“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665salvation, and its two parts as “FAITH, or KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, and LOVE,
or THE WORSHIP OF GOD.”^97 But he adjusts his account of it to his anti-
Trinitarianism: Christ taught not of himself but “by divine communication” from
the Father, and did so “in all ages,” since the name Christ incorporates “the proph-
ets who foretold his coming, and the apostles whom he sent” (126–7).
In his next three chapters Milton treats God’s nature and internal decrees as
pertaining to the Father alone, pointedly eschewing the customary discussion of the
Trinity in this place. Chapter 2, “Of God,” repeats conventional ideas about the
evidences of God’s existence, the impossibility of forming right ideas about God
outside of scripture, and the attributes usually ascribed to him: true, simple, im-
mense and infinite, eternal, immutable, incorruptible, omnipresent, omnipotent,
one, omniscient, supremely pure and holy, just, most gracious.^98 But he gives spe-
cial emphasis to God’s oneness, citing many confirming biblical texts and explain-
ing them, characteristically, by an appeal to reason:
What could be more plain and straightforward? What could be better adapted to the
average intelligence, what more in keeping with everyday speech, so that God’s peo-
ple should understand that there is numerically one God and one spirit, just as they
understand that there is numerically one of anything else.... Certainly the Israelites
under the law and the prophets always understood that God was without question
numerically one, and that there was no other besides him, let alone any equal to him.
(147)Milton’s ongoing concern with issues of self-definition and individual authorship at
a cultural moment of emergent individualism in the mid-seventeenth century finds
an analogue in his emphasis here and throughout De Doctrina on God’s unitary
rather than triune nature, and on the individual essences of God and the Son.
Milton treats the concept of Accommodation in terms that provide an instruc-
tive insight into his way of reading biblical texts, and that also have important
ramifications for the representation of God in his epic. Like everyone else, he asserts
that God “as he really is” is incomprehensible to humans, far beyond “man’s imagi-
nation, let alone his understanding” (133). In later chapters he specifies that God is
invisible and inaudible, manifested to humans only through the Son or through
some angel or prophet or other sign, and to the angels and saints in heaven more
fully though still partially.^99 Like most Protestants he insists that our idea of God
should correspond to the biblical representations of him, since that is how he has
accommodated himself to human understanding, but he avoids biblical literalism by
emphasizing that all such representations of God are necessarily metaphorical:
It is safest for us to form an image of God in our minds which corresponds to his
representation and description of himself in the sacred writings. Admittedly, God is
always described or outlined not as he really is but in such a way as will make him
conceivable to us. Nevertheless, we ought to form just such a mental image of him as