“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665a minister of God, and therefore a creature, [who] was created or produced of the
substance of God, not by a natural necessity but by the free will of the agent, probably
before the foundations of the world were laid, but later than the Son, and far inferior
to him.... The brightness of God’s glory and the image of his divine subsistence are
said to have been impressed on the Son but not on the Holy Spirit.^123Milton explicates most of the biblical texts about the Spirit as references to some-
thing other than this “far inferior” divine person. Since the Spirit was not given
until the coming of Christ, all uses of that term in the Old Testament refer to some
manifestation of “the virtue and power of God the Father” (CPW VI, 283). At the
Creation, when “the Spirit of God brooded” (Genesis 1:2), the reference is to
“God’s divine power, not any particular person.”^124 At other times “spirit” means
an angel, or “the force or voice of God” breathed into the prophets, or the light of
truth with which God illumines his people (282–3). In the New Testament it
sometimes means the Father himself, or his power and might (as the agent of Mary’s
conception), or “a divine impulse, light, voice or word sent from above,” or some-
times “the actual person of the Holy Spirit or its symbol” or its gifts. Yet even when
the Spirit descended in the form of a dove at Christ’s baptism it came “not so much
in its own right as sent by the Father to be a symbol and minister of divine power
... [and] a representation of the Father’s supreme love and affection for the Son.”^125
Biblical texts declare the Spirit to be “subservient and obedient in all things; to have
been promised, and sent, and given” by God and the Son; to be numerically dis-
tinct from the Father; to share in the divine attributes only by God’s commission; to
speak and act and move others by God’s power; and to be sought as a gift from
God, not invoked directly (288–95).
This conception of the Son and the Holy Spirit has important implications for
the epic Milton is writing. If the Son is mutable, subject to change, and lacks
omniscience, then he has the free will and capacity for moral growth that all intel-
ligent creatures enjoy, and Milton can present his offer in the Council in Heaven to
suffer and die for man’s redemption as a free and meritorious choice. Later, he can
present Christ in Paradise Regained as undergoing a genuine temptation. And the
Bard’s invocations to the Spirit in both poems may be glossed as petitions for illu-
mination from the light of God.
In his treatment of the Creation (chapter 7) Milton again identifies the Father as
sole God and Creator and the Son as his agent. Appealing to the maxim in logic that
no agent can act unless there is something such as matter to be acted upon, he
repudiates the orthodox formula that God created all things ex nihilo; he also con-
cludes that there must be “some bodily power in God’s own substance, for no one
can give what he does not have.”^126 Since it is inconceivable that matter existed
eternally and independent of God, it must have “originated from God at some
particular point of time.” Creation is therefore ex Deo, and matter is not evil or
worthless but “intrinsically good, and the productive seedplot of all subsequent