eternal, heavenly existence. Human beings enter life in a state of sinfulness, carrying the burden of Adam and Eve’s Fall. Therefore we are offered the possibility of redemption, but God has already decided which of us will choose the path to redemption or damnation.
Calvinists maintained the difficult, and some would argue, paradoxical tenet that (a) we must by our actions redeem ourselves, while (b) the redeemed have been preselected by God. This might trouble us because the original sin of Adam and Eve condemned the human race to a state of punitive detachment from God’s wisdom: we must accept even that which we cannot properly understand. Consequently Calvinists argued that the ceremonial rituals of the Roman Church were self-indulgent, even decadent distractions from an attainment even of a limited knowledge of our God-willed condition and fate.
In its early years the English Reformation, particularly during the reign of Henry VIII, was less a theological than a political rebellion; the monarch rather than the Pope became the acknowledged head of the Church, with all the financial, ideological and legislative benefits carried by that role. The practices of the Church itself were largely unaltered by Henry’s 1534 Act of Settlement but gradually, through the sixteenth century, more and more Anglicans become apologists and campaigners for what they perceived to be true Protestantism. Influenced by Calvinism they acquired the collective title of ‘Puritans’; they sought to purify the Church of England of its Roman practices and beliefs. As a result there was conflict, evidenced respectively in the reigns of Henry’s son Edward VI (1547–53) and daughter Mary I (1553–8). Edward, the so-called boy-King, was pro-Calvinist. He instituted the persecution and execution of Catholics and licensed the radical Book of Common Prayer (1549) which for the first time ever offered scripture in vernacular English, an act of independence from predominantly Latinate Roman doctrine. Mary, his sister, went to the other extreme, married Philip II of Spain, a fanatical anti-Protestant, reinstituted Roman Catholicism as the state religion and persecuted radical Protestants. Bishop Latimer and Archbishop of Canterbury Cranmer, both Anglicans with Calvinist sympathies, were burnt at the stake. The reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) restored a degree of compromise. Despite the official re-establishment of an independent Church of England the nation remained divided, with numerous factions of Protestantism as much set against each other as united in opposition to Catholicism.
Elizabeth was obliged to play the role of mediator, which she did with tactical brilliance.
Significantly, the Elizabethan period also involved the emergence of England as a major financial centre. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was more than a military/religious victory. English sea power, along with its Dutch counterpart, became the instrument for early colonialism. The West Indies, America and the Indian subcontinent became predominantly English trading centres. The East India Company (referring to the region now comprising the states of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh) was founded in 1600, and the ‘Company’ part of its title reflects the rapidly changing economic condition of London in the later sixteenth century. The establishment of a company whose profits were distributed among shareholders and which was a speculative enterprise was an inaugural feature of modern capitalism. London at the turn of the sixteenth century was alive with companies, and this environment provided Milton’s father with a very profitable profession, what in modern terms would be referred to as an accountant and stockbroker.
These economic transformations were closely related to the ongoing state of religious conflicts: what we now call the middle classes, the traders and entrepreneurs of the period, were predominantly Protestant and Calvinist. And there were a number of reasons for this. Roman Catholicism embodied the feudal, hierarchical systems of medieval Europe and, particularly in England, a new class was emerging, managed by enterprise and endeavour rather than birthright.
Calvinism did not explicitly incorporate a political philosophy but its conception of man’s relationship with God found a sympathetic secular counterpart in the state of mind of the latent middle classes. Calvin emphasised that the elect was an assembly of individuals, unlike the institution of the Church with its self-sustaining hierarchies and oppressive conventions. There seemed for many middle-class Protestants to be an obvious parallel between their unsteady relationship with the monarchical, aristocratic structures of the medieval state and with the similarly reactionary characteristics of the old church, in both its Roman and High Anglican manifestations. But even among Calvinist orientated Protestants there were divisions, caused principally by the notion of predestination. If the elect had already been chosen by God then matters such as conscience in determining an individual’s choice between virtuous or sinful acts were at once irrelevant and self-contradictory. The writings of the sixteenth-century Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius inspired the most divisive feature of Calvinism. Arminius held that the tenet of predestination was flawed – God might well be aware of the choices which would be made by human beings between virtuous and sinful acts but such acts were on our part deliberate. Even though God knew in advance who the elect would be, we, because of our post-lapsarian gift of free will, could still choose our destiny.
The influence of these events upon Milton’s beliefs and the course of his life was immense. From his first days at school to his declining years during the Restoration he found himself at the centre of a whirlwind of savagely divided opinions on every aspect of the human condition, from how our faith determined our private demeanour to whether Kingship or radical republicanism carried the sanction of God. Some, for the sake of their safety and sanity, might have maintained the lowest possible profile, entering the storm only when obliged to do so. Milton, though never an inflexible zealot, devoted his existence to the defence of what he believed was both God’s will and the common-good of his countrymen. Opinions on his political and religious views will continue to differ but no-one would dispute that his turmoils bequeathed us some of the finest poems ever written.
Arminianist theology did not become the foundation of a particular religious sect or political grouping; rather, it indicates the inherent tensions within the broad spectrum of Protestantism and late Renaissance intellectual life. On the one hand, Calvinism replaced attendance to Papal doctrine with an empiricist reading of scripture, while at the same time its findings appeared to impose restrictions upon interpretive freedom and the fundamental notion of the believer as a self-determining individual – Arminius reacted against the latter and these doctrinal divisions would be re-enacted within the religious/political fabric of England during the Civil War and its aftermath. Milton’s relationship with Arminianism is important because it operates as an index to his position within and responses to the complex factionalism of English political and religious life. For example, the term Independents is applied to a large number of prominent individuals of the Parliamentarian cause, Cromwell included. Independency advocated an early version of the modern concept of freedom of the individual, arguing that within the institution of the Protestant Church certain particulars of belief should be left to the scrutiny and choice of the particular worshipper. Independency could be regarded as an enactment of Arminianist doctrine, in that both emphasise the importance of choice and self-determination in individual’s dealings with religious practice. This went against the regimen of the Presbyterian Church, one of the most powerful and influential elements of the Parliamentarian cause. Presbyterianism, originating mainly in Scotland, was organised Calvinism. As an institution it was radical – it rejected the hierarchical Anglican structure of bishops for example – yet authoritarian in that it imposed upon members of its congregation theological ordinances just as unbending as those of the Catholics. As we shall see, the conflicts between Presbyterianism, organised religion, and the Independents were continuous during the late 1640s and early 1650s, when the victorious Parliamentarians were restructuring the civic, political and religious fabric of England. Milton, in his early years, sometimes allied himself with aspects of the Calvinist-Presbyterian cause – this was the most emphatically anti-Catholic grouping in Britain – but as he began to establish his reputation as a pamphleteer on religious and political issues and eventually became a civil servant in the English republic, he shifted his allegiance to the Independents, the advocates of theological individualism, free speech and free will. Sometimes Milton would attack Arminianism (see Areopagitica, WJM, p. 313), not so much as a doctrine in its own right but because it had occasionally, and paradoxically, been adopted
