Bright Essenceby W.B. Hunter, C.A. Patrides, and J.H. Adamson, Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1971.

This book began when it occurred to all three authors that Milton "was not an Arian"(p. vii).Though they are eager to join the three persons of the godhead in a trinity, and all believers in an orthodox faith, they were unable to unite their threefold insight into a single text, and produced instead a dishevelled collection of fourteen essays.

However, one insidious idea unifies and fatally weakens all fourteen:that if Milton expressed, in poetry or prose, what the three authors call a heresy,it is deplorable; if he expressed what they consider orthodoxy, it is matter for rejoicing; and that to separate him from the heresiarch Arius is nobly done. In all this they get little support from Milton, who asked rhetorically, "Who finds not that Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Jerome, and others discover more heresies than they well confute, and that oft for heresy which is the truer opinion?"(1)

Nevertheless, Professor Hunter speaks disdainfully of "the Arian mythology" as if Athanasius's beliefs were not equally mythic (2). Professor Patrides calls the idea that Paradise Lost is an Arian document "alarming"(3). Professor Hunter says that Milton "falls into the errors"of traducianism and mortalism (4); thus, traducianism and mortalism are not ideas or doctrines, they are errorsand you do not adopt or embrace them, you fall into them. Professor Patrides condemns the De Doctrina Christianaas a "singularly gross expedition into theology" because of that traducianism and mortalism, as well as subordinationism, a heresy not, Professor Patrides is relieved to say, the same as Arianism, but uncomfortably close to it. He searches for the complete trinity in Milton's book and blames Milton when it isn't there;"the treatise is rather seriously marred by its rejection of the co-equality and co-essentiality of the three persons within the godhead"(5).

In passing let me point out what an injustice Professor Hunter does Milton by saying he fell into traducianism.

The metaphysical basis for the doctrine that every human being by nature deserves hell is original sin, the concept that Adam and Eve,by eating the forbidden fruit, received an infection that they passed on to their offspring through all generations. Traducianism is the doctrine that this infection, and the soul it disables, are received by each individual from his or her parents; the soul, the body and the infection being propagated together. Christendom adopted, however, the doctrine of creationism, according to which, whenever a foetus is conceived, God creates for that occasion one soul which he infuses into the foetus to be infected with original sin and rendered totally depraved. Thus instead of playing one mean trick on mankind, God plays billions of them. Milton argues that if this is so, God's labor of creation did not end on the sixth day, nor does he even get a day off on Sunday--an ingenious point, but Thomas Aquinas had already thought of it. Can God, asks Milton, create anything impure, much less an impure soul?

But, my opponents insist, God does not create impure souls but only souls which,from the viewpoint of original righteousness,are weakened and impaired. My answer is that to create pure souls which lack original righteousness, and then to put them into contaminated and vicious bodies, to surrender them to the body as to an enemy, imprisoned, innocent and unarmed, with blinded intellect and with will enchained, quite deprived,in other words, of the strength which is needed to resist the body's vicious tendencies--to do all this would argue injustice just as much as to have created them impure would argue impurity (6).

Is this the language of a man who fell intotraducianism? And, a related point, does it not convince? Does creationism not appear to be an instance of the Christians' unerring instinct for making their God as "laboriously vile"(the phrase is Empson's) as they can?

The "essays which comprise this volume"(p.vii) as Professor Patrides puts it with a free and easy "comprise," are intended to right a great wrong done to Paradise Lost in 1823, when the De Doctrina was rediscovered and published and ministers of religion felt obliged to warn their flocks against its author's epic poem, hitherto regarded as edifying but now found to be filled with the poison of heresy.It was indeed a wrong; it should have been possible for any reader, Christian or not, to enjoy Paradise Lost without determining whether Milton was Sabellian, Arian, Athanasian, Apollinarian, Monophysite, or Nestorian. The poem, as the New Critics teach, says what it says; to roam outside its text, seeking indications of what the poet must have meant,is to commit the Intentional Fallacy. William Empson, an atheist, pointed out that people read Paradise Lostfor 156 years without noticing any deviations from orthodox Christianity. C.S. Lewis, a Christian, expressed gratitude that Milton kept his theological whimsies as he called them, out of his poem.

But with this labored and (as we shall see) ineffectual attempt to prove that Milton was not an Arian, the three professors, in a certain sense, put the ministers of 1823 in the right.The professors imply that if the poem expresses the Arian heresy it loses much of its value. And they go much further than the ministers,for the ministers warned only their Christian flocks, but the Professors labor to offer a heresy-free epic to the world, to anybody who might want to read an epic.

We have now to consider whether Milton was an Arian. What is an Arian anyway?

Constantine the Great declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire in 313 A.D. and by 319 Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, was seriously worried that by worshipping both Jehovah and Jesus it was worshipping two gods. To worship one god and only one was the command of Jehovah as well as a cardinal point of Platonism and stoicism; but Saint Paul decrees that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. Christendom was caught between a Scylla of monotheism and a Charybdis of ditheism.

Sabellius, another Presbyter, had attempted his own solution in the previous century by teaching that the godhead manifested itself to man in three modes--the father, the son, and the holy spirit--as an actor, for example, might appear in three roles; this idea had been condemned as a heresy before Arius was born.

To preserve monotheism, Arius reduced Jesus to a creation ex nihiloof Jehovah. Though this creation was before the creation of the world, it was in time; hence Jesus lacked an essential attribute of divinity, namely eternity. "There was a time when the Son was not" was to become an Arian slogan, encapsulating the whole creed.

To preserve some divinity in Christ, Arius lavished on him many phrases not unlike Milton's

Thee next...of all Creation first

Begotten Son, divine similitude,

In whose conspicuous countenance, without cloud

Made visible, the almighty Father shines

Whom else no creature can behold(7).

That is, Arius bade us worship Christ because, though only a creature, he is the first creature, and the true image of his father who can be rendered visible in no other way to angels and men.

Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria (292-373) saw this as an intolerable degradation of Jesus to the status of a second-class god, and proposed a novel theory. He too had a Scylla and a Charybdis between which to steer: the Scylla of Sabellianism, identifying Jehovah and Jesus so completely that any difference between them became illusory, and the Charybdis of Arianism, differentiating Jehovah from Jesus so clearly that only one of them could be God. So Athanasius produced the formula that has resounded down the centuries: Jesus and Jehovah are of one substance, homoousios,that being Athanasius's emphatic expression of the idea that they are quite identical, but each is a different person (prosopon) ; and one must neither divide the substance nor confuse the persons. Against the Arian slogan, "There was a time when the Son was not," Athanasius taught that the begetting of the Son is eternal. This is the concept that survived the controversy-- and against what odds anyconcept could survive that controversy, we shall see in a moment--to be repeated every day and hour, all over the earth, as part of the canon of the mass.

The Council of Nicea (325) where Athanasius's concept triumphed was not conclusive. The battle of the Athanasians against the Arians continued with new councils, new synods and new creeds for three centuries. Constantine and his sons, Constans and Constantius, kept reversing themselves, now deposing Arius from his episcopal throne,branding him a heretic, driving him into exile, persecuting his followers; now doing the same thing to Athanasius, who was thus deposed from his episcopal throne five times. On one of these occasions the emperor Constantius sent a letter to the Alexandrians announcing "his unalterable resolution to pursue with fire and sword the seditious adherents of the wicked Athanasius, who flying from justice, has confessed his guilt, and escaped the ignominious death which he had so often deserved"(8). This erratic behavior is blamed on the sister of Constantine, allegedly an Arian; but an equally probable speculation imputes to the emperors a deliberate policy. Constantine may have realized that by establishing Christianity he had created a Frankenstein's monster, threatening to attain enough unity and strength to shake his throne,as indeed happened in the middle ages when the pope humiliated the holy roman emperor.By constantly changing the target of his persecutions from Arius to Athanasius and back, the emperor practiced a roman ruler's most traditional maxim,divide et impera.In 360A.D., the emperor Julian, with a design to extirpate Christianity, granted the Christian sects complete freedom of religion, thinking in this manner to make them destroy each other,"having found by experience that no wild beasts are so hostile to men as are most Christians to one another"(9). As Julian's policy was designed to create so much division in the religion that it would destroy itself, so--the inference recommends itself--the policy of Constantine and his sons was designed to create just enough division to weaken the religion and make it manageable.

At the synod of Ariminum or Rimini,an Arian minority, posing as Athanasians, persuaded the majority to write a creed without the homoousion. Genuine astonishnent followed; among the duped bishops, that the homoousionhad become an icon of faith scarcely less sacred than the name of Jesus himself, and among the general population, that the synod had promulgated such an execrable creed. St. Jerome wrote:"The whole world trembled and was amazed to find itself Arian."(Professor Patrides uses this sentence as an epigraph to his book [p.63], presumably because he sees 1823 as a repetition.) From then on, the homoousion became the touchstone of Athanasian faith, making its other formulae unnecessary; and the Arians allowed themselves to be pushed into a diametrically opposite and trivialized position, making their touchstone of faith the homoiousion ,the "similar substance" constituting the Son. The distinction between the Arianism of Arius himself and the later Arianism that was so degraded as to consist merely of the homoiousionis expressed by calling the latter's adherents semi-Arians, while the former acquired from church historians the name of high Arianism. David Masson, for example, roundly declares that the christology of De Doctrinais "high Arianism"(10).On the other side, the ideas of Athanasius also underwent popularization and became crude. The Athanasian creed, a forgery dated a century after the death of Athanasius, so astounded Gennadius, Patriarch of Constantinople, that he dismissed it as the work of a drunk(11).

The complexity and richness of Arius's ideas compared with what they became when the two parties polarized, demonized each other, and fought for a slogan rather than an idea, justifies the following generalization: if a Christian saves his monotheism by placing Jesus one degree below Jehovah, he is an Arian; if he does so by making both Jesus and Jehovah, in an incomprehensible manner (the word incomprehensible occurs three times in the Athanasian creed) the supreme God, he is an Athanasian (or a Catholic, that being the propagandistic name the Athanasians have enjoyed ever since the other side became reduced to semi-Arians).

Now it is true that Milton would resent anyone calling him an Arian, as indeed he resented being called a Puritan, and said so in print. Every Christian sect in the seventeenth century called itself Christians, or some equally noble name ("The Friends of the Inner Light";"The Family of Love"), and finally accepted such names as Quaker, Baptist, Familist or the like only in helpless acquiescence to popular usage.Besides, Milton exhorted his readers to reject any doctrine not derived from the bible and their own reason, and boasted of having done the same himself;it would be contradictory to profess himself the disciple of Arius or any other non-scriptural author.

But, given the definitions and terminology I set forth in the last paragraph but one, it is desperate of Professors Hunter, Patrides and Adamson to try to maintain that Milton was not an Arian. Milton declares that the second person of the Trinity was "the first of created things." "Not a scrap of real evidence for the eternal generation of the Son can be found in the whole of Scripture." The Son is not of the same essence as the Father. The generation of the Son "took place within the bounds of time." "...a supreme God is self-existent, but a God who is not self-existent, who did not beget but was begotten, is not a first cause but an effect, and is therefore not a supreme God." Milton draws up a list of qualities that Jesus possesses either only partially, or only derivatively from the Father:life, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, works, creation, remission of sins, and more (12).

The red herring by means of which the professors seek to argue that this determined, defiant, articulate Arian was not an Arian, is the argument that the De Doctrinareally expresses subordinationism and not Arianism. In Arianism, as we have seen, Jehovah creates Jesus ex nihilo;but in subordinationism "the Father is an entire substance but the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole"(13).In other words, in Arianism Jesus comes out of nothing but in subordinationism he is part of Jehovah's substance. By avoiding the drastic ex nihilo, Milton avoided the tentacles of Arius.

The professors' error is to suppose that Milton was prepossessed of the all-importance of the word substantia, substance, as Athanasius was of that of ousios(also "substance," or "one's property" or "being, existence, essence, nature")(14). As we have seen, in the fourth century the Athanasians and Arians seized on ousios as their most emphatic way of affirming or denying the identity of Jehovah and Jesus. Milton however writes: "God imparted to the Son as much as he wished of the divine nature, and indeed of the divine substance also... But do not take substance to mean total essence" (quid aliud intelligi potest quam Deum divinae naturae quantum voluit filio impertisse, immo etiam substantiae divinae, mode ne substantia pro essentia accipiatur)(15).

Milton's God in fact shares his substance very generously,his offhanded behavior in this point constituting one of Milton's heresies; God withdraws his essence from his substance and then from the latter makes the entire universe, as all readers of Paradise Lostare aware(16). It is no distinction to Jesus to be made of the substance of Jehovah; the angels, the devils, the starry heavens and all that they contain are made of the same substance. What signifies much more than Jesus' possession of Jehovah's substance is his lack of Jehovah's essence, signifying that which makes Jehovah unique, as ousios does in the language of Arius and Athanasius.To seize on the word substancein order to infer that Milton was calling Jesus homoousios with Jehovah is to omit the scholarly discipline of deriving meaning from context.

Indeed,Bright Essence is questionable throughout for its implicit assumption that Milton cared what was determined by synods and councils from the fourth through the sixth centuries A.D. That was the age when bishops first acquired the power Milton deplored, and tried to abolish, in Of Reformation in England and other antiprelatical tracts. Consider these words from the Preface to De Doctrina:

I intend also to make men understand how much it is in the interests of the Christian religion that men should be free not only to sift and winnow any doctrine, but also openly to give their opinions of it and even to write about it, according to what each believes....Without this freedom to which I refer, there is no religion and no gospel.Violence alone prevails;and it is disgraceful and disgusting that the Christian religion should be supported by violence(17).

Milton knew the violence of the period in question:

So far was [the order of bishops] from removing schism, that if schism parted the congregations before, now it rent and mangled, now it raged. Heresy begat heresy with a certain monstrous haste of pregnancy in her birth, at once born and bringing forth. Contentions before brotherly were now hostile. Men went to choose their bishop as they went to a pitched field, and the day of his election was like the sacking of a city, sometimes ended with the blood of thousands. Nor this among heretics only, but men of the same belief, yea confessors, and that with such odious ambition that Eusebius, in his eighth book, testifies he abhorred to write(18).

The age in which the views of Arius, Athanasius, Cyril and Nestorius were weighed in councils at Nicea, Ephesus, Chalcedon and Constantinople, and creeds that were to last fifteen centuries were forged,may be represented by some anecdotes omitted from Bright Essence:

The sudden death of Arius was almost certainly caused by poison(19).

The western Roman empire threatened war against the eastern to make them restore Athanasius after deposing him(20).

Osius of Cordova, a bishop aged 100, was incarcerated and beaten to make him change sides from Athanasian to Arian (21).

Arian troops trying to seize Athanasius in Alexandria attacked the church of Saint Theonas "with every horrid circumstance of tumult and bloodshed"(22).

An Arian army occupied Alexandria for four months during which time "many of the faithful were killed...bishops and presbyters were treated with cruel ignominy; consecrated virgins were stripped naked, scourged, and violated; the houses of wealthy citizens were plundered;and under the mask of religious zeal, lust, avarice and private resentment were gratified with impunity, and even with applause"(23).

In a contest at Rome between Felix, an Arian bishop, and Liberius, an Athanasian one, "the adherents of Felix were inhumanly murdered in the streets, in the public places, in the baths, and even in the churches; and the face of Rome...renewed the horrid image of the massacres of Marius and the proscriptions of Sylla"(24).

Athanasians attacked the palace of Hermogenes, an Arian bishop of Alexandria, burnt it, dragged him by the heels through the streets, "and after he expired, his lifeless corpse was exposed to their wanton insults"(25).

When the Arians clashed with the Athanasians in Constantinople, 3,150 persons were killed. The well before the church of St. Acacius overflowed with a stream of blood which filled the porticoes and the adjacent courts (26).

The synod of Alexandria which condemned the Nestorian heresy shouted, "May those who divide Christ be divided by the sword,may they be hewn in pieces, may they be burnt alive!" At this synod Dioscorus,Bishop of Alexandria, kicked and trampled Flavian, Bishop of Constantinople,so badly that after a few days Flavian died of his injuries(27).

The neoplatonic philosopher, Hypatia, angered Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, by attracting to her lectures people whom he needed to side with him in a quarrel with Orestes, the prefect of the city. "On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics; her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames."Cyril bribed the authorities to quash their investigation, and later promulgated a doctrine about the twofold nature of Christ that makes him SaintCyril. (28)

When the Monophysites protested the council of Chalcedon, "Jerusalem was occupied by an army of monks; in the name of the one incarnate nature[of Christ] they pillaged, they burnt, they murdered; the sepulchre of Christ was defiled with blood..."(29)

Bewildering, don't you think--all this carnage over the meaning of a few technical terms of platonic philosophy that aren't even in the Bible? But I have saved the best for last:

The emperor Constantine sent an admministrator named Macedonius to enforce the Arian creed in Thrace and Asia Minor. Macedonius employed the following methods: "the rites of baptism were conferred on women and children who, for that purpose, had been torn from the arms of their friends and parents; the mouths of the communicants were held open by a wooden engine while the consecrated bread was forced down their throat; the breasts of tender virgins were either burnt with red-hot eggshells, or inhumanly compressed between sharp and heavy boards"(30).

In North Africa, Athanasians were persecuted by a Gothic king, who, like all the Goths, had been converted to Arianism by a missionary, Wulfila. "Respectable citizens, noble matrons, and consecrated virgins were stripped naked and raised in the air by pulleys, with a weight suspended at their feet. In this painful attitude their naked bodies were torn with scourges, or burnt in the most tender parts with red-hot plates of iron" (31).

"Without this freedom...there is no religion and no gospel...it is disgraceful and disgusting..." Christianity was supported by so much violence in the centuries during which it took form, and the prominence of torture among the other forms of violence was such, as to bear out the theoretical proposition developed through Chapter Seven of Milton's God: people always try to resemble their God and if he insists on torture they insist on torture. If the professors had discarded the title Bright Essence and replaced it with Darkness VisibleorHis Red Right Arm or Only in Destroying,they would have paid better tribute to Milton's attitude both to the creeds and to the manner in which they were developed.

As Empson notes, when Milton in De Doctrinawas considering the concept of Christ's death as the payment of a debt to his father, he quoted many Bible texts to show that it was a real payment and not merely an example of courage as the Socinians claimed. Then, seemingly changing the subject from redemption to consubstantiality, he added, "Moreover,I confess that I cannot see how those who hold that the son is of the same essence as the father manage to explain either his incarnation or his satisfaction"(32) Empson speculates, no doubt accurately, on what Milton's thoughts must have been:"God couldn't have been satisfied by torturing himself to death, not if I know God; you could never have bought him off with that money;he would only have been satisfied by torturing someone else to death"(33).

If Sabellius is right, and Jehovah and Jesus are simply one, like a single actor playing two different roles, then Jesus was talking to himself when he said, "Oh my father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me"(Matt. 26:39).The idea has appeal;Milton's praise of Jesus in that he "Forsook the courts of everlasting day And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay"(34)is echoed in many great poems. But, it cannot finally be accepted as the meaning of Christianity because the concept of sacrifice is lost. Christianity is the attempt "to patch the neolithic craving for human sacrifice on to the new transcendental God of all mankind"(35).As the Lord High Executioner remarked, few things are more awkward than a man trying to behead himself.Milton notices what a poor imitation of redemption it would be if the supreme God offered himself to himself. "The God to whom we were reconciled, whoever he is, cannot, if he is one God, be the same as the God by whom we were reconciled, since that God is another person. If he is the same, then he is his own mediator between himself and us, and reconciles us to himself by himself; a quite inexplicable state of affairs!"(36)

But if Arius is right, and Jehovah and Jesus are distinct from ome another, one can say unhesitatingly that Jesus is much better than his father, and one can yield to a strong inclination to worship Jesus and abhor and resist his father. This is, as Professors Hunter, Adamson and Patrides know, the Manichean heresy, which attracted the young Saint Augustine, then turned up in the middle ages, in the south of France, under the name of Catharism or the Albigensian heresy,against which, when Saint Dominic found himself unable to extirpate it with preaching, he instigated a huge massacre called the Albigensian Crusade, and afterwards, to finish its work, founded the Inquisition.(The Albigensian Crusade produced a very quotable sentence when the soldiers who sacked the city of Albi asked their commander how to distinguish the heretics from the Catholics. He said, "Kill all of them, God will know his own.")

Thus, if I treat Jesus and Jehovah as one, the idea of redemption is lost and with it all of Christianity. If I treat them as two, I embrace an ancient and widespread heresy. The Athanasian creed, which insists by deploying the word ousiosthat Jesus and Jehovah are one, and by deploying prosoponthat they are two, sets me the task of imagining something as mind-boggling as dry water or a circular triangle. The intent is to keep me at an equal distance between Sabellianism and Arianism, and to keep me uncertain whether Jehovah committed murder or suicide when Jesus expired on the cross, and last of all, to keep me uncertain whom I shall meet when I meet my maker.

Psychiatrists speak of a "double bind,"meaning a situation in which an individual is forced to choose one of two alternatives and both make him feel frightened or inadequate. In the Nazi concentration camps, according to Eugen Kogon, the SS imposed a rule that prisoners must keep their shoes well shined, on pain of a brutal public flogging; but a clause in the rule said the shoes must not be too well shined, for that argued trifling away one's time on insignificant activities, which also earned the flogging. The Athanasian creed functions to reduce the believer to just such helpless frustration.It is impossible to think that Jehovah and Jesus are one and two without drifting into Sabellianism or Arianism and hence into fear of hell fire. Thus one can surmise the creed's usefulness in keeping subordinates in line.

In Orwell's 1984, when O'Brien has Winston Smith helpless on a torture maschine, he holds up four fingers and says,"How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?...And if the party says it is not four but five--then how many?"(37) To understand the trinity, one should picture Athanasius leaning over a rack on which a heretic is panting and groaning, to hold up two fingers and ask:"How many fingers am I holding up, Arius?...And if the church says it is not two but one--then how many?"

Gibbon noticed this anxiety-engendering quality of the creeds, and expressed it in superb metaphors. Of a period when orthodoxy consisted in asserting both the homoousion and the pre-eminence of the father (Jesus and Jehovah are identical yet Jehovah is greater) he writes:

Within these limits the almost invisible and tremulous ball of orthodoxy was allowed securely to vibrate. On either side, beyond this consecrated ground, the heretics and the daemons lurked in ambush to surprise and devour the unhappy wanderer.(38)

In the name of the fourth general council, the Christ in one person, but intwo natures, was announced to the Catholic world: an invisible line was drawn between the heresy of Apollinaris and the faith of St. Cyril; and the road to paradise, a bridge as sharp as a razor, was suspended over the abyss by the master-hand of the theological artist.(39)

To augment these anxieties resulting from the inevitability of mental heresies and the fear of hell-fire as a result, there is the doubt about judgment day. Shall I meet Jesus, in whom his worst enemies admit there are redeeming features (couldn't help it, folks) or shall I meet his ghastly father? The creeds produced by the homoousian controversy and the controversy about Jesus' twofold nature (which is the same controversy employing different verbiage) leave it ambiguous whether Jesus is the supreme God or only his representative. The dread experienced by Christians who have been praying to Jesus for decades only to find him so cruel that he might be his own father, is notorious:

Oh, the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed...(40)

From the behavior of the emperor Constantius, it may be inferred he suffered from the creeds' power to make anxiety. He sat up whole nights adjusting the words and phrases of ever-changing creeds, and when he fell asleep he dreamed creeds (41). St. Hilary of Poitiers saw the connection between the anxiety-making and the violence:

Every year, nay, every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries. We repent of what we have done, we defend those who repent, we anathematize those whom we defended. We condemn either the doctrine of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others;and, reciprocally tearing one another to pieces, we have been the cause of each other's ruin(42).

Another saint, Gregory Nazianzen, lamented that the kingdom of heaven was converted by discord into the image of chaos, of a nocturnal tempest, and of hell itself (43).

In conclusion, it is clear Milton never tried to write any of the early creeds into Paradise Lost, and it is a good thing he didn't. He says of the theologians, "To save this paradox [the trinity] from utter collapse they have availed themselves of certain strange terms and sophistries borrowed from the stupidity of the schools"(44).Great poetry is not written with strange terms borrowed from stupid schools,or even from what the poet falsely imagines to be such.

Arianism enjoyed a distinguished history in the 17th century. As an attempt to refuse belief to that which cannot be understood, to break a double bind, and to end a state of chronic anxiety, Arianism was a step forward for the intellect of western man. In 1614 two Arians, Legate and Whiteman, were burned at the stake pour encourager les autresby the Anglicans. One of the burnings was at Smithfield; was it witnessed by the six-year-old John Milton? If so, might he have formed the childlike impression that later matured into the conviction that to support the Christian religion with violence was disgraceful and disgusting? Official repression prevailed till the civil war, when Arianism became more common. In London's Mecca of heresy, Coleman Street, a congregation of Arians met under the leadership of a nameless Welshman. On 2 May, 1648, the Puritan Long Parliament,not to be outdone by the Anglicans, decreed death "without benefit of clergy" for Arianism or any heresy affecting the trinity (45).Professor Patrides holds that Milton declined to publish the De Doctrinabecause he was dissatisfied with it(46).How many times, I ask, does a man have to risk death for his beliefs? Milton came close to being hanged, drawn and quartered for publishing The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates .If he publicized his Arianism, he was likely to be hanged or burned by any future government, Anglican or Puritan.

Amidst the "prodigious" ferment of heresy and "religious speculation of all kinds" after the dissolution of the Long Parliament the Arians were conspicuous, forming part of a "teeming chaos"(47).Besides Milton, Sir Isaac Newton was an Arian, and personally petitioned Charles II to free him from his obligation, as a fellow of a Cambridge college, to take holy orders, because his conscience revolted at an oath to believe the trinity. His manuscript notes about Athanasius characterize him as "his personal nemesis [whom he] learned to hate... fiercely"(48).John Locke was implicitly Arian as in The Reasonableness of Christianity"the great and infinite God" is clearly distinguished from Jesus concerning whom no more and no less is to be believed than that he is "the Messiah"(49).Thus, the three greatest minds of the Restoration--the supreme poet, supreme mathematician, supreme philosopher--were all Arians, and that may help explain their greatness. They freed their energies for something better than counting O'Brien's fingers.

Notes

(1) Merritt Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, Odyssey Press, Indianopolis, p. 729, col. 2.

(2)Bright Essence,p. 70.

(3) Page 72.

(4) Page 140.

(5) Page 168.

(6) Complete Prose Works of John MiltonNew Haven and London: Yale U.P., 1973, VI, 321.

(7) PL III, 383-87.

(8) Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,,New York: Modern Library, n.d., I. 711.

(9) Ammianus Marcellinus, quoted in J. Stevenson, ed., Creeds, Councils and Controversies,SPCK, London, 1966, p.54.

(10) David Masson The Life of John Milton, facs. ed.,Gloucester, Mass.:Peter Smith, 1965, VI, 823.

(11)Decline and FallII,30, n. 114.

(12) Yale Prose,VI, 206, 263-4, 264-68.

(13) Bright Essence , p. 9, n. 26.

(14) Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1889, s.v. "ousios."

(15) Yale Prose,VI, 211: Columbia Works, XIV, 192.

(16) Book VII, Lines 168-73.

(17) Yale Prose VI. 122-23.

(18) Hughes, ed., Complete Poetry and Major Prose, p. 656, col. 1.

(19) Decline and Fall, I, 694, note.

(20) I, 704.

(21) I, 708.

(22) I, 710.

(23) Ibid.

(24) I, 716.

(25) I, 717.

(26) I, 718.

(27) II, 481.

(28) II, 470-71.

(29) II, 475.

(30) I, 719.

(31) II, 28.

(32) Yale Prose,, VI,444.

(33) Milton's God, Chatto and Windus, London, 1965: p. 208.

(34) On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, lines 13-14.

(35) Milton's God, p. 247.

(36) Yale Prose, VI, 218.

(37) Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four ed. Irving Howe, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1982, p. 166.

(38) Decline and Fall, I, 687.

(39) II, 484.

(40) G. M. Hopkins, Poems and Prose,ed. W. H. Gardner, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953, p. 61.

(41) Decline and Fall, , I, 697.

(42) I, 688.

(43) I, 732.

(44) Yale Prose, Vol. VI, p. 218.

(45) Life of John Milton, I, 60; III, 157; III, 600.

(46) Bright Essence, , pp. 171-72.

(47) Life of Milton V, 14-15.

(48) Richard Westfall, Never at Rest Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, Eng., 1980, p. 318. Westfall speculates that the rage Newton brought to scientific controversies resulted from the frustration of his trinitarian studies.

(49) Ed. and intro. George W. Ewing, Henry Regnery, Chicago: p. 1, 16-17.