God is ‘the being of things’; Henry Niklaes, the founder of Familism, he described as ‘a blasphemous libertine’ because he said that ‘God hath godded us with him’ – a phrase frequently used by Ranters in the sixteen-fifties, as well as by ‘the Maids of Aldgate’ whom Milton defended in Colasterion. Many thought mortalism a mere excuse for libertinism. William Lilly, on the other hand, used the word as a synonym for ‘free men’: English help to the Dutch had ‘wholly made them libertines and weakened ourselves’. For Rutherford libertines included those who condemned the condemnation of heretics, and who made ‘conscience, not the Word of God, their rule’. He described William Dell as a libertine, and no doubt would have added Milton if he had read the De Doctrina Christiana – or even Areopagitica.5
We recall Milton’s possession from the late fifties (and we do not know for how long earlier) of a manuscript of Jean Bodin’s Heptaplomeres, so subversive and critical of Christianity, that it was not published, even in Latin, until the nineteenth century. It circulated in manuscript and copies were very difficult to come by. (Did Milton obtain his copy on his Italian journey, as his friend Nathan Paget appears to have acquired Familist and Behmenist manuscripts during his stay in the Netherlands?1) From Heptaplomeres – a disputation between spokesmen for all religions and none – Milton could have found confirmation of many of his ideas – the desirability of religious toleration, rejection of the decalogue and the Trinity, climatic theories. He would not have gone so far as some of the Biblical criticisms in Bodin’s work, but he might have been interested in the idea that ‘each of us is his own Adam’. The suggestion that the Genesis story is ‘a pretty allegory’ would be more likely to appeal to Gerrard Winstanley than to Milton.2
Milton’s ideas also have many links with the Hermetic tradition, and especially with his Buckinghamshire neighbour Robert Fludd, the great synthesizer of this tradition.3 Milton seems to have possessed a copy of the Hermetic writings. He refers several times to ‘thrice-great Hermes’ – in the undergraduate De Idea Platonica, and in II Penseroso. Hermetic influences have been found in At a Vacation Exercise, and in the Third and Seventh Prolusions. Frances Yates suggests that the Hermetic trance is described at length in Il Penseroso.4 Milton twice refers to John Dee, and in Areopagitica there may be an echo of Giordano Bruno.5 More important perhaps is the parallelism of Milton’s thought with that of the Hermeticists. Though this body of ideas embraces magic, alchemy and astrology, it is completely devoid of ritualism or sacramentalism.6
Milton’s daemons in II Penseroso and the Seventh Prolusion, and the Attendant Spirit in Comus (called Daemon in the manuscript – like Comus himself),7 may or may not be Hermetic: likewise the ‘millions of spiritual creatures’ who ‘walk the earth unseen’ in Paradise Lost (IV. 677–8) and the ‘demonian spirits’ of Paradise Regained.8 But the corporeality of angels links with this tradition, as Fludd himself tells us. The names of some of Milton’s angels come from Fludd who, like Milton, gave Satan’s name before the Fall as Lucifer. Milton’s phrases in Paradise Lost, ‘potable gold’ and ‘vegetable gold’ may refer to Fludd’s experiments. Messiah was armed in ‘radiant urim’, the stone that in Fludd’s philosophy mediates between God and the material world.1 Like Milton, Fludd used mathematical arguments against the Trinity, and speculated on whether light was created or eternal.2 Fludd has something very like Milton’s theory of creation. He referred directly to Hermes Trismegistus, and also drew on the related Paracelsan tradition.3 Milton later championed the Paracelsan view that like cures like, as against the Galenic theory, which he had earlier espoused, that contraries cure.4
I shall have many occasions in the following pages to cite parallels between Milton’s thought and that of Hermeticism, particularly as mediated by Fludd.5 Milton’s anti-Trinitarianism, mortalism and materialism, for instance, may be linked with this tradition, as well as with the ideas of radicals like the Leveller Richard Overton, or John Goodwin, a fellow defender of regicide, or the Socinians Paul Best and John Bidle. Maurice Kelley is right to emphasize that Milton was not a lone seeker in theology but rather ‘part of a small, unorganized but vigorous movement that manifested itself openly in the second half of the sixteen-forties’. He is equally right to argue that scholars should be looking for Milton’s sources among post-Reformation radicals rather than among Greek Fathers;6 though we may note that Milton’s favourite early Christian writer, Lactantius, was influenced by Hermes.7
I tried once to list those sects and radical groups which shared any of Milton’s radical views: anti-clericalism, millenarianism, antinomianism, anti-Trinitarianism, mortalism, materialism, hell internal. I was a little startled by the result: the group closest to Milton was the Muggletonians, followers of John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, who in 1652 were commissioned by God as the Two Last Witnesses foretold in Revelation II. This was very salutary. I have in my time criticized other historians for treating the radicals of the English Revolution as a ‘lunatic fringe’. Yet I had always placed the Muggletonians outside my pale of sanity. I was wrong. A religious group which survived for three hundred years among solid London artisans cannot be dismissed as mad. Reeve and Muggleton moved in London radical circles, the circles from which Ranters, Quakers and such emerged: early London Quakers saw the Muggletonians as perhaps their most serious rivals. Muggletonians preserved, fossilized, many of the ideas of this Seeker milieu of the fifties, the milieu from which many of Milton’s ideas seem to derive.
The curve of Milton’s political career quite surprisingly follows that of the Quakers: his support for Cromwell in 1649 and 1653, his growing disillusion under the Protectorate, his rejection of all organized churches, the traumatic effect on him of the Restoration, leading to apparent political quietism and withdrawal from politics whilst still hoping for ultimate divine revenge. Many others followed a similar course. Milton’s friend Roger Williams early denied ‘any true church in the world’. He ‘will have every man to serve God by himself alone, without any church at all’.1 In 1648 the near-Socinian John Bidle asked ‘whether any public worship was justified, or a papal usurpation?’ Walwyn could not ‘associate in a church way, … not knowing any persons to be so qualified as ministers of the Gospel ought to be’, though in 1649 he still had hopes for the future.2 Winstanley found rest ‘in no outward form of worship’. Ranters thought that men no longer needed ‘such lower helps from outward administrations’ once Christ had come into their hearts. Giles Randall and other Seekers, Clarkson and many Ranters, John Gratton in his pre-Quaker days, refused to go to any church.3
‘Better no ministry than a pretended ministry’, was the view attributed to William Erbery by John Webster. ‘In this darkness’ of the apostacy ‘he had rather sit down and wait in silence than be beholding to the pretended light and direction of deceivable guides.’ Erbery moves parallel to Milton in many respects. He was ‘ever entire to the interest of this Commonwealth’; he was accused of being a Socinian; he was a passionate foe to any state church, any intolerance. He expected to see God and his saints ruling on earth and judging the world. Like Milton, he rejected Fifth Monarchism; his attitude to the Ranters was – and was thought by contemporaries to be – ambiguous.4
John Reeve was another who believed that all visible worship was done away with by Christ, ‘that the invisible worship of the invisible God may take place in the hearts of his people for ever.’ There had been no true worship since Constantine’s day. ‘Inward, spiritual silent praying and praising’ should now replace ‘outward praying, preaching, fasting … to be seen of men’.1 When Lodowick Muggleton after the Restoration advised his followers to ‘keep all at home … as long as the powers of the nation doth forbid you to go to any meetings’, rather than attend the parish church, he added that there was no ‘necessity for any public meetings at all’.2 Perhaps closest of all to Milton was Colonel Hutchinson, who when he was asked after the Restoration where he went to church replied, ‘Nowhere.’ To the question ‘How he then did for his soul’s comfort?’ he replied, ‘Sir, I hope
