Milton as a Puritanism

Well, some of them were. But after a while things started to bother some of the returning Protestant leaders. Elizabeth made England Protestant (again), but for some, it wasn’t Protestant enough. Elizabeth wanted to hold the country together and so tried to manage the national church in a way that included as many people as possible. Because of this, the Church of England signed up to a Protestant theology, but many of the outward features of the old church stayed the same – such as bishops, ministers wearing robes, and using a written service book. For some people these things could be used perfectly well in a Protestant context, but others thought that because they couldn’t find these things in the Bible, they shouldn’t be used. These people are often known as Puritans. Church historian Patrick Collinson has called the Puritans ‘hot Protestants’, meaning people who were keen to reform the Church of England further to be more extremely Protestant.

Different scholars have suggested different ways of defining Puritanism. Some of the common characteristics include emphasis on the importance of preaching and on the importance of spiritual experience. Milton is often counted as a Puritan, though this depends on which definition of Puritanism you are thinking of.

When Milton studied at Cambridge, his college, Christ’s, was a stronghold of Puritanism. Some of the fellows (i.e. tutors and lecturers) of the college got in trouble with the university authorities for attacking some of the practices of worship used in the college chapel and for speaking to each other in English instead of Latin. As the seventeenth century went on, Puritans became concerned with the way the Church of England, particularly under Archbishop William Laud, was starting to move back to ritual and ceremonial practices found in the Catholic Church, and was starting to downplay the importance of preaching from the Bible.

The Puritans often suffered (and still suffer) from a negative stereotype of being miserable killjoys. While there are some things about some Puritans which might fit this view, such as the Puritan attack on theatre, many of them lived out their faith in a joyful way and some of them really enjoyed the natural world and the arts. (Milton fits in here, since he wrote some of his poems to be set to music and helped to put on shows for the nobility.) All of them believed that ordinary people were important and wanted the whole population to be educated to understand God’s message to them.

At the time of the English Civil War (a series of disputes and battles between 1642-51), Puritanism was generally associated with the Parliamentarian side, and Laudianism with King Charles’ supporters. These religious disagreements contributed to the mix of tensions leading to the wars. When Parliament won the war and set up a republic, the ideas of different Puritan groups had an input into political decision-making.

One possible explanation for why the republican government didn’t ultimately succeed is that when the Puritans got into power, they split into their different factions. There was a whole spectrum of different religious groups in the broader Puritan movement, some more bizarre than others, but the distinction which is most significant for thinking about Milton is the distinction between Presbyterians and Independents. The Presbyterians wanted to keep a national church, but to have it led by a council of ministers (presbyters) who had equal status to each other, instead of by bishops. The Independents wanted each specific congregation to be able to decide for itself its beliefs and practices. Milton seems to have moved from working with the Presbyterians against the bishops, to being disillusioned with the Presbyterian desire to bring in a new system of religious control. His sympathies probably moved to the Independent side.

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Milton’s own beliefs

It’s hard to pin down Milton’s exact beliefs, except to say that he was a strong Protestant who emphasised the freedom of the individual. It is fair to say that Milton probably held a number of controversial beliefs, such as the idea that the soul dies with the body and will be resurrected with the body on the Day of Judgement. He certainly held controversial views on divorce and may well have had sympathies with Arminianism, a new variant of Protestant theology, which, in contrast with mainstream Calvinism, emphasised human freedom rather than God’s ruling power over all things.

Milton probably held heretical views, which contradict orthodox Christian belief, on the Trinity. Instead of the standard Christian belief that God is one God in three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – Milton seems to have believed that these were three separate beings, and that the Son and Spirit were not equal with the Father. These ideas are found in a theological work traditionally attributed to Milton, De Doctrina Christiana (meaning ‘On Christian Teaching’), although there is currently some debate over whether Milton wrote it.

These debates about Milton’s theological beliefs influence how we read Paradise Lost, where, for example, it seems to me that the Son is a being who is greater than the angels but not strictly equal to God the Father.

Paradise Lost was written after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, who returned the Church of England to how it was in his father’s time before the Civil War. It seemed as if the Puritan cause had been defeated. We might see Abdiel in Books V and VI of Paradise Lost as representing this Puritan cause, standing for purity and truth in the midst of a corrupt society. In Book V, lines 809-48, Abdiel defends a radical obedience to God with ‘zeal’, even though his manner seems ‘out of season’ and ‘singular and rash’ (V.849-51). Many Puritans seemed this way to the people around them. It seems that Milton became increasingly isolated, politically and religiously, in his later life. Perhaps he saw himself as an Abdiel figure: ‘Among the faithless, faithful only he’ (Paradise Lost, V.897).