“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665His comment in Areopagitica that “the acute and distinct Arminius” was perverted by
a book he had undertaken to refute (II, 519–20) disavows Arminius but registers a
good deal of admiration for him. Milton apparently did not fully realize that
Areopagitica’s core arguments – purification by trial and the development of virtue
through the constant, reasoned choice between good and evil – assume free will,
but writing that treatise may have prompted him to reexamine the issue.^106 In De
Doctrina Christiana Milton asserts, with the Remonstrants, God’s general call to all
humankind in Christ, God’s provision of grace sufficient for salvation to all, and
conditional rather than absolute election. But he develops his own version of
Arminianism.
In chapter 3 he ascribes to God’s “internal efficiency” both his General Decree
ordaining from all eternity everything that he meant to do, and his Special Decree
of Predestination electing to salvation all humans who believe and persevere, insist-
ing passionately that God formulated these decrees in ways that secure the freedom
of his intelligent creatures. God’s General Decree established his eternal “idea of
every thing,” and that idea incorporates radical contingency, leaving many things
to the free choices of free creatures, men and angels. Citing a plethora of scripture
passages in which God made his actions contingent upon the faith, or obedience, or
repentance, or sinfulness of humans, and appealing also to “the standards of mortal
reason,” Milton concludes that “God has not decreed all things absolutely” and
specifically, that he has “decreed nothing absolutely, that he left in the power of
free agents.”^107 He means by this to set aside all versions of Calvinist determinism
grounded upon God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and immutability, since human
freedom, real and not simply nominal, was part of God’s plan from all eternity:
Nor do we imagine anything unworthy of God, when we assert that those events,
those conditions which God himself has chosen to place within the free power of men
depend on the will of men; since God purposely framed his own decrees with refer-
ence to such conditions, in order that he might permit free causes to act in accordance
with that liberty which he himself gave them. It would be much more unworthy of
God, to grant man a merely nominal liberty, and deprive him of the reality... under
the pretext of some sophistical necessity resulting from immutability or infallibility.... God is not mutable so long as he determines nothing absolutely which could
happen otherwise through the liberty decreed for man.^108
Appealing, again, to reason, he counters the infralapsarian position by insisting,
with an analogy to human foresight, that God’s certain foreknowledge does not
amount to determination, and that it in no way limits the liberty of choice secured
to angels and humans from all eternity by his General Decree:
The sum of this argument may be thus stated in strict conformity with reason. God of
his wisdom determined to create men and angels reasonable beings, and therefore
with free will; he foresaw at the same time which way the bias of their will would