Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

is not irresistible, which is to say, as an anti-Calvinistic Thomas Jefferson insists in his summary of Arminian beliefs, “man is always
free
and at liberty to receive or reject grace.” Third, as Jefferson continues, divine justice “would not permit [God] to punish men for crimes they are predestinated to commit” (1:554). And last, foreknowledge and causation are distinct, even in a time line created, governed, and immutably foreseen by an omnipotent and omniscient God.
    In England before the 1640s, clergy who held Arminius’s heterodox opinions regarding salvation tended to be high-ranking and conservative, adhering to and even embellishing sacramental ritual and set liturgical forms that to Puritan sensibilities smacked of Roman Catholicism. This religiously and politically conservative English clergy presided over a top-down episcopal hierarchy whose regime complemented and reinforced the Stuart monarchy’s civil sway—hence the so-called “thorough” government of church and state during the 1630s, when king and bishop sought to rule without Parliamentary interference. Continental followers of Arminius, by contrast, remained largely Calvinist in devotional culture and practice. Their deviations from Calvinist orthodoxy, moreover, were republican and not authoritarian in their political implications, as Jefferson’s enthusiastic assessment suggests. Yet Arminian English bishops were oblivious to any such implications and, though in the minority, used their power to institute and enforce their cultural and governmental preferences, even when doing so meant outraging consciences or ruthlessly punishing dissent. Such impositions grated on the Puritans, who, regardless of their views on salvation, deplored episcopal pomp, debunked most sacraments, and endorsed plain spontaneity in worship.
    During the 1640s, the defeat of the high-church, anti-Calvinist elite and the ready resort of the now predominant Presbyterian faction to its own coercive policies seem to have freed Milton to argue explicitlyin behalf of rational choosing and free will. For all his support of the Presbyterian faction against the prelates, Milton had never endorsed predestination. His Arminian tendencies become unmistakable in the divorce tracts and in
Areopagitica
’s exaltation of rational choice, toleration, and individual accountability. Milton insists that God created man free, and if Adam had not been free, he might as well have been a puppet: “a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions” (
MLM
944). By the end of the 1640s, Milton’s contention that the English have every right to try and execute King Charles rests on an anti-Presbyterian first premise, all the more provocative for being presented as a self-evident truth: “No man who knows aught can be so stupid [as] to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself” (
TKM
in
MLM
1028). At this distance, it seems clear that Milton’s breach with the Presbyterians rests on differing conceptions of the dignity of the human subject. By the time he comes to write his epic, choice and responsibility are for Milton the very stuff of human morality and of human desert (Danielson; S. Fallon 1998). Most Presbyterians, by contrast, deemed the ethical categories of choice and responsibility meaningless or wickedly delusional.
    In
Paradise Lost
, it is only to the characterization of Satan and his followers that the language of predestination applies. Hell is thus described as a “prison ordained” to which they have been eternally “decreed,/Reserved and destined” (1.71, 2.160–61). Like stereotypical Calvinists, certain devils spend vast stretches of time debating “of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate/Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute”—i.e., “in wand’ring mazes lost” (2.559–61). Fate is their preferred ideological fiction as they persistently elide their responsibility for rebelling