Spiritual Architecture and Paradise Regained: Milton's Literary Ecclesiology

ONE: Writing the Church

ONE Writing the Church
That Milton continued his critique of the English Reformation in Paradise Regained should not be surprising given his interest in the church prior to 1671. Destined as a child for a life in the church, supported in his literary aspirations by his parents , and convinced by biblical and classical models of the poet’s divine purpose, Milton never really separated his religious and poetic vocations.1 As a young man he commemorated important church figures such as Bishop Andrewes, celebrated the victory of the true church in the Gunpowder Plot, acknowledged events in the church calendar, and responded to the beauty of church architecture, windows, and music.2 Among his earliest compositions are metrical psalms, a poetic form he returns to in 1648, possibly to contribute to a new psalter.3 In the Nativity Ode he portrays himself as a sacred poet, offering his poem as a gift of worship to the infant Christ, and in Lycidas he condemns the false shepherds of the English church, later adding that the poem “foretels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy.” A Mask (Comus) has also been read as an allegory of the battle between the true and false church, the Lady, like the Protestant church, remaining pure and steadfast 1 in the wilderness.4 Although these early indications of Milton’s interest in the church and of his religious calling as a poet are somewhat conventional, his passionate devotion to the community of faith and to his exalted place in it are unmistakable. It is unclear whether he decided not to take holy orders in the Church of England to devote himself exclusively to his religious calling in poetry, or whether the actions of the “corrupt Clergy” made it impossible for him to enter the ministry in good conscience. What is clear, however, is that by the late 1630s and early 1640s, Milton found himself devoted to the church but without a public role in it. From 1641 onward, his religious and priestly calling would be fulfilled in writing, offering his prose, in one example, as a “plain ungarnish’t” “thanke-offering ” to the Son while looking forward to singing him “an elaborate Song to Generations” when he “hast settl’d peace in the Church” (Animadversions, CPW 1:706). His poetic ambitions on hold, with the exception of the metrical psalms and the sonnets, many of which also address church reformation, Milton served the church through prose controversy over the next 20 years. As a result of writing in the genre of prose controversy, Milton’s ecclesiology became more clear and detailed than was possible in the early poetry. The same exalted purpose for the church persists, but because the established clergy resists reform, denying the church its biblical form, Milton’s passionate devotion becomes vituperative polemic, hermeneutic argument, and prophetic condemnation. In the antiepiscopal tracts of 1641–42, the “seeds of a sufficient determining” (Tetrachordon, CPW 2:679) that will grow into the mature ecclesiology of De Doctrina Christiana and the late poems are planted for the first time. The authority of the Word over tradition , presbyters over bishops, toleration over persecution, the independent, apostolic church over the state-sponsored church introduced by Constantine, worship over idolatry, the upright heart over formal observance — all of these ideas, introduced 2 Spiritual Architecture and Paradise Regained with varying degrees of emphasis in 1641–42, were called out of Milton by the events of the civil war and Interregnum and refined by him as circumstances arose. They are also variations on two essential principles of Christian liberty: that the Bible is God’s Word and that each Christian is free to interpret it to determine what to believe and how to worship. This is not to say that Milton began an ecclesiological program in 1641 that remained consistent and unchanged until his death. Positions intuited in the 1640s emerged more fully when circumstances forced him to define his views more carefully according to the two “canons” of Christian liberty. Milton’s ecclesiology, then, is not a series of disconnected responses to Laudian Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, and state Independency as Barker suggests.5 Nor does it evolve “toward something like a vanishing point” until nothing is left but the “church of one man,” in which Milton is a victim of his own “self-isolating conviction” and the “archetypal encounter of idealism and realpolitik,” as Fixler argues...