Milton and the Idea of the Fall

This page intentionally left blank

MILTON AND THE IDEA OF THE FALL In Paradise Lost (1667), Milton produced the most magnificent poetic account ever written of the biblical Fall of man. In this wide-ranging study, William Poole presents a comprehensive analysis of the origin, evolution and contemporary discussion of the Fall, and the way seventeenth-century authors, particularly Milton, represented it. Poole first examines the range and depth of early-modern thought on the subject, then explains and evaluates the basis of the idea and the intellectual and theological controversies it inspired from early Christian times to Milton’s own century. The second part of the book delves deeper into the development of Milton’s own thought on the Fall, from the earliest of his poems, through his prose, to his mature epic. Poole distinguishes clearly for the first time the range and complexity of contemporary debates on the Fall of man, and offers many new insights into the originality and sophistication of Milton’s work. is a Tutorial Fellow in English at New College, Oxford. He is the editor of Francis Lodwick’s A Country Not Named (2005) and co-director of the AHRB research project ‘Free-thinking and language-planning in late seventeenth-century England’.

WILLIAM POOLE

MILTON AND THE IDEA OF THE FALL WILLIAM POOLE New College, Oxford

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521847636 © W. Poole 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2005 - -

---- eBook (EBL) --- eBook (EBL)

- -

---- hardback --- hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Know the fall is being created, for when we were not created, and uncome forth, we were as he is, that is in perfection. Thomas Tany

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on the text List of abbreviations

page viii x xi 1

Introduction Part

I

Fallen culture

1

The Fall

9

2

Augustinianism

21

3

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660

40

4

The heterodox Fall

58

5

Heresiographers, Messiahs and Ranters

83

6

The Fall in practice

96

Part

II

Milton

7

Towards Paradise Lost

125

8

Paradise Lost I : the causality of primal wickedness

146

9

Paradise Lost I I : God, Eden and man

158

10 Paradise Lost

III:

creation and education

168

11

IV:

Fall and expulsion

182

Paradise Lost

Conclusion

195

Notes Index

200 234 vii

Acknowledgements

This book is built on the ashes of a doctoral thesis (Oxford University, 2001), and both were written in New College, Oxford; Linacre College, Oxford; and finally Downing College, Cambridge, to the Master and Fellows of which I owe so much. They elected me to a research fellowship young, and have tolerated me with wit and the occasional sigh. Norman Powell Williams’ classic 1924 Bampton lectures, published in 1927 as The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin, shaped my understanding of the theological background to the issues this book addresses, and his work remains one of powerful clarity. J. M. Evans’ Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (1968) transmitted Williams’ work, and the long history of Fall speculation, to Miltonists. A. D. Nuttall’s The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake (1998) I first heard as undergraduate lectures. I know that this book opposes the assumption of Dennis Danielson’s fine Milton’s Good God (1982) – that you can make sense of the Fall – to which it is nonetheless grateful. Various other books are complementary to this one, notably J. M. Turner’s One Flesh (1987), John Leonard’s Naming in Paradise (1990), Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote’s museum catalogue The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early-Modern Europe (1998) and Philip C. Almond’s Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (1999). I next thank my close circle of friends, who know who they are. I also thank my pupils at Downing College – it is to your type of audience this book is primarily addressed. Valued assistance has also been offered by Matthew Armstrong, Rhodri Lewis, Richard Serjeantson, Marcus Tomalin, Jake Wadham and Jack Wakefield. Sophie Read cheerfully axed one third of the penultimate draft to meet the exigencies of this series. The two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press produced exemplary reports and opposing courses of revision, and my thanks to Ray Ryan, Maartje Scheltens and Robert Whitelock at the Press for their time. viii

Acknowledgements ix My undergraduate tutors, like distant radio galaxies, still exert a pull: they may have nothing to do with the surface of this book, but Mark Griffith and Craig Raine had a hand in making its maker. John Carey, my doctoral supervisor, oversaw a swift thesis with the lightest of hands. Finally, A. D. Nuttall first inspired my interest in the Fall and just about everything else. I dedicate this, my first book, to my family, and to the memory of my father D. E. Poole (1945–2001): nunc est bibendum.

Note on the text

Texts originally in languages other than English have been cited in translation, or supplied in both original and translation if pertinent. All translations are my own, unless indicated. In the case of classical texts, I have relied heavily on the Loeb editions. Early-modern manuscript sources, like printed sources, are cited unmodernised, although I have italicised expansions.

x

Abbreviations

CG CPW CRW E JFHS LC

MLQ N&Q OED PL

Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei [City of God], ed. and trans. G. E. McCracken et al., 7 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1957–72) John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. D. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958–82) Nigel Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century (London: Junction Books, 1983) Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion in Confessions and Enchiridion, trans. A. C. Outler (London: SCMP, 1955) Journal of the Friends Historical Society Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad litteram [Literal Commentary on Genesis] in La Gene`se au sens litte´ral, trans. with introduction and notes by P. Agae¨sse and A. Solignac, 2 vols. (Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1972) Modern Language Quarterly Notes and Queries The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, 20 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, 2nd edn revised by the author (London: printed by Samuel Simmons, 1674)

xi

Introduction

[I]f I have spoken any thing, or shall hereafter speake in this Pamphlet vnaduisedly, illiterately, without good order or methode; acknowledge (I beseeche thee) the generall punishment of whole mankinde, which more especially discouers it selfe in my weaknesse, the confusion of tongues. I am confounded, I am confounded, poore silly wretch that I am, I am confounded, and my minde is distracted, my tongue is confounded, and my whole nature corrupted . . .1

This – slightly disingenuous – apology for bad prose was written in 1616 by the future bishop of Gloucester and crypto-Catholic, Godfrey Goodman, some way into his stout quarto on the effects of original sin, The Fall of Man; or, the Corruption of Nature. Goodman here pauses in his general narration of woe to lament his own inarticulacy, tracing this first to ‘the confusion of tongues’ that took place at Babel, but, behind that, with his ‘whole nature corrupted’, to the Fall of man itself, the primal transgression of Adam and Eve in Eden as recorded in Genesis 2–3. Goodman thus adds to his catalogue of human ills not merely the conviction that man’s linguistic capacity has become crippled – his ability to describe accurately, and then subsequently to report such descriptions to others – but also the corruption of his very physical and moral fabric. Indeed, Goodman’s tract, as its full title indicates, extended the effects of the Fall from the microcosm of man to the macrocosm of his environment – the Fall has altered external reality itself. I forget my selfe, I forget my selfe, for, speaking of mans corruption, I am so far entangled, that I cannot easily release my selfe; being corrupted as wel as others, me thinkes whatsoeuer I see, whatsoeuer I heare, all things seeme to sound corruption.2

Not only perception (‘my minde’) and description (‘my tongue’), but also the objects of such perception and description had become ineluctably compromised. 1

2

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

Goodman, though, offered a narrative of continual decline, something that the Fall had inaugurated but not concluded: this first great shock had been followed by a series of aftershocks from the confusio linguarum and the Flood down to the present age. Had not of recent years the telescope revealed blemishes in the moon, and had not the first new star appeared in the supposedly changeless heavens back in 1572? Worse, are there not now more females than males engendered?3 Others held the theologically neater position that the original Fall was bad enough, and no further decline was necessary. Henry Vaughan, in his poem ‘Corruption’, for instance, wrote of Adam’s crime: ‘He drew the Curse upon the world, and Crakt / The whole frame with his Fall.’4 John Milton said something similar in ‘At a solemn musick’, in which, under his musical metaphor, he implicates ‘all creatures’ in not only the effects but also the cause of the Fall: . . . till disproportion’d sin Jarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair musick that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood In first obedience, and their state of good.5

This was a neater position because it conformed to St Paul’s contrast between the Fall of the first and the Atonement of the second Adam: ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinthians 15:22). And without the first Adam, what need of a second? Not everyone in the seventeenth century, though, was happy about narratives of decline, whether catastrophic or continual, and Goodman was answered by the Oxonian George Hakewill in 1627 with his Apologie of the Power and Providence of God.6 Hakewill replaced Goodman’s pessimistic narrative with a more lenient, optimistic vision. The world, he said, was not in decline, and undue scepticism concerning man’s access to external reality was likewise exaggerated. Modern poets, Hakewill declared, are as good as their ancient counterparts, and the reason why change in the heavens has only recently become visible is because finer instrumentation has been developed, not because change is something new.7 Hakewill thus restricted the consequences of the Fall to the purely human realm, locking original sin into the moral core of the individual, but out of man’s other faculties, and out of the external world. In doing so, he was following Francis Bacon, who had opened his Of the Proficience

Introduction 3 and Advancement of Learning (1605) with a brusque rejection of ‘the zeale and jealosie of [those] Diuines’ who taxed seekers after natural knowledge with admonishments of the Fall of man, and of the vanity of human knowledge.8 The Fall, replied Bacon, affected only man’s moral rectitude: it did not alter his sensory acuity or the things his senses observed. Bacon thought this a point important enough to repeat, opening the Instauratio magna (1620) with the same affirmation.9 It is not hard to see how men such as Bacon or Hakewill found it necessary to contest the point of view represented by Goodman. How could the new science feel confident about the processes it sought to observe if both these processes and their observers were irreversibly damaged? Bacon’s sentiment was much repeated throughout the century. The educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius visited England in the winter of 1641–2, at which time his influential pamphlet A Reformation of Schooles was published. He too employed Bacon’s distinction, equating ‘serpentine’ knowledge with the wrangling of the schools, and taking issue with the strategy of blaming the impossibility of reformation in educational method on original sin, ‘[a]s if the feare of the Lord ought not to be an antidote against that corruption, which God hath so often pronounced to be both the beginning, and the end of wisdome’.10 In 1665 Robert Hooke prefaced his Micrographia, the first and flamboyant classic of microscopy, with the slightly dangerous sentiment: And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge . . .11

‘. . . that were never yet forbidden’, he hurriedly adds. Bacon and Hakewill represent attempts to restrict but not to deny original sin. As the century progressed, however, increasingly radical voices were heard, especially throughout the revolutionary decades. These denials were usually phrased in evangelical rather than epistemological terms, but one of the arguments of this book will be that such ‘radical’ voices are not to be found simply in the obvious places – the pamphlets of the political radicals, the Ranters, Diggers, Seekers, Quakers, Behmenists, Muggletonians and their colourful ilk. Indeed, these ‘third culture’ radicals actually developed complicated and on occasion mutually incompatible theories about the Fall, and a later chapter will sort out some of these strands. More importantly, radical speculation on the Genesis narrative often emanated from socially conservative, even on occasion high-church, quarters. Throughout the 1650s, another future bishop, Jeremy Taylor,

4

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

launched a punishing campaign against the doctrine of original sin, much to the horror of his fellow exiled Anglicans – and much to the glee of his Presbyterian adversaries. One of them, Nathaniel Stephens, wrote a book pointing out that there was not much difference between what Taylor was saying and the opinions of the radical Baptist and Agitator Robert Everard. After the Restoration, scepticism concerning the traditional understanding of the Fall persisted. The ecstatic texts of Thomas Traherne, for instance, read curiously like some passages in the Quaker George Fox’s Journal. Who wrote these lines? I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam, which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me, and it was showed to me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and their virtue.12

Blunter voices were also raised from high in the aristocracy. As Rochester lay dying in 1680, he told Gilbert Burnet that original sin did not exist and that ‘the first three Chapters of Genesis . . . could not be true, unless they were Parables’.13 Also in these decades various figures in the early Royal Society developed geological and palaeontological theories that at best marginalised the events in Eden, and, in the case of Hooke, hinted at the extreme antiquity of the Earth, thereby casting doubt on the scope and accuracy of the Mosaic narrative of creation. Hooke and his friends were also reading the notorious Prae-Adamitae (1655) of the Calvinist heretic Isaac La Peyre`re, which hypothesised on biblical grounds that men had existed for countless aeons before Adam, and that the Bible only told of a specifically Jewish creation. As Hooke wrote in his journal in late 1675, ‘To Martins and Garaways club: Ludowick, Hill, Aubery, Wild. Discoursd about Universal Character, about preadamits and of Creation.’14 The major project of this book is to investigate some of the discussions canvassed above, particularly with reference to the writings of John Milton, whose Paradise Lost is easily the most famous exploration of the causes and consequences of the matter in Eden. In order to understand the various disputes over the Fall, we need to know where these ideas came from and how they operated in contemporary English theology and literature. Goodman’s pessimism reflects the inheritance from late scholastic reactionaries, and afterwards from the early Reformers, of a predominantly Augustinian theology. It was Augustine who had systematised

Introduction 5 ideas on the Fall and original sin in the patristic period, and who, following his disputes with Pelagius, bequeathed his harsh exegesis of Genesis 2–3 to Western theology. Although, after Anselm, Augustine’s ideas were somewhat softened, and further so when combined with an Aristotelian anthropology, the early Reformers reinstated the father, and the Calvinism which underpinned the theological dimension of the English Reformation continued this emphasis. Consequently, the ninth and tenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles, ‘Of original or birth sin’ and ‘Of free will’, are more in keeping with, say, Goodman than with Hakewill, and these articles remained (and remain) unrevised. Nevertheless, the Augustinianism of most sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury theologies, particularly Protestant but also Catholic, found no real answers to certain problems Augustine himself had left unresolved. Augustine’s central assumption had been that a perfect God ought to create perfectly, leaving the glaring logical difficulty that perfect beings should not then have behaved as Genesis 2–3 appeared to record. Augustine had in fact pointed this problem out, concluding in the De Genesi ad litteram that God had not made man entirely sufficient to have stood. But the reason for this momentous decision remained occluded and, at this juncture, Augustine counselled that the pious should avoid further discussion. Narrative poets like Milton who disobeyed this advice were going to have to discover and develop strategies to overcome or at least to disguise the inherited problems. It would be simplistic, however, to see the endorsed narrative of the period as one only of the universal decline of belief in the Fall and original sin. Many, if not most, groups maintained such beliefs, and after initial rejection some (for instance the Quakers after the Restoration) even redeveloped them.15 Again, La Peyre`re the pre-Adamite, having wrecked the traditional reading of Genesis 1–3, nevertheless found he could not dispense with the theological importance of the first Adam and his Fall, and so was forced to create the device of ‘retroimputation’ of original sin backwards in time from Adam to the ancient pre-Adamite races, an idea Marin Mersenne for one found hard to digest.16 Indeed, original sin is a very difficult concept for any Christian to dismantle, as a proper demolition job leaves Christ with not all that much to do, and many, seeing that danger, turned back. As was affirmed in the academic disputations for 1624 in Cambridge University, ‘the incarnation of Christ presupposes the Fall of man into sin’.17 Christ’s connection to the Fall is graphically enforced by a Latin pattern-poem recorded by Abraham Fraunce in 1588:

6

Milton and the Idea of the Fall Qu an di tri mul pa os guis rus sti cedine uit H san mi Chri dul la

Resolving the middle into the top and then into the bottom lines produces the sentiment ‘Those whom the ill-omened serpent struck with his dire stroke / Are those whom the marvellous blood of Christ washed with its sweetness.’18 Nevertheless, the seventeenth century did witness a combination of critiques of the Genesis narrative and the doctrines raised upon it that rendered Augustinian-derived understandings of the matter in Eden increasingly problematic: the patristic scholarship of Taylor, for instance, privileging the Eastern Church fathers for anti-Augustinian purposes; the declarations of Hobbes, Spinoza and La Peyre`re concerning the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and their subsequent adoption by Pe`re Richard Simon;19 the growing conviction in some minds that the fossil record was both of organic and very ancient origin. Such critiques could be ignored, but they could not be undone.

part 1

Fallen culture

chapter 1

The Fall

In early-modern England, you could not escape the Fall. It was political: if man was fallen and wayward, how should he be governed? Was the original state of Adam as, supposedly, head and ruler of his family, holding, ‘by Right of Father-hood, Royal Authority over [his] children’, intrinsic justification for a patriarchalist monarchy? Was ‘the desire of Liberty . . . the First Cause of the Fall of Adam’?1 Or, asked Republicans of Patriarchalists, was Adam, created in the image of God, originally free, and in possession of political liberty, and does this apply to his progeny too? In 1649 Milton certainly said so: ‘No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey: and that they liv’d so.’2 The Fall also had class implications: in a famous sermon preached late in 1662, Robert South declared that it was as difficult for us now to imagine the height of unfallen Adam’s intellect ‘as it is for a Peasant bred in the obscurities of a cottage, to fancy in his mind the unseen splendour of a Court’.3 By contrast, Defoe later claimed that ‘the most noble Descendants of Adam’s Family, and in whom the Primogeniture remained, were really Mechanicks’.4 Of course, Eve’s role as temptress secured for her daughters particular opprobrium. As Abraham Cowley lamented: Nay with the worst of Heathen dotage We (Vain Men!) the Monster Woman Deifie; Finde Stars, and tye our Fates there in a Face, And Paradice in them by whom we lost it, place.5

Not stopping at feminine inferiority because of the Fall, most commentators located such inferiority even in the state of innocence, occasionally somewhat inadvertently, as when John Salkeld protested that Eve before 9

10

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

the Fall wasn’t frightened of snakes ‘though by nature timorous and fearfull’. Alexander Ross repeated a commonplace when he said that Eve didn’t mind being treated as inferior to Adam before the Fall: only fallen women, presumably, resent being dominated.6 Most trenchant was John Knox, who insisted on feminine subjection because ‘God by the order of his creation hath spoiled woman of authoritie and dominion’.7 In many discussions of the Fall, including Paradise Lost, circularity thus ensues, where Eve is stated to be inferior to Adam before the Fall, and is then told afterwards that this is one of her punishments, a possible cause of the Fall thereby redefined as an effect (PL 4.295–9, 10.195–6). The way out of this problem, theologically, was to claim that women’s inferiority is double, deriving from both nature and sin: ‘One of them onely was deriued from this sinne, the other was the prerogatiue of creation.’8 Lack of any political and legal rights for women, again, was all because of Eve. Reflecting on the curse delivered to Eve in Genesis 3:16, one lawyer explained: See here the reason . . . that Women have no voyse in Parliament, They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to be married and their desires or [sic] subject to their husband, I know no remedy though some women can shift it well enough. The common law here shaketh hands with divinity.9

Not all women took this kind of attitude lying down. Aemilia Lanyer, for one, devoted a section of her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to a defence of Eve, arguing that Adam was more to blame for the Fall than Eve, who was in her inexperience ‘simply good’.10 Eden and what happened in it were not, however, completely shut away in the past. The place Eden itself, though supposedly lost, intruded on the early-modern reader as a literal, mappable location. The Geneva Bible (1560) included such a map, deriving from the French text of Calvin’s Commentary on Genesis (1553). By this point, emblematic maps in which Eden was depicted as the centre of the Universe, with Adam, Eve, tree and serpent observed by God looking down from the heavenly spheres, were giving way to geographical maps. In these, emblematic elements had been replaced by something similar to modern cartographical practice, in which a rough scale map of ancient Mesopotamia was drawn, insinuating similarity to other geographical maps.11 Though it might be locatable in this way, one could hardly deny that Eden itself had disappeared, presumably as a consequence of the Flood. But the ideal lived on, not just as a metaphor for delight, idleness,

The Fall 11 solitariness, even death, as in Shirley’s ‘summer room, / Which may, so oft as I repose / Present my arbour and my tomb’.12 Increasingly, and reciprocal to the Protestant affirmation that Adam and Eve worked hard in Eden, agricultural reform in early-modern England adopted corresponding terminology, often in combination with an at first incongruous, rather technical vocabulary of ‘artificiall help[s]’. Thus John Beale, future FRS and current cider enthusiast, in 1657: We do commonly devise a shadowy walk from our Gardens through our Orchards (which is the richest, sweetest, and most embellisht grove) into our Coppice-woods or Timber-woods. Thus we approach the resemblance of Paradise, which God with his own perfect hand had appropriated for the delight of his innocent Masterpiece. If a gap lyes in the way between our Orchard and our Coppice, we fill up the vacancy with the artificiall help of a hop-yard.13

Gardening provided man with a zone that could remind him of his lot before the Fall, and the many manuals for agricultural and horticultural improvement combined recollection of Eden with often Messianic expectations of salvation to come, just as biblical commentaries celebrated the perennial pleasures and duties of gardening: As [Adam’s] charge was both to dresse the garden, in planting and nourishing of trees: in which kind of husbandrie many euen now do take a delight, and hold it rather to be a recreation, then any wearines vnto them: as also to keepe it from the spoile of the beasts . . . Adam was not to liue idely in Paradise, much lesse should we spend our daies in doing of nothing.14

Nevertheless, standing in a garden also gave opportunity for reflection, as to Ralph Austen, author of one of the most popular horticultural manuals of the century, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees. For Austen, tending to fruit trees allowed opportunity for lamentation and self-abasement.15 Beale’s correspondent John Evelyn was one of the most enthusiastic gardeners of the age. In the difficult days just before the Restoration, Evelyn proposed to withdraw from the confusions of society, and found a utopian group who would cultivate their garden: ‘a society’, he said, ‘of the Paradisi Cultores, persons of antient simplicity, paradisean and hortulan saints . . . by whome we might hope to redeeme the tyme that has bin lost’.16 Unfallen Eden was supposed to be a changeless environment; Evelyn employed evergreens in his horticultural designs.17 His fragmentary Elysium Britannicum pointedly echoed Bacon’s line on God almighty first planting a garden, and elsewhere in the work Evelyn wrote with a grammatically enforced parallelism between pre- and postlapsarian opportunities: ‘It was then indeede that the Protoplast onely remained

12

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

happy, whilst he continued in this Paradise of God; and, truely, as no man can be very miserable that is master of a Garden here; So no man will ever be happy, who is not sure of a Garden hereafter.’18 In the opening words of Evelyn’s Kalendarium hortense, the parallelism (with carefully limiting brackets) is explicit: As Paradise (though of Gods own Planting) was no longer Paradise then the Man was put into it, to dress it and to keep it; so, nor will our Gardens (as neer as we can contrive them to the resemblance of that blessed Abode) remain long in their perfection, unless they are also continually cultivated.19

At the other end of the political scale, the haberdasher and one-time army Agitator Roger Crab decided, in about 1652, to give away all he owned and take up the life of a hermit in his garden, where he ate ‘nothing but Roots, and the fruits of the Earth, and . . . fair Water’, as the press reported.20 There he turned east, and had a vision of paradise: ‘Reader, this is to let the[e] understand, when I was in my Earthly Garden, a digging with my Spade, with my face to the East side of the Garden, I saw into the Paradise of God from whence my Father Adam was cast forth . . .’21 Such partial re-enactments of paradisal behaviour appeared in many different places. Augustine’s autobiographical Confessiones had instigated this trend with the father’s anecdote about his youthful sins, including stealing fruit from someone else’s pear tree, merely ‘because we would doe that which was not lawfull’. Likewise, in his partially imitative autobiography, Richard Baxter recalled how ‘to concur with naughty Boys that gloried in evil, I have oft gone into other men’s Orchards, and stoln their Fruit, when I had enough at home’ (Baxter later recounts how he was abused in the streets of Kidderminster for preaching infant damnation as a consequence of the Fall).22 Cowley, in his remarkable ode on the Royal Society, celebrated Bacon, in an inversion of the traditional ethical signatures of the Eden narrative, as a marauding orchard-robber: With the plain magique of tru Reasons Light, He chac’d out of our sight, Nor suffer’d Living Men to be misled By the vain shadows of the Dead: To Graves, from whence it rose, the conquer’d Phantome fled; He broke that Monstrous God which stood In midst of th’Orchard, and the whole did claim, Which with a useless Sith of Wood, And something else not worth a name, (Both vast for shew, yet neither fit

The Fall

13

Or to defend, or to Beget; Ridiculous and senceless Terrors!) made Children and superstitious Men afraid. The Orchards open now, and free; Bacon has broke that Scar-crow Deitie; Come, enter, all that will, Behold the rip’ned Fruit, come gather now your Fill.23

Less salubrious figures than Bacon were again reported as copying, in various ways, Adam and his conduct. From 1641 the Adamites reappeared – heretics from the patristic era who had had isolated revivals over the centuries on the continent. These were restaged in Long-Parliament London in a string of part heresiographic, part pornographic accounts, often accompanied by lurid woodcuts of naked gatherings. As one London Adamite says, ‘I am the Sonne of Adam, who begot me in his innocencie: I follow his steps before he fell: that is, I am an Adamite.’24 Although these pamphlets were clearly spurious, some early Quakers notoriously paraded naked ‘as a sign’, often just for prophetic force, but occasionally with explicit Edenic reference. One Quaker couple toured the north under the names of Adam and Eve.25 Sudden stripping also happened in sensitive places: in 1652 one female Quaker started stripping off during a sermon given by Peter Sterry, an event which attracted a good deal of coverage.26 When the popular presses turned their attention to the Ranter phenomenon from 1649, they recycled various of the Adamite woodcuts, with minor alterations. Thus the Adamite speech-bubble ‘Downe lust’ becomes ‘Behold these are Ranters’.27 John Robins, a fanatic who sprang into prominence in 1651–2 and who, according to the press, said ‘That he was God Almighty’, apparently also stated that he was the third Adam, one better than Christ. His opponent John Reeve claimed that Robins’ disciples ate only apples and water, and that some thereby died. Robins, never shy of self-publicity, had also said that he was the first Adam ‘in state’, and that ‘Christ was a weak and imperfect Saviour, and afraid to dy, but [Robins] was not afraid to dy’.28 Another spurious anecdote about certain Quakers was related by William Kaye and then popularised by the stationer and heresiographer Thomas Underhill. Kaye had visited these Quakers in jail where he heard that ‘their Conscience telling them that they were to destroy original sin, [they] did therefore, in obedience to the lights thats in them . . . sacrifise or kill their own mother’.29 This shades into the territory of the joke, and in a related vein the mischievous Republican Henry Neville, in his series of pamphlets depicting female parliaments, had the assembled ladies

14

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

panicking that the end of the world was nigh in April 1647, because Adam and Eve ‘were seen both in one person, and whereas Eue was once taken out of Adam, Adam was now seen strut[t]ing out of Eue’. Later on in the century, Neville was to write an internationally successful hoax, The Isle of Pines (1668), in which a sophisticated critique of patriarchalism was undertaken via a rewrite of the Genesis narrative, set on a distant desert island. Despite or arguably because of its clear structural affinity with Genesis, it was taken by some as fact: shortly after publication Louis XIV’s secretary Henri Justel wrote to Henry Oldenburg, one of the Royal Society’s two secretaries, to confirm that The Isle of Pines was real, and with his recommendations about how its inhabitants should be treated, living as they did untroubled by lawyers, quacks and theologians. Oldenburg had to disabuse him; Justel was not pleased.30 This selection of anecdotes introduces us to the variety and extent of talk about the matter in Eden and its consequences. Next, though, we need to understand the theological underpinning that created this environment in which the Fall and original sin were so important. This will involve phrasing the problem in early-modern terms, and then, in the next chapter, exploring its theological origins in patristic thought, following its course in outline up to the age of Milton. First, then, we need to understand the concept and the problems of the Fall, and what kinds of decisions can be taken about these problems. Western monotheistic Christianity – or any other monotheistic religion that holds God to be both benevolent and omniscient – has a basic problem: in Boethius’ well-known formulation, si quidem deus est, unde mala? bona vere unde, si non est? – ‘[if ] there be a God, from whence proceed so many euils? and if there be no God, from whence commeth any good?’31 It is the first of these questions that necessitates the device of the Fall, a story to explain why evil and the God of love coexist. In Aristotelian thought the propensity of man to err was discussed simply in terms of inherent weaknesses: kakia (vice), acrasia (unrestraint) and theriotes (bestiality) are properties of man, and not, moreover, properties that require theological justification.32 In Judaeo-Christian terms, however, justification was sought, and in narrative form: the question was now phrased in terms of historical happenings, and not explained as a timeless property of man. Presuming God to be an unchanging good, and accepting the real existence of evil in the world, such evil had to have been caused by man, and caused, so readers conditioned by the primarily historical genres of the Old Testament naturally assumed, by a specific man or men at a specific time.

The Fall 15 One early attempt to identify a plausible Fall story in the early Old Testament latched onto the account in Genesis 6:2 ‘. . . the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose’, causing hybrid offspring. At least two early-modern English readers reinterpreted this section of the Old Testament as implying the existence of two genetically distinct strands of humanity, an Adamite and a pre-Adamite branch: ‘that the Sons of Adam of the second Creation, saw the Daughters of the Men of the first Creation that they were fair, and married them’.33 Such an interpretation, of course, was rare, and the use of Genesis 6 itself as a Fall narrative had been rejected in the Jewish literature of the immediately pre-Christian centuries in favour of the now familiar tale of Adam and Eve, naked in Eden.34 The point is that neither Genesis 6 nor Genesis 2–3 was designed to house an aetiology for universal sinfulness; and attempts to found such a doctrine on either section of Genesis are posterior, and hence likely to encounter certain problems of fit. Concentration on Genesis 2–3, though, in equating the problem of evil with the creation and subsequent behaviour of the two first people, had one stark problem and one stark advantage. The advantage was that the problem of evil was thus more obviously concentrated on purely human agents, without the problematic influence of marauding angels, although the role of the serpent, subsequently interpreted as Satan, qualifies this advantage. It also cleared the stage: Genesis 2–3 is much more explicit about what two humans did and said than Genesis 6 with its vague ‘daughters of men’. Again, the Flood following Genesis 6 was supposed to have wiped out the monstrous brood of the human–angelic marriages, hence eradicating that recension of original sin, and so Genesis 6 fails to solve the problem of whence current original sin derives. The disadvantage of privileging Genesis 3 was that it associated questions concerning the origin of evil with questions concerning the status of creation itself. Making creation and Fall contiguous makes one wonder whether man was made fallible, and if so, why? So, if we accept the axioms of an omniscient and benevolent God and the fact of a fall of some kind in Eden, we have a number of choices we must make concerning our estimation of the status of unfallen man: and almost all early-modern discussions are conditioned by where they locate themselves in relation to this choice. Either we imagine that Adam and Eve were created perfect, or we imagine that they were created imperfect. If we choose the former version, we will be likely to regard the Fall as a plunge from heights to depths, a catastrophe severing the realm of

16

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

perfection from the realm of the fallen, a cosmic disaster. If we stress the latter, we will take a more lenient view of the matter in Eden, saying that man maybe is not so different after the Fall from what he was before it; that man was made to fall, and that, trusting in the inscrutable wisdom of God, we ought not to worry about it too much.35 We may even take Genesis literally and celebrate a paradoxical promotion, for does not God admit at Genesis 3:22, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us to know good and evil’? Perhaps the forbidden fruit did contain real wisdom. And with this suspicion that the ‘Fall’ may be no such thing, a third way of thinking is generated out of the second, a tendency to query what this god was doing making prohibitions at all, if our gain was for our good. We may even find ourselves regarding this botching demiurge of vain prohibitions as a jealous tyrant, though that is of course an almost impossible admission in this period. So from the two initial options spring three tendencies, which appear mutually exclusive. The first two agree that God is good but disagree about the perfection of his creation. The second and third versions identify creation as imperfect but make opposing estimations of the moral status of the creator. The third position exists as the shadowy antithesis to the first but in Christian literature for obvious reasons its influence is felt as a threat rather than as a positive thesis. The first position, historically, is associated with the Western Church and its Latin fathers, particularly Augustine (354–430). Later, after a period of the modification of Augustinianism, certain reactionary movements in late scholasticism, especially Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358) and the schola Augustiniana moderna, reinstated the father’s original gloom. Gregory’s admirers, with respect to his patristic commitment, called him the Doctor authenticus; his opponents called him the Tortor infantium, the torturer of children, reflecting his Augustinian insistence that unbaptised babies, tainted as they are with original sin, go to hell.36 Next, with the advent of the Reformation, the Augustinian understanding of the Fall assumed theological centrality, especially in the Calvinist inflection so influential in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The second tendency, less ambitious in its initial estimation of and thus more lenient in judgement on the first man and woman, was developed in the Eastern Church by the Greek fathers, most influentially in the writings of Irenaeus (c. 140–c. 200), who in his maturity came west to become the bishop of Lyons. Although this version of the Fall became the heterodoxy in Augustinian Europe, its logical force persisted, and indeed certain German Spirituals, particularly Sebastian Franck, resurrected the

The Fall 17 Irenaean interpretation as part of their anti-Lutheran theologies. This tradition had an important influence in England in the radical decades, as we shall see. Other important carriers were Socinians, who, in seeking to limit the status of Christ, limited the extent of the Fall and the initial grandeur of man. Consequently, they made Adam ‘a rude unwritten Blanck’ or an ‘idiot’, as South and Milton respectively complained.37 As Socinus said, ‘Whatever Divines dispute about Original Sin, it is all of it clearly to be reckon’d as the mere invention and forgery of humane wit’; original sin was ‘a Jewish Fable, and brought into the Church from Antichrist’.38 Stephen Nye, the Socinian controversialist and first English historian of the sect, wrote that to say that God imputes sin to us and then damns us for it is to draw ‘the just Character of an Almighty Devil. For if the Devil had Supream Power, what worse could he do[?]’39 One need not be a conscious heretic to slip into thinking about newly made Adam in child-like terms, however. The characterist John Earle in his Micro-cosmography (1628), for instance, wrote that ‘A Childe . . . Is a Man in a small Letter, yet the best Copie of Adam before hee tasted of Eue or the Apple . . . His Soule is yet a white paper vnscribled with obseruations of the world, wherewith it becomes a blurr’d Note-booke.’40 Francis Osborne, ‘an old atheistical courtier’ who wrote an Oxford student best-seller, Advice to a Son, also essayed ‘A Contemplation on Adams Fall’. This idiosyncratic piece sought to excuse Adam and Eve or at least lessen their culpability in various ways. Adam was ‘no better furnished with Knowledge than an Infant in his Primitive Innocencie’, said Osborne, which is why he desired more. Osborne also suggested that Adam’s naming of the beasts constituted a prophecy of the Fall, as his etymologies were ‘suitable to the sinful Use [which] was after to be made of them’. Eve is less to blame than Adam because while she did try to shift some responsibility onto the serpent, at least after the Fall she didn’t have the cheek to remind God, as Adam did, just who was responsible for having created such fallible beings.41 Others simply rejected the Fall altogether. William Rabisha, the mysterious soldier-preacher-cook, wrote that Adam was ‘in his own nature one and the same for ever; for he was made of the earth earthly’.42 More socially conservative figures like Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Traherne went back directly to Greek patristics, part of the general resurgence of interest in the Greek fathers as a complement to the Augustinianism of the schools. The final, highly subversive reaction to the narrative of the Fall – to call God bad – is almost invisible in the early-modern period, but any

18

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

educated person would recognise it as a tenet of the patristic heresy of Gnosticism. Most Gnostic writings remained undiscovered in the seventeenth century, but Gnostic beliefs had been recorded and refuted principally by Irenaeus and Epiphanius, although material was also available from Tertullian, Augustine, Philastrius of Brescia and Theodoret of Cyrus. Accounts of the Gnostics also filtered through vernacular Church histories. One Civil War yellow-press heresiographer, for instance, managed to list a bewildering number of impossible ‘Cavalier’ sects supposed to be stalking the streets of 1640s London: joining Jesuits and Arminians, there were Adamites, Minanders, Ebionites, Corinthuses, Nicholitains, Marcions, Encraticae, Valentinians – thirty-three groups altogether. Many of these sects were (mis)named after Gnostic sects, and the anonymous writer has simply lifted most of the names from Patrick Simson’s Historie of the Church, the third book of which listed with thumb-nail biographies the principal heretics from Simon Magus to the Pope.43 An important semi-Gnostic text was translated and published by John Everard in 1649 – the Corpus hermeticum. Isaac Casaubon’s now celebrated philological demolition of its supposed antiquity comprised merely an incidental few pages of his 1614 De rebus sacris, and so Everard could still announce untroubled over three decades later that the Corpus hermeticum was ‘written some hundreds of yeers before Moses his time’.44 The Corpus hermeticum contained a disturbing kind of Fall narrative, a cataclysm in the primal heaven itself: But after a little while, there was a darkness made in part, coming down obliquely, fearful and hideous, which seemed unto me to be changed into a certain moyst nature, unspeakably troubled, which yielded a smoke as from fire; and from whence proceeded a voyce unutterable, and very mournful, but inarticulate, insomuch that it seemed to have come from the Light.45

Two years later, Thomas Totney, writing under the prophetic name of Theauraujohn Tany, pushed back the Fall to the point of creation itself: ‘Know the fall is being created, for when we were not created, and uncome forth, we were as he is, that is in perfection.’46 This Gnostic tradition, then, was visible in seventeenth-century England, although as with the Irenaean tendency it exerted influence not so much as a witnessed belief as a set of possible thoughts, both preserved and occurring in often quite different milieux. These tendencies were not nearly as distinct as they might seem. The connection between the Irenaean and Gnostic models was pointed out by

The Fall 19 orthodox theologians. Thus the Utrecht theologian Saldenus, commenting on the supposed properties of the forbidden tree, wrote: It is said to be of the species ‘tree’, which suffices, but it is also said to be a ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. By which appellation in no sense is there placed any efficacy or power in the tree itself for engendering or multiplying wisdom, such as many of the ancient writers supposed and as the Socinians would have it today. Upon which error, doubtless, was the madness of the Ophites [a Gnostic sect] founded, who once held in veneration the serpent-seducer above all others because of its deeds, by which men were led to taste of the tree, and thereby to gain knowledge of good and evil, which before they did not have. No indeed, they went further, and put the serpent in place of Christ, or what is even worse, blasphemed that Christ was actually changed into it.47

But the dominant tradition, with its stark logic of perfect God, perfect creation, itself had some necessary kinship with its subversive counterparts, a kinship driven by the difficulty of constructing a convincing narrative out of the Augustinian position. If man was created perfect, he would not fall. Because he did, elements of imperfection, whether phrased in metaphysical terms of the inherent instability of matter or in psychosexual terms of Adam unable to resist Eve, had to be admitted. Narrative explorations of the event of the Fall almost always noticed this problem. The Quaker Isaac Penington the Younger adopted the metaphysical tack: ‘Nothing can act above its nature. Adam when he fell, shewed the weakness of his nature, The Prince of this World came and found somewhat in him to fasten upon. Frailty is a property of the flesh. Weakness is proper to the earthly image, as strength to the heavenly.’48 The problem with the narrative attack on the conventional understanding of the Fall was simply that it failed as theodicy. Dogma could not really explain easily how man got from one side of the Fall to the other, but its principles were secure: God remained good, axiomatically so. The objection that some frailty was needed was designed to explain how man got from one side to the other, but it was obviously flawed in terms of explaining why rather than how this had taken place. As Stephens retorted to Everard, scepticism concerning the original splendour of Adam ‘to my understanding doth cast a blurre upon the Creator himselfe’.49 So a certain clandestine reciprocity between these models is needed in practice, as what the one lacks, the other supplies. And if the conventional tendency required, at some point, elements of the second, it therefore might find itself closer on occasion to the third, Gnostic, tendency, than it had imagined. This is partly a question of genre. The Reformed understanding of the Fall and of original sin was dogmatic, and dogmatically disseminated. The

20

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

paradigm is the catechism, designed to be repeated by children until it is mechanically known and perhaps mechanically believed. It has no need of narrative sophistication. Edward Elton’s popular A Forme of Catechizing, typical of such texts, managed the process of the Fall in three questions and answers.50 Catechisms, understandably, emphasised effects, not causes: The woman deceiued by the deuill, perswaded the man to taste the forbidden fruite, which thing made them both forthwith subiect to death. And that heauenly image according to which he was first created, being defaced, in place of wisdome, strength, holinesse, truth and righteousnesse, the iewelles wherewith God had adorned him, there succeded the most horrible plages, blindnesse, weaknesse, vaine lying, and unrighteousness, in which euils and miseries he also wrapped and ouerwhelmed his issue and all his posteritie.51

Despite the impeccable orthodoxy of such statements, many of the constituent components were not deducible from Genesis, which does not state that the serpent is the devil, fails to explain why Adam and Eve do not die upon eating the fruit, has nothing to say about the effects of the transgression on Adam’s posterity, and does not specify its causal role in terms of subsequent diseases and sins. Indeed, as we saw, God says in Genesis 3:22 not that ‘blindnesse’ was the result of the Fall but that Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened, and they had become as gods themselves. In response to this troubling statement, orthodox commentators, in a moment of pure doctrinal imperative, glossed this verse as spoken ironically. Gregory of Rimini thought it proof that God could lie.52 Luther said that it was ‘a sarcasm and bitter derision’; vernacular commentators followed suit: ‘vttered ironice, by way of derision’; ‘a bitter mock’. The Geneva Bible marginalium is ‘derision’. In this way, God becomes the first person to joke in the Bible, and it is a grisly joke.53 On the other hand, it is not as simple as saying that catechism represents one extreme, and epic, say, the other: ‘credal’ versus ‘experimental’ forms, to adapt familiar terms from a different argument in this period.54 Rather, writing about the Fall traverses the spectrum between such extremes, and single texts can include diverse hues. Milton’s Paradise Lost, for instance, contains sections of more dogmatic material, and then sections where such dogma is tried out. If these three tendencies, then, have certain interdependences, it is nonetheless true that the Augustinian strand was dominant in seventeenth-century England, though under increasing pressure. First, then, the history and structure of the Augustinian Fall must be delineated, and its inherent tensions revealed.

chapter 2

Augustinianism

AUGUSTINE

‘Let us admit’, wrote Voltaire on original sin, ‘that Saint Augustine was the first to authorise this strange idea, worthy of the fiery and romantic head of a debauched and repentant African, Manichaean and Christian, indulgent and persecuted, who spent his life contradicting himself.’ 1 Augustine also incurred the wit of Gibbon, who brilliantly described the Western Church’s adoption of the father’s teachings as conducted ‘with public applause and secret reluctance’.2 Such enlightened scorn was not the dominant tone of the age. The first full English translation of the City of God appeared in 1610 with the influential annotations of Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), featuring on its title page a picture of the Sun dispersing its rays with the motto SIC AVGVSTINVS DISSIPABIT – ‘Thus will Augustine spread abroad.’ The continental Reformation itself had been intellectually established on the re-editing of Augustine, particularly the later Augustine. As Luther wrote in May 1517, ‘Our theology and St Augustine are progressing well . . . Aristotle is gradually falling from his throne.’3 In 1506 Amerbach published his landmark eleven-volume edition of Augustine at Basel, where Erasmus, who had earlier persuaded Vives to write his commentary on the City of God, produced his own edition of the father in 1528–9. The other major edition of Augustine prior to the celebrated Maurist edition of 1679–1700 was the one prepared by the Louvain theologians and printed at Antwerp in 1576–7. English vernacular consciousness of Augustine was well-served, though it is notable that publication of translations of Augustine somewhat petered out as the seventeenth century progressed. Various sermons and tracts appeared throughout the sixteenth century, particularly during the reforming years of Edward’s reign, but the major works only appeared in the first half of the seventeenth century. We have seen that the City of God 21

22

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

was published in 1610; the Enchiridion had appeared three years previously, and the Confessions were translated first by the Roman Catholic Sir Tobie Matthew in 1620 and published at Saint Omer, prompting William Watts’ 1631 Protestant effort, with ‘the marginall notes of a former Popish translation, answered’, as its title page advertised. The early moderns, though, possessed no complete printed translations of either The Trinity, or, of more relevance here, the mature Literal Commentary on Genesis, but access to Latin editions of these and other works was not problematic, and Augustine’s later thought on the Fall could easily be extracted from the middle books of the City of God. Reformed teaching was in any case largely based upon Augustinian sources, and the brand of Calvinism that reached England in the sixteenth century, particularly through the mediation of Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr and Theodore Beza, had a recognisably Augustinian attitude to the Fall. In keeping with his own intellectual biography, Augustine’s ideas on the Fall were not static, but evolved over his prolific career. Pelagius, for instance, could even quote the young Augustine against the old Augustine on the freedom of the will.4 For our purposes, the sites of most importance occur in the Literal Commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram, hereafter LC; composed 401–14), and the central books of the City of God (De civitate Dei, hereafter CG; these books composed 417–20), later distilled in the Enchiridion (hereafter E; composed 421–2).5 The late anti-Pelagian works necessarily engage with Genesis, and Augustine also left various earlier commentaries, finished and unfinished, on Genesis. Augustine’s mature thought was shaped by controversy, with specific reference to the British monk Pelagius, and various other Pelagian or semi-Pelagian theologians, notably Julian of Aeclanum. Pelagius had a reputation for asceticism – though Jerome did say that he was stuffed with Scottish porridge – and in early fifth-century Rome he popularised the notion that man was able of his own free will to perfect himself. This, though, required Pelagius to reject the Fall, or at least its consequences, which he enthusiastically did. Commenting on the crucial verse Romans 5:12 – ‘. . .as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned’ – Pelagius insisted that Adam’s Fall applied to his posterity merely as an example or pattern. Hereditary transmission of original sin and the guilt associated with it were mere doctrinal fictions.6 This was the position against which Augustine had to define his views on the origin and effects of sin. There were various prior exegeses of Genesis, often allegorically tinged, on which Augustine could draw. We mentioned in the last chapter the

Augustinianism 23 Greek tradition represented in the West by Irenaeus, who wrote of Adam in innocence: ‘man was a child, not yet having his understanding perfected; wherefore he was easily led astray by the deceiver’.7 But in the West the greatest influences on Augustine were Tertullian, the African jurist-turned-Christian apologist, and the so-called Ambrosiaster, commentator on Paul. Tertullian and Ambrosiaster both emphasised the literal truth of the events of Genesis 2–3, and the ensuing depravity of man, which must therefore be transmitted from parent to child as a seminal toxin. Ambrosiaster, commenting on Romans 5:12, which ends, in the Authorised Version’s translation of the Greek construction, ‘. . . for that all have sinned’, used instead the Old Latin Bible, which read ‘in quo omnes peccaverunt’, ‘in whom [i.e. Adam] all have sinned’ (my italics). This reading, also preserved in the Vulgate, is nevertheless a mistranslation of the Greek eph’ from epi, ‘inasmuch, because’. What had been a statement connecting death and sin in a causally ambiguous fashion became the statement that all had sinned in Adam, the fulcrum text for those who wished to argue for the biological transmission of original sin (‘traducianism’), or for the seminal presence of all mankind in Adam’s loins. This did not mean, however, that pointing out the error disposed of the doctrine, as ethical convictions are based on deeper foundations than chance mistranslations.8 Augustine, for instance, would later argue for the seminal identity of all mankind in Adam on the reasoning that while Adam was made from the dust, which is something different from flesh, all his progeny were made from flesh, and therefore all creation was in Adam (CG 13.3). Augustine’s own ideas follow closely the writings of Tertullian and Ambrosiaster. He insisted that Genesis 2–3 must be understood as literally having happened, though amenable to allegorical readings, of which Augustine produced at least two, the early Allegorical Commentary on Genesis and the last books of the Confessions. But the literal truth had to be preserved, especially as, for Augustine, in order for the prophetic, typological elements of the Old Testament to be instances of God’s design in history, they had to be located within a fabric of entirely real happenings. In this way, paradoxically, Augustine promoted all Old Testament narrative to the level of fact while simultaneously subordinating it to the figural structures for which such facts serve as material.9 Augustine’s emphasis on the literal truth of Genesis also reflects his rejection of moments in his earlier writings in which he had speculated about the Fall in terms of a Plotinian fall-into-flesh.10 Again following Tertullian and Ambrosiaster, Augustine stressed the disaster of the Fall

24

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

and all humanity’s implication in it. His mature thinking, though, is a complex of various movements, and although his understanding of the Fall is bleak, he did not, pace Voltaire, simply invent the doctrine, nor is the texture of his argumentation merely dogmatic. Indeed, Augustine deliberately thinks his way through some dangerous areas using a mixture of narrative and dogmatic approaches, and the result is a kind of laboratory of thought-in-process rather than a credal digest. Augustine’s Adam and Eve are mature, tranquil figures, untroubled by any adverse mental or physical motions. Adam, had the occasion arisen, would have masterfully controlled his erections, and he and Eve would have coupled lustlessly (Augustine then closes off this line of thought by asserting that they fell before they had consummated their marriage; CD 14.26).11 Because God brought the beasts to Adam for him to name, so Augustine told Julian, Adam must have been possessed of the greatest of intelligence.12 Before the Fall the first humans suffered from no emotional disturbance or perturbatio, and ‘there was no depressing gloom at all, no unreal gaiety’ to trouble their steady thoughts (CD 14.10, 26). In such stasis did they live, in an environment that nonetheless seemed to have been designed for temptation, with its forbidden and unforbidden trees. Importantly, this vision of prelapsarian tranquillity was to underpin a widespread discussion on the origin and governance of emotional disturbance – the early-modern theory of the ‘passions’. The current mental turmoil suffered by all men was traced explicitly to the Fall, and defined in opposition to the state of affairs that had obtained before this calamity for mental equilibrium. As J. F. Senault wrote, deriving his authority from Augustine, ‘In this happy estate the soul commanded with mildness, the body obeyed with delight, and whatsoever object presented it self, these two parties did alwaies agree.’13 Another writer on the passions pointed out that had Adam not fallen all his posterity would possess equal ability ‘to apprehend the mysteries of Nature’, and the phenomenon of relative intelligence would not be.14 Such uncompromising elevation of Adam and Eve led Norman Powell Williams to present Augustine as the extreme manifestation of the tendency to exalt Adam and Eve in their first creation. But, as J. M. Evans suggested, Augustine’s thought is slightly more nuanced.15 Even despite the logical impossibility of ultimate exaltation – Adam and Eve would then be indistinguishable from God and no creation would have taken place – Augustine is careful to stress the conditional nature of Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian state. First, they were not created constitutionally free from death but only conditionally so (CD 13.1). This distinction

Augustinianism 25 Augustine defined in the Literal Commentary and the Enchiridion as the difference between the angelic state of non posse mori, not being able to die, and the unfallen human posse non mori, able not to die (LC 6.25.36, E 28.105). They can will good, but they can also will evil (E 28.105). In this way, they are suspended in a position halfway between the angels and the beasts: For he [God] created man’s nature to be midway, so to speak, between the angels and the beasts in such a way that, if he should remain in subjection to his creator as his true Lord and with dutiful obedience keep his commandment, he was to pass into the company of the angels, obtaining with no intervening death a blissful immortality that has no limit; but if he should make proud and disobedient use of his free will and go counter to the Lord his God, he was to live like a beast, at the mercy of death, and enthralled by lust and doomed to eternal punishment after death. (CG 12.22)

This was a classic, much repeated sentiment, but Augustine perhaps derived it from the Eastern father Theophilus, the second-century bishop of Antioch, who had used the same distinction in his own early discussion of the Fall. Theophilus puts the problem in a nutshell: ‘[f]or if God had made him [Adam] immortal from the beginning, he would have made him God. Again, if he had made him mortal, it would seem that God was responsible for his death.’ So God created him ‘in an intermediate state’.16 The ambiguity of this ‘middling man’ model, though, is obvious when one compares Theophilus’ idea of middling with that of Augustine: Theophilus quite explicitly says that Adam was forbidden the fruit of knowledge because he was a child and so not yet ready for it, whereas Augustine emphasised Adam’s maturity.17 The tendency of the Augustinian usage to slip towards the Theophilan is seen in the seventeenth century in phrases such as Raphael’s to Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost that ‘God made thee perfet, not immutable’ (PL 5.524), a direct quotation from at least William Perkins; and the whole matter was laconically summarised by the Calvinist commentator Zacharias Ursinus, who noted ‘the equivocation and ambiguitie in the word Perfect’.18 Augustine, then, develops a qualified position in which mere perfection is shaded into something more conditional. In the Literal Commentary he adds, ‘I do not think that a man would have deserved great praise if he had been able to live a good life for the simple reason that nobody tempted him to live a bad one’ (LC 11.4.6). Nevertheless he does not qualify the consequences of the Fall. We all fell in Adam, and even though ‘we did not yet have individually created and apportioned shapes in which to live

26

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

as individuals; what already existed was the seminal substance from which we were to be generated’ (CG 13.14). This makes us guilty: ‘whatever should spring from their stock was also to be held liable to the same penalty’ (CG 13.3). We are lucky God hasn’t damned the whole lot of us as a result, and he would have been perfectly just to do so (E 25.99). So much for Augustine’s understanding of man before and after the Fall; how, then, does man get across the Fall? In the Literal Commentary, Augustine had proposed two types of knowing evil: through knowledge of good, and through experience (LC 8.14.31). Adam and Eve unfallen possessed the former, and fallen, the latter. For the Augustine of this work, evil can be known innocently by contemplating and avoiding the inverse of good. It is noteworthy that this argument does not appear in the corresponding discussion in the City of God. There, as we saw, innocence relies on not feeling perturbatio. This is, however, a different approach to evil from that adopted in the Literal Commentary, where the mental barrier between pre- and postlapsarian states is akin to the difference between a doctor knowing a disease and a patient contracting it. The contemplative knowledge of evil is supplanted in the City of God by a kind of insulation from knowledge of evil. Granted, the ideas of knowledge per prudentiam boni and a lack of perturbatio are not strictly incompatible, but the emphasis has shifted. In the City of God the unfallen mind is both a more static and a more implicitly frail original, with fewer testing experiences allowed near it. While Augustine asserts the tranquillity of unfallen man, he also makes unfallen man more distant and unratiocinative, defined as innocent primarily by his lack of perturbation rather than by his doctorly knowledge of the ills one must avoid. Hence the old narrative problem is exacerbated: how can Eve desire a fruit unlawfully without feeling perturbation? How can Adam assent to Eve? There must have been a fall, perhaps some falls, before the Fall. The per prudentiam boni/per experientiam distinction had the advantage of giving a clearly delineated Fall. At the point at which one becomes the other, the apple is taken. But recourse to perturbatio is at once more psychologically persuasive and less definite, replacing a vertical line separating two states with a zone of indeterminacy. The public act is now preceded by the private transgression. Augustine meets this problem, and in 14.11–13 of the City of God he accepts the consequence that the hard typological, single Fall must be replaced with a more protracted phenomenon: ‘in Adam’s transgression the evil act was preceded by an evil will’. Voluntas has to come before opus: ‘the evil act could not have been arrived at if an evil will had not

Augustinianism 27 gone before’ (14.13). Otherwise the Fall would be mere puppetry. Yet the bifurcation of the old Fall produces two different kinds of fall: a public, easily locatable fall, and a secret, occluded fall. At this point in the argument of the City of God Augustine could have introduced into his discussion of the causation of the Fall the character of Satan in the serpent, as the agent or at least external (‘procatarctic’, in the terms of early-modern logic) cause of the first, shadowy fall of the human mind.19 Yet Augustine chooses not to do this, accepting that a tempter needs temptable subjects. Thus, Eve had already experienced the first fall when the serpent approached her, and likewise Adam when Eve approached him: Now this first falling away is voluntary [spontaneus], for if the will had remained steadfast in love of the higher unchangeable good that provided it with fire to love, it would not have been diverted from this love to follow its own pleasure. Nor would the will in consequence have grown so dark and cold as to allow either the first woman to believe that the serpent had spoken the truth or the first man to place his wife’s will before God’s injunction. (14.13)

Augustine then repeats this remarkable conclusion: ‘the evil act was committed only by those who were already evil’. This first evil happened in occulto: ‘in secret they began to be evil, and this enabled them to fall into open disobedience’ (14.13). What is the relation between these two falls? Augustine now betrays slight unease: In short, the fall that takes place in secret preceded the fall that takes place in full view, but the former fall is not to be regarded as such. For who considers exaltation a fall, though there is already present in it the lapse whereby the Most High is deserted? On the other hand, who could fail to see that there is a fall when a manifest and unquestionable transgression of some command takes place? (14.13)

Nevertheless it is hard to see why from God’s omniscient point of view the second of these falls is any more significant than the first. If God had to decide on one, surely the fall of the will would be a better choice than the apple-taking? Although Augustine feels the need to reaffirm the physical transgression, he has by this point dissolved the typological outlines with which he had started, and replaced them with an indeterminate expanse, stretched between a visible terminus ad quem and an invisible, potentially recursive terminus a quo. Did Adam and Eve fall together? How soon after creation did they fall? Were their wills untroubled at any point excepting the instant of their creation? What would

28

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

have happened if their wills fell but they thought better of taking the apple? Could they fall off from grace and then repair themselves? These are the kinds of questions for which Augustine does not provide answers, although other generic contexts will render them insistent. Instead Augustine seeks to curtail discussion of such issues, and he employs a number of different devices to this end. Although he emphasises that it is the act of turning, not the object to which one turns, that is bad – ‘the lapse is not to what is bad, the lapse is bad’ (12.7) – he can also on occasion attempt to reunite turning and the object turned to, the private and the public fall. Meditating on Matthew 7:17–18 (‘Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit’), Augustine encourages us to see the evil will of the fall in occulto as itself the fruit. It is a complex manoeuvre, but, following the logic of the thought, the apple thus becomes a metonymy for itself being taken: ‘the will itself, or man himself in so far as he was possessed of an evil will, was the evil tree, as it were, that bore the evil fruit that those works represented’ (14.11). If this were to be illustrated graphically, a hand is reaching for a fruit, which fruit is itself a hand reaching for another fruit, which in turn repeats the action, and so on. But contact is never made. Augustine’s attempt to equate the will with its object by means of visual metaphor evasively freezes the causality of paradise into a tableau of incompletion. This is because Augustine cannot admit a positive will to transgress as that would grant evil a positive existence, and on Augustine’s Neoplatonic understanding evil is not a thing at all; it is the absence of good, literally nothing: ‘For evil has in itself no substance; rather the loss of what is good has received the name evil’ (11.9). Such a model has the advantage that it overcomes the objections of the Gnostics or the Manichees, who held that there were two positive principles at work in the world, one good and the other evil, and that matter was the realm of the evil principle (11.13, 22). As Augustine says, good can exist on its own – God – but evil cannot (12.3). To interpret evil as a real thing is simply a linguistic move – in Augustine’s metaphors, it is like trying to see darkness or to hear silence (12.7). The privative theory of evil is open to the criticism that in Aristotelian terms it provides no efficient cause for evil, and Augustine deals with this problem in his discussion of Lucifer. Aristotle, in the third chapter of the second book of the Physics, had enumerated the four causes that exhaust causality: formal, material, efficient and final (an apple is made to the form of an apple, out of vegetable substance, by the tree from which it

Augustinianism 29 derives, for people to eat). In Augustinian terms, formal and material categories do not apply to sin, and the final cause must always be for the greater glory of God; as Augustine says, ‘at the very moment when God created the devil, although in his own goodness he created him good, he had already through his own foreknowledge prepared a way to use him even after he became bad’ (11.17). Augustine is left with the efficient cause of the evil will – which Augustine then rejects. His reasoning is noteworthy. Augustine, discussing the first sin, admits that an evil will must be the efficient cause of an evil deed, and as we saw he will later use this decision to bifurcate the next fall, the Fall in Eden. But when one asks for the efficient cause of the evil will, no answer is found, because ‘nothing is the efficient cause of an evil will’ (12.6). Indeed, as he titles his subsequent chapter, ‘an efficient cause of an evil will must not be sought [non esse quaerendam]’. He continues: ‘No one then should look for an efficient cause of an evil will, for the cause is not one of efficiency but deficiency even as the evil will is not an effect but a defect’ (12.7). Augustine derives from the tangible notions of a defect or the act of defecting (defectio, deficere) the intangible ‘deficient’ (deficiens) cause, a notion resting on its aural similarity to the efficient cause.20 But in Aristotelian terms there is no antonym of the efficient cause, nor any accompanying antonyms of the other three. There are four, not eight causes. Attempts to construct others based on the verbal possibility of antonym are mere puns. And lest it be argued that Augustine is embarking upon a subtle critique of Aristotelian causality from a Neoplatonic standpoint, his final words in this paragraph arrest cogitation: ‘Hence let no one seek from me to know what I know that I do not know, except it be in order to learn how not to know what we should know cannot be known.’ Earlier, in the Literal Commentary, he had imposed a similar ban on the question of why God didn’t make man just a little bit more sufficient to have stood: ‘Obviously he is able. So why didn’t he? Because he didn’t want to. And why he didn’t want to is his business. For we ought not to know more than it is proper to know’ (LC 11.10.13).21 Furthermore, Augustine’s account of the creation of the angels raised the problem that the angels who fell seem not to have possessed the same extent of wisdom as the angels who stood: ‘who can clearly determine to what extent they partook of that wisdom before they had sinned?’ (LC 11.11). This comes dangerously close to admitting that the angels-to-fall were created with that propensity, and at least one influential modern theologian, arguing for a rehabilitation of the Irenaean understanding of

30

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

creation, has judged Augustine’s theodicy to founder on exactly this problem.22 Again, R. F. Brown, in his powerful and negative critique of Augustine on evil, notes that the unfallen angels appear to have been created with that assurance, and therefore literally determined not to sin. Real freedom is only possessed by the angels-to-fall.23 Two chapters later, despite surrounding protests to the contrary, Augustine finally admits: ‘So we must conclude either that the angels were unequal in rank or, if they were actually once equal, it was after the fall of the sinning angels that the others acquired certain knowledge of their own everlasting felicity’ (11.13). The Augustinian Fall, then, is a complicated and indeed somewhat mysterious thing. As the father wrote of original sin itself, ‘nothing is more important to proclaim; nothing is more hidden from the understanding’.24 He inherited, refined, authorised and transmitted a set of decisions about the angelic and human falls more influential than any other comparable set – indeed, he effectively blocked the possibility of organised opposition in the West for many centuries, and dissent almost always took the form of modification rather than rejection. But Augustine’s actual writings on the whole matter, as we have seen, are often experimental, willing to explore narrative techniques of making sense of the opening chapters of the Bible, and this experimentalism both enlivens Augustine’s writing and destabilises its doctrinal output. Augustine replaced one human fall with at least two, one happening in the mind, one in public. He admitted that man might have been made better. He stated that too much thinking was not good. He was not above using pun as a rhetorical tool. Perhaps the angels had not all possessed the same mental surety before the Fall, he wonders. ‘Augustinianism’, then, is a very much more fraught business than its credal digests let on: ‘All seemd well pleas’d, all seem’d, but were not all’ (PL 5.617). ANSELM TO ARMINIANISM

Such was the inheritance of the continental Reformers, although after a long succession of adjustments usually concerned to lessen the force of Augustine’s doctrinal base. Anselm, under the guise of obedience to the father, considerably softened the father’s teachings, holding the fallen appetite morally neutral unless acted upon; children, moreover, suffer merely from a deprivation of original justice rather than themselves being depraved, the hallmark distinction between Augustinian and most scholastic models of original sin.25 For Augustine, original sin was both

Augustinianism 31 ineradicable and incriminatory; later thinkers preferred to suppress the second attribute, while not quarrelling with the first. After Anselm, on the continent the ‘Chartrain School’ displaced Genesis with Timaeus, offering allegorised readings of creation shorn of any obvious fall at all. Such allegorism was ousted by the Magister sententiarum, Peter Lombard, the twelfth-century theologian whose Sententiae was adopted as the host text for subsequent medieval commentary. Lombard and his colleagues and immediate predecessors developed subtle discussions of the Fall and its causes, ventilating the timing of external versus internal temptation, whether Adam sinned more than Eve or not, and whether the psychogenesis of sin can be abstracted into stages. Lombard himself helpfully distinguished between suggestio and consensus, temptation and capitulation, arguing that only the latter constituted sin.26 Yet the Anselmic revision persisted. Thomist teaching portrayed the original righteousness of Adam as a donum supernaturale, a gift added to Adam’s nature qua human nature, something of which one could be deprived, like other dona, but not an intrinsic quality the loss of which causes depravity. Aquinas was quite clear that Adam did not possess knowledge of all things, and placed him ‘half way between what the present state of knowledge is, and what is the knowledge of the fatherland [i.e. heaven], where God is seen in his essence’. Adam, like other humans, would grow into a state of knowledge rather than having it all given to him at once. The trees of Eden did not actually contain the things their names suggested.27 Duns Scotus went as far as to say that Adam had to be tempted, and that concupiscence was not part of original sin, but natural to man, all men. Likewise Gabriel Biel considered man to be ab initio potentially rebellious. As Heiko Oberman summarises, ‘the differences between the deficiencies of Adam’s nature before and after the possession of original justice is certainly not a qualitative but a quantitative one: the difficulties have increased, the struggles intensified’.28 The moral thrust of Augustinian anthropology, with its material and mental plunges from heights to depths, had been replaced by a more conservative model of gifts and subtractions. The predominantly Aristotelian anthropology of the schoolmen was, as it were, uninflected: Aristotle provides no ready categories for pre-, postlapsarian and resurrected man. Rather, the quasi-mystical notions of original sin and original righteousness inherited from Augustine were reclothed as additions to or subtractions from a given, implicitly static nature. This was likewise the inheritance of the Council of Trent, which decided that concupiscence was in itself no sin but merely the fomes

32

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

peccati or ‘tinder of sin’. Again, the Tridentine decrees did not mention Adam’s supposed mental powers before the Fall. Counter-Reformation teaching on the Fall and original sin, then, had partially dismantled the Augustinianism on which it was still recognisably based, and many of Augustine’s loaded categories, such as original righteousness, original sin, depravity, concupiscence and so forth, had been emptied out. A midseventeenth-century heresiographer perceived the difference between Catholics and Protestants on original sin as follows: ‘[T]he difference between them and us standeth not in the abolishment of it, but in the manner and measure of the abolishment of it.’29 This had ecclesiological ramifications: Protestant anti-Calvinist writers in England also argued that too great an emphasis on original sin put in question the efficacy of baptism, which such writers were anxious to defend. It was not solely a Catholic complaint therefore, and this ‘sacramental thrust’, in Tyacke’s phrase, would come to characterise English Arminianism. As early as the 1590s, Richard ‘Dutch’ Thompson of Clare College, Cambridge, who knew Arminius personally, was arguing in a work only published posthumously that the universal efficacy of baptism negated absolute predestination.30 In the later scholastic period, however, there were reactionaries who contributed a great deal towards the reintroduction of a more austere Augustinianism, and as such provided the ‘headwaters of the Reformation’, in Oberman’s phrase.31 The via antiqua of Aquinas’ age, which had held that the created order of the Universe was effectively the only way it could have been, came under attack by the so-called via moderna as insufficiently awed by God’s potentia absoluta to do as he pleased. The via moderna contrastingly insisted that the Universe was ‘less a rational than a volitional construct; God made a covenant and will not break it, yet this promise leaves the world a more anxious place than Thomas had known . . . Christ had said that his church was built on a rock, but later medieval theology seemed to expose it as a scaffold of possibilities’.32 The schola Augustiniana moderna shared this interest in reaffirming God’s absolute power but regarded the certainty that God ‘will not break’ his pactum or soteriological ‘pact’ with man as semi-Pelagian. What is the point of stressing God’s power if he is then disallowed from exercising it? The schola Augustiniana moderna in contrast rejected the implication that although God could choose not to reward good works he will never take up this option, and instead reinstated a ‘strongly pessimistic view of original sin, with the Fall being identified as a watershed in the economy of salvation’; a ‘strong emphasis on the priority of God in

Augustinianism 33 justification, linked to a doctrine of special grace’; and a ‘radical doctrine of absolute double predestination’. These retrenchments were buttressed by Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings.33 The magisterial reformers continued the trend of the schola Augustiniana moderna, though precise links are unclear. Luther in his Lectures on Genesis unhesitatingly affirmed Adam’s initial splendour, even ascribing to Adam and Eve perfect knowledge of astronomy.34 Adam also controlled the animals: he could ‘command a lion with a single word’. This ability Luther derived from Adam’s naming of the beasts: ‘solely because of the excellence of his nature, he views all the animals and thus arrives at such a knowledge of their nature that he can give each one a suitable name that harmonises with its nature’.35 This was further than Augustine had gone: the father had used Pythagoras’ observation that the first giver of names was the wisest of men, but had not mentioned any attendant physical powers. Adam as mage, however, would become an important symbol in the hermetic tradition.36 Luther, however, also acknowledges Augustine’s statement on man created inter angelos bestiasque: ‘Man is a living being compounded of the nature of the brute and of the angels.’ In the same section, he comments upon ‘innocence’ in tones that recall ideas on the childishness and naivety of the first people: ‘I call it the innocence of a child because Adam was, so to speak, in a middle position and yet could be deceived by Satan and fall into disasters, as he did. The danger of a fall will not exist in that perfect innocence which will be found in the future and spiritual life.’37 Now, far from man being the great astronomer, he is a figure in his ‘childhood glory’.38 Calvin too mirrored these hybrid tendencies, though in his commentary on Genesis, translated into English in 1578, he was less affirming of Adam’s supposed magical abilities.39 Calvin emphasises man’s creaturely station under ‘the yoke of God’; man does not require any great intelligence in order to subsist in his given moral and intellectual stratum with ambitionless humility. This restriction of Adamic cognition is particularly jolting in the Institutes, where Calvin can move from heady tones – ‘[T]he nimblenesse of the minde of man which veweth the heauen and earth & secretes of nature, and comprehending all ages in vnderstanding and memorie, digesteth euery thyng in order and gathereth thynges to come by thinges past, doth playnly shewe that there lyeth hydden in man a certayne thing seuerall from the body’ – to pessimism: ‘From hence cometh it that all the Philosophers wer so blynded, for that in a ruine they sought for an vpright buildyng, and for strong ioyntes in an

34

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

vnioynted ouerthrowe.’40 Calvin, like Luther, united the straying ideas of man as created upright and man as bending down in the now familiar trope of pendency: ‘Adam therefore might haue stande [sic] if he wold, because he fell not but by his owne wil. But because his will was pliable to either side, and there was not geuen hym constancie to continue, therefore he so easily fel.’41 This spare account, Eve nowhere in sight, provided the template for subsequent English discussions, many of which we have encountered in the form of catechisms or summae. English theologians such as William Perkins and William Ames produced best-selling manuals, adding to continental tracts by Wollebius, Polanus, Pareus, Ursinus, even Curcellaeus and Arminius.42 Although within academic theology there was a good deal of strife in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries about whether God had formulated his absolute decrees of predestination before the creation or after the Fall (Supra- versus Sublapsarianism), no one, at least in the academe, disagreed about the basic importance of the event itself.43 As the ninth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 ran: Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly talk, but it is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature enclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit, and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.44

The original Forty-Two Articles of 1553, upon which the Thirty-Nine were based, had inserted et hodie Anabaptistae repetunt – ‘which also the Anabaptists do now a daies renue’ – after the mention of the Pelagians, demonstrating the context of doctrinal controversy in which the articles were drawn up. Most other confessions, including the Augsburg, Genevan, Heidelberg and Scottish, contain similar passages. The influence of the catechism has been mentioned; as Glanvill complained in another context but with a telling metaphor, ‘We seldom examine our Receptions, more then children their Cathechisms; For Implicit faith is a vertue, where Orthodoxie is the object.’45 The deficient cause as the explanation for this state of affairs also lived on. As Sir William Leighton wrote from the debtors’ prison: Iniurious Adam in thy selfe accurst, cease to complaine of God & natures thrall: Since he that made man good, left him at first, a power to stand, and yet a will to fall.

Augustinianism

35

fetch not thy fault, from heauens determination but blame thy mind to weake & insufficient: Sinne is no being but a meere priuation, and hath no cause efficient, but deficient.46

And finally, the intellectual superiority of Adam and Eve before the Fall was also affirmed late into the period. As South put it, ‘An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.’47 Not all influences upon conceptions of Adam and Eve were aural or textual: visual art too insinuated a version of the Eden narrative that did not so much gloss over as escape from certain of the causal issues Genesis raises. The tall, often bearded Adam with his sexually mature wife gaze out of countless windows, tapestries and paintings of the period, frozen in various postures, assiduously gardening, or talking with the serpent. Books, too, employed illustrations: a fine example is the Theatrum vitae humanae of Jean-Jacques Boissard, with engravings by the celebrated Theodore de Bry. Boissard’s Theatrum moves through Mundi creatio to Lapsus diaboli, then to Hominis creatio and lapsus Adami, all headed by de Bry’s finely etched illustrations.48 Indeed, Adam and Eve are often portrayed in all the significant stages of their Edenic life in the same frame. In one Medici tapestry, for instance, there are three Eves and two Adams; in Cranach’s Paradise, there are five Eves and six Adams, all stages of innocence and guilt crowding into one canvas.49 In de Bry’s Creatio hominis plate, Adam and Eve in their various postures are shadowed around Eden by God as a cloud with the Tetragrammaton in it.50 In this way, visual representations of Adam and Eve could insist upon their maturity, and their proper as well as improper occupations, while at the same time giving the viewer the quasi-divine role of seeing it all happen at once. However, this vision was derived from a theology that had used the maturity of creation to emphasise our distance from that maturity, sometimes even the impossibility of comprehending unfallen man. This aspect visual art often neglected, though one notable exception is the fine Burgesse plate, after Medina, in Tonson’s 1688 edition of Paradise Lost, accompanying the book of the Fall. Like the Medici and Cranach multiplications, various duplicate Adams and Eves recede into the distance. By far the most imposing presence, though, is Satan, darkly inked, thrusting into the foreground. The viewer cannot get to Adam and Eve in innocence without Satan impinging, a visual situation that parallels the epistemological difficulty of thinking about sinless environments.

36

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

The location of pieces involving Adam and Eve could also be extremely pointed. We noted the connection between the issues of original sin and baptism and the desire of anti-Calvinists to stress the efficacy of the latter for washing away the former. The most imposing affirmation of this position must be Grinling Gibbons’ 1685 marble font in the Wren church of St James, Piccadilly. The baptismal font is carved as the tree of knowledge itself, with Adam and Eve flanking its base. Water poured in the top of the hollowed tree washes off the stain originally caused by the figures further down. Incidentally, William Blake was baptised in it.51 Nevertheless, there were some changes in the theological climate, and before leaving Augustinianism it is necessary to track the various signs of change from the Elizabethan to the Caroline period. In the universities, the debates held at the Cambridge Commencement and the Oxford exercises at the Comitia and Vesperies act as a theological barometer for such changes, reflecting mainly Calvinist commitment but with some later indications of Arminian usurpation.52 In 1597, Richard Field held that ‘the doctrine of predestination once handed down by Augustine and in our own time by Calvin is the same and is in no way contrary to Catholic truth and upright faith’. He followed this with the provocative statement: ‘The orthodox fathers who once held the will to be free and those today who hold it to be bound mean the same thing’, a statement almost all of the popular systematic manuals contained.53 Such Calvinist reaffirmation may in part have been prompted by the scandal in Cambridge the previous year over the Frenchman Peter Baro, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, who had been involved in theological quarrels since 1581, and William Barrett, a chaplain at Gonville and Caius. Barrett preached against Calvinist determinism in 1595, and as a result was summoned before Convocation and told to recant. Through his complaint to Archbishop Whitgift, he became the unwitting cause of the Lambeth Articles of 1595, which, against Barrett, reaffirmed determinism.54 Baro himself was in especial trouble in 1596 for his proto-Arminian views, and was eventually hounded out of the university.55 His Summa trium de praedestinatione sententiarum, published posthumously in 1613, distinguished between two views on predestination held by Augustine at different times, and a third position claimed for Augustine by Calvin and Beza, but possibly not authentically Augustinian. Here one can see the polemic strategy of separating supposed versions of ‘Augustinianism’ from the writings of the father himself, as a prelude to discrediting Calvinism as not as patristically grounded as it claimed.56

Augustinianism 37 Oxford had earlier had similar troubles over Antonio del Corro, a Spaniard accused of meddling with predestinarian issues. Certainly, in his 1581 version of Paul’s letter to the Romans, recast as a dialogue between a Discipulus and a Praeceptor, Corro glossed the crucial verses on the first and the second Adam in a non-Calvinist fashion. Romans 5:12 appears in subtly different garb from what we earlier encountered: ‘For as through one man sin came into the world, and through sin death; and thus death came over all men, from whom [ex quo] all have sinned.’57 The grammar is as problematic as the in quo reading of the Vulgate, but the implication of the parallelism is clear: that people sin from Adam, not in him, a position that is indeed akin to saying that original sin does stand ‘in the following of Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly talk’. Corro also said that Christ’s sacrifice ‘is indeed universal and sufficient, but such is the fault of unbelieving men that efficiency cannot at all correspond to sufficiency’.58 Unsurprisingly, this book was not printed in Oxford, where, as Wood said of Corro, ‘his person could never be well relish’d’. His publisher also sold the famous Danish Lutheran and supporter of free will Niels Hemmingsen on Ephesians.59 The in quo reading, however, had already been quietly challenged by Erasmus: his celebrated Paraphrases simply read ‘inso muche as all men synned’, and cautioned that the first and second Adam are not to be rigidly compared.60 In general, though, the theses debated between the students and the doctors maintained an even keel. In 1617, as it had been earlier in 1597, the habit of treating original sin as merely a lack of something rather than a real disease is trounced: ‘Original sin is not simply a privation of original righteousness, but is a positive quantity.’ The next year similar ideas were still in the air, Thomas Marler answering yes to ‘Did Adam possess original righteousness before the fall?’; he also agreed that Adam’s Fall was both necessary and contingent ‘in different respects’. In 1622 concupiscence still remains in the regenerate, original sin is a positive entity, free will is extinguished for Adam’s posterity, and we are unable of our own will to turn to God. Cambridge, traditionally Calvinist earlier and to a greater degree than Oxford, despite the Baro affair mentioned, carries a similar record. In 1612 we are assured ‘Divine Prescience was not the cause of man’s Fall’; the next year it is still the case that ‘Fallen man is subject to divine predestination.’ But in 1629 Edward Quarles of Pembroke said that ‘all baptised infants are without doubt justified’, which got him into some trouble, and in 1632 the thesis affirmed was exactly the opposite: ‘traces of sin remain in the regenerated, even after baptism’. Tellingly, the Root-and-Branch

38

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

petitioners of 1640 complained, as an example of ‘the faint-heartedness of ministers’, of their neglecting to preach ‘of original sin remaining after baptism’.61 The generally Calvinist climate of the universities was changing, however. The declaration of Charles I in November 1628, ordering that ‘all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God’s promises’, nominally banned predestinarian disputes in the universities, but effectively accompanied a rising tolerance for Arminianism.62 Bastingius, the favoured Oxford textbook, received his last printing there in 1614, and Ursinus, his Cambridge counterpart, in 1601. A salient indication of the way things were moving is provided at Oxford by a publication of Giles Widdowes, sometime fellow of Oriel and rector of St Martin’s church. In 1630 he published at Oxford, at his own expense, his hectoring sermon against ‘Puritans’ which he titled The Schysmatical Puritan. It was republished the following year. Widdowes, who was an ally of William Laud, then in his ascendancy, listed ten types of schismatic Puritan. But this list, as well as containing Familists and Anabaptists, sects uncontroversially controversial, included Perfectists, Sermonists and Presuming Predestinatists, supposed schismatics who held what were clearly Calvinist tenets and indeed were simply various of Widdowes’ fellow academics dressed up as Separatists – which they were not. That Widdowes was able to lump academic Calvinists together with ‘Puritans’ and ‘Schismatics’, even if for polemic purposes, is an indication of how different things were from the 1590s, when anti-Calvinism was the hand that rocked the boat. For the first time, Calvinist and Anabaptist were seen alike as enemies of the Church, and Widdowes’ category of anti-Disciplinarians, ‘whose purenes is aboue the Kings Supremacy’, is particularly offensive, suggesting as it does that those who think the elect cannot fall from grace are treasonable. These are again associated with ‘Geneva-Presbyters’. The implications this has for how original sin was viewed can be seen in Widdowes’ rebuttal of Anabaptist tenets: ‘The Anabaptist is he, whose purenes is a supposed birth without originall sinne. And yet our bodies are parts of Adams nature, that did sinne. And no man was borne without sinne, Christ only excepted. His tenet is, that infants must not be baptized.’ Widdowes’ continued refutation, though, has other prey in sight: [I]t is without question, that Gods Supremacy may pardon or punish pro absoluto beneplacito, only as he will, seeing ’tis the prerogatiue of supremacy, he being supreme Iudg. But he cannot be iust in decree, if he so reprobates, but for sinne foreseene. For the law was not, that any should die in Adam, if he had not eaten

Augustinianism

39

of the forbidden fruit: and therefore this law in prevision transgressed is the meritorious efficient of reprobation.63

Widdowes’ terminology is hard, deliberately so, but his basic revision is obvious. He effectively rehearses the scholastic Via moderna’s position: God can do precisely what he likes, but won’t. This is because he is just. Therefore he judges, even to damnation, those whom he knows will sin. We only die in Adam because he happened to sin and God foresaw that he would. But judgement according to ‘sinne foreseene’ was exactly the kind of presumption upon God’s Eternal Decrees of absolute predestination to election and to reprobation, based upon his mere pleasure, that the Reformers, and before them the schola Augustiniana moderna, had reviled. Importantly, it was also the position the Lambeth Palace articles of 1595 and the Synod of Dort in 1618–19 had anathematised. As the Dortist articles open, ‘Forasmuch as all men haue sinned in Adam, and are become guiltie of the curse, and eternall death, God had done wrong vnto no man, if it had pleased him to leaue all mankind in sin, and vnder the curse, and to condemne them for sinne.’ Election is ‘not vpon foresight of faith, and the obedience of faith, holinesse, or any other good quality’.64 Widdowes’ revision of this position is not the last instance of neoscholasticism we will see, a neoscholasticism which in no sense dispenses with the Fall and original sin, but which does significantly rewrite the meaning of such ideas, away from the mainstream of reformed commentary.

chapter 3

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660

Throughout the middle years of the seventeenth century original sin was contested as it had never been contested in England before, and many of the disagreements turned on fine details. Thus the rather vague wording of the ninth of the Thirty-Nine Articles on man being ‘very far gone from original righteousness’ was a phrase that could admit of myriad readings, from a superlative understanding of ‘very far’ (‘wholy defiled in all faculties’, as the Westminster Assembly had it) to virtual excision (‘some degree’, as their opponent William Parker revised).1 In this chapter, in particular, the tendency of theological terminology to wordplay and logical contortion will prove central. A good initial example is provided by the commentator who essayed to prove that Calvinists were really unwitting Pelagians. As Thomas Pierce, the unpopular President of Magdalen College, Oxford, argued, Pelagians deny original sin. But Calvinists say that Christ died only for the elect. Now, Christ, according to Paul, died for all those dead in Adam. But if these for whom Christ died were only the comparatively small number of the elect, then only a minority died in Adam. Therefore the majority never suffered from original sin.2 It seems improbable that Pierce believed this: what he was doing was pointing out the kind of logical trickery such types of argumentation permitted. John Gaule complained: [A]ll the errors which have been about Original Sin, have risen chiefly through want of a perfect Definition, or compleat Description of it, some (and they not the least Hereticks) have contended against all definition; others have been so various in defining, and so incompleat in describing, that they have administered but matter unto more contention.3

The subject now is the long quarrel that raged throughout the first decade of the second half of the seventeenth century, a quarrel specifically concerning original sin. It is important for three reasons. First, it represents the most protracted, publicised and openly debated argument on 40

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 41 original sin in the period, spanning public debate, private manuscript and printed book. Second it centres around the illustrious figure of Jeremy Taylor, academic, future bishop and a man to whom the martyred king had given his wrist-watch. Taylor’s reasoning was based on intense patristic scholarship, particularly of the Eastern fathers, and despite the protests of his fellow beleaguered Anglicans Taylor did not give ground. Finally, the dispute is important because in 1658 the Presbyterian Nathaniel Stephens published a book in which he pointed out the parallels between the interpretations of the Fall of Robert Everard the Leveller, Agitator and Baptist, and Jeremy Taylor himself. This realisation is much more important than the actual substance of Stephens’ book. What he saw was the far political left and the far political right producing strikingly similar theology. When the flat map of politics was pasted onto a globe, the extremes, from a theological point of view, met. In 1649, Robert Everard, a captain in the parliamentary army, published his examination of the Genesis narrative and the doctrines drawn from it, The Creation and Fall of Adam Reviewed. At this point, it seems, Everard was active in Leicestershire and the northern counties where he spread Baptist doctrine; the Newcastle clergy were complaining in 1652 that Everard ‘had preached sundry times in the hearing of many hundreds against Original sin in man’. ‘His way of life’, Nathaniel Stephens said, was ‘itinerary from place to place’, and this probably explains why Stephens later complained that Everard’s attacks on original sin were ‘spread farre and neare’. Richard Baxter remembered him as ‘a busie preaching Sectary (in appearance) [who] . . . disputed for Anabaptistry, and against Original Sin (whom Mr. Stephens hath wrote against . . .)’. Back in 1647, he spoke out in the earliest hours of the Putney debates as Agent of Cromwell’s regiment, telling the assembly, ‘you are resolved every one to purchase our inheritances which have been lost’.4 Everard was confused in his own time with William Everard, the founder Digger: the army man ‘suffereth in his reputation, by the misapprehension of divers, who take him to be that Everard that is reported to be deeply affected with the Ranting Principle’. But Robert did later say of himself that over these years he ‘had run through almost (if not altogether) all the Severall Professions of Christianity then appearing in this Kingdome’.5 Stephens, the Presbyterian curate of Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire, had long been keen on attempting to reason with sectaries. He is the ‘priest Stephens’ from the early pages of Fox’s Journal; Fox evidently awed as well as troubled him.6 Later, in his celebrated A Plain and Easie Calculation of the Name, Mark, and Number of the Name of the Beast,

42

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

incorporated by Matthew Poole into his Synopsis criticorum, Stephens also engaged the Digger spokesman Gerard Winstanley in debate, one of the very few to do so.7 In 1650, then, having had experience of men like Fox for some years, Stephens visited nearby Earl Shilton, where ‘the Masters of Division have played their principall game’, in order to dispute with the separatists there. Returning later in the year for a set dispute, his opponents failed to show, and so Stephens left a written statement for them to ponder. He was answered by two letters, the latter written by Everard himself and subsequently published in 1650 as Baby Baptism Routed. Unfortunately this work, described by two Coventry ministers as ‘sheets of Satyrical invectives’, is lost, but Stephens excerpts copiously from it.8 In 1651 Stephens produced his own Precept in support of infant baptism, and in this year too the Thirty Baptist Congregations published their joint confession, which Stephens was later to associate doctrinally with both Everard and Taylor; many of the signatory congregations were also from Leicestershire. So too appeared William Parker’s The Late Assemblies Confession of Faith Examined, an attack on the Westminster Confession containing a long section on original sin, another concern for Stephens in the Vindiciae. In 1652 Everard reprinted The Creation and Fall, and also produced his Natures Vindication. The sole extant copy of The Creation and Fall in this edition is bound with both Natures Vindication and the Thirty Congregations’ confession, with a common title page.9 Stephens’ Precept itself aroused opposition in the form of the ‘Coryphaeus of the anabaptists’, John Tombes, who wrote his Antipaedobaptism (1652) in reply.10 (These two controversialists, in passing, had once been students together at Magdalen Hall.) Everard, after engaging in some controversy about the laying on of hands in the mid 1650s, turned Catholic at the Restoration, publishing a defence of his apostasy which received a great deal of attention at the time, eliciting various printed replies. Henry Oldenburg wrote to Robert Boyle about the sad case of this ‘Anabaptist . . . turned Papist’.11 Leaving the Baptist side of the debate for a while, elsewhere trouble was brewing. Jeremy Taylor had already achieved some notoriety thanks to his Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1647), a plea for an ethical rather than a theological, dogmatic approach to Christianity, but one which deployed some dangerous tools. In particular, Taylor argued from textual grounds for the rejection of the absolute authority of scripture. It was objected by some, notably the Calvinist John Reading, that this was to arm sceptics and sectaries, not to defend Christianity. At least the first part of this accusation was absolutely accurate: Anthony Wood noted that the

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 43 Quaker Samuel Fisher, in a public debate with Reading in 1650, had derived his sceptical views on textual authority from Taylor’s tract of three years previously, which had given ‘too great a seeming advantage to fanaticism and enthusiasm’, and it was this that drove Reading to write explicitly against Taylor. The infamous Clement Writer credited Taylor in his Fides divina of 1657, a notable example of a non-learned textual sceptic deriving authority from a learned source of utterly differing political allegiance.12 Taylor had mentioned original sin in passing in the Liberty of Prophesying as one of the three notions, along with angels and the immaculate conception, which together only exhaust forty lines of solid sense, despite the multitudes of unwarranted books such subjects had elicited.13 But his real attack on original sin commenced near the middle of the next decade. Taylor was beginning to spread his thoughts on the matter by early 1655, as a letter from Evelyn demonstrates. Concerning Taylor’s view, as Evelyn wrote back to Taylor, ‘[I] do not doubt but it shall in tyme gaine upon all those exceptions, which I know you are not ignorant appeare against it. ’Tis a great deale of courage, and a great deale of perill, but to attempt the assault of an errour so inveterate.’14 Taylor circulated his views among the Anglican clergy, who were not impressed. As Henry Hammond, himself far from enthusiastic for the Calvinistic understanding of the matter, wrote to Gilbert Sheldon in September 1655, ‘Dr Taylrs book is matter of much discours, & in yt point of Orig: Sinn disliked by every one, but by none more then the 2 [persons to] whom tis addrest.’15 On 26 October 1655, the exiled bishop of Salisbury Brian Duppa wrote at length to Richard Baylie, President of St John’s College, Oxford, adding his concerns over the manuscript of Taylor’s Unum necessarium already in press: I was very much troubled wthin my self, as soon as I saw what he droue at . . . I found this fell not casually from him, but was a studied error . . . I wished him to consider whom he offended, and whom he gratified in this, or whom he left, and Whom he adhaered to . . . the choice he hath, is not great, for ether it must be to ye old Pelagians, or to the new brood that hath sprung out of there Ashes, whether Socinians or Anabaptists, or any other of newer denominations.16

In captivity at Chepstow, Taylor corresponded on the matter with John Warner, bishop of Rochester, and busied himself writing what is now the seventh chapter of Unum necessarium, ‘A Further explication of the doctrine of Original Sin’, printed separately and then included in subsequent editions with the epistle to Warner still attached. So, despite all

44

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

Taylor’s careful canvassing of his opinion, and despite the strongly negative response, he went ahead and published the Unum necessarium in 1655, and the ‘Further explication’ the following year. The following year, too, appeared the Deus justificatus, a more accessible version of the offending portion of the larger work. This was the doing of Taylor’s literary agent, the prominent Royalist bookseller Richard Royston, who initially published the Deus justificatus without Taylor’s consent, something Royston was of course perfectly entitled to do.17 A second edition appeared in the same year, with the Taylor–Warner correspondence attached. Duppa’s ‘I wished him to consider whom he offended, and whom he gratified in this’ is a political as well as a theological warning – in their current situation, the deposed clergy ought to be sticking together and not causing trouble for each other. It was, Duppa added, an ‘Vnwary blow’ upon ‘his poor desolate Mother the Church’, more wounding than any external persecution the Church had received.18 In this way Taylor’s attack was particularly significant, because it implicated his fellow clergy in exactly the kinds of dubious speculation they wished to avoid. They were all too sensitive to this; Duppa’s letter was occasioned by his anger that Taylor had attached Duppa’s name to his book. The ejected Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Robert Sanderson, asked the keeper of Bodley’s library and fellow of Queen’s, Thomas Barlow, to undertake a refutation; while on the other side, John Owen the Independent and intruded Dean of Christ Church composed a work against Taylor, no longer extant.19 Sheldon wrote directly to Taylor rebuking him and urging him to recant. Taylor defiantly refused, replying that ‘some friend of mine has been blowing ye Coals’. Either Taylor was correct, or he was not: if the former, so much the better; if the latter, someone ought to explain why.20 Taylor was obviously pushing his colleagues too hard, although they tried to keep the controversy behind closed doors. Sanderson advised Barlow to steer clear of the question of the transmission of original sin, as ‘the wisdome of God hath thought fit to set it without the reach of our reason’. He lamented that Taylor, ‘amidst the Distractions of these Times’, could be ‘so peremptory and pertinacious of his Errors’. But throughout their correspondence, Sanderson repeatedly advised Barlow only to write an expository tract on the matter and not to attack Taylor directly.21 Likewise, Herbert Thorndike’s huge Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England of 1659 contained a section on ‘the late novelty in the Church of England about Originall sinne’, in which he tried to repair

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 45 some of the damage made by ‘that excellent doctor’, whom he tactfully never names.22 The following year Henry More, who cannot have been unsympathetic to Taylor, as the Cambridge Platonists did not have much room for original sin either, wrote to Taylor that the Presbyterians called him ‘a Sosinian, that yo denied Originall sinne, that you were an Arminian, and so a hereticke in graine’.23 Such accusations were not mere slurs, either. Taylor’s interpretation of Romans 7:19, ‘the evil which I would not, that I do’, as spoken by Paul under the persona of a Jew, not a regenerate Christian, and Taylor’s adjudication of the in quo crux against the in quo understanding, imitate passages from Arminius and Grotius, and Episcopius respectively. As Burnet later recalled of the latitude men, they ‘read Episcopius much’. Had Taylor himself, despite his public recourse to the Greek patristics as his authorities, been fetching his ideas from nearer, more heterodox authors?24 The answer, based on some advice of Taylor’s to an Irish friend in 1660 on what theological books to collect, is yes. Apart from recommending many of his own works, he also listed Episcopius, ‘whose whole works are excellent and containe the whole body of orthodox religion’. Heber, Taylor’s nineteenth-century biographer, reprinted this letter and put his finger on this very sentence as the origin and explanation of Taylor’s doctrine of original sin.25 Refutations poured from the press. Warner’s own objections were made public by Taylor himself in his Answer to a Letter of 1656; John Ford the Mayor of Bath weighed in the next year, as did John Gaule; Stephens’ Vindiciae fundamenti appeared in 1658, along with Anthony Burgess’ vast Treatise of Original Sin, and Henry Jeanes’ Second Part of the Mixture of Scholasticall Divinity and his letters to and from Taylor appeared in 1660.26 Much as the exiled Anglicans had feared, Taylor, ‘like a second Julian’, had provided a golden opportunity for their opponents to demonstrate that the Anglicans did not adhere to the orthodox articles of the Church.27 The only real supporter was, as was noted, John Evelyn, though it is tempting to join with Evelyn none other than the promoter of experimental philosophy John Wilkins, who in his 1669 revisions to his popular manual-cum-reading-list for preachers, Ecclesiastes (first published in 1646) listed under the heading ‘Original Sin’ two new authorities: ‘Bp Taylor: Tracts. Episcopius’ without listing any of their detractors.28 Taylor was appreciative of Evelyn’s support, and wrote to him of his book, ‘[I] give God thanks that I have reason to believe that it is accepted

46

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

by God and by some good men’. In 1655 Evelyn discussed astronomy, conversion of the Jews, and original sin with the mathematician William Oughtred. Said Oughtred, as Evelyn reported: ‘Original Sin was not met with in the Greek Fathers; yet he [Oughtred] believed the thing; this was from some discourse upon Dr Taylors late booke which I had lent him.’29 Evelyn had better luck with a young Frenchman: ‘I brought Monsr le Franc a young French Sorbonne proselyte to converse with Dr Taylor; they fell to dispute on original sin, in Latine, upon a booke newly publish’d by the Doctor, who was much satisfied with the young man.’30 Evelyn’s support is in keeping with his paradisal attitude to gardening discussed earlier, and a further insight into this milieu is provided by the letters to Evelyn of John Beale. Beale was keen on Taylor too, and he maintained in this private correspondence that if one were to read all the ante-Nicene fathers in chronological order and reliable editions, ‘Hee will hardly find in them a Catholique concurrence in ye Athanasian expressions of ye Creede, or wth ye Westerne notion of Originall sin, or of the state of soules departed, imediately.’ The bar of catholicity is to be provided by ‘Dr Taylors mitigation in his Infamous Liberty of Prophesying.’ The way to make students serious admirers of Christian antiquity, Beale remarkably adds, is to teach ‘wth a dose of Socinianisme’. Beale likewise recommended which theologians he found acceptable, and it is a roll-call of English Arminianism: Baro, Thomson, Overall, Montagu, White and Andrewes, some of whom we have already encountered. To these he added some Melanchthon and ‘the safest’ of Luther. Grotius, Hammond and Peter Martyr were then to be digested into commonplaces and placed in the margins of Bibles.31 Evelyn and Beale, though, kept this kind of thing quiet. It was Taylor’s perverse need to publish to the world his divisiveness that so appalled his co-religionists. It may also account for the fact that Taylor was eventually promoted abroad, perhaps in the hope that he would be less trouble there. So much, then, for the course of this quarrel; what remains is to rehearse some of its argumentation, particularly the connections between the sectarian and the Taylorian positions. It was Taylor who drove Stephens into print, but Stephens had ‘some years since’ prepared a response to Everard, the motor of the whole dispute. Stephens’ basic complaint was that Everard outdid Pelagius.32 For Everard, the Fall prompted neither physical nor mental change: afterwards, Adam ‘had his senses and retained his knowledge’; ‘his body had all the parts and lineaments thereof ’. Stephens also noted that Everard stood ‘so strongly’ upon a particular verse of Paul in 1 Corinthians, a verse

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 47 we will encounter repeatedly: ‘The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.’33 This verse suggested to many radicals that the first Adam’s initial condition had been less exalted than mainstream exegesis insisted. As Stephens remembered of their public debate, ‘[Y]ou did urge me at Earle-Shilton in Leicestershire, Anno 1650, Decem. 26. before a multitude of people to answer this question, what place of Scripture have you to prove that Adam had the Spirit of God, or that he was a spiritual man before the Fall.’ Original righteousness, so Everard explained, had only consisted in man’s dominion over the creatures. Indeed, Adam in his first estate had been ‘a meer carnal man’; ‘like a burned child, able of himself to take heed of the fire’.34 Having called into question the fact of the Fall, Everard inevitably queried the idea of a transmitted guilt: ‘why might it not be said, When Adam beleeved, I beleeved; when Adam repented, I repented?’35 This is what Stephens reported of Everard, but Everard’s own text, if anything, goes further than Stephens’ account. Everard described the righteousness of prelapsarian Adam as merely ‘Passive Righteousness’; at the Fall, Adam wickedly ‘improv[ed]’ his abilities. Anticipating Taylor, Everard also pointed out that traducianism should allow us to inherit Adam’s virtues no less than his sins, an observation he uses to discredit the whole notion of transmitted sin, a doctrine that simply takes metaphor too seriously. Adam was prone to sin before the Fall, as after. In a move he shared with the mortalist Overton, Everard also stated that the animal kingdom remained unfallen.36 Nathaniel Stephens had reacted earlier to Everard’s theories. Although Everard’s Baby Baptism Routed is lost, it clearly repeated the arguments of The Creation and Fall, as Stephens’ response, A Precept, stresses the role of baptism in washing away (some) original sin. Although Stephens insists that the unbaptised are still saved by God’s ‘Promise’ as opposed to those saved by both ‘Promise’ and ‘Seal’, he nevertheless regards the new-born child as corrupt.37 Stephens was defending the standard Presbyterian line against an attack that not only denied the Fall, but almost inverted it: for Everard, original sin was not transmitted and therefore did not exist; furthermore, before the Fall, Adam was already prone to sin, a mere ‘carnal’ man, as opposed to the spiritual man, who is Christ. In this period, too, Stephens had had his work cut out for him – he had undergone at least four public disputations, he had been written to at least twice, and he had been harassed in print by Everard and Tombes. Finally, as a cautionary note, the involvement of baptism in the debate might make us suppose that rejection of baptism and rejection of original

48

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

sin are interdependent, as they prove to be in Everard. But actually most Baptist confessions retained the notion: Everard is something of an exception, with the Mennonite Waterland confession (1581–2) and John Smyth’s Short Confession (1610) as lone predecessors, along with the early Hutterite Account of Our Religion (1540) of Peter Riedemann.38 After their associational meeting in Leicester in 1651, the Midland General Baptists’ confession The Faith and Practise of Thirty Congregations, Gathered According to the Primitive Pattern was produced by the prominent Baptist publisher William Larner, or Larnar, who also published Everard. As the Leicester–Lincolnshire area represents the greatest concentration of its signatories, it is not surprising that Stephens, a Leicestershire man, felt compelled to act. Everard was clearly connected to the Baptist cause, but was something of a maverick, and is not one of the confession’s signatories, although it has been argued that he helped write it.39 The confession, indeed, is rather more theologically conservative than Everard’s own tracts, accepting both predestination and original sin. What is objectionable from a Presbyterian point of view is that the confession extends Christ’s atonement to all who died in Adam, not just to the Calvinist elect. The Thirty Congregations confession, therefore, is not particularly noteworthy in its interpretation of the Fall. Its importance largely derives from its pioneering nature – it was the first Baptist confession to be signed by a substantial number of congregations.40 The next year, however, Everard released his Natures Vindication, as well as the second edition of The Creation and Fall. The full title of the pamphlet renders explicit Everard’s stance: Natures Vindication; or A Check to All Those Who Affirm Nature to Be Vile, Wicked, Corrupt, and Sinful.41 This gestures towards a central problem or rather conflict in early-modern terminology, the meaning of the word ‘nature’, and Everard’s pamphlet is a contribution to this debate. ‘Nature’, of course, could carry a positive meaning, as we so readily assume. But as current ‘nature’ – whether it be the nature of man himself, or the nature of his environment, or both – is fallen, ‘nature’ could also be vile, wicked, corrupt and sinful. This book opened with a discussion of Godfrey Goodman’s The Fall of Man; or, the Corruption of Nature, a work that argued strenuously for this latter interpretation of the word. So Francis Cheynell, the anti-Socinian, could write in 1643 of ‘that cursed Atheisme which reigns in the heart of every man by nature’, and, a decade later, an anti-Quaker likewise of ‘the miserable estate of all men by Nature’.42 But, as Everard says, ‘natural affections are not sinful, vile, or corrupt’. Some kind of fall took place, but what this does to ‘nature’ is ambiguous:

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660

49

That our Father Adam sinned against God, by breaking his Law, is agreed . . .; which I do not only grant, but maintain, because the word of the Lord hath spoken it. But to the latter cause of the Objection, where you say, So he corrupted his Nature. I answer, If by corruption of Nature you mean he did such an abuse to it, that endeavoured to destroy or violate Nature, that do I freely grant to be a truth: for such a corruption or violation, Nature is capable to partake of, and that through or by mens oppressing or wresting it out of its proper office wherunto it was assigned by the providence of God. Read 2 Cor. 2.17.43

Despite Everard’s concession, it is clear by the word ‘endeavoured’ that he is replacing the notion of corruption completed and certain, with that of corruption attempted and so possibly uncompleted or uncertain. Crucially, Everard also deliberately mishears ‘Nature’ for ‘his Nature’: what had been a statement pertaining to man’s nature is now applied to all nature, and attacked as such. Everard thus exploits a common problem in debates about the nature of nature: which nature is meant? Both Cheynell and the anti-Quaker above used the ablative construction ‘by nature’. But what does this mean? Is man corrupted by the fact of his belonging to external nature, the fallen world around him, or is it a purely internal, psychological nature that damages him? Later, Everard’s nature, under a metaphor, has both wings and legs, something therefore both human and supra- or extra-human: ‘I do not hold that Natures wings were clipt since the Fall, and so disabled to fly up to such spiritual things; or, that the legs of nature were so broken by the first man’s disobedience, so that they could not carry men to Jesus Christ.’44 In this way Everard attacks and destroys the negative conception of nature by maximising it – for him ‘nature’ embraces all things, human and superhuman, internal and external, and when it is understood in such all-encompassing terms, it cannot at all be called vile and corrupt. Stephens did not reply to Natures Vindication as yet, instead devoting himself to writing his commentary on Revelation, A Plain and Easie Calculation. Nevertheless in that work, as we noted, Stephens paused to mention none other than Gerard Winstanley, demonstrating in passing that Stephens had some personal contact with the Diggers, and may even have known Winstanley himself.45 Stephens actually cites page numbers from Winstanley’s New Law of Righteousness, as he does with Everard, thus demonstrating very close textual attention. This is also important because, as will be shown, Winstanley’s New Law itself interpreted the Fall as reversible, allegorising it out of historical existence, and even proposing that there were men before Adam.

50

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

Winstanley is not mentioned again by Stephens, which is odd given that Stephens could easily have dealt out some smart side-blows to Winstanley in the course of his later Vindiciae. That he did not may suggest that, for Stephens, Winstanley was beyond the pale. Everard and Stephens were at least arguing about a real event and (two) real people, and what they had done. Winstanley dismantled even that basic scaffold of agreement, and perhaps Stephens simply shied away from such extreme heresy, or couldn’t be bothered to point out the obvious. And so to Jeremy Taylor’s Unum necessarium, which appeared mid 1655 with a part-apologetic, part-defiant preface to Duppa and Warner, the same two exiled bishops who had initially been troubled by Taylor’s chapter on original sin when they had seen it in manuscript. Taylor in his offending chapter – which Duppa called the colloquintida (bitter apple) – claims not to reject original sin, but his taste in theological forebears is telling. Augustine himself is not popular, and both Gregory of Rimini and Luther are described as having ‘fallen into the worst of S. Augustine’s opinion’. Speaking of the Augustine–Pelagius dispute, Taylor tartly remarks, ‘error is no good confuter of error’. And despite Taylor’s protracted attempts to soothe worries over his treatment of the Thirty-Nine Articles, he could not prevent himself from remarking that the ninth article is ‘nothing to the truth or falsehood of my doctrine’ – as Sanderson had bluntly said of Taylor and the Articles, ‘there is as much affinity, as between light and darkness’.46 Taylor’s position is remarkably close to that of Everard. He queries the notion of original righteousness using the same scripture: the first man is of the Earth, earthy. The excellencies Adam possessed in Eden Taylor refers to as ‘gifts’, things, that is, not intrinsic to human nature but superadded to it. But, he cautions, because scripture is not explicit about this issue we can only guess about these gifts, and are apt to guess wrongly. The Fall, to use Taylor’s term, ‘disrobed’ us – a metaphor that confirms Taylor’s basically scholastic estimation: that original righteousness is best understood as being in receipt of a donum indebitum, a free gift of God. Taylor even affirms that death ‘at first was the condition of man’, as Pelagius had said. Taylor defends his extremely heterodox interpretation, crucially, by recourse to narrative techniques of analysis. Rather than arguing solely on a dogmatic level, Taylor prefers to rehearse the actual story at hand, the process of the Fall, thinking about it in terms of plausibilities and probabilities:

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660

51

I do not know that any man thinks that if Adam had not sinned that sin, Cain should have been wise as soon as his Navel had been cut. Neither can we guess at what degree of knowledge Adam had before his fall. Certainly, if he had had so great a knowledge, it is not likely he would so cheaply have sold himself and all his hopes, out of a greedy appetite to get some knowledge. But concerning his posterity; indeed it is true that a child cannot speak at first, nor understand; and if (as Plato said) all our knowledge is nothing but memory, it is no wonder a child is born without knowledge. But so it is in the wisest men in the world; they also when they see or hear a thing first, think it strange, and could not know it till they saw or heard it. Now this state of ignorance we derive from Adam, as we do our Nature, which is a state of ignorance and all manner of imperfection; but whether it was not imperfect, and apt to Fall into forbidden instances even before his Fall, we may best guess at by the event; for if he had not had a rebellious appetite, and an inclination to forbidden things, by what could he have been tempted, and how could it have come to pass that he should sin?47

‘[W]e may best guess at by the event’ – Taylor here replaces doctrinal imperative with a more experimental sensitivity to biblical text as embodying narrative, and therefore open and favourable to, and indeed demanding of, narrative-oriented analyses. Two things here must be noted. First, Taylor is initially cautious and respectful about what we can know for sure about the unfallen state – as before, he stresses that we can’t even guess at the extent of prelapsarian intellection. Second, Taylor does not keep this promise – he soon moves into a probabilistic discussion of what is and what is not a likely answer to this problem, based on Adam and Eve’s posterior conduct. This leads him to adopt what we saw was the Eastern patristic tendency of discussing Adam and Eve as if they were children, inexperienced and ignorant. This is in no sense completely alien to the Augustinianism earlier examined. Augustine himself had admitted that an evil will must precede an evil act, and so Adam and Eve must have sinned in secret before in the open, unprompted by the devil. But what was desperately problematic for Augustine, Taylor embraces, and not without a certain wit. Augustine had identified the shadowy territory of the fall of the will, and then had stepped back, hastily declaring that it was ‘not to be regarded as such’ (CD 14.13). Augustine courted the danger of recursion: decoupling the fall of the mind from the public transgression bereft this mental fall of any precise temporal origin, and so the advent of imperfection could be pushed back ever nearer to the point of creation itself. For Augustine, this is a necessary flaw in his system; for Taylor, it is not necessarily a problematic consequence. Taylor admitted that man was created mortal;

52

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

he also states that man had ‘a rebellious appetite, and an inclination to forbidden things’, it seems ab initio. Taylor even says that ‘Concupiscence . . . also is natural, but it was actual before the fall, it was in Adam, and tempted him’, which was what Duns Scotus had proposed.48 Nevertheless, while Taylor and Augustine subscribe to quite different doctrinal decisions, these decisions arise from – and to an extent directed the interpretation of – the same field of enquiry. At the doctrinal level, what looks like an incompatible difference of kind is accompanied at the level of narrative interpretation by a mere difference of degree. In the second component of his great attack Taylor, again like Everard, turns his attention to original sin itself, positing three ways in which it can be said to be: ‘[1. E]ither by a Physicall or Natural efficiency of the sin it self: or 2. Because we were all in the loyns of Adam, or 3. By the sentence and decree of God.’49 Against this first mechanism Taylor directs a string of objections. If sin is efficacious of itself, ‘then it must be that every sin of Adam must spoile such a portion of his Nature that before he died, he must be a very beast’. Secondly, if this whole accumulative lump is then transmitted to us, ‘by this time we should not have been so wise as a flie, nor so free and unconstrain’d as fire’. Next, sin transmitted thus ‘by physical causality’ can be no respecter of persons: it would wipe out habitual righteousness too. Finally, such a model of original sin enforces the conclusion that original sin does more harm than any actual sin, and so we would ‘suffer less for doing evil that we know of, then for doing that which we knew nothing of ’.50 Next, can we be said to have sinned in Adam’s loins, as Augustine insisted? Tayor again demolishes this argument by taking very literally the idea of transmitted ethical guilt. Not only would the guilt of original sin be passed to us, but, ‘there being no imaginable reason why the first sin should be propagated, and not the rest’, all our forebears’ sins would flow down through humanity, and so at birth Abel would have been wickeder than Cain, and Seth wickeder than Abel, and so forth up to our sorry selves. Moreover, this version of traducianism would apply to all kinds of things: a lustful father would beget a lustful son, and a fine orator another fine orator – which latter example Taylor falsifies by mentioning Cicero’s son Marcus, who was no good at public speaking.51 Finally, it is possible that God has simply decreed original sin. But what can this mean? ‘He threatned death and inflicted it.’ This left Adam and all his posterity ‘in the meer natural state; that is, in a state of imperfection’. So it cannot be said that original sin in the sense of a

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 53 debauching, guilt-imputing phenomenon was decreed by God. Thus falls the conventional model of original sin.52 Taylor’s attack was the most intelligent and eloquent of the period. Indeed, Taylor’s ‘quick and elegant pen’ was precisely the problem: as Jeanes complained to Taylor of a mutual friend, ‘who having your person in too great an admiration, greedily swalloweth whatsoever falls from your pen, though never so false and erroneous’.53 His subsequent addition of a seventh chapter justifying the sixth on original sin also confirmed his indebtedness to the Eastern fathers, whom Taylor marshals into an extremely imposing squad. (This recalls Oughtred’s concession, noted above, that original sin ‘was not met with in the Greek Fathers’.) However, the value of Taylor’s attack lies particularly in his identification of certain weak points in the received (Presbyterian) doctrine, and his use of certain strategies to expose those weaknesses. First, Taylor rubbishes the older, qualitative way of thinking of original sin by treating it, rather coyly, in a quantitative fashion. Although his position is deeply scholastic in its conclusions, it departs from scholastic thinking in precisely this way: by treating transmissive sin as one would treat any other transmitted quantity, he exposes the bogus science on which the whole discussion of original sin was based. Taylor’s quantitative approach to sin should thus be seen as shrewd parody. Indeed, though Taylor does not quite see this, quantitative transmission would conform to geometric models of expansion, and the rate of expansion of original sin would accelerate accordingly. He also attacks qualitative ways of thinking about such issues by explicitly refusing to grant to original sin any special status setting it apart from other ethical substances, as it were. If this ethical thing is transmitted, why not other ethical things? ‘Naturally it is all one’, Taylor shrugs.54 Secondly, having exposed the problems traducianist models face, Taylor then dismisses the whole idea of traducianism, confirming our sense that Taylor’s quantitative discussion was all along tinged with irony. And out with traducianism goes the idea that something that should be discussed in terms of the will can be talked about in material terms – in Taylor’s terms, the will is a ‘moral’ as opposed to ‘natural’ zone. ‘It is generally, now adayes especially, believed, that the soul is immediately created, not generated’; ‘the soul is from without, and is a Divine substance’.55 Therefore one cannot talk about the soul and its status in terms of transmission, because it is not a transmitted thing. Neither can one talk about its properties in terms of material substances, because cognition is not material. Taylor thereby imposes an anthropological

54

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

dualism onto his discussion of man and his sin. In so far as man has a ‘nature’, it is one inherently weak and corrupt, and that is the realm of the material. But insofar as man sins, that falls within the ambit of ‘the interior faculties’, which are non-material. The great error of Western theorising about original sin, Taylor implies, is to have conflated these two discussions. Taylor divorces them. Finally, Taylor’s attack arises from his larger sense that Christ’s role as atoning saviour must be situated within an economy that traces the origin of sin to a rational choice made by individuals, and the receipt of salvation again to a rational choice open to all individuals today. He writes continually as an experimental first-person narrator: ‘I sin like a Gentleman, not like a Thief; I suffer infirmities, but doe not doe like a Devil; and though I sin, yet I repent speedily, and when I sin again, I repent again, and my spiritual state is like my natural, day and night succeed each other like a never failing revolution.’56 Indeed, Taylor concluded the Deus justificatus by pointing out that people just didn’t really care about original sin, a more important marker than any doctrinal nicety: And why the Conscience shall be for ever at so much peace for this sin, that a man shall never give one groan for his share of guilt in Adams sin, unlesse some or other scares him with an impertinent proposition; why (I say) the Conscience should not naturally be afflicted for it, nor so much as naturally know it, I confesse I cannot yet make any reasonable conjecture, save this onely, that it is not properly a sin, but onely metonymicall and improperly.57

Taylor’s arguments owed something to the continental Arminians, as we have seen, and they also bear striking similarity to earlier remarks by Samuel Hoard, whose controversial Gods Love to Mankind (1633) had attacked double predestination, and with it the Dortist conception of original sin some two decades before Taylor.58 Hoard’s work was reprinted in 1656, and the previous year it had been a target of William Lyford, who in a miniature version of the whole Taylor–Stephens– Everard quarrel, bracketed Hoard with Thomas Collier and his The Marrow of Christianity (1647). Collier had said that: ‘Adam was made a reasonable, wise, and understanding man; He was in a perfect, morall, sinlesse condition; but if we could attain the perfection that was in Adam, it would be no more than a morall and humane perfection; they that have but the first Adams wisdome, are still of the earth, earthly.’59 But Hoard was the Earl of Warwick’s chaplain; Collier was a Baptist minister. Nevertheless it was Taylor’s eloquence, reputation and sheer persistence that promoted him to an importance no comparable figure achieved. Taylor, as we saw, won few friends. This was in part due to his political

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 55 situation: for his fellow Anglicans, this was exactly what they did not need, and for the empowered Presbyterians, this was music to their heresy-obsessed ears. Samuel Rutherford and John Reading had already pounced on Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying, so he should have known better. Secondly, Taylor refused to retract: indeed, his letter to Sheldon borders on the defiant. His subsequent publications and his clash with Jeanes ceded no ground, and as late as 1665 the Jesuit Edward Worseley was reminding his readers that Taylor never recanted.60 Taylor was simply too embarrassing a figure to support. One later exception was the Deist and suicide Charles Blount, an expert in the posthumous conscription of, at best, grudging allies. His Oracles of Reason, a collection of Deist documents, opened with a demolition of the literal interpretation of the Genesis narrative more extreme than anything Taylor would have countenanced. Blount primarily co-opted Thomas Burnet’s Archaeologiae philosophicae (1692), but he listed as additional support Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Peyre`re – and Jeremy Taylor. Much later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote more extensively on ‘the Origen of our Church’ than on any other writer of the time excepting Milton, and returned again and again to this one still notorious transgression, Taylor on original sin.61 The aftermath of Taylor’s Unum necessarium and Deus justificatus need not be discussed exhaustively. Nonetheless, a few of his opponents are exemplary either for their intransigence or for their realisation of the larger significance of Taylor’s attack. Henry Jeanes was the most belligerent of Taylor’s opponents, a man who had spent his Oxford time ‘pecking and hewing’ at his studies.62 Jeanes, a Presbyterian academician and scholastic, opened a heated correspondence with a friend over the book, and eventually Taylor wrote directly to Jeanes, telling him to find something better to do with his time. Jeanes clearly thought that trouncing the golden pen of the Anglicans was a very good use of his time, and so published their correspondence in 1660, doubtless to smear Taylor in the year of his triumph and elevation to a bishopric. It is a nasty publication, waspishly written on both sides, though with Jeanes definitely ending up as the more odious of the pair. Nathaniel Stephens waited until the end of this long quarrel before associating all its major combatants. Each was awarded a section of the Vindiciae, and the very subtitle of Vindiciae fundamenti of 1658 declares to the world an odd association: Robert Everard, William Parker and Jeremy Taylor are all lumped together as common adversaries of the (now deposed) Presbyterian orthodoxy.

56

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

The actual substance of Stephens’ work is not, of course, particularly original, but two elements deserve mention. First, Stephens too faces the old problem of the mistranslation of Romans 5:12, and the troublesome in quo crux. But, in an example of someone whose beliefs have supplanted the evidence they were once based upon, Stephens repeats the problem merely to dismiss it: Secondly, say they, these words And death passed upon all men ε$ φ$ ω# πα´ ντες η% μαρτον, are thus to be rendred, in as much or so farre forth as all have sinned, page 78. Well, let the words be rendred, which way they will, the scope of the text, and the connexive particle, for, do plainly show that they contain the reason of the general passage of death upon every individual man. And therefore we must necessarily and unavoidably come to the disobedience of the first man, in whom, as in the common root all have sinned.63

But this last observation on ‘the common root’ was based on precisely the text redefined by the reading ‘in as much or so farre forth’, rather than ‘in whom’. Stephens, though, is past caring. Second, Stephens, unlike Jeanes, is sensitive to the conditional nature of Augustine’s original thought on the matter. Whereas Jeanes tramples on the problem of the ‘evil will’ – ‘This greedy appetite [which caused the Fall] . . . was undenyably a great sinne, and therefore to say it could be in him [Adam] before his fall, were a very grosse contradiction’64 – Stephens is aware that the traditional Augustinian–Calvinist line had been to stress mutability: man ‘was made in a mutable and changeable condition, in which he might stand or fall by his own election’. Stephens later expands this position in a cento of Augustinian passages: First, for the true cause of the fall, we do affirme that our first parents being seduced by the temptation of Sathan, did voluntarily and freely eate the forbidden fruit. Their own defective will was the immediate cause of their fall. Second, God was pleased according to his wise and just Councel to permit the fall, that thereby a doore might be opened to the sending of Christ for the more full declaration of the glory of his grace in the salvation of man as fallen. Third, for the power that Adam had to stand or fall, as on the one side we must necessarily say that he was made in a state very good and free from all sinne: so also it must needs be affirmed, that he was made in a mutable state, farre different from the state of the blessed Saints and Angels confirmed in grace, and farthest off from the immutability of the Creator himself. Fourth, if the question be put, how farre did the Lord go in the fall of Adam? We must needs affirme that he created the first man in such a holy state that he might freely obey all his commands: only he did not sustain him with that special and infallible grace to preserve him from falling.65

The quarrel over original sin, 1649–1660 57 Again, Stephens says that ‘man was created mortal, and if Adam had not sinned, he should have been immortal by grace’, an imitation of Augustine’s non posse mori–posse non mori distinction. Stephens also admits, somewhat cagily, that the whole problem of original righteousness turned on the precise nature of Adam and Eve’s intellects before the Fall. When people spoke of exalted mental powers and the like, what did they really mean? Was this to make Adam and Eve experts in the arts and sciences? Or was theirs a mystical or theological intelligence? Stephens realises that it was the assumption of the former type of intelligence that was causing all the narrative problems. Hence Adam’s knowledge was ‘not so much that which is literal, hystorical, and textual, but . . . that which is spiritual’.66 This, one may feel, is cheating a little, but it is a revealing cheat – as long as original righteousness was defined in some vague ‘spiritual’ sense, one need not face the problem of the divine philosophers acting so unphilosophically. Jeremy Taylor is the star of this chapter, but there was a Baptist in the wilderness before him, the fiery Robert Everard, and this demonstrates both congruence between high Church controversy and separatist radicalism, and a contemporary awareness that this was so. But the precise nature of this congruence remains problematic. Did Taylor read Everard? When Everard wrote of original sin ‘why might it not be said, When Adam beleeved, I beleeved; when Adam repented, I repented?’ this was the same thought Taylor would use five or so years later when he too asked why all ethical inclinations were not seminally transmitted.67 But Taylor’s argument seems too closely knit and integrated to require the hypothesis of help from the Agitator and maverick Baptist, and Taylor had been sceptical about original sin since at least the publication of The Liberty of Prophesying in 1647. Rather, very different men were asking similar questions of similar material, and were producing similar answers. Moreover, they had a common enemy in sight. Tellingly, Stephens never proposes that his opponents were in personal contact, only that they were producing parallel theologies and that this was worrying enough. It is perhaps more alarming to see such political extremes moving in sympathetic motion, while the skeins of contact remain invisible.

chapter 4

The heterodox Fall

Caution has to be exercised concerning the nomenclature of the ‘radicalism’ of the mid seventeenth century. Many religious writings we term ‘radical’ because they were written by figures well known for holding or being sympathetic to politically radical ideas, and in this sense religious and political radicalism inform one another. But, as the last chapter demonstrated, political and theological radicalism are not simply or inevitably twins, and, more subtly, some forms of radicalism can be informed or at least paralleled by movements in high culture, and vice versa. So we cannot reduce all radicalism to a kind of sui generis broth of jostling ideas, just as it will not do to freeze ‘orthodoxy’ into a rigid, inert casing. As J. G. A. Pocock stresses, the relation between heterodoxy and orthodoxy is dynamic, not simply oppositional; this is also true for the even more difficult relation between radicalism and heterodoxy.1 Secondly, different radicals stemmed from different roots, and one of the concerns of this chapter is to distinguish models of approaching Genesis 2–3 developed within the radical milieu. Muggletonians, for instance, vocally disagreed with Quakers on this issue. Next, much of the material concerning this milieu derives from hostile accounts and heresiographies, and is thus unreliable, on occasion luridly so. Nevertheless, the heresiographers have their own story too, and their need to lay an interpretative grid on an initially bewildering array of phenomena itself tells us much about how observers classified what they were seeing, and what their fears were. Many, indeed most, early-modern heresiographers analysed sectarianism in terms of the categories provided by their ancient predecessors, the patristic heresiographers, most popularly Epiphanius, Irenaeus and Augustine, and the radical reformation on the continent provided an intermediary reference point. This device comforted the righteous by roping them to a long tradition of godly struggle, but it also inadvertently awarded the heretics under discussion a pedigree more ancient than the heresiographer’s traditional rhetoric of ‘novelty’ allowed. 58

The heterodox Fall 59 Finally, the recording of heresy, or at least heterodoxy, is inevitably connected with its spread. The Adamites were a case in point – reinvented in about 1641, they migrated from pamphlet to pamphlet until no-one’s views of 1640s sectarianism could be uninformed by their presence. This presence was only textual – unlike the various continental uprisings, no 1640s Adamite collectives have been traced – but the suspicion, no matter how genuinely held, was influential.2 Most heresiographies, particularly of the revolutionary decades, announced the newness of their subjects: novel opinions ‘growne . . . of late yeeres’ or ‘sprang up in these latter times’, as the title pages of two works read. The tactic, of course, was not new. Lollards, for example, preached, it was claimed, ‘new doctrines and wicked’.3 But, paradoxically, most heresiographers were also keen to say that the sectarian monsters of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline England had all been seen before, and so there was nothing novel here. Stephen Denison, for instance, who preached a turgid sermon in 1627 against Hetheringtonians and others, inserted into the printed version along with some showy fonts and illustrations a list of the eighty-eight heresies enumerated by Augustine in his De haeresibus.4 Similarly, the stationer Thomas Underhill in his Hell Broke Loose (1660) dated Quakerism from the time of St Paul.5 The author of Little Non-Such (1645) complained that ‘all the heresies fomented at severall times, in former ages, and condemned by severall Councels, are now extant, attended with as many more’.6 Most interestingly of all, Ranters have long been associated with Gnostics, both at their first appearance, and by modern commentators such as Friedman, Smith and Nuttall.7 On the continent, Calvin had claimed that the French Libertines – probably, as they were so stupid, without knowing it – were merely reproducing a farrago of ideas familiar from Simon, Cerdon, Marcion, the Gnostics, Valentinus, Apelles and the Manichaeans. Calvin’s approach was to be very influential in England, and it is crucial to note that he treats a given heresy as a perennial, logical possibility, not solely a matter of textual or oral debt.8 So when the St Andrews academic and polemicist Samuel Rutherford stated that many of the heresies of ‘Spiritual Antichrist’ had spread to England from the continent and particularly from Germany, paralleling English antinomian texts with continental heresiographical accounts, there is an element of conventionality to his statement. But it is also one worth taking seriously, given the demonstrable interest of many radicals, particularly the translator John Everard, in German mystics or Spirituals such as John Tauler and Sebastian Franck. Over the middle

60

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

decades of the century there appeared, in print as well as in manuscript, works such as the medieval Theologia Germanica, translated by Giles Randall in 1646 (which had previously ‘walked up and down this City in Manuscripts at deer rates’); and Franck’s The Forbidden Fruit, the text that will chiefly concern us here.9 The German Spirituals and Anabaptists had long doubted orthodox accounts of original sin. The Hutterites also dismantled the notion, and correspondingly produced no theology of Atonement.10 Balthasar Hubmaier, for instance, burned as an Anabaptist, wrote in his On Free Will that man was composed of three natures: spirit, soul and body, a distinction common to Platonism and Gnosticism. Hubmaier then associated Adam with the soul and Eve with the flesh, another old idea. But, Hubmaier insisted, the spirit, the most important category of the three, remained upright after the transgression, and this was enough to query any overly pessimistic estimations of the Fall. ‘Adam would have preferred not to eat of the forbidden tree’, Hubmaier said, but did so ‘against his own conscience, so as not to vex or anger his rib, his flesh, Eve’. The Lutherans are gruffly rebuffed: ‘So now no one can any longer complain about Adam and Eve, nor try to excuse or palliate his sin by Adam’s Fall, since everything has been adequately restored.’ The forbidden tree was named a tree of knowledge merely to remind man that he had quite enough already. God forbade the fruit to encourage man not ‘to wish to learn and experience more than was necessary for man’.11 Hubmaier, although his tripartite division of man’s being was an individual touch, was working in a tradition that typically emphasised that the cause of the Fall was just as it was termed in the Bible: a desire for more knowledge than was fit, or for the wrong knowledge. Consequently man’s initial lot can hardly have been exalted, and man – including man today – should cast off his desire for elevation. Such spiritual abasement reverses the Fall. The Theologia Germanica had discussed Lucifer’s and then Adam’s falls very much in these terms, exhorting the believer to do otherwise, not just to lament current powerlessness.12 Cornelius Agrippa’s celebrated De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum atque artium declamatio of 1530, translated into English in 1569 as Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, methodically listed and rejected in 102 chapters every art and science recognisable as such to Agrippa. He opens his work with an admonitory comment on the Fall, and a recollection of the Gnostic Ophites:

The heterodox Fall

61

If at first I shall admonishe you, that all Sciences be as well naught as good, and that it bringeth to us, aboue the limite of Humanitie, none other blessing of the Deitie, but that perchance, wich that auncient Serpent promised to our firste parents, saiynge, Ye shalbe as Goddes, and shall know good and ill. He shall then vaunte himselfe in this Serpente, whiche bosteth himselfe to haue knowledge, as wee reade in deede that the Heretikes Ophiti did, whiche worshipped the Serpents in their Sacrifices, saying, That he hath brought the knowledge of Vertue into Paradise.13

Such cautions against intellectual curiosity were common; as Montaigne said, ‘In Man curiosity is an innate evil, dating from his origins: Christians know that particularly well. The original Fall occurred when Man was anxious to increase his wisdom and knowledge: that path led headlong to eternal damnation.’14 Agrippa, however, exemplifies the difficulty of inheriting on the one hand the duty to affirm that unfallen Adam and Eve were created ‘in ye best degree’, and on the other the desire to castigate intellectual aspiration. Agrippa’s book ends on an uneasy combination of both strains, in which Adam and Eve are created in possession of ‘formes and knowledges’, but things are nonetheless ‘reueled’ when they transgressed: bicause God created al things very good, yt is to say in ye best degree, wherein thei might abide: euen as he than [sic] hath created trees ful of fruites, so also hath he created the soules as reasonable trees ful of formes and knowledges, but thorow the sinne of the first parent al things were reueled, & oblivion the mother of ignoraunce stept in.15

The distinction seems to be that the prelapsarian ‘formes and knowledges’ are internal things of the soul, whereas sin ‘reueled’ other things, external things of ignorance. Sebastian Franck was influenced by Agrippa, and also by the idea of Christian folly, prominent in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, and stemming from Paul’s statements ‘professing themselves to be wise, they became fools’, and, ‘if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise’.16 Franck, a printer by trade, was one of the most prominent of the sixteenth-century German Spirituals, an anti-Lutheran, and hence favourable to an anti-Lutheran exegesis of Genesis 2–3. He also despised slavish obedience to intellectual authority. ‘Foolish Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory’, said Franck of the four doctors of the Latin Church, ‘of whom not even one knew the Lord, so help me God, nor was sent by God to teach. Rather, they were all apostles of Antichrist.’17 Franck had also translated the classic

62

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

text of Christian folly, Erasmus’ Encomium moriae, and his Forbidden Fruit, with its exhortations to ‘unlearn’, is steeped in such professedly anti-intellectualist writings. Franck’s Paradoxa (1534, many subsequent editions) was deeply influenced by Tauler and by the Theologia Germanica, and treats ‘Adam’ as an attitude to be resisted rather than simply as a historical person; Adam, he says, citing the Theologia Germanica, is our self-will, and as such is still alive. But Adam can be rejected: ‘Adam’s sin does not harm anyone, unless it be taken in hand and put on’; ‘Adam’s fall, the tree of knowledge, repentance; likewise, death, life, suffering, the resurrection of Christ are each in its own way still in full swing, as well as all other stories in the Bible.’18 It was Franck’s The Forbidden Fruit, though, under the supposed authorship of ‘Augustinus Eleutherius’, which was to be the most influential of his writings in English circles.19 A translation appeared in 1640, marked ‘Amsterdam’, and a distinct text was printed in London two years later. John Everard’s own manuscript translation had already been in some circulation.20 (Everard got into considerable trouble for his translations, and was made to read out a list of retractions on his knees before William Laud in late 1639.)21 Notably, Franck’s work appears in the library catalogues of both George Fox (who lists a lost 1650 edition produced by Calvert) and, later, the Quaker bibliophile Benjamin Furley, and Franck has accordingly been proposed as an influence on early Quakerism.22 Certainly, in 1676 the Quaker Hilary Prach was writing from London to a German Quaker friend that he had himself just finished a translation of Franck on the forbidden tree into English, ‘because it agreed with our position’.23 For Franck, the narrative of creation and fall is both literal and allegorical, ‘as the thing was done outwardly, so the same . . . happened inwardly in the heart of Adam’; ‘the exterior world, and whatsoever outwardly is to be seene or is done, is onely an accident and a certaine signifying figure of the true and interior nature’.24 Literal and allegorical modes fuse. This contrasts with the technique of the Digger spokesman Gerard Winstanley who, in deference to his allegorical priorities, wrote that there were five rivers flowing out of Eden rather than the biblical four: one for each sense.25 Franck, however, stays close to what he sees as the literal signification of the text. Thus, of the forbidden tree, ‘who should eate thereof, their eyes should be opened to view themselves, and they be made Gods, and so know both Good and Evill’. The interior meaning of this verse applies, as Augustine might have agreed, to ‘nothing

The heterodox Fall 63 26 else but our owne will and knowledge’. Commenting on the inclusion of good as well as evil in the name of the forbidden tree, Franck infers that the prelapsarians were ignorant of both: they ‘walk[ed] in innocencie . . . ignorant both of Good and Evill’. This state, rather than being something quite out of our grasp, is one we should labour to regain, and Franck associates this with ‘unlearning’: ‘We must therefore learne to forget, and unlearne whatsoever Adam knew, or doth know, wils, loves, &c.’ Those who wished to praise unfallen perfection had a logical problem: man could not be that perfect without encroaching upon the higher order of the angels, let alone God. Emphasising man’s initial dejection had fewer problems. Thus Franck counsels that we too must ‘become little Children and Fooles again’, ‘void of all knowledge’. Our best state is when we quite literally vegetate: And man, like a Logge, is no better then dead; but while he doth nothing, knows & desires nothing, but, keeping a holy Sabbath or rest; dyes wholly unto himself, and being void of will or wit, resignes himselfe over unto God, and permits in him to know and doe in him what, when, and how he will.27

The Theologia Germanica, again one of Franck’s major sources for The Forbidden Fruit, also stressed that the fall was not simply or even importantly to do with taking apples, but with egocentrism. As Everard translated the passage: What other thing did the Divell, or what was his turning away, or fall; but bec: he arrogated vnto hims: that he might be somthing, & and somthing of hims: & in his owne right. This arrogance to be I, to be mee, to be mee [sic], & to be mine was his turning away & Fall. And ye same thing is yet done . . . It is wont to be said that Ad. perished, or fell bec: he eate an Apple: But I say that hapened bec: he arrogated somth: to hims:, & bec: of his I, to mee, mine, mee, & such like.28

This sentiment was put to particularly trenchant use in England as part of John Webster’s 1654 attack on the traditional university curriculum: ‘The whole Scripture is given that man might be brought to the full, and absolute negation of all his wit, reason, will, desires, strength, wisdome, righteousness, and all humane glory and excellencies whatsoever, and that selfhood might be totally annihilated.’29 Joseph Salmon too, in a pamphlet he wrote before his more notorious A Rout, A Rout, also shows Franckean influence. Adam, like a child, came into the world not only naked but blind: This was that Antichrist that appeared in, and to our first Parents, and that which they harlotryed with, from the Lord: God He created Adam blind and naked to

64

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

this end, that Adam might not see, but God for him; nor Adam might not know, but what God knew in him, and for him; and so this Adam, though blind and naked, yet cloathed with such divine Robes, as were althogether inconsistent to fleshly Adam; so here was God All, the Creature Nothing . . . And as Adam, in the History; so all in the Mistery, commit dayly fornication with the Whore our fleshly wisdime; by eating of the Forbidden Tree; for this forbidden Tree is in us, and we tast of it continually; and howerly suffer death for the same.30

Henry Pinnell, the army chaplain and translator of the prominent academic Paracelsan Oswald Croll, also wrote of Adam in terms of rise-asfall: ‘Did not Adam dye when he was risen, and ascended to the Meridian of his created life?’ Adam was intrinsically restricted, and should have remained thus: ‘Adam had his root and rise but in and from the earth; how then could his righteousnesse be heavenly or spirituall?’ He was ‘that earthly Adam who hath (only) breath breathed (but) into his nostrils’; his was ‘but a terrene Paradise at best’. Pinnell finds the orthodox conception of prelapsarian perfection a danger to piety: ‘When the shadow of the first Adams excellency is so bigge and long upon the earth, it is too cleare a signe that the Day-starre is very low and little in the Horrison of mans heart.’31 Pinnell then unfolds his catalogue of objections to the orthodox model: if Adam were otherwise than initially imperfect, he could not have fallen; if Adam ‘had not in him the Principles and Seeds of sin, how could he have transgressed and become a sinner?’; ‘mortall at first’, he was of the earth, earthly; his falling was more like that of a man who had nothing running into debt than a man who was originally rich; crucially, even God admits that his eyes were opened.32 This can be likened to the sentiments of another sometime army chaplain, William Erbury or Erbery, who, as Wood reported, ‘declare[d] himself for universal redemption, that no man was punished for Adam’s sin, that Christ dies for all, that the guilt of Adam’s sin should be imputed to no man, &c’.33 Pinnell, like everyone who argues his way, faces grave problems of theodicy. The Franckean reading of Genesis as the story of limited, creaturely beings overpromoting themselves has great narrative persuasion, especially given the full name of the forbidden tree and God’s seeming admission of its properties at Genesis 3:22. But such approaches cannot explain why God would have created man in such a fallible condition. Such objections are met rather brusquely by Pinnell: ‘It was the will of God . . . He is to give account to none but himself. He is above all Gods, and may do what pleaseth Himselfe in heaven and earth.’ God, if he so chose, could ‘dash . . . in pieces . . . that earthen vessel of the first Adam and his created state, fitted to ruin and destruction’.34 In this way

The heterodox Fall 65 Pinnell shows the limits of the Franckean approach: it cannot furnish any explanation as to why God chose to make Adam ‘fitted to ruin’, resorting instead to ideological imperative. Perhaps the most interesting reader of Franck, however, is Isaac Penington the Younger, prominent convert to Quakerism in 1658, and spiritual mentor to the Quaker Thomas Ellwood, one of John Milton’s pupils. Penington, the son of the Alderman of that name, also associated with Lady Anne Conway and Henry More and their circle, and was, with Conway, socially one of the most highly placed of the early Quakers. Henry More liked him: ‘There’s none reades more like a down right good man than he’, he wrote to Lady Conway in 1675. Penington was also once jailed for not taking off his hat to the Earl of Bridgwater, erstwhile Elder Brother of Milton’s Mask.35 Penington is of particular interest because in his pre-Quaker days he had some connection to the Ranters, and to the Muggletonians, as Christopher Hill has discussed.36 Certainly, Giles Calvert, who published other Ranters, was Penington’s sole publisher from 1648–54, Penington’s most interesting phase. Even after Penington started selling his copy principally to Lodowick Lloyd, Calvert was still publishing the odd work up until 1659. John Reeve, with Muggleton one of the Two Witnesses, had signed a letter of 1654 to Penington, ‘Yours with all the elect’, but Penington fell into controversy with Muggleton in the late 1660s, who mockingly titled him with inverse snobbery, ‘Squire Penington’.37 In A Looking-Glass for George Fox Muggleton produced one of the most shrewd contemporary analyses of the early Quakers: Here people may see what the Quakers Christ within them is, a meer allegory, a spirit without a body, and their flesh and bone of their bodies they count Christs body, and so when their souls slip out of their bodies, and goes into God, as they imagine, their bodies goes to the Earth, and so Christs body goes to the Earth, and his spirit that is in them, goes into Gods vast spirit that taketh all things into its self; And according to Squire Pennington’s saying unto John Reeve, but it was when he was upon the Ranting Principle, but since that he is turned Quaker; for the Quakers principle is but the Ranters refined into a more civil kind of life. For the Ranters were so grosly rude in their lives, that spoyled their high language, and made people weary of them; but the Quakers that were upon the Rant are the best able to maintain the Quakers principle of Christ within them, than any other Quakers that were not upon the Rant, as William Smith, and Squire Pennington, and others as I know.38

Indeed, the idea that early Quakerism was close to Ranting was widespread: Richard Baxter and Alexander Ross both said so, and Henry More

66

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

complained that Quakerism was ‘tinctured with Familisme’.39 Penington, who produced eleven tracts in his pre-Quaker period (from A Touch Stone or Tryall of Faith (1648) to Expositions (1656)), certainly wrote like a Ranter in his tellingly titled 1649 pamphlet Light or Darknesse: And this is that which my Soul in its inmost part desireth, That the Tincture both of good and evil, in all its varieties and expatiations, might be blotted out; and things reduced into, and produced in their Originality, which comprehends both good and evil in an absolute perfection. And then we shall see all things, no more with one kinde of eye appearing to be evil, nor with another kinde of eye appearing to be good, but as they are indeed in their inmost bottom, where alone is true Knowledg, Peace, Rest, and Content, eternally to be found and possessed.40

Later in life, Penington remembered how in his youth, after a period of Calvinist angst, he prayed for illumination – and got too much: But I soon felt, that this estate was too high and glorious for me, and I was not able to abide in it, it so overcame my natural spirits: wherefore, blessing the Name of the Lord for his great goodness to me, I prayed unto him to take that from me which I was not able to bear, and to give me such a proportion of his light and presence, as was sutable to my present state, and might fit me for his service. Whereupon this was presently removed from me, yet a favour remained with me.41

This remarkable passage corresponds to the time of his first pamphleteering. His eighteenth-century Quaker biographer, Joseph Gurney Bevan, described Light or Darknesse and Penington’s two following publications as written in an ‘unusual style’ and ‘often expressed in terms at which even the pious at this day would revolt, and which the wise would contemn’.42 Muggleton and Bevan, then, though working with opposing biases, both clearly identified a wilder phase in Penington’s writing. While this general observation works well at a distance, it does not quite prepare one for the extreme disparity between chronologically adjacent works. The Great and Sole Troubler of the Times Represented in a Mapp of Miserie (1649) is a depressed, passive piece: man is mad, hates God, and must simply wait for dissolution: the work ends wishing only for ‘the Refiners fire’. In contrast, Light or Darknesse, published the following year, in the tradition of Erasmus and Franck praises folly with an energy foreign to the earlier work: ‘But now, I have been so toss’d and tumbled, melted and new-moulded, that I am changed into that which I thought it utterly impossible for me ever to be. I am grown at peace, if not in love, with folly. I begin to prefer Folly at my very Heart above Wisdom.’43

The heterodox Fall 67 Light or Darknesse, indeed, evinces a Franckean pre-ethical, almost prehuman bliss, recaptured through self-abasement. Penington wished ‘good and evil. . .blotted out’: ‘Destruction will make an end of their wickedness, yea and it will make an end of your Righteousness also, and then ye will become both one lump of Clay, without either Good or Evil.’ Destruction will return men to an Edenic state, by ‘bring[ing] forth it self and everything again in its Primitive Glory’.44 Penington’s prelapsarians are not philosophers but clods. We have fallen away from this state – ‘the Creature [is] in its fallen, sunken estate’ – and are rewarded with a God of wrath. Indeed, in explicit opposition to how God appeared in Eden, Penington has bold words for how he appears in 1650 England: ‘as a severe dreadful Iudg, as an Enemy to the Life, Being and Happiness of it; as a Tormentor to it, as a Destroyer of it’. But Penington also says that this aspect is only one of God’s faces, and that we can find, as well as others, an Adamic state in our hearts, where God will appear kind and bountiful.45 However, even Adam-as-clay did not have full access to God. In Severall Fresh Inward Openings, another pamphlet of 1650, Penington cautioned that Adam unfallen only saw God ‘through the vail’: ‘God indeed shewed himself to Adam, as he appeared in the Creature, as he shined through the vail; but hid himself as he was in himself: so that Adam could in no wise reach to the true Vision, but onely to such an appearance as God pleased to dart forth of himself through the vail.’46 Finally, in the Divine Essays of 1654, as was noted in the first chapter, Penington admitted that ‘Adam when he fell, shewed the weakness of his nature, The Prince of this World came and found somewhat in him to fasten upon. Frailty is a property of the flesh.’47 So for Penington, prelapsarianism is desirable but also oddly vulnerable and passive. In a direct quotation from Franck, as Smith has noted, Penington advises us to ‘vomit up’ the forbidden fruit, to become stupid again: ‘ignorance is better than knowledg. Man hath still eaten too much of the tree of knowledg, and he must vomit up all this fruit again.’ Compare Franck: ‘it is behooveful that we be born anew, do vomit up the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’.48 Penington and the Franckeans, in conclusion, seek both to demolish any sense of an absolute and impermeable barrier between unfallen and fallen states of man, and to aid this project by emphasising man’s constant creaturely dependence on God. Consequently, they dispense with any idea of man’s initial grandeur, instead praising unfallen man as a log, a trunk, a piece of clay, ignorant of both good and evil. We are exhorted to behave

68

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

thus. As such, theirs is a coherent theology of personal abasement, founded on a set of assumptions about the Genesis narrative that directly contradicts those of the magisterial reformers at every important point. What had been an anti-Lutheran project in early-to-mid-sixteenth-century Germany becomes an anti-Presbyterian one in mid-seventeenth-century England. One similarity among the writers so far discussed is their readiness to take seriously the idea that the forbidden tree was genuinely potent. Franck’s writings, though, and those writings he influenced, were openly welcoming of allegorical interpretation, and although Franck says that he does not deny that a literal Fall took place, his emphasis on the falls we daily see taking place about us might make us wary of taking the literalistic ramifications of his exegesis too seriously. Even Augustine had allowed that the castigation of desire for too much knowledge was licit, as long as it relied on strictly allegorical exegesis of Genesis, and left the literal sense intact: And I know there are some who think the sin of those people consisted in having anticipated too hurriedly the desire for knowledge of good and evil, and in having wished to lay hold prematurely of what was more suitably preserved for them for a later time . . . This, so long as they understand that tree not as a literal tree with literal fruit, but only metaphorically so, can have a certain congruity with upright faith and a probability of truth.49

But given that the overwhelming understanding of the Genesis narrative in the early-modern period was literalistic, some radical thinkers extended this literalism to the forbidden tree itself, the last outpost of allegorism in the otherwise non-allegorical territory of orthodox exegesis. As one of Samuel Hartlib’s correspondents commented in an undated letter: I shall in the next place returne to my great greate granfather Adam & question with my selfe what was the formall cause of his transgression & what or how it was, corruption was wrought vpon his whole posterity, To which I answer that whosoeuer he be that doth maintaine that barely the breaking of the comand, without any inherent quality in the fruite to suplant him in his former condition shall neuer make either sound Divine or able Phision.50

This dangerous extension of a perfectly orthodox technique was one that derived from medical theory, specifically Paracelsan medicine; Hartlib’s correspondent was a medic, and Pinnell was a translator of Paracelsan texts. As the influential Flemish iatrochemist Jean-Baptiste van Helmont wrote: ‘Death proceeded not from the Will, or from sin; but from the Apple.’51 This is exactly opposite to the Theologia Germanica above, which had maintained that talk of real apples was idle.

The heterodox Fall 69 One peculiarity of Paracelsan systems, though, is that they also tend to emphasise the magnitude of Adam’s unfallen intellect, and this at once distinguishes them from the Franckeans, and creates the potential narrative problem that Adam would appear already to possess what the forbidden fruit nominally offers. Van Helmont overcame this difficulty by defining the knowledge of the apple as different in kind from man’s initial knowledge. He treats the apple as an aphrodisiac, thus equating sexual knowledge with the Fall, a conclusion Augustine had gone to some pains to refute: ‘For it pleased the Lord of things to insert in the Apple, an incentive of the Concupiscence of the Flesh, to wit, from which he was able safely to abstain, by not eating the Apple, therefore diswaded from: For otherwise, he had never at any moment been tempted by the Flesh of his genital Members . . .’ 52 Augustine agreed that unfallen Adam never suffered from unwonted erections, but he refused therefore to relegate all sexual contact to the fallen world. God, Augustine said, had created man with sexual organs, and declared his creation good. Therefore sex cannot be inherently sinful. He had hedged somewhat by insisting that although prelapsarian sex was theoretically licit, it never actually took place; van Helmont dispenses with the distinction, and with it, any possible sexual activity before the fall. In other words, Augustine abstracted concupiscence from intercourse; van Helmont did not.53 If one neglected to distinguish carefully the type of knowledge Adam had and the type the apple offered, problems could arise. This is best witnessed in a manuscript translation of the Paracelsan Andreas Tentzel, ‘Of Spirituall mumy’, located among the papers of the Cambridge medic Dr Daniel Foote.54 This curious treatise takes ‘magic tree’ ideas to new extremes. The starting point, once again, is acceptance of the godly power of the forbidden tree. Tentzel rejects the orthodox solution to the Genesis 3:22 problem, with its gloss of God’s comments on man’s promotion as irony. The trinity does not traffic in wit: ‘ye Person of ye Father testifiinge to ye other this very thinge, sayinge, Behould ye Man is Become as one of us to know good & evill &c. Neither is this expression of ye holy Trinity to be judged ironicall, as it may perhaps att ye first sight seeme to some.’ 55 But the account then construes the matter in Eden in a fashion quite removed from the other iatrochemists. The tree gained its power ‘by way of transplantation from ye Serpent’; ‘And further it’s probable yt ye Serpent had his den under yt tree or thereabouts; Which thinge God knowinge did therfore forbidd Adam to use and eate ye fruit of it.’56 The business of the treatise is to instruct how one might utilise this knowledge

70

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

(‘spirituall mumy’) imparted from the serpent to the tree – and any serpent, it seems, will do. Tentzel even asserts that if one plants in earth mixed with serpent semen, the resultant flora will act like modern ‘smart drugs’. Better still, for greater efficacy sake, chiefly for ye heightening of witt, lett it [serpent ‘mumy’] be transplanted into some certaine fruite belongeinge to ye braine, sowinge viz: ye earth with ye extreame parts of ye roots of cherrie-tree: For then ye fruite thereof will attract & convert into themselves (together with ye nutriment by a way truly balsamicall and magneticall) ye mumiall spirite of ye Serpent.

Tentzel then looks forward to a time when the tree of life can be used in a similar fashion, and immortality achieved.57 In one sense this is a preposterous document, because Tentzel ignores the biblical backdrop of prohibition, fall and expulsion. Although Tentzel’s text is not a piece of theology the theological objection is hard to ignore: Tentzel instructs his reader to enact the Fall in a reconstructed Edenic environment. Nowhere does he forbid. In the most obvious way, this Paracelsan text demonstrates the structural fault less visible but no less problematic in all the accounts that grant potency to the tree: if the Fall was really upwards, then why did God try to prevent it? The Franckeans had solved this problem by defining the knowledge as genuinely on offer but undesirable; Tentzel trusted the text of Genesis with its eye-opening conclusion, and thus risked inculpating God. Similarly, Rosicrucian emblems often insinuated the exciting fall into wisdom: Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, an early example of multimedia, employing parallel illustrations, mottoes, prose commentaries and musical notation for accompanying ‘Alchemical Fugues’, contains several suggestive plates, including one of a sage plucking an apple from a tree enclosed in a chapel.58 Perhaps the most sensitive extrapolation of the ‘magic tree’ tradition is provided by a rare work written by a rare man: William Rabisha and his Adam Unvailed, and Seen with Open Face (1649). It was published in his most productive year by the arch-radical printer of the revolutionary decades, Giles Calvert, whose print-shop Thomas Hall called ‘that forge of the Devil’.59 In 1649 a parliamentary captain called ‘William Rabysha’ was awarded £100 by parliament for carrying the news from Ireland that Wexford had been taken, and given both the prevalence of radical religion in the army and the extreme rarity of the name (of Yorkshire origin) the William Rabisha who produced Adam Unvailed and ‘Capt. Wm Rabysha’

The heterodox Fall 71 60 are likely one and the same. Rabisha signed his tract ‘Yours in the fellowship of the Spirit, and Minister of God according to the dispensation of grace given to him’, though, and apart from his similarly idiosyncratic A Paralel between Mr Love’s Treason and the Many Thousands that are Hanged for Theft (1651), a condemnation of capital punishment, he produced no other comparable work. The complication is that William Rabisha was also the author of a clamorously Royalist cookbook published on the Restoration, in which Rabisha protested that he had been abroad in exile throughout the revolution. But it was published by Calvert again, an obvious fingerprint of prior radical association. It would seem that all three Rabishas were one, and that Rabisha reinvented his past when it became politically expedient.61 What impact Rabisha had is very hard to say, as the scarcity of his book is matched by a scarcity of reference to it, although it is listed in the libraries of three men as colourful as Rabisha himself: Thomas Jeake the provincial radical and bibliophile, Thomas Britton the coal-seller and eclectic, and Francis Lodwick the language-planner and pre-Adamite. Rabisha’s ideas are certainly compatible with what the last of these three men wrote about the Fall.62 Rabisha turns the Fall on its head. His title-page boldly promises arguments ‘in opposition to what ever hath been formerly declared by most men’. He opens by detailing the enemy position, ‘the Principle which I doe here oppose and deny to be a Truth’, and his thesis is that the common reading of the Fall makes no causal sense: [T]hey contradict themselves, and give themselves the lie; in that they say Adam was made in holiness and righteousness, and so continued till he ate the fruit thereof; and yet to say, he sinned before he ate thereof, that is a plain contradiction: and therefore the principle touching Adam’s holiness is not a truth . . . their eating did not effect or produce their lusts and desires, but their lusts and desires did effect their taking the fruit and eating thereof.63

Rabisha thus detects that all Augustinian-based theories have to contain within themselves the elements of their demise – those problems earlier investigated of the ‘evil will’ and its origin. He attacks by name not only high-church figures like Ussher on this point but also the Digger Winstanley, on the grounds that Winstanley too had said that the Fall was a demotion. Rabisha opposes this, once again, by echoing the Corinthians text on the nature the earth[l]y man: ‘the first Adam was made of earth earthly’ – ‘For he lost nothing by his eating of the forbidden fruit; he having nothing to lose, neither wisdom, righteousness, knowledge, or

72

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

light inherent in himself; but contrarily, being meerly blinde, foolish, ignorant, and empty of all those attributes.’ God was not speaking ironically at Genesis 3:22, as the orthodox were forced into insisting. God, for Rabisha, does not lie to himself, and the connective ‘therefore’ before the expulsion would make no sense if God were only joking (‘Therefore the LORD God sent him forth . . .’).64 So far Rabisha and the Franckeans would agree. But Rabisha pushes on: ‘I say he gained all his naturall knowledge, light, righteousness, wisedom, and the like, by vertue of his eating of the forbidden fruit.’ At this point Franck would advise us to vomit up that knowledge as a bad thing, but for Rabisha, the fruit deified man. In a statement Franck would have deplored, man did become like God, Rabisha says, in kind if not in degree: ‘as a coal is like a whole world set on fire, so was Adam like God in the knowledge of good and evil’. Man in his fallen state differs from God only in that his ethical performance does not always match his ethical understanding.65 But that understanding, in a remarkable moment in English religious writing, is divine. Rabisha’s close reading of Winstanley – let alone the connective particles of Genesis – might encourage us to classify him as a literalist exegete. But Rabisha then permits Genesis to dissolve back into allegory. We were not ‘in’ Adam; the trees were not ‘materiall or naturall’, and we only die in Adam ‘in an allegoricall sense’. No matter how closely Rabisha has watched words like ‘therefore’ in the text, the narrative is just a ‘type’ of what we all go through.66 It is a fine denouement: literalistic exegesis used to refute the ‘literal’ reading, and then itself dismissed. The question remains for Rabisha, however, what God was doing prohibiting the Fall. Rabisha takes refuge in the long perspective: God suffered the Fall to convince man of sin; God, seeing that even this was not enough, had to become incarnate. When this view of gradual growth across the ages is combined with gradual growth in Eden – Adam, in a very strange phrase, ‘grew out of something’ – we are only a step away from the type of theodicy associated with Irenaeus, against that of Augustine, in which human history is now seen as a process of development, not of forlorn wandering. Rabisha was almost certainly unaware of any such scholarly ancestry – he does not seem a particularly bookish sort – but his emphasis on growth and potential, rather than damage and defect, is testimony to a growing awareness that the Augustinian theodicy presupposed by almost all early-modern religious writers was not the only option.

The heterodox Fall 73 Rabisha did share one opinion with Winstanley – an ultimate commitment to the allegorical priority of scripture – and Winstanley is the most rigorously allegorical of the radical writers on Genesis. Winstanley was the spokesman of the famed Digger community; as one contemporary newspaper described them, ‘The new fangled people that begin to dig on St Georges Hill in Surrey, say, they are like Adam, they expect a generall restauration of the Earth to its first condition.’67 They assembled in April 1649 on St George’s Hill near Walton, Surrey, and moved four months later to nearby Cobham. Initially under the leadership of William Everard and Gerard Winstanley, the group soon achieved notoriety: ‘sowing the ground with Parsnips, Carrets and Beans, their number encrease every day, it began with five, and is now above fourty, but they say they will shortly be above five thousand’. Within a year of the initial occupation the community, crushed by local hostility and unyielding soil, had dispersed.68 Winstanley discussed the Fall in almost all his pamphlets. His first work, The Mysterie of God (1648), manifests immediately his allegorical turn: ‘Adam himself, or that living flesh, mankinde, is a Garden which God hath made for his own delight, to dwell, and walk in.’ Already the Fall is reversible: ‘Now the curse that was declared to Adam was temporary.’69 Allegory also internalises and thus marginalises the role of Eve and the serpent, who are not discussed as separate things. It all takes place in the mind, and there alone: ‘the Serpent, my own invention’; ‘the ground of Adams fall, arises up first in Adams heart, as fruit growing up from a created Being’. Again, God foresees the Fall because nature is unstable, ‘all these being created qualities’.70 In The New Law of Righteousness (1649) Winstanley rejects in ringing public tones preacherly talk of original sin: ‘Therefore you Preachers, do not you tell the people any more, That a man called Adam, that disobeyed about 6000 years ago, was the man that filled every man with sin and filth, by eating an apple’; rather, ‘Adams innocency is the time of child-hood’.71 Winstanley too employs close textual scrutiny, first to point out a problem produced by literal reading, and then to use that problem to reject the literal sense. The problem he points out is that the Bible itself says that there were men before Adam: Therefore let none speak so discontentedly against Adam, the first man by Creation, that they say lived on earth about 6000 years ago, as though he brought in the misery upon all; for the Scriptures seems to declare, that there were men in the world before that time.

74

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

For when Cain had killed his brother Abel, which in one verse Moses seemes to say, was the third man in the world, yet in a few verses following, writing of Cains punishment, declares Cains own words, Thou hast set a mark upon me, and every one that sees me, wil kil me: And yet by the story before, there were no more men in the world, but his Father Adam and he, now Abel being dead. Gen. 4. 14. Therefore certainly this Adam, or first man that is spoken of, is he that is within, as I have spoke of, which kils or surpresses Abel.72

Winstanley also shows witty disrespect for academic polyglot exegesis in his obviously fanciful etymologies that Adam is ‘A-dam’ because ‘he does dam and stop up the streams of the waters of life and libertie’; and that Eve is ‘Ivie’ because she ‘clings about the tree’ in covetousness.73 By Fire in the Bush (1650), Winstanley’s allegorising is subtly reconstituting the original text: [F]lesh sees his folly, and growes very weary thereof; the patience of the spirit is honoured by the flesh. And that righteous Ruler (God), the Seed and tree of Life, begins to walke in this coole of the day, with delight, in the middle of the garden (Mans heart); the sweet breathings of that pure spirit is now entertained, and falne Earth begins to see himselfe naked, and to acknowledge his nakednesse before the spirit, and is ashamed.74

In Genesis, the cool of the day is broken by the ominous approach of God about to curse and expel his creatures; now, his approach heralds a return to blessedness. To perceive one’s nakedness is an anagnorisis, a sweetness in shame perennially available: Many men live in their innocencie longer than others, some are tempted sooner than others, but all must be tempted, and tried by the evil one . . . This is the first estate of mankinde, or the living soule in his innocencie, and you need not looke back six thousand yeares to find it; for every single man and woman passes through it.75

Winstanley, though, does have his own theory of human origins: while Genesis describes allegorically man’s various spiritual states, it also documents the historical fortunes of the initial community, which came into existence at some unspecified time. This community was not a couple in a garden, but a larger group of workers, like the Diggers themselves. Initially, people shared the workload, the stronger compensating for the weaker. But one day, ‘The stronger, or elder brother seeing the outward objects before him, thereupon imagines and saith, why should I that do all the worke, be such a servant to these that doe least worke, and be equall with them?’76 Thereupon the elder brother tyrannises over the younger, and that both was and is the Fall. Moreover, it is in no sense a ‘birthright’;

The heterodox Fall 75 this fall is one we all have the choice to embrace or reject. Winstanley, in dismantling the apparatus of hereditary taints, also questions the very idea of heredity. The same structure that guarantees the continual existence of original sin is that which allows a hereditary aristocracy. Dismantle one, and the other collapses too. Nor is it all the fault of the elder brother: the younger is also culpable, as he ‘lets go his hold in the Earth, and submits himself to be a slave to his brother’.77 (Note that this cannot comfortably be translated back into the terms of the Genesis narrative: talk of a ‘guilty apple’ as well as a guilty Adam would merely be transferred epithet.) The central principle of this fall, then, is individualism, self-promotion. Here Winstanley intersects with the Franckeans in his distrust of ‘imagination’, lamenting ‘But thou seest now, how Imagination, that Serpent, hath deceived thee; o thou living soule, how art thou falne?’78 ‘Imagination is that God, which generally every one worships and ownes; and in the matter, they worship a lye, the Devill and meere nothing’; ‘imaginary Hypocrites, that worship they know not what, but as their fancie tells them’.79 So Winstanley’s fall is what were traditionally its effects. In The Law of Freedom, his last work, ‘When Mankinde began to buy and sell, then did he fall from his Innocency; for they began to oppress and cozen one another of their Creation Birth-right.’80 Indeed, as Winstanley accepts that there were men before Adam, his fall cannot be primal. He writes of ‘ignorant and rude fancy’, ‘rudeness and ignorance’, as if they were parts of human nature; law is required because ‘the spirit in Mankind is various within it self ’.81 Some people simply need controlling because that is how they are. When he talks of ‘Original Righteousness’, in a temporal inversion it is something now available, something we must hurry to obtain.82 Winstanley’s advice, unsurprisingly, was not heeded, and the Digger experiment failed. But meanwhile, Winstanley’s writings had dismantled not just what most orthodox people thought about the opening chapters of the Bible, but what most of the radicals we have surveyed thought too. Such allegorism was not uncommon; compare the reported sentiment of the recanting Quaker John Toldervy: That the Garden of Eden is the world, that the Trees thereof are all living beings. That Paradice is in man. That man fell by harkning to the wicked, which was the fleshly mind, and that not the Woman properly, but the silliest and weakest part was the Woman that tempted him. That Adam was the earthly nature in man.83

76

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

What makes Winstanley different is that behind his allegorical front he set up an alternative narrative of political origins, based on an originary communism, and this second project is ultimately much the more significant of the two. This was going too far for almost all Winstanley’s contemporaries. One commentator simply reinstated the Fall, and then used it as a stick to beat Winstanley’s political assumptions: ‘had they been of Adam’, this journalist sneered, ‘they had had Passions, and then of necessity Laws’.84 Another journalist linked them to the continental Adamites, insinuating that the Diggers practised communism, which they did, and sexual libertinism, which they did not.85 The final people to be discussed in this chapter are the ones that fit even less comfortably with what we have seen so far. Winstanley was not really talking about what happened in a garden, but he used the language of the garden story as a base from which to articulate his political vision. To an extent, much of what he says is compatible with the Franckean fall, but allegorised to stand for a quite different historical event. Again, much of what the Paracelsans wrote was recognisably associated with the Franckean paradigm – they just disagreed about the nature and effect of the forbidden fruit. Some versions of Genesis circulating in the revolutionary decades, though, dismantled the Fall itself. On a European level, the most notorious of all was the pre-Adamite hypothesis of La Peyre`re, which had been circulating in France since the beginning of the 1640s.86 It became an international scandal when the famous Elzevier firm of Amsterdam published the Prae-Adamitae in 1655.87 The following year it appeared in an unsigned English translation, and at that point pre-Adamism became available to those without the learned languages. The impact of the initial Latin edition had been felt in 1655, when Samuel Hartlib wrote in his diary, the Ephemerides, that one M. Finck, or possibly a friend of Finck, ‘know’s also the name of the Author of Prae-Adamitarum as j take it le Pere as j take it or Liperira a frenchman’.88 The English translation carried names of neither author, printer, publisher, nor translator. The stationers Underhill and Webb petitioned the council of state about the impending publication, identifying the printer, but the request cannot have been all that effective, as many copies survive. They neglected to name the translator, probably, if unexpectedly, David Whitford, gentleman, scholar, clergyman, and Royalist soldier.89 La Peyre`re held that there were two types of people: Jews, and everybody else. All Jews derive and date from the time of Adam and Eve, two

The heterodox Fall 77 special new creations unconnected to the rest of humanity alive at that time. All others are pre-Adamites, whose great sinfulness had recently prompted God to create a fresh pair that would generate the race chosen to usher in salvation.90 La Peyre`re’s hypothesis, despite the fact that people immediately said he was ‘a man for whom all religions are alike indifferent; and in the opinion of the most harsh observers, an impious man and an atheist’, was not sceptically motivated, and shows many similarities with Socinian thought.91 His larger religious philosophy, as Popkin has stressed, was both philosemitic and Messianic, and his pre-Adamism was maintained from, rather than against, the Bible. Men existed before Adam because Paul said so. His system sought to redefine the connection between the process of sin to redemption, and the process of mortality to immortality. Whereas previously these two processes were tied to the Fall, La Peyre`re instead traced their association to the perishable matter out of which man was formed, long before Adam. The central exegetical hypothesis of La Peyre`re’s model is very simple, and from it flow many of his conclusions. When Paul wrote that ‘For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed where there is no law’ (Romans 5:13), the law there referred to was not, as it is commonly interpreted, the Law given to Moses, but the interdiction given to Adam. But, if this is taken to be the case, then the phrase ‘until the law’ must imply that there was a pre-Adamic time, populated by people to whom sin was not imputed. The actual emendation ‘is not imputed’ to ‘was not imputed’ is made on textual grounds, the Greek, La Peyre`re now says, having indeed been corrupted ‘by the carelessness of the Transcribers’.92 In La Peyre`re’s appended Systeme he stepped up this thesis, denying the direct Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, which was rather ‘a heap of Copie confusedly taken’, deriving from Moses’ diaries.93 Adam and Eve themselves are childish creations. Adam ‘grew from infancy and youth to man’s estate’; Eve grew ‘as a house grows, as trees grow’. Adam had to acquire knowledge ‘by meditation, reasoning with himself, by cultivation, and time’. He didn’t possess all language instantaneously but gradually compiled a dictionary.94 La Peyre`re’s understanding of original sin is accordingly idiosyncratic, ‘original sin’ no longer being strictly original, but only reigning from Adam to Jesus. This does not mean that the men before Adam were sinless, merely that ‘they were not guilty of trespass against God ’. Later, however, it is proposed that original sin is imputed backwards to these people.95

78

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

La Peyre`re’s reworking of the Genesis narrative effectively reintroduces the problem the narrative was supposed to explain: the origin of evil. Man’s corruption can no longer date from the Fall because, even if some ethical blame can be imputed to pre-Adamites, the cause of their lack of perfect rectitude can no longer be traced to an apple-fall yet to take place. So La Peyre`re distinguishes between two types of sin. The first is the special category of original sin, a juridical category applicable only to Jews. The second source stems from the nature of matter.96 Adam’s sin is ‘double’: ‘A natural sin, naturally inherent in Adam, by the infirmity of his nature, and that peccant matter whereof he was made: Legal, which hapned and was imputed to Adam, by violation of the Law of God.’97 Matter is thus inherently corrupt: ‘Warrs, Plagues, and Fevers, and whatsoever else of this sort troubles and afflicts mankind, are the consequences of natural sin, which is the wickedness and imperfection of Nature.’98 La Peyre`re thus obviously borders on metaphysical dualism, and he may have derived this view from the Corpus hermeticum, which he cites elsewhere in the book.99 In terms similar to those of Penington, La Peyre`re states that creation may initially have been good, but had little chance of lasting. In the course of a single paragraph, his terminology slides from a vocabulary of ‘perfection’ to one of ‘corruptible matter’: It is true, that men were created in the beginning perfect, right, and excellently good, in as farr as men by force and vertue of their own creation could be created perfect, right, and excellently good. But no man ought to be ignorant, that men were created from the beginning of corruptible matter, which might easily be turn’d from perfect to imperfect, from right to wrong, from good to evil, which the men which were first created did evidence by a strong and approved example, since the nature of their composition, and their own negligence carried them, being upright made, so far aside.100

As an ontological event, the Fall in Eden is thus rendered superfluous. The angels fell, according to La Peyre`re, from ‘the corrupted creation’; next, pre-Adamic men ‘perish’d in their own thoughts’; finally, the late, minor drama of Eden takes place. Eden and the problem of evil become disconnected, and the first casualty of this disconnection is theodicy. La Peyre`re, despite his high hopes that his system would heal religious dissent and reunite the Jews with their pre-Adamic brethren, cannot avoid metaphysical dualism, the problem Augustine himself had so long laboured to solve, with only marginally more success. La Peyre`re’s influence in England is hard to assess, although he gained one convert, the F. R. S. Francis Lodwick.101 But the pre-Adamism of

The heterodox Fall 79 the radical milieu is unlikely to derive from the Frenchman. Laurence Clarkson, writing as a Muggletonian, recalled his Ranting days in 1650: I neither believed that Adam was the first Creature, but that there was a Creation before him, which world I thought was eternal, judging that land of Nod where Cain took his wife, was inhabited a long time before Cain, not considering that Moses was the first Writer of Scripture, and that we were to look no further than what there was written.102

The most interesting case is Thomas Tany. He, of all the early moderns, was the closest to a Gnostic in the theological sense. The soul, for Tany, is ‘no created substance, for ’tis the divine breath of God’; at death ‘it returns to the fountain from whence it had its Original’. Creation itself is thus the Fall, and ‘Adam’ is an allegory for the entirety of the creation. Of course there were men before Adam. Man is ‘Gods descent’ or the ‘outwork’ of God. ‘God was little before the Fall, and the Fall of man did raise God.’ Tany also considered the Bible both textually corrupt and older than Moses. Universal history, as Tany writes in his unmistakable style, is a cycle of departure and return: ‘The letting down of the creation was a declarative of God’s excellency: In evan sam sene allah in sele mem, the taking up the life created into him, is the bringing his wearied creative into perfection in himself: O avallo eternitas in sem sadei mel tedet alli ne pekod olon.’103 At some point in these decades an anonymous pre-Adamite, too, scrawled a few manuscript pages in support of the hypothesis, arguing in Neoplatonic terms: The Great God who is altogether Glorious and transcending in his Goddnes being from eternity ever was communicative of this his goodnes, and that he might communicate what he had to others he created Rational Beings which were vessels capable in some measure to receive it and hence it is that men were from everlasting. God who is a most necessary being and most necessarily existing co[u]ld not be and but partly act. And so being a necessary Agent and a good which is most communicative must most necessarily communicate[.] A necessary good must necessarily communicate, which is Ground enough to raise an argument to prove that this world with those Glorious beings that are in it were from eternity.104

But none of these men encountered La Peyre`re’s ideas directly, and Clarkson, Tany and Winstanley wrote before the publication of the Prae-Adamitae. La Peyre`re’s influence was only felt later, and few would openly dare to concur. Francis Lodwick and Charles Blount were rare exceptions.105

80

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

Finally, at the end of this rich roll-call of heterodoxy, we come to the Muggletonians, whose theory of Genesis, as has rightly been observed, was the ‘core of the Muggletonian vision’.106 Muggletonians accept that Adam was created in God’s image and placed in Eden. ‘His spirit or nature was of the very same life and nature as God was of; therefore it is said, that God breathed into Adam the breath of Life, and he became a living soul.’ This special relation to God gives Adam a nature superior to all other created beings, including the angels. In this initial state he lived ‘capable to see, and to understand the spiritual forms of these two Trees’; ‘For while he stood in the state of innocency he was capable to behold the face of God, and live.’107 But despite all these fine attributes, Adam is still a creaturely being, and consequently imperfect. His soul was necessarily mortal, and so Adam was never bound for heaven: ‘Adam could have had no other Heaven than this World, he being made of this Earth, he should never have gone higher, to the Place where God is, the holy Angels, and all spiritual Bodies are, there Adam should not have come.’108 Adam is therefore in a pendent condition: ‘Adam being made of the earth, though his spirit was of the immortal seed, yet it was capable to fall from that state of innocency wherein he was created.’109 So far, Muggleton’s version is by no means idiosyncratic. But his interpretation of the two trees and of the seduction is where he parts company with anything familiar. The trees, Muggleton insists, are people. The tree of life is ‘the very person of God himself ’, and is, in Muggletonian theology, the same object as the person Christ. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the serpent, also Satan. The trees speak. One prohibits, one tempts.110 Eve is seduced by the angel/tree/serpent, and this has specific sexual application: [I]t is clear that Cain was none of Adams son; for Adam was never counted a wicked one by any that writ Scripture; so that Cains father was the devil, that is, he was that Serpent Angel that deceived Eve, and Cain was the devil manifest in flesh . . . she was with childe by that Serpent Angel before Adam knew her.111

In 1675 the Muggletonian John Saddington wrote a Muggletonian creed that concisely expresses the ensuing doctrine of the two seeds: X V . I do believe that the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil was that serpent angel which GOD cast out of heaven down to this earth for his rebellion . . . X V I I . I do believe that that outcast angel or serpent-tree of knowledge of good and evil did enter into the womb of Eve, and dissolve his spiritual body into seed, which seed died and quickened again in the womb of Eve.

The heterodox Fall

81

XVIII.

I do believe that Eve brought forth her first born the son of the devil, and very devil himself.

X I X . I do believe that there is no other devil but man and woman; since the first devil, that serpent angel devil, became seed in the womb of Eve, and clothed himself with flesh and bone. XX.

I do believe that Cain was not the son of Adam, though he was the son of Eve.112

The Muggletonian model exemplifies the difficulty of generalising about whether sectarians read allegorically or not. In one sense, Muggletonians read very allegorically – even the trees in Eden are not real trees at all. But conversely, perhaps they are extreme literalists, preferring to imagine the situation the text describes in verisimilistic terms, and then to interpret the text accordingly. Hence, as apples on trees can’t really do the things seemingly accredited to them, the literal meaning behind the text must be that the forbidden tree is a person and its apple is sex. It all depends whether you think you are trying to make sense of a situation or a text. Ultimately, both levels inform one another. The Muggletonians start with the conviction that Genesis 2–3 describes real happenings, and then proceed to protect that conviction by appealing to their own ideas of what is verisimilar, and what is not. From their point of view, they are dilating what Moses left implicit, and that, of course, is neither an orthodox nor a radical thing to do: it is the only thing to do. To conclude, what if anything associates the procession of ideas canvassed in this chapter? Some, for instance those of Thomas Tany, have departed from what early-modern people would term Christianity. But certain motifs are pervasive. First and most importantly the majority of the figures discussed place considerable emphasis on creatureliness and materiality: man is inherently unstable, and matter is inherently corrupt. This can stray close to metaphysical dualism, and some, like La Peyre`re, cross the line. But often the emphasis is pietistic, and has an antiAugustinian logic: rather than a plunge from glorious heights to miserable depths, man is created for, rather than in, perfection. This idea, as we have seen, was also shared by figures as remote as Theophilus of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, Faustus Socinus and Jeremy Taylor. The second motif is one to do with the problem of ‘literal’ readings. The literal reading of Genesis was actually based on a set of prior ideological imperatives, and these on occasion clashed with the text. The classic site is Genesis 3:22, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of

82

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

us, to know good and evil’, the text to which so many of the radicals turned their eyes. Their view was that the forbidden tree was not a placebo, because God himself says otherwise. This, of course, is a perfectly ‘orthodox’ technique of reading, but one dangerous because applied to a verse that had traditionally been granted immunity from meaning what it apparently says. This immunity was revoked by the radicals, returning us to the etymology of the word ‘radical’: getting back to the root, stripping away accretions. This did not produce uniformity, however: people then differed about what the unironic Genesis 3:22 could mean. The material of this chapter is radical to the extent that it differs profoundly from what either an Anglican or a Presbyterian theologian could tolerate. But this is not to say that their techniques of reading differ in kind, and that is perhaps what is truly dangerous about such approaches. Again, precisely how far theological radicalism can be paralleled to a political or social radicalism remains something about which it is unhelpful to generalise. The last chapter demonstrated that, in the case of the Taylor quarrel, even the high Church had its heretic. This chapter has performed the converse operation. The late Christopher Hill, who did more to popularise the radical milieu to literary critics than anyone else, was wont to give the impression that all radicals united together in a destructive and heady demolition of sin, hell, original sin and other oppressive concepts.113 From a distance, it can look like that. However, what has been emphasised here is the variety of theories in a milieu dominated by the familiar figures of army men, sectarians, itinerant preachers and the like. Almost all these people were indeed political radicals. But they also developed their own very complex map of interlocking theologies, and, to adopt a distinction used in the high Church, although certain concepts often proved unifying, they did not produce uniformity. For van Helmont, the Fall was to do with sex; for Winstanley, it was about the workplace. There were two types of men in the world at the time of the Fall, said La Peyre`re; there were two types of men as a product of the Fall, taught Muggleton. Man should be a clod, said Franck; man is like God, replied Rabisha. ‘God was little before the fall ’, Tany revealed, ‘and the fall of man did raise God.’

chapter 5

Heresiographers, Messiahs and Ranters

Chapter 4 investigated the views of various heterodox figures by privileging their own texts. But the problem of sources was also recognised, given that many of our accounts of who said what, even in the decades that witnessed the effective collapse of censorship, derive from hostile reports. We mentioned the heresiographic habit of simultaneously calling heresy new and old, and this is indicative of the conflict of interests between two different rhetorical attitudes to problems: either we have seen it before, and so know what to do about it; or we have never seen it before, and so it can’t be all that important. This chapter revisits that conflict, and extends it into a discussion of some contemporary heresiographic accounts of pseudo-Messiahs, and of the people called Ranters. The conflict is as old as the genre itself, which has always had an ambiguous attitude to its own existence. Irenaeus, for instance, with Epiphanius the principal patristic model for early-modern heresiography, once related an anecdote about his old teacher, Polycarp, one of the earliest observers of what he saw as heresy. Polycarp’s reaction to it, as Irenaeus explained, was to run away: ‘he would have cried out and stopped his ears . . . And he would have fled from the very place where he had been sitting or standing.’ Polycarp also related how in Ephesus John the disciple had once seen Cerinthus the Gnostic in a public bath, and had run away lest the bathhouse tumble over his head. Again, the barbarian peoples who believe in Christ by tradition and not scripture, Irenaeus rhapsodises, would simply flee from heretical talk, like Polycarp, with their fingers in their ears. Yet Irenaeus also records how Polycarp once faced up to Marcion, and called him ‘firstborn of Satan’.1 There are thus two choices in the face of heresy: to run, or to stand one’s ground. And although Irenaeus cites Polycarp as a precedent for both – presumably in order to justify his own book, which meticulously explicates its targets – the option of running away clearly appealed as the more ‘authentic’ or ‘primitive’ reaction rather 83

84

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

than, say, to invite the heretic into sober discussion for the purposes of recording his or her views for posterity. But that is exactly what a heresiographer must do, and Irenaeus’ valorisation of the other, shunning role, betrays his slight unease at the whole business of preserving and hence communicating error. It is not heresy but heresiography, then, which belongs to the later age of the world. Pristine, non-textual Christians, after all, had had experience of error, and so the novelty is not actually heresy itself but, surprisingly, this need to write it down. These two approaches – heresy is new and so unhistorical; heresy is old and so nothing special we haven’t seen and seen off before – are tied up in the generic overlap between the historiography of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Eusebius’ plan for his Historia ecclesia, for instance, states as a second task of his work ‘The names and dates of those who through a passion for innovation have wandered as far as possible from the truth’.2 Ephraim Pagitt, whose Heresiography (1645) was, with Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena (1646), the most popular London heresy list, presented his book as the natural counterpart to his earlier Christianography (1640), a list of Christian churches throughout the world. Pious curiosity concerning impious things, however, can hamper the job of extirpation: in 1598, for instance, when various Socinian books were seized in the Low Countries and condemned to the flames, their final combustion took some time – as the deputies, out of interest, had taken them home to read.3 The problem is that refutations can end up inculcating the principles they ostensibly refute, because the reader may decide that the position under attack is actually the more powerful. Benjamin Franklin once said that he converted to atheism after reading a hopelessly argued refutation of it.4 Indeed, this may be the secret design of the book in question. Bernardino Ochino’s Thirty Dialogues, published in 1563 when Ochino was 76, contained two on the trinity which while nominally supporting it ‘furnish a full quiver of arguments against it’, later taken on verbatim by Socinians.5 This was also true of his dialogues on polygamy and divorce, published in English in 1657, signed only by the publisher, and with the divorce dialogue guiltily hiding behind the titular Dialogue of Polygamy.6 It is not unimportant that Ochino adopted dialogic form, in which proposition and refutation emanate from the same pen. Socinianism itself provides a neat example of the problem. When the bishop of Lincoln Thomas Barlow died (Barlow was sometime librarian of the Bodleian, and Sanderson’s correspondent about Jeremy Taylor), he left his manuscripts to the care of his domestic chaplains, with instructions not to print. But an unauthorised edition did appear, containing a

Heresiographers, Messiahs and Ranters

85

list of anti-Socinian writings for the better instruction of young divines (Barlow was famed for his reading-lists for young scholars). His chaplains were furious, issuing the following complaint: And his [Socinus’] Opinions being so dangerous to the Foundation of Christianity, it is somewhat unaccountable what necessity there was, to be directed to Chapter, Page, and Section, where to find them asserted to all the advantage they are capable of: Especially if we consider, that Men are naturally too inquisitive after forbidden Knowledge: The Experiment cost our first Parents very dear, and their Posterity have ever had such a fatal Curiosity to pry into the Errors of former Ages, as never needs to be set on edge.7

So heresiography can materialise into the place where its target once was. Such a possibility becomes particularly obvious when surveying the heresy lists that sprang up in early 1640s London. Titles include A Discoverie of 29 Sects Here in London (1641), The Divisions of the Church of England Crept in at X V Several Doores (1642), Religions Lotterie (1642) and X X X I I I Religions . . . against the Parliament (1644). Such pamphlets, never more than a few pages long, typically list on their title pages names of sects, and then inside provide brief, titillating descriptions. But often few, if any, of the named targets actually exist. For example, the title-page list of X X X I I I Religions runs, in three numbered columns: 1. Cardinalls, 2. French faction, 3. Spanish faction, 4. Adamites, 5. Prelaticall faction, 6. Jesuites, 7. Malignants, 8. Priests, 9. Arminians, 10. Italian Faction, 11. Sheolomothites,

12. Chiliastes, 13. Clementines, 14. Simon Maguses, 15. Achians, 16. Minanders, 17. Ebionites, 18. Corinthuses, 19. Nicholitains, 20. Marcions, 21. Encraticae, 22. Valentinians,

23. Theodotians, 24. Samseis, 25. Samosetens, 26. Manacheams, 27. Appolinaries, 28. Donatists, 29. Selucians, 30. Pelagians, 31. Abelardes, 32. Peterenins, 33. Fraticellins.

Most of these divisions, no one need question, are anything but ‘Sects, Societies, and Factions of the Cavaliers’, and the two trajectories of the novel (‘French’, ‘Prelaticall’, ‘Spanish’, ‘Italian’ factions; ‘Jesuites’ etc.) and the ancient (‘Marcions’, ‘Pelagians’ etc.) again coexist. As was mentioned earlier, most of the more recondite sects are lifted straight from Simson’s Historie of the Church, and garbled slightly in the process. This does not mean that heresiography, even at the yellow-press level, tells us nothing about what was ‘really’ going on: behind the fantastic

86

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

labels of the X X X I I I Religions stood real people, playfully obscured by pun: ‘Their Will is as rotten as old . . . they will begg to be Ushers there rather then to leave it’, obvious ‘let-me-not-(quite)-mention’ gestures to Laud and Ussher.8 And although lists such as the X X X I I I Religions are only indirectly informative about Long-Parliament London, other productions took a blunter line. The Hell Broke Loose catalogue of 1647, for instance, could function equally as a dissuasive and as a manual: the various errors were accompanied by who said them, in what book and where.9 More academic works like Rutherford’s Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist likewise combined an interest in ancient sects with some much more contemporary and immediate connections.10 Rutherford’s direct connection to medieval German mysticism was, as has been demonstrated, sound. Calvin, writing against the French Libertines, said that they thought: ‘regeneration is to return to that innocent state which Adam enjoyed before he sinned. And in their view this innocent state sees neither white nor black . . . Hence to mortify the old Adam means to cease having to make judgments, as if one had knowledge of evil but like a child lets himself be led by his natural sense.’ 11 Rutherford, in his work, explicitly recalls Calvin on the Libertines, and what he records is indeed very similar to ideas that were being carefully and thoughtfully discussed and read in England at this time, and which he would have recognised: ‘The state of Innocencie was to know nothing good, or ill, more then children, and Adams first sinne is to know good and ill, and regeneration is to be stript naked of the knowledge and sense of either sinne or righteousnesse.’ 12 The point, finally, is not that either a given heresiography is or is not accurate, but that the transmission of unorthodox ideas is effected by both the heretics and their ‘paparazzi’, as it were; and the snaps of the latter, while they do not exactly capture the movements of the former, bear some relation to them. Thus, in a peculiar fashion, heresiographers and heretics are complicit, and their choices mutually illuminating. This approach to heresiography can be developed by surveying one particular idea close to the heart of this book: the notion of Atonement, and how this is treated and transmitted in some heresiographical accounts involving self-proclaimed Messiahs. Atonement – the redemptive action of Christ on the cross – and original sin are reciprocally connected. As John Knewstub complained of Henry Niclaes and his Family of Love in 1579: As this doctrine of H. N. warranteth us from any hurte by Adam his fall, except wee shall be founde transgressours actually after his example, against the will and

Heresiographers, Messiahs and Ranters

87

commaundement of GOD: so it setteth foorth in the like maner Christe Jesus, no otherwise to be an helper unto vs, then so farre foorth, as wee shall be by his example of doctrine and life be led into the like obedience. And therefore as Adam (in his opinion) hath nothing speciall in the falling away of man from God: so Christe yeeldeth no priuate and peculiar helpe to his saluation.13

It is striking, then, that one particular anecdote recurs in the literature, a kind of distorted Imitatio Christi. In a work written against John Robins, the interregnum fanatic whose disciples called him God, an Oxford student called Alexander visited Robins and his disciples in the New Prison at Clerkenwell. Alexander was reported to have associated Robins’ doctrines with ‘the like erroneous Opinion’ of the notorious Elizabethan Messiah William Hacket: In Queen Elizabeths Raign (said M. Alexander) . . . divers there were, that accounted one Hacket to be their God; and amongst the rest one Ardingworth took upon him to proclaim him Christ in Cheapside, where they were both apprehended, and soon after Hacket receiv’d sentence to be hang’d on a Gibbit neer the Standard where he belcht forth these blasphemous words, O thou God of Heaven, come down and save me, or else I’le rent thy Throne asunder; and so miserably died.14

Written at least two generations after the Hacket affair, Alexander’s account of Hacket’s death would seem spurious. This impression is encouraged by the almost identical use of the same anecdote in a slightly earlier pamphlet to describe a Ranter: one W. Smith, amongst the rest, were [sic] lately apprehended at York, for denying the Deity, Arian-like, and putting in execution several illegal practises against the Parliament; for which, upon a fair tryal, he received sentence to be hanged; and being brought to the place of execution, he uttered many blasphous words upon the ladder, saying, Deliver me, O God, from the hands of these wicked persecutors, or else Ile rest [sic] the Heavens, and pull thee out of thy Throne; and so died in a very desparate and sad condition.15

These two accounts are clearly not independent, and the Robins pamphlet is indebted both in detail and phrase to the Smith account. Hacket apparently did blaspheme God as he died. Behind both interregnum accounts, the one of Smith and the other of Hacket himself, lies the official pamphlet on the Hacket affair produced by Richard Cosin in 1592, Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation. According to Cosin, Hacket progressed through various roles, starting with John the Baptist, before imitating Christ. He and his prophets also cursed – oddly, they cursed themselves to draw divine power – in a manner proleptic of

88

Milton and the Idea of the Fall

the interregnum cursers, especially the ‘destroying angels’ of the later Messiah William Franklin, and the Muggletonians. Franklin’s fascinated but hostile heresiographer, Humphrey Ellis, likens his subject’s behaviour to that of Hacket, despite Hacket’s historical distance, and so Hacket was clearly remembered.16 Hacket, on his way to the scaffold, approached ‘one while crying out Iehouah Messias, Iehouah Messias: another while crying out thus: Looke, looke, how the heauens open wide, and the son of God commeth downe to deliuer me’.17 On the scaffold he himself became the (highly antagonistic) Son: O God of heauen, mightie Iehovah, Alpha and Omega, Lord of Lordes, King of Kings, and God euerlasting, that knowest me to be that true Iehovah, whome thou hast sent: send some miracle out of a cloude to conuert these Infidels, and deliuer me from these mine enemies: If not, I will fire the heauens, and teare thee from thy throne with my handes.

His last words were ‘Haue I this for my kingdom bestowed vpon thee? I come to reuenge thee, and plague thee’ – ‘and so was turned off ’.18 It is debatable how much of all this Hacket actually said. But why did this anecdote ‘feel right’ for application to the supposed later execution of Smith? Is there a deeper point being made by the idea of a kind of blaspheming Christ? First, the biblical text undergoing distortion is the already problematic biblical cry of dereliction – ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ – the moment when Christ on the cross quotes the opening half-verse of the despairing Psalm 22.19 Secondly, we note that Smith is called an Arian, and Arians denied the consubstantiality of Father and Son, and hence the orthodox trinity. In the Bible, the cry of dereliction hints at a similar moment of division in the Godhead, when Father and Son are momentarily at odds. In the Hacket and Smith anecdotes, the victim actually upbraids God as an equal; indeed, at the point of death, superior divine power is claimed. An alternative divine power structure is twice acted out: one in which the Son and the Father are not the same being, but antagonists. This is to adopt the phraseology of A. D. Nuttall, whose The Alternative Trinity seeks to trace such trinitarian fallings-out. In this connection, Nuttall observes that Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, written almost exactly contemporaneously with the Hacket affair, also contains a similar play on the cry of dereliction. In Faustus’ final moments, he shouts, ‘My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!’ Faustus had also earlier imitated Christ with his ‘Consummatum est: this bill is ended.’ 20 Nuttall comments:

Heresiographers, Messiahs and Ranters

89

in the strangest of all scriptural passages for orthodox Christians, Christ on the cross cries out that he, who is God, has been forsaken by God. When, moments before the end, Faustus, abandoned by the Creator, cries out ‘My God, my God’ we can scarcely avoid expecting the rest of the cry of dereliction, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27:46), but instead we get, ‘Look not so fierce on me!’ The cry of dereliction is overtaken and displaced in the sentence by the conspiracy of heaven. It is as if, by a final horror, the feared absence of God proves less dreadful than his presence.21

Nuttall’s implicit conjecture is that the Calvinist superstructure of Marlowe’s play threatens to twist into Gnosticism, where the creator of this world is seen as evil. The sight of Faustus, a highly sinful Christ-figure, cowering before a hitherto absent, now very present, angry God, does not commend either character. Marlowe’s play has prepared us for this final impasse: the Prologue told us that the heavens had ‘conspir’d’ Faustus’ overthrow, and when Faust in a moment of repentance calls on the trinity, the wrong one turns up: Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephastophilis.22 Of course, it would be hard to say that the Smith anecdote functioned with this kind of sophistication. But, especially if Marlowe’s play was written after Hacket’s execution, the comparison is instructive. The dating