INTRODUCTION
 

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…I hope that readers will not be deterred by my use of the words “Christian humanist.” Non-Christians and nonhumanists may not be inclined to care about refinements within a vocabulary whose terms for them are objects of attack, having served as vehicles of a historical hegemony they oppose.
 

…we are usually closest to understanding a world view when we study its internal debates…
 

…a dynamic, multifaceted, practical, and political Christianity is a rich and even inevitable context for reading Milton.
 

…the public rather that the private dimensions of Milton’s poetry.
 

Christian humanism shares with Marxism…a commitment to see the private good as definable only in the public, or community’s good.
 

…Richard Bernstein… “What we desperately need today is…to seize upon those experiences and struggles in which there are still the glimmerings of solidarity and the promise of dialogical communities in which there can be genuine mutual participation...”
 

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…tendency…contemporary…aftermath of World War I or of May 1968…to turn an assumed “fatigue and depoliticization” into a perceived “emphasis on personal, private salvation” in Milton’s late poems.
 

Frederic Jameson… “the religious community” served “as a concrete mediator between the public and the private…”
 

…he fails to find “all these great themes of church and collectivity : in Milton’s poetry…
 

This book is largely about “the religious community” that Jameson recognizes in Milton’s milieu.
 

…I discuss the advisability of a new term—“radical Christian humanism”… acknowledging that there are limitations to…”the traditional approach to Milton,” which “views the poet as the last great Renaissance apologist for humanism.”
 

How is the “humanism” reflected in his erudition related to his faith?
 

…if Milton viewed “the world as evil” and “virtue as renunciation” of the world, [must he] also have ultimately rejected a commitment to action in this world.
 

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…Milner…”only two major options” available: scientific empiricism or Cartesian rationalism. Milner contends…the latter… Rapaport…sees…empiricism (or techne) with a vengeance…”the instrumentalization of reason” underlying an absolutist revolutionary state.
 

I am interested in Milton’s “reason” and “temperance.”
 

…Waldock (1947)…either a “Renaissance” or a “Puritan” Milton (Widmer’s “humanist” vs. absolutist” Christian)…
 

…since the eighteenth century. “the rational man has given way to the ‘reasonable’ man…refusal to draw logical conclusions…willingness to compromise…precisely…non-rational…
 

I…offer a reconsideration of recta ratio…post-empiricist and post-Cartesian.
 

…move beyond both Milton the “poet of democratic liberalism” and Milton the “prophet of revolutionary absolutism.”
 

…Milton’s Christianity did build upon pre-modern conceptions and experiences of reason that have some affinities with the post-modern…
 

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Chapter…Three...combination of a Christian humanist rationality and radical political action…Eden of Milton’s PL in the context of his commitment to the revolutionary cause.
 

Chapter Four…consider the operation of an individual character’s free reason in situations that are simultaneously ethical and political… Adam and Eve before the Fall…in the context of Milton’s humanistic and antinomian Christian radicalism.
 

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THREE
 

Milton’s God: Creativity and the Law
 

Satan…attempt to use some of nature’s law and deny the rest leads inevitably to his own and his followers’ enslavement.
 

Our standard for evaluating the justice of God’s rule of heaven should be the same ideal that we took from Milton’s prose to judge his hell: a government that preserves liberty, for both the governor and the governed.
 

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The angels do not fall from ignorance or from stupidity, but from the only force that can oppose itself to knowledge of such creative power, from the pride that hardens their hearts against admitting its significance:
 

The angels who sing at this world’s creation laud not primarily their King’s omnipotence but his great ordering beneficence when they affirm: “to create/Is greater than created to destroy” (7.606-7)
 

… “for strength from Truth divided and from Just,/Illaudable, naught merits but dispraise”
 

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Milton…”evil and vice, [illegitimate power] being disorder, cannot possibly be ordained and continue vicious, for this would imply the presence of two contraries, order and disorder”… And God’s own goodness is such that he does not subject his creation to contraries: “he cannot deny himself," Milton quoted from Scripture, he “cannot lie”; thus, “the power of God is not exerted in . . . things which . . . imply a contradiction” (DD)
 

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the reason why Christ here “regulated and contracted his power . . . the Evangelist Matthew clearly expresseth”: “And he did not many mighty works there, BECAUSE OF THEIR UNBELIEF, Mat. 13.58. Christ judged it not a thing reasonable or meet (and consequently it was impossible for him to do it)...
 

William Empson speaks for many critics, nevertheless, when he denies that goodness is perceptible in the God of PL, whom he calls “the harsh Old Testament figure.” The Puritans’ identification of their cause with that of the ancient Hebrews…
 

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while God’s power to create displays his omnipotence over all being, his gift of the Law reveals the essence of his goodness.
 

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God, when he reveals himself in answer to Adam’s natural seeking, repeats this pattern, telling him first: I made you; and second: there are my commandments.
 

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What does it mean to say that God’s law is truth and that those who break the moral law are liars? It means first of all that the law is primarily descriptive and only secondarily, or derivatively, prescriptive. It means as Hooker, Goodwin, and Milton’s Adam and Abdiel have joined the psalmist in observing, that the physical and spiritual nature of creation contains within itself the rules of its own operation.
 

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As Milton’s understanding of reality’s utter consistency was the basis for his view of a human magistrate’s responsibility to natural and national law, so it is also the basis for his depiction in PL of God’s own government of both angels and humans.
 

Christ is servant-king, a ruler whose greatness consists in the creativity and strength necessary to harmonize universal law with situational need.
 

Milton strove for an English government modeled on God’s government of his creation—not on the outward signs of a monarch’s glory but on the rule of law, of  “reason abstracted as much as might be from personal errors.” Human rulers must be accountable for their acts before law to the governed, who must judge them…
 

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…Milton portrays the true king of heaven and earth as a voluntarily accountable monarch. There God is shown to do things because they in themselves are right; God’s actions are not “right” (as both Laudians and Presbyterians had found themselves asserting) simply because he performs them. It is on the basis of natural law that God accounts…for his dangerous gift of freedom...
 

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…for Milton and the revolutionaries, the prerogative of the English Crown had to be, like the divine prerogative, bound absolutely to law if it were not to cloud the sun of royalty.
 

John Goodwin was still doggedly defending this radical theology, which grounded God’s own royal prerogative in law, against attacks from ministers of the Cromwellian establishment two years before the Restoration. Because Goodwin argues that the prerogative and sovereignty assigned to God by Scripture must be understood as being consistent with God’s fealty to reason and natural law, a voluntaristic Calvinist opponent, George Kendall, “arraigns me of treason against the most August and sacred Prerogative of the Divine Majesty..."
 

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…two years after the execution of the king who had claimed a royal prerogative above all law, “That prerogative which God stands upon in the Scriptures, and claims to Himself as a royalty annexed to the crown of heaven and earth, . . . standeth not in any liberty claimed by Him to leave what persons He pleaseth to ruin [or salvation] . . . but to make the terms and conditions, as of life so of death, as of salvation so of condemnation…"
 

…the faith of revolutionary humanism that the human relation to God’s purpose is to be diligent and impartial in the consideration of God’s ends, we may examine the actual experience of Milton’s Adam as he lives through the justice of an “accountable” God who does not subject him to “meer grace and mercy” but to Law.
 

Can he make deathless Death? That were to make

 

Adam holds that God cannot contradict Himself.
 

For God to deal falsely with a law of nature, even physical nature, would be unjust…
 

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Will he draw out,

 

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Adam has reached the realization that, because of his law, there are things God “cannot do.”
 

The God of justice is not opposed to the God of love: God’s infinitely creative fulfillment of the law’s terms is what preserves human freedom and hence humanity.
 

FOUR
 

Milton’s Antinomianism and the Separation Scene in Paradise Lost
 

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One of Milton’s additions to the Biblical story of the fall is a dramatic episode of two hundred lines in book 9 during which Adam and Eve decide to work separately in the garden for a morning.
 

Why do Adam and Eve quarrel?
 

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In 1969 Fredson Bowers argued…that Adam, as the embodiment of reason, should have commanded Eve, the embodiment of passion, not to go.
 

[other]… readings conclude that Adam had to let Eve go in order to preserve her liberty.
 

…what is at stake in this scene, as in the whole epic, is the meaning of human liberty.
 

The divorce tracts have rightly been taken as a contextual gloss on PL.
 

…tracts emphasize “the satisfaction of psychological needs as the very ‘end’ for which marriage was ordained”…
 

…carried on in the midst of his campaign for “true Reformation in the state.”
 

This “state”…is a postlapsarian necessity; but society itself, in the Christian humanist view, was instituted by God at the creation of human beings.
 

…procreation as the end of marriage is to ignore…(“very”) end, which is to turn the private into a public self, to bind “the married couple to all society of life…”
 

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Many of Hill’s readers have been distressed to find Milton’s views combined with those of such strange characters as the Ranters, New Model army preachers, New England heretics, and radical schismatics…
 

Some have objected to the idea of Milton in the “tavern” associating with the radical fringes of society.
 

Some antinomians—the Ranting sort—he condemned, as in his sonnet 12: “License they mean when they cry liberty.”
 

…have to judge one’s allies, in some of whom right ideas, freely and sincerely held, nevertheless resulted eventually in corrupt practices, inward slavery. Why, we must ask, and how do genuinely righteous persons fall?
 

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For Milton, as for the most radical sectary, no law had to be obeyed by a Christian simply because it was a law: as Christ could break the Sabbath to heal the sick, so Christians could break any of the commandments in the spirit of Christ.
 

…in the face of this doctrine’s apparent abuse, there remained the problem of defining a "more perfect” morality than that of the Ten Commandments or of any system of positive law.
 

…how can one know when one’s decision to act is based on the direction of God’s spirit dwelling in one’s heart and when it is based on personal desire? I believe that in Milton’s view the first persons who had to deal with this dilemma of total spiritual liberty were unfallen man and woman…
 

…quarrel between Adam and Eve in the light of Milton’s answer to the epistemological question that faced ethical and political antinomianism.
 

We can best study that answer by viewing Milton, as Christopher Hill suggests, within the milieu of his radical contemporaries.
 

...the army preachers John Saltmarsh and William Dell, the Ranters, and the Independent minister John Goodwin.
 

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Instead of describing their doctrine as the negative antinomianism, many gave it a positive formulation as “free grace.”
 

…all manifestations of antinomian belief, however much they differed, did share two points: a common belief in the abrogation of the whole law, and a common underlying motivation for this belief in a reaction against the frightening, inscrutable picture of the deity preached by powerful branches of seventeenth-century Scottish and English Calvinism.
 

…term that genuinely characterizes a variety of people in the radical wing of the revolutionaries.
 

…the sectarian and individual differences among the antinomians made the revolutionary effort impossible to sustain beyond 1659. The dynamics of this libertarian idealism informs Milton’s interest in Eden.
 

… “voluntarist antinomianism”… Calvinists, Saltmarsh and Dell belong; Ranterism …offshoot of this branch.
 

…“humanist antinomianism”… John Goodwin and John Milton…
 

…Christian humanist line that reaches from Saint Thomas Aquinas through Richard Hooker...
 

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…seventeenth century…beliefs were radicalized.
 

Orthodox preachers of the covenant urged hearers who had not yet discovered a genuine holiness within to try harder to find it. ...the spiritual biographies contain victorious accounts of those who eventually succeeded. There are also some tragic accounts, ranging from depression to suicide, presented by teachers like Saltmarsh who opposed the Covenant theologians, arguing instead for free grace, or antinomianism.
 

… “high” Presbyterians…sign of election would be obedience to a legally constituted Presbyterian state church.
 

…Saltmarsh…churches’ legal requirements encouraged a person to become the possessor of a “carnal, formally deceiving heart”—as the fear-based persecution of religious sects clearly revealed.
 

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…Michael…book 12 of PL: “So Law appears imperfect, and but giv’n/With purpose to resign them in full time/Up to a better Cov’nant”
 

Milton differs importantly from Saltmarsh in that he did not accept the doctrine of predestination or “perseverance.”
 

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Saltmarsh…The Old Testament moral law, from which believers have been released, was genuine law in that it had something of the Image of God in it.” “That law . . . [however] was but a few beams of righteousness, even ten, but a decalogue of righteousness.” In the gospel, “the righteousness of God is brought forward in more glorious and spiritual commandments; and for ten, there are scores.” The new image of God offered in the gospel is not embodied in a list of positive laws: “the Gospel commands us rather by patern than precept, and by imitation [of Christ] than by command.” We move, Milton says in PL, from "strict Laws” to “large Grace.” ...“it is not a less perfect life that is required for Christians but, in fact, a more perfect life than was required of those who were under the law” (DD)
 

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…Saltmarsh’s own campaign for religious toleration against the Presbyterians’ “chaines and fetters to the glorious and free spirit.” There were, he believed, no a priori restrictions that a state church could impose on a Christian’s belief or religious practice.
 

Saltmarsh…1647 to tell the generals that “though the Lord had done much for them and by them, yet . . . God would not prosper their consultations, but destroy them by divisions amongst themselves . . .because they had sought to destroy the people of God.” Milton too did not hesitate to warn Cromwell that governing justly in peacetime would be harder than winning the war.
 

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…Ranters…merely a short-lived offshoot of the voluntarist kind of antinomianism and not a central example of the phenomenon we are studying.
 

Lawrence Clarkson in his Ranter phase felt obliged to act out all behavior that had been called sinful: “the ground of this my judgment was, God made all things good, so nothing evil.” The Ranter, when asked, “May a Christian then live as he list?” answered a loud “Yes!”
 

Twentieth-century readers generally view the Arminian heresy as antithetical to the antinomian heresy.
 

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In the seventeenth century, however, the two heresies were often lumped together…
 

In fact…Goodwin’s impetus toward that belief and away from the Calvinist formulation of the doctrine of predestination was the same as Saltmarsh’s impetus toward antinomianism.
 

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Milton and Goodwin followed a typical Puritan radical’s development in their progression from an unexamined Calvinism that had been inspired by the courage of the reforming Presbyterians, to an Independency based initially on a reaction against Presbyterian intolerance, and finally to individually posited heretical views.
 

...“considering how the case doth stand with this present age full of tongue and weake of braine . . . into the causes of goodnes we will not make . . . deepe . . . inquirie.” It is the inferior, second way that yields Hooker’s famous sentence, “The generall and perpetuall voyce of men is as the sentence of God him selfe”
 

Yet…he concludes, “a common received error is never utterly overthrowne, till such time as we goe from signes unto causes”
 

Going from signs to their causes, form positive laws to natural law, was the procedure of the revolutionaries fifty years after Hooker…
 

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The spirit worked to rectify fallen reason and allow it to sort possibly relevant moral truths into an order genuinely applicable to a particular situation. The positive laws do that task for us well much of the time. When they do not, we are free, the radical Christian humanists claimed, to inquire into root causes…
 

…in the same terms that Milton’s Samson answers Dalila’s theological and moral relativism; Goodwin appeals to the universal law of nature against false political and religious teachings to assert that a true God and nation would not ask to be served by ungodly deeds.
 

… “all human laws and constitutions are but a like structure and frame with the Ceremonial Laws of old made by God himself, which were all made with knees to bend to the law of nature.”
 

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The combining of this antinomian sense of God’s goodness with the Christian humanist concept of natural law as the embodiment of that goodness brought a return to the roots of individual freedom and the source of social change. This combination was achieved most consciously by John Milton, who articulated both a belief in “general predestination, that is, free will, and a belief in the abrogation of the moral law, that is, the ethical dimension of antinomianism.
 

…Miltonic liberty is the believer’s freedom to work confidently in an ethical situation…voluntarist antinomians…believed that a divine command had to be entirely arbitrary…
 

…Goodwin… “Be. . . admonished . . . that the importunity of an inward solicitation is no argument that the perswasion unto which you are solicited cometh from God.” But the humanist antinomian had available the entire law of nature to order the moral vision with which he or she viewed the elements of a particular situation.
 

Released from all positive laws, the Christian must build his or her moral judgment, inner authority, through the discernment of the valid hierarchy of natural laws that apply in particular ethical situations.
 

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…the separation scene of PL…is a concentrated exploration of the antinomian experience.
 

…the question that confronted Puritan radicals as the revolutionary cause, to which God had given the victory, wavered, fell into confusion, and suffered defeat: “How do genuinely righteous persons fall?”
 

Because they are perfect beings, their moral decisions do not concern whether to obey God’s will as expressed in a code of laws...
 

…not because, as Satan implies in book 5 (lines 798-99), they are incapable of error.
 

As Goodwin had phrased it: “In whatsoever God acteth, we are to look not only for will, but counsel; i.e., wisdom, and tendency of ends worthy of Him; and these discernable . . . by men.” To the already perfect, obedience means growth through the steady exercise of the inner light within a dynamic moral context.
 

…on the one hand, voluntaristic antinomians like the Ranters and, to a lesser extent, the Calvinist Army preachers and Levellers, who believed that the inner light...Christ as the self, speaking directly to the will of the believer, obviating the need for reason, and, on the other hand, humanistic antinomians like Milton and John Goodwin, who believed that the inner light is Christ in the self, rectifying reason… In Milton’s interpretation right reason is supreme over the codified law…
 

…Milton’s Art of Logic, reason…on the intuitive level of the angels and sometimes of humans; on the noetic and dianoetic level of reasoning from axioms alone; and on the level of…the syllogism and its extensions—what we call discursive reasoning.
 

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…the oneness of truth, the unity of God’s nature…
 

…the “natural” or “unwritten law”…
 

…total vision of moral reality, of which the codified laws are extractions. The liberated reason bears the responsibility for perceiving God’s order…
 

…while Christians should not unquestioningly obey the law, as codified by Moses, or Archbishop Laud, or the Westminster Assembly, in the blind faith that God will somehow make the whole cohere, they also should not irrationally abandon the positive laws altogether, as the Ranters did.
 

Milton himself advocated…what royalists called murder…what clergy called adultery.
 

William Empson was wrong to say, in his brilliantly perverse antinomian judgment of Eve’s fall, that…she ate the apple in accordance with the spirit of liberty with which Milton believed God had endowed human beings.
 

For a particular law may be justly broken only in deference to a rationally understood higher purpose of the whole law, not simply in deference to anything one sincerely feels at the moment to be right. In any ethical situation right reason strives to balance all applicable laws in a noncontradictory hierarchy consistent with the unified divine purpose, with “natural law,” ultimate truth.
 

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His view of marriage as a rational relationship enabled him in PL to portray the first marriage as the first ground for developing an ethic based in humanistic antinomian liberty…
 

The Edenic couple work in harmony (balance) until the separation scene.
 

…they do not sin; but they lose their balance in particularly antinomian ways…
 

Eve feels an urge toward independent action and a greater personal efficiency than is possible to rationally free creatures.
 

Adam reasons largely noetically by arranging axioms in their natural hierarchy: efficient work is good, rational (conversant) love is a higher good…
 

…Eve…resorts to the more tedious method of syllogisms…
 

In Milton’s view…she uses…”this deducing," he wrote in his Art of Logic, “has arisen from the weakness of the human intellect, which weakness being unable by an immediate intuition to see in an axiom the truth and falsity of things, turns to the syllogism in which it can judge whether this follow or do not follow”… Adam’s axiomatic reasoning shows his quicker logical ability, closer to that of the angels.
 

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What is the “instinctive insight” available to “right” reason? What is the divine inspiration of the indwelling spirit of God? How does it relate to other urges and to the discoveries of discursive reason? How, in the terms of seventeenth-century controversy, can one tell a true prophetic voice form a false one or a divinely approved desire from a personally mistaken one?
 

Had Eve simply gone off at that point, following her initial impulse, she would have resembled antinomians of the extreme, Ranting sort, who could not believe themselves capable of a mistake—much less of a sin…
 

The orthodox Anglican and Puritan answer to Eve would be that she should ignore her mistaken thoughts and accept the reasoning and decision of church and state (that is, Adam, in this prelapsarian microcosm), to whom God has given authority over her. Yet Milton’s antinomian answer was that Eve’s decision must be freely made, not simply accepted for another’s authority and not coerced.
 

I believe…that Milton’s understanding of the inner light as right reason means that Adam fails as Eve’s governor when he “lets” her go, because by giving his permission when he does, he substitutes his own authority for her truly free decision.
 

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Genuine insights, inspirations, “motions” from God…
 

The very slow or impaired reason, which cannot figure them out at all, must be convinced by the testimony of a witness previously found to be a reliable reasoner. But reliance on testimony is not a suitable method in important investigations, because it takes away a person’s freedom by circumventing his or her reason. Even divine testimony, Milton says in the Art of Logic, while it “makes me believe; it does not prove, it does not teach, it does not make me know or understand why it is so, unless it also adds reasons…
 

Because he wants so fervently to be wanted by her, he lets her rest in her mistaken beliefs and act on the basis of his (permissive) authority.
 

… “thy stay, not free, absents thee more.” But he transgresses the spirit of that law…not “Do what you want” but rather “Understand and choose the right”—the “right” being that act which completes the perfectly balanced picture, the mean, the unifying spirit behind the particular letters, the situational embodiment of natural law.
 

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He must use the rhetorician’s patience as well as the logician’s rigor to bring her to the point where, not the authority of his testimony or his permission, but his right reasons enable her right reason to understand the whole picture that her balancing choice will perfect.
 

…command/permission dichotomy that has entered the conversation with his reduction of ratio to logical method.
 

The function of both logic and rhetoric in right reasoning is to keep the dialogue open and moving toward the truth. Thus, Adam should not say, “go, if you think you should,” when he knows Eve’s thought is mistaken.
 

He must not close the encounter before both participants have been freed of the passions clouding their reasons.
 

…Milton provides his Adam with a model in Raphael. Surely, Adam’s human questionings and reasonings must be as tedious and exasperating for the benevolent angel to bend his intuitive reason to as Eve’s imperfect understanding and discursive reasoning are for Adam’s quicker, axiomatic mind.
 

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…Eve still believes that her complete freedom means she is really free form danger, that she will not fall. Though Adam, like the humanist Goodwin, does not hold this view, Eve has not understood his reasoning; and his literal permission has given a sanction that seems to her a testimony to the rightness of her reasons for wanting to go.
 

If he had insisted on his desire to protect her from insult, he would have undermined her freedom; he would have acted as erroneously as the anti-tolerationists, who had wanted to protect the nonconformists from contamination by false doctrine.
 

What Adam offers, in wanting to accompany her, is the “exterior help” of a fellow thinker, debater, pamphleteer, student…
 

This strenuous complex, and collaborative exercise of the inner light in new and demanding circumstances is the shape of prelapsarian collective obedience. Eve’s rationalization for declining Adam’s collaboration illustrates the process by which the radical antinomian view could veer from its precarious course, surrendering total freedom to an appearance of freedom that actually leads into captivity.
 

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Adam’s admonition in the face of Eve’s incipient voluntarist antinomianism parallels Milton’s to the sectarians of his own day—those, like Nayler, whose freedom he sought all his life to establish, and who, of their won will, even when they were externally free, fell…
 

…God…book 3: “Where only what they needs must do, appeared/. . . What pleasure [receive] I from such obedience paid”… So too Adam desires the pleasure of Eve’s freely willed companionship and of her conformity to his advice. But in his desire for this high pleasure, he fails to provide for the spirit that underlies such freedom as God defines it, for the beloved’s will to be rightly informed by its own reason.
 

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The challenge to Adam’s diplomacy in this scene is as ponderous and as delicate as the task of implementing an unpopular public policy is to any righteous governor of a free and godly people beset with enemies.
 

Milton gives complex recognition to the necessarily precarious nature of an antinomian liberty of conscience.
 

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In the human dynamics of the repentance scene at the end of book 10, it is Eve rather than Adam who is the more skilled, or right, reasoner. She is the phronimos (possessor of phronesis) who accomplishes the opening of the dialectic.
 

…she “outreasons” him; and it is Eve, as many readers have recognized, who “takes the lead” into praxis, opening the road to postlapsarian freedom.