But at last the Jews in the first century connected the two origins of evil. The fall of man, from being a confused and obscure legend, took on a definite meaning, and became the source of all evil and suffering for mankind. A curious legend of the same time 12 tells that after the creation of man, God ordered the angels to worship Adam. Satan refused, and was consequently driven out of Heaven. But he avenged himself by inducing Adam to eat the apple. This legend is extremely logical, and ought to have prevailed. Adam is here the direct cause of Satan's misfortune, and not an innocent victim. Satan's behavior is much more human (if the expression is permissible in this case) than in the orthodox tradition.

But there was more. Jewish Gnosis 13 identified Adam with the Son of God, the promised Messiah. So here is perhaps the first origin of the idea that Satan rebelled through envy of the Son; Milton adopts this for poetical purposes without believing it. But there were theologians at the Reformation who held the theory. Calvin condemns them severely in his Commentary on Genesis.

The Jewish beliefs about Satan's rebellion and the war in Heaven probably passed into The Revelation. In any case The Revelation is an important source for Milton's tale:

...

a great red dragon. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth. . . . And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels. . . . And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan . . . and his angels were cast out with him.11

12 Bousset, p. 469. This is found also in the Koran, 20:115.

13 Cf. Bousset, p. 558.

14 Revelation 12:3-9.

This applies to the end of the world. But it is a sort of law in prophetic imagination that the end should be like the beginning, and these texts became, in the tradition, a precious source of knowledge about the origins. Milton in the De doctrina quotes them as proofs for the war in Heaven.15 Here also the Serpent is called Satan; later this will be thought a further proof that Satan was the serpent who tempted Eve.

Lastly, the beginnings of the Christian era saw the birth of an erroneous interpretation of a few verses in Isaiah, and this mistake became also an important docu

ment:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! . . . For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north . . . I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.1

16

The imprecation is aimed at the King of Babylon, and Lucifer is only the morning star. So far as we know, Tertullian and Gregory were the first to apply the passage to Satan, who kept the name Lucifer. From this came the mountain in the North and the chief motive of Satan's revolt: the ambition to be like the most High.

The different elements of the tale are now all evolved: Satan's revolt through ambition; sensuality in the fall of the angels; the temptation of Eve by the Serpent, who is Satan; of Adam through Eve; sensuality in the fall of

man.

15 Prose Works, IV, 216–17.

16

14:12-15. Gunkel suggests (Schöpfung und Chaos, 1895, pp. 132–34) that this may be an allusion to a myth, perhaps Babylonian, recording the ambition and failure of the Morning Star, which disappears in the light of the sun "hides its diminished head," as Milton puts it (P. L., IV, 35).

T

CHAPTER III

THE FATHERS

HE elements of the tale of the Fall were put to

gether and more or less worked out by the

Fathers. Yet most of the Fathers, before Augustine, seem to the modern reader hopelessly backward and chaotic. It is only Augustine who gives a coherent tale. The astonishment of the modern reader at the eccentric ideas of the early Fathers was fully shared by Milton, who, consequently, frequently looks upon them with open contempt.

I. MILTON'S OPINIONS OF THE FATHERS

In 1641, in the pamphlet Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Milton expressed picturesquely his feelings about the Fathers, thus:

when men began to have itching ears, then not contented with the plentiful and wholesome fountains of the gospel, they began after their own lusts to heap to themselves teachers, and as if the divine scripture wanted a supplement, and were to be eked out, they cannot think any doubt resolved, and any doctrine confirmed, unless they run to that indigested heap and fry of authors which they call antiquity. Whatsoever time, or the heedless hand of blind chance, hath drawn down from of old to this present, in her huge drag-net, whether fish or seaweed, shells or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen, those are the fathers.1

2

Further on, Irenæus is sharply rebuked, and called “the patron of idolatry" to the papist for having said that 2 Ibid., II, 430.

1 Prose Works, II, 422.

"the obedience of Mary was the cause of salvation to herself and all mankind . . . that the virgin Mary might

..

be made the advocate of the virgin Eve." Did Milton change his opinion of Irenæus when he came to call Mary "Blest Mary, second Eve"? Tertullian also was to return to favor, but here he is vigorously blamed: "Should he move us, that goes about to prove an imparity between God the Father and God the Son?" Still, he feels a certain amount of respect for Clement of Alexandria, and tries to prove that Clement was not in favor of bishops.

4

In The Reason of Church Government (1641) Milton calls Jerome" the learnedest of the fathers." Yet in the same year, in Reformation in England, he violently attacks the early Fathers, and Clement is not spared:

Who is ignorant of the foul errors, the ridiculous wrestling of Scripture, the heresies, the vanities thick sown through the volumes of Justin Martyr, Clemens, Origen, Tertullian, and others of eldest time? Who would think him fit to write an apology for Christian faith to the Roman senate, that would tell them "how of the angels," which he must needs mean those in Genesis, called the sons of God, "mixing with women were begotten the devils" as good Justin Martyr. . . told them."

But Cyprian, Lactantius, and especially Augustine are praised for having refused to submit to the authority of the ancients:

St. Austin writes to Fortunatian that "he counts it lawful, in the books of whomsoever, to reject that which he finds otherwise than true; and so he would have others deal by him." He neither accounted, as it seems, those fathers that went before, nor himself, nor others of his rank, for men of more than ordinary spirit, that might equally deceive, and be deceived."

8 Ibid., II, 432. Ibid., II, 433-34.

Ibid., II, 458.
6 Ibid., II, 379-80.

7 Ibid., II, 385.

On that understanding, Iso he would have others deal by him," Milton seems, as we shall see, to enter into a sort of pact with Augustine. In 1641 again, in his Animadversions, he declares:

I shall not intend this hot season to bid you the base through the wide and dusty champaign of the councils, but shall take counsel of that which counselled them-reason: the gift of God in one man as well as in a thousand.R

But it is in 1642, in the Apology for Smectymnuus, that the councils are finally disposed of thus:

I have not therefore, I confess, read more of the councils, save here and there; I should be sorry to have been such a prodigal of my time; but, that which is better, I can assure this confuter, I have read into them all. And if I want any thing yet I shall reply something toward that which in the defence of Murena was answered by Cicero to Sulpitius the lawyer: If ye provoke me (for at no hand else will I undertake such a frivolous labour) I will in three months be an expert councilist."

In 1644, in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton quotes the fathers, Tertullian and Jerome in particular, chiefly to give instances of ancient prejudice on the subject of marriage.

In Tetrachordon (1645), as we have seen, he attacks Augustine for his "crabbed opinion" on a similar subject. But the attack shows the weight he attaches to Augustine's opinion:

Car il l'attaque à part, comme un noble adversaire.

Then he quotes, in regular battle order, the Fathers that are on his side. He is rather shamefaced about it, for they are the very same Fathers so derided in 1641: Justin, Clement, Origen, and Tertullian. He is brazen enough • Ibid., III, 162-63.

8 Ibid., III, 56-57.