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Gallagher argues against an accepted notion that the works of John Milton show an inclination towards supporting biblical inerrancy and misogyny. Through careful exegesis, Gallagher proposes that Milton's theological depictions and adaptations reconcile biblical discrepancies, and seek to provide a positive account of biblical female figures.
I argue that the seventeenth century Puritan poet and polemicist John Milton is not at all the theological Arminian he is nearly universally held to be. In fact he exemplifies the typical theological paradigm held by virtually every English Puritan of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This century of Puritanism has its theological nexus in the Calvinism of Beza as propagated through William Perkins and others. Puritans were Calvinists. They fought what they saw as the various and intermingled pressures of Roman, Laudian, and Arminian forces arrayed against their desire for the complete and biblical reformation of the English church. While the Puritans were certainly not absolutely monolithic, their core theological beliefs about the nature of God, man, sin, and salvation, were deeply and irrefutably Calvinist. Calvinists are soteriological monergists: they argue that God alone is the author of salvation. Man is a fallen, depraved rebel; when one is saved from judgment it is by God's gracious will alone and has nothing to do with the virtue or attitude or future faith of the sinner. Salvation is purely a result of the eternal decree of the deity "from before the foundation of the world" and is irresistible, unconditional, and eternal. The Arminian position, arising in the early seventeenth century and codified in the Remonstrance of 1610, holds that ma cooperates with God in salvation to some extent. Remonstrant theology rejects both the supralapsarian and the sublapsarian views of election and predestination, the doctrine of irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints -- major cornerstones of Calvinist doctrine. Instead, Arminians argue for conditional election based upon God's foreknowledge of future faith through prevenient grace. Salvation is thus synergistic and conditional. Calvinists are faced with the difficulty of explaining the justice of a perfectly good and utterly sovereign God who elects to salvation some but not others, regardless of either merit or foreseen faith. Arminians developed their system to bypass this difficulty and to preserve the character of the deity: God must not be made the unjust author of evil. Milton was clearly a puritan. Why then has he long been considered Arminian? A long list of critics have argued for his Remonstrant theology, and these assertions have gone almost entirely unchallenged since the early nineteenth century. Everyone knows Milton is an Arminian. But what if this understanding of Milton is inaccurate? What if, instead of being that rarest of exceptions -- an Arminian Puritan -- Milton could in fact be shown to be Calvinist? This shift would entail a large-scale reconsideration of virtually everything Milton has written. Milton's thought revolves around how paradise was lost, how it can be regained, and how we are to live in the interim. The most central issue for Milton is theodicy; the question of the existence of evil in a world supposedly controlled by a good deity of unlimited power and knowledge. Theodicy is a particular problem for Calvinists, with their insistence upon God's absolute, eternal sovereignty -- while Arminian thought is itself already a theodical structure, grounded in the contingencies of conditional decrees, divine foreknowledge, and human freedom. Our primary questions, then, if we are to consider Milton, must be historical-theological questions: who, exactly, controls this economy of loss and redemption? God, man, or both? To misread Milton's theology is to misread Milton. My work provides a corrective which opens up a richer, more historically accurate, and more stimulating reading of the poet's works. I first show the relationship between Calvinist and Arminian thought through analysis of the Remonstrance of 1610 and the Canons of Dordt (1619), thus establishing the nature of the theological debate in Europe and England during Milton's lifetime. Next I demonstrate and critique the long-term consensus regarding Milton's supposed Arminian theology, while attempting to explain the origins of such significant misreadings of his rhetoric. I further clarify the historical-theological context by delineating the contours of the Calvinist/Arminian debates as they were understood in seventeenth century England while laying out a series of close readings of Milton's prose and poetry demonstrating Milton's strong Reformed theology. I argue that Milton holds to a peculiarly English Calvinism that, in its strong emphasis on eternal providence and theodicy, is a direct and deliberate repudiation of Arminian theology. Along the way I show how a growing mass of unexamined assumptions about Milton's Arminianism -- assumptions endemic to critical essays, footnotes, and scholarly apparatus -- work to short-circuit a reader's ability to recognize the Calvinist paradigm actually informing Milton's thought.
In Paradise Lost (1667), Milton produced the most magnificent poetic account ever written of the biblical Fall of man. In this wide-ranging study, William Poole presents a comprehensive analysis of the origin, evolution, and contemporary discussion of the Fall, and the way seventeenth-century authors, particularly Milton, represented it. Poole first examines the range and depth of early modern thought on the subject, then explains and evaluates the basis of the idea and the intellectual and theological controversies it inspired from early Christian times to Milton's own century. The second part of the book delves deeper into the development of Milton's own thought on the Fall, from the earliest of his poems, through his prose, to his mature epic. Poole distinguishes clearly for the first time the range and complexity of contemporary debates on the Fall of man, and offers many insights into the originality and sophistication of Milton's work.
"Literature and theology are inextricably intertwined in this study of the figure of God as a literary character in the writings of John Milton"--Provided by publisher.
Locating John Milton's works in national and international contexts, and applying a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial, Milton and Toleration offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton's visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination. Milton is often enlisted in stories about the rise of toleration: his advocacy of open debate in defending press freedoms, his condemnation of persecution, and his criticism of ecclesiastical and political hierarchies have long been read as milestones on the road to toleration. However, there is also an intolerant Milton, whose defence of religious liberty reached only as far as Protestants. This book of sixteen essays by leading scholars analyses tolerance in Milton's poetry and prose, examining the literary means by which tolerance was questioned, observed, and became an object of meditation. Organized in three parts, 'Revising Whig Accounts,' 'Philosophical Engagements,' 'Poetry and Rhetoric,' the contributors, including leading Milton scholars from the USA, Canada, and the UK, address central toleration issues including heresy, violence, imperialism, republicanism, Catholicism, Islam, church community, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, legal theory, and equity. A pan-European perspective is presented through analysis of Milton's engagement with key figures and radical groups. All of Milton's major works are given an airing, including prose and poetry, and the book suggests that Milton's writings are a significant medium through which to explore the making of modern ideas of tolerance.