sets in, however, questioning and then revision may occur in another, and such is the case, I think, with Milton. Religion, Jung tells us, is "a careful consideration and observation of certain dynamic factors, understood to be 'powers,' spirits, demons, god, laws, ideas, ideals or whatever name man has given to such factors as he has found in his world powerful, dangerous or helpful enough to be taken into careful consideration, or grand, beautiful and meaningful enough to be devoutly adored and loved."⁹ He is not talking of creed and certainly not of church. Protestantism offers the frame of the conviction that God has revealed himself in Christ, who suffered for mankind, but the liberation from the dogma and ritual of Catholicism led to the authority of the Bible (and each man's interpretation of it now becomes possible) and to the ascendancy of inner experience. Elsewhere Jung also commented that when confronted with humankind's need for dependence and security, "What can one say of the Protestant? He has neither church nor priest, but only God—and even God becomes doubtful."¹⁰

The Milton of the 1640s, concerned with church government, espouses Presbyterianism and then rejects it; moves into Independency with its Arminian proportions, but falls out with certain practices; and finally abjures church attendance for himself. Milton's approval of Presbyterianism was probably a short-lived stratagem to effect church reform rather than a wholehearted acceptance of principles—that is, if he even had a clear knowledge of those principles that were to emerge with the Westminster Assembly of Divines' Confession of Faith in 1646 (called first An Humble Advice). The close alliance of Presbyterians and the monarchy during the troubled period from 1644 to 1649 also could not have continued Milton in their support. Independents, basically working through congregational organization, believed in leaving doctrinal matters to individual consciences. And this was and was to be a main lemma of Milton's religion. Independence from state control was meaningful when a Them/Us relation existed, but as the state became controlled by the Independents, during the Interregnum, and there was largely only Us, the question of liberty of conscience became a question of tithing and state support of the clergy. Milton's overt antagonism toward the non-separation of church and state, like that of others in England and America, grew belatedly; the state/church collocation should have been foreseen from the first Erastian actions of the mid-sixteenth century, but was not, causing, later, schism among former partners.

William B. Hunter suggests that the main catalyst for Milton in reexamining his beliefs (creed, religion, theological positions) was the reception given his divorce tracts in 1643-45.¹¹ And this may be so, particularly with the rejection of his argument for divorce in the Confession of Faith, which, though he is unnamed, is a direct attack upon his position: "Although the corruption of man be such as is apt to study arguments, unduely to put asunder those whom God hath joyned together in marriage, yet nothing but Adultery, or such wilfull desertion as can no way be remedied, by the Church, or Civill Magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of Marriage…. And, the Persons concerned in it, not left to their own wills and discretion, in their own case."¹²

It seems clear why Milton is tolerant of varying sects—it is the personal religion that is important, and as long as a sect does not interfere with a person's personal religion it need not be stamped out: "No protestant therfore of what sect soever following scripture only, which is the common sect wherin they all agree, and the granted rule of everie mans conscience to himself, ought, by the common doctrine of protestants, to be forc'd or molested for religion."¹³ Disagreement on doctrine was not important, but doctrine not derivative from God's word and the organization that fostered a concept of infallibility for any such doctrine were reprehensible. Thus we see Milton accepting adult baptism and the salvation this sacrament held forth as available to everyone. He could be called, that is, a General Baptist on this issue, not a Particular Baptist, for whom salvation was possible only for the elect. Thus we see him reflecting certain antinomian concepts as well, such as the abrogation of Mosaic law through the New Covenant (see Chapter 8), or antinomian resistance to persecution of religious dissenters. But at no point does Milton condone the libertinism often associated with the movement. His emphasis on the internal illumination that each person experiences as the Spirit of God fills one links him with the Friends (or Quakers), one of whose central figures in the mid- and later part of the century was Milton's former student and friend Thomas Ellwood. But Milton was not a Friend; his position on militarism and soldiery is a manifest disagreement with the Friends' precepts. And what strikes some people as "libertine" and morally offensive is Milton's acceptance of polygamy, although it hardly constitutes a religious congruence with, say, the Familists and their religion of love. In De doctrina Christiana (I, x) he is concerned to deny that scripture condemns or denies polygamy, that is all; he is not advocating it. The litany of sectarians that Christopher Hill reviews¹⁴ indicates how Milton agreed with different groups on this point or that, but we cannot push him into any specific pigeonhole, although he came close to the Muggletonians for Hill on the basis of anti-clericalism, materialism (since Milton saw creatio ex deo as fundamental), millenarianism, and mortalism, but also, invalidly, anti-Trinitarianism and hell internal.

The anti-Trinitarian controversy in Milton studies—so frequently and erroneously labeled Arian controversy—has had a long and still ignorantly viable life. It is not that Milton was anti-Trinitarian but that he subscribed to the nonheretical (until the Council of Nicæa) doctrine of subordinationism. In De doctrina Christiana (I, v) he wrote, "it is certain that the Son existed in the beginning, under the title of the Word or Logos, that he was the first of created things, and that through him all other things, both in heaven and earth, were afterwards made…. All these passages prove that the Son existed before the creation of the World, but not that his generation was from eternity."¹⁵ He continues that the Father and the Son are not one in essence and that the essential unity of the three persons of the Trinity is illogical. Rather, each has its own essence, but all derive from the same substantia, the Godhead, as does everything created. The concept of the one God equates with God the Father; the other persons of the Trinity may be called God "in accordance with the Father's decree and will," but, like all things created, they come from the substantia of God. This is not an anti-Trinitarian position, no matter how unorthodox it may seem to be.

Milton's language in De doctrina Christiana evidences his worriment of the word more incisively than allowed by the superficial "Three Persons in One Indivisible God" that seems to constitute Trinitarianism for most people. Milton contended that such a statement was indefensible because of illogic and contradictory of scripture: "I have already demonstrated satisfactorily, from the agreement of spiritual texts, that when both Father and Son are mentioned, the name, attributes, and works of God, and also the divine honor, are always ascribed to the one and only God the Father…. Even the principal texts which are quoted as proof of the Son's divinity show quite plainly, when they are closely and carefully studied, that he is God in the way I have suggested….. If Father and Son were of one essence, which, because of their relationship, is impossible, it would follow that the Father was the Son's son and the Son the Father's father. Anyone who is not a lunatic can see what kind of conclusion this is. For I have said enough already to show that more than one hypostasis cannot be fitted into one essence."¹⁶ The statement in the Confession of Faith on the Trinity falls between the general, inexact catch-phrase and Milton's analytic argument: "In the Unity of the God-head there be Three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; God the Father, God the Sonne, and God the Holy Ghost. The Father is of none, neither begotten, nor proceeding: The Sonne is eternally begotten of the Father: the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son."¹⁷

John Short's exposition of 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 reads Paul's words in a way that is consistent with Milton's ideas. "Therefore, while he is in no doubt that God is mediated through Jesus Christ, he never fully identifies the two. God must be supreme from first to last. It is God, and God alone, who is the alpha and the omega. Whatever the relationship in terms of communion may be between the Father and the Son, they are not in the apostle's thought identical. In respect of the work of Christ among men, for man's redemption, the relationship is one of subordination to the Father."¹⁸ Saint Augustine is also both helpful and confusing on the issue, but yielding a seemingly much less unorthodox Milton: "For by the name Father, the Father by Himself is made known, but the name God includes Himself, as well as the Son and the Holy Spirit, because the Trinity is one God…. God alone makes and is not made, nor can any passive potency be conceived in Him, insofar as He is a substance, by virtue of which He is God…. To sum up: Whatever is spoken of God in respect to Himself and of each single person, that is, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Sprit, and together of the Trinity itself, is to be predicated in the singular of each divine person and not in the plural…. [J]ust as we do not speak of three essences, so we do not speak of three greatnesses. I give the name essence to what the Greeks call ousia, but which we more generally designate as substance."¹⁹

For Milton—the later Milton at least—creation is ex deo, that is, from the substance that is God. When at the end of time the Son puts himself under the Father so that God will be All in All (1 Corinthians 15:28),²⁰ Milton interprets, there will be a bodily return of all substance to the one and only substantia, the Godhead, out of which creation has come. Similarly, with double meaning he wrote in Paradise Lost at the defeat of the rebellious angels, with reference to the Messiah's Sign in Heaven: "Under whose conduct Michael soon reduc'd / His Armie, circumfus'd on either Wing, / Under thir Head imbodied all in one" (VI, 777-79).

The concept of a "hell internal" that Christopher Hill refers to derives 1) from Satan's remarks, such as "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n" (PL I, 253-54) and "Which way I flie is Hell, my self am Hell" (PL IV, 75); 2) from the narrator's reference to Satan, "The Hell within him, for within him Hell / He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell / One step no more then from himself can fly / By change of place" (PL IV, 20-23); and 3) through contrast, from Michael's prophetic voice telling Adam, "Then [with knowledge, deeds, and love] wilt thou not be loath / To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A Paradise within thee, happier farr" (PL XII, 585-87). C.A. Patrides has shown how common the "hell internal" metaphor was among writers on religion,²¹ and thus Adam's "O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears / And horrors hast thou driv'n me; out of which / I find no way, from deep to deeper plung'd!" (PL X, 842-44) is not unusual, surely not a means of linking Milton with any sectarian group. He refers, of course, to "The second degree of death … called SPIRITUAL DEATH."²² It consists "in the loss or at least the extensive darkening of that right reason, whose function it was to discern the chief good, and which was, as it were, the life of the understanding," and "in that extension of righteousness and of the liberty to do good, and in that slavish subjection to sin and the devil which is, as it were, the death of the will."²³

What all this is meant to suggest is that the various attempts to make Milton a proponent of one creed or another are unacceptable because they are based on a tangency or two, not on a clear placement of him in any specific fold past his defection from Anglicanism. Commentators have been too eager to place Milton in a niche, find a similar thought or approach, and precipitantly pounce on a label. His religion was his own, and a description of it—which must be accordingly generalized except inasmuch as one can detail theological positions from De doctrina Christiana—indicates that it was.

Quite simply, Milton was Calvinist, agreeing with election and predestination but also accepting renovation (and vocation) as the means to restoration through the redemption of Christ. Renovation means the state of grace to which man is brought after having been cursed and subject to God's anger; through vocation—God's invitation to fallen man to learn the way to placate and worship the Godhead—all are invited to salvation. Like the Puritan, Milton emphasized the doctrine of the Fall, the inheritance of "the sin common to all men," and the need and means of regeneration. "Ingrafting in Christ" defined regeneration for Milton, as the former person is destroyed and a new inner man emerges, restored to God's image, sanctified in soul and body, to God's service and to good works. Regeneration brings repentance and faith. A logical conclusion for this precept is that no agent is needed to bring the individual into regeneration: the internality of "Faith, … Vertue, Patience, Temperance, … Love, By name to come call'd Charitie" (PL XII, 582-84) is an individual matter entirely. It is most unlikely that Milton had come to such attitudes during the early 1640s when he was arguing against prelaty, but perhaps the Protectorate, the "Blue Laws" under Major-General Lambert, and the issue of liberty of conscience led him to these ideas.

We can see such ideas dimly before the end of the 1650s, but it was probably the experiences of those years that, around 1658 onward, led to the thoughts of Paradise Lost and De doctrina Christiana, both apparently developed in those years of 1658-65 when fears about the Restoration did not encroach. It would have been an easy step to turn from church attendance or any other external show of religious action. The minister has his function to maintain "the primitive faith" and feed "the sheep that worship Christ," "to bring joyous messages from heaven, and … teach the way which leads beyond the grave to the stars" ("Elegia quarta," ll. 17-18, 92-93). But for those like Milton who recognize that way already, there is no continued need for ministerial services, not even for the preaching of the Word. If internal scripture, then, is superior, it follows that no visible church has authority over the inner scripture. And with the nullification of the church's role in administering the two sacraments that remain, baptism and the Lord's supper,²⁴ the church had lost for him almost all reason for being. The charity to be dispensed to those one comes into contact with, one's "neighbors," is the main topic of Book II of De doctrina Christiana; it is not church-related. While he acknowledges that worship be maintained, he deduces that no special day or place is required. He does not object to holding a sabbath and in a specific place, but he firmly believes that no coercion from civil authority should exist to ensnare one's free conscience, particularly by invalid recitation of scripture. Milton's church is a church of one.²⁵

Two areas in which Milton's theological thought have caused consternation for some are the Incarnation and the eschatological relationship of body and soul. Milton's view of the Incarnation and the death of Christ seems to come close to Nestorianism and Monarchianism, although neither label is apposite. The relationship of the divine being and the human being in the Incarnation of the son as Jesus may be a union of the two natures (traditional and orthodox), a union of two persons (as Milton argued), a dominance of humanity and human personality in the person of Jesus (Nestorianism), or a single person as well as a single being (Monarchianism). Behind Milton's thinking is traducianism, which alleges that since the soul is substance, it was propagated from parent to child. Thus the soul as substance would die (or sleep) with the body and await reemergence at the Last Judgment. Early on, if "Lycidas" and "Epitaphium Damonis" can fully carry the weight of theological interpretation, Milton would seem to have believed that the soul did not die with the body at death. We see Lycidas and Damon both mounted high, rejecting the rainbow. But later Milton accepted the doctrine of thanatopsychism, that is, that the soul dies with the body and awaits renewal at the resurrection. Similar is psychopannychia, which taught that the soul slept until the resurrection of the body. Milton's language in De doctrina Christiana (I, xiii) places him in the category of thnetopsychist, but he also uses the word "sleep" of the soul at death, suggesting he did not distinguish between the two concepts. This belief in the death (or sleep) of the soul is generally called mortalism and was not uncommon in the Renaissance, as Norman T. Burns has shown us.²⁶ The main issue, of course, between the ascent of the soul and the death of the soul is its nature, that is, its materiality.

For the Nestorian the natures of God and man were not merged; Jesus was man in whom God worked his will, as it were. There was no union of essences; instead the divine Logos took up abode in the man Jesus. Milton proceeds from his interpretation of kenosis in Philippians 2:6-8,²⁷ which we see reflected in 1629 in the "Nativity Ode": "That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable, / And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty, / Wherwith he wont at Heav'ns high Councel-Table, / To sit the midst of Trinal Unity, / He laid aside" (8-12); and later in "Upon the Circumcision": "for us frail dust / Emptied his glory" (19-20). If the Son fully "emptied" himself of his Godhead and was incarnated as Jesus, then we are surely on the verge of Nestorianism. But Milton hedges somewhat, saying, "Christ, then although he was God, put on human nature, and was made Flesh, but did not cease to be numerically one Christ" (YP, VI, 420). Thus Christ is thought of as not relinquishing his divine nature: he maintains "the essence itself." There is union for Milton, but the stress on the individual beings flirts with the concept that God worked through Jesus rather than that Jesus was divine. Milton, however, also contends that Jesus died in both natures (divine and human), and of course this is logical if the soul is substance and was propagated from parent to child.²⁸ Monarchians were anti-Trinitarian, seeing Christ either as mere man, chosen by God, and inspirited and exalted by him (he is Son of God by adoption), or as truly divine but thus indistinguishable from God the Father. Such thinking led to the heresy espoused by the Patripassians and Sabellians that the Father also suffered in the Crucifixion. Again Milton's interpretation of kenosis puts him dangerously close to the first view noted for Monarchianism, even though he was not anti-Trinitarian, as I have argued.

While there has been much attention to theological issues in Milton and some attempts to categorize his creed and church on the basis of a likeness or two, little scholarship has been devoted to Milton's religion per se. The best statement, though brief, is that already cited, by William B. Hunter in A Milton Encyclopedia (7:106-20). Another is the published dissertation by Paul Chauvet,²⁹ who reviewed the Anglican and Puritan contexts as well as the schismatic groups such as the Arminians, the Independents, and the Antinomians, which Milton would have known. Deriving evidence from the facts of his life and from the works, including De doctrina Christiana, Chauvet presents a Milton who is anti-Roman Catholic, recognizes that in 1632 he was an Anglican as the signing of the Thirtynine Articles makes clear (38), and sees him moving toward a middle position between Anglicanism and Puritanism (such as the Arminians represented) at least after 1639 and by 1645. For Milton the Bible is of prime importance. Chauvet recognizes an affinity first with Presbyterian attitudes, with Baptist beliefs, and with Antinomian thought, and thus stresses the importance of individual conscience for Milton "et que les bonnes et les mauvaises oeuvres sont également indifférentes à notre salut" (119). He discusses Milton's beliefs in toleration, separation of Church and State, and liberty of conscience. "Milton est le constant accusateur du péché et le chantre infatigable de la Rédemption…. mais que ce même puritanisme, en émancipant sans prudence la conscience individuelle, sapait les bases de la fois apostolique et tendait a démolir la doctrine après la discipline …" (211). He therefore concludes that Milton's religion is individualistic and not specifically congruent with those given classifying labels: "Le Miltonisme est, dans son essence, la religion puritaine fortement modifiee par la personnalité ultra-intense de John Milton" (243).

Religion is an escape from the unconscious, supplying the "other side," or anima. Milton's father may have been a deterrent in bringing him to realizations about himself and about his religion: the church was the world to which he was intended until 1637 when, with his mother's death, he was able to achieve some freedom of decision as well as movement. But it took two decades to traverse the road to his individualistic religion, "Le Miltonisme," as Chauvet labeled it. Taking on his father's energy in its formulated religious structure repressed his own energy (I use the term in its Jungian manifestations). As the form that such energy took in religious matters, the church was the first to be reexamined and recast, only later to take new form for Milton's own energy. "[E]verything depends on the form into which energy passes. Form gives energy its quality…. For the creation of a real value, therefore, both energy and valuable form are needed."³⁰ It is the father archetype that supplies energy, the anima or mother archetype that supplies form.

Through those two decades, the content which the form held also underwent reexamination and recasting. And it was with his father's death in 1647 that Milton moved into such revision, although at first the concerns were governmental, religious ostensibly only in religiongovernment issues such as liberty of conscience. In a way this period was a delaying action created by the transference of ego energy to the object government; only with reductive analysis (a severing of that transference) can one release that energy to achieve what was promised oneself in the past. With the period of 1658-65 and the writing of De doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost , Milton was able to forge new religious content for his new form through the exercise of his own energy. Again Jung supplies a rationale of this human experience. The adult cut loose from parents finds that "energy streaming back from these manifold relationships [of the past] falls into the unconscious and activates all the things he had neglected to develop…. To the man in the second half of life the development of the function of opposites lying dormant in the unconscious means a renewal."³¹ In the postscript to Defensio prima published in 1658 Milton has given proof of this statement: "Now that my toil has won the richest rewards I had hoped for in this life, I do delight in them with all thankfulness, but at the same time I am earnestly seeking how best I may show not only my own country, to which I devoted all I have, but men of every land and, particularly, all Christian men, that for their sake I am at this time hoping and planning still greater things, if these be possible for me, as with God's help they will."³²

But we can see the major beginning of the assertion of self in Sonnet 19, "When I consider how my light is spent," written surely in (October?) 1655, "Ere half my days in this dark world and wide," despite some attempts to place it earlier. (It is not "On His Blindness," of course; that is only a significant background for the tenor of the poem, which is the resolve to activate the things that had been neglected to develop when time and occasion and psychic energy should appear.) What the poem suggests is an emptying of self and the past, and a picking up the pieces of what remains to reform them in the present and future. According to James P. Driscoll, "Nothingness beneath real identity [and this is what Sonnet 19 shows us] is a necessary condition for understanding the larger self…. [I]t symbolizes consciousness freed from ego tyranny to gain contact with the whole self."³³ The opposites of rebellion and sublimation are rawly presented in Paradise Lost, perhaps because they were rawly and recently the oppositions within Milton's own two-decade experience. Paradise Regain'd, I have argued elsewhere,³⁴ was begun in the late 1640s and completed and expanded in different form after 1665. This reexamination of Milton's religion and its apparent psychological substructs suggests a reason for the poem's inchoate condition and for an alteration of content and form, and for its renewal as a work of real value beyond the influence of Paradise Lost and Thomas Ellwood's imperceptive reading of that epic. With Paradise Regain'd Milton proceeded to full assertion of his religious precept.

Abbreviations

CD

De doctrina Christiana ("Of Christian Doctrine")

CM

The Columbia Milton: The Works of John Milton. Frank Patterson, gen. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-38.

CPB

Milton's Commonplace Book

DDD

The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce

ME

A Milton Encyclopedia. William B. Hunter, gen. ed. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1978-83.

PL

Paradise Lost

PR

Paradise Regain'd

SA

Samson Agonistes

YP

The Yale Prose: Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Don M. Wolfe, gen. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-82.

Notes

¹ Alan Dures, English Catholicism, 1558-1642 (London: Longmans, 1983), 39.

² Ibid., 84.

³ See also my discussion (and rejection) of Milton's "Alleged Roman Catholicism" in ME, 2:26-27. Many of the issues here that involve Milton's thinking, particularly in Of True Religion, are examined in my essay '"Connivers and the Worst of Superstitions': Milton on Popery and Toleration," forthcoming.

⁴ See my essay "The Structure and Myth of Paradise Regain 'd."

⁵ Compare Carl Jung's remark in Aion (The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968], 9, pt. 2:109): "the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter." The view of "Ad Patrem" presented in Chapter 4 is consistent with this reading of this statement.

⁶ See Thomas B. Stroup, Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton's Poetry (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1968), and Hunter's book on Comus, already cited, among others.

⁷ The passages read: "Shepherd I take thy word, / And trust thy honest offer'd courtsie, / Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds / With smoaky rafters, then in tapestry halls / And courts of princes, where it first was nam'd, / And yet is most pretended" (321-26), and "If every just man that now pines with want / Had but a moderate and beseeming share / Of that which lewdly-pamper'd Luxury / Now heaps upon som few with vast excess, / Natures full blessings would be well dispens't / In unsuperfluous eev'n proportion" (768-73). In the first instance the manuscript of the poem (in the Trinity MS, that is) shows alterations being made as Milton wrote; the second is preceded by extensive revision, which is made on the pasted leaf, definitely in 1637. Both seem odd passages to have been presented before the Bridgewaters in 1634.

⁸Milton: A Biography, 1:556.

⁹ Jung, Psychology and Religion, 5.

¹⁰ Jung, Two Essays, 215.

¹¹ See ME, 7:107.

¹²The Confession of Faith (London, 1651), Chapter XXIV, Section VI, 53; it appears on 44 of the 1646 expanded version of An Humble Advice.

¹³A Treatise of Civil Power (London, 1659), 34-35.

¹⁴ In Milton and the English Revolution, esp. 100-116.

¹⁵ YP, trans. John Carey, 6:206.

¹⁶ Ibid., 233, 238, 264.

¹⁷ I quote from the thirty-two-page first edition of An Humble Advice (London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, [1646]), Chapter II, Section 3, p. 8.

¹⁸The Interpreter's Bible (New York and Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1953), 10:238. See also Timothy J. O'Keeffe, Milton and the Pauline Tradition: A Study of Theme and Symbolism (Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of America, 1982).

¹⁹The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. Press, 1963), Book V, Chapter 8, 186-87. For clarification of the terms ousia, hypostasis, and substantia, see C.A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition, Chapter 1, esp. 16-20, and William B. Hunter, "Some Problems in Milton's Theological Vocabulary," Harvard Theological Review 57 (1964): 353-65. See also William B. Hunter, C.A. Patrides, and Jack Adamson, Bright Essence: Studies in Milton's Theology (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1971), and Peter A. Fiore, Milton and Augustine: Patterns of Augustinian Thought in Paradise Lost (University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, [1981]).

See Michael Baumann, Milton's Arianism (Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Lang, 1987), for an out-of-date and uninformed restatement of Milton's "heresy."

²⁰ The 1611 Authorized Version reads: "And when all things shall be subdued vnto him, then shal the Sonne also himselfe bee subiect vnto him that put all things vnder him, that God may be all in all." See also PL III, 339-41, and VI, 730-33. In The Interpreter's Bible, Clarence Tucker Craig writes in his exegesis (10:240) that "Though an English reader might assume that all the world of phenomena was to be absorbed into the ultimate reality of God, that certainly was not the expectation of Paul. He did not believe in the loss of individual consciousness by absorption in the world soul."

²¹ See Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition, 111-15, 174-78.

²²De doctrina Christiana, I, xii; YP, 6:394.

²³ YP, 6:395.

²⁴ See ibid., 573: "If, then, any believer can preach the gospel, so long as he is endowed with certain gifts, it follows that any believer can administer baptism"; and ibid., 557: "I do not know why ministers should forbid anyone except themselves to celebrate the Lord's Supper."

²⁵ The term has been used before. Its sense can be inferred from remarks of Milton's being "Church-outed" (The Reason of Church-Government, 41); it is more implicit in Considerations Touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the church (1659) where he speaks of "the true freedom of Christian doctrin and church-discipline subject to no superior judge but God only" and of Christ, "who hath promised … both his holy spirit and his own presence with his Church to the worlds end" (142, 144). Cf. John S. Tanner's "Milton Among the Mormons" in Ringing the Bell Backward, ed. Ronald G. Shafer (Indiana, Pa.: Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania Imprint Series, 1982), 123-32.

²⁶Christian Mortalism from Tyndal to Milton (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972).

²⁷ "Who being in the forme of God, thought it not robbery to bee equall with God: / But made himselfe of no reputation, and tooke vpon him the forme of a seruant, and was made in the likenesse of man. / And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himselfe, and became obedient vnto death, euen the death of the Crosse." See also Michael Lieb, "Milton and the Kenotic Christology: Its Literary Bearing," ELH 37 (1970): 342-60; republished in The Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton's Works (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1989), Chapter 4, 38-52.

²⁸ "For if Christ really died, then both his soul and his body died … on the same day. As for his divine nature, it is more questionable whether that also succumbed to death. A lot of passages in the Bible make his divine nature succumb to death along with his human nature, and they seem to do so too clearly for it to be explained away as mere idiomatic parallelism" (De doctrina Christiana, I, xvi; YP, 6:439).

²⁹La religion du Milton (Paris: H. Didier, 1909).

³⁰ Jung, Two Essays, 58.

³¹ Ibid., 71.

³² YP, 4, i: 537, trans. Donald C. MacKenzie.

³³Identity in Shakespeare, 135. Also interesting in connection with Milton's sense of Patience in this poem is Driscoll's remark (141): "But if evil's facticity gains acute, personal reality, it shatters the roseate armor of our anthropomorphic cosmologies and leaves patience the sole defense against madness. Job is the pattern of all patience; faith is the substance of his patience." Samson, of course, has exhibited some amount of impatience, and thus not true faith, in contrast to the Son in Paradise Regain 'd.

³⁴ "The Chronology of Milton's Major Poems," 356. See also my discussion in Paradise Regain'd, Chapter 2, 9-28.