“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665until the final resurrection – a doctrine he will explain further in chapter 13: “The
idea that the spirit of man is separate from his body, so that it may exist somewhere
in isolation, complete and intelligent, is nowhere to be found in scripture, and is
plainly at odds with nature and reason” (CPW VI, 318–19). The breath of life God
infused into Adam, Milton explains, was not the soul but the vital power that
sustains life and faculties; his creation in the image of God refers not to his soul but
to his whole being, endowed “with natural wisdom, holiness and righteousness”
(324). In all humans, he supposes, the more ethereal soul as well as the denser body
must be “generated by the parents in the course of nature,” since this is the only
way original sin could have been transmitted to Adam’s progeny.^135
The next three chapters deal with God’s government of all things, in terms that
provide a further basis for the theodicy of Paradise Lost. God’s ordinary provi-
dence Milton equates with nature, whose order and laws God established in the
beginning; his extraordinary providence produces effects outside nature, by mira-
cle. God does not cause natural or moral evils, but simply allows them to happen
by the operation of natural causes and the choices of free agents. When God
chastises evildoers and hardens those who chose evil he is entirely just; but more
than that, he “always produces something good and just” out of a sinner’s evil.^136
As for temptations, Milton accepts the traditional distinction between evil temp-
tations, by which God provides evil persons opportunities for sin and withdraws
his grace from them, and good temptations, by which God tempts the righteous
(like Job) so as to exercise their faith or patience, or lessen their self-confidence
(388).
Treating God’s government of the angels (chapter 9), Milton emphasizes their
free will and the limitations on their knowledge, as he does also in Paradise Lost.
Against the opinion of many Calvinists, he insists that the evil angels revolted from
God “of their own free will” and that the good angels remained faithful not by
God’s predestinating election but by their own will and power: “they are called
‘elect’ only in the sense that they are beloved or choice.”^137 He also contests the
view that angels see into God’s thoughts, insisting that “they know by revelation
only those things which God sees fit to show them, and they know other things by
virtue of their very high intelligence, but there are many things of which they are
ignorant.”^138 In Paradise Lost Milton works out the full implications of his monist
ontology for angels, portraying them as eating food and enjoying sex; but in the
treatise he holds himself to his chosen method and enumerates only those activities
for which he can find biblical citations: their obedience, their ministry to believers,
their patrol of the earth, their frequent appearance as soldiers, and the leadership of
Michael.
Milton treats the conditions of prelapsarian human life (chapter 10) in terms
directly relevant to his epic. He asserts that Adam and Eve were bound only by the
natural moral law and a single positive law, the divine prohibition against eating the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: