Milton agreed with Servetus, Socinians and Ranters in many of his views on the Trinity, with Servetus, Socinians, some Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and Muggletonians in his mortalism. Milton’s heresies on divorce linked him in the minds of contemporaries with Ranters and libertines. His emphasis on the absolute authority of conscience meant that believers were redeemed from the curse, freed from the law. This led him to the very verge of antinomianism which the Ranters overstepped. Milton’s emphasis throughout his writings on the light/darkness antithesis links him with Clarkson, Bauthumley and other Ranters, and with the Quakers; it looks back to Hermeticist and alchemical writers culminating in Robert Fludd. Milton’s insistence that Adam and Eve made love before the Fall links up with Ranter attitudes to sex; the fact that they laboured before the Fall associates him with popular traditions drawn on by the Diggers. That hell was an internal state (whether or not it was a geographical location as well) goes back to Marlowe and beyond, and is found in Boehme, Wither, Overton.1 To many of the radicals Milton must have seemed one of them, as he did to Edwards, Baillie, Pagitt, Ross, Fuller.
Once this point has been established, as I think it can be, it appears superfluous and rather foolish to hunt for the sources of Milton’s ideas only in the writings of classical philosophers or early Christian theologians. It is possible that Milton, a very learned man, might have got from Plato, Seneca, Origen, Lactantius or the Cabbalists ideas that were current among his radical contemporaries. But this assumes an isolated Milton: it is at least worth reminding ourselves what ideas were current in London taverns at this time. Milton would certainly have read Gangraena before associating himself so firmly with Edwards’s victims.2 No doubt the poet’s exceptionally wide reading gave an extra dimension to his theology, and this often led him to conclusions different from those of his radical contemporaries. But all around him men and women were eagerly and freely debating these matters, verbally and in print. Milton acclaimed the debate in Areopagitica; he took part in it, both in his published tracts and in his dialogue with himself in De Doctrina Christiana.
Such an approach enables us to side-step many scholarly, not to say scholastic, discussions – such as whether Milton is or is not properly described as an Arian.3 Milton claimed to base all his views on Scripture only. Although his strong prepossessions enabled him to argue away certain crucial Biblical texts which he did not like, he would never have followed any thinker, orthodox or heretical, against his own reading of the Bible. That would have signified being a heretic in the truth, adopting an implicit faith.4
Few of Milton’s views were original. But the vigour and eloquence with which he expressed them, and the circumstances in which he expressed them, call for comment. To say that ‘language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known’ is in one sense the conventional Baconian doctrine that things are more important than words. Yet Milton extends the point to argue that ‘any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only’ is as estimable as a university pedant. So even the ‘élitist’ Of Education unexpectedly echoes Milton’s defence of mechanic preachers, his preference for ‘a homely and yeomanly religion’.1
In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton had insisted that men must be liberated from the tyranny of custom, of accepted ideas. ‘Error supports custom, custom countenances error.’ Custom’s defenders decried free reasoning ‘under the terms of humour and innovation’. This line of argument had often been repeated since the authoress or author of Haec Vir in 1620 had said ‘Custom is an idiot.’2 But to defend innovation and liberty of speculation in 1643 was to defend the right of the lower classes to challenge the assumptions of their betters. It led Milton within six years to the ultimate revolutionary position, defence of regicide. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates also starts with an attack on the ‘tyranny of custom’.3 The traditional humanist emphasis on the superiority of reason and virtue to mere birth is used in Eikonoklastes to justify regicide: ‘it were a mad law that would subject reason to superiority of place.’4 Milton went well beyond orthodox Puritanism in his belief that the whole Mosaic law was abolished, moral as well as ceremonial; that Christians are emancipated from Sabbath observance, and that the words ‘blasphemy and heresy’ are mere bugbears.5
In the late forties a whole range of certainties had broken down. King Charles had gone: was King Jesus coming? Church courts, ‘the bawdy courts’, had disappeared: what restraints on moral behaviour were henceforth legitimate? The press was free, assembly was free: what limits, if any, should there be to liberty of speculation? Was Christianity itself open to question? Such problems worried or attracted large numbers of ordinary men and women in London, the Home Counties, East Anglia and the army. We may call them Seekers so long as we do not thereby imply any unity of outlook among the large numbers who were dissatisfied with traditional forms and beliefs. Their discussions, unrestrained by the presence of social superiors or by the discipline of a traditional education, led to a proliferation of wild heresies. ‘The new upstart wantons that deny God’s ordinance, or new notionists,’ said a pamphleteer of 1649, were ‘full of whimsies’.6
We know something of what went on from the autobiographies of Ranters, Quakers, Muggletonians, Bunyan and many others. Such men, in the words of a Cromwellian ordinance of March 1654, ‘contended against magistracy, against ministry, against Scriptures and against ordinances, … running after fancies and notions’. They justified themselves ‘under the notion of liberty’, saying that ‘the magistrate hath nothing to do… in… these things.’1 Milton operated at a more sophisticated level than Fox or Bunyan, Reeve or Clarkson. But he knew of the discussions and speculations which went on in London congregations and taverns, and I would guess that he participated in them.2 He certainly disapproved of the ordinance from which I have just quoted, since it confirmed the existence of a state church and set up Triers to judge the doctrines of ministers.
In 1649 Clement Walker described Milton as ‘a libertine’, who ‘will be tied to no obligation to God or man’. In 1660 he was called a ‘Christian libertine’; seventeen years later, ‘a great agent for libertinism’.3 As the word was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was accurate enough. Calvin attacked the Libertines of his Geneva for saying that they had found the way back to the state of Adam before the Fall – a Paradise within them, happier far.4 Samuel Rutherford, denounced in Milton’s sonnet, in 1648 criticized Familists for saying that 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