“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665but it belongs to his justice that all receive grace sufficient for salvation.”^112 Milton’s
concern for human freedom is further evident in his insistence that God’s grace is
resistible and that human response to grace is both possible and necessary. It is possi-
ble because even after the Fall “some traces of the divine image remain in man”
which God’s grace further restores; it is necessary, because God willed that “in their
own salvation, men should always use their free will” (CPW VI, 185–9). The repro-
bate are not damned by divine decree but because of their own obstinacy and pride:
“God... excludes no man from the way of penitence and eternal salvation, unless
that man has continued to reject and despise the offer of grace, and of grace sufficient
for salvation, until it is too late” (194). Even when God punishes especially heinous
crimes by hardening the sinner’s heart he does so only after “a great deal of
forebearance” (199). These positions lie at the heart of the theodicy Milton sets forth
in Paradise Lost as his justification of God’s ways, and they are articulated formally by
God in the Council in Heaven (PL 3.173–97).
In chapters 5 and 6 Milton explains and argues for his most serious heresy, Arianism,
his own and his seventeenth-century contemporaries’ preferred term to describe
anti-Trinitarian heresy.^113 But the term has specific appropriateness for Milton, as
his position on the Godhead comes closest to the Arian heresy denounced at the
fourth-century Council of Nicaea. The orthodox Trinitarian position elaborated
by Athanasius and Augustine and accepted overwhelmingly by seventeenth-cen-
tury Christians of all denominations, identified three persons or hypostases in the
Godhead, one in nature (essence, substance) but distinct in existence (subsistence).
The Nicene Creed described the Son as equal to and consubstantial with the Father
and his generation from the Father as eternal and natural: he is “only-begotten, that
is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God,
begotten not made, of one substance [homoousios] with the Father.”^114 We cannot be sure
when Milton abandoned that position: he wrote the Nativity Ode as an orthodox
Trinitarian, though his inability to complete a poem on Christ’s Passion or to pro-
duce a very effective poem on the circumcision suggests that even in the 1630s the
redemptive sacrifice of the incarnate Son was not at the center of his religious
imagination.^115 His careful study of the Hebrew Bible as he worked on the divorce
tracts may have prompted his attention to the issue of God’s oneness; by 1650,
when he licensed the Racovian Catechism, he showed some sympathy for the Socinians,
though in De Doctrina Christiana he rejects their belief that the Son came into exist-
ence only at Christ’s birth and subsequently attained his divine excellence by the
Father’s gift and his own merit.^116 Arius held that the Son is a subordinate divine
person though not generated out of the Father’s substance and not a sharer in the
divine essence (which cannot be communicated); that he was created by God’s will
and then made God’s agent for the rest of creation; that he is “neither eternal nor
co-eternal nor co-unbegotten with the Father, nor does he have his being together
with the Father”; and that he holds all that he has by God’s gift, “life and being and
glories.”^117 Since he is a creature – albeit unique and by God’s gift divine – he