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Freedom and Covenant: The Miltonian Analogy Transfigured

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Radner, Ephraim

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4 See my "Children of Cain: The Oxymoron of American Catholicism," in Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, The Fate of Communion (forthcoming); also available at anglicancommimioninstitute.org

5 See the groundbreaking work of Christopher Hill in Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1978) and his earlier The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). See also Roy Flanagan, ed., The Riverside Milton (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998). Quotations here are from John Milton, The Prose Works of John Milton: With a Biographical Introduction by Rufus Wilmot Griswold. In Two Volumes (Philadelphia: John W. Moore, 1847).

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6 "Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. . . . What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men" (Areopagitica; citations are taken from the University of Oregon Renascence Editions of the Areopagitica, 1997, available online).

7 "For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. . . . Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one. . . . How many other things might be tolerated in peace, and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one another?" (Areopagitica).

8 "Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers" who mutilated her wholeness. "From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth . . . went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection" (Areopagitica).

9 "There be who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their own pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with meekness, nor can convince. . . . They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity. . . . To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it . . . this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a Church; not the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and inwardly divided minds" (Areopagitica).

Freedom and Covenant: The Miltonian Analogy Transfigured

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Radner, Ephraim

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