Milton and the English Revolution (9781788736855) by Hill Christopher

Author:Hill, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Digital Dist

The Hermeticist doctrine had been taken over by the Familists, who believed that every member of the Family of Love by obedience of love became a Son of God. Or, as Croll put it, man ‘riseth to such perfection that he is made the Son of God, transformed into the same image which is God and made one with him’.2 Robert Fludd taught that heaven was attainable on earth. ‘The Rosicrucians call one another brethren because they are Sons of God’ in this sense. Christ dwells in man ‘and each man is a living stone of that spiritual rock’. Of these stones the true Temple will be constructed, of which the temples of Moses and of Solomon were only types. ‘When the Temple is consecrated, its dead stones will live … and man will recover his primitive state of innocence and perfection’.3 This may perhaps enrich our sense of the scene in Paradise Regained when the Son of God miraculously stands on the pinnacle of the Temple. ‘The Son and the saints make one perfect man’, declared William Erbery; ‘the fullness of the godhead dwells in both in the same measure, though not in the same manifestation. … The fullness of the godhead shall be manifested in the flesh of the saints as in the flesh of the Son’ – i.e. on earth.4

Servetus drew extensively on the Hermetic literature as well as on the pre-Nicene Fathers. He shared the Hermeticist view that the supreme God is invisible, incomprehensible, inaudible, transcending all things. He could be known only through the Logos, first of created things, through whom the world was made and animated. God is the essence of all created things: ‘all things are a part and portion of God’, Servetus thought. ‘God fills all things, even hell itself.’ For Servetus, Christ was not a hypostasis but a human being. But the Logos existed as the Son of God before taking flesh as a man. Since his life on earth all men are capable of becoming Sons of God by adoption, through faith in Christ; of participating in the divine nature. ‘We are in heaven when we believe that Christ is the Son of God.’1

We do not know whether Milton got his conception of the sonship of all Christians from the Hermetic, the Familist or the anti-Trinitarian tradition, or direct from the Bible. But he cannot have been ignorant of any of these traditions. In 1641–2 Milton attacked the distinction between clergy and laity because it obscured ‘the glorious titles of saints and sons’. A Christian’s self-respect derived from consciousness of ‘the dignity of God’s image upon him,… enobled to a new friendship and filial relation with God’.2

Bidle agreed that ‘there are many Sons of God’, men who become such through faith. The Socinian John Knowles said: ‘A son is of a father: angels and men are called the Sons of God.’3 Again these views were capable of antinomian interpretation. Captain Francis Freeman had Christ in him, John Robins and William

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