Notes to Chapter 1pertaining to a general, conditional election, not to the election of certain individuals
in preference to others.
111 My translation. “Praedestinatio itaque et electio videtur nulla esse singularis, sed duntaxat
generalis; id est, eorum omnium qui ex animo credunt et credere persistunt; praedestinari
neminem aut eligi qua Petrus est aut Joannes, sed quatenus credit credensque perseverat:
atque tum demum generale electionis decretum credenti unicuique singulatim applicari
et perseverantibus ratum fieri” (CM XIV, 106).
112 My translation. “Quod si Deus neminem nisi non obedientem, non credentem reiicit,
certe gratiam etsi non parem attamen sufficientem omnibus impertit, qua possint ad
agnitionem veritatis et salutem pervenire.... Causa igitur cur Deus non omnes pari
gratia dignetur, est suprema ipsius voluntas; quod sufficienti tamen omnes, est iustitia
eius” (CM XIV, 146–8).
113 John R. Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: Why it Matters,” in Milton and Heresy, eds.
Dobranski and Rumrich 75–92, demonstrates the ubiquity of the term, and also notes
the several early readers of Milton’s epic poem who found Arianism in it, among them
Defoe, John Toland, John Dennis, Newton, Joseph Warton, and Thomas Macaulay.
114 Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson (New York, 1958), 36. See
Henry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge, Mass., 1956),
332, 359–61; and J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London, 1958), 223–79.
115 See chapter 2, pp. 38–9; chapter 3, p.62.
116 See chapter 8, p. 253; CPW VI, 419. The Socinians held that the Son was simply the
human Christ, that he was made Lord and given his divine exellence by gift of the
Father and by his own merit, that he was ignorant of the mind and will of the Father
until his baptism and temptation, at which time he was rapt up into heaven and in-
structed by God concerning his mission. See The Racovian Catechisme (Amsterdam,
1652), 27–164; [John Biddle], The Apostolical and True Opinion concerning the Holy Trin-
ity (London, 1653); and H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century Eng-
land (Oxford, 1951).
117 “The Confession of the Arians,” in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. E. R. Hardy and
Cyril R. Richardson (Philadelphia, 1954), 333–4.
118 Athanasius, Four Discourses against the Arians, ed. A. Robertson (Oxford, 1892), 309.
119 Page 275. A similar argument appears in the Racovian Catechism, 119. In the same
place, Milton argues that the words “he did not reckon it robbery to be equal with
God, Philip. 2:6” demonstrate that he is not the supreme God, “For ‘to consider’
means, surely, to have an opinion, but there is no place for ‘opinion’ in God.” Cf.
Milton’s Artis Logicae, CM XI, 308: “opinio tamen in Deum non cadit, quia per causas
aeque omnia cognoscit.” For a fuller discussion of such parallels with Arianism, see
Michael Bauman, Milton’s Arianism (Frankfurt and New York, 1987), 19–70, and
Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic (Providence and London, 1966), 133–63.
120 Milton explicates in his own terms that favorite proof text of the orthodox, John 1:1,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God,” insisting that to be from the beginning of creation, to be with God, and to be
the only begotten and visible divinity, are very different things than to be the one,
invisible and eternal God, “so different that they cannot apply to one and the same
essence” (273).
121 Pages 307–9. These considerations undermine the claims of Hunter, et al. in Bright
Notes to Chapter 12