De Doctrina Christiana:
Nunc Quo Vadis?

William B. Hunter

Although we may have to wait for a new generation of scholars to accept the fact, the attribution to John Milton of the eccentric religious treatise De Doctrina Christiana is sufficiently destabilized to raise serious doubts about interpretations of his canonical works that are based primarily upon it as representing his beliefs. Granted that I am more than a little biased in assuming such a conclusion, one may proceed to ask the next question: if this indeed be the case, now where do you go from here? What follows are suggestions which for one reason or another I shall not be able to follow up.

Most obviously, one may question further the evidence that has been presented both in favor of the attribution and against it. I think that I have countered in "Responses" in Milton Quarterly most of the adverse argu ments, but must admit at once to a couple of my own. I asserted that had Milton been recognized as a heretic from his conversations with neighbors, he could not have received a Church of England burial in St. Giles church. But Anthony Low has written me that such burial would have been denied only to a person judged to be in error by a church court that evidently had not met. This, of Course, does not nullify the probability that Milton himself wished for such an interment near his father rather than one in the Puritan Bunhill Fields of his immediate neighborhood. Second, I rashly asserted that he would have agreed to all the Thirty-Nine Articles except those concerned with church polity. But the first one asserts that the Son is equal to the Father, whereas I have argued that Milton adopted a subordinationist position. Also, with others I have compared the treatise with Milton's Latin work on logic, which like it is in great part a palimpsest--a text copying, adapting, and modifying the work of someone else. But Dr. Paul Sellin has proposed a significant question about such comparability: the logic, like Milton's grammar and the English and Russian histories, is an expository work designed for instruction. De Doctrina belongs to quite a different genre, the argumentative. It may prove worthwhile to investigate further the audience to whom it was addressed--certainly not an English one, I am convinced. Other errors that I have committed will undoubtedly be brought to public attention. So far I have [End Page 97] not seen any evidence that makes me alter my position nor do these flaws I have named seem to be decisive. But always possible is the discovery of some new evidence for or against the attribution of the work to Milton, though I cannot now foresee what it may be.

I think that it should prove worthwhile to investigate further the parameters within which it was composed. One may now safely assume that it reveals two strata of activity--an early one based on a summary and acceptance of the dogmas in the conservative religious digests of Ames and Wolleb, especially the latter, and a later overlay of more or less radical revisions of them. The original groundwork is most easily remarked in the second book and the later alterations in the first fourteen chapters of the first. What should prove significant, but has not hitherto been investigated, is the ways the author merely modified, without challenging, the Reformed dogmas of the earlier compilation to which he was also adding proof texts, such a study focusing mostly on the generally ignored second book. In a note ("Responses," 32-33) Stephen Fallon unintentionally has led the way: from Wolleb the author closely paraphrased a sentence that rejected the "implied" reception of any belief--that is, one's unquestioning acceptance of its interpretation made by some other religious authority. But then Fallon observed that the author added to Wolleb's principle some quite un-Miltonic addenda that partially nullified it. It certainly would be plodding, but probably productive, scholarship to discover exactly how the author modified other quotations he had taken from the Medulla or the Compendium in the more conservative chapters following 14. The same investigation should also reveal which edition of each he had read and thus define more exactly the date when he made his original digest.

An interesting but minor question is why the treatise was known shortly after its discovery in 1823 under the title of De Dei Cultu. Probably there is a simple answer, but I have not come across it.

A more complex problem, again concerned with Wolleb, is the use that Milton himself made of the material in the Compendium that the treatise ignored. John Steadman has pointed out this issue (Yale Prose, 6.115-16n), listing a number of details in which Milton as its supposed author surprisingly "by-passed the treatise" so that the material "went directly into Paradise Lost," although the question may be raised as to how generally, Wolleb's views merely reflect the Reformed tradition. In any case, there is no reason to doubt that Milton knew Wolleb's digest well enough to incorporate its views into his own work without having first digested it in the treatise.

It seems likely that in collecting the thousands of proof texts he entered in his treatise its author did not have to discover them all for himself from reading the Bible. Besides relying upon those already provided by Ames and Wolleb or by other dogmatists who had considered the same issues, he would have used collections of texts ordered by subject like Amandus Polanus' Enchiridii Locorum Communium Theologicorum (1600). A comparison of the collections in the treatise with such "cheat sheets" could be useful as an indication of how he put the work together and the depth of his biblical learning. My guess now is that the earlier compilation from the Reformed dogmatists would be more responsive to such an investigation than his far more radical overlays like those in the chapter on the Son of God, where the biblical evidence cited is applied in more eccentric ways.

I have found some of the most rewarding insights one may gain in relating De Doctrina to Milton's writings are the recognition of the differences between them that one often can quickly and easily discover. Hitherto the reverse and more difficult applications have been made that see the treatise as a gloss to point out similarities to the canon. Dr. Sellin's distinctions of differing interpretations of predestination are already well known. The lack of congruence between the treatise and major aspects of Milton's major poems is, to say the least, unsettling. Thus Vickie Hodges has demonstrated how despite Milton's certain interest in the biblical Samson the treatise never mentions him, even in its chapter of saving faith which should have used him as an example as an example as the book of Hebrews does. For a paper on Milton's views on the Millenium I myself devoted one of Kelley's footnotes to the chapter on that subject that pointed just such lack of concordance (Yale Prose, 6.615n). Likewise, I had no trouble showing that, despite the centrality of Adam and Eve's disobedience to Paradise Lost, they are never mentioned in the chapter that the treatise devotes to the subject, and disobedience is barely mentioned in its chapter on the fall of man ("Responses" 35-36). Again, the treatise is not concerned with the obedience of Jesus as is Paradise Regained nor did the temptations which are its subject hold any interest for that author. Discrepancies like these may encourage further search for others.

Reflections on such differences can indeed bring sur prising new insights. Angelic sexual activity, totally missing from the treatise but fervently endorsed by Raphael toward the end of Book VIII of Paradise Lost, led me to recognize the different understandings of the purpose of [End Page 98] sexuality (Visitation Unimplor'd 134): the propagation of children (the primary motive for the treatise and for the Roman Catholic Church) as opposed to the companionship that Milton endorsed. Obviously, should angels propagate there would quickly be a population problem in heaven because they do not die--a problem that Raphael never mentioned. I must admit that I had forgotten its solution in Book X, when the fallen Adam laments,

        O why did God
Creator wise, that peopl'd highest heav'n
With Spirits masculine . . .
        not fill the world at once
With Man as Angels without Feminine? (10.888-93)

Clearly, no baby angels. Indeed, from Adam's viewpoint, which the poem implies would also be ours, heaven must be populated now by sexually active same-sex angels. One hesitates even to speculate as to what goes on in hell.

The straight-laced would, I suppose, argue that is the fallen Adam speaking from his newly limited and distorted anti-feminist perspective. Besides, the only angel he had seen was the male Raphael. But in "The Relique" John Donne had written to a female friend, "Difference of sex no more wee knew/ Then our Guardian Angells doe." Every angel in the Bible whose sex can be identified is male, as are all--good and bad in Paradise Lost. Those who oppose my interpretation may find proof of angelic heterosexuality back in Book I, where the narrator observes that "Spirits when they please/ Can either sex assume or both" (423-24), thus providing them even with bisexuality. But I must respond that this observation is made of hell's new demonic occupants, who have just been listed and characterized at some length in the immediately preceding passage. A couple of lines later they may "works of love or enmity fulfill," but whether such beings are angelic or demonic is not clear. Indeed, sexually active demons were accepted in popular culture--for example, as male incubi and female succubi.

On a very different and complex subject, Kelley has pointed out how significant was William Sidney Walker's "felicitous revision" of Sumner's original translation of 1825 so as to make it "echo Milton's statement of the same ideas in his earlier work" (Yale Prose 6.5)-parallels inevitably still reflected to some degree in Carey's translation and unconsciously giving every reader the impression of greater similarity than may actually obtain between the original Latin versions of the treatise and those of the canon. Thus Walker himself cited parallels he found in the Latin of the second paragraph of the Epistle (6.5n). They are the first such examples (6.118, n.5) of the hundreds that Kelley noted as showing interdependence of treatise with canon. Following Walker's observed parallels, he quotes

the two greatest evils in life . . . namely, tyranny and
superstition--1st Defense, Yale Prose IV, 535

and

[the] two most prevailing usurpers over mankinde, superstition and tyrannie--Readie and Easie Way, Yale Prose VII, 42

as being very similar to Carey's translation,

those two repulsive afflictions, tyranny and superstition--De Doctrina, Yale Prose VI, 118.

Milton's two do suggest iteration of his thought from 1651 to 1660, though one must remember that he had certainly reviewed his earlier phrase more recently in 1658, when he republished the Defense. But when one places its Latin beside the parallel claimed for De Doctrina the similarity vanishes as it does with the English phrase from Readie and Easy Way:

Quae duo in vita hominum mala sane maxima sunt . . . , Tyrannis et Superstitio--1st Defense, Columbia Milton VII, 552

duas teterrimus pestes, servitutem et metum--De Doctrina, Columbia Milton XIV, 3.

It is instructive to compare the translations of the treatise by Sumner (following Walker) and Carey with a literal one:

those two detestable curses, slavery and superstition--Sumner, Columbia Milton XIV, 4

those two repulsive afflictions, tyranny and super-stition--Carey, Yale Prose VI, 118

[the] two most loathsome diseases, servitude and fear--literal.

Clearly, one should consider warily such parallels and any annotations that derive from English translations rather than the original Latin. Indeed, echoes of Milton's genuine writings that we hear in them may only be [End Page 99] produced in the echo chambers of Walker or later translators. John Shawcross for years has complained that Kelley's annotations often are not to the actual Latin text of the treatise but to the translator's possibly questionable interpretation of it. Furthermore, its applications to the canon by other scholars have almost always been made from the English version, not from the original text. As he has argued, we need a good literal translation that does not falsify by imitating canonical passages or assuming eccentric doctrines. Such a literal rendering, he has written me, "would still make the treatise unorthodox, but it would be a different unorthodoxy" from what has been assumed.

The particular example of possible common authorship that Walker pointed out does, however, offer an interesting anomaly that I do not believe has been remarked on before. When one closely examines the second paragraph of the Epistle in either Latin or English but in its original context, it is immediately evident that it was not part of the original composition but has been inserted between the first and third paragraphs. Its contents have no direct connection with what precedes it or what follows. The third paragraph, with the omission of Carey's added connecting word, "But"--it is not in the original text--makes much better sense when read immediately after the first one. It is possible that Milton himself, reflecting his beliefs and the phraseology that Kelley cited from the two other works, dictated this intrusive sentence and that the parallels emphasized in the translation may indeed be real and were intended. I have not found such intrusions elsewhere in the Epistle though, of course, some may be there.

I am uncertain about whether yet some unanswered problems even have possible solutions. No one has fully reviewed the variety and possible identity of hands distinguished by Kelley in the various later additions to the original manuscript. Gordon Campbell, who has made some study of them, doubts that as many amanuenses were involved as Kelley recognized. They need the inspection of a paleographer who also compares them with those in such other manuscripts as the Trinity and the Commonplace Book. Identification of the varieties of its paper too might yield some evidence as to its provenance. Yet another untested lead is the attempt to identify in Holland and Saumur the name of someone associated with the manuscript because of its obvious orientation to Continental authorities and more particularly those at these two locations. By correspondence I was able to run down a minor Dutch landscape painter named Jeronimus Picard, but he seems a very unlikely prospect. I have been unable to find the names of the faculty or more important the student registration list of the Remonstrant Academy in Amsterdam and wonder whether they may still survive somewhere. I do not know whether any records at all exist today from Saumur in view of later attacks on the Huguenots in France, but the question may be worth asking.

Later, I must address some questions to the stylometric group to which perhaps only they can respond. For a minor one, why are chapters xi and xxii so deviant in the graphing of the various parts of the treatise? The former chapter on the Fall of Man does not deny the dogma of original sin, which Paradise Lost confirms (6.389n), and it cites classical Greek authors three times, though this scarcely seems exceptional. The latter chapter spends a good deal of energy trying to clarify the relations of works and faith for one's salvation, which may set it apart. But I see no special reasons otherwise for these two chapters to swing so wide of the others.

Much more important is the graphing of the Epistle closer to the Latin of Milton's Defenses than does any of the work that follows, a point that Dr. Tweedie has clearly recognized. Others have felt unspecified but real similarities between Milton's ideas and his style, both English and Latin, and those of the treatise. The problem, of course, is that it would be strange for him to write such a preface as though he were the author to a work not his. Evidently the issue is worth consideration. I can offer only two further comments. First, its strong emphasis upon publication, apparently immediate, is unexpected for the not fully complete work that follows. Second, its author implies that the original goal of his study was refutation of Roman Catholicism, for he writes of its earlier stages, "After I had painstakingly persevered in this work for several years, I saw that the citadel of reformed religion was adequately fortified against the Papists" (Yale Prose 6.120). I do not know of any such energies Milton had expended on this subject except the commemorative (and public) poems associated with the disclosure of the Gunpowder Plot. What one would expect him to have recounted would be such energies directed against the bishopric of the English church. In any case, the statement certainly was not true in the spring of 1673 when, with the manuscript in his possession, he felt impelled to dictate Of True Religion . . . and what best means may be us'd against the growth of POPERY. Someone may come up with further clarification of the relationship between the Epistle and the treatise which it introduces.

Another important question is a coincidence that I noted in my "Responses" (37n.6). Dr. Tweedie's investigation proved that there are very close stylistic bonds between Milton's Defenses and Salmasius' Defensio [End Page 100] Regia, to which he was responding in the first one. As I observed, by this method the two authors cannot be distinguished. I think it could be very useful to see whether du Moulin's Regia Sanquinis Clamor, which the Second Defense answers, and Alexander More's Fides Publica, which elicited the Defense of Himself, fit into a similar pattern--or perhaps all six works are marked by the same stylistic habits. In such a context one must place Dr. Sellin's startling demonstration of how well More's life and thought match positions that the treatise supports, leading to the revolutionary possibility that Milton had such a work of More in his possession and was moving to publish it in order further to discredit this enemy. Unexpectedly, Dr. Tweedie's yet-unpublished graphing of his work is in immediate accord with the stylistic characteristics that she discovered in Milton's Defenses. Possibly such practices thus are not decisively distinctive of Milton's writing but derive from those of an opponent or even suggest an established international style reflected in all these works. If so, the conclusions of the stylometrists lose some of their effectiveness because De Doctrina would obviously belong to a different stylistic tradition and thus would be expected to graph differently.

Or finally, as I have suggested, if the author of the treatise had indeed learned his Latin in Milton's school during the 1640's when he was compiling at his teacher's dictation a religious compendium out Ames and Wolleb to which he added proof texts, it would be interesting to extend the stylometric study to representative Latin works that his pupils would later publish. Such an investigation would reveal whether, as seems likely, they adopted to some degree their teacher's stylistic habits and so it could support or bring into question to some extent the thesis that I have tentatively proposed, that De Doctrina originated in a compendium compiled under Milton's dictation by one of his students in the 1640's which he later modified in part by heretical additions under the influence of more eccentric Continental dogmatists even as to at least some extent he continued to write in the style that Milton had taught him.

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Unless the investigations that I have suggested or that others develop from different evidence furnish decisive proof that Milton indeed authored De Doctrina, it is questionable to apply it as a gloss to interpret his genuine works. You must go in some other direction.

Works Cited

Campbell, Gordon, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, David I. Holmes, and Fiona J. Tweedie. "The Provenance of De Doctrina Christiana." Milton Quarterly, 31 (1997): 67-121.

Hunter, William B. "Responses." Milton Quarterly, 33 (1999): 31-37.

------. Visitation Unimplor'd: Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1998.

Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. 8 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1954-82.

------. The Works of John Milton. 18 vols. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1931-38.