“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665mid-1640s by Richard Overton’s mortalist treatise, Mans Mortalitie (1643),^148 which
was constantly linked with his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as examples of das-
tardly heresy. Milton now argues (as had Overton) that the soul or spirit as well as
the body suffers physical death and that the whole person is then resurrected at the
last day. More boldly, he insists that “even Christ’s soul succumbed to death for a
short time when he died for our sins” (405).
Chapters 14–16 analyse Christ’s role in humankind’s restoration, in terms conso-
nant with Milton’s version of Arianism and Arminianism, and also with his por-
trayal of Jesus in Paradise Regained. Restoration is the act of the Father accomplished
through Christ, who satisfied for the sins of all humankind by voluntarily fulfilling
the law and enduring his Passion and death (415–16, 444–7). As defined by the
Council of Chalcedon, the hypostatic union of two natures in the one person of
Christ meant that each nature retained its own characteristics and functions, under-
standing and wills; and that the Logos in his incarnate state emptied out (kenosis) the
glory and form, though not the essence and power of the Godhead.^149 Appealing
both to scripture texts and to reason, Milton pronounces such definitions “sheer
vacuity”; Zanchius, he scoffs, defends the orthodox view that the Word assumed
human nature rather than the person of a particular man “as confidently as if he had
been present in Mary’s womb.”^150 Milton’s christology does not exactly conform to
any of the recognized christological heresies;^151 he is led to his conception by his
sense of what must pertain to Christ as an individual entity. Reiterating his anti-
Trinitarian argument that the terms “nature,” “subsistence,” and “person” are in-
terchangeable, and insisting that the Logos must unite with a particular human
being since human nature cannot exist in the abstract, he concludes that “one Christ,
one ens, and one person” is formed (he thinks it presumptuous to say just how) by
“a mutual hypostatic union of two natures, or, in other words, of two essences, of
two substances, and consequently of two persons” (423–4). He allows the orthodox
formula of the communication of properties, whereby what belongs to one nature
is sometimes attributed to the other, but assumes that the hypostatic union has
produced a single person with a single understanding and will, all of whose sayings
and actions refer to this new self. He supposes that the kenosis or emptying out
means that the Son literally divests himself of whatever divine attributes and powers
he enjoyed in heaven, leaving the incarnate Son with a substantially human intel-
lect and will, which can then gain back divine understanding and “know everything,
John xxi.17, that is, after the Father had instructed him, as he himself acknowl-
edges” (425–6). This christology allowed Milton to present Jesus in Paradise Re-
gained as beginning from a condition of limited human understanding of himself
and his role.
Milton’s discussion of Christ’s mediatorial office and its threefold function (chapter
15) largely conforms to orthodox formulas. His prophetic office, exercised from the
beginning to the end of the world, involves teaching the whole will of his Father by
revealing divine truth and illuminating the mind. His priestly function is that by