Radicalism and Mysticism in the Later Seventeenth Century: John Pordage’s Angels
In 1667, when Paradise Lost was published, John Milton’s nephew, pupil and biographer, Edward Phillips, was working as tutor for Philip Herbert, 5th Earl of Pembroke. At the same time, the Earl’s steward was the little-known author of a visionary and prophetic epic poem about angels, Samuel Pordage. Were there discussions of their parallel projects? Unfortunately, we do not know whether Milton and Pordage heard news of each other, or even met. Their shared interests included not only poetry and angels, but radical religion: Samuel’s father, John, was a visionary who had conversed with angels, rejected the moral law and founded a church. The circumstantial associations deepen with another visitor to the Earl’s house in that same year, 1667. This was Richard Bovet, author of Pandaemonium (1684), an antiSadducist compendium of tales of witches and spirits, but also a dissenter’s attack on Catholicism and on Restoration politics. Bovet was later involved in plotting against the regime. Not only was there an element of political sympathy between them, but Bovet’s title Pandaemonium derives from Milton’s epic (which Bovet commends in the text). Perhaps all three writers intersected in person as well as in spirit in 1667.1
Milton and the Idea of the Fall
Introduction Part I. Fallen Culture: 1. The fall 2. Augustinianism 3. The quarrel over original sin 1649-60 4. The heterodox fall 5. The fall in practice Part II. Milton: 6. Towards Paradise Lost 7. Paradise Lost I: the causality of primal wickedness 8. Paradise Lost II: God, Eden, and man 9. Paradise Lost III: creation and education 10. Paradise Lost IV: fall and expulsion Conclusion.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of