¹ This paper will be concerned exclusively with the evidence of the De Doctrina because that is the work in which Milton makes his explicit, literal statement of what he believes. Paradise Lost is his imaginative representation of the Fall of Man and as such, though it incorporates much that he thinks literally true, is amplified with innumerable concrete particulars that we cannot say he would endorse as historical fact supporting his religious faith. The De Doctrina, therefore, not Paradise Lost, is the proper source for our knowledge of Milton's private, personal creed. As I see it, we can use the De Doctrina as a possible means of clarifying ideas that in Paradise Lost may seem vague, though even this has to be done cautiously; but we are on shaky ground when we try to piece out what may seem vague in the De Doctrina with the possibly more detailed and concrete amplification of Paradise Lost. — All quotations from the De Doctrina are from Book I and are given, unless otherwise noted, in Sumner's translation as reprinted in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al. (New York, 1931–38); references to volume and page of this edition will be given in parentheses in my text and in the footnotes.

² Sewell, Arthur, A Study in Milton's Christian Doctrine (London, 1939), pp. 127–128, 179–181Google Scholar; Curry, Walter Clyde, “Milton's Scale of Nature,” Stanford Studies in Language and Literature, ed. Craig, Hardin (Stanford, 1941), p. 192Google Scholar; Lewis, C. S., A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1942), pp. 85–88Google Scholar; Saurat, Denis, Milton Man and Thinker (rev. ed., London, 1944), pp. 94, 112–113Google Scholar; Eisenring, Albert J. Th., Milton's “De Doctrina Christiana,” An Historical Introduction and Critical Analysis (Fribourg, 1946), pp. 131–132Google Scholar; Hanford, James Holly, A Milton Handbook (4th ed., New York, 1946), p. 232Google Scholar; Curry, Walter Clyde, “Milton's Chaos and Old Night,” JEGP, XLVI (1947), 49Google Scholar; Grierson, H. J. C., “The Metaphysics of Donne and Milton,” Criticism and Creation: Essays and Addresses (London, 1949), p. 39Google Scholar; Woodhouse, A. S. P., “Notes on Milton's Views on the Creation: The Initial Phase,” PQ, XXVIII (1949), 221–225Google Scholar; Curry, Walter Clyde, “Milton's Dual Concept of God as Related to Creation,” SP, XLVII (1950), 205, 207Google Scholar; Hunter, William B. Jr., “Milton's Power of Matter,” JHI, XIII (1952), 558Google Scholar.

³ From the point of view of this paper Milton's statements about God's spirituality are vague; they are not vague, I believe, with respect to the purpose Milton intended them to serve. In the paragraph of chapter ii where he says that “God considered in his most simple nature is a Spirit,” what Milton is really thinking about is God's simplicity, and he is thinking about that because he believes it invalidates the trinitarian position: if God is a simple Being, how can there be three Persons in one God? Milton makes his meaning clear enough for his own purposes; apparently it does not occur to him that his use of “spirit” might need clarifying.

⁴ This summary interpretation requires elaboration and defence, which I intend to furnish in a book I am now writing on Milton's philosophical view of Nature. Some crucial items of evidence and implication may be noted here, (i) That original matter was actually a substance Milton explicitly tells us (XV, 23). (2) In the Aristotelian tradition prime matter, which is pure potentiality, is prior to creation only in the order of cause, not in the order of time. Milton thinks the original matter was also prior in the order of time, and existed as a substance distinct from God's substance. The evidence for this is quite clear: original matter “originated from God at some particular point of time” (“aliquando ex Deo”: XV, 18–19), and “though at first confused and formless,” it was “afterwards adorned and digested into order by the hand of God” (“indigesta modo et incomposita, quam Deus postea digessit et ornavit”: XV, 22–23). The conferring of form upon the already subsistent but formless original matter, and the digesting of this into order, are precisely what Milton understands by “creation.” (3) It follows from the preceding that Milton is not a pantheist. Original matter, which passively submits to God's creative efficiency, is itself already a substance distinct from God; hence the creatures, when God brings them into existence, will subsist independent of His substance. Other items in the De Doctrina furnish quite demonstrative evidence that Milton is no pantheist. When he distinguishes between God and heaven as a created place (XV, 31), when he speaks of matter as “having proceeded from God, and become in the power of another party” (XV, 25), and when he says that the human spirit “has no participation in the divine nature, but is purely human” (XV, 227), he is plainly thinking of a real, actual, substantial distinction between God and other beings. Besides, no man is a pantheist who writes two long and learned chapters for his “best and richest possession” (XIV, 9) trying to prove with every scrap of evidence he can lay his hands on that those two creatures, the Son and the Holy Spirit, are emphatically not of one substance with the Father.

⁵ Cf. Milton's Art of Logic (XI, 33).

⁶ Sumner's translation except for the phrase “virtually and eminently,” which he incorrectly rendered “virtually and essentially” (for Milton's “virtualiter …. et eminenter”). Professor Walter Clyde Curry presented this very important correction in “Milton's Dual Concept of God as Related to Creation,” p. 200.

⁷ See n. 4 above.

⁸ Milton knows, or at least at one time had known, the Scholastic definition of prime matter as pure potentiality, as the fourth Prolusion shows (XII, 187); but in the De Doctrina he makes no explicit use of it.

⁹ See n. 4 above.

¹⁰ And regardless of whether at this point Milton's idea of “spirit” involves the orthodox conception of immateriality, or whether by “spirit” he means here (as he certainly means when he speaks of the human spirit) “material form.”

¹¹ “Virtualiter, quod aiunt, et eminenter” (XV, 24).

¹² Perhaps it should be noted that a statement like this is not intended to suggest potentiality (in the Aristotelian sense) in God.

¹³ Fletcher, Harris Francis, The Use of the Bible in Milton's Prose, Univ. of Ill. Stud, in Lang, and Lit., XIV (Urbana, 1929), 162Google Scholar.

¹⁴ For all that, potentiality really is implied in Milton's doctrine of God, though it can be more decisively inferred from other premises: if what was God's substance has become (note the word one has to use) the substance of something that is not God, then God Himself has undergone some real change. — Perhaps I may add that Milton's rejection of the formula actus purus (ch. ii: XIV, 49) seems to me an inappropriate basis for inferring potentiality in his God. In rejecting Aristotle's formula he is not rejecting what Aristotle meant by it. For Aristotle, actus purus has reference to God's internal constitution, what He is in Himself without regard to any external beings whatever. It denotes the fullness and perfection of God's actuality, and therefore the impossibility of any change, increase, or diminution in His own Being. Every existent, whether God or anything else, is able to operate externally with causal efficiency in precisely the measure to which it is in act; but Milton thinks the formula actus purus expresses a limitation, rather than the necessary condition, of efficient causality. Along with the orthodox he insists that God's external actions with regard to created, ontologically contingent, beings are absolutely free; unlike the orthodox he thinks that if God were actus purus His freedom of action would be inhibited. In other words, Milton thinks the proper occasion to criticize the formula comes when he is discussing God's freedom. It would perhaps be going too far to assert that he simply misunderstands the formula, but he does misapply it. Therefore his rejection of it seems to me a dubiously valid reason for inferring potentiality in his God — although on other grounds, as I have said, that corollary can be deduced from his theory.

¹⁵ A main source of Milton's trouble, no doubt, is his attempt to make the “mythological” language of Genesis i:a (“And the earth was without form, and void”) serve directly, without translation, as the technical language of theology.