Justified True Belief

(●) The blind poet who set out to justify the ways of God to men, and wrote the English-speaking world’s picture of the fall. + Ask almost anyone who has never opened Genesis to describe Satan, and what comes back is Milton. The proud figure who would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, the council of fallen angels debating strategy, Satan’s voyage up through Chaos to the new-made world, the two human beings walking out of Eden hand in hand with the whole world before them: none of that scenery is in the Bible, and all of it is in Paradise Lost. That is a strange thing for a poem to accomplish, and Milton meant it to. He told his reader in the first twenty-six lines exactly what he was attempting, which was not to retell a story everyone knew but to answer a question everyone asks. If God is good and God is strong, why is the world like this? Theologians have a word for an answer to that question, theodicy, from the Greek for God and justice: an attempted defense of God’s goodness in a world that contains evil. Milton wrote one in twelve books of blank verse, which is verse with a steady five-beat line and no rhyme at the end of it, and it is the best known theodicy in the English language. He was also a working politician who defended the execution of a king, a pamphleteer whose books were burned by the public hangman, and a man who went blind at forty-three in the middle of the job and kept working anyway. He dictated one of the greatest poems in the language to whoever happened to be in the room, sometimes a daughter, sometimes a paid amanuensis (a secretary kept for no other purpose than to write down another man’s words as he speaks them), sometimes a friend who had dropped by, and he could not read back a line of it.

(●) 1608 AD: Born above his father’s shop off Cheapside, to a man the family remembered as cut off for reading an English Bible. + John Milton was born on 9 December 1608 in Bread Street, a busy commercial lane in the City of London, at the sign of the Spread Eagle. His father was a scrivener, which in that century meant something between a lawyer’s clerk and a private banker: he drew up contracts, witnessed deeds, and lent money at interest. He was also a serious composer whose psalm settings and madrigals were printed alongside the best musicians of the age, and the household was full of music. John Aubrey records that the father had been disinherited by his own Roman Catholic father for turning Protestant, the story going that he was found with an English Bible in his chamber. Aubrey had it from people who knew the family, and no document of the time confirms it, so it is best held as the family’s own tradition. What is certain is the consequence in the son’s life: a prosperous father with money to spend and a settled conviction that the Bible in English was worth losing an inheritance over. He spent it on his boy. There were private tutors at home, then St Paul’s School a few minutes’ walk away, and by his own account he was regularly at his books until midnight from the age of twelve. He came out of it with Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and with the ruined eyes that he later believed the late nights had begun.

(●) 1625 AD: Cambridge disappointed him, so his father paid for six more years of reading at home. + He went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1625, took his bachelor’s degree in 1629 and his master’s in July 1632. He did not enjoy it. He quarrelled with his first tutor badly enough that he seems to have been sent home for a term, and he thought the curriculum, still built on the medieval logic of the schools, a waste of a good mind. His fellow students called him the Lady of Christ’s, which he mentions himself, with some spirit, in a Latin exercise. Most graduates of his sort went into the church. Milton had been intended for it and decided against it, saying later that he would have had to subscribe to terms he did not believe, and that a man who swears against his conscience at the start of his ministry has begun by perjuring himself. So instead of a parish he took a library. From about 1632 to 1638, at his father’s houses in Hammersmith and then at Horton in Buckinghamshire, he read his way through the Greek and Latin classics, the church fathers, history and mathematics, at his own expense and nobody’s schedule. It was not idleness, though it must have looked like it to the neighbours. In those quiet years he wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, the masque now called Comus performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634, and in 1637 Lycidas, the elegy for a drowned college contemporary that many readers still count the finest short poem in English. A masque was an evening’s entertainment got up for a great house: speeches in verse, music, dancing and costumes, often with the family’s own young people taking the parts, performed once for the guests in the hall and not meant for a public theatre. He also wrote a Latin poem to his father thanking him for the education and gently defending the choice of poetry over money.

(●) 1638 AD: In Italy he found Galileo under house arrest, and never forgot what a licenser could do. + In May 1638 he left for the continent and spent fifteen months travelling: Paris, then Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice and Geneva. He read his Latin poems to Italian academies and was flattered by their praise, and he made friends he corresponded with for years afterward. He was an English Protestant reciting verse in the capital of the Counter-Reformation, which is the name given to the Roman Catholic church’s long answer to the Protestant Reformation, and he seems to have enjoyed every minute of it. The visit he remembered longest was to an old man outside Florence. Galileo Galilei had been condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for teaching that the earth moves, and was living out his sentence under house arrest at Arcetri, blind. Six years later Milton wrote the scene into Areopagitica, his attack on censorship, in a single sentence that has done as much for Galileo’s reputation as any: "There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." That last word is worth stopping on, because it runs through the rest of his life. A licenser was an official who read a book in manuscript and decided whether it might be printed at all, so that nothing reached a press without his approval and whatever he disliked never existed to be read. Milton was standing in front of the most famous scientist in Europe, old and blind and confined to his own house by men with that power, and when his own Parliament took the same power up a few years later he had the picture ready to hand. He had planned to go on to Sicily and Greece. News from home changed his mind. England was sliding toward civil war, and he thought it shameful to be touring abroad while his countrymen fought for liberty at home. He was back in London by the summer of 1639, and for the next twenty years he wrote little poetry beyond a handful of sonnets.

(●) 1642 AD: A marriage that collapsed in weeks turned him into the most notorious pamphleteer in England. + In the early summer of 1642, at about Whitsuntide by his nephew Edward Phillips’ account, Milton, then thirty-three, married Mary Powell, the seventeen-year-old daughter of an Oxfordshire family that owed his father money. Whitsuntide is the old English name for Pentecost, the Sunday seven weeks after Easter, and people in that century fixed a date by the church calendar much as we fix one by a public holiday. She went home to her parents within about a month and did not come back for three years. He never explained publicly what had happened, and neither did she. What he did instead was write. Between 1643 and 1645 he published four tracts arguing that incompatibility of mind, and not adultery alone, is a ground for divorce, because Scripture makes the purpose of marriage the companionship of husband and wife and a marriage that cannot supply it is already dead. The argument was far outside what any church of his day would allow, and the reaction was ferocious: Herbert Palmer told both Houses of Parliament from the pulpit in August 1644 that the book deserved to be burnt, the Stationers petitioned the Commons against it in the same month, and the catalogues of dangerous sects that began appearing in 1645 gave the Divorcers an entry of their own. The Stationers were the London company of printers and booksellers, who held the legal monopoly on printing and had a direct interest in stopping books that came out without their stamp on them, so their outrage was not purely theological. Then came the turn that made him famous. Parliament had abolished the bishops’ censorship, the old arrangement under which a book had to pass a churchman before it could go to press, and then quietly put in a censorship of its own. The Licensing Order of June 1643 required every book to be approved before printing, and Milton, whose divorce tracts had been printed without a licence, answered it in November 1644 with Areopagitica, unlicensed and unrepentant. It changed nothing at the time, and it is worth being plain about that: licensing before publication stayed in force in England for another fifty years, under that order and the acts that replaced it, and the pamphlet attracted almost no notice. Mary returned in 1645, apparently after her family’s fortunes collapsed with the king’s cause, and the marriage resumed. Her parents moved in as well, so that the house filled up with the relations of the young woman who had walked out of it. They had four children before she died in May 1652, days after the birth of their daughter Deborah.

(●) 1649 AD: He defended the killing of a king, took office under the new republic, and lost his sight at his desk. + Charles I was beheaded on 30 January 1649. Within two weeks Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, arguing that power is held in trust from the people and that a king who breaks the trust may be called to account like any other man. In March the Council of State made him Secretary for Foreign Tongues, which meant that he wrote the government’s Latin correspondence with the courts of Europe and answered its critics in print. He had gone, at forty, from private scholar to the voice of a regime that most of Christendom regarded as a gang of regicides. Regicide means king-killing, and it was the plain word of the day for the men who had signed the king’s death warrant; to most of Europe it named a crime with no excuse attached, and Milton was now the man paid to supply the excuse in Latin. The answering took a toll. When the continent’s most celebrated classical scholar, Claudius Salmasius, published a Latin defence of the executed king, Milton was ordered to reply, and he did so in 1651 with the Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, a book that made him famous across Europe. His sight had been failing for years, and his doctors told him that if he went on reading and writing he would lose it entirely. He went on. By early 1652 he was completely blind, at forty-three. That year took nearly everything else along with his sight. His wife Mary died in May, and their only son John died in June, aged fifteen months, so that within a few weeks a man who had just gone blind lost his wife and his only boy. He kept his post through all of it, with assistants reading to him and taking his dictation, and he held it for another eight years. In 1656 he married again, Katherine Woodcock, and that did not last either: she died in February 1658, and their infant daughter a month later. The sonnet he wrote about seeing her in a dream, and waking to the dark, is the only poem he left about his second wife.

(●) 1660 AD: The king came back, the hangman burned his books, and he very nearly hanged with them. + In the spring of 1660, with the republic collapsing and Charles II on his way home, Milton published The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, a last public argument against restoring the monarchy. He was blind, out of office, and writing against the tide of an entire nation, and he knew it: he compared himself in the closing lines to a man crying out to the very stones. The Restoration came in May, and Milton, who had spent eleven years telling Europe in Latin why the new king’s father had deserved to die, went into hiding in a friend’s house in Bartholomew Close. In August the government ordered two of his books to be burned by the common hangman: Eikonoklastes, his reply to the book of meditations that went out under the dead king’s name, and the Defensio, the Latin defence of the regicide that had made him famous abroad. He was arrested in the autumn and held from about October until December, and it is worth picturing what a blind prisoner would have been listening to in those weeks, because the men who had signed the king’s death warrant were being hanged, drawn and quartered while he sat in custody. Then the danger passed almost as quietly as it had come. The Act of Oblivion, which Parliament had passed at the end of August, was a general pardon for what had been done in the late troubles, and it worked by listing the men who were to be excepted from it; Milton was not on the list. The Commons ordered his release on 15 December, and he paid heavy fees to get out. The poet Andrew Marvell, who had worked under him as a Latin secretary and now sat in Parliament, was among those who spoke for him, and complained in the House that the gaoler had charged him far too much. He came out of it ruined, watched, and fifty-two years old. He had lost his eyesight, his savings, his public cause and very nearly his life. He had not yet written the poem anybody remembers.

(●) 1667 AD: Blind and out of favour, he sold Paradise Lost for five pounds down, and had seven years left to live. + He had been turning the subject over for twenty years. The composition seems to have been done mostly between about 1658 and 1663, in a routine his early biographers describe: he lay awake in the early morning composing verses in his head, forty or fifty at a time, and waited, often impatiently, for someone to come and write them down. He called the visits of the night muse his inspiration and said the verses came to him unsought. In 1665, with plague emptying London, a young Quaker friend named Thomas Ellwood found him a cottage at Chalfont St Giles, and was lent the finished manuscript to take home and read at his leisure. By Ellwood’s own account, published in 1714, he handed it back with a pleasant remark: "Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?" Milton said nothing, sat a while in silence, and changed the subject. When Ellwood next visited him in London, Milton showed him Paradise Regained and told him the question had put it into his head. Paradise Lost was published in 1667, in ten books, under a contract with the printer Samuel Simmons whose terms are usually quoted to show how little the age thought the thing was worth: five pounds down, five more when the first impression sold, and the same again for later impressions. Readers were quicker than the price suggests, and the first printing sold out in about eighteen months. In 1671 he published Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes together, the second a tragedy about a blind strongman among enemies, working in a mill, which no one has ever read without thinking of the man who wrote it. The revised twelve-book Paradise Lost appeared in 1674. Milton died that November, probably of gout, and was buried beside his father in St Giles Cripplegate.

What He Taught

(T1) God’s goodness can be defended, and a poem is a fair place to do it. + A man at a funeral does not usually want an argument. He wants the thing explained in a way he can carry, and what he can carry at that moment is a story, a picture, a piece of music. Milton knew that about people, and it shaped what he did with the oldest problem in religion. The problem is easy to state and hard to answer. God is good, God is able, and yet here is the world. The formal answer is what theologians call a theodicy, meaning a defence of God’s justice: an account of why a good and powerful God might allow the evil we actually find. Milton opens Paradise Lost by announcing that this is his subject, that he means to assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men, and then he does not argue it in propositions. He dramatizes it. You watch the angels choose. You watch Eve reason her way into the fruit. You hear God the Father explain, before it happens, why he will not prevent it. Notice the modesty inside the ambition. He does not say he will prove God good, and he does not say the problem is a misunderstanding. He says he will justify, which is a courtroom word: he will make the case, knowing there is a case to answer. Christian readers have argued ever since about how well he did it. Nobody has doubted that he faced the question squarely, and a great many readers who would never finish a page of philosophy have taken in an argument about providence because it arrived as a story.

(Q) "That, to the height of this great argument, / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men." + Source: Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 24 to 26 (1674 text in modernised spelling). The last three lines of the opening invocation, where Milton asks the Spirit who "from the first / Wast present" to illuminate what in him is dark. He states his purpose before he tells a single line of the story.

(T2) God made his creatures able to fall, because obedience that cannot be refused proves nothing. + Suppose a man builds a machine that says "I love you" every time he walks into the room. He can listen to it as often as he likes, and it will never once mean anything, because the machine has no other option. Now suppose his wife says it. The words are the same words. What makes the difference is that she could have said nothing. That is the heart of Milton’s answer to the problem of evil, and it is the argument that philosophers now call the free will defence: the claim that a world containing creatures genuinely free to love or refuse is worth more than a world of guaranteed compliance, and that such freedom carries the real possibility of going wrong. In Book III, before the fall has happened, God the Father says it plainly. Man was made just and right, with everything he needed to stand. He was also made free, and freedom that cannot fall is not freedom. Milton then presses the point in a way that is easy to miss. If the angels and Adam had been unable to disobey, what would their obedience have shown? Nothing about them, only something about their wiring. Reason, he adds in the same speech, is itself choice, which is why a creature that cannot choose cannot really think either. There is one thing he does not do, and Christian readers who come to him expecting it should be warned: he never suggests that the fall was small, or that freedom makes the ruin acceptable. He shows the ruin at full size, and then argues that the alternative would have been a world of very obedient machinery.

(Q) "I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall." + Source: Paradise Lost, Book III, lines 98 to 99 (1674 text in modernised spelling). God the Father, looking down on Satan approaching the new-made world, tells the Son what is about to happen and whose fault it will be. A few lines later he puts the question that the whole defence turns on: "Not free, what proof could they have given sincere / Of true allegiance, constant faith or love, / Where only what they needs must do appeared, / Not what they would?" (Book III, lines 103 to 106).

(T3) A virtue that has never met its adversary is not yet virtue. + Everyone knows the difference between a man who has never been offered a bribe and a man who has turned one down. We may respect them both. We only know something about the second one. Milton built an argument for a free press on exactly that difference, and it is worth seeing how the two connect, because the connection is what makes Areopagitica more than a pamphlet about printing. His opponents wanted books licensed before publication so that readers would not meet bad ideas. Milton’s reply was that a goodness produced by never meeting bad ideas is not goodness at all but ignorance in good clothes, and that God did not deal with us that way. Adam was given a real command and a real option. We are not kept from evil; we are called to know it and refuse it. So the censor, however kindly meant, is in the business of manufacturing a blank virtue, and Milton had a further reason to resist him. A book, he says, is not a piece of furniture. It carries the living mind of the man who wrote it, so that to destroy a good book is closer to killing a person than to burning a chair: "as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye." It should be said that Milton was not asking for what a modern reader means by free speech. He explicitly excluded Roman Catholic writings and anything he judged outright blasphemous, and he accepted punishment after publication for what was genuinely libellous or impious. His case is narrower and sharper than the slogan it later became: the state may not sit in judgment on a book before anyone has read it.

(Q) "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." + Source: Areopagitica (1644), in the modernised-spelling public-domain text at Project Gutenberg. A fugitive virtue is one that runs away; cloistered means shut up behind walls, as in a monastery. The image behind the sentence is a footrace, with a garland for the winner, and the point of it is that no one wins a crown without dust and heat. Two pages later Milton draws the conclusion: "Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"

(T4) What God brings out of the fall is better than what the fall destroyed. + The last two books of Paradise Lost are a history lesson. The archangel Michael shows Adam what will come of what he has just done: Cain and Abel, the flood, Babel, Israel, and at the end of it a descendant of his own who will be born, die, rise and return. Adam has been listening to the consequences of his sin for the better part of two books, and then he says something that startles every first-time reader. He breaks out in praise, and says he cannot tell whether to repent of his sin or rejoice at the good that will come of it. Later writers gave this idea a name borrowed from the old Latin liturgy for Easter Eve, the service sung in the dark of the night before Easter morning, which calls Adam’s sin a happy fault because it won so great a Redeemer: the fortunate fall. The thought is not that sin was good. Milton has spent the whole poem showing that it was catastrophe. The thought is that God is so far from being defeated by it that he draws out of the wreck a greater good than the garden ever held, which is the point Paul is making when he sets the disobedience of one man against the obedience of another (Romans 5:19). Michael tells Adam that the earth will one day be a paradise "far happier place / Than this of Eden, and far happier days." Christian readers have not all been comfortable here, and it is fair to say why. Press the fortunate fall too hard and it starts to sound as though the sin were needed, which would make God the author of it. Milton does not take that step, and the balance he keeps is exactly the balance of the text he is following: Adam is not excused, and God is not thwarted.

(Q) "O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good." + Source: Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 469 to 471 (1674 text in modernised spelling). Adam’s answer after Michael has shown him the whole future, up to the Son’s return in glory. He goes on to say that he stands full of doubt whether he should repent of the sin he caused or rejoice the more at the good that will come from it.

(T5) The paradise that matters in the end is the one carried inside a person. + Milton was blind, watched by a hostile government, and living in rented rooms in a city that had recently burned, when he wrote the close of the poem. It is worth holding that picture while reading what Michael tells Adam on the last page. Add deeds to your knowledge, the angel says, and faith, virtue, patience, temperance, and above all love; do that, and you will not be sorry to leave this garden, because you will carry a better one within you. The word for what Milton is describing is not escapism. It is the ordinary Christian claim that the presence of God with a person is a greater possession than any place, which is what Paul means when he says that to depart and be with Christ is far better (Philippians 1:23), and why Jesus, asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, answered that it was already in the midst of them (Luke 17:21). And then the poem does something no reader expects. Having promised an inner paradise, it does not end in contemplation. It ends with two people walking out into an unpromising world, hand in hand, with the whole of it in front of them and providence to guide them. Milton had lost a political cause, a wife, a son, his sight and nearly his life, and he ended his great poem with a couple taking the first step of an ordinary hard life together. It is a quieter ending than the one the first ten books led a reader to expect, and it is the one he chose.

(Q) "Then wilt thou not be loath / To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A Paradise within thee, happier far." + Source: Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 585 to 587 (1674 text in modernised spelling). Loath here carries its older force of unwilling. Michael is finishing his instruction to Adam before the two of them descend from the hill of vision, and these are nearly the last words of teaching in the poem.

(Q) "Thousands at his bidding speed / And post o’er land and ocean without rest: / They also serve who only stand and wait." + Source: the sonnet beginning "When I consider how my light is spent," lines 12 to 14 (modernised spelling). It is numbered 19 in most modern editions and XVI in the 1673 Poems; the familiar title "On His Blindness" was supplied by its eighteenth-century editor Thomas Newton, not by Milton. A blind man asks whether God expects day-labour of someone he has left in the dark, and patience answers him: God needs nothing from anyone, and the servant who simply stands ready is serving too. Milton wrote it in his blindness and then spent the rest of his life declining to take its advice.

What Christian Readers Made of Him

(†) His poem became the way English-speaking Christians pictured the fall. + Genesis 3 is startlingly brief. A serpent, a question, a piece of fruit, and a conversation in the cool of the day: it takes up less space than a newspaper column, and it tells you almost nothing about how any of the participants felt. For centuries preachers and painters filled in the gaps. After 1667 they filled them in with Milton. The scale of that is easy to underestimate. Joseph Addison gave Paradise Lost eighteen Saturday papers in The Spectator between January and May 1712, working through it book by book for an audience of ordinary readers and treating it as England’s answer to Homer and Virgil. John Wesley thought it so valuable and so difficult that in 1763 he published his own abridgement with notes, cut and glossed for readers of, as he put it, a common education, and his preachers carried it round the country, though it sold so slowly that no second edition was called for until after his death. Hymn writers borrowed his phrases, artists painted his scenes, and the picture of Satan that most Christians carry in their heads came to us through his lines rather than through the text of Scripture. That is a debt with a caution attached, and the caution is simply this: the poem is not the Bible, and Milton would have been the first to say so. He fills in a council in hell, a war in heaven, and an argument between Adam and Eve before the fall, none of which Scripture provides. Reading him well means enjoying the invention as invention, and going back to Genesis for the account.

(†) The case he made against the licensers outlived them. + Areopagitica failed. That is worth stating first, because the pamphlet is now so famous that people assume it did something at the time, and it did not: Parliament ignored it, the Licensing Order stood, and the surviving records suggest hardly anyone bought it. Its life began later. English licensing finally lapsed in 1695, and through the eighteenth century Milton’s argument was reprinted, quoted and borrowed by people arguing for liberty of conscience on both sides of the Atlantic. What made it useful to Christians in particular was that its foundation is theological rather than merely practical. Milton does not argue that ideas are harmless or that truth is a matter of taste. He argues that God made us to be tried, that a virtue never tested is worth nothing, and that truth is strong enough to win a fair fight. Those are claims a believer can hold, and they are the reason the pamphlet reads very differently from a modern argument that all opinions are equally good. His own boundaries were narrower than his admirers often remember (T3). Later Christians took his principle further than he took it himself, which is what usually happens to a good argument.

(†) Readers have argued for three centuries about whether the poem is orthodox. + Samuel Johnson set the pattern in his Life of Milton (1779). He detested Milton’s politics and said so at length, and then judged the poem one of the greatest productions of the human mind, and admitted in the same breath that nobody ever wished it longer. Admiration and argument have travelled together ever since. The sharpest dispute concerns Satan. Milton gives him the best speeches in the first two books, and the Romantic poets concluded that Milton was secretly on his side: William Blake’s remark in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it has been quoted ever since by readers who find the fallen angel more attractive than the God of Book III. The most influential Christian reply came from C. S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), who argued that Milton knew exactly what he was doing: Satan is given magnificent rhetoric because that is what pride sounds like from the inside, and the reader who is taken in by it has been shown something true about himself. Lewis also insisted, against a fashion for reading the poem as private mythology, that its main structure is the ordinary Christian story and that Milton meant it as such. The dispute is worth having, and it is not settled. A reader coming to Milton for the first time should know that the poem is doctrinally ambitious, that it argues as well as narrates, and that it was written by a man whose private theology, when it finally came to light, was stranger than his poem ever let on.

(†) Where he parted from the creeds: a private theology he never dared publish. + In 1823 Robert Lemon, going through the cupboards of the old State Paper Office in search of something else, found a bundle of Latin manuscript that turned out to be a complete systematic theology, copied out by the secretaries who had worked for Milton after he lost his sight. A systematic theology is a book that takes Christian doctrine in order, God and creation and sin and Christ and the church and the last things, and sets down what the writer holds on each head and which verses he holds it on. It was published in 1825 as De Doctrina Christiana, "On Christian Doctrine," in Charles Sumner’s English translation, and it caused a scandal that has never quite subsided. Its authorship was seriously challenged from the early 1990s onward; the detailed study of the manuscript by Gordon Campbell, Thomas Corns, John Hale and Fiona Tweedie (2007) settled the question for most scholars in favour of Milton. He kept it in a drawer, and given what is in it, that was prudent. - The Son. Two phrases from the creeds have to be unpacked before the disagreement is visible. To call the Son eternally begotten is to say that he comes from the Father the way light comes from a flame, always and without a first moment, so that there was never a time when the Father was there and the Son was not. To call him of one substance with the Father is to say that whatever it is that makes the Father God, the Son has that very thing, not a smaller share of it. Milton denied both. The Son "was begotten of the Father in consequence of his decree, and therefore within the limits of time," and "he who is properly the Son is not coeval with the Father, much less of the same numerical essence" (Book I, chapter 5). Coeval means of the same age, so the claim is that the Father had no beginning and the Son did. He is exalted above all creation and worshipped, but derived, later, and less. That is a rejection of the faith confessed at Nicaea in 325 and held across Christendom since, and it runs against the opening of John’s Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). - Creation. He denied creation out of nothing, holding that "both Scripture and reason concur in pronouncing that all these things were made, not out of nothing, but out of matter" (Book I, chapter 7), and that the matter came from God’s own substance. Scripture says the opposite about the origin of what we see (Hebrews 11:3), and Christians have understood from the beginning that nothing stands beside God as raw material. - The soul. He held that a human being is a single thing rather than a soul wearing a body, so that at death the whole person dies and waits unconscious for the resurrection. "The whole man is soul, and the soul man," he writes in the same chapter. The instinct behind it is sound, since Scripture does promise resurrection of the body and not escape from it, but Paul plainly expects to be with Christ the moment he dies (Philippians 1:23). - Marriage. Having argued in public for a wide liberty of divorce, he argued in private that the law contains nothing against polygamy, either by direct prohibition or by implied censure, reasoning from the patriarchs (Book I, chapter 10). Jesus answers the question from Genesis and from the created order: "So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate" (Matthew 19:6). There is a further count, and it is a matter of conduct rather than doctrine. Milton’s controversial prose can be savage. In the Defensio Secunda he attacked an opponent, Alexander More, with personal accusations picked up from gossip, and never withdrew them when they proved shaky. A man who argued so nobly for letting truth grapple with falsehood in open encounter did not always fight that way himself. None of this is a reason to put the poem down, and Christians of every tradition have gone on reading it with profit. It is a reason to read it with open eyes. The wonder of Paradise Lost is that a man holding those private opinions wrote a poem in which the Son offers himself for the guilty, heaven rejoices, and a fallen pair walk out of Eden with a promise to hold on to.