John Milton\'s Arian Epic in Book 3 of Paradise Lost

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Milton’s Arian Epic: Naming Deity in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, Nicaea, and Reformation Confessions of Faith The modern town of Iznik lies in the northwestern corner of Turkey not far inland from the shores of the Black Sea, and reachable, so the tourist literature points out, by ferry from Istanbul across the eastern end of the Sea of Marmara to the port of Yalova and from there by a short bus trip. Iznik’s ancient name was Nicaea and it was here in 325 that the Roman Emperor Constantine convened the first ever ecumenical gathering of Christian bishops to restore quiet to his dominions by dealing with the disruptive teachings of Arius, an otherwise obscure presbyter in the church at Alexandria. The heart of what Arius taught was subordination of the Son to the Father. He believed in God the Father and in the Son but insisted that the Son was not fully divine, nor was he co-equal nor co-eternal with the Father in essence. The Arian crisis broke out at least six years prior to the Council of Nicaea. From Arius himself we possess only three letters that have survived, plus a few fragments of another, as well as some verse theology known as the Thalia or Banquet. Aside from these meager remains, the reigning Bishop Alexander, and his deputy and eventual successor, Athanasius, supply most of what we know of him. The earliest of Arius’s letters, from the year 318, is addressed to his Arian ally Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, and complains of his treatment at the hands of Bishop Alexander for excommunicating him for heresy. It contains one of the two cardinal points of Arian doctrine which show up time after time in fourth-century Arian writings—the idea that the Son is not co-eternal with the Father: He has driven us out of the city as atheists, because we do not concur in what he publicly preaches, namely, that the Father has always been, and that the Son has always been [...]. We are persecuted because we say that the Son had a beginning, but that God was without beginning. (Quasten 10)

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The other cardinal point of Arianism—that the Son does not share the essence of the Father—is found in Arius’s Thalia: “Foreign from the Son in essence is the Father, for He is without beginning” (Quasten 12). By 319 relations had so deteriorated between Arius and his bishop that Alexander convened a synod with a hundred bishops of Egypt and Libya, formally condemning Arius for teaching that God was not always the Father; and of the Son that there was a time when He was not. For the Son is a thing created, and a thing made; nor is He like to the Father in substance; nor is He the true and natural Word of the Father; nor is He His true Wisdom; but He is one of the things fashioned and made. (Quasten 16) The sum of these statements is that Arius taught that the Son was a reduced deity (Hanson 100), a secondary God (Quasten 8) of different essence from the Father, who because He had a beginning of existence could not be equal with His Father who was the “Unbegotten” and creator of the Son. The Council of Nicaea in 325 condemned the cardinal Arian lines of reasoning concerning the Son in its major finding and in the anathemas appended to it: We believe in [...] the Son of God, begotten of the Father, onlybegotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father. .................................... But as for those who say, There was when He was not, and, Before being born He was not, and that He came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is from a different

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hypostasis or substance, or is created, or is subject to alteration or change—these the Catholic Church anathematizes. (Kelly 232) I am leaving out of this essay discussion of the Holy Spirit in both the theology of Arius and of Milton as being a bit beside the Arian question which centered on the Father and Son. Arianism was “theological rationalism” which could not handle the mystery of how the inner life of God could be defined by “internal divine relations” (Quasten 8). So it had to argue that the Son could not be part of the indivisible essence of the Father, and that further, such a Son had to have had a beginning of existence. Both the Arians and Milton looked at divine relations and sought to explain them rationally and logically and from the stance of human experience. Cyril of Jerusalem explicates the Arian dilemma of faulty reasoning in his Catecheses: Divine generation is spiritual. Bodies [human] are begotten from bodies, and there has to be an interval of time for it to be completed. But time does not come into the begetting of the Son from the Father. [...] For what He [the Son] is now, that has He been timelessly begotten from the beginning. [...] Do not think, therefore, in terms of human generation, as when Abraham begat Isaac. [...] For God was not at first childless, and then after lapse of time became Father, but He had his Son from all eternity. (Quasten 370)

At issue in the ongoing discussion of John Milton’s theology concerning the doctrine of the Trinity is whether or not he was Anti-Trinitarian in his Paradise Lost; and if so, was he more particularly an Arian. There were many in the seventeenth century who rejected Nicene Trinitarianism as that was expressed in Reformation confessions, e.g., Socinians, Unitarians, and Anabaptists; and we need not draw out their distinctions as schools of thought. What they had in common with those who were more specifically Arian, such as Milton, is that all were anti-Trinitarian, meaning that all rejected not only the Nicene Creed, but all other Nicene-influenced creeds since. The term “Arian” had both broad (inclusive) and narrow lines of definition. When a

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seventeenth-century writer wished to speak broadly and inclusively of those teachings having in common the subordination of the Son to the Father, he might freely move between several labels for such views. For example, one William Freke uses both “Arianisme” and Unitarian in a similar vein in his Vindication of Unitarians published in 1690(Champion 109). Milton is broadly an Arian under this definition because he subordinates the Son to the Father. More narrowly, as we shall see, he is also an Arian because his outlook parallels those called Arians in the fourth century in the crucial areas of their rejection of the Son’s co-eternality and co-essentiality with the Father. The three ancient traditional Trinitarian confessions authorized by law since the time of King Henry VIII were the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed (Bray 164). These creeds were the paramount expression of orthodoxy in England and are what Milton doubtless has in mind in his Christian Doctrine when he sneeringly dismisses what he calls “the orthodox line,” referring to his opponents who “hold that the Son is of the same essence as the Father, and generated from all eternity” (6.205).1 Of these, the Athanasian Creed had for many years been vilified as being a too emphatic and vehement expression of the Nicene formulation of the Trinity doctrine, especially since it contains anathemas condemning any who do not hold to its expression of the Trinity.2 It’s cardinal and famous phrases— “one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity”—simply did not make reasonable sense to opponents of Nicaea. Milton would readily have agreed with Stephen Nye, a Unitarian clergyman, who ridicules the Athanasian Creed as “Philosophical and Cabbalistical,” a “full Dictionary for Theological Gibberish” (7). It is my view in this paper that Milton is an Arian in his Paradise Lost because he subordinates the Son contrary to both Nicaea and to the English Reformation Nicene-influenced confessions, both continental and English, which dominated the history of Protestant England from the time of King Henry VIII onward. Michael Bauman puts the case succinctly in his book, Milton’s Arianism:

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Simply put, if what was condemned at the council of Nicea was Arianism, then John Milton was an Arian. No one, I suspect, would deny the antecedent. The consequent, however, is another matter. That is, no one doubts that the Nicene creed was formulated in response to a theological threat universally termed “Arianism.” Quarrel arises not over that, but over whether one should identify Milton’s theology with the anathematized position. (Bauman 2) Bauman was following the lead of Maurice Kelley who firmly asserted in his 1941 book, This Great Argument, that “Miltonists [...] should cease to question the anti-Trinitarianism of Paradise Lost”; and that they should come to realize that the epic is “an Arian document” (122). He had based his assumptions on a minute comparison of the epic with Milton’s very heretical3 theological treatise, the Christian Doctrine, which until its discovery by Robert Lemon in the State-Paper Office at Whitehall in 1823 and its subsequent publication in both Latin and English in 1825, had remained hidden. Had Miltonists observed Kelley’s injunction there had then been no need of Bauman’s work—but they did not. In 1959 began a chain of essays and works opposed to Kelley’s thesis which to this day continue to muddy the clear stream of thought Kelley and Bauman sought to establish. Paramount among these works is the book Bright Essence by William Hunter, C. A. Patrides, and J. Adamson which contains the seminal essay of opposition, Hunter’s “Milton’s Arianism Reconsidered,” published first in the Harvard Theological Journal in 1959 which defends Milton’s subordinationist trinity. Over the years since, Hunter has been indefatigable in his attempts to overturn Kelley, and has admitted in recent years that “one can make a good case” that This Great Argument is “the most influential work of Milton scholarship published in this century” (“Provenance” 129). If it is, then one can also say that Hunter’s efforts have gone a long way toward undermining that influence and destroying the consensus that had been gathered around Kelley. Hunter’s first attempt at a defense of Milton in the 1959 essay was to declare that “Milton was not an Arian,” since “subordination as such has not been branded heterodox, though it is not the view of the Trinity found most widely today—or in the seventeenth

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century for that matter” (“Arianism” 50). The trouble with this statement is that it robs Arianism of its very definition by taking the matter of subordination of the Son to the Father and declaring it an alternatively acceptable orthodoxy. This is a false impression, for even after Milton’s death, when penalties for dissent were lessening, the Toleration Act of 1689 denied comfort to any who failed to subscribe to the articles of religion4 and, more pointedly, any who deny “the doctrine of the blessed Trinity”5(Williams 45-46). What has continued to bog down discussion of Milton’s views has been what seems to me a willful misunderstanding on the part of Professor Hunter and his allies on the issue of defending subordinationism as orthodoxy. Hunter is wrong if he imagines that after Nicaea subordinationism was acceptably orthodox. Kelley turns this improper notion inside out to show its absurdity: “Subordination can become orthodox only by affirming the equality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—then it is no longer subordinationism” (Kelley, “Provenance” 159). Those who like Hunter hope to defend Milton’s unorthodox orthodoxy by using Philo and various ante-Nicene Church Fathers like Origen and Tertullian (Hunter,Bright 38-44)for evidence of orthodox subordinationism are reading from the wrong side of Church history: it only matters what the Church pronounced as orthodoxy after the first four Church councils—Nicaea 325, Constantinople 381, Ephesus 430, and Chalcedon 451. The first two spoke of the pre-incarnate co-equality and co-eternality of the Son; the second two addressed the issue of the incarnate Jesus as being both God and Man. By the fifth century it was really only proper to speak of the Son’s subordination to the Father if one were confining one’s remarks to the incarnation, not to the preincarnate relationship of Son and Father. Pope Leo makes this clear in his Tome written in 449 as a preface to the issues raised at Chalcedon of the pre-incarnate Son and the Son as Jesus: “For from our side he possesses the humanity that is inferior to the Father, and from the Father he possesses the divinity that is equal to the Father” (Stevenson, Creeds 319-20). The issue of Milton’s improper subordination of the Son in his Christian Doctrine is, or should be, obvious. That it meets the standards for the label “Arian” to be placed upon his views should be equally obvious from the work of Kelley and Bauman. In recent years, however, Professor Hunter has tried a new

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way to get around Kelley by provocatively asserting that Milton was not the author of the Christian Doctrine after all, and to offer other candidates for the honor. It is beside my mission to refute this notion and it remains to be seen what the lasting influence of Hunter’s anti-Milton authorship will be; but it has been opposed sharply and solidly by Barbara Lewalski and Christopher Hill, as well as by Maurice Kelley in his last published essay, “The Provenance of John Milton’s Christian Doctrine, a Reply to William B. Hunter.” I should like to suggest in the remainder of this paper a route, previously unstressed by either Kelley or Bauman that will get us around the Christian Doctrine roadblock set up by Hunter and others. In doing so I am not at all setting aside the Christian Doctrine as a legitimate gloss upon Paradise Lost, for I see no valid reason yet to reject it as being genuinely Milton’s work and the fullest endorsement of his ideas. What I am emphasizing is that we do not need to lean all our weight for establishing the primary case for his Arianism on the Christian Doctrine when we have at hand the much greater authority of established Nicene standards for orthodoxy in the Reformation confessions and in the laws of the realm which all sanction the creed of the Council of Nicaea, either by directly naming it, or by the Nicene-like wording used in the various articles that express what the Trinity is.6 The two great British confessions having supreme weight during Milton’s days were the Thirty-Nine Articles contained in the Book of Common Prayer and authoritative for belief and conformity of opinion in the Church of England; and the Westminster Confession of Faith which regulated the Cromwell years. These along with earlier documents important to English church history such as the Ten Articles of 1536, the Wittenberg Articles also of 1536, as well as the seed document which was foundational to all of them, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530, declared unmistakably and emphatically the continuing authority of the Council of Nicaea: typical is this excerpt from the Wittenberg Articles, a document of belief put together by an English delegation sent to Wittenberg to meet with Luther and Melancthon by order of King Henry VIII:

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[W]e confess simply and clearly, without any ambiguity, that we believe, hold, teach and defend everything which is in the Canon of the Bible and in the three Creeds, i.e. the Apostles, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, in the same meaning which the Creeds themselves intend and in which the approved holy Fathers use and defend them. (Bray 119) Article 8 of the Thirty-Nine Articles titled, “Of the Three Creeds,” compels belief in “The three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’ Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed” (Bray 289). The weight of such confessions, backed by the imprimatur of the state and the Church of England fell upon the whole realm during the administration of several rulers during the Reformation. King Henry’s voice, for example, is heard in almost every article of the Ten Articles: “and we will that all bishops and preachers shall instruct and teach our people committed by us unto their spiritual charge” (Bray 162). Orthodoxy was not a myth, and the stability of the state depended upon conformity among the people. Orthodoxy was the basis of the several Acts of Uniformity (1549, 1552, 1559, 1662) which all had at their heart the basis of state preservation by adherence to the articles of faith. One of the first acts of the British church in King James’s administration was its Canons of 1604 which demand excommunication of any who are found “impugners of the Articles of Religion” (Kenyon 137. Articles 4 and 5 of the Canons). The purpose behind such formulations of doctrine was, as stated in the Thirty-Nine Articles: “for the avoiding of the diversities of opinions, and for the stablishing of consent touching true religion” (Bray 285. Preface to the articles, 1562 version). Orthodoxy is not at all the nebulous affair Professor Hunter and others would like us to believe was the case in the seventeenth century, for regardless of the laxity of enforcement of the doctrine of the Trinity that may be demonstrated to be the case at any one point in English church history, it remains an unassailable fact that the Nicene confessions were always on record in the British Reformation and were always the highest authority so far as defining orthodoxy was concerned.7 To say otherwise is simply to deny the record. The full statement of the Trinity came to be expressed over and again in Reformation confessions. The very quintessence of the doctrine may be

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summed up in this small excerpt taken from Article 1 of the Thirty-Nine Articles. “There is but one living and true God [...] And in Unity of this Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power and eternity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”(Bray 285). Each person of the Godhead is equally powerful, equally eternal and equally sharing an identical essence or substance. In Milton this is not the case. Milton created some 600 names for the Father and Son in Paradise Lost, 400 for the Father and 200 for the Son (Isitt xxi-xxii). That Milton well knew the importance of naming is evident in this remark from the Christian Doctrine: “The NAMES and ATTRIBUTES of God show either his nature or his divine power and virtue” (6.138). Names for God in the confessions are not mere ornaments to defining his deity; they are the very heart of the matter, for without them we should not be able to comprehend God at all. The most important set of theological proof names for divinity in the entirety of Paradise Lost are those sung by the angels in Book 3 to the Father: Thee Father first they sung Omnipotent, Immutable, Immortal, Infinite, Eternal King; thee Author of all being, Fountain of Light, thyself invisible Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit’st Thron’d inaccessible (372-77) Milton has lifted a portion of this list in the Angels’ hymn from Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks. 8If we are to find Milton a true orthodox Nicene Trinitarian in his epic, instead of an Arian as I contend, we should expect to find evidence for this in the names he chose for the Father and Son showing co-equal essence and co-equal eternality. The charge is often leveled against those who find heterodoxy in Paradise Lost that it is unfair to condemn Milton based on his poem since, so the argument goes, he is not writing a systematic theology.

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Granted, he is not, but one should expect from both a formal theology and from a poem written in defense of God that the names in both should conform to the orthodox confessions where names are paramount. We do not find equal naming in the angel hymns in Book 3. Only the Father is ever called omnipotent, immortal, infinite, eternal king and the like. Turn where we may in the epic these expressions, along with their synonyms implying ultimate deity, are the sole property of the Father’s essence and never of the Son’s. Only the Father is ever called “the supreme King” (1.735), “Heav’ns Lord supream” (2.236), “th’ Eternal Father” (5.246; 6.96), “th’ Eternal King Omnipotent” (6.227), “the most High / Eternal Father” (10.31-32), and “the Father infinite” (5.596), to name a few. And Milton makes the Son himself acknowledge the Father’s supremacy in Book 6: “O Father, O supreme of heav’nly thrones, / First, Highest, Holiest, Best” (6.723-24). Similar descriptors of supreme divinity are the common stock of attributes found also in the Reformation confessions. For example, from the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession we find these attributes listed for the Trinitarian Godhead: “everlasting, infinite [in] power [and] eternity” (Bray 285); “infinite in being and perfection, invisible, immutable, immense, incomprehensible, [and] almighty” (Bray 489). The crucial difference between Milton’s handling of the attributes for deity and the attributes listed above is that throughout Paradise Lost Milton confines them to the Father, whereas in the orthodox confessions they are the equal properties of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In Book 3 Milton reflects Arius’s beliefs when in his naming of the Son the angels sing attributes of deity which are of an inferior order of glory. Thee next they sang of all Creation first, Begotten Son, Divine Similitude In whose conspicuous cont’nance, without cloud Made visible, th’Almighty Father shines, Whom else no Creature can behold; on thee Impresst th’ effulgence of his Glory abides,

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Transfus’d on thee his ample Spirit rests. (3. 383-89) The orthodoxy here is only apparent; a closer look at each of these attributes reveals an Arian underpinning. By “of all Creation first,” Milton places the Son in the order of created beings, not of eternal deity as would be required were he truly Nicene. The Son comes into being at some point in time, reminding us of Arius’s pronouncement of the Son that “there was a time when he was not”(Quasten 16). The Son is but the leading member of creation, the first it is true, but nonetheless a creature for that honor. Arius had made the Son a creature, and here Milton does as well. He also is “begotten,” which in both Arius’s and Milton’s lexicon means made or created, and does not refer to one existing from eternity as the Nicene Creed demands. In Christian Doctrine Milton claims that the Son is begotten only in a metaphorical sense “because he is the only mediator between God and man.” But, he says, if actual begetting were in view, then “if one in fact begets another being, who did not previously exist, one brings him into existence" (6.211). In a similar vein Arius, in a letter he wrote in 318 to his ally, Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, explains the Son as coming into existence from nonexistence: “And before he was begotten, or created or determined or established, he did not exist” (qtd. in Hanson 6). The Nicene Creed, however, specifies of the Son that He is “begotten as only begotten of the Father [...] begotten not made” because His nature is identical with the Father’s. The Council of Nicaea anathematized any who say “that he came into being from non-existence.” (Hanson 163). For Arius, only the Father is uncreated (Harnack 246). “Divine Similitude” is but divine resemblance and not the same at all as a full endorsement of complete and natural divinity. In the creation account of man in Book 7 we find this express use of “similitude” to mean resemblance only: “Let us now make man in our image, man / In our similitude” (519-20). The Son only reflects the Father’s glory and does not possess it fully and naturally in himself. He is the visible manifestation of his Father’s light which “shines” out in his face. Milton is magnificently subtle here and the expression of divine resemblance sounds so close to orthodoxy as to be easily missed. We must not miss, however, the full idea—the Son reflects the Father’s qualities in

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limited compression. He is “visible” but the Father invisible; he is not “Almighty” as is the Father but only suggests such power in his outshining of the Father’s natural and superior power. This same resonance of inferiority occurs in Book 6 where the Son is mighty but not almighty. The Son must fight Satan in his Father’s chariot, with his Father’s “bow and thunder” and with his Father’s sword (6.711-14). These are figures for inferiority and unnatural power. Orthodoxy demands that the Son have equal and natural power, not power as it were transferred from Father to Son. Though the Son is “Second Omnipotence” (6.684) and has “Power above compare” (6.705), he is only, as the Father reminds him “Mightiest in thy Father’s might” (6.710). The Father’s glory and spirit are “Impress’t” and “Transfus’d” upon the Son from outside his own being and are not his natural possession. He shines forth the Father’s deity but does not have it by means of sharing an identical essence with the Father. By impressing and transfusing that which is not already the possession of the Son, Milton makes the Father the giver and the Son receiver of the elements of glory, as though speaking of normal human conditions of giving and receiving rather than of an eternal, natural begetting. Milton’s use of metaphors of light to express the relationship between the Father and Son (shines, impress’t, effulgence, glory) imitates early Christian practice, but does not go far enough to unmistakably equate light as meaning the expression of identical divine essence. The Phos Hilaron is an early Christian hymn in which we see this device of divine equation: Serene light of the Holy glory Of the father Everlasting Jesus Christ (qtd. in Pelikan 31) Light was a powerful all for Athanasius, the main opponent of Arius and Arianism in the fourth century, to carefully express orthodox thought: Being the radiance of eternal light, he [the Son] is surely eternal himself; for if the light exists always, it is evident that the radiance, too, exists always. [...] God [...] is eternal light, neither beginning

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nor ending. Therefore the radiance lies before him and is with him eternally, having no beginning and being eternally begotten. (qtd. in Pelikan 59) Had Milton intended orthodoxy in the attributes of light he expresses, he would have had to make sure that his readers understood him to be saying that the Son is as much light as is the Father. Instead, he leaves room for an Arian reading. Milton could not name the Son with the same attributive qualities of essence that he provides the Father because as a rationalist, he was unable to accept the irrational mysticism he saw lingering behind the Nicene confessions of the Trinity. This train of thought is evident in his later prose works. Two individual beings, he insists (and so does Arius), cannot have an identical essence. His Art of Logic published in 1672 distinguishes essence based on differences in number: “[T]hings which differ in number also differ in essence, and never do things differ in number without also differing in essence. Here let the theologians take notice” (8. 233). This identical thought is also in his Christian Doctrine: “If two things are two numerically, they must also be two essentially” (6.216). Thus by this ruthless logic the Father and Son cannot share ultimate supreme divinity because it violated Milton’s sense of logical and theological decorum. He was unwilling to subscribe to what the theologians of Nicene mentality were saying about two persons sharing one essence. Hence, his Father and Son do not do so. In this he is a true Arian and is like his father Arius who said that Father and Son must have distinct essences from one another. The noted church historian, J. N. D. Kelly in what he says of Arius, we also may apply to Milton and to all rationalist skeptics of the mysterious Nicene doctrine of the Trinity: Arius could speak of the holy Triad […] as consisting of three Persons. But the Three he envisages are entirely different beings, not sharing in any way the same nature or essence. This was the conclusion he deduced, by the exercise of his ruthless dialectic (Creeds 229).

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Had Milton’s angels begun their hymn with “Thee Father and Son” instead of just “Thee Father,” and then followed with omnipotent, immutable, infinite, and so on, there would be no question of his Nicene Trinitarian credentials. An orthodox Trinitarian would have been sure to do something like this in such an important set of names. Milton’s regression to Arianism remains obscure. When he was 21 and orthodox he wrote of the Son in his Nativity Ode that he once sat “the midst of Trinal Unity,” an echoing of that most vigorous creed of Nicene orthodoxy, and most hated by English Arians,9 the Athanasian which says: “the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity” (Schaff 66). And likewise, by the time he was 33 in 1641 he was still a Nicene Trinitarian when in Of Reformation he writes of the “one Tri-personall GODHEAD” (1.613-14). But somewhere in the 1640s or 1650s, in the increasing radicalism of his political and religious outlook, he set aside the mystery and the disquietedness to his soul which the Nicene Trinity evidently brought about, to embrace the far less mysterious comfort of a rationalistic skepticism which denied the idea of three persons sharing an identical essence. What makes Milton an Arian in both his treatise and in his epic is his restriction of the attributive names of ultimate deity solely to the Father. The fact that Milton names the Father and Son at such variance from such confessions, and the fact that he reveals in his naming his adherence to the essential points of fourth century Arianism condemned at Nicaea, are what constitute my charge that Paradise Lost is indeed, as Kelley famously pronounced, “an Arian document.”

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1

All references to Milton’s prose in this essay will be found in the Yale edition of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton . 2 Article 28 specifies: “He therefore that will be saved, must thus think of the Trinity.” 3 The phrase is Christopher Hill’s. 4 Article 8 demands subscription to the articles of religion. However, Dissenters were not to be punished if they objected to Articles 34, 35, 36 which were specific to practices within the Church of England and from which now the Toleration Act was freeing them. 5 Article 17 specifically denies toleration to “any person that shall deny in his preaching or writing the doctrine of the blessed Trinity, as it is declared in the aforesaid articles of religion.” 6 One may gather a significant listing such synods, authoritative letters, councils and decrees in the two works by Stevenson for the ancient world and from Bray for the English confessions; penalties for failure to observe orthodoxy were spelled out in constitutional documents such as one may find plentifully displayed in Elton, Kenyon, and Williams. 7 Orthodoxy, so far as it was a matter for the Church of England and the realm, was spelled out in various acts of legislation such as the Wittenburg Articles and the Ten Articles (1536), the Acts of Uniformity (1549, 1552, 1559, 1662). All had as their basis the preservation of the articles of faith. Even children were to be taught the creeds and articles, as commanded legally by Thomas Cromwell in injunctions he wrote to accompany the 1536 Ten Articles (Bray 177). The canons of 1604, articles 4 and 5 provide for excommunication of any who are found “impugners of the Articles of Religion” (Kenyon 137). 8 Hughes 267, n.373-82. Hughes quotes Sylvester’s translation from G. C. Taylor’s Milton and Du Bartas: Before all Time, all Matter, Form, and Place, God all in all, and all in God it was: Immutable, immortal, infinite, Incomprehensible, all spirit, all light, All Majestie, all-self-Omnipotent, Invisible. 9 Such as the Unitarian Stephen Nye who objected to those “Trinitarians” who he says “absolutely refused to part with the Damnatory Clauses in the Athanasian Creed” (6). Nye refers to such statements as these in the creed: “Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith: Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly” (Schaff 66).

Works Cited Bauman, Michael. Milton’s Arianism. Frankfurt, Bern, and New York: Lang, 1987.

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Bray, Gerald, ed. Documents of the English Reformation. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994. Champion, J. A. I. The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1992. Elton, G. R. The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1965. Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318-381. Edinburgh: Clark, 1988. Harnack, Adolf. Outlines of the History of Dogma. 1893. Trans. Edwin Knox Mitchell. Boston: Beacon 1957. Hill, Christopher. “Professor William B. Hunter, Bishop Burgess, and John Milton.” SEL 34 (1994): 165-93. Hughes, Merritt Y. ed. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Indianapolis: Odyssey 1957. Hunter, William B. “The Provenance of the Christian Doctrine.” SEL 32 (1992): 129-42. Isitt, Larry R. All the Names in Heaven: A Reference Guide to Milton’s Supernatural Names and Epic Similes. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2002. Kelley, Maurice, ed. Milton, Complete Prose Works, vol 6. ---. “The Provenance of John Milton’s Christian Doctrine, a Reply to William B. Hunter.” SEL 34 (1994): 153-63.

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---. This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana as a Gloss upon Paradise Lost.

Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1941. Kelly, J. N. D.

Early Christian Doctrines. Peabody: Prince,

1978. Kenyon, J. P. ed. The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1969. Lewalski, Barbara K. “Forum: Milton’s Christian Doctrine.” SEL 32 (1992): 143-54. Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton.

Ed. Don M.

Wolfe, et al. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953-82. ---. Paradise Lost. Ed. Roy Elannagan. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Nye, Stephen. Observations on the Four Letters of Dr. John Wallis, Concerning the Trinity and the Creed of Athanasius. London: 1691. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Light of the World: A Basic Image in Early Christian Thought. New York: Harper, 1962. Quasten, Johannes. The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature. 1950. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1986. Vol. 3 of Patrology. Schaff, Philip. The Greek and Latin Creeds. 1889. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998. Vol. 2 of The Creeds of Christendom.

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