In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Milton Über Alles: The School Divinity of Paradise Lost 3.183–202
  • Debora Shuger

If the theology of Paradise Lost is Arminian, it seems odd that the poem never depicts predestination as based on foresight of faith, given that in the seventeenth century this was what “Arminianism” meant.1 Even odder, from an Arminian standpoint, is the pair of lines found at precisely the point where one would expect predestination to be explained in terms of foreseen faith: after the Father’s declaration in book 3 that, despite Adam’s foreseen disobedience,

Man shall not quite be lost, but sav’d who will, Yet not of will in him, but grace in me Freely voutsaft.2

(3.173–75)

Were Milton’s God an Arminian, this apparently universal offer of grace should be followed by something to the effect that those whom God foresees will accept His grace are His elect, eternally predestined for salvation. However, the Father does not say this, but rather starts off in what would appear to be the opposite direction:

Some I have chosen of peculiar grace Elect above the rest; so is my will.

(3.183–84) [End Page 401]

The elect here form a delimited group of those whom God chooses for His own (peculium) without respect to any foreseen qualities in them, bestowing on them alone His special favor. Milton’s use of “Elect” and his insistence on the gratuitous, arbitrary nature of the divine choice sound Calvinist.3 Yet the rest of the Father’s speech heads back to the Arminian camp:

The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warnd Thir sinful state, and to appease betimes Th’ incensed Deitie while offerd grace Invites; for I will cleer thir senses dark, What may suffice, and soft’n stonie hearts To pray, repent, and bring obedience due. To Prayer, repentance, and obedience due, Though but endevord with sincere intent, Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut. And I will place within them as a guide My Umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear, Light after light well us’d they shall attain, And to the end persisting, safe arrive. This my long sufferance and my day of grace They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste; But hard be hard’nd, blind be blinded more, That they may stumble on, and deeper fall; And none but such from mercy I exclude.

(3.185–202)

Although Milton does not describe God as decreeing predestination based on His foreknowledge of individuals’ response to “offerd grace,” the universality of the invitation, the sufficiency of the grace offered, and its resistibility seem wholly consistent with Remonstrant soteriology. Yet since Arminianism denies the existence of an elect “chosen of peculiar grace,” lines 183 to 184 have struck scholars as attempting to graft a Calvinist “super-elect” on to “an otherwise generally Arminian position,” perhaps, Dennis Danielson suggests, as “a sort of compromise solution”; perhaps, as Stephen Fallon argues, because Milton, who saw himself as marked out both by peculiar grace and his own free endeavor [End Page 402] from among the general run of souls, was willing to sacrifice theological coherence to satisfy his “need to be outstanding in as many ways as possible, or in more ways than are possible at once.”4

As Fallon notes, the basic problem with the passage is that it presents fallen humankind with three options whereas Calvinism and Arminianism alike acknowledge only two: for Calvin, a person is either elect or rebrobate; for Arminius, each person, having received grace sufficient to respond to the divine call, either accepts or spurns it.5 Milton, however, distinguishes the elect from those among the nonelect who “to the end persisting, safe arrive,” and then contrasts these two categories of the redeemed to the remainder of the nonelect “rest” who, turning away from the light, “stumble on, and deeper fall.” This tripartite schema is certainly unusual, but it is not, I shall argue, an incoherent conflation of incompatible positions. Nor is it unprecedented. The tripartite plan of salvation that the Father lays out in 3.183–202 corresponds to that laid out by an important English divine of Shakespeare...

pdf