Milton and Monotheism

SIX The Son after the Trinity

216 SIX The Son after the Trinity Adam’s book 8 encounter with God was interpreted in chapter 3 as a main expression of monotheism in Paradise Lost. God’s question, “What think’st thou then of me, and this my state, /...Who am alone / From all eternity” (PL 8.403–06) both asserts an utterly monotheistic godhead and challenges Adam to conceive of it. Adam’s answer—humble, wise, but also a negotiation of the problems of monotheism—dramatizes the unstable position of the adherent to monotheism, as well as the adherent who seeks to be a poet of monotheism. Importantly, in this foundational myth of monotheistic narrative, in both God’s question and Adam’s answer, Milton relies upon the vocabulary of Antitrinitarianism. When God says of himself, “Who am alone / From all eternity , for none I know / Second to me or like, equal much less” (8.405–07), he rejects the orthodox defense of the Trinity based upon equality between Father and Son. The anti-Socinian polemicist Frances Cheynell, for example, commenting on Philippians 2:6, argues, “and therefore the Son counts it not robbery to be equal with the Father, because he subsists in the nature of God.”1 Commenting in De doctrina Christiana on the same Scripture, Milton interprets equality against the Trinity: “But if the sense of the passage is that he is an equal, it rather refutes than proves The Son after the Trinity 217 the theory that he is of one essence with God. For equality cannot exist except between two or more essences” (YP 6:274–75). That the Son and the Father do not have the same essence is the central claim in Milton’s Antitrinitarianism, and one of the most important objectives of De doctrina itself. It is ultimately his separate essence that, contra orthodox formulations, denies the Son equality with the Father: “in these passages, as elsewhere, we are taught about the Son’s divine nature as something distinct from and clearly inferior to the Father’s nature” (YP 6:273). Further, when Adam answers God in book 8, he makes the statement (apparently accepted) that God is under no necessity to propagate: “No need that thou / Shouldst propagate, already infinite ; / And through all numbers absolute, though one” (PL 8.419– 21). For Maurice Kelley and Michael Bauman, this is a decidedly Arian assertion.2 Orthodox Trinitarian thought asserted the Son’s shared essence and did so largely by maintaining that the Son was not begotten by the will of the Father, but by a necessary act. If the Son is begotten as a necessary result of the divine nature, there is less risk that Christ’s sonship will imply secondariness or contingency. Such logic also served Socinians: Johann Crell argues, “either the Son is not the most high God or was begotten of the Father by necessity of nature” (Crell, Two Books, 276).3 Milton, insisting on the Son’s secondary status, concludes, “however the Son was begotten, it did not arise from natural necessity, as is usually maintained” (YP 6:208).4 In book 8, as Adam works out God’s monotheistic nature, he is not only arguing with God, but with those contemporaries of Milton who are debating the Trinity. In fact, the entire presence of Genesis 18 in Paradise Lost can be read as a meditation on the Trinity. Many commentators, including Augustine and Luther, understand the three visitors to be a reference to the Trinity.5 Not just the number of angels, but the deep ambiguity of persons forges the link to the Trinity, for Calvin: “The reason why Moses introduces, at one time, three speakers, while, at another, he ascribes speech to only one, is, 218 Milton and Monotheism that the three together represent the person of one God.”6 And so Socinians must take Genesis 18 into account. For example, Crell’s commentary on Hebrews, translated by Thomas Lushington, moves from Hebrews 13:2 to declare, “how vainly they are mistaken , who think that the three men who were seen and invited of Abraham, Gen 18:2, were the persons of the holy Trinity.”7 In light of these debates, Milton’s rewriting of Genesis 18 appears to be a strong Antitrinitarian gesture: in the figure of Raphael, he reduces the three visitors to one and defines the one figure as an angel rather than a part...