Joad Raymond - Milton's Angels - The Early-Modern Imagination-Oxford University Press, USA (2010)

MILTON’S ANGELS
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MILTON’S
ANGELS
The Early Modern
Imagination
JOAD RAYMOND
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Nicola, Marchamont,
and Elias
Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one color
Braving time.
Acknowledgements
Among the benefits to being a Miltonist is the excellent community

of learned scholars, and the present time is well stocked with
them: my thanks, for various discussions of this book, to David
Norbrook, Sharon Achinstein, Nigel Smith, David Loewenstein,
Martin Dzelzainis, Paul Stevens, Gordon Campbell, Tom Corns,
Neil Forsyth, Edward Jones, Laura Knoppers, Jameela Lares, Annabel
Patterson, Noël Sugimura, Graham Parry, Jason Rosenblatt. I owe a
great intellectual debt to Kevin Sharpe and Steve Zwicker, for being
good friends and good readers over many years. I am indebted to
David Colclough, Rosy Cox, Nicole Greenspan, Lauren Kassell,
Kevin Killeen, and Simon Schaffer for reading chapters and offering
excellent advice; Sophia Mullins too read drafts, first as a student and
then as a friend. Olivia Smith, also once a student, sent more
references than I could use, and took me for an important drink.
Thanks to Line Cottegnies and Sermin Meskill for conversations and
hospitality. And for dialogue, references, and informative corres
pondence, thanks to John Morrill, Lori Newcomb, Norah Carlin,
John Ford, Vittoria Feola, Julie Park, Blair Hoxby, Sue Wiseman,
and Steve Bardle.
I would like to give particular acknowledgement to four ground
breaking books: Robert H. West’s Milton and the Angels, Stephen
Fallon’s Milton among the Philosophers, J. M. Evans’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and
the Genesis Tradition, and Neil Forsyth’s The Satanic Epic. All are
brilliant models of different kinds of scholarship and helped to shape
this book. To contributors to a conference entitled ‘Conversations
with Angels’, which I co ran with Lauren Kassell at the Centre for
Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities in Cambridge, in
September 2005, and which provided the origins of a forthcoming
collection of essays, I owe various kinds of debt, and I especially thank
Walter Stephens, Tony Grafton, Alex Walsham, Peter Marshall, Nick
x acknowledgements
Wilding, and Pete Forshaw for illuminating conversations. To my sons

Elias and Marchamont I owe much happiness.
Papers based on the book were given at various conferences and
seminars, beginning with the International Milton Symposium in Beau
fort, South Carolina, in June 2002, where the idea initially stuck out its
neck, and ending with the International Milton Symposium in London
in July 2008; and, in between, in Cambridge University, Birkbeck
College, London, Oxford University, Goldsmith’s College, London,
Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Illinois at
Urbana Champaign, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University
of Maryland, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3, Université de
Versailles Saint Quentin en Yverlines, and Université de Paris VIII
Vincennes à Saint Denis, 23 May 2003. I am grateful to many members
of many audiences for discussions.
Portions of Chapter 9 appeared in David Loewenstein and Paul
Stevens (eds), Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto,
2008); portions of Chapter 12 in Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham
(eds), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006); and a version
of Chapter 7 in Line Cottegnies, Claire Gheeraert Graffeuille, Tony
Gheeraert, Anne Marie Miler Blaise, and Gisèle Venet (eds), Les Voix
de Dieu: Littérature et prophétie en Angleterre et en France à l’âge baroque
(Paris, 2008). My thanks to these editors and their presses.
I am also indebted to librarians and archivists at the University of
East Anglia, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress,
Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, the British
Library, the Public Record Office, the Wellcome Library, the Bei
necke Library, the Firestone Library at Princeton University and the
library at the Princeton Theological Seminary, the New York Public
Library, and the university libraries in Charlottesville, Urbana
Champaign, and Madison.
The University of East Anglia has provided a supportive environ
ment during the writing of this book, and many students created a
stimulating one. The extent of the research on which it is based would
not have been possible without the generosity of the Leverhulme
Trust, which awarded me a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in
2003; nor without the Arts and Humanities Research Council,
which granted a Research Leave award for the spring of 2007.
A fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library provided a commodi
ous period for thinking and drafting. OUP has been a great press to
acknowledgements xi
work with, and Andrew McNeillie the best of editors. I must also
thank an anonymous reader of the manuscript for saving me from
Error.
This book has consumed many years with reading, writing, and
unwriting. I dispatch it now with special thanks to those friends who
helped it emerge from darkness into light: Eivind, Simon, David,
Helen, Dean, Sean, Sophia, Kevin, Nicola. It is dedicated to my
three loves.
j. r.
Contents
List of Illustrations xv
List of Abbreviations and Conventions xvi
1. Introduction: Protestant Angels, Poets,

the Imagination 1
I. U N D E R S T A N D I N G A N G E L S
2. Angelographia: Writing about Angels 19
3. Angelology: Knowledge of Angels 48
4. A Stronger Existence: Angels, Polemic, and Radical
Speculation, 1640–1660 89
5. Conversations with Angels: The Pordages and their
Angelical World 125
6. The Fleshly Imagination and the Word of God 162
7. Spiritual Gifts: Angels, Inspiration, and
Prophecy 189
II. M I L T O N ’ S A N G E L S
8. Can Angels Feign? 207
9. Look Homeward Angel: Angelic Guardianship
and Nationhood 229
10. Angels in Paradise Lost 256
11. The Natural Philosophy of Angels 277
12. ‘With the Tongues of Angels’: Angelic
Communication 311
xiv contents
III. L I TE RATU RE AND RE P R E S E N T A T I O N

13. Dryden’s Fall: Dreams, Angels, Freewill 327
14. Conclusion: Angels and Literary Representation 355
Notes 385
Index 457
List of Illustrations
1. Thomas Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635), title

page engraving. CUL, shelfmark SSS.21.15. (By permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 50
2. Thomas Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635),
engraving of ‘The Principat’. CUL, shelfmark SSS.21.15.
(By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 54
3. Sixteenth century book of magic with instructions for conjuring
spirits. Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger MS V.b.26.
(By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library) 108
4. Samuel Pordage, Mundorum Explicatio (1663), ‘Hieroglyphical
Figure’. BL, shelfmark C.117.b.62. (By permission of the
British Library) 138–9
5. John Pordage, Theologia Mystica (1683). Bodl., shelfmark Vet.
A3 e.1643. (By permission of the Bodleian Library) 148
6. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1669 issue of 1667 edition),
consecutive openings showing the end of book 5 and beginning
of book 6. CUL, shelfmark SSS.32.40. (By permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 208–9
7. Panel on east doors of the Baptistery in Florence, designed by
Lorenzo Ghiberti, 1424–52 362
List of Abbreviations and Conventions
I have retained original punctuation and spelling, though I have

modernized u/v and i/j/y on typographical and palaeographical
grounds only, and where the sense is clear. As we await the Oxford
Complete Works of John Milton, I use the Latin translations in the
Columbia or Yale editions according to which I prefer; I translate
the poetry myself. I have transliterated Greek and Hebrew.
I have followed the Julian calendar employed in early modern
England, ten days behind the Gregorian calendar in use across most
of continental Europe; the year is taken to begin on 1 January, though
the legal calendar began on Lady Day, 25 March.
I use the King James Bible, except where otherwise indicated.
Place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated (and
I have used this rigorously, for modern and early modern books).
When I occasionally refer to ‘we’ and ‘us’ I means humans;
I appreciate that this may occasionally seem parochial.
Aquinas, Summa Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Thomas
Gilby et al., 61 vols (Cambridge, 1964–81)
Augustine, City Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans,
ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, 1998)
BL British Library
Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford
Calvin, Commentarie A Commentarie of John Calvine, upon the first booke
of Moses called Genesis, trans. Thomas Tymme
(1578)
Calvin, Institution John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion,
trans. Thomas Norton (1611)
Columbia The Works of John Milton, 18 vols, ed. Frank Allen
Patterson (New York, 1931–8)
CPW Complete Prose Works of John Milton, general ed.
Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, 1953–82)
CUL Cambridge University Library
list of abbreviations and conventions xvii
Donne, Major Works John Donne, The Major Works, ed. John Carey
(1990; Oxford, 2000)
Evans, Genesis J. M. Evans, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Genesis
Tradition Tradition (Oxford, 1968)
Fallon, Philosophers Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers:
Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth Century
England (Ithaca, NY, 1991)
Heywood, Hierarchie Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed
Angells (1635)
Keck, Angels David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle
Ages (New York, 1998)
Lawrence, Angells Henry Lawrence, Of our Communion and Warre
with Angels (1646), reissued as An History of
Angells (1649) with same pagination
McKenzie and Bell D. F. McKenzie and Maureen Bell (eds),
A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating
to the London Book Trade, 1641–1700, 3 vols
(Oxford, 2005)
Marshall and Walsham Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (eds),
(eds), Angels Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge,
2006)
Milton, Poems Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey
(1968; 2nd edn, 1997)
Norton Shakespeare The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt
(New York, 1997)
O&D Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David
Norbrook (Oxford, 2001); cited by canto and
line
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Peter Martyr, Common Pietro Martire Vermigli, The Common Places of
Places the Most Famous and Renowmed Divine Doctor Peter
Martyr, trans. Anthonie Marten ([1583])
PL John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler
(1968; 2nd edn, 1998)
Pordage, Mundorum S[amuel] P[ordage], Mundorum Explicatio (1661)
PR Paradise Regained, in Milton, Poems
Pseudo Dionysius, Pseudo Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans.
Works and ed. Colm Luibheid, Paul Rorem, et al.
(New York, 1987)
xviii list of abbreviations and conventions
Raymond (ed.), Joad Raymond (ed.), Conversations with

Conversations Angels: Essays towards a History of Spiritual
Communication, 1100–1700 (forthcoming)
Raymond, Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in
Pamphleteering Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003)
TT British Library Thomason Tracts shelfmark
West, Angels Robert H. West, Milton and the Angels (Athens,
Ga., 1955)
Williams, Expositor Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor:
An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis,
1527–1633 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1948)
Williams, Ideas of the Norman Powell Williams, The Ideas of the Fall
Fall and of Original Sin (1929)
1
Introduction
Protestant Angels, Poets, the Imagination
Actions with Angels
On 10 September 1672 Thomas Wale brought his wife to see the

antiquary Elias Ashmole, and she told him the following story:
That her former Husband was one M:r Jones a Confectioner, who formerly
dwelt at the Plow in Lombardstreet London, & who, shortly after they were
married, tooke her with him into Alde Streete among the Joyners, to buy
some Houshold stuff, where (at the Corner house) they saw a Chest of Cedar
wood, about a yard & halfe long, whose Lock & Hinges, being of extraor
dinary neate worke, invited them to buy it. The Master of the shop told
them it had ben parcel of the Goods of M:r John Woodall Chirurgeon (father
to M:r Tho: Woodall late Sergant Chirurgeon to his now Ma:tie King Charles
the 2d: . . . My intimate friend) and tis very probable he bought it after D:r
Dee’s death, when his goods were exposed to Sale.
Twenty yeares after this (& about 4 yeares before the fatall Fire of London)
she & her sd husband occasionally removing this Chest out of its usuall place,
thought they heard some loose thing ratle in it, toward the right hand end,
under the Box or Till thereof, & by shaking it, were fully satisfied it was so:
Hereupon her Husband thrust a piece of Iron into a small Crevice at the
bottome of the Chest, & thereupon appeared a private drawer, wch being
drawne out, therein were found divers Bookes in Manuscript, & Papers,
together with a litle Box, & therein a Chaplet of Olive Beades, & a Cross of
the same wood, hanging at the end of them.
They made no great matter of these Bookes &c: because they understood them
not; wch occasioned their Servant Maide to wast about one halfe of them under
Pyes & other like uses, wch when they discovered, they kept the rest more safe.
About two yeares after these discovery of these Bookes, M:r Jones died, &
when the fire of London hapned, :::::::::::::
^though the Chest perished in the Flames,
2 introduction
because not easily to be removed, :::::::

^yet but the Bookes were taken out &
carried with the rest of M:rs Jones her goods into Moorefields, & being safely
back, she tooke care to preserve them; and after marrying with the foresd M:r
Wale, he came to the knowledge of them, & thereupon, with her consent,
sent them to me . . .
The remainder of the story was Ashmole’s. His servant brought him
the books, and he identified them as having belonged to John Dee, the
celebrated magician and astrologer of Elizabethan England and
Europe. They included Dee’s manuscript of his ‘Conference with
Angells’, which took place in 1581–3, together with
the 48 Claves Angelicæ, also Liber Scientia Terrestris—Auxilÿ & Victoria

(These two being those very individuall Bookes, wch the Angells commanded
to be Burnt, and af were after restored by them as appears by the printed
Relation of D:r Dee’s Actions with Spirits pag: 418. & 419.) The Booke
intituled De Heptarchia Mystica Collectaneorum Lib: primus, and a Booke
of Invocations or Calls.
These four works of occult philosophy and ritual magic were used in
the summoning of angels. The string of beads and cross were for the
same purpose. Mr Wale, to Ashmole’s glee, agreed to exchange these
books for a book about the Order of the Garter. Ashmole later sent
him an additional gift for his kindness.1
There are two stories in Mrs Wale’s narrative. The first is a literal
minded story of marriage and trade. She and her first husband buy a chest
because they admire the workmanship. They discover the manuscripts
through detective work. The maid economically reuses irreplaceable
manuscripts as pie wrapping (though ‘like uses’ may also suggest the
privy). Mrs Wale rescues the movables from fire. Her husband dies, she
remarries, her goods become her second husband’s. He sees their value
and trades them for a coffee table book. Ashmole puts them in his library.
The second story inhabits the first, and it is a tale of magic and
providence. The newly married couple buy a chest and it sits in the
corner. It makes a mysterious noise when moved. On investigating, they
discover a secret compartment with magical books and objects, but do
not understand them. They are preserved from fire several times: from
the oven, two are resurrected from conflagration after angels demand
their burning, and they survive the Great Fire of London, though there
seems little reason to save them. Then the widow marries a warder in the
Tower of London, educated enough to recognize something in these
introduction 3
books—magical symbols, pictures of angels—that causes him to bring

them into the hands of the man uniquely qualified to appreciate and
preserve them. The books seem to be alive, speak to humans, and cause
them to follow their own purposes. The books are enchanted, and
survive by their wits. This spiritual story is not only compatible with
the mundane story, it is the same story seen in a different way.
Other stories can be told around these books. This first volume
recording a ‘Conference with Angells’ is separated from a manuscript of
later conversations, which finds its way to the library of Robert Cotton,
where it is consulted by scholars, and from which a dark reputation
irradiates. In the late 1650s this manuscript is edited by Meric Casaubon,
son of the great Huguenot scholar Isaac. Meric wants to challenge
scepticism concerning the existence of the spirit world, which he fears
has spread in Cromwellian England, by publishing an edition; but he is
convinced that the angels that spoke with Dee were fallen, and that Dee
had unwittingly but credulously practised necromancy in summoning
demons (many Protestants contended that the age of angels appearing to
humans was over). Archbishop William Ussher encouraged Casaubon,
because he wished to discourage the worship of angels, an idolatrous
Roman Catholic practice. This is a story of scholarly gullibility and the
pervasiveness of angels of darkness disguised as angels of light.2
The Council of State sought to suppress Casaubon’s edition in the
summer of 1658, but was thrown into disarray by the death of Oliver
Cromwell, and it was published in 1659. It seemed at this stage to be an
implicit attack on religious enthusiasm; so thought a clergyman, who
remembered the attempted suppression and who annotated the vol
ume in 1683. William Shippen was sympathetic to Casaubon’s reli
gious outlook, but he deplored the scholarly inaccuracies in the
edition. Religious affiliation, politics, and scholarly principles con
verged on the same object. None of the players here expressed doubts
about the credibility of the reported conversations, though they sought
to do different things with them. And finally, Robert Hooke, curator
of experiments at the Royal Society, doubted the interpretation of
these manuscripts. In a lecture to the Royal Society in 1690 he argued
that a learned man like Dee could not have believed in such manifest
nonsense, and that the texts must in fact be a mode of secret writing.
Yet Hooke numbered among his friends and colleagues natural philo
sophers who were interested in alchemy and angel magic, and firmly
believed that the supernatural world was intervolved in the natural
4 introduction
world even if it could not be experimented on. Growing knowledge of

the natural world and promotion of this knowledge was not incom
patible with the study of angels. Here a story might be told about
different ways of giving order to nature (though there are no grounds,
it must be emphasized, for a story of secularization).3
These are just a few aspects of the movement of books of angelic
conversations and magic, and their interpretation within a nexus of
knowledge or beliefs about religion, natural philosophy, politics. There
is an imposing validity and flexibility of beliefs in angels. While Dee’s
conversations with angels have become, to modern scholars, the most
notorious example of committed belief in the immediate reality of angels,
they were in early modern Britain meaningful as only one of a range of
encounters with angels. The ways of describing angelic–human relations,
the place of knowledge of angels in broader intellectual concerns, and the
stories that can be told about them, are manifold, develop, and multiply.
Angels were very much alive and nearby in Protestant Britain.
The Reformation, Continuity, and Change
Around 1500 most beliefs about angels, most representations of them,

most of the ways in which angels figured in culture, broadly under
stood, were not founded on Scripture. Angel imagery and doctrine
were absorbed from pre Judaic as well as pre Christian culture, from
patristic sources, from the fifth or sixth century writings attributed to
Dionysius, from scholastic writings that strayed far from Scripture and,
probably, from popular culture. Reformers confronted a corpus of
writing and belief that was diverse and lively, but had little authority
as they saw it. The Protestant injunction that true faith lay in the
authority of Scripture alone, and that the rest was at best adiaphora (or
things indifferent), or, at worst, popish and idolatrous invention, might
have removed almost all knowledge of or interactions with angels.
Given the prevailing understanding of Protestant theology, and judg
ing by the near or total silence on angels in substantial studies of the
Reformation, one would be forgiven for assuming that this happened,
that angels were swept away with the tide of anti Catholicism. The
Reformation, however, did not do that. As I show in Part I of this
book, Protestants were very interested in angels, despite the reserva
tions expressed by Calvin, Luther, and others. This book, for reasons
introduction 5
that will become apparent, focuses on Britain, though it has cause

thoroughly to examine the exchange between Britain and the rest of
Europe, where doctrine was formed and reformed. In Britain angels
did disappear from the stage, and their place in the fine arts was very
marginal. Much medieval architecture that represented angels was
destroyed in acts of iconoclasm, initially in the 1530s, and subsequently
in the 1640s.4 In 1643, prompted by a parliamentary order, William
Dowsing entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, where, according to his
diary, ‘We pulled down two mighty great angels, with wings, and
divers other angels . . . and about a hundred chirubims and angels, and
divers superstitious letters in gold.’5 British Protestants did little to
create and circulate an alternative visual iconography of angels. They
did, however, write about angels. Angels appear in systematic the
ology, practical divinity, sermons, scriptural annotations, devotional
writings, catechisms, prayers, and a small number of expository works
dedicated to elaborating the theology of angels; but also in secular
genres, including commonplace books, political treatises, newsbooks,
political pamphlets, and poetry. The language of angels and spirits, as
metaphors or rhetorical devices, spreads into all modes of writings.
Angels are ubiquitous in early modern texts.
The Roman Catholic and Protestant theology concerning angels is less
polarized than might at first appear in the polemics of early modern
British divines (and in modern scholarship). As I demonstrate in Part I,
many Protestants allowed of angelic hierarchies, and some even accepted
the schematizations of Pseudo Dionysius or Gregory. Most Protestants
accepted the idea of guardian angels assigned to a particular place or
community, and some the notion of individual guardian angels (espe
cially for the elect). Prayer to, and worship of, angels was universally
rejected, though angels persist in Protestant liturgy, and the Feast of
St Michael was sometimes observed. And angels survived in churches:
many fifteenth century church roofs, especially in East Anglia but also in
Yorkshire and the North, are still decorated with ornate flocks of angels,
with feathered wings, carrying scrolls and musical instruments. The most
common is St Michael, pictured trampling a Satanic dragon or weighing
human souls, and he frequently occupied a symbolic place in church
architecture, ornamenting the doorways between nave and sanctuary,
the boundary between the profane world and the sacred.6 While
Protestant divines certainly insisted that angel devotion and credulity
concerning doctrine distinguished the Roman Catholic from the true
6 introduction
Church, in practice the distinction was less clear. Within Protestantism

there was a diversity of beliefs, and clear boundaries cannot always be
drawn on doctrinal issues.
Angels were increasingly removed from immediate experience, in
worship and of the everyday world, and there was a weakening of
specific ideological associations and of specific theological engage
ments with angels. There was also, however, much work undertaken
renewing and redrawing beliefs in and knowledge about angels. Angels
were reworked in the context of natural philosophy, and this power
fully shaped their place in British culture. Epistemological and pro
cedural differences between natural philosophy in Britain and many
places in Roman Catholic Europe meant that angels were handled
differently in these cultures in ways that only indirectly relate to
confessional difference. The development of angel doctrine in Britain
after 1500 was probably shaped more by internal intellectual and
religious dynamics than by responses to Roman Catholic angel doc
trine. Protestant angels should not be understood as largely reactive;
nor as a residuum from pre Reformation theology. Angels were too
alive in the culture, too powerfully connected to other, dynamic
concerns, to be reduced to confessional politics.
There was, then, in Britain, no decline in interest in angels, or clear
shift away from traditional theological concerns. Instead there was a
developing and enlarged understanding of the role of angels in nature
and theology that interacted with developments in other areas of
theology, politics, and culture. Angels were part of the intellectual
furniture, and they were a particularly creative part. One arena of
angelic fermentation was poetry. English poets wrote about angels a
great deal, not least because angels were part of the spiritual vocabu
lary, and useful metaphors; but several ambitious English poets wrote
epic poems in which angels figure prominently, as characters or central
devices. Among these are Thomas Heywood’s extraordinary and
baroque Hierarchy of the Blessed Angells (1635), Samuel Pordage’s
visionary Mundorum Explicatio (1661), Lucy Hutchinson’s defiant
Order and Disorder (1660–79), and, most ambitious of all, Milton’s
Paradise Lost (1667). This is a diverse group of poems, but, I would
argue, together they should constitute (independently of Milton’s
personal greatness) an essential feature of any literary history of early
modern Britain. Angels captured the Protestant imagination, and
Protestants chose to write epic poems about them.
introduction 7
How can we write truthfully about things we do not understand?

How can a Protestant forge a vision of heaven from her imagination,
and how can she tell stories about sacred creatures of whom she knows
little? Is this not to risk misrepresentation, slurring of sempiternal
beings, even blasphemy? Narrative, it turns out, is one aspect of this
theological conundrum. Inspiration is another. Narrative can be used
as a heuristic device for learning truth, just as natural philosophy and
the study of Scripture can be complementary. I argue in Chapters 6
and 7 that the doctrine of accommodation—by which ineffable truths
are lowered and the human mind lifted so that they converge without
misrepresentation—is an essential component of the aesthetics of reli
gious poetry. This is especially important because accommodation
offers a mode of representation that complicates the conventional
dichotomy between truth and fiction; it is not a form of metaphor or
allegory, but a means of representing truths in figurative manner.
There are different accounts of accommodation, and different views
of the role of human agency, especially over whether accommodation
is attributable to God alone, or whether it can be performed by
inspired humans; I argue that Milton, who has long been recognized
as citing an account of accommodation through his narrator Raphael,
himself makes a claim to participate in a strong version of the process.
The kinds of truth that poetry can reach for are extended for those
who believe in prophecy as an active, living force; coupled with my
analysis of accommodation is an investigation into prophecy and its
theological underpinnings. Prophecy is a literary mode, but, even in
the hands of ambitious poets, it is not only a literary mode.
One of the subordinate themes of this book is the close association
between angels and Protestant theories of representation. This is not
opportunism on my part: when theologians sought to explain or
explore notions of representing the invisible, from the thirteenth
century to the seventeenth, they turned to the question of how angels,
immaterial spirits, made themselves visible to humans. The association
between angels and representation is a strong one, and it operates on
several levels: I bring them together here because they were connected
in the minds of many theologians and poets, and that connection was
fundamental to thought and writing. Angelic apparitions became the
dominant analogy for accurate representation, including accommoda
tion, and this in part explains their attractiveness to epic poets. Angels
not only are characters and plot devices, a superior form of deus ex
8 introduction
machina, but are intimately connected to the literary medium. This

does not mean that the religious materials are only displacements of
literary intentions and effects, as some types of criticism are disposed to
suggest; for these poets, and many others, the literature has a religious
purpose. Milton’s medium is narrative poetry, but the vision that
drives him concerns grace and salvation. It is for these reasons—the
vitality of Protestant angelology, the convergence of epic poems
around angels, the importance of accommodation to theology and
poetics, and the association between angels and representation, in
doctrinal as well as literary writings—that I describe this as a book
about the early modern imagination.
The imagination, with the gift of the spirit—which is not to say
the inspiration of the Romantic poet so much as that of the religious
enthusiast—enables the author to write truthfully of heavenly things. It is
this faith that gave interest in angels such life in early modern Britain, and
especially in the mid seventeenth century. This faith shapes not only
poetry, but also theological prose and the experience of everyday life; it
is essential to this book that these three are part of the same lived and
understood reality. The imagination can also be, as John Pordage and
others saw, a wilful devotion to merely earthly things, a darkness that
overshadows the gift of spiritual grace and light. It is the former imagin
ation that concerns me in this book, just as I write, almost exclusively,
about good angels, unfallen angels, and it is these that I mean when I write
of ‘angels’ without a qualifier. The few exceptions to this are clear in
context. There has been a great deal of scholarship on early modern devils,
demons, and witchcraft in recent decades, and I have little to add about
them herein. Very little has been written about early modern angels,
especially in a Protestant context, and the first part of this book seeks to
rectify this, by offering an overview of writing about, beliefs in, and
knowledge about angels.7 It is a foolish but necessary assay.
What Words or Tongue of Seraph Can Suffice?
This intellectual context is essential to understanding Milton’s epic, the

most eloquent, most intellectually daring, most learned, and most
sublime poem in the English language. The chronological, geograph
ical, and emotional ambition of Paradise Lost is almost without bounds.
It begins before Creation, describes the history of the universe, and
introduction 9
concludes with the end of time. It extends from heaven through created
space and the earth to hell and the void beyond. It is the grandest poem
in the Renaissance epic tradition, and puts an end to that tradition. Yet
its focus is domestic, turning on a single human relationship: it tells a
story of love, intimacy, betrayal, heartbreak, and wounded reconcili
ation. Adam and Eve’s actions and feelings seem heroic because they are
situated and given significance within Creation in a way that no other
poem, pagan or Christian, has achieved. Milton accomplished this by
introducing a machinery both expansive and theologically daring. This
machinery is angelic. Angels are fundamental to the execution of
Milton’s design in Paradise Lost. They are necessary because without
them the story does not work. He uses angels to narrate swaths of
history, to interact with, protect, and converse with humans, to fight
with rebel angels. He uses them to make mistakes, to sin, to argue, to
bind together the celestial narratives with the terrestrial. The story of
Paradise Lost is told by and of angels; it relies upon their conflicts,
communications, and miscommunications. They are the creatures of
God but also the creatures of Milton’s narrative. Milton makes the Fall
morally ponderous, tragic, and part of the fabric of the universe by
surrounding it with the actions and interactions of angels. Take away
the angels from Paradise Lost, and you would be left with a linear,
expository narrative. So although its concern is with, and its focus
upon, humankind, angels are central to its design.
This book is not a study of a narrow aspect or theme of Paradise Lost,
and I am not merely contending that angels are important. Rather, I argue
that in terms of its imaginative drive and aesthetic architecture, Paradise
Lost is a poem about angels, and that Milton’s understanding of poetic
representation is inseparable from his understanding of Creation in gen
eral and angels in particular. There is a case to be made here for Milton’s
uniqueness and for his typicality, and in making it I offer a reading of
Paradise Lost. He is typical in that his concerns with angels are common.
Angels were part of his intellectual background, and they were an essential
formal element of any systematic theology (they form a transitional
section between the description of God and of material Creation);
when he wrote De Doctrina Christiana, he incorporated discussions of
them out of necessity, though they are less central to it than to his epic
because it is not a work of narrative and imagination, nor an inspired text.
In the late 1630s, when Milton was planning to write a tragedy, angels
repeatedly figured in his plans. For the following two decades, the
10 introduction
revolutionary years—during which he mainly devoted himself to writing

prose—there was a surge of interest in angels. More people wrote about
and spoke with them. Anxieties about religious and social fragmentation,
political conflict, widespread apocalypticism, the breakdown of the
Church, interest in the occult, and the growth in antinomian theology
created a culture in which angels seemed to be more immediately present.
When Milton returned to poetry, and began to write his epic, angels
carried not only a venerable theological tradition, but an electric contem
porary valence as a means of describing and interacting with the world. In
this respect Milton can be said to be typical.
Milton is unique because of his greatness. But he is also distinct in the
intensity of his interests, and in the way, I shall argue, that he binds
together narrative and doctrine. This is not unconnected to his great
ness. Milton’s angels are peculiarly intense creations. Like humans, they
eat, digest, make love for pleasure, suffer pain, and feel isolated. Their
vision is subject to the laws of optics. They engage in more intimate
relations with humanity than in any other early modern text. Their
representation engenders conceptual problems: as the poet John Dryden
complained, their numerousness is perplexing; as Paradise Lost’s first
annotator, Patrick Hume, complained, though invulnerable they wear
armour. In these lie precisely their strengths. They are learned repre
sentations, focused in their relations with scholastic and Hebraic tradi
tions. They engage, with near weightless delicacy, with a vast corpus of
exegetical scholarship and practical divinity. They perform many func
tions, imaginative, narratological, religious, natural philosophical, and
political. They bear messages from their author about the ways of God.
As I argue in Part II, Milton’s angels are a mix of literal representation,
extensive learning, unusually theology, and inspired storytelling, all
subordinated to a narrative that is at once descriptive and heuristic.
Milton, while insisting that he is guided by the spirit, uses narrative to
discover as well as explicate truths. Does his unusual theology make his
poetry more interesting or beautiful? This is a potentially embarrassing
question in the twenty first century, but it is worth asking. It may be that
the close ties between his narratives and his heterodoxies generate his
creative verve, and that his faith in his vision and in truth give vitality to
his imagination. Few poets write with such commitment to a vision of
the nature of the world, and with the conviction that this vision can be
communicated through narrative poetry, and so perhaps the beauty that
Milton offers is inseparable from his theology and faith.
introduction 11
In the Printer’s Note he added to the 1668 edition of Paradise Lost,

Samuel Simmons stated that the prose ‘Arguments’ to the poem had
been procured ‘for the satisfaction of many that have desired it’. It is
easy enough to assume that readers desired them because they had
‘stumbled’ not only on the unrhymed form of the poem but also on the
narrative folded into its long and complex verse paragraphs. These
arguments gloss the action of the poem, creating and resolving ambi
guities; they also provide an element of exegetical self justification that
is absent from the poem itself. In the argument to book 1 Milton
explains the location of his hell: ‘described here, not in the centre (for
heaven and earth may be supposed as not yet made, certainly not yet
accursed) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest called chaos’. It is a
logical necessity that hell is not placed within earth, as many assumed,
which is yet uncreated. Humans will not be created until after the fall
of angels, as they were made to supply their place. Is this merely an
effect of the way Milton tells his story, or is the story as it must have
been given the circumstances that we know? Here narrative can lead us
to the truth: hell cannot be within earth. And later in the argument:
‘that angels were long before this visible creation, was the opinion of
many ancient Fathers’.8 This conforms to the descriptions in De
Doctrina Christiana, but it is also a logical necessity from the former
deduction. Milton is not only describing his narrative here, but also
defending its principles according to exegesis (and, uncharacteristic
ally, citing patristic sources in order to appear less unconventional).
This is not fiction, the argument tells us. I show this in a series of
readings that deliberate on the properties and actions of angels within
Paradise Lost. But I also argue that Milton saw Paradise Lost as a
prophetic work, in the strongest sense of the word: that it was based
on inspiration beyond that associated with the vatic poet tradition.
Our modern, reified opposition between truth and fiction, once again,
is an anachronism that misconstrues Protestant theology and Milton.
Inspiration and narrative work together.
Strange as Angels
There is a residual narrative that angels disappeared from Britain

because of embarrassment, lack of interest, reformed theology, or
because of their incompatibility with modern science. It would
12 introduction
certainly be possible to assume this on the basis of some statements

made about them in the later seventeenth century. For example, the
only reference to angels in the Philosophical Transactions in the whole of
the seventeenth century is by Robert Hooke, writing in 1668. He
describes an optical trick, a magic lantern, that can be used to deceive
‘Spectators, not well versed in Opticks’ into seeing ‘Apparitions of
Angels, or Devils, Inscriptions and Oracles on Walls; the Prospect of
Countryes, Cities, Houses, Navies, Armies . . . &c.’. Angels are the
matter of illusion. ‘And had the Heathen Priest of old been acquainted’
with the device he describes, ‘their Oracles and Temples would have
been much more famous for the Miracles of their Imaginary Deities’.
This is not an invitation to consider priests mere jugglers; Hooke
believed in the reality of angels, but they held a complex place in his
natural philosophy.9 Margaret Cavendish, in The Blazing World
(1667), uses the same trick: her fictional Empress uses illusion to
deceive her countrymen into thinking her an angel, upon which her
authority is founded.10 In his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding
(1690) John Locke repeatedly turns to comparisons between angels
and humans, and repeatedly dismisses them as inutile on the grounds
that such knowledge is obtained only through revelation. For ex
ample:
Whether Angels and Spirits have any Analogy to this, in respect of Expansion, is
beyond my comprehension: and, perhaps, for us, who have Understanding and
Comprehension, suited to our own Preservation, and the ends of our own Being,
but not to the reality and extent of all other Beings, ’tis near as hard to conceive
any Existence, or to have an Idea of any reall Being, with a perfect Negation of all
manner of Expansion; as it is, to have the Idea of any real Existence, with a perfect
Negation of all manner of Duration: And therefore what Spirits have to do with
Space, or how the communicate in it, we know not.11
Locke is vexed that angels cannot be discovered and contribute to his
argument. He makes the same rhetorical manoeuvre repeatedly: if only
we knew how angels fitted in here, the matter might be resolved, but
this we cannot know. They occupy a different realm of knowledge. A
final example: by the 1690s the Athenian Mercury was publishing
tongue in cheek responses to familiar questions about angels, such as
the doctrine of guardianship.12 These late seventeenth century writ
ings do not indicate a process of secularization, however: at this period
it seemed much easier to effect a separation between different kinds of
knowledge.
introduction 13
I discuss some versions of the narrative of the disappearance of angels

in my final chapter, and contest it throughout the book. I do not,
however, offer an alternative narrative of transition. Part III looks at
literary representations more generally, examining Dryden at length,
Shakespeare, Donne, and others more briefly. Although I present
Dryden and Milton as embodying antithetical attitudes to theology
and representation, I am not suggesting that one displaces another;
rather, there is a reconfiguration of writing and knowledge and a
multiplication of the languages in which angels are described.
While much of this book is a recovery of the substantial and often
attractive body of knowledge, belief, and writing about angels in early
modern Britain, and much a reading of Paradise Lost, it also presents a
number of arguments, some focused on particular chapters, others
subtending throughout the book. They can be summarized thus:
1. Protestants in Britain and elsewhere were interested in angels,
and re created angel doctrine in ways that responded to and fitted
within their religious, political, and intellectual culture more broadly;
their beliefs about angels were neither residual nor reactive.
2. Protestant theories of representation were shaped by the doctrine
of accommodation. This provided a means of legitimizing depictions
of the invisible, sacred world, and did so by identifying a mode of
figuratively representing truths without fiction, metaphor, or allegory.
3. Angels are intimately associated with notions of representation,
and there was in Protestant Britain no antipathy between theology and
poetry. Theology could be a creative force.
4. Paradise Lost is a poem shaped by prophecy and accommodation;
it is, in powerful ways, literal. It is also a poem about and told by angels,
and these two facts are connected.
5. In Paradise Lost Milton powerfully integrates story and doctrine;
theology is the basis for his narrative elaborations, and he confines
himself within what he understands to be true, but storytelling is also a
means of developing theology, and extends what is known. Belief and
imagination cross fertilize.
6. During the course of the seventeenth century the ways of repre
senting and using angels in religion, natural philosophy, and literature
multiply. The languages of ‘spirit’ in natural philosophy dilate,
and accounts of angels become complementary to the discourse of
14 introduction
experiment; after the enthusiastic conversations with angels in the

1640s and 1650s quieten, a plurality of theological views concerning
angels settle, and they are less immediately controversial; the relation
ships between representation and the sacred world, and the place of
angels in imaginative writing, proliferate, opening different claims
upon truth and inspiration.
These are the various arguments of Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern
Imagination.
I do not personally believe in angels, God, or the Devil. This is a
question I have had repeatedly to answer over the past few years.13
There is clear room for a dialogue between the present and the past on
this topic, as there has been a surge of interest in angels in both popular
belief and international literature over recent years: including Tony
Kushner’s Angels in America (1990–2, 2003), Elizabeth Knox’s The
Vintner’s Luck (1998), Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2000),
Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002); and Wim Wenders’s film
Wings of Desire (1987) should be mentioned also. Works such as these,
and the environment that produced them, are part of the motivation
behind my writing this book. If it had a point of origin, beyond
reading Milton, it was some years ago when I rode the escalator up
from the platform at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. As I emerged
into the main hall I saw towering over me a bronze angel, wings erect,
holding the limp body of a man. For an inexplicable moment it was
real, and the words of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke came into
my mind:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.14
I could not breathe, and knew that terror. Later I learned that this was a
statue made by Walker Hancock (1901–98) in 1952 to commemorate
Pennsylvania Railroad workers who laid down their lives in the Sec
ond World War. In retrospect that moment of intimate familiarity may
have prompted more rational interests. This book, however, concerns
early modern angels, and these are, or should be, strange to us. I try to
introduction 15
sympathize with my subjects and imaginatively identify with their

beliefs. I reconstruct and operate with their categories and their lan
guage.15 I have an old fashioned commitment to the recovery of the
past, and believe that much of it can be understood, especially those
things that pertain to being human, while I recognize that elements of
experience, such as emotion and faith, which lie close to my subject,
cannot be recovered, though they can be accounted for in an interro
gation of thought and action. For this reason I search for coherence
and consistency in the perceptions and writings not only of Milton, but
also of other writers, who might be regarded as more temperamental
or idiosyncratic, including the enthusiast and visionary John Pordage.
At times the book may seem to validate the cognitive processes and
perceptions of my subjects, even their values. I seek to make Pordage
familiar in all his strangeness. I do not seek to sympathize with angels,
who are another species (each a species to itself, according to Thomas
Aquinas), and while this is a contribution to post human studies, it
claims no special insight into what is beyond or more than human.
Nonetheless, in order to understand Milton as he would be under
stood, I argue, we must both allow that he believed he had such insight
and imagine that his insight might be true. I seek to make Milton
stranger, despite his familiarity.
PART I
Understanding
Angels
2
Angelographia
Writing about Angels
How many volumnes have been writ about Angels, about immaculate
conception, about originall sin, when that all that is solid reason or
clear Revelation, in all three Articles, may be reasonably enough
comprized in fourty lines!
Jeremy Taylor, Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1647)
Angelology
‘Angelology’ was not a word in common use in the early modern

period. In modern usage a word referring to the study of angels, and to
that branch of theology concerned with angel doctrine, seems emi
nently practical. This was not so 400 years ago. Various words were
coined in English in the seventeenth century, derived directly from the
Greek, to denote angel related matters. Thomas Heywood invented
‘angelomachy’ in 1635 to describe a war between angels. John Prideaux
coined ‘Angelographies’ (to pair it with ‘Pneumatologies’) in a sermon
published in 1636; it was a direct appropriation from the Latin, and
perhaps he had heard of Otto Casman’s Angelographia (Frankfurt,
1597). The word did not catch: Richard Saunders followed Prideaux,
with Aggelographia . . . or, A Discourse of Angels (written before 1675;
published posthumously in 1701), then Richard Blome, in a translation
from Latin in 1694; and Increase Mather published Angelographia, or, A
Discourse Concerning the Nature and Power of the Holy Angels in 1696.1
Robert Gell’s Aggelokratia Theon, or, A Sermon Touching Gods Govern
ment of the World by Angels (1650) was followed by John Scott’s use of
20 understanding angels
‘angelocracy’ in 1685 to describe government by guardian angels. The

earliest use of the word ‘angelology’ I have found in English is in
Gideon Harvey’s Archelogia Philosophica Nova, or, New Principles of
Philosophy (1663), where he writes that ‘Pneumatology’ can be divided
into three parts ‘aptly denoted by Theology, Angelology and Psychology’.2
However, the term was not taken up for some decades. The language
did not need a general term to describe the study of angels or know
ledge of them.
This is for a simple, but important, reason. There were compara
tively few books written specifically about angels as angels in the two
centuries following the Reformation. This is not a sign of lack of
interest, however, or of embarrassment. Early modern Protestants
wrote a great deal about angels, but usually when discussing other
things. They wrote about angels in many contexts: sermons, systematic
theology, devotional works, scriptural commentaries and annotations,
religious polemics, treatises on doctrinal issues, volumes on and of
ritual magic, spiritual autobiographies, books on witchcraft and de
mons, and also in less immediately religious works, including political
treatises, news reports, diaries, sensational pamphlets, treatises of nat
ural philosophy, and works of ‘imaginative’ writing. Angels penetrate
all kinds of writing in sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain.
Angels were part of a common substratum of thought and belief, but
were not a simple, well defined idea; they could be used intellectually
in a variety of ways. In this chapter I consider traditions of writing
about angels, the impact of the Reformation, and the forms and genres
of angelography; in the next I outline what Protestant knowledge and
beliefs were.
I shall follow seventeenth century precedent, and use the words
‘angelology’ and ‘angelography’ sparingly. To use either too casually
would be to risk implying that this was a conceptually defined body of
knowledge and writing, rather than a range of approaches to an aspect
of Creation that shaped and were shaped by genre and context. I will
also be guarded in writing of ‘beliefs’ concerning angels. First, there is a
spectrum of kinds of belief, from an intuitive apprehension of the
spirits that surround us, through a faith in the existence of personal
guardian angels, to the conscious rationalizations that generate answers
to questions about angelic bodies and movement. To homogenize
these risks simplifying the dynamics of conviction, persuasion, and
reasoning. Secondly, there was no coherent set of mental furniture
angelographia 21
that was equally solid and fitted in the same room. By objectifying a
belief system we distance it from our own in form as well as content.
For this reason I use ‘belief’ tentatively, and often prefer the defami
liarizing term ‘knowledge’. Beliefs about angels were a form of know
ledge, intersecting with and supporting other forms of knowledge,
including the political and natural philosophical.
Histories of Angels
Beliefs in immaterial spirits that are deities in a polytheistic system, or

that serve deities, antedate Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The ancient
Mesopotamians worshipped winged protective genii. Ancient Egyptians
believed that with each human was born an invisible and indivisible
double that protected him or her. Ancient Near Eastern art shows genii,
protective spirits with feathered wings, that shaped later Christian rep
resentations of angels. The Assyrians carved protective spirits with
wings; Roman Victories were winged; both influenced later iconog
raphy. The Greeks had good and evil daemons, beings between humans
and gods, and the writings of Aristotle and Plato shaped the develop
ment of the Jewish religion. Early Judaic angelology recognized super
natural beings, and as Judaism developed into a monotheistic religion,
and God became more ontologically distant from man, these intermedi
aries became more significant. During the Babylonian exile (597–537
bce) Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrianism, and its angelology
became increasingly elaborate. Yahweh’s works were assigned to beings,
and some of these beings were given individual names as well as titles
suggestive of ranks. Early Judaism preferred the notion of a leader
among these angels, and Mal’akh Yahweh, the Angel of the Lord,
became a distinct being as opposed to a manifestation of God. Early
Christianity also absorbed Gnostic beliefs—which included angel
worship and the idea that angels participated in the creation of the
world—and arose from and contributed to a rich array of religious
writings, not all of which became part of the biblical canon. Yet these
texts influenced the Church Fathers and shaped their understanding of
canonical Scripture. Early Christian angels were a synthesis of and
elaboration upon the stories, images, and theology of earlier religions,
which remained embedded in later theology. Nevertheless, for the
purposes of this chapter it is necessary to focus on Judaeo Christian
writing, and particularly the accounts of angels in Scripture, which form

the main foundations of subsequent doctrine.3
There are almost 300 references to angels in the Protestant Bible;
more in Catholic Bibles that accept the canonical authority of twelve
books (Tobit, Judith, Rest of Esther, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch,
with Jeremiah, Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the
Dragon, and 1 and 2 Maccabees) which the Protestants classified as
apocrypha, holy books that were not the inspired word of God. Angels
are variously referred to: in Hebrew as mal’ach, in Greek as aggelos, both
meaning ‘messenger’. But, subject to interpretation, references to bene
’Elohim (sons of God), seraphim, cherubim, and watchers also denote
angels. In addition to these canonical and deuterocanonical (secondary)
books, angels figure prominently in some ‘inter Testamental’ writing,
that is, in texts written after most of the Old Testament books, and
before New Testament times. The Christian Bible was only standard
ized into its modern form between the second and fifth centuries, and to
the Church Fathers some of these inter Testamental books had a status
equal to now canonical Scripture. Among the most interesting of these
are the book of Enoch, written around the second century bce, which
tells, in the voice of the prophet Enoch, the stories of the fall of the rebel
angels and of Enoch’s travels through earth and hell (sheol). Enoch is a
source for much occult angel lore, and for elaborations on the story,
foreshadowed in Genesis 6, that the fall of angels involved lust for
human women. The book of Enoch was suppressed by the Church,
and the text was missing from early modern Europe, but it left fragments
and traces that shaped Bible culture. Jubilees, another pseudepigraphal
work (in the Christian tradition: it is considered canonical by the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church), is a commentary on Creation presented
as a vision to Moses and written down by an Angel of the Presence.4
Little specific angel doctrine appears in the Bible, hence the attract
iveness of the pseudepigrapha to those who wanted more. The Bible
does not tell directly of the creation or fall of angels. No account is given
of Satan as head of the fallen angels or the metaphysical embodiment of
evil. Satan was the invention of the Church Fathers, Justin Martyr,
Tertullian, Cyprian, Irenaeus, though they were influenced by the
Zoroastrian account of a powerful figure of evil who operated inde
pendently of God.5 Nowhere do we read in Scripture that an evil angel
entered the serpent that tempted Eve, nor that individual guardian
angels watch over humans, nor that angels will act on our behalf as
angelographia 23
intercessors with God. Instead we find stories of angelic interaction with

humans that raise questions rather than answer them: how do angels
communicate, do they eat, do they have bodies, how do they move? A
reference to ‘the seven holy angels, which present the prayers of the
saints, and which go in and out before the glory of the Holy One’
(Tobit 12: 15) invites speculation about the organization of the angels in
heaven that the rest of Scripture cannot support or negate. References to
thrones, principalities (or princedoms), and seraphim suggest distinc
tions among the angels, but the nature of those distinctions is unex
plained. The very reticence of Scripture invites readers to elaborate.
Incomplete allusions and silences ask readers to fill the gaps with
narrative. Early Christian exegesis grew out of rabbinical Midrash,
which glosses Scripture through retelling its stories. The fourth century
Vita Adae et Evae (‘The Life of Adam and Eve’, also known as Apocalypsis
Moses) tells the now familiar story of the fall of angels and the temptation
of Adam and Eve by the Devil in the guise of a serpent. This is included
among the Old Testament pseudepigrapha, but its late date makes this
misleading: it is a retrospective gloss offering a point of view that did not
exist in Old Testament or even early Christian times.6 But it is a good
story, and it stuck, influencing Muhammad, who repeatedly tells in the
Qur’an the story of Iblis (from the Greek Diabolos), who refuses to
worship Adam, and becomes man’s adversary and tempter. The history
of angels is not, then, told in either the Protestant or Catholic Bible, but
in the accumulated stories that prophets and pseudo prophets and
believers told about angels.
Anatomizing Angels: Dionysius, Lombard,

Bonaventure, Aquinas, Neoplatonism
The visions of Dionysius, who saw heaven and had revealed to him the
celestial hierarchy, had a profound and lasting impact on devotional,
technical, and fictional writings about angels. His writings in Greek only
indirectly influenced Christian scholarship, but the translation of the
Celestial Hierarchy into Latin by John Scotus Eriugena in c.860, and the
production of commentaries in the twelfth century, gave them great
impetus.7 They proceeded to inform the basis of the detailed angelolo
gical dogma of the Catholic Church to the present day. They are,
however, an elaborate fiction. The author presents himself as Dionysius
the Areopagite, converted by St Paul of Athens in the first century, and

thus effectively the earliest of the Church Fathers. Lorenzo Valla and
others demonstrated in the mid fifteenth century that the Dionysian
treatises were written later, in the fifth or sixth centuries. Dionysius thus
writes under a pseudonym. The addressee of his treatises, ‘Timothy the
Fellow Elder’, is also fictional, a literary device to establish auctoritas.
The teacher whom he names, and the other works to which he refers,
may also be fictitious.8 In assuming the authority and voice of an
identifiable figure from Scripture, Pseudo Dionysius was following
the conventions of pseudepigrapha, written in the personae of biblical
prophets, though he was later even than these. His fiction was sustained
for about a thousand years. When the deception was uncovered, the
Church was reluctant to dispense with the foundations of so much of its
devotional writing, and sought to ignore the scholarly arguments or
preserve the visionary integrity of the writing on the grounds that they
had been accepted for centuries.
Pseudo Dionysius claimed to have seen into the celestial hierarchy,
and described its internal organization and the roles of ranks within it.
According to Pseudo Dionysius the angels were formed into three
ternions: the first hierarchy, consisting of the seraphim, cherubim, and
thrones, are beings that are supremely pure and have a close relation
ship to God; the middle hierarchy, consisting of Dominions, Virtues,
and Authorities (or Powers), show conformity to God and reflect ‘the
ordered nature of celestial and intellectual authority’; the lower hier
archy of Principalities, Archangels, and Angels is concerned with
revelation and proximity to the human world.9 The hierarchy is not
a flexible one. The positions of angels are fixed. Illumination and
understanding, perfection and purification, are mediated down the
hierarchy: enlightenment descends from God not directly to the
lower angels but through the hierarchy. Other schema were available.
Gregory the Great (c.540–604) challenged the Dionysian ranking,
translating the positions of Virtues and Principalities, so that the latter
were promoted to the second ternion, and the former demoted to the
lower ranks; in this he was followed by St Bernard.10 Dante sided, like
most, with the seeming apostolic authority of Pseudo Dionysius:
E quella che vedea i pensier dubi

nella mia mente, disse: ‘I cerchi primi
t’hanno mostrati Serafi e Cherubi.
angelographia 25
Cosı̀ veloci seguono i suoi vimi,

per somigliarsi al punto quanto ponno;
e posson quanto a veder son soblimi.
Quelli altri amor che dintorno li vonno,
si chiaman Troni del divino aspetto,
per che ’l primo ternaro terminonno.
E dei saper che tutti hanno diletto
quanto la sua veduta si profonda
nel vero in che si queta ogne intelletto.
Quinci si può veder come si fonda
L’esser beato nell’atto che vede,
non in quel ch’ama, che poscia seconda;
e del vedere è misura mercede,
che grazia partorisce e buona voglia:
cosı̀ di grado in grado si procede.
L’altro ternaro, che cosı̀ germoglia
in questa primavera sempiterna
che notturno Arı̈ete non dispoglia,
perpetualemente ‘‘Osanna’’ sberna
con tre melode, che suonano in tree
ordini di letizia onde s’interna.
In essa gerarcia son l’altre dee:
prima Dominazioni, e poi Virtudi;
l’ordine terzo di Podestadi ée.
Poscia ne’ due penultimi tripudi
Principati e Arcangeli si girano;
L’ultimo è tutto d’Angelici ludi.
Questi ordini di su tutti s’ammirano,
e di giù vincon sı̀, che verso Dio
tutti tirati sono, e tutti tirano.
E Dı̈onisio con tanto disio
a contemplar questi ordini si mise,
che li nomò e distinse com’ io.
Ma Gregorio da lui poi si divise;
onde, sı̀ tosto come li occhi aperse
in questo ciel, di se’ medesmo rise.
E se tanto secreto ver proferse
mortale in terra, non voglio ch’ammiri;
chè chi ’l vide qua sù gliel discoperse
con altro assai del ver di questi giri.’
(And she who saw the uncertain thoughts in my mind, said: ‘The first circles
have shown thee Seraphim and Cherubim. They follow their bonds thus swiftly
to gain all they may of likeness to the point, and in this they may in so far as they
are exalted in vision. These next loving spirits that circle round them are called
Thrones of the divine aspect, and with them the first triad is completed. And
thou must know that all have delight in the measure of the depth to which their
sight penetrates the truth in which every intellect finds rest; from which it may
be seen that the state of blessedness rests on the act of vision, not on that of love,
which follows after, and the measure of their vision is merit, which grace begets
and right will. Such is the process from step to step. The second triad that
flowers thus in this eternal spring which no nightly Ram despoils sings continual
hosannas, the threefold strain resounding in the three ranks that form the triad.
In this hierarchy are the next divine orders: first Dominions, then Virtues, and
the third are Powers. Then, last but one of the festal throngs, wheel Principal
ities and Archangels, and the last is all of Angels making sport. These orders all
gaze above and so prevail below that all are drawn and all draw to God. And
Dionysius set himself with such zeal to contemplate these orders that he named
and distributed them as I do; but later Gregory differed from him, so that as soon
as he opened his eyes in this heaven he smiled at himself. And if a mortal on
earth set forth truth or secret thou needst no marvel, for he that saw it here
above revealed it to him, with much more of the truth of these circles.’11)
Pseudo Dionysius offers a great many more insights, explaining how it

was possible for humans to understand beyond the limited powers of
their faculties and describing the communication, agency, and emo
tions of angels. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74) cited Dionysius more
than any other author, and Dionysian hierarchies profoundly shaped
Aquinas’ vision of heaven.12 This Neoplatonism influenced concept of
hierarchy provided a framework for comprehending and explaining all
of Creation.13
An account of Protestant writing about angels must take its cues
from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Peter Lombard
(c.1100–60), Bonaventure (c.1217–74), and Aquinas systematized
Christian knowledge of angels. Their intellectual development is
closely related to their modes of exposition. The second book of
Peter Lombard’s Sentences dealt with Creation, angels, humans, and
the Fall. These were closely associated topics, linked not only because
the understanding of each derived in considerable part from interpret
ing Genesis, but because the answers to the central questions about
each were intervolved. Lombard inherited a position of broad con
sensus about angels from his Scholastic predecessors, but in system
atizing and developing this body of knowledge his Sentences provided
the basis for subsequent commentaries on angels. Lombard asks
questions about angels that result in a series of propositions. His topics
angelographia 27
are as influential as his answers (here teased from his not entirely
persuasive ten divisions):
1. For what reason have rational creatures, humans or angels, been
made? (because God is good, and his Creation is good)
2. When were angels made? (at the same time as the created world)
3. Where were angels made? (in heaven or the empyrean)
4. What kinds of angels were made, and were they all equal? (several,
equal in some respects and not others; there are gradations within
the angels’ substance, and their use of it)
5. Were they created good or evil, and was there was any interval between
their creation and fall? (all were created good; they fell immediately)
6. Were they created perfect and blessed, or miserable and flawed?
(the former)
7. Did they fall of their own freewill and how was that possible?
(they did, though those that did not fall were supported by grace)
8. Who were the fallen angels, what was the cause of their fall, and
what are their subsequent actions among humans? (Lucifer and the
other rebels fell from envy; some live in hell and some in the air;
they have limited power to tempt men)
9. Is it possible for good angels to sin, or bad angels to live uprightly?
(no: those who turned to God were supported by fuller wisdom and
grace confirming them in their choice; those who turned away have
no access to grace because of their hatred and envy; hence their
choices are not reversible)
10. How do evil angels know about temporal things? (though
weakened in nature they can still learn through experience)
11. Are all angels corporeal? (no)
12. What are the orders; were they instigated from the first creation of
angels; are angels within orders equal? (there were gradations of
angelic substance before the fall, though the orders, as outlined by
Dionysius, were only subsequently introduced; there are grad
ations within each order)
13. Are all angels sent on missions? (yes)
14. Are Michael, Gabriel, Raphael names of orders or spirits? (they are
spirits)
Lombard answers other questions in passing: his is a coherent and

sustained account of angels, that resolves questions about them by
fitting them into the larger pattern of Creation and trying to create a
coherent account of freewill and grace while preserving the sense that
they are creatures. Lombard’s Sentences became a textbook, establishing
the questions and terms of argument for subsequent commentators.14
Bonaventure’s influential Commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences syn
thesized it not only with Pseudo Dionysius but also with Aristotle,
whose writings were then being disseminated in Western Christendom.
Thirteenth century angelologists sought to integrate natural philoso
phy with theology, and the bodies and agency of angels were an area
where the interfaces of knowledge could be explored. Angelology
became a formal topic in Paris in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, facilitated by interest in logic and the quaestio form, and
discussions of angels became thoroughly dialectical. Bonaventure be
gins with a question, outlines the case for one answer, states the
opposed arguments, then presents his own arguments and conclusion
before finally dismissing the counter arguments to this.15 Aquinas’
method was different and more artful: he began with a question,
followed it with a series of propositions (which turn out to be false),
responded to this with a counter proposition (itself inadequate),
offered his own reply, or responsio, then responded to objections
while furthering his own conclusions. Though intricately structured,
the effect is a dizzying tumble of arguments, revealing how argumen
tum pro et contra can generate new and not always fully conceived
perspectives.16
Bonaventure deals with the question ‘whether several Angels are
together in the same place?’ first by stating that it seems to be so:
because angels inhabit a place spiritually rather than corporeally, be
cause it is possible for two points to be together (simul), because two
souls can inhabit the same body, and more besides. However, heaven
was filled with holy angels, so they have distinct places; they have
natural termini, as Augustine (whose fragmentary discussions of angels
lie behind much medieval commentary) says; because angels are
understood to be in place, and as the objects placed multiply so
must the places, so each angel has a place; and also because one
thing cannot be in more than one place. ‘Respondeo’ (I respond),
writes Bonaventure, angels are not limited by place, and space is not
used up by angels:
angelographia 29
But since the order of the universe thus is taken away through omnimodal
indistance [omnimodam indistantiam], just as through infinite distance: just as
the order of the universe does not suffer, that an Angel be infinitely distant
from an Angel, nay all are enclosed within the one circumference of the
ultimate Heaven [caeli ultimi]; so it does not suffer, that an Angel be in the same
prime place with an Angel. And from these (considerations) the objections are
clear.17
And he clears up the remaining objections.

Debates such as this led to the Protestant mockery of angels
on a pinhead Scholasticism; however, they reveal both Bonaventure’s
engagement with Aristotelian natural philosophy, and the momentum
that such arguments can carry. If truths like this are to be applied to
angels, if we assume that they are bound by the conventions of logic
and the laws of the universe, if we think that they are creatures, then
much can be learned about them that lies beyond the text of Scripture
and the stories of the Apocrypha.
Angels are in many ways at the heart of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.
There are four quaestiones concerning angels in the treatise on divine
government: on angelic illumination; the speech of angels; the array,
or hierarchy, of angels; and the array of devils. Angels are used to
explain the communicative networks of heaven and the structure of
Creation. In addition there is a discrete treatise on angels within the
Summa. As with Lombard and Bonaventure, questions about angels fit
into a logical structure. The Summa begins with God, proceeds to the
Trinity, thence to Creation as a principle, then to angels, and then to
the six days before proceeding to man. Angels are a logical step in a
chain. Aquinas divides the topic into fifteen questions, each subdivided
into a series of articles (my numbering follows the Summa):
Q. 50. the angelic nature
Q. 51. angels and bodies
Q. 52. angels and position in space
Q. 53. the movement of angels in space
Q. 54. angelic knowledge (or power of knowing)
Q. 55. the medium of angelic knowledge
Q. 56. the angels’ knowledge of spiritual beings
Q. 57. the angels’ knowledge of material things
Q. 58. how an angel’s mind functions
Q. 59. the will of the angels
Q. 60. angelic love

Q. 61. the creation of the angels
Q. 62. the raising of the angels to the state of grace and glory
Q. 63. sin in the angels
Q. 64. the devils’ punishment
Quaestio 54 is divided into five articles. The first asks: ‘is an angel’s
actual understanding identical with his substance?’ The answer is no: an
angel’s act of understanding is not the same as his substance. This is only
so for God. Consequently, there are degrees of more and less perfect
understanding. Article 2 asks: ‘is an angel’s actual understanding iden
tical with his existence?’ No: activity and existence are distinct in all
creatures. Article 3 asks: ‘is an angel’s power to understand one thing
with his essence?’ No: in every created being existence and essence are
different. He adds: ‘The reason for calling angels ‘‘intellects’’ or
‘‘minds’’ is that their knowledge is wholly intellectual: whereas that
of the human soul is partly intellectual and partly in the senses.’ Article 4
asks: ‘is the difference between agent and potential intellects found in
angels?’ No. Humans understand some things only in potentia, and
hence need the imagination; angels comprehend even immaterial
things directly or passively. ‘Now there is no imagination in angels;
hence no reason to divide their intellects in this way.’ Article 5 asks:
‘have the angels only intellectual knowledge?’ They have. Men have
faculties in their souls, such as memory and hearing, that are tied to the
senses. As they have no bodies, their only faculties are intelligence and
volition. They only have memory in the Augustinian sense of an
intellectual faculty, not as an aspect of their soul.18 The shape of
Aquinas’ logic shows both the relentless systematization of knowledge
and an interpretation that, rather than interpreting existing evidence,
interrogates the properties of the creature.
Aquinas needed to write about angels, as they were a means of
understanding God. God was ineffable, and Christ’s nature, despite the
Incarnation, lay beyond the human intellect, since he had been made
co eternal. Angels, however, were created beings, and were therefore
an indispensable mediating concept, halfway between man and God.
Their structural position in the Summa, between heaven and earth,
reflects their intellectual position in Aquinas’ system. Without them
the Summa does not work. Whatever their role in the liturgy, or as
figures of comfort and protection in the popular imagination, angels
angelographia 31
were intellectually necessary as a way of grasping the divine. They

could be used to describe hierarchies in Creation, the enchantment of
the universe, the government of the earth. Angels present useful,
constructive ways of thinking.
Aquinas builds on Lombard and Bonaventure to present an extra
ordinary synthesis of patristic and pagan beliefs. He represents the final
stage in a shift in emphasis in medieval angelology, which began with
John Scotus Eriugena’s translation of Pseudo Dionysius, developed
with Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (late 1090s), which relegated the
Devil from this world into hell, and culminated with Aquinas’ con
templative angels. Angels became less important as agents in this world,
and more significant as intellectual beings, made androgynous, and
celestialized, moved up into the heavens.19 Nevertheless Aquinas’
questions, together with the silences of Scripture, invite further inter
rogation of the nature and actions of angels. It is a short step to a
narrative account that wonders whether angels can make mistakes,
whether they can sympathize with a human perspective on desire, or
how an angel could effectively convey a message to a human without
bungling it. Aquinas’ synthesis and systematization of knowledge
opens up a world of unknown things.
The most significant British writer about angels contemporary with
Bonaventure and Aquinas was Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln
(c.1170–1253). His interests unite many of the themes of this book, and
anticipate the several intersections of post Reformation angel writing.
He wrote a treatise on optics, a commentary on Genesis, in which he
states that angels are made of light, a translation of pseudepigrapha,
a translation (from Greek to Latin) of and commentary on Pseudo
Dionysius’ Hierarchy, and a hexameron. He criticized the papacy, was
interested in apocalypticism, and sought to associate magic with natural
philosophy (hence his association with Roger Bacon and the legend,
recorded by John Gower, that he forged a brazen head that could
foretell the future). Dee’s understanding of light and astrology were
influenced by Grosseteste. This range of concerns—optics, papal cri
tique (especially in reputation), Genesis, hexamera, angelic hierarchies,
matter, magic, the Apocalypse—might have made him a central figure
in early modern debates about angels. He was, however, seldom men
tioned in Britain, and the key writings all but unknown, though Edward
Browne apologized in the 1690s for Grosseteste’s popish doctrine of
angels. Grosseteste was, perhaps, a lost tradition or opportunity.20
On the eve of the Reformation the greatest interest in the doctrine

of angels, at least beyond the immediately practical side, was expressed
by humanists interested in Neoplatonism. Thus, Marsilio Ficino
devised a schema of the universe in which magic drew upon the
music of the spheres and the planetary angels (though he was sceptical
about it); Francesco Giorgi, an account of spiritual magic that relied on
the cooperation of one’s guardian angel and the angels that moved the
celestial spheres; and Tomasso Campanella, a description of natural
magic in which the stars were angels with whom he believed he had
communicated.21 Renaissance Neoplatonists reiterated in new con
texts traditional beliefs about the government of the world by angels,
and added confused interest in daemons and in cabbalistic angels’
names and in Gnostic myths. They identified associations rather than
developed angel doctrine, however, and their philosophy in some
ways diminished the significance of angels as creatures participating
in the world.22 Protestants associated Neoplatonism with two tenden
cies in thinking about angels. First, a contribution to theories of angelic
names and cosmic intervention. Secondly, Neoplatonism was associ
ated with the corruption of upright religion, and thus could be po
lemically conflated with Catholic elaboration on angels. Calvin
instructed believers to ‘forsake that Platonicall philosophie, to seeke
the way to God by Angels’ which was pure superstition.23 And, in a
later English context, John Biddle condemned those Christian cabbal
ists who privilege Plato over Scripture, and thereby ‘pervert the
Worship of the true God’.24
Reformed Angels
Reformers vocally attacked Scholastic angel doctrine as overly curious,

over confident, vainly speculative, and thus susceptible to the temp
tations of the fleshly mind, superstitious, idolatrous, fictitious, and
ungrounded in Scripture. That monks debated how many angels
might dance on a pinhead was a Protestant slur. William Chilling
worth alluded to this in 1638, defending reformed learning against the
Catholic Edward Knott, who had sneered that Protestants had some
superficial talent in preaching and languages, but no deep grasp of
philosophy nor metaphysics. Chillingworth mockingly replied that
Protestants do not debate ‘Whether a Million of Angels may not sit
angelographia 33
upon a needles point? . . . they fill not their brains with notions that
signify nothing’.25 He treats it as a commonplace. The motif was then
echoed by Henry More in 1659. More, however, was defending a
discussion of whether the soul has dimensions independent of the
body.
And it is a seasonable contemplation here (where we consider the Soul as
having left this Terrestrial Body) that she hath as ample, if not more ample,
Dimensions of her own, then are visible in the Body she has left. Which
I think worth taking notice of, that it may stop the mouths of them that, not
without reason, laugh at those unconceivable and ridiculous fancies of the
Schools; that first rashly take away all Extension from Spirits, whether Soules or
Angels, and then dispute how many of them booted and spur’d may dance on
a needles point at once. Fooleries much derogatory to the Truth, and that
pinch our perception into such an intolerable streightness and evanidness, that
we cannot imagine any thing of our own Being; and if we doe, are prone to
fall into despair, or contempt of our selves, by fancying our selves such
unconsiderable Motes of the Sun.26
More objects to the foolishness of the question being handled by those

who have already adjudicated that spirits have no dimension. After all,
it is a question that pertains to the relationship between spirits and
space and matter. Only if one believes that spirits have dimensions is it
a reasonable philosophical question. He is himself dealing with equally
abstract questions. It is a very fine line he treads, and he only remains
steady because of the mockery in ‘booted and spur’d’. While the topic
may not be entirely unlike those taken seriously by medieval scholars,
the famous phrase appears in Protestant polemic, and in contexts
where Protestant learning is being defined.
The Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura, the letter of Scripture as
the basis of true doctrine, suggested that accumulations of Catholic
visions and revelation concerning angels must be disregarded. In his
Institution of the Christian Religion Calvin raises the subject of angels and
immediately proceeds to what should not be believed:
That the Angels, for as much as they are the ministers of God ordeined to
execute his commaundements, are also his creatures, it ought to be certainly
out of all question. To move doubt of the time and order that they were
created in, should it not rather be a busie waiwardnes than diligence? . . . if we
will be rightly wise, we must leave those vanities that idle men have taught
without warrant of the word of God, concerning the nature, degree, and
multitude of Angels.
Pseudo Dionysius (Calvin knows of his debunking) receives particular

scorn:
No man can deny, that the same Denyse, whatsoever man he was, hath
disputed many things both subtlely and wittily in his Hierarchie of Heaven:
but if a man examine it more neerely, he shall finde that for the most part it is
but meere babbling. . . . If one should read that booke, he would thinke that
the man were slipped downe from heaven, and did tell of things not that he
had learned by hearesay, but that he had seene with his eyes.27
Paul, who really had been ravished above the third heaven, did not
utter such things. Over a century later an English preacher, while
discussing creatures’ knowledge of God, echoed him: ‘ye School
DD. [Doctors] put up many nice Interrogatories, & as confidently
resolv ym as if y. had been in Heavn’.28 In 1630 the Church of England
clergyman John Bayly preached at Oxford a sermon on guardian angels
that, despite his usually moderate tone, mocked scholastic attempts to
rank the diverse names of angels ‘as if they had come downe from
heaven to tell men upon earth what order was kept there’.29 Bayly
nonetheless reproduced a deal of traditional angelology, and unlike
many Protestants he maintained that guardian angels ministered to the
elect. Another mid seventeenth century clergyman, William Jenkyn,
writing a commentary on the epistle of Jude, scorned ‘popish School
men’ for their audacity,
Nor do they only shew their boldnesse in ranking and dividing them thus into
these three Hierarchies and nine orders . . . but they presume to tell us the reasons
of all these severall appellations, and to set down the severall properties and
offices which are allotted to all these orders of Angels, whereby they are
distinguished among themselves.
Implausibly he proceeds to outline them in detail; like others, the
condemnatory rhetoric is stronger than his ability to place clear
water between confessions.30 Another preacher, John Patrick, outlines
Catholic doctrine, contrasting ‘the useful plainness of Holy Writ’ with
‘the impertinent curiosity, and trifling subtilty of the Schools’. His
lengthy Reflexions upon the Devotions of the Roman Church (1674) relates
these beliefs, with derogatory asides instead of counter argument, so
that ‘every one may know that the School divinity about Angels, is
very peremptory and presuming in this kind; telling us in what place
they were created, resolving whether the number that stood was equal
to those that fell; the way thereby they understand, and the way they
angelographia 35
communicate their thoughts one to another’.31 The volume concludes

with angels, as if these represent the utmost excess.
Protestant polemic simplified Catholic perspectives on angels,
making them seem homogeneous, and parodying the tenuously
complex justifying logic. There is no denying, however, that doc
trine around 1500 included a great deal that was not founded upon
Scripture, and embarrassed loyal members of the Church (Erasmus
was among those who recognized the forcefulness of some reformed
critiques). Protestants initially effected a clearing out of much medi
eval doctrine.
Luther was mildly interested in angels. Though they appear in his
writings frequently, and throughout his life, he offers no sustained
discussion of them. They are incidental to more important topics.
Consequently, his doctrine of angels is less distant from Catholic
orthodoxy than that of other reformers. In his early commentary on
the Psalms he refers to the ten ranks of angels (a Franciscan tradition);
in his later commentary on Genesis he rejects this tradition, citing it as
evidence of spurious angelology.32 In the Psalm commentary he can
sound like Aquinas:
the knowledge by which an angel knows God in another angel, and the
knowledge by which he knows God face to face, are as different as the
knowledge of the sun in a cloud and the knowledge by which it is seen in
its own brightness, since the creature is not pure light but rather full of light
from the light.33
His writings implicitly accept the doctrine of individual guardian

angels, and that Michael is the protecting angel of the Jews.34 He
condemned the worship of angels, but accepted that it was possible
to call upon them in extremis.35 He expressed opinions on how they
made sounds, and on the curbing of their freedom following their
rebellion.36 He voiced the Augustinian understanding, fundamental to
the way early modern writers thought and wrote about angels, that
man was ‘intermediate between angels and beasts’.37 This is one
perspective on the scale of nature that extends, in Samuel Ward’s
phrase, ‘from the Mushrome to the Angels’; it is also a way of
understanding the immortal part or soul of man, and a way of coming
to terms with an unintelligible God.38 Nevertheless, Luther’s emphasis
was on faith, and more general questions about angelic physics were
irrelevant to him, though not in themselves dangerous.
Calvin’s antagonism to excessive interest in angels was clear, and his

influence on English angelology profound. He shifted the emphasis on
their role from intercession to mediation, and emphasized the obstacle
of ignorance. Explorations beyond the text of Scripture were unprof
itable and potentially perilous. He rejects the doctrine of individual
guardian angels, condemns praying to angels or asking for assistance,
denies that humans can know about hierarchies, and insists that it is
wrong to enquire when they were made; though he does affirm that
they have no shapes, and that they are ministering spirits (reminding
us, very much in character, that such ministration can include minis
tering God’s wrath as well as his grace).39 Calvin’s aversion is some
thing deeper than these doctrinal positions suggest. Thoughts about
angels, like images, are likely only to distract or deceive. Curiosity
leads to vain speculations, and these in turn lead us to fashioning our
own ideas about God, rather than those he offers to us. Proud and
superstitious men ‘in the seeking of God do not climbe above them
selves as they ought to have done, but measure him according to the
proportion of their owne fleshly dulnesse, and also neglecting the
sound manner of searching for him, do curiously flie to vaine specu
lations’.40 They forge rash presumptions and then worship not God but
their dream of him. God is comprehended through the Incarnation,
and understanding angels does not for Calvin, as it did for Augustine,
Aquinas, and even Luther, bring us any closer to knowing God. Angels
perform God’s offices, but do so more as efficient secretaries than as
mysterious and benign witnesses of human drama.
Luther’s position on angels is much like his position on art: they
have a non essential role to play in worship, and as long as they do not
become the focus of undue attention it is not impossible that contem
plating them will lead the faithful man closer to true faith. Moreover,
he retains much of pre Reformation angel doctrine as adiaphora (things
indifferent, not essential to salvation, and upon which the Church had
given no decision). The presence of this position within Protestantism
means that doctrines were not polarized along confessional lines.
Calvin adopts a more extreme ‘minimalist’ position. Angels are an
unimportant area of doctrine, defined more by the dangers of excessive
fervour than by their contribution to theodicy, and the body of solid
theology exploring them is very slight.
There are competing positions about the role of angels in salvation.
Substantial elements of angel doctrine survive the Reformation purge
angelographia 37
of credulity. These two facts meant that angels played a role in

establishing differences within Protestantism. This often centres on
the breadth of an opponent’s beliefs in angels, and his vulnerability
to charges of popery. Attacks on Laudian innovations in the 1620s and
1630s implicitly and explicitly associated angels with Romanism.
However, the antitheses within which angels marked out doctrinal
differences were not always concerned with the distance from Rome.
Thus Joseph Wright, attacking Quakers in 1661 for their emphasis on
humility, the efficacy of the will, and on the inner spirit:
And is not the Worship of those that call themselves followers of the Light
within, the Worship of Angels? That is, of Devils, while they disobey that which
God hath shewed them in the Scriptures of Truth, and intrude into such things which
are not to be found there; Where is there such a thing to be found in all the Record,
that God hath given of his Son, that all men ought not to look into, and be
guided by the Scriptures of Truth; but that all men ought to look into, and be
guided by the so called Light, which is within them? Oh the vanity of that fleshly
and puffed up Mind, that hath been the Author of this Intrusion and Doctrine of
Devils; so directly contrary to the Doctrine of the Holy Prophets, Apostles,
and of Christ Himself . . . 41
The indirection of the argument is itself revealing: Quakers intrude
into the unknown and place great weight upon the inner light which
has no justification in Scripture, therefore they worship angels. They
worship angels, and because this is sinful, the angels must be devils.
Angel worship is thematically relevant not only as a symbol of irreli
gion, but also because when Paul warns the fleshly mind against
intruding into things unseen, it is the ‘voluntary humility and wor
shipping of angels’ that concerns him. Angels are a rhetorical figure for
idolatry and for forcing meanings upon Scripture.
An association with angels was not always a slur within a
Protestant rhetorical context. In the 1630s Laudians associated
them with the beauty of holiness, reintroducing them within
funerary monuments, church architecture, and liturgy.42 Puritan
clergymen stressed their confraternity with angels, defining a right
eous community by its conversation, metaphorically understood,
with angels.43 Some religious radicals claimed to have less meta
phorical conversations, summoning, hearing, or speaking with
angels, witnessing the invisible world, receiving revelation or
prophecy. The association of angels with medieval excesses of
fervour and invention did not prevent them from occupying a
central place in Protestant theology, or from being used positively

to demarcate positions within Protestantism.
Britain witnessed a strain of anxiety about angels that was an inher
itance from Calvinist minimalism.44 However, this ambivalence is only
part of the wider Protestant response in Britain and elsewhere. Angels
were integral to Protestant biblical exegesis, they played a role in
systematic theology, they offered comfort (though perhaps less than
to Catholics), and, crucially, they established the Protestant Church as
the true Catholic Church, and enabled verification of the workings of
providence. It is easy to exaggerate the contrast between Protestant
and Catholic angel doctrine, and to overstress the anxiety or ambiva
lence Protestants felt about angels in the contemporary world. The
Protestant view of angels remained thoroughly rooted in Aquinas. Its
iconoclasm was presented as a restoration of the teachings of the true
Church. Prayers to angels dwindled, but the new view was supported
not by silence but by publishing. Between 1530 and 1700 angels were
adapted into religious life in Protestant Britain by a process of icono
clasm and readjustment, and angelic visions continued in the eight
eenth century, though they were more symbolic and pious than
febrile and theologically charged, and the visionaries risked slighter
persecution.45 A story of an appearance of a healing angel in Stamford
told in a 1659 pamphlet was retold in an early eighteenth century
commonplace book; it was still an angel, though it spoke to the
community in a different way.46 Angels were a canvas where faith
and the rationalized understanding of the universe met with a reposi
tory of collective memories.
Writing about Angels
Most writing about angels does not appear in books about angels.
A handful of these appeared in sixteenth and seventeenth century
Britain, notably John Salkeld’s A Treatise of Angels (1613), Henry
Lawrence’s Of our Communion and Warre with Angels (1646, reissued
in 1649 as An History of Angells), and Benjamin Camfield’s A Theological
Discourse of Angels and their Ministries (1678); to these might be added
Heywood’s The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635), a thorough and
focused engagement with the topic that breaks the conventions of
systematic study and transgressed genres. Angels appeared in a broad
angelographia 39
array of works, from sermons to polemics to poems, and these writings

did not simply reflect a pre existing body of thought. Genre shaped the
questions writers asked about angels, and how they resolved and
presented their answers. Modes of writing interacted with notions of
angelic being and action. It is in the nature of scriptural commentaries
that they address certain issues (when God made the lights in the
firmament in Gen. 1: 14–18 did he make angels at the same time?).
Sermons are more selective about their texts, and more oriented
towards the application and matters of practical divinity (angelic
guardianship is a more interesting theme for preachers than angelic
freewill). The genres of books, their scope and shape, their publishing
and distribution contexts, encroach upon the ideas presented in them.
The doctrinal statements about angels most familiar to English men
and women appear in the Elizabethan homilies, sermons stating official
Church doctrine regularly read in churches throughout the country.
The homilies are diffident. The sermon ‘Concerning Good Order and
Obedience’ (1563) begins: ‘Almightie God hath created and appointed
al thinges, in heaven earth and waters, in a mooste excellente and
perfecte order. In heaven, he hath appointed distincte or severall
orders and states of Archaungelles and Aungelles.’ Angels—their
good order rather than any particular hierarchy—are presented as
proof of the necessity of hierarchy and obedience to governors on
earth. This homily does not mention them again, though, obedient to
symmetry, they reappear in the homily against disobedience (1570),
which reasserts the premiss that human obedience mirrored angelic
obedience, and the diabolical nature of disobedience: ‘So heere
appeareth the originall kyngdome of God over angels and man, and
universallie over all thinges, and of man over earthly creatures whiche
God had made subject unto him, and withall the felicitie and blessed
state which angels, man, and all creatures had remayned in, had they
continued in due obedience unto God their King.’47 This does not
represent a significant departure from the opening credo of the Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215.48 The homilies on idolatry and prayer cau
tion against worshipping angels; the Homily on the Passion dwells on
the fact that God sent his Son and not an angel to redeem mankind;
and angels are mentioned in retellings of the stories of Tobias and
Lazarus in the homilies on fasting and on death. Otherwise the hom
ilies are strikingly silent. There was very little an English Protestant
needed to believe about angels.
The Book of Common Prayer was the other rubric for the everyday
experience of angels in worship, and it too was reserved. The West
minster Assembly was formed in 1643 in part to purge the Church of
innovations; when it reported on the Book of Common Prayer, its list
of doubtful matters began with the Prayer Book’s affirmation ‘that
there be Archangels and that Michael is a created Angel’.49 Presbyter
ians in the 1640s had already suggested that the Laudian Church had
edged towards Rome in its angel doctrine. Yet the Feast of St Michael
and All Angels (29 September) had been in the Prayer Book since the
first Edwardian edition of 1549, when the collect began: ‘Everlasting
God which hast ordeyned & constituted, the services of al angels &
men in a wonderfull ordre’.50 The Assembly exaggerated in order
to emphasize its own minimalist position; its own catechism barely
mentioned angels. John Boughton’s 1623 catechism said a little more:
j[acob] . . . tell mee what are Angels?
b[enjamin] They are immortall Spirits, or spirituall substances, free from bodies, or
exceeding power, wisedome, and agilitie, created after the image of God, to minister
to him, and men his children.
j[acob] How many sorts of Angels are there?
b[enjamin] Two. Good and bad.
j[acob] What are the good Angels?
b[enjamin] The good Angels are those Elect spirits in heaven, which by the grace of
God continued in the truth and integritie, in which they were created; and by the
same grace are so confirmed in that estate, as that now they cannot fall from it, but are
for ever blessed.51
The sum of the necessary creed was minimal.
A very different picture emerges from scriptural annotations and
commentary. Detailed statements about angels can be found, some
times scattered through different notes, sometimes synthesized in a
digression, in such works as Gervase Babington’s Certaine Plaine, Briefe,
and Comfortable Notes upon Everie Chapter of Genesis (1592), Andrew
Willet’s Hexapla in Genesin: That is, A Sixfold Commentarie upon Genesis
(1605), John Trapp’s A Commentary or Exposition upon all the Epistles
(1647) and his A Clavis to the Bible (1650), the Westminster Assembly’s
monumental Annotations upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament
(1645, 1651) and a series of associated scholarly works from the 1640s
and 1650, including John Richardson’s Choice Observations and Explan
ations upon the Old Testament (1655), and, finally, George Hughes’s An
Analytical Exposition of the Whole First Book of Moses (1672). These
angelographia 41
represent a domestication and popularization of, and a considerable

elaboration on, the annotations of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin,
which were available to educated readers. Scriptural annotations
address particular places and cruxes. If an angel dines with Abraham,
how does it eat? When the Lord ‘opened the mouth’ of Balaam’s ass, did
the angel itself vocalize, or did it use the mouth of the ass? The questions
coincide with many of Lombard’s and Aquinas’. Here Protestants show
no resistance to enquiry, because making sense of the biblical stories,
which is to say, resolving the literal meaning, requires it.52
To take the first of these examples, Gervase Babington comments
on Genesis 18: 8, ‘he took butter, and milk, and the calf . . . and they
did eat’: ‘How the Angells did eate.’
For their eating, we know it was but by dispensation for the time, not for any
necessitie of nature. And if you aske what became of the meate which they did
eate, the Schoolemen will readily answere you that it did vanish in the
chawing, as water doth in boyling. Wiser men aske no such questions, and
therefore neede no such answere. In the extraordinary dealings of God what
neede wee to sift his secrets, and to bee wise above sobrietie?’53
In contrast, Andrew Willet spells out the various positions on this text,
then resolves,
it is the sounder opinion, that these angels, as they were endued with true bodies
for the time, so they did verily eate, as they did walke and speake and doe other
actions of the bodie truly: yet did they not eate of any necessitie: but like as these
bodies by the power of God assumed for the present, were againe dissolved and
turned to their first nature, so was the meat which they did eate.54
The annotations of the Westminster Assembly repeat Willet’s position;
George Hughes paraphrases a little confusingly: ‘If question be, how
those bodies could eat? Or whether nourished? It is answered, doubt
less they did truely eat, and the bodies were refreshed for the time that
God made use of them, and after both [i.e. body and food] were
resolved into their principles by the hand of God.’55 In Babington’s
response we find a minimalist answer, coupled with a warning against
insobriety; while those who came after him essentially agreed they felt
a need to spell out alternative positions before stating theirs. Annota
tions are accumulative texts. Once asked and explored, a question
tends to linger around the relevant place in Scripture. It is possible to
ignore the question of angelic digestion (and excretion), but to do so
would not be scholarly.
The same process surrounds the question of when angels were

created. The date of angelic creation does not depend upon the gloss
of any single verse; rather, it is a silence in the narrative. An attentive
reader will ask it, and once opened it proves a can of worms. Where
the annotator deals with it depends on his opinion. Babington adds a
note on this at the end of his commentaries on Genesis 1: ‘When the
Angells were created, it is not precisely named, but that they were
created, both by this place it is knowne, and Coloss. 1. 16. By Jude also
and Peter: the usuall opinion is, the first day, reade Junius.’56 Willet also
deals with this topic at the end of chapter 1, but he adds to this question
another: Why did Moses omit the creation of angels? He answers at
some length, offering three possibilities before concluding that ‘Moses
applieth himself to the simple capacity of the people, and describeth
onely the creation of visible and sensible things, leaving to speake of
the spirituall, which they could not understand.’57 The Westminster
annotators, also at the end of Genesis 1, dilate at length on the original
questions and on Willet’s broadening of it; they follow Willet but
withhold final judgement.58 Their verdict excludes only the opinion of
those, including Milton, who thought that angels were created before
the visible universe.59 Here again we see a process of accumulation and
a shift in emphasis. While Protestants may have commended restraint
in comparison to Scholastic theology, they covered much of the same
ground, while presenting Scripture as the sole basis of their analysis.
Genesis received more annotation than any other text, perhaps in part
because of reformed interest in the doctrines of sin, predestination, and
atonement,60 and Genesis raised many of the most curious angelolo
gical questions.
Systematic theology, in the tradition of Aquinas’ Summa, handled
the same issues: where, when, why, what do they do, what are we to
understand by them, what do we need to know?61 The most influential
models were from the Reformation on the Continent: especially
Calvin’s Institutes, Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Common Places, William
Bucanus’ Institutions, but also Johannes Wollebius’ Compendium Theolo
giae Christianae (1626, partly translated in 1650). The Medulla Theologiae
(1623, 1627) of William Ames, an Englishman by birth who spent much
of his life in exile in the Netherlands, was also widely read (and partially
translated as The Marrow of Sacred Divinity in 1643). A later work, and
further evidence of a popularization of the formerly Latin genre, was
Henry Hibbert’s Syntagma Theologicum, or, A Treatise wherein is concisely
angelographia 43
comprehended, the body of divinity, and the fundamentals of religion (1662).

Milton’s unfinished De Doctrina Christiana belongs to this genre. These
works begin with God and work their way down through Creation. In
them questions about the timing of the creation of the angels fit into a
broader interpretative framework, and are usually followed by a discus
sion of what angels are and what they do. There is no necessity for
discussions of angelic digestion in this context: the focus is not on
biblical narratives but on the system of beliefs, and the coherence of an
account of Creation and salvation. Whereas an account of angels is
necessary to understand certain scriptural narratives, a subtly different
analysis of angels is useful in an exploration of soteriology, and it is this
that we find in systematic theologies (as well as some sermons). While
angels are not essential to salvation, they help humans understand it.
Systematic theologies purposively descend from God through angels to
humans as part of the hermeneutic of knowing God, and this is as true
for Protestants as for Catholics.
A process of accumulation shapes these works. Once an issue has
been discussed, and placed in a systematic development, it becomes
part of a standard repertoire, a topos of analysis or argument. These are
highly generic texts: their particularities are worked out through the
many things they share with their antecedents. Bucanus’ Institutions
(sometimes referred to as ‘the commonplaces’, because of the topical
way they are organized) is a digest of patristic and Scholastic and
Reformation commentary, which in turn influenced Ames, for
example, and Willet borrows and cites from him, sometimes rejecting
his arguments, especially in the 1633 expanded edition of Hexapla in
Genesin. Bucanus was quoted approvingly by William Prynne and
Samuel Rutherford (for equating presbyters and bishops), and com
mended in Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory as particularly useful to
those who could not afford many books; this sentiment is reversed in
Richard Montagu’s controversial Appello Caesarum, which dismisses
‘moderne Epitomizers’ in favour of more ancient authorities.62 Buca
nus’ Institutions is organized in transparent and accessible chapters, on
themes from God and the Trinity, through angels or original right
eousness; the manner is remote from the systematic interrogation of
Aquinas, but the issues derive directly from Scholastic theology.
A similar hybridity can be found in An Exposition on the Fourteene
First Chapters of Genesis (1626), by Alexander Ross (who translated
Wollebius into English), a dialogue interpreting Scripture. Ross
comments on angels in detail because he is concerned about the

popishness of much angel doctrine.63 Ames’s treatment is more con
cise, and presents a series of propositions concerning the ‘special
Gubernation about intelligent Creatures’ (Milton has a corresponding
chapter in De Doctrina), in which he identifies the similarities and
differences between angels and humans. Perhaps what is most signifi
cant about this chapter is that a digest of angel doctrine could be so
concise: it assumes that the reader was familiar with many of the
touchstones of the discussion. Readers of works such as these assem
bled their own credos, much as one would a commonplace book.64
Henry Fairfax, Dean of Norwich and cousin of the parliamentarian
general, prepared a commonplace book with headings about angels,
their creation, relationship with man, their fall, ‘Permissione peccati’
and ‘Determinatione peccati’. These were perhaps intended for use in
preaching: the good intentions failed, as most of the pages remain
empty, a fact that is perhaps related to his parishioners’ complaints
about his dereliction of duties.65 On 1 January 1655 the parishioners of
Stortford began to compile at the house of one Mr Paine a collective
systematic theology ‘about those fundamentall truths that are necessary
to bee knowne and practiced by every one that would bee saved’.66
Cornelius Burgess and John Milton compiled similar notes from their
reading, perhaps with the view to publishing a systematic theology.67
What binds these texts together, then, is the interest in placing know
ledge of angels into a coherent framework that is focused not so much
on interpreting Scripture or practical divinity as on assembling a
meaningful picture of the visible and invisible world.
Sermons were an important genre for Scripture centred Protestant
ism, used to analyse biblical texts and to disseminate doctrine. Sermons
constitute a significant proportion of press output, and printed versions
suggest their wider role in aural experience.68 Angels figured in ser
mons in two ways. First, within a commentary on Scripture, in which
they could play an incidental or a substantial role. Hundreds of ser
mons touch upon angels, exegetically or imaginatively, in passing.69
A 1616 sermon by Nathaniel Cannon mentions angels only in order to
emphasize human dependence on divine assistance.70 Others offered
more extended exploration, including John Gumbleden’s sermon ‘An
Angel, in a Vision’, which examines an angel appearing to the soldier
Cornelius in Acts 10: 3.71 Gumbleden discusses angelic apparitions and
the assumptions of bodies, guardians, the ministry of angels, angelic
angelographia 45
communication, and angelic knowledge. Similarly, John Everard’s

‘Militia Caelestis’ begins with Psalm 68: 17 (‘The Chariots of God
are twenty thousand thousands of Angels’), and develops a general
survey of angel doctrine. Both provide an angelology in miniature. All
of these examples formally resemble scriptural commentary, and some
scriptural commentaries, including Luther’s lectures on Genesis, Cal
vin’s on Job, and Joseph Caryl’s multi volume Exposition . . . of the Book
of Job (1647–66), began life as extended series of sermons.
Secondly, a few sermons focus on an aspect of angel doctrine, and
draw more directly upon systematic theology. One of the most widely
cited Reformation works on angels was Urbanus Rhegius’ sermon on
good and evil angels, which outlined a broadly acceptable Protestant
doctrine. Sermons by Bayly and Prideaux follow this pattern. Robert
Gell’s Aggelokratia Theon, or, A Sermon (1650) is only in the most indirect
sense a commentary on Deuteronomy 32: 8, 9, and more extensively a
statement of angel doctrine in support of astrology (it was preached
before the Society of Astrologers).72 Following the execution of the
minister Christopher Love for treason in 1656, a group of fellow
Presbyterians published a treatise of his entitled ‘The Ministry of An
gels’, which had grown out of one or more sermons. His editors warned
that it was ‘not intended for a Philosophical, but for a Christian auditory;
the . . . subject is high, and there is room enough for speculation’, and
thereby distanced it from Thomistic writing, but it is in fact one of the
more extended writings on angels from the 1650s.73 Sermons that focus
on a particular theme often adopt an essayistic or meditational form.
William Austin’s meditation entitled ‘Tutelar Angels’ probably began
life as a sermon for 29 September, the feast of St Michael the Archan
gel.74 These sermons focus on a topic that bridges abstract theology with
practical divinity, such as the existence of guardian angels. They are
generically similar to short treatises on angels, such as Robert Dingley’s
The Deputation of Angels (1654), a defence of angelic guardianship, Arise
Evans’s The Voice of Michael the Archangel (1654), and A Modest Enquiry
into the Opinion Concerning a Guardian Angel (1702). These pamphlets are
topical, seeking to mount an argument that is sensitive to an immediate
political or religious context. Angels were more persuasive when per
ipheral, not central, to arguments.
The angelology, a systematic examination of angel doctrine (written
in isolation from a full theological system), is a rare genre. Prior to the
Reformation there was little need for the form, as it constituted a
fragment of a larger examination of Creation or salvation. It is because of

Protestant concern about the popishness of much writing about angels,
and perhaps out of fear of lingering popular beliefs, that the form
discovers a rationale. The concern about justifiable angel doctrine,
and the extent to which Thomistic arguments could be perpetuated in
a reformed context, resulted in early modern Britain in a handful of
works, including John Salkeld’s A Treatise of Angels (1613), Henry Law
rence’s Of our Communion and Warre with Angels (1646), and Benjamin
Camfield’s A Theological Discourse of Angels and their Ministries (1678).
Isaac Ambrose’s ‘Ministration of, and Communion with Angels’ per
haps belongs with this group, but it was published, in 1662, as part of a
larger work on divinity. Later in the century Increase Mather and his son
Cotton wrote several treatises about angelology that were, despite
Cotton’s visions of an angel, largely reiterations of commonplaces.75
While deriving their topics and organization from systematic theology,
these works share a distinct premiss: they endeavour to sketch the extent
of Protestant angel doctrine, and to describe the ministry of angels
within the reformed Church. Their concerns are therefore at once
expansive, in that they define a body of knowledge, and restrictive, in
that they take to heart Calvin’s admonitions about curiosity and, at least
polemically, repudiate excessive speculation. The Jesuit educated Sal
keld offers a digest of Scholastic knowledge for a Jacobean Protestant
audience; the godly Lawrence surveys knowledge of angels to consider
them as patterns for human behaviour. Camfield’s angelology is a
defence of the existence of the spirit world against what he perceived
as creeping Sadducism and scepticism.
Poems about angels are the concern of much of this book. They are,
like all of the forms discussed above, inclined to certain kinds of topic
and not others. Some that interest me are atypical of their time. Samuel
Pordage’s Mundorum Explicatio is based on prophetic visionary insights;
Heywood offers a compendium of learning; Hutchinson’s Order and
Disorder is equally influenced by scriptural commentary and Guillaume
de Salluste du Bartas; Milton’s Paradise Lost binds doctrine and narrative;
Donne offers momentary elucidation, rather than sustained insight, from
systematic study. In many other poems, however, from Spenser’s
‘Hymne of Heavenly Love’ (1596) to Cowley’s A Vision (1661), angels
speak or are seen, in ways that resemble, borrow from, and develop the
insights in non fictional prose, imaginatively illuminating the sacred, or
using sacred images to make political points. Poetic writing about angels
angelographia 47
tends towards narratives of Creation, or reflections on symbolism: the

symbolism of angels’ wings, for example. In contrast, angels appear in
strikingly few dramas in the early modern period.76
Finally, it is worth reflecting on a genre of writings about angels that
scarcely exists in early modern Britain. Glossing biblical metaphors,
logically deducing the nature of angelic bodies, inferring the lacunae
in scriptural narratives, none of these involves reflecting on angels as
creatures like us. Angels are models for humans, but few writers reflected
upon what it would be like to be an angel. Angelic emotions (angels
weep and sing praises in Scripture) are metaphors, not grounds for
speculation. Yet sometimes this consideration erupts in writing.
Henry More, whose writing about angels is profound and imagina
tive, both mystical and natural philosophical, maintaining the unob
jectionable proposition that there are two polities of light and darkness
among both angels and men, asserts: ‘every Angel, Good or Bad, is as truly
a Person as a man, being endued also with Life, Sense, and Understanding;
when they are likewise capable of Joy and Pain, and therefore coercible
by Laws’.77 This goes beyond the imaginative sympathy customarily
offered to spirits. Jan Amos Comenius, the Moravian theologian and
educationalist, pushes these issues harder: ‘There is in Angels a sense of
things, as well as in our spirits. . . . Also they have a sense of pleasure and
griefe: for as much as joyes are said to be prepared for the Angels, and
fire for the divells, (into which wicked men are also to be cast.)’78 The
link that Comenius makes between sense perception and emotion is
suggestive: cognition and sensation are associated with feelings, par
ticipation in Creation with emotions, spiritual being with limitations.
His exploratory approach anticipates Milton’s angels, who are, more
than Aquinas’ or Dante’s or perhaps anyone’s, subject to the imper
fections and difficulties of being a creature.
This chapter has explored the Christian traditions of writing about
angels, the way questions about angels emerge from scriptural narrative
and are developed and extended, the impact of the Reformation on the
body of knowledge concerning angels, the various genres in which
British Protestants wrote about angels, the way genre shapes the
expression of beliefs and ideas, and some of the rhetoric used to
characterize confessional difference. The following chapter outlines
the actual differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants, and
presents a brief catechism of reformed doctrine.
3
Angelology
Knowledge of Angels
Catholic and Protestant Differences
Protestant angelology was shaped by the emphasis on sola scriptura and

by a reaction against Catholicism. Angels were commonly mentioned
in complaints against popish inventiveness: ‘What distinctions, orders,
degrees and offices doe they make of Angels? what curious questions
doe they raise?’1 But Protestants were not merely anxious about angels.
They did not allow angels to creep in by the back door: rather, they
explored angels afresh as a useful element of theology. Just as angels had
been a powerful testing ground for Aristotelian natural philosophy in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so in the sixteenth and seven
teenth centuries they offered a way of examining the world in the light
of reformed theology and developments in natural philosophy.
The differences between Protestants and Catholics on the theology
of angels can be reduced to a series of headings, though doing so risks
making the doctrines on both sides seem more undifferentiated than
in reality it was. A useful overview, however, and one that is as
prescriptive as descriptive, can be found in Andrew Willet’s Synopsis
Papismi, That is, A Generall Viewe of Papisty: wherein the whole mysterie of
iniquitie and summe of Antichristian doctrine is set downe, which is main
tained this day by the Synagogue of Rome, against the Church of Christ,
published in six swelling editions between 1592 and 1634. A sequel
entitled Tetrastylon Papisticum, That is, The Foure Principal Pillers of
Papistrie appeared in 1593, with two further editions that decade.
Willet was a Calvinist supporter of the established Church who pub
lished anti Arminian opinions; he was independently minded,
angelology 49
though fiercely anti Catholic. Willet identified three Catholic–Protestant

controversies: concerning the hierarchies and degrees of angels, their
ministry and office, and the worship and invocation of angels. However,
as he deals with each topic, he multiplies the differences and shifts the focus.
Hierarchies
Concerning the hierarchies of angels, Willet writes that the papists (he
is hostilely characterizing their position, so I will retain this term)
‘boldely affirme’, on the basis of the diverse names given to them in
Scripture, ‘that there are nine orders of Angelles’, while Protestants
accept that there are ‘diverse orders’ but judge that to ‘enquire of them
more subtilly’ is not only ‘foolish curiositie’, but also ‘ungodly and
dangerous rashness’. A second, and consequent, question under this
heading is whether Michael is the prince of angels. The papists say that
Revelation reveals that he is, and the position was formerly held by
Lucifer. The Protestants say that ‘Michael’ in Revelation signifies
Christ. Willet claims (and it is not clear whether he believes himself
to be describing a universal Protestant position or merely forwarding
his own arguments) that there is no reason to believe that there is
necessarily a prince among fallen or unfallen angels. ‘Sathan’ is a name
given to all evil spirits, and they are all princes.2
Most Protestants did believe in a heavenly hierarchy without commit
ting themselves to specific orders: such detail lay beyond human know
ledge. The influential Institutions of Christian Religion, by the French born
Swiss theologian William Bucanus, stated one Protestant position, that
there is order, but the names ascribed to ranks in fact describe offices:
No man that is conversant in the Scriptures can deny, but that there is some
order among the Angels, because order and distinction in all things is an
excellent and divine thing: for some are called Cherubins, others Seraphims;
some Angels, other Archangels. But this order is not from the dignitie and
excellencie of the nature of the Angels, as though some were more excellent
by nature: but rather from their diverse kinds of offices. . . . But that there be
Hierarchies, and degrees of Hierarchies among the Angels, as the Papists
imagine, it cannot be proved by any testimonie of Scripture.3
Similarly, William Perkins wrote in A Golden Chaine, or, The Descrip
tion of Theologie, a lucid and weighty tome published in nine editions
between 1591 and 1621:
Figure 1. Thomas Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635), title page
engraving
That there are degrees of Angels, it is most plaine. . . . But it is not for us to
search, who, or how any been in each order, neither ought we curiously to
enquire howe they are distinguished, whether in essence, or qualities.4
The fact that the Dionysian treatises were not written by a disciple of
Paul’s was widely known and recited in attacks on Scholastic angel
doctrine.5 Many Protestants overlooked this, however, and Catholic
propagandists repudiated or ignored the humanist disproof.6 However,
to reject Dionysius was by no means to reject hierarchies. In a section
entitled ‘The Degrees and Orders of Angels’ in The Great Mysterie of
angelology 51
Godliness (1652), Joseph Hall argues that heavenly hierarchies of

perfection show that equality has no place in Creation, and that ‘He
that was rapt into the third heaven can tell us of thrones, dominions,
principalities, Angels and Arch angels in that region of blessednesse.’7
We do not know, however, the various employments of these angels,
and Hall devotes several pages to summarizing the presumptuous
conceits of those who schematize the properties and relative powers
of the hierarchies, as if, though wrong, the knowledge is nonetheless
not redundant.8 In a 1639 sermon John Blenkow accepted the notion of
hierarchies, but without the ‘too curious’ inferences of the Scholastics;
he favoured the opinions of the learned, ‘who though they hold some
kinde of order and subordination amongst the Angels, yet they are not
so bold as to assign in particular their degrees and orders: and to affirme
a thing so remote from our understanding, were necessary eyther some
evident reason, or more firme authority then can be alleadged’. He
accepts that Michael was ‘chiefe patron of the Jewes’ and a type of
Christ, though without allowing him to be head of the angels.9
Others declared with Richard Sibbes that ‘we must not rashly presume
to looke into these things’, but nonetheless accepted the notion of
hierarchies, summarized traditional Roman Catholic accounts of them,
and made use of the significance of hidden orders.10 Such dismissals
are half hearted. John Salkeld’s Treatise of Angels describes the various
approaches to hierarchies in considerable detail while explicitly not com
mitting himself to them; his interest in these details, and his non
judgemental exposition, suggest that he had sympathy with the Scholastic
position.11 Joseph Glanvill insisted that ‘’tis not absurd to believe, that
there is a Government that runs from Highest to Lowest . . . So that some one
would fancy that perhaps the Angels may manage us, as we do the Creatures
that God and Nature have placed under our Empire and Dominion’. This
accepts much of the Pseudo Dionysian doctrine of hierarchy, without the
specific names and properties.12 Still others insisted that names corre
sponded to a hierarchy of duties.13 Brian Duppa performs a very slippery
movement in rejecting certain knowledge of hierarchies:
Nor shall we offend to inlarge this meditation further, to conceive as some of
the Fathers did, that as the Angels fell from severall Hierarchies, some from
being Seraphins, some Cherubins, some Thrones, some out of higher Seats,
some out of lower: so on this great Day, when God shall distribute his glory
among us, we may opine at least, that into those severall Hierarchies we shall
be assumed . . .
Duppa nonetheless knows that one day humans will be above the
angels.14 Much Laudian angel doctrine adopts this double movement,
and appears closer to Catholic than Nonconformist doctrine.
Some Protestants, Willet notwithstanding, explicitly accepted
the usefulness of the hierarchies. Heywood uses them to structure
his meditative poem Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells. He associates
rejection of hierarchies with rejection of the spirit world
altogether. His taxonomy merits quoting at length, because it is
compact and reveals a Protestant’s imaginative engagement with
the idea:
In three most blessed Hierarchies th’are guided, Angeli in quot Choros
And each into three Companies divided: dividuntur.
The first is that in which the Seraphims bee, The first Chorus.
Cherubims, Thrones; distinct in their degree.
The Seraphim doth in the word imply, The Seraphim and
A Fervent Love and Zeale to the Most High. his office.
And these are they, incessantly each houre
In contemplation are of Gods great Power.
The Cherubim denotes to us the Fulnesse The Cherubim.
Of absolute Knowledge, free from Humane dulnesse;
Or else Wisedomes infusion. These desire
Nothing, but Gods great Goodnesse to admire.
The name of Thrones, his glorious Seat displaies; The Thrones.
His Equitie and Justice these still praise.
The second Ternion, as the Schoole relates,
Are Dominations, Vertues, Potestates.
Dominions, th’Angels Offices dispose; Dominions.
The Vertues (in the second place) are those Vertues.
That execute his high and holy Will:
The Potestates, they are assistant still, Potestates.
The malice of the Divell to withstand:
For God hath given it to their powerfull hand.
In the third order Principates are plac’t;
Next them, Arch Angels; Angels are the last.
The Principates, of Princes take the charge, Principates.
Their power on earth to curbe, or to enlarge;
And these worke Miracles. Th’Arch Angels are Arch Angels.
Embassadors, great matters to declare.
Th’Angels Commission hath not that extent, Angels.
They only have us Men in government.
‘God’s in the first of these, a Prince of Might:
angelology 53
‘He in the second doth reveale, as Light:

‘Is in the last, his Graces still inspiring.
To know what’s to their Offices requiring;
The formost Ternion hath a reference The Offices of
To contemplate Gods Divine Providence: the three Ternions.
Prescribing what by others should be don.
The office of the second Ternion
Doth his concurring Influence disperse
Unto the guidance of the Universe;
And sometimes hath a working. Now we know,
The third descends to’have care of things below;
Assisting good men, and withstanding those
That shall the rules of Divine Lawes oppose.15
Potestates are synonymous with Powers; Principates with Principal

ities. The description is conventionally Pseudo Dionysian, and it
parallels Dante’s Paradiso, canto XXVIII. Heywood emphasizes the
importance of providence more than a Catholic might, though he also
suggests that miracles are ongoing, despite Protestant reservations
about this. Principates perform miracles, and Heywood is thoroughly
committed to their contemporary relevance: the frontispiece to
book 7, on the Principates, shows a conventional angel with a sword
hovering over a wicked kingdom (its denizens have diabolical faces)
with the banner ‘Protero’ (‘I trample’); on the upper left a godly court
hovers in the clouds, with the banner ‘Protago’ (presumably protego,
‘I protect’). The family are clearly discernible as King Charles, Henrietta
Maria, and their three children. The image suggests that Principates
govern the earth, protecting good kings and punishing bad, but it also
compares the royal family to angels, forming a little kingdom in the
clouds.16 Hierarchies had clear political uses.
There was a close affiliation, as James VI and I observed, between
monarchy and episcopacy, and the interpretation of the angels of the
seven Asian Churches, addressed in Revelation, was central to argu
ments about the proper government of the Church.17 Heavenly hier
archies were frequently paralleled to earthly, and those who challenged
them compared to rebellious angels.18 John Taylor argued that heredi
tary monarchy was the best form of government, just as there was one
sun in the sky and ‘Amongst the Angels there are distinctions, as
Principalities, Powers, Thrones, Dominions, and Michael an Archangel.’19
George Lawson described the government of heaven in distinctively
Figure 2. Thomas Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635), engrav

ing of ‘The Principat’
earthly terms, and presented the divine order as the proper basis for
humane government, though, oddly, he suggested that while the
government of the fallen angels was monarchical, he was not so sure
about the unfallen.20 Even Protestants reluctant to identify the hier
archy in detail were confident that it contained lessons for the proper
order of human society and the conduct of politics.21
The distinction between the Catholic and Protestant positions was
not a simple one, then, and despite claims that titles reflected offices or
angelology 55
duties rather than nature, Protestants did not challenge the assumption
that the various scriptural names for angels reflected an organization
that was hierarchical in nature. Milton’s vision of a meritocratic
Creation brings him close to total rejection. In Reason of Church
Government he writes: ‘Yea, the Angels themselves, in whom no
disorder is fear’d, as the Apostle that saw them in his rapture describes,
are distinguisht and quaterniond into their celestiall Princedomes, and
Satrapies, according as God himselfe hath writ his imperiall decrees
through the great provinces of heav’n.’22 ‘Quaterniond’ implies rejec
tion of the Pseudo Dionysian three ternions, and is not rooted in
conventional exegesis of angelic hierarchy. Instead it suggests the
four angels who govern the four corners of the world, and the four
winds that blow therefrom, which appear in Revelation 7: 1–2. It
anticipates Henry More’s gloss on Daniel 7, where he writes:
ruchot is the very same word that is in Psal. 104. 4. These are the Four Winds of
Heaven, The Quaternio of the Angelical Ministers of Divine Providence.
Something like that Apoc. 7. where there is mention of the Four Angels at
the Four Corners of the Earth, holding the Four Winds of the Earth that they
should not blow on the Earth, nor on the Sea. And that the great things in the
vicissitude of Kingdoms and Empires are done by the Angels, is an Hypothesis
that both Daniel and the Apocalypse plainly supposes, the latter indeed incul
cates to awaken this dull Sadducean Age.23
None of this Milton would have objected to. Milton uses the scriptural
names without hierarchy, and in Paradise Lost ranks conventionally
placed low in the hierarchy demonstrate greater abilities than the
higher ranks. They are names of duties, words used to describe and
praise rather than assert status. It is the fallen angels, and particularly
Satan, who are most concerned with hierarchy:
Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,
If these magnific titles yet remain
Not merely titular, since by decree
Another now hath to himself engrossed
All power, and us eclipsed under the name
Of king anointed . . . (PL 5. 772 7)
Milton is neither inconsistent nor satirical, but, rather, committed to

individual merit as the basis of salvation.24 His belief that Creation’s
hierarchies should be flexible, mobile, and founded upon communi
cation prevented any commitment to hierarchies as the Scholastics and
some Protestant contemporaries would have understood them. The

Pseudo Dionysian hierarchy as modified by Scholastic theology was
rigid and unyielding.25 Milton’s vision is anything but uncommitted,
though it is less a satire of Roman Catholic doctrine than an image of
his own interpretation of Scripture, supported by his understanding of
nature; its inconsistency reflects the fluidity of Creation.
Willet’s minor point under this heading is easier to address, though
he is also misleading here. He states that Protestants (and not Catholics)
identify Michael in Revelation as Christ and not a created angel. In fact
Protestants were divided on this. The Geneva annotators, David
Pareus, Arthur Dent, Joseph Mede, Johannes Wollebius, and others,
accepted that Michael in Revelation was Christ, but others state that he
was an angel, or even a prefiguration of the emperor Constantine.26
The Westminster Annotations prefers this first reading, but acknow
ledges that some take Michael to be a ‘chief created angel’. The
interpretation of Jude and Daniel also made the reading ambiguous.
Thomas Heywood, William Jenkyn, and Milton insist that the iden
tification with Christ makes no sense of Scripture.27
Ministry and Offices of Angels

The second Catholic–Protestant division Willet identifies is on the
question of the ministry of angels, which also falls into two parts,
protection and offices. The papists erroneously say that Michael ‘is
the protector and keeper of the whole Church of Christ’, and that
kingdoms and churches ‘have their speciall angels for their protectors’.
Protestants know that Christ and all angels protect the whole Church
‘without anye limitation of place’, and that it cannot be proved out of
Scripture that angels are assigned to kingdoms. Willet subordinates under
this another error: papists believe that ‘Everie one hath from his nativitie
an Angell for his custodie and patronage against the wicked, before the
face of God.’ This causes Willet some concern, as he stops to repudiate the
textual proofs for the doctrine, before asserting the Protestant belief that
the doctrine of individual guardian angels cannot be proved. Moreover,
we are carried to heaven at death by a choir or company of angels.28
Protestants were more divided on these issues than Willet cared to
admit. Many, including Calvin, Peter Martyr, and Milton, accepted
Daniel 10, which refers to Michael as the prince of the Jewish people,
angelology 57
and also to the princes of Greece and Persia, as proof of the existence of
local guardian angels. I discuss some of the extensive Protestant uses of
this doctrine in Chapters 9 and 13.29 Willet’s subordination of the
question of individual guardian angels to the notion of guardians
assigned to a place is odd, as the former was a more controversial and
doctrinally significant issue. Belief in dual guardian angels, one good
and one bad, developed in the early days of the Christian Church
(based on Acts 12: 15). One influential non canonical text, which
reflects this belief, is the second century work The Shepherd by Hermas,
a supposed disciple of Paul’s. John Pringle translated this in 1661,
disseminating apocryphal writings to a wider audience. Hermas relates
how the doctrine is communicated to him by an angel (disguised, as
many later angels, as an old man in a white cloak):
3 Hear now saith he, first of faith, there are two spirits with man, one of
equity, and one of iniquity; And I said to him, how Lord shall I know that there
are two spirits with a man? Hear saith he, and understand; The spirit of
righteousnesse is tender, gentle and bashfull, affable and quiet, when therefore
it shall ascend into thine heart, immediately it speaketh with thee of right
eousnesse, of pardon, of charity, of piety; All these when they shall ascend into
thine heart, know that the spirit of equity is with thee; to this genius
therefore, and to its works give thou credit.
4 Take now also the works of the Spirit of iniquity, first it is bitter,
wrathful, and foolish, and its works are pernitious and overthrow the servants
of God; when therefore these things shall ascend into thine heart, thou shalt
understand from its works this to be the spirit of iniquity.
5 How Lord shall I understand? Hear quoth he, and understand, when
wrath shall happen to thee or bitternesse, understand that to be in thee; After
that the desire of many works, and of the daintiest meats, and of drunken
nesses, and the desirings of many strange things, and pride and much speaking,
and ambition, and whatsoever things are like these; Thou therefore when
thou shalt know its works, depart from them all, & believe it in nothing,
because its works are evil, and do not agree to the servants of God.
6 Thou hast therefore the works of both the Spirits, understand now and
believe the Genius, of Righteousnesse, because its teaching is good . . . 30
The doctrine, which is developed in the Qur’an (the good angel sits on
the right shoulder, the evil on the left), became a commonplace in
medieval theology, a literal belief as well as a means of exploring
human motivation. The doctrine received qualified support from the
earlier reformers, including Luther, Urbanus Rhegius, and Johannes
Rivius, plus some later writers.31 In his Institution, however, Calvin

dismissed it as uncertain, adding that ‘not one Angell onely hath care of
every one of us, but that they all by one consent doe watch for our
safetie’. In his later commentary on Genesis he was more emphatic:
‘they doe wickedly disgrace the goodness of God, whiche thinke
everie one of us is defended by one Angel. And there is no doubt
but yt the divel by this subtilty, hath gon about in some point to weken
our faith.’32 Gervase Babington placed a similar interpretation upon
this passage in 1592; and the Westminster Assembly’s Annotations agree
in phrasing so careful that it may prevaricate: ‘no Angel is restrained
from a particular ministration to any of the elect; nor any of the elect so
allotted to the custody of any Angel that he may not expect the
protection of many’.33 Belief in guardian angels thereby became firmly
associated with popery. Willet was supported by Thomas Cartwright,
William Fulke, and Christopher Love (who insisted that only the elect
received any ministration from angels).34
Not all English Protestants agreed. Salkeld reported that Protestants
were unsure about guardian angels, but he presented a great deal of
evidence for the belief, from the Greek and Roman churches, which,
he suggested, was enough to persuade some. The tenor of his summary
suggests either a reluctance to admit his own faith, or a genuine
uncertainty inclining towards accepting the doctrine.35 The ancient
nature of the belief was an argument in its favour. While Thomas
Browne was sceptical of proofs based on Acts 12, he was nonetheless
inclined to take it on trust because it was not the fabrication of the
Church of Rome but as old as Pythagoras and Plato (philosophy and
theology persuasively coincided).36 Henry Lawrence approves the
doctrine in a diffident fashion. He set a precedent for Robert Dingley’s
treatise and for others of widely differing theological positions later in
the century.37 In fact the doctrine of the guardian angel was sufficiently
malleable to Protestant belief that it could be used to distinguish
differences within Protestantism. Dingley ridicules the papist account
of tutelary spirits: ‘The Pontificians hold that each man hath two
Angels allotted him by God, one to vex and punish him, the other
to guard and comfort him: But this is absurd, God appoints not an evil
Angel constantly to attend his Elect, and if Satan Depute him, the Elect
Angel set by God will continually expel and vanquish him.’38 Dingley
nonetheless is a fervent advocate of the doctrine of protecting spirits for
the elect. This distinction could be found in Bucanus’ Institutions, which
angelology 59
supports guardian angels for the elect, while emphatically denying any
scriptural grounds for individual evil angels.39 Lawrence too makes this
distinction: the reprobate do not have a guardian angel. Thus, the
doctrine has an additional value within Calvinist circles, despite Cal
vin, of being conformable to the doctrine of predestination.40 It was
not a remnant of popery, but had its own life in inter Protestant
conflicts. It was, moreover, useful for poets: the pagan genius had
deep literary roots, invited prosopopoeia, enabled the externalization
and dramatization of hidden impulses, and set human internal conflict
into a heavenly context. In his 1648 poem Prosopopoeia Britannica,
George Wither’s own guardian angel explains to him:
A genius, is an incorporeall creature,
Consisting of an intellectuall nature;
Which at the self same time, a being had,
With that, for whose well being it was made.
And, may be cal’d, that Angell, which designeth,
Adviseth, moveth, draweth, and inclineth
To happinesse; and, naturally restraineth
From harme, that creature, whereto it pertaineth:
And, this am I to you.41
His genius inspires him, and gives him poetry.
Some Protestants reported conversations with or visions of their
guardian angels, sometimes summoned by magic. Guardians were not
the only angels sought by supplication or rituals, but they were
particular targets because of their relationship with the conversant,
and because they were immediately present. The interest in angelic
communication cut against the grain of the Protestant insistence that
the age of miracles and angelic apparitions was over.42 Jean Bodin’s
account of a friend who felt the presence of, and on one occasion saw,
his guardian angel was known in seventeenth century Britain. Bodin
writes:
Every morning at three or four o’clock the spirit knocked at his door, and
sometime he rose, opening the door, and saw no one, and every morning the
spirit kept it up and if he did not rise, the spirit knocked again, and went on
waking him until he rose. Then he began to be afraid, thinking, as he said, that
this was some evil spirit. And he therefore went on praying to God, without
missing a single day, asking God to send him his good angel, and he often sang
the Psalms, almost all of which he knew by heart. Well, he has assured me that
the spirit has accompanied him ever since, giving him palpable signs: touching
him, for example, on the right ear, if he did something that was not good, and
on the left ear, if he did well.43
The friend is now generally assumed to be Bodin himself. In his

reflections on guardians, Henry More mentions both Bodin and
Girolamo Cardano, who left accounts of his own experience of his
guardian angel in The Book of my Life, of his father’s conversation with
angels in On Subtlety, and of the spirit world in general in On Variety.44
There was a surge of interest in summoning and conversing with
angels in the late Elizabethan period. Numerous manuscripts of ritual
magic from the period survive (many of them copies of medieval
manuscripts), and John Dee, Simon Forman, and Richard Napier left
accounts of angelic conversations and the search for the name of their
guardian (a cabbalistic interest).45 Lilly’s autobiography reveals a suc
cession of angel summoners in the decades following Dee. Others who
spoke with their guardians include Socrates (with his daimon), Athan
asius Kircher (with Cosmiel), Tomasso Campanella (he thought they
were guardians; they proved to be evil spirits), an anonymous Hugue
not friend of Pierre Le Loier, and, later, Robert Browne.46 The
German mystic Jacob Boehme, contrary to the conventions of Prot
estant ars moriendi, saw his on his deathbed.47 In 1663 John Heydon
published the name of his guardian, Malhitiriel.48 Reginald Scott, Dee
and Forman’s contemporary, was suspicious of interest in guardians
and condemned curiosity into guardians and attempts to converse with
the spirit world. Ironically a posthumous 1665 edition of his famously
sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) added materials directly contrary
to his own views, including guidelines on conjuring ‘the Genius or
Good Angel’. The magic makes a nonsense of the Pseudo Dionysian
hierarchies as well as of Scott’s disbelief.49 Perhaps this shift between
the 1584 and 1665 editions reflects broader changes in the position of
angels, including the loosening grip of the traditional systematization,
and a broader willingness to use angel doctrine in experimental and
occult ways.
The second part of Willet’s discussion of angelic ministry concerns
angels and human prayers. The papists erroneously believe ‘that the
Angelles do offer up our prayers unto God’. The troublesome text is,
again, from Revelation. Willet, true to form, brings Augustine to his
defence, argues that the text denotes Christ, and that, in any case, ‘If this
place might be understood of Angels, that they have some ministerie
angelology 61
about our prayers, it maketh nothing notwithstanding for popish

invocation of Angels.’ Protestants, he says, follow Scripture, which
makes Christ the only mediator.50 Willet’s true concern is mediation;
carrying prayers was a minor issue compared to prayers to angels, which
Willet treats under a separate heading. However, there are exceptions:
John Pordage thought it possible to communicate with the spirit world
with prayer, and his disciples believed that their guardian angels carried
their prayers up to another protecting angel, who then represented
these prayers to the Father and Son.51
An ‘appendix’ to this discussion of guardian angels and prayers
concerns whether angels or saints ‘know our heartes’. Catholics be
lieve, writes Willet, that angels can see true repentance within a sinner.
They see through their own power of perception, as ‘all things done in
the worlde may be seene in God, as in a glasse’ by the angels, an image
used by Dante among others, which belief Willet labels a ‘prophane
speculation’. Protestants believe that the angels know only what God
chooses to reveal to them: ‘the spirite of God may reveale the secrets of
the heart of man, not by giving them a generall gift them selves to
looke into the heart, as into a glasse, but by revealing such thinges,
when the Lord seeth it expedient’.52 Protestant theologians did place
much greater restrictions on angelic knowledge and perception, as
appropriate to a doctrinal system in which humans and angels are
isolated creatures, worshipping their maker directly. Protestants none
theless continued to dispute angelic eyesight and knowledge through
the seventeenth century. In times when understanding of human
perception, and the nature of the material universe, were changing,
such debate was a means of further probing the mysteries of Creation.
The Worship and Invocation of Angels

Willet’s third controversial question concerns the worship and espe
cially the invocation of angels. He acknowledges here, without wishing
to acknowledge the niceties of his enemies’ theology, that Catholics
distinguish between the adoration of God and the ‘religious reverence,
honour and adoration’ of angels and saints. This echoes the distinction,
drawn in the Council of Nicaea’s decrees of 787, between latria, that
worship due to God alone, and dulia, a reverence that could properly be
paid to lesser creatures; a distinction that was subsequently complicated
by hyperdulia, a special reverence for creatures with an extraordinary
relationship with God.53 Willet contends that Protestants revere angels,

but all ‘religious worship or service’ is due only to God.54 Again, the
crux here lies in Revelation (19: 10 and 22: 9), where John falls down to
worship an angel, and is rebuked by that angel; each side finds their own
position in the text.55 In practice the two positions can be mistaken for
each other, as the distinctions are rooted in precise terminology.
The proximity between reverence and worship can be seen in
Edward Leigh’s Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650), where
he paraphrases the angel’s warning to John: ‘thou owest not to mee
religious but sociall worship’.56 Wollebius states that it is admissible to
adore saints (and therefore angels) when they appear to us, but not in a
religious way.57 Joseph Hall compares the distinction to that between
praise and flattery.58 And Henry Lawrence reminds his readers that
angels help raise humans to God’s ordinances, and ‘therefore wee
should love them and reverence them, therefore wee converse with
them, and study to know them, and finde them out, even the least
peeces & circumstances of them’. It is ambiguous whether the in
tended subject of the clause is God’s ordinances or angels, and the
matter is further confused by Lawrence’s subsequent comparison of
these dear objects to ‘our Elixurs, and our Philosophers stone, turning
all they touch into gold; therefore let us value the knowledge of them
as things necessary for us, and which have a great influence upon our
holy walking’.59 Lawrence by no means intends to commend worship
of angels, but in describing due praise he steers close to prayers and
metaphors associated with the occult. Arise Evans, the Fifth Monarch
ist, appears to cross the line when he denies being ‘popishly affected in
worshipping of angels’, on the grounds that while it is clearly wrong to
worship men, ‘the Holy Angels are of another nature, so that we
cannot err in that worship we do unto them’, and they do not reject
worship; we should ‘fall down flat before a Holy Angel’ in case it is an
Angel of the Presence.60 Evans and Fifth Monarchists often had elastic
readings of Revelation.
The secondary question concerns prayers directed to angels as
intercessors. Catholics permit this practice, while Protestants believe
‘That angels are not to be worshipped, nor invocated as mediatours,
intercessors, or advocates, the scripture speaketh evidently.’ Christ is
our only intercessor, and God the true object of our worship.61 Sixty
years later Robert Dingley half heartedly commended the thorough
ness of Willet’s Synopsis Papismi, and its rejection of adoration of
angelology 63
guardians, while doubting the wisdom of denying the existence of

guardians altogether.62 Protestants did universally reject praying to
angels, though some drew finer distinctions. Luther suggested that it
was appropriate to call on one’s guardian in extremis, though not to
pray or invoke angels; Calvin thought even this limited calling risked
idolatry.63
In the 1620s invocations to angels, and what constituted prayer and
worship, emerged as a marker of difference between Protestant com
munities. The Arminian Richard Montagu was forced in 1624 to
defend himself from an accusation that he had preached, and before
the king, ‘That there was no cause why every man might not turne himselfe
unto his Angell keeper, and say, Holy Angell keeper, Pray for me.’ He argued
against the Catholic practice of praying to saints and angels (and he was
impeccably orthodox in stressing the distinction between the two)
while maintaining the legitimacy of the doctrine of guardian angels
and insisting that some form of conversation was permissible. Montagu
rejects Catholic readings of Jacob’s deathbed prayer to an angel (Gen.
48: 16), and claims that Jacob expresses a wish, and that the angel is
Christ, but then backtracks: ‘to suppose and grant Hee was an Angel,
he could then be no other but his Guardian Angel . . . in this present
question touching Invocation, the Case of Angels Guardians is perad
venture different, much and many wayes, from the condition, and
employments of them at large’. He acknowledges Calvin’s rejection
but argues that calling on guardians differs from calling on saints,
because they are ‘ever in procinctu, nigh at hand unto us, continually,
and never abandoning us all our dayes’. The matter comes down to
distance and the fact that our voices cannot carry to the spiritual ears of
the saints in heaven. Montagu insists that belief is not an essential tenet
of faith, though there are sufficient grounds for it, and so it should not
‘bee taxed with point of Poperie or Superstition’.64 In another work
published the same year, however, he lists rejecting the doctrine as an
error, and the prohibition of prayers to angels as another. Montagu was
a fierce polemicist who knew when to conceal his own controversial
doctrines. High Anglican policy seemed, from the 1610s onwards, but
particularly under Laud, to be drifting towards Rome in services and
doctrine and church decoration, and angels were one measure of this.
In churches and funerary monuments angels began to reappear. William
Austin joined Montagu in endeavouring to reincorporate them into
worship; some churches sang the ‘angelic hymn’, the words of an
angel at the Nativity; prayers were offered to angels; all of which gave rise
to complaints and petitions by the godly in 1641–2.65
Protestants from other theological traditions held that various
addresses to angels were legitimate. Some tried to speak with angels
through ritual magic, though hostile commentators thought that only
fallen angels would participate in these communications.66 Some of these
magicians and enthusiasts are discussed in the following two chapters.
Richard Baxter thought that the case of John Pordage showed the danger
of seeking out angels, but he also thought that the Protestant reaction
against popery meant that people did not thank angels enough, and
showed little sense ‘of the great Benefits that we receive by Angels’.67
Under these three headings, then, Willet in fact describes eight distinct
papist ‘errors’ or ‘heresies’: (i) the existence of a specific hierarchy of
angels; (ii) that Michael is the prince of angels; (iii) the existence of angels
assigned to churches or kingdoms; (iv) that individuals are assigned
guardian angels; (v) that angels carry our prayers to God; (vi) that angels
see into our hidden thoughts and feelings; (vii) that we can worship
angels in a limited fashion; and (viii) that we can pray to angels as
intercessors. He might have added a ninth doctrinal difference: the
continuing appearance of angels to humans, sometimes bringing miracles
or prophecies. Protestants declared that the age of miracles was over.
Miracles and prophecies had ceased with the coming of Christ and the
gospel, when the conviction of the spirit took priority over external
performance and proofs. Though Augustine had declared as much, this
point constituted a distinction from Roman Catholic doctrine, and angels
were intricately associated with both miracles and prophecies. When
miracles ceased, so did angelic apparitions. Angels bring humans proph
ecies or prophetic books, and they prepare humans to receive the spirit of
prophecy (angels are, metaphorically, the spirit of prophecy).68 Many
Protestants did, however, believe that both miracles and prophecies
could still occur in principle, and that under extraordinary circumstances
God would raise them.69 The doctrine divided Catholics and Protestants,
but also formed a frontier of debate within Protestantism.
Angelology: A Catechism
In 1647 John Trapp, in a brief essay of commonplaces on angels within

his voluminous commentary on the Johannine epistles, warned: ‘if the
angelology 65
Theology for Angels were written, we should need another Bible: the
creation and government of Angels containing as great variety of matter,
as doth the religion of mankinde’.70 It is necessary here to move away
from drawing distinctions between modes of writing, historical periods,
and inter and intra confessional conflicts, and instead offer a more
synthetic survey of widely held beliefs and knowledge. To avoid biblical
proportions, they are presented here in an undifferentiated manner, over
looking discontinuities, textures of writing, and confessional conflict;
some of the topics are developed more fully later in this book.
When Were Angels Created?

On the first day of Creation: Augustine interpreted the ‘Heavens’ in
Genesis 1: 1 (also known as the empyrean heaven, to distinguish it
from the visible heavens of the terrestrial universe) to include the
angels; Lombard, Aquinas, and most Protestants agreed. A few pre
ferred the fourth day, when the ‘visible heavens’ were created. Almost
everyone in the early modern period thought that angels were made
within the material creation described in Genesis. Calvin insisted that
it was culpable curiosity to ask the question, though he also disliked
this interpretation of Genesis 1: 1 on the grounds that that the empyr
ean heaven was God’s dwelling place and therefore already existed.71
Salkeld, though he himself opted for the first day, listed the many
Church Fathers who thought that angels preceded the corporeal
world, including Origen, Gregory, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome.
Milton also inclined to this account.72
The Westminster Annotations reminded its reader that the date lay
among adiaphora. Though the annotations upon Genesis 1: 1 and Job
38: 7 indicate disagreement among the annotators, the (unusually) long
note concluding Genesis 1 was clear:
In all this History of the Creation, there is no mention of the creation of
Angels; whence some have supposed them to be eternal; but against that may
be alleadged, Col. 1. 16, 17. Some, that though they had a beginning, yet it
was long before the Creation recorded in this Chapter; but in the same place
of the Apostle, all things in heaven and in earth, visible and invisible, are wrapped
up in one original, and that distinguished from the eternal duration of the
Creator, who was before all things, and by whom all things consist; and this
according to the judgement of the soundest Divines in all ages. For the time
of their making, this is certain, they were made before man fell; but on what
day, whether the first day with the highest heaven, (as some conceive . . . )
when the Firmament was made, by which they understand all the three
Heavens, whereof one is the habitation of Angels; or the fourth day, when
some hold, that as the visible heavens were garnished with stars, so the
invisible were furnished with Angels; which might be the more probable,
but that it seems the Angels were made before the stars; for the sons of God, by
which are meant the Angels, are said to shout for joy at the first appearing of
the morning stars, Job 38. 7. In this diversity of opinions for the time of the
creation, we conceive that in the six dayes space, and before the last day, there
is no errour of danger which way soever we take it.
This left the question of why Moses did not mention their creation.
The annotators continued:
If it be asked why their creation was not more punctually expressed, the
answer may be, not as commonly it is, that the Jews were too dull to be
informed of spiritual beings, for the mystery of the Trinity is divers times
insinuated in this Book of Genesis, and Cherubims are mentioned, Chap.
3. 24. and afterwards we read of Angels, Gen. 19.1, 15. & Chap. 28.12. & 32.1.
but because this first History was purposely and principally for information
concerning the visible world, the invisible, whereof we know but in part,
being reserved for the knowledge of a better life, 1 Cor. 13. 9.73
The two most common explanations were that Genesis is exclusively
concerned with material creation; and that Moses was speaking down
to the Jews, and did not mention them lest it tempt the Jews idola
trously to worship angels. A third proposed reason was that the Jews
would simply not understand the nature of angels, and so he omitted
them.74 Willet’s answer merits quotation at length:
For the first: 1. Moses neither passed over the creation of angels in silence, for
feare least the Israelites should have committed idolatrie in worshipping of
them, as Chrisostome, and Theodoret thinke: for the Israelites could not be
ignorant that the angels had diverse times appeared to their fathers the
Patriarkes, and so could not be ignorant of them. 2. Neither are they omitted,
because Moses onely treateth of those things, which had their beginning with
this materiall world, but the angels were created long before the visible world,
as Basil and Damascene thinke, for it shall even now appeare, that this is a false
supposition, that the angels were created so long before. 3. Neither yet is the
creation of the angels comprehended under the making of heaven and the
lights, as Augustine & Beda thinke, for this were to leave the literall sense
which is to be followed in the historie of the creation. 4. But the onely reason
is this, because Moses applieth himself to the simple capacity of the people,
angelology 67
and describeth onely the creation of visible and sensible things, leaving to
speake of the spirituall, which they could not understand: and this seemeth to
be Hieroms opinion, epist. 1 39. Ad Cyprian.
Another explanation was that Jews or Christians might be led to
suspect that such powerful beings had a hand in Creation.75 John
Lightfoot, biblical scholar, Hebraist, and member of the Westminster
Assembly, writes:
For if their day of their Creation (which was in most likelihood the first) had
beene named, wicked men would have bene ready to have taken them for
actors in this worke, which were onely spectators. Therefore as God hides
Moses after his death, so Moses hides the Creation of them, lest they should be
deified, and the honour due to the Creator given to the creature.76
Behind this lay the spectre of the heresy of Simon Magus, according to
whom angels created the world.77 Calvin proposes a fifth alternative:
God spoke on a need to know basis. John White thought so: ‘their
creation be not described, or pointed at in particular, as not so needful
to be known by us, whom it concerns most, to understand the state and
conditions of those visible things, with which we have most to do’.78
How Do Angels Know Things, and How Much Do They Know?

There are two kinds of answer to this question. The knowledge of
angels is static: once the angels had chosen to stand, their knowledge
was fixed (the knowledge of the fallen angels was diminished). Or the
knowledge of angels changes through experience. Both answers can be
further subdivided into those who explore the limitations of angelic
knowledge, and those who stress their near omniscience.
Salkeld follows Aquinas in his Aristotelian reasoning: angels have
forms and species infused in their consciousness at creation. They do
not need to learn through experience. Their knowledge is purely
intellectual (hence they are called ‘minds’ or ‘intelligences’). They
have ‘no imagination’. This does not mean that angels cannot conjec
ture, but it does mean that this knowledge is fixed according to their
hierarchies. Cherubim, Principalities, and Powers were associated
with knowledge, and hence, according to Aquinas, it was these who
fell.79 John Colet’s treatise summarizing Dionysius suggests that love is
superior to knowledge; hence in the higher orders knowledge pro
ceeds from love, and in the lower, love proceeds from knowledge.80
Lawrence presents a different, less Aristotelian account. There are four

grounds of angelic knowledge: (i) natural; (ii) revelation; (iii) experience;
(iv) supernatural. Having no senses, angels know by species infused into
them, but they also know by reasoning, which they perform with speed
and accuracy beyond human comprehension. Thus, their mode of
knowing is more like humans’ than Aquinas and Salkeld suggest. They
know everything about someone committed to their charge, though not
about others, and so they are almost all knowing.81 Wollebius, specifically
discussing the more limited knowledge of fallen angels, includes another:
astrology.82 The suggestion that angels know through observation of the
position and movements of the stars derives from the special relationship
angels have with the spheres, and their powers of observation. Not all
scriptural commentators allow the validity of astrology (Milton did).
Wollebius may include it only as a compensation for the impairment of
natural knowledge among fallen angels.
Some commentators emphasize the superiority of angelic knowledge
to human, exploring the latter through the former.83 Comenius thought
their knowledge more sublime than human, ‘1 because of the clearnesse
of their understanding, which nothing obumbrates. 2 by reason of their
power to penetrate any whither, and see things plainly. 3 because of their
long experience for so many ages’. He adds: ‘and yet they are not
omniscious’.84 Roman Catholic writers describe guardian angels seeing
into the minds of their charges, and seeing through God as if a giant
mirror. Protestants were emphatic that angels did not see into humans’
thoughts. They were more likely to admit the possibility of ‘experi
mentall’ knowledge in angels (distinguished from natural and supernat
ural).85 Regarded as ‘creatures’, finite, independent beings, angels are
more likely to be seen as limited in power and resources. Thus, John
Gumbleden writes: ‘how comes the Angel here to understand that? surely,
not by any naturall knowledge of his own; no, for, Angels are creatures; and
Creatures (how eminent soever) know no more of the secret mind of God,
then what is revealed immediately unto them by the mouth of God’.
Angels, like humans, are students of some divine mysteries.86 Milton
writes: ‘The good angels do not look into all the secret things of God,
as the Papists pretend; some things indeed they know by revelation, and
others by means of the excellent intelligence with which they are gifted
[per eminentem quondam ratiocinationem]; there is much, however, of
which they are ignorant.’87 Through insight and ratiocination angels
(and devils) hypothesize about human thoughts and conjecture the
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future.88 For Cornelius Burgess, ‘most divines speake confusedly’ on

angelic knowledge, some identifying threefold, some fourfold knowledge
(i.e. natural, supernatural, revelation, experimental). He nonetheless
claims that when they were first created, their knowledge was exclusively
natural, and that after the angelic fall good angels acquired other forms.
However, he then takes a step back: ‘now if any desire to know <b.t> by
wt means they know, whether by their essence as god doth or by species
or ideas abstracted from things as wee do, is not much material or
profitable & more philosophical then Theological’.89
Do Angels Have Bodies?

Aquinas, synthesizing theology with Aristotelian natural philosophy,
stated that angels were incorporeal and non material. Until the seven
teenth century most writers tacitly agreed with him. Angels did not have
bodies, though they sometimes adopted bodies of air in order to appear
to and communicate with humans. Angels are not material, though,
for the sake of logical consistency, Aquinas states that they have some
form of substance—ethereal, fiery, or purely intelligential—that tran
scends human understanding, and so, according to how humans under
stand things, they are not material.90 Sixteenth century reformers usually
reiterated that angels were ‘spiritual beings’. For Calvin these issues were
irrelevant. Peter Martyr writes that the ‘substance and nature’ of spirits
‘cannot be expressed’.91 Divergent approaches developed in the seven
teenth century in response to shifts in natural philosophy. Angelic
corporeality was discussed in relation to visibility and to eating. Having
no bodies, angels have no need to eat. Unlike humans, they are preserved
‘by immediate Influence’ from God.92 The tradition of the ‘Food of
Angels’ was in most exegesis a metaphor, though the description of
Manna in Exodus 16: 31 led some spiritual enthusiasts and alchemists to
seek the actual substance through purification and communion with
spirits. The corporeality and substance of angels are discussed below.93
How Do Spirits Speak to and Interact with Humans?

To be seen by humans angels are given temporary bodies by God or
condense bodies of air in order to create a visual simulacrum. These
bodies do not deceive humans as they represent the true nature of the
angels. In order to communicate, angels either speak directly to human
minds, impressing or imprinting their thoughts, while moving the virtual

body to mimic speaking, or they themselves speak audibly while
manipulating the virtual body, or they speak using the organs of the
virtual body to generate the sound. Reflections on these topics appear
throughout commentaries on Genesis as well as discussions in system
atic theology.
When angels speak to each other, they use hardware free instant
messaging:
Properly speech belongs not to any thing but to man, who onely hath the
instruments of speech, yet there is an internall and mental speech in spirits,
which is nothing but the reasoning and discoursing of the minde; and this
speech is imperfect in respect of man; for none understands what is in the
minde of man but himselfe; in Angels it is more perfect, for they understand
one another by this mentall speech; but in God it is most perfect, for after an
incomprehensible manner, he speakes to himselfe, and the three persons in the
glorious Trinity doe understand one another after that manner which we
cannot conceive, much lesse expresse. Then as our minds internally and
spiritually can speake to God although our tongues do not moove, so can
the Angels speake to one another, so can God both to them and us.94
Angels can see into each others’ thoughts, while human bodies ob
struct communication. Aquinas suggests that their exchanges involve
only the desire for, and the conveyance of, enlightenment, which does
not imply the need for language in inter angelic conversation, though
when they speak to humans they have a full range of tongues. Others
suggest that they speak in Hebrew, the uncorrupted language of
Paradise. Assumed bodies and the tongues of angels are discussed in
Chapter 12.95
Do Angels Have Senses?

According to Aquinas, angels do not have senses. How do they hear?
Mentally: ‘as the sense is moved by a sensible object, so the intellect is
moved by an intelligible object; hence as the sense is stimulated by
some sign of a sensory kind, so too the angel’s mind can be aroused to
attention through some power of a mental kind’.96 This is what some
commentators refer to as ‘inward senses’ among men.97 Those who
assign to angels substantiality, among them Milton, find some more
material equivalent of the senses: senses and bodies are connected, and
are discussed together below. Comenius associates angelic senses with
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emotions, and concludes, ‘they are not unlike to our spirit which
perceiveth by organs’.98
Do Angels Have Freewill?

Early Christian communities developed stories of the fall of angels.
Explanations of the existence of evil exploited angelic freewill to
blame Satan for his fall and for the existence of evil in the world.
Medieval commentators agreed that angels had freewill; the problem
for them was then explaining why once angels had fallen they were
unable to redeem themselves, and why all angels who did not initially
fall managed to remain unfallen (Origen had argued that backsliding
was possible for all). Essential to these discussions was Augustine’s
argument that angels exercised their freewill with the assistance of
grace. This helped clear God of responsibility for sin, but in so doing it
risked impairing the exercise of freewill, especially among the fallen
angels denied grace. Peter Lombard developed an elegant solution to
this conundrum. Angels were perfect in innocence before their fall.
Some angels fell, those assisted by grace did not, in both cases ex
pressing their freewill. Those that turned to God (conversio) were
granted grace that enabled them to develop wisdom, merit, and
therefore glorification. Those who turned from God (aversio) were
confirmed in envy and hatred. Both retain freewill, but in order to
will towards good, the fallen angels would need the grace that had
been withdrawn from them. As God chooses not to change things,
they cannot reform. Meanwhile, the good angels are capable of
improving, and will not fall because of their further realization of
wisdom and glory.99
Aquinas reiterates much of this account, yet also diverges from it.
Though constitutive of intellect, freewill exists in gradations corre
sponding to angelic hierarchies: ‘In the higher angels free will exists
more nobly than in the lower, as does the power of intelligent
judgement.’ He repeats Lombard’s account of merited bliss and
glory, but places conversio and aversio in the first act of each angel:
they perform an act either of charity or of sin. Once they have chosen
charity, they cannot turn back. In their superior natures this revelation
of bliss freezes their state, and to choose to act against true order would
be to turn against their capacity for freedom, which is a logical
impossibility. Hence, the unfallen angels, unlike humans, cannot
backslide. ‘Freedom of choice, then, is greater in the angels who

cannot sin than in us who can.’ Yet this greater freedom leads to a
single, unalterable consequence. The same is true for the fallen angels,
for, unlike humans, ‘When an angel chooses freely he cannot go back
on his choice once it is made.’ Angels have freewill, but only actually
use it once, and even then there seems to be a precedent cause.100
Among Protestants there is a greater variety of positions, not least
because they explore the doctrine of predestination in relation to
angels, linking human and angelic freewill. In some hands, where
the subject is less delicately treated than in Lombard’s or Aquinas’,
angels do not seem to have freewill. Willet, for example, discusses
angelic freewill alongside human, and states that God chose not to
give grace to Adam to prevent transgression just as he chose not to
give it to the angels. Yet he gave it to some of the angels, and in a
predestinarian system this gift of grace to the elect that prevents the
otherwise unavoidable consequences of freewill does not look like
freewill at all.101 Salkeld says something very similar: he accepts the
Thomistic account, and adds that unfallen angels are so ravished by the
sight of God that they are irresistibly attracted to good.102 Freewill is
nonetheless necessary as a means of explaining the existence of evil.
Joseph Hall agrees that angels have freewill, but crosses Aquinas when
he declares that creatures can choose against the primary order: angels
‘suffered their will to dwell in an end of their own; and by this means
did put themselves into the place of God’.103 Henry More argues that
astrology must be false because it disallows the freewill of men and
angels.104
Comparisons between human and angelic freewill generate prob
lems. Wollebius restates a common Protestant view, but brings a
dilemma into focus:
Predestination is either of Angels, or of men.
The Predestination of Angels is that, by which God appointed to save eternally
some of them in their first happiness, and that in Christ their head: but to leave
others to themselves, and to punish them eternally for deserting their station
voluntarily; & this for the manifestation of the glory of his grace & justice.
The Predestination of men is that by which God appointed, out of the race
of mankinde created to his Image, but falling into sin voluntarily, to save some
through Christ eternally, but others being left to themselves in their own
misery, to damn eternally; and that for the manifestation of the glory of his
mercy and Justice.105
angelology 73
Wollebius is a sublapsarian: humans fall, and subsequently God offers

grace and redeems them. Predestination follows sin. However, in
accepting Aquinas’ and Lombard’s account of grace assigned to some
angels, Wollebius implicitly adopts a supralapsarian account in relation
to angels. They are predestined before their fall. Freewill looks even
more tenuous. Free angels are consistent while free humans are not;
this is evident to, though not directly discussed by any of, these writers.
Humans experience freewill in their actions, which are a mixture of
good and bad, whether they are elect or reprobate. Elect angels,
however, can only do good, and fallen angels can only do evil. It is
not simply that the ends are foregone, but the means are uniform with
the ends. The Protestant version of angelic freewill looks even less free
than the Scholastic view.
After this fast footwork it is a relief to read Robert Boyle stating that
angels do not have freewill; and Lawrence, whose Calvinism allows
him to admit that the fallen angels ‘have not the liberty of acting,
which the good Angells have’; and the anonymous Calvinist preacher
who describes angels as instruments that are ‘ordered and directed by a
higher cause’.106 Or Milton, who rejects predestination and in prose
avoids the question:
Some are of the opinion that the good angels are now upheld, not so much by
their own strength, as by the grace of God. . . . It seems, however, more
agreeable to reason, to suppose that the good angels are upheld by their
own strength no less than man himself was before his fall; that they are called
‘elect,’ in the sense of beloved, or excellent . . . 107
Why Did the Angels Fall?

The angels fell through pride or envy or lust.108 Explanations developed
through narrative elaborations on Scripture and pseudepigrapha. The
story of a fall through pride, antedating the creation of the world, came
from Origen via Augustine, based on interpretations of Isaiah 14: 12–15:109
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou
cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my
throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congre
gation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
St Jerome equated this Lucifer with Satan, the Hebrew common noun
for ‘adversary’. Once Satan had hypostasized into the embodiment of
evil (the Satan rather than a satan), a story became clear. An angel
rebelled against his maker through pride, and was punished in the pit.
Justin Martyr had already identified this Satan with the serpent who
tempted Adam and Eve. Reading the Bible with these identifications
in place, a story emerged of the fall of the angels, who subsequently
assisted humankind’s fall.110 Other passages in Scripture could be read
in the light of this story. The inferred narrative became the source of
religious truth.
Aquinas argued that angels only sin by pride and envy (he is reject
ing Augustine, who includes carnality in this list). The Devil’s sin was
not submitting to God, and instead desiring to exceed the limits of his
own nature and be like God, thinking he could claim this by justice
and through force. This desire of godlikeness is ambiguously pride
and/or envy.111 In Heywood’s poetic narrative of the war in heaven
pride is Lucifer’s sin, though it accompanies other sins, including envy:
In this puft Insolence and timp’anous Pride,
He many Angels drew unto his side,
(Swell’d with the like thoughts.) Joyntly these prepare
To raise in Heav’n a most seditious Warre.
He will be the Trines Equall, and maintaine,
Over the Hierarchies (at least) to raigne.112
We might hear an echo of this in the beginning of Paradise Lost:
his pride
Had cast him out from heaven, with all his host
Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equalled the most high . . . (PL 1. 36 40)
Salkeld puzzled over Augustine’s account, because he thought it

unlikely that angels should aspire to be equal to God, but he deduced
the following: ‘that the particular pride of the Angels consisted, in that
they being exalted with the contemplation of their beautie and per
fection, they would be exempt from all service, command, and sub
jection unto their Creator’. They desired therefore to be subject to
none in actual service and obedience, and their first sin was this
pride.113 In this reading, which grows out of Aquinas, pride and envy
of God are much the same thing. Wollebius will not commit himself
angelology 75
on the sin of the angels, though he states that it must have been
committed with pride.114
Richard Hooker describes the angels’ sin with compelling logic and
prose, independent of these scriptural elaborations: the sinning angels
must have thought of something other than God, and it could not have
been anything below them, which would have been evidently subor
dinate to God.
It seemeth therefore that there was no other way for Angels to sinne, but by
reflex of their understanding upon themselves; when being held with admir
ation of their owne sublimitie and honor, the memorie of their subordination
unto God and their dependencie on him was drowned in this conceipt;
whereupon their adoration, love, and imitation of God, could not choose
but be also interrupted. The fall of Angels therefore was pride.115
William Ames also thought that ‘it is most like’ that their first sin ‘was
pride’ (superbiam); and Willet, that it was ‘pride, in desiring to be like
unto God’.116
In most accounts, the sin of pride is associated with envy of God. In
another exegetical tradition, envy of humankind is the primal angelic sin.
In the fourth century pseudepigraphal text Vita Adae et Evae, Satan himself
speaks and gives his own motivation for his fall. He merits quoting:
The devil replied, ‘Adam, what dost thou tell me? It is for thy sake that I have
been hurled from that place. When thou wast formed[,] I was hurled out of
the presence of God and banished from the company of the angels. When
God blew into thee the breath of life and thy face and likeness was made in the
image of God, Michael also brought thee and made (us) worship thee in the
sight of God; and God the Lord spake: Here is Adam. I have made thee in our
image and likeness.’
And Michael went out and called all the angels saying: ‘Worship the image
of God as the Lord God hath commanded.’ And Michael himself worshipped
first; then he called me and said: ‘Worship the image of God the Lord.’ And
I answered, ‘I have no (need) to worship Adam.’ And since Michael kept
urging me to worship, I said to him, ‘Why dost thou urge me? I will not
worship an inferior and younger being (than I). I am his senior in the Creation,
before he was made was I already made. It is his duty to worship me.’
When the angels, who were under me, heard this, they refused to worship
him. And Michael saith, ‘Worship the image of God, but if thou wilt not worship
him, the Lord God will be wrath with thee.’ And I said, ‘If He be wrath with me,
I will set my seat above the stars of heaven and will be like the Highest.
And God the Lord was wrath with me and banished me and my angels from
our glory; and on thy account were we expelled from our abodes into this
world and hurled on the earth. And straightway we were overcome with grief,
since we had been spoiled of so great glory. And we were grieved when we
saw thee in such joy and luxury. And with guile I cheated thy wife and caused
thee to be expelled through her (doing) from thy joy and luxury, as I have
been driven out of my glory.[’]117
This story requires that the angelic fall took place after the creation of
man, on the sixth day or later, but before the human fall. It was not
widely held in seventeenth century Britain, but among those who
espoused it was the notable Hebraist John Lightfoot:
Now fell the Angels: for they seeing the honour and happinesse in which man
was created and set, and the Lord giving the Angels themselves a charge
concerning him to keep him in his wayes, and to be ministring spirits to
him for his good; some of them spited this his honour and happinesse, and
dispised this their charge and ingagement, and so through pride against the
command of God, and for envie at the felicity of man, they fell.118
The story makes Satan a more complex figure. The poet Thomas Peyton
also narrated it this way, telling how Lucifer ‘thought himselfe to equall
God on high, j Envies [humankind’s] fortune’, and seduces them.119
The third main tradition was the story of the watcher angels who
lusted after human women and thereby fell, a story based on Genesis 6:
1–4 and the book of Enoch. This interpretation depends upon the
identification of the ‘sons of God’ (bene ha’elohim) with angels (the
Septuagint translates this as aggeloi):
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and
daughters were born unto them,
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they
took them wives of all which they chose. . . .
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the
sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to
them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
These giants, or nephilim, were the offspring of this illicit union
between angels and women. The story helps explain human evil in
the form of these giants. This text, supported by the epistle of Jude and
2 Peter, was in turn elaborated in the book of Enoch, Jubilees, the
pseudepigraphal Testament of Ruben, and in exegesis, to provide a
full blown account of the fall in which angels are driven by lust for
women. While Enoch was not available in early modern Europe, the
tradition was extant in other texts and was widely known.120
angelology 77
The Enoch story was incompatible with Satan’s involvement in the

expulsion from Eden, and with the notion that angels were incorporeal
spirits, and for these and other reasons it was rejected in most Scholastic
and reformed theology.121 Instead, most commentators glossed ‘sons
of God’ as the children of the godly or the sons of Seth, and the
daughters of men as wicked women or the descendants of Cain;
though they acknowledged that elsewhere in Scripture ‘sons of God’
did indeed indicate angels. The giants were men ‘mightier then the usuall
sort’.122 In Paradise Lost Milton identifies the sons of God as godly men,
though in Paradise Regained Satan tells Belial the Enoch story.123 Willet
denounced the watcher angel mythology, associating it with Michael
Psellus’ unorthodox belief that angels had bodies and reproduced.124 The
tradition was frequently acknowledged, though usually to be dismissed.
Others devised more detailed accounts of the angelic rebellion. The
Protestant theologian Jerome Zanchius, for example, offered a variant
of the pride story, writing that the angels rebelled when the Incarna
tion was, perhaps incompletely, revealed to them.125 The Incarnation
distinguishes man, as Christ takes on human rather than angelic form
(some Protestants used this to argue that humans were above angels in
dignity). Resenting this slight to their status, some angels refused to
acknowledge Christ; this is a variation of the Vita Adae et Evae story, in
which envy of humans prompts sin. This version had some circulation
in seventeenth century Britain. John Bayly agreed that their sin was
pride, through which they refused ‘to adore the man Christ Jesus, when
that decree of the Incarnation was divulged, And let all the Angells of God
adore him’.126 Henry Lawrence also states something much like this: the
angels’ sin was opposition to Christ being made man, ‘that all standing,
all restauration was to be by God man, in which the Angelicall nature
was left out’.127 Milton’s Satan rebels out of resentment at the Son’s
promotion: though drawing on Zanchius and Lawrence, this is pecu
liar to Milton and pertains to his Arianism.
Many Protestants simply refused to resolve the question of the
angels’ first sin, which not only depended upon elaborate interpret
ation of Scripture or the authority of pseudepigrapha, and was un
necessary to salvation, but also relied on a curiosity into narrative
patterns. Thus Joseph Hall: ‘What were the particular grounds of
their detection and ruine, what was their first sin, it is neither needfull,
not possible to know’. Hall also recriminated the ancients for making
Lucifer into a devil, beyond what the texts would bear.128
Are Angels Differentiated in Sex and Do they Reproduce?

The giants of Genesis prompt these questions, to both of which the
answer is a clear negative. A distressed Adam asks in Paradise Lost: ‘why
did God . . . not fill the world at once j With men as angels without
feminine’ (10. 892–3). The number of angels is fixed, and they are
created and not begotten. They are spirits, and spirits do not multiply.
As one commonplace book compiler noted, ‘the Angell nature is not
nor can be multiplyed by propagation’.129 Ross infers that angels cannot
feel lust, because they have no bodies, and cannot beget, ‘for they have
no seede fit for procreation, because they feede not; for seede is a part of
our foode. Againe, if they could procreate children, they should be
distinguished in male and female; for both these must concurre in
procreation.’130 After the twelfth and thirteenth centuries angels were
consistently represented as androgynous in church decorations.131
White noted that angels had sometimes resembled young men with
wings ‘to note their incorruptible nature and agility in service’.132
Medieval theologians imaginatively described how incubi and suc
cubi could appear to reproduce with human witches by using virtual
bodies to transport human seed. These explanations assumed that
spirits were sexless and disembodied.133 There was, however, an occult
interest in angelic reproduction and seed. Heywood had read some
where that ‘Rabbi Avot Nathan a learned Jew, affirmeth, That Spirits
have three things in common with men, namely Procreation, Food,
and Death.’134 The said text only became available in Latin in 1654,
and it is unlikely that Heywood found a Hebrew copy.135 Those who
search could find the grotesque and prurient writings, or reports of
them, by Michael Psellus. To Agrippa the nephilim of Genesis were
strong and mighty men ‘procreated from the secret seed of the super
iors, whom they think were begotten by the mixture of Gods or
Angels with men’. After various classical examples of interspecies
miscegenation he notes that ‘more over Psellus is the Author, that
Spirits sometimes cast forth seed, from the which certain little creatures
arise’.136 The orthodox answer was, however, negative.
Do Angels Have Names?

The names given to angels in Scripture—seraphim, cherubim, arch
angels—were usually understood by Protestants, following Augustine,
angelology 79
to be names of offices. They are called ‘angels’ because they are

messengers; ‘shining stars’, because of their pure shining nature; ‘god’
because of their dignity and power; ‘watchers’ because of their sleep
less vigilance; and so on.137 They are a ‘host’, a common scriptural term
that emphasizes their numerousness and orderly character. Even
Calvin elaborated upon the metaphoric implications of these descrip
tors: he writes, ‘They are named armies, because they doe like a Gard
environ their Prince, and doe adorne and set foorth the honorable
shew of his majestie, and like souldiers they are always attending upon
the ensigne of their Captaine, and are ever so prepared and in readiness
to doe his commandements.’138 Milton’s heaven and his angels appear
at times to be organized along military lines.139 Meric Casaubon
complained of fantastical books in which castles were built in the air,
and ‘the heavens battered with great guns’; Milton would be very
culpable here.140 However, far from being heterodox, this picks out
and elaborates a prevalent theme in theology: as ministering spirits they
resemble an army, and like an army they pitch their tents in their
watchfulness. Hence, ‘they rejoice at our conversion, are Ministring
Spirits for our good, pitch their tents about us’.141 They are all called
mal’ach and aggelos, and hence angels, because they are messengers.
Colet writes: ‘Although the lowest spirits are, by a special name, called
Angels, yet inasmuch as their offices can be discharged by all the higher
ones (since a higher power can do all that a lower can) the names of the
lower are suitable to the higher, though those of the higher are by no
means so for the lower.’142 The names are only upwardly mobile. For
Heywood: ‘The name of Angell is a word of Office, not of nature,’ and
‘they are then onely to be stiled Angels, when any message is delivered
them to be published abroad’. ‘Arch Angeli’ are ‘Cheife Messengers.
And therefore they are character’d by particular names, as Michael,
Gabriel, Raphael, &c.’143 Individual names, according to Gumbleden,
are imposed only when they undertake ‘extraordinary business’.144
Scripture gives few ‘extraordinary’ names to angels. The canonical
books provide only Michael and Gabriel. Uriel appears in the apoc
ryphal 2 Esdras, and in the apocryphal book of Tobit, Raphael is named;
these are both second century bce texts, and the names are embedded in
other, pre Christian religious writings. Uriel, who figures prominently
with these more famous three in Paradise Lost, was thought to be one of
the seven Angels of the Presence, discussed below.145 Some would add
Lucifer to this list.146 Many other names appear in Hebrew writings,
especially the Zohar, and in Midrash. Seventy angels’ names were

commonly borrowed from The Book of the Angel Raziel. According to
the fifteenth century Hebrew Sefer ha Heshek, Metatron, who appears
in the Talmud and in pseudepigrapha, and is in some Midrashim the
greatest of the angels, has seventy six various names. Metatron is some
times identified with Michael or the prophet Enoch. Robert Gell refers
to Metatron in the feminine, and associates her with Michael and
Christ.147 More angels are named in Enoch and in the Testament of
Solomon, among Christian Gnostics and Church Fathers, including
Gregory, and in Pseudo Dionysius.148 Names were adopted and multi
plied in Christian cabbalistic traditions, which interested early modern
occult writers. Robert Fludd, for example, gives the names of the angels
who rule each of the nine orders, beginning with Metatron, who
governs the seraphim, through Zophiel, Zabkiel, Zadkiel, Samael,
Michael, Anael, and Raphael, down to Gabriel, who governs the angels.
Agrippa provides tables for calculating the names of the seventy two
angels. Gematria, a cabbalistic method of numerically interpreting the
Torah, gave power to these names. Later ritual magic ascribed special
potency to particular names.149 Perhaps both ultimately derived from the
Zoroastrian belief that to escape from this world by passing through the
spheres one had to recite the names of the angels that governed those
spheres. John Aubrey describes the ‘Berill’ or showstone of a Norfolk
minister, who, notwithstanding his vocation, called and conversed with
angels in it, which had the names Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel
inscribed around it. Other contemporary astrologers summoned these
same angels: perhaps their origins in Scripture provided them with a
veneer of religious orthodoxy as well as power.150 This occult tradition
fascinated Heywood, who names the angels governing the world
according to the regions of the zodiac: Raphael, Gabriel, Chamuel,
Michael, Adahiel, Haniel, Zaphiel, Malthidiel, Corona, Varchiel, and
many more. Belatedly he adds:
But since of these the Scriptures make no mention,
Far be it that the least of mine intention
Should be to create Angels.151
Most orthodox commentators resisted the urge to investigate names.
In Genesis 32: 29, after Jacob wrestles with an angel, he asks its name,
and is rebuked. This was understood as a general warning. The
Westminster annotators infer that the angel will not serve Jacob’s
angelology 81
curiosity. While Gabriel identifies himself to Zacharias (Luke 1: 19,

26), and ‘the Angel of the Covenant, Christ Jesus, had also a name
before his Incarnation . . . where he is named Michael’, it is not known
‘whether all the Angels have particular names, (which may be so if God
please, for he may call both Angels, and Starres by their names, Psal.
147. 4. in a literal sense)’.152 Names were given to the angels collect
ively, reflecting office, and individually, though these names were not
revealed, hence their power as occult knowledge.153
Why do God’s functionaries need names? While Michael is a
warrior, and Raphael a healer, and their names are used to identify
their attributes, the other angels of Scripture, and of exegesis, are
without personality or individuality. Hobbes altogether denied that
Old Testament angels were real beings.154 For most commentators
the undistinguished mass of angels were nonetheless individuals. The
reasoning came from Aquinas, who wrote that each species in the
material world is constituted by its form and its matter; in the imma
terial world, however, ‘each being of and by itself constitutes and
occupies a distinct degree in the scale of being’, so each angel is a
species unto itself.155 The English Catholic priest Matthew Kellison, in
a treatise on ecclesiastical hierarchy that commences with the premiss
of angelic hierarchies, puts it succinctly: ‘the Angelles are so different
in nature and perfection that there are not twoe of one sort and kind (as
there are of men and other creatures) but that everie one is distin
guished in nature and office from everie one, even from the highest to
the lowest’.156 This uniqueness is double edged: they are individuals,
but, lacking the shared characteristics of a species, they also lack the
elements of social and intellectual differentiation within a community
that would give them a quality approximating a human personality.
They are so entirely dividuated that they seem homogeneous.
Angels have personal names, though they may not matter a great
deal except to ritual magicians and Gnostics, but seldom have person
ality. Angels do not need to call each other by name as their commu
nication is direct and soundless. John Blenkow preached in 1639, ‘that
they have names in Heaven, may seeme improbable, in this respect,
that whilest they were on Earth, they should have names, in regard of
the weake capacity of humane Nature, who cannot otherwise or well
distinguish things but by their names’.157 Names, then, are a conse
quence of accommodation, fitted for human understanding, and not a
property of heaven. Nonetheless, humans use names to understand the
nature of heaven, seeking to identify by name angels that perform

specific duties.
For example: according to the pseudepigraphal book of Jubilees,
there is a group of angels known as ‘Angels of the Presence’. Jubilees
is a rewriting of Genesis and Exodus, partly narrated by one of these
Angels of the Presence. These were sometimes identified with the
‘seven holy angels, which present the prayers of the saints, and which
go in and out before the glory of the Holy One’, in the apocryphal
Tobit (12: 15), in which case they are seven in number. This revela
tion is given to Tobit by Raphael, who identifies himself as one of
these angels. They also appear to be identical with ‘the seven Spirits
which are before his throne’ in Revelation (1: 4; also 8: 2). There are
seven throne angels according to The Book of the Angel Raziel; and
twelve Angels of the Presence in another rabbinical tradition. Paul
also refers to those who stand in His Presence (2 Cor. 2: 17). In a
rabbinical tradition, however, there are four angels, and they are
equated with the animalistic angels of Ezekiel 1. The numbers four
and seven invite correspondences with other passages in holy writings:
there are either seven or four archangels, and lists of names of
archangels and the Angels of the Presence overlap. Having established
the existence of this group, Jewish and Christian commentators
sought to establish their duties. Why they were distinct? Was it simply
a matter of hierarchy? According to the Testament of Levi, one of the
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, they lived in the sixth heaven.
What are their names? Gabriel and Michael were usually added to
Raphael; Uriel was a possible fourth. Metatron was another candi
date.158 Arise Evans rhetorically asked, ‘who can tell which is the
Angel of Gods presence?’, but his scepticism was not universal even
among early modern Protestants.159 In the chapter on the special
government of angels in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton notes the
existence of seven particular angels ‘described as traversing the earth
in the execution on their ministry’, who are the eyes of God.160 In
Paradise Lost Uriel is:
One of the seven
Who in God’s presence, nearest to his throne
Stand ready at command, and are his eyes
That run through all the heavens, or down to the earth
Bear his swift errands over moist and dry,
O’er sea and land . . . (3. 648 53)
angelology 83
He does not identify the other six. Milton names nine angels in the epic,
and gives special status to the four in rabbinical tradition.161 Pordage’s
angels have no names. The interest in the Angels of the Presence is
orthodox, though associated with rabbinical traditions and the occult.
Are Humans Superior to Angels?

Angels are messengers; some take this to mean servants both to God
and to humans.162 They are nonetheless superior in nature to humans,
in respect of their being pure spirit. Augustine adds that they are
superior ‘in merit of life and in the weakness of our infirmity, because
we are miserably unlike them in will’.163 This account of human
inferiority shifted over the next twelve centuries. Scholastic theolo
gians suggested a more complex relationship in spiritual terms: Bona
venture writes that angels support humans, and that humans, through
their redemption, make amends for the fall of the angels, and that they
are thus in a sense equal.164 Aquinas argues that the distinction between
angels and humans in terms of the dignity of their natures is unbridge
able; however, it is possible for humans to merit equality with angels
through meriting great glory. In this sense, humans are ‘taken up’ into
the angelic orders, implicitly restoring their depletion by the angelic
fall.165 Humans are in several ways privileged: humans are given an
atonement; the angelic fall was irreversible because grace was forfeited;
Christ adopted human nature and not angelic. For some, particularly
in the seventeenth century, this raised humans above angels.166 The
German mystic Jacob Boehme insisted that ‘Man is higher dignified
than the Angels, if he continue in God.’167
Though the emphasis on human superiority had mystical and anti
nomian associations, some Calvinists and orthodox churchmen shared it.
Alexander Ross insisted that the angels are closer to the image of God in
nature, and humans closer than angels to the image of God in respect of
dignity; moreover, angels are ‘created for the use of man’.168 And Richard
Sibbes in 1638: ‘we are in Christ above Angels, advanced higher then
Angels . . . he did not take upon him the nature of Angels, but of men; and
as he hath advanced us above Angels, so his dispensation is, that those
glorious creatures should be our attendants for our good; and they distaste
not this attendance’.169 This elevation of humans was used to explain
the rebellion of angels. John Trapp offered a series of grounds on which
the saints were ‘above the Angels’, hedged with a cursory ‘some say’,
including the superiority of human nature and righteousness, and the

privileging of the saints in and through Christ. For Trapp angels are ‘meer
creatures’, things made for a limited purpose, whereas humans are the
centre of Creation.170 There is something unpleasantly triumphalist in
Trapp’s writing, as he exults in human superiority over a species of
spiritual creatures. Henry More characteristically tackles, without resolv
ing, the paradox that Christ should be both human and head of the angels,
when it would have been ‘more reasonable for God to have united
himself Hypostatically (as they call it) with some Angel then with Humane
nature’.171 He proceeds to wonder, humanely, if angels do not suffer too.
Lawson notes that the Incarnation exalts humans, though inferior, above
angels; yet he also recognizes that consorting with angels is a great
privilege:
They are above us, and we are a great Distance from them in respect of our
present Estate, yet some of them are very near us, though we do not see them,
nor speak unto them, nor familiarly converse with them; and they love us,
have a special care for us, and all of them are ministring Spirits for us, who shall
be Heirs of Salvation.
Though this is not human triumphalism, it suggests the extraordinary
arrogance that can be embedded in imagining a whole species and
society of beings made to serve humans, over whom Christ preferred
humans, and who will continue to serve humans despite a nominal
equality.172
There was a shift in the seventeenth century towards stressing the
superiority, through grace, of humans to angels. This may be a con
sequence of a greater theological emphasis on grace, and a reduced
emphasis on nature, or matter, as a measure of moral values. One effect
is to reduce the status of angels as superior beings sharing Creation with
man; they are humbled as humans become more central to providence.
What Do Angels Do?
Angels are God’s messengers and agents in the world. But what do
they actually do? Katherine Austen, who compiled a commonplace
book in 1664 with several pages on angels, identifies three purposes:
they serve and assist man, they bear messages, and they stand in God’s
presence.173 Most descriptions of angels briefly summarize their duties.
angelology 85
Calvin states simply that God uses them to execute his decrees,
proceeding to identify their labours according to their names in Scrip
ture.174 Gervase Babington suggests that angels have a work ethic: ‘hee
would not his Angels to wante what to doe, but made them minister
ing Spirites’.175 According to Joseph Hall, they praise God, order
Creation, especially protect humans, guarding, cheering, and healing
the elect.176 Though their name means ‘messengers’, their most im
portant function, in the history of Christianity, is to contemplate God,
and secondarily to support human prayer and devotion and to convey
illumination to humans. In the medieval period interactions with
humans began to eclipse divine contemplation.177 Later writing about
angels greatly diversifies their agency, assigning numerous activities.
First angels praise God: ‘it is the ministerie, office and work of
Angels’, wrote Urbanus Rhegius, ‘without ceasing, perpetually to
praise the Majestie of god, to preach his worde, and glorifie this our
God therein’.178 This praise is figured as singing, emphasizing its
aesthetic properties, and perhaps suggesting its continuous, ritualized
nature. When angels sing, they are praising God, and this is, like
angelic speech, a model for human praise of God. Their singing is a
model for the liturgy: ‘they begin the Antiphone, and teach us how to
sing’, preached John Wall in a sermon entitled ‘Angelorum Antipho
nia: The Angels Antheme’.179
Secondly, they are messengers and ambassadors. Rhegius writes,
‘They are also the Ambassadors of God in cheefe and most speciall
causes and affayres betweene God and men, to reveale and manifest the
ready good will and clemencie of God towardes men,’ citing the
appearance of Gabriel to Mary.180 The discernible bearing of messages
to humans was understood to be a thing of the past, as the age of
visitation by angels, together with miracles and prophecy, was over.
Nonetheless, angels continued to work, albeit invisibly, among hu
mans. They do not, in Protestant accounts, bear messages back to God.
As Willet writes, ‘the Angels doe report unto God the affaires of the
world, and the acts and gests of men, and so their supplications in
generall: but this they doe as messengers, not as mediators’.181
Thirdly, they are ‘ministering spirits’, working God’s business on
earth. Calvin writes that this is one of the few things known for certain.182
These ministrations comprehend a variety of business, intervening in
human affairs, guiding and protecting humans. Rhegius implies a high
degree of direct intervention and communication among them:
they have even amongst us & within us, their ministry and function, with
great faith and diligence doe they guide, direct, governe, and defende us: they
are present with us, helpe us every where, providently take care of us, and doe
obtaine for us, all things tending to the glorie of Christ, and even reconcile
him unto us, doo instill and beate into our minds his holie will, yea, doo call us
away, and plucke us backe from all those sinnes and vices which God hath
forbidden us, and which he abhorreth.183
Other Protestants would be more cautious about the extent of free

agency and intervention. Such ministrations exalt humans: in Paradise
Lost, Satan mocks those who would prefer to be ‘Ministering spirits’
than free beings, and proudly rejects service (6. 167–8).184 Christopher
Love asks why God uses angels to ministrate in this world when he
could do so without them, and answers: to show the reconciliation of
angels and humans after they fell out through sin and were reconciled
through the atonement; to declare his love to his people; because the
saints will repair the orders of angels, angels are willing to serve humans
on earth; and because evil angels tempt humans, good angels assist the
elect.185 Among these ministrations is providing succour. Protestants
removed angels from deathbed scenes, but most agreed that angels
could invisibly provide comfort, at least to the elect.186 Angelic min
istration is not only comforting, however. The angels that raze Sodom
(Gen. 19: 13) and the destroying angel sent to Jerusalem (1 Chr. 21: 15)
reminded commentators that the judgements of God that angels exe
cute are not only supportive. They are ministers of wrath as well as of
grace. Angels devastate.187
Fourthly, angels are witnesses. They watch human tragedies: hence
the tears of angels.188 They are also the ‘benign eyes of God’, hence
perhaps they are called watchers, watching humans, and watching God
in preparation for his commands.189 Milton describes angels watching
over Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost books 4 and 9. Henry Ainsworth
writes that angels are ‘beholders of our wayes & conversation, and
affected (after their spiritual manner) with the things they see in us’.190
Human actions have an audience, inspire emotions, and so are given
significance within a cosmic framework.
Fifthly, angels heal. The angel that annually touches the pool at
Bethesda (John 5: 4) endows it with healing powers. Fallen angels
spread disease, and angels bring cures. Angel magic sought to harness
this faculty.191 The angelic spells used to find cures in popular medi
cine, however, lay outside the limits of orthodoxy. John Patrick even
angelology 87
mocked the credence that Catholics gave to Raphael as a medicinal

angel.192
The question can be asked another way: What use are angels? or What
do humans do with angels? There is a functionalist perspective on what
angels do: it suggests that they help humans understand God and
understand themselves. They are a means of conceiving of order, and
a means, through analogy and differentiation, of conceiving of what it
is to be human. They are a way of shaping social behaviour. Joseph
Hall writes that ‘the life of Angels is politicall, full of intercourse with
themselves and with us’.193 It forms a pattern for imitation, and both
social commentators and theologians stressed that humans should be
more like angels. Though early modern Protestants would not have
described this role of angels in functionalist terms, they articulated it
through the language of imitation and of fellowship between humans
and angels. Ainsworth writes that, because angels are spirits, ‘the
fellowship between them and us is spiritual, to be learned out of the
scriptures, and discerned by faith not by eie sight’.194 Although there
could be no direct interaction between humans and angels in post
Incarnation times, saints (meaning here the elect or godly humans) and
angels were part of a real community.195 Cornelius Burgess, in his
systematic notes on angels, observed there were three uses for angels:
(1) to provide patterns of imitation, (2) to instruct men, and (3) to
provide humans with consolation.196
Conclusion
Despite the caution that Protestants expressed about going beyond the
immediate authority of Scripture, reformed writers wrote extensively
and imaginatively about angels. Modern emphasis on the visual im
agination, where Protestant artists were certainly less creative than
their Catholic counterparts, perhaps occludes this. Protestants ad
dressed many of the issues traditionally examined in writing about
angels, adapting them to their own soteriology and to transformations
in the understanding of natural philosophy. The impact of natural
philosophy on views of angels, and the ways in which angels consti
tuted thought experiments in natural philosophy, are discussed in
Chapter 11. Other topics outlined above are further developed
in other chapters. Some of the radical uses of angels are discussed in
Chapters 4 and 5. The relevance of angels to theories of representing

God is discussed in Chapter 6, while Chapter 7 considers the place of
angels in prophecy. Theological views of angelic communication and
virtual embodiment are explored in Chapter 12. The doctrine of
guardianship, and local guardians, are further explored in Chapters 9
and 13. The place of angels in the Protestant imagination are the
subject of much of the rest of this book. There was no single, unified
Protestant angelology, and angels were an area of conflict between
Protestants, but angelology did not disappear in the two centuries after
the Reformation.197 They were an extensively useful element in Prot
estant theology: a matter of doctrine, necessitated by fragments of
Scripture, a realm of immediate spiritual experience, a means of
rationally understanding the visible world, and an archive of social
memories.
4
A Stronger Existence
Angels, Polemic, and Radical Speculation,
1640–1660
Too many in these dayes have been wantonly busie to converse with Angels,
out of pride and curiosity, but the good Angels wil not be spoken with upon
those terms; or if they do speak, to be sure it will be no comfort to those
persons: for the Apostle by laying down a supposition, hath given us a
certainty, that the Angels will speak no other doctrine then he did. Therefore
such spirits as are intruders into things not seen, are vainly puft in their fleshly
mind, Col. 2. 18. how spiritual soever they seem to be.1
T hus wrote a group of Presbyterians headed by Edmund Calamy

in 1657. Over the preceding two decades, angels had seemed
increasingly present, and angel doctrine had been re examined and
rewritten. Angels furnished some with a means of articulating radical
politics and theology, while fear of Sadducism led others to restate the
commonplaces of Thomist angelology. Calamy felt surrounded by
those who claimed to converse with angels, those who were too
interested in the niceties of doctrine, and those who denied the spirit
world altogether.
If the Reformation had made angels seem more remote from every
day experience, this was reversed in the revolutionary decades. The
surge of interest in and writing about angels that took place around
1641 was the effect of several related trends: apocalypticism, an influx
of mystical theology, anxieties about the civil war and social and
political fragmentation, the challenge to ecclesiastical hierarchies, the
spread of radical theologies, and an increase in witch persecution.
These created an intellectual and soteriological environment in
which angels had a powerful valence, as metaphors and a means of
analysing and redescribing society. They also became a theme for

imaginative speculation, and poems by Andrew Marvell, Samuel Por
dage, Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Dryden need to be read
against this background.
Four things underpin this interest. First, angels are understood to be
immediate, our contemporaries, part of the experienced present, despite
Protestant warnings that angelic apparitions ended with the age of
miracles and prophecy. Secondly, a rise in millenarianism. Angels are
harbingers of the apocalypse: ‘And I saw an angel coming down out of
heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great
chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or
Satan, and bound him for a thousand years’ (Rev. 20: 1–2). Hence, a
mid seventeenth century English manuscript commentary on Revela
tion is richly illustrated with angels; such illustrations are uncommon in
Reformation England, but here angels fit the subject.2 Angels widely
figure in 1640s writing with apocalyptic tendencies, ranging from con
cerns about social disorder to belief that the thousand year rule of the
saints was imminent. These first two points concern knowledge and
understanding; the second two concern language and representation.
Thirdly, angels are traditionally a means of interpreting and charting
hierarchies. In a period when hierarchies are being challenged, they
provide an evidentiary language to re establish or reconfigure order.
Fourthly, angels can be used to redraw the heavens, to model man’s
place in the cosmos. The political and religious turmoil of the 1640s and
1650s invited writers to use angels to explain and intervene in social
turmoil. Angels are intermediate interlocutors and shapers of human
history, but they also furnish the language of politics and social order.
The outbreak of civil unrest and war in Britain witnessed the
increased permeability of angels into disparate realms of political and
religious knowledge. Angels appear in many varieties of writing in the
revolutionary years. For the purposes of mapping some of these shifts I
here suggest four modes: rhetorical or figurative angels, exegetical
angels, creaturely angels, and the angels of radical writing.3
Rhetorical Angels
Angels became polemically charged in 1641. The Root and Branch

movement against episcopacy provoked an extended debate on the
radical speculation 91
identity of the seven angels in Revelation. Though the use of angels

was topical and polemical, it was shaped by scholarship in theology and
natural philosophy. In Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted (1640) and
Humble Remonstrance (1641), Joseph Hall used John’s epistles to the
seven angels of the Asian Churches to justify church government by
bishops. Others agreed that the ‘angels’ to whom John addressed his
letters were the bishops who led the Churches, thereby distinguished
from the many presbyters in a church.4
This account was challenged by Smectymnuus (the pseudonym of
five Presbyterian divines), who argued that the term ‘angel’ was meant
collectively, not individually: ‘by Angell is meant not one singular
person, but the whole company of Presbyters’; the very name reveals
that it ‘doth not import any particular jurisdiction or preheminence,
but is a common name to all Ministers’, because all ministers are God’s
messengers.5 The word ‘angel’ is to be understood ‘not properly, but
figuratively . . . this phrase of speech, Angell for Angels, is common to all
types and visions’, and ‘one angel in the singular number’ sometimes
conceals ‘a multitude of Heavenly angels’.6 What is at stake is Church
hierarchy, but the Smectymnuans stray into a more general account of
angels: this is characteristic of the rhetoric surrounding angels in 1641
and after.
Milton, who would become the most famous English angelogra
pher, took up writing polemic during this debate. In Animadversions
upon the Remonstrant’s Defence Against Smectymnuus (1641) Milton
argues that angels are not unique offices in the Church but actions
performed by true pastors. He attributes to them a creative, evangelic
power: ‘there is no imployment more honourable, more worthy, then
to be the messenger, and Herald of heavenly truth from god to man,
and by the faithfull worke of holy doctrine, to procreate a number of
faithfull men, making a kind of creation like to Gods, by infusing his
spirit and likenesse into them, to their salvation’.7 In The Reason of
Church Government (1642) Milton argues that the seven angels are
antithetical to prelates, as they perform God’s work. Angels convey
true messages while prelates create false idols.8 In this role they also
inspire: he looks forward to his promised great literary work, which is
not to be a quick labour, ‘nor to be obtain’d by the invocation of
Dame Memory and her Siren Daughters, but by devout prayer to that
eternall Spirit who can enrich will all utterance and knowledge, and
sends out his Seraphim with the hallow’d fire of his Altar to touch and
purify the lips of whom he pleases’.9 The eternal spirit, the echo of
Isaiah 6: 1–7 suggests, is God, the true muse and inspirer of Milton’s
poem; the seraphim are figures for divine inspiration, but also inde
pendent beings. Unlike the figure of Phoebus, who touches the
doubting poet’s trembling ears in ‘Lycidas’, their role is consonant
with the theology of angels outlined in De Doctrina Christiana. They are
simultaneously figurative and real.10 Milton’s early writing about
angels concerns representation, iconoclasm, and the restorative
power of true ministry, and he thought of them in both poetic and
political terms, while rejecting their appropriation as a basis of Church
hierarchy.
Many others intervened in the debate. John White picked up the
theme in a parliamentary speech on the future of episcopacy, arguing
that ‘Angel is a name common to all Presbyters who are Christs
Messengers and Ambassadors.’11 The same argument was made in
1641 by an anonymous author who cited Joseph Mede’s Clavis Apoc
alyptica (1627) in support his case, and republished John Rainold’s 1588
pamphlet that challenged Richard Bancroft and queried the antiquity
of church government by bishops.12 Hence, the debate over episcop
acy is conferred with an account of the nature of angels, and both are
brought within the context of an apocalyptic reading of Revelation.13
There is only a short step to identifying bishops as associated with the
fallen angels of the popish Antichrist.
The late 1630s and 1640s were rife with apocalyptic sentiment. The
Scottish divine and mathematician John Napier, like Mede, thought
that Revelation described future history: he predicted in 1593 that the
year 1639 would see the Fall of the Roman Antichrist. The conclusion
of the Second Bishops’ War that year appeared to be a victory for
Presbyterianism over the attempted imposition of episcopacy on Scotland.
One 1641 pamphlet described this peace as the angel sheathing his
sword.14 King Charles’s defeat resulted in the calling of a Parliament
that quickly set about eradicating episcopacy root and branch. Earlier
apocalyptic works were republished and translated, and Revelation was
interpreted as a literal prophecy of present and imminent history; both
were read in radical, destabilizing ways.15 Learned apocalyptic exegesis
was disseminated in pamphlets. In February 1642 the House of Com
mons Committee for Printing ordered inspection of a translation of
Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica, which appeared in 1643.16 In The Apostasy
of the Latter Times (1641) Mede argued that the worship of angels and
saints in the popish Church was evidence that Rome was the Whore of
Babylon, and that her idolatry proved that the latter days were immi
nent.17 Johann Heinrich Alsted’s influential millenarian treatise The
Beloved City was translated into English and published in 1643. Thomas
Brightman’s Apocalypsis Apocalypseos (1609) was published in English in
Amsterdam in 1611 and 1615, and then in London in various forms in
1641 and 1644; Brightman identified the Church of England as the
lukewarm Laodicean Church, and the Scottish Kirk and Genevan
Church as the blessed and virtuous angel of the Philadelphians (Rev.
3).18 These works describe the role of angels in human history; they
undermine episcopal authority and encourage readers to see angelic
intervention in events taking place around them.
The events of the late 1630s and early 1640s moved British authors
to reread accounts of the apocalypse, and to reconsider the identifica
tion of the English Church with Laodicea. Hence the appearance of
dialogue pamphlets, including Napier’s Narration, or, An Epitome of his
Book on the Revelation (1641) and a verse pamphlet, Brightmans Predic
tions and Prophesies (1641), which insisted Brightman had prophesied
the events of recent years. Another dialogue pamphlet of 1641
describes a conversation between a London citizen and a Puritan
minister, showing how Brightman’s account of the angels of the
seven churches has been fulfilled by the Thirty Years War.19 The
minister recalls, with sadness, the days when Martin Marprelate ‘dealt
somewhat roundly’ with the Angel of the English Church; the eager
ness of the people for these writings indicates the low esteem in which
the episcopacy are held. Marprelate was the pseudonymous author of a
series of attacks on Elizabethan bishops and Church government
published surreptitiously in 1588–9; his name was a byword for anti
ecclesiastical polemic and popular pamphleteering. The citizen, more
up to date with worldly things, reports that
in London there is much talke of a Woman who cals her selfe by the name of
Margery Mar Prelate, who either makes or prints Bookes, and as you say, hee
dealt roundly with them, so I can assure you doth she, and you would admire
if you knew how greedy men are of those Bookes, and are much bought up in
London, by which it is more then manifest that our Bishops and Prelates are very
much despised . . .
Margery Marprelate, the self conscious successor to Martin, authored

and printed pro Covenanting pamphlets from 1640.20 The pamphlet
asks to be read in two contexts: first as a topical, didactic intervention

in the maelstrom of print; secondly, as an intervention in the historical
tradition of anti ecclesiastical scholarship, seeking to validate the
judgements of that tradition.21
The debates of 1640–1 intensified the topical relevance of the figura
tive and doctrinal use of angels. For many pamphleteers they were a test
of confessional difference: one’s faith in angels or scepticism about the
extent of true knowledge of them marked the distinction between the
Protestant and Catholic faiths. The Covenanter Robert Baillie attacked
the Book of Common Prayer for its similarities to the Roman Catholic
liturgy, noting as one example the ‘Angelike Hymne’, ‘Gloria in excel
sis Deo’.22 The Westminster Assembly’s Protestation (1643) complained
that the Prayer Book affirmed the existence of archangels, and that
Michael is a created angel.23 The parishioners of St Giles in the Fields
petitioned in 1641 against the Laudian prebendary of Westminster
William Heywood for his popish doctrines, citing in evidence his
granting a licence to a Catholic book that encouraged praying to ‘thy
good Angell’. Heywood was ejected and imprisoned, and the petition
was printed as a pamphlet, apparently with the patronage of Parliament’s
Committee for Religion.24 A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny (1641),
a substantial tract documenting the persecution of William Prynne, John
Bastwick, and Henry Burton, proclaimed, ‘Such a spectacle both to men,
and Angels, no age ever saw before.’25 Angels stood alongside men as
witnesses to present history.
Angels were prominent in anti Catholic polemic in the early 1640s.
The pamphlet Seven Arguments Plainly Proving that Papists Are Trayterous
Subjects to all True Christian Princes (1641) describes the elaborate shows
of piety mounted by Jesuits to facilitate the assassination of rulers,
among them the ‘Raviliack’ (Henry IV’s assassin), who undergoes a
mock religious ceremony in which he is presented with a knife and
blessed with prayers and invocations: ‘Come Cherabims, come Ser
aphims, and highest Thrones that rule, come blessed Angels: yea,
blessed Angels of charitie, come and fill this holy Vessell with glory
and eternitie’.26 He is set before an altar with a picture showing the
angels lifting to heaven another assassin. The pamphlet at once depicts
popery in a bloody light, arguing against its toleration in Protestant
monarchies, while also blackening by association the religious rites of
episcopacy. In another 1641 dialogue pamphlet, Sions Charity towards
her Foes in Misery, a London citizen and a country gentleman discuss
whether it is appropriate to describe Parliament’s enemies as ‘infernall

Spirits’ (and Laud, implicitly, as ‘Great Belzebub, that Prince of dev
ils’), language, the citizen reports, rife on booksellers’ stalls.27 The
gentleman insists that ‘Michael the Archangell strove against the
devil, and disputed about the body of Moses’ in Jude 9, and yet used
no ‘cursed speaking’ or ‘railing accusation’, relying on God to do the
rebuking; Michael sets an example for human conduct.28 In The Down
Fall of Anti Christ (1641), the Nonconformist John Geree shows that
angels and ministers will bring down the papal Antichrist, and, impli
citly, episcopacy, by preaching.29 An anonymous 1641 pamphlet, Old
Newes Newly Revived, mocks the exile of two royal courtiers with a
woodcut depicting them as winged angels flying the country. John
Taylor’s pamphlet The Brownists Conventicle satirizes the independent
preacher Samuel Eaton by placing apocalyptic arguments about angels
and episcopacy in his mouth:
And there was a battell in heaven, Michael and his Angels fought against the
Dragon, &c. Grace & peace be multiplied. This Text dearly beloved brethren,
and most dearly beloved sisters, may not unproperly be applyed to these
present times. . . . By this Michael and his Angels in my Text, is meant one
particular Church, and peculiar Church . . . I say unto you againe brethren,
wicked Angels are the Bishops Deanes, Arch Deacons, Prebends, non resi
dents, which live without the care and charge of soules . . . 30
The crudeness of the argument invites ridicule. During 1641 angels

acquired a newly forceful political currency; particularly associated
with independent allegiances, they were part of the religio political
language used to discuss history, revelation, and church government.
One 1642 pamphlet shows the rhetorical power of angels that
develops out of the anti ecclesiastical context. Three Propositions of the
Angels of Light, With Three Solutions Therein Considerable is anonymous:
no author, printer bookseller, or place of publication is identified
within its pages. It does not appear in the Stationers’ Register, nor
other official papers. The twenty eight page pamphlet seems to have
passed without comment and made little or no impact; only two copies
survive today. The three propositions are made in prose that resists
interpretation. For example:
One thing considerable, though there be a neere affinity with Angel nature
and working as created of God in power and will sustained of God in Christ,
subordinate to his will glory and pleasure, yet in their nature though spirits and
glorious creatures, have some acts and works in extraordinary wayes, to

accomplish as God appoints and sends them forth and set them about to
doe, wherein somethings extraordinarily have beene done by them by Gods
appointment, in one instant it may be seene in the 2 Kin. 19. 35. and herein
also they agree with all their fellow creatures created of God to be, and worke
in and after the will and good pleasure of God . . . 31
The contorted, non idiomatic syntax suggests a poorly educated

author. Alternatively he or she may be reluctant to express his or her
message plainly, or may be a native of another Protestant country,
most likely the Netherlands or Germany, wrestling with the language.
There are, most unusually in writings about angels, no references to
previous scholarship. Cautiously expressed, the propositions are: first,
God made the angels; and thirdly, that angels work in the world
through Christ’s light, and in doing so reveal God’s glory. The second
proposition, the central theme of the book, is more challenging: there
are two kinds of angel, those considered at the beginning of Creation,
and those who are sent among us, ‘Heavenly and Church Angels’. The
phrase ‘Church Angels’ may suggest pastors, in which sense John
Donne uses it his Easter Day 1622 sermon, but this author has a
mystical meaning.32
Though the author conventionally rejects angel worship and dec
lares that fallen angels cannot part from sin, some of the angel doctrine
is idiosyncratic. The passage cited from 2 Kings describes an angel of
the Lord slaying 185,000 Assyrians in one night. Usually interpreted as
evidence of the astonishing power of angels, this author represents the
action as performed ‘extraordinarily’, as if with powers conferred by
God for the occasion, rather than by the angel’s natural might. More
arresting is the account of the nature of angelic knowledge, which
distinguishes between the experimental knowledge available to the
two kinds of angels:
Some such glory and excellency the Angels in the first sort of Angels, cannot
partake of, as might bee largely made out in the second and third Chapter of
the Revelation, and will in severall particulars shew it forth, in what Christ will
communicate to those angels, as to eat of the tree of life, when angels of the
first sort we minded were at the first, in that perfect glory wherin they abide.33
Because of original sin humans attain an additional kind of knowledge.

The author denies the scriptural origins of episcopacy, suggesting that
the seven angels belong to the ‘church of Christ mysticall’. These
angels, ‘spiritualized natures in light and knowledge’, operate in a

different cognitive realm, separate from heaven. These are not crea
turely angels, with senses and agency, but remote and abstract spirits.34
Angels walk among us. We are surrounded by angels of light, in ‘the
garments of men’, and angels of darkness, who can disguise their sin,
‘though they may trans form themselves into Angels of light, but
never into the light of the Angels of light, no!’35 It is the reader’s
duty to distinguish between them. At times the prose threatens to
crumble into religious ecstasy:
this spiritual sightednesse will be very usefull to those that have it in the day
and time of the Angells sounding forth of God and Christ [i.e. the last days], to
fulfill his will and worke: usefull in freeing from that darknesse which covers
the wicked, who cannot away with Angell nature nor working, it is so hot and
fiery an approach of God in these Messengers, they will allow of nothing but
what is of God according to the truth in Christ.36
Though the author never quite sounds like Jacob Bauthumley—who

similarly employs the rhetoric of light and darkness, finding the key to
Creation immanent in humans—the self dissolves into spiritual out
pouring, and the voice moves from explication towards prophecy.37
The work is a symptom of the turmoil in publishing and politics at
the beginning of the 1640s; it is an obscure statement on soteriology
and a gloss on fragments from Revelation published as a pamphlet
amidst the urgent newsbooks, satires, and polemics of 1642. It conveys
some sense in the context of contemporary pamphlets that bear witness
to an apocalyptic moment and assume a non learned form, and it is
unlikely that Three Propositions could have been written or published in
England before 1641.38 The account of angels of light implicitly brings
the conflict between light and darkness to the immediate present.
While the author’s exegetical point is subtle, there is a starker message:
the angels of light and of darkness are real and among us. The reader
must identify them, and decide which side he or she is on. In 1642 this
was a bleak message, disclosing both ecclesiastical and political crisis.
Angels also played an increasing role in political argument. They
were witnesses to and moral judges of political events. Angels, and the
right to say what they are and what they do, became part of challenges
to and defences of authority. Arguing against proposals for an ‘accom
modation’ between the warring sides in the spring of 1643, one
pamphleteer warns: ‘all the Powres in Heaven and Hell are parties
here, and offended greatly: Michaell and his Angells, Belzebus, and his
Angells’.39 The war is a struggle between good and evil. A broadside
reporting a royalist conspiracy, The Malignants Trecherous and Bloody
Plot Against the Parliament and Citty (1643), describes Michael and Satan
struggling for ‘Sions safety’. The angels are invisible, however, and do
not appear in the engravings.40 Other pamphlets remind their oppon
ents that angels witness actions here on earth, and will be present when
sinners are sent to eternal confusion.41
A pro Parliament pamphlet of 1643 contended that the king would
be safer at Whitehall, under ‘Angelicall protection in the way of his
Kingly office and duty’ than in the hands of the ‘Dammees’.42 This
nickname for cavaliers alludes to their blasphemous swearing; its full
force relies on the belief that angels and devils walk among us. Angels
guarantee, figuratively and through their interventions, an orderly
creation. The Necessity of Christian Subjection (1643) used angels to
justify absolute monarchy: because kingship goes back to Adam just
as ‘the angels and those of Heaven, had their beginning from God by
Creation’, and because monarchy alone is ‘an Idea or resemblance of
Gods government in Heaven’.43 A Discovery of the Rebels (1643) argued
that ‘the King is the highest of men, and yet but a humane creature, as it is
in the Greek, not a God, nor a creature Angelicall’, inferior in a linear
hierarchy.44 The author of Peace, Peace, and We Shall Be Quiet (1647)
writes that ‘as the world hath one God, so should a Kingdome be
governed by one King, as Gods Substitute . . . Amongst the Angels
there are distinctions, as Principalities, Powers, Thrones, Dominions, and
Michael an Archangel’.45 Edward Symmons laments that ‘Hells own selfe
is broake loose into’ England, and implicitly compares Parliament’s
rebellion with the fall of Lucifer and his angels. Mercurius Pragmaticus in
April 1649 also described the rebels as ‘the Devills Agents on Earth, and
like the Apostate Angells in Heaven, [they] do perswade themselves
(being promoted by a spirit of presumption) that they equalize the
highest’.46 Conversely, Maximes Unfolded (1643) repeatedly uses angels
as analogies to argue that a king’s power must be constitutionally
limited.47 A broadside elegy for John Pym, the parliamentary leader
who died in 1643, claimed that had angels been as good as him they
would not have fallen, and it imagined him ‘translated from the House
of Commons, to the Upper House of Glory, and Parliament of Angels
in Heaven’.48 In 1649 Richard Arnway imagined angels in heaven
celebrating Charles I’s union with the Son.49
More common in the pamphlets of this period, however, is the

presentation of the living or deceased in hell, conversing with Charon
or Machiavelli.50 Parliaments were usually diabolical rather than heav
enly; the Parliament of Hell became a recurrent motif in royalist satire.
In these satires Satan holds a parliament and plans to foment dissent and
rebellion; the device, with a long literary history, works as an explan
ation of recent history, but also reflects allegorically upon the Long
Parliament.51 Other pamphlets suggest that the Devil is prompting the
opposition—clergy, Presbyterian forcers of conscience, royal partisans,
rebels—often disguised as an angel.52 One 1648 newsbook refers to the
‘Westminster Divells’ and in particular to ‘Laurance Lucifer, author of
their Rebellion, who for his pride was throwne downe to Hell, and
they for their presumptuous insolence I feare, will never go to
Heaven’, perhaps alluding to Henry Lawrence MP, who had recently
published a large treatise on angels.53
That the Devil was able to transform himself into an angel of light
was commonly cited Scripture,54 but for the most part these satires and
polemics do not get caught up in exegesis, and, while observing its
fundamental principles, pay minimal attention to the details of angel
doctrine. Their use of angels is primarily figurative or rhetorical, to
interpret a human struggle in terms of good and evil. Their significance
is not purely allegorical, however: they presuppose belief in the
immediate reality of the angelic world. The rhetorical deployment of
angels relied on perceived reality, that angels are around us, that they
are moral witnesses, that they are good and evil. The political language
worked because its metaphors were grounded in a shared understand
ing of the relationship between the seen and unseen world; but it
remained easier to think with demons than with angels.
Exegetical Angels
Scriptural annotations and schematic treatises constituted a second

mode of writing about angels that was energized during the 1640s.
Church reform and millenarianism gave some impetus to these more
sustained, doctrinal expositions. The Westminster Assembly of Div
ines, commissioned by the Long Parliament to define a new religious
settlement, produced a collaborative set of annotations on both Testa
ments in 1645, and an expanded version in 1651. In part because of this
there followed a cluster of scholarly works, including John Lightfoot’s

biblical chronology, The Harmony, Chronicle and Order, of the Old
Testament (1647), John Trapp’s A Commentary or Exposition upon all
the Epistles, and the Revelation of John the Divine (1647), and his A Clavis
to the Bible, or, A New Comment upon the Pentateuch (1650), Edward
Leigh’s Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650) and Annotations on
Five Poetical Books of the Old Testament (1657), Henry Hammond’s A
Paraphrase, and Annotations upon all the Books of the New Testament
(1653), John Richardson’s supplement to the Westminster Annotations,
Choice Observations and Explanation upon the Old Testament (1655), John
White’s A Commentary upon the Three First Chapters of the First Book of
Moses Called Genesis, published posthumously in 1656, and many
sermons and commentaries on particular scriptural texts. These express
doctrines about angels while interpreting Scripture: whether angels
adopt bodies, whether they digest, whether the angels in Revelation 12
and 20 are Michael or Christ.55
In addition the revolutionary decades saw the publication of English
editions and translations of a number of systematic theologies, includ
ing William Ames’s Medulla Theologica (1628; London edition, 1630),
translated as The Marrow of Sacred Divinity Drawne out of the Holy
Scriptures (1642). Johannes Wollebius’ Compendium Theologiae Christianae
(1626; London edition, 1642) was partly translated by Alexander Ross
as The Abridgement of Christian Divinity in 1650.56 These were works
that shaped Milton’s systematic theology, De Doctrina Christiana, which
discusses angels as aspects of Creation and of divine government.57
Milton read Ames and Wollebius in Latin: the publication of English
translations of these treatises points to a growing audience untrained in
Latin and theology yet interested in accounts of Creation and cosmic
administration. These accounts are very different from the popular
practical divinity of Arthur Dent, William Perkins, or Richard Baxter.
The development of a popular appetite for systematic theology is
suggested by a manuscript headed ‘This Booke Containes in it the
matter of severall conferences att Mr Paines Among some of ye
inhabitants of Stortford [in Hertfordshire] about those fundamentall
truths that are necessary to bee knowne and practiced by every one
that would bee saved.’ Stortford’s citizens began this collaborative
work on 1 January 1655, and recorded a series of questions and answers
that combined practical and theoretical divinity, from proofs of God’s
existence to ‘How wee can prove that there is A devine decree
concerning Angells and men before the world.’58 Their enquiries

reflect the contemporary appetite for new and diverse printed mater
ials, but perhaps also the promise of the coming millennium.
This exegetical writing about angels is characteristically focused on
known doctrinal truths, rather than ecclesiastical or political argument.
Much of it appears in expository works, however, to which angel
doctrine is incidental: authors from diverse theological positions are
diverted into offering a consistent and sustained account of angelic
actions. John Trapp supplemented his 1647 Commentary or Exposition
with ten sets of ‘common places’, including five pages on angels that
run through the usual exegetical topics, including hierarchies and
angel worship, and observes, ‘if the Theology for Angels were written,
we should need another Bible: the creation and government of Angels
containing as great variety of matter, as doth the religion of man
kinde’.59 In the early seventeenth century Henry Ainsworth wrote a
series of learned commentaries on Old Testament books; one rep
rinted around this time was his The Communion of Saints: A Treatise of
the Fellowship that the Faithfull Have with God, and his Angells, and with
One an Other, originally 1607, reprinted in Amsterdam in 1640 and in
London in 1641, which outlines the duties of angels as heavenly
messengers and warriors, their relationship with Christ, their interest
in humans, and the error of angel worship.60 William Jenkyn’s for
midably detailed Exposition of the Book of Jude (1652) discusses angels in
passing, but also devotes a discrete section to a systematic angelology.61
John Blenkow’s tract Michael’s Combat with the Divel, or, Moses his
Funeral (1640) uses Jude as the basis for discussing angelic hierarchies,
idolatry, and angelic speech. The Laudian Joseph Hall’s The Great
Mysterie of Godliness (1652) includes a treatise entitled ‘The Invisible
World’, which outlines a systematic account of angels, their number,
hierarchies, actions, knowledge, apparitions, and the respect humans
owe them. Christopher Love, executed for treason in 1651, wrote a
treatise entitled ‘The Ministry of Angels’ that was included in a
posthumous collection edited by a group of Presbyterian ministers
who wanted to preserve Love’s memory but also to combat the spread
of angel worship and belief in guardian angels.62 Robert Dingley’s The
Deputation of Angels, or, The Angell Guardian (1654) is a sustained
defence of the notion of angelic wardship—many Protestants retained
a version of this, as Chapter 9 shows—but digresses to discuss a wide
range of topics.
The Westminster Assembly’s annotations were a direct consequence

of the religious controversies of the 1640s. However, it would be wrong
to infer that these were radical or apocalyptic writings: instead they were
the routine business of learned exegetes, accelerated by the Revolution.
This is not the case with Henry Lawrence’s Of our Communion and Warre
with Angels, the most sustained piece of writing on angels and the only
systematic angelography produced in the 1640s and 1650s, which can be
seen as central to the revolutionary moment. Lawrence was a Baptist,
with unusual though not heterodox beliefs about angels, who moved
from exile in the 1630s to the nub of political power in the 1650s, and
was an acquaintance of Milton. His book was initially published with
two title pages in 1646, one with no imprint (generally assigned to
Amsterdam), the other printed for the London radical bookseller Giles
Calvert; it reappeared as An History of Angells Being a Theological Treatise,
in 1649 and 1650, both printed by Matthew Simmons, but with two
different booksellers, William Nealand and Thomas Huntington
respectively; and finally, it appeared in 1652, as Militia Spiritualis, or,
A Treatise of Angels, printed by Simmons for John Blague and Samuel
Howes. The five different title pages cover the same set of sheets: there
was in fact only one edition and it was printed by Matthew Simmons for
Giles Calvert; when it failed to sell, other booksellers took it over, with
Calvert’s agreement, and Simmons printed new title pages.63 The asso
ciation with Amsterdam originates with George Thomason, who wrote
this on the title page of his copy.64 Simmons printed seven of Milton’s
prose tracts between 1643 and 1650; his son would print a more famous
book about angels which also failed to sell quickly, Paradise Lost.65
Milton and Lawrence were using the same printer around the same
time, and later Milton would work for Lawrence, when the latter, an
MP since 1646, became a member of the Council of State in 1653.
Milton would write a sonnet for his friend Edward Lawrence, Henry’s
son; and Peter Heimbach would write to Milton in 1657 asking him to
intercede with Lawrence senior on his behalf. Perhaps there was already
an association between the two men.66
Lawrence’s Communion and Warre with Angels offers an extended
account of the being and offices of both fallen and unfallen angels.
It is presented as an exploration of Ephesians 6: 11–18: ‘Put on the
whole armour of God; that ye may bee able to stand against the
wiles of the devill. For wee wrestle not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the
darkness of this world, against spirituall wickedness in high places,

&c.’ The text is an undivided body of continuous prose covering
the central topics of angelology: corporeality, apparitions, diges
tion, speech, guardianship, modes of angelic knowledge and cog
nition, the power of angels to act in the world, and angelic
election and reprobation; it also contains much practical divinity.
The ‘panoply’ (full armour) of Ephesians occasions this meditation,
but also leads to a militant view of spiritual combat, of salvation,
and of life as a struggle between good and evil. Lawrence had spent
some of the previous decade overseas, concerned about religious
persecution, and his impetus to study angels probably had millen
arian as well as soteriological origins.
Despite poor sales, Lawrence’s book was recognized as authorita
tive, or at least authoritatively Protestant. Various writers cited it in
print and court proceedings.67 It offered an accessible if unoriginal
summary of reformed views on angels written by someone in polit
ical authority; it reveals that angels were a pressing, if not always
doctrinally controversial, theme in the 1640s. Lawrence’s other major
work concerned baptism, a topic equally open to violent and polar
ized views of salvation and diabolical operation in the world, and
which raised more tempers, but which was less susceptible to being
used as a starting point for a general and extended reflection on
Creation.
The impetus behind these writings is diverse, but all venture into
speculative territory in the course of elaborating an argument or
body of knowledge which touches upon angelology. This is explicit
in another translation: Johann Amos Comenius’ Physicae ad Lumen
Divinum Reformatae Synopsis (1633), published in English as Naturall
Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light, or, A Synopsis of Physicks (1651).
This arresting work of systematic exposition seeks to unite experi
mental knowledge, reason, and the revealed knowledge of Scripture.
Comenius admires Francis Bacon’s attempt to create a universal and
rational framework for observed natural philosophical knowledge,
but, influenced by the encyclopedism and millenarianism of Johann
Heinrich Alsted, argues that the process could be accelerated through
admitting revealed knowledge. He offers means of finding a har
mony between natural philosophy and faith in the literal truth of
Scripture.68 The final chapter of this manifesto he devotes to angels,
for reasons he makes plain: ‘We joyn the treatise concerning Angels
with the Physicks; because they are also a part of the created World,
and in the scale of creatures next to man; by whose nature, the
nature of Angels is the easier to be explained.’69 Many in the course
of the seventeenth century linked the natural philosophical and
theological properties of angels, but Comenius is unusual in the
clarity with which he indicated their intellectual usefulness. Come
nius’ affirmations are for the most part traditional: he discusses
angelic numbers, senses, assumed bodies, strength, movement, and
knowledge. In two matters he is imaginative: first, the extent to
which he makes explicit his ambitions to unify reason, natural
philosophical knowledge, and scriptural exegesis, in doing which
he discovers that angels are a necessary object of contemplation and
explication. Secondly, and like Milton, he briefly muses on angels’
experience of their senses, as if it has occurred to him to reflect upon
what it might feel like to be an angel.70
Visible and Creaturely Angels
In much scholarly work and often in figurative and political uses,

angels were remote, textual creatures. Contact with angels, especially
good angels, was uncommon; there are more sceptical and satirical
accounts of visions than sympathetic ones. Angelic visitations were
understood to have ceased. As Henry Lawrence wrote, God ‘would
have us walke in the spirit, and converse more with the spirit then
formerly . . . wee have faith enableing us to converse with the Angells
in a way more spirituall’.71 However, some did have visions, and a
few, not all of them religious enthusiasts, did speak with angels.
Angelic communication increased in the 1640s, though the increase
may be exaggerated by the invisibility of earlier, occult traditions.
This constitutes a third mode of writing about angels: ‘creaturely’
writing, based upon actual sighting of and communication with other
beings.
In the tense atmosphere of the 1640s a number of angels appeared as
portents, such as the armies in the skies allegedly seen after the battle of
Edgehill, the first major military encounter of the civil war. The editor
of the pamphlet A Great Wonder in Heaven (1642 [1643]) introduces
fallen angels as a means of understanding the portents: he begins by
reflecting on the history of apparitions,
by which it is evidently confirmed, that those legions of erring angels that fell
with their great Master, Lucifer, are not all confined to the locall Hell, but live
scattered here and there, dispersed in the empty regions of the ayre as thicke as
motes in the Sunne, and those are those things which our too superstitious
ancestors called Elves and Goblins, Furies, and the like,
such as those that appeared to Macbeth (his source could be Shakespeare
or Holinshed). He reports the repeated sighting of the ‘infernall
Armies’ in the sky, confirmed not only by local dignitaries but by
officers of the king’s army who recognize some figures, ‘distinctly
knowing divers of the apparitions, or incorporeall substances by their
faces, as that of Sir Edmund Varney, and others that were there slaine; of
which upon oath they made testimony to his Majestie’.72 One 1648
pamphlet, Strange Predictions Related at Catericke in the North of England:
By one who saw a vision, and told it himselfe to the company with whom he
was drinking healths; how he was struck, and an Angel appeared with a Sword,
combines news with an admonition delivered to a drunk man by an
angel, after which a neighbour runs around in a devil costume. The
mocking pamphlet warns of the dangers of neutralism.73 In 1652
Joseph Hall scorned a vision of an angel ‘in a visible form, with a
naked sword in his hand’ descending on an altar and prophesying
England’s destruction.74 Hall believed in the reality of the spiritual
world, but imaginary visions were more likely to harm than benefit
true belief. Another wonder pamphlet, about a speaking ‘Man fish’ in
the Thames in 1642, compares the prodigy to ‘an Angel sent to guard
this Kingdome . . . so debonarie and full of curtesie’.75 Angels were
synonymous with providential warnings and protection, though
were often treated sceptically or satirically.
Angels played a part in conversion narratives and visionary experi
ences. Anna Trapnel’s account of her spiritual revelations of 1642
describes a vision of an angel, an outward, sensible vision that speaks
and comforts her inwardly.76 Another prophet, Mary Cary, asserted
that the regicide only took place because of the support of ‘thousands
of Angels’, invisible angels unfortunately for the regicides.77 Elizabeth
Poole, called to prophesy for the army’s Council of Officers in
December 1648, may have seen angels in John Pordage’s house in
the following months.78 Anne Green, wrongly condemned for in
fanticide in Oxford in 1651, had visions of angels foisted upon her.
Several news reports and pamphlets of her story were published after
she providentially survived hanging, one reporting that a physician
ushered the women around her away, fearing they might ‘suggest
unto her to relate of strange Visions and apparitions’. Nonetheless,
and perhaps at this hint, one derivative and sensationalized pamphlet
ornamented her story with a vision of paradise and ‘4. little boyes
with wings, being four Angels’.79 Angels—real, immediate angels,
that visit and speak to people and visibly act in the world—are
turned into gossips’ fantasies.
Angels do act in the world, but invisibly. Like providence they need
to be discovered in patterns of events. Looking at the stars’ predictions
for 1644, the astrologer William Lilly wrote, ‘it may be feared that God
hath sent downe into our English Court and Common Wealth, that
destructive and Martiall Angell, which incited the enemies of God to
destroy each other’.80 According to Lilly and others, angels interfere in
human affairs (sometimes fouling the predictions of astrologers).
A belief in angels as beings who directly intervene in contemporary
events using their own power underpins other kinds of texts, which
we might be tempted to read metaphorically or polemically. Arise
Evans’s pamphlet The Voice of Michael the Archangel, To his Highness the
Lord Protector (1654) describes Oliver Cromwell’s riding accident on 29
September 1654, St Michael’s day, as an intervention by the angel.
Michael is the angel the Lord promised to send to deliver the English,
Evans writes, and the accident must be his work (he appeared before
the horses and caused them to panic). Evans exhorts: ‘the angel with
his drawn sword stands in your way, though yet you have taken no
notice of him; but I beseech you again consider seriously what befell
you on Saint Michael the Archangels day last past, and know what an
Angel Michael is said to be in Scripture’. Though the work is suasory, it
is also meant literally; and Abraham Cowley’s mocking A Vision,
Concerning his Late Pretended Highnesse Cromwell, the Wicked; Containing
a discourse in vindication of him by a pretended angel, and the confutation
thereof by the author (1661) is intended as an antidote to this literalism.81
Not all those who saw angels presumed to publish. The intellectual
descendants of John Dee sought to summon and converse with angels
yet were secretive about it. Lilly’s autobiography, written at Elias
Ashmole’s request, suggests a community of astrologers who sum
moned angels as part of their divination, hinting at the extent and
the difficulty of defining its contours. Ashmole was a friend to Lilly and
a patron to Pordage, who sought to summon angels. Lilly had read
Dee’s conversations with angels: he thought genuine spiritual
communication, and ‘Mosaical Learning’, had occurred, but that it had

been curtailed by the personal imperfections of Dee’s scryer Edward
Kelley, and by other, unrecordable things.82 Lilly reports that Simon
Forman’s more successful astrological predictions were executed ‘by
Conference with Spirits’.83 Lilly’s first teacher was the Welsh astrol
oger and physician John Evans, who once succeeded in invoking ‘the
Angel Salmon’, who destroyed part of a building. Salmon may be an
incarnation of Solomon, mythical author of the Ars Notoria, a treatise
on angel magic that circulated in manuscript before it was printed in
Latin and then in an English translation in 1657. The Ars Notoria
teaches invocations of angels’ names in order to effect magic by the
power of angels. This knowledge Solomon received by the thunder
ous voices of angels themselves.84 Lilly bought one of Forman’s copies
of Ars Notoria in 1633–4, some years after Forman’s death. Lilly’s
subsequent teacher Alexander Hart was paid to assist in ‘a Conference
with a Spirit’ by ‘a rusticall Fellow of the City’.85 While Lilly does not
indicate that Hart ever successfully summoned spirits, he presents this
as a recognizable economic transaction.
William Hodges, a royalist astrologer from near Wolverhampton,
dealt with the thorniest judicial questions by consulting angels in a
crystal: ‘His Angels were Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel,’ though ‘his Life
answered not in Holiness and Sanctity to what it should, having to deal
with those holy Angels’. Lilly reported some successes despite these
reservations.86 Angelic consultations work, and in the hands of poor
scholars are more reliable than astrology. Aubrey later described the
practice of calling visions in a ‘Berill, or Crystall’, a red tinted crystal
that is one of the twelve stones mentioned in Revelation. His account
was illustrated with an image of one beryl successfully used by a
Norfolk minister: the crystal is set in a ring engraved with ‘the
Names of Four Angels, viz. Uriel, Raphael, Michael, Gabriel’. Angels
appeared openly to the minister, and forewarned him of his death.87
Lilly describes one Sarah Skelhorn, a ‘Speculatrix’ who called angels by
magical invocation and saw them in a crystal. They also followed her
around the house.88 He also mentions two old prophecies that he
believes were validated, which
were not given vocally by the Angels, but by Inspection of the Crystal in
Types and Figures, or by Apparition the Circular way, where, at some
Distance, the Angels appear representing by Forms, Shapes, and Creatures,
Figure 3. Sixteenth century book of magic with instructions for

conjuring spirits
what is demanded: It is very rare, yea, even in our Days, for any Operator or
Master to have the Angels speak articulately; when they do speak, it’s like the
Irish, much in the Throat.89
Forman’s pupil Napier, for whom Lilly felt much admiration, prayed
to angels: ‘he invocated several Angels in his Prayer, Viz. (a) Michael,
Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, &c.’. Ashmole annotated and added a striking
detail: ‘At sometimes, upon great Occasions, he had Conference with
Michael, but very rarely.’90 One of Napier’s manuscripts from 1619
describes consultations with the angel Raphael, who answers Napier’s
questions about alchemy and the health, longevity, and fortunes of
several clients.91 This may explain why Lilly thought Napier outdid
Forman. Aubrey confirms Napier’s godliness, and reports that he
conversed with Raphael, who would give him responses to queries
about patients. It was because of conversations with angels, rather
than his horoscopes, that his predictions were so reliable. Aubrey
thought the same of the skilled Mr Marsh of Dunstable, who
privately confessed that astrology was merely the ‘Countenance’
and that his real business was done ‘by the help of the blessed
Spirits’.92
Lilly is coy about his own communications with spirits. He admits, ‘I
was once resolved to have continued Trithemius for some succeeding
Years, but Multiplicity of Employment impeded me, the Study
required in that kind of Learning, must be sedentary, of great Reading,
sound Judgment, which no Man can accomplish except he wholly
retire, use Prayer, and accompany himself with Angelic Consorts.’93
Lilly means not merely the holy life necessary as a precursor to spiritual
conversations, but literal angelic consorts. The Steganographia of the
fifteenth century German mystic Johannes Trithemius describes a cab
balistic and hermetic method for acquiring and transmitting knowledge
that uses angelic names to invoke and communicate with and by angels.
Though it influenced John Wilkins’s Mercury, or, The Secret and Swift
Messenger (1641), the first partial English translation of Steganographia
was by Lilly in 1647. Lilly and his contemporaries read it as a magical
resource and a means of summoning and conversing with angels.94
Throughout his almanacs in the 1640s Lilly hints at the role of angels
in human affairs. He repeatedly states that guardian angels protect
countries, and the fortunes of a country depend upon their interven
tion, most strikingly in 1647–8:
Live English Parlia[ment]. Fear not the male contented, thy Angel Protector is
very potent, his name is not Michael, yet he is powerfull . . . Welcome sweet
Messenger from Ireland, what newes dost thou bring? Famine, mortality,
& most horrible division is now there, great deserting each other; poor bestiall
Kingdome, thy Angel is a sluggard, but the English Angel is active.95
He refers to the presiding angels of several countries, but to identify the

English guardian as not Michael is unusual.96 Perhaps he accepted the
passage in Dee’s diaries, in which Michael implies that it is Enoch who
presides over England.97 Though they are certainly political, Lilly’s
angels are not mere metaphors, or even intelligences presiding in the
stars, but real beings engaged in struggles. He assigns to them respon
sibility for heavenly apparitions such as parahelii, as in The Starry
Messenger (1645):
I am clearly of opinion, These Sights, as well as many others, were caused by

those tutelary Angels, who, by Gods permission, and under him, have the
Government of the English Commonwealth. They are sensible of those many
impending Miseries now too plentifully amongst us. Their conference with
man now, as in the days of old, very few attain unto, it being a blessing sought
after by many, attained unto by few: And yet there are some of opinion, There
lives in the world some, a small Party in England, that know more then they
utter, and, either by Vision, or verball Colloquie, have the knowledge of
future events, yea even from the blessed Angels.
But alas, these are Riddles; I must adhere unto my Astrologie; and yet wish
all happinesse to those good souls that either confer with their own Genius,
whom some call, A good Angel; or with such other of those heavenly
Ministers whom God in mercy affordeth them. And herein let no Reader
mistake me, for I abhor Witches, or those Necromancers that raise the deceased
out of their graves, or those Circular Priests now almost worn out of the
world: My meaning is this, That I do believe there are many now living, to
whom God, by his Angels, gives Revelation of things to come: And where and
to whom God gives such a blessing, I believe that Saint may lawfully use the
Talent God hath enabled him with.98
Angels are God’s messengers, but in this cosmology they bear dele
gated authority and have responsibility for sending messages them
selves. Demonic magic, conventionally understood as magic exercised
through the agency of fallen angels,99 is a practice entirely distinct from
the lawful calling of angels. Lilly describes not only natural or sympa
thetic magic, but actual ‘verball Colloquie’ in which angels disclose the
future, a practice widely sought but accomplished by fewer, though
‘many now living’, who keep quiet their conversations with their
‘Genius’ or tutelary ‘good Angel’. Such prudence was necessary,
because these practices were easily identified by hostile observers as a
form of demonic magic, or cacodemology. Lilly describes in his 1648
Ephemeris a vision of angels struggling over the fate of England, and
another vision of an angel waving a sword over London. These can be
seen as metaphors, albeit metaphors that are grounded upon specific
angel doctrines, in part because they conform to literary conventions
of dream visions (‘slumbering I thought a voice delivered articulately
these words’); but they must also be understood literally, as induced
visions of guardian angels dutifully articulating prophetic warnings.100
Anti Merlinus, or, A Confutation of Mr. William Lillies Predictions
(1648) dismisses Lilly’s enquiries into the actions and names of guardian
angels, and accuses him of ‘pretending . . . to ground his predictions
upon Cacodemologie, or conference with Devils, and lapsed
Angels’.101 The author, H. Johnsen, identifies himself as a student of
astrology, and uses the term ‘cacodemology’ in a technical rather than
bombastic manner, accurately identifying this subtext of Lilly’s writ
ings in the 1640s. Perhaps he had heard rumours of Lilly’s angelic
conversations. Lilly says nothing about fallen angels, but Johnsen
transforms them into demons. While conversing with angels is close
to prayer, conjuring fallen angels is witchcraft, and risks execution
under the 1604 Act Against Conjuration and Witchcraft. Persecution
for witchcraft recommenced in England in 1645.102 Dee, Forman,
Napier, Evans, Lilly, and others conversed with angels, but did not
advertise it in print.
The association between astrology and natural magic partly explains
the ferocity of the attacks on astrology in the 1640s. Scriptural anno
tators and theologians conventionally described judicial astrology as
presumptuous though not unlawful, and with some basis in reality.103
Calvin thought astrology a means to divine wisdom, and Wollebius
that angels’ superior knowledge was partly based on their ability to
interpret stars. The inhabitants of Stortford endorsed the influence of
the stars as a fundamental truth.104 The 1640s saw a rise in the number
of astrological publications and a diversification in their forms.105
Predictions and attacks on individual astrologers were politicized.
But there was also a more general attack on the art of astrology itself,
pressed by fear of witchcraft, apocalypticism, and suspicion of mystical
theology. Most of these attacks associated astrology with demons and
sorcery. Samuel Clarke’s A Mirrour or Looking Glasse (1654) presented a

list of God’s judgements ‘against witches, conjurers, enchanters and
astrologers’. Other taxonomies of magic and compendiums of proph
esies and illusions condemned magicians and astrologers as heretics.106
John Vicars attacked astrology as a form of witchcraft, and called Lilly
the servant of Satan.107 Astrologers were caricatured as foolish, and
their assisting angels were assumed to be always fallen.
The most detailed report of angelic conversations published in the
revolutionary decades indicates why Lilly and others were reluctant to
publicize theirs. Occult knowledge was valuable precisely because it was
possessed by few and passed on through personal and controlled circum
stances. It was nonetheless dangerous as it invited accusations of caco
demology and witchcraft. In 1659 the scholar Meric Casaubon published
a substantial folio volume entitled A True and Faithful Relation of What
Passed for Many Yeers between Sr. John Dee (A Mathematician of Great Fame
in Q. Eliza. and King James their Reignes) and Some Spirits: Tending (had it
succeeded) to a general alteration of most states and kingdomes in the world
(1659). Some of Dee’s transcripts of his conversations with angels in
the 1580s had survived in Sir Robert Cotton’s library, which was not an
isolated private space, but an internationally renowned repository for
scholars, and knowledge of these manuscripts shaped Dee’s posthumous
reputation.108 The late William Ussher, who had preached against the
worship of angels, had wanted the manuscripts published, and this
prompted Casaubon to study them and commission partial transcrip
tions. The resultant edition expresses his antipathy to Dee.109
Dee spoke with angels, including Michael, Uriel, and Gabriel.
Gabriel reminded Dee that man in innocence ‘was a partaker of our
presence and society’, and so spoke customarily with God and good
angels; but man lost this favour, along with the angelic language, when
the Devil, properly called ‘Coronzon’, caused the Fall.110 These com
munications took place through the medium of a showstone and
scryers, including Edward Kelley and Bartholomew Hickman, some
in London, some with Count Laski in Poland, the emperor Rudolph
and King Stephen in Kraków, and Count Rožmberk in Bohemia.
A True and Faithful Relation is remarkable in several respects, not just
because of its revelations, such as the existence of female angels, but
because it is the most detailed and extensive account of conversations
with angels from the early modern period, replete with scholarly
learning, cabbalistic mysticism, and tables of mystical and paradisal
alphabets dictated by angels.111 Moreover, it was published by a scholar

whose perceptions and intentions were very different from Dee’s. The
manuscripts spoke to numerous 1650s concerns—a perfect, angelic
language, the relationship between Christianity and the cabbala,
Mosaic learning or exchanges between natural philosophy and the
spiritual world—but what interested Casaubon was proof of the exist
ence of the spiritual world and of the dangers of conversing with
angels. He published Dee’s records to attack modern Sadducism,
enthusiasm, and radical speculation.
Casaubon was both doubtful of stories of diabolical possession and
fearful that scepticism about spirits led to atheism.112 It was essential to
his argument that Dee’s conversations were real, not the fictions of a
delirious mind or a confidence trick by a series of unscrupulous
assistants. The enthusiastic interest in angels in the 1640s was twinned
with a scepticism that appeared to undermine belief in a spirit world;
the attack on enthusiasm, by drawing attention to its physiological
basis, threatened faith itself, as if the existence of imaginary spirits
proved there were no true ones: ‘this Licentious Age will afford very
many, who with the Saduces of old (that is, Jewish Epicures) believe no
Spirit, or Angel, or Resurrection’. Casaubon thought that Dee’s docu
mented conversations could empirically falsify disbelief, and his preface
promised to fight atheism in Anabaptists and others, challenging their
‘Supposed Inspiration and imaginary Revelations’. Like many contem
poraries, he saw the revolutionary decades as a critical moment in the
history of religion, in which radical modes of belief and doubt threa
tened to undermine the true Church altogether.113 Casaubon emphat
ically asserts that Dee’s experiences were real, and they prove both
enthusiasts and sceptics wrong. ‘All I understand by reality’, Casaubon
qualifies, ‘is, that what things appeared, they did so appear by the
power and operation of Spirits, actually present and working, and
were not the effects of a depraved fancy and imagination by meer
natural causes.’114 Dee’s conversations were real conversations, Casau
bon argues, with real spirits, but they were not good angels. Dee
conversed with devils seeking to subvert true religion.
Casaubon knew that his contemporaries doubted the veracity of
either Dee or his scryers, not least because of the sensational sugges
tion, made by the naked female angel Madimi, that Kelley and Dee
should hold their wives in commonalty. Few angelic voices survive, so
I shall quote Madimi:
Not content you are to be heires, but you would be Lords, yea Gods, yea the Judgers of
the heavens: Wherefore do even as you list, but if you forsake the way taught you from
above, behold evil shall enter into your senses, and abomination shal dwel before
your eyes, as a recompence, unto such as you have done wrong unto: And your
wives and children, shall be carried away before your face.115
The words were communicated by Kelley, and some have thought

that the antinomian order that they commit adultery was Kelley’s
fabrication. However, among many objections to Kelley’s reliability,
the most potentially damaging to Casaubon’s argument was the flawed
scholarship of Dee’s angels. ‘Devils, we think generally,’ wrote Casau
bon, ‘both by their nature as Spirits, and by the advantage of long
experience . . . cannot but have perfect knowledg of all natural things,
and all secrets of Nature, which do not require an infinite understand
ing . . . The knowledge Divels have of things Natural and Humane is
incomparably greater then man is capable of.’ Yet it was evident that
one of Dee’s spirits was deficient in this respect, speaking post classical
Latin, ‘rather as one that had learned Latin by reading of barbarous
books, of the middle age, for the most part, then of one that had been
of Augustus his time, and long before that’.116 Even fallen angels should
speak perfect Latin. Moreover, Casaubon adds, Kelley himself noticed
that the spirits appeared to borrow from Agrippa, Trithemius, and
Paracelsus, modern authors with dubious doctrines, rather than report
directly the book of nature. Casaubon’s resolution of this doubt is deft,
and echoes the doctrine of accommodation which was a premiss for
the artistic representation of unfallen angels: like God or Moses, the
Devil fits himself to the capacity of those to whom he speaks, and Dee
seems to have been happy with the performance. Just as the pagan gods
were widely understood to be the images of fallen angels,117 corrupt,
occult knowledge could be passed on by the Devil, and if Michael or
Madimi sounds like Agrippa, this could be because the Devil deceived
Agrippa before he deceived Dee:
If any thing relish here of Trithemius or Paracelsus, or any such, well may we
conclude from thence, that the Divel is like himself. This is the truest
inference. It is he that inspired Trithemius and Paracelsus, &c. that speaketh
here; and wonder ye if he speaks like them? . . . Yea, those very Characters
commended unto Dr. Dee by his Spirits for holy and mystical, and the original
Characters (as I take it) of the holy tongue, they are no other, for the most
part but such as were set out and published long agoe by one Theseus
Ambrosius out of Magical books, as himself professeth. . . . So that in all this
the Divel is but still constant unto himself, and this constancy stands him in
good stead, to add the more weight and to gain credit to his Impostures.
Not to be wondred therefore if the same things be found elsewhere, where
the D. hath an hand.118
The very characteristic that suggests human agency is in fact evidence

of a diabolical confidence trick. Casaubon’s trust in his devils equals
Dee’s trust in his angels.
Casaubon’s intent in publishing the work is twofold. First of all, he
seeks to discredit the alleged revival of Sadducism and sceptical or
radical theologies that challenged the spiritual architecture of heaven.
But he is also seeking to discredit enthusiasm itself, and with it the
religious toleration associated with the Protectorate. The Council of
State heard of the publishing enterprise late in the summer of 1658 (it
had been entered in the Stationers’ Register on 3 March) and called in
the printers and publishers and requested to see a sample sheet.119 The
President of the Council was Henry Lawrence, who presumably had
an inkling of what the book would contain and the ways in which its
publication by a known royalist like Casaubon could reflect upon the
government. The state papers do not contain any report by the
committee formed to investigate the publication. Ten days later Oliver
Cromwell died, and one of the committee, Richard Cromwell, suc
ceeded as Lord Protector. The volume appeared with a 1659 imprint.
The Revd William Shippen, who annotated a copy in the 1680s and
recorded the story of the attempted suppression, saw the volume as
politically charged and implicitly anti enthusiast and anti fanatic.120
Casaubon exploits a record of conversations with angels for two
purposes, one theological, the other political. Angels always had and
would have this two handed property, but it became particularly
pronounced in Britain during the 1640s and 1650s.
Radical Angels
Casaubon’s oblique intervention was also a response to the fourth

mode of writing about angels, one which speculates about them, and
uses them ‘imaginatively’ (a word needing careful interpretation in the
context of this period) to discuss matters of soteriology. This mode of
writing can be described as a ‘radical mode’.
Around 1656 Thomas Hicks, who wrote against Quakers and

religious heterodoxy more generally, encountered four men who
denied the immortality of the soul. Hicks proceeded to write a tract
against this wilful ignorance, entitled A Discourse of the Souls of Men,
Women, and Children; and of the Holy and Blessed Angels in Heaven, and of
the Evil and Damned Spirits in Hell. His adversaries were materialists and
mortalists: he is not specific enough to indicate whether they were
psychopannychists, like Milton and Richard Overton, believing that
the soul sleeps between death and Resurrection.121 Hicks systematically
uses angels to demonstrate the existence of an immortal human soul:
‘Mortall men cannot see the immortal substance of their souls, with
their bodily eyes; no more they cannot see the Angels which tarry
about them, unless they do assume a body to themselves, no nor they
cannot see the Divel and evill spirits although they do go throughout
the world continually.’122 The tract straddles practical divinity and
mechanical theology. Human souls, angels, and devils are all spiritual
substances, and to deny one is to deny the other.123 His adversaries
were probably unpersuaded by his reasoning. The argument had been
made at greater length and more variously by Henry Woolnor in 1641,
also responding to an outbreak of mortalist reasoning, and also using
angels as tools of reasoning.124
Another heresy significantly revised and developed in these years
was Socinianism, the denial of the divinity of Christ, which sometimes
involved unusual angel doctrine. The Socinian Racovian Catechism
was printed in Latin in London in 1651, with a licence signed by John
Milton; it was investigated by the Council of State.125 An English
translation by John Biddle appeared the following year, one of a series
of publications by Biddle that developed antitrinitarianism in an idio
syncratic though perhaps distinctively English direction. In 1647
Biddle declared that the Holy Spirit was not part of the Godhead but
‘a created spirit’ and the head of the angels. The House of Commons
ordered that the work be seized and burned, and appointed divines to
persuade Biddle of his errors.126 The following year he affirmed the
humanity and non divine nature of Christ, and that the Holy Spirit
was an angel: ‘the word Angel Originally Greek, and the Hebrew
Malak answering thereunto, signifieth any Messenger whatsoever,
but is in Scripture oftentimes appropriated to signifie a Spirit or
Heavenly Messenger. In both which respects the Holy Spirit is an
Angel, being not only a Messenger, but a Spiritual Messenger sent out
of Heaven’.127 Subsequent publications by Biddle caught the attention

of the Council of State: in December 1654 they were declared blas
phemous and burned, and he was imprisoned without pen and ink.128
A dispute with John Owen followed, and the scandal of Biddle’s beliefs
was reported at length in the newsbooks. Other Socinian works were
pursued, and enthusiastic gestures alarmed the authorities. These were
tense weeks in which Parliament debated the new constitution, the
Instrument of Government, and Fifth Monarchists and Quakers were
prominently disruptive.129 A few days after Biddle’s arrest Thomas
Tany, another antinomian with a distinctive vision of angels, mounted
a symbolic attack on the Parliament door with a sword; the same
committee examined both Tany and Biddle.130 The response to Biddle
was resolute, despite the demands of other events that might have been
more pressing (Cromwell dissolved the Parliament a week after their
last discussion of Biddle).131 Antitrinitarianism was perhaps the most
disturbing heresy of the later seventeenth century, and Biddle’s writ
ings were distinguished by the clarity and simplicity of his scriptural
exegesis, in contrast to Owen’s dogged responses.132 Responding to his
claim that the Trinity was three separate persons, God, his human Son,
and the chief angel, confutations were obliged to restate orthodox
theological accounts of angels.133 In Biddle’s hands angels proved a
flexible theological device, and this was just as threatening to ortho
doxy as denying the existence of the spirit world altogether.
The translation of mystical authors like Trithemius, Henry Corne
lius Agrippa, the Ars Notoria (Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the Ars Notoria
were all translated by Robert Turner in the 1650s), and especially Jacob
Boehme (from 1644 onwards) prompted radical speculation about
angels, and invited enthusiasts to find ways of incorporating occult
beliefs and folklore and spiritual experimentalism into conventional
Protestant angelology.134 John Pordage, who left accounts of angelic
visions, was a devotee of Boehme. Pordage is discussed in the next
chapter; here I shall consider the angel beliefs of a number of people
who converged on Pordage’s kitchen in Bradfield, Berkshire, in 1649,
when he began to experience his visions, including Abiezer Coppe,
Thomas Tany, Richard Coppin, and William Everard.
Inspired by angelic voices, Coppe writes in A Fiery Flying Roll (1649)
that angels walk among humans, pouring forth their vials of wrath and
swearing oaths, cursing, and teaching others to curse, and he has had
‘absolut, cleare, full communion’ with them.135 In A Second Fiery Flying
Roule (1650), written shortly after his stay with Pordage, Coppe uses
Revelation 10, a favourite among enthusiasts, to encourage the godly
(‘Precisians’) to desire their neighbour’s wife. ‘It’s meat and drink to an
Angel [who knows no evill, no sin] to sweare a full mouth’d oath.’
There is an angelological joke in the colloquial ‘it’s meat and drink’:
conventionally angels need neither. Coppe wants his readers to reflect
on traditional exegesis through this playful paradox, but also mounts an
argument in favour of the inner gospel, against the formal and external
moral law. Later he relates:
I have gone along the street impregnant with that child [lust] which a
particular beauty had begot: but coming to the place, where I expected to
have been delivered, I have providentially met there a company of devils in
appearance, though Angels with golden vials, in reality, powring out full vials,
of such odious abominable words, that are not lawfull to be uttered.136
The place of revelation is more likely to have been a brothel than a

church, for there he finds good angels disguised as bad. This is an
evident moral inversion, but it is also an angelological one, for while
angels of darkness often disguise themselves as angels of light, angels of
light do not present themselves as evil angels.
This apocalyptic, eschatological view of angels is both immediate
and rarefied, simultaneously literal and metaphoric. Even as he
writes, Coppe says, Michael is fighting the dragon in heaven. His
associate Richard Coppin also used this as the central motif in his
Michael Opposing the Dragon (1659), where he suggests that anyone
who has been enlightened by Christ or angels, and been administered
a heavenly message or spiritual comfort, should themselves become
an angel of God and minister to others; each man should be an
angel.137 Yet the entirely internalized eschatology of Coppin’s Divine
Teachings means that angels are transformed into human impulses.138
Little is known about William Everard’s beliefs, but he appeared in
the form of a spirit, or a spirit appeared in his shape and wearing his
clothes, during Pordage’s disturbing revelations of the angelical
world. Everard was also a signatory to the perfectionist tract, prob
ably penned by Gerard Winstanley, which declares: ‘Every single
man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same
Spirit that made the Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe.’139 He
was accused of heresy, denying God and Christ, though Winstanley
declared him innocent.140
Enthusiasts propounded a much closer relationship between angels

and humankind than others, perhaps because they sensed the perfectibility
of the human soul. In this proximity, angels could lose their identity as
thinking, acting, communicating beings, and become an aspect of
human soteriology. However, the rich and metaphoric writing of
spiritual enthusiasts suggests a dual vision of a coextensive or coexistent
world of angels. Angels are both a figure for an internalized and
human centred eschatology, and also real, independent creatures,
whose actions shape the universe and whose struggles have their
own pathos.
Jacob Bauthumley was at this time expounding a Behmenist
internalist eschatology in which the struggle between Michael and
the Dragon was ‘the fleshly and dark apprehensions of God against
the pure and spirituall’. He develops the Augustinian account of evil
as the privation of good to an extreme by contending that the Devil is
not a creature. Only God has being: ‘as men speake, though improp
erly’, that is, in its accommodated sense, the Devil is ‘the corruption of
nature’, the internalization of man’s sinful acts.141 He rejects the notion
of a locale called heaven, and the idea that angels participate in God’s
court, ‘waiting upon God, as serving men about their Lord, to see
what his pleasure is’. They have no fleshly form or shape but are found
in man, just as humans inhabit the angelic nature. When humankind
fell:
There were Angels, Hell, and his discoveries of God, became dark and
confused, and so brought him into bondage; so that the dark and carnall
knowing of God is the evill Angel, and the glorious and pure manifestation of
God is the good Angel: So likewise the providences that fall out in the world,
that tend to the comfort or well being of Creatures, they are the good Angels,
& the crosse providences & occurrences that do afflict and grieve a people or
person, they are the evill Angells or Angels of wrath and displeasure, not that
they are so indeed, but because the Creature doth misapprehend the mind of
God in them; for all things, whether Angels good or evill, principalities,
powers, life or death, things present, or to come, are for good to them that
are called of God.142
This is the most radically uncreaturely account of angels possible.

Bauthumley veers from orthodoxy—God honoured man by taking
human form and not angelical—to heterodoxy—angels are the spirit
ual reality of human good and bad impulses, and manifestations of
God’s power. The account of providence dispenses with angels as
beings with freewill or an internal principle of being; angels are our

angels, our communication with the light side of God’s mind.
Thomas Tany’s elaborate Behmenist narrative of the fall of angels is
a foundation of his soteriology. The actions of angels do have a moral
and narrative significance. Angels, created on the first day, reject the
duty of love and fall; ‘they descended into Vegitables, and left their first
habitation’. Thus ‘these Angels became men’. Man is a fallen angel
embodied in the fig leaf of flesh; Tany interprets Genesis 6 as describ
ing the union of angel with human into a single being. Tany also
describes the process another way: every human has an internal angel,
‘we are the vegetables of the Deity tied to himself by the Angel in us,
for our Angel converses with him’. This angel is the inner light of God,
‘a refined man, or man unbodied or unvailed’. Only through the eye
of our inner angel can we see Christ.143 The notion may come from
Paracelsus, who writes: ‘nothing could pass from us to God were there
not an angel in us, who takes our inner message to Heaven. Nor would
anything of God come to us without such an agent, who is swifter than
all our thoughts . . . the angel is nothing other than the immortal part of
man.’144 For Tany, the angel is at once a near synonym for the soul,
but also a figure in a cosmic narrative; Tany’s fall is both allegorical and
literal. Tany joined Pordage in seeking to identify his tutelary angel,
just as Dee had done.145
In 1651 Tany was imprisoned for blasphemy, condemned, like
Bauthumley, for denying the material existence of heaven and hell.
As the angels fall into man, there is no need for a material hell. His
associate Robert Norwood was imprisoned for allegedly asserting that
the soul of man is the essence of God. His theology, like Tany’s,
suggests not a purely internalized eschatology but a species of materi
alism that sees all creation as corporeal. Challenging his excommuni
cation he writes, ‘if God be not a body, yet he hath a body, the whole
Creation is his body; my soul in one sence is not a body; but in another
sence it is a body; though it be not a fleshly, nor yet a natural body, it
may be a spiritual body; for there are spiritual bodies as well as natural
and earthly bodies’.146
Laurence Claxton, or Clarkson, was not connected to Pordage, but
was well connected to his acquaintances. Following release from
imprisonment for his Ranter work A Single Eye (1650), he pursued
astrology and magic in texts that suggest an association between
Behmenism, radical theology, peculiar angelology, and occult learning;
perhaps he knew about Pordage’s visions or Everard’s conjurations. He

writes:
I attempted the art of Astrology and Physick, which in a short time I gained
and therewith traveled up and down Cambridgeshire and Essex . . . improving
my skill to the utmost, that I had clients many, yet could not be therewith
contented, but aspired too the art of Magick, so finding some of Doctor Wards
and Woolerds Manuscripts, I improved my genius to fetch Goods back that
were stoln, yea to raise spirits, and fetch treasure out of the earth, with many
such diabolical actions, as a woman of Sudbury in Suffolk assisted me . . . 147
Claxton later discovered true faith from the Muggletonian prophet
John Reeve, and his A Paradisal Dialogue betwixt Faith and Reason (1660)
articulates an extended Muggletonian natural philosophy and history
of angels. God, angels, and humans all have bodies, but whereas God is
entirely divine, humans have a natural body and a spiritual soul, and
angels have spiritual bodies and rational souls. Reason desires and is
thus mutable and imperfect (a Behmenist belief he shared with Por
dage). Angels do not subsist autonomously, but rely on the daily
revelation of Christ, without which they would become ‘a bottomless
pit of imaginary confused darkness’.148 God gave reason to the angels to
damn one, the serpent, and the serpent is the sole reprobate angel
(Claxton differs from Reeve and Muggleton on this).149 God made the
serpent more like himself than the other angels in order to punish him
and display his own goodness. Reason longs for something higher, and
while Adam apprehended good and evil without reason, the angels are
purely rational beings.150 This inverts Raphael’s account of angelic
intuitive versus human discursive reason in Paradise Lost:
reason is her [the soul’s] being,
Discursive, or intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
Differing in degree, of kind the same. (5. 486 90)
Angels can be used to meditate on the nature of reason. For Claxton

the spiritual soul makes humans superior; for Milton humans become
more like angels as their bodies turn to spirit.151
Both Milton and Claxton, however, are materialists and mortalists.
Claxton writes that God must have a body in order to be worshipped,
though he does not develop the natural philosophical basis of this
position. Earth and water are eternal, all matter exists from eternity,
so Creation is neither ex deo nor ex nihilo.152 God made and gave life to
angels and humans out of pre existing, eternal matter, ‘uncreated,

senseless, dark, dead matter’. This matter is like but also unlike
Milton’s ‘wide womb of uncreated night’; Coppe and the Quaker
John Perrot also figure Creation as being from a womb, and Morgan
Llwyd describes ‘the heavenly nature and angelical world’ as the
‘mother’.153 Claxton proceeds: after Creation matter is animate; God
made angels and men in his own likeness, hence he must have a form;
angels have faces and tongues; how else could they speak or sing?
Angels have bodies formed like men, though
they shine like unto the Sun or a flame of fire; being formed in a Region of a
more higher nature than this; therefore they are of motion as swift as thought,
and of a pure, thin, or bright fiery nature; so that with great ease they pierce
through a narrow passage at the Divine pleasure of the Creator.154
Claxton thinks through the narratological implications of these angelic

bodies in a provocative account of the Fall. The biblical account of
Eve eating a fruit is accommodated speech, describing sexual posses
sion (‘Scripture Language is much like a modest pure Virgin, which is
loath to have her secret parts mentioned in the least’). The angelic
serpent tempted Eve, entered Eve’s womb ‘through her secret parts’,
and begot Cain.155 Claxton adapts the story of the sons of God in
Genesis 6 to reflect upon the sexual performances of angelic bodies.
Angelic bodies orificially penetrate and impregnate human bodies.
Medieval iconography of the Annunciation represents Gabriel meta
phorically penetrating Eve’s ear with his prophecy. According to
Claxton, the Incarnation inverts the Fall. God bodily conceives him
self in Mary,
just so on the contrary the womb of the Virgin wife Mary, was honoured with
the Angelical God himself, through which her polluted nature was not onely
cleansed while he was in her womb, but also by the vertue of the Divine
power, she was inhabited to conceive his glorious Majesty of her Seed into a
holy Babe of unspotted flesh, blood and bone.156
Thereby the angelic God became the true God.

How does Claxton know this? An ‘unerring spirit’ told him. This
could be an angel he conjured,157 or it could be Reeve, to whom God
spoke directly, giving him a commission as a true prophet, one of the
two witnesses of Revelation 11, empowered by the mighty angel with
the little book who swears oaths.158 Angels are both the intellectual
framework of Claxton’s and the Muggletonians’ heterodox theology

and its scriptural foundation, the things that make it true.
Biddle’s belief that the Holy Spirit was an angel, Pordage’s angelic
conversations, Ranter and Muggletonian cosmologies, Lilly’s angel
magic, Tany’s attempt to name his angel, and Coppe’s and Bauthum
ley’s eschatology had several things in common: a belief in angels’
intimacy with humans; a desire to explain human circumstances
though angels; a willingness to elaborate imaginatively on the angelic
world as a means of understanding the immediate, material world. It is
a vision that is at once internalist and permits creaturely communica
tions. While exploring the narrative of Creation and redrawing the
heavens, the radicals both internalized angels and sought to speak with
them face to face. For these men, angels were not only real, they were
also present, an appropriate matter for enquiry, and a lens upon
Creation. There was a correlation between religious enthusiasm and
a readiness to think with angels. This reinforced suspicions of specu
lations about angels: it was marred with both popery and enthusiasm.
Conclusions
The revolutionary decades of the seventeenth century witnessed

copious writing about angels and I have suggested four complementary
perspectives upon these engagements. There is a rhetorical mode, in
which angel doctrine is used metaphorically, in topical and political
writing, to bring Scripture to bear upon constitutional thought and
polemical force. This mode often reflected a traditional understanding
of hierarchy and orderliness in Creation, and relied upon traditional
exegesis and a belief in the immediate reality of angels. The second
mode is the exegetical, and these decades saw further development of a
vernacular tradition of scriptural commentaries and systematic angelo
graphy. It is possible that this tradition reached an intellectual reso
lution in these years: following the Restoration fewer scholars
produced major works of scriptural commentary or annotation,
though this also correlates to a decline in apocalyptic fervour. The
third, creaturely mode describes the visible or invisible intervention of
angels in recent human affairs, providential appearances, and direct
communication between humans and angels; this is the most tenuous
mode of writing as it is secretive and usually indirect, though it
indicates an intensive level of activities promoting interspecies

interaction. The fourth mode is a synthesis of the first three: it is
metaphoric and exegetical and literal. It can be described as a radical
mode, not only because it is associated with religious enthusiasts, but
because it evokes the immediacy of the spirit world and attempts to
redescribe the history and geography of the universe, to redraw the
heavens.
These modes are linked by their social origins in millenarian
expectations, political fissure, and the tension between growing con
servatism and radicalism, and bear witness to a broader cultural shift.
However, they are also linked by their powerfully creative and analytic
use of angels to describe and understand the world, their latent powers
as intellectual mediators sharply brought into focus in ways that
emphasized the imaginative as well as the doctrinal.
5
Conversations with Angels
The Pordages and their Angelical World
J ohn Pordage conversed with angels, and they transformed his life.
His story, and that of his family, and his gathered congregation, is
an important and revealing one in the history of religious radicalism in
the seventeenth century. It tells of a zealous individual whose experi
mental divinity rejected religious orthodoxy and prompted him to
move through an occult visionary period to a revised spiritual outlook
that was finally accommodated in the Restoration to a position com
patible with doctrinal quietism. Beginning in 1649 Pordage saw angels,
and explored the invisible, spiritual worlds they inhabited.1 His spirit
ual insights were informed by reading occult authors, especially Jacob
Boehme, but also Paracelsus and Hendrik Niclaes, yet he saw himself
as a contributor to the central, visionary tradition of the true Protestant
Church. While he was cautious about revealing his theology, his
ejection from his living after a trial in 1654 persuaded him to publish
a description of his spiritual revelations and angelic conversations. He
had numerous followers, and was in later life involved in the founda
tion of the Philadelphian movement. Angels were central to Pordage’s
heterodox and controversial theology, and their testimony was also the
source of his insights and the proof of their verity. John’s son Samuel, a
young witness to his father’s contact with angels, would write an epic
poem that charted the universes his father had discovered, using
narrators that spoke with, and were guided by, angels. The writings
of the Pordages reveal the depth of intellectual turmoil that could
result from beliefs in angels, their imaginative and prophetic force,
and their central role in enthusiastic spirituality.
How Do You Speak to an Angel?
When Richard Baxter looked back on the spread of heresy in 1650s

England, he identified five principal new sects with similar doctrines:
the Vanists (after Sir Henry Vane, republican politician, religious
writer, and subject of a sonnet by Milton), Seekers, Ranters, Quakers,
and Behmenists. Of the last he writes:
The cheifest of these in England are Dr. Pordage and his Family, who live
together in Community, and pretend to hold visible and sensible Commu
nion with Angels, whom they sometime see, and sometime smell, &c. Mr.
Fowler of Redding accused him before the Committee for divers things, (as for
preaching against Imputed Righteousness, and perswading married Persons
from the Carnal Knowledge of each other, &c.) but especially for Familiarity
with Devils or Conjuration.
Baxter had read Pordage’s account of his trial and had also conversed
with one of his ‘Family Communion’, who confessed that he did not
know ‘whether it were with the Eye of the Body or of the Mind’ that
he saw the odd sights that he understood to be angels.2 Baxter thought
that Pordage and Boehme were melancholy persons who sought
converse with angels, something that ‘God hath not judged suitable
to our Condition here in the Flesh’.3
The translation of mystical and occult authors, especially Boehme
(from 1644 onwards), impelled radical speculation about angels.
Enthusiasts sought ways of incorporating occult beliefs and folklore
and spiritual experimentalism into conventional Protestant angelol
ogy.4 Pordage was profoundly influenced by Boehme’s writings—his
theology was also Paracelsian and familist—but his writings cannot be
reduced to their Behmenist influence. His communication with the
angelic world also fits into an astrological–magical tradition. A client of
Elias Ashmole, it is likely that Pordage was in William Lilly’s commu
nity of angel conversants, and that his visions were invoked, at least
initially, using astrological–magical means; though this is something he
expressly denied.5 Lilly had learned about angel summoning from his
tutors, the Welsh astrologer John Evans and Alexander Hart; from the
manuscript recording John Dee’s conversations with angels, which
Ashmole also read; and from Simon Forman’s manuscripts. Lilly’s
autobiography, written at Ashmole’s request, reveals a community
conversations with angels 127
among whom angel conjuration was an aspect of astrological practice,

and Pordage may have benefited from this tradition as much as from
Behmenism.6 After Pordage’s death, Ashmole commended him for
‘his knowledge in, or at least great affection to, astronomy’, and
Aubrey characterized him as a ‘Physitian & Astrologer’.7
Baxter’s suggestion that Pordage was a member, or even a leader, of a
sect of Behmenists is an exaggeration, but it is not without foundation.
Pordage was thoroughly connected with the antinomian underground,
as would emerge during his trial, when associations were identified
between Pordage and Abiezer Coppe, Thomas Tany, Richard Coppin,
William Erbery, and one ‘Everard’. Such connections began before his
notoriety, and before the war. In 1634, perhaps as part of an official
crackdown on antinomian ministers, John Davenport preached at
St Stephen Coleman Street against Pordage, who ‘broches new fangled
opinions concerning the signes, that No Man can trie himself by them,
but was to stay by for an over powring light’.8 His hostile comments
capture an element of the theology of Pordage and his followers: an
inward, mystical searching for spiritual regeneration through commu
nion with the divine. Hendrik Niclaes proclaimed that it was possible
to find spiritual perfection here on earth, that Christ had already
returned and his spirit dwelled in Family of Love and in their mystical
doctrines; this ‘Blasphemous doctrine of Familisme’ was attacked by
John Etherington in a 1645 pamphlet. Etherington condemns a
Mr Randall for preaching this doctrine, along with ‘one that went
from hence [London] to Redding, D. Pordage, who was in expectation
of (if he hath not obtained) the chief publike place there’.9 Ethering
ton’s comments suggest a network of perfectionists boldly promoting
their doctrines in and around London; he had himself been convicted of
being a leading familist, and his acute account is based on detailed
personal knowledge. This network was not restricted to an under
ground of shadowy figures that we only identify by misspelt surnames.
Pordage also had connections to John Dury and Elias Ashmole,
Thomas Bromley, Mary, Lady Vere, and to Philip Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke (and his son Samuel worked in the house of the Duke of
Buckingham and had other aristocratic connections).10
Pordage’s closest, most influential relationship may have been with
his wife, Mary, née Lane, whom he married in 1633. She is a marginal
figure in accounts of his trial, usually present in the background. In a
later account of Pordage’s spiritual development, forming a chapter in
the history of the Philadelphian society, a quite different picture

appears:
It was then from some of this Inward Mystical way in England that ye Phila
delphian Society had its Rise: & that wth a fresh Concurrence & Holy Gale of a
Divine Life & Power Opening first & Principally in Mrs Pordage Wife of Dr
John Pordage Doctor in Physick: who married her for ye Excellent Gift of
God he found in her; wch Gift he also became in a high degree Partaker of.11
The Philadelphians stressed the role of women in revelation: Jane Lead

was its figurehead (and Pordage her spiritual guide), and women
prophets were central to the society. It is possible that Richard
Roach, the Philadelphian author of this passage and friend and follower
of Lead, exaggerated Mary’s role, or that it was exaggerated when it
reached his ears at second or third hand. Alternatively it may be true,
and it may also be the case that the ‘M.P.’ who wrote in 1649 a
pamphlet entitled The Mystery of the Deity in the Humanity, or, The
Mystery of God in Man, was Mary. There is much overlap between the
vocabulary of John Pordage and this author, who refers to herself as ‘a
poor Hand maid of the Body’; there is not, however, an exact theo
logical semblance between the texts. M.P. equates Eve, for example,
with Reason; and describes the Son as ‘formed in flesh, a little lower
then the Angels’, which does not correspond with Pordage’s pos
ition.12 This disparity is inconclusive, however: the theologies of
radical mystics, as with all believers, change over time and context,
and though they do not espouse precisely the same vision, there are
striking similarities between these two authors, and M.P. was probably
in dialogue with Pordage, whether she was Mary Pordage, Mary
Pocock, or (in less likelihood) Mary Pennington.13 Mary and John’s
household was an enthusiastic and visionary one, they were inspired
and suffered fear and prosecution together, and when Mary died in
1668 John did not remarry.
In 1654 Pordage was called before the Berkshire Commissioners
for the Ejecting of Scandalous Ministers and accused of scandal and
blasphemy. During the course of his trial several sets of articles were
brought against him, some suggestive of local gossip, others more
serious charges about his alleged denial of the divinity of Christ.
During the 1650s antitrinitarianism was a particular source of anxiety.
Christ’s status was an even more charged means than angels were of
exploring the relationship between God and man; Sadducism and
Socinianism were the most sensitive, most heterodox, most

shocking—though often imaginary—theological positions during
these years.14 The proceedings against Pordage in September to
December 1654, motivated by local politics,15 were relentless and
irregular. He was not permitted to hear some depositions, and he was
not allowed to cross examine prosecution witnesses or freely pro
duce his own. His main persecutor was Christopher Fowler, a
Reading minister still vexed that Pordage had escaped earlier charges,
and Fowler was both a witness and a member of the committee that
judged the case. When Pordage wrote Innocencie Appearing through the
Dark Mists of Pretended Guilt (1655), a treatise describing the pro
ceedings and vindicating his beliefs and behaviour, Fowler published
his own, argumentative account, Daemonium Meridianum: Satan at
Noon (1655).
During the trial, associations were identified between Pordage and
various radicals. He complains that his enemies are trying ‘to crucifie
me between transgressors, Hereticks, Familists, Ranters, Sorcerors’. Fowler
accuses him of being an ‘Erberist’, a follower of William Erbery
(1604–54), a radical Welsh army chaplain and admirer of Boehme
who was accused of denying the divinity of Christ and of being a
Ranter. One of Pordage’s witnesses, Richard Stockwel, was also
accused of being an Erberist, and Pordage acknowledges having
heard Erbery preach.16 Pordage had earlier testified at Reading in
support of Abiezer Coppe, and had praised Richard Coppin, a radical
Puritan associated with Coppe and with Ranterism.17 Among the
visitors who stayed at Pordage’s house during his most intense
visionary period, presumably partakers of his ‘Family Communion’,
were the Behmenist Thomas Tany and one Everard. This was
probably the Digger William Everard (like Tany, a self proclaimed
‘Jew’), who also experienced prophetic visions.18 After his stay at
Pordage’s house a rumour arose that Everard was a conjuror, which
Pordage was in part inclined to believe, thinking him responsible for
raising certain apparitions of guardian angels and a dragon.19 The
prophetess Elizabeth Poole also visited around this time.20 Erbery,
Pordage, Coppin, Coppe, and Tany were also associated through the
radical bookseller Giles Calvert, who published books by all of them,
and by William Everard’s comrade Gerard Winstanley, who also had
angelic visions. Calvert introduced the Ranter Laurence Claxton to
Coppe’s London radical group ‘My one flesh’. Claxton, who also
knew Everard, trained in astrology and physic, studied magic in some

manuscripts he found, and tried to summon spirits.21 This is not to
suggest that Pordage really was a Ranter, but that all of these religious
radicals were networked, admired Boehme, believed in the validity
of spiritual visions, and had an interest in summoning spirits in which
magic and astrology played a part. In some respects, all 1640s radicals
were seekers. The internalization of eschatology and the resurrection,
mortalism, and the denial of the existence of a separate, material
hell, were compatible with outward conversations with angels and
angel magic.22
The witnesses against Pordage testify to some bizarre happenings;
one charge is that ‘at the said Doctors house the face of God hath
been seen; not as Moses saw him, but the very face, as one man may
see anothers’. This looks like a form of extreme anthropomorphism
resembling that of Claxton and the Muggletonians. The parishioners
do not specify whether God has a man’s face, though the phrase
implies as much; much later Pordage would deny anthropomorph
ism.23 A neighbour, Mrs Flavel, in a trance, ‘saw the Philosophers
stone, which she knew to be the Divinity in the Humanity’. Pordage
responds that he is not charged with having seen it, nor is the
relevance of the charge clear, ‘Not to speak any thing concerning
the Mystical writings of the deep Hermetick Philosophers, or what
the judgement of some of them is concerning this secret’.24 Evidently
he held opinions on the nature of the philosophers’ stone which he
was prudent enough not to disclose. The terse hermetic gloss here
gives meaning to a later passage in which he describes his family’s
experiences at the height of his visionary period: ‘Our sense or
faculty of tasting, was very pleasantly entertained, with those invisible
dews which were sweeter then hony or the honycomb; and therefore
deserve to be called the Dews of Haven, with which instead of food,
we were many times wonderfully refreshed.’25 Pordage ate manna,
the food of angels, though he was circumlocutious about the meals.
Pordage’s angelology is infused with hermeticism, and his patron
Ashmole was interested in both the philosophers’ stone and the
food of angels.26
Fowler alleged that Pordage had ‘very frequent and familiar converse
with Angels’; that a dragon came into his chamber, and that as he
struggled with it he was assisted by ‘his own Angel . . . in his own shape
and fashion, the same clothes, bands and cuffs, the same bandstrings’;
that his Chamber ‘hath sometimes been almost filled with spirits’; that
his angel commanded him to cease preaching; that a visitor to his
house in a trance saw ‘two Angels all in white, with Crowns’ floating
over the head of Pordage’s daughter, and other visions.27 Margaret
Pendar, another neighbour, was converted by visions of angels, and
later testified to seeing a vision of a man who promises to heal her: he
produces a book he calls ‘the book of the Lamb . . . a broad book with a
parchment cover, and I saw writing in it’. A dark angel appears and
tempts her to suicide. Later Pordage visits her and prays ‘in a very
strange language, she did not understand well what he said’. She
implies that the book was not the Bible and that incantations and
heresies formed part of Pordage’s prayers.28
Throughout his trial Pordage was cautious about revealing anything
about his visions. When responding to questions concerning angels, he
declines to utter anything that might be taken as self accusation. He
responds thus to the allegation that he had conversed with angels:
As this Article is presented in general terms, without expressing whether the
Communion be visible or invisible, I do not see how it can touch me, though
my enemies were my Judges, because every true Christian hath frequent
communion or converse with Angels, as you may see solidly and clearly
proved from Scripture by the Lord Lawrence, one very learned and pious,
now President of the Lord Protectors Councel, in his Book Entituled, Our
Communion and War with Angels.29
Pordage hoped to lean on the orthodoxy and authority of Lawrence’s

1646 angel treatise, and to point out that similar interests were held by
those now in power. He exploits an ambiguity in ‘converse’ and
‘communion’, noting that while communication with the spirit
world in the form of prayer and faith is legitimate, to make that
invisible world visible is to risk accusations of heresy or enthusiasm.
He is aware that, without being explicit, his enemies are exploring the
ground for accusing him of cacodemology and conjuration, a capital
offence under the 1604 Act Against Conjuration and Witchcraft. In
response he points out that the Devil walks up and down the earth, in
Bradfield as much as anywhere, and that every family is exposed; his
persecution proves him a faithful servant of God. He continues:
If it can be proved that I ever so much as looked toward the unlawfull Art of
Black Magick, or that any evil Spirit were raised up by any compact of mine,
explicite, or implicite, or that those evil apparitions were subdued and overcome
by any other means then by Gods blessing upon our fasting and prayers, I shall
judge myself worthy of punishment; but otherwise it is hard measure to be
prosecuted and prejudiced for the malice of the Devil towards me, inflicting
what I was passive in, and could not help, especially by those who profess the
Christian religion, and know that the God of heaven rules over all, permitting
and disposing of whatever comes to passe.30
Though emphatic that he does not conjure demons, he does not
directly deny conversing with angels. Throughout the trial his
accusers return to this allegation, and of the question of his ‘own
angel’, and Pordage is repeatedly and adroitly non committal. Even
tually he admits in court ‘that I had an Angel of God that stood by me,
assisted me, comforted me, and protected me, when that dreadfull
apparition was before me’, though he signally does not acknowledge
it to be an individual guardian, and his phrasing allows a metaphoric
reading.31 He does not wish to admit his belief in individual guardian
angels (though he might have invoked Lawrence’s support again) while
his enemies pursue it as a Trojan horse for other, more noxious
doctrines.
In a fragment of spiritual autobiography, Vavasor Powell records
that in a period of uncertainty he wished that the Devil would appear
before him in order to terrify him into rectitude. Satan did subse
quently appear, ‘not onely by his secret workings in the conscience,
but by visible representations, and outwardly real apparitions’.32 If
Pordage had simply declared that he had seen evil angels, it would
have been startling, but the real danger lay in the implication that he
had compacted with them. In the seventeenth century bad angels
appear more frequently than good, and though doubtless more terri
fying, they were also more straightforward, less open to hermeneutic
suspicion, because no good angel would disguise itself as a bad. An
apparently good angel, however, might be a bad angel disguised;
hence Pordage’s claim that he could smell the difference (his son
would later write that the difference was always visible, and that ‘starry
Halos’ always distinguished good angels33). Richard Baxter offered a
reason for the frequency that is implicit elsewhere: ‘Corporeal Cras
situde is an abasement, and therefore fittest for the more Ignoble sort
of Spirits: We that dwell here in Bodies, are of a lower Order, than
those of the more high and invisible Regions.’ The ministrations of
good angels are offered invisibly, because to assume corporeal form is
undignified:
Some Men have long Laboured to attain a Visible or Sensible Communion

with them, and think they have attained it: But while they presumptuously
desire to pervert the Order of Gods Household and Government, it is no
wonder if in stead of Angels, they Converse with Devils that are Transformed
into seeming Angels of Light, that by Delusion, they may Transform such
Men into Ministers of Righteousness.34
He proceeds to suggest that the actions of the devils in the world are
also more noticed than the actions of angels, in part because Protest
ants, in their reaction against the Roman Church, show ‘little
Sence . . . of the great Benefits that we receive by Angels’.35 Yet the
consequence of this philosophy of angels, which Baxter shared with
Pordage’s persecutors, was that it was more scandalous to claim to see a
good angel than to see a devil. If one claimed that an apparition was
good, there were grounds for thinking that one had spoken or held
commerce with it, and if it was not a good angel, one was therefore
guilty of demonolatry or witchcraft.36
In March 1655 Pordage published Innocencie Appearing, his account
of the trial, supplemented by petitions, and various written submissions
that the court would not allow. Among these is a document, appar
ently prepared late in the proceedings, that would surely have pro
voked sensation if presented to the court. In it Pordage, prompted by
God, reveals his visions of angels.37 These were conversations with
visible angels, experienced in 1649–50, which he had suppressed
during his trial despite the best efforts of his accusers to elicit a
confession. He is threatened by spirits in the shape of Everard, a
giant, and a great dragon. The ‘Ministration of the Holy Angels’
supports him during these trials.38 His visions, experienced with his
family, disclose the existence of two worlds, Mundi Ideales,
the Mundus Tenebrosus and Mundus Luminosus, both opened up
to the inward senses, or ‘internal spiritual faculties’, though he
describes the experience as a sensual one, visual, olfactory, tactile,
and gustatory. While he firmly denied having any communion or
compact with evil spirits, his initial vision is of the dark world,
prompted by the Devil (‘it was certainly evil’). The light world
followed, and then the eternal world. Here is part of his description:
We beheld innumerable multitudes of evil spirits or Angels, presenting them
selves in appearing distinctions of order and dignity, as powers, principalities,
dignities; my meaning is there seemed to be inferiority and superiority,
Governors and governed, The Princes of this dark world, and their subjects,
which presented themselves as passing before our eys in state and pomp; all the
mighty ones appearing to be drawn in dark ayery clouds, Chariots with six or
at least four beasts, to every one, besides every figured similitude of a Coach,
was attended with many inferior spirits, as servants to the Princes. But
concerning the shapes and figures of the spirits, you must know, they were
very monstrous, terrible, and affrighting to the outward man. Those that drew
the clowdy Coaches, appearing in the shapes of Lions, Dragons, Elephants,
Tygers, Bears, and such like terrible beasts; besides the Princes and those that
attended them, though all in the shapes of men, yet represented themselves
monstrously mishapen, as with ears like those of Cats, cloven feet, ugly legs
and bodies, eys fiery, sharp and piercing. . . . Now besides these appearances
within, the sperits made some wonderful impressions upon visible bodies
without: as figures of men and beasts upon the glass windows, and the
Cealings of the house, some of which yet remain: But what was most
remarkable, was the whole visible world represented by the spirits, upon the
Bricks of a Chimney, in the form of two half Globes, as in the Maps . . . were
but the eys of men opened to see the kingdom of the Dragon in this world,
with the multitudes of evil Angels which are everywhere tempting and
ensnaring men, they would be amazed, and not dare to be by themselves,
without good Consciences, and a great assurance of the love and favour of
God, in protecting them, by the Ministration of the Holy Angels.39
His family is also tortured by the noxious smells of these angels, by
‘loathsome hellish tasts’, and by physical pains caused by the Devil’s
poisonous darts.40 Though the spirits are seen with the inward eye,
they are also seen, projected onto surfaces, with the outward eye.
Pordage’s parishioners do not differentiate, identifying real sights and
real smells. The visual description of the light world is less elaborate:
There appeared then to our inward sight multitudes almost innumerable,
of pure Angelical spirits, in figurative bodies, which were as clear as the
morning star, and transparent as Christal, these were Mahanaim or the Lords
host, appearing all in manly forms, full of Beauty and Majesty, sparkling like
Diamonds and sending forth a tincture like the swift rays, and hot beams of the
Sun, which we powerfully felt to the refreshing of our souls, and enlivening of
our bodies.
The bodies are figurative but they are nonetheless male and highly
colourful, the first point orthodox, the second unusual, though it has
a scriptural origin. Pordage and his family hear ‘many musical sounds
and voices’; their ‘spiritual joy and delight’ was ‘infused into our
souls, uttered by the tongue’.41 The syntax is ecstatic and therefore
unclear, but the tongues seem to be angels’. The eyewitnesses smell
heavenly perfume, and eat the food of angels. An unutterable ‘pleasing

impression’ is ‘sensibly felt in the inward parts’. Pordage collapses
the inward sensations into the outward. The inward worlds are
coextensive but discontinuous with the outward worlds; angels are
‘more immediately’ in the invisible world than ‘in this visible air’,
which implies that they are in this visible air, to be seen, even if not
immediately so. The prosecution witnesses testify that the visions
were seen with the bodily eye.42 These are inward worlds that make
impressions on the outward senses. They are spiritual but also
material.
Pordage describes the spiritual enlightenment that visions brought,
convincing him and his family of the merits of the life of virginity, a
state of inward passivity. His preaching on virginity may explain his
reputation for personal licence (support of this doctrine could be
mistaken for antinomianism) and for discouraging sex between his
married neighbours (presumably when undertaken through desire
rather than spiritual impulse).43 The spiritual world has been opened
to them, and they have lived in joyful communion with it for four
years since the three or four weeks of intense visions. Among the
reasons he gives for not having disclosed it before or during his trial is
that there has already been much light given to the world, that
revealing the light to the world is not proof of the (pure) life itself,
and that he had to possess the life before revealing the light, so they
might be in union. The occasion of his trial becomes both a provi
dential occasion for him to reveal what God might have intended only
for his own family, and yet another example of the persecution of the
saintly by the Beast.44
Pordage’s vision is thoroughly Behmenist and hermetic, and it
probably involved ritual magic—I suspect Pordage initially sum
moned angels with spells, and he may have practised alchemy45—
but it is rooted in Protestant theology and specific angel doctrine.
Angels are ministering spirits; there are two sorts, good and bad;
humans, at least the elect, are assigned a personal angel; Pordage’s
angel assumes human form; witnesses describe traditional iconog
raphy, as the angels wear white and crowns. He endorses a hierarchy
of angels, without specifying the Pseudo Dionysian orders. Fowler
asserts an orthodox account of angelic visitation, against which he
measures Pordage’s heterodoxies: angels appear infrequently and do
not tarry, and they appear with messages, for comfort, for deliverance,
for direction. Nothing in Lawrence, Fowler contends, supports

visible converse with angels. Pordage can counter this kind of argu
ment. Fowler’s scepticism about ‘heavenly converse’, Pordage argues,
suggests that he does not believe in the continuing ministration of
angels, and thus denies Scripture and limits God.46 In an appendix to
his tract Pordage argues that there are degrees and distinctions among
both fallen and unfallen angels, in support of which he adduces the
names used in Scripture. Similarly, there are governors and governed
in this outward world. Both orders, secular and divine, Pordage
attributes to divine providence. Angelic hierarchies, even for Por
dage, are evidence of the necessity or providential significance of
political hierarchies, and in support of this he cites scriptural texts,
not his own visions. This provides a basis for his appeal to superior
magistrates, in the light of the oppressive judgement of the Berkshire
commissioners; even for a visionary who communed with angels,
conventional exposition of angel doctrine can serve a purpose in
logical, political argument.
Pordage was ejected from his rectorship on 8 December 1654, and
wrote in self vindication. He lobbied in London, without success,
though Cromwell was sympathetic. He played no further part in public
life, though questions continued to be raised about his orthodoxy.47
The trial, and the publications, had little impact on the news or
contemporary politics. One reader, however, noticed Pordage and
his angels: in 1655 Christopher Parkes read Pordage and Lawrence on
angels, Salkeld on paradise, and Agrippa, and a few years later he read
Boehme.48 Parkes was probably seeking knowledge of angels in the
present.
‘All the Rhetoric an Angel has’: Angels and Epic
Samuel Pordage, aged 21, appeared briefly at his father’s trial, with
several other witnesses, to testify on what he had heard his father
preach in 1652 and 1654. His depositions suggest John’s general
interest in Christology, witchcraft, and necromancy, without giving
the prosecutors evidence of heresy. It was, however, after this depos
ition in his pamphlet account of the trial that John inserted testimony
of his insights into the spiritual world.49
Samuel was born in December 1633, and had attended the Merchant
Taylors’ School, but he was in Bradfield often enough to provide
testimony, and his subsequent writings suggest a close relationship
with his father. Though there is no record of Samuel attending
university, his later career reveals him an able neo Latinist and a
learned author, and some of this learning can be attributed to John’s
influence. At least in his early years, Samuel was part of his father’s
extraordinary spiritual community.
The younger Pordage’s Poems upon Several Occasions (1660) offers
formulaic panegyrics, elegies, and love lyrics; his Heroick Stanzas on his
Majesties Coronation (1661) shares its tone with much poetry celebrat
ing the restoration of the king. Stylistically and intellectually these bear
no relation to his most substantial poem, Mundorum Explicatio, or, The
Explanation of an Hieroglyphical Figure: Wherein are couched the mysteries of
the external, internal, and eternal worlds, shewing the true progress of a soul
from the court of Babylon to the city of Jerusalem; from the Adamical fallen
state to the regenerate and angelical. A sacred poem (1661).50 Published
under the initials S.P., the elaborate theology and angelic communi
cations outlined in this epic are based on John Pordage’s visions,
elaborating, and perhaps augmenting, what he had been reticent
about. It contains an impressive engraved ‘Hieroglyphical Figure’
designed by John that outlines the universe of the poem; the poem
is an ‘explanation’, the title states, of this figure. Samuel’s later
writings—including Azaria and Hushai (1682) and The Medal Revers’d
(1682), both responses to Dryden, and the tragedy Herod and Mariamne
(1673)—show none of the religious enthusiasm of his epic. Mundorum
Explicatio has been neglected, perhaps because of its poetical infelici
ties, perhaps because of its spiritual subject matter, but this neglect is
undeserved, because it is risky and ambitious and makes strong claims
for the relationship between spiritual radicalism and poetry in the
seventeenth century.51
Part discursive, part narrative, Mundorum Explicatio (‘Explication
of the Worlds’) describes a soul’s journey through multiple uni
verses. It is self consciously modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy,
and echoes Homer; at times its allegorical journey to salvation
resembles John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678); while its
claim to visionary poetics, spiritual revelation, prophesy, and a
divinely inspired literal truth anticipate Paradise Lost. The ‘Proae
mium’ begins:
Figure 4. Samuel Pordage, Mundorum Explicatio (1663), ‘Hieroglyph

ical Figure’
I Sing no Hero’s douty gests in warrs,

Nor blazon forth some Warlike Champion’s Scarrs:
I here no Prince’s acts hypothesize
With glozing praises: Nor unto the Skies
Advance some common Justice in a King,
Nor the dread fury of the Wars I sing:
Nor with bewitching Layes advance above
The Sacred, the base toyes of wanton Love.
His muse is, he announces, Urania, and his theme is heavenly love, the
‘cursed Earth’ and ‘Th’Eternal horrors of the larger Sphear j Where
great Beelzebub and his Princes are’.52 Did Milton hear these lines in
1661, while writing his own poem, and worry that someone had
pre empted his Protestant epic? The rejection of military epic, the
scorn of courtly love, the identity of the Muse are the same. Whereas
Milton began in medias res, however, and told his story with only the
occasional intervention of a narratorial voice, Mundorum Explicatio is
didactic. It begins by demonstrating the existence of a spiritual world,
in the face of the perceived proliferation of Sadducism, and outlining
Pordage’s vision of the four worlds. He dismisses poetic fantasies of
‘brain built worlds’: his worlds are intended literally. The external or
terrestrial world, the light or paradisiacal world, the dark or Tartarean
world, and the eternal world (especially important in John’s later
theology) are rooted in Behmenism (the poem is prefaced by an
encomium to Boehme and his translator, John Sparrow), but they
are also the basis of John’s visions. The poem journeys through them
in an allegorical or accommodated narrative, though the poems also
presumes their real, material existence. Pordage insists, for example, on
the real existence of spirits in the outward world. He describes at
length the corporeality and senses of angels to show that they are
beings who interact in the created world in ways that are capable of
rational explanation.53 They are, then, both spiritual allegories and
unambiguously real.
The three parts of the poem differ in content and form. Part I
describes Creation, especially the nature of spirits and angels, and
offers a Behmenist and Paracelsian account of the double Fall of man.
Adam is made in the likeness of God, with a pure body of the
spiritual materials sulphur, mercury, and salt. Evil is the First Principle
of the universe; good, which will eventually overcome it, is the
Second. Adam is made in this Second Principle, and is left to be
tempted for forty days (an antetype of Christ’s temptation in the

desert). Adam’s first Fall is when he discovers desire and is unmarried
from the Second Principle. His understanding shrinks and God’s
image is obscured. The power to propagate, which had hitherto
been within man, is now moved without and clothed with flesh
(genitals). The more familiar narrative of the Fall follows, which, in
Boehme’s and Pordage’s scheme, is the second Fall of humankind.
The temptation of Eve by the serpent is described at length, and some
of the serpent’s rhetorical strategies resemble those depicted by
Milton; it is possible that both authors were familiar with the
extended and imaginative account of diabolical rhetoric by the
godly preacher John White in A Commentary upon the Three First
Chapters of the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (1656).54 At this
point—and in discussing Lucifer—Pordage’s imaginative impulses
overcome his didactic tendencies, and the poem moves away from
the discursive towards narrative. Lucifer flies to the fallen angels, and
addresses these ‘Princely vassals!’ in triumph at having ‘colonize[d]’
the visible world of earth (pp. 76, 77); his exploitation of the language
of tyranny, slavery, and liberty has parallels with Paradise Lost. The
narrator layers titles upon Lucifer, ‘Monarch . . . Prince . . . Primate . . .
Duke . . . Earl’, indicating a suspicion of worldly honorifics. One
contemporary reader seems to have noticed this anti hierarchical
impulse, underlining these words.55 Lucifer’s oration reveals the
causes of the angelic rebellion: he and his peers resented their servile
position in heaven, and were driven to rebel as love (the Second
Principle) began to displace evil. The world is now the ‘fighting
stage’ (p. 78) for these two principles. A roll call of devils follows
(in which Samaliel Satan is distinguished from Lucifer, the Devil),
and an allegory of Death as a ‘murthering hag’ (p. 82) bearing fatal
darts. Good angels fight evil in this world; each individual has a good
and an evil angel at his or her shoulder; spirits must fight with spirits,
and so local guardian angels are assigned places throughout the
created world, with Michael as their general, in order to conduct
this battle.56
The narrator discusses the allegory of the tree of knowledge of
good and evil, the actions of Lucifer in the world, and radical sects,
including Dippers, Ranters, Quakers, and Fifth Monarchists. Then
there is a startling break in the narrative, and a change in narrative
structure. The remainder of part I describes an unnamed man who
seeks illicit knowledge, accepts a diabolic pact, and descends into

hell, guided by a fallen angel. He encounters Lucifer on his throne,
and is given necromantic skills in return for eating the fruit of the
Tree of Death (the Devil can infuse humans with the arts and
sciences; p. 119). The various fruits on the Tree, ‘Fruits [that] will
ope your dimmer eyes’ (p. 118), represent diverse forms of know
ledge. Death is associated with secular knowledge and conjuration.
The Man becomes Hell’s Magician, and the narrator abruptly
breaks off and ascends promising ‘a higher strain’ (p. 122). The
narrative is surely intended to recall John Pordage’s rejection of
sorcery and necromancy, and Samuel’s testimony in his father’s
trial. The son’s poem seeks to exculpate his father from unjust
charges of sorcery.
The oddest aspect of Pordage’s diabolical iconography is hell’s coat
of arms behind Lucifer’s throne
A Dragon guils, with wings erect i’th’ayr,
A wreathed tail, his mouth flames proper yield,
Holding a Banner, in a sable Field. (p. 114)
The rest of the arms showed the earth, with Death slaying a lamb, and a
dragon triumphing over a human form. The chivalric characterization
of the Devil may express a Christian disdain for the martial ethos of
Continental epic.57 Pordage identified himself on title pages, both
before and after 1661, as ‘gent’ or ‘esq’; yet on the title page of
Mundorum Explicatio he is, uniquely, ‘S. P. Armig.’. ‘Armiger’ is one
who bears arms, and Pordage’s claim here is puzzling, especially as
there is no other reference to arms in this volume. There is, however,
an extant seventeenth century description of the coat of arms of
‘Dr Pordage of Bradfield’, though few seventeenth century readers
of the poem can have known it:
The Crest A Dragons head spitting fire
The Coate 3 Crosse Crosseletts sables
And a Bend checherd Gules & or
in a field Argent.58
The fiery dragon, associated with Lucifer in Pordage’s elaborate cosmol

ogy, presents a striking coincidence. The arms that Samuel claims in this
volume echo Lucifer’s Arms of Hell. Perhaps the difference between the
argent and sable fields indicates an enmity between the Pordages and
the Devil’s seed, and the shared fiery dragon an acknowledgement that
the light and dark worlds are coextensive within this terrestrial sphere.
Part II shifts focus and describes the journey of a Pilgrim, led by his
guardian angel, to Mundus Luminosus, or paradise. Goaded by the
punishing conscience of his angel, the Pilgrim undergoes adult baptism
with John, is tempted, and is shown, by Alathia, or truth, a map of the
Holy Land—which becomes the basis of a series of inset narratives on
the life of Christ. The poem turns into a hybrid form, combining an
Italianate epic romance with spiritual allegory and didactic passages of
occult philosophy. Alathia denounces predestination, explains that
heaven is not a place but the presence of the Second Principle, and
declares that good humans have both the serpent and the dove in them.
The poem becomes more experimental in these passages, perhaps look
ing back to Sidney’s Arcadia, introducing a series of inset songs in various
metres. No single form—epic, narrative, lyric, didactic verse—can
capture the full range of truths that Pordage feels driven to express.
Pilgrim’s spiritual transcendence is the most intellectually and
imaginatively exciting passage of the poem, and its dramatic turning
point. Apocalypsis, assisted by Sophia, unbinds Pilgrim from the world
and unlocks his senses: he beholds the internal worlds, and sees
‘Myriads of Angels in their proper Sphear’ (p. 192). Angels live here
when not attending upon humans, and here angels are therefore
symbolic of the inner sphere, or the invisible world. Pilgrim’s seeing
and hearing them is proof of revelation and of the existence of this
world. Pilgrim’s five senses are opened to the angelic world. He hears
the songs of seraphim, reproduced within the poem, like the angelic
hymn in Paradise Lost (7. 602–32). He hears the voices ‘Of the Angel
ical core’, smells ‘Paradysaical Odors’, feels the warm touch of Love,
tastes the food of angels (p. 193). Samuel captures in imaginative form
the literal truth of John’s earlier experience, his revelation of the
angelic world.
The exposition veers into allegory, as Pilgrim is tempted by Ima
gination, who offers pictures, turning spiritual objects into worldly,
deceiving the viewer with mere shadows instead of substance. Alle
gorical poetry is dangerous, reflecting on Samuel’s own method.
Pilgrim’s revelation is not to be understood allegorically: these are
real angels, and real sensory stimuli. The passage, powerful and
moving, recalls John Pordage’s testimony in his 1655 pamphlet of
the appearance ‘to our inward sight multitudes almost innumerable,
of pure Angelical spirits, in figurative bodies, which were as clear as the

morning star’; John too had his senses opened to the angelical world,
heard its song and ate its food.59 Allegory is the mode chosen by those
without inspiration. On his space journey to the Mundus Luminosus,
beset by Lucifer and protected by guardian angels, Pilgrim is able to see
all four worlds. He also sees purgatory. The angel explains, in another
inset song: the Devil introduced to the world errors mixed with truths,
and the believer must sift doctrines before rejecting them. The angel
avers that over zealous Protestants have rejected purgatory as a popish
fiction without sufficient consideration, and that there exists out of
necessity an intermediate space through which imperfect souls are
redeemed:
But tell me Man! what shall those Pilgrim’s do,
Who in Heav’ns Way have gone, but not come to
Be dead, and risen with the Lord, when by
The Way they lose their mortal Life, and dye?
They are not fit for Paradise: What then?
Must they be hurled to the Stygian Den?
Must they be damn’d? with God’s great Mercy rather
Doth it not stand, to bring their Spirits hither?
Where they may finish, what they had begun;
And to the end of Sion’s Race may run? (p. 223)
The guardian’s indignation makes him more of a rounded character

than most seventeenth century angels; perhaps it resembles the passion
of Raphael in Paradise Lost when he chastises Adam for his unmanly
subordination to Eve (8. 560 ff.). The theology is peculiar, but the
poetic argument is challenging.60 The surface allegory (purgatory
becomes visible to a Protestant through revelation) accompanies a
literal meaning: purgatory must be real, and Pilgrim sees it as he travels
between the worlds. This richly figurative episode suspends the story
between imaginative speculation and rational argument (perhaps
resembling the anomalously allegorical Limbo of Vanities in Paradise
Lost; 3. 444–97). It is one of the strengths of imaginative writing that it
is able to do this. Both Pordage and Milton seek to integrate these
aspects of their writing, so the narrative accords with doctrine, and
doctrine is explicated by narrative.
Pilgrim enters paradise, passing through the gate guarded by a
cherub with a flaming sword. The narrator apologizes that he does
not have the pen of a Tasso, du Bartas, Spenser, Quarles, or Sylvester,
let alone the tongue of an angel: this is not only a modesty topos
but a figure for ideal speech and a metaphor for accommodation.61
As in Paradise Lost, however, angels speak of invisible things on
man’s behalf: the loquacious guardian angel describes the fall of the
angels and Creation. Pilgrim is told of the ‘theamagical twelve fruits’,
the forms of knowledge (visible in the hieroglyph): some are con
ventional (languages, reason, poetry), some eclectic (interpretation
of dreams and of poetry), some specific to Pordage’s interests (the
gift of union and communion with holy spirits, the gift of the five
internal senses, and of divine magic; pp. 267–84). Among other
things, this is a retrospective justification of John Pordage’s interests,
his claim to have communicated with the world of spirits, and his
pursuit of magic. The poem presents true magic and theology as
intertwined: the interpretation of Scripture is a ‘theamagical’ gift,
and, for all of the virtue in Trithemius, Agrippa, and Paracelsus,
divine magic is only truly learned through revelation (pp. 274, 283–
92). Whereas the common rout pursue the philosophers’ stone out
of avarice, the true magician, instructed by purity and regeneration,
commands spirits and tastes fruits beyond expression by ‘all the
Rhetoric an angel has’ (p. 284). Part II ends in an ecstatic, sublime
silence as Pilgrim meets Jesus through the protective veil of his
angel’s wings.
Like John Heydon, the young Rosicrucian author of a series of
occult literary texts published in the early 1660s, Samuel seeks to
incorporate Christian magic into his theological system, and angelic
revelations are integral to these arguments and their exposition.
Heydon’s various writings discuss a vision of aerial men, astrology,
astromancy, magic and theology, the bodies of angels, guardian angels,
the problems of representing the invisible world, the interpretation of
dreams, the Fall of man, and more. He reports that God made the earth
‘out of Chaos, which was the bodies of wicked Angels’, one of the
strangest accounts of Creation.62 The Pordages’ writings are not
Rosicrucian, and are less obscure than Heydon’s, but they share an
unusual set of convergent interests, and they articulate these concerns
through a self consciously literary form, turning sacred truths into
poetry.
Part III is much briefer and discusses the principles of literary
representation. The vision concluding part II is risky, boldly ignoring
warnings of blasphemous iconography; the third part begins by
stating that it is not lawful to utter the wonders of Sion. Pordage may
hint that there are things he will not reveal in poetry (pp. 309–10). He is
not, he says, writing with the imaginative fancifulness of a poet. Pre
empting criticism, he argues that this invisible world is real and
accessible to the eyes of the soul, though he has not himself been
granted this privilege:
But least (because I here so stiffly plead)
You should suppose I have been there indeed;
I will confess (as ’counting it great shame
To be accounted better than I am)
That I not worthy have accounted been;
O no I cleans’d am not am [sic] enough from Sin)
I am a Pilgrim and do thither wen,
Strong is my Faith I shall come there: Amen!
Assur’d I am, although a very few
Attain (whilst here on Earth) this Court unto,
That here on Earth it may attained be,
Though Flesh, and Blood impeed its clarity. (p. 316)
He writes guided by poetic and religious inspiration, but never reveals

the source of his insight. Samuel avoids mentioning the real reason for
his certainty and assurance: that his father has described these worlds to
him. The prophetic inspiration is John’s. The poem stumbles to an
abrupt and paradoxical conclusion as Pilgrim passes Jacob’s ladder and
enters the New Jerusalem, where he encounters the ‘Clouded Glory’
of an unrepresentable God. ‘No Man, or Angel a Commission has j To
dive into this abstruce secret Place.’ The narrator exhorts: ‘O Man
destroy all Images j Of God’, and he leaves aside the truths he has ‘darkly
shadow’d forth’ (pp. 330–2) to ascend into an ecstatic, aporetic silence.
Mundorum Explicatio is one of a cluster of seventeenth century epics
that are centrally concerned with angels, including Paradise Lost,
Heywood’s Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells, and Lucy Hutchinson’s
Order and Disorder. Epics could comprehend everything, and debates
about the legitimacy of representing the invisible naturally interested
poets, and informed the Christianization of epic and the invention of a
vernacular poetic tradition. For the Pordages, however, there were
additional attractions to this course: the epic form enabled them to
describe a voyage through the worlds that had been discovered through
John’s spiritual inspiration. Fiction was an ideal means of explicating
spiritual truths. In their invention, however, the spiritual and the literal
can no more be separated than the fiction and the vision. The inner
worlds are also sensible, outer worlds, and the poetry is prophetic.
Pordage’s Lost Angelical World
John Pordage remained the centre of a large, private congregation, and

an inspiring figure among networks of religious enthusiasts. He div
ided his time between Bradfield and London, teaching and perhaps
resuming medical practice, before moving more permanently to
London in the 1660s. His associates included Jane Lead and Ann
Bathurst, both of whom experienced visions of angels influenced by
Pordage’s teachings. The worship of the community around Pordage
combined his theology with an increasing spiritualism that softened or
undermined its enthusiastic accounts of the reality of multiple worlds.
Pordage’s theology survived and evolved in the Restoration, but it
became a belief which encouraged the contemplation of, rather than
interaction with, angels.
Pordage did not publish again, and Samuel’s Mundorum Explicatio
remained the deepest exploration of John’s visions, but following his
death his followers edited a series of manuscripts that had circulated
among them for some years, eight or more treatises that composed little
less than a systematic theology and guide to the universe and its materials.
A pair of these were posthumously published under the title Theologia
Mystica in 1683, with an address to the reader by Jane Lead and a preface
by Edward Hooker. The volume outlined a vision of the six worlds (or
globes, or centres) contained within the globe of Eternal Nature, itself
within the Eternal World or Archetypal Globe: the six worlds were the
‘Angelical Heaven or The Love world’, the ‘Dark fire world Hell, or
The wrath world’, the ‘Fire light world or The severe world’, the
‘Light Fire world or Paradise’, the ‘Four Elementarie world, or The
outward visible world’, and the ‘Fire less world or the mercifull world’
(see Fig. 5). A treatise was planned for each of these worlds, and the two
outer globes are briefly described in Theologia Mystica. No further vol
umes followed. The publisher or editor of the first volume of Jane Lead’s
A Fountain of Gardens (1696 [1697]) inserted an advertisement:
This is to give Notice, that Leave having been at last obtained, after many
reiterated Solicitations, from the Executors of the said Dr John, and of
Figure 5. John Pordage, Theologia Mystica (1683)
Mr. Francis Pordage, the Publisher of this Book will undertake to Gratifie the
World with all the Theological, Theosophical, and Philosophical Works of the said
Illuminated Son of Wisdom, which are come to his Hands; if there shall be
any suitable encouragement given to such a Design.
She or he lists the titles:

Mystica Philosophica; or, a Treatise of Eternal Nature . . . The Angelical World: or,
a Treatise concerning the Angelical Principle, with the Inhabitants thereof,
and God in this Principle . . . The Dark Fire World: or a Treatise concerning the
Hellish Principle . . . A Treatise concerning the Incarnation of Jesus Christ . . .

A Discourse concerning the Spirit of Eternity, in its First Being. . . . Sophia: or
Spiritual Discoveries. . . . Experimental Discoveries concerning Union of
Natures, of Essences, of Tinctures, of Bodies, of Persons, and of Spirits.63
The proposed edition did not appear, though a German translation of
some of these works appeared in Amsterdam in subsequent years.64
Pordage did not intend these works for publication, and therefore
the authority of the extant texts must be doubted. A later manuscript
found among the papers of a ‘philadelphian and mystic’ Dr Keith, who
may be its author, states that Pordage ‘did not put his Manuscripts into
that order which was necessary for publishing them: but set them
down only for his memory, & he wrote at several times upon ye
same subject in a different manner, & left some pieces imperfect’.65
The manuscript describes itself as ‘A Preliminary Treatise which may
serve for an introduction to the following Work’, and it is unfortu
nately detached from the said work, though it is probably related to
those that make up the printed volume of 1683. The author offers
some insight into Pordage’s posthumous papers. He notes that
the published edition of Pordage’s work ‘The Eternal World & of
Eternal Nature’ is only an epitome, written by someone with a poor
grasp of Pordage’s meaning, while he has based his text on the original
manuscripts. He acknowledges that there are contradictions in Por
dage’s terminology that derive from their composition over many
years. He remains faithful to Pordage’s ideas and words while neces
sarily supplying ‘the Disposition of ye work & ye Connexion of ye
parts’ to remedy the state of the originals.66 These observations should
warn us that all of Pordage’s post Restoration works have been sig
nificantly altered. This is confirmed by an extant English manuscript,
‘A Tract of Christ’s Birth and Incarnation’, which contains extensive
interpolations, reproducing a dialogue between at least two readers,
and appears to have been significantly resequenced. A number of
responses to Paradise Lost have been introduced by one reader, includ
ing a speech in which devils rejoice at the Fall of humankind. At one
point the reader–rewriter observes, ‘I have made very free with ye Dr.
MS. for ye 2 last Pages, broken ye Drs Method & reserv’d other things
that come over again for other Places.’ And later he adds that in
another manuscript, unfortunately missing, he has kept faithfully to
Pordage’s matter while making free with his method.67 Contradictions
within Pordage’s tracts may result from their free adaptation by

followers not in complete sympathy with his vision.68 Several manu
scripts survive in the papers of Richard Roach, an Anglican clergyman
and fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, who was a founding member
of the Philadelphian Society; Pordage’s influence was keenly felt within
these restricted circles, but his was a living tradition, and his readers took
liberty to revise and change his works as they copied them.69
What survives, however, enables a reconstruction of Pordage’s later
beliefs in angels, some of which can be inferred back to his original
visions. These later writings are based upon his earlier journeys, but the
direct revelations seem to have ceased: ‘This Eternal World was called
the Globe of Eternity, at the time when I was taken up to have a view of
it.’70 Pordage no longer communicated directly with angels, and
instead of febrile visions he offered a systematic cosmology.
This is what he describes: the angelical world is created in matter
from Eternal Nature, out of the three elements, salt, mercury, and
sulphur; its form, however, is framed by an idea or principle, ‘the
inmost framing spirit,’ or Archaeus, ‘brought forth by God out of
Eternal Natures Spirit’. This is true of all the worlds except the dark
world, or hell, which is formed by Lucifer and the fallen angels.71
There is thus a material consistency to the universe coexisting with a
separation in innate principle. This (Neoplatonic and Behmenist)
account explains why these worlds are permeable to the traveller,
while nonetheless remaining entirely invisible to those without spirit
ual passports. Angels have freewill, and so Lucifer was free to fall: he
exalted the fire qualities (one of the principles within Eternal Nature)
within himself, and so fell into the fire quality, ‘And by this means one
Region of the Angelical World thro’ ye sin of Lucifer & his fellow
Angels was turned into Hell.’ Man was made to supply the fallen
angels’ place, and God created first the celestial paradise and secondly
the visible world out of the matter that Lucifer had corrupted. If man
fell, he would therefore fall into this world rather than into the fire.72
Pordage depopulates this angelical world, however, by elaborating a
Behmenist account of middle spirits or genii that are not angels, not an
uncommon belief in the later seventeenth century. The copyist attests
that this passage is from a lost treatise on the dark world:
I confess according to ye Philosophy of ye ancients, & according to Natural
Magick that belongs to this visible World, there are a middle sort of spirits
born from ye spirit of this macrocosm, that are mortal spirits & have no Eternal
souls, & are different from ye apostate angels, & from ye holy angels, & also
differ from ye race of mankind that have immortal souls, & for whom Christ
died, but not for these mortal spirits. Now ye ancient Philosophers according
to their Natural Magick did find out yt of this sort there some Good, loving &
very kind, & some were evil, subtile & hurtfull to mankind, The Good they
called good Genii; The bad & hurtfull they called evil Genii. And Socrates
with many others had good Genii, & many others had bad Genii for their
Guides. But this is not ye proper place to treat of this Thesis of Natural Magick
in relation to this visible creation . . . 73
This doctrine would direct the Philadelphians. These spirits inhabit the
Still Eternity, and are simple, unlike angels, who are mixed spirits
created from Eternal Nature.74 The role of angels in Pordage’s later
theology is also restricted by his emphasis on the seven spirits that stand
before the throne of God, or throne angels, which he modifies from
the orthodox Angels of the Presence, the seven spirits which, in
Revelation 1: 4, witness the face of God. Pordage states that these
seven who wait upon the Trinity inhabit Still Eternity, proceed from
the body of Holy Ghost, and are thus co essential powers with him;
‘they are the high Favourites, Friends and Companions of the supreme
Majesty’.75 Here, and elsewhere in Pordage’s philosophy and that of
the Philadelphians, traditional aspects of angelology are sectioned off
into occult and increasingly elaborate revelations, detached from con
ventional learning and practical worship.
Pordage’s later writings testify to a weakening of commitment to
the immediate, sensible reality of angels. He states that Adam was an
angelical man, ‘a Paradisical Man, in the Figure of an Angel’; this
distinguishes him from his postlapsarian ‘Bestial Form’.76 It also, how
ever, equates angels with the human soul, an increasingly conven
tional position in the later seventeenth century, and by humanizing
them diminishes their status as unique creatures. Pordage espouses the
orthodox position that only Christ, and not angels, can mediate
between humans and God; this does not contradict his earlier position,
but goes against the tendency of his earlier experiences of communi
cating with angels, and, in Mundorum Explicatio, their role as travel
guides.77
There is nonetheless much that can be learned about Pordage’s
angels. They have senses; they need food; they are, unlike the seven
spirits, corporeal; there is no reason in their world.78 One of his
disciples would later dwell at considerable length on the implications

of this point for angelical knowledge. Because they are compound
beings they are open to human senses: as we have senses for exterior
objects, and as there are also spiritual objects in the world, ‘there
must be in us besides ye exterior senses, other Spiritual interior ones
for the perception of Angelical and Divine Objects’.79 Angels have
senses, which must be distinguished from the purely spiritual senses
of simple spirits. The latter are, presumably, like God’s, who has
spiritual senses and the organs of sense ‘in a Spiritual manner’.80
Angelic senses are, like their being, mixed, lying between human
and spiritual sense; in this lies a continuity with the earlier visions.
Two thoroughly creaturely statements about angels in the modified
manuscripts of Pordage’s writings suggest an ongoing commitment
to thinking about angels as discrete beings who participate in a
cosmic drama. The first is that angels may be capable of a form of
reproduction: ‘Nay I see no reason to doubt why Angels, good &
bad, should not have that Powre, to form new ideas in their im
aginations, to impregnate by them a suitable matter, & so to bring
forth new compounded living Bodys; supposing God will permit it
or not hinder it.’81 This heterodox doctrine echoes the Byzantine
writer Michael Psellus on daemons.82 This is not a form of sexual
reproduction; it is autochthonous, perhaps even platonic in manner.
The author of the manuscript preface to a Pordage tract notes the
sexlessness of angels, which makes them superior to humans, an idea
(derived from Matt. 22: 30) which may be his own or Pordage’s:
‘I think no one will say that part of ye Angels are Men or Male, &
part Women or Female. . . . in Eternity after ye thousand years none
shall marry & be given in marriage; because they have all resurrection
bodys, & consequently are equal to ye Angels.’83 The second doc
trine is that at the end of time there will be a Universal Restitution or
Restoration, which even fallen angels will enjoy.84 It is possible that
these doctrines are additions by copyists: the second, in particular, is
associated with Jane Lead’s post 1697 revelations.85
One of Pordage’s copyists, transcribing his discussion of the
seven spirits, interjected: ‘I am not certain whether he speaks
properly or metaphorically.’86 This speaks to a fundamental issue.
In passages in these later works it is unclear whether Pordage has
retained a commitment to the real existence of these worlds
witnessed through inspiration. His mysticism seems diluted. This
may be the effect of shifting views, or of manuscript transmission

and emendation: Philadelphians, including Francis Lee, Jane Lead’s
son in law and spiritual heir, wanted to distance the movement
from its enthusiastic origins.87 However, it is necessary to bear in
mind the delicate relationship between reality and allegory that is
maintained in Pordage’s earlier writings: there he speaks properly
and metaphorically. His visions are allegorical while nonetheless
depending on the reality of the worlds he describes. The literary
mode of Mundorum Explicatio relies on the simultaneous allegory
and the reality that underpins Pilgrim’s journeys and ruptures the
literary surface. Some readers, particularly those with their own
theological agendas, may have had difficulty understanding or
accepting this balance. Even Behmenists: after all Boehme spoke
about the angelical world, and heard its songs on his deathbed, but
did not claim to have travelled through it.88
Ann Bathurst’s ‘Transportations’ and the

Philadelphian Society
Mary Pordage died in 1668, and, some time after, Pordage was
joined in his ministry by Jane Lead. According to her own testi
mony, Lead, born in Norfolk in 1624, met Pordage in 1663. In 1670
she began to experience visions (involving the Virgin Sophia, a
figure clearly derived from Pordage’s theology) and to record them
in a spiritual diary, later published as A Garden of Fountains. By 1674
she was sharing a house with Pordage.89 Richard Roach wrote that
her ‘Extraordinary Gift of Revelation ye Dr gave great Regard to &
Attendancd upon’.90 Pordage encouraged visionary women. The
Philadelphian Society was inaugurated, with this name and regular
public meetings, in 1696 or 1697, which continued until 1703
(Lead died in 1704); this was a public birth, bringing internal conflict
as well as expansion, of an older Church. Lead was its acknowledged
founder, but the Society pre existed this event, and her doctrine was
deeply rooted in Pordage’s teachings. Roach claimed that the Society
was part of a community that had met and waited on the Spirit for fifty
years; this was Pordage’s spiritual gathering, dating from the mid
1640s.91
Lead saw angels in her visions, and they constitute part of her
divinity. In a 1694 vision she describes seeing in the third circle of
heaven, ‘Seraphims and Cherubims, bright Angels, very numerous’.92
In her 1670s visions she describes contemplating and hearing the
angelical world; she writes of the Angels of the Presence and throne
angels.93 In a vision in February 1676 she reports the Lamb of God
appearing to her and describing Creation, the Fall of the Angels and of
Man:
Now know, that before this, there was a Creation of Angelical Hosts, as an
immediate produce from the everlasting Being. Who delighted to generate
Thrones, Mights, and Powers, that so God through distinct Existencies of
Celestial Spirits, of that high Angelical Order, might come to manifest his
Attributes, which before lay void and hid in an Eternal Stillness. So as here was
the Angelical World in pre existency before the Paradisical.94
Her visions, and her terminology, are clearly shaped by Pordage, though
it is also likely that his beliefs, and the records of them transmitted among
Philadelphians, were influenced by hers. Lead’s accounts of angels have
little of the immediacy of Pordage’s sensory encounters: they are
circumscribed as visions or prophecies, received in a particular state of
mind, and conveyed within the limits of genre. There are some inter
esting exceptions: she records a conversation she held with John the
Apostle, whom she also describes as ‘the Angel John’ in 1694. Strikingly,
she writes to a friend in 1676: ‘there is a certain Person, well known to
you and men, whose Angel did lately appear in full Day, in an upper
Room, where a few Names were met together, to wait for the Promise
of the Father’.95 The terminology suggests an individual guardian angel,
one visible to a third party. This suggests a more intimate experience
than Lead’s other angelic visions, not least because she seems to be
describing the use of her outward eyes.
Ann Bathurst, a follower and acquaintance of Pordage and Lead,
had extensive visions of individual guardian angels, conversing with
them, and witnessing conversations between them. Her ‘Transporta
tions’ and ‘Visionall Dreams’ are less well known than Lead’s writings,
but her relationships with angels are more developed and intimate.96
Roach records that Bathurst, and her friend Joanna Oxenbridge, had
‘great & Wonderful Experiences & Manifestations from ye Heavenly
World’.97 Two manuscript volumes of Bathurst’s ‘Transportations’
survive, one having belonged to the aforementioned Dr Keith. The
other states that ‘thise visions ware when did live with dc pordich’: in
March 1679, when she received her first vision of an angel, she was
sharing a house with Pordage and Lead. In her first ‘Transportation or
Manifestation’, which took place ‘either in the Body, or out of the
Body . . . I cannot tell’, she undertakes a journey in which she sees
paradise and the Kingdom of Christ, where
I appeared to my self (I mean my Angel appear’d to me, but I understood it
not) at wch being surprized, and the flesh shrinking at the greatness of the
Glory, I perfectly felt a Touch on the top of my head, wch drew my spirit out
of me, as you would draw a knife or sword out of a sheath, & it cut as it was
drawn forth, I felt it cut like a two edged sword.
The journey continues: she sees the Father, the Dragon, the Beast, and
Babylon. She asks to see angels,
and immediately there were several of them compassing part of the Throne:
They were like unto transparent Gold, wth faces like Men, having two large
golden Wings coming forth of each side of their faces, wch was most
glorious.98
The dramatic and literary expression of this initial vision commences
800 manuscript pages of spiritual revelations that took place over
seventeen years, involving many visible and speaking angels,
Pordage inspired diagrams of the universe, and three distinct theories
of the offices and nature of angels.
The angels appeared in bed, and at prayer meetings. She distin
guishes an ‘outward Angel’ (sometimes ‘of this Lower world’) from her
‘supreme Angel’ or ‘Angel in the Unity of Love’. The former is visible
not only to herself, but to her friends, and she can see her friends’
outward angels. One day in 1680, she records in her spiritual diary,
I saw my friends Angel & mine put into scales in sight of the B.B. [Bright
Body, or Jesus] to be weighed in a higher center, & in other cloathing; My
Angel I thought to be wanting in weight . . . 99
A few days later she recorded a systematic angelology:
FMy ffriend & I read a Vision of our Three fold Angel. Our supreme part
being an Angel that allwise abides in the Unity of Love, after we have once
become a little Child of that Center, & [marginal reference: Matt. 18,3,4,10]
wch allwise beholds the face of our Father in heaven: there’s also another
Angel of ours, wch is our Guardian, or souls Angel that goeth up with our
requests: I have sometimes seen it goe up like a white Cloud with my prayers,
and my Angel of the Unity of Love come to it to hear its requests, yt she might
pray them over again. So Now as my ffriend read the Vision to me, I saw my
Angel like a white Cloud go to the place of the Unity of Love, and my Angel
of ye U. of Love, wch was in a gold garment & like a Child, run to the white
Cloud (wch was my Angel also) and say, what is your request? I’m come to
hear yt I may offer it up, for being near the Father & Son I know best how to
offer up according to his will, and know best his will and what He requires of
yow. Thus did I see both these Angels, as if one prayed lying on its face, and
the other praying the requests over again & better; and when my spirits Angel
understood what I wanted that I had not asked for, she said to the other (my
souls Angel) yt I must ask for ffaith, yrby declaring what great advantage it was
for the (third Angel or) Angel in the lower world to have great ffaith, what
victory it gave us over our selves, so as nothing could hurt us; that ffaith keeps
everything without us, and nothing without us hurts us; and yt I should
assuredly beleive yt no concerns in ye world should hurt our souls progress,
and if they did, yt we should be helped out of them. This was said as to us
both, my friend & me, :::::::
ând ::::::::::
::::::::: :::::::::::::
I received strength.100
Each righteous individual has three angels: an angel in the Unity of

Love (or spirit’s angel), who stands in the presence of the Trinity; a
personal guardian angel (or soul’s angel), who conveys messages
between the individual and heaven; and the angel in the lower
world, who is equivalent to the this worldly part of the human soul
of the person. The ‘Vision of our Three fold Angel’ that Bathurst reads
with her friend may be Pordage’s (he was still alive at this time). In the
‘Preliminary Treatise’ the following view is outlined:
There is then in us a threefold Spirit; a Natural one for this World; An Eternal
angelical soul for ye Angelical objects, that is, all that in ye Angelical Principle
is manifested, & thus not onle ye Angels, but even God too is introduced into
ye World; & a Divine Spirit, for ye enjoyment of God and his most sacred
Influences with ye other Objects of ye Eternal World.101
It is possible that this tripartite system was retrospectively inserted into
Pordage’s beliefs.
These angels have traditional duties: they are ministering spirits,
responsible for human wellbeing, they are witnesses, and they are
messengers, communicating between heaven and earth. They have
modes of knowledge unlike ours, and know God in ways unknown to
us. They sing beyond the expression of human tongue. In other
respects they are heterodox. Bathurst’s angels are intensely personal:
she identifies them, and they offer a more active channel of commu
nication with God than is conventional within Protestantism. They are
also sexed according to their human: hers are feminine, while a male
friend’s angel is masculine.102 In one vision her soul is exalted, and the
process is represented by the gift of an edible book from Christ, an
image rooted in traditional theology, but particularly significant in
occult learning:
He gave my Angel F a Book all of gold, & said, read it; my Law and Love is
written in it; Eat it, and let it be yor food, and yow shall Live for ever, and yow
shall not want my assistance. and she (i.e. my angel) took the Book & eat it,
and her Garment became very rich and beautiful and shining.103
In addition to personal angels there are angels and spirits that are
independent of humans. Angels are varied in their appearance:
sometimes they wear transparent gold garments, ‘Not in the figure
of Cherubims as sometimes I have seen them’. Bathurst can visu
ally distinguish between cherubim and other angels. In 1686 ‘A
Glorious Angel like the Son of God appeared, girt about the paps
wt a Golden Girdle, like an Ephod; his breast full of Milk of Consola
tion . . . his Garment was most glorious.’ Later she sees her soul, ‘like a
Cherubim allwise hovering on the Wing’.104 She has a clear visual
iconography in her mind’s eye, though she does not disclose it at
length. Angels have bright, transparent bodies, and wings, and wear
golden garments.
Bathurst’s visions are frequent, and once she has picked up a theme
for meditation she can rhapsodize on it for pages, over weeks (per
haps it was a theme among her prayer community). Her observation
of her angel’s interaction with other angels seems to have an allegor
ical significance, but at times it turns into pure soap opera. Ann’s
friend A.B.’s angel in the Unity of Love spots Ann’s angel wearing a
warmer garment, and requests one, which she is granted; she then
jealously spots and requests a girdle, shoes, shoelaces. The angels look
on their own and others’ garments with reverence and shame. Ann
concludes with a moral, ‘I take all this Adorning to have great
Signification; for they were not putt on, till They themselves saw
they had need of them,’ but the narrative suggests a good natured
competition among neighbours, each seeking not to be left behind.
Three days later:
I saw like a Garland of spring flowers on AB’s head, then on her Angels head
in the U. of Love: and I had one on my head, yt seem’d ready to be left off.
A.B.’s Angel seeing my Garland sitt not like hers, complained to me & said,
hers was so low even over her eyes yt she could not see with it: My Ang. told
hers, it did well so low, to keep her from being hurt by falls: it seem’d too big
for her and so fell a little below her eye briers; but mine was half way on the
back part of my head: I seem’d to be grown too big for it, near to leave it off,
and it went off, and I had a Crown putt on my head. She lookt on my Angel &
saw the Crown, but said nothing: and being content she soon had a Crown
putt on her own head.105
This is a fashion contest. The concern over appearances and compe

tition over worldly goods is comic, though sincerely meant, but it
should not distract from the daring, presumptuous premiss: that she
speaks with angels, and, through them, with God.
Bathurst’s angelology changes twice, and the effect is to move away
from the immediacy of these angels to systems of angelical offices, in
which angels are less creaturely and less accessible to human inter
action. In November 1681, about a month before Pordage’s death, she
describes seeing the Angel of ‘Mr B.st’ divide ‘into 12 Angels, all of
them cloathed in white cloudy raiment and in his figure seven of these
angels were much of his size, but the other five something lesser and
brighter. The 7 Angels were shown to me to be his souls Angels, being
the 7 ruling Spirits of the Soul.’ Each of the seven has its own property
(love, desire, will, faith, joy, wisdom, and patience), and all look like
Mr B. The other five are spirit angels, ‘who were of a lesser figure and
brighter, were the Spirits Angels, which went into a Light, and into Mr
B’s head, where they all sate as in a Glob of Light’. These five have a
more direct, spiritual knowledge, comparable to God’s, a transcendent
and divine knowledge (as there is no reason in Pordage’s angelical
world). This is the knowledge that the unfallen Adam had of nature.106
This new account of angels is indebted to Pordage’s account of the
seven spirits, not strictly angels, who sit in the presence of God; and
like Pordage in his later angel writings, these are more distant from
humankind, more allegorical in their conception. These are angels
Bathurst witnesses; at one point they draw her apart ‘to converse wt
them, by wch means I felt a divine strength communicated to me’, but
they do not speak to her, nor she to them.107 Thereafter she describes
dialogues between her spirit and her soul, removing angels from the
exchange. Though there is not a once and for all shift, her angels are
displaced by spirits that do not require explanation in the conventional

terms of angel writing, and have a purely abstract, allegorical exist
ence, as figures rather than creatures.
Shortly following this new dispensation of angels Bathurst enters the
inner ring of heaven, where she witnesses the Trinity and obtains new
knowledge. From the Trinity go forth ‘the Host of Heaven, wch were
astrums, and of Them there were Three Orders, even Thousands of
Thousands, and a Thousand times ten thousand, even an innumerable
order’. The first order of Astrum angels are closest to paradise, and
are transparent Figures of a light Gold colour. . . . The Second order of the
Astrums was of a whitish Cloudy Colour; and the Third order was of a Graish
Cloudy colour; all compassing Paradise, yet beneath and under it, all of them
close and near to one another; the 2d compassing the first, the 3d compassing
the 2d like shaded Colours; the first Gold colour, the 2d whitish, the 3d
Gray.108
These tripartite divisions were important to Pordage and Bathurst, and

Bathurst takes from Pordage the habit of representing the geography of
the universe in diagrammatic form. She draws the Astrum angels as a
semicircle underneath a dot that represents paradise. This follows a
drawing of four concentric circles that represent the Deity, the Eternal
Majestic Stillness, the One Element or White Mist, and Chaos. She
teases out more symbolism from the Astrums: the first comprise the life
of a beast, the second, man as he is a man (itself threefold: soul, mind,
will), the third, the ‘Supreme Created Good in Man’.109 These are less
creatures than a set of mystical correspondences drawn across spiritual
life. The three sets of propositions about angels—the three personal
angels, the twelve angels, and the Astrum angels—are not exclusive,
but increasingly elaborate systems drawn across the same set of abstract
spiritual notions. These are not the kind of angels with whom one
would converse, or summon with ritual magic, any more than one
would seek to reconcile them with natural philosophy. Bathurst con
tinues to see her earlier kind of angels, and even hears her own angel
speak, in a strangely archaic and stilted fashion: ‘And my Angel made
such sad moane, that all the Centers [the senses of other angels] seemed
sadded thereat; and still my Angel said, I [Aye] how soon is my soul
tied!, it has no sooner got its flight to thee, but there are, as it were
Ropes flung to lay hold of me . . . ’. On other occasions the angels of
dead souls visit and speak to her, and once she senses Gabriel, ‘a very
large Masculine Angel’, but these occasions are very few, and angels as
beings are increasingly rare in her visions.110 At one point in 1683 she
refers to angels, and glosses that she means by this ‘the Spirits of Just
Men made perfect’. As the emphasis shifts to Christ as mediator, angels
adopt an allegorical, symbolic, or decorative role.
Were Bathurst’s angels ever real: did she believe she encountered
actual beings through the evidence of her bodily senses? Certainly
the contrast between her visions in 1679 and those in 1681 and later
suggests so: there is an immediacy and a vividness to the former that
is replaced by self conscious divinity in the latter. The frequency
with which angels appear and their familiarity in the earlier visions
suggest not only a shift in conscious doctrine, but a heightened
sensibility, a feverish spiritual intensity not unlike that to which
Pordage testified in 1654. Moreover, in October 1680 she records
the following:
I saw my Angel in the U. of L. with a very rich Neck lace of large pearle, such
as I never saw any near so large in this World; and A.B.’s Ang. was sitting
by me & fixed her Eye on the beauty of the pearle, but said nothing, only
seem’d as if she hoped to have one also . . . This since has been opened to me to
Signifie the Adorning we have when we putt on Christ, wch indeed is our
Rich Ornament.
At first she does not know what the vision means, indicating that she sees
a picture, an object that is in the first place visual rather than semantic.
Only subsequently is the symbolism disclosed, and the image becomes
an interpreted allegory. The activity of mapping the heavens, of repre
senting paradise on a map with the Astrum angels, or drawing the
circumference of Eternal Nature within the Archetypal Globe, is one
that occurs after the journey is over; the narrative describes the process of
seeing and learning, before it is complete enough to be mapped.
Unfortunately Bathurst does not draw figures of angels, but perhaps
sketching was incompatible with the nature of her transportations.
Entertaining Angels
Angels became less integral to the religious experiences of Ann Bathurst

and John Pordage, though the spiritual journey of both begins with
revelations by angels. Similarly, the tenor of the Philadelphians after
Pordage’s death, under the spiritual leadership of Jane Lead and Francis
Lee, is less vibrant with experimental theology, visionary communica
tion, and the occult. Angels are real, but they are objects of contempla
tion. They remain a dimension of the spiritual, a spiritual world that
coexists with the real, material or lower world. But the theology
becomes a great deal more businesslike than Pordage was in the 1650s.
What began with manuscripts of ritual magic, enthusiasm, anti
nomianism, and space travel made way for Philadelphianism, which
in turn made way for Pietism. These eighteenth century conversations
with angels more closely fitted the expectations of polite society. The
Pietists John Freke and William Law inherited the influence of
Boehme, and sought to reinvest natural philosophy with a spiritual
content. They condemned the secular hubris that thought scientific
experimentation, such as demonstrations of electrical fire, could be a
fit ‘Entertainment for Angels’, and their disciples drew maps of the
universe that showed the Fall and Regeneration of man, with Michael
and Uriel as fiery circles in the heavens. These multi layer, colour
fold outs with moving parts, book technology of extraordinary com
plexity and sophistication, descend from Pordage’s ‘Hieroglyphical
Figure’ and schema.111 The Pietists did not, however, as Pordage
would have done in 1649, turn the tables on the scientists by discussing
this with angels.
6
The Fleshly Imagination and
the Word of God
Theology and the Imagination
What makes people willing to believe things about invisible beings that
they cannot see or speak to and know little about? What makes it
permissible to write an imaginative narrative about the sacred world?
St Paul warned man against ‘intruding into those things which he hath
not seene, vainely puft up by his fleshy mind’ (Col. 2: 18). Speculation
led to false devotion, including the worship of angels. Reformed
theology placed restrictions on the use of the imagination in especially
visual but also verbal representation of the sacred world.
Traditional accounts of the invisible world, by the Church Fathers
and Scholastic theologians, were suspicious of literalism and committed
to fourfold exegesis. Scripture was understood to have four levels of
meaning, originally proposed by Philo: literal (or historical), allegorical,
tropological (or moral), and anagogical. Such exegesis invited inter
pretative elaboration while circumventing the problem of the specific
characteristics of the real heaven and its inhabitants. The fertile angelic
world of Pseudo Dionysius, Augustine, Bonaventura, and Aquinas was
founded on these exegetical practices, in which the literal was a starting
point that enabled complex non literal constructions.1 Protestants
reacted by emphasizing the primacy of the literal meanings of Scripture,
and resisting the turn to imagination and theological speculation.2
This theological shift to exegetical literalism and the authority of
Scripture alone affected the social circumstances of poets and painters,
but also the theories of representation with which they worked.
Biblical drama disappeared from Britain in the later sixteenth century,
the fleshly imagination 163
in part because of objections like that of William Perkins, who

complained of the profanity of feigning representations, like showing
God ‘popishly conceived to be like an old man sitting in heaven in a
throne with a sceptre in his hand’.3 Many poets expressed anxiety
about the dangers of fleshly speculation. Some such expressions were
a prologue to bolder descriptions, like the account of the fall of angels
in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder:
But circumstances that we cannot know
Of their rebellion and their overthrow
We will not dare t’invent, nor will we take
Guesses from the reports themselves [fallen angels] did make
To their old priests, to whom they did devise
To inspire some truths, wrapped up in many lies;
Such as their gross poetic fables are . . .
But not to name these foolish impious tales,
Which stifle truth in her pretended veils,
Let us in its own blazing conduct go
And look no further than the light doth show . . . 4
Despite repeated expressions of caution, Hutchinson ventures into
the invisible and incomprehensible. The poet could circumnavigate
essential truths, and restrict herself to adiaphora, that which was neither
commanded nor forbidden (though this category itself brokered con
flicts within Protestantism), but narratives invariably encountered con
troversial materials.5 When were angels created, and when did they fall?
Telling stories around Scripture requires decisions about matters of space
and time and causality, and narrative presents explanatory and interpret
ative structures: sometimes it argues, sometimes explains, sometimes
discovers.6 Poets who intruded into these circumstances, however cau
tious, could find themselves undertaking fleshly manoeuvres.
Theology should not be seen as a purely repressive force. It also stirred
the imagination. Humanist biblical interpretation, for example, empow
ered poets by inaugurating a rhetorical approach to Scripture. In the mid
fifteenth century Lorenzo Valla (who demonstrated that the Donation of
Constantine and the writings of Pseudo Dionysius were both forgeries)
examined biblical texts with the intense and historicist rhetorical scrutiny
that others applied to classical texts. Two centuries later, Richard Simon’s
Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678) argued that Moses was not the
author of the Pentateuch and that the texts were chronologically con
fused and disparate.7 This work marked—it was a consequence of
transformations in understanding as much as a cause—a paradigm shift in

attitudes to Scripture, anticipating nineteenth century biblical criticism.
Between these two events exegesis entered a rhetorical phase, involving
the scrutiny of the language, narrative context, and historical circum
stance. Humanism’s linguistic vigilance facilitated the creative interroga
tion of biblical narratives, hence feeding poets’ imaginations.
One theological doctrine that empowered poets, providing a means of
understanding the imagination and (which was a quite different thing)
creativity, was called ‘accommodation’. It explained the light by which
Scripture could be read, and the invisible world described by mere
humans. It described how transcendental scriptural truths could be con
veyed to finite human comprehension, without distortion or misrepre
sentation, by the condescension of the ineffable and the upward reach of
human intelligence, sometimes assisted by the Holy Spirit. This doctrine,
embedded in early modern understanding of the nature of representation
and of the spirit world, offered poets diverse accounts of the relationship
between narratives and spiritual meaning. It was fundamental to Milton’s
authorization of his own writing. After the Reformation accommodation
was used as a ‘saving’ concept for scriptural literalism, preserving the
coherence of Scripture in the face of new ideas that sat uneasily alongside
former beliefs.8 Accommodation found literal truths in figurative inter
pretations, but it also claimed to complicate the distinction by offering a
mode of description that was neither literal nor figurative. Accommo
dation requires us to treat with caution the categories ‘imagination’,
‘feigning’, ‘fables’, and ‘invention’.
This chapter explores the development of the notion of accommo
dation and debates about accommodation and scriptural interpretation
in early modern Britain, before turning to reformed poetics in the
seventeenth century. Paradise Lost is one of a series of epic poems, all
centrally concerned with angels, that use this doctrine to meditate on
representation. The theological tradition was fundamental to literary
writing. There is a connection between seventeenth century epic,
reformed theories of representation, and the invisible world of angels.
Accommodation and the Bodies of Angels
Accommodation presents a theory about the truths contained within

Scripture and their interpretation drawn from Scripture itself. The
instructions offered by scriptural texts on how they should be read have

a distinct authority. The Word of God was understood to offer a
figurative mode of representation, in which visible patterns denoted
with imperfect transparency higher truths.9 Access to these higher truths
both depends on and provokes spiritual exploration and inspiration.
This theory was useful because of the many suggestive ambiguities in
the Bible. To use two common examples: when Scripture tells us that
God is angry, should we infer that God experiences passions? When we
read that the angels look upon the face of God, are we to understand that
God has a face? Exegetical exercises were also demanded by silences and
contradictions within Scripture: why, for example, does Moses not
mention the creation of the angels? (Alexander Ross answered: ‘Because
hee did accommodate himselfe to the rude capacitie of the Jewes.’10) And
why is God described as weary when this is elsewhere declared impos
sible? Scripture needs active interpretation, and this activity must be
regulated by an understanding of the nature of figuration.
Early patristic accounts of accommodation appear in discussions
of anthropomorphism (assigning human shape to God) and anthropo
pathy (attributing emotions to God). This focus was perhaps because
the language of Scripture was here intuitively metaphorical, though it
subsequently became an inherited topic. The Alexandrians, Philo (c.20
bce–c.ce 50) and Origen (185–254 ce), erect complex allegorical
meanings and numerical symbols. In On the Creation Philo writes,
‘these are no mythical fictions, such as poets and sophists delight in,
but modes of making ideas visible, bidding us resort to allegorical
interpretation guided in our renderings by what lies beneath the
surface’.11 Though his own readings are full of verve, he regards this
as a sign of the limitations of the human mind. Though made in his
likeness, men can only think of God anthropomorphically:
We are not able to cherish continually in our souls the thought which sums so
worthily the nature of the Cause, that ‘God is not as man’ (Num. 23: 19), and
thus rise superior to all the human conceptions of Him. In us the mortal is the
chief ingredient. We cannot get outside ourselves in forming our ideas; we
cannot escape our inborn infirmities. We creep within our covering of
mortality, like snails into their shells, or like the hedgehog we roll ourselves
into a ball, and we think of the blessed and the immortal in terms of our own
natures. We shun indeed in words the monstrosity of saying that God is of
human form, but in actual fact we accept the impious thought that He is of
human passions. And therefore we invent for Him hands and feet, incomings
and outgoings, enmities, aversions, estrangements, anger, in fact such parts and
passions as can never belong to the Cause. And of such is the oath—a mere
crutch for our weakness.12
According to Philo, Moses was responsible for accommodating hard
truths in intelligible form. He does not, however, indicate that there is
a powerful hermeneutic connection between Moses’ ‘surest truth’ and
things said for instruction. Philo both frowns on the impious who offer
‘mythical fictions’ by attributing human passions to God, and admits
that it is a necessary crutch.13
Later debates about anthropomorphism and anthropopathy—
among scholars who rejected or accepted either or both as viable
verbal practices—usually focused on the truth possible in accommo
dated speech. Lactantius in the fourth century discussed human form as
a symbolic embodiment of divine virtues, without any suggestion of
physical similarity, but in his treatise on divine anger he argues that
God does experience real anger and love and other emotions, though
categorically not ‘vicious affections’. If he did not show anger, he
would not be feared, and hence not reverenced. God is angry because
he cares.14 The belief that Scripture says that God is angry because he is
in a real sense angry would become associated with the Audian heresy,
condemned by the Church in 399 ce.15 Hilary of Poitiers (c.300–c.367)
offered a limited justification of anthropomorphism while attacking
the Arian heresy. He writes that there is no real similarity between God
and human attributes, yet ‘the weakness of our understanding forces us
to seek for illustrations from a lower sphere to explain our meaning
about loftier themes’. These analogies, which set the ‘spiritual’ and
‘invisible’ alongside the ‘carnal’ and ‘palpable’, are an imperfect but
‘necessary aid’, necessary because they are edifying: ‘we must employ
ordinary natures and ordinary speech as our means of expressing what
our mind apprehends; a means no doubt unworthy of the majesty of
God, but forced upon us by the feebleness of our intellect, which can
use only our own circumstances and own our words to convey to
others our perceptions and our conclusions’. By such means we
advance towards ‘inward meaning’.16 Anthropomorphism is more
than a necessary evil: it leads us to truth.
These authors stress that compromise or an acceptance of human
limitations is necessary to approach God, and they attribute the agency
for such compromise to humanity, especially Moses but also other
prophets. This is a form of social accommodation.17 With Augustine
and Pseudo Dionysius this agency shifted to create a hermeneutic mode

of accommodation. Augustine (354–430) attributed the accommodation
of divine attributes for human comprehension to God alone. God makes
himself visible, Augustine writes, ‘not as He truly is, but in a way which
those who saw Him could bear’. Augustine’s primary concern here is the
physical appearance to human eyes, a question fundamental to all
accounts of angels, but verbal representation follows the same pattern.
God never repents or feels anger, but Scripture describes these emotions
to translate immutability into human concepts.
[I]f Scripture did not use such terms, it would not communicate its meaning so
clearly to all the race of men for whom it has care. If it did not first bend down
and, as it were, descend to the level of the fallen, it would not terrify the
proud, arouse the negligent, exercise the inquirer and nourish the intelligent.18
Scriptures bends down to our fallen capacities; and it does so to

humans of all capacities, the inquisitive and perspicacious as well as
the sinful. Anthropopathy offers a purposeful form of representation
that is figurative without committing any misrepresentation.
Pseudo Dionysius’ exquisitely detailed and audacious description of
our knowledge of God and the organization of heaven laid founda
tions shaping all subsequent angel doctrine. For Pseudo Dionysius
angels and representing the invisible are inextricable, and following
him the issues would be tied. The immeasurable and infinite are
beyond the comprehension even of prophets, he writes, yet the
authors of Scripture were allowed
a power by which, in a manner surpassing speech or knowledge, we reach a

union superior to anything available to us by way of our own abilities or activities
in the realm of discourse or of intellect. This is why we must not dare to resort to
words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being,
apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed.19
Scriptural language is unique, and overcomes some of the limitations

of being human. Many, including Milton, would echo these words.
This hermeneutic strategy offers something of a third way: allowing
divine inspiration in the sacred Scriptures, it assumes that the Holy
Spirit confers upon the language itself a special representational
potency, even when that language is no longer in the mouths of
prophets. Far from being a misrepresentation, scriptural language
speaks of something that is true even if it is beyond us.20
The most important and carefully deliberated aspect of this description

is the metaphor of movement. Here, as repeatedly in Pseudo Dionysius’
works, we are drawn upward towards the truth. The ‘incongruous
dissimilarities’ applied to God in Scripture ‘enabled that part of the soul
which longs for the things above actually to rise up’. Love is a ‘yearning’
that permits union: ‘It moves the superior to provide for the subordinate,
and it stirs the subordinate in a return toward the superior.’21 Not only
does Scripture bend down to us; we reach up for it, and begin to
transcend the fixed hierarchies of Creation. In this respect Augustine
and Pseudo Dionysius (unknown to each other) differ from their
predecessors, shifting towards a hermeneutics of accommodation. Fol
lowing them accommodation would usually be understood to involve
‘contemplation’ that allows this bending and lifting, to be both a special
property of Scripture and an inspired process of reading, by which
the limited capacities of humans can encounter and comprehend the
incomprehensible truths of the ineffable.
Aquinas accepts this account, though emphasizing the downward
movement of condescension, the creation of similitudes for man’s
imperfect understanding.22 Aquinas’ main interest in the concept,
however, is its use in describing and explaining angelic bodies. The
nature of angels, their status as mediators between God and human
kind, their incorporeality and their self representation to humans, are
central to the theology and conceptual labour of the Summa Theologiae.
Aquinas writes: ‘Just as the figurative expressions used in the Bible to
convey truths that are beyond reach of our senses are not lies’—lying is
the risk for mere creatures—
because in speaking in this way Scripture does not identify one order of things
with another, but merely avails itself of certain analogies in the sensible world
to give us an idea of purely intelligible properties—so it is no slur on the
truthfulness of holy angels that the bodies they assume should seem to be
living men when in fact they are not.23
From henceforth scriptural analogies would be associated with the

virtual bodies of invisible beings. Incorporeal spirits adopted bodies
as a means of representing themselves to the capacities of humans,
though in doing so they risked deceit.
Despite challenges to the Thomist synthesis and the revival of
interest in Plato, Renaissance Neoplatonists adopted Aquinas’ theology
of angels in detail. They also appropriated and extended the doctrine of
accommodation as a model for characterizing the correspondence

between the ideal world and the world of experience, and the means
by which humans might be drawn to the infinite through the imme
diate. Through the Renaissance Neoplatonists the notion of accom
modation became something of a commonplace. In their hands,
however, accommodation described movement around the allegorical
system of universal correspondences and the work that poets did. It
was a weak version of accommodation, which, while it fitted into a
religious universe, was detached both from mainstream theology and
from the fervent inspiration of the spirit.24
Reformation, Literalism, and Accommodation
Reformers renewed attention to processes of signification. A nexus of

issues touched upon accommodation and angels’ bodies: first, the con
viction that sola scriptura was the path to true belief; secondly, the
emphasis on spiritual light as the guide to interpretation; thirdly, the
Calvinist suggestion that the visual image was a means of forgetting rather
than approaching the spiritual, which led to a greater emphasis on textual
culture, and to iconoclasm. Reformed theologians stressed the pre emi
nence of literal meaning, allowing figurative readings permissible only
when the literal sense was incoherent. This necessitated a more vigorous
defence against anthropopathy and anthropomorphism, which were,
because they created images of the divine, idolatrous. Accommodation
became for reformers a means of legitimizing a specific mode of figura
tive interpretation within a literalist framework.
John Calvin (1509–64), the most influential authority on represen
tation in Protestant Europe and especially in Britain, declared that any
representations of God in human or visible terms both were erroneous
and led to false worship. His arguments, though primarily concerned
with the visual, repeatedly glanced at the limits of language and the
human mind: ‘God indeed, I graunt, sometime in certaine signes hath
given a presence of his godhead, so as he was said to be beholden face
to face, but all these signes that ever he shewed, did aptly serve for
meanes to teach, and withal did plainly admonish men of an incom
prehensible essence.’25 Signs teach, but reveal their inadequacy. Hence,
on Moses’ description of God’s anger: ‘he bringeth in god speaking
after the manner of men, by a figure called Anthropopathia: because
otherwise he could not expresse that which was very necessarie to be

knowen’. The margin glosses the rhetorical figure: ‘Anthropopathia is
a figure by whiche humane affections are attributed to God for our
capacitie, at what time those thinges which belong to him, are to us
incomprehensible.’ Moses’ next verse describes God’s repentance, and
Calvin explains that ‘God verily is not greeved or sorrie’ because he is
immutable, but ‘the holy Ghost frameth himselfe to our capacitie’.26 In
the Institutes he writes that Anthropomorphites are misled,
because oftentimes the Scripture ascribeth unto him a mouth, eares, eies,
hands and feete. For what man, yea though he be slenderly witted, doth not
understand that God doth with us speake as it were childishly, as nurses doe
with their babes? Therefore such maner of speeches doe not so plainly
expresse what God is, as they doe apply the understanding of him to our
slender capacitie. Which to doe, it behooved of necessitie that he descended a
great way beneath his owne height.27
Calvin unequivocally emphasizes the downward movement God’s
deliberate framing of himself to human faculties, and the agency of
the spirit. The true Christian is like a child, but one who has to read
knowingly, and see that the rhetoric reveals sacred truth.
It is not only in connection to God that this pattern of accommodation
occurs in Scripture. Angel’s bodies are also accommodated: ‘As for shape,
it is certaine, that spirits have none, and yet the Scripture for the capacitie
of our wit doth not in vaine under Cherubin and Seraphim paint us out
Angels with wings, to the intent we should not doubt that they will be
ever with incredible swiftnesse, readie to succour us.’28 Similarly, Donne
writes, ‘we paint angels with wings, because j They bear God’s message,
and proclaim His laws’.29 Protestant exegesis is not straightforwardly
literal. It encompasses rhetorically informed figurative interpretation,
where the figure is authorized by the Spirit, and the reading is guided
by rhetoric. The two main exempla where this manner of reading is
proved and tested are the bodies of God and of angels.
Peter Martyr (1500–52) dwells at length on accommodation to
explain scriptural interpretation and angelic bodies, and to repudiate
anthropomorphism. Regarding the latter, he insists that the likeness
between man and God witnessed in Scripture describes spiritual rather
than physical similarity, and that attributing ‘the members and parts of
mans bodie’ merely helps ‘our weake capacitie’, giving us knowledge
by through ‘speciall signes and shadowes’. We perforce must use this
language, though it is heretical to take it too much in ‘earnest’.30
Accommodation is a property of Scripture, and a hermeneutic process,

but, essentially, it also shapes the language that we use when we speak
of God: it is a process that implicates both writers and readers, poets as
well as prophets.
For Peter Martyr angels are a laboratory for exegesis. Their icon
ography is symbolic: scripture ‘setteth them out unto us; not onelie
with wings, but also full of eyes; that is to saye, that they execute the
office committed to them by God, both wisely and speedily’. This
image is an accommodated one, and emphatically not an invitation to
devise a fourfold exegesis of angelic wings. Though the substance and
nature of spirits is inexpressible, it is lawful to picture them, ‘as they
have shewed themselves unto men’—just as we are authorized to use
the accommodated language of Scripture—provided this does not
involve worship. He adds a telling rider: ‘for they be not, as God is,
infinite; but are bounded and limited’.31 In other words, angels can be
seen as conceptual and ontological mediators between God and man
kind. God in his infinitude cannot be represented, but angels can, and
as finite yet spiritual substances they can be used to explain two things
of the utmost importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:
first, the nature of the spiritual world and its relationship to the material
world of Creation; and secondly, the relationship between God and
man. Accommodation and angels, once again, walk hand in hand as a
means of understanding man’s place in the universe.
In early modern Britain theologians followed these cues. A number
of patterns can be discerned:
1. an emphasis on the primacy of the ‘literal sense’—the ‘historical’,

‘grammatical’, or ‘plain sense’—consonant with much of Protestant
Europe;32
2. an increasing stress on human agency in accommodation; initially
Moses’ deliberate condescension to his immediate audience, but
subsequently more various;
3. close association between accommodated language and the visible
appearance of angels;
4. use of accommodation to save Protestant literalism: it uses
the figurative sense without being fiction;
5. the involvement of the theory in defending the existence of the
spirit world (against perceived Sadducism).
A few examples illustrate the roles of accommodation in English

writing. Thomas Wilson, in his Theologicall Rules to Guide us in the
Understanding and Practise of Holy Scriptures (1615), appeals to the rhet
orical trope anthropopathia to contradict the doctrines of the anthro
pomorphites. Because humans are dull, Scripture speaks of God’s body
partly to shadow forth the spiritual. The anthropomorphites’ literalism
disregards the nature of accommodation: ‘By bodily things the scrip
tures lead and lift us up to see such excellent divine things as bee in
god, by a figure called Anthropopathia.’33 John Gaule’s meditation on
Abraham’s entertainment of the angels integrates the silences of Scrip
ture commonly explored in annotation, showing how knowledge can
develop through self conscious accommodation. Equating angels with
God, he ponders:
Doth the Lord eate Buls flesh, or drinke the bloud of Goates? . . . God eates,
and eates with Abraham, and can as easily dispense with the corporall nutri
ment he receives; as with such substance, he now assumes. Their Bodies they
now tooke, were brought to nothing, and so was their Meate. Spirits never
eate of necessitie, sometimes of dispensation. God now eates, not of hunger,
and for his owne refreshment: but of good fellowship, and for the others
satisfaction. . . . oft times will God stoope to the act of our nature; that we
might reach to the works of his Grace.34
He closely associates accommodation, food, angelic digestion, and

anthropomorphism, much as Milton does, and natural philosophy
emerges through Scripture. This eating is not illusory, but God stoops
as our nature reaches. John White identifies in Scripture’s description
both human and divine agency: Moses consciously applies himself to
the weak capacity of man, while God is compassionately willing to
‘shadow his wayes’. This was part of a shift in early modern theology
towards human agency. This shift was rooted in older traditions,
including Philo, but was not simply a form of ‘social’ or conscious
accommodation, as it involved granting special powers to the human
spirit. White is a meditative commentator, who is, in lyrical and
unhurried prose, inventive in ways similar to Milton:
Thus God sometimes, in his Word, represents himself, as moved with humane
Affections, Grief, Joy, Wrath, Compassion; with humane expressions in forms
of speech, as Expostulations, Complaints, and Deliberations; with humane
Actions, Coming, Going, Sitting still, Arising, Standing, Sleeping, Forgetting,
Remembering, and the like.
And this he doth, 1. That he may condescend to our weaknesse, which

moves him to feed us, as Paul doth his hearers, with milk, because we cannot
brook strong meat . . . representing Heavenly things to Earthly men, by earthly
means . . .
And, 2. To affect us the more, by representing spiritual things, by those,
which being Earthly, are nearest to Sense, which usually works most on our
affections.
Let it fill our hearts with the admiration of God’s mercy, and compassion
towards such unworthy wretches as we are, unto whom he is pleased to
descend so low, seeing we cannot ascend up unto Him, cloathing himself, as
it were, with our flesh, and appearing to us, in a sort, in the form of a
man, laying aside his own Glory and Majestie for our encouragement and
instruction.
A special end, which the Spirit of God aimes at, in setting out this history of
mans Creation, with such variety of Circumstances, and representing God
consulting in such a manner, is, to raise up our hearts to a more serious
consideration of, and diligent searching into, the work it self . . . 35
Moses’ description involves condescension, but it also empowers us,

working on our affections to raise our hearts. Affections are uniquely
human; far from scorning the fleshliness of the human mind, God
works upon what is human to effect this illumination. White’s account
of accommodation is powerful: it is both persuasive and claims great
potency. Scripture is not allegorical or literal: by partaking of a higher
truth the shadow is transformed as well as the idea. Language clothes the
truth with flesh, resulting not in misrepresentation, but in something
like the Incarnation.
What is at stake in the doctrine of accommodation in seventeenth
century Britain can be seen in a dispute at the margins of mainstream
theology. The encounter, between the Socinian John Biddle and the
Presbyterian John Owen, was perhaps the most significant and explicit
argument on the doctrine. It has an additional interest for the reader of
Milton: Biddle probably had a hand in the publication of the Racovian
Catechism, which Milton licensed in August 1650 (and for which he was
subsequently questioned by the Council of State). In contrast, Lucy
Hutchinson was a follower of Owen.36 The efflorescence of writing on
the spirit during the 1640s and 1650s, which spurred new interests in
angels, also electrified opinions on the nature and representation of God.
Biddle denied the divinity of Christ and argued that the Trinity
consisted of God, Christ the man, and a Holy Spirit, who is the chief
angel. This he proved on the basis of Scripture alone, through pure
literalism. We can only ‘reduce the Christian Religion to its primitive

integrity . . . by cashiering those many intricate terms, and devised
forms of speaking, imposed on our Religion, and by wholly betaking
our selvs to the plainness of the Scripture’.37 The elaborate figures used
by his opponents are, he writes, ‘brainsick Notions . . . first hatched by
the subtilty of Satan’.38 Biddle’s notion of plainness is politically and
theologically charged, and understates the extent to which his oppon
ents offered literal interpretations to refute his claims (though perhaps
not their pride in wordly learning and Neoplatonic philosophy).39
Biddle claimed to read Scripture literally, in contrast to Roman
Catholics and Anglicans, who were too hasty to develop figurative
readings, and occult writers who affected allegories.40 However, most
orthodox Protestants claimed to privilege the literal, while disagreeing
about where obscurities within Scripture demanded figurative exe
gesis. This meant that accusations of allegorical licence were common
in polemics against competing exegetical positions. Biddle avers to
mean something unusually simple: that he allows no figurative read
ings except in those places where Scripture expressly enjoins it, or
where Scripture is manifestly self contradictory. Figurative readings
are otherwise a slippery slope to mystical fabrications.41 Hobbes had
similar reservations about metaphors, but whereas Hobbes attacked
radicals and enthusiasts Biddle challenged established and orthodox
Churchmen.42 Scripture attributes to God a shape, a place, passions and
affections, and to allegorize this is to manipulate it:
Would not this be to use the Scripture like a nose of wax, and when of it self it
looketh any way, to turn it aside at our pleasure? And would not God be so far
from speaking to our capacity in his Word, (which is the usual Refuge of the
Adversaries, when in these and the like matters concerning God, they are
pressed with the plain words of the Scripture) as that he would by so doing
render us altogether uncapable of finding out his meaning, whilst he spake one
thing, and understood the clean contrary? Yea, would he not have taken the
direct course to make men substitute an Idol in his stead, (for the Adversaries
hold, that to conceive of God as having a shape, or affections, or being in
certain place, is Idolatry) if he described himself in the Scripture otherwise
then indeed he is, without telling us so much in plain terms, that we might not
conceive amiss of him?43
Sleep and weariness are attributed to God but, being flatly contradicted
elsewhere, these can be read as figures. Otherwise, it is our interpret
ative duty to accept the anthropopathy and anthropomorphism of
Scripture at face value. Biddle does not reject figurative interpretations

outright, but denies accommodation any place in his theological
system, on the grounds that it does not save literalism but provides
an excuse for invention.
Owen responded that Biddle made a monster of God, giving him
real, rather than figurative, eyes, ears, lion shape, and drunkenness. He
endorses accommodation:
We say indeed . . . God condescendeth to accommodate his wayes and proceedings (not
his Essence and being) to our apprehensions, wherein we are very far from saying
that he speaks one thing & intends the clean contrary; but only that the thing that he
ascribes to himselfe, for our understanding, and the accommodation of his
proceedings, to the manner of men, are to be understood in him, and of them,
in that which they denote of perfection, & not in respect of that which is
imperfect and weake.44
This is not to give the reader free rein. The figurative expressions in
Scripture are not to be read mystically, but ‘the literall sence is to be
received, according to the direction of the Figure which is in the
words’.45 Owen claims to undertake a more nuanced rhetorical analy
sis that enables him to maintain literal interpretation through the
interpretation of figures. It was his Socinian adversaries who made
language so enigmatic ‘as to turn almost the whole Gospel into an
Allegory’.46 Owen uses the word ‘accommodated’ in the strong theo
logical sense, but also to mean a human adjustment to an audience,
though he sees them as different processes. God alone lifts us, though
we translate in the process of explicating Scripture. He writes emphat
ically that the Scriptures have nothing human in them, but are the
product of pure inspiration.47 Owen reacts against enthusiasts who laid
claim to special insight into truth. Humans can condescend to an
audience, as he is obliged to in defence of the Trinity, but there is
no inspiration involved and nothing special in the language used,
merely the pragmatics of explication.48
While Owen’s account of accommodation is much attenuated from
the mystical account of Pseudo Dionysius, it concurs that the figura
tive representation of God in Scripture offers greater access to truth
than would be available in non figurative language. Others would
insist that this is in fact non figurative language, that the process of
accommodation means that the language used describes reality neither
figuratively nor literally. Accommodation cannot be aligned with
the figurative interpretation of Scripture, and opposed to the literal
interpretation of Scripture; it can also be understood as a means of

saving literal meaning. Thus Francis Bampfield writing in 1677: ‘The
Scriptures are not accommodated to vulgar received Errours, or mere
imaginary conceits, or vain false appearances, but they speak of things,
as the things themselves really are, Is not the lord Christ Truth it
self?’49 Accommodation prevents you from having to say or think
things that are not true.
This is how the doctrine is deployed among a number of seventeenth
century divines, for whom falsehood and feigning bedevil the issue of
divine representation. This was understood through the language,
shared by all grammar school boys, of rhetoric. In a sophisticated
discussion of the interpretation of rhetorical figures in Scripture, Wilson
emphasized that ‘in such tropicall and figurative speeches, there is no
purpose to deceive, but by meet resemblances to expresse the truth’.50
He and others expressed the anxiety that elevated rhetoric might not be
suited to divinity and soteriology. Concern about deception extended to
angelic apparitions. Aquinas had argued that angelic bodies were like
figures of speech in the Bible, and thus ‘no slur on the truthfulness of
holy angels’.51 This argument was elegantly developed in Peter
Le Loier’s treatise on spectres, translated into English in 1605, where
he notes that ‘all feyning and dissembling, or any kinde of fiction is very
unseemely in the Angells of Truth’. Hence, the bodies they assume must
be ‘True and unfeyned formes’, not intending to deceive, ‘for that they do
not oppose & set before our eyes humane shapes and formes, because
thereby they would bee thought and esteemed to be men: but to the end
that by their humane properties, we should know the virtues of the
Angells’.52 Here and elsewhere the intention not to deceive is translated
to the literal reality of the representation. Henry Lawrence states that
Abraham’s angelic visitors must have really eaten: ‘it is certaine that they
did what they seemed to doe . . . for they never deceived your senses,
their colour, their shape, their eating, their drinking, their speaking was
what it seemed to be’.53 In a 1650s sermon on Acts 10 John Gumbleden
insists that the angel and Cornelius really spoke ‘mouth to mouth with
the other’, because God would not have deluded Cornelius (Gumble
den disparages transubstantiation), ‘neither was there any thing imagin
ary, or phantasticall, but all was reall, and substantiall, here’. This was not
like the image of Samuel conjured by the Witch of Endor; there was ‘no
painting, no counterfeiting, no deluding here; no, neither could there be:
because he that came in to Cornelius was an Angel of God; who knows not
how to delude or counterfeit’.54 What Gumbleden means by ‘real’ here is

less important than the concern over angelic falsehood. If angels present
illusions, they must do so in a way that does not involve feigning, deceit,
falsehood, or misrepresentation; just as when Scripture speaks of the
invisible world, and of God’s emotions, it does so truthfully. Represen
tation of the invisible and the unknown need not involve fiction if it fits
a pattern of accommodation. Accommodation means that the language
is neither figurative nor literal.
Reformed Poetics
Could accommodation influence (or help) poets? On the face of it, this
seems unlikely: while human agency might be involved in the uplift
ing, it is the Holy Spirit that guarantees the process of communication.
Except for those who included within it Moses’ deliberate adjustment
to his audience, accommodation was usually understood as something
performed by God or the Holy Spirit.55 Poetry was fiction, a product
of the fleshly imagination. Pseudo Dionysius wrote that Scripture used
poetic imagery not ‘for the sake of art’; and Peter Martyr describes
fables as ‘a narration of a false thing, devised for commoditie or delite
sake’.56 Art serves the fleshliness of the secular mind; we look upon it
for pleasure, for itself, and if we think we see God in it, this is a form of
idolatry. This view accords with the literary theory of George Putten
ham in the late sixteenth century, who thought that anthropopathia
risked underpraising God, and that the Christian poet should use figures
to praise him superlatively; Dryden espoused comparable principles a
century later.57
As we have seen, however, some found room for human agency in
accommodation, not only as a conscious adaptation but as a hermeneutic
capacity. Moreover, the Puritan emphasis on the spirit increasingly
relocated that spirit as a motion within the human. Just as biblical
commentaries, Scripture paraphrases, and rhetorical textbooks influ
enced the poetics of the early modern religious lyric,58 so early modern
theories of representation were shaped by works of scriptural exegesis.
Poets and critics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appropriated
the doctrine of accommodation in their accounts of poetics and literary
creation. This some did because it was a convenient language with which
to explain or justify imaginative representations of the spiritual world;
others because it was understood that the language of Scripture, the

language used by the prophets, had special properties that were trans
ferred to its use in other contexts, including religious poetry. But some
claimed more than that: they were transferring agency for accommoda
tion into the human domain. Their readers were therefore able to
achieve, in reading their imaginative texts, a special kind of insight into
the truth.
Milton is the most incautious of poets, and the next chapter
suggests that he occupies a special place in this shift, as well as
among English poets; others, however, also transgressed the bound
aries laid by Puttenham. Many poets express caution, yet create
a tension between prescript and practice. Thomas Heywood’s Hier
archie of the Blessed Angells reflects on accommodated language at
length and outlines the conventional symbolism of God’s material
attributes:
Sometimes, what’s proper unto Man alone,
Is given to this trias, three in One:
As, when we attribute unto him Wings,
It straight unto our apprehension brings,
How he protects and shadowes us. If Eares?
With what facilitie and grace he heares
Our devout Prayers. . . .
His Face, sometimes, his presence doth imply;
Sometimes, his favour and benignitie.59
He proceeds to construe God’s hands, feet, nostrils, and eyes. Where
we ‘reade Wrath’, we are meant to understand a promise of God’s
terrible judgements; where ‘eyes’, his omniscience. Heywood implies
that this power of signification was deliberately implemented by the
prophets, who were not merely intermediaries for the Holy Spirit. He
touches upon a distinction between two understandings of prophecy:
as being a passive conduit for God’s voice, and as consciously passing
on inspired knowledge. However, he brings accommodation and
prophecy into close association:
The Divine Wisedome, knowing how dull and weake
Mans heart and braine is, Taught the Text to speake
To our capacities. The Prophets, they
Did not of this great Deity display
The absolute perfection; but so leave it,
That by a glimpse we far off might conceive it.60
The corporeal provides a vehicle for spiritual expression, and this way
of speaking has an uplifting power:
Now to proceed: The Scripture Phrase doth reach

No farther, than our stupid sence to teach;
That by corporeall things we may prepare
Our hearts to know what things spirituall are;
And by Invisible, make demonstration
Of what’s unseene, beyond mans weake narration.
And for this cause, our passions and affects
Are in the Scriptures, for some knowne respects,
Confer’d on the Almighty; when ’tis said,
God did repent him that he man had made.
Or when hee’s wrathfull? herein is not meant,
That He is angry, or, He can repent:
But ’tis a Figure from the’effect arose,
And that the Greeks call Metanumikos.61
The prophets condescend to our capacities; they know, through the

gift of inspiration, the spiritual realm that lies beyond the weak lan
guage of human narration. The name that Heywood gives to the figure
is different from Puttenham’s anthropopathia; metanumikos implies a
transcendence above a world governed by names into a world that
defies language.
How much of this power does Heywood claim for himself? He
writes with authority about the invisible, endorsing the Pseudo
Dionysian hierarchy of angels that confers upon Hierarchie its nine
book structure, insisting that angels were made on the first day of
Creation, that Lucifer had six days of glory before he rebelled out of
pride, and he describes, albeit in insipid terms, the war between
Lucifer and Michael.62 These beliefs could be held entirely upon
the authority of orthodox theologians, and do not indicate that
Heywood believed his poetic skills granted him special insight into
revealed truths. Heywood does not let his imagination or inspir
ation—whichever it is—run free: he interrupts his narratives with
discursive passages that support, justify, and qualify the verse. Each
of the nine books begins with an emblem, and a verse argument (a
precedent for Paradise Lost63), and concludes with extended prose
‘Theologicall, Philosophicall, Poeticall, Historicall, Apothegmaticall,
Hierogriphicall and Emblematicall Observations, touching the fur
ther illustration of the former Tractate’, followed by commentary on
the emblem and then verse meditations on the preceding book. He

explains his reasoning:
That nothing in these short Tractates may appeare difficult to the Ignorant,
I hold it necessarie unto my present purpose, (as willing to be understood by all)
to illustrate whatsoever may seem obscure, as well by precept as Historie. . . .
that was the end to which industrious Authors first aimed their Indeavours, and
spent so much Inke and Oile, in their dayes labours, and nights watchings.64
Heywood’s purpose is didactic. Though Hierarchie was a labour of love,
the magnum opus of a popular dramatist and the first translator of Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria (1625), it is a work more of learning than of inspiration.
Lucy Hutchinson avows resistance to invention, to speculative
writing about ‘circumstances that we cannot know’. Humans, impri
soned by bodily senses, are ignorant. Adam finds no companionship in
beasts, but cannot reach to converse with angels:
No; for though man partake intelligence,
Yet that, being joined to an inferior sense,
Dulled by corporeal vapours, cannot be
Refined enough for angels’ company.65
Hutchinson’s dualist universe is severely hierarchical. The contrast
with Milton is profound. Hutchinson repeatedly emphasizes the
ignorance of humans and the limited capacity of their understanding.
In her theological treatise ‘On the Principles of the Christian Religion’
she writes that Scripture does not state when the angels fell, but
only tells us, they kept not their first station, became haters of God, enemies,
accusers, and murtherers of mankind, liars and deceivers; that they are subtile,
and restlesse in persuading the destruction of men; that they are mallitious
tormentors, and tormented, and uncapable of redemption.
And again:
The creation and our owne frames are like faire volumes to a dimme sighted
man, where the truths of God are written in legible characters; but wee cannot
make any sense of them without the help of devine illumination, which sacred
spectacles once put on makes us read the discoveries of God with holy wonder
and delight . . . 66
But again and again she moves from the negative to the positive, from
ignorance to surmise, from darkness to light. She starts with limitation,
and argues towards an affirmation or a means. This pattern obtains in
her accounts of representation.
The language of shadows and mirrors exploited in The Life of Colonel

Hutchinson and her elegies resembles the conventional language of
Neoplatonism, but it is also shaped by these theological and soterio
logical concerns. God is mirrored by Christ, who is mirrored by
Scripture, which is mirrored by John, and Lucy is a reflection of his
virtue.67 It is the principle of accommodation that lifts these shadows
up to share the light of their higher partners. Hence, perhaps, her
recurrent dwelling on the details of John’s appearance and clothes, in
language that is both philosophical and erotic.68 Similarly, Order and
Disorder creates a process of literary circumvention. Hutchinson insists
on the superiority of paradisal nature to postlapsarian art, and dismisses
the capacity of pencils, wit, and other means of feigning to capture the
perfections of paradise. Nothing remains of it, and so we should not
invent . . . but then she continues:
We know there was a pleasant and noble shade
Which the tall growing pines and cedars made,
And thicker coverts, which the light and heat
Even at noonday could scarcely penetrate. (3. 159 62)
The proceeding description is partly extra scriptural. However, the

elaboration is securely confined within brackets, like the walls of
paradise, that emphasize the narrator’s hesitation.
Hutchinson’s emphasis on plain speech, the dangers of elaboration,
the dichotomy between religious contemplation and poetic fancy, and
the risks of the fleshly imagination are drawn from writing on accom
modation. The preface to her epic promises to disappoint expectations of
elegant poetry: ‘they will find nothing of fancy in it; no elevations of
style, no charms of language . . . I would rather breath forth grace cordi
ally than words artificially.’ She will not turn ‘Scripture into a
romance’.69 Romance is antithetical to Scripture, and, in her life of her
husband, to providence. Elaborate rhetoric is a sign of artifice, not of
revelation, and this is a religious work in which it would be indecorous.70
The preface turns to optimism, however. The Word lifts human reason:
comparing that revelation God gives of himself and his operations in his Word
with that of the wisest of mankind, who only walked in the dim light of
corrupted nature and defective traditions, could with all their industry trace
out or invent, I found it so transcendently excelling all that was human, so
much above our narrow reason, and yet so agreeable to it being rectified, that
I disdained the wisdom fools so much admire themselves for; and as I found
I could know nothing but what God taught me, so I resolved never to search
after any knowledge of him and his productions, but what he himself hath
given forth.71
Hutchinson makes no explicit claim to privileged or prophetic insight,
but she does explore truths that lie in revelation’s penumbra, and can
do so because she relies on the power of Scripture to condescend to her
and lift her. Provided she remains within the inspiring remit of Scrip
ture, even while she reads it figuratively (a practice she reflects upon72),
she does not stray into the ‘impious tales’ or pagan fictions of the
fleshly imagination. And she becomes even more positive: in plain and
elegant poetry, ‘Truth loses not its perfection.’ Accommodation lifts
the writer above her limitations, and prevents her from saying things
that are impious or untrue.
Samuel Pordage’s relationship to accommodation is distinctive, but
revealingly so. As Chapter 5 showed, John travelled through the
invisible universe, and conveyed to his son the prophetic insights
that formed the basis for his epic Mundorum Explicatio. Samuel was
able to claim a more powerful version of accommodation than Hutch
inson, Heywood, or any of the divines discussed above. He insists that
poetry is properly religious, and condemns the vitiating ‘wanton
rithmes’ of secular poetry praising ‘Mistress’ eyes’: ‘The end of Poesy
is the praise of God, j Us’d to that end it is exceeding good.’73 There
are limits to the poet’s vatic power, however. God is beyond man’s
proper knowledge. The hieroglyphic figure (Fig. 5.1) presents God as
eyes, ears, and ciphers in a sun enveloped in cloud, and Pordage warns:
Nor Man, or Angel a commission has
To dive into this abstruce secret Place,
Therefore thine eyes withdraw, and be Content
To know god as He will, nor represent
Thou to thy mind, or in thy fantasie
An Image of the glorious Deity;
For never ought we Heav’n’s high Majesty
To Form or Figure whatsoever tye:
Therefore O Man destroy all Images
Of God, that in thy fantasie shall rise.74
Samuel requires a theory of accommodation, and this account is
embedded in his description of angelic bodies. Both good and bad
angels freely adopt bodies of air, exploiting their thrall over the elements,
and can animate dead bodies. They nonetheless have their own incor
poreal bodies, and their adopted virtual bodies reflect these.75
But whensoever Spirits Bodies here
Assume, and to our outer Eye appear,
They put on such as may convenient be,
And with their inner Bodies best agree,
For look what shapes their inner Bodies have,
Such shapes, (if visibly appear) they crave.
Pordage compares this to a wax simulacrum of a man, inside which a
man will fit. Angels are ‘self Taylors’: the invisible body is clothed with
a corresponding visible body, ‘So that the outer forms the’assimulate j
In all things answer their internal state’.76 The ambiguous neologism
(which John Taylor had recently used to signify feigning) suggests that
the angels both simulate their outward appearance and assimilate it.
They are thus able to communicate with humans, who can
understand
Nothing, but what’s compos’d of matter, and
Form, and what is corporal.
However, the simulated body accurately represents a reality that is
beyond the human senses. Pordage also notes that good angels usually
appear in human form, which suggests that angels indeed look like
humans with wings.77 Despite his Behmenist insistence on an inner
world distinct from the corporeal world of ordinary human experi
ence, Pordage suggests that these two correspond so closely that at
times they cannot be distinguished, and sounds and actions in one
penetrate to the other. In his version of accommodation the human
and divine crash into each other.
Milton and Accommodation
Accommodation is a common foundation for poets writing imagina

tive narratives based upon Scripture, and it is more significant to
Milton’s conception of his creation than to Pordage, Heywood, or
Hutchinson. In Paradise Lost Raphael explains accommodation to
Adam repeatedly, and his explanations echo beyond the frame of his
speech, to envelop the whole poem. Milton relies on reformed
accommodation to justify what would otherwise be an unsustainable,

even outrageous, incursion into the unknown.
. . . how shall I relate
To human sense the invisible exploits
Of warring Spirits . . . what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By likening spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if earth
Be but the shadow of heav’n, and things therein
Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?
(5. 564 76)
. . . who, though with the tongue

Of angels, can relate, or to what things
Liken on earth conspicuous, that may lift
Human imagination to such highth
Of godlike power . . . (6. 297 301)
Thus measuring things in heav’n by things on earth . . .

(6. 893)
. . . though to recount almighty works

What words or tongue of seraph can suffice,
Or heart of man suffice to comprehend?
Yet what thou canst attain, which best may serve
To glorify the maker, and infer
Thee also happier, shall not be withheld
Thy hearing, such commission from above
I have received . . . (7. 112 19)
This theology of literary articulation, crossing the boundary between

visionary insight and word, is also alluded to by Michael and by the
epic’s blind narrator:
So law appears imperfect, and but given
With purpose to resign them in full time
Up to a better covenant, disciplined
From shadowy types to truth, from flesh to spirit . . .
(12. 300 3)
So much the rather thou celestial light

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (3. 51 5)
These passages address the reader’s relationship with the poem, but
they do not invite her to read the poem, or specific passages, meta
phorically or allegorically.78 Allegory posits a gulf between ideal and
the representation, and instructs the reader in how to read that repre
sentation in order to experience a lifting from the real towards the
ideal.79 Accommodation, however, presumes no such divide. There is
a particular affinity between the images of the poem and the reality
they offer to describe; this is not a likeness of signification, but a deeper
similarity where human conception meets transcendent truth without
a self conscious process of interpretation. This happens because of the
power of language, in which Scripture instructs the poet, and because
of inspiration, the guidance of the Spirit. These are premisses of
Milton’s aesthetic.80
Milton also uses and discusses the doctrine of accommodation in the
work now known as De Doctrina Christiana, in a manner different from
but analogous to the musings of Paradise Lost.81 He asserts that no one
can know God through reason alone, and that knowledge of the Word
‘must be understood with reference to the imperfect comprehension
of man’, as God is above man’s comprehension.
Our safest way is to form in our minds such a conception of God, as shall
correspond with his own delineation and representation of himself in the
sacred writings. For granting that both in the literal and figurative descriptions
[vel describi vel adumbrari] of God, he is exhibited not as he really is, but in such a
manner as may be within the scope of our comprehensions, yet we ought to
entertain such a conception of him, as he, in condescending to accommodate
himself to our capacities [qualis ipse se ad captum accommodans nostrum], has
shown that he desires we should conceive. For it is on this very account that
he has lowered himself to our level, lest in our flights above the reach of
human understanding, and beyond the written word of Scripture, we should
be tempted to indulge in vague cogitations and subtleties.82
The Latin expresses the sense of indeterminacy and ambiguity implicit
in such representation, one characteristic of discussions of angelic
bodies. ‘Vel describi vel adumbrari’ offers as alternatives a description
or representation and a semblance, a counterfeit or feigning (not a
‘figurative’) delineation. Representation would be feigning if it was not
accommodated to human capacities.
The movement of Milton’s prose here is significant. He proceeds
to reject anthropopathia, closely following Puttenham, as ‘a figure
invented by the grammarians to excuse the absurdities [nugas] of
the poets on the subject of the heathen divinities’. Yet it is to the

Scholastic, purely rhetorical and uninspired, account of anthropopa
thy that he objects, while he endorses the attribution of human
feelings to God ‘after the manner of Scripture, that is, in the way
wherein God has offered himself to our contemplation’.83 While
rejecting the Audian heresy with its literal account of God’s body
and Lactantius’ literal understanding of God’s anger, he steers very
close to both.84 He quotes a series of anthropomorphisms from
Scripture, and adds: ‘however we may attempt to soften down
such expressions by a latitude of interpretation, when applied to
the Deity, it comes in the end to precisely the same’. That is, the
qualifications make little difference. Indeed, he adds, after quoting
the decisive ‘Let us make man in our Image’ (Gen. 1: 26), ‘if God
habitually assign to himself the members and form of man, why
should we be afraid of attributing to him what he attributes to
himself, so long as what is imperfection and weakness when viewed
in reference to ourselves be considered as most complete and excel
lent when imputed to God?’85 This is to be accomplished, and the
truest apprehension of God obtained, by accommodating one’s
understanding to his Word, which is itself accommodated to one’s
understanding (‘eos optime capere statuamus qui suum accommodant
captum Dei verbo; quandoquidem is verbum suum accommodat
captum Dei verbo’).86 The syntax mimes the reciprocal process.
Milton becomes increasingly emphatic: we are obliged to follow the
anthropopathisms of Scripture. God is as he represents himself, so why,
and on what authority, should we think otherwise? We are, after all,
only human.
In arguing thus, we do not say that God is in fashion like unto man in all his
parts and members, but that as far as we are concerned to know, he is of that
form which he attributes to himself in the sacred writings. If, therefore, we
persist in entertaining a different conception of the Deity than that which it is
to be presumed he desires should be cherished, inasmuch as he has himself
disclosed it to us, we frustrate the purposes of God instead of rendering him
submissive obedience. As if, forsooth, we wished to show that it was not we
who had thought too meanly of God, but God who had thought too meanly
of us.87
Milton’s argument winds through a familiar logic, until he endorses,
beyond all doubt, the anthropopathy he originally rejected. We are not
trying to capture the essence of God, only to find out the most accurate
way of writing about him. God is, as far we can understand, really like
that; ‘it comes in the end to precisely the same’. Raphael’s meditation
on the problems of representing spiritual warfare similarly cancels itself
when he concludes with a question:
what if earth
Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?
(5. 574 6)
In De Doctrina’s discussion of accommodation, God suddenly becomes

much more like the language we use to describe him than we think.
To suggest otherwise would be to devalue his high estimation of us.
To Milton accommodation signifies the condescension of God and
the raising of human thought, and the Christian guarantee that while
this is taking place miscommunication or misrepresentation or misun
derstanding will not occur. Accommodation inhabits inspired writing:
it is God who is representing himself, and his prophets, therefore, are
conduits for his words, though their words are also his. True believers
will use Scripture as the palimpsest for discoursing of God, because its
terms, images, figures are all authorized. Milton’s account of accom
modation admits of human agency, provided the human has the spirit
with him or her, and it grants special power to the poet, extending a
seventeenth century English poetic. It is an especially strong version of
the doctrine, granting much more to the individual believer, compre
hending the ability, in appropriate conditions, to understand and
describe the sacred. There are circumstances when it is possible for
writers to go beyond what is expressly laid down in Scripture provided
they stay true to his own divine self conception. If what they write is
protected by the operation of accommodation, and provided they
have the spirit with them, it will be true, at least in human terms,
which are for all practical purposes the same as divine; it amounts to
the same in the end. This is more daring than anything Hutchinson or
Heywood offers, though it is not so far from Pordage, whose father
had communicated with angels.
To see how Milton claims so much on behalf of accommodation,
however, it is necessary to examine the other element in the formula.
While accommodation is for the poet an insurance policy against
misrepresentation, Milton reaches deeper into sacred mysteries
because of his belief in the operation of the spirit. Milton’s adaptation

of accommodation is not an excuse for writing figuratively, but
evidence that he is really inspired, guided by an inner illumination
that enables him to think that what he writes is, in a sense, true, as
literally true as scriptural accounts of God’s anger or right hand. The
next chapter—a transitional interlude in which this book moves from
considering angels and theology towards Milton’s angels and the
literary imagination—examines this operation of the spirit, understood
within the context of Protestant theology of the spirit and particularly
the inner light fundamental to British radicalism. It was understood in
several ways: inspiration, vision, the voice of an angel heard internally
or audibly, the voice of God, prophecy. Marvell asks the question most
eloquently:
Where couldst thou words of such a compass find?
Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind?
Just heaven thee like Tiresias to requite
Rewards with prophecy thy loss of sight.88
7
Spiritual Gifts
Angels, Inspiration, and Prophecy
Poetry, Prophecy, and the Poet–Prophet
The spirit of prophesie, is not like the spirit of the buttery . . . we must not in
raging, or aspiring affection presume to mount above the cloudes in the
highest region of the aire, or to pierce the unknowen deepes of the earthly
Center. It is a scrupulous, and vaine curiositie to busie our selves, or impor
tune other about any such inquiry, as neither is lawfull in practise, or assured in
use, but both impious in the one, and uncertaine in the other.1
Thus cautioned the physician John Harvey, writing in 1588. His voice
was one in a chorus. Early modern Britain saw a surge both of
prophetic activity, and of cautions against the delusions of inspiration.
Calvin warned that true prophecy was rare, and that false prophets
abounded, yet it was intrinsic to the intellectual dynamics of Protest
antism that individual believers claimed special insight beyond priestly
jurisdiction.2 Prophets appeared. Especially at times of political or
social fracture, in the 1580s and the 1640s, men and women pro
claimed themselves prophets. These prophets, however, were not
simply the enemies of orthodox theology. Many worked closely
within the tenets of Protestant belief to legitimize their activity.
Milton saw himself as a prophet. But what did this term mean to
him, and what did it mean in the context of mid seventeenth century
Britain? Milton was a vatic poet, in a tradition of poet–prophets who
opposed courtly political orthodoxies with religious truths.3 Scholars
have accentuated the authorial self fashioning in Milton’s stance. They
have emphasized the poet–prophet role, and the term prophet has been
heavily qualified by the term poet.4 In the Renaissance poet–prophet
tradition, a Protestant view of history is presented as seen through the

eyes of a poet elevated to a privileged position within his society (he
sees beyond its present circumstances). These poets resist the courtly
panegyric associated with the endorsement of a heavily hierarchical
vision of society—hence the ‘latent radicalism’ of the tradition—and
voice social criticism through Scripture, especially the prophetic
books.5
At the root of many seventeenth century poets’ claims to inspir
ation, and their aspiration to a role of legislator of virtue, lies Sidney’s
Apologie for Poetrie: ‘Among the Romans a Poet was called Vates, which
is as much as a Diviner, Fore seer, or Prophet, as by his conjoyned
wordes Vaticinium & Vaticinari, is manifest: so heavenly a title did that
excellent people bestow upon this hart ravishing knowledge.’6 Sidney,
responding to Plato’s account of poetry as feigning, claims a special
kind of truth for poetry. In contrast to the limited truths of historians, a
poet ‘pictures what should be, and not stories what have beene, they
will never give the lye, to things not affirmatively, but allegorically,
and figurativelie written’.7 The true poet does not speak falsehoods,
though his words may not be literal, argues Sidney, as the truths he
speaks are not simply affirmative. He speaks a prophetic truth that is
neither positive nor false.8 The tradition extends through John Dennis,
who, in his Grounds of Criticism (1704), describes poetry as ‘one of the
Prophetick Functions’, but reduces this prophesy–poetry to secular
inspiration.9 The early modern Protestant prophetic tradition is a
mode of writing, shaped by biblical forms.10
Milton is among the poets indebted to Sidney, yet his vision of the
poet–prophet is considerably more ambitious. To see the prophetic
element of Milton’s verse as being exclusively located within a poetic–
prophetic or a Sidneian tradition, as a social critic finding a voice in
Scripture, understates the truth claims he seeks to make. It places a
boundary between Milton and other early modern prophets, and finds
a creative tradition for his prophecy that confers social respectability. This
approach is certainly justified by the nature and quality of Milton’s
writing, the density of literary allusion, the breadth of genres he employs,
the music of the words. The younger Milton is frequently on the verge of
stepping decisively beyond this tradition, as in ‘Lycidas’, where he speaks
in St Peter’s voice, and subsequently claims that what he foretold in the
apocalyptic section of the poem had come true.11 In Paradise Lost,
however, Milton’s truth claims are even greater. I propose to put aside
inspiration and prophecy 191
the term poet, and ask: did Milton believe that he was not only imaginatively
inspired, but also prophetically inspired, speaking a truth about Creation
and the Fall brought to him by God? Is there a sense in which Paradise
Lost is not only an expression of political theology, but also a divine
vision of a hitherto undisclosed reality
Protestant Prophecy
Early modern Protestants agreed that the age of prophecy was over.12
Like miracles, prophecy disappeared with the early Church, redundant in
the age of true faith, when, Augustine wrote, the eyes of the heart had
been opened. Thus, one speaker in James VI’s dialogue Daemonologie says:
All we that are Christians, ought assuredly to know that since the comming of
Christ in the flesh, and the establishing of his Church by the Apostles, all
miracles, visions, prophecies, & appearances of Angels or good spirites are
ceased. . . . the Lawe and Prophets are thought sufficient to serve us, or make
us inexcusable.13
James associated prophecy, miracles, and angelic apparitions. This
connection is a common one, and it is significant. Reginald Scott, a
sceptic with a very different account of spiritual activity, wrote that
miracles and prophecies ceased with the Incarnation:
We maye as well looke to hear prophesies at the tabernacle, in the bush, or the
cherubin, among the clouds, from the angels, within the arke, or out of the
flame, &c. as to expect an oracle of a prophet in these dayes.14
The Cambridge Platonist John Smith charted a more complex history:
the spirit of prophecy died under the Jews, was restored under the new
dispensation of the Messiah, then subsequently faded in the second
century. Miracles ended in the fourth.15
The age of prophecy was over. Protestants qualified this assertion,
however, observing that under extraordinary circumstances God might
raise up new prophets and work miracles.16 Peter Martyr Vermigli wrote
that now that people had emerged from darkness and gross idolatry, and
‘now that all places abound with bookes, and teachers, there is no need of
the helpe of prophets’. But he acknowledged that a small number of
prophets might continue to appear, though they would not be so celebrated
as those of former ages.17 The Elizabethan clergyman William Perkins offered
guidance in distinguishing between true and false prophets, signifying that
modern prophecy was possible in principle.18 This special qualification

to the general rule not only provided security in case they were wrong,
but permitted the visible workings of providence, a doctrine that
extensively informed the Protestant understanding of the world.
There is a second qualification. Protestants redefine prophecy to
include the form of inward conviction that is experienced when
hearing or reading the word of God. Calvin writes:
Prophane men because they thynke religion standeth onely in opinion, to the
ende they woulde beleve nothing fondly or lightly, do covet and require to
have it proved to them by reason, that Moises and the Prophetes spake from
God. But I answere that the testimonie of the holy ghost is better than all
reason. For as onely God is a conveniente witnesse of hymselfe in hys owne
worde, so shal the same worde never finde credit in the hartes of men, until it
be sealed up with the inwarde witnesse of ye holy ghost.19
This suggests the double bind of Calvinist hermeneutics, but one

consequence is that the only proof of the true prophet is inward
conviction in the auditor. This extends to reading the prophetic
books of Scripture. Reading Scripture, which is to say reading it with
faith and understanding it, relies on inspiration, the witness of the Holy
Ghost. Interpretation is a form of prophecy (especially, but not exclu
sively, interpretation of the prophetic books). Thus, Jeremy Taylor, in
Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1647), defends the right and
necessity of every man to interpret Scripture according to his own
light and reason: ‘it is best every man should be left in that liberty from
which no man can justly take him, unlesse he could secure him from
errour: So that here also there is a necessity to conserve the liberty of
Prophesying, and Interpreting Scripture’.20 Because there are no
failsafe human rules for interpretation, each man must rely on the
guidance of the spirit (which can be extinguished by the neglect of
one’s understanding); hence true interpretation is synonymous with
prophecy. Taylor’s position is unusually tolerationist, but a similar
identification of prophecy with interpretation can be found in the
writings of Charles Odingsells, who identifies four senses of prophecy
according to Scripture, the last of which is preaching or expounding
the doctrine of the prophets. ‘The gift of Prophecying in this sense’, he
writes, ‘is perpetual in the Church, and must not faile.’21 In prophecy
could lie the apostolic continuity of the true Catholic Church, which
is to say the Protestant Church. The centrality of prophecy is partly
consequent on the Protestant emphasis on the inner light, the priest

hood of all believers, and the need for a non institutional apostolic
succession (for which this specific sense of prophecy must not fail).
Some, however, restricted this prophetic practice to the proper
teachers of the Church.22 This is a specific mode of prophecy, related
to but distinct from the more general use of that term. It troubled the
Church at times of heightened apocalypticism, but did not undermine
the common understanding that prophecy had ceased.23
Putting this special sense to one side, how do Protestants understand
prophecy and the prophetic office? Most agree that prophets speak of
things far off in time or space: they speak of things done long ago, far
away, or to come.24 Vermigli, highly influential in early modern
England, agrees that prophecy reveals past, present, and future, defin
ing it as ‘a facultie given unto certeine men by the spirit of God,
without teaching or learning, whereby they are able certeinlie to know
things heavenlie, high, and secret, and open the same unto others’.25
The gift of prophecy is independent of learning. However, prophets
must understand the meaning of their words, or they are madmen.
Vermigli distinguishes prophecy from dreams, oracles, and visions.
Instead prophecy arrives through the light of inspiration:
And the heavenlie light, wherewith a mans mind is then lightened, is rather as
a sudden passion, as that which may easily be remooved, than as a passible
qualitie: and is as light in the aire, but not like the light of the celestial bodies:
not as a palenesse comming of the natural temperature of the bodie; but as that
which riseth of a sudden frighting of the mind.26
Without rushing ahead of my argument, recall Milton’s invocation to

Paradise Lost book 3:
Hail holy light, offspring of heaven first born,
Or of the eternal co eternal beam
May I express thee unblamed? (3. 1 3)
By ‘unblamed’ Milton seems to mean without misrepresentation or sin

or error or blasphemy.
. . . Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovereign vital lamp; but thou
Revisitst not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray
. . .
So much the rather thou celestial light

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (3. 21 55)
This purging of ‘mental sight’ also happens to Adam when the angel
Michael prepares him to receive a prophetic vision of future history
(11. 411–22). This idea of visual enlightenment is integral to defin
itions of prophecy. True prophecy illuminates the mind.
John Smith, whose essay on prophecy is above all an attempt to
understand prophecy by exploring rabbinical writings on the subject,
describes a hierarchy of prophecy: from Mosaic through prophetic
dreams and visions to prophecy with no visual content based on hearing
the voice of God. All prophecy mixes reason and imagination, and the
more elevated the mode, the greater the role of reason. Smith focuses
on an issue that recurs throughout discussions of prophecy. With the
exception of Moses and the lowest form of prophecy, all prophetic
visions are mediated by angels: ‘The Hebrew masters here tell us that in
the beginning of Prophetical inspiration the Prophets use to have some
Apparition or Image of a Man or Angel presenting itself to their Imagin
ation.’27 He quotes Moses Maimonides equating angelic conversations
with prophetical visions, and approves Isaac Abarbanel’s suggestion that
the status or degree of the angel sent corresponded to the status of the
receiving prophet.28 Hence, an angel high in the hierarchy, a seraph or
cherub, would bring a more significant message than a mere angel or
archangel. Even those sceptical of contemporary prophecy—such as
Harvey, who refers scornfully to ‘seraphicall illuminations’ and sensa
tionalizing pamphlets—accept that angels are involved in prophecy.29
The numerous prophets who appeared in Lutheran Germany and
Scandinavia were frequently agitated by an encounter with an angel,
sometimes disguised as an old man, usually dressed in white. The angel
encourages the prophet to call his local community to repent.30 Angels
are a means by which inspiration is brought; they instigate visions; they
authenticate the prophet; they also symbolize the moment of transition
from ordinary man to visionary prophet.
How then could one distinguish between a true prophet and a false?
Taylor writes that any sure distinction is impossible. Smith writes the
false can be identified, that melancholy men cannot be prophets, for
example, but he thinks that ultimately it requires inspiration to recognize
the true prophet.31 Others suggest more numerous external signs. For
Vermigli, the only signs of the true prophet are that he does not lead
his people into idolatry, and that his predictions are realized. False
prophets use indecent gestures, and do not understand their own
speech.32 William Perkins asserts that false prophets are personally
insufficient: they maintain heresies, they are rash and inconstant in
judgement, they are inclined to vice, and have a strange complexion
and body temperature. Young people, women, the talkative, and the
unruly were also unlikely to be true. Other warning signs included
ambiguous speeches (true prophecy was plainly spoken), and a ten
dency to provoke disquiet in church and commonwealth, or to touch
upon private interests. Perkins also warned against prophets that
seemed to go against the Word of God, including those who spoke
in particulars about things about which God had chosen to be vague.33
This implies the many predictions that circulated in early modern
Britain under the name of Merlin, Nostradamus, Piers Plowman,
and Mother Shipton, but it also seems to warn against visionary
insights into heaven or the angelic orders.34 Thomas Hobbes, to
whom enthusiasm represented the greatest threat to social stability,
thought a true prophet was simply defined. Visions, voices, and
inspirations could not be persuasively communicated to another. In
stead the true prophet was known by ‘the doing of miracles’ and ‘not
teaching any other Religion than that which is already established’.
And as the age of miracles was over, so was the age of prophets.35
True prophecy is the gift of God. But this does not exclude all
human effort. Maimonides had insisted that, though prophecy was a
natural faculty of humankind, true prophets were prepared by educa
tion and training and prompted by the will of God. Fools and ignor
amuses could no more be prophets than asses or frogs.36 Most
Protestants rejected the role of education, but did insist that prophets
were honest and virtuous.37 Honesty and virtuous conduct could
therefore be a means of self preparation for prophecy. Vermigli
wrote that the gift of prophecy ‘must be given freelie’ and could not
be obtained by industry or purgation; however, fasting and prayers
could help prepare the prophet. Prophecy was not a habit, but ‘a
preparation’ or ‘disposition, being in a kind of qualitie’.38 This does
not imply collaboration with God, but that it is appropriate to cultivate
prophecy by preparing for it. Hence, the spirit of prophecy is not the
spirit of the buttery.
These theological descriptions for the most part keep modern

prophecy at arm’s length. However, prophecy was important to
reformed communities, and early modern Protestant exegetes did
find self proclaimed prophets among their contemporaries. Calvin,
Luther, and Vermigli had their prophets in Germany and Scandinavia
and Italy; Perkins, Scott, and Harvey lived in the days of the enthusi
astic Elizabethan prophet ‘Frantic Hackett’.39 Milton lived during the
apogee of English prophecy, the 1640s and 1650s, when radicals and
antinomians challenged traditional theological decorums and claimed
intimate relationships with God.40 Lady Eleanor Davies, the most
notorious prophet of the 1620s, was succeeded by Anna Trapnel,
Elizabeth Poole, Mary Cary, Elinor Channel, and Esther Biddle, a
generation of women prophets who were widely reported, and often
abused in the pamphlet press.41 The Philadelphians encouraged proph
esying among women (Poole visited John Pordage at Bradfield).
Female prophecy was less controversial than female preaching, not
least because it seemed to be authorized by Joel 2: 28: ‘I will pour out
my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall
prophesy.’42 Prophecy was for women a means of negotiating a
voice, in which agency could be deflected onto a higher power.
Eleanor Davies’s prophecies, though frequently political and critical
of Laud and Charles I, were protected by their very obscurity (she
nonetheless spent many months in prison). Trapnel fell into a trance
and claimed not to recall her ecstatic outpourings.43 Mary Cary was
inspired by visions of angels.44 Female prophets in the1640s and 1650s
usually delivered their words in a semi conscious state: they were
merely conduits for God. However sincere such protestations were,
these prophets present their own role as that of a passive channel not
responsible for the form or content of their prophecies.
While such postures protect the prophetesses, act as a verification of
the divine inspiration, and demonstrate that they do not consciously
tinker with the inspired words—an important qualification—they do
not fit the common Protestant requirement that the prophet under
stand his or her words. Such trances alienate the mind, whereas true
prophecy, in Smith’s words, ‘doth not ravish the Mind, but inform and
enlighten it’.45 This can be contrasted with some of their male contem
poraries. Abiezer Coppe was one of the most eccentric of the period’s
prophets, but he presents himself as fully attuned to God’s voice, and a
co author of his prophecies. He is called by God and speaks as a
Hebrew prophet, but he also fashions his words: ‘And I expect

prejudiciall hearts, eares, and eyes from some; But rejoyce exceedingly
that I know the Fathers voyce, though I cannot yet speak plaine enough
after him, or write that smoothly, which is written fairely in me, in this
particular.’46 John Reeve, another self proclaimed messenger from
God whose bearing and meaning was inimical to socially respectable
forms of religion, claimed that on three consecutive mornings he heard
the voice of Jesus, ‘by voice of words’, telling him that he had been
given the gift of understanding Scripture. ‘I being as perfectly awaked
when he spoke to me . . . as I was at the writing hereof’. His were not
dream visions. The spirit of prophecy enables him to see things far off:
‘I declare by Revelation from the Holy Spirit, what was from Eternity.’
He proclaims: ‘woe would have been unto us, if wee had come in our
own name; but wee know that God sent us, as sure as he sent Moses,
the Prophets, and the Apostles’.47 Reeve was an antinomian, but he
observes the rules of prophecy: his words are from God, they will
come true, he has had revealed to him past, present, and future, he is
conscious when he receives his insights, and he is convinced of his
commission. This is neither like a Mother Shipton prophecy, not like
an Anna Trapnel pamphlet. This is not to suggest that Reeve cynically
fashions his prophecy according to Protestant textbooks; rather, his
convictions fit the details of the Protestant theology of prophecy, and
reveal the social force of that model.
Wisdom’s Sister, the Heavenly Muse
Which returns us to Milton. How does Milton relate to these pre

scriptions concerning true prophecy? Harvey warned, in the quotation
with which I began this chapter, ‘we must not in raging, or aspiring
affection presume to mount above the cloudes in the highest region of
the aire, or to pierce the unknowen deepes of the earthly Center’. The
‘centre’ referred to is hell. This soaring is what Milton does, and what
he thinks poets should do. He writes in Reason of Church Government
(1642) of ‘a Poet singing in the high region of his fancies with his
garland and singing robes about him’, and imagines himself writing in
the future the kind of poem not ‘to be obtain’d by the invocation of
Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that
eternall Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and
sends out his Seraphim with the hallow’d fire of his Altar to touch and
purify the lips of whom he pleases’.48 The angel is a figure for divine
inspiration, purifying sins by touching the prophet’s lips. It derives
from Isaiah, and informs many writings about prophecy.49 Milton’s
angel is a seraph, high in the Pseudo Dionysian hierarchy. As we have
seen, the involvement of angels in the preparation for and experience
of prophecy is central to Protestant theological traditions, and it is
especially appropriate for Milton because of his understanding of the
Holy Spirit. In the same tract, Milton describes the prophetic vocation:
‘when God commands to take the trumpet and blow a dolorous or a
jarring blast, it lies not in mans will what he shall say, or what he
shall conceal’. God writes the message, and man is the messenger.
Nevertheless, it is the duty of the would be prophet and would be
poet to prepare for this command, and to augment his talent by study,
prayer, and careful living.50 The prophet is inspired by God, but
human labour and scholarship are necessary to the vocation. Milton’s
allusions to prophecy in this passage—in contrast to those in the Latin
Defensio51—are not a merely decorative aggrandizing of his poetic
vocation: they engage deliberatively with discussions of what it
means to be a prophet. When referring to his experience of ‘inward
prompting’ he wants his readers to hear the motion of a divine spirit,
not a human impulse.52
In Paradise Lost the narrator describes the impulses of the spirit in
some detail. His muse is Urania, whom Guillaume du Bartas appro
priated from astronomy to appoint as the muse for Christian poetry.53
But Milton’s Urania is a figure for another, truer muse. His Urania, ‘if
rightly thou art called’, descends from heaven:
The meaning, not the name I call: for thou
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwellst, but heav’nly born,
Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with eternal wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the almighty Father, pleased
(7. 5 12)
With thy celestial song.
He tells her ‘thou art heav’nly’ while Orpheus’ muse was ‘an empty
dream’ (7. 39). In writing an epic Milton observes epic conventions,
but assures the reader that his Christian version supersedes and flies
higher than its pagan predecessors. Du Bartas’s Urania displaces the
classical version, but Milton’s in turn displaces Du Bartas’s. The muse is

invoked earlier, in book 1, and it is the muse that inspired Moses and
that witnessed Creation:
Sing heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos . . .
. . .
thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dovelike satst brooding on the vast abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: what is dark in me
Illumine . . . (1. 6 23)
Though designated differently, this is the same muse (hence ‘before

the hills appeared’) that inspires him throughout the poem; it is the
spirit through which God moves prophets.54 Juvencus, the earliest
Christian epic poet, invoked the Holy Ghost as his muse; but this
will not do for Milton.55 Importantly for our understanding of his idea
of prophecy, Milton does not believe in the Holy Spirit in this way. De
Doctrina Christiana argues that it is not a being, but a series of offices:
‘The name of Spirit is also frequently applied to God and to angels, and
to the human mind.’ Milton denies the Holy Spirit as understood in
Trinitarian theology. The ‘spirit’ signifies different things. Sometimes
it is the Son, the spirit that moves on the water. Sometimes it is an
angel, such as the spirit that takes up Ezekiel. Elsewhere it is inspir
ation: ‘Sometimes it means the light of truth, whether ordinary or
extraordinary, wherewith God enlightens and leads his people.’ And
sometimes it is ‘used to signify the spiritual gifts conferred by God on
individuals, and the act of gift itself’.56 This is the sense in which
Milton’s muse is the spirit, why he calls the meaning, not the name,
and why the light that shines inward is invoked in book 3. The muse
and the spirit and the light are not beings but human qualities, inspir
ation and creative power, direct from God, brought by an angel, or
dwelling in the human. This is why blindness, his blindness, is like
living in the shade of angels’ wings (‘cœlestium alarum umbra’).57
If this is the spirit or muse that brings Milton his poetry, then he
must mean that he is inspired, and that it is therefore in a sense true.
However, I want to raise a possible objection at this point. What
if Milton is simply engaged in playing the role of a Thamyris, Homer,

or Tiresias?58 What if the reality of prophecy makes a good archetype
for fiction? What if he speaks metaphorically?
The possibility must be conceded. According to Ernst Robert
Curtius, in an uncharacteristically torpid moment, the opening lines
of Paradise Lost are an ‘artistic yet artificial prologue’, and Milton fails
to give life to Urania (a classical figure whom the poet has dressed up as
Christian).59 If we read Paradise Lost as metaphor or uninterested
fiction, Milton’s interests are aesthetic, and detached from religious
truths. His claim to superiority to pagan and Catholic poets can be
understood as a secular claim, a purely egoistical pride in individual
achievement. His interlocutors are not the ‘fit audience . . . though
few’ (7. 31) of a godly remnant, but other poets: the tradition he
supersedes, Hesiod, Lucretius, Ovid, Prudentius, Dante, and the
poets that will follow him. As with all literary interpretation that
disentangles the text from the inconveniences of history and ideology,
a consistent case can be made for an uninspired literary Milton, a
Milton who lives in a hall of textual mirrors.
This constitutes a strangely secular view of Milton, and one better
fitting the modern literary academy than the world of early modern
antinomianism, experimental theology, and political enquiry. Dante’s
Commedia describes a world that was, the poet believed, more or less
like the real, invisible one. He did not think that each individual that
Dante the narrator encounters on his voyage was located precisely
where he put them. The narrative nonetheless exemplifies moral
truths, and incorporates, often in non narrative form, doctrinal truths
based on Church teaching, such as the angelic hierarchies. In so far as it
reaches beyond human understanding, it is through its imaginative
plenitude, not because Dante had visited his other world. However,
Milton’s religious ambitions (and his account of faith) are different.60
He writes with a startling literalism. In his religious beliefs, and his faith
in prophetic visions, he is more like John Reeve and John Pordage than
Dante. The grounds for thinking this are developed over the remain
der of this book; the remainder of this chapter shows that Milton’s
account of inspiration reflects a Protestant blueprint, and that he takes
care to authorize his own claims.
Milton not only writes about prophetic inspiration; he describes the
experience. In profound contrast with Thomas Heywood and Lucy
Hutchinson, Milton’s prophecy is more than the light that guides
scriptural interpretation and more than an event in scriptural history.61

It is a poetic fury leading the poet to hidden truths. How does Milton
experience inspiration? It is brought by the spirit, the spirit of God, an
inner light, or an angel. After describing the dangers with which he is
surrounded in the evil days of the Restoration, the poet remembers the
muse’s company:
yet not alone, while thou
Visitst my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east . . . (7. 28 30)
Notice the ‘or’ that balances a nocturnal against a dawn visit from the
spirit. Book 9’s invocation charts Milton’s decision to choose a divine
theme, more heroic than the chivalric epics he had considered writing
in his youth,
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly vision unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse . . . (9. 20 4)
He is concerned that if not inspired he may not finish his poem, that
the climate or years may
damp my intended wing
Depressed, and much they may, if all be mine,
Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear. (9. 45 7)
The fact that the poem is finished is partial proof that it is inspired, that
it has been brought to his ear and his muse is heavenly, more powerful
than Orpheus’. The casualness of ‘celestial patroness’ almost conceals
the careful repetition of that ‘or’: does the muse dictate when he is
asleep, or inspire the lines after he wakes? Milton presents himself,
twice, as uncertain over when he receives his inspiration. Milton’s ‘ors’
are important.
Perhaps this gives a cue to his early biographers, who either repeat
Milton’s self mythologization or offer independent observations.
Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips writes: ‘And hee waking early (as
is the use of temperate men) had commonly a good Stock of Verses
ready against his Amanuensis came; which if it happend to bee later
than ordinary, hee would complain, Saying hee wanted to bee milkd.’
And Jonathan Richardson writes that Milton ‘frequently Compos’d
lying in Bed in a Morning (’twas Winter Sure Then) I have been Well
inform’d, that when he could not Sleep, but lay Awake whole
Nights, he Try’d; not One Verse could he make; at Other times
flow’d Easy his Unpremeditated Verse, with a certain Impetus and Æstro,
as Himself seem’d to Believe’.62 The ‘Æstro’ perhaps echoes the
‘hallow’d fire’ driving the poet in Reason of Church Government.
The poem and the biographers describe a genius who receives his
compositions at the boundary between sleep and waking, who
discovers his words as much as he labours for them. This is a picture
of prophetic inspiration.
Further, consider the line Richardson quotes: the verse is ‘easy’
because he has the assistance of the spirit and makes little effort himself;
it is ‘unpremeditated’ because it is only partly conscious. If it were too
purposefully studied, it would not be inspired. The true prophet’s
labour is to prepare himself, to furnish himself with virtue and learn
ing, not to prepare the verse. Calvin would say that the words were
either God’s or the human’s. The biblical prophets were ‘forbidden to
invent anything of their own’; they were merely the ‘amanuenses’ of
the spirit, writes Calvin.63 The instrument of God cannot also be an
artist. If there is anything human in the prophecy, it cannot be divine.
The voice of God cannot be tampered with. Vermigli writes that
prophets ‘above all things’ must not add to or remove anything from
their inspiration; to do so would be to corrupt it, and to deceive
themselves and others.64 For Perkins a prophecy that was false in the
smallest detail signified a false prophet.
Smith proposes a more complex account of human agency in
prophecy. He did so because of the influence of the Hebraic tradition:
if Milton was unfamiliar with Smith’s work, he certainly shared an
interest in the same traditions, unusual at the time.65 Prophets interpret
their visions in the dialects familiar to them. Both Maimonides and
Abarbanel agree in this, and it is why an element of human learning is
necessary for a prophet. The spirit impressed his truth upon prophets
so clearly that ‘it became their own Sense’; and hence ‘those Words and
Phrases in which they were audibly express’d to the Hearers afterwards
or penned down, should be the Prophets own’.66 Smith allows an
element of human agency not only in the interpretation but in
the actual writing of prophecy. And in an unexpected turn of his
argument, he suggests that if writing is too consistent or rational
in its presentation, it is probably uninspired. Prophecy is naturally

contradictory:
There is sometimes a seeming inconsistence in things spoken of, if we shall
come to examine them by the strict Logical rules of Method: we must not
therefore in the matter of any Prophetical Vision look for a constant Methodical
contexture of things carried on in a perpetual coherence. The Prophetical Spirit
doth not tie it self to these Rules of Art, or thus knit up its Dictates Systemat
ically, fitly framing one piece or member into a combination with the rest, as it
were with the joints and sinews of Method: For this indeed would rather argue
an humane and artificial contrivance then any Inspiration, which as it must
beget a Transportation in the Mind, so it must spend it self in such Abrupt kind
of Revelations as may argue indeed the Prophet to have been inspired.67
Excessive artifice suggests human contrivance. Prophecy can contain
inconsistencies and multiplicities precisely because it does not conform
to the rules of art. Richardson reports that Milton ‘would Dictate
many, perhaps 40 Lines as it were in a Breath, and then reduce them
to half that Number’.68 Smith’s Hebraic account of prophecy would
permit room for revision. In this perspective, which I believe is
Milton’s, to call a poet a true prophet does not deny the imaginative
power of his art; nor does it lessen engagement with literary traditions.
Inspiration does not stop the prophet from using humanist learning,
rhetoric, or the sinews of a vernacular tongue.
Protestants declare that the age of prophecy is over, but nonetheless
outline in detail the circumstances in which prophecy takes place, the
qualifications of the true prophet, the nature of the communication,
and the means by which the true prophet can be distinguished from
the impostor. In mid seventeenth century Britain a handful of reli
gious enthusiasts declared that they were prophets in the tradition of
biblical prophecy. Milton was among them.
Paradise Lost describes events from the beginning of time to its end,
many in the words of angels: the narrator’s voice frames a series of
speeches and stories offered by angels to humans. Raphael’s narrative
of the war in heaven and Creation to Adam in books 5 to 8, and
Michael’s prophecy of future history in books 11 and 12, are true
because they are spoken by angels. Unfallen angels do not need to
present evidence or show their credentials: they are truth speakers.
The poet who repeats the things known only to God and angels in
the voice of angels either presents a pure fiction, or something that
has a special status, the status of a revealed truth. The centrality of
angels to the narrative of Paradise Lost—a poem told by and about

angels—constitutes part of a truth claim. The rest is disclosed in the
representation of the inspired narrator in the poem, a narrator who is
Milton himself, and confirmed in De Doctrina Christiana’s account of
inspiration by the spirit. These are the truths revealed in Milton’s
dawn waking vision, brought by a spirit of God, perhaps an angel.
While these claims sit uncomfortably in the narratives of a secularized
literary history, they are integral to the texture of early modern
religious belief and practice.
PART II
Milton’s Angels
8
Can Angels Feign?
Abdiel’s Flight
At the beginning of book 6 of Paradise Lost the seraph Abdiel returns to

the throne of God, having deserted his superior officer, Satan. He
arrives at dawn and is surprised when light discloses the sight of an army:
Chariots and flaming arms, and fiery steeds
Reflecting blaze on blaze, first met his view:
War he perceived, war in procinct, and found
Already known what he for news had thought
To have reported . . . (6. 17 21)
Abdiel had expected to relate to his fellow angels and to God the news
of Satan’s rebellion. The sight of the army reveals to him that this news
is already public. Milton’s angels are in many ways strikingly human,
and here it appears they are subject to the vicissitudes of light and
optics. Why else would Abdiel not have seen the angelic army earlier?
But there is a more troubling anthropomorphism implicit here, one
which has not been formerly noted.
To see it we must cross the partition between books 5 and 6. The
relevant passages appeared on consecutive openings in the 1667
edition of Paradise Lost (see Fig. 6), and have seldom done so since.
In the 1674 edition an opening was introduced between the passages,
accommodating the prose ‘argument’ to book 6; the effect is to
interrupt the narrative, and it is the narrative continuity that matters
here. Book 5 ends with a magnificent stand off between Satan and
Abdiel in which the zealous angel, surrounded by hostile forces,
presents in his fury a defence against the fallen angel’s seductive
arguments that is both rhetorically accomplished and thoroughly
208 milton’s angels
Figure 6. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), consecutive openings showing

the end of book 5 and beginning of book 6
reasoned.1 The ‘Ambiguous words and jealousies’ of Satan, his ‘ca

lumnious art j Of counterfeited truth’ have turned a third part of the
angels against their maker (5. 703, 771–2; 2. 692; 5. 710). Abdiel rises
against Satan’s falsehoods and defies him out of zeal for God’s
service. Yet in his zeal he may step beyond the bounds of his
commission. Abdiel is alone:
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number, nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind
Though single. (5. 898 903)
He stands alone without help from God, who is characteristically

reserved when he is needed. Milton’s angels do not have perfect
knowledge. Their knowledge, and their means of knowing things,
are inferior to the penetrative, intuitive powers attributed to angels by
Aquinas and others.2 Abdiel has to rely on his own wits.
can angels feign? 209
Satan asserts that the angels were self begot, and that God falsely
claimed the credit for this (a well known Gnostic heresy, and a
particularly resonant one in a poem about Creation).3 In response
Abdiel counterblasts:
I see thy fall
Determined . . . henceforth
No more be troubled how to quit the yoke
Of God’s Messiah; those indulgent laws
Will not now be vouchsafed, other decrees
Against thee are gone forth without recall;
. . .
soon expect to feel
His thunder on thy head, devouring fire. (5. 878 93)
This is for the most part a reasonable observation based on evident

facts. Abdiel can see that Satan has fallen, and that punishment can
soundly be predicted. But the declaration that ‘decrees j . . . are gon
forth’ stretches beyond plausible inference.
In Paradise Lost ‘decrees’ specifically designate God’s public pro
clamations. For example: the decree by which God begets and
anoints his only Son. Milton is unusual among Christian exegetes
in attributing Satan’s fall to envy over the Son’s promotion; one early
attack on the unorthodox theology of Milton’s epic singled out this
‘Groundless Supposition’, thinking it incompatible with orthodox
Trinitarianism: ‘This Scheme of the Angels revolt cannot Answer
either to the Eternal Generation of the Son, which was before the
Angels had a Being, or to His Temporal Generation of the B. Virgin,
that being long after the Fall of the Angels.’ Charles Leslie was
probably right; Defoe also thought that the promotion of the Son
laid a ground for Arianism, and another reader of a 1669 edition
noted in the margin, ‘this acco<unt> of Xts birth seems . . .
prophan<e> & destroys coæternity’.4 Milton’s account of Satan’s
fall commences with a decree, so in Paradise Lost this word bears
considerable weight. The force of a decree is amplified by Milton’s
God’s intensely communicative nature. In Paradise Lost book 6, God
converses aloud with the Son in heaven. When he pronounces his
decree in book 5, the angels seemingly cannot see him, but they
certainly hear the Word, and the decree is spoken aloud.5 The audi
bility of speech and song in Paradise Lost follows from Milton’s com
mitment to materialism and his sense of community. Throughout De
Doctrina Christiana Milton uses the word ‘decree’ to designate both the
general Decree by which God effects the world and all that will
happen, and those special decrees by which he performs or proposes
particular events; they are audible announcements. Decrees are com
munications, not private resolutions.6
When Abdiel tells Satan that decrees are gone forth, he means that
God has told his court that Satan is to reap the consequences of his
disobedience. Yet after a night’s travelling he finds ‘Already known
what he for news had thought j To have reported’. Why does he not
expect an army already to be mustered? If the decree has already been
made, why does he expect to report news?
There are three possibilities. The first is that Milton overlooked this
detail, obscured by the book division that separates the passages, and
that it is an authorial inconsistency. If, however, an effective explan
ation can be found, then it should be preferred, not least on the
grounds of charity. The second possibility is that Abdiel is confusingly
referring to an earlier decree known to both himself and Satan. This
could be the decree pronounced by God that elevates the Son to his
right hand as the head of the angels; the angels must bow their knees to
the Son, confess him Lord, and
abide
United as one individual soul
For ever happy. (5. 609 11)
This does not sound much like Abdiel’s ‘devouring fire’. Yet the
omnipotent adds:
Him who disobeys
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place
Ordained without redemption, without end. (5. 611 15)
If this is understood to be a corollary to the main decree, Abdiel could

have just realized that Satan’s rebellion is foreshadowed in this decree,
and that his punishment is already certain.7 In which case Abdiel is not
fabricating, but articulating something that has just occurred to him.
Though this solution is neat, it is not persuasive. First, Abdiel does
not explicitly invoke this earlier decree in order to strengthen his
defence. Satan was not the only auditor of the anointing decree; the
other rebel angels by whom Abdiel is surrounded and threatened were
also present. At this compelling moment in the drama, Abdiel might
hope to sway them by putting forward this interpretation, thereby
undermining the rebellion against God. Persuading them would not
only be brotherly, but would also diminish the physical threat he faces.
Secondly, this interpretation does not explain why Abdiel thought he
would report news; nor does it acknowledge the significance of the
anticlimax when the army appears; it only explains his certainty that
Satan is already doomed. The problem of why Abdiel thinks he is
going to report news, and why Milton’s narrator indicates this fact,
remains. Thirdly, from a literary point of view, it undermines the
dramatic tension of Abdiel’s flight. His poise is heroic because of his
felt isolation, and the nocturnal journey through the wide countryside
bridges books 5 and 6 precisely to suspend Abdiel between flight and
arrival. When at sunrise he sees ‘all the plain j Covered with thick
embattled squadrons bright’, it is a powerful moment: he apprehends
the full wonder of divine providence. If he has worked it all out in
advance, the episode loses the ‘blaze on blaze’ of unanticipated fulfil
ment, and Abdiel ceases to be a heroic witness. If his rencounter with
Satan and subsequent journey is coloured by mechanical certainty
without doubt or hesitation, then God’s applause to one who has
‘fought j The better fight’ and borne ‘Universal reproach’ (6. 29–30, 34)
is complacently forensic. Abdiel has struggled; hence his meriting of
praise; hence the significance ‘of so many myriads fallen, yet one j
Returned not lost’ (6. 24–5). Finally, Abdiel states that ‘other decrees j
Against thee are gone forth’. This firmly distinguishes them from the
‘indulgent laws’ of the anointment.8 Abdiel means that these are decrees
other than the decree anointing the Son heard by all, ‘God’s first and most
excellent special decree’, as it is described in De Doctrina.9 The plural of
‘other decrees’ emphasizes the distinction. These are something new and
different, according to Abdiel; both Abdiel and Satan know what the
earlier decree is, and they are not discussing it here.
This leaves a third, counter intuitive interpretation. It is in accord
with Milton’s theology that Abdiel is surprised at this point, and this is
not an oversight. There is a discrepancy between what Abdiel knows
and what he affirms in the heat of argument. Abdiel, unswerving from
a greater truth, is averring that which is merely speculative. In other
words, while arguing with Satan, he risks telling an untruth.
Unfallen angels should not falsify. The distortion of facts is super
ficially harmless, but in the context of the poem is breathtaking.
Abdiel, and through him Milton, is contending with the father of
lies (John 8: 44). The preceding lines emphasize Satan’s verbal evasion,
his deception, his equivocation.10 Raphael earlier told Adam that Satan
‘with lies j Drew after him the third part of heaven’s host’ (5. 709–10).
Commentators on Scripture commonly asserted that lies were essen
tial to the Fall of humankind, as Satan could only tempt Eve by
lying.11 A fallen angel can lie without complication or compunction,
but surely not an unfallen one? Abdiel is threatened by physical
violence, a danger that echoes through Milton’s imagination; yet
lying is a more fearsome weapon than violence.12 God predicts that
Adam and Eve will not fall ‘By violence, no, for that shall be with
stood, j But by deceit and lies’ (5. 242–3); and so it transpires, when
God reports that man sins ‘believing lies j Against his maker’ (10. 42–
3). Abdiel, moreover, is one who refuses to ‘swerve from truth’, and is
usually held up as an example of virtuous conduct in the epic.13
Received wisdom concerning Milton’s angels tells us that he is un
orthodox on two points: first, the matter of angelic digestion (angels
not only eat real food when it is polite, they digest it); secondly, that
angels embrace and penetrate each other for sexual pleasure.14 Abdiel’s
rhetorical liberty here may be an even greater heterodoxy.
Doctrine and Story
A good angel who deceives or misleads demands some consideration

of the status of Milton’s angels. What are their offices in the poem?
How are they portrayed? What is their nature? Beginning with an
overview of critical responses to Milton’s angels, I will suggest that
the tendency is to allegorize them, and that this is founded on a
misapprehension of the nature of early modern angels. Milton’s
doctrine of angels—by which I mean beliefs, theological, political,
and natural philosophical, supported by learning and reason, and thus
often distinguished from acts of faith and imaginative speculation—is
interwoven with narrative. The basis for this, Milton’s understanding
of accommodation and inspiration, was outlined in the preceding two
chapters. The question for this chapter is: how should we read
Paradise Lost in the light of this? I will propose a reconsideration of
the relationship between doctrine and narratives in Milton’s poetry
and in early modern imaginative writing.
Faced with interpretative difficulties, readers tend to separate Mil
ton’s angel doctrine from his story. On the one hand, readers suggest,
this is what he believes, and on the other, here is the story he tells in
which angels play a fictional role. Patrick Hume, Milton’s first anno
tator and a reader bent on establishing Milton’s poem as a classic, was
puzzled that immaterial beings, ‘incapable of any Blow or Bruise’, who
could ‘feel no destroying deadly Wounds’, should wear armour.15
A few years later Charles Leslie thought the narrative indecently
fantastic: ‘The Gravity and Seriousness with which this Subject
ought to be treated, has not been Regarded in the Adventurous Flight
of Poets, who have Dress’d Angels in Armor, and put Swords and Guns
into their Hands, to Form Romantick Battles in the Plains of Heaven, a
Scene of Licentious fancy.’16 Samuel Johnson suggested that an ‘incon
venience of Milton’s design is, that it requires the description of what
cannot be described, the agency of spirits. He saw that immateriality
supplied no images, and that he could not show angels acting but by
instruments of action; he therefore invested them with form and
matter.’ Johnson did not grasp the extent of Milton’s materialism, and
the philosophical underpinnings of angelic substance. For example,
Milton was committed to the idea of angelic armour: Raphael describes
it as ‘panoply’, referring to whole body armour (see Eph. 6: 11, 13), and
thereby elegantly distinguishes angels’ armour from the spiritual ar

mour that was a commonplace of seventeenth century divinity. The
‘golden panoply’ and ‘celestial panoply’ (6. 527, 760) is pointedly
material, and suggests that this is an aspect of angels’ substantial
being, rather than a spiritual allegory.17 The angels suffer as they
struggle to release themselves from it. Johnson thought that Milton
had made his angels material in order to tell a good story, which
seemed to him a poorly conceived poetic fancy, and he regretted
that Milton’s angels ‘unhappily perplexed his poetry with his philoso
phy’.18 More emphatically, T. S. Eliot asserted a division in Milton
between ‘the philosopher, or theologian, and the poet’, evidence of
the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that broke the organic relationship
between a writer’s thought and his language. Belief and poetry no
longer went hand in hand.19 This view has cast a long shadow over
Milton and the interpretation of early modern imaginative writing.
The longest and most thoughtful account of Milton’s angels appears
in Robert West’s 1955 book Milton and the Angels, and it articulates
most clearly this critical paradigm. West distinguishes between
Milton’s serious and casual angelology, separating those ‘scientific’
and heterodox passages where Milton risks his poetry in order to
make a point about angels, from ‘creative’ passages involving angels,
in which their philosophical foundations—how they know things,
how they move, their physical composition—are merely incidental.20
In doing so he drives a wedge between imaginative storytelling and
deliberated accounts, intended to be taken literally, of things that are
believed to be true. West is followed by Alastair Fowler, whose
learned editorial annotations distinguish between ‘story’ and ‘doc
trine’, as if the poetry is air or angels, but not both.21
It seems to me that we cannot do this if we want fully to read
Paradise Lost as a poem. Because to do so we must accept that its ideas,
learning, ethical imperatives, aesthetics, and its historical situation,
meet within its narratives and verse in ways that cannot be regarded
as incidental or always extricable. To formulate it crudely: what
Milton writes about angels in Paradise Lost does not conflict with his
deliberated beliefs; what he imagines, he imagines on the basis of a
sustained engagement with writing about angels; when he tells stories,
they elaborate upon knowledge, and this knowledge is articulated
through narration. Rabbinic Midrashim, one source for Milton’s
thinking about and imagining of angels, tell stories around Scripture
to resolve its narrative discontinuities and contradictions, and in so

doing indirectly elaborate theology or doctrine; just so Milton’s poetry
knots together story and doctrine, poetry and philosophy.22
The relationship between Milton’s systematic theology and his epic
suggests an intimacy between theology and the creative imagination.
In De Doctrina Christiana Milton asserts, ‘Anyone who asks what God
did before the creation of the world is a fool; and anyone who answers
him is not much wiser.’23 By the ‘creation’ of ‘this world’, Milton
means everything that is made by the Word and spirit of God, the
visible and invisible world, not limited to that described in Scripture.
Yet, despite his caveat, he is prepared to point out that God did not
spend the period before Creation preordaining that which took place
afterwards; and that he did make his own dwelling place in the highest
heaven, and that he made angels before the creation of the world
(indeed in all likelihood they fell before ‘the first beginnings of this
world’). He adds that angels have freewill, are assigned to oversee
particular kingdoms or nations, that there are many things of which
they are ignorant, and so on.24 Likewise in Paradise Lost: heaven exists
before the world, the angels are made and fall, of their own freewill,
before visible Creation, and hell is not in the centre of the earth. The
author exploits the grounds of his theology as the basis for narrative
elaborations: certainly treatise and poem agree, but more importantly,
belief is the premiss of imagination. The commonly held doctrine that
angels maintained their position not so much by their own strength but
by the grace of God might have made for a better poem, but it is not to
be found in Paradise Lost because Milton did not hold it to be true.25
We can contrast Milton’s imaginative latitude (and the word
imaginative needs to be treated with some caution) with other Scripture
based poems that elaborate a version of accommodation. Thomas
Hobbes and Sir William Davenant, in their mid century exchange
on literary theory, concurred that a presumptuous poetic familiarity
with God was ‘saucy’, and a mark of dangerous inspiration.26 Milton’s
boldness in representing the sacred is proportionate to the strength of
his claim concerning accommodation and inspiration, but it is also
evident in the relationship between his narrative and doctrine, and this
can be seen in the very different narrative patterns on Heywood and
Hutchinson. The angel doctrine in the last four chapters of Hierarchie
of the Blessed Angells is presented in ways that contrast with Paradise
Lost, and Heywood’s account of the war in heaven is resoundingly

allegorical:
But shall I now tell
The Weapons, Engines, and Artillerie
Used in this great Angelomachy.
No Lances, Swords, nor Bombards they had then,
Or other Weapons now in use with men;
None of the least materiall substance made,
Spirits by such give no offence or aid.
Onely spirituall Armes to them were lent,
And these were call’d Affection and Consent.27
Heywood invites us to read his war in heaven, as critics tend to read
that in Paradise Lost, as an extended metaphor.28 While Milton uses his
imagination freely to describe the actions of angels in narrative form,
Heywood reveals his hesitation about straying into heterodoxy by
turning his elaboration into allegory, and by stressing that it is not
meant literally. Like Milton, he goes beyond the testimony of Scrip
ture: he contends, for example, that Lucifer had glory among the
angels for six days, and that God revealed the Son’s incarnation at
the end of Creation, commanding that all angels should obey the Son
and humankind, and that it was this that provoked the dissention
between Lucifer and Michael. In this and other interpretations, Hey
wood engages with prose literature on the nature, office, and history of
angels, borrowing and recasting exegesis. He does not allow his stories
to stand by themselves, however, but supports (and constrains) each
with extensive apparatus.29 While Milton lets narrative do its work,
Heywood’s muse does not travel unfettered.
Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, written between 1660 and
1679, offers a revealing contrast with, and perhaps a conscious reaction
against, Milton. Echoes suggest that Hutchinson had seen some or all
of Paradise Lost, either in the 1667 edition or in manuscript, via a
mutual acquaintance, Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey. Anglesey’s
library was a refuge for literary Nonconformists; Milton had consulted
him in connection with the publication of History of Britain; and to him
Hutchinson dedicated her earlier translation of Lucretius.30 Hutchin
son’s caution in Order and Disorder, which corresponds to her debt to
du Bartas in Sylvester’s translation, is also a reaction against Milton’s
lack of it. Hutchinson retreats from the scandal that writing fiction
about Eden, heaven, and angels risks. ‘Let’s waive Platonic dreams’,
her narrator enjoins,
Of worlds made in Idea, fitter themes
For poets’ fancies than the reverent view
Of contemplation, fixed on what is true
And only certain, kept upon record
In the Creator’s own revealèd Word,
Which, when it taught us how the world was made,
Wrapped up th’invisible in mystic shade.31
The story of the fall of angels is, according to Hutchinson’s stern
narrator, based on ‘circumstances that we cannot know’, and anything
we invent or guess is probably inspired by reports that the same fallen
angels themselves imparted to men gullible enough to believe ‘their
gross poetic fables’. She exhorts: ‘look no further than the light doth
show’.32
Hutchinson’s censures suggest a dialogue with Milton’s text.
Whereas the exchange between God and the Son in book 3 of Paradise
Lost represents their physical separateness, and suggests Milton’s anti
trinitarianism, canto 3 of Order and Disorder begins with God’s calling
‘in himself a sacred council’, stressing the triune nature of Hutchin
son’s God. Elsewhere Milton’s Adam speaks with God ‘concerning
solitude and fit society’ (8, argument) and convincingly maintains that
he needs an equal mate, ‘Collateral love, and dearest amity’; in
response to which God admits that in resisting Adam’s arguments he
was only testing the man, and that the creation of Eve was ‘Intended’
all along (8. 426). This daring dramatization adroitly both notes and
resolves the apparent discrepancy between the accounts of Eve’s
creation in Genesis 1 and 2.33 It is hard not to hear Milton’s creation
being chastised in Hutchinson’s single line assertion: ‘Whether he
begged a mate it is not known’ (3. 312; though a similar account of
Eve’s creation could be found in John White’s 1656 Commentary on
Genesis34). These and other passages intimate that Hutchinson had
read Paradise Lost before writing the first five cantos of her epic.
It is possible to overstate the contrast between these authors and
their attitude to elaboration on Scripture. Hutchinson’s claims have
the air of rhetorical ploy or modesty topos. In her brief passage on the
creation and nature of angels, for example, despite her caveat against
prying ‘Too long on things wrapped up in mystery’ (1. 292), she
endorses the Pseudo Dionysian orders of angels, and indicates that

angels were made on the first or second days of Creation. There is
some discrepancy between professed caution and practice. In later
cantos Hutchinson is prepared to elaborate with impunity, most mem
orably in her account of the parting between Rebecca and Jacob,
which is entirely extra scriptural (18. 275 ff.). Hutchinson’s warnings
against the excessive elaboration upon scriptural narrative may reflect a
dialogue with Milton, and anxiety over his influence. When Milton
effectively retired after Genesis 3, Hutchinson felt relatively free to
extemporize on the remaining chapters, though these are, of course,
set in the fallen world. What Heywood and Hutchinson do not do,
however, is develop doctrine through their narratives; they narrate and
articulate doctrine in discrete modes.
The most remarkable comparison with Paradise Lost is Pordage’s
Mundorum Explicatio (1661). Pordage both explicates doctrine and
explores it through narrative—as in the narrator’s voyage through
purgatory—and in this respect is as daring as Milton. Exploiting the
trappings of epic, Samuel attempts to re create in poetic narrative the
spiritual revelations of his father, John.35 The imaginative expansive
ness of Mundorum Explicatio is founded on the authority of prophetic
vision; Milton takes similar risks, and he does so because he feels
possessed of a similar authority.
Milton himself articulates caution about speculation. On the mys
tery of the Incarnation, the deepest mystery remaining after disposing
of the Trinity, De Doctrina Christiana warns, ‘it is best for us to be
ignorant of things which God wishes to remain secret’, words that
resonate with Raphael’s reiterated counsel that the ‘great architect’ had
wisely concealed the ‘fabric of the heavens’ and much of his creation.36
Others’ anxieties about the limits of knowledge draw attention both to
the abundance of Milton’s elaboration on Scripture, and to the intel
lectual consistency with which he sustains such elaboration. He does
not insure himself by writing allegorically, except in a few distinctive
passages. In his accommodated, prophetic mode, knowledge is central
to the imagination, and the relationship between doctrine and narra
tive assumes profound importance. Milton binds together doctrine and
narrative with an intensity that is unique, and to lose sight of the
connection between his fictional imperatives and the divine truths
he intended to impart through them is to diminish the force and
ambition of his poetry.
The Left Hand
Storytelling and doctrine were not antipathetic, and the powers of

imagination and argument formed alliances in other kinds of writing.
Another literary form, the pamphlet, can illuminate these connections,
because of its close association with deception and manipulation, and
because of what it reveals about the relationship between the literary
imagination and the presentation of argument. Abdiel’s looseness with
the truth, his rhetorical opportunism, his feigning or deceiving (per
haps too strong a word), can be contextualized in the burgeoning
culture of news and pamphlets in the seventeenth century. Abdiel
expected to report news, and the rich meanings of these words devel
oped in this context. Bringing news was an activity in which truth and
lies competed, as the pamphleteer Milton well knew.
It is because of the reputation of pamphlets and newsbooks (whose
patron was said to be another ‘father of lies’, the god Mercury) for
manipulation, misrepresentation, temporizing, and lying, that it has
represented something of a scandal that the poet and Puritan Milton in
1641 became so closely involved with them. After his youthful career
Milton all but abandoned poetry for prose, returning to it in earnest
only in the mid 1650s, after he had put some distance between himself
and the compromised politics of Cromwell’s Protectorate.37 It is
possible to impose upon Milton’s life an opposition between his
working in prose and in poetry, one Milton himself encouraged in
1642 in referring to pamphleteering as something undertaken with his
left hand (with poetry, like the Son, seated on the right):
I should not choose this manner of writing [prose] wherein knowing myself
inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the
use, as I may account it, but of my left hand . . . a poet soaring in the high
region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him might
without apology speak more of himself than I mean to do . . . sitting here
below in the cool element of prose.38
Some readers of the poetry have presented this pamphleteering career

as a distraction from Milton’s true vocation as a poet, an achievement
merely of the left hand while waiting for a suitable opportunity to
engage the right. Yet there are reasons beyond biography why, instead
of seeing this reductive opposition, readings of Paradise Lost could be
informed by pamphlets and non canonical writings, reasons which

speak to how we judge both Abdiel’s and Milton’s acts of poetic
fabrication.
Between the mid sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth,
pamphlets became part of everyday politics, a means of creating and
influencing public opinion, a foundation of the influential moral and
political communities that constitute a ‘public sphere’. Printed words,
and their exchanges with readers, moved to the centre of political life.
At the same time the pamphlet became a model of public speech, a way
of conceiving of the power of the word. Writers of poetry exploited
the form or its generic elements, and engaged in traffic with this
common and debased mode. Pamphlets were themselves a literary
form, often highly artful and indirect, best understood and appreciated
with reference not only to context, but also to the traditions and
conventions of pamphleteering. Pamphlets can rarely be reduced to a
simple argument, as they spoke through fictional and imaginative
devices. They rely on intertextuality, on pamphlet genres, conven
tions, personae, and decorum, just as Paradise Lost acquires meaning
through its relationship with Virgil and others.39
Pamphlets can teach us about seventeenth century poetry. One
adversary condemned the pamphleteer Milton as ‘a fabulist and a
mere poet, though his style is prosaic’.40 That was in a sense true,
and that was precisely why Milton was an accomplished propagandist.
Despite his dismissal of his polemical prose as an accomplishment of
the left hand, he knew that the work of the left and right hands was not
clearly distinguished. The literary elements of pamphlets, their rhet
orical tropes, eloquence, performances, persuasive fictions, were not
mere dressing for argument, but integral to it. Pamphlets conducted
arguments through imaginative discourse. The same is true of Paradise
Lost. To accept this principle is to reject the narrowly literary approach
that divorces figurative or allegorical writing from its historical con
texts and literal referents, that feels comfortable, for example, in
isolating Paradise Lost from technical writings on angels. This is the
approach adopted when Milton is assumed to write about angels as
angels infrequently, treating them more commonly as human figures.
If this were the case, there would be no conundrum to be resolved in
Abdiel’s conduct. He is merely a fictional narrative device, modelled
on humanity, and so deceit is no surprise. Poetry is thereby dissociated
from ideas.
We need to integrate more fully our understanding of the relation

ship between polemic and poetry, as the noise of the marketplace can
help us to appreciate the music of Paradise Lost. In listening to both, we
stand to refine our understanding of the nature of writing in the
seventeenth century.41 At a more local and less ambitious level, this
integration of imagination and argument suggests another perspective
on Milton’s deceiving angel: we should take both the narrative and the
doctrine seriously, as coexisting if not inseparably at least in a mutually
reinforcing framework.
The model for and condition of this approach mirrors Raphael’s
description of accommodation:
High matter thou enjoinst me, O prime of men,

Sad task and hard, for how shall I relate
Of warring spirits; how without remorse
The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfect while they stood; how last unfold
The secrets of another world, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? Yet for thy good
This is dispensed, and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By likening spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if earth
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?42
Humans are thereby able read about and discuss God in intelligible
terms without assuming that God is like us, and so the ‘shadowy
types’ accessible to limited human intelligence correspond to the
‘truths’ that are beyond human consciousness (12. 303). This associ
ation between representation and truth, as I argued in Chapter 6,
underlies Milton’s understanding of his poetry, and it provides a
model both for understanding the relationship between Milton’s literal
narrative and its implicit doctrines, and for how he should be read.
Raphael’s preamble has been used as the basis for historicist readings
that seek an allegory of recent history—of the civil wars, Common
wealth, and Protectorate—in Milton’s epic. In the early eighteenth
century, Francis Atterbury, reading Paradise Lost, commented alongside
the description of Moloch’s portentous frown (2. 106), ‘probably ye
picture of some great man in Milton’s time’.43 This mode of reading
the epic, and particularly the war in heaven, has prevailed. If the
imaginative narrative is understood to comprehend doctrinal truths,
however, through a creative process that resembles accommodation,
then any interpretative process that seeks encoded meanings will
always fall short of grasping either the poetic intentions or the richness
of the poetic outcomes. This is as true of interpretations that identify
historical or political allegories as of those that discover numerological
or alchemical subtexts. This is not to resist attempts to locate political
or historical meanings in literary works, but to insist that our historicist
hermeneutics need a fuller and more coherent account of signification,
one that goes beyond the mainstays of allegory and metaphor.
It is possible to offer a reading of the Abdiel episode that is guided
by just such a search for encoded history and politics, and this reading
illuminates Milton’s casuistry. To show this, I will erect my own
straw man. It is not hard to identify in the heroic Abdiel, who does
not change his mind under threat of violence, some degree of self
representation on Milton’s part. It may be that Milton is using the
occasion of the conflict with Satan to represent a particular biograph
ical incident. Critics have suggested that Milton portrays himself in
Abdiel and Cromwell in Satan; or that Abdiel’s royalist rhetoric
echoes Claudius Salmasius (the pro monarchical polemicist with
whom Milton exchanged tracts in 1649–54), while Milton puts
himself in Satan, the good Puritan opposed to ceremony and pros
tration.44 Neither analogy is persuasive.
There is a stronger case to be made for seeing Milton in Abdiel and
in Satan those enemies of the Good Old Cause with whom Milton
crossed quills. Milton’s opponents laid against him charges of deceit, in
resonant phrases. In the Defensio Regia (1649) Salmasius had suggested
that the regicides were only academically accomplished in ‘the arts of
deceiving, dissembling, falsifying, and lying’, in which arts none could
overcome them.45 Alexander More, attacking Milton in the dedication
to Regii Sanguinis Clamor (1652), declared Charles II (so called) ‘chosen
of God, guarded by angels, acknowledged and hailed king by all men
(I do not name the executioners as exceptions, for they are not men,
but devils)’.46 Perhaps more damagingly for Milton, the anonymous
author of the main text of Clamor, Peter du Moulin, warned of the
dangers of pragmatism, of doing evil—telling lies perhaps—thinking
that good may come out of it, as ‘Satan has proved that there is no
reward more powerful than this fallacy for driving good men to the
side of evil; he has produced no artifice more certain to undermine the

church.’47 It was the printer Adrian Vlacq who, by reporting on his
correspondence with Samuel Hartlib concerning the authorship of
Clamor, drove home the charge that in Defensio Secunda (1654) Milton
had knowingly misled his readers.
This obscure but significant episode in some ways supports the
accusations of those who charged Milton with deceit. When Regii
Sanguinis Clamor appeared in 1652, Milton suspected that Alexander
More, who wrote the dedication, was in fact the author of the whole
work. He proceeded to write a response on this basis. This assumption
worked to Milton’s advantage partly because rumours were circulating
of More’s sexual misconduct (he had fathered a child with Salmasius’
maid, before abandoning her). Milton had apparently completed his
rebuttal in Defensio Secunda when Samuel Hartlib informed him of
grounds to doubt this attribution. Milton chose to ignore Hartlib, not
least because he wished to exploit the rhetorical advantage that slander
offered him. There were, then, real grounds for accusing Milton of
deceit. In unhesitatingly identifying Alexander More as the author of
that work, an identification that the printer Adrian Vlacq knew Milton
had reason to question, Milton had lied with his ‘black hand’. Vlacq
asked: ‘is that man in his right mind who writes something other than
that which he knows and . . . is eager to impose upon the whole world
and to defame a neighbor with calumnies and the blackest lies’.48
Milton’s numerous antagonists thought that falsehood—misnaming,
deception—was at the heart of his apologia, and of the regicides’ cause.
In his presentation of Abdiel’s contest with Satan, Milton re presented
his isolation, and championed his own role as a zealous servant of the
truth unmasking the duplicity of royalist rhetoric. The scenario inverts
his various opponents’ accusations of falsehood and diabolical compli
city. Satan, like Salmasius, exploits the language of justice and liberty to
uphold a self interested monarchalism. The unfalling angel is an expli
cator of rhetorical deception and a guide to discriminating allegiance.49
In Mercurius Politicus, the weekly newsbook that supported and chron
icled the fortunes of the British Commonwealth, Marchamont
Nedham condemned Salmasius for being a promoter of tyranny
drunk with pride and ambition. In Abdiel’s exchange with Satan,
then, Milton interpreted and reappropriated the debates of the 1650s.
The conclusion to book 5 reflects on his deliberately misleading attri
bution of Clamor to More, and his continuing support (with his left
hand, as a polemicist) of the Commonwealth after its republican ideals

had been tarnished by the establishment of the Protectorate. To reduce
this account to its boldest formulation: if it was legitimate for an angel to
tell half truths for the greater good in the service of the state, then why
not Milton?
The deceiving Abdiel is using his left hand according to the occa
sion. He lies for a greater good because he is Milton, required to
express, with his mastery of irony and fables, support of a government
for the good of the public, despite his uncertainties and the falsehoods
that make his work easier. Abdiel is Milton’s self representation, but
also his self exculpation.
There is something persuasive about this as a reading, and it fits the
mould of much criticism on Paradise Lost over recent decades. As if we
should say that Satan raises his standard in the ‘spacious north’ (5. 726)
because he is in part Charles I, or that in Adam Milton relives his own
anxieties.50 Yet there is also something unsatisfying in it, whether we
read this historicist interpretation as a forensic analysis of Milton’s
encounter with Salmasius, or even as a more general reflection upon
the ethics of verbal exchange. Allegorical decoding—whether histori
cist or aestheticist—belies the account of accommodation offered by
Raphael, and the role of the literary imagination in controversial
writing. Such readings translate, with greater or lesser confidence,
poetry into prose, finding in the allegorical or symbolic surface of
the poem coded references to or descriptions of other meanings and
events about which the poet could not or did not want to write
directly. This mode of allegorically inclined historical interpretation
supposes a fierce separation between representation and thing repre
sented. It brings the left and right hands together only by finding the
left hand at work in a right handed text. It finds continuity in Milton’s
writings through the 1640s and 1660s, but at the expense of misrepre
senting the nature of pamphleteering. It finds a single code where there
are many, and even the most left handed of writers seek to persuade
through the interaction of multiple codes.
Moreover, this approach is not sympathetic to Milton’s angels: it
treats them as figures or allegories for humans. Their dilemmas and
their emotions seem familiar to us because they are in fact humans
with wings. Hence critical judgements like: ‘the good angels are
polemicists whose swords are symbolic of pens, printing presses,
pamphlets’. They encode political ideas or arguments. Their material
being is not relevant, as Milton’s creation is a symbolic language in

which a sword is a printing press and chaos political discord.51 In this
account (whether the refraction is considered ‘flexibly symbolic’ or
rigid), a pamphlet is a prosy, stable, political proposition, and the
poetry a dark glass through which we view the pamphlet. This is to
misapprehend both. Even for a merely competent pamphleteer, pol
itical allegories are worked through narratives or performances that are
independently coherent; the prima facie meaning has to work as well
as any others it is intended to support. Pamphlets, at least imaginative,
effective pamphlets, are inventive and singular, just as poetry is;
singular both in their imaginative insight, and in their articulation of
a historical occasion. And so in poetry, which verbally comprehends
otherness: and, in Milton’s case, one of the most powerful instances of
otherness is the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of angels.
Abdiel only figures human values because in the first instance he
stands tall as a representation of an angel.52
I have used a close reading of connected passages in Paradise Lost to
reassess the nature of Milton’s angels and to assert the value of
associating imaginative angels with theology and natural philosophy.
In contrast to Heywood’s and Hutchinson’s there is a peculiar inten
sity in Milton’s representation of angels. This is in part because of his
strong view of accommodation, and in part because of his inspiration.
Writing in the seventeenth century, even in topical pamphlets and
contentious prose, to which Milton committed his talents for two
decades, suggests that a more sympathetic means of reading Paradise
Lost might involve seeing the close relationship between doctrine and
poetic narratives. Finally, I offered and rejected a species of historicist
reading that used Milton’s political life as a key for understanding
Abdiel’s actions, and read the poetry as figurative or allegorical. It is
now time to resolve the main question.
Truth and Lies
Can Milton represent an unfallen angel feigning? The answer resides in

theology and in poetry, together. In the integration of story and
doctrine we find both Milton’s engagement with his communicative
environment, and his ability to absorb these materials and tell a story
self sufficient enough to speak angelology and poetry at the same time.
Abdiel deceives because he is an angel. It is not really deceiving, but

I will hold onto that word momentarily. Abdiel deceives not because
he is really a human, but because he is an angel in a tight spot on a
rhetorical roll. Milton’s representation of Abdiel’s circumstances is
precise, and accords with the author’s account of the nature of angels.
Abdiel is confined by optics, he cannot see in the dark, cannot see
across heaven, and therefore cannot see sympathetic faces; he is con
fined by topography, and finite in his speed, as he has to fly all night to
find God; he is stranded with freewill, as just when he most needs a
comforting word from God, he finds himself unsupported and utterly
alone. But this does not make him human. If Milton’s angels seem
human, it is not because he wishes to use them imaginatively to reflect
upon human situations, but he presents angels in ways that are sym
pathetic to human circumstances because his angels are also sentient
and free material beings, confined by optics and subject to passion,
love, and divine decrees, the creatures of God. Milton’s angels act in
accordance with his natural philosophy, and he takes as cues customary
questions of theologians and natural philosophers, pressing the ques
tions unusually far, and resolving them in characteristically trenchant
ways.53 Early readers from Hume and Leslie onwards were troubled
with this uncompromising marriage of invention with learning. This is
not just ‘story’, but story and a serious point about angels, and therefore
a serious point about theology and natural philosophy.
Moreover, De Doctrina Christiana provides the ethical justification
for Abdiel’s actions. One chapter of the systematic theology attends to
those special duties we owe a neighbour when we are mindful of his
reputation or fortune. There, under the heading of veracity and
its antithesis, falsehood, Milton cites Job 13: 7 (‘should you speak
wickedly for the sake of God?’) as a proof text for the precept that
‘We must not, then, tell a lie, even in the service of God.’ It later
emerges, however, that a characteristic Miltonic pragmatism governs
this precept: ‘In practice, however, it frequently happens that not only
to disguise or conceal the truth, but actually to tell lies with deceitful
intent makes for the safety or advantage of one’s neighbor.’54 Indeed,
he goes on, the usual definition of falsehood—saying something
untrue with the intention to deceive—is wholly inadequate, as false
hood involves both ‘evil intent’ and a duty of truthfulness to the
auditor. In other words, you can lie to someone with a clean con
science if it is in his or her interest, and in any case falsehood only exists
in relationships where truthfulness is specifically required. To say

something that is not strictly true is not necessarily to lie. Exactly the
same course appears in Milton’s account of the works of the faithful,
where he notes that, while these ‘never run contrary to the love of
God and of our neighbour’, they may ‘sometimes deviate from the
letter even of the gospel precepts (particularly those which are special
rather than general), in pursuance of their over riding motive, which
is charity’.55 Hence, deceitfulness, even to a neighbour, can be a
necessary course of action for the truly faithful.56
Perhaps Milton writes to exculpate himself here: he may well be
supplying a retrospective defence of his own action in the 1650s,
among them his wrongful accusation of More, and his failure to
speak out against Cromwell during what he later called a ‘short but
scandalous night of interruption’.57 But it also provides an explanation
of why Abdiel can be creative with the truth: it is in the interest of
Satan and the other falling angels that they are confronted with the
inevitable consequences of their rebellion, and therefore Abdiel (who
knows it, though he cannot prove it) is doing a service for Satan; and,
moreover, Abdiel does not owe a duty of truthfulness to a rebel against
God. Milton constrains himself here within a true, accommodated
representation of an angel, and in a sense the angel really does feign
something to Satan. According to Milton’s own casuistry, Abdiel can
therefore tell what may be the first untruth—it is wrong to call it a lie
after Milton’s careful casuistry—in history, and Satan can retain his title
as father of lies, for it is Satan, and not Abdiel, who bears responsibility
for Abdiel’s fabrication.
In his elaboration on falsehood in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton
explicitly reflects on the association between actual lies and modes of
figurative speech: ‘parables, hyperboles, fables and the various uses of
irony are not falsehoods since they are calculated not to deceive but to
instruct’.58 Figures of speech are like lies, but are not lies because they
are faithfully educative. Any reader of seventeenth century pamphlets
will find this proposition resonant. The figurative or fictional is an
essential and recognized element in the explication of doctrine;
pamphlets lie, but you knew that anyway and it is an instructive kind
of lying, and therefore not really lying at all. In this respect, angels and
pamphlets may be a little alike. Paradise Lost is as effective a gloss on
De Doctrina Christiana as De Doctrina Christiana on Paradise Lost, because
knowledge and imagination work together in the thought behind
both. This reminds us, moreover, that Milton’s representation of a war

in heaven is no more feigned than, but just as feigned as, Abdiel’s
speech: both are intended to instruct, to lead their auditor’s attention
from a shadowy type to a truth. The parallel with angelic bodies is
exact, and this is because they are understood to be governed by
identical principles of truthful representation. Angels could not
deceive, and hence the virtual bodies they adopted were, though
angels had neither bodies nor shapes, nonetheless ‘True and unfeyned
formes’; angelic bodies, like scriptural figures of speech, were ‘no slur
on the truthfulness of holy angels’.59 Inspired poetry and angelic bodies
set truths before men’s eyes.
That an angel might justifiably mislead according to the standards of
human ethics is borne out by Raphael’s own caution over the problem
of accommodation:
how shall I relate
Of warring spirits?
Raphael’s shimmying here precisely resembles the structure of Milton’s
argument about accommodation in De Doctrina: descriptions of God
are figurative, but the resemblance is real, and more semblable than
you can understand. Raphael’s reservations are threefold: is narration
possible; is it lawful; is it too sad? He overcomes the last two reserva
tions on the grounds of divine dispensation. The first he washes away
by likening the spiritual to the corporeal (Milton’s monism means that
this is difference in degree and not kind, as both are substances), and
asking:
what if earth
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
What if we are more alike than you think? The premiss of Raphael’s
speaking to Adam at all is that he can talk in ‘parables, hyperboles,
fables and . . . irony’ in order to instruct, because unfallen angels can
speak falsehoods. Abdiel invents God’s decree both because Milton
needs to tell a good, coherent dramatic story, and because he is an
angel. And this, the poem tells us, is how we should read Paradise Lost.
9
Look Homeward Angel
Angelic Guardianship and Nationhood
The Vision of the Guarded Mount
In November 1637 John Milton drafted an elegy for his friend and
fellow student Edward King, in which the lyric voice instructs an angel
to ‘look homeward’. The poem, ‘Lycidas’, is a pastoral elegy for an
anonymous drowned shepherd which observes a structure conven
tional to the genre: it is spoken by a nameless shepherd who, following
an invocation, offers a history of their friendship in the pastoral mode,
a series of recriminations, a digression, in which St Peter condemns the
clergy for their failings, a laying on of flowers, and a consolation. It is
towards the end of the poem, in the consolation, that the angel is
invoked. That the shepherd might speak of an angel is understandable,
conventional even, as angels look to human affairs as sympathetic
witnesses. But where is an angel’s home?
These are the lines as they appeared in Milton’s notebook:

:::::: floods and sounding sea
Ay mee whilst thee ^the Shoars
wash farre away, where ere thy bones are hurld
whether beyond the stormie Hebrides
where thou phapps under the humming tide
visit’st the bottome of the monstrous world
or whether thou to our moist vows deni’d
sleep’st by the fable of xCorineus old x
Bellerus
where the great vision of the guarded mount
looks toward Namanco :::: ^s, and Bayona’s field
looke homeward Angel now and melt wth ruth
and O yee Dolphins waft the haplesse youth.1
Edward King drowned in the Irish Sea when travelling from

Cambridge to his home in Ireland. In his poem Milton imagines a
displaced mourning. Whereas the procession of mourners in Bion’s
Lamentation for Adonis pass by the youth’s body on a ‘glorious bed of
State’, Milton’s mourners are deprived of a focus.2 Edward King’s
body was lost, and, with its floating corpse, Milton’s pastoral elegy
threatens to turn away from Theocritus and Virgil and, perhaps inad
vertently, towards Lucan’s Pharsalia, another state of the nation poem
that exploits the pathos of unrecovered bodies. Cornelia laments there
for her unburied husband, Pompey: ‘Quid porro tumulis opus est aut
ulla requiris j Instrumenta, dolor?’ (‘But what need is there of a grave,
or why does grief require any trappings?’). She consoles herself that his
image endures in her breast.3 Perhaps one of the most extraordinary
qualities of ‘Lycidas’ is that it can harbour such an intensity of both
intertextual self consciousness and sharp political criticism.
Not only is the body lost, the angel invoked for protection is not
named. This renders more effective the unexpected change of subject
in this sentence. When we read the verse ‘looke homeward Angel now
and melt wth ruth’, we ask ourselves: has Lycidas/King been renamed
an ‘Angel’, or is the unnamed angel addressed here ‘the great vision’
referred to earlier?4 In retrospect, as soon as we have identified the
‘guarded mount’, it seems clear. The angel is the vision seen on the
mount, but for a moment we might be consoled by the idea that
Lycidas has become an angel, instructed to face his old home, from
which he has been mercifully delivered. This theme—the transmigra
tion of Edward King—is picked up again later when the poet addresses
Lycidas: ‘henceforth thou art the Genius of ye shoare’.5 Here Lycidas
becomes a genius loci, a spirit associated with a particular feature of
landscape, a pagan prefiguration of an angel.6 The earlier passage is
confusing because it does not yield meanings easily, and because the
poet’s voice, consistently unstable in ‘Lycidas’, shifts from addressing
Lycidas to addressing the angel and the dolphins. Milton’s conspicuous
revision, replacing ‘Corineus’ with ‘Bellerus’, suggests that he wasn’t
inclined to give anything away too easily, almost, as some critics have
suggested, as if the poem is coded.7
This emendation merits excavation. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
fantastical history of the settlement of Britain by Brutus, Aeneas’ great
grandson, Corineus is one of Brutus’ companions. Milton would later
retell the story in his History of Britain (commenced in the late 1640s).
look homeward angel 231
The land that Brutus arrived in was peopled by tyrannizing giants,

which he proceeded to eliminate in the process of founding a civilized
nation. Corineus was assigned to Cornwall, where he threw the great
est of the giants, Goëmagog, off a coastal cliff, giving its name to
Langoëmagog.8 The name Milton chose in the earlier draft suggests
an imperial myth for the settlement of Britain. But he then crossed it
out, in favour of another name inscribed in the landscape. Bellerus
appears to be a coinage, but is clearly derived from ‘Bellerium’, the
Latin name for Land’s End.9 Why is Bellerus a fable? The sense of ‘fable
of Corineus’ is straightforward: it is the fabulous history of Geoffrey,
and Lycidas could sleep near the place of this legend. The revised
version is less direct. At first reading it seems to be a fable that the
reader has forgotten—perhaps another of Brutus’ companions, perhaps
another giant10—and perhaps the fable is that of the vision of the
guarded mount, which is quite close to Land’s End. But Bellerus is at
best the personification of Bellerium, no legend comes to the reader’s
aid, and ‘quite close’ has insufficient explanatory force in such a dense
passage. The next reference intensifies the obscurity.
The ‘guarded mount’ is St Michael’s Mount, located in the bay of
the south side of Land’s End, or Bellerium, and from this we can
de anonymize the angel as Michael, archangel, head of the created
angels, antagonist of Satan in Revelation. Though one of the four
angels named in Scripture, he is not named here. The pages on
Cornwall in Camden’s Britannia offer some clarification. There we
find ‘Belerium’ identified as Land’s End, the story of Corineus, and
also an account of the vision of the mount:
In the very top heereof within the Fortresse, there was a Chappell consecrated
to S. Michael, the Archangell, where William Earle of Cornwall and Moriton,
who by the bounteous gift of King William the First had great lands, & large
possessions in this tract, built a Cell for one or two monks; who avouched that
S. Michael appeared in that mount: which apparition, or the like, the Italians
challenge to their hill Carganus, and the Frenchmen likewise to their Michaels
mount in Normandie.11
The ‘great vision’, then, was seen by monks, and there was reason for
Protestants to suspect this vision as popish superstition, founded on
spurious theology and a desire to manipulate the credulous. Camden
notes how monks of various nations seem to want to claim Michael as
their own, and implies that the multiplicity of visions suggest that all
are spurious. Why would Milton seem to lay claim to this doubtful
angel, asking it to ‘looke homeward’?
Milton takes up the vision, though under suspicion of being a
monkish fable, because it conforms to his theology and speaks to his
idea of nationhood. The angel is a local guardian angel, assigned to
watch over a particular place. This is the sense in which an angel has a
home beyond or besides heaven. This doctrine appears elsewhere in
Milton’s writing, in De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Regained, and it
shapes the conclusion of ‘Lycidas’.
Angels Appointed as Governors
Belief in individual guardian angels marked a clear, though not abso

lute, difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics.12 The
question of angels assigned to a particular place or people, however,
was less polarized. Andrew Willet ascribed two erroneous belief to
papists: ‘Michael (say they) is the protector and keeper of the whole
Church of Christ, Dan. 10. 21. And as earthly kingdoms have their
speciall angels for their protectors, so also have particular Churches.’
Protestants, he claimed, believed the opposite: ‘The whole Church
hath Christ himselfe, who is the true Michael, for her protector and
defender: And so is that place in Daniel to be understood. . . . Secondly,
It cannot be proved out of scripture, that kingdomes have their speciall
Angels protectors.’13 This overstates the dichotomy, as many Protest
ants, among them writers that Milton knew well, believed that the
created angel Michael had a special role in protecting the Church, and
that angels were assigned to particular places and communities.
The belief was founded on the reference to ‘Michael your prince’ in
Daniel 10: 21, and also on Daniel 12: 1: ‘at that time shall Michael stand
up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people’.
Pseudo Dionysius elaborates the doctrine in The Celestial Hierarchy,
where he writes that the lowest ternion, consisting of principalities,
archangels, and angels, preside over human affairs, and among their
purposes is to establish ‘the boundaries of nations’. He adds:
the theologians also say that Michael presides over the government of the
Jewish people and that this is in order to make clear that Israel, like the other
nations, was assigned to one of the angels, to recognize through him the one
universal ruling source. For there is only one Providence over all the world, a
supra being transcending all power visible and invisible; and over every nation
there are presiding angels entrusted with the task of raising up toward that
Providence, as their own source, everyone willing to follow, as far as possible.14
These presiders were sometimes specifically designated principalities
or princes. Calvin accepted the doctrine: ‘Surely when Daniel bringeth
in the Angell of the Persians, & the Angell of the Grecians, he sheweth
that he ment, that there are to kingdomes and provinces certaine
Angels appointed as governours.’15 Peter Martyr concurs that angels
‘defend kingdoms and provinces (as it is written in Daniel)’.16 William
Lilly claimed that portents were ‘framed by the Guardian Angels or
Intelligencees of that Kingdom where they appear’.17 Later writers
adduced the accepted notion of a local guardian in support of the
more tendentious doctrine of individual guardians, perhaps following
Origen in doing so. Hence, William Austin writes: ‘Neither is it
strange, that one Angel should seeme sufficient to keepe one Man; since
wee find in Daniel, that one Angel is Set over a Nation. And, it may well
stand for likelihood; when we see daily before our Eies, that God sets one
Man (a Creature, much more feeble) to rule and protect divers Kingdomes.’
And an anonymous pamphleteer in 1702 argued: ‘It seems agreeable to
Reason, that as each particular Kingdom hath it’s Guardian Angel, so
each Province, City, Town, Village, and Particular family should have
theirs likewise; and then it will be easily inferred that every individual
Person, in each Family should have a Genius alloted to him.’18
Other early modern British statements of the doctrine do not
conflate individual and local angels in this way, but explore the
scope of the body or community with which they are affiliated.
These can be ‘Bodies Politick’, or, according to Lilly, kingdoms.19
For the less monarchist Henry Lawrence, angels are assigned not only
to ‘Provinces & Countries’ but also to Churches.20 For Hardick
Warren in 1651, ‘Monarchies, Kingdoms and Cities’ had their ‘presidential
Angel’.21 And for Thomas Tryon in 1689: ‘Communities, Nations and
Countries have also particular Angels assigned to their government, or
super intendency.’22 Robert Dingley expanded the list in 1654, mak
ing a politic nod to the Lord Protector under the new constitution:
‘It is therefore most probable, that Cities, Shires, Provinces, Islands,
Churches and Kingdoms have particular Angels to be presidential over
them, and that each Republick hath an Angel to be its protector.’23
Angels can protect natural bodies (islands, for example, or mounts),
political bodies (countries and shires), and religious communities.

In this doctrine of local guardianship, we can find an early modern
means of understanding the significance of belonging to a place or
nation.
This doctrine did not receive universal assent. Johannes Wollebius
cautioned against looking too closely into it. The Westminster Assem
bly’s Annotations evade the issue. It is a rabbinical fantasy according
to the godly clergyman George Hughes. One Calvinist preacher
condemned it as heathen and anti Christian.24 John Patrick, in his
Reflexions upon the Devotions of the Roman Church (1671), suggests that
Roman Catholic beliefs in guardian angels were formalized and made
more elaborate in the early seventeenth century, introducing ‘bold and
presuming speculations’ far beyond the legitimate interpretation of
Scripture:
howsoever some places may seem fairly to countenance this in the Scripture,
and make it a probable opinion; that at some particular Seasons at least, there
have been particular Angels deputed to preside over a Countrey or Province;
and so also that they have had the charge of particular Persons; yet the
evidence of it there, is not so cogent, as that it should be put as an Article of
Faith into Summs of Divinity, or that Praters and Offices should be made to
them, and they religiously courted and worshipped under that notion.25
Scandalously and absurdly, Patrick reports, papists go so far as to assign

guardian angels to monasteries, colleges, even altars. The vision of
Michael at the monastery on St Michael’s Mount is, presumably, part
of this popish fabulation.
Despite his anti popish rhetoric, Milton subscribed to just such an
account of angelic guardianship. Although the chapter on the ‘Special
Government of Angels’ in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana generally
follows Ames and Wollebius, he differs from them on this tenet. ‘It is
credible’, he writes, ‘that they also preside over peoples, kingdoms
and fixed places’ (‘Præsidere etiam populis, regnis, et certis loci
angelos credibile est’), citing Daniel 12: 1.26 This is the sense intended
by the Son in Paradise Regained when he refers to ‘his angels president j
In every province’.27 Milton is more diffident about the idea of
individual guardian angels, though he does not directly rule them
out. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644) he refers to ‘each
ones alloted Genius’, and in De Doctrina he quotes several of
the common proof texts, and glosses: ‘Tutelares nempe in cœtibus
fidelium, ut nonnulli putant’. ‘To be sure, guardians at gatherings of

the faithful, as some suppose’ implicitly dismisses stronger readings
of the same passages, but makes a concession to angelic representation
and protection of communities. He notes that there are many more
examples in Scripture.28 In Paradise Lost the argument to book 9
describes how ‘Mans transgression known, the Guardian Angels forsake
Paradise,’ and the phrase clearly indicates the widespread doctrine,
though it might indicate that the office of guardianship ends with
original sin. When Milton appeals to ‘the great vision of the guarded
mount’ in ‘Lycidas’, he is not simply conjuring a poetic image, a
monkish fable, or another echo of his pagan intertexts. The vision of
Michael as a protecting angel, assigned to a particular place, people, or
nation, is one rooted in his personal theological beliefs. The speaker of
‘Lycidas’ summons the angel to ‘look homeward’, knowing that it is the
angel’s responsibility to protect the people of country; this is the sense
in which an angel has a home.
At the end of the poem, following the consolation sequence in
which the angel appears, the poet–swain twitches his mantle and
heads for new woods and pastures. In 1638 Milton also departed his
country—where popular demonstrations and well received covenant
ing propaganda denounced the new Prayer Book in terms with which
Milton, judging by the anticlerical passages of ‘Lycidas’, would have
concurred—and travelled to Italy.29 There he wrote his next extant
poem, a lyric addressed to the singer Leonora Baroni:
Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes)

Obtigit æthereis ales ab ordinibus.
(Each individual has as his lot (believe thus, ye peoples) a winged angel from
the heavenly orders.30)
Milton’s phrase is terse, and allows of two possibilities: he could be

suggesting that the belief in tutelary angels is one held by Leonora’s
audience at Rome, distancing himself from the belief; or the imperative
credite might encourage the belief (‘believe me’). His doctrine on this
point is no clearer here than in De Doctrina. What the continuity between
‘Lycidas’ and ‘Ad Leonoram’ does indicate is Milton’s grasp of the force
of this imagery: the intimate relations between humans and angels
suggests the enchantment of the world, the operation of providence,
hope emerging from a youth’s death in a time of religious darkness.
Christian Angel and Classical Genius
Milton’s choice of angel is significant. As Pseudo Dionysius writes,

Scripture identifies Michael as the principality responsible for protect
ing the Jewish people. The Christian Church subsequently laid claim
to Michael as its own, understanding itself to have succeeded the Jews
as the true Church and to have inherited the protecting angel with
this status. Thereafter Michael could be associated with a Church or a
people.31 Hence, John Prideaux in 1636: ‘some of our later writers
reject the particular deputations of severall Angels, to distinct Provinces, or
Persons, and content themselves with that which is certaine, that the
Angels indefinitely have a charge over Gods people’. Transformations
in the fortunes of cities or peoples could be associated with their
losing their angel, who could migrate to favour another: ‘so it is no
wonder if Monarchies, Kingdoms and Cities do change their manner of
Government, and as it were a thing forsaken of its presidential Angel,
flying to another nature of other power’. Prideaux, too, wondered if
angels always kept the same charge, or if they might be ambassadors
moving between negotiations while others succeeded to their
places.32 At the end of the century John Dryden described it as a
commonplace:
’Tis a Doctrine almost Universally receiv’d by Christians, as well Protestants

as Catholicks, that there are Guardian Angels appointed by God Almighty,
as his Vicegerents, for the Protection and Government of Cities, Provinces,
Kingdoms, and Monarchies; and those as well of Heathens, as of true
Believers. . . . St. Michael is mention’d by his Name, as the Patron of the Jews,
and is now taken by the Christians, as the Protector General of our Religion.33
It was for this reason that competing visions of Michael were observed
in Italy and France, and off the Cornish coast. After the Reformation
these visions had a more specifically denominational appeal in the
opposition between Roman Catholic and reformed Churches. Such
a vision could appear to endorse the Church, but also to assert a right
to be seen as a (though not necessarily the) chosen people.34
To claim Michael as a protecting angel was to draw upon a tradition
that was rich with theological and ideological meanings. It was to
present England or Britain as Israel, and its people as the Jews. In this
account Michael indeed has a home, the place or people to which he is
assigned. When the shepherd–speaker of ‘Lycidas’ conjures this angel,

leaving it unnamed, and tells it to ‘look homeward’, Milton not only
draws upon the doctrine of local guardians, he also presses upon
Michael the responsibility for protecting his home, protecting the
true Church, and imagines this ‘home’ as a place coextensive with its
people. As with the Jews, the people and the nation are one.
Milton’s concern with a missing body gives way, especially in the
digression in the voice of St Peter, to a broader theme, the sufferings of
a political body. The poet who regrets the corruption of the Church
hopes for a providential intervention by the angel responsible for
protecting the people who make that Church. Though Milton’s
landscape seems enchanted in places with pagan myth and ancient
history, it is also identified with a godly people, and a strictly Christian
theology. ‘Lycidas’ is a politically charged poem, a prophetic, Spen
serian attack on Laudianism and a call for reformation.35
There is also within this Christian story a pagan one. Samuel
Johnson is one of many who have been troubled by the mixing of
Christian and pagan imagery in the poem, attributing it to poor
judgement and frivolousness, the display of a college education rather
than grief or real invention.
With these trifling fictions are mingled the most awful and sacred truths, such
as ought never to be polluted with such irreverent combinations. The shep
herd likewise is now feeder of sheep, and afterwards an ecclesiastical pastor, a
superintendent of a Christian flock. Such equivocations are always unskilful;
but here they are indecent, and at least approach to impiety, of which,
however, I believe the writer not to have been conscious.36
Johnson had a different notion of the funeral elegy from Milton, but
repeatedly found Milton’s angels irritating, mainly, I suspect, out of a
lack of sympathy with and understanding of Milton’s theology and
natural philosophy.37 Nonetheless, the unsettling relationship between
the Christian and pagan imagery is intensified once the angel’s role,
and its theological foundations, have been elaborated. It is not, after all,
a genial pagan god, a tree spirit, or an image borrowed from Virgil, but
a precise part of Christian theology.
The nature of the relationship between classical and Christian
ideas—and the opposed readings that it yields, some that see it as
focused on poetic tradition, and others that stress its political
critique38—cannot be lightly resolved. The archangel Michael and
St Peter rub shoulders with old Damoetas and Neptune, and they do so
with scandalous grace. However, we can see how one of the pagan
figures merges into a Christian, as an antetype is revealed as a type
under the Law of the Gospel. Lycidas is, as a final consolation towards
the end of the poem, transformed into ‘the Genius of ye shoare’, or a
genius loci, a classical spirit assigned to a place, much as Sabrina is in
A Maske. In this Lycidas bears an evident semblance to the local
guardian angel. If the syntactical ambiguity surrounding ‘look home
ward angel’ invites a momentary misconception that Lycidas is that
angel, this line returns to that misconception and makes it true: he is a
sort of angel. Precedents for this have been identified in Virgil’s
Eclogue V, where the dead shepherd Daphnis is imagined as a God:
ipsi laetitia voces ad sidera iactant
intonsi montes; ipsae iam carmina rupes,
ipsa sonant arbusta: ‘deus, deus ille, Menalca!’
sis bonus o felixque tuis!
(The very mountains, with woods unshorn, joyously fling their voices star
ward; the very rocks, the very groves ring out the song: ‘A god is he,
Menalcas!’ Be kind and gracious to thine own!39)
It has been claimed that Milton’s ‘genius of the shore’ is ‘more pagan
than Christian’ because of Virgil’s use of the same idea.40 However,
though the landscape celebrates Daphnis’ deification, Virgil’s deity is
not assigned to the landscape. Virgil writes about not a genius loci but a
god, which is not the same thing as a spirit or an angel. A more likely
echo is Jacopo Sannazaro’s first piscatory eclogue (1526), in which a
shepherd named Lycidas laments a drowned shepherdess:
At tu, sive altum felix colis aethera, seu jam
Elysius inter manes coetusque verendos
Lethaeos, sequeris per stagna liquentia pisces,
Seu legis aeternos formoso pollice flores . . .
. . .
Aspice nos, mitisque veni; tu numen aquarum
Semper eris, semper laetum piscantibus omen.
(But you, whether you in felicity dwell in the high Aether, or now among the
Elysian shades and venerable bands of Lethe pursue the fish through the crystal
streams, or whether you pluck unwithering flowers with your lovely hands . . .
look down on us and gently come to us; you shall ever be the godhead of
the waters, ever a happy sign to fishermen.41)
After wondering where she rests, Sannazaro’s Lycidas announces that

his shepherdess is turned into a genius loci, a water deity, and beseeches
her: ‘behold us’. The similarity between Milton’s angels and these
pagan intertexts is as superficial as that between ‘look homeward’
and ‘Aspice nos’. This semblance is limited as there is too much
theology in Milton’s genius. Milton’s Lycidas returns from the com
pany of saints in heaven to watch the shores and protect ‘all that
wander in that perilous flood’ (line 185), the flood being, presumably,
the Irish Sea. Though the notion of a ‘genius’ may be classical in
origin, here it is thoroughly Christianized. While this does not hold
for all of the classical elements in the poem, this one, at least, ought to
have secured Dr Johnson’s approval.
Milton’s angel is not a literary device, adapting classical poetry to a
Christian context; it is a concept grounded in Scholastic and Refor
mation theology. It is more sacred truth than trifling fiction. In
choosing Michael, Milton lays claim to a providential, Protestant
destiny for the country he protects. In the light of this, Lycidas
becomes one of an army of subaltern spirits watching over the land
under the wing of Michael, as well as a symbol of the failure of the
Church. This angel too is looking homeward, to the sufferings of the
political body, the people.
The Boundaries of Nations
Where does an angel look when it looks home? Where did Milton
think of as home in 1637, and how did he think of it?
Scholarship on the ‘British problem’, and especially on colonialism
and orientalism, has placed Milton in a narrative of incipient nation
alism, and accused ‘Lycidas’ of anti Irish sentiment and an aggressive,
imperialist sense of place.42 Such a reading is typical of recent schol
arship that identifies a strong nationalistic strain in Milton’s writing,
both poetry and prose.43 Milton was concerned with issues of nation
hood, the character of the English people, and especially with civility.
However, to place him in a tradition of blood and soil nationalism is
both to overstate the role of ethnicity in early modern identity
formation, and anachronistically to assume a stable and coherent
notion of the nation state, something that did not develop until
later.44
Milton’s idea of Englishness did not assume a dichotomy between

the English and the foreigner so much as between the civilized and the
uncivilized. Hence, in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649):
He therfore that keeps peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever
Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a
neighbour: but if an Englishman forgetting all Laws, human, civil and reli
gious, offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the Law in his
behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin,
a Heathen.45
In his History of Britain Milton sways between expressing pride in the

resistance of the Britons (whom he associates with the Welsh) and
subsequently of the Saxons to Roman rule, and lamentation of their
shortcomings, describing lavishly the failures of these people. The
origins of the English people lie as much in the Celtic Britons as in
the Anglo Saxons, and the continuities are as much cultural and civic
as they are ethnic. When in the 1639 poem Mansus he offers to sing of
the kings of his native land (indigenas), it is Arthur smashing Saxon
phalanxes under the might of warring Britons that he mentions.46 In
the History Milton grudgingly reiterates the story of the Brutus, which
he knows to be a fable, mainly in order to denigrate the Anglo Saxons.
His hero is not his people but civility itself, and his villain the barbarism
that is spread widely among peoples and nations.47 Milton’s expressions
of pride cannot be separated from his ambivalence, the same ambiva
lence that caused him to criticize the English and British for backslid
ing (often in advance of the offence), and to adopt the voice of a
Jeremiah.48 When he eventually wrote his earlier promised English
epic, it neglected to mention the English people.49
Though Milton’s rhetoric is sometimes marked by phobia and
caricature, this does not originate in a stable, nationally focused iden
tity. When he articulates a sense of pride in the English people, it is not
with a simple sense of belonging; for his attention is simultaneously
drawn towards civic minded reflection on the state of the island,
towards the fate of Protestantism in Europe, towards the spirit of
liberty everywhere. In his most buoyant statements of national pride
we find both qualifications, and a particularity of focus that takes us
beyond England. In Areopagitica he asks: ‘Why else was this Nation
chos’n before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should
be proclam’d and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of
Reformation to all Europ.’50 He adds that the prelates suppressed the

light of Wyclif, and so the reforming glory went to our neighbours.
England was a chosen nation, but not the chosen nation, and he is in
any case concerned with the light spread across Europe.51
Milton did define ‘patriotism’ in his later life, in his 1666 letter to
Peter Heimbach. There he notes that he worked for the republican
government in the 1650s not out of ‘Politicam’ (‘policy’, or ‘politics’)
but out of ‘Pietatem in Patriam’ (‘dutifulness towards one’s country’).
The civic minded tone of this Ciceronian phrase is clear, and he
playfully adds ‘Patria est, ubicunque est bene’ (‘One’s country is
wherever it is good with one’). We might attribute this to the political
and rhetorical invention of a disillusioned public servant cum epic
poet, but it is a commonplace derived from Cicero, and one that, in its
seventeenth century appropriations, articulates a very tenebrous sense
of belonging.52 Milton’s definition turns one’s country into a matter of
policy or politics; one’s country is not a matter of ethnicity or culture,
but wherever one can identify oneself as a citizen, wherever one can be
and do good.
Interest in orientalism, imperialism, and empire, and in notions of
‘otherness’, has led critics to dwell on negative representations of the
foreign, on caricatures and stereotypes, in pursuit of constructions of
national identity. Boundaries and borders have eclipsed other consid
erations. Much less has been offered on the positive, insular construc
tion of identity, on the sense of national spirit, on what lies within
borders. This is in part because there is so much less to say about the
latter in early modern Britain, because there was no fixed sense of
national identity tied to the state. Milton’s letter to Heimbach was
written after his relationship with his country had suffered from
revolutionary hopes being fulfilled and then dashed. The reality of
events engaged two of his rhetorical tendencies: militant optimism and
jeremiad. ‘Dutifulness’ towards his country had almost expatriated him
(‘expatriavit’), left him homeless. Writing from the perspective of
1666, however, Milton felt that he might still do some good for his
country (‘utinam ne inutilis, quicquid muneris in hac vita restat mihi
peragendum’).53 Patriotism—perhaps the positive dimension of
nationalism—was in early modern Britain a relativistic sentiment.54
One looks homeward when looking towards what is good.
The doctrine of local guardian angels, in ‘Lycidas’ and elsewhere,
alerts us to the possibility of another way of thinking about belonging
to a place, the idea of home. The St Michael of ‘Lycidas’ expresses a

sense of Protestant, providential destiny, its remit delineates a com
munity by mapping shores around it, and, in assuming a role of tutelary
authority and protection, it indicates a set of civic values that we
associate with the nature of a good political community. In other
words, the local guardian angel presents a substitute, or a metonym,
for a missing notion of nationhood. The doctrine articulates a sense of
what it means to be providentially attached to, to be identified with, to
be rooted in a place.
In ‘Lycidas’ Milton reflects upon belonging. The poem sketches a
landscape for the reader, first in a passage where the poet–speaker asks
the nymphs where they were when Lycidas drowned, and answers that
they were not at the place of the fatality, not
on the steep,
Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream . . .
(lines 52 5)
Later the poet–speaker wonders where Lycidas’ bones are, and intro
duces the sequence ‘shores, and sounding seas . . . Hebrides . . .
Bellerus’ (lines 154–60). This emphasis on geography helps explain
the substitution of Bellerus for Corineus: Milton chooses here place
instead of legend. The imaginative landscape stretches from the Heb
rides, Anglesey, the Welsh coastline, the Irish Sea, the Dee, Land’s
End, to St Michael’s Mount. Pseudo Dionysius wrote that local
guardian angels established ‘the boundaries of nations’, and Michael’s
boundaries in ‘Lycidas’ include the shores of Britain, extending into
the Irish Sea.
The status of Ireland, however, is unclear: it is present in the
poem as King’s home and intended destination, but it may be that a
Roman Catholic country simply cannot be included as part of a
chosen nation. In either case, Milton presents no contention for the
inclusion or exclusion of Ireland in or from Michael’s nation, from
which it appears that Ireland is not a focus of his line of argument. It
is easy to extrapolate anti Irish sentiment backwards from his anti
prelatical polemics of 1641–2, his commonplace book notes probably
made at the same time, and his Observations of 1649. Yet the poem
itself does not suggest it. Nor does it seem right to infer that the
geography of the poem is significantly shaped by anti popery, nor by

colonial ambitions.55 The references to Spain do not construe it as a
menace, but instruct the angel to look home, which is where the
threat lies. The poem does not trouble itself with faith in Ireland,
though it explicitly addresses the failed reformation in Britain. The
poem constructs a landscape through a series of peripheral points,
including those in Wales and Scotland, but also reaches into the Irish
Sea. Ireland’s relation to the imagined geography of these shores is left
undetermined. Michael’s protection is defined inclusively rather than
exclusively.
What is the nature of that community, and how does one belong?
As I have suggested, Michael’s commission extends (at least) over
Britain and effects protection rather than exclusion; the problem to
which he is the solution concerns internal corruption rather than
national boundaries. Secondly, it follows that it is unclear whether
he is assigned to the people, Church, or nation. Seventeenth century
theological writings tended to isolate political or geographical units,
stating that angels were assigned to nations and kingdoms or to major
features of the landscape. Yet, as we have seen, Michael was specific
ally assigned to the Jewish people, and their history conflated nation
and people, just as reformed theology identified the true Church with
believers, rather than the institutional or architectural infrastructure.
The nation is the community. So it is in ‘Lycidas’: Michael is associated
with a feature of the landscape, but he protects the community that is
his home, and his responsibility is to a chosen people, a people defined
by civic values and neighbourliness, not race. His charge does not
distinguish between people and land. This is more than prosopopoeia.
It assumes a relationship between the nation and the people that is not
based on political authority; the relationship between the nation and
the people or land is not patrimonial. The most rigid or stable account
of nationhood available to the early modern British was one that
equated the nation with the king’s jurisdiction, that treated the people
as the king’s subjects, and the nation as his personal territory. To
remove the notion of kingship from the relationship between the
land and the people, therefore, could be seen as an anti monarchical
gesture, a delineation of a notion of the people as citizens, or as having
their identity through their tongue or their native landscape.56 This
belonging, an emphatically non secular notion, is a pattern of identity
formation that links landscape, community, neighbourliness, religion,
and, through the notion of protection, well being. To have an angel

looking over one is to be well.
Thirdly, the widespread Protestant belief in guardian angels reminds
us that the land was still enchanted.57 The landscape is full of invisible
meanings and spiritual beings.58 Seeking the roots of modern national
ism and national identity, looking for our reflection in the past, we
overlook this; and it is a fact of considerable importance for under
standing nationhood and identity in the early modern period. I use the
word ‘enchanted’ for its defamiliarization effect, and because it stresses
that the water nymphs and deities of classical literature—which we,
for our own comfort, relegate to the past and transform into self
consciously literary tropes—have their early modern Christian (and
therefore, in Milton’s and his contemporaries eyes, real) correlatives.
Angels inhabit the landscape; they are witnesses to human actions, and
rejoice in or lament for them; they are the instruments of providence.
The landscape of pagan river gods, of Camus and Neptune, is not in
essence incompatible with one in which St Peter rises to denounce
ineffectual clergymen. Within the visible world there is an invisible,
consubstantial one, and the government of this world—by God, through
angels—asserts an association between the people and the land that is
above and beyond worldly politics. This providentialism leads not to
empire or race but to a sense of the history that is inscribed in the land,
and a concern for the country, its faith, and its future. This agrees with
what we have seen about Milton’s patriotism. One’s country is wherever
it is well with one: but that does not mean that it is just anywhere.
Marvell’s Protecting Angel
Andrew Marvell’s poem The First Anniversary of the Government under

His Highness the Lord Protector, published in January 1655, celebrates the
constitution known as the ‘Instrument of Government’ introduced in
December 1653, under which Oliver Cromwell was made Lord Pro
tector, and, within the framework of the constitution, the Protector
himself. Marvell concludes by likening Cromwell to an angel. It is a
puzzling comparison:
While thou thy venerable head dost raise
As far above their malice as my praise.
And as the angel of our commonweal,

Troubling the waters, yearly mak’st them heal.59
The lines allude to John 5: 4, which describes how a pool named

Bethesda in Jerusalem was visited ‘at a certain season’, presumably
annually, by an angel who ‘troubled the water’ and ‘whosoever then
first after the troubling of the water stepped in, was made whole of
whatsoever disease he had’.60 A man who had suffered an infirmity for
thirty eight years was unable to approach the water. Jesus saw and
conversed with him, then healed him without recourse to the pool.
Marvell’s allusion presents Cromwell as ‘the angel of our common
weal’, a divine messenger who heals the English by bringing peace and
political stability.61
The syntax of these lines, like Milton’s in ‘Lycidas’, is resistant:
‘them’ designates the waters, and ‘heal’ is an intransitive verb attached
to the waters, not, as it seems at first reading, the effect of Cromwell’s
troubling of the waters. It is the waters that do the healing, and not
Cromwell, and the object of healing is not indicated, though the
passage suggests that it is the commonwealth, or the troubled com
munity that occupies it, that is healed. The lines also echo Robert
Herrick’s ‘To the King, to Cure the Evill’, a poem that praises King
Charles by deliberately confusing the angel’s healing power with that
of Christ. Marvell may want to remind his readers that Cromwell is not
to be confused with Christ, and that his abilities depend precisely upon
his disturbing qualities: presumably his authoritarianism, his impa
tience, his bluff intellect.62
This concluding image adds yet another register to Marvell’s com
plex admixture of panegyric and deliberation. Marvell’s poem praises
Cromwell with an eye upon the constitutional role and limits of the
office of Lord Protector, while also admitting the imbalance between
the man and the office.63 The poem engages with the literature
debating the strengths and weaknesses of the constitution published
in the year following its introduction, deliberates its way through the
political languages of 1654, and articulates active support of Cromwell
specifically within the practical constraints imposed upon political and
constitutional ideals by the immediate historical circumstances. This
position, and the complex voice of the poem, were subsequently
occluded: first, by Cromwell’s dissolution of the first Protectorate
Parliament in January 1655; secondly, by the increasing polarization
between principled republicanism and the pragmatism of the govern

ment; and, thirdly, by the Restoration programme of rewriting the
history of the preceding decade. These conspired to dissipate
the political intricacies and evanescent constitutional discourse of
1653–4. In its aborted publication in Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems in
1681 (from which it was cancelled while the volume was in press) it
became a poem in praise of ‘O.C.’
The concluding image is discomfiting in part because angels are
immortal and do not hold secular office. Cromwell is moved out of the
terms of the constitution; meanwhile, the annual process of healing
seems to concede, ever so tactfully, either that the Government was
itself unfinished, and that allegiance to it was therefore necessarily
provisional, or that the healing of the commonwealth will be ongoing.
These lines can be pressed a little further, however, through their
relationships with theology and with Milton’s ‘Lycidas’. We can ask:
where did angels fit in the political languages of 1654–5? Are concep
tions of angelic offices a versatile simile, or do they bear upon the
argument of the poem? And what sense is conveyed by the preposition
‘of ’ in ‘angel of our commonweal’? Is Cromwell a representative or a
messenger?
Angels infrequently visit Marvell’s poems. In ‘On Mr. Milton’s
Paradise Lost’, published in the 1674 edition of the epic, they occupy
the ‘vast Design’ that initially troubles the reading poet:
Messiah Crown’d, Gods Reconcil’d Decree,

Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav’n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All.64
Angels are among the secret truths that the poet fears Milton will ruin.
Marvell is drawing on conventional reservations about penetrating the
mysteries of Scripture, reservations articulated in both theology and
poetry, by du Bartas for example, who interjects one of these passages
while narrating precisely the creation of angels.65 Perhaps for this
reason Marvell seldom pries into invisible worlds. The dangers of
presumptuous knowledge appear in the nunnery episode of ‘Upon
Appleton House’. There the subtle nun, seducing the virgin Thwaites
away from her destined public service, flatters her:
I see the angels in a crown

On you the lilies show’ring down:
And round about you glory breaks,

That something more than human speaks.
(lines 141 4)
Angels are associated with popery and rhetorical deception, with

wooden saints, beads, and holy water.
There is one other, more sympathetic apparition of an angel in
Marvell’s poetry, and that is earlier in The First Anniversary. Marvell
anticipates a future epic, in ‘graver accents’, that will form the literary
counterpart to the overthrow of monarchy, but:
Till then my muse shall hollow far behind
Angelic Cromwell who outwings the wind;
And in dark nights, and in cold days alone
Pursues the monster thorough every throne:
Which shrinking to her Roman den impure,
Gnashes her gory teeth; nor there secure. (lines 125 30)
In contrast to the concluding couplet, there is no single, obvious

scriptural allusion here. In what sense is Cromwell angelic? Does
Marvell refer only to the speed of angels? One critic suggests that
this is pure flattery, comparing Cromwell to a spiritual being that does
not have to struggle with ponderous matter; another that Marvell here
encourages Cromwell to chase the beast, so that in so doing he would
become Christ and bring about the last days.66 The comparison is not
so direct, however. Just what kind of an angel Cromwell is here
depends on the identification of the monster with the gory teeth—it
is either the beast or Antichrist in Revelation 11: 7, commonly asso
ciated with the Church of Rome, or it is the Whore of Babylon,
Revelation 17: 3–18—and the text is ambiguous.
Contemporary readings of Revelation contest the identity of the
angels who fight Antichrist. The first, and the only angel assigned a
personal name in Revelation, is Michael, who vanquishes the dragon
Satan and casts him from heaven (Rev. 12: 7–8). Another angel, clearly
identified as Christ mounted on a horse (Rev. 19: 11, 19–20), defeats
‘the beast’; then a third angel locks the beast, now identified with
Satan, in the bottomless pit (Rev. 20: 1–3). The majority of seven
teenth century commentators (among them Joseph Mede) identify
the angel at 12: 7 as Christ; and the majority of these state that the
angel at 20: 1 is also Christ. This is the reading of the Geneva Bible
note.67 Andrew Willet contended that this was a point of clear
doctrinal difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics, the

latter thinking that Michael was the head of the created angels, the
former knowing him to be Christ.68 Yet several Protestants offered
alternative identifications, contending that Michael was either the
angel Michael himself or that his name represents a force of angels.
The same authors also dispute the reading of 20: 1.69 John Napier, the
influential interpreter of Revelation from the 1590s, states, somewhat
anomalously, that Michael here represents the Holy Spirit. Thomas
Brightman, among others, argues that the angel at 12: 7 was the
emperor Constantine.70 The Westminster Annotations state that
Michael represents the emperor Constantine; though they dispute
the identification of the angel at 20: 1 with Constantine on the
grounds that there was not sufficient evidence.71 John Mayer asks,
‘why may not one Angell bee chiefe amongst the good Angels, as well
as one Devill is chiefe amongst the evill Angels? . . . And therefore
some hold Michael to be an Angell indeed.’72 Mayer inclines to
believe that Michael in Revelation was an angel, and this was the
position of John Foxe, who is the sole commentator that Marvell
recommends as a gloss on the apocalypse.73
We cannot know precisely how Marvell read these passages, but
the range of commentators shows that there was no consensus within
English Protestantism about the identification of Michael with
Christ. To equate ‘Angelic Cromwell’ with an apocalyptic Christ is
highly tendentious. The image is closer to Revelation 12 than to
Revelation 19. The pursuit of the beast is an ongoing process; she
shrinks to her Roman den, is not chained there. The last days are not
upon us. Like the allusion to John 5: 4, which distinguished between
the angel of Bethesda and the Christ figure who will follow, this
passage, and the tenor of the allusion, differentiates between the
Cromwell–angel figure, and Christ. If the allusion is primarily to
Revelation 12, then angelic Cromwell is compared not to Christ but
to Michael.
What did these details matter to Marvell? Why did angels creep into
The First Anniversary, when they seem very remote from the language
and sentiments of his two other poems on Cromwell, ‘An Horatian
Ode’ and ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’? First, it reflects the
widespread interest in angels in the 1640s and 1650s, their penetration
into the language of soteriology and politics, and the intensification of
speculative interest in their symbolic range. Some specific echoes, all
chronologically proximate to the poem, help to gloss the final couplet,

and to develop further the identification of ‘Angelic Cromwell’ with
Michael. First, the newsbook Certain Passages in February 1655 in
cluded a set of astrological observations by William Lilly in which he
eulogizes: ‘the Tutelary Angel of England seems to direct the Noble
Protector, who by wisdom prevents all mistakes’.74 A guardian angel is
guiding Cromwell and protecting the nation. A similar notion appears
in Jacob Boehme’s Mysterium Magnum, written in 1623, though pub
lished in English translation in 1654: ‘Each Country hath its Princely
Angel Protectour with its Legions.’75 The terminology of this otherwise
conventional invocation of the doctrine of a local guardian angel is
suggestive. A protecting angel echoes the title of Cromwell’s office,
moving away from the terms guardian, tutelary, or custodian angel, and
consciously deploying the concept in a topical and political fashion.76
A treatise by William Gurnall, published a few days before Marvell’s
poem, pressed angelology into the service of political debate about
allegiance and the Protectorate, while an anonymous pamphlet of 1653
or 1654 dedicated to Cromwell promises that his record ‘one day shall
be revealed amongst Men and Angels’.77 Most compellingly, Robert
Dingley insisted in 1654 that it was probable that ‘Cities, Shires,
Provinces, Islands, Churches and Kingdoms have particular Angels
to be presidential over them, and that each Republick hath an Angel
to be its protector’.78 Dingley’s book, dedicated to Colonel William
Sydenham, a member of the Protector’s Council, here flatters Crom
well by implicitly comparing him to an angel whose responsibility is to
protect the republic.
The angel Michael manifests itself in another way in these debates.
Central to the story that The First Anniversary tells is the episode
describing Cromwell’s riding accident on 29 September 1654, the
feast of St Michael, which Marvell uses to imagine a world without
Cromwell. This incident had been seized upon in the hostile press as
evidence of Cromwell’s incompetence and as a providential warning
against the Protectorate. The Welsh prophet Arise Evans interpreted it
as a sign from the angel himself:
I beseech you again consider seriously what befell you on Saint Michael the
Archangels day last past, and know what an Angel Michael is said to be in
Scripture. . . . He is also the Prince of the people of God, and their angel to
protect them, against which people you have appeared much, to destroy them
hitherto, Dan. 10.21.
Michael himself has responded to the prayers of the Protestant Church,

Evans says, and delivered a powerful omen.79 Evans’s The Voice of
Michael the Archangel is among the texts that Marvell repudiates.
The First Anniversary displays an acute sensitivity to the linguistic
registers of 1654. When Marvell describes Cromwell as ‘the angel of
our commonweal’, he is using the same conceit as Dingley: Cromwell
is neither a messenger nor a representative, though he is an angel, a
protecting angel, assigned to the shores of Britain as the angel is
assigned to the pool at Bethesda. This angel looks in two directions:
first outwards to the political landscape of 1655, where the protecting
angel is needed. Secondly, backwards, to a literary tradition and to
another poem that meditates on the state the nation is in. Marvell’s
work was in an ongoing dialogue with Milton’s, and The First Anni
versary has a close relationship with ‘Lycidas’. There are three echoes of
the earlier poem: the ‘kingdom blest of peace and love’ (line 218)
catches Milton’s ‘blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love’ (line 177), the
stops that Cromwell plays with his sweet touch (lines 58, 61) echo the
shepherd poet’s touching ‘the tender stops of various quills’ (line 188),
and Marvell’s ‘beaked promontories’ (line 358) reverberate with Mil
ton’s ‘beaked promontory’ (line 94).80 Moreover, the dragon’s swing
ing tail (lines 151–2) resembles the dragon in the ‘Nativity Ode’, and
Amphion’s building of the commonwealth (lines 87 ff.) echoes in
diction and sense Areopagitica. Milton is a persistent presence through
out Marvell’s writing.81 The First Anniversary’s relationship with ‘Lyci
das’ may lie behind Marvell’s decision to place the protector angel so
prominently and perplexingly. It is also possible that Marvell read the
comparison of Cromwell to ‘quasi tutelaris deus’ in Milton’s Defensio
Secunda (a work the sublime eloquence of which he lauded) as imply
ing a tutelary spirit or guardian angel.82 We have seen how Milton
invokes the doctrine of local guardian angels to tell the angel of
St Michael’s Mount to look homeward to his troubled country, and
to imagine Edward King resurrected as ‘the genius of the shore’
responsible for protecting ‘all that wander in that perilous flood’. He
assumes that his readers will recognize the doctrinal basis for the
imagery, as Marvell does in his concluding lines.
‘Lycidas’ is spoken by a poet within the poem, a shepherd who
departs in the concluding lines, creating a frame (a broken frame: there
is no corresponding voice in the opening). The poem spoken within
the frame concludes with the image of the local guardian angel, offered
in consolation, and the angel is Michael. Marvell’s poem also ends with
an angel, having invoked Michael as an analogue for Cromwell in the
earlier passage praising ‘Angelic Cromwell’. This buried allusion to
‘Lycidas’ shapes the poem; it is different in quality to the echoes of
Dingley and others that establish the linguistic framework within
which Marvell operates.83 Marvell may well have believed in local
guardians (his literary techniques do not permit us to make this kind of
inference), but the purpose of the allusion is to create an additional
layer of meanings that emerges from this double orientation.
First, there is a silent pun here on ‘Protector’. The only reference to
Cromwell’s title is in the ‘Roofs Protecting weight’ (line 98) in the
passage describing the construction of the commonwealth. The title
was a puzzle in several respects. Milton addressed Cromwell in 1654:
‘You suffered and allowed yourself, not indeed to be borne aloft, but
to come down so many degrees from the heights and be forced into a
definite rank, so to speak, for the public good.’84 This acknowledges
the odd political circumstance of late 1653, in which Cromwell’s
authority was unlimited by any constitutional restraints: in accepting
the office of Lord Protector he placed significant boundaries on his
prerogative.85 Like Milton, Marvell praises Cromwell for ‘Yielding to
rule, because it made thee less’ (line 228). Marvell’s reticence about the
title in a poem otherwise specific about the written constitution
suggests his reservations about the effectiveness of the constitutional
limits imposed on Cromwell; certainly the poem permits the reader to
imagine him as an unprecedented kind of ruler, and a man greater than
his position, whose restless and violent personal qualities threaten the
very republic that he serves. There was, moreover, no significant
political precedent for the role of Protector. Marvell’s pun notes just
such a precedent: the role of an angel whose duty it is to preserve the
interests of a community.
It is a silent pun because this is part of the mode of The First
Anniversary. Far from becoming a lesser poet as he entered the public
realm of opinion, persuasion, and politics, Marvell, ever the ventrilo
quist and the intertextual magpie, found ways of articulating a vision of
politics beyond the limits of extant political vocabulary, and he did so
by subsuming this vocabulary within the languages and devices of
poetry. The watery circles at the beginning and end of the poem recall
the drowned and drifting body of Lycidas. In the earlier poem Michael
protects the shores of Britain, and the waters, at first the source of grief,
the ‘remorseless deep’ (line 50) are miraculously transformed into a

source of comfort and healing, where the drowned shepherd protects
those who would otherwise be lost. Marvell’s image relies on a
moment of self conscious intertextuality which looks simultaneously
to two different kinds of intertexts. While he sublimates the language
of the dozens of pamphlets and newsbooks echoed throughout The
First Anniversary, he expects us to hear and to reflect upon this literary
echo, bearing argument and allusion together in mind. While the
other texts provide the evanescent language of politics (it is this that
matters rather than the texts themselves), ‘Lycidas’ is a palimpsest that
the poem will not release. An expression of support for the constitu
tion and its Protector concludes by presenting the latter as an angelic
guardian of place, an image expressed in imitation of an earlier poem
that worries about the fate of the people, of true religion, and the role
of the civic minded poet.
Finally, the role of the Protector is here imagined in terms other
than those spelled out in the constitution and the texts that debated it,
the language that Marvell has hitherto been using. It is not a crassly
flattering image; it moves Cromwell out of the constitutional frame
work, but painstakingly. Marvell’s angel is designated a role as well as a
limited place. The ‘angel of our commonweal’ signifies not a sublimely
good being but a divine instrument whose duty is to protect a place, to
comfort, to heal, to do his duty to those he serves. Angels, however
powerful, minister to humans. Cromwell’s agelessness, signalled by the
watery circles in the opening lines, is a conventional trope of pan
egyric, but the troubled waters at the end of the poem bind his angelic
agelessness to the hope of future anniversaries, and therefore to the
protecting duties he has been assigned and to which he is dutifully
limited.
Prosopopoeia
Perhaps, of all angel doctrine, the notion of guardianship, individual

and communitarian, is most easily understood in terms of psycho
logical need. Angels populated the landscape, replacing fairies and
spirits and performing the tasks ascribed to them, leaving magic in
the land. They gave to acts of providence, signs, and strange events
an agency that looked human. Moreover, posting angels throughout

the universe means that they are near when needed. An increasing
awareness of the great distances of the universe, and of the time
needed to traverse them at finite speeds, emptied space and made
heaven remote. The logical consequence is that it must take an
angel a considerable time to traverse the universe to come to a
human’s aid: consider Abdiel’s nocturnal flight across heaven in
Paradise Lost. Heywood’s Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells notes in a
passage discussing Satan’s flight to earth the calculations of Persian
mathematicians: if angels fly at a thousand miles an hour, it would
take one at least six years and six months to descend from the eighth
heaven.86 For the purposes of human protection this does not strictly
matter because God, unlike angels, is omnipresent, and can come to
assist without restriction of time and space should all hell break loose
on earth. Angels, however, cannot. If angels are to have a role
intervening in human affairs, as all authors wish to maintain, they
must be stationed proximately. The notion of angelic guardianship
supports this, and so became more useful as theologians recognized
natural philosophical claims about space and velocity. The tenacity
of the belief, then, could be seen to stem not from residuality as
much as adaptability.87
However, this does not exhaust the imaginative potential of angels
assigned to watch over a particular place. Milton and Marvell put the
doctrine to subtle use. For other poets, local angels enable prosopo
poeia and a voice of moral authority. The land speaks within an
eschatological drama. According to William Lilly, the angels president
over nations sent portents and prophecies to their people.88 George
Wither’s long pamphlet–poem Prosopopoeia Britannica (1648) uses this
device to place a warning on the state of the kingdom in an angel’s
mouth. The poet–speaker describes how an angel arrives as he con
siders the kingdom’s troubles and speaks a prophetic commentary on
the civil war. The angel is ‘brought into the room’ by the poet–
speaker’s ‘rambling Fancie’ and his (his gender is explicit) physical
appearance is an emblem (he wears a threefold broken crown): there
is no pretence at verisimilitude in the poem. The angel’s commentary
articulates Wither’s own perspective on what has gone wrong and
what the people need to do to achieve peace. He is a literary angel, a
device, and disengaged from angelology, except for the notion that he
is the guardian angel of the three kingdoms (not Britain in the modern
sense). Towards the end the angel explains that what he has said should
be taken as true because ‘I am that j Which is your genius cal’d.’ He
then explains the doctrine:
A genius, is an incorporeall creature,
Consisting of an intellectuall nature;
Which at the self same time, a being had,
With that, for whose well being it was made.
And, may be cal’d, that Angell, which designeth,
Adviseth, moveth, draweth, and inclineth
To happinesse; and, naturally restraineth
From harme, that creature, whereto it pertaineth:
And, this am I to you.89
It is hard to imagine that any of Wither’s contemporary readers were
likely to believe that the visit represented an actual event, nor that
Wither intended them to. Nonetheless, the voice of the angel marks
understanding of and concern with the fate of the kingdoms, and this is
conveyed through the doctrine of guardianship that author and reader
know and share.
A final example of this vein: Abraham Cowley wrote during the
brief reign of Oliver’s son Richard Cromwell A Vision, Concerning his
Late Pretended Highnesse Cromwell, the Wicked; Containing a Discourse in
Vindication of him by a Pretended Angel, and the Confutation thereof by the
Author, which was published in 1661 after the Restoration. It is a prose
pamphlet that occasionally rhapsodizes into verse. Cowley describes
how in a vision that was no dream he was transported to ‘Mona’
(Anglesey), from which he sees the prospect of three kingdoms, and
there he breaks out into a lament on the chaos into which they have
descended. He is interrupted by a giant figure (his body also emblem
atic), who proclaims: ‘I am called The North west Principality, His
Highnesse, the Protector of the Common wealth of England, Scotland,
and Ireland, and the Dominions belonging thereunto, for I am that
Angel to whom the Almighty has committed the Government of those
three Kingdoms which thou seest from this place.’90 Cowley doubts
that ‘Cromwell amongst all his forein Correspondences had ever held
any with Angels’, but the angel insists that Cromwell was the greatest
Englishman ever, if not the greatest man ever, and that he now counts
himself ‘a naturalized English Angel’. This collapses the careful distinc
tion between the three kingdoms and England drawn earlier, which
distinction is also made in Wither’s poem, but it carefully establishes a
sense in which this is the angel’s home. Of course, Cowley soon

realizes that this is a fallen angel, and they dispute perspectives on
Cromwell, tyranny, and the 1650s. After seventy pages of this the evil
angel is about to drag Cowley away when a good angel appears, ‘The
comeliest Youth of all the’Angelique race’, who utters some unrec
ognizable words that drive the other off.91
The close connections between this and the poems by Milton,
Marvell, and Wither are striking. All are state of the nation poems
that invoke the presence of national angels; Milton and Wither raise
questions about the relationship between the islands and the kingdom
(reading Milton in the backlight of Wither and Cowley sharpens
the impression that Ireland is not simply excluded from Michael’s
protection); Cowley and, briefly, Milton both adopt the vantage
point of Anglesey; Cowley’s Cromwell driven by an evil angel retorts
to Marvell’s ‘Angelic Cromwell’. Marvell may have known Wither’s
poem, and also Wither’s later poem on Cromwell’s riding accident,
which, like The First Anniversary, construes a complex and qualified
mode of praise.92 Cowley claims in the preface that he had planned
a sequel to his pamphlet, which ‘was to be a Discourse with the
Guardian Angel of England, concerning all the late Confusions and
Misfortunes of it’.93 This savours of a response to Wither’s poem,
which fits precisely this description; it is possible that these two, and
others, constitute a sub genre that crosses the boundaries of poetry and
prose. But all of these writings are rooted in an account of the nature
and offices of angels that was common in early modern Britain. And all
engage in a dialogue that is founded upon a sense of the imaginative
possibilities of angels.
10
Angels in Paradise Lost
An Angel Sees Something Strange
Raphael describes to Adam his experience of the outbreak of war in

heaven:
strange to us it seemed
At first, that angel should with angel war,
And in fierce hosting meet, who wont to meet
So oft in festivals of joy and love
Unanimous, as sons of one great sire
Hymning the eternal Father: but the shout
Of battle now began, and rushing sound
Of onset ended soon each milder thought. (6. 91 8)
Raphael hedges his narrative with cautions about the difficulty of

representing actions beyond human grasp. Here, however, he offers a
glimpse of the inner life of angels. One of Milton’s most distinctive skills
as a narrative poet is to discover instants of astonishment, to step behind
paradoxical acts of recognition, such as Adam and Eve’s first moments
of consciousness, and imaginatively to explore them. In this passage
Raphael sounds naive, his diction simple, his language protestatory
rather than rhetorically disciplined (contrasting with the preceding
lines). Until this point in time angels had experienced little variety in
heavenly life: suddenly they face the unknown. Instead of confining
himself, as Aquinas had, to the moment of deciding to fall or stand,
Milton imagines that decision developing in time. Moreover, and more
challengingly, he describes an angel’s response to these events, the
angel’s awareness of estrangement. The poetry imagines an angel’s
experience of being, his emotions, his sense of strangeness—paralleling
Adam’s self alienation as he first experiences his body and realizes that it
angels in paradise lost 257
is his (8. 257–73)—as the nature of the universe is changed. The

experience continues when the good angels first see military ordnance:
‘to our eyes discovered new and strange’ (6. 571).
What is strange to an angel? The question arises because of the
decision to make angels creatures, not merely instruments of narrative
but beings who live independently of the specific duties that God
assigns them. Paradise Lost repeatedly focuses on the similarities and
dissimilarities between human and angelic experience. It does so with
an extraordinary tact. A discreet moment of such spiritual analysis,
which is also a historical and theological analysis, takes place near the
beginning of book 11. It is based on verses of Genesis (3: 22–3),
following God’s discovery of protoplasts’ sin: ‘And the Lord God
said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and
evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life,
and eat, and Life for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from
the garden of Eden’. To whom is God speaking? And what does
he mean by ‘become as one of us’? To the first question, some exegetes
inferred the angels, others the remainder of the Trinity. Calvin demurred:
‘Some refer to the plural number here used to the angels, as if God
would make a distinction between man, who is an earthly and despised
animal, and celestial beings; but this exposition seems far fetched.’ Nor
did Calvin think the plural indicated the Trinity, the common alter
native solution; instead he thought the ‘us’ indicated a fellowship
between God and Adam. For Calvin, God’s phrase was ‘An ironical
reproof ’, suggesting that Calvin and Milton shared a view of God’s
mordant and mocking sense of humour.1 Milton, however, elaborated
on the text considerably, and his reading is not Calvin’s. After God
explains to the Son that he intends to expel Adam and Eve from Eden,
though with a promise of final redemption, he continues:
But let us call to synod all the blest
Through heaven’s wide bounds; from them I will not hide
My judgments, how with mankind I proceed,
As how with peccant angels late they saw;
And in their state, though firm, stood more confirmed.
(11. 67 71)
It is a theologically distinctive action, and one that merits close atten

tion. That angels can be ‘more confirmed’ in their unfallen state
indicates that they have freewill. This is no surprise: while many
theologians deny freewill to angels, or seem to, it is essential to

Milton’s Creation, and theory of angels, that beings are free to perform
good and evil. The problem that follows angelic freewill is that it seems
to imply that good angels might sin in the future (Origen argued that
all beings could backslide), or even that fallen angels might repent. Yet
the irreversible nature of the fall of angels was fundamental to Chris
tianity since Satan was transformed from a testing angel, performing
God’s will, to the metaphysical embodiment of evil. Thereafter there
were two kinds of angels: good and evil, and this antithesis was
reinforced by interpretations of Paul’s words ‘Satan himself is trans
formed into an angel of light’ (2 Cor. 11: 13–14). How, then, could
beings capable of acting freely at least once thereafter be fixed in their
moral status? And if the fallen angels did not act freely, how was God
not responsible for their evil actions?
Peter Lombard’s deft handling of this dilemma was discussed earlier.
Those angels assisted by grace did not fall; by turning to God they
received more grace, confirming them in their goodness, and enabling
them to improve. Those who turned from God receive no grace, and
are thus confirmed in their fall; though free, they could not redeem
themselves without intervention by and support from God.2 Though
both kinds of angels are free, they cannot change their state. Milton’s
narrative is a variant of this: his ‘blest’ angels are confirmed in their
position by witnessing others’ sins. A few lines earlier he has given his
readers a lesson in ‘prevenient grace’ (11. 3), showing how Adam and
Eve’s free repentance is assisted—made possible—by the free offer of
grace by God, and Milton dramatizes the illusory dichotomy between
human agency and divine assistance by placing a book division
between them. Here, however, it is the experiential knowledge of
the consequences of sin that confirms them: God summons his angels
so they can see the humans judged. The possibility of the angels’
backsliding seems far more real than in Lombard’s system, as is appro
priate for a narrative poem, but also echoes Milton’s greater concern
with individual responsibility. The angels are then summoned by a
trumpet—blown by an angel—take ‘their seats’ (11. 82) in the theatre,
and observe the judgement of humankind.
In these few lines a complex theological issue is explored and
quietly resolved. This tactful handling of doctrine is characteristic of
the poem. The poem is as indebted to scriptural annotation as it is to
hexameral poetry, yet it is easy to overlook its subtle doctrinal
statements.3 Raphael, Michael, and the narrator alike offer narrative as

a mode of exegetical commentary. In Chapter 5 I reconstructed the
angelology of Pordage and his circle, accepting his visionary integrity,
in contrast to materialist historiographical traditions that explain vi
sions as symptoms of other historical phenomena, and Christian tra
ditions that accept the principle of visions while discarding the
enthusiastic content. In this chapter I lay aside scepticism about Mil
ton’s inspiration, and reconstruct or redescribe his visions of angels
from the details of the poem. This chapter, as far as possible or useful,
detaches the imaginative narrative from the concerns with politics and
theology: if Milton witnessed heaven, then his testimony is worth
viewing from the inside.
What Is Heaven Like?
Paradise Lost is an epic of space travel. The movement of angels is

followed from the empyreal heaven (beyond the fixed heaven of the
created world) through Creation to its centre, earth, down through
chaos to hell, the furthest extreme from God. Though angels are
remotely stationed in distant places, as local guardians, heaven is
their collective home. Milton’s heaven has specific physical and men
tal characteristics. Aquinas’ heaven is featureless light; Dante’s is
spheres of light.4 Milton’s heaven embodies light with fields, ‘happy
fields’, ‘vales’, and hills (1. 249, 321; 6. 71; 5. 757; 6. 69). God’s throne
is on a ‘sacred hill’ or ‘holy mount’ at the centre, higher than others (5.
619; 6. 743). When the angels move to war, they ‘march’ above the
ground and are thus undivided by the hills, vales, woods, and streams
below. Beneath the surface, ‘Deep under ground’, is the original matter
of the universe, ‘sulphurous and nitrous foam’, ‘spirituous and fiery
spume’.5 This is covered by ‘celestial soil’, and on this ‘bright surface’
grow ‘plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems and gold’ (6. 69–72, 478–9,
510–12, 472, 475), a profusion melding organic with inorganic.
Luther’s idea of heaven similarly did not efface the material world,
but idealized earthly things, making rivers flow with pearls and pre
cious streams.6 Flowerets grow in Eden and heaven (5. 379, 636; 6.
784). Except for the precious stones and metals and heaven’s oft
iterated spaciousness, the landscape looks much like England. Raphael
acknowledges this: ‘(For earth hath this variety from heav’n j Of
pleasure situate in hill and dale)’ (6. 640–1). Heaven has a crystal wall, or
‘battlements’; at the end of the war it recedes, leaving a verge, over
which the sinning angels throw themselves—their own agency is
important—in terror (1. 742; 6. 860–5). This, like the gems and gold,
suggests that heaven merges a natural landscape with architectural
features. All are manufactured by God, though on earth some are left
by nature and others introduced by man. There is a parallel, perhaps
entirely coincidental, with baroque ceiling paintings of the heavens,
which combine painted architecture, extending the real architecture of
the hall, with a visualization of the empyrean, breaking down the
barrier between reality and illusion, and the human and the divine.
Heaven also has ‘high towers’ and ‘towered structures’, some associated
with Satan’s pride (2. 62; 1. 733; 5. 907). It has a gate which, at Raphael’s
approach,
self opened wide
On golden hinges turning, as by work
Divine the sovereign architect had framed. (5. 254 6)
The gate confounds any boundary between technology and provi

dence. Angels sleep in ‘pavilions numberless’ interspersed among
‘living streams’ and ‘the trees of life’. As they sleep, they are ‘Fanned
with cool winds’. Angels sleep? They do, helped by soporific ‘roseate
dews’, heavenly medication (5. 652–3, 646–7). They sleep at night—
for there are days and nights in heaven, that measure the passage of
premundane time, which is a form of sequentiality (5. 580–2)—and
night in heaven is dark, but not very dark. Heaven is ordinarily
brightness itself, hence night is ‘twilight (for night comes not there j In
darker veil)’; and later, ‘darkness there might well j Seem twilight
here’ (5. 645–6; 6. 11–12).
Given the widespread reluctance to represent heaven, and Calvinist
warnings about the danger of writing about it as if one had been there,
Milton’s heaven is materially visualized. Heaven is not cloudy or delites
cent, but is a landscape, as tangible as that of ‘Lycidas’. It is also profoundly
musical. Music forms part of its internal logic as well as of its environ
ment. The angels are sometimes organized as a choir, and their music is a
perpetual, rational pleasure, embodying joy, unity, love of God:
Then crowned again their golden hearts they took,
Harps ever tuned, that glittering by their side
Like quivers hung, and with preamble sweet
Of charming symphony they introduce

Their sacred song, and waken raptures high;
No voice exempt, no voice but well could join
Melodious part, such concord is in heaven. (3. 365 71)
This heavenly unanimity contrasts with the ‘partial’ song that is sung in
hell; though hellish notes are still ‘angelical’ and ravishing, as the devils
generate music to ease their suffering, consoling themselves for loss of
heaven (2. 547–52). The angels commence with harps, a standard
accessory in the visual arts and their instrument of choice in Paradise
Lost, and then sing. The epic narrator then repeats their hymn. Over
the next forty lines or so angelic voices sing words with complex, total
harmony; though the song soon segues into the narrator’s, and it ceases
to be clear who is speaking:
Hail, Son of God, saviour to men, thy name

Shall be the copious matter of my song
Henceforth, and never shall my harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Father’s praise disjoin.
Thus they in heaven . . . (3. 412 16)
Their singing is ‘as the sound of seas’ (10. 642). In the scornful eyes
of the devils, music characterizes heaven, and it is synonymous with
praise of God. Mammon refers scornfully to heaven’s ‘warbled
hymns’ and ‘Forced alleluias’ (2. 242–3). In contrast, the Son looks
forward to the end of time when God ‘shalt be all in all’ and the
pure,
circling thy holy mount,

Unfeigned alleluias to thee sing,
Hymns of high praise,
a compressed image synthesizing the geometry, topography, music,

and praise essential to heaven (6. 732, 743–5; also 10. 641–2). When
the angels move from peace to war, they silently march to ‘instru
mental harmony’ in a more heroic mood (6. 62). This music, audible
from heaven, forms a continuous part of Adam and Eve’s experience
of Eden, and angelic choirs sing when a ‘genial angel’ brings Eve to
her nuptial bed (4. 712). While angels sleep, some keep watch and
‘melodious hymns about the sovereign throne j Alternate all night
long’ (5. 656–7). Angelic music never stops in heaven.
Heaven and its angels are also defined by hierarchy. Milton adopts the
traditional, partly scripturally based nomenclature of the angelic orders,
descending from seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, through dominions,
virtues, and powers to principalities, archangels, and plain angels.7 He
does not apply them as fixed markers of status, however, though differ
entials of status are observed among the angels. Sin, speaking to Satan,
refers to ‘all the seraphim with thee combined’ (2. 750), which seems to
imply that a whole order fell with him; this was one theological tradition.
Raphael, moreover, narrating the war in heaven, repeatedly names the
fallen angels operating the ordnance as seraphim (6. 579, 604). However,
allusions to thrones and powers in hell, and especially to cherubim, and
the angelic hymn referring to ‘The aspiring dominations’ thrown down
by the Son, indicate that Satan did not lead a whole order to fall, nor were
all of his followers from a single order (1. 157, 324, 534; 2. 310; 3. 392).
Satan is repeatedly an archangel, the context implying elevation (1. 593,
600). Satan is ‘the lost archangel’ (1. 243), and Raphael tells Adam that
Satan was ‘of the first, j If not the first archangel, great in power’ (5. 659–
60, 694). Satan is matched against Michael (anticipating the final conflict
described in Revelation), and the narrator refers to Michael as an ‘arch
angelic power’, and later an archangel (11. 126, 238, 884); Raphael calls
him ‘The great archangel’ (6. 257). However, Raphael, the ‘affable
archangel’ (7. 41), is also a seraph and an ‘angelic virtue’ (5. 277, 371)
and Satan scornfully mistitles Gabriel a ‘Proud limitary cherub’, a logical
insult only to a seraph, the sole rank above cherub in the conventional
Pseudo Dionysian ordering (4. 971). The narrator describes Uriel as an
‘archangel’, though Satan addresses him as ‘Brightest seraph’ (ironically,
for Lucifer was among the brightest), and disguises himself as ‘a stripling
cherub’ in order to appear inconspicuous and deferential (3. 648, 667,
636). Either ‘archangel’ signifies an elevated rank, or the narrator uses it
to mean powerful or mighty angel, or, most likely, it means an angel
performing a distinctly important service, just as the word ‘angel’ might
refer to a specific rank or the species more generally.
In the midst of the war, ‘down they fell j By thousands, angel on
archangel rolled’ (6. 594).8 The juxtaposition of angel against archan
gel, which disturbs the iambic rhythm, suggests distinction within
similarity (which ‘cherub on throne’ would not have); it represents
a cyclical inversion of proper hierarchy, without investing in the
specifics of that hierarchy (as ‘dominion on principality’ might). The
line, like all references to the orders of angels, is more committed to
the ideas of hierarchy and order than specific gradations. Milton’s

Creation is flexible and mobile: creatures are positioned according to
their actions, and actions generate moral status rather than reflect it.
Consequently, the notion of a fixed hierarchy of angels, through
which enlightenment is channelled, developed by Pseudo Dionysius
and Aquinas, would be alien to Milton’s understanding.9 Milton’s
theory of matter, freewill, and evil depends on flexible hierarchies.
Raphael tells Adam that ‘great j Or bright infers not excellence’ (8. 90–
1), and looks forward to human bodies being ‘Improved by tract of
time’ (5. 498).
This is not to say, however, that hierarchies do not matter. When he
returns to hell having secured humankind’s fall, Satan disguises himself
as a ‘plebeian angel militant j Of lowest order’. This is hell, where
hierarchy is accorded greater social and symbolic presence, but
the episode indicates that hierarchy is clear and visible (10. 442).
The narrator describes Satan’s farewell to Chaos:
Satan bowing low,
As to superior spirits is wont in heaven,
Where honour due and reverence none neglects. (3. 735 7)
Angels show due honour to Raphael as he heads towards earth, though

the respect acknowledges his high message: there appears to be a
correlation between the statuses of the messenger and of the message
(as there is in prophecies brought by angels).10 When God calls his
angels before him, they appear
Under their hierarchs in orders bright
Ten thousand thousand ensigns high advanced,
Standards, and gonfalons twixt van and rear
Stream in the air, and for distinction serve
Of hierarchies, of orders, and degrees . . . (5. 587 91)
The organization folds in a military structure and multiplies the dis

tinctions of the angelic orders. Satan is associated with the seraphim,
and is a leader within the army (5. 684), and the military divisions
correspond to the order; but the leader of the thrones is not, presum
ably, answerable to the leader of the cherubim. Ranking within the
army works independently of the hierarchies. Offices and orders
provide a sociological structure to the angels, but do not constitute a
single, coherent hierarchy; they override it, and their plurality under
mines a Pseudo Dionysian account of heaven.
The names of the angelic orders do not reflect a fixed hierarchy.

So what do they mean? On the eve of the war in heaven, Satan’s
forces travel north through heaven, through regions associated with
particular ranks:
Regions they passed, the mighty regencies
Of seraphim and potentates and thrones
In their triple degrees . . . (5. 748 50)
The hierarchies of the angels represent ‘regions’ and ‘regencies’, and

areas of heaven are associated with particular ranks (Satan passes them to
his seat). The different orders are like armies or encampments, and are
mapped onto celestial topography. The ranks are treated as metaphors
for orderliness. The names ‘angel’ and ‘archangel’ refer to offices that
angels perform; the remaining terms describe not only ranks but prop
erties.11 There are particular qualities associated with the names of orders.
Milton himself—assuming that he, and not the epic voice, is the author
of the arguments—tells us that Abdiel is a seraph, a status reinforced in
the poem (5. 804, 896). A seraph is the highest rank of angel, yet Abdiel
is subordinate to Satan’s command. Elevated status would undermine his
appearance as a fearless, isolated, and physically threatened figure. Yet as
a zealous angel it is fitting that he is a seraph, an angel burning with love of
God. The name expresses a quality rather than status.
Raphael’s reference to the fallen angel ‘Nisroc, of principalities the
prime’, appears to indicate a clear hierarchy within an order, perhaps
equivalent to Satan’s primacy; this may refer exclusively to fallen
angels, however. The desire to convert descriptive into definitional
terms characterizes postlapsarian language. The fallen angels are con
cerned with titles. Hence, Satan in hell addresses the others:
Thrones and imperial powers, offspring of heaven,
Ethereal virtues, or these titles now
Must we renounce, and changing style be called
Princes of Hell? (2. 310 13)
And to his followers as he falls:

Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,
If these magnific titles yet remain
Not merely titular, since by decree
Another now hath to himself engrossed
All power . . . (5. 772 6)
As Abdiel reminds Satan, all angels were made by God through the
Son, and the names they were given are the gifts of God, describing
their essences, not honorifics to which they are entitled:
. . . all the spirits of heaven
By him created in their bright degrees,
Crowned them with glory, and to their glory named
Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers
Essential powers, not by [Christ’s] reign obscured,
But more illustrious made . . . (5. 837 42)12
The same argument maintains that hierarchy does not degrade the
lower ranks, but exalts them through association with the superior.
Abdiel does not object to rank but to the appropriation of its terms for
something other than a merited description of a property. The five
names deployed in this debate are significant. Angel and archangel
(literally, ‘chief angel’) describe duties (the bearing of messages); cher
ubim are the worldly angels who guard the gates of Eden (Gen. 3: 24);
seraphim, meaning ‘fiery’, are six winged figures in Isaiah 6.13 The
other five names, those used here, are found in Scripture, and are
expressive of virtues, but are not clearly angels; their appropriation into
clear ranks was the imaginative work of Pseudo Dionysius. Hence
their suitability as ambiguous, contested terms. Adam’s tardy interest in
the angelic ranks follows his fall. He addresses Michael:
Celestial, whether among the thrones, or named
Of them the highest, for such of shape may seem
Prince above princes . . . (11. 296 8)
Hierarchy shapes Milton’s heaven, but it is not a chain of being.

Two models dominate the organization of heaven and its angels:
armies and choirs. Angels sing, of course, but their organization into
choirs emphasizes that music can involve social and spatial order.
Milton uses ‘quire’ as a collective term for angels (punning on a
gathering of paper). They sing in choirs, but they are also silent in a
choir when God asks for volunteers to intercede for humankind,
their collective silence underscoring the extraordinary sacrifice by
the Son (3. 217). The ‘angelic choirs’ part in unison to give way to
Raphael (5. 251). The organization of a choir is a spatial reflection of
harmony: the individual identity is shaped by its position in a col
lective; their interaction indicates their joy and concord. The second
model of social organization is the army. The angels are composed
into camps and have a military command structure. The militancy of

angels is not the consequence of the war: their creation is not
described, but the earliest moment in the time scheme of the poem
in which the angels are seen to have this military structure antedates
their fall. The angels celebrate the elevation of the Son with dancing,
but their ‘camps’ are then ‘Dispersed in bands and files’, and the
disaffected Lucifer leads ‘his legions’. They have banners and know
how to march: the vocabulary is distinctly martial (5. 651, 687–8).
There is no ontological transformation when they are assimilated into
the army that unexpectedly meets Abdiel’s eyes, ‘thick embattled
squadrons bright, j Chariots and flaming arms, and fiery steeds’ (6.
16–17). Subsequently (in time, not narrative), Gabriel is ‘chief of the
angelic guards’ in Eden protecting Adam and Eve, supervising angels
that behave like idealized troops:
About him exercised heroic games

The unarmed youth of heaven, but nigh at hand
Celestial armoury, shields, helms, and spears
Hung high with diamond flaming, and with gold.
(4. 551 4)
In narrative terms, this prepares us for the war in heaven in the

following two books, and for the puzzling incident of the debili
tating angelic armour. These are angels now at war. They have
more in common with seventeenth century English sermons than
with Renaissance Italian art. These martial angels may also have
been coloured by the presence in Milton’s Britain of the idealized
discipline and reputed theological devotion of the New Model
Army.14 Gabriel’s troops show good discipline when faced with
Satan:
the angelic squadron bright
Turned fiery red, sharpening in mooned horns
Their phalanx; (4. 977 9)
and Gabriel is sent on a military observation mission to the gates of hell

(8. 29). Who is to say whether these images were rooted in the writings
of Caesar or Thucydides, or in newsbook accounts of the recent wars
in Britain? These twin modes of organization—the choir and the
army—merge in book 12 at the birth of Christ, when the shepherds
hear a carol sung by ‘a choir j Of squadroned angels’ (12. 366–7).
Michael’s narrative announces the New Testament.15 At the Incarna

tion the Church militant is also born, and the community of saints
founded, hence the choir and the army become one.
A third, more abstract design governs the organization of heaven
and angels, and it emerges from these two: this is geometry. The angels
dance in circles; when they move to war, they shift into a ‘quadrate’
(squaring the circle?) and a ‘cubic phalanx’ (5. 163; 6. 62, 399, 743).16
The circles are more complex than the squares, and are described as a
geometrical pattern:
That day, as other solemn days, they spent
In song and dance about the sacred hill,
Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere
Of planets and of fixed in all her wheels
Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,
Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem:
And in their motions harmony divine
So smooths her charming tones, that God’s own ear
Listens delighted. (5. 618 27)
The dancing is associated—by resemblance—with the movement of

the spheres, traditionally understood to be rotated by angels, move
ment which generates music expressing complex and ideal har
monies (‘their’ in line 625 could refer to angels or the spheres).
Like Hobbes, Milton imagines geometry to be a science with a
special truth status: for him, however, it is created by God and not
man, and the angels’ dance expresses a perfection, the ideal behind
man’s clumsy attempts to ‘model heaven’ using arcs ‘With centric
and eccentric scribbled o’er’ (8. 79–83). Movement, line, music, and
truth are synthesized.
Perhaps heaven’s most essential aspect is the hardest to describe:
pleasure. Raphael’s account includes brightness, fine dining, and sexual
embraces. Satan scornfully identifies ‘feast and song’ as the slothful
pleasures of heaven (6. 167). The pleasure implicit in heavenly life is
best understood in contrast to the pain of the fallen. Hell is defined by
pain. Nisroc, in the middle of the war in heaven, observes that ‘Sense
of pleasure’ can be forgone in favour of a stoic contentment, ‘But pain
is perfect misery, the worst j Of evils,’ and it is Satan who first sins,
who ‘first knew pain (6. 459–64, 327; cf. 2. 242–3, 278, 752; 6. 431).
Heaven is painless. Angels are understood to be beings who live in
a state of constant pleasure—though that pleasure can be solemn,

disciplined, and arduous—and who do not know pain.
What Are Angels Like?
Paradise Lost is unusual in combining both general and individualized

portraits of angels. The portraits of named angels express character as
well as the common properties of angels, in uncertain proportions.
Angels, fallen and unfallen, have wings as part of their ‘proper shape’.
These wings are used to fly, they rustle in flight (1. 768), they sym
bolize speed. Raphael’s are conspicuously ‘gorgeous’ and, as a seraph,
he has six of them. His feathers shed ‘heavenly fragrance’ as he flies
(5. 250, 277, 286). Wings punctuate the visual and metaphorical
registers of the poem: the word and its derivations are used eighty
one times. Other features of attire are mentioned. Angels wear ‘crowns
inwove with amaranth and gold’; Uriel sports ‘a golden tiar’ (3. 352,
625). They have hair, and ‘Bind their resplendent locks’ with flowers
(3. 361, 626). The false angel of Eve’s dream has locks that ‘distilled j
Ambrosia’ (5. 56–7). Michael wears a helm and a purple ‘military vest’,
and carries a spear (11. 240–9). A particularly detailed description is
offered of Satan’s disguise as a ‘stripling cherub’ (evidently an exact
disguise, but a securer subject for a poet than an unfallen angel, as it is a
simulacrum):
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb
Suitable grace diffused, so well he feigned:
Under a coronet his flowing hair
In curls on either cheek played, wings he wore
Of many a coloured plume sprinkled with gold,
His habit fit for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a silver wand. (3. 637 44)
Angels wear appropriate clothes and head decorations, have locks of

curly hair, and exude grace or spiritual substances. They are bright and
colourful. Nothing in this would seem unfamiliar to a medieval or
Renaissance artist.17
Traditional angels appear as young men, however (feminine men
being conventionally beautiful, masculine women monstrous), while
Milton’s are differentiated according to age; Adam assumes they are all
male (10. 893). The ‘youth’ in the above passage could be a universal
characteristic of angels, but the ‘stripling cherub’ implies an appear
ance junior to Uriel’s. Zephon is ‘Severe in youthful beauty’, in
contrast to Satan, who is scarred (4. 845; 1. 601; 2. 401). This is a
synecdoche, as angels are sempiternal and do not age. Yet the disguise
is real enough, and there are other ways in which angels vary in their
appearance or have distinguishing qualities, such as brightness and
strength (7. 131; 5. 838; 10. 425; 4. 786). When Azazel is described
as a ‘cherub tall’, the qualifier presumably refers to his activeness,
elegance, or boldness rather than his height, but the visual texture of
the poem benefits from this ambiguity (1. 534). While Milton relies
heavily on traditional iconography, these qualifiers individualize the
poem’s angels: Zephon is severely beautiful, Abdiel zealous, Raphael
‘the sociable spirit’, Michael a ‘gentle angel’ yet solemn (5. 221; 11.
234–6, 421).
In addition to making love, Milton’s angels eat. Their digestive
process is significant to the theology and natural philosophy of the
poem. Their food is also described with care:
Tables are set, and on a sudden piled

With angels’ food, and rubied nectar flows:
In pearl, in diamond, and massy gold,
Fruit of delicious vines, the growth of heaven.
On flowers reposed, and with fresh flowerets crowned,
They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet
Quaff immortality and joy . . . (5. 632 8)
These are not the nutritional properties of the food; it is in eating and
drinking that immortality and joy are experienced. Hence, eating,
commonly associated with transience and decay, is here associated
with their opposites. Raphael emphasizes that angels have senses and
emotions. In 1667 this last phrase had read ‘with refection sweet j Are
filled’, which suggests a more literal minded understanding of what
goes on at those tables. The emendation further emphasizes the rejec
tion of the metaphysics of the Church sacrament of Communion, by
showing a truer communion which acknowledges the bounty of
communion in everyday eating. Appetite and digestion are more
angelic than submission and symbolic transcendence. While the pas
sage invites a symbolic reading—surely this is spiritual nutrition?—it
firmly declines to pursue that register, instead emphasizing the virtue
of pure pleasure, and finding it in material food and drink. The

symbolic and the literal appear as one.
The representation of angels at leisure, celebrating the promotion of
the Son, provides opportunities for distinctive perspectives on angels as
real creatures, such as the proposition that angels sleep, and that dews
prompt them to do so (5. 646–7). The movement of angels is swift,
though achieved with effort.18 It is intriguing, then, to find their
motion described as gliding:
The cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding metéorous, as evening mist
Ris’n from river o’er the marish glides . . . (12. 628 30)
‘Metéorous’ suggests atmospheric movement, parried by ‘on the

ground’, but it also intimates a portent. The cherubim come to keep
humans in exile from Eden. The scene is viewed through Adam’s eyes,
and the obscurity of the movement, no longer the winged descent of
Raphael spied from a distance, indicates Adam’s impaired vision.
However, Uriel glides on a sunbeam (4. 555), and Satan ‘wrapped in
mist j Of midnight vapour glide[s] obscure’, and creeps ‘like a black
mist’ (9. 158–9, 180): the repetition of the image suggests that some
thing in angelic motion physically resembles the disembodied gliding
of mist.
These depictions of angels meld the figurative and the literal, and
Milton’s heaven is a place where these two collapse into each other
firmly and inexplicably. Individuation reaches its apogee in the proper
noun, though for a poem awash with the names of classical figures
there are few names given to unfallen angels: Gabriel, Michael,
Raphael, Uriel, Abdiel, Ithuriel, Zephon, Uzziel, and Zophiel.
Raphael gives a reason:
I might relate of thousands, and their names
Eternize here on earth; but those elect
Angels contented with their fame in heaven
Seek not the praise of men: the other sort
In might though wondrous and in acts of war,
Not of renown less eager, yet by doom
Cancelled from heaven and sacred memory,
Nameless in dark oblivion let them dwell. (6. 373 80)
Angelic modesty informs Raphael’s tact, and the poem resists the
incantation of angelic names that is common in occult texts and ritual
magic (especially that concerned with summoning angels). Elsewhere

in the poem, the names of fallen angels are spoken more freely, because
they are names invented by humans for the earthly manifestation of
devils, and are used proleptically by Raphael and the epic narrator.
Raphael speaks Lucifer’s name to Adam, but indicates with a ‘(So call
him . . . )’ that it is a translation that captures the angel’s original
brightness, rather than the actual name, a name mysteriously or polit
icly unspeakable (7. 132).19 Raphael is here consciously adapting his
speech for his auditor, and the angel explicitly indicates that he is doing
so. Four unfallen angelic names are those most commonly used in
writing on angels because of their scriptural status: Raphael and
Michael appear in the Old Testament, Raphael in the apocryphal
book of Tobit, Uriel in 4 Ezra and numerous pseudepigrapha. All
four were developed in cabbalistic traditions; Uriel, for example, was
associated with the sun in rabbinical writings on angels, and Milton
makes him ‘regent of the sun’ (3. 690).20 The other names are more
unusual and complex. Abdiel, meaning ‘servant of God’, is a human in
the Bible (1 Chr. 5); as an angel he appears in Sefer Raziel Hamalach, or
The Book of the Angel Raziel, a cabbalistic work influential in occult
writings though only available in Hebrew in seventeenth century
Britain, where the name appears in a treatise describing cosmic geog
raphy and the power of names.21 Why Milton gave this name to such
an important character in the poem is not known, though the meaning
of the name is particularly resonant in context.
Ithuriel and Zephon are the ‘two strong and subtle spirits’ who
discover Satan crouching at Eve’s ear in book 4. They apparently fail to
recognize Satan, though they may simply refuse to name him, as to do
so would be to taint or misuse an unfallen name by association with
evil. As the exchange concerns self knowledge and recognition of
another, naming is an important issue, and Milton’s choice of names
is provocative.22 Ithuriel means ‘discovery of God’ and can be found in
the Key of Solomon. ‘Thuriel’ can be found in Trithemius’ Steganogra
phy, a source for occult angelology in seventeenth century Britain,
though doubtful as Milton’s source.23 Zephon, meaning ‘a looking
out’ or ‘searcher of secrets’, is a human name in Numbers 26: 15.
Milton probably used it mindful of the Baal Zephon mentioned in
Exodus 14: 2, and discussed in De Diis Syris (1617), where John Selden
argues that Baal Zephon was an idol sentinel. As Agrippa suggested,
the names of good and bad angels might be paired. Milton therefore
appropriates Zephon as the true, original sentinel, of which Baal

Zephon was a later, idolatrous corruption.24 Uzziel is another human
name (Exod. 6: 18), meaning ‘strength of God’, but was used as an
angel name in rabbinical writings including The Book of the Angel
Raziel, where he is one of the seven angels that stand before the throne
of God.25 The non scriptural Zophiel, or ‘Spy of God’, also figures in
rabbinical traditions and the Key of Solomon. He is also mentioned as an
archangel, whose name ‘argueth pulchritude’ in Robert Fludd’s Mosai
cal Philosophy; and there is an Iophiel in Agrippa.26 The name may
derive from Iofiel or Jophiel; identifying sources for names is made
more complicated by transliterating from the Hebrew.
Milton may not have been interested in angels’ names: he chose to
name few in a literary form that invited compendious lists. Perhaps his
muse–angel did not speak of them. Dee searched for angel names,
believing that in the angelic tongue they held mystical power; yet in
Milton’s heaven they are seldom used. He avoided Metatron, Israel,
Zadkiel, Samael, and Asriel, all names common in occult and rabbin
ical writing about angels. However, his nine do not simply reflect the
canon of theologically inoffensive angel names. In his reluctance to
name, he partly avoided the unsafe territory of human inventions, and
preserved the mysterious and poetic power of angels’ names. Those he
did use include scriptural names but also obscure names from occult
traditions. His choices suggest that he was familiar with The Book of
the Angel Raziel, or a manuscript copy of the Key of Solomon, or a
manuscript of Solomonic magic.27
What Do Angels Do?
Milton’s angels sing, watch, play games and exercise, eat, sleep, make
love, bear messages, interpret, bear witness, move the universe, and,
above all, talk. They make mistakes: Raphael misunderstands Adam’s
account of his need of Eve; Uriel is deceived by Satan. They are agents
with freewill, responsibility, and leisure time.
The four main activities of angels in Protestant doctrine are to praise
God, bear messages, and act as ministering spirits and as witnesses.
Milton’s angels do these things, but his narrative mode requires that he
asks what do they do the rest of the time, and whether their con
sciousness and freewill require other activities. Aquinas’ angels would
contentedly stand in choirs and sing praises, but Milton’s need a more
active, diverse life, expressing their freewill, without which their praise
would be meaningless. The singing of Milton’s angels colours the
universe. It provides a backdrop for Adam and Eve’s life, day and
night.28 When they praise God, they praise with hymns; Raphael
reports one that follows Creation:
Great are thy works, Jehovah, infinite
Thy power; what thought can measure thee or tongue
Relate thee . . . ? (7. 602 4)
Their praise is endless (the fallen angels object to this), full of copia but
always unable to reach the heights to which they must aspire. Milton’s
angels are, unlike any other angels, profoundly articulate beings.
Angels are, as their name indicates, messengers, but messages are, as
any narrative must discover, occasional. Angels who are primarily
messengers must recede into the background when the story is being
developed another way. These angels, however, talk all the time: to
each other, to humans, and when free from other duties they make
music that is verbal as well as tonal and rhythmic.
Milton’s angels watch, and, though they sleep, vigilance is essential
to their duties. This is not only a reflection on the state of war.
Through the night, while others sleep, watches of angels take alternate
duty in singing hymns around God’s throne (5. 656–7), lest heaven fall
silent. Watches protecting the human couple ‘in warlike parade’, led
by Gabriel, change at ‘the accustomed hour’ of night (4. 779–80).
Gabriel also guards the sole gate of Eden, overseeing ‘The unarmed
youth of heaven’ who engage in ‘heroic games’, presumably training
exercises (4. 542–54); this contrasts with the forbidding cherubim, who
will guard the gates from human return. Raphael will later explain that
he did not see Adam’s creation because he was on an ‘excursion toward
the gates of hell’, to ensure that none had escaped (8. 29–34). These are
the actions of an army, but they also suggest the more extended duties
of angels as part of the broader communications network of the uni
verse. As part of these duties, angels not only interact directly with
people, but witness human activity as an audience. This audience gives
human actions meaning in a broader context, one more intelligible and
familiar than the inexpressive and omniscient eyes of God. Adam
inadvertently remarks on this when answering Eve’s question about
why the stars unseen shine at night. He tells her not to think,
though men were none,

That heaven would want spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night . . . (4. 675 80)
Among the works that these creatures behold are Adam and Eve.
Humans provide a kind of theatre for angels. Angels weep tears, and
though the only angelic tears the poem describes are dissembled, the
implication is that angels know pathos as well as joy (1. 620). In all four
outlines for a drama entitled ‘Paradise Lost’ or ‘Adam Unparadiz’d’
drafted around 1640 (after the angels in ‘Lycidas’ and ‘Ad Leonoram’),
Milton included a ‘Chorus of Angels’.29 In the epic, too, they are
spectators at the ‘woody theatre’ of Eden (4. 141), and sometimes
provide a chorus between Eden’s couple and the human reader.
Raphael and Michael act as messengers; though Raphael is also an
‘angel guest’ (9. 1), and is like an ambassador, greeting, dining, and
conversing politely.30 These encounters are more extended than the
portentous scriptural visits of message bearing angels; Milton recon
ceives angelic–human sociability in order to imagine the prelapsarian
state. Raphael is likened to a ‘friend’ to humans (9. 2), suggesting
friendship is not possible between angels and humans, though some
thing like it, perhaps fellowship, is. Adam calls Michael a ‘heavenly
instructor’, providing not a message but a Socratic lesson (11. 871). He
calls Raphael a ‘divine interpreter’, perhaps referring to Raphael’s active
translation of the spiritual world and actions into human terms. This
much is suggested when Raphael qualifies an allusion to Lucifer’s
palace with
so call
That structure in the dialect of men
Interpreted,
another phrase in which Raphael indicates that he is consciously

adapting his speech (7. 72; 5. 760–2; also 3. 657). However, the label
‘interpreter’ also gestures to a broader role angels play: as beings that
stand between God and humans they present a step towards under
standing the ineffable. As they provide an audience for human life, so,
by providing a mediating term between the finite and the infinite, they
ensure that space, literally and metaphorically, is not a vacuum.
Speaking is a duty for angels, who must praise God and bear his
messages. Their hymns to the Son in book 3 and to Creation in book
7 are poems of praise, using epideictic rhetoric that is declarative and
oddly passive. In the hymn to the Son their selfhood is erased in
praising, and the syntax focused on the ‘thou’ being praised, so that
the introduction of the first person singular (‘the copious matter of
my song’ (3. 413), also embracing the narrator) is startling, and
emphasizes that these are individuals, as well as voices in a choir.
The hymn to Creation moves from the expulsion of the fallen
angels, through a meditation on how providence brings forth good
from evil, to praise of the world and men; there is no reflection on
the singers’ own place in this universe, and how it has been altered
by this addition. As envy at man’s creation is sometimes cited as
the cause of the angelic fall, Milton expresses their selflessness.
Their selflessness is remote from the rhetoric of rhetoricians, in
profound contrast to the subtle manipulations in the diabolic
synod in book 2. This pattern of selflessness can be contrasted,
however, with the very different rhetoric Raphael uses to describe
freewill and its dangers:
freely we serve,
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall:
And some are fallen, to disobedience fallen,
And so from heaven to deepest hell; oh fall
From what high state of bliss into what woe! (5. 538 43)
This passage begins with a seeming paradox, and works its way
through a series of sonorous antitheses (free–serve, stand–fall,
heaven–hell, bliss–woe) and emphatic syncrisis and homoioteleuton.
The structured rhetoric is introduced because Raphael is talking the
ology, and he sounds not unlike God discussing freewill, grace, and
salvation, using the schemes anaphora, anadiplosis, antithesis, and
climax (3. 183–202). Angels are, naturally, rhetorical beings, and
choose their styles, tropes, and figures to suit the occasion. Thus it is
possible for a Miltonic angel—unlike a Thomist angel, who commu
nicates by beams of pure intellectual thought—to flatter and deceive
another through disguise and guileful words.
Angels protect, make love, eat, bring prophecies, blow trumpets;
they also perform unique duties as required. Among these is guarding
paradise, assigned to cherubim with flaming swords (God invites

Michael to choose his best troops; 11. 101); and at the end of Paradise
Regained a ‘fiery globe’ of them lifts the Son from his ‘uneasy station’
on the pinnacle (4. 581–4). Another is the catastrophic altering of the
cosmos that follows the fall, a task assigned to angels:
While the creator calling forth by name
His mighty angels gave them several charge,
As sorted best with present things . . . (10. 649 51)
The sun is moved to create inhospitable seasons, and the moon and the
five planets are moved from their original, ideal trajectories so that
their convergences produce malignant influences and bad weather: the
earth’s misalignment from the sun’s axle results in discord among
animate things, antipathy, and death.31 Angels were traditionally asso
ciated with the planetary spheres, turning them and generating the
music of the spheres: in this passage Milton extends the astrological
framework, and envisions the destroying angels, the angels of terror,
creating discord within an erstwhile ideal creation. As with the cher
ubim that bar access to Eden brandishing a fierce blazing sword
(12. 633–4), the reader is reminded that angels are terrible and sublime,
as well as protecting and sociable.
11
The Natural Philosophy
of Angels
Milton and Natural Philosophy
Milton’s angels seemed strange to some early readers. Sir Samuel

Morland, who had worked with Milton during the 1650s, and as
an ambassador delivered at least one speech written by Milton,
thought the epic account of a war in heaven risible.1 He presumes
his reader
would be very little satisfied with my Endeavours, in case I should, in
imitation of a late learned Author, try to squeeze a plausible Description of
LOST PARADISE, out of St. John’s Vision in the Isle of Patmos, and fancy to my
self a formal and pitcht Battle, upon a vast and wide Plain, in the North part of
Heaven, fought between two might Hosts of Blessed and Revolted Spirits,
conducted and led up by mighty Arch Angels, (for their Generals) riding in
Brazen Chariots, drawn my foaming Steeds, and clad with Adamantine Coats,
one of which was, by a massy Sword, cut down to the wast, and stain’d with
Angelick blood: Where the one of these Armies dug up the Terrain of
Heaven, and with the Materials they there found, made Powder, Bullets
and great Guns (it is pity that Bombs were not in use when he wrote that
Treatise) and with them did great Execution upon their Enemies, who in
Revenge tore up great Mountains by the Roots, and hurl’d them at
their Heads, with a great number of Romantick Stories, which is Ludere
cum Sacris . . . 2
Calling Paradise Lost a ‘Treatise’ reveals his doubt about Milton’s
poetics, as well as his natural philosophy. Morland’s satire looks
like a conventional attack on allegory, for its hostility to realism,
for rejecting the visible world.3 It is not: Morland regrets that,
having made the invisible visible, Milton has made it absurd.
Spiritual truths should be less physical. His grounds are theological,

because Milton uses his imagination where it is not appropriate,
but also natural philosophical, because questions about the invis
ible world and incorporeal beings were ‘not to be fathom’d by the
Line and Plummet of Human Understanding’.4 Morland was not
alone in his objections to the narrative of books 5 and 6. Patrick
Hume, Milton’s first annotator, wrote in 1695 that the represen
tation of invulnerable angels wearing armour was a paradox;
Charles Leslie in 1698 described these ‘Romantick Battles’ as ‘a
Scene of Licentious fancy’; Samuel Johnson thought that ‘The
confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narration
of the war in heaven fills it with incongruity.’5 Such reservations
have the merit of taking the creatureliness of Milton’s angels
seriously, while doubting their convincingness.
Milton used narrative to experiment with angels, and he was not
alone in exploring their physical nature. Interest in angels was not
outmoded or nostalgic in the 1660s. Early modern natural philo
sophers explored the nature of angels from both experimental and
devotional perspectives; and early modern theologians asked questions
about angels that were influenced by natural philosophy. Natural
philosophy and theology enquired into angelic matter, movement,
eyesight, and ingestion. Paradise Lost connects or overlaps with these
concerns. The perplexity of Morland and his successors originated not
only in Milton’s conceits but also in his understanding of the natural
world.
Milton did not directly engage with contemporary natural philosophical
debates, with arguments over experimentalism, or with the writings of
the Royal Society, and there is no conclusive evidence for what he read
or knew in this field. Critics have debated Milton’s familiarity with
seventeenth century natural philosophy and astronomy, suggesting,
for example, that Paradise Lost articulates sympathy for the ‘old
science’, and that he assimilates ‘scientific’ interests only to subordinate
them to aesthetic ends; that he is prescient of later science; and that
he disliked the political and religious agendas of the Royal Society.6
Milton’s cosmology has been a focus of this debate. He alludes to five
different models of the cosmos, while tending to geocentrism.
Yet Michael censures those who seek the secrets of nature (12.
575–87), and Raphael warns Adam that God will hereafter laugh at
those who
the natural philosophy of angels 279
come to model heaven

And calculate the stars, how they will wield
The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive
To save appearances, how gird the sphere
With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb . . . (8. 79 84)
This might be a critique of scientific rationalism.7 Some suggest that,

through his inconsistencies, Milton cherrypicks, from various available
paradigms, those notions that seem most useful or attractive.8 Others
still that Milton engaged attentively with natural philosophy, and
sought to integrate it into his theological and poetic commitments:
that his depiction of the natural world uses detailed knowledge of flora
and fauna to create a poetry that subtends multiple and possibly
contradictory meanings, poetry that is itself a reading of the Book of
Nature;9 that he engages with contemporary debates about mechanical
philosophy and vitalism or animism (the belief in the existence of an
active and organizing principle within all matter), and that his account
of nature, especially in his narrative and his portrayal of angels, is
rigorously systematic in its philosophical and political implications.10
The conflict originates in the inconclusive nature of the evidence,
but also in the unsatisfactory dichotomy between the poet’s being
interested or not interested in natural philosophy, and a schematic
division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ science. The cosmology of Paradise
Lost cannot be pinned down to a heliocentric or a geocentric model,
but this was something of a false dichotomy, as there were a range of
available models, and the irrefutable demonstration of one was recog
nized as impossible. This was a matter of epistemology rather than
ontology: the focus of contestation was the appropriate method and
nature of analysis and demonstration.11 Raphael does not dismiss en
quiry into such matters, but rather suggests the multiplication of means
of comprehending data, and particularly the complication of those
means, will not lead to understanding. His is a point about how, rather
than what, we know. While Milton may not have wished to engage
with experimentalists or the Royal Society personally or polemically,
he shared with them interests in matters concerning angels and the role
of spiritual causes, where natural philosophical issues converged with
theology. He asked questions about the nature of matter, assumed a
monist account of matter and motion (affirming the unity of matter
and spirit), and believed that the liberty that was essential to human
agency and salvation extended to the stuff humans were made of.
There was a convergence of questioning, rather than intellectual
alignment. Milton’s position was not a conservative or anti intellectual
one: he was interested in natural philosophy as it assisted him in
forming his narrative, and so offered a means of imagining and
describing theological truths.
Angelic Digestion and Lovemaking
‘Orthodox’ angelology represented a broad span of beliefs, covering

much that was deemed adiaphora. There was a wide remit of speculation,
and this speculation could be highly atypical and even controversial
without being heterodox in the strict sense. Milton is conspicuously
odd on two matters of angel doctrine. First, digestion: angels eat food
not only out of politeness, but enjoy and digest it. Secondly, lovemaking:
they practise total interpenetration for pleasure. Both need to be under
stood in terms of the nature of matter as much as of theological doctrine.
Food, sustenance, and appetite were conventional markers of differ
ence between humans and angels. Augustine described angels as beings
that perceived and understood ‘without needing to be sustained by
food’, but were instead ‘sustained by a quickening Spirit’; ‘it is not the
power of eating and drinking, but the need to do so, which is removed
from such spiritual bodies’.12 Aquinas states that angels do not assimilate
food into their assumed bodies, and that they present ‘only an image of
spiritual nutrition’.13 The food of angels was therefore a metaphor for
spiritual sustenance. As Robert Dingley wrote, ‘Angels are Spirits, their
nature, Communion, Food, Delights are Spiritual.’ The logic of these
commentators compasses both the physiological and the theological. In
the next life, it was argued, man, freed from his mortal body, would
become more like the angels and thus free not only from disease and
deformity but also ‘From want of meate, drinke, marriage’. In this life,
however, plants and animals are given to humans, and human bodies
depend upon consumption. By 1672 George Hughes, a Presbyterian
inclined clergyman who had been ejected under the Act of Uniformity
in 1662, troubled by the deceptive implications of a virtual body that
only seemed to eat, suggested that the angels that visited Abraham ‘did
truely eat, and the bodies were refreshed for the time that God made use
of them’.14 Here it is the words ‘truely’ and ‘refreshed’ that diverge from
Thomist traditions. Robert Fludd, who believed angels to be corporeal,

interpreted the same text of Genesis: ‘Surely a man so profound in
divine mysteries, would not have beene so absurd, as to have offered
them his food, if he had knowne that it would not naturally have
nourished them.’15 Both conflate real eating with nourishment, as does
Milton’s Raphael, who takes ‘corporal nutriments’ (5. 496). John White,
whose imaginative exploration of Genesis 1–3 merits comparison with
Milton’s, asks why prelapsarian man needed such things:
But why doth God abase Man so far, in this his happy condition, as to support,
and as it were to prop him up, by the Creatures, whereas he might have
preserved Man, as he doth the Angels, by immediate Influence from himself,
without the help of any Creature at all, and have continued his life, as well
without food as by food?16
He answers: because life on earth is a temporary abasement for man
kind. Food indicates the humanity of humankind, both its corporeal
being and its susceptibility to appetite; it designates the dichotomy
between humans and angels.
This is a dichotomy that Milton deconstructs. He uses the food of
angels to explore the fluid scales of Creation and the community
between humans and angels. Milton’s very unusual account of angelic
digestion reflects a different vision of matter and of interspecies rela
tions. When Raphael visits, Adam tentatively offers food, but the angel
reassures him:
what he gives
(Whose praise be ever sung) to man in part
Spiritual, may of purest spirits be found
No ingrateful food. (5. 404 7)
Raphael proceeds to emphasize that not only can angels digest

real food, turning ‘corporeal to incorporeal’ (5. 413), they actually
require sustenance: ‘whatever was created, needs j To be sustained and
fed’ (5. 414–15). So not only is the meal that Raphael takes with Adam
a real one, the heavenly food of angels is described in sensual terms:
in heaven the trees
Of life ambrosial fruitage bear, and vines
Yield nectar, though from off the boughs each morn
We brush mellifluous dews, and find the ground
Covered with pearly grain . . . (5. 426 30)
This detail, lingering on the reality of heavenly food and nutrition,

reappears later in Raphael’s description of a four Michelin starred feast
in Heaven:
Tables are set, and on a sudden piled
With angels’ food, and rubied nectar flows:
In pearl, in diamond, and massy gold,
Fruit of delicious vines, the growth of heaven. (5. 632 5)
Heaven is material and organic, and its physical properties are inter
laced with the mental.17 Milton’s unorthodoxy on the matter of
angelic digestion, often understood to be an exceptionally literal
minded moment, is one aspect of a fuller theological picture of
the creatureliness of angels, the spiritual congruity and legitimate
sociability between humans and angels, and the continuity of matter
across all of Creation.
Milton’s second alleged heterodoxy, on angelic sex, is also more
embedded in tradition than might at first appear. The penetrability of
angels was a commonplace: though they could act with assumed
bodies and upon material objects ‘with external violence’, according
to Jan Amos Comenius, they themselves ‘can be hindred or stayed by
no body’.18 ‘They are creatures, that have not so much of a body as
flesh is, as froth is, as a vapour is, as a sigh is,’ preached Donne, ‘and
yet with a touch they shall moulder a rock into less atoms than the
sand that it stands upon; and a millstone into smaller flour, than it
grinds.’19 The association between power and penetrability is a
paradox. The fact of penetration was commonly iterated in both
theological and natural philosophical writings; it is the reimagining
of this as a sexual and pleasurable act that distinguishes Milton.
Moreover, he develops this by denying fallen angels the pleasure of
sexual intercourse (as Satan laments; 4. 508–11), whereas in demono
logical and witchcraft writings it is the devils who have the active sex
lives.20 Sexual intercourse is intrinsically good. Angels interpenetrate
‘union of pure with pure j Desiring’ (8. 627–8); they feel desire, and
what they desire is union with another pure being. The unstated
antithesis here is the union of the sons of God with the daughters of
men in Genesis 6: 1–4.21 This interpretation is not endorsed in
Paradise Lost, where Milton prefers the dominant alternative explan
ation in which the sons of God are descendants of the line of Seth,
and the daughters of men are the descendants of Cain (11. 573–87,
621–2); it does find a place in Paradise Regained, however, where

Satan reminds Belial:
Before the flood thou with thy lusty crew,
False titled Sons of God, roaming the earth
Cast wanton eyes on the daughters of men,
And coupled with them, and begot a race.22
Interspecies desire was associated with fallen angels, and sometimes
with the fall of the angels itself.23 Paradise Lost recovers this realm of
creaturely experience for pure angels.
Matthew 22: 30 states: ‘in the resurrection they neither marry,
nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven’.
Robert Bolton asserts that in heaven humans would be like angels and
therefore free from ‘want of marriage’. This implies not the satisfac
tion of all desires, nor a Neoplatonic pairing of souls, but an emanci
pation from longing and sexual difference, another distinction
between angels and humans.24 Interest in the gendering of angelic
apparitions—in contrast to their natural sexlessness—might have
derived from concern with this boundary.25 Some commentators,
however, explored the idea of angelic desire and procreation further.
Richard Brathwaite describes the Albigensian heresy (c.1200), that
Adam and Eve in innocence were unmarried and undifferentiated in
sex, and that if they had continued so, ‘mankind should have increased
as Angells doe’.26 Alessandro Piccolomini compares the desire for
conjunction, penetration, and perfect union between lovers with
the perfect union of celestial spirits.27 Whereas sexual intercourse
between humans and fallen angels was a form of metaphysical
evidence—demonstrating the reality of the spiritual world—Milton’s
account of angelic lovemaking is at once an indicator of their material
nature, but also proof that all rational beings, with the exception of
God, experience community and desire as a principle of their being.
Not only is lovemaking pure—as the narrator of Paradise Lost is at
pains to declare in book 4’s account of prelapsarian human inter
course—lovemaking can be driven by an appetite for union with
another pure being. Purity, far from being based on abstention,
separation, and order,28 can be, at least in the angelic world, the
basis for desire and intermingling and pleasure. Milton’s implicit
reading of Matthew 22: 30 finds heaven promising not the absence
of desire and pleasure but pure promiscuity.
Wind, Fire, and Light: The Bodies of Angels
Though these are the loci classici for discussions of Milton’s angels, as if
he was only earnest in his representations when being evidently
unorthodox, there are other themes that suggest intense concern
with the creatureliness of angels. One, closely related to sex, is the
bodies and matter of angels. There was in early modern Britain a
spectrum of beliefs about the corporeal and material nature of angels,
and about the relationship between body and matter. As Henry More
wrote in An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660),
‘Concerning Angels, some affirm them to be Fiery or Aery Bodies;
some pure Spirits; some Spirits in Aery or Fiery Bodies; Others none
of these, but that they are momentaneous Emanations from God; Others
that they are onely Divine Imaginations in men.’29
The Thomist position is that angels are incorporeal and non mater
ial. Angels do not have bodies, though they sometimes adopt bodies of
air to appear before humans. These bodies are not manipulated by
quasi material mechanism but by divine power. Angels are not mater
ial. However, Aquinas’ account of substances means that they are
possessed of an unintelligible, purely intellectual substance: ‘The an
gelic substances, on the other hand, are of a higher order than our
minds; we cannot therefore apprehend them as they are in themselves,
but only according to the way in which we apprehend realities com
posed of form and matter.’30 This is also the understanding of Thomas
Heywood and William Austin, though the latter also sketches another
doctrine, popular in the early seventeenth century, that ‘they have a
most fine thin Substance (like that, which the Philosophers call Æthereum
animæ vehiculum; which joynes it to the Body). And, that they have a
forme above all Creatures: but, what it is; Ignoramus.’31 This fine, aetherial
substance was devised to explain the material agency of spirits in the
world—for those who were disinclined to appeal to the continuous
action of divine power of the special providential intervention of
God—and it received its fullest development in a British context by
the Cambridge Platonists. It is an uneasy form of dualism, one
that rejects a straightforward matter–spirit dichotomy in favour of
a spiritualized form of matter. However, Henry More and Ralph
Cudworth, the two authors who wrote most extensively on the
subject of spirits, were opposed to the mechanism of Thomas Hobbes,
and sometimes seem closer to Aquinas’ dualist theory of material and

immaterial substances than to monism or animism.32 A similarly
ambiguous corporealism, firmly grounded in dualism, is advocated
by Henry Woolnor in a 1641 treatise attacking mortalism: ‘though
soules are of a simple spirituall substance, as are Angels in respect of
elementary; yet even Angels themselves and much more mens soules,
are not without a spirituall kinde of composition. For to be simply
simple, is proper only to the nature of God.’ He adds: ‘all created
spirits, being compounded of act and potency, have a kinde of simili
tude with corporall natures, both in regard of matter and forme; yea,
even Angels themselves’.33 John Trapp’s account of the corporeality of
heaven, impenetrable even by angels (except by miracle), suggests a
similar, tenuous corporeality.34
Others suggest that angels are corporeal and substantial, a position that
seems less complex and ambiguous. This is Hobbes’s position, grounded
in materialist and mechanist philosophy. In Leviathan (1651) Hobbes seeks
to elaborate, on the basis of reason, a comprehensive and inclusive
description and justification of absolutist sovereignty. His system relies
on the exclusion of alternative authorities, such as religious inspiration and
prophecy, which he associates with both fairies and linguistic nonsense, so
the notion of angels as spiritual beings that appear to humans represents a
challenge both to his politics and to his theory of matter. He dismisses
spirits as ‘Idols of the brain’, and argues that even ‘real, and substantial’
apparitions were ‘subtile Bodies’ formed supernaturally by God and
described as ‘angels’ because they were in a sense messengers. They
were not spiritual beings. In the Old Testament ‘Angels were nothing
but supernaturall apparitions of the Fancy, raised by the speciall and
extraordinary operation of God.’ He concedes that in the New Testament
there is evidence ‘that there be also Angels substantiall, and permanent’.35
His language indicates extreme reluctance, as if this is a weakness in God’s
design, and he is emphatic that such spirits must also be corporeal.
This puts Hobbes in some odd company. Robert Fludd writes that
angels have fully corporeal, albeit aerial bodies.36 Jacob Boehme’s
mysticism blurs categories like (in)corporeal, but he writes about
angels as visible and substantial, as if material: ‘Paradise consisteth in
the power [and vertue] of God: it is not corporeall, nor comprehen
sible; but its corporeity or comprehensibility is like the Angels, which
yet is a bright, cleere, visible substance, as if it were materiall; but it is
figured meerely from the vertue [or power] where all is transparent
and shining.’ In their first creation angels were hidden, but in their
second creation they ‘were bodified’.37 Boehme girds his system by
speaking of similitudes and analogies, but his angels are certainly
corporeal and probably substantial; as the writings of his disciple
Pordage show, the cautious use of language conflicts with the material,
sensuous reality of the experiences described.
A third conceivable position is that angels are corporeal and insub
stantial, though no early modern writer seems to have advocated this,
unless one considers the tenuous corporeality of the Cambridge
Platonists, Woolnor, and Trapp a sufficient approximation. Boehme
gestures in this direction, as does Robert Gell with significant qualifi
cation: he writes that angels ‘hath a subsistence without the grosse
elements’, and that, like man, who consists of three parts (spirit, soul,
and body), angels ‘have something analogical to a body, and that’s
wind . . . Somewhat proportionable to the soul, and that’s fire . . .
Somewhat answerable to the to the spirit, and that’s light’.38 Gell is a
traditionalist dualist metaphorically attributing corporeality as a way
of enhancing the metaphoric range of angels, and because even a
figurative body makes the actions of spirits easier to comprehend.
Finally, there is a strange position that is distinct from the Cambridge
Platonists and Aquinas in its thoroughgoing monism, and distinct from
Hobbes in rejecting any simple notion of corporeality. This is Milton’s
position: angels are substantial and material, but, unlike humans, their
matter is highly spiritual and therefore they are not corporeal. Milton
uses angels to explore the nature of matter. His position can briefly be
summarized as follows. Milton was, like Hobbes, a materialist; in
contrast to Hobbes, he rejected mechanism in favour of the view
that matter is animate and therefore free. Creation was ex deo, and
therefore all matter is in origin good; evil is a perversion of matter, and
is thus a privation of being. Matter and spirit exist on a continuous
scale, from the incorporeal to the merely corporeal. This scale permits
movement, and beings can ascend and descend it through continuing
obedience to God, refining the very corporeality of their being.39 The
most penetrating imagining of this in Paradise Lost is in Raphael’s
explanation to Adam of why angels can eat with men:
O Adam, one almighty is, from whom

All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depraved from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,

Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refined, more spirituous, and pure,
As nearer to him placed or nearer tending
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. (5. 469 79)
Though in heaven he eats the food of angels, Raphael can digest

human nourishment, converting it, he says, ‘To proper substance’,
discreetly leaving ambiguous whether ‘proper’ means ‘suitable
for angels’ or ‘superior in substance to paradisal vegetation’. He
continues:
time may come when men

With angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit,
Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend
Ethereal, as we, or may at choice
Here or in heavenly paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progeny you are. (5. 493 503)
Milton’s metaphor for understanding the gradual transitions of matter

and the move to and from gross and tenuous corporeality is digestion.40
The angel explains the relative places of angel and man on this scale in
order to justify his own eating, but it is, elegantly, also a governing
trope in the poem, meaningfully framing the human act of illicit
consumption that violates order and human freedom. This, the most
striking statement of Milton’s monist natural philosophy in the epic, is
also one of the most informative and poetically memorable passages
about angels, and one in which the communicative nature of Milton’s
universe is symbolized. They are eating together in order to talk.
Matter, the Fall, and conversation are all linked through digestion.
This is testimony to the importance of natural philosophy in the poem.
Angels explore matter by explaining and embodying its properties.
Their agency, their speech and hearing, their movement, are ‘proof’
for Milton’s metaphysics. What Raphael tells Adam about Creation
must be in some sense true, and is a means of engaging with natural

philosophy. It is why angels fight a war, why they eat, why they make
love. However, it is not only natural philosophy, it is self evidently
theology, and also politics (as the politics of angels, sex, and the Fall
were inescapable in the 1650s).41
According to Milton, corporeality and incorporeality are extremes
of a hierarchy, one that permits movement through a process analo
gous to digestion, and so a material being need not be corporeal.42 This
is an unusual notion, though Descartes similarly accepted the existence
of incorporeal substances.43 It is a difficult position to sustain: if
corporeality and incorporeality are extremes on a spectrum, then
there must be forms between that possess elements of both and thus
hold properties that we do not have language adequate to describe.
Moreover, as theologians since John of Damascus commonly observed,
the most extreme form of incorporeality must be God, not an angel.
‘They hang between the nature of God, and the nature of man, and are
of a middle condition,’ wrote Donne; ‘to be simply simple, is proper
only to the nature of God’, wrote Henry Woolnor. Hence, angels
must possess some degree of what God is not.44 It is also a difficult
position to adumbrate in a narrative poem (a poem less static and
didactic than Heywood’s Hierarchie) for some of the reasons that
Johnson and Eliot identified. The angels of Paradise Lost can be seen
as ‘tenuously corporeal’.45 Though Milton imagines them as ‘pure j
Intelligential substances’ (5. 407–8), there are passages where they
seem to have an essential, if infinitely malleable, physical shape. Even
describing the voluntary assumption of shapes by spirits, the narrator
suggests some anterior form:
spirits when they please
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure . . . (1. 423 5)
The ‘when’ implies limitations: at rest they have a shape, and when
imprisoned by the will of God, as when the fallen angels are turned
into serpents:
supplanted down he fell
A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,
Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power
Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned . . .
(10. 513 16)
God pronounces Satan ‘vitiated in nature’, and his being is thus

impaired (10. 169; cf. 6. 691). Henry More agreed with the effect
upon the substance of the fallen angels (‘this Rebellion . . . changed their
pure Æthereal Bodies into more Feculent and Terrestrial’), but Milton
extends this effect to the malleability of substance.46 As serpents they
remain until they are permitted to resume ‘their lost shape’ (10. 574).
When the fallen angels shrink themselves to enter Pandaemonium at
the end of book 1, it is a sign of their debasement:
they who now seemed
In bigness to surpass Earth’s giant sons
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless . . .
. . .
Thus incorporeal spirits to smallest forms
Reduced their shapes immense . . . (1. 777 90)
The devils retain their ‘shapes’ while diminishing their proportions.

Ironically their sense of rank is intensified at this point, as the ‘great
seraphic lords and cherubim’ are distinguished from the lesser devils by
sitting deeper within the building and ‘in their own dimensions like
themselves’ (1. 793–4). As the commoners diminish themselves in an
evil cause, their natural leaders (nature having been perverted and
inverted) assert usurped authority by retaining their full size. This
assertion of an unjust hierarchy through physical domination—and
the visual effect is comic—is a greater transgression against nature than
self compression.
Travelling to earth, Satan is a shape shifter. His cherubic appearance
is distinguished from ‘his proper shape’ (3. 634), and in Eden he assumes
the shape of a cormorant, a lion, and a tiger (4. 196, 402–3) before he is
discovered by an angel guard ‘Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve’
(4. 800). The disguise is transformed when Ithuriel touches the toad
with a spear, provoking a reaction that is both symbolic and chemical:
no falsehood can endure
Touch of celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness: up he starts . . . (4. 811 13)
And finds himself ‘in his own shape’ (4. 819). The nature of an angel’s
shape is not a question most theologians address. To espouse a dualist
philosophy, and therefore to believe that angels are purely spiritual
beings, is to believe that angels only adopt bodies or shapes, and

therefore that the limitations and symbolic significance of these bodies
is a matter of volition.47 Bodies and shapes are more significant for
occult writers like Boehme, Fludd, Pordage, for whom an angel’s shape
is not only a matter of symbolism. Milton joins with them in this. Even
his unfallen angels have shapes. After identifying Eden with his tele
scopic eyesight, Raphael flies there, apparently in the shape of a bird:
He lights, and to his proper shape returns
A seraph winged; six wings he wore, to shade
His lineaments divine . . . (5. 276 8)
A description of the wings follows, as sensuous as it is symbolic; these

are real wings, which shed fragrance when shaken. He ‘wears’ the
wings, in the sense that he is free to choose other limbs, but this is his
‘proper shape’, drawing on Isaiah 6: 2. One difference is striking. In
Isaiah the first pair of wings covers the seraphim’s face; here the first
pair ‘clad j Each shoulder broad’ and ‘came mantling o’er his breast j
With regal ornament’ (5. 278–80). Raphael’s face is exposed, and the
‘lineaments divine’ that his wings conceal are the rest of his being. This
makes conversation easier, but it also emphasizes the divinity of the
form, the ‘proper shape’ of an angel.
Milton’s angels do not have bodies, but they do have proper shapes.
Their incorporeality is tenuous or tentative; they do, after all, wear
armour, and must choose a shape for that armour, and this ultimately
impedes as well as protects them. The good angels struck by Satan’s
gunpowder fall trapped in their armour:
unarmed they might
Have easily as spirits evaded swift
By quick contraction or remove. (6. 595 7)
The unfallen angels respond by throwing heaven’s hills at the rebels:

Their armour helped their harm, crushed in and bruised
Into their substance pent, which wrought them pain
. . .
ere they could wind
Out of such prison, though spirits of purest light,
Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown. (6. 656 61)
The purest, intelligential substances are equally trapped in their

armour, though they have not begun to slide from incorporeality to
corporeality (unlike the fallen angels they feel no pain but only shame).
To have a shape—which pure, intelligential substances do—is to
possess some of the properties associated with having a body. To
have a shape is glorious and divine, yet it is also a potential weakness,
especially when incorporeality begins to decline into corporeality
(downward movement on the sliding scales in Milton’s universe is
always more troubling, more damaging and corrupt, than stasis on a
lower part of the scale). It is an essential part of being a creature, as even
the most spiritual substances are made of prime matter. De Doctrina,
discussing the nature of angelic senses, similarly intimates angelic
shapes: spirit contains inferior substance as the spiritual and rational
faculty contains the corporeal.48 Bodies emanate from spirit, and the
shape that a spiritual being has is not only a manifestation of its identity:
it is the potential it has to turn corporeal. As corporeal beings can be
sublimated into intelligential by a process of digestion, so incorporeal
beings can decline into corporeality through corruption and impair
ment by sin. The body will be implicit in the shape, and suffer a loss of
beauty through the diminution of brightness and loss of lustre, as Satan
unhappily discovers when Ithuriel fails to recognize him even when he
returns to his ‘own likeness’ (4. 836, 850).
‘As Far as Angels’ Ken’: Angelic Optics
When Satan awakes lying prone on the burning lake at the beginning
of book 1, his eyes emit light and feeling perceptible to his companion
Beelzebub, despite the visible darkness: the narrator refers to his ‘eye j
That sparkling blazed’ (1. 193–4). The description is based on an
extromissive theory of vision in which eyes emit rays that are reflected
by objects and return to the eye.49 The dominant alternative model in
the early modern period was intromissive, arguing that the eye saw by
apprehending light that was reflected from objects. In either case light
could be understood as particles or as waves, alternatives advocated by
Pierre Gassendi and Robert Hooke, respectively, in books published in
the 1660s. Questions of optics appear tangentially and repeatedly in
book 1, in which a series of extended similes that play with proportion
and perspectives are attached to the fallen angels. One alludes to
Galileo viewing the moon through a telescope, the only living person,
other than Milton, identified in Paradise Lost (1. 287–91). These figures
of scale and optics warn the reader of the profoundly visual properties
of the epic, the role of perspective, and the dangers involved in
interpreting Satan.
Satan’s very first action in the poem, the first active verb that marks
the transition from the past experience of falling from heaven, and the
passive experience of being tormented by thoughts, is to look around:
round he throws his baleful eyes
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate:
At once as far as angels’ ken he views
The dismal situation waste and wild . . . 50
The reference to angelic optics performs a number of tasks: it indicates

that the fallen angel’s faculties have not (yet) deteriorated; it indicates
that angels have a finite field of vision; and it raises interpretative
questions, including how far and by what means angels see. These
are issues that the narrative poet encounters out of necessity, but they
also arise for theologians and philosophers. For the former, angelic
optics is a conventional motif in considerations of the nature and
offices of angels; for the latter, angelic optics is a useful simile for
describing the efficacy of lenses.
For Aquinas, senses are a property of bodies, unlike the ‘faculties’ of
spirits. Though his account of angels is profoundly concerned with
their creaturely properties, he therefore does not dwell on angelic
eyesight.51 Some later commentators say that angels both see and
know from God. God is a kind of lens or mirror—lenses and mirrors
were commonly conflated in discussions and rumours of instrumen
tation at this time52—through which angels see all of nature. Dante
describes this in the Paradiso:
Queste sustanze, poi che fur gioconde
della faccia di Dio, non volser viso
da essa, da cui nulla si nasconde:
però non hanno vedere interciso
da novo obietto, e però non bisogna
rememorar per concetto diviso . . . 53
(These beings, since they were made glad with God’s face from which nothing
is hid, have never turned their eyes from it, so that their sight is never
intercepted by a new object and they have no need to recall the past by an
abstract concept . . . )
John Dee’s angels see by similar means.54 God limits angelic eyesight
by concealing the interior life of humans, and certain mysteries of
nature. Joseph Hall described this eloquently:
so perfectly knowing are they, as that the very heathen Philosophers have
styled them by the name of Intelligences, as if their very being were made up of
understanding; Indeed what is there in this whole compass of the large
universe, that is hid from their eyes? Only the closet of mans heart is lockt
up from them, as reserved solely to their maker.
He develops this further, suggesting that angels do not ‘look through

the dim and horny spectacles of senses, or understand by the mediation
of phantasms: but rather, as clear mirrours, they receive at once the full
representations of all intelligible things; having besides that connaturall
light, which is universally in them all, certain speciall illuminations
from the Father of lights’.55 Hall opposes the mirror to the lens,
perhaps juxtaposing an extromissive against an intromissive theory of
vision, though also stressing the superiority of angelic cognition to
human sensory perception (even with the best of lenses, human insight
would be inferior). The imagery is indebted to Pseudo Dionysius,
who describes angels as ‘clear and spotless mirrors’.56 This view is
adopted by Robert Gell and perhaps also by Milton’s friend Henry
Vane, who describes angels as ‘flames of fire, consuming and dissolving
all objects of outward sense’, who receive light from Christ and are
therefore ‘high and vast’ in their ‘natural capacities’.57
Some dismiss this first account, associating it with Scholasticism and
Jesuitism, and provide a second explanation of their optics, in which
angels have powerful sight through their own faculties, though the
mechanics of this perception is different from human eyesight.58
Comenius writes that angelic knowledge is more sublime than
human because nothing obscures angels’ understanding and they can
‘penetrate any whither, and see things plainly’. He adds that they are
‘not omniscious’, but are ‘a thousand times more quick sighted upon
us’ and thus can infer the thoughts of men even while they cannot see
them.59 This penetrative capacity of angelic perception implies a
difference not only in degree but in kind. Nevertheless, we can
understand this perception as being something like human perception,
and Comenius’ project is to reform natural philosophy through sacred
knowledge, and to understand man’s nature better by comparison with
an understanding of the nature of angels: ‘Although . . . they perceive
without Organs, yet we must needs hold that they are not unlike to
our spirit which perceiveth by organs.’60 John White, the Dorchester
clergyman, similarly restricts angelic perception and repudiates the
divine lens or mirror theory: he writes that when angels accept an
earthly ministry and leave heaven, it is a form of condescension that
deprives them of ‘the Vision of God’.61 Angelic eyesight is imperfect,
though less imperfect than in Paradise Lost, in which Abdiel cannot see
across heaven. This account of vision supposes that angels’ sight is, like
humans’, finite, but that it does not depend on conventional optics.
Angels can see through objects if not into human thoughts.62 Their
perception depends upon their own faculties, and is immeasurably
more powerful than human sight.
A third account of suprahuman vision suggests that it conforms to
conventional optics, as an enhanced version of human perception.
This is found in the writings of natural philosophers promoting
experimental knowledge. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) stresses
the limitations of human knowledge based on narrow senses, and it
seeks to establish a more solid knowledge based on observation sup
ported by ‘the adding of artificial Organs to the natural’. Optical lenses,
among those who understood clearly the differences between lenses
and mirrors, are imagined as the means to a new ‘Science of Nature’
grounded on sound observation:
By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be repre
sented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as
to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the
understanding. By this means the Heavens are open’d, and a vast number of
new Stars, and new Motions, and new productions appear in them, to which
all the antient Astronomers were utterly Strangers.
Hooke also imagines that other devices will improve other senses, but
it is enhanced eyesight that will revolutionize knowledge. Prosthesis
will bring man closer to perfection: ‘And who knows but the Industry
of man, following this method, may find out wayes of improving this
sense to as great a degree of perfection as it is in any Animal, and
perhaps yet higher.’63 The comparison to a sense more powerful than
any animal’s may imply an angel, just as the tongue of angels suggests
ideal speech, and angelic knowledge, superior understanding.64 Sight,
moreover, has a special status among the senses: it is the telescope
that provides the basis for modelling the universe and conceiving of
space, the place where angels travel and which they shape with their
interventions.
In Roman Catholic Europe natural philosophers similarly deployed
angels in their writings, initially within explanations of agency and
causation, and later as rhetorical flourish. This demotion can be seen in
the career of Galileo, where it must be understood as belonging to
communicative strategy rather than disenchantment. Athanasius
Kircher writes that ‘A perfect observation, free from all error and
falsehood could only be carried out by an angel,’ which confers
authority on instruments as much as it recognizes human inferiority.
Angels authorized telescopes and certified their capacity for perfection,
and thus their ability to extend the human. In Britain, perhaps because
of suspicion of Jesuit interest in angels, this role was performed by both
angels and Adam.65 Hooke’s acquaintance Joseph Glanvill, another
early member of the Royal Society, uses the power of the telescope
to imagine ideal human senses. In The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) he
considers the power of prelapsarian Adam’s eyes, regarding his deduc
tions as a form of experimental knowledge. Adam would have received
‘better information from the most distant objects, than we by the most
helpful Telescopes’. The prosthetic enhancement of the senses provides
the most useful and vivid point of comparison. Because of the natural
sensitivity of his eyes, ‘Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of
his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew’d him much
of the Cœlestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilæo’s tube:
And ’tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach as much of the
upper World, as we with all the advantages of art.’66 Glanvill’s account
of the protoplasts aligns him with Hooke on two points: first, that
inferences about the idealized faculties of spirits can be considered as a
form of experimental knowledge (Henry More says this in 1681, and
elsewhere writes of angels’ ‘terrestrial Omnipercipiency’67); secondly,
that ideal senses can be imagined and described most effectively not
through spiritual metaphors but through analogies with instruments.
By implication, even the most powerful senses operate through con
ventional optics. Distance, which does not affect the first two accounts
of angelic perception, is a consideration in this third model.
How far do Milton’s angels see, and by what means? Milton’s angels
have superior eyesight, though it follows some of the same restrictions
of human vision. Waking on the burning lake, Satan sees ‘as far as
angels’ ken’ (1. 59), and travelling through Limbo ‘far distant he
descries’ the allegorical Jacob’s Ladder (3. 501), reminding us of the

limits of his vision. Seeking earth, he lands on the sun, and the poet
describes perspective through the geometry of light:
Here matter new to gaze the devil met
Undazzled, far and wide his eye commands,
For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade,
But all sunshine, as when his beams at noon
Culminate from the equator, as they now
Shoot upward still direct, whence no way round
Shadow from body opaque can fall, and the air,
Nowhere so clear, sharpened his visual ray
To objects distant far, whereby he soon
Saw within ken a glorious angel stand . . . (3. 613 22)
Again the emphasis is on the limits of angelic eyesight, and again the
poet refers to angels’ ken; but Milton carefully imbricates this descrip
tion with an explanation of the movement of light and the making of
shadows. Satan’s ‘visual ray’ also suggests the extromission of rays from
the eye to the perceived object, recalling his ‘sparkling’ eyes in book 1.
Eyesight and optics are not peripheral issues in this passage. The
angel that Satan sees is Uriel, ‘regent of the sun’ (3. 690), one of
the seven angels of God’s presence, the first unfallen angel presented
in the poem, who, because of his association with light, is ‘held j The
sharpest sighted spirit of all in heaven’ (3. 690–1). Satan approaches
him disguised as a cherub, and his deception is
unperceived;
For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone . . . (3. 681 4)
Uriel cannot see through the disguise because he sees by conventional

optical means. Their conversation emphasizes earth’s obscure remote
ness from heaven. Uriel praises the cherub for making the effort ‘To
witness with thine eyes what some perhaps j Contented with report
hear only in heaven’ (3. 700–1). Some angels know earth only through
the inferior sense of hearing, and, indirectly, the inferior medium of
news. This is a more material universe than others imagined: it is hard
to see the earth. Standing at the gates of heaven, Raphael can see the
earth only because the weather is good. After Uriel has sent Satan
earthwards (locating it with a description that combines perspective
with the mechanics of the solar system; 3. 722–33), he sees that he has
been deceived when Satan’s emotions ‘marred his borrowed visage’
(4. 116). Uriel does not penetrate the disguise; the disguise is ruptured,
and Uriel, at an enormous distance, interprets the visual evidence. His
vision is at once powerful and limited, and its failure is central to the
poem’s narrative: it enables Satan’s invasion of Eden, his corrupting of
Eve’s dream, and Gabriel’s interruption of Satan, and it is why Raphael
descends to Eden to warn Adam and Eve, and to describe the war in
heaven.
Angelic optics are integral to the adumbration of Milton’s plot.
Perhaps as important is the way the emphasis on light and perspectives
shapes the aesthetic architecture of the poem. We follow characters’
movement and points of view, and the effect is cinematographic. The
organization of Milton’s universe is conceptual, symbolic, and hier
archical, but the primary mode in which his narrative is organized is
visual, and this visual dimension is organized along perspectival lines.
Sometimes the narrator draws attention to a perspectival device (‘he
then surveyed’68), but the device permeates the narrative and
imagery of the poem more generally. Angelic sight is, in this account,
a matter of experience. Whereas Aquinas’ angels know purely intui
tively (God creates all knowledge in them), Milton’s have a full range
of senses (senses that are part of their whole being rather than particular
organs). Their knowledge increases through the use of these senses,
and hence is both experimental and finite. In this respect Milton is
aligned with Hooke, Glanvill, and More.
Milton prevaricates between heliocentric and geocentric models of
the universe, models that did not at his time seem straightforwardly
antithetical.69 Evoking the dislocation of the stable and orderly orbit of
the sun at the Fall, a catastrophic vision of the effect of the Fall that
suggests why prelapsarian cosmology cannot be comprehended by
postlapsarian humans, Milton imagines two possible explanations that
preserve the geocentric model while elucidating the seasons and other
imperfections of the postlapsarian universe. One of them involves the
action of angels:
Some say he bid his angels turn askance
The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more
From the sun’s axle; they with labour pushed
Oblique the centric globe: some say the sun
Was bid turn reins from the equinoctial road . . . (10. 668 72)
The intervention of angels is only a fancy, albeit one consonant with

the belief that angels govern the spheres and their harmonies (the
model magnificently detailed in Dante’s Paradiso, canto 28), though
the poet is careful to note the ‘labour’ that this involves, in contrast
to the effortlessness of Creation. Others had, of course, doubted
that humans could understand without direct revelation whether the
spheres were moved with angels, and whether heavenly bodies moved
‘by Excentricks and Epicycles: or onely by Concentricks: or the Earths
motion: or the motion of the Starres in the heavens’.70 The structures
of Milton’s universe are irresolvable, and that is Raphael’s point:
elaborate geometry (‘centric and eccentric scribbled o’er’) is invoked
in order ‘To save appearances’ because the means by which we know
are imperfect (8. 79–84). The weakness of human calculations is that
increasingly complex qualifications are required to assimilate new
observations to existing models of explanation, in order to preserve
both the apparent universe and formerly understood truths.71 The
poet does not scorn the efforts of astronomers to understand the
universe. When Satan lands on the sun, Milton imagines that this
creates a sunspot, a symbol of moral corruption but one with a material
cause:
There lands the fiend, a spot like which perhaps
Astronomer in the sun’s lucent orb
Through his glazed optic tube yet never saw. (3. 588 90)
This ‘in the sun’ is powerful. The narrator’s speculations make a

different claim upon truth than an astrological treatise would, but
Milton found the explanation of a sunspot as a surface imperfection
on the sun stimulating. This was Galileo’s explanation, and it showed
that the sun was rotating, and was thus an important proof of the
heliocentric universe. Jesuits, by contrast, proposed that sunspots were
caused by moons or other impediments at a distance from the surface.
This Satanic sunspot is presumably unlike those yet seen by the
astronomer on account of its size (though perhaps Milton was aware
that sunspots had become rare in recent years—since 1645—in which
case Galileo’s observations may have had a special status, despite
improvements in telescope technology).72
Astronomy also furnishes a powerful simile to comprehend
the vertiginous description of Raphael’s perspective of earth from
heaven:
From hence, no cloud, or, to obstruct his sight,

Star interposed, however small he sees,
Not unconform to other shining globes.
Earth and the garden of God, with cedars crowned
Above all hills. As when by night the glass
Of Galileo, less assured, observes
Imagined lands and regions in the moon . . . (5. 257 63)73
Raphael sees his destination because there are no obstacles. He sees the
cedars on the hills because he sees by natural means. This is the
combination of enormous distances and minute detail that Hooke
and Glanvill dream of in their account of the enhanced human senses
that will bring sound experimental knowledge. Galileo’s perception of
the moon, and his inferences about its geography, are less reliable,
perhaps because he is human and hence more fallible, perhaps because
his sense is artificially enhanced by prosthesis, perhaps because God is
the better lens maker. The telescope is Milton’s comparison for the
superiority of angelic eyesight, and it follows from the essential simi
larity in mode between angelic and human optics. This way of seeing
accords with Milton’s unusual account of dawn and twilight in heaven
(5. 628, 645–6, 667); and it explains why Abdiel, stranded with his
enemies in the northern parts of heaven, cannot see his friends or God
until he flies through ‘heaven’s wide champaign’ towards them, and
morning brings light to illuminate the unfallen legions.
Sensing without Organs
Angels have other senses, at least according to Milton. Aquinas did not
think so. Whereas humans knew through both the senses and the
intellect, according to Aquinas, angels were wholly intellectual. While
the senses were employed to apprehend only the outward properties of
an object, the intelligence apprehends the essence of the object:
If an angel had to derive his knowledge of material things from these things
themselves, he would have first to render them actually intelligible by a
process of abstraction. But it is not thus that he knows such things; he
knows them by possessing, as part of his nature, intellectual representations
of things—representations actually intelligible from the start; as our mind
knows them by the representations which it renders intelligible by a process
of abstraction.74
Angelic knowledge is complete: angels cannot learn by experience,

and the angelic intellect is a repository for the essences of almost all
Creation (constituting a second Creation).75 Less Scholastic accounts
of angels attribute to them other forms of knowledge. The Institutions of
William Bucanus, for example, distinguished between three sources of
angelic knowledge: natural, instilled in them by God; supernatural,
whereby they see and know God and are moved to virtue by this
knowledge; and, thirdly, ‘experimentall knowledge, which is obtained
by experience, and by observation of those things which we do here’.76
Fallen and unfallen angels were assumed, in the sixteenth and seven
teenth centuries, to be able to learn; Satan was attributed skill as a
natural philosopher on account of his ‘experimentall knowledge’.77
Accounts of angelic learning firmly emphasized sight, the least bodily
of the senses. An exception is Comenius, who insists upon a mode of
sensory perception independent of corporeality:
There is in Angels a sense of things, as well as in our spirits. (For they see, hear,
touch, &c. though they themselves be invisible, and intangible.[)] Also they
have a sense of pleasure and griefe: for as much as joyes are said to be prepared
for the Angels, and fire for the divells, (into which wicked men are also to be
cast.) Although therefore they perceive without Organs, yet we must needs
hold that they are not unlike to our spirit which perceiveth by organs.78
The coy ‘&c.’ implies without stating both smelling and tasting, which
are more closely linked to particular organs (touch can imply move
ment without specifically indicating the tactility of skin). Comenius
glosses over the complex relations among organs and therefore bodies
and senses, though he acknowledges a connection between organs and
emotions. This association troubled Thomas Heywood, who contends
that if angels have bodies and organs then they must have senses and
therefore passions and thus alteration: this is not possible in a perfect,
immutable being, and therefore angels cannot have any of these.79
Milton attributes organs, senses, and emotions to angels. Satan’s
passions reflect his corrupted state. The unfallen angels feel joy, and
this is another commonplace, deriving from Job 38: 7 (‘When the
morning stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy?’).
Some commentators interpret this strongly. Duppa makes an angel’s
capacity for joy depend on its ability to perceive a sinner’s conversion
‘not onely by outward signes, but sometimes by discovery of our hearts
too’. The proof is: ‘There is knowledge, or else there would be no joy
in the presence of the Angels.’80 Milton goes beyond joy: Raphael

seems to blush with pleasure when he describes angelic intercourse to
Adam (8. 618–19); he frowns at Adam’s perceived misconceptions
(8. 560) as Michael frowns with an ‘inflamed’ face at Satan (6. 260–1).
Gabriel expresses disdain for Satan (4. 903); God and his Son laugh
with scorn and derision at their enemies. The narrator also mentions
the organs of angels, eyes, knees, ears, tongues, wings, and scars.
Because his angels are substantial without being corporeal, they assume
organs suited to their actions, though they also possess a natural,
normative shape to which they return as a matter of habit. Among
the purposes to which organs and body parts are suited is sensory
perception, hence, as Raphael explains to Adam, ‘All heart they live,
all head, all eye, all ear’ (6. 350). Angels sing, they converse with each
other and with humans, they taste ambrosial nectar, and interpenetrate
with pleasure. Although Uriel does not see through Satan’s disguise,
he hears his approach with his back turned, ‘admonished by his ear’
(3. 647). Raphael explains to Adam that ‘Intelligential substances’,
meaning angels, as distinct from the rational substance of humans,
contain
Within them every lower faculty
Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste.
(5. 408 11)
Explaining ‘Spirit’ in De Doctrina Christiana, where spirit is the uni

versal substance, expelled from God, out of which body is created,
Milton writes: ‘spirit, being the more excellent substance, virtually, as
they say, and eminently contains within itself what is clearly the
inferior substance; in the same way as the spiritual and rational faculty
contains the corporeal, that is, the sentient and vegetative faculty’.81
Milton makes the same point here as in Raphael’s speech in Paradise
Lost, and the passage explicates the material nature of Milton’s angels.82
Angels sense with their whole being.
‘Knowne to be of Strange Velocitie’:

The Speed of Angels
When Satan disguises himself, he chooses a ‘habit fit for speed succinct’

(3. 643). He is concerned about aerodynamics. Having a body, or
being composed of matter, brings limitations upon movement and

speed. In 1672 George Hughes, in his Analytic Exposition of . . . Genesis,
warned that conjectures about how Abraham’s angels travelled so fast
were vain.83 Yet this was a tardy intervention which more closely
resembled the reservations of late seventeenth century natural philo
sophers than generations of theologians. Aquinas argued that although
angels had no bodies, they moved through space, and that movement
was not instantaneous. Angels moved in time, though that time and
their movement could be discontinuous. ‘But notice that this angelic
time—whether continuous or not—is not the same as the time which
measures the motions of the heavens and of all the corporeal things
whose changes depend on that motion. For the angel’s movement is
independent of the heavens.’84 This means that the speed of an angel
does not depend on physical force so much as ‘a decision of his will’,
and that an angel is able to will to move through discontinuous time
and therefore ‘he can be now here and now there, with no time
interval between’.85 This distinction is a technicality, then: to humans
an angel’s speed seems fantastically swift because the angel passes
between two points without any time lapse, but this is only because
the angel has moved from being in one place at one moment, to
another at the next moment, without actually passing through the
space between. It is not instantaneous only because instantaneousness
is a property of continuous time. With these complications, Aquinas
maintains that angels move at a finite speed, though they are very fast.86
Most sixteenth and seventeenth century writers follow Aquinas.
John Salkeld writes that ‘Angels may in some sort be sayd to be in
[a specific] place,’ and when Origen and Tertullian say that angels are
everywhere (‘Angelum esse ubique’) they mean ‘that Angels have such
swift motion, that they can be in almost an unimaginable short space of
time in any place’.87 Bucanus writes that angels are ‘finite spirits,
though not circumscribed, because they are not measured by their
place, but limited, because they are so in one place, as they cannot be
in another’. They are ‘so nimble and so swift, that they are moved in an
unconceivable time’. Hence, they are said to have wings.88 Wollebius
similarly distinguishes between being in a definite place and being
circumscribed.89 Perhaps Milton uses this distinctive word with similar
signification, while making the opposite point, when Abdiel observes
that God ‘formed the powers of heaven’ including angels, ‘Such as he
pleased, and circumscribed their being’.90 This emphasis on location,
and the finite speed of movement, arises out of the need to distinguish
between angels and God, who is uniquely infinite. As Richard Sibbes
writes, angels move ‘Suddenly, in an unperceivable time, yet in time
because there is no motion in a moment, no creature moves from place
to place in a moment, God is every where.’91 Jeremy Taylor’s claim that
angels ‘move in an instant’ probably means the same as Sibbes’
or Aquinas’, though the phrase invites a stronger construction.92
Comenius, as interested in the ‘Physicks’ of the question as in the
theology, writes that angels are stronger and more agile than corporeal
creatures, moving, unlike wind or lightning, without resistance, so
‘though an Angell be not in many places at once, (Dan. 10. 13. 20.) yet
they can in a moment passe themselves whither they will’.93 More
enthusiastic authors, including Fludd and John Everard, concur with
these interpretations.94 It is because of their speed that angels figure in
ideal messaging systems, as a point of comparison in John Wilkins’s
Mercury, or, The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641), and as the bearers of
messages in Trithemius’ Steganographia. Heywood notes that it is through
spirits ‘that Magitions have such speedy intelligence (almost in an instant)
of things done in the farthest and remotest places of the world’.95 One
seventeenth century alchemical text claimed that, through natural
magic, ‘all that Spirits can do (except velocity) may be performed’.96
The speed of angels was a theological topic that was associated with
astrological calculations of the size of the universe. Robert Bolton
insisted, in a posthumous work of 1632, that no human knowledge
of ‘Geometry, Arithmetike, Opticks, Hypotheses, Philosophy. &c.’
could ‘illighten us’ about the nature of the third, celestial heaven; he
nonetheless acknowledged ‘the severall computations of Astronomers’
concerning the ‘incredible distance from the earth to the Starry
Firmament’ as praise of Creation.97 Later writers were more inclined
to calculate, though inexactly, the speed of angels. The 1649 com
mentary on Ezekiel by the independent minister William Greenhill
merits quoting at length:
Astronomers observe, that from the center of the earth (which is 3000. to the
surface) up to the Sun is above foure millions of miles[;] to the Firmament,
where the fixed stars are, above fourescore millions of miles, and from thence
to the place of the blessed, where Saints and Angels are, more millions then
from the earth to the Firmament. So that according to their account, it must
be above 160. millions from heaven to earth; and this space the Angel came
flying in a little time: we think a bullet out of a Musket flyes swiftly, and it
doth, for it hits the bird or mark ere the report is heard, and will flye 180. miles
in an houre, according to its motion. The Sunne moves swifter 1160000. miles
in one hour; the fixed stars about the æquinoctiall move 42 millions of miles
each houre; and yet the motion of an Angel is swifter, being a Spirit, and
passing through the air without opposition; no creature in heaven or earth,
moves faster then an Angel.98
Robert Dingley, who accepted Aquinas’ doctrine that angels were not
circumscribed by place, borrowed from this passage in an elaboration
on Luke 23: 43. Christ says that he will see the thief beside him that
same day in heaven, and such swift motion ‘was done by the conduct
and celerity of Angels that conveyed it’. Dingley specifies the speeds of
a bullet and the sun, and concludes that ‘the Seat of Angels and blessed
Souls is at an huge distance from us’.99 Greenhill’s figures suggest that
an angel must take less than three hours forty eight minutes to fly from
heaven to earth; I suspect he intends considerably less, without wishing
to be imprudently specific. Heaven is profoundly distant, however,
and even at their superlative speed, angels can take some time to reach
earth; a consideration that has implications, as the previous chapter
indicates, for the remote stationing of guardian angels. The often
reserved Thomas Heywood, made bold by the Arabic astronomers
Thabit ibn Qurra and al Farghanı, whose calculations (developed in
their commentaries on Ptolemy) he probably read in Roger Bacon’s
Opus Maius (1266) while at university, expands:
’T must likewise follow, That such as are sent

Downe to the Earth, cannot incontinent,
But with much difficultie or’ecome the way;
Have time to penetrate (as needs it is)
Now that Cœlestiall Body, and then this.
When as (if Alphraganius we may trust,
Or Thebit, Arabs both) of force it must
Be a great distance. For these Authors write,
If that an Angell in his swiftest flight,
Should from the eighth Heaven, to the Earth descend,
A thousand miles in threescore minutes to spend,
(So far remote they are, if truly told)
Six yeares six months his journey would him hold.100
At a thousand miles an hour an angel would take six and a half years to
travel the (approximately) 56,979,000 miles from the earth to heaven
(i.e. the fixed stars), beyond which lies the celestial heaven and God’s
throne. Elsewhere, however, Heywood describes Thomist discon

tinuous movement, and the complex relationship between angelic
being and location:
Know then, He
Is not contain’d in place, as Brutes and we;
But Place it selfe he in Himselfe containes,
Bee’ng said to be still where his Pow’r remaines.
And though it passe our weake ingeniositie,
Yet He is knowne to be of strange velocitie;
And without passing places, can with ease
Or go or come at all times when he please . . .
It is agreed upon, the Good and Evill,
The blessed Angell, as the cursed Divell,
Have all those faculties, and without [p]aine
Or passing intermediat things, can gaine
To what they purpose, in one instand round
The spatious world, and where they please be found.101
Angelic flight is limited, but angels have swifter modes of transport.
The words echo Bucanus: an angel is not circumscribed, but is limited
because it operates in a single place. Heywood reconciles the theo
logical and the natural philosophical and the poetic; like later natural
philosophers, however, his emphasis is more on diabolical speed and
transvection than on the abstract question of angelic motion.102
Milton does not aspire to measure speed and distance in this way.
Adam suggests that the movement of the stars is in ‘spaces incompre
hensible’ (8. 20), and Raphael affirms this:
me thou thinkst not slow,
Who since the morning hour set out from heaven
Where God resides, and ere mid day arrived
In Eden, distance inexpressible
By numbers that have name. (8. 110 14)103
Raphael undertakes in a continuous time of approaching six hours

(assuming the morning hour is a modest six; Milton would rise at four)
what Heywood suggests by ordinary motion should take six and a half
years (though the distance that Heywood suggests, travelled at the
speed that Greenhill suggests, would take less than eighty minutes).
The scope and nature of space is beyond human understanding;
though Milton is interested in the notion of multiple worlds which
may imply infinite space.
The Copernican universe was larger and harder to measure than

Ptolemy’s, and, like Galileo, Milton found the idea of infinity intri
guing. Speed and movement shape Milton’s narrative, and seep into
the language of the poem despite his insistence that questions about
‘celestial motions’ are at best ‘doubtfully answered’ (8, argument).
Adam refers to the ‘incorporeal speed’ of light, ‘Speed, to describe
whose swiftness number fails’ (8. 37–8). Raphael confirms the ‘Speed
almost spiritual’ of the ‘corporeal substances’ of the heavenly spheres,
which are themselves moved by angels (8. 109–10). The incorporeal is
faster than the corporeal. Do angels travel at the same incorporeal
speed of light? Precisely this speed is suggested when Uriel descends to
earth to warn Gabriel of the suspicious spirit he met in the sun:
Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even
On a sunbeam, swift as a shooting star
In autumn thwarts the air . . . (4. 555)
Imagine this is meant literally: Uriel travels at the same speed as the
beam of light on which he surfs. He is in a hurry, and the speed of light
must be at least equal to his own unassisted speed. If the comparison to
a shooting star, an effect of light, is meant literally, then the analogy is
exact. The movement may be mechanically precise too: as Milton
thought light substantial, and its rays physically moved between the
object and the eye, then a spirit equally material might be supported by
it.104 Yet, according to Milton, there are faster things than angels. The
Son refers to Grace as ‘the speediest of [God’s] winged messengers’,
implying that grace is a messenger, like an angel, and that it is faster:
perhaps because it is the gift of God its speed is infinite.105 When the
Son himself descends to Eden to declare God’s judgement to the
transgressing Adam and Eve, he travels in a manner entirely different
from messengers: ‘Down he descended straight; the speed of gods j
Time counts not, though with swiftest minutes winged’ (10. 90–1).
The divine—the speed of Christ, the architecture of the universe—is
uncountable, beyond numbers and reckoning. Angels are creatures
and are therefore subject to numbers. De Doctrina suggests that the
wings of angels indicate their great velocity.106 However, the ‘winged’
minutes are a reminder that wings also represent finite speeds, the
fastest speed a creature can attain to, almost immeasurable.
The concepts of numbers and numberlessness are threaded through
the poem. The distance from heaven to earth is inexpressible in
numbers with names, and numbers fail to describe the speed of

light. The fallen angels are repeatedly ‘innumerable’ and ‘numberless’
(1. 338, 344, 780). During Creation ‘numberless’ angels surround the
chariot of the Son, and when the angels shout for joy after the
prophecy of the apocalypse and the promotion of the Son, the cry is
‘Loud as from numbers without number’ (7. 197; 3. 346). More
suspiciously, Satan promises ‘angels numberless’ to Eve (9. 548).
Angels seem numberless, but are not so. When Satan summons his
fallen legions into a kind of order and inspects them, ‘Their number
last he sums’ (1. 571). At first, Raphael describes the heavenly forces as
‘Army against army numberless’ (6. 224; also 5. 653); then tempers this,
revealing that God ‘limited their might’ though they were
numbered such
As each divided legion might have seemed
A numerous host. (6. 229)
To describe the numbers of angels Milton suggests numberlessness

before retreating from the idea. They are almost infinite in number,
according to De Doctrina, ‘so numerous that they are almost innumer
able’.107 And in Paradise Lost, they are only almost numberless, in
contrast to the uncountable nature of God and the extent of the
universe.
The poem vividly delineates the limitations of angels’ speed.
Abdiel takes a whole night to fly across heaven. Raphael takes a
morning to fly to earth. Uriel surfs the sunbeam. Wings are an
encumbrance, subject to obstruction by the medium through which
they impel. On his ‘flight precipitant’ from the sun to the earth, Satan
‘winds with ease j Through the pure marble air his oblique way’
(3. 563–4). This downward (‘precipitant’ suggests both speed and
geometry) voyage through the ‘calm firmament’ (3. 574) is easier
than his vertiginous (and upward) flight through Chaos, where he
plummets through a vacuum, a fashionable natural philosophical
subject when the poem was published, and is buffeted by winds.
The narrator stresses the physical effort of flight and the resistance
of the environment:
with expanded wings he steers his flight
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air
That felt unusual weight, till on dry land
He lights . . . (1. 222 8)
These are inclement conditions, but flying involves effort for unfallen
angels. Raphael’s flight to earth, which symbolically and physically
parallels Satan’s, is limited in speed and tasking:
Down thither prone in flight
He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky
Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing
Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan
Winnows the buxom air . . . (5. 266 70)
The ‘steady wing’ suggests both control and sustained exertion. Most
theologians dwell only on the theoretical limitations of angelic speed,
its symbolic properties, its implications for diabolic agency; Milton
lingers on the impeded experience of flight, the implications of limited
speed for the messengers. The near infinite is much more open to
exploration, and more poetically evocative, than the infinite. Milton’s
angels are creatures, and their speed reflects this.
Conclusions
Milton’s angels are objects of natural philosophical knowledge. This

was not, c.1667, a nostalgic enterprise. Angels were not killed off by a
scientific revolution, nor did they constitute an embarrassment to
mechanist philosophers.108 As the assumptions of saving appearances
were discarded in favour of the more systematic practice of experi
mentalism in the late 1660s, angels shifted as objects of knowledge.
Angels do not appear in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions.
Angels cannot be dissected, grafted, excavated, weighed or measured,
or asphyxiated in an air pump. However, mechanist philosophers,
experimentalists, and members of the early Royal Society—men
such as Robert Hooke, Joseph Glanvill, and Henry More—did write
about angels, and used them for thought experiments. John Locke’s
Essay (1690) repeatedly touches upon angels, reluctantly conceding
that they cannot contribute to actual knowledge, but in his manu
scripts he willingly reflects on them in considering the distinction
between space and extension.109 More was still writing about angelic
invocation, the ‘terrestrial Omnipercipiency’ of angels, and their
relationship with saints, in 1672. Boyle collected manuscripts about
angel magic and the philosophers’ stone.110 There was no divorce
between mechanical and occult or spiritual philosophy; rather, it was

the opponents of the Society, such as Hobbes, who doubted that
spiritual beings were reliable evidence. For other Restoration natural
philosophers, a doctrine of the existence and actions of spirits was
entirely necessary. Religious convictions urged them towards pneu
matics, and they developed doctrines of immateriality to attack per
ceived Sadducism and purely mechanical explanations. They
formulated accounts of the actions of spirits in the material world,
finding various means of explaining spiritual agency and occult caus
ation that could complement empirical accounts. The experimentalist
or mechanist spirit of enquiry did not vanquish the investigation of
spirits. Rather, angels were naturalized.
Increasingly the ‘proof’ of the spirit world lay in descriptions and
explanations of apparitions, such as those compiled by Robert Boyle,
Glanvill, and More. The spirits concerned were predominantly
demons because the age of miracles and angels was over; otherwise
unfallen angels would have been as useful as fallen. These compen
diums were a contested area in which the status of fact could be
explored. Catalogues of actions of spirits were a necessary corollary
to mechanist philosophies. The language used to write about angels in
natural philosophical contexts dilated, became detached from precise
theological connotations, and became part of the language of spiritual
action and causation. This was fundamental to the language of mech
anical explanation, but at the same time it shifted angels to, and fixed
them in, a distant area of knowledge, just as the Reformation had
marginalized them from the everyday experience of worship.111
Early modern theologians and natural philosophers discussed angelic
materiality, bodies, reflection, eyesight, communication, and speed.
These discussions often have different terms, different directions, and
different purposes, though the overlap is extensive. Milton’s interest is
in telling a story. Through storytelling he asks questions and finds
answers.112 He makes narratives that are informed by an understanding
of nature and theology that turn his narrative into something truer and
more solid, more given to grace and redemption. While he was doing
this, inserting angels within, or inserting within angels an understand
ing of natural philosophy, natural philosophers were taking up ques
tions that had previously belonged to theologians, and theologians
were responding to or drawing upon natural philosophy. These were
importantly permeable boundaries.
This intellectual exchange had a finite lifespan, but it was a productive

one for Milton and for others. It would go too far to claim that Milton
had a positive relationship with the new science, but his significant
field of interests included space, telescopes, sunspots, the nature of
infinity, subjects not indifferent to the agendas of the Royal Society.
His narrative discloses perspectives on angelic optics, physics, speed,
numbers, and bodies that are as remarkable and as considered as his
explicit discussions of the more provocative issues such as angelic
digestion and lovemaking. This engagement gives the lie to the
image of a purely literary Milton, a poet whose angels converse solely
with those of other poets, and whose ambition is predominantly to
surpass his predecessors. The invention of this secular figure, both
disinterested and uninterested in the spheres of politics and religion
and the natural world, is not only anachronistic, but misrepresents the
poet’s God, his monism, and his desires to unify spirit and matter
and to reconcile poetic with spiritual concerns. The representation
of Satan is influenced by Homer’s Achilles and Beaumont’s Psyche,
but this is but one element in a compound the purpose of which
extends beyond poetic allusion. Paradise Lost is a Lucretian epic and a
hexameron that absorbs poetic knowledge as well as theological and
natural philosophical knowledge, and works with these materials to
fashion an intended truth that can only be apprehended through
literary means.113
We should not reduce the truth to these means. There is no real
division between the philosopher, theologian, and poet, because the
story is ‘a complex narrative organism’, and the part and whole must be
understood together.114 Milton’s account of bodies is consubstantial
with his account of the senses and of perception, of freewill and reason.
All are elaborated through narrative, and whether he formulated them
before writing the narrative or as the narrative developed, we cannot
say: the narrative and the doctrine are inseparable. Accordingly, the
theology and the physics are also inseparable. Milton’s theology, his
physics of angels, and his poetic narrative are cut from the same cloth,
and his fabrication of narrative through the various kinds of knowledge
in which angels could figure was in some ways symptomatic of his age.
12
‘With the Tongues of Angels’
Angelic Communication
Spiritual and Audible Sounds
For seventeenth century Protestants angels were unlike people, and

their interaction with humans could be fraught. Conversation between
angels and humans—understood not only as verbal communication,
but as the experience of being with and around angels as part of the
normal human environment—was essential to humankind’s place in
Creation. Yet the most immediate form of conversation, verbal com
munication and the relay of information that happens in Scripture, was
made difficult by angels’ disembodiment and incorporeality. The
theme by which theologians explored this nexus of issues was widely
discussed in seventeenth century Britain: the speech of angels. Milton
saw this, and human–angelic conversations are complicated in Paradise
Lost in a way that further develops his natural philosophy.
Milton frequently interrogates interspecies communication. For
example, when Raphael is describing to Adam the war in heaven, he
several times pauses to comment on the difficulty of description, the
condition of narrating this ‘fight j Unspeakable’. He asks:
who, though with the tongue
Of angels, can relate, or to what things
Liken on earth conspicuous, that may lift
Human imagination to such height
Of godlike power.1
Raphael draws attention to two problems here. The first is, as discussed
in Chapter 6, the doctrine of accommodation: representing God and
heaven presents a problem to Raphael, so too describing the actions of
warring spirits, and his preface warns the reader that what she reads may
be neither novelistic realism nor simple allegory.2
But there is another problem here, one that has been overlooked,
perhaps because we too hastily assume that Milton’s angels are like his
humans, in which case the problem disappears. This is the practical
basis of the exchange between angel and human.3 Raphael speaks with
the ‘tongue j Of angels’: how does Adam hear him? Does an angel
make noise? Do angels have tongues? This is a recurrent point of
exegesis in medieval and early modern discussions of angels, and one
that Milton reflects on in Paradise Lost.
For mainstream theology from Pseudo Dionysius through Aquinas to
Calvin, angelic speech is a metaphor. It is used as a ‘human’ or accom
modated figure for the mediation between the hierarchy of God, angels,
and man, and serves a large purpose: in Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, for
example, conversio (referring to a communication in either direction, but
also a turning to God) explains or describes how the angelic hierarchy, an
intellectual foundation for his entire theology, is bound together with
relationships of subordination and exaltation. For Milton, however,
angelic speech is not a metaphor, or not just a metaphor. First, because
he offers a dramatization, a narrative account of the communications not
just between God and his angels, but between God and man and between
man and angels, among all of Creation, in which it is a literary necessity
that characters speak to each other. Secondly, because his angels are
material beings, with imperfect senses, limited knowledge, subject to
the laws of motion, optics, to freewill. Like humans, they are the
creatures of God. So they speak to man, and to each other, and when
they do, their converse is not simply a turning towards illumination, but
material sociability. Later Raphael will echo himself:
to recount almighty works
What words or tongue of seraph can suffice,
Or heart of man suffice to comprehend? (7. 112 14)
Raphael’s warnings are the formula of a storyteller, a modesty topos that

reminds the listener that she is listening. But the epic also impresses
upon us that Adam really hears the words, and admires the voice. When
Raphael finishes telling the story of Creation, the narrator tells us:
The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear
So charming left his voice, that he awhile
Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear. (8. 1 3)
the tongues of angels 313
These three lines were interpolated in the revised, twelve book

version of 1674, appearing at the beginning of the new book 8; they
are a transitional frame, of course, but they tell us that Raphael’s is a real
voice, that real music sounds in Adam’s ear. Following Raphael’s
account of angelic digestion (pp. 279–80, above) and of the nature of
human and angelic freewill, Adam exclaims:
Thy words
Attentive, and with more delighted ear,
Divine instructor, I have heard, than when
Cherubic songs by night from neighbouring hills
Aërial music send. (5. 544 8)
Adam’s pleasure is in part a pleasure in the music of the voice. Angels

characteristically, in Milton and elsewhere, sing hymns of praise to
God. This music forms part of Adam’s sense experience, his universe.
He comments to Eve:
How oft from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to other’s note
Singing their great creator. (4. 680 4)
He sounds like no one more than Caliban, musing that

the isle is full of noises . . .
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears.4
Milton’s angels, like Prospero’s enchantments, are noisy. When God

anoints the Son, ‘The multitude of angels’ issue
a shout
Loud as from numbers without number, sweet
As from blest voices. (3. 345 7)
We are told of the ‘Angelic harmonies’ with which the heavens

resound when God completes Creation, harmonies ‘intermixed with
voice j Choral or unison’.5 Milton’s angels sing and speak in a manner
audible to humans. Even when they are not speaking directly to
humans, their voices can be heard.
There is a close association between angels and music. Their song is
a pattern for human praise and for human prayers, more perfect and
therefore an ideal to be striven for.6 All prayers in Mass imitated the

prayers of angels, and antiphonal singing was understood to derive
from angelic worship. In medieval churches the Annunciation was
sometimes staged as a musical costume drama, in which the angel
sang antiphons. Angelic speech can be represented through music.
Music articulated theology.7 Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth century
Benedictine nun, believed herself directly inspired and authorized by
the Spirit; she wrote music, which she believed to be based on the
prophetically revealed principles of heavenly music, in which angels
themselves sing. Human music was an imperfect reflection of celestial.8
The liturgy was modelled on suppositions, tenuous though rooted in
sophisticated Scholastic thought, about the nature of angelic praise of
God. Milton follows a similar logic when his angelic hymn modulates
into the narrator’s own voice, without an apparent seam (3. 372–412;
pp. 258–9, above). Milton suggest that the protoplasts can hear angelic
song; a few other writers, including Pordage, suggest that postlapsarian
humans can also hear it if they reach a state of spiritual purity.9 For
many this singing is not an audible phenomenon, however, not the
creaturely practice of Milton and Pordage. Hence, John Wall writes of
the tongues of angels, but he means a divine symbol; he writes: ‘The
walls of Jerusalem are the companies of Angels . . . Therefore do they
rejoice and sing’.10
The singing of angels is often associated—and conceptually
enriched—with the music of the spheres. Renaissance Neoplatonism
adopted the ancient cosmology that described Creation as a hierarch
ical series of concentric spheres ascending from earth to heaven. The
rotation of each sphere generated a note that combined to make a
heavenly harmony, based on Pythagorean proportions, inaudible to
humans because of the impurities of the body, and each of the nine
orders of angels was assigned a corresponding sphere; the seraphim, for
example, the highest of the angelic orders, associated with divine love,
governed the outermost sphere, the Primum mobile, from which the
other, inferior spheres derived their motion. Lorenzo’s bittersweet
speech in the final act of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice draws on
the idea:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls.
It is also something that Thomas Heywood outlines in his Hierarchie of

the Blessed Angels.11 Angelic hierarchies and the music of the spheres are
closely related. We need to recognize, however, that angelic hymns
are rooted in theological traditions, and the music of the spheres in
Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophy that was generally understood as
a weaker description of reality, sometimes as no more than metaphor.
This was especially the case among Protestants.
For Milton the doctrine of the nine angelic orders was popish, and
such hierarchy as did exist in Creation was flexible and permeable.12
His facetious second prolusion discusses the music of the spheres
(suggesting that human ears are not able or worthy enough to hear
it) and makes no mention of angels.13 Angelic music in Paradise Lost
does not resemble the music of the spheres in two ways: first, it is
profoundly verbal; these are words that are being sung. Secondly, it is
far more creaturely than any account of the celestial harmonies. These
are words sung by beings that have independent intellectual faculties,
freewill, and a purpose to their singing.
Angelic Bodies and Organs
This merits some contemplation, not least because it suggests Milton’s

deliberation over conventional accounts of angelic speech, and his
conscious move away from contemporary commonplaces. The account
of angelic speech most influential upon early modern angelology was
Aquinas’ Summa. Augustine scarcely touched upon the subject, though
he was clear that angels, fallen and unfallen, had spiritual bodies rather
than material.14 He does observe that ‘God does not speak to the angels
in the way that we speak to each other, or to God, or to the angels, or
as the angels speak to us, or as God speaks to us through them.’ He
speaks without sound, and when we hear him ‘with our inward ears,
we ourselves come close to the angels’. Beyond this Augustine will not
resolve.15 Aquinas is far more specific. He argues that angels commu
nicate between each other by directing thought with their will.
Human communication is obstructed by the body, and thus ‘We
have to make use of an outward, vocalized communication.’ As angels
have no bodies, ‘there is no place for outward, but only for inward
speech; this includes not only a conversing with itself in an inner
thought, but also the thought’s being directed by the will towards
communicating with another. Accordingly the tongues of angels is a

metaphor for the power they have to make their thoughts known.’
Such communication is unaffected by distance. Though the medium
of Aquinas’ angelic communication is immensely powerful, the mes
sages are very restricted: the strict hierarchy means that enlightenment
is exclusively passed down from greater to lesser; when a lesser angel
speaks to a greater, it is only to express a wish to know or receive,
though he adds that angels are also always speaking in praise of God.16
When speaking to us, the arrangement is different, as he shows in a
discussion of angelic bodies that attends to the question of speech.
Angels sometimes need bodies for their actions in our world, for which
purpose they adopt bodies of air (the view famously exploited in
Donne’s ‘Air and Angels’). This is in fact a form of accommodation;
it is a sensible analogy to give us an idea of their actual being. The body
is not a functioning one, however: it is merely a representation, and is
not used for speech. So Aquinas writes: ‘An angel does not really speak
through his assumed body; he only imitates speech, forming sounds
in the air corresponding to human words.’17 This argument, that
spirits impelled the air to make audible sounds, was endorsed in six
teenth century commentaries on Genesis by David Pareus, Johannes
Mercerus, Benedictus Perereius, Andreas Rivetus, and Martin Luther,
for example in their accounts of the vocal powers of Abraham’s visitors,
Balaam’s ass, and the serpent of Genesis.18 Leonardo doubted the per
suasiveness of this account, insisting that it was speculative, and that a
body of air would instantly dissolve.19
This problem was widely discussed in seventeenth century
England. John Salkeld was sympathetic to Jerome’s opinion that ‘the
Angels have their manner of tongue, though different from all hum
ane, without all corporall motion, or sound’; even when they adopt
bodies and present the appearance of speaking, ‘they can have no true
vitall locution or vocall speech’; though he finally prevaricates that ‘it
cannot be declared, neyther how the Angels doe outwardly speake
into us in our eare; neither how inwardly in our hearts’.20 The
enterprising public lecturer Balthasar Gerbier, in a manual on well
speaking published in 1650, contrasts ‘sensible vocall action’ with the
‘intellectual speech’ of angels, who speak ‘not as men doe, with a
moving tongue, with a shrill throat, their speech is wholly Spirituall’.21
The minister, poet, and translator of Boehme into Welsh, Morgan
Llwyd, wrote that God and the angels had a single language, in which
the angels ‘glorify God, and converse with one another, and with the
Saints, without the Noise of Tongues or Sounds of Words’.22
The Westminster Assembly’s Annotations, the distillation of patristic,
Scholastic, and Reformation commentary published in 1645 and 1651
that had a special status as a statement of establishment orthodoxy,
stated:
As God gave them bodies for a time, so he gave them the faculties thereof to
walk, to speak, to eat, and drink, and such like; yet what was let into the body
in an extraordinary manner, might afterwards be resolved into ayr; and what
they did might not be so much by any natural faculties of those bodies they
assumed, as by a supernaturall application of those parts they had to what they
did . . . 23
At Numbers 22: 28, however, the Assembly articulates a marginally
different position, glossing the powers of speech of Balaam’s ass: ‘the
Angel of the Lord formed his own words by the mouth of the Ass, as
the Devil did by the mouth of the Serpent, Gen. 3’. This is a distinc
tion Milton would have noticed. Do spirits produce the sounds them
selves while simultaneously moving the body, or do they use material
bodies to generate sounds? The first comment from the Annotations
suggests the former, the second the latter. Committees often fail to
secure perfect coherence in their publications; here it seems they
prevaricate on two sides of a complex but nonetheless relatively
inconsequential question.
Gervase Babington, in his not entirely accurately entitled Certaine
Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes upon Everie Chapter of Genesis,
presents a simpler, mechanical explanation of the instrumental use of
an assumed body:
But how could the Serpent speake, since this power is not geven to beasts, but
only to man? No question it was not the Serpent by his owne power, but
Satan in and by the Serpent, which is not impossible. . . . When God permit
teth, Satan is able to shrowde himselfe under the creatures, as may best fit his
purpose. Many wicked Southsayers Satan casteth into pangs and fits of furie,
and then speake they by him, or he rather by them what he will.24
Andrew Willet, whose Hexapla in Genesin of 1605 is one of the
weightiest commentaries produced in English, preferred a similar
explanation: ‘the devill used the serpent a subtile beast as his instru
ment, and spake out of him’. Eve was deceived ‘by the craft of the
devill speaking and working by the serpent’.25 This intimates that the
serpent is the bodily cause of the sound, manipulated by the Devil.

Willet seems to be following Calvin here, who annotates Genesis 3: 4:
‘the serpent was not eloquent by nature: but when Sathan by the
Sufferance of God, had gotten him a meete instrument, he caused
his tongue to speake, whiche God also permitted’.26 Glossing the visit
of the angels to Abraham at Genesis 18 (where they consume a meal,
which gave rise to extended reflections on angels in many commen
taries and treatises), Calvin writes:
I doubt not, but that God which made al the world of nothing, and which is a
wonderfull workmaister in fashioning his creatures, gave unto them bodies for
a time, wherin they might do that office whiche was committed unto them.
And as they did truely walke, speake, and doe other duties, so I judge that they
did as truely eate.27
Willet on the same chapter surveys the possibility that the angels
adopted counterfeit bodies or real bodies that undertook counterfeit
eating, and resolves: ‘it is the sounder opinion, that these angels, as they
were endued with true bodies for the time, so they did verily eate, as
they did walke and speake and doe other actions of the bodie truly’.28
On the same text the Devon minister George Hughes, in his learned
Analytical Exposition of Genesis (1672), writes that the angels assumed
‘True humane bodies’, as discovered by the fact that they ate and spoke
and so on.29
Finally, for John Gumbleden, the distinction between implicit and
audible could practically and clearly be made. In a sermon on the
apparition of an angel to the soldier Cornelius in Acts 10 (published in
1657 though preached some years earlier), Gumbleden navigates some
of the standard issues of angelology, considering angelic communica
tion at unusual length. He writes: ‘The Angel said unto him; but, can
Angels speak? it seems they can: and that, either unto God; or, unto
themselves; or, unto men’. For the former, he follows Aquinas; for the
speech of angels to men he elaborates:
to men also do Angels speak; and that, either without, or, with assumed Bodies:
when the good Angels (as they are in themselves, Spirits, and without material
Bodies) speak unto the hearts, and soules of faithfull men (as no doubt,
oftentimes they do) then, after a spiritual, and heavenly Manner, without
words, without any vocall noise, or audible speech (but to him only, to
whom they speak, if to him) they secretly instill, insinuate, conveigh, and commu
nicate their meaning to the minds, and understandings of men; in a manner,
like as they do their own minds, one unto another . . . but, when they appeared
in the forme of men (as in ages past they did,) then they assumed such Bodies as
we ourselves have, with all their integral parts, together with all instruments of
Speech, and therefore Tongues: wherewith, they so appeared, they spake vocally,
and audibly to the eares of men.30
When angels speak to humans without assuming bodies, they speak

inwardly, imposing their thoughts upon the mind. This was commonly
described as ‘impressing’, which, while deriving from Aquinas’
‘impressa’, compares virtual sense impressions to printing on the
human senses; in the words of Milton’s friend Henry Lawrence,
‘Angells . . . speake to the internall, first of all, making such compositions
there, as the understanding presently takes of, and reades what is
written.’31 The term suggests the spiritual, communicative power
attributed to printing. When, however, angels assume a body, they
use the instruments of speech wherewith the body is furnished in
order to speak vocally and audibly to the ear. There are, then, contrast
ing accounts of how angels speak to humans that contest whether their
speech is audible, and, if so, how it is generated. Not a great deal seems
to be at stake here, as either account proves the reality of the spiritual
world. For all of these writers, however, the notion of angelic song
would be a metaphor, a form of perfect, idealized speech, praise directed
by the will to God. Adam would not hear it in paradise. Only those
radicals whose angels were material and corporeal—Laurence Claxton
and the Pordages among them—would contend that angels made real
noise, and that audible speech was integral to angelic faculties.32
Several poets concerned themselves with the matter of angelic
song and speech, and some specifically affirmed that angels did not
have tongues. The sixteenth century Huguenot Guillaume du Bartas
describes Satan’s vocalization through the serpent in his creation poem
La Semaine (1578, translated into English by Joshua Sylvester in 1605):
Sith such pure bodies have nor teeth, nor tongues,
Lips, artires, nose, palate, nor panting lungs,
Which rightly plac’d are properly created
True instruments of sounds articulated.33
Ethereal natures want language, states du Bartas, because they have no

tongues or other organs of speech. Influenced by du Bartas, Lucy
Hutchinson describes Abraham and Sarah feeding their angelic visitors
a calf, milk, and butter:
Not knowing that they, from heaven’s high courts employed,

In human shapes did angels’ natures hide
Till, after the conclusion of the meal,
Th’ambassadors their message did reveal . . . 34
She reveals nothing about the digestive process. She is similarly reti
cent on the matter of angelic conversation. In contrast to Milton’s
prelapsarian man, who speaks with angels as with equals, Hutchinson’s
Adam stands below celestial beings just as he stands above brute
creatures. His nature is not ‘sublime j Enough’ to delight ‘in angelic
converse’:
No, though man partake intelligence,
Yet that, being joined to an inferior sense,
Dulled by corporeal vapours, cannot be
Refined enough for angels’ company . . . 35
She does not explain how angels convey their messages, or unpick the
other angelological controversies that necessarily underpin any narra
tive of angelic–human relations. She is more concerned with morality
and symbolic meanings, the matter of practical divinity, than in the
abstract, systematic theology of the annotator.
In Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells, Thomas Heywood develops a
discussion of Augustine and Aquinas on angels into an argument that
angels cannot have bodies:
If they have bodies? They must needs be linkt
Of members, as Mans is; Organs distinct,
And like composure; else they must be fram’d
Confus’d, and without those which we have nam’d.36
If angels had bodies, then they must have organs such as tongues; and if
organs then senses, and if senses then passions, then perturbation and
alteration. For Heywood, materiality, senses, passions, and speech are
logically connected, and none are properly attributed to angels. Milton
sees similar connections, and finds them all in angels.
These poets are writing imaginatively, but nonetheless make strenu
ous efforts to conform to their rigorously developed theological pos
ition; all subordinate their poetics to a pre formulated doctrine yet
seek space for the inventive exposition and exploration of that doc
trine. Angelic tongues are a theme in which theology and imaginative
representations necessarily interact.
Noise in Paradise
Do Milton’s angels have tongues? Milton’s angels are substantial,

physical beings; they are spirits, but nonetheless material. They are,
however, not corporeal.37 They have no bodies, and therefore they
have no tongues and no ears. Except, as we have seen, their matter has
a ‘proper’ shape, the angel’s ‘own’ shape, and they assume form
according to their purposes and will. This is seen in the war in heaven,
which shows, as Raphael explains, that angels live ‘Vital in every part’
(6. 345), though they bleed real blood, blood such as angels bleed. Yet
Raphael continues in a way that radically qualifies any simple notion of
disembodiment, lest we should think Milton’s substantial angels similar
to Aquinas’, or to Pseudo Dionysius’, for whom angel’s limbs are
purely symbolic:38
All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense, and as they please,
They limb themselves, and colour, shape or size
Assume, as like them best, condense or rare. (6. 350 3)
Angels may not have corporeal forms with ears; they are all ear.39 They
have limbs according to their wills, as necessary to fulfil their works of
love or enmity. In this specific sense they do have bodies, spiritual
bodies, that contain all the virtue of corporeal bodies without the
corporeality. This explains, moreover, what Raphael means when he
tells Adam that ‘pure j Intelligential substances’ contain within them
‘every lower faculty j Of sense’; that is, all the human senses are
contained within the angelic senses, a claim that I think we need to
take literally (5. 408–11). Angels can hear and they do have substantial
senses. This is Milton’s God’s assurance of downward software
compatibility.
Angels do, then, have tongues after a fashion. They are all tongue,
which is why their singing is audible from earth. It is not mere allegory
when Milton refers to angelic limbs and organs.40 As his angels are
really vocal and audible, so they have limbs and organs and senses
without mundane corporeality. Hence the many references to the
knees of angels, to the ears of angels, to the tongues of angels; perhaps
even to Satan’s scars; certainly the tears that Satan sheds prior to his first
address to the fallen angels in hell, ‘Tears such as angels weep’, false,
dissembling tears, but they must be real, wet tears otherwise they
would not be persuasive oratory.41 Angel body parts, not only tongues,
are all over Milton’s Creation.
Because his angels are substantial, Milton circumnavigates Scholastic
arguments about angelic noise production. He does not have to debate
assumed bodies, strange acts of ventriloquism, or the impressing of
angelic thought upon the human mind. His angels speak and hear,
participate in the production and reception of sound waves in a world
that seems to be fully audible. When Satan, disguised as a cherub,
approaches Uriel—‘the sharpest sighted spirit of all in Heaven’
(3. 691), who cannot penetrate the disguise—he admonishes him ‘by
his ear’ (3. 647). While Aquinas’ angels are transparent, enabling their
perfect, silent communication, Milton’s are substantial and opaque.42
Milton’s narratives should not be understood to be ‘imaginative’ in any
simple or post Romantic sense; he also believes them to carry the
burden of the truth. Hence, Milton’s account of angelic conversation,
the noise in heaven and the substantiality of angelic tongues, should be
understood as both imaginative narrative and natural philosophy.
There is an impediment to this reading, however, a problem Milton
might have drawn from reading Calvin, Luther, Willet, the Westminster
Annotations, or one of any number of commentaries. He introduces it
in the temptation. The serpent approaches Eve, attracts her eye with a
‘gentle dumb expression’, and,
glad
Of her attention gained, with serpent tongue
Organic, or impulse of vocal air,
His fraudulent temptation thus began. (9. 528 31)
The narrator leaves undetermined whether Satan speaks as spirits

speak, or uses the serpent’s tongue as an instrument.43 Undetermined,
that is, after raising the alternative possibilities that were commonly
proposed in writings about angels. Alternatives, moreover, that seem
irrelevant to Milton’s narrative, as Satan has no need of the serpent’s
tongue to issue audible speech. The ‘or’ here does little other than raise
the disputes of angelology, the same ‘common gloss j Of theologians’
that Milton earlier dismisses. Why raise the issue at this stage in the
poem if there is nothing to be resolved, if it is a non question?
The solution has three parts. First, there is nothing to stop Satan from
using the serpent’s tongue for the purposes of audible speech. It adds a
virtuoso shine to his fraudulence. In many discussion of angelic speech,

from Aquinas onwards, authors are concerned about the ethical impli
cations of assumed bodies and bodies of condensed air. For an angel to
present the illusion of bodily existence or the illusion of speech or of a
speaking body, they knew, might constitute a form of deception,
deluding the human senses with a simulacrum of a reality that was
not. Devils were understood to do this, working false wonders and
exploiting their superior natural philosophical knowledge to create
illusions to deceive and delude human senses; but illusions were more
morally complicated in the case of unfallen angels. Lawrence argues that
Abraham’s angels must have really eaten, ‘for they never deceived your
senses’; Peter Le Loier, that when angels appear in the form of men they
do not intend to be mistaken for men, and that there is no cause for
saying ‘that there is fiction and feyning in the angels’; Gumbleden says
that the soldier and the angel really encountered each other and ‘spake,
mouth to mouth’, that there was ‘no painting, no counterfeiting, no
deluding here’.44 The solutions are various, but many authors raise
counterfeiting, feigning, the making of fictions, as a concern. This is
not a problem for Milton’s Satan, the father of lies: if he uses the serpent
as an instrument of speech when he could speak for himself, then the
deception has an additional twist (he is practising not just diabolical
possession, but strangely unnecessary ventriloquism).45 Secondly, Mil
ton thereby hints that those angelologists who claim that unfallen angels
cannot really speak, but can create the illusion of speaking without
feigning, are themselves guilty of fictions. Thirdly, Satan’s illusion of a
serpent that really speaks is essential to Milton’s story. Demonologists
acknowledged the difficulty of distinguishing between the Devil’s
illusions and reality, but also the difficulty of separating illusions from
those preternatural effects that the Devil was able to work within nature
using his skills as a natural philosopher.46 Milton’s Eve’s immediate
response to the speaking serpent is to ask, in syntax that discloses her
puzzlement, ‘What may this mean? Language of man pronounced j By
tongue of brute, and human sense expressed?’ (9. 553–4). The fact that
the serpent has a tongue that can produce meaningful speech becomes
part of Satan’s confidence trick, the pseudo evidence that deceives her.47
Before taking the fruit, Eve muses on the virtue that ‘taught j The
Tongue not made for speech to speak thy praise’ (9. 748–9).
The alternatives offered in this passage, then, reflect the exchange
between natural philosophy and theology in Milton’s imaginative
narrative. Poetry and knowledge are not meant to be opposites.

Hence, many authors shift freely between accommodated representa
tion, angelic bodies and apparitions, and speech; the tongues of angels
and sacred poetry have a deep association that speaks to the preoccu
pations and the logical and intellectual foundations of the culture. The
angels of Paradise Lost are genuinely and emphatically noisy. Speech
and vocal communication constitute relationships, those mutual
relationships that reject the strict hierarchies that Pseudo Dionysius,
Aquinas, Thomas Heywood, and others attributed to the angelic
orders. In conversing, a reciprocity is achieved that benefits both
parties, that exalts both as the differences of a hierarchy are traversed
and narrowed.48 Sociability and conversation are good things. When
God sends his messenger Raphael—the ‘sociable spirit’ (5. 221)—to
bring a warning to Adam, he orders him to converse ‘half this day as
friend with friend’ (5. 229). He arrives, in his ‘proper shape’ as a seraph
with six wings (5. 277), while Eve is preparing dinner, and leaves when
the day is spent and Adam retires to his bower. Raphael’s message is not
a pithy interdiction, but a warning that depends upon a lengthy
narrative, questions and answers and counter questions. Its force is
acquired not through the unyielding concrete direction of a com
mandment, but through conversation. Both man and angel express the
pleasure they take in this conversation. To speak with the tongue of
angels is to speak eloquently without feigning, to speak aloud, and to
listen with pleasure; this is both the story that Milton tells, and his
doctrine of angels.
PART III
Literature and
Representation
13
Dryden’s Fall
Dreams, Angels, Freewill
Dryden versus Milton
Picture yourself at the theatre in London, watching a play about the

Fall of Mankind. Adam and Eve are sleeping in paradise. Enter Lucifer,
who tells you about dreams and the susceptibility of women to vain
shows. So he crouches at Eve’s ear, whereupon a vision arises:
deformed shapes dance around a tree; an angel enters, with a woman
‘habited like Eve’ (the script does not elaborate on this), sings praises of
the tree; the woman objects. The angel gives the fruit to the shapes
who transform into angels. The woman concedes this empirical proof,
and the angel moralizes that forbidden pleasures are more rewarding.
You might be forgiven for thinking you are seeing an exchange
between the Earl of Rochester and Margery Pinchwife, until the
Eve figure flies to the sky with the angels.
It is Milton, but strangely transformed. It is The State of Innocence and
the Fall of Man, Paradise Lost transposed into opera by John Dryden.
Written in 1674, it was never performed, and was not printed until
1677. It was nonetheless a popular success.
Dryden’s first question in adapting Paradise Lost must have been:
what can I cut? There were other issues: the use of heroic verse, the
limitations of stage machinery, the dilemma of costume, the aesthetic
demands of representing an idea of paradise. How could one visually
represent the invisible? But the first and, from the perspective of
practicality, the most necessary question was: what could be dispensed
with? Creation? Hell? The war in heaven? How could Milton’s epic—
which extends from the creation of time through human history and
328 literature and representation
the apocalypse to the end of time, from the marital bower through all
the visible universe and beyond, and takes twelve hours and upwards
to read aloud—be compressed into two and a half hours of traffic for
the commercial stage?1 One of Dryden’s many criticisms of Milton’s
epic was that ‘he runs into a flat of Thought, sometimes for a Hundred
Lines together . . . ’tis when he is got into a Track of Scripture’.2 He
himself intended to be—needed to be—economical.
Yet there are a handful of places where The State of Innocence amplifies
on its original, and they are significant. They indicate Dryden’s creative
and intellectual interests, interests which made him engage sympathet
ically with his source but also carried him away from it. One is Eve’s
dream. In Paradise Lost the dream is inspired in Eve’s imagination when
Satan, ‘Squat like a toad’, whispers in her ear (4. 800). When Eve
awakens, troubled by her dream, she narrates it to Adam, who in
turn explains the physiology of dream work:
know that in the soul
Are many lesser faculties that serve
Reason as chief; among these fancy next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful senses represent,
She forms imaginations, airy shapes,
Which reason joining or disjoining, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private cell when nature rests.
Oft in her absence mimic fancy wakes
To imitate her; but misjoining shapes,
Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Some such resemblances methinks I find
Of our last evening’s talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad. (5. 100 16)3
The senses receive data which they then represent to the fancy, fancy
supplies conjectures based on these data, reason affirms or denies these
conjectures, and thus is formed what we think or know. When we
sleep, reason sleeps with us, but fancy (‘mimic’ suggests an attribute of
fancy rather than a substitute for true fancy, though the ambiguity is
there to be dwelt on) can continue to act upon old sense data to
generate the uncensored simulacra of reality that are dreams. The
passage is characteristically Miltonic: it supplies a physical basis for
dryden’s fall 329
mental processes, explained using a dynamic metaphor, one that risks

turning into romance. Moreover, by putting the metaphor into
Adam’s prelapsarian mouth it becomes knowledge or perfect science.
Milton thereby uses fictional premisses to articulate knowledge that is
keener and truer than that in non fictional writing.4
In Dryden’s State of Innocence, Lucifer himself articulates the physi
ology of dreams. As in Milton’s original he crouches at Eve’s ear and
whispers, but in this version the dream is performed: in the dream
deformed shapes dance, and an angel persuades a figure representing
Eve, in a similar state of undress, to eat the fruit, before praising inter
dicted joys.5 It is possible to read this episode as an attempt to vulgarize or
even systematically to efface the radical political implications of Milton’s
poem. Dryden introduces singing and dancing and stage machinery—
effectively a masque interlude—into the work of a resolutely and con
sciously untheatrical author. We see the dream itself. We do not hear
Eve’s own, unnerved relation of it, and Adam’s response is merely to
hope that heaven will avert what the dream seems to portend (4. 1. 1–2).
Though the performance is a transposition of Eve’s thoughts received
through diabolical suggestion, Lucifer’s plan is to ‘set’ dreams ‘before the
Woman’s eyes’ (3.3.10). This suggests something more than mental
drama; and the intended audience see a real drama, the elaborate stage
management that Lucifer imposes upon Eve. Dryden inverts much of
Milton’s design, and the result is almost burlesque.
Dryden famously visited Milton and asked his permission to adapt
Paradise Lost. The main authority for this event is John Aubrey, whose
notes on Milton report: ‘Jo Dreyden Esq Poet Laureate, who very
much admires him: & went to him to have leave to putt his Paradise
lost into a Drama in Rhyme: Mr Milton recieved him civilly, & told
him he would give him leave to tagge his Verses.’ The two poets had
worked in physical proximity at Whitehall for the Council of State
during the later 1650s, but by the occasion of this visit, between 1669
and 1674, Dryden was Poet Laureate, Historiographer Royal, and a
successful playwright, while the blind Milton was living in relative
isolation. Aubrey’s narrative invites us to read the meeting as a clash
between an old world and a new, between two cultures. The temp
tation is to read subtexts into the alleged exchange, as if Dryden said,
‘John, let me subject your dried out and washed up 1650s politics to
the final humiliation by converting your life’s work into that slavish
and fashionable form that you so roundly dismissed in the note that
you added to the fourth issue of the first edition in 1668 as ‘‘the
troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’’, and turning it into a
stage play, the form you sneeringly eschewed in Samson Agonistes
(1671), and, what’s worse turning a fair profit out of it while you
have nothing to look forward to but the grave’; and Milton said, ‘Sure
John, go ahead, because, first, you’re going to look stupid, and,
secondly, both of us know that this is the epigone of the English epic
form and your long standing ambitions to write an epic are now dead
and buried, and by the way I heard that when you read my book you
said to the Earl of Dorset, ‘‘this man cuts us all out, and the ancients
too’’.’ This may be reading too much into Aubrey’s story.
Andrew Marvell, who had worked alongside Milton and Dryden for
the Council of State during the late 1650s, added a note of adversarialism
in his commendatory poem to the 1674 edition of Paradise Lost, which
reflects on the difficulty early readers had with Milton’s blank verse:
Well mightst thou scorn thy readers to allure
With tinkling rhyme, of thine own sense secure;
While the town Bayes writes all the while and spells,
And like a pack horse tires without his bells:
Their fancies like our bushy points appear,
The poets tag them, we for fashion wear.6
Marvell’s diction, and swipe at Dryden under the nickname Mr Bayes,
suggests that he knew of the visit that Aubrey relates, and saw the
excellence of Milton’s poem, and he pins its distinction from the
fashionable sphere of Restoration literature on Dryden’s tags, or
rhymes. Marvell suggests a struggle over the politics of form. These
perspectives suggest that it was form that most concerned Dryden: the
epic form and heroic verse.
Milton in his youth had planned a biblical tragedy, sketching outlines
entitled ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Adam Unparadized’, which included a
chorus of angels alongside the paradisal couple and the personification
of vices and virtues. In his later years he left these aside in favour of epic.
There is reason to suspect that there was a literary–political dimension to
this decision: Milton chose to abandon the dramatic form because the
public stage was closed during the 1650s, because epic more comfortably
suited his reflective, ambitious design, and because drama was a mode of
representation he no longer felt comfortable with. By the Restoration
Milton was well versed in the world of print, and used it to his own
dryden’s fall 331
advantage. The absence of any dedication, the starkness of the

frontmatter of Paradise Lost, suggests his self perception as a print author,
freed from the constraints of patronage, and this also is in stark contrast
to Dryden’s fulsomely dedicated drama.7 When Milton did compose a
tragedy, Samson Agonistes, probably written in the mid 1660s and pub
lished in 1671, he was careful to distinguish himself from the fashionable
drama of the day, including Dryden’s, returning to a more ancient
manner and specifying that he never intended it for the stage.8 Dryden’s
adaptation reverses this deliberated rejection of theatre. His script,
moreover, purports to be an opera, a mixed form even more distant
from Milton’s aesthetic of the sublime. The State of Innocence includes
songs, dances, and elaborate stage effects: it begins with the heavens
opening and angels wheeling in the air, and later, a ‘Cloud descends
with six Angels in it; and when it’s near the ground, breaks; and on each
side, discovers six more.’9
Despite this interest in performance and theatricality, Dryden’s
opera never reached the stage. Though it was probably written in
the spring of 1674 (it was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 17
April, licensed by Milton’s old detractor Roger L’Estrange), it was not
printed until 1677, and Dryden then declared that he allowed it to go
to the press only because of the number of imperfect manuscript copies
of the texts then circulating. The most probable reason why the opera
was never performed is that it was unfinished. It carries several marks
of a text awaiting further revision: the songs and music are unevenly
distributed, and one scene (2. 2) is in blank verse, and jars with the
couplets of the remainder. Dryden may have been experimenting with
mixed forms, or he may have intended to revise it, and add rhyme, at a
future stage. This may seem like an improbably mechanical procedure,
but in Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668), Neander comments:
When a poet has found the repartee, the last perfection he can add to it, is to
put it into verse. However good the thought may be; however apt the words
in which ’tis couch’d, yet he finds himself at a little unrest while Rhyme is
wanting: he cannot leave it till that comes naturally, and then is at ease, and sits
down contented.10
This is not Dryden’s own voice, but that of a character in a dialogue;

nonetheless, Dryden defended rhyme in a analogous manner frequently
enough, and what is interesting here is the implication that rhyme is a
decoration that may arise from the thought but can nonetheless be
applied towards the end of the process of composition (Milton implies

the same in Eikonoklastes).11 Dryden’s blank verse scene may have been
awaiting further work.
Whether or not Dryden was satisfied with the work, whether or not
he found it derivative, inadequate, or incomplete, it was nonetheless a
popular success of a sort he had not intended. Under the title ‘The Fall
of Angels and Man in Innocence’ (matching the Stationers’ Register
entry), it became his most popular dramatic work in manuscript, was
printed in nine editions between 1677 and 1701, and was second in
reproducibility only to his Absalom and Achitophel. As a text, particularly
as a manuscript text, it took on a different guise in adapting to the
new medium, circulating alongside libertine poetry and satire. In
manuscript, Eve’s account of her sexual experience, and the prurient
hints of nakedness, had a quite different quality.12 Charles Leslie, who
complained about the licence and impiety of Milton’s armoured angels,
thought Dryden’s adaptation worse: ‘the Truth has been Greatly Hurt
thereby, and Degraded at last, even into a Play, which was Design’d to
have been Acted upon the Stage: And tho’ once Happily Prevented,
yet has Pass’d the Press, and become the Entertainment of Prophane
Raillery’.13
In contrast, and despite early recognition that it was a work of the
imagination that rivalled the classics, Milton’s book sold fairly slowly.
The State of Innocence may have been the version of Paradise Lost known
to the widest Restoration public, a crib for a demanding text. The
adaptation appropriated the lustre of an imaginative narrative based on
the Genesis story, translating the unyielding anti heroism and theo
logical earnestness of an anti theatrical author into zestful savouries for
the Restoration palate. ‘Let them please their appetites in eating what
they like,’ Dryden writes in his preface, ‘but let them not force their
dish on all the Table.’14
Readers have concurred with Marvell that Paradise Lost and
Dryden’s adaptation are antipathetic. An early and insightful response
to Dryden’s drama appeared in a pamphlet entitled The Reasons of
Mr. Bays Changing his Religion (1688), by the presumably pseudonym
ous Dudley Tomkinson. The pamphlet presents a dialogue between
Crites, Eugenius (two of the three interlocutors in Dryden’s Essay
of Dramatic Poesy), and Bays, the persona by which the Duke of
Buckingham satirized Dryden in The Rehearsal (1672). In the dialogue
Bays—that is Dryden—confesses that he ‘affronted the whole Celestial
dryden’s fall 333
Hierarchy’ when he was seized by the ‘Spirit of Contradiction’ and

‘undertook to clear Miltons Paradice of Weeds, and garnish that
noble Poem with the additional beauty and softness of Rhyme’. Bays
proceeds to incriminate himself: in Milton’s epic Adam speaks so
ungracefully, so unlike a gentleman, that ‘you’d pitty his condition.
And then for Eve, as he has drawn her Character, she talks so like an
insipid Country House keeper, whose knowledge goes no farther than
the Still or the Dairy, who is as little acquainted with the tenderness of
passion, as the management of an Intreague, that one cannot choose
but wonder at it.’15 In his improved version, Bays continues, Eve
speaks feelingly of love, and Adam, having benefited from a university
education, has learned all about supralapsarianism. For Tomkinson,
Dryden has turned the sublime lines of Paradise Lost into a polite
drama of court intrigue that is artistically grotesque and theologically
confused.
For the most part critics have concurred on the question of artistry.
Walter Scott thought Dryden’s task ‘may be safely condemned as
presumptuous’ and that in places it ‘strangely degraded’ Milton’s
verse. Others have suggested that Dryden’s drama ‘merited obscurity’
despite its early popularity; that his characters are crude parodies, and
the whole an ‘offensive vulgarisation of Paradise Lost’.16 A few dissent
ers have contended that Dryden’s version of the Fall story is in some
ways stronger—more natural, more admitting of the transformative
power of love—than Milton’s; that Dryden brings out the comedy
implicit in the theological problem of God’s foresight; that its com
pression is masterful.17 One eccentrically suggests that Dryden presents
a more complex account of gender; another that Dryden’s Eve is
‘decidedly less suppressed’ than Milton’s, a page before he notes that
discretion is not one of womankind’s strengths.18 For most readers,
however, Dryden’s State of Innocence can be read as Paradise Lost thrown
in a blender.19
There is deeper sense in the adaptation. There was a nuanced and
mutual influence between Milton and Dryden, and The State of Inno
cence shows a complex attitude to, and sophisticated transformations of,
its source.20 Some of the aesthetic decisions are politically motivated.
Dryden was undertaking a hostile political coup, seeking to contain
the dangerous enthusiasm and inspiration of the old republican in a
rational and polite form. The State of Innocence set bounds around the
enthusiastic licence of the epic, wrapping its harsh language and unruly
structures in rhyme and decorous narrative.21 Dryden took Milton to

task for his politics, though with punctilious and perhaps generous
specificity. In the debate in hell in the first act, the fallen angels
appropriate the constitutional language of the 1650s, conferring ‘in
frequent Senate’ (not a word Paradise Lost uses in this context); they
have become the ‘States General of Hell’, a term that clearly indicates
the Dutch republic; they hate ‘Universal Monarchy’, a phrase that
echoes Whig anti French rhetoric of the 1670s.22 Dryden seems to
criticize the popular pro Dutch sentiment that swelled during the third
Anglo Dutch war (which some blamed on France), and associates
Whig rhetoric with republicanism.23 While Milton shows Satan
using the language of liberty cynically and improperly, Dryden’s
Lucifer is at ease with it. Moreover, the images of the devils sitting
‘as in Council’ in their palace is an allusion to popular engravings in
broadsides around 1660 that represented Cromwell and his Council of
State as Lucifer and his peers sitting around a table.24 Dryden also
rendered the narrative and the language of Paradise Lost banal by
translating it into the terms of Restoration comedy, transforming
Milton’s radical vision of sexual politics into a courtship. When
Adam suggests to Eve that they lock themselves in close embrace,
she responds that something that is not shame forbids her, ‘some
restraining thought, I know not why, j Tells me, you long should
beg, I long deny’ (2. 3. 54–5). He praises Eve’s beauty, and she agrees
to be his delight even while worrying that some other new made
beauty might creep into his heart. After the Fall their desire is articu
lated through libertine commonplaces, Adam sounding like Dorimant
when he asks ‘Where appetites are giv’n, what sin to tast?’ (5. 2. 78).
Small wonder that Tomkinson mocks Dryden’s implicit criticism of
Milton’s Eve:
she talks of love as feelingly as a Thrice married Widdow, yet rails at marriage
with the same concern as if she had seen the misfortunes of half her Daughters;
tells her Gallant that it was the Practice of all his Sex to decoy poor Innocent
Maids with sham stories of their Passion; and that he’d be as apt to forget her
after the enjoyment was over, as a Sharper of the Town forgets the last friend
he borrowed money of.25
There is none of the breathless eroticism of Milton’s postlapsarian

lovemaking, and Dryden has accommodated Edenic love relations
within the patterns and mores conventional upon the Restoration stage.
dryden’s fall 335
Yet the relationship between these texts is not exclusively one of

political opposition, and Dryden’s account of Milton, deeply ingrained
with ambivalence, is not a thoroughly hostile or an ignorant one.
Dryden’s adaptation is an adaptation, emerging from Dryden’s close
and conflicted relationship with Milton; it is a dialogue, an imitation, a
translation that discloses the shift in Restoration literary modes. An
exploration of the matrix of this adaptation can show how Dryden’s
angelology and his extended account of freewill disclose a seriousness
of purpose and a degree of coherence in his adaptation. Angels,
dreams, and freewill, it will be seen, were intimately related.
Angels
Though Dryden was certainly concerned with the form and politics of
Paradise Lost, what he does with angels suggests that he was also
occupied with content: he takes Milton to task over his angelology.
Dryden believed in guardian angels. Milton, too, believed in angels
assigned to a particular place or kingdom, though perhaps more
diffidently. In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton writes, ‘It is probable,
too, that angels are put in charge of nations, kingdoms, and particular
districts.’ St Michael appears in this capacity at the end of ‘Lycidas’, and
Paradise Lost suggests such a connection between Uriel and the sun,
and between Raphael and Michael and earth.26 To Dryden the doc
trine was intellectually and aesthetically significant. In his ‘Discourse
Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ (1693) Dryden reflects
at length on the possibility of modern epic. The aspiring author of a
Christian epic, he writes, faced a problem with the machinery, which
is so much less rich than in heathen epic. Moreover, there is another
dilemma in the conflict between omnipotent good and the over
matched forces of the Devil, which is little conducive to dramatic
tension. The solution to these problems lies in the same Christian
doctrine, he writes:
’Tis a Doctrine almost Universally receiv’d by Christians, as well Protestants as
Catholicks, that there are Guardian Angels appointed by God Almighty, as his
Vicegerents, for the Protection and Government of Cities, Provinces, King
doms, and Monarchies; and those as well of Heathens, as of true Believers. All
this is so plainly prov’d from those Texts of Daniel, that it admits of no father
Controversie. . . . St. Michael is mention’d by his Name, as the Patron of the
Jews, and is now taken by the Christians, as the Protector General of our
Religion. These Tutelar Genij, who presided over the several People and
Regions committed to their Charge, were watchful over them for good, as far
as their Commissions cou’d possibly extend. The General Purpose, and
Design of all, was certainly the Service of their Great Creatour.
These guardian angels are not in possession of God’s power nor sight of
his whole plan. They are ‘Finite Beings, not admitted into the Secrets
of Government, the last resorts of Providence’.27 This means that they
can oppose each other, and be deceived by the wicked, and this creates
uncertainty and therefore drama. Dryden both believes in the exist
ence of guardian angels, and thinks that they solve the problems of
Christian epic. They may even be its enabling condition. Poets might
have found in the Old Testament ‘the Machines which are proper for
their Work’. Reading Daniel,
and Accommodating what there they find, with the Principles of Platonique
Philosophy, as it is now Christianis’d, wou’d have made the Ministry of
Angels as strong an Engine, for the Working up of Heroique Poetry, in our
Religion, as that of the Ancients had been to raise theirs by all the Fables of
their Gods, which were only receiv’d for Truths by the most ignorant, and
weakest of the People.28
Guardian angels have a symbolic role in the 1677 dedication of The
State of Innocence; there Dryden plays with angels, associating them with
the Roman Catholic baroque in a dedication that is intended to chafe
the sensibilities of many Protestants. The dedicatee was Maria Beatrice
of Modena, who in November 1673 became Duchess of York and
wife to the heir to the throne: Dryden wryly praises the celestial beauty
of this most prominent Catholic in imagery drawn from the opera:
‘your Person is a Paradice, and your Soul a Cherubin within to guard
it’. She has ‘subverted . . . even our Fundamental Laws’ and reigns
‘absolute’ over the English, despite their stubborn assertions of liberty.
Meanwhile, it is the poet’s duty to celebrate such beauty: ‘Beauty is
their Deity to which they Sacrifice, and Greatness is their Guardian
Angel which protects them.’29 The doctrine of guardianship is also
exploited in the dramatic text, where, however, a significant variation
is introduced. Gabriel and Ithuriel refer to themselves as ‘the Guardians
of this new made pair’ (3. 2. 2), suggesting that they are individual
guardian angels rather than guardians of place. In Paradise Lost it is
Gabriel who assigns Ithuriel and Zephon to protect Adam and Eve,
dryden’s fall 337
and the angels assume a collective responsibility for the humans.30 The
distinction may well be intended to pass unnoticed. It is, however,
theologically significant, particularly in the light of Dryden’s stressing,
in the ‘Discourse Concerning Satire’, that both Protestants and Cath
olics adhere to certain beliefs about angels. While the existence of local
guardian angels was relatively uncontroversial, credence in individual
guardian angels was used by some to distinguish Roman Catholic
doctrine from Protestant.31 Dryden’s two phrases about guardian
angels do not indicate that he held such beliefs; he had not yet
converted to Catholicism; and in any case Protestants who rejected
the doctrine of custodian angels after the Fall might hold that angels
were assigned to Adam and Eve in paradise, at least until they were
debarred by the fiery cherubim.32 Dryden’s language nonetheless
articulates a doctrine that marks confessional difference, and we
know from his ‘Discourse’ that it was a confessional difference he
understood in 1693. If he does not believe it, then his choice of
terminology foregrounds the imaginative uses that can be made of
the elaborate dogma of angelologists. Theological arguments about the
nature and status of angels provide an apparatus for the poet, who can
elaborate doctrine through narrative and complex imagery, who can
articulate subtle distinctions or create scandal by the lightest of touches
upon issues that are deeply rooted in doctrinal or confessional differ
ences. It is, in part, the complexity of their theological basis that makes
angels a useful register for the poet.
All Dryden’s angels are male. In ‘The Authors Apology for
Heroique Poetry and Poetique Licence’, which appears as a preface
to the printed State of Innocence, he justifies this decision: ‘how are
Poetical Fictions, how are Hippocentaures and Chymæras, or how are
Angels and immaterial Substances to be Imag’d? . . . For Immaterial
Substances we are authoriz’d by Scripture in their description: and
herein the Text accommodates itself to vulgar apprehension, in giving
Angels the likeness of beautiful young men.’33 What is remarkable
here is not Dryden’s uncharacteristic conformity to erroneous ‘vulgar
apprehension’, but his concern with the nature of matter (the pseudo
paradox of ‘Immaterial Substances’), his association of this with poet
ical creation, and his use of the hard word ‘accommodates’, which is
doing more work than at first appears. We have already seen his
reference to readers ‘accommodating’ their reading of Daniel with
the principles of (Neo ) Platonic philosophy. He invokes the doctrine
of accommodation (see Chapter 6, above), and humorously responds

to the several passages in Paradise Lost in which the angel Raphael
puzzles over how to relate the ‘invisible exploits j Of warring Spirits’
and ‘lift j Human imagination’ to apprehend the divine. His own text,
Dryden says, has to lower itself to the apprehension of the vulgar
audience, and in doing this he will represent all angels as beautiful
young men. This is doubtless convenient for the Restoration stage. It
also enables Adam to vent his misogyny following the Fall: ‘Our wise
Creator, for his Quires divine, j Peopled his Heav’n with Souls all
masculine’ (5. 4. 66–7). Yet there is more at stake here, because
Dryden is correcting Milton’s angelology, with its startling, sexually
active angels:
To whom the angel with a smile that glowed
Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue,
Answered. Let it suffice thee that thou knowst
Us happy, and without love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoyst
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier that air with air, if spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul. (8. 618 29)
As Dryden makes the sexual encounter between Adam and Eve

conform to the norms of Restoration comedy (when he offers a close
embrace, she protests, ‘Somewhat forbids me, which I cannot name’;
2. 3. 52), he cancels the sexuality of unfallen angels in a silent correc
tion of Milton’s heterodoxy.
Dryden’s angels are not free of sexual longing, however, and there is
a sting in the tail. While in hell, Lucifer remarks how odd the
rumoured mankind is:
Of form Divine; but less in excellence
Than we; indu’d with Reason lodg’d in Sence:
The Soul pure Fire, like ours, of equal force;
But, pent in Flesh, must issue by discourse:
We see what is; to Man Truth must be brought
By Sence, and drawn by a long Chain of thought:
By that faint light, to will and understand;
For made less knowing, he’s at more command. (1. 1. 146 53)
dryden’s fall 339
This is far from Raphael’s distinction between intuitive and discursive

reason (5. 486–90); for Dryden angelic cognition is different in nature.
For Milton there was a fundamental continuity between human and
angelic comprehension that followed from the material nature of both
creatures; Dryden was a dualist. Not only does Lucifer not have a
body; unlike Milton’s Satan he is immaterial, insubstantial. He looks
upon Adam and Eve and thinks that they are odd. Strikingly, we learn
the characteristics of angels from their mouths while they are reflecting
on what a peculiar creature man is. Later Lucifer spies on Adam and
Eve and discovers lust; and Dryden exploits the dramatic potential of
angelic disembodiment. Eve, having given in to Adam’s expectations,
describes her experience of orgasm (ecstasy, immortal pleasures,
breathlessness, loss of selfhood; 3. 1. 39–46), and Lucifer expresses
envy:
Why have not I like these, a body too,
Form’d for the same delights which they pursue?
I could (so variously my passions move)
Enjoy and blast her, in the act of love. (3. 1. 92 5)
It is a clever defamiliarizing device, reflecting on human difference

from a non human perspective: Lucifer initially thinks that Eve is odd
because she has a body; later he wishes he had one, so he could rape her
and experience orgasm himself.
The conjunction between sexual desire and malicious and destruc
tive violence appears plentifully on the Restoration stage, but Lucifer’s
fantasy has a basis in Christian exegesis. This is the story of the sons of
God who take to wife the daughters of men in Genesis 6, and who,
according to one reading, were fallen angels.34 Milton rejects this
reading of Genesis; Dryden dramatizes the diabolical temptation,
while making it plain that it was mechanically impossible: angels, to
Lucifer’s chagrin, don’t have the right equipment. In doing so he
follows Milton, and thus differs from most seventeenth century nar
rative poems about angels, in presenting an angel reflecting upon its
experience of being, upon what it feels like to be an angel.
None of this is as difficult as Milton’s dense angel learning, but it
does show Dryden consciously responding to and reworking his
original in terms of its angelology. It is not only in the detail that
their uses of angels differ, however, but in their very mode of repre
sentation. For Milton accommodation is what makes his poem
possible, which is to say, is what makes it true. Everything Milton

writes about angels develops from his beliefs about their nature and fits
with and follows from what he knows about them. He articulates
knowledge through his narratives, and his poetry posits that doctrine
and story, inspired feigning and fact, are inseparable. For Dryden
the case is quite different. His account of accommodation permits
the misrepresentation of angels as young men, in order to fit a com
mon misperception. Spiritual reality matters less than the beauty of the
images. ‘You are not oblig’d, as in a History, to a literal belief of what
the Poet says,’ he writes; ‘but you are pleas’d with the Image, without
being couzen’d by the Fiction.’ Milton’s enthusiastic faith and aesthet
ics did not allow of this distinction. Dryden again: ‘And Poets may be
allow’d the like liberty, for describing things which really exist not, if
they are founded on popular belief: of this nature are Fairies, Pigmies,
and the extraordinary effects of Magick: for ’tis still an imitation,
though of other mens fancies.’35 He does not here name angels,
though these words appear in a discussion of the legitimacy of repre
senting angels. In the near contemporary essay ‘Of Heroique Playes’
(prefatory to The Conquest of Granada, 1672) he makes the same point:
‘an Heroick Poet is not ty’d to a bare representation of what is true, or
exceeding probable: but that he may let himself loose to visionary
objects, and to the representation of such things, as depending not on
sence, and therefore not to be comprehended by knowledge, may give
him a freer scope for the imagination’. This judgement may be
understood as a direct response to reading Paradise Lost. Milton freely
imagines such visionary objects, but ties himself to theology. Dryden’s
visionary objects are governed by the proper conventions of heroic
poetry, only through which could ideal beauty be wrought.36 It is both
acknowledgement and criticism of Milton.
Dryden then raises the question of representing ‘spirits’, and continues:
This I say is foundation enough for Poetry: and I dare farther affirm that the
whole doctrine of separated beings, whether those Spirits are incorporeal
substances, (which Mr. Hobbs, with some reason thinks to imply a contradic
tion,) or that they are a thinner and more Aerial sort of bodies (as some of
the Fathers have conjectur’d) may better be explicated by Poets, than by
Philosophers or Divines.37
‘Spirits’ here slips straight into angels, and the value of angels is that we
cannot know about them; they are machinery for literature; a matter
dryden’s fall 341
for feigned representations, visionary objects. This is what makes them

beautiful and therefore useful.
Freewill
Dryden had just been reading Hobbes. Curiously (and perhaps it is no

more than a curiosity), in his notes of Milton, following the mention
of Dryden, Aubrey adds: ‘His [Milton’s] widow assures me that
Mr. Hobbs was not one of his acquaintance,’ as if familiarity with
Hobbes and with Dryden were connected. To see how Dryden is
responding to Milton, it is necessary to shed more light on his reading
of Hobbes, and the importance to Dryden’s writings of debates about
freewill. Some evidence for this lies in another passage of The State
of Innocence in which Dryden deviated from and expanded upon
Paradise Lost.
Between the dream and the separation scenes Raphael and Gabriel
enter paradise to warn Adam that an ‘Apostate Angel’ seeks their
downfall and has whispered ‘Delusive dreams’ into Eve’s ear. Adam
must protect Eve’s frailty, and, though the warning assists with the
outward threat, responsibility is ultimately his: ‘Ills, from within, thy
reason must prevent’ (4. 1. 13–18). To which Adam responds with a
question: ‘what praises can I pay j Defended in obedience; taught
t’obey’ (21–2). Adam asks in what sense his praise can be meaningful
if he is protected and instructed in obedience, which makes his
expression of prayer subservient rather than voluntary. His question
provokes a long and unresolved debate. The scene is the most power
ful in the opera, and it is where Dryden’s adaptation of Milton is most
complex.
The debate between Adam and the angels in The State of Innocence
parallels the exchange over the nature of freewill between Hobbes and
John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, which found its way into print in the
1650s. The texts were first juxtaposed, perhaps without his realizing
the nature of their association, by John Dowell in 1681.38 The exact
nature of the parallel is confusing: Adam and the angels cannot be
straightforwardly aligned with one or other position, and Dryden’s
own relationship with Adam and the angels is not clear.39 To inter
rogate which of Hobbes’s and Bramhall’s arguments Dryden is echo
ing, the nature of those echoes, and where Dryden’s allegiances in the
dichotomies he presents lie, it is necessary to summarize the debate. It

is inspired by God’s instructions to Raphael, the angel’s words on
freewill to Adam in book 5 of Paradise Lost, and Satan’s complaint
about the praise owed to God and ‘The debt immense of endless
gratitude’ (5. 235–45; 4. 46, 52). In response to Adam’s question,
Dryden’s Raphael states that man possesses freewill as he was given
reason; Adam doubts that ‘finite man’ can possess freewill, as that
would make his state equal his Creator’s. Adam’s increasingly sophis
ticated arguments, here, closely keyed to the terms of Hobbes’s and
Bramhall’s debate, are what spurred the scorn of Tomkinson; his
philosophical inclinations seem absurd, perhaps intentionally so,
from his waking moments, when his first words recapitulate
the proof of the existence of God from Descartes’s Meditations (2. 1.
1–12). Raphael suggests that God does not give his power away, but
can give away liberty of choice, just as—and the mechanical analogy is
interestingly unfortunate—he can set an orb in motion then leave it to
revolve of its own accord. But, Adam asks, how does this square with
preordination? Either freewill or preordination must be in vain.
Gabriel responds (a little lamely; the purpose must be to introduce a
discussion of various kinds of causality) that the rest of Creation is
governed by necessity, and Adam asks: ‘Yet causes their effects
necessitate j In willing agents: where is freedom then?’ (4. 1. 51–2).
In other words, even if man wills something, this does not make him
free unless his will is a cause; otherwise he may will that which is
ordained by other causes, and not be free in any sense that Adam can
understand. Raphael then posits the distinction between God’s infer
ence of what must be and the bringing about of events, thus ‘Causes
which work th’effect, force not the will’ (4. 1. 64). The sense is not
entirely clear, but the angel’s point seems to be that there are first and
second causes, and freewill exists within the realm of second causes,
the realm which Adam understands; God’s foreknowledge pertains to
the realm of first causes, which is beyond Adam’s apprehension and
does not interfere with freewill. Adam responds, perhaps with some
justification, ‘the long chain makes not the bondage less’ (4. 1. 66). He
may feel free, but is in fact not; he can choose, but in so doing wills
the inevitable. At this point the weary Gabriel—their limitations are
another respect in which Dryden’s angels resemble Milton’s—states
that these ‘impious fancies . . . Make Heav’n, all pure, thy crimes to
preordain’ (4. 1. 75–6).
dryden’s fall 343
Who said anything about crimes? Dryden is less meticulous about

the condition of innocence than Milton, though his mode of repre
sentation has in any case abandoned all notions of plausibility. Adam is
duly chastised, but he might well have asked how Gabriel has inside
information about the crimes he will freely commit. Gabriel’s point is
that Adam’s scepticism about freewill risks the scandal of imputing
the origins of evil to God. Here Adam’s Scholastic training breaks
down. He apologizes and asks perhaps his most important question: if
freedom is founded on the necessity of first causes, and first causes are
sufficient to produce effects, how is man free? And Raphael responds:
Sufficient causes, only work th’effect
When necessary agents they respect.
Such is not man; who, though the cause suffice,
Yet often he his free assent denies. (4. 1. 85 8)
In other words: causes may be sufficient but nonetheless not take effect
because the human will, not subject to necessity, denies them. We are
witnessing a confusion about the meaning of sufficiency, and I will
look at these lines more closely below. Adam asks in what sense these
causes are then ‘sufficient’, and Raphael points out that Adam’s
account of causality only works with the benefit of hindsight, from
which perspective anything can be proved necessary.
The exchange approaches its climax as Adam changes direction and
asks the central question about the origins of evil: why does not God
prevent man from sinning, because by not preventing ill he seems to
will it? Gabriel’s Miltonic response is that such intervention would
take away freewill. And Adam answers, of course, wouldn’t that be
better for man than to be allowed freely to sin? What then would
be the point of reward and punishment? responds Raphael. We have
returned to the starting point: how can rote praise be meaningful?
Crimes are necessary to allow just punishment and reward. Then, with
a dramatic panache only angels could get away with, Gabriel and
Raphael announce that they have completed their task and leave.
They have not: Adam is left to reflect on how hard his condition is,
wishing that he were ‘ty’d up from doing ill’ (4. 1. 114), just as Milton’s
Adam would do after the Fall. The angels have failed to explain the
problem of freewill to Adam, and he is left helpless on stage, a character
in a drama, faced with choices, riven with doubts, and waiting for the
next scene. Enter Eve, wanting to spend some time on her own.
Hobbes’s argument with Bramhall about liberty and necessity began

at the Marquess of Newcastle’s Paris residence in 1645, when they
were all in exile. Bramhall’s ‘A Discourse of Liberty and Necessity’
circulated in manuscript, articulating his position and provoking
Hobbes’s response. The fruits of this debate then appeared in print,
increasingly hostile in tone, between 1654 and 1658. Dryden could
have read everything he needed to read to write his scene in a single
volume, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance. Clearly
Stated and Debated between Dr. Bramhall Bishop of Derry, and Thomas
Hobbes of Malmesbury (1656). Though the volume was Hobbes’s, as the
title page suggests it presents animadversions between both parties,
printing lengthy extracts from Bramhall’s anterior texts. The typog
raphy requires patience. Hobbes begins by quoting a passage of Bram
hall’s ‘Discourse’ under the initials J.D. (John, Bishop of Derry), then
quotes, under T.H., his own Of Libertie and Necessitie (1654) in
response, then J.D.’s A Defence of True Liberty (1655). Then he incorp
orates a section of new argument, headed ‘Animadversions’, which
consists mainly of compressed quotations from the previous sections
threaded towards a conclusion. Hobbes does not explain what he is
doing, how he is doing it, or even identify the texts that he is quoting:
Animadversions upon the Bishops Reply Number, XI.
This argument was sent forth only as an espie, to make a more full discovery,
what were the true grounds of T.H. his supposed Necessity.
The Argument which he sendeth forth as an Espie, is this, If either the decree of
God, or the Fore knowledge of God, or the Influence of the Stars, or the
Concatenation (which he sayes falsly I call a Concourse) of causes, or the Physical
or Moral Efficacy of objects, or the last Dictate of the Understanding, do take
away true liberty, then Adam before his fall had no true liberty. In answer
whereunto I said, that all the things now existent, were necessary to the production of the
effect to come; that the Fore knowledge of God causeth nothing though the Will do;
that the influence of the Stars is but a small part of that cause which maketh the
Necessity; and that this consequence If the concourse of all the causes necessitate
the effect, then Adam had no true liberty, was false. But in his words, if those do
take away true liberty, then Adam before his fall had no true liberty, the consequence is
good; but then I deny that Necessity takes away Liberty; the reason whereof which
is this, Liberty is to choose what we will, not to choose our Will, no inculcation
is sufficient to make the Bishop take notice of, notwithstanding he be otherwhere so
witty, and here so crafty, as to send out Arguments for spies. The cause why I denied the
consequence was, that I thought the force thereof consisted in this, that Necessity in the
Bishops opinion destroyed Liberty.40
dryden’s fall 345
For the most part the roman text repeats Bramhall’s words, the italic
type Hobbes’s voice; he begins with A Defence, works backwards to ‘A
Discourse’, then justifies his former response in Of Libertie. It is a
cumbersome procedure, though it is marked by professional honesty:
a reader sympathetic to Bramhall could find his argument at length here,
and in his own words, albeit fragmented by Hobbes’s contradictions.
This paragraph, despite its oblique formulation, reveals both how
Hobbes’s arguments could inform Dryden’s reading and rewriting
of Paradise Lost, and the proximity between Hobbes’s words and
Dryden’s angels’ position on necessary causes and the human will.
Hobbes is a compatibilist: he contends that freewill exists, and that
there is no conflict between this and God’s prescience. Liberty consists
in the absence of external impediments, so that one can do as one wills,
and divine prescience is not an impediment to this. It is compulsion
that obstructs liberty, and not necessity, which is the realm in which
God’s foreknowledge and first causes operate. Hobbes’s conception of
what it meant to possess freewill was more restricted than that assumed
by many contemporaries. Man is free because he experiences himself as
free (Dryden’s Gabriel points out that man is the best judge of whether
or not he is free), because he deliberates upon an action and then wills
it.41 Man’s will is nonetheless subject to causes. This is most clearly
stated in a passage of Leviathan which uses the same chain metaphor
against which Dryden’s Adam remonstrates. Hobbes writes:
because every act of mans will, and every desire, and inclination, proceedeth
from some cause, and that from another cause, in a continual chaine, (whose
first link is in the hand of God the first of all causes,) they proceed from
necessity. So that to him that could see the connexion of those causes, the
necessity of all mens voluntary actions, would appeare manifest.42
In these terms foreknowledge is an effect, not a cause: knowledge,

even foreknowledge, depends on events, not vice versa.43 Raphael says
just this in a crisp triplet:
Heav’n by fore knowing what will surely be,
Does only, first, effects in causes see;
And finds, but does not make necessity. (4. 1. 56 8)
Hobbes’s position looks like Raphael’s, not like Adam’s position, and
Adam inverts Hobbes’s argument about the chain. For Hobbes, the
chain does not preclude liberty; for Adam it does.
Bramhall’s defence of liberty does not rule out a notion of preordi

nation; he maintains that freedom and necessity are irreconcilable, but
nonetheless does not deny that human freewill and preordination exist.
His resolution of the problem is different, however, from Hobbes’s
insistence that they are compatible. He is critical of attempts to separate
causes: consider, he writes, ‘a man imprisoned and fettered, is he
therefore free to walk where he will because he has feet and a loco
motive faculty?’44 This is Adam’s chain once again, and Hobbes may
have had in mind this passage when writing about freewill in Leviathan.
Man must be free, Bramhall insists, or punishment could not be just
(here he resembles the angels’ position), hell could not exist, and
society would fall apart. This is certain, even if we cannot comprehend
how it is so. We must simply accept that we cannot understand.
Dryden’s Adam resists passivity and refuses to concede the limits of
reason. Bramhall accepts ineffability and places the harmony between
prescience, causes, and freedom in a realm of temporality beyond
human experience or comprehension, introducing a note of mystical
obscurity:
the readiest way to reconcile contingence and liberty with the decrees and
prescience of God, and most remote from the altercations of these times, is to
subject future contingents to the aspect of God, according to that presentiality
which they have in eternity. Not that things future, which are not yet existent,
are co existent with God; but because the infinite knowledge of God, incir
cling all times in the point of eternity, does attain to their future being, from
whence proceeds their objective and intelligible being.45
This is a form of compatibilism, which places the resolution of the

apparent tensions between prescience, causes, and freedom in a realm
of temporality beyond human experience or comprehension. Bram
hall’s terminological imprecision was sure to irritate Hobbes, who
responded that he shared this opinion, and it seemed to go against
the rest of Bramhall’s argument. Hobbes also noted that, while they
both seemed to believe that good angels were free, Bramhall’s claim
that they were ‘more free than we’ was nonsensical.46
On the question of the chain, and the separation between first
and second causes, Dryden’s Adam seems to side not with Hobbes
but with Bramhall. Adam thinks he cannot be free if only within a
realm of secondary causes, whereas for Hobbes that is just how far
freedom extends. Adam’s comments on causes necessitating effects
dryden’s fall 347
iterates Bramhall’s answer to Hobbes. The angels use compatibilist

arguments, and while Bramhall himself defended a kind of com
patibilism, the angels do so by distinguishing between first and
second causes. This is Hobbes’s distinction, and the angelic notion
of freewill looks more like Hobbes’s, which for many (including
Bramhall and Adam, and subsequent philosophers) was not freewill
at all.
However, at one stage at least in the argument the resemblances
between Adam and Bramhall and between the angels and Hobbes
falter. This is in the lines quoted above, when Raphael says that
‘sufficient causes’ are only effective when they function through
‘necessary agents’, and not through man, who can freely deny his
assent. Hobbes had argued that a sufficient cause was one in which
nothing was lacking to produce an effect; which was the same as a
necessary cause. The notion that a free agent is something that might
not produce an effect when all the necessary causes were present ‘is
non sence, being as much to say, The cause may be sufficient, that is to
say, necessarie, and yet the effect shall not follow’.47 For Bramhall there
was no contradiction: ‘a cause is said to be sufficient in respect of the
ability of it to act, not in respect of its will to act. The concurrence of
the will is needful to the production of a free effect. But the cause may
be sufficient, though the will do not concur.’ For Bramhall, Hobbes
was wilfully confusing two sorts of sufficiency, one defined inclusively
of the will, the other exclusively, and was guilty of ‘a meer Logom
achy, or contention about words’.48 The distinctions are also played
out in the opera:
adam. What causes not, is not sufficient still.
gabriel. Sufficient in it self; not in thy will. (4. 1. 89 90)
Gabriel’s position here is clearly that of Bramhall; and Adam articulates

Hobbes’s position, that if causes do not produce effects, then they are
not sufficient. The terminological match is precise: Dryden had these
texts in mind when writing this scene.
There is no one to one correspondence between the positions of
the disputants. Adam and the angels both articulate arguments and
assumptions drawn from both Hobbes and Bramhall. The debate is the
same, but the skirmish lines are drawn differently, and there is no
single, simple alteration that explains the transformations. Dryden is
using the arguments, not offering us a roman à clef. His appropriations
reflect the presentation of Hobbes’s Questions: animadversions which

exhibit both sides of the case and both voices, before digesting the
voices into a new argument, a third, hybrid, though partial, voice.49
Dryden’s reworking of the Hobbes–Bramhall debate is self consciously
unresolved, and it impinges directly upon his understanding of
dramatic form. It is, therefore, not an anomalous intrusion into a
disunified text but his considered response to the form of Milton’s
epic. This can be seen in what ensues: Adam is abandoned on stage, the
angels having flown off after their glib ‘Our task is done’ (4. 1. 111),
and faced with a decision. He feels helpless under the burden of a
freewill he cannot understand and which the angels cannot explain to
him. He is not a proposition in a debate but a character in a drama. The
debate concerns freewill specifically inflected in a dramatic context.
This is not about Hobbes and Bramhall: it is about theatre.
Dryden had puzzled over freewill before he read Paradise Lost, and
his interest caused him to pick out this theme in reading and subse
quently adapting the epic. One of the reasons the Hobbes–Bramhall
debate mattered to Dryden was because it addressed his conception of
theatre. Just as angels presented a perspective on literary representation
and the machinery of epic, so freewill was a means of understanding
the two grandest literary genres, tragedy and epic, not least because it
necessarily illuminated heroism. I will unpick some of the connections
between these themes before returning to the matter of dreams.
Dryden proposed one link between freedom and heroism in his
1664 dedication of The Rival Ladies to Roger, Earl of Orrery. There he
writes that Orrery governs men in his role as a statesman as he also
governs them on the stage in his plays:
Here is no chance which you have not fore seen; all your Heroes are more
than your Subjects; they are your Creatures. And though they seem to move
freely, in all the Sallies of their Passions, yet you make Destinies for them
which they cannot shun. They are mov’d (if I may dare to say so) like the
Rational Creatures of the Almighty Poet, who walk at Liberty, in their own
Opinion, because their Fetters are Invisible; when indeed the Prison of their
Will, is the more sure for being large: and instead of an absolute power over
their Actions, they have only a wretched Desire of doing that, which they
cannot choose but do.50
The relationship between freedom and necessity is one that is played
out on the stage. It is the same relationship that Dryden seeks to resolve
in his proposals concerning guardian angels: what is the role of
dryden’s fall 349
uncertainty and therefore drama when the omnipotent fights against

the finite, or when the outcome of the conflict dramatized is already
universally known?51 It is the playwright’s art to make his creatures
seem to walk and choose at liberty, when in fact he has already sealed
their future. If all the world’s a stage, then the playwright is God, and
vice versa. Freewill is a dramatic problem. The stage is also, therefore,
a place where the relationship between freewill and divine preordina
tion can be represented and explored. The apparent freewill of the
characters coexists with the aesthetic design of the author. Humans
and characters are both ‘Rational Creatures’ (which is to say, things
created); the poet is also the ‘Almighty’. And both humans and
characters walk—or might walk—in invisible fetters, the chains of
which Adam complains. According to the ‘Discourse Concerning
Satire’, God furnished his angels with insight into only part of the
story, not the ‘Main design’. According to the Essay of Dramatic Poesie,
the ‘Unity of Action’ of a play depends on whether the lesser,
‘imperfect actions of the Play are conducing to the main design’.52
The playwright’s plot is described with the same phrase as divine
providence: both plan a ‘main design’, which is beyond the cogni
zance of their creatures. An agent’s ignorance of the main design is
what enables both the perception of freedom to act and drama itself.
Freewill is for Dryden a concept inscribed within dramatic and
aesthetic theory. Dryden’s critical theory, the first sustained body
of criticism in English, is recognizably prompted by theology and
political and natural philosophy.
Freewill, angels, and their dramatic and aesthetic consequences are
what is at stake in the pivotal scene in The Conquest of Granada, Part II,
performed in January 1671 (three years before The State of Innocence,
and, I propose, after Dryden had read Paradise Lost). Almanzor, the
charismatic and faintly ridiculous hero of the burlesque heroic drama,
is approached by the ghost of his mother, sent, she relates, by an angel
from the battlements of heaven to warn him that he is in danger of
committing a terrible crime in battle (killing his father, though she
does not disclose this). The visit echoes Hamlet, though the ghost is
specifically not a purgatorial visitor; after death she flew, she says, to
the middle sky, but could go no further until she had completed the
assigned task. Immediately after the ghost disappears, Almanzor reflects
upon the nature of freewill, just as Dryden’s Adam asks the angels
about freewill when they convey to him a warning message. Almanzor

exclaims:
Oh Heav’n, how dark a Riddle’s thy Decree,
Which bounds our Wills, yet seems to leave ’em free!
Since thy fore knowledge cannot be in vain,
Our choice must be what thou didst first ordain:
Thus, like a Captive in an Isle confin’d,
Man walks at large, a Pris’ner of the Mind:
Wills all his Crimes, (while Heav’n th’Indictment draws;)
And, pleading guilty, justifies the Laws.——— (4. 3. 143 50)
How can punishment be just in such circumstances? The analysis is

fundamentally Hobbesian, though Almanzor colours it with Bram
hall’s criticism of Hobbes: this account of freedom might actually be a
form of bondage. Our wills appear to be free, we experience our selves
as free, though we are in fact prisoners invisibly confined. In an
extraordinary turn a few lines later Almanzor meets his love Almahide,
who compares true love to angelic digestion:
For it, like Angels, needs no Nourishment.
To eat and drink can no perfection be;
All Appetite implies Necessity. (4. 3. 170 2)
The associations are striking and revealing. Dryden later noted that
‘Thoughts, according to Mr. Hobbs, have always some Connexion,’
and the thematic connection here, between angels and freewill, appe
tite and necessity, seems to be via Milton, whose angels eat with real
appetite and discuss freewill.53 Milton places angelic meals at the centre
of a heroic poem, and Dryden alludes to these topics, seemingly
without other motivation or association, in a play that explores heroic
form, a recurring preoccupation of his criticism. In invoking these
themes, Dryden is pursuing an analysis of heroic drama and poetry.
The essay ‘Of Heroique Playes’ prefaced to The Conquest of Granada,
with its reflections on the representation of ‘visionary objects’ and
‘incorporeal substances’, is also, in part, a response to Paradise Lost. In
his dedication of the same play to the Duke of York (in which he
raptures that ‘the Guardian Angel of our Nation’ takes a particular
interest in the duke), Dryden suggests that Almanzor is himself an
experimental character of ‘excentrique vertue’, whose ‘excessive and
overboyling courage’ and transgressions and imperfections cause him
to shine more brightly in an epic context.54 Almanzor is governed only
dryden’s fall 351
by pride and appetite, yet defies the impositions of the chains of

necessity. His reflection upon freewill is a unique moment in the
drama, prompted by the ghost’s intervention, which itself announces
the imminence of the dramatic resolution, and it is a foil by which his
defining heroism is illuminated. Almahide tells Almanzor: ‘Great Souls
discern not when the leap’s too wide’ (4. 2. 451). His heroism is one
that will defy society and the divine ‘main design’, and thus plays a role
in defining just what constitutes a heroic play. It is as if a dramatic
character can challenge the necessity that the great playwright imposes
upon his freewill. The hero defies the chains of inevitability. No
wonder Dryden thought Satan the hero of Paradise Lost.55
Dryden’s long standing concern with the nature of heroism and
how it could be represented was inseparable from his concern with
literary form, and implicitly conceived an account of freewill; and,
conversely, an understanding of the nature of freewill was fundamental
to a coherent account of dramatic action and of the formal properties
of heroic poetry and drama. Dryden’s reading and subsequent adapta
tion of Paradise Lost had at its centre his enduring concern with freewill
and dramatic form, and the virtue of angels in the machinery of
representation.
Dreams
Dryden’s engagement with Milton on the terms of contemporary

debates about the nature and office of angels, and his extended,
discursive treatment of freewill, reveal that The State of Innocence, for
all its many aesthetic shortcomings, was more than an offensive
vulgarization or assault on the politics of Paradise Lost. The adaptation
provided for Dryden an occasion not only to respond publicly to the
poet whose greatness he had cautiously acknowledged, and who may
have scotched his own plans to write a British epic, but also to deal
with a series of themes that recurred throughout his work: freewill,
immaterial substances and their representation, angels, and literary
form. Seventeenth century authors moved fluidly between these
themes because one implied another and because the notions associ
ated with each substantially overlapped.
Dryden’s purpose in adapting Paradise Lost was a serious one, and we
can see its coherence in terms of its author’s interests, though the
adaptation may sometimes seem tendentious and incoherent in

relation to the epic. In conclusion, let us return to the dream scene
in both Milton’s and Dryden’s versions and see what is to be learned
about both texts from Dryden’s reworking. Eve’s dream does not
appear in traditional Christian exegesis, though in the pseudepigraphal
Apocalypsis Moses she has a premonitory dream of Abel’s murder by
Cain.56 An implicit influence upon Milton’s poem may be the corpus
of works on witchcraft that testify to the diabolical use of dreams to
tempt unsuspecting women.57 Some authors suggested that unfallen
angels, especially guardian angels, had a power to influence dreams.58
Dreams and angels are intimately related in both poetry and theology.
The dream as a literary motif, a stage in a progress towards a fall, such
as Redcrosse’s dream in The Faerie Queene, is also behind Milton’s
passage. Less well known, but which may have had a greater impres
sion on Milton, was the discussion of dreams in Heywood’s Hierarchie
of the Blessed Angells, in which dreams are stated as proof of the
existence of angels. While Hobbes dismissed the idea of efficacious
witchcraft on the grounds of the absurdity of the notion of an ‘incor
poreal’ substance, Heywood took more or less the opposite tack,
arguing that there must be a creature ‘intermediate’ between God
and man, and that, as there are bodies without spirits and bodies
with spirits, so must there be spirits without bodies:
Unbodied things that have both life and sence,
And these the Spirits, Dreames will teach us plaine,
By their events, that such about us raine,
To warne us of the future.59
Heywood then lists a number of prophetic dreams, from the Bible and
classical literature, that prove the existence of immaterial beings and
therefore of angels. Hence, dreams prove the existence of angels.
Others believed that dreams were dangerous because they were false.
Lucy Hutchinson expressed reservations about Milton’s poem, suggest
ing that he pushed too far into what could not be known, the mysteries
that God concealed from man’s knowledge. Instead the religious poet
should stick to what is true and certain, that is, in the Creator’s Word as
recorded in Scripture, ‘Which, when it taught us how the world was
made, j Wrapped up th’invisible in mystic shade’.60 This was something
of a commonplace: Hobbes and Sir William Davenant had suggested as
much, Marvell expressed his concerns over Milton’s invasion of the
dryden’s fall 353
‘sacred truths’, and Milton’s Raphael warns Adam not to conjecture on

the secrets of the heavens or to dream on other worlds.61 For Dryden
this was of no concern. He concurs with Hutchinson that dreams are by
definition untrue, but for him it is this that gives them their peculiar
literary force: they are feigning, like art itself, and therefore a suitable
medium for reflecting upon art and for drawing attention to the
artfulness of art.
For all its literary allusiveness, Milton’s Eve’s dream is unassailably
real. This is one of the distinctive qualities of Milton’s aesthetic against
which Dryden reacts. The reader is given, in Adam’s voice, a physio
logical explanation of how dreams are produced. When Satan crouches
at Eve’s ear in book 4, he assays her in order to ‘forge j Illusions as he
list, phantasms and dreams’ (4. 802–3). We do not know whether Eve
dreams a story that Satan whispers to her, or whether she constructs her
own dream story in response to his whispered seductions. In either
case, the dream is figured as a real dream in Milton’s narrative, so real
that it has provoked critical debates about whether the dream itself
imparts sinful notions to Eve. Dryden’s dream scene, by way of con
trast, is a play within a play, or a masque within an opera, in which
Lucifer is the playwright and director. The condition of its possibility is
not human psychology or physiology, but the theatre itself. Dryden’s
Adam comments that women are ‘With shows delighted’ (5. 4. 64);
Lucifer, that ‘Vain shows, and Pomp, the softer sex betray’ (3. 3. 12);
and it is a show that Eve gets. Whereas Milton’s Eve is tempted by a
serpent that speaks and offers eloquent, reasoned arguments, Dryden’s
Eve watches a serpent take the fruit from the tree and then reappear in
human shape (4. 2, stage directions). She is deceived by show. In
Dryden’s adaptation what tempts Eve is theatricality, the dramatization
of her temptation which takes place not in her head but in front of her
sleeping eyes. Lucifer has invented theatre.62 In the separation scene
Adam warns Eve of the fallen archangel: ‘Full of Art is he’ (4. 1. 162).
Dryden’s Eve’s dream is not a real dream, but a metatheatrical
reflection upon the nature of the show that the King’s Company
would be putting on at Drury Lane: it plays with the idea of show
as temptation and transgression because it is a fiction. We are not
obliged literally to believe the playwright, writes Dryden in his pref
ace, ‘but you are pleas’d with the Image, without being couzen’d by
the Fiction’. Milton writes his account of the invisible and immaterial
bolstered by his self assurance that he writes nothing contrary to what
he knows is or could be true, and relying on the theological principle of

accommodation to collapse the distance between human understanding
and impenetrable celestial truths. In Dryden’s criticism the figuration or
imaging of nature is primary, but the art takes on its own life, and can
transcend questions of verisimilitude by displacing or becoming iden
tical with nature itself. Accommodation is for theologians, not drama
tists. Art must imitate nature, but when it is successful it goes beyond
imitation and is judged on the terms of art, on whether its images are,
he writes, ‘strongly and beautifully set before the eye of the Reader’.63
Lucifer stages Eve’s dream, for Eve and Dryden’s audience, as a piece of
theatre which is to be valued according to the beauty of its singing,
dancing, machinery, and text. In adapting Paradise Lost for the theatre,
Dryden is demolishing the political underpinnings of its aesthetics
and its enthusiastic religion, and translating it—painstakingly and
thoughtfully, if unsatisfactorily and incompletely—into a new literary
mode. We are tempted, with Eve, by the theatre itself.
14
Conclusion
Angels and Literary Representation
Angels in Protestant Culture
Wherefore, if we will be rightly wise, we must leave those vanities that idle men
have taught without warrant of the word of God, concerning the nature,
degree, and multitude of Angels. I know that such matters as this, are by
many more greedily taken hold of, & are more pleasant unto them than such
things as lie in their daily use. But if it greeve us not to be the schollers of Christ,
let it not greeve us to follow that order of learning that he hath appointed. So
shall it so come to passe, that being contended with his schooling, we shall not
onely forbeare, but also abhorre superfluous speculations, from which he calleth
us away. No man can deny, that the same Denyse, whatsoever man he was, hath
disputed many things both subtlely and wittilie in his Hierarchie of Heaven: but
if a man examine it more neerely, he shall finde that for the most part it is but
meere babling. But the dutifull purpose of a Divine is, not to delite eares with
prating, but to stablish consciences with teaching things true, certaine, and
profitable. If one should read that booke, he would thinke that the man were
slipped downe from heaven, and did tell of things not that he had learned by
hearesay, but that he had seene with his eyes. But Paul which was ravished
above the third heaven, hath uttered no such thing, but also protesteth, that it is
not lawfull for man to speake the secrets that he had seene. Therefore bidding
farewell to that trifling wisedome, let us consider by the simple doctrine of the
Scripture, what the Lord would have us know concerning his Angels.1
Calvin’s words were echoed and reiterated more than they were
heeded. In this book I have shown that Protestants did not shy away
from writing or thinking about angels out of embarrassment, but
that they rather used them imaginatively, often drawing upon pre
Reformation traditions but also exploiting them in innovative ways,
grounded less in anti popish reaction than in the recognition of new
opportunities. The emphasis on sola scriptura opened up interpretation

of the Bible to new and inventive hermeneutics, invited readers to
explore territory that was only imperfectly and half knowingly
mapped. Revitalized biblical exegesis, Scripture reading in new social
and intellectual contexts, the impact of apocalypticism and of natural
philosophy, these and other trends opened up the study of angels to
new and diverse uses.
Protestantism in Britain did result in a decline in interest in, and
articulated opposition to, visual representations of angels. It also
resulted in diminished daily experience of angels in the context of
worship and prayer (and to a lesser extent in liturgical music):
angels were no longer invoked as intercessors, which role was
reserved for Christ alone. However, angels were invoked in ritual
magic, which remained a substantial, if clandestine, presence in
Tudor and Stuart Britain. And, more significantly, thinking and
writing about angels flourished, occupying many forms and social
spaces. Protestants related to angels through words and ideas, not
pictures and gestures. The Protestant imagination was perhaps
more susceptible to images than traditional accounts allowed,2
but concerning angels its engagements were intensively verbal.
Britain produced no Lucas Cranach, able to adapt the visual to
new theology and replace unacceptable with acceptable images
(and in any case, Cranach was able to express little of the Protest
ant view of angels).3 In Britain especially, the visual iconography of
angels did not develop, but the written word intensified to replace
it. Words enabled Protestants to embrace angels, but also to keep
them at a respectful distance, allowed them to represent angels
in powerful and detailed ways without risking the idolatry and
doctrinal confusion associated with visualization.
This was a reciprocal relationship: angels presented a language
through which Protestants examined the nature of representation.
Following medieval traditions, Protestant discussions of accommoda
tion, and of the affinity between remote truths and their human
representations, turned to angelic figuration of bodies as an explana
tory analogy. Protestant epic—by Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas,
Phineas Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, Samuel Pordage, and Lucy
Hutchinson—used angels in central ways as topics or narrative devices.
The Protestant imagination embraced angels, and angels facilitated and
justified the Protestant imagination.
conclusion 357
The theological impetus of the Reformation in Britain was not

hostile to poetry, and poets did not find theology an impediment to
their making. Many critics have suggested an antipathy between
poetry and theology. C. A. Patrides writes that theology provides a
gloomy airless room for poets, that Paradise Lost offers a ‘window to the
sun’ only in so far as it can distance itself from theological discourse.4
The roots of this view lie as far back as the seventeenth century: as we
have seen, Dryden complained that Milton sometimes ‘runs into a flat
of Thought, sometimes for a Hundred Lines together . . . ’tis when he
is got into a Track of Scripture’.5 For Dryden the usefulness of angels
lay in the fact that they were unknown, and therefore ideal substance
for the feigning that was integral to literature; Milton deadened the
imagination by sticking to theology.6 The reaction was strong enough
for John Dennis to need to defend ‘the use of Religion in Poetry’ and
vice versa as early as 1704, though his instrumental language suggests an
awkward, static relationship.7 Yet this was at a time when Milton’s
reputation was waxing as a national poet who transcended political
differences.8 Some who have championed Milton have done so by
insisting that his sources are literary rather than theological and that the
epic does not present or reveal a coherent system of ideas.9 This
presents an unnecessarily narrow and homogeneous view of tradition
and influence that reinforces the assumption that poetry and doctrine
are not friends. This view has influenced or been echoed by those who
are sympathetic to Christianity as well as those who are hostile to it.10 It
is evident in Daniel Featley’s smart quip about uneducated preachers
presenting themselves as true ministers: ‘a Metamorphosis after Ovid,
not made by Poeticall license, but Propheticall Liberty’.11 It also
presumes that fiction and truth are irreconcilable opposites.
Yet there was a considerable overlap between poetry and theology,
and ways in which they were profoundly cross fertilizing.12 Looking at
writing about angels brings this creative intersection into focus. Angels
were discussed in many and diverse modes of theological writing—
scriptural commentary and annotation, systematic theology, sermons
and practical divinity, ritual magic—and the kinds of questions asked,
and the answers given, were often the same. Are there hierarchies of
angels? How did angels eat with Abraham? How fast do angels fly? The
means by which these answers are presented, however, vary between
modes of writing, and in poetry especially the manner of asking and
resolving questions tended to differ sharply from other modes. Angels
continued to be a means of poetically answering questions about the

nature of the universe and man’s place in it into the eighteenth century
and beyond, in admittedly inferior epics such as Samuel Catherall’s
Essay on the Conflagration (1720) and Thomas Newcomb’s The Last
Judgment of Men and Angels . . . After the Manner of Milton (1723).13
I cannot agree with Robert West’s judgement, expressed in 1955:
As the seventeenth century moved on towards Deism angels and devils
became increasingly inconvenient. . . . In the eighteenth century the usual
attitude towards angelology was that it was an exploded study which might
well be dropped from sight. . . . The nineteenth century . . . was likely to think
of angelologists as absurd and amusing, sometimes engagingly human, more
often horrifyingly inhuman, and as always the purest type of man in error
before the establishment of science. Much of this view has persisted into the
twentieth century, even in an age of global conflict and nuclear weapons.14
Newcomb and Catherall seem to live in a different world from Milton
and Pordage, though this need not imply a thesis of modernization,
such as secularization, the disenchantment of the world, the scientific
revolution, or a ‘dissociation of sensibility’.
In this chapter I consider what broader changes might have taken
place in writing and thinking about angels during the two centuries
and more following the Reformation. This concerns not only the
relationship between angels and natural philosophical enquiry, but
knowledge more broadly understood. I will also make some proposals
concerning the relationship between theology and literature, the
demise of allegory, the secularization of writing, and the idea, persist
ent if diffidently handled, of a dissociation of sensibility. These themes
are interconnected, and therefore this chapter offers not only an
account of literary representation in the early modern period, but
also proposals about the relationship between poetry and theology,
and an alternative to some narratives of transition and transformation
in seventeenth century thought and culture.
Fiction, Allegory, and Iconoclasm
Allegory, an exegetical procedure and a mode of writing about abstract

principles or higher ideas through a material narrative, lost prestige in
early modern Britain. The attack on allegory in the late seventeenth
conclusion 359
century focused in its complaints on the fact that allegorical writing

abandoned the world of observable phenomena. Thus Richard
Blackmore in 1695:
Ariosto and Spencer . . . are so hurried on with a boundless, impetuous Fancy over
Hill and Dale, till they are both lost in a Wood of Allegories,—Allegories so wild,
unnatural, and extravagant, as greatly displease the Reader. This way of writing
mightily offends in this Age; and ’tis a wonder how it came to please in any.15
Allegory seemed absurd as it was construed in opposition to history
and realism and the world of ‘fact’.16 This opposition was exaggerated,
however, and continues to be. Allegorical writing borrowed from
other modes to complicate its surface; allegory was preserved undam
aged as a reading strategy, and can be seen as a dominant hermeneutic
mode in modern scholarship.17 Blackmore’s complaint parallels Sam
uel Morland’s mockery, made the same year, of Milton’s war in
heaven, ‘fought between two might Hosts of Blessed and Revolted
Spirits . . . clad with Adamantine Coats, one of which was, by a massy
Sword, cut down to the wast, and stain’d with Angelick blood’.18
Whereas Blackmore’s complaint is that allegory is insufficiently real,
Morland’s is that Milton’s angels are too real.
Milton represented his angels with a discomforting literalness. Milton
shies, as many modern scholars have suggested, from allegory as it did
not offer a sufficiently truthful medium. Allegory has no substance. It
foregrounds its fictionality, tells the reader to find something else in
there. This can be seen in the three main allegorical passages in Paradise
Lost that are clearly demarked as such. First, Satan’s encounter with Sin
and Death and Chaos, which occupies 400 lines in book 2, and which is
then reprised in book 3 with Satan’s flight through limbo, or the
‘Paradise of Fools’, perhaps the most sharply anti Catholic passage in
the poem (3. 444–97); and thirdly, the bridge that Sin and Death build
between earth and hell in book 10 (229–418). Sin, Death, Chaos, and
the bridge are not real things, but negations within a positive reality.
These allegories are associated with evil, and allegory, something that by
its very nature is not, may be a distinctively appropriate mode with
which to represent the perversion of matter and the privation of being.19
Allegory separates representation and thing represented, which creates,
for Milton, a kind of ontological paradox or deficiency. The allegories
can be read as tests for the reader that illustrate the dangers of reifica
tion.20 But when writing about true things, Milton’s aesthetic seeks to
rise above a mere ‘lie’ that points to the truth, and instead to present the
truth as directly as possible.21 This possibility is guaranteed by prophetic
inspiration and by the spirit that facilitates accommodation.
Paradise Lost is nonetheless a fiction. It is a fiction in the sense that it
uses a non literal narrative to explore a truth that is in some way close but
not identical to the narrative. But the way in which it is close is not the
way of allegory, which foregrounds its alterity and posits a real, onto
logical separation; it is rather the way of accommodation, which posits as
close a proximity as possible within the limits of human language and
comprehension, and one that even pushes beyond these limits.22 Literal
and figurative collapse together. Paradise Lost is not a fiction in the sense
that it is made up and untrue. It is a fiction in the sense that Milton uses
literary modes and structures in his representation. The underlying
critical anxiety about the relationship between literature and theology
obscures the sense in which this is a natural and inevitable association.
Tony Nuttall, considering the risks that Milton took in representing
God, concludes that Milton avoided the risk of being accused of
presumption by being literary. Milton’s poem is an epic, and could
not be mistaken for anything other than fiction. Milton did not think he
was inspired.23 Angels were only ‘somewhat as he described them’, and
Raphael has to offer defensive preliminaries to Adam (7. 115–20), which
would be unnecessary if Milton were truly inspired. Nuttall adds that
accommodation is performed by God and not man, and that Milton uses
extra scriptural language. Accommodation could not occur to a mind
living entirely within the accommodated world.24 We have seen that
stronger versions of accommodation were available to Milton and were
implied by him in his representations of inspiration in the poem; they
were sufficiently strong to make his description more than ‘somewhat’
like real angels. But Nuttall’s subtext is that the truth has to sound like
truth, and that literary manoeuvres indicate a commitment to worldli
ness, to literary value, that is at odds with or divorced from commit
ments to justifying God. We find the same in frequently iterated and
generally unexceptionable statements that ‘The ultimate goal’ of Paradise
Lost was to create a ‘national or Christian heroic’ work to rival the
classics in its power and universality, despite the explicit statement of the
invocation to book 1.25
For Milton, however, any poetic superiority he achieved would
have afforded the appearance of truth to the truths he believed to be
conveying (and might also have proved that his was the one true God,
conclusion 361
and that he was truly inspired). Narrative is one means to poetry, but
also a means to truth, not, as Blackmore would have it, mere wild
stories. To Milton narrative offered explanatory structures. It can be
used to expound doctrine, and links in the chain of narrative used to
infer doctrine. Sometimes narratives collapse or implode, and this can
present problems for those seeking doctrinal consistency, as well as
those seeking to read doctrinal consistency into a narrative.26 This is
particularly evident in a text as consequential and closely scrutinized as
Genesis, a text which, moreover, generally prompted strongly literalist
interpretation (in contrast to Revelation, which was always read as a
mixture of literal and allegorical modes).27 These exegetical practices
recognize that even sacred texts are literary. Exegesis is a literary
procedure, and represents the roots of the tradition that lies behind
the critical appreciation of literature.28 Andrew Willet, whose inter
ventions on angels have been discussed earlier in this book, offers the
following intervention on the story of the planting of vines and the
invention of wine in Genesis 9: 20:
And mention is made rather of Noahs planting of vines, then sowing of corne,
wherein he no doubt was occupied also: not because the invention of things
necessarie he would leave unto God, and of things for pleasure unto man, as
Ambrose supposeth (for there is no doubt, but that wheat was in use before the
flood) but for that it ministreth occasion to the storie following.29
Such exegetical manoeuvres, explaining and exploiting narrative struc

tures, also shape Paradise Lost, such as the separation scene between Adam
and Eve, motivated by the fact that they are not together in a later verse
in Genesis. It is Milton’s narrative method to show the story, rather than
to explain it. His narrative is, however, bound to notions of truth.
A similar relationship between narrative and doctrine shapes the first
panel on the east doors of the Baptistery in Florence, designed by Lorenzo
Ghiberti between 1424 and 1452. Milton would almost certainly have seen
this during his trip to Florence in 1638, but its value here is not as an
influence but as an analogous way of developing doctrine through narra
tive. The panel shows Genesis 1–3, representing the creation of Adam
(bottom left), the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib (centre right), the
temptation (upper left, receding into background), and the expulsion.
On the right Adam and Eve have been driven though the gates of Eden,
and appear in relief, closer to the postlapsarian viewer. Ghiberti abandoned
the quatrefoil frames of earlier panels, and used the open square to create
Figure 7. Panel on east doors of the Baptistery in Florence, designed by

Lorenzo Ghiberti, 1424–52
dramatic effects with ruptured planes and frames: the bottom ledge, and
with it Adam’s right hand, breaks out of the picture; a choir of angels form
a canopy sheltering the scene of sin from God and Eve, who occupy the
centre of the image, though one of them appears to be watching the sin;
and an angel bursts through the door through which the humans are
expelled, pushing them towards the viewer and away from the paradisal
scenes to the left. In this panel several images form a narrative, and they are
visually linked by angels. Angels witness Adam’s creation, and separate that
scene from the centre of the picture; they appear to be having a conver
sation except for one that peers behind the others at the temptation,
creating a temporal paradox. Angels clutch the newly created Eve as she
emerges from Adam’s side; another choir forms a canopy over this second
conclusion 363
creative act. The angle of these figures directs the eye to the left, where sin
takes place furtively in the background. In creating a canopy that separates
this scene, Ghiberti isolates sin from Creation, indicating the purity of the
unfallen couple (they were not made flawed and thus susceptible to sin).
The trees guide the eyes upward, to a swirl of angels around God, rippling
across the less dense top third of the picture. Their movement points
downwards and to the right, where it converges in the angel that breaks
through the plane of the picture in expelling Adam and Eve, only here
with their nakedness covered. Angels are witnesses and God’s assistants, but
also narrative devices: as in Paradise Lost, a narrative structured around
angels tells the story of the Fall. Time and space are imperfectly distin
guished, as successive images are interspersed within the same frame, much
as in the complex time scheme of Paradise Lost and other Renaissance
narratives that imperfectly distinguish, or make interdependent, space and
time.30 It is a virtuoso creation that shows how the imagination explicates
doctrine through narrative. Milton’s poetry works like this, but it also
discovers doctrine in the necessary logic of storytelling. As the argument
to book 1 informs its reader: ‘hell, described here, not in the centre (for
heaven and earth may be supposed as yet not made, certainly not yet
accursed) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest called chaos’.
Milton came from a culture that viewed with suspicion the repre
sentation of the sacred, on the basis of the commandment against
making graven images or likenesses of anything in heaven, earth, or
the waters. However, distinctions were drawn, implicitly and expli
citly, between different kinds of representation. The visualization of
the sacred was the focus of the strongest objections. Words were
different, and Protestants turned to words for imagining angels.
Raphael warns Adam about the difficulties of representing spirits to
human senses, and promises that he will when necessary compare
‘spiritual to corporal forms j As may express them best’; Michael
Murrin argues that consequently the reader can never know when
she is being presented a simile and when a literal description, ‘so that
we cannot distinguish tenor and vehicle in the narrative’.31 Such an
interpretation suggests a sequential deployment of metaphor. If the
likening is understood to describe the process of accommodation,
however, Raphael’s metaphors and literalisms may be concurrent. He
does not switch between a non literal mode and a literal mode, leaving
the reader confused as to when this happens. His words are simultan
eously literal and non literal. A similar possibility is suggested in
Murrin’s insightful reading of Milton’s description of heaven, in which

the compiling of multiple similes ultimately thwarts visualization
(3. 344–71: angelic shouts loud as from an infinite number; sweet as
from blessed voices; pavement like a sea of jasper; and harps hung at
sides like quivers). This method is, Murrin suggests, drawn from the
example of Scripture, and suited to Protestantism: ‘The iconoclast
could either multiply images or dispense with them altogether, oppos
ite verbal techniques which have the same function.’32 Words are used
to challenge the tendency to reify and to idolize. Milton’s representa
tions of heaven are both material and literal and fraught with meanings.
Murrin does not suggest that Milton is inspired; rather, he links the
death of allegory to the end of claims to prophetic inspiration, which
occurs because of a shift from a metaphysical to a craftsman’s conception of
poetic creativity. Poetry became associated with human skills and pleas
ures, and this in part because of the dawn of the ‘age of reason’ and
Baconian experimental science.33 (Once again natural philosophy appears
to determine literary transformation.) Thus, Murrin understands Milton’s
rejection of allegory to follow from his iconoclasm and conscious com
mitment to biblical language. However, it is also possible to describe it as
characteristic of the Protestant imagination: it is iconoclasm performed
through excessive visualization, a visualization so rich that it pushes the
reader to resolve its challenges conceptually. For Catherine Gimelli Mar
tin, Milton does not reject allegory but straddles its transformation. A
traditional mode of allegory, held together by mysticism, correspondences,
and signatures, is displaced by the new science, which turns allegory into a
relativistic meta critique that critiques the new empirical world. The
transitory synthesis during this period of transformation was a mode of
baroque allegory that realistically reflects the uncertainty and indetermin
acy that the Cartesian–Newtonian world view sought to efface, and in
doing so anticipates the postmodern critique of certainty. For Martin,
Milton embodies this approach: he is an allegorical poet, as well as a
realistic one.34 Her conclusions are not so far from Murrin’s: they both
describe a literary transformation that corresponds to a shift in modernity,
driven by science and empiricism, and though Martin insists that allegory
survives, it does so by absorbing a great deal that allegory was understood
not to be. ‘Accommodation’ is a better way to understand that doubleness
(as early modern theology and rhetoric are better tools for reading Milton
than Nietzsche and Foucault), and it recognizes that the literal and meta
phoric meanings were understood to be simultaneous. Moreover, Paradise
conclusion 365
Lost would resemble baroque aesthetics,35 as would Ghiberti’s Renaissance

doors, were it not so theologically driven, and if the relationship between
narrative and doctrine were not so intensive. And if Milton is inspired—
which is to say, if he believes himself to be inspired and founds his literary
mode on this belief—then this rejection of allegory as a literary mode goes
hand in hand with a belief that a higher truth is being represented in this
more literalistic mode; and his conception of creativity is not that of a
craftsman but that of a prophet.
Milton’s rejection of allegory is not typical of seventeenth century
writing, however. First, allegory does survive into modernity, adapting
to empiricism, historicism, and realism, and negotiating hostility to its
more baroque elements.36 It even persists in scientific writing and in
religious writing, denuded of the scholarly apparatus of fourfold exegesis.
Hence, a number of epic poems in the early eighteenth century use
heavenly machinery to expound natural philosophical principles (and in
them angels appear as representations of principles and as voices of
authority).37 Secondly, the disappearance of allegory has more to do
with the decline, through collective forgetting, of the medieval intellec
tual apparatus within which it made sense. Thirdly, the grounds supplied
by those who reject allegories tend to be its excesses, its distraction from
the real, increasingly understood in material terms. Milton had mastered
the apparatus of allegory, and understood the arguments against it, but he
moved away from allegory on theological grounds, and not in favour of a
natural philosophical literalism but in order to espouse a superior form of
fiction, an inspired truth telling fiction. He occasionally uses allegory in
order to reject it, and, however repellent he makes its associations, his
allegories form part of the dynamic contrasts within the poem.
Where does Paradise Lost stand in relation to the literary currents of
the seventeenth century? If it does not follow the pattern of the
rejection of allegory, can the theological commitments that made
allegory inappropriate to Milton’s purposes be said to place him on
one side of a divide that led to modernity?
A Dissociation of Sensibilities?
In a brave essay E. M. W. Tillyard once tried sympathetically to sketch

the emotional foundations of the theological content of Milton’s
poetry, not to attribute the poet’s religion to personal psychology so
much as to show how the theological might be associated with

intellectual conflict and creative powers. Tillyard rightly contends
that Milton’s theology was connected to every department of his
thought. Following Arthur Barker, he asserts that this refusal to
separate theology from poetry and science made Milton old fash
ioned. The future lay with those who would divide the natural from
the theological, whereas Milton’s allegiances lay with a hierarchical
and ‘traditional conception’ of the world which ‘was pretty well
exempt from theological controversy before it was undermined by
the new science’. Milton’s belief in this is ‘emotionally the most
powerful theological element in his poetry’. Hence, for Tillyard,
Milton’s poetry is imaginatively committed to an interconnectedness that
science destroys.38 There are many valuable insights in Tillyard’s essay,
but germane here is his association of a narrative of secularization, the
scientific revolution, and a dissociation of sensibility in which Milton
stands on the pre dissociation side of the chasm. Tillyard focuses on a
powerful series of correlations and common assumptions that need to
be challenged.
The theory that a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ took place in the middle
of the seventeenth century was forwarded by T. S. Eliot, though cer
tainly rooted in previous literary history and grounded in his reading of
George Saintsbury and Herbert Grierson. Eliot’s historical critical thesis
was part of a prehistory of his own poetics, one in which a fragmented
language accurately reflected a broken sensibility, one that longed for
reintegration through the deep structures of myth and religion while
rejecting a romantic view of a world unified and made meaningful by the
perceiving self (with different values it corresponds closely to Martin’s
analysis). In his essay on the so called metaphysical poets he writes:
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is

something which had happened to the mind of England between the time
of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson
and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the
reflective poet. . . . A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his
sensibility. . . . The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the
dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could
devour any kind of experience. . . . In the seventeenth century a dissociation of
sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation,
as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets
of the century, Milton and Dryden.39
conclusion 367
The nostalgic tone underscores the parallel with the Fall. Donne lived
in a prelapsarian age of passionate and rational apprehension; Milton,
in an intellectual age when these unities were broken. Eliot’s essay on
Marvell indicates one culprit: the civil war.40 Unity was broken when
Parliament (read innovation and enthusiasm) and king (tradition,
hierarchy, and spiritual unity) fell out in 1642. Though it is hard to
find external support for the thesis—justified as it is only through
gestures: to an Elizabethan world view, to the rise of Puritanism, to
an allegorical civil war—it found many supporters.41 Frank Kermode
described its tenaciousness, though being untenable as a way of
describing the seventeenth century, as early as 1957.42
Gordon Teskey, a more sympathetic and gifted reader of Milton
than Eliot, has recently offered a more persuasive, yet similarly shaped
narrative, a transition from a theological world to a humanist world in
which Milton straddles the boundary. ‘Milton is the last major poet in
the European literary tradition for whom the act of creation is centered
in God and the first in whom the act of creation begins to find its
center in the human.’ Teskey inverts some of Eliot’s categories. In the
condition of modernity, the artist does not represent understood things
about the world using technical expertise so much as communicate
lived experiences, mediating them to us with a shamanistic power.43
Milton is not a divinely inspired poet, but one who exploits the
modern condition of delirium, a mode of poetic inspiration that
oscillates between heavenly flight and rational composition.44 This
‘delirium’ looks very much like a translation into literary poetics of
the theology of prophetic inspiration, and Teskey denudes Milton’s
poetics (if not his poetry) of its religion.45 What makes Milton unique
in the story Teskey tells is that he embodies the paradox in the shift: in
order to praise his Creator, he must assume his power; in becoming the
apotheosis of a tradition he looks to the future. For Teskey, the true
subject of Paradise Lost is making, and the epic is haunted by a self
consciousness about art that enriches the dialogues it has beyond its
moment, and makes it reach beyond history, religion, and metaphysics
to the power of imaginative structures despite the author’s metaphys
ical and theological commitments.46
Two other narratives inhabit this glorification of the poet as maker,
this ‘immense cultural change’. The first is secularization, cast as the
disappearance of God, the decay of the coherent system of Christian
ity, the ascent of poets as creators with a power not only equivalent to
but also distinct from God’s. It is ‘the change from the imaginary
perception that we live in a world created by God to the equally
imaginary perception that we live in a world, an environment, created
by Man’. The syncrisis emphasized with the repetition of ‘imaginary’
conceals the disappearance of a foundation of absolute truth in this
movement. In Teskey’s account, making the knowledge of the world
appears equivalent to making the world itself (which is to take the side
of modernity). Embedded in this modernization thesis is a second
narrative, that of the scientific revolution. ‘Cosmic disarray’ is brought
on by ‘the new science’, which complements terrifying change with
the promise of a ‘new world’, a ‘technological and scientific civiliza
tion’, for which Bacon’s Novum Organum is the ‘prophetic text’.47
Teskey’s account of Milton as a poet of modernity, even a poet of
the future, presupposes a narrative of transition that resembles Eliot’s
on several points: a decay of traditional hierarchies and loss of a
coherent universe, the rise of science, secularization, the poet as
creator of his own authority; where they differ most significantly is
in their accounts of the poet’s relationship with language. Teskey also
rejects the idea that modernity disenchanted the world, but he does so
by claiming that it is the poet, the poet’s mind and her creativity, that is
the place of modern enchantment, not the land, rivers, or sky.48 Like
Eliot he suggests that philosophy and theology enter into conflict with
art during the seventeenth century, though it is Milton’s ability to
inhabit both sides of this conflict that for Teskey makes him great.
Tillyard and Teskey exemplify how a story of literary transform
ation—whether disenchantment and dissociation or the shamanization
of the poet—can dovetail with a traditional view of the scientific
revolution, in which experimentalism shattered a coherent world
picture that had survived for centuries through ‘saving knowledge’.49
Instead of adapting an existing paradigm to accommodate new obser
vation, the new science of the later seventeenth century razed the
ground of knowledge and built it anew on Baconian principles. Such
an account of later seventeenth century natural philosophy, and the
empirical principles of the scientific revolution, has been extensively
and intensively challenged in recent decades. Without rehearsing those
well established arguments here, this book has already shown that
angels were not killed off by natural philosophers. Natural philosophers
complemented experimental knowledge with other forms of knowledge:
they conducted thought experiments, they devised pneumatologies,
conclusion 369
they imported the language of spiritual causation to describe mechanical

causation, and they compiled compendiums of the actions of spirits.
Angels had to be spoken of to construe a necessary corollary to mechanical
philosophy. Hence, natural philosophers dilated the vocabularies in
which angels were written of, while detaching them from experimental
means of describing the world.50
This book has also brought into doubt elements of the third narra
tive of emergent modernity, the disenchantment of the world. The
development of a secular model of enlightenment rationality, as
sketched by Max Weber, should have erased angels from the imme
diate world view. Yet, as I have argued, many Protestants saw the
landscape as inhabited not only by symbolic meanings but by guardian
angels who were connected to particular places and topographical
features.51 Angels stayed in the landscape, though they may have
remained invisible. This testifies to a multiplicity of perspectives, an
angelic world within, or imposed as upon a palimpsest, the visible
world of the ordinary senses.
The air pump and microscope did not rout angels, which should
lead us to ask whether a deeper significance inhabits the connection
between these narratives of a scientific revolution, an intellectual
rupture or dissociation, and of the disenchantment of the world.
Significant shifts in the understanding and practice of natural philoso
phy, in perceptions of the spirit world, and in the place and generation
of literature took place in the two centuries following the Reforma
tion. Perhaps Eliot, Tillyard, and others were partly correct in their
account of interconnectedness, and the enrichment of discourses and
perspectives that took place in natural philosophy had its parallel in the
sphere of the imagination.
A broader literary picture is valuable here, including the role of
angels on the medieval and Renaissance stage. Whereas Shakespeare
used the supernatural world of ghosts and fairies more extensively and
imaginatively than his contemporaries, his angels are word pictures.
This presents a significant shift away from the place of angels in
medieval drama, and it is worth identifying some of the changes and
continuities here. Medieval drama is traditionally seen as didactic and
allegorical;52 yet it was a mixed mode, one that combined narrative and
dramatic visual elements both to entertain and to explicate Scripture. The
performances were instigated and implicitly approved by the Church,
but, like Elizabethan plays, they were the product of collaboration
with and between trade companies, carpenters, actors, and the writers
(probably usually clergymen); hence, the instruction they gave could be
playful and complicated.53 Yet they were representing sacred truths, and
the souls of humans and the good of the Church were at stake. Angels on
the medieval stage embody coherent thought about doctrine: about
music, with which they are closely associated, and the heavens, for
example.54 They represent the nine Pseudo Dionysian hierarchies, either
through references in the spoken word, as characters (each order played
by a single actor), or through stage machinery: the records of the Mercers’
Company equipment include nine figures of angels that moved by
mechanical operation.55
The main purpose of angels in the cycle plays is to represent the
greatness of God; they do, however, go beyond mere iteration of
recognized doctrine. In the Towneley Creation play Lucifer declares,
‘I am so seemly, blode and bone’ (line 102). He has not yet seduced
any fellow angels (though they are, presumably to clarify the script,
designated as ‘Angelus Malus’ and ‘Angelus Bonus’), nor fled heaven,
though he is expressing his envy of the Son and planning his rebellion.
He is an angel in mid fall if not already fallen, and his bodily meta
phors are thus less incongruous than they would be in the mouth of a
good angel. He is still in heaven, however, and this sense of the
material embodiment of blood and bone are located in the spiritual
world. After their Fall the materiality associated with corrupted spirits
is further developed, as their degradation is described in physical
terms: ‘Now ar we waxen blak as any coyll j And ugly, tatyrd as a
foyll’ (lines 136–7). In the Chester Tanners’ play at precisely the same
moment—as Lucifer offers to sit in God’s throne and exalt himself in
pride—he imagines himself in bodily terms: ‘Behoulde my bodye,
handes and head— j the mighte of God is marked in mee’ (lines 188–
9). Lucifer’s words parody the Mass, and his recognition of body parts
corresponds to his shifting status. Once fallen, demons are the subject
of material, scatological humour, as in the N Town play, where,
as soon as he falls, Lucifer exclaims: ‘For fere of fyre a fart I crake!’
(line 81). By associating not only physical torment but embodiment
with spiritual corruption, the plays define angels as incorporeal,
spiritual beings.
Some cycle plays, then, are inventive and exploratory, and their
storytelling pushes beyond doctrinal explication. The Chester Tan
ners’ play devises a partner to Lucifer, an angel named Lightborne,
conclusion 371
who encourages Lucifer in his attempt on God’s throne and praises the
brightness of his body. He plays a role similar to Beelzebub in Paradise
Lost, a second in command who supports Lucifer’s arguments against
the orders of unfallen angels, and falls with him. Lightborne becomes
‘secundus demon’ on his fall, and he and the newly named ‘primus
demon’ engage in mutual recrimination. Though the good angels
speak as distinct orders, and though they sound human in their sensible
advice, they are not personalized to the extent that this testy exchange
between the two demons enables. A similar imaginative effect is
achieved in primus demon’s final, self pitying exclamation:
Out, alas! For woo and wickednesse
I ame so fast bounde in this cheare
and never awaye hense shall passe,
but lye in hell allwaye heare. (lines 270 3)
The dramatic effect is not the corporeal binding of the demon in a chair
that parodies the throne to which he aspired so much as realization of
the mental chains that fix his spirit to hell. This notion can be found in
Aquinas (‘the devils, while abroad in this dark atmosphere, are not
actually imprisoned in the fire of hell, yet their punishment is not the
less for that, since they know that the imprisonment awaits them’); in
Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, where Mephistopheles explains,
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed,
In one self place. But where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be;
and in Paradise Lost, where Milton transforms it into a matter of the

psyche:
within him hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from hell
One step no more than from himself can fly
By change of place.56
The reiteration of the word ‘hell’ in paradise, and at line endings,

performs this sense of containment and recurrence. The Tanners’ play
shows the demon experiencing something that is similarly both
internal and external. The theological exposition here is part of a
dramatic realization that is based in part on, if not sympathy, at least
the attribution to the demon of human characteristics.
The exploratory and narrative based approach to angel doctrine in

the cycle plays is in some ways closer to Milton than to Shakespeare,
for whom angels are figures for virtue and outward beauty: ‘O, what
may man within him hide, j Though angel on the outward side!’
exclaims the Duke in Measure for Measure. In Richard III and in Richard
II angels are one among numerous markers of moral good and emb
lems of military might.57 There are elements of more specific angel
doctrine. In The Merchant of Venice Lorenzo alludes to the angels and
cherubim that inhabit the celestial spheres that generate music inaud
ible to human ears.58 In The Tempest, a play rich with the occult and
with spiritual beings, angels are an ideal of visible beauty; Gonzalo,
unnerved by mysterious noise, invokes them (he is a Catholic); and
Ferdinand speaks of ‘Our worser genius’.59 This refers to the doctrine
that each human has a pair of guardian angels, one good, one evil. The
same doctrine appears in Henry IV, Part II, in Othello, and in Sonnet
144.60 It was perhaps a doctrine to which Shakespeare was theologic
ally drawn, though his use of it is not dramatic, and we do not see the
struggle of human conscience externalized in this form. This contrasts
with Marlowe’s Faustus, where the paired good and evil angels, visible
to the audience, speak to Faustus’ conscience, their interaction
becoming increasingly evident to his senses as he falls. In Antony and
Cleopatra, however, the idea of a guardian angel theatrically enters
Shakespeare’s imagination, when the soothsayer cautions Antony:
Thy daemon, that thy spirit which keeps thee, is
Noble courageous, high, unmatchable,
Where Caesar’s is not. But near him thy angel
Becomes afeard, as being o’erpowered.61
An angel doctrine more than decorative appears in the first scene of
Henry V, too, when the Archbishop of Canterbury reports the trans
formation in the prince upon his father’s death:
at that very moment
Consideration, like an angel came
And whipped th’offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise
T’envelop and contain celestial spirits.62
Hal’s moral regeneration is imagined as a purifying process conducted
by an angel, not a guardian angel but an intervening providential angel,
an agent of God’s judgement.
conclusion 373
And in Hamlet, where the confessional differences between Lutheran

Wittenberg (where both Hamlet and Faustus studied) and Counter
Reformation Paris (Laertes’ university) may be at stake, angels linger
invisibly behind the action. Accosting the priest who denies full burial
rites to Ophelia, Laertes exclaims: ‘A minist’ring angel shall my sister be j
When thou liest howling.’ The suggestion that blessed human souls
become angels, or become like angels, is a common theme in Catholic
writing, though it may be merely figurative here. Not so Hamlet’s
response to the ghost of his father, a ghost that claims to have returned
from purgatory. On his first sighting Hamlet exclaims: ‘Angels and
ministers of grace defend us!’ When he sees the ghost for a second
time, in Gertrude’s closet, he entreats, ‘Save me and hover o’er me with
your wings, j You heavenly guards!’ Luther implicitly accepted belief in
individual guardian angels, and suggested that it was appropriate to call
upon their support in extremis, though not to pray to or invoke angels.63
If his words are understood as calls and not prayers, Hamlet’s angel
doctrine precisely fits Luther’s (and not Calvin’s). When Claudius is
seeking forgiveness, kneeling in his chapel, he asks, ‘Help, angels!’,
invoking angels in a manner contrary to Luther. Appropriately a false
prayer follows. The contrasting invocations of angels by Claudius and
the prince may reflect competing attitudes to prayers to angels, a fault
line of confessional differences over angels in the Reformation, in which
case Shakespeare represents the theology with some care.64
Shakespeare’s angels are images and ideas. He uses doctrine when it
is imaginatively powerful. Something similar can be said of Donne.
Several of the songs and sonnets assume the notion of tutelary angels.
He suggests that human spirits replace fallen angels in heaven; that
angel worship is idolatrous; he notes that angels assume bodies of
condensed air to communicate with humans. He imagines angels
looking down on us from heaven. These doctrines are voiced in poetry
and sermons alike. In one of the Holy Sonnets, the narrator asks:
If faithful souls be alike glorified

As angels, then my father’s soul doth see,
And adds this even to full felicity,
That valiantly I hell’s wide mouth o’erstride:
But if our minds to these souls be descried
By circumstances, and by signs that be
Apparent in us, not immediately,
How then shall my mind’s white truth by them be tried?65
The doubt is expressed whether humans in heaven (he knows that his
father is there) see like angels. If they do, then his father will be able to
see directly into Donne the speaker of the poem’s soul, and see that
he is indeed in a state of grace. If they do not, then his father will have
to judge him by the external evidence of his behaviour. The speaker
knows that humans are transparent to angels’ eyes (a view more closely
associated with Catholic than Protestant theology). The sonnet turns
to consider the disparity between outward conduct and inner
existence, especially ‘Dissemblers [who] feign devotion’, before
concluding:
Then turn
O pensive soul, to God, for he know best
Thy true grief, for he put it in my breast.
The grief could be Donne the speaker’s father’s grief at his son’s
apparently perilous condition, in which case the soul is the father’s
in heaven, and the son instructs the father to ask God for enlighten
ment concerning his son’s spiritual condition; though it is possible that
God also gave the father’s grief (spiritual doubt?) to the son. Alterna
tively, the soul could be the speaker’s and the dichotomy between
‘thy . . . grief’ and ‘my breast’ indicates that human souls are not even
transparent to themselves. We cannot know, and so the irresolvable
ambiguity reminds the reader that we are bound by our senses, and
cannot know another’s state of grace, in contrast to angels. However,
in an Easter sermon of 1622 he quotes Luke 20: 36 (‘There we shall be
as the angels’), and infers, ‘our curiosity shall have this noble satisfac
tion, we shall know how the angels know by knowing as they
know’.66 This runs against the doubt of the sonnet. The difference
may be explained by genre, as the certainty of the prose sermon
contrasts with the ambiguity of the sonnet. However, a later sermon
cautions that ‘even in heaven our faculties shall be finite’.67 The
sermon carefully distinguishes angelic knowledge from human, iden
tifying in Thomist terms their three kinds of knowledge (through
nature, confirmation in grace, and revelation); whereas the earlier
sermon insists that humans know God better than angels, for he has
revealed himself to us in his actions more than angels have.68 For
Donne, angels are above all a means of gauging and understanding
human knowledge. What he actually believes—or knows—about
them is limited.
conclusion 375
In ‘The Dream’ similar doctrine is handled differently. The lyric

speaker describes being woken from a happy and rational dream by a
visitor both true and associated with fantasy, capable of turning dreams
into reality: so he suggests that they enact his dream. This is compli
cated in the second stanza:
As lightning, or a taper’s light,
Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;
Yet I thought thee
(For thou lov’st truth) an angel, at first sight,
But when I saw thou saw’st my heart,
And knew’st my thoughts beyond an angel’s art,
When thou knew’st what I dreamed, when thou knew’st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and cam’st then,
I must confess, it could not choose but be
Profane, to think thee any thing but thee.69
Her appearance suggests the visitor is an angel, but a human can see
into a human heart better than an angel, which proves her to be
human. Doubtless the speaker’s thoughts are too human for an angel’s
grasping. By the next stanza their love has been consummated, and
the angel–woman rises, causing him to doubt: if she is leaving,
perhaps her love is impure, which is to say not ‘all spirit’. He resolves
that she is leaving only to return: ‘Thou cam’st to kindle, goest to
come’ (there must be a pun here on orgasm, though a very early
usage in this sense), so he resolves to dream again. Donne’s poetry
relies on the temporality of its experiences and revelations: he
describes here a compulsive erotic cycle of sleep, half waking,
seduction, satisfaction, doubt, consolation, and sleep. The speaker
never really wakes, and the opening and closing lines leave ambigu
ous whether the visitor wakes the dreamer and controls the cycle, or
the dreamer ultimately holds sway over the boundary between the
two states. The poem imagines a dream vision, ambiguously inter
rupted by an angel and then renewed; but it also describes a com
pulsive sexual relationship between two lovers who share a space and
are not yet perfectly familiar with each other. The hook of the poem
is this near substitutability: by comparing the visitor to an angel, an
identification from which she never emerges, Donne is imagining
sex with an angel.
The conceit appears elsewhere. An epistolary poem to a fellow cler
gyman (‘To Mr. Tilman’) draws upon the conventional iconography
of angels; ‘Elegy 2: To his Mistress Going to Bed’ does so in a less

orthodox fashion:
In such white robes heaven’s angels used to be
Received by men; thou, angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite;
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.70
Evil angels inspire fear; good angels give men an erection. Instruc
tions on how to distinguish good and bad angels identify haloes or
beards, or insist that humans are unable reliably to make such
distinctions. Donne’s criterion is unusual (Tony Kushner echoes it
in Angels in America, in which the arrival of an angel is presaged by
involuntary sexual arousal71). Again the outcome is sexual consum
mation. ‘Air and Angels’ has a related imaginative premiss: the
common doctrine that angels adopt bodies of air in order to appear
to humans. The poem’s speaker begins by noting that angels appear
as voices or ‘a shapeless flame’ (and are ‘worshipped’: a distinctively
Roman Catholic word choice), then argues that the speaker’s love
must adopt a body (‘else could nothing do’, a pun on sexual activity),
just as his own soul does, and that body must not be ‘More subtle’
than its parent, which is to say the speaker. In the second stanza the
speaker realizes that he has loaded his love with too much body, that
his love is overwhelmed with matter:
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere;
Then as an angel, face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love’s sphere;
Just such disparity
As is ’twixt air and angels’ purity,
’Twixt women’s love, and men’s will ever be.72
His love will wear her love (rather than her body) as a body in order to
live in this world, just as an angel adopts a body of less pure air in order
to communicate with a lesser being. The sweetness of tone disguises
the disparagement. Here the speaker is the angel, the love object the
less pure air, and here the speaker implicitly posits the possibility that
angels experience themselves as sexual beings.
conclusion 377
Two lovers are also angels in ‘The Ecstasy’, in which ‘we are j The
intelligences, they [our bodies] the sphere’.73 And in ‘The Relic’ the
speaker imagines himself and his lover as both angels: ‘Difference of
sex no more we knew, j Than our guardian angels do’ (using Matt. 22:
30, on which he would later preach a sermon).74 The theological
context of this poem is playfully peculiar. The poem imagines itself
to be a ‘paper’ left in a tomb accompanying a ‘bracelet of bright hair
about the bone’. The speaker speculates that the tomb may be broken
in an age and place ‘Where mis devotion doth command’, which is to
say under Roman Catholicism, in which case it might be treated as a
holy relic; and the poem concludes with the miracles wrought by the
lovers. These play with some familiar Renaissance paradoxes: the two
lovers are one, they love something unknowable, and they find unity
without touching. The resolution, the miracle that is the loved object,
the speaker implies, is inexpressible. It is these paradoxes that make
their love more perfect, and their angelic lack of sexual difference is
listed among them. The comparison is paradoxical because angels are
not sexual beings; but there is a sense in which their gender sameness
makes them more perfectly sexual, because they love as equals. Milton
pushed this a stage further with his angelic sexual intercourse, yet is
anticipated by Donne’s imagining of angels as beings who might
experience intercourse, or whose experience might serve as a model
for human intercourse.
These are not fleeting references but ideas that occasion imaginative
exploration and play. They do not directly reveal what Donne bel
ieves. In a 1627 marriage sermon he does outline legitimate know
ledge of angels, and he emphasizes its limits: ‘Onely the Angels
themselves know one another.’ They are spirits, but we do not
know what spirits are. They have offices, but we do not know how
they perform them. We know they are creatures, but do not know
when they were created, whether before or with the world. There
may be one angel for every man, but we do not know it. They know
and see, but we do not know how. They exist in distinct orders, but
the details are not revealed. More affirmatively: they do not have
bodies, but have great physical power; they were formed in time, but
do not age; they are God’s eldest sons; ‘they hang between the nature
of God, and the nature of man, and are of middle Condition’. They
are divine enigmas, and the rest is speculation. This is prose: there is
no angelic sex here. Despite this negative approach, Donne does
speculate. He follows his angelology with logical questioning: ‘If by

being like the Angels, we shall know the Angels, we are more then like
ourselves, we are our selves, why doe we not know our selves?’ Why
did Adam, knowing himself immortal, relinquish his body to death?
Why do we not know ourselves immortal, and resist the temptations
of sin? Logic moves—like his lyrics, Donne’s sermons exist in narra
tive time—into something else.
To know this immortality, is to make this immortality, which otherwise is the

heaviest part of our Curse, a Blessing unto us, by providing to live in Immortal
happinesse: whereas now, we doe so little know our selves, as that if my soule
could aske one of those Wormes which my dead body shall produce, Will you
change with me? that worme would say, No; for you are like to live eternally
in torment; for my part, I can live no longer, then the putrid moisture of your
body will give me leave, and therefore I will not change; nay, would the Devill
himselfe change with a damned soule? I cannot tell . . . 75
Donne’s delivery might have clarified whether that last question was
spoken by the worm or the preacher, but probably not. Within a few
lines of his sober angelology the preacher is engaged in an imaginary
conversation with a worm, the worm destined to feed upon his corpse,
about human immortality. Sermons occupy different social spaces
from poems, and observe distinct generic conventions, but they are,
of course, literary performances, and imaginatively speculate in order
to express ideas. Donne’s sermons only imperfectly offer a doctrinal
key with which to interpret poems, and if we do not find angelic sex in
his preaching then that may have been a matter of social propriety
more than literary decorum. Theology mattered to Donne, and angels
constituted a narrow and necessary area of that theology. But his
religion did not tell him what to say, and what he thought about
angels was less important to his writing than how he used them to
think. Angels furnished him with a voice, a set of concepts, and a
language that was both affirmative and imaginative.
Many other writers during this century of alleged transformation
used angels as literary devices, underpinned by doctrine in a minimal
way, but appearing only to support an argument or story without
much interest in the nature of angels, the problems of doctrine, or
even of the imagination. Perhaps the most interesting dramatic de
ployment of angels, alongside Marlowe’s Faustus, is in William Percy’s
Mahomet in his Heaven, written in 1601 probably for private performance.
conclusion 379
Taking its cue from a story in the Qur’an, and risking the representa
tion of Muhammad on stage, the play is partly set in heaven, where
angels dance and sing and observe the hierarchies, as in medieval cycle
plays. Two hapless angels descending to earth are caught in sexual
intrigue, and are tricked by humans. The play takes place in a Muslim
cosmos—Mahomet is in heaven—and its fictional world is in a sense
inverted and demonized. Within the context of the play the Muslim
heaven is none the less real: it is not satirizing a Muslim concept of
heaven but using this concept as a setting for comedy. Moreover, this
Muslim universe is partly fused with the Christian: Islam is both the
inversion of Christianity, and also partly identified with Protestant
values and beliefs. When a human succeeds in transporting herself to
heaven through trickery, Mahomet (who later falls in love with her)
exclaims:
By Cherubin, by Seraphin, by the

Virtues, Potestates, and Dominions,
By the Thrones, the Angells and Archangells,
Zaniel, Chamnel, Zaphiel,
By Haniel, Gabriel, Jurobates,
I do adjure thee, tell mee whence thou beest.
Perhaps Mahomet’s heaven is a kind of pure fiction, where no religious

values can be threatened.76
Spenser’s ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Love’ (1596) tells the story of
divine love from the beginning of time and the begetting of the Son
(within time, which seems heterodox), through the creation and fall of
angels, to the Passion. It compresses a good deal of doctrine, especially
angel doctrine, into a superficially transparent narrative, but declines
to explore; it is love of God that inspires the poet to transcend the
‘feeble reach of earthly sight’, not inspiration.77 Henry Burkhead’s A
Tragedy of Cola’s Fury (1645–6), a play about the Irish Rebellion of
1641, is one of the few early modern English dramas featuring an
unfallen angel; Milton’s unfulfilled drafts for a tragedy promised
another; like Grotius, in his influential Adamus Exul (1601), his angels
are real and unfallen. Burkhead’s angel unexpectedly materializes to
provide succour to, and perhaps release from captivity, the hero,
Caspilona. It is a deus ex machina, providing a providential turning
point in the plot. Later the angel sings the epilogue, fulfilling a merely
decorative function.78 Charles Fitz Geffrey’s The Blessed Birth Day
(1634), a poem that takes off from the angels’ hymn on the Incarnation,
professes itself uninspired and makes no claims to accommodation
(‘Sing we high myst’ries in an humble straine, j And lofty matters in
a lowly vaine’). It comments didactically on the properties of angels,
but the tone never rises above scholarly distance:
He who the glorious Angels did create,

Becomes a Worme yet keeps his owne estate.
God had his lowlinesse enough commended,
Had he but to an Angels state descended.
For twixt an Angel and a Worme, more ods
Is not, then twixt an Angels state and Gods.79
Abraham Cowley’s angels in Davideis (1656), speedy, hymning, and

prophetic, are similar. These works, and many others, show little more
than a rhetorical deployment of angels, or literal commentary on angels
occupying digressions or asides in a narrative. This kind of use precedes
and postdates the early modern period, and shows the dissemination of
angel doctrine and little angelological verve.
Shakespeare and Donne can be contrasted with Dryden, whose
theory and practice were explored in the previous chapter. Dryden
writes freely about angels precisely because they are unknowable.
Whereas Milton is at pains to stick to truth (relying on the theological
principle of accommodation), for Dryden theology should be left to
the theologians. We cannot know about angels, and that is why they
are so useful. They are ideal matter for feigned representations. In
Dryden’s criticism perhaps lies one origin of the modern sense of an
antipathy between theology and imaginative poetry. It is not typical of
his age, however; rather it is one of several, competing contemporary
positions.
John Dennis, writing a letter on the problem of angelic bodies in
1722, hampered by ignorance of angel doctrine and discomfited by
Milton’s confounding of spirit and matter, nonetheless offers insights
into contrasts between Milton and his contemporary Cowley and his
non contemporary Torquato Tasso (1544–95): it is because Milton
expressly declares that his angels are spirits that he creates problems for
himself, whereas the other poets leave it to the reader’s imagination,
and thereby avoid inconsistency.80 The problem, then, is where nar
rative and doctrine collide, and the sensible route is to separate them,
leaving one to reason and the other to the imagination. But these were,
conclusion 381
as Dennis saw, contemporary positions, and the contrast is in modes of

representation. Shakespeare and Donne use angel doctrines because
they provide a language with which to think and write; what they
believe matters less than how they think through these beliefs. Milton
works through doctrine, so that the imaginative and the doctrinal
develop together. What Dryden believes is entirely irrelevant, which
is not to say that he was irreligious: angels are mysterious images that
can be exploited. Whereas for Shakespeare and Donne the content of
the ideas supplies imaginative potency, for Dryden it is the mere form
of the idea that triggers the labours of the imagination. In the eight
eenth century angels were used to demonstrate Newtonian physics,
though their value was consistently rhetorical—as narrators and
symbols—rather than empirical or experimental.
I am not tracing a transformation of literary representation on the
basis of these authors; nor am I importing natural philosophy or
theology to explain poems that perform or open up very well without
them. Rather, I am suggesting that some of the dichotomies conven
tionally discovered in the seventeenth century—Renaissance–
modernity, enchantment–secularization, God–man, theory–history,
apprehension–comprehension—those dichotomies beloved of those
critics who hold most fervently the autonomy of literature as a patri
monial inheritance—are not supported by an analysis of the fortunes of
angels in early modern imaginative writing, and that if these dichoto
mies cannot be supported by an analysis of these beings that subtend
across such broad areas of knowledge, belief, and practice, then they
did not operate in the way that is presently believed.
For both Eliot and Teskey, Milton sits on the cusp of transform
ations, though he faces in different directions. Eliot sees philosophy or
theology and poetry becoming divided in Milton; his view in large
part derived from his lack of sympathy with the enthusiasm that gave
Milton the confidence to explore theological issues in stories of the
sacred and invisible world, and the politics that persuaded him to put
his literary abilities into public service. It is this imaginative antipathy
that separates doctrine and story. Teskey positions Milton as a ‘theor
etical poet’, yet the natural philosophy of his angels, and much else
besides, marks him out as a material poet as much as an abstract one.81
His writing challenges this dichotomy. He develops his angels both
theoretically and practically. His narrative discloses perspectives on
the properties of angels that are as remarkable and as considered as
his self conscious representations of angelic digestion and lovemaking.

Narrative can do this. Milton does not himself represent a turning
point; Dryden is his contemporary, and an account of the 1660s that
places Milton as the past and Dryden as the future is undertaking too
much ideological work at the expense of history.82 It is an irony of
chronology that the two are placed on either side of a shift, and yet
shared a government office in the later 1650s. Milton’s is one of a
plurality of perspectives, discourses, techniques, or beliefs that devel
oped and coexisted in the same period. It is, of course, enlightening to
ask how typical Milton is of his times, and the process of sifting out the
ways in which he is typical from those in which he is extraordinary,
heterodox, and original may lead to a more intimate understanding of
his writings. But the idea of typicality itself may presuppose too much,
for personal and for social reasons. A writer holds a ‘typical’ belief in
conjunction with other beliefs that may have been atypical and which
shape and give meaning to the ‘typical’ belief; in this context the
apparent typicality may dissipate. Social reasons also make typicality
doubtful: Milton’s sensibility, his understanding of the relationship
between words and the world, his doctrine of angels and sense of
what it means to live alongside them and why it is legitimate to write
about them, developed alongside those of Dryden, Locke, and
Glanvill. Their positions are interconnected and in an important
sense simultaneous. What takes place in early modern imaginative
writing, which we find fragmentarily reflected in the several narratives
of transformation, may be the same that takes place in non imaginative
writing. Writing about angels suggests that there is a multiplication of
languages or discourses that assume different modes of referentiality,
languages that are simultaneous and interdependent, though divergent
if not contradictory.
In the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there is
a profound confluence of concerns about representation, faith, spirit
ual practice, and knowledge, in which areas of knowledge proliferate
and are rearranged without being, in any simple sense, superseded. Not
until Blake would another great poet earnestly claim the authority of
angels themselves for his imaginative representation of them (as opposed
to using angels to represent authority). However, poets continued to
exploit the permeable intersections between theology and natural
philosophy, and one way to do this was to figure conversations with,
protection by, or the flight of angels. Though it became easier to
conclusion 383
separate fiction and truth, and to keep the imagination free from
inspiration, one paradigm did not displace another. The fortunes of
angels show no dissociation or profound rupture.
Last Things
In this book I have sketched the landscape of angel learning and angel
writing in early modern Britain. Paradise Lost has been at the centre of
this map, because of its intrinsic interest as the greatest poem of the
period, and one that relies on angels for its aesthetics and theology, and
because it provides a persuasive point of entry to the vast body of
writing that concerns or touches upon angels. I have presented a
reading of the poem and its representational modes, and suggested
some of the implications of this reading of Milton and his solid angels
for our understanding of the way poetry intervenes in political and
intellectual culture.
Over the past two decades the range of interpretative devices for
reading poems politically and historically has been extended and
enriched. The best historicist interpretations do not make poetry
seem any less guileful; indeed, more precise local contextualization
has disclosed the ingenuity of poetic performances. But the tenor of
such interpretations is to emphasize allegorical encodings, political
allusions, and verbal echoes. In this interpretative decoding, the role
of imaginative discourse in political language—both in poetry and in
prose exposition and argument—has been underexplored. The literary
elements of political discourse, its fictional devices, tropes, eloquence,
performances, persuasive fictions, were not mere dressing for argu
ment, but integral to it. Poetry shared its imaginative devices with
other kinds of writing, and the exchange between modes was multi
lateral and mutual. When a scriptural commentary employs an
extended metaphor, it can be to avoid an uneasy point through
studious ambiguity, sustained with rhetorical conviction. Drama, dia
logue, a scene in hell, could be useful to sophisticated and sober
political debate. Scriptural commentary could be exploratory as well
as analytic. Even at its most imaginative and indirect—a war in heaven,
with armour and uprooted mountains—poetry can be engaging with
the force of argument. Poetry was not ‘safe’ because it was disengaged
from knowledge and truth.
Early modern writings of all modes used imaginative narrative to

explore and to explicate theological and political positions; and these
positions correspondingly formed the basis for diverse imaginative
exercises. This was especially so for epic, a form more associated
with knowledge than empire or romance. This cross fertilization was
not a universal characteristic of writing—indeed, these connections
can be shown to be shifting during the course of the seventeenth
century—but it was a powerful potential that was exploited not only
by Milton but also by other poets and polemicists.
The period also witnessed, as the literary culture of Protestant
Britain developed and was consolidated, a multiplication of modes of
writing about angels. Some of these were attached to the idea that
angels were remote from human understanding—as they were from
godly worship—that the separation between the visible and the invis
ible world necessarily drove a wedge between beliefs and literary
performances. In the eighteenth century this would result in much
writing about angels that presented them didactically, or proselytiz
ingly, but not harmoniously. What is unique about Milton, and what
makes Paradise Lost so distinctively great, is not his relationship to
rupture, but the conjunction he effects between a story about humans
and angels and a sustained doctrine of the being and action of angels.
The force of his poem lies in a narrative taut enough to knit together
story and doctrine and a language capacious enough to speak angelol
ogy and poetry at the same time. Savouring this, we can feel the pathos
of Milton’s first two humans moving in the shadows of angels with all
the more weight.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1. BL, Sloane MS 3188, 1–3 (note by Ashmole); the other books are bound
in Sloane MS 3191.
2. Pp. 112–15 below.
3. For Shippen, see BL, 719.m.12. Also pp. 112–15, 306–8, below; Michael
Hunter, ‘Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the Thought of Robert
Boyle’, British Journal for the History of Science, 23 (1990), 387–410: 409.
4. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, i: Laws Against Images (Oxford,
1988); Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War
(Woodbridge, 2003).
5. Trevor Cooper (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East
Anglia during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2001), 155–6; see also
John Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the Administration of Iconoclasm
in the Puritan Revolution’, ibid.
6. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,
c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, 1992), 269–71; Richard Marks, Image and
Devotion in Late Medieval England (Thrupp, 2004), 65; Peter Burton
and Harland Walshaw (eds), The English Angel (Moreton in the Marsh,
2000).
7. But see esp. Keck, Angels; West, Angels; Marshall and Walsham (eds),
Angels; Raymond (ed.), Conversations.
8. PL 1, argument.
9. Philosophical Transactions, 3/38 (1668), 742; pp. 292–3 below.
10. Margaret Cavendish, Political Writings, ed. Susan James (Cambridge,
2003), 51, 96, 97.
11. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690), 97;
see also pp. 141, 185, 209, 279, 351.
12. Athenian Mercury, 10/3 (1691), 30; Athenian Oracle, 4 vols (1728), i. 4–5.
13. Once to a Roman Catholic priest. During this conversation he said to
me: ‘the problem with Protestants is that they cannot say where their
church was before the Reformation’, an objection that most ten year
olds could have responded to in 17th century Britain.
14. Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria
Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York, 1995), 331.
386 notes to chapter 2: angelographia
15. On anachronism, see Nick Jardine, ‘Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in

the History of the Sciences’, History of Science, 38 (2000), 251–70, and
‘Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of
Science’, History of Science, 41 (2003), 125–40; Quentin Skinner, Visions
of Politics, i: Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), chs 3 and 4; and Joad
Raymond, ‘Describing Publicity in Early Modern England’, Huntington
Library Quarterly, 67 (2004), 101–29.
CHAPTER 2
1. John Prideaux, ‘The Patronage of Angels’, 16, in Certaine Sermons (1637);
Antoine Le Grand, An Entire Body of Philosophy, trans. Richard Blome
(1694), 18; also John Scott, The Christian Life (1687), 317; Heywood,
Hierarchie, 341; and works mentioned in text.
2. Gideon Harvey, Archelogia Philosophica Nova (1663), first part, fourth
book, p. 1. OED first use is 1753.
3. S. G. F. Brandon, ‘Angels: The History of an Idea’, History Today, 13
(Oct. 1963), 655–65; Allison Coudert, ‘Angels’, in Mircea Eliade (ed.),
The Encyclopedia of Religion, i (New York, 1987), 282–6; Peter R. Carrell,
Jesus and the Angels: Angelology and the Christology of the Apocalypse of John
(Cambridge, 1997); Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology:
Antecedents and Early Evidence (Leiden, 1998); and works in next note.
4. Edward Leigh, Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650), 243; Williams,
Ideas of the Fall, 20–8; John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on
Genesis, 2nd edn (1930; Edinburgh, 1994), 139–47; Williams, Expositor,
151–3; Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton, 2003) and The Old Enemy:
Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton, 1987); Michael E. Stone, A History of
the Literature of Adam and Eve (Atlanta, Ga., 1992); Elaine Pagels, The Origin
of Satan (New York, 1995), ch. 2; West, Angels, 129–30; Kathryn Powell
and Donald Scragg (eds), Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo Saxon
England (Cambridge, 2003); Ariel Hessayon, ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The
Prophet Theauraujohn Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot, 2007), 244–
59; Philo Judaeus (or Philo of Alexandria), Philo, trans. F. H. Coulson and
G. H. Whitaker, Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols (1929–62), ii. 449–75, esp.
453–5; John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam
and Eve (Oxford, 1990), 52; Mindele Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic:
The Renaissance Tradition to ‘Paradise Lost’ (Lexington, Ky., 1994), 211;
Fowler’s notes to PL 11. 621–2, 642; 3. 463–5; R. H. Charles, The
Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1913); and
James H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols
(Garden City, NY, 1983–5).
5. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge, 2006), 36–41, 175–82.
6. Ibid. 182–3, 191–9.
notes to chapter 2: angelographia 387
7. Pseudo Dionysius, Works, 26–9.

8. Karlfried Froehlich, ibid. 33–46; also 69 n. 128, 57 n. 89, 72, 117, 166.
9. Ibid. 161–73; quotation at p. 167.
10. Keck, Angels, 55–8.
11. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, iii: Paradiso, trans. John D. Sinclair
(1939; New York, 1979), 406–9.
12. Pseudo Dionysius, Works, 168; Ch. 6 below; Aquinas, Summa, xiv. 183,
99–105, 111–13.
14. My paraphrases are based on the English–Latin text (trans. Alexis
Bugnolo) at <http://www.franciscan archive.org/lombardus/>,
accessed 17 Oct. 2007; see also Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols
(Leiden, 1994), i. 303–97; Keck, Angels, 73, 89–91.
15. Keck, Angels, 75–6; the texts are available at <http://www.franciscan
archive.org/index2.html>, accessed 17 Oct. 2007.
16. Kelly, Satan, 253–5.
17. Bonaventure, Commentaries on the Four Books of Sentences, trans. Alexis
Bugnolo et al., bk 2, distinction 2, pt 2, art. 2, qu. 4, <http://www.
franciscan archive.org/index2.html>.
18. Divine government at Aquinas, Summa, xiv. 89–167; angels in vol. ix;
qu. 54 at ix. 73–91; quotations at pp. 81, 85.
19. Henry Mayr Harting, Perceptions of Angels in History (Oxford, 1998), 15–19.
20. James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste (New York, 2000), 106–10, and
Robertus Grossetesta Lincolniensis, ‘An Essay in Historiography, Medi
eval and Modern’, in Maura O’Carroll (ed.), Robert Grosseteste and the
Beginnings of a British Theological Tradition (Rome, 2003); Deborah
E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and
the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999), 117–18; Nicholas H. Clulee, John
Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (1988), 52, 54;
Richard Day (ed.), The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs (1658); Grosse
teste, On the Six Days of Creation, trans. C. F. J. Martin (Oxford, 1997);
Edward Brown (ed.), Fasciculus Rerum, 2 vols (1690), i. 305–7. I am
indebted to John Flood for correspondence on Grosseteste.
21. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella
(1958; Stroud, 2000).
22. West, Angels, 12; Robert Elrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser
(Geneva, 1960), 9; Clay Daniel, ‘Milton’s Neo Platonic Angel’, Studies
in English Literature, 44 (2004), 173–88; Michael B. Allen, ‘The Absent
Angel in Ficino’s Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975),
219–40. Also Bruce Gordon, ‘The Renaissance Angel’, in Marshall and
Walsham (eds), Angels. On conjuration, see pp. 107–9, 132–2, below.
23. Calvin, Institution, 69.
24. John Biddle, Twelve Arguments Drawn out of Scripture (1647), 4, and A
Twofold Catechism (1654), sig. a1r, identifying Henry More among others.
25. Edward Knott, A Direction to be Observed by N.N. ([London or St

Omer], 1636), 19–20; William Chillingworth, preface to Religion of
Protestants (1638), sig. §§§2v; James Long, ‘Of Angels and Pinheads:
The Contributions of the Early Oxford Masters to the Doctrine of
Spiritual Matter’, Franciscan Studies, 56 (1999), 239–54 (esp. n. 23);
Marshall and Walsham in eid. (eds), Angels, 1; James Steven Byrne’s
essay in Raymond (ed.), Conversations.
26. Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), 190–1.
27. Calvin, Institution, 64–5.
28. [Thomas Lamplugh, Archbishop of York?], Folger Shakespeare Library,
MS V.a.63 (MS sermons, 1653–8), 1658 sermon on Mark 10: 17, no
foliation.
29. John Bayly, Two Sermons: The Angel Guardian (Oxford, 1630), 5–6.
30. William Jenkyn, An Exposition of the Epistle of Jude . . . Second Part (1654),
47–9; quotation at p. 48.
31. John Patrick, Reflexions upon the Devotions of the Roman Church (1674),
418, 425.
32. Martin Luther, A Commentarie upon the Fiftene Psalmes, trans. Henry Bull
(1577), 91–2; Philip M. Soergel, ‘Luther on the Angels’, in Marshall and
Walsham (eds), Angels, 69.
33. Quoted in Soergel, ‘Luther on the Angels’, 69.
34. See esp. A Sermon on Preparing to Die (1519), in Luther’s Works, 55 vols, ed.
Jaroslav Pelikan et al. (St Louis, Mo., 1955–86), xlii. 113, also vi. 88, xx.
170; see also Soergel, ‘Luther on the Angels’, 72–3; Peter Marshall, ‘The
Guardian Angel in Protestant England’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations;
Kelly, Satan, 310 (referring to Luther’s Little Catechism); also pp. 230–7,
333–4, below.
35. Luther, Works, iii. 271–5, xx. 74, ii. 355; p. 371 below.
36. Williams, Expositor, 116–17; also p. 320 below; Soergel, ‘Luther on the
Angels’, 78–9.
37. Augustine, City, 533; Luther, Works, i. 111.
38. Samuel Ward, The Life of Faith (1621), 2; also C. A. Patrides, ‘Hierarchy and
Order’, in Philip P. Weiner (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973–4),
ii. 436, <http://etext.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html>, accessed May
2007.
39. Calvin, Institution, 64–8, and Commentarie, passim, esp. 381–2, 413, 663–4;
Institution is ambivalent about guardians, while Commentarie states that the
belief is wicked.
40. Calvin, Institution, 6, and book 1 passim; William A. Dyrness, Reformed
Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to
Edwards (Cambridge, 2004), 49–89.
41. Joseph Wright, A Testimony for the Son of Man (1661), 139.
42. Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter Reformation: Glory, Laud
and Honour (Woodbridge, 2006).
notes to chapter 2: angelographia 389
43. Kate Harvey, ‘The Role of Angels in English Protestant Thought 1580 to
1660’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 2005).
44. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Angels and Idols in England’s Long Reformation’,
in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels; also Raymond Gillespie, ‘Im
agining Angels in Early Modern Ireland’, ibid. 24–5.
45. Elizabeth Reis, ‘Otherworldly Visions: Angels, Devils and Gender in
Puritan New England’, and Owen Davies, ‘Angels in Elite and Popular
Magic, 1650–1790’, both in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels.
46. Good Angel of Stamford (1659); BL, Add. MS 43410, fos 144v–146v.
47. Certaine Sermons Appoynted by the Quenes Maiesty (1563), sig. Riiiir; An
Homelie against Disobedience and Wylfull Rebellion (1570), sig. Air–v.
48. E text available at <http://www.piar.hu/councils/ecum12.htm>, accessed
Oct. 2007; see also Kelly, Satan, 316.
49. [Westminster Assembly], The Protestation of the Two and Twenty Divines
(1643), sig. A2v.
50. The Booke of the Common Praier (1549), sig. Nivv. Also the editions in
London (1586), Edinburgh (1637), Cambridge (1638), London (1639,
1642).
51. John Boughton, God and Man, or, A Treatise Catechetical (1623), 35.
52. On scriptural literalism, see Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and
the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), 107–14, and Ch. 6 below.
53. Gervase Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes (1592),
fo. 65v.
54. Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Genesin (Cambridge, 1605), 203.
55. George Hughes, Annotations upon all the Books of the Old and New
Testament (1651), at Gen. 18: 8; George Hughes, An Analytical Exposition
of the Whole First Book of Moses (1672), 217.
56. Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes, fo. 7v. Francis
cus Junius was a 16th century Huguenot theologian, and editor, with
Emmanuel Tremellius, of a Latin Bible that Milton used.
57. Willet, Hexapla, 17; Williams, Expositor, 61; cf. Columbia, xv. 30–1.
58. Annotations upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament, following
Gen. 1: 31; also Alexander Ross, An Exposition on . . . Genesis (1626),
31–2.
59. Columbia, xv. 32–5; p. 11 above.
60. Williams, Ideas of the Fall; James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal
Marriage and Sexual Relation in the Age of Milton (Oxford, 1987); William
Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge, 2005).
61. Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona
J. Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ (Oxford,
2007), 92–8.
62. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (1644), 372, 419, and The Due Right of
Presbyteries (1644), 3, 4, and passim; Richard Baxter, Christian Directory
(1673), 927; Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem (1625), 11–12.
63. Cf. Henry Hibbert, ‘Gloria in Altissimis’, 18, in Syntagma Theologicum

(1662).
64. Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance
Thought (Oxford, 1996); Peter Beale, ‘ ‘‘Notions in Garrison’’: The Seven
teenth Century Commonplace Book’, RETS/Newberry Lecture, 2 Apr.
1987, TS in Bodl.; William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and
Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995), 61–5; Kevin
Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England
(New Haven, 2000), 76–120, 277–307.
65. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.b.108; Andrew J. Hopper, ‘Henry
Fairfax’, in ODNB.
66. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.356.
67. Cornelius Burgess, ‘The Grounds of Divinity handled according to the
Method of the Vulgar Catechisme’, CUL, Add. MS 6164; Campbell
et al., Manuscript of ‘De Doctrina’.
68. Mary Morrissey, ‘Sermons, Prayer Books and Primers’, in Joad Raymond
(ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, i (forthcoming).
69. John Hume, Bios Epoyranios, or, The Character of an Heavenly Conversation
(1670); John Everard, Some Gospel Truths Opened (1653), 381; Thomas
Lamplugh’s sermons in Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.63, e.g.
sermon dated 25 July 1658; Thomas Hill, The Militant Church Triumphant
over the Dragon and His Angels (1643), 5; The Works of John Owen, D.D.,
ed. William H. Goold, 16 vols (New York, 1851–3), ix. 610; John Wall,
Alae Seraphicae (1627), passim; pp. 371–2, 375–6 below.
70. Nathaniel Cannon, Three Sermons (1616): see the third item, ‘The Court
of Guard’; cf. Brian Duppa, Angels Rejoicing for Sinners Repenting (1648).
71. John Gumbleden, Two Sermons, pub. with Christ Tempted: The Devil
Conquered (1657).
72. Bayly, Two Sermons, 4; Prideaux, ‘Patronage of Angels’.
73. Christopher Love, The Dejected Soules Cure . . . To which is added I. The
Ministry of Angels (1657), sig. A4v.
74. William Austin, Devotionis Augustinianae Flamma (1635), 243–57. See also
Richard Holsworth, The Valley of Vision (1651), 489–538.
75. Increase Mather, Angelographia (Boston, 1696) and Coelestinus: A Con
versation in Heaven (Boston, 1713); Cotton Mather, The Angel of
Bethesda (1722); Elizabeth Reis, ‘Otherworldly Visions: Angels, Devils
and Gender in Puritan New England’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds),
Angels.
76. Pp. 367–71, 376–7 below; Richard Sibbes, Light from Heaven (1638),
111–12; John White, A Commentary upon . . . Genesis (1656), iii. 240
(cited by book and page); CUL, Add. MS 6164; Ross, Exposition, 73.
77. Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660), 37.
78. J. A. Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light (1651), 232.
Contrast Holsworth, Valley of Vision, 508–9.
notes to chapter 3: angelology 391
CHAPTER 3
1. Edward Leigh, A Treatise of Divinity (1646), 40.
2. Andrew Willet, Synopsis Papismi, That is, A Generall Viewe of Papisty
(1592), 291–3.
3. William Bucanus, Institutions of Christian Religion, trans. Robert Hill (1606),
69.
4. William Perkins, A Golden Chaine (Cambridge, 1600), 12.
5. Kate Harvey, ‘The Role of Angels in English Protestant Thought 1580 to
1660’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 2005), 92–6; Henry Hibbert,
Syntagma Theologicum (1662), 33; Myles Davies, Athenae Britannicae, 3
vols (1715–16), iii. 7; John Bayly, Two Sermons: The Angel Guardian
(1630), 4.
6. C. A. Patrides, ‘Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy: The
Decline of a Tradition’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 155–66,
and ‘Renaissance Views on the ‘‘Unconfused Orders Angellick’’ ’, Journal
of the History of Ideas, 23 (1962), 265–7.
7. Joseph Hall, The Great Mysterie of Godliness . . . Also, The Invisible World
(1652), 144–5; referring to 2 Cor. 12: 2 and Col. 1: 16.
8. Hall, Great Mysterie, 146–53.
9. John Blenkow, Michaels Combat with the Devil (1640), 7.
10. Richard Sibbes, Light from Heaven (1638), 206; William Jenkyn, An
Exposition of the Epistle of Jude (1652), pt 1, p. 465, pt 2, pp. 47–8.
11. John Salkeld, Treatise of Angels (1613), 125–6, 291–322.
12. [Joseph Glanvill], A Blow at Modern Sadducism (1668), 52.
13. This is the tenor of Jenkyn, Exposition of Jude, pt 1, p. 465; Cornelius
Burgess, ‘The Grounds of Divinity’ (begun 1619), CUL, Add. MS 6164,
p. 54; Isaac Ambrose, ‘War with Devils’, in The Compleat Works (1682),
104–5.
14. Brian Duppa, Angels Rejoicing for Sinners Repenting (1648), 8–9.
15. Heywood, Hierarchie, 194–5; for Sadducism, see pp. 194–6; cf. Dante,
pp. 24–6 above.
16. See also John Heydon, who explicitly supported the nine orders and
individual guardian angels: Harmony of the World (1662), 2, 92; Theoma
gia, or, The Temple of Wisdome (1663–4), vol. iii, sig. Aaa2r, pp. 126, 148–9.
See also Robert Boyle, Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God
(1663 edn), 9.
17. See pp. 90–2 below.
18. E.g. Nathanael Hardy, The Hierarchy Exalted (1661), 22.
19. John Taylor, Peace, Peace, and We Shall Be Quiet (1647), 8–9.
20. George Lawson, Theo Politica (1659), 49–51.
21. John Swan, Redde Debitum (1640), 16–17; Heywood, Hierarchie, 282–3.
22. CPW i. 752–3.
23. Henry More, A Plain and Continued Exposition of . . . Daniel (1681), 25–6.
392 notes to chapter 3: angelology
24. Contra Harris Francis Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbinical Readings (Hamden,

Conn., 1967), 217, 220–1; West, Angels, 131–6 (‘His achievement with
the hierarchical terms in Paradise Lost is a sort of general allusiveness that
does not seriously exceed what Protestants would accept not yet fall
wholly short of what Catholics claimed’); Feisal G. Mohamed, ‘Renais
sance Thoughts on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Trad
ition?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 65 (2004), 559–82, and ‘Paradise Lost
and the Inversion of Catholic Angelology’, Milton Quarterly, 26 (2002),
240–52. See also John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the
Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford, 1990), 57–68; and Howard Schultz,
Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York, 1955), 123.
25. Witness Aquinas on angelic communication proceeding purely down
ward (Summa, xiv. 112–15, and below, pp. 70, 313–14), and John Colet’s
summary of Dionysius in Two Treatises on the Hierarchies of Dionysius, ed.
and trans. J. H. Lupton (1869), 16–18.
26. See pp. 245–6 below. Also Johannes Wollebius, The Abridgment of
Christian Divinitie, trans. Alexander Ross (1650), 51.
27. Westminster Assembly, Annotations upon all the Books of the Old and New
Testament (1651), at Rev. 12: 7; Heywood, Hierarchie, 336; Jenkyn,
Exposition of Jude, pt 2, p. 45; Columbia, xv. 104–7.
28. Willet, Synopsis Papismi, 293–5.
29. Calvin, Institution, 66; Peter Martyr, Common Places, 357; see pp. 230–7,
333–5, below.
30. John Pringle (trans.), The Three Books of Hermas (1661), 58–9.
31. Philip M. Soergel, ‘Luther on the Angels’, in Marshall and Walsham
(eds), Angels; Urbanus Rhegius, An Homely or Sermon of Good and Evill
Angels, trans. Ri[chard] Robinson (1583; 1593), 30v; Bayly, Two Sermons,
9–10, citing Zanchius. See, idiosyncratically, Thomas Tryon, Pythagoras
His Mystick Philosophy (1691), 157, 181, 188.
32. Calvin, Institution, 66; Calvin, Commentarie, 663–4; cf. the very Calvinist
Bodl. MS Sloane 1233, fo. 78v.
33. Gervase Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes upon
Everie Chapter of Genesis (1592), fo. 127v; Westminster, Annotations, at
Gen. 32: 2. The identical phrase appears in John Richardson, Choice
Observations and Explanation upon the Old Testament (1655), at Gen. 32: 2.
34. See Peter Marshall, ‘The Guardian Angel in Protestant England’, in
Raymond (ed.), Conversations; Love, Dejected Soules Cure, 4 and passim;
cf. John White, A Commentary upon . . . Genesis (1656), i. 44; BL, Add.
MS 1233, fo. 78r–v.
35. Salkeld, Treatise, 251–80; cf. Benjamin Camfield, who reserves judge
ment in A Theological Discourse of Angels and their Ministries (1678), 70–5.
36. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1642), 44–5, 60–1.
37. Lawrence, Angells, 19–22; Robert Dingley, The Deputation of Angels
(1654), see esp. his list of predecessors at pp. 69–76; Edward Hyde,
Christian Vindication (1659), 351–6; Thomas Tryon, Treatise of Dreams and

Visions (1689), 143–76; BL, Add. MS 4454, fo. 6; Pordage, at p. 131
below.
38. Dingley, Deputation, 149.
39. Bucanus, Insitutions, 73–4.
40. Marshall, ‘Guardian Angel’; also Harvey, ‘Role of Angels’, 79–87.
41. [George Wither], ‘Terrae Filius’, in Prosopopoeia Britannica (1648), 105.
42. See pp. 90, 189–93, 307.
43. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of
a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 171. See also Robin
Briggs, ‘Dubious Messengers: Bodin’s Demon, the Spirit World and the
Sadducees’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels; Walter Stephens,
‘Strategies of Interspecies Communication, 1100–2000’, in Raymond
(ed.), Conversations.
44. Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheisme (1653), 257–7, 258; Girolamo
Cardano, The Book of my Life, trans. Jean Stone, introd. Anthony Grafton
(New York, 2002), 209–15; Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 166–8.
45. BL, Sloane MS 3188; Meric Casaubon, A True and Faithful Relation of
What Passed for Many Yeers between Sr. John Dee . . . and Some Spirits
(1659); Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels:
Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999); Lauren
Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrol
oger, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford, 2005), 33, 215–21; Bodl., MS
Ashmole 235, fos 186v–193r; Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 864, fo. 233;
Sophie Page, ‘Speaking with Spirits in Medieval Magic Texts’, in
Raymond (ed.), Conversations; pp. 106–9 below.
46. Briggs, ‘Dubious Messengers’, 182–3; Trevor Johnson, ‘Guardian An
gels and the Society of Jesus’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels,
191; Owen Davies, ‘Angels in Elite and Popular Magic, 1650–1790’, in
Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels, 306–7; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and
Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (1958; Stroud, 2000), 224–9;
Ingrid D. Rowland, ‘Athanasius Kircher’s Guardian Angel’, in Raymond
(ed.), Conversations.
47. Durand Hotham, Life of Jacob Boehme (1653), sig. Dv; Peter Marshall,
‘Angels around the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in the English Art
of Dying’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels.
48. Pp. 111, 120, 123 below; Heydon, Theomagia, iii. 126.
49. Reginald Scott, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1665), 223–4; West, Angels, 61–6.
51. On Pordage and his disciples, Ch. 5 below.
52. Willet, Synopsis Papismi, 297–9. Cf. Richard Montagu’s rejection of the
notion that angels see through God as mirror; Immediate Addresse unto
God Alone (1624), 139–41. For more on angelic eyesight and knowledge,
see pp. 67–9 and 289–97 below.
53. Keck, Angels, 172–3; Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, i: Laws

Against Images (Oxford, 1988), 47–8.
55. Willet makes a more elaborate case in relationship to Gen. 17, where
‘Abraham fell on his face, and God talked with him.’ He argues that if
this were an angel, then Abraham’s falling on his face was not a gesture of
adoration (because of Rev. 22: 9); if it is such a gesture, then God must
have appeared directly; Hexapla, 198. Cf. George Hughes, An Analytical
Exposition of the Whole First Book of Moses (1672), 239.
56. Edward Leigh, Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650), 612.
57. Wollebius, Abridgment, 272.
59. Lawrence, Angells, 51.
60. Arise Evans, The Voice of Michael the Archangel (1654), 18–19.
62. Dingley, Deputation, 147–50.
63. Luther’s Works, 55 vols, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al. (St Louis, Mo. 1955–86),
xlii. 113, iii. 271–5; Calvin, Commentarie, 875–6; Calvin, Institution,
426–32.
64. Montagu, Immediate Addresse, }4v, 95, 91, 98–9. Alexandra Walsham,
‘Angels and Idols in England’s Long Reformation’, in Marshall and
Walsham (eds), Angels, 154–5, describes this as a shift in emphasis rather
than a departure from Calvinist tradition. I think Montagu manipulates
Calvin’s Institution, 427–8, to conceal how radical his departure is.
65. Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter Reformation: Glory, Laud
and Honour (Woodbridge, 2006), 51, 77–8, 94, 97–8, 103, 125–6; Austin,
Devotionis Augustinianae Flamma; R[obert] B[aillie] K., A Parallel or Brief
Comparison (1641), 15–16; p. 94 below.
66. See pp. 106–9, 131–2 below.
67. Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691), 176, 222–3.
68. Reginald Scott, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), 156; King James I (sic),
Daemonologie (1597), ed. G. B. Harrison (1922; Edinburgh, 1966), 65–6.
On prophecy, see pp. 189–202 below.
69. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post Reformation England’, in Kate
Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representa
tions of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, Studies in Church History,
41 (Woodbridge, 2005); D. P. Walker, ‘The Cessation of Miracles’, in
Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (eds), Hermeticism and the Renaissance:
Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (Washington,
DC, 1988); West, Angels, 56.
70. John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon all the Epistles, and the
Revelation of John the Divine (1647), 659.
71. Williams, Expositor, 48, 62; Calvin, Institution, 64. Examples include:
John Trapp, A Clavis to the Bible (1650), 3, 5; Babington, Comfortable
Notes, 7v; Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the Five Bookes of Moses
(1627), 8; Wollebius, Abridgment, 40; Alexander Ross, An Exposition on
the Fourteene First Chapters of Genesis (1626), 31–2; William Ames, The
Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642), 53; John Richardson, Choice Observations
and Explanations upon the Old Testament (1655), at Gen. 1: 8; Love,
Dejected Soules Cure, 21, 31–2; Lawrence, Angells, 7; among those who
suggest the fourth day are Willet, Hexapla, 17, and John Lightfoot, The
Harmony, Chronicle and Order, of the Old Testament (1647), 2. The pseud
epigraphal book of Jubilees states that angels were the fourth of seven
creations on the first day; Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
(Cambridge, 2006), 35–6.
72. Salkeld, Treatise, 8–21; Columbia, xv. 32–5.
73. Westminster, Annotations, at the various places indicated in the text. See
also Love, Dejected Soules Cure, 31; Ross, Exposition, 32.
74. Williams, Expositor, 61–2.
75. Christopher Love, Treatise of Angels, 31–3, in The Dejected Soules Cure
(1657).
76. John Lightfoot, Erubhin, or, Miscellanies (1629), 150–1.
77. R.B., A Muster Roll of the Evill Angels (1655), 3, 12; Samuel Clarke,
A Mirrour or Looking Glasse, 2nd edn (1654), 216; White, Commentary,
ii. 104; Wollebius, Abridgment, 39.
78. White, Commentary, i. 5.
79. Salkeld, Treatise, 116–42; Aquinas, Summa, ix. 33, 73–165; Kelly, Satan,
245.
80. John Colet, Two Treatises on the Hierarchies of Dionysius, ed. and trans.
J. H. Lupton (1869), 21.
81. Lawrence, Angells, 28–32.
83. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie Eight Bookes (1611),
12; Jenkyn, Exposition of Jude, pt 1, p. 455; Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium,
or, The Devil’s Cloister (1684), 22; Hall, Great Mysterie, 126.
84. J. A. Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light (1651), 237,
238; John Everard, Some Gospel Truths Opened (1653), 381; Austen’s
notebook, BL, Add. MS 4454, fo. 8.
85. Sibbes, Light from Heaven, 95; Gumbleden, Christ Tempted, 23.
86. Gumbleden, Christ Tempted, 9; Richard Sibbes, A Glance of Heaven
(1638), 139–40; Matthew Poole, Blasphemoktonia: The Blasphemer Slaine,
2nd edn (1654), 25–6.
87. Columbia, xv. 106–7.
88. Dingley, Deputation, 118, 123.
89. CUL, Add. MS 6164, p. 55.
90. Aquinas, Summa, ix. 37, 13; Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Separate Sub
stances, trans. Revd Francis J. Lescoe (West Hartford, Conn., 1963), 146–7.
91. Calvin, Commentarie, 381; Peter Martyr, Common Places, 341.

93. Lauren Kassell, ‘ ‘‘The Food of Angels’’: Simon Forman’s Alchemical
Medicine’, in William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (eds), Secrets of
Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.,
2001), and ead., Medicine and Magic, 199–206; pp. 130, 282–9 below.
94. Ross, Exposition, 2nd pagination, 129.
95. White, Commentary, i. 32; Ross, Exposition, 2nd pagination, 100; Light
foot, Erubhin, 97; David S. Katz, ‘The Language of Adam in Seven
teenth Century England’, in Hugh Lloyd Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair
Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor
Roper (1981); pp. 309–18 below.
96. Aquinas, Summa, xiv. 111; ix. 4, 81, 125. Cf. Hall, Great Mysterie, 127;
Heywood, Hierarchie, 39–40.
98. Pp. 282–99 below, p. 69 above; Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed, 232.
99. Marcia L. Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols (Leiden, 1994), i. 343–6, 348–9.
100. Aquinas, Summa, xi. 177–9, 227–39, 259–77.
101. Willet, Hexapla, 34. This complex problem was developed most
extensively in relation to human freewill and the problem of original sin.
See Williams, Ideas of the Fall; Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton,
2003) and The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton, 1987).
102. Salkeld, Treatise, 182–209, esp. 189–90. Hooker also says the elect angels
cannot fall; Ecclesiastical Politie, 10–11.
103. Hall, Great Mysterie, 257–62; quotation at p. 261.
104. Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660),
359–60.
105. Wollebius, Abridgment, 32–3.
106. Boyle, Some Motives, 110; Lawrence, Angells, 57; BL, Sloane MS 1233,
fo. 75r–v.
107. Columbia, xv. 96–9.
108. Williams, Expositor, 117–18.
109. Keck, Angels, 24.
110. Kelly, Satan, 205–6, 175–6.
111. Aquinas, Summa, ix. 251–7.
112. Heywood, Hierarchie, 340.
113. Salkeld, Treatise, 335–44; quotation at p. 342.
115. Hooker, Ecclesiastical Politie, 10–11.
116. William Ames, Medulla Theologiae (1629), 53; Willet, Hexapla, 37; also
Jenkyn, Exposition of Jude, pt 2, pp. 480–1.
117. Vita, 13: 1–16: 4, in R. H. Charles (ed.), The Apocrypha and Pseudepig
rapha of the Old Testament in English, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1913); <http://
www.ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig/adamnev.htm>, accessed Nov.
2007.
118. Lightfoot, Harmony, 3.

119. Thomas Peyton, The Glasse of Time in the First Age (1620), 29.
120. Williams, Ideas of the Fall, 20–8, 112–18, 161–2; John Skinner, A Critical
and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, 2nd edn (1930; Edinburgh, 1994),
139–47; Williams, Expositor, 117–18, 151–3; Forsyth, Old Enemy, 147–
81, and Satanic Epic, 38, 128, 145, 181; Kelly, Satan, 13, 34–5, 131–4;
Michael E. Stone, A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve (Atlanta,
Ga., 1992); Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York, 1995), ch. 2;
Kathryn Powell and Donald Scragg (eds), Apocryphal Texts and Traditions
in Anglo Saxon England (Cambridge, 2003). Ruben had been translated
into Latin by Robert Grosseteste, and appeared in English in Richard
Day (ed.), The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs (1658).
121. Williams, Expositor, 152; Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent
(New York, 1998), 42.
122. Annotations in Geneva Bibles; Westminster, Annotations, at Gen 6: 2
and Job 1: 6, 38: 7; Richardson, Choice Observations, at Gen. 6: 2 and
p. 156; Salkeld, Treatise, 324–4; CUL, Add. MS 7338 (Philip Henry’s
Genesis commentary, on Gen. 6, 27 June 1658); Lightfoot, Erubhin,
13–15, and Harmony, 8; Ross, Exposition, 93–5; Babington, Comfortable
Notes, fo. 28r. Trapp, Clavis, 62–3, is unusual in not mentioning the
reading.
123. PL 11. 573–87, 621–2; PR 2. 178–81; see also James Grantham Turner,
One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relation in the Age of Milton
(Oxford, 1987), 268–9.
124. Willet, Hexapla, 73.
125. Williams, Expositor, 118.
126. Bayly, Two Sermons, 2.
128. Hall, Great Mysterie, 264; also Love, Dejected Soules Cure, 44.
130. Ross, Exposition, 96.
131. Henry Mayr Harting, Perceptions of Angels in History (Oxford, 1998),
17–18.
132. White, Commentary, iii. 240.
133. Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief
(Chicago, 2002), 58–86.
135. Masekhet Avot de Rabi Natan, trans. Francis Tayler (1654); Golda Wer
man, Milton and Midrash (Washington, DC, 1995), 42.
136. Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. F.
(1651), 453–4.
137. Bucanus, Institutions, 67; also R. Saunders, Angelographia (1701), 6–12;
Robert Gell, Aggelokratia Theon, or, A Sermon Touching Gods Government
of the World by Angels (1650), 12.

139. Amy Boesky, ‘Milton’s Heaven and the Model of the English Utopia’,
Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 91–110; pp. 263–5 below.
140. Casaubon, True and Faithful Relation, sig. Er.
141. Lawson, Theo Politica, 52; Bayly, Two Sermons, 15–16; Bartas: His Devine
Weekes and Workes, trans. Joshua Sylvester (1605), 204; Edward Leigh, A
Treatise of the Divine Promises (1641), 171.
142. Colet, Two Treatises, 17–18.
143. Heywood, Hierarchie, 373, 209; Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 61–3.
144. Gumbleden, Christ Tempted, 9.
145. Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbinical Readings, 223–45; Uriel also appears in the
pseudepigraphical Vitae Adae et Evae and Prayer of Joseph and the apoc
ryphal 2 Macc. 15; pp. 82–3, 149–57, below.
146. Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Theology, ii (Dallas, 1947), 19–20;
though see Kelly, Satan, 191–214 and passim.
147. Gell, Aggelokratia, 12.
148. Gustav Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels including the Fallen Angels
(New York, 1971), 339–56.
149. Ronald H. Isaacs, Ascending Jacob’s Ladder: Jewish Views of Angels, Demons,
and Evil Spirits (Northvale, NJ, 1998); West, Angels, 77; Davidson,
Dictionary of Angels; Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Encyclopedia of Angels
(New York, 1996); Agrippa, Three Books, 414–37; Heydon, Theomagia,
iii. 148–51; on the power of names in PL, see Leonard, Naming in
Paradise.
150. Mr. William Lilly’s History of his Life and Times (1715), 49–50, 54.
151. Heywood, Hierarchie, 215–16.
152. Westminster, Annotations, at Gen. 32: 29.
153. See also Bayly, Two Sermons, 5.
154. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), 270,
274, 278, and 269–89 passim.
155. Aquinas, Summa, ix. 13.
156. Matthew Kellison, A Treatise of the Hierarchie (Douai, 1629), 1–2.
157. Blenkow, Michaels Combat, 5.
158. Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evi
dence (Leiden, 1998), 124–51 and esp. 124–5 n. 3; Kelly, Satan, 36–9, 62,
146; Isaacs, Ascending Jacob’s Ladder, 66; Davidson, Dictionary of Angels,
pp. ix–xi, 40; Peter R. Carrell, Jesus and the Angels: Angelology and the
Christology of the Apocalypse of John (Cambridge, 1997), 69–70.
159. Evans, Voice of Michael the Archangel, 19.
160. Columbia, xv. 102–3. The Latin is dense: ‘Et septem praecipue orben
terrae perlustrant.’
161. Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbinical Readings, 245–8, 255. On the names of
Milton’s angels, see also Larry R. Isitt, All the Names in Heaven: A
Reference Guide to Milton’s Supernatural Names and Epic Similes (Lanham,
Md., 2002); Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John

Selden (Oxford, 2006), 74–92.
162. Gell, Aggelokratia, 12.
163. Augustine, City, 353.
164. Quoted by Marı́a Tausiet, ‘ ‘‘Patronage of Angels and Combat of
Demons’’: Good versus Evil in Seventeenth Century Spain’, in Marshall
and Walsham (eds), Angels, 255.
165. Aquinas, Summa, xiv. 154–5.
166. Harvey, ‘Role of Angels’, 3–4.
167. Jacob Behme (sic), Forty Questions of the Soul, trans. John Sparrow (1665), 134.
168. Ross, Exposition, 23, 31.
169. Sibbes, Light from Heaven, 106.
170. Trapp, Clavis, 252–3.
171. More, Explanation, bk 5, ch. 6.
172. George Lawson, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrewes (1662), 29–30,
325.
173. BL, Add. MS 4454, p. 8.
175. Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes, 10r.
177. Mayr Harting, Perceptions of Angels, 13–15.
178. Rhegius, Homely or Sermon, 26r.
179. Boyle, Some Motives, 168; John Wall, Alæ Seraphicæ (1627), 121–43, at
122; Erik Peterson, The Angels and the Liturgy: The Status and Significance
of the Holy Angels in Worship, trans. Ronald Walls (1964).
180. Rhegius, Homely or Sermon, 26v; Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 61–3.
183. Rhegius, Homely or Sermon, 26v.
184. Patrick Hume discussed the ministerial functions of Milton’s angels;
Annotations on Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ (1695), 120, 195.
185. Love, Dejected Soules Cure, 15–17.
186. Peter Marshall, ‘Angels around the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in
the English Art of Dying’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels; Bruce
Gordon, ‘Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and
Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation’, in Bruce Gordon and Peter
Marshall (eds), The Place of the Death: Death and Remembrance in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000).
187. Trapp, Clavis, 147; Calvin, Commentarie, 413.
189. More, Antidote, 255; they are watchers in the book of Enoch, Job 7: 20
(‘preserver’ in King James translation), and in Dan. 4: 13; Kelly, Satan,
23, 34; Williams, Ideas of the Fall, 24.
190. H[enry] A[insworth], The Communion of Saints (Amsterdam, 1640), 200.
400 notes to chapter 4: radical speculation
191. See p. 243 below; Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels, p. 33 and chs 12,
13; Robert Fludd, Doctor Fludds Answer unto M. Foster (1631), 64 and
passim; William Foster, Hoplocrisma Spongus (1631), 4 and passim; Ains
worth, Communion of Saints, 198.
405–7; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in
England c.1400–c.1500 (New Haven, 1992), 73, 269–71; Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Century England (1971).
193. Hall, Great Mysterie, 174 (paraphrasing an unidentified author).
194. Ainsworth, Communion of Saints, 196.
195. For this language of fellowship, see John Gaule, Practique Theories, or,
Votive Speculations (1630), 31; Harvey, ‘Role of Angels’, 159, 301.
196. CUL, Add. MS 6164, p. 58.
197. Pace West, Angels, ch. 2.
CHAPTER 4
1. Christopher Love, The Dejected Soules Cure (1657), sigs A4v–Br.
2. [William Spenser?], ‘The Apocalypse Revelation of St John’, CUL, MS
Dd. 1. 24.
3. By ‘radical’ I mean imagining the transformation of the present by
pursuing an idea to its roots, a usage this chapter justifies. See Conal
Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth Century England (Basing
stoke, 1994), 140–68; ‘Rethinking the English Revolution’, History
Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), 153–204; Glenn Burgess and Matthew
Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 2007).
4. [Joseph Hall], Humble Remonstrance (1640 [1641]), 23–4; Peloni Almoni,
A Compendious Discourse (1641), sig. A4v.
5. Smectymnuus, An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance
(1641), 53.
6. Ibid. 56–8.
7. CPW i. 711–14; quotation at p. 721.
8. Ibid. 850. Cf. Constantine Jessop, The Angel of the Church of Ephesus
(1644), 3.
9. CPW i. 820–1; also Ch. 7 below.
10. CPW vi. 310–15, 343–50; Maurice Kelley, This Great Argument: A Study
of Milton’s ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ as a Gloss upon ‘Paradise Lost’ (Prince
ton, 1941), 110–18.
11. John White, Speeches and Passages (1641), 421.
12. Dr. Reignolds His Letter to that Worthy Councellor . . . As Also a Question
Resolved (1641), also published as The Judgement of Doctor Reignolds (1641);
first pub. posthumously in Informations, or, A Protestation (1608).
notes to chapter 4: radical speculation 401
13. Also William Prynne, The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie (1641);
Henry Ainsworth, Counterpoyson Considerations (1641); Paul Baynes, The
Dioceans Tryall (1641); Robert Greville, Baron Brooke, A Discourse
Opening the Nature of that Episcopacie (1641).
14. Peace Againe in Sion, or, Heaven Appeased (1641).
15. Kevin Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations: Prophecy, Hermeneutics and Pol
itics in Early Modern Britain’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker
(eds), Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge,
2003).
16. See Joseph Mede, The Key of the Revelation, trans. Richard More (1643).
17. Joseph Mede, The Apostasy of the Latter Times (1641), 9, 24, 43, 66. See
also John Archer, The Personal Reign of Christ upon Earth (1642).
18. Thomas Brightman, A Revelation of the Apocalyps (1611) and A Revelation
of the Revelation (Amsterdam, 1615), 109, 124–5.
19. A Revelation of Mr. Brightmans Revelation (1641), 27–8.
20. Ibid. 34–5; Raymond, Pamphleteering, 27–52, 179–81, 204–5, 229–33,
and sources cited there; David Como, ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of
1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, Past and Present, 196
(2007), 37–82.
21. On 1640s millenarianism, see Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth
Century England (1971), 78–115, and The English Bible and the Seventeenth
Century Revolution (1993), 196–250, 314–23; William M. Lamont, Godly
Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660 (1969); H. R. Trevor Roper, ‘The
Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament’, in Religion, the Reformation and
Social Change and Other Essays (1967); Paul Christianson, ‘From Expect
ation to Militance: Reformers and Babylon in the First Two Years of the
Long Parliament’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 24 (1973), 225–44;
Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–
1645 (Oxford, 1979), 204–41; Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from
Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); Bernard Capp, ‘The Polit
ical Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, in C. A. Patrides and Joseph
Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Litera
ture: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussion (Ithaca, NY, 1984); Sharpe,
‘Reading Revelations’, 138–43.
22. R[obert] B[aillie] K., A Parallel or Brief Comparison (1641), 15–16.
23. The Protestation of the Two and Twenty Divines (1643), sig. A2v.
24. The Petition and Articles Exhibited in Parliament Against Doctor Heywood
(1641), 4; the work was François de Sales, An Introduction to a Devoute
Life, probably the 1637 edition, though I have not located Heywood’s
licence. For the offending passage, see Introduction, trans. John Yakesley
(Paris, 1637), 667 [691].
25. A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny (1641), 1.
26. Seven Arguments Plainly Proving that Papists Are Trayterous Subjects to all
True Christian Princes (1641), 13.
27. Sions Charity towards her Foes in Misery (1641), 2–3.

28. Ibid. 3.
29. John Geree, The Down Fall of Anti Christ (1641), sig. Br.
30. John Taylor, The Brownists Conventicle (1641), 6–7.
31. Three Propositions of the Angels of Light (1642), 5.
32. Donne, Major Works, 308.
33. Three Propositions, 15, 10.
34. Ibid. 9, 11. See Kate Harvey, ‘The Role of Angels in English Protestant
Thought 1580 to 1660’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 2005), chs
5 and 6, for theological contexts.
35. Three Propositions, 18, 10.
36. Ibid. 15 (printed ‘17’).
37. Jacob Bauthumley, The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650).
38. See Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations’, 138–9 and passim.
39. A Suddaine Answer to a Suddain Moderatour (1642 [1643]), 7; Brian Duppa,
Angels Rejoicing for Sinners Repenting (1648), 10–11.
40. Malignants Trecherous and Bloody Plot (1643), TT 669 f.8 (22).
41. Theophilus Philanax Gerusiphilus Philalethes Decius, An Answer to the
Lord George Digbies Apology (1642 [1643]), 27; Robert Bacon, The Laby
rinth the Kingdom’s In (1649), 34.
42. A Discovery of the Juglings and Deceitfull Impostures (1643), 4.
43. The Necessity of Christian Subjection (Oxford, 1643), 4.
44. J. V., A Discovery of the Rebels (1643), 9.
45. J. T., Gent., Peace, Peace, and We Shall Be Quiet (1647), 8–9.
46. Edward Symmons, A Vindication of King Charles (1648), 27, 204; Mercur
ius Pragmaticus, 51 (17–24 Apr. 1649), TT E551(19), sig. Pppv; Mercurius
Elencticus, quoted in Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in
Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007), 70.
47. Maximes Unfolded (1643), 40; see also John Pordage, Innocencie Appearing
through the Dark Mists of Pretended Guilt (1655), 106–7; Robert Austine,
Allegiance not Impeached (1644), 31–2, in which angels represent impartial
judgement.
48. An Elegie Sacred to the Immortal Memory (1643), TT 669 f.8 (42).
49. Richard Arnway, The Tablet or Moderation of Charles the First Martyr ([The
Hague], 1649), 22–3.
50. Raymond, Pamphleteering, 218–19; e.g. T. B., Newes from Rome (1641);
J. M., Newes from Hell (1641); Archy’s Dream (1641). For the purposes of
Lucianic allusion, and perhaps to seem less inflammatory, the Devil is
sometimes displaced by Pluto.
51. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994),
182–93; The Devil in his Dumps (1647); The Devill and the Parliament
(1648).
52. Mercurius Pragmaticus, [51] (17–24 Apr. 1649), TT E551(12), sig. Av. Cf.
Richard Overton, The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (1645), 1.
53. Mercurius Fidelicus, 1 (17–24 Aug. 1648), 5.

54. Love, Dejected Soules Cure, 27; Robert Bacon, The Labyrinth the King
dom’s In (1649), 33; Edward Hyde, A Christian Vindication of Truth
Against Errour (1659), 351; Three Propositions, 10.
56. Theologica Germanica could be mentioned here. John Everard translated
this into English as ‘Theologica Deutsch’ in 1628–36. A Latin edition
(originally Antwerp, 1558) was published in London in 1632. It circu
lated in manuscript in English translated by John Everard (CUL, MS Dd.
12. 68), and was printed in an English translation by Giles Randall,
Theologia Germanica, or, Mysticall Divinitie (1648). It is not a systematic
theology, but a mystical account of God and human morality; it reflects
growing interest in mysticism in the 1640s, and probably influenced
Coppe and Bauthumley’s thought about angels.
57. On Milton, Wollebius, and Ames, see William B. Hunter, ‘The Mil
lennial Moment: Milton vs. ‘‘Milton’’ ’, in Juliet Cummins (ed.), Milton
and the Ends of Time (Cambridge, 2003); Maurice Kelley, ‘Milton’s Debt
to Wolleb’s Compendium Theologiae Christianiae’, PMLA, 50 (1935), 156–
65; CPW vi. 17–21 and index.
59. John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition (1647), title page, 559.
60. Henry Ainsworth, The Communion of Saints (1640), 19–22, 194–201.
61. William Jenkyn, An Exposition of the Epistle of Jude . . . Delivered in XL
Lectures (1652), 447–52 and passim; see also An Exposition of the Epistle of
Jude . . . The Second Part (1654). Jenkyn retains much Aristotelian philoso
phy, and returns repeatedly to angelic hierarchies, dismissing them, then
diffidently restating the schema of ‘popish Schoolmen’ (Exposition, pt 2,
pp. 47–50). This troubled and interested him more than any other topic.
62. Love, Dejected Soules Cure, angels treatise, separate pagination, 1–46; see
pp. 106–11 below.
63. Calvert entered both this and Lawrence’s Of Basptisme (1646) in the
Stationers’ Register on 7 July 1646.
64. TT E509(2); Thomason also noted that Of Basptisme (1646) was pub
lished in Rotterdam.
65. D. F. McKenzie, ‘Milton’s Printers: Matthew, Mary and Samuel Sim
mons’, Milton Quarterly, 14 (1980), 87–91; Peter Lindenbaum, ‘The Poet
in the Marketplace: Milton and Samuel Simmons’, in Paul G. Stanwood
(ed.), Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and his World (Bin
ghamton, NY, 1995); Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Rematerializing Milton’,
Publishing History, 41 (1997), 5–22; Joad Raymond, ‘Milton and the
Book Trade’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), A History of
the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002).
66. See Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford, 2000), 349;
Milton, Poems, 343–4. David Masson tentatively suggests the men
may been acquaintances; The Life of John Milton, 7 vols (1859–94), vii.
658.
67. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 25; Christopher Fowler, Daemonium Mer
idianum: Satan at Noon (1655), 80, 84; Pordage, Mundorum, 50. See also
Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), 159, and The
Saints Everlasting Rest (1650), 242; West, Angels, 23; Robert Dingley, The
Deputation of Angels (1654), 159–65.
68. Ann Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philoso
phy in the Late Renaissance’, Isis, 91 (2000), 32–58; Brian Harrison, The
Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998),
104–5; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and
Reform 1626–1660 (1975), 113–14 and passim; Howard Hotson, Johann
Heinrich Alsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal
Reform (Oxford, 2000), 56, 138–9, 158, 182–201.
69. J. A. Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light (1651), 228.
70. Ibid. 232.
71. Lawrence, Angells, 16–17; pp. 94–5 above and 189–93 below.
72. A Great Wonder in Heaven (1642 [1643]), 3, 4, 7. Cf. B. G., The Relation of
a Strange Apparition in the Air (1654); William Radmore, Wonderful News,
from the North (1651).
73. L. P. and P. M., Strange Predictions Related at Catericke (1648), 2–5. Cf.
Most Fearefull and Strange Newes from the Bishoppricke of Durham (1641).
74. Joseph Hall, The Great Mysterie of Godliness (1652), 159; Alexandra
Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 182.
75. The Marine Mercury (1642), A3r.
76. Anna Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints (1654), 14.
77. Mary Cary, The Little Horns Doom (1651), 32; also Walsham, Providence,
213.
78. Fowler, Daemonium Meridianum, 61.
79. Mercurius Politicus, 32 (9–16 Jan. 1651); Joad Raymond (ed.), Making the
News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England, 1641–1660
(Moreton in the Marsh, 1993), 182–4; A Declaration at Oxford (1651), 4;
Raymond, Pamphleteering, 113–15.
80. William Lilly, Merlinus Anglicus Junior: The English Merlin Revived
(1644), 6.
81. Arise Evans, The Voice of Michael the Archangel (1654), 16; also pp. 252–3
below.
82. Mr. W. Lilly’s History of his Life and Times (1715), 101; C. H. Josten (ed.),
Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), 5 vols (Oxford, 1966), v. 542; Ch. 5 below.
83. Lilly, History, 14. On Forman’s astrology, see Lauren Kassell, Medicine
and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and
Physician (Oxford, 2005).
84. Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon, trans. Robert Turner (1657) (for
voices, see e.g. p. 35); BL, MS Sloane 1712; Peter Forshaw, ‘ ‘‘Behold, the
dreamer cometh’’: Hyperphysical Magic and Deific Visions in an Early

Modern Theosophical Lab Oratory’, and Stephen Clucas, ‘False Illuding
Spirits & Cownterfeiting Deuills: John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and
Religious Anxiety’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations; Lynn Thorndike, A
History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York, 1923–58), ii.
279–89.
85. Lilly, History, 24–5.
86. Ibid. 49–50.
87. John Aubrey, Miscellanies (1696), 128–32. Uriel is probably here
appointed as one of the four or seven Angels of the Presence; pp. 82–3
above. He is a significant figure in occult writings.
89. Ibid. 88.
90. Ibid. 54; Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and
Healing in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 16–19, 210,
212–14.
91. Bodl., MS Ashmole 235, fos 186v–193r.
92. Aubrey, Miscellanies, 133–6.
94. Lilly, The World’s Catastrophe, or, Europe Many Mutations Untill, 1666
(1647); Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William
Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester, 1995), 31. On Trithemius’
intentions, however, see Anthony Grafton’s essay in Raymond (ed.),
Conversations.
95. Lilly, Merlini Anglici Ephemeris 1648 (1648), sig. Cr; see also sigs C3r, E8r–v,
F6r.
96. See pp. 56–7 above and 230–7 below.
97. Meric Casaubon, A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many
Yeers between Sr. John Dee . . . and Some Spirits (1659), 394.
98. William Lilly, The Starry Messenger (1645), 11; also Lilly, An Astrologicall
Prediction of the Occurrences in England, Part of the Yeers 1648, 1649, 1650
(1650), 6.
99. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe (Oxford, 1997), chs 14–15.
100. Merlini Anglici Ephemeris 1648, sig. A3v.
101. H. Johnsen, Anti Merlinus, or, A Confutation of Mr. William Lillies Predic
tions (1648), title page (quotation), sig. A3r, pp. 4, 21.
102. Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth Century English Tragedy
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart
England: A Regional and Comparative Study (1970), 135–44.
103. Westminster, Annotations, at Gen. 15: 5; Henry More, An Explanation of
the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660), 339; though contrast Gervase
Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes upon Everie
Chapter of Genesis (1592), fos 6v–7r; Andrew Willett, Hexapla in Genesin
(Cambridge, 1605), 11; George Hughes, An Analytical Exposition of . . .

Genesis (1672), 6; Francis Bampfield, All in One (1677), 114–24. See also
Reginald Scott, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), 169–71.
104. Calvin, Commentarie, 37; Johannes Wollebius, The Abridgement of Chris
tian Divinity, trans. Alexander Ross (1650), 53; Folger Shakespeare Li
brary, MS V.a.356, fo. 72v.
105. Harry Rusche, ‘Merlini Anglici: Astrology and Propaganda from 1644 to
1651’, English Historical Review, 80 (1965), 322–33; Geneva, Astrology and
the Seventeenth Century Mind; Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular
Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (1979), ch. 3.
106. Nathanael Homes, Daemonologie and Theologie (1650); A Collection Out of
the Best Approved Authors, Containing Histories of Visions, Apparitions,
Prophesies (1657).
107. Homes, Daemonologie and Theologie, 106–40; Samuel Clarke, A Mirrour or
Looking Glasse, 2nd edn (1654), 453–8; A Collection Out of the Best
Approved Authors, sigs Mm2r, Pp1v; John Vicars, Against William Li Lie
(alias) Lillie (1652); John Raunce, A Brief D[e]claration Against Judicial
Astrologie (1650).
108. On Cotton’s library, see Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton 1586–1631:
History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1979). For Dee’s
books, see Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels:
Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999), 218–20; Lilly,
History, 100–1. On Ashmole’s and Dee’s manuscripts, see Josten (ed.),
Elias Ashmole, iii. 1264–74; BL, Sloane MS 3188, fos 2–3.
109. West, Angels, 193 n. 10; Casaubon, True and Faithful Relation, sig. Ar–v;
for William Shippen’s perceptions of Causabon’s partiality, see his copy,
BL, 719.m.12.
110. Casaubon, True and Faithful Relation, 92.
111. Peter J. French, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (1972),
89–125; Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between
Science and Religion (1988); W. A. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of
Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995);
Deborah E. Harkness, ‘Shows in the Showstone: A Theater of Alchemy
and Apocalypse in the Angel Conversations of John Dee’, Renaissance
Quarterly, 49 (1996), 707–37, and John Dee’s Conversations; Michael
Wilding, Raising Spirits, Making Gold and Swapping Wives: The True
Adventures of Dr John Dee and Sir Edward Kelly (Nottingham, 1999);
Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson, John Dee’s Library Catalogue
(1990).
112. Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (1655) and Of
Credulity and Incredulity (1668), 47.
113. Casaubon, True and Faithful Relation, sig. Av.
114. Ibid., sig. D2v.
115. Ibid., Actio Tertia, 10; the episode is discussed on pp. 9–23.
116. Ibid., sigs E3r–v.

117. PL 1. 358 ff.; John Selden, De Diis Syris (1617); Jason Rosenblatt,
Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), 74–92.
118. Casaubon, True and Faithful Relation, sigs E3v–E4r.
119. McKenzie and Bell, i. 411; French, John Dee, 12; A Transcript of the
Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers; From 1640–1708 A.D., 3
vols (1913), ii. 167.
120. BL, 719.m.12, p. 6 and passim.
121. Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cam
bridge, Mass., 1972).
122. Thomas Hicks, A Discourse of the Souls (1657), 4–5.
123. Ibid. 4.
124. Henry Woolnor, The True Originall of the Soule (1641), 16–21, 91–3, 290,
297. Woolnor’s book provoked defences of mortalism by Richard Over
ton, Mans Mortalitie (1643) and Man Wholly Mortal (1655).
125. McKenzie and Bell, i. 307, 308, 310–11; W. R. Parker, Milton: A
Biography, 2 vols, vol. ii rev. Gordon Campbell (1968; Oxford, 1996),
i. 395, ii. 994 n. 153, and sources cited there.
126. John Biddle, Twelve Arguments Drawn Out of Scripture (1647), 1; McKen
zie and Bell, i. 209–10; Biddle, A Confession of Faith Touching the Holy
Trinity (1648), 3.
127. Biddle, Confession of Faith, 9–10, 15–16, 57.
128. McKenzie and Bell, i. 354–5, 363–4.
129. The Faithful Scout, 205 (8–15 Dec. 1654), TT E237(4), 1680; Certain
Passages, ‘76’ (8–15 Dec. 1654), TT E237(5); Perfect Diurnall of Some
Passages, 262 (11–18 Dec. 1654), TT E237(6), 4024; Mercurius Poli
ticus, 235 (7–14 Dec. 1654), 4086; 236 (14–21 Dec. 1654), 5002;
Weekly Post, 205 (12–19 Dec. 1654), TT E237(7), 1675, 1678;
Severall Proceedings in Parliament, 274 (21–8 Dec. 1654), 4335–6;
McKenzie and Bell, i. 363–6.
130. Mercurius Politicus, 238 (28 Dec.–4 Jan. 1654 [1655]); Raymond (ed.),
Making the News, 405; Ariel Hessayon, ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The
Prophet Theauraujohn Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot, 2007)
and ‘Thomas Totney [Theaurau John Tany]’, in ODNB.
131. On the political and publishing contexts of these weeks, see Joad
Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instru
ment of Government’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (2001), 313–50;
Sarah Mortimer, ‘Refuting Satan: Owen, Socinianism and the Interpret
ation of Scripture’, M.Phil. thesis (University of Oxford, 2003).
132. John Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae (Oxford, 1655); Owen and Biddle’s
exchange is discussed below, pp. 171–3.
133. The Racovian Catechisme (‘Amsterdam’, 1652), 14–25; Biddle, A Two Fold
Catechism (1654) and The Apostolical and True Opinion Concerning the Holy
Trinity (1653); John Owen, Christologia, or, A Declaration of the Glorious
Mystery of the Person of Christ (1679), in The Works of John Owen, D.D.,
ed. William H. Goold, 16 vols (New York, 1851–3), i; John Brayne, The
Divinity of the Trinity Cleared (1654); Nicholas Estwick, Mr Bidle’s Con
fession of Faith (1656).
134. Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. F. (1651); Jacob Boehme,
The Tree of Christian Faith (1644), The Way to Christ Discovered (1647), XL.
Questions Concerning the Soule (1647), The Second Booke. Concerning the Three
Principles (1648), The Third Booke of the Authour, Being the High and Deepe
(1650), Of Christs Testaments (1652), Mysterium Magnum, or, An Exposition of
the First Book of Moses (1654), all trans. John Sparrow.
135. Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (1649), 8–9.
136. Abiezer Coppe, A Second Fiery Flying Roule (1649 [1650]), 11–12, 13.
137. Richard Coppin, Michael Opposing the Dragon ([1659]), 39; Coppe, Second
Fiery Flying Roule, 3.
138. Richard Coppin, The Exaltation of All Things in Christ, pt 3 of Divine
Teachings (1649), 42; though Satan exercises Coppin’s imagination as if
an independent being.
139. Gerrard Winstanley, William Everard, et al., The True Levellers Standard
Advanced (1649), 6. On antinomianism and perfectionism, see esp. Nigel
Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and English Radical Religion 1640–
1660 (Oxford, 1989), and David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and
the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre Civil War England
(Stanford, Calif., 2004).
140. Hessayon, Gold Tried, 197–8.
141. Jacob Bauthumley, The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650), 27, 28.
142. Ibid. 25, 24, 27.
143. Thomas Tany, Theauraujohn His Theou Ori Apokolipikal (1651), 32, 22,
25; Theauraujohn Tany His Second Part (1653), ‘To the Reader’, 75; see
Hessayon, ‘Gold Tried’, 332–3, 353–6.
144. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, ed. Jolande Jacobi, trans. Norbert Guterman
(Princeton, 1979), 164.
145. Casaubon, True and Faithful Relation, 237, 394; Pordage, Innocencie
Appearing, 14, and below pp. 129, 132; Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 864,
fo. 233v; Hessayon, ‘Gold Tried’, 330–1.
146. Robert Norwood, The Form of an Excommunication (1651), 26.
147. Laurence Claxton [Clarkson], The Lost Sheep Found (1660), 32, also 24–
5; Journal of the House of Commons, vi. 474–5 (the report of the Commit
tee for Suppressing Licentious and Impious Practices; the committee was
ordered to investigate Coppe on the same day); on Pordage and Everard,
see pp. 129, 130, 133 below.
148. Laurence Claxton [Clarkson], A Paradisal Dialogue betwixt Faith and
Reason (1660), 13, 26–9, 23, 30, and Lost Sheep Found, 55.
149. Claxton, Paradisal Dialogue, 29, 26–7; John Reeve and Lodowick Mug
gleton, Joyful News from Heaven (1658), 21.
notes to chapter 5: conversations 409
150. Claxton, Paradisal Dialogue, 28, 38.

151. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in
Seventeenth Century England (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 102–5; pp. 278–80,
284–5 below.
152. Claxton, Paradisal Dialogue, 13, 33, and Lost Sheep Found, 55. Christo
pher Hill suggests Milton’s close proximity to the Muggletonians, Milton
and the English Revolution (1977), 111–12; on Milton’s materialism’s
hermetic dimension, pp. 324–33.
153. PL 2. 150, 911; 10. 477. On Claxton’s mortalism and materialism
(understood partly through Reeve and Muggleton’s theology), see Clax
ton, Paradisal Dialogue, 14–21, 33, 58, 63; Reeve and Muggleton, Joyful
News from Heaven, 28–32, 47 (cf. PL 3. 340–1; 5. 496–7); pp. 282–9
below; B. J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism
and its Development in England (Cambridge, 1996), 131.
154. Claxton, Paradisal Dialogue, 61, 45.
155. Ibid. 44; pp. 22–3 above.
156. Claxton, Paradisal Dialogue, 44.
157. Though he affirms truths ‘Against Angels and all thy Seed’, and declares
‘against Angel and man’, because angels are pure reason and it is Faith and not
Reason that speaks true; Claxton, Paradisal Dialogue, 37, 64, 13, 33, 89–90.
158. Claxton, Paradisal Dialogue, 75, and Lost Sheep Found, 43, sig. H3v.
CHAPTER 5
1. Manfred Brod, ‘A Radical Network in the English Revolution: John
Pordage and his Circle, 1646–54’, English Historical Review, 119 (2004),
1230–53, 1238–9 on date.
2. Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), 74, 77, 78; on the Pordages,
see also Ariel Hessayon on John and Nigel Smith on Samuel, in ODNB.
3. Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), 176–7.
4. Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. F. (1651); Jacob
Boehme, The Tree of Christian Faith (1644), The Way to Christ Discovered
(1647), XL. Questions Concerning the Soule (1647), The Second Booke.
Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence (1648), The Third
Booke . . . the Threefold Life of Man (1650), Of Christs Testaments (1652),
Mysterium Magnum, or, An Exposition of . . . Genesis (1654), Aurora (1656),
all trans. John Sparrow; Hendrik Niclaes, An Introduction to the Holy
Understanding (1649), Revelatio Dei (1649), A Figure of the True and
Spiritual Tabernacle (1655), An Apology for the Service of Love (1656).
Agrippa, Paracelsus, Pictorius, and the Ars Notoria were all translated
by Robert Turner in the 1650s.
5. John Pordage, Innocencie Appearing through the Dark Mists of Pretended
Guilt (1655), 70, 91. Margaret Lewis Bailey, Milton and Jakob Boehme:
410 notes to chapter 5: conversations
A Study of German Mysticism in Seventeenth Century England (New York,

1914), 106, suggests that Mrs Pordage introduced John to his own
visions; see also Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 833, fos 64–82. On Pordage’s
Behmenism, see esp. Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and
English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), 205–10.
6. William Lilly, Mr. William Lilly’s History of his Life and Times (1715),
14, 24–5, 49–50, 54, 88, 100–2; see also Deborah E. Harkness, John
Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of
Nature (Cambridge, 1999), 218–20; and C. H. Josten (ed.), Elias
Ashmole (1617–1692), 5 vols (Oxford, 1966), iii. 1264–74.
7. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3rd edn, ed. Phillip Bliss, 4 vols
(1813–20), iii. 110; Bodl., MS Aubrey 7, fo. 9v; John Aubrey, Brief
Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols (1898), ii. 160–1.
8. Sheffield University Library, HP 29/2/40B, quoted in Ariel Hessayon,
‘John Pordage’, in ODNB, and in David Como, Blown by the Spirit:
Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre Civil
War England (Stanford, Calif., 2004), 71 and n. 95. Como notes that this
may have happened in the Low Countries.
9. John Etherington, A Brief Discovery of the Blasphemous Doctrine of Famil
isme (1645), 10; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 43–6, 445; Peter Lake, The
Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish
in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001), passim and 183.
10. Hessayon, ‘John Pordage’; Josten (ed.), Ashmole, i. 109; Wood, Athenae
Oxonienses, iii. 110; Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 833, fo. 63v; Désirée Hirst,
Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (1964),
103–9, 168–71.
11. ‘An Acct. of ye Rise & Progress of the Philadelphian Society’, Bodl., MS
Rawlinson D. 833, fos 63v–64r; ‘gale’ perhaps echoes Samuel’s ‘Gale j Of
Love’, Pordage, Mundorum, sig. b7v.
12. M.P., The Mystery of the Deity in the Humanity (1649), 40, 20, 14.
13. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 37, 50–83. Nigel Smith proposes Mary
Pocock; Perfection Proclaimed, 190 n. 28 and 210–12. Phyllis Mack,
Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth Century England (Ber
keley, 1992), and Brod, ‘Radical Network’, 1238, follow him. Mary
Pordage is proposed by B. J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult
Thought: Behmenism and its Development in England (Cambridge, 1996),
114; Hessayon is uncommitted, ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The Prophet
Theauraujohn Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot, 2007), 195–6.
A late MS note in Bodl. copy, Vet. A3 f.306(4), attributes it to Mary
Pennington.
14. Nigel Smith, ‘ ‘‘And if God was one of us’’: Paul Best, John Biddle,
and Anti Trinitarian Heresy in Seventeenth Century England’, in
David Loewenstein and John Marshall (eds), Heresy Literature and Politics
in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2007); Sarah Mortimer,
‘Refuting Satan: Owen, Socinianism and the Interpretation of Scripture’,

M.Phil. thesis (University of Oxford, 2003).
15. Brod, ‘Radical Network’.
16. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 22; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside
Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (1972; Harmondsworth,
1975), 154–8; William Erbery, The Great Earthquake (1654), sig. A2v, and
The Great Mystery of Godlinesse (1649). John Tickell, The Bottomless Pit
Smoaking in Familisme (1651), 49, 81, associates Coppe and Pordage
with familism, accurately identifying the influence of Hendrik Niclaes.
17. Christopher Fowler, Daemonium Meridianum: Satan at Noon (1655), 60–1;
Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 62. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 320,
describes Coppin as a ‘near Ranter’; his Divine Teachings (1649) contained
an epistle by Coppe. See pp. 117–18 above.
18. A less likely candidate is John Everard, a divine accused of familism,
Anabaptism, and antinomianism, who preached on angels, and produced
the first English translation of The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius
Trismegistus (1649) and Pseudo Dionysius’ Mystical Divinity (1653),
which he believed to be authentic. Everard was deprived of his benefice
under Laud on charges of heresy. He died in obscurity around 1650, and
his sermons were posthumously published in 1653. Everard mixed
learned angelology with mysticism. See Some Gospel Truths Opened
(1653).
19. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 11–13, 68. On Everard’s identity, and on
Pordage and Tany, see Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 284–6, 180–2;
on Tany’s Behmenism, see Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 214–17. A news
pamphlet reporting Pordage’s visions, A Most Faithful Relation of Two
Wonderfull Passages Which Happened Very Lately (1650), judges that he is
mad, and blames Everard; it is probably derived from Pordage’s account.
20. Fowler, Daemonium Meridianum, 61.
21. Laurence Claxton [Clarkson], The Lost Sheep Found (1660), 24–5;
Gerrard Winstanley, Saints Paradise (1648), 64–71, 77–8; Brod, ‘Radical
Network’, 1241; pp. 120–2 above.
Europe (Oxford, 1997), 384, 544.
23. See esp. Laurence Claxton [Clarkson], A Paradisal Dialogue (1660), 6–7;
also John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, Joyful News from Heaven
(1658), 15; for later Pordage on anthropomorphism, see J[ohn] P
[ordage] M.D., Theologia Mystica, or, The Mystic Divinitie of the Eternal
Invisibles (1683), 36.
24. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 29, 84.
25. Ibid. 76.
26. Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman,
Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford, 2005), 206 n., 227–30.
27. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 14–15, 16, 19.
28. Ibid. 15.

29. Ibid. 25; cf. Fowler, Daemonium Meridianum, 80, 84.
30. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 26.
31. Ibid. 68.
32. The Life and Death of Vavasor Powell (1671), 8.
33. Pordage, Mundorum, 41, and Innocencie Appearing, 66–7, 74.
34. Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), 221–2. Baxter
thought that good and bad angels could only be distinguished by their
effects: anything that promoted uncharitableness, revenge, or division was
clearly bad (p. 236). Aubrey thought, however, that good and bad spirits
could indeed be differentiated by smell; John Aubrey, Miscellanies (1696),
136.
35. Baxter, Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, 222–3. While not endorsing
angel worship, he rejects the suggestion that it turned the Roman
Church into Antichrist (p. 234).
36. A digest of the trial was published in 1693 as an example of (Everard’s)
witchcraft: A Collection of Modern Relations of Matters of Fact Concerning
Witches (1693), 9–20.
37. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 72.
38. Ibid. 73.
39. Ibid. 73–4.
40. Ibid. 74–5.
41. Ibid. 75; for Mahanaim, a marginal note refers to Gen. 32: 1, 2 (cf. PL 11.
214); for colours, Dan. 10: 6. The vision resembles Augustine’s second
revelation; see Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A
History, 2nd edn (1988; New Haven, 2001), 55.
43. On antinomianism, see J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters
and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986); Como, Blown by the Spirit, passim
and 387–8. Pordage was associated with Ranterism in one pamphlet, The
Ranters Declaration (1650), 3.
44. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 78–9.
45. Brod, ‘Radical Network’, proposes alchemy, 1239–40, 1250. Pordage
wrote a traditional alchemical tract; see Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and
Occult Thought, 75.
46. Fowler, Daemonium Meridianum, 100–1, 157–8; Pordage, Innocencie
Appearing, 66–7.
47. Brod, ‘Radical Network’, 1249–50.
48. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.95, unfoliated.
50. Around this time Samuel may also have published anonymously Eliana:
A New Romance (1661), with a preface dismissing those who condemn
romance as a genre. If it is his, this long work must have been written
at least partly concurrently with Mundorum Explicatio. The 1663 edition
of Mundorum is a reissue of the same sheets with a different title page,

and a slightly different title: Mundorum Explicatio; Wherein are couched the
Mysteries of the External, Internal, and Eternal Worlds; Showing the true
progress of a Soul, from the Court of Babylon to the City of Jerusalem; from
the Adamical fallen state, to the Regenerate and Angelical. Also the Explan
ation of an Hieroglyphical Figure. A Sacred Poem (1663). The manuscript
in BL (Sloane MS 1401A) is a part transcription from a printed edition,
though with some variations. Wellcome Library MS 3592 is a later part
copy of Theologia Mystica with some changes.
51. Though see Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some
Contemporaries (New York, 1984), 220–42; and Pordage’s Mundorum
Explicatio, ed. Harriet Spanierman Blumenthal (New York, 1991).
52. Pordage, Mundorum, ‘Proaemium’, sig. b8r.
53. For Sadducism, Pordage, Mundorum, 37, 41; poets’ fancies, p. 8; four
worlds, see the hieroglyph and below; the encomium, sigs a4r–a5v; the
spirit world, pp. 32–40; angelical corporeality, pp. 40, 41, 43.
54. John White, A Commentary upon . . . Genesis (1656), iii. 8–29.
55. Pordage, Mundorum, 99; see Bodl., Malone 463.
56. See pp. 230–7, below.
57. Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago, 1994),
ch. 12 and passim; Robert T. Fallon, ‘Michael Murrin’s Milton and the
‘‘Epic without War’’: A Review Essay’, and Murrin, ‘A Reply to Robert
Fallon’, Milton Quarterly, 31 (1997), 119–23, 123–4.
58. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 865, fo. 230.
59. Pordage, Innocencie Appearing, 75–6.
60. Hill notes the theological similarity to Henry Stubbe; Experience of Defeat,
242 n. 3.
61. Tongues, Ch. 12; accommodation, Ch. 6 below.
62. John Heydon, Theomagia, or, The Temple of Wisdome, 3 vols (1664), i. 1,
The Idea of the Law (1660), and The Harmony of the World (1662). The
Firestone Library Copy of this last (shelfmark 6487.456) bears a 17th
century inscription dismissing it as ‘all Rosy Crucian’. The Pordages
sought to avoid such a reception; for Heydon it would have been a
badge of learning.
63. Jane Lead, A Fountain of Gardens (1696 [1697]), sig. D4r–v. See also Notes
and Materials for an Adequate Biography of . . . William Law (privately
printed, 1854), 148.
64. John Pordage, Theologia Mystica, oder, Geheime und verborgne gottliche Lehre
von den ewigen unsichtbarlichfeiten (Amsterdam, 1698); Vier Tractatlein
des seeligen Johannes Pordadschens, M.D., in manuschriptis hinterlassen: und
nun . . . ubergesetzt (Amsterdam, 1704). See also Gottliche und wahre Meta
physica (Frankfurt, 1715); Ein grundlich Philosophisch Sendschreiben vom rechten
und wahren Steine der Weissheit (1727).
65. Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 405, p. 230; also MS Rawlinson A. 404.
66. Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 405, p. 232.

67. Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 354, fos 27r–v, 57v, 61v. As this is a fair copy it is
possible that this reader–rewriter is Dr Keith.
68. The reader or copyist of Pordage’s tract on the Incarnation identifies an
apparent contradiction in whether human faculties can penetrate into
the divine, or, as Pordage suggests elsewhere, ‘only ye Superior can
penetrate into ye Inferior’; fo. 13v. The opposite view is stated in Bodl.
MS Rawlinson A. 404, p. 14; the treatise to which this is prefatory may
be the one to which the first reader is referring, in which case the
contradiction could be Pordage’s or one of his copiers’. See also the
manuscript notes, inscribed in a copy of Theologia Mystica, on the state of
Pordage’s printed and manuscript works, reproduced in Hirst, Hidden
Riches, 325–6.
69. Roach’s miscellaneous papers are Bodl., MSS Rawlinson D. 832–833; see
also B. J. Gibbons, ‘Richard Roach’, in ODNB, and Gender in Mystical
and Occult Thought, 152–7. Roach discusses angels in The Great Crisis
(1725), passim. For other evidence of influence, see John Case, The
Angelical Guide (1697).
70. Pordage, Theologia Mystica, 16.
71. Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 404, pp. 144–7.
72. Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 405, p. 195; MS Rawlinson A. 404, pp. 164–5;
MS Rawlinson A. 354, fo. 27r.
73. Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 404, pp. 152.
74. Pordage, Theologia Mystica, 74–5.
75. Ibid. 71–3; see also Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 354, fos 59r, 64r; MS
Rawlinson A. 404, p. 145; cf. Boehme, XL. Questions, 252, and Second
Booke Concerning Three Principles, 90; on seven spirits, pp. 82–3 above.
76. Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 354, fo. 37r.
77. Ibid., fos 66–7.
78. Pordage, Theologia Mystica, 87, 89, 92, 129–30.
80. Ibid., p. 11; Pordage, Theologia Mystica, 36.
82. West, Angels, 144–8; Agrippa, Three Books, 453; Thomas Stanley, The
History of the Chaldaick Philosophy (1662), 51–5; p. 78 above.
83. Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 405, pp. 225, 228.
84. Ibid., pp. 201 ff.
85. Jane Lead, The Enochian Walks with God (1694), 16–18.
87. Hirst, Hidden Riches, 168. Rufus M. Jones argues, unsympathetically, for
Lee’s superior intellectual powers over Pordage and Lead; Spiritual
Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1914), 229–30.
88. The Threefold World, in The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Philoso
pher, 4 vols (London, 1764–81), ii. A Compendious View of the Grounds of
Teutonic Philosophy (1770) includes Boehme’s writings and Pordage’s.

Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 26 ff., XL. Questions, 31 ff., and anon., The
Life of one Jacob Boehmen (London, 1644), sig. A4v.
89. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, 143–4; Sylvia Bowerbank,
‘Jane Lead’, in ODNB; Lead, in Pordage, Theologia Mystica, 2; Paula
McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the
London Literary Marketplace (Oxford, 1998), 167–79, 196–201; Julie Hirst,
Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth Century Mystic (Aldershot, 2005), 27,
92.
90. Richard Roach, ‘An Acct. of ye Rise & Progress of the Philadelphian
Society’, Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 833, fo. 64r.
91. Ibid., fos 82–8; Jane Lead, A Message to the Philadelphian Society (1696),
internally dated 1 Jan. 1696 [1697?].
92. Lead, Enochian Walks, 37.
93. Lead, A Fountain of Gardens, [i.] 17, 299; ii (1697), 313, 470.
94. Ibid. ii. 73.
95. Ibid. i. 58, 495.
96. Ann Bathurst, ‘Transportations’, Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 1262, p. 9; ‘a
Dream or Vision’, p. 7; ‘Visionall Dreams’, MS Rawlinson D. 833, fos 89r,
92r.
97. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 833, fo. 65r. Three non holograph manuscripts
of Bathurst’s spiritual diary are extant, two overlapping (without being
identical): Bodl., MSS Rawlinson D. 1262, 1263, and 1338. The first
two are consecutive, and the first contains the ownership inscription
‘This Book belongs to Dr Keath’s Library at Mrs Brackley’s in Tufton
Street Westminster.’
98. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 1262, pp. 9–13.
99. Ibid., pp. 69, 79, 81, 83.
100. Ibid., pp. 85–6.
102. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 1262, pp. 118–19, 170.
103. Ibid., p. 90.
104. Ibid., pp. 143, 280, 386; see also the spirits (not angels) at p. 358.
105. Ibid., irregular pages e and f, which follow p. 96.
106. Ibid., pp. 154–6, 177.
107. Ibid., p. 157.
108. Ibid., p. 174. Describing a vision of 1676, Lead mentions ‘the outward
Astrum of this World’s Principle’; Fountain of Gardens, i. 245.
109. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 1262, pp. 174, chart between pp. 170 and 171,
180.
110. Ibid., pp. 185, 197, 228, 233, 235–6, 245, 348.
111. Simon Schaffer, ‘The Consuming Flame: Electrical Showmen and Tory
Mystics in the World of Goods’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds),
Consumption and the World of Goods (1993), 489–526 (quotation at p. 494)
416 notes to chapter 6: fleshly imagination
and fig. 24.8. The figures appear in The Works of Jacob Behmen, the
Teutonic Philosopher; the figures were ‘left’ by William Law, but were
drawn by his disciples from Andreas Freher’s designs.
CHAPTER 6
1. Aquinas, Summa, i. 15–17; Keck, Angels, 47–52.
2. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science
(Cambridge, 1998), 107–14; David Lawton, Faith, Text and History: The
Bible in English (Charlottesville, Va., 1990), 16–47; Debora Kuller Shu
ger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley,
1998), 11–53; William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture:
The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge, 2004).
3. Quoted in Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cam
bridge, 1991), 136.
4. O&D 4. 43–9, pp. 57–60; on Lucy’s prying, cf. the theological contexts
outlined in C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford,
1966), 7–14.
5. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (2003), 157–61 and passim.
6. On narrative and interpretation, see pp. 73–4 above, Chs 8 and 14
below; A. D. Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert,
Milton, Dante and St John (1980), 101–8, and The Alternative Trinity:
Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford, 1998), 115.
7. Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 18–19; Lawton, Faith, Text and History, 38–9.
8. Nuttall, Alternative Trinity, 10; C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An
Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1964), 14–
15; G. E. R. Lloyd, ‘Saving the Appearances’, Classical Quarterly, 28
(1978), 202–22; pp. 277, 296 below.
9. The key passages include Exod. 31: 17; 1 Cor. 2: 4; 2 Cor. 3: 4–6; and
Heb. 9: 23–4.
10. Alexander Ross, An Exposition on the Fourteene First Chapters of Genesis
(1626), 32.
11. Philo, trans. F. H. Coulson and G. H. Whitaker, 10 vols (1929– ), i. 125.
12. Ibid. ii. 166–7.
13. Ibid. iii. 39, 41.
14. The Works of Lactantius, ii, trans. William Fletcher, Ante Nicene Chris
tian Library, xx (Edinburgh, 1871), 1, 12, 32. See also Kathleen Ellen
Hartwell, Lactantius and Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1929).
15. In Theophilus of Alexandria’s annual paschal epistle, which Milton knew
from Theodoret’s Church history: CPW vi. 136–7 n. 16; i. 377, 498.
16. A Select Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church,
2nd ser., 9: St. Hilary of Poitiers: John of Damascus, ed. W. Sanday, trans.
E. W. Watson and L. Pullan (Oxford, 1899), 45, 71.
notes to chapter 6: fleshly imagination 417
17. H. R. MacCallum, ‘Milton and Figurative Interpretation of the Bible’,

University of Toronto Quarterly, 31 (1961–2), 397–415.
18. Augustine, City, 411, 686. Cf. Milton, CPW vi. 136.
19. Pseudo Dionysius, Works, 49.
20. Ibid. 49, 50.
21. Ibid. 150 (quotation), 152, 81 (quotation), 83.
22. Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Separate Substances, trans. Francis J. Lescoe
(West Hartford, Conn., 1963), sect. 101.
24. MacCallum, ‘Milton and Figurative Interpretation’, 411–12; Kevin
Killeen, ‘ ‘‘A Nice and Philosophical Account of the Origin of All
Things’’: Accommodation in Burnet’s Sacred Theory (1681) and Paradise
Lost’, Milton Studies, 46 (2006 [2007]), 106–22. More generally, see
James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook, 4th edn (New York, 1954),
205; Roland Mushat Frye, God, Man, and Satan: Patterns of Christian
Thought and Life in ‘Paradise Lost’, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, and the Great
Theologians (Princeton, 1960), 9–15; James H. Sims, The Bible in
Milton’s Epics (Gainesville, Fla., 1962), 27–35; Patrides, Milton and the
Christian Tradition; William G. Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth:
Studies in Milton’s Symbolism (New Haven, 1968); W. B. Hunter, C. A.
Patrides, and J. H. Adamson, Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology
(Salt Lake City, 1971); Lee A. Jacobus, Sudden Apprehension: Aspects of
Knowledge in ‘Paradise Lost’ (The Hague, 1976); John Guillory, Poetic
Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York, 1983), ch. 6;
Robert L. Entzminger, Divine Word: Milton and the Redemption of
Language (Pittsburgh, 1985), 29; Kathleen M. Swain, Before and After
the Fall: Contrasting Modes in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Amherst, Mass., 1986);
Mindele Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition
to ‘Paradise Lost’ (Lexington, Mass., 1994), chs 15–16 and app. e; Jeffrey
Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis (Columbia, NY, 2001), ch. 3; John C.
Ulreich, ‘Making the Word Flesh: Incarnation as Accommodation’, in
Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (eds), Reassembling Truth:
Twenty First Century Milton (Selinsgrove, Pa., 2003); Neil D. Graves,
‘Milton and the Theory of Accommodation’, Studies in Philology, 98
(2001), 251–72.
25. Calvin, Institution, 35, 37; quotation at p. 33.
26. Calvin, Commentarie, 176, 178.
28. Ibid. 67; cf. Calvin, Commentarie, 122, where he attributes agency to Moses.
29. ‘To Mr. Tilman’, lines 19–20, in Donne, Major Works, 287; cf. CW xv.
34–5; CPW vi. 315.
30. Peter Martyr, Common Places, 29, 30.
31. Ibid. 358, 341.
418 notes to chapter 6: fleshly imagination
32. Terms from Harrison, Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science,
111.
33. Thomas Wilson, Theologicall Rules (1615), 22–3, citing St Hilary.
34. John Gaule, Practique Theories, or, Votive Speculations (1630), 30–1.
35. John White, A Commentary upon . . . Genesis (1656), i. 98–9. White died
in 1648, and this was posthumously published under the supervision of
his eponymous son, with Stephen Marshall and Thomas Manton.
36. William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols, vol. ii rev. Gordon
Campbell (1968; Oxford, 1996), i. 395, ii. 994 n. 153; David Norbrook,
‘Lucy Hutchinson’, in ODNB.
37. John Biddle, A Two Fold Catechism (1654), a2r–v.
38. John Biddle, Twelve Arguments Drawn out of Scripture (1647), 4. John
Owen attributed his heresies to ‘brainsick men’; Vindiciae Evangelicae
(Oxford, 1655), 71.
39. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae; John Brayne, The Divinity of the Trinity
Cleared (1654); Nicholas Estwick, Mr Bidle’s Confession of Faith (1656);
Biddle, A Two Fold Catechism, sig. a1r–v (naming Henry More’s Con
jectura Caballistica, 1653).
40. Harrison, Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, 108–14.
41. Biddle, Two Fold Catechism, sig. A5v.
42. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), 24–31.
43. Biddle, Two Fold Catechism, sigs A7r–A8r.
44. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 14.
45. Ibid. 13.
46. John Owen, A Brief Declaration and Vindication (1669), sigs A6v–A7r.
47. John Owen, Of the Divine Originall (1658), 22.
48. He does not mean the use of the language of Scripture in such a way as to
preserve some of its special qualities (a common position, shared by
Milton); Owen, Brief Declaration, 30, 31.
49. Francis Bampfield, All in One: All Useful Sciences and Profitable Arts
(1677), 50.
50. Wilson, Theologicall Rules, 28; cf. White, Commentary, i. 5.
52. Peter Le Loier, A Treatise of Specters or Straunge Sights (1605), fo. 45v.
54. John Gumbleden, Christ Tempted: The Devil Conquered (1657), 13.
55. Nuttall, Alternative Trinity, 149.
56. Peter Martyr, Common Places, 550; Pseudo Dionysius, Works, 148, 152, 153.
57. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), 22–3; Dryden,
‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ (1693), in
The Works of John Dryden, iv, ed. A. B. Chambers and William Frost
(Berkeley, 1974), 18; Pt III below.
58. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century
Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979).
notes to chapter 6: fleshly imagination 419

60. Ibid. 69.
61. Ibid. 69–70.
62. Ibid. 334, 339–42.
63. See also Bartas: His Devine Weekes and Workes, trans. Joshua Sylvester
(1605); Thomas Peyton, The Glasse of Time (1620); J. A. Rivers, Devout
Rhapsodies (1647).
65. O&D 4. 43, 3. 295–8.
66. Lucy Hutchinson, On the Principles of the Christian Religion . . . and On
Theology (1817), 33–4, 11; cf. 15.
67. David Norbrook, ‘Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘‘Elegies’’ and the Situation of
the Republican Woman Writer’, English Literary Renaissance, 27 (1997),
468–521: 471–2.
68. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N. H.
Keeble (1995), 16, 19, 28, 49.
69. O&D, p. 5.
70. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 3–27.
71. O&D, p. 3.
72. E.g. O&D 8. 87 ff., 15. 95 ff., 19. 126 ff.
73. Pordage, Mundorum, 93.
74. Ibid. 331.
76. Pordage, Mundorum, 43; ‘self Taylors’ at p. 42.
77. Ibid. 39, 41.
78. Arnold Stein, ‘Milton’s War in Heaven—An Extended Metaphor’,
ELH, 18 (1951), 201–20; Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of
Allegory: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Dur
ham, NC, 1998), ch. 5.
79. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 1–30.
80. For accounts of Milton’s theory of accommodation that associate it with
literalism, see Michael Bauman, Milton’s Arianism (Frankfurt am Main,
1987), 115–17; Treip, Allegorical Poetics, chs 12–21.
81. On the authorship of this work, see Gordon Campbell, Thomas N.
Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of
‘De Doctrina Christiana’ (Oxford, 2007), and the literature therein cited.
82. Columbia, xiv. 30–3. John Carey translates these phrases as ‘described or
outlined’ and ‘in bringing himself within the limits of our understand
ing’; CPW vi. 133–4.
83. Columbia, xiv. 32–3. Cf. Carey’s ‘the nonsense poets write about Jove’;
CPW vi. 134.
84. See Maurice Kelley’s useful note, CPW vi. 136–7 n. 16.
85. Columbia, xiv. 35.
86. Ibid. 36.
420 notes to chapter 7: inspiration & prophecy
87. Ibid. 37–9.

88. PL, p. 54.
CHAPTER 7
1. John Harvey, A Discoursive Problem Concerning Prophesies (1588), 38–9.
2. William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville, Va., 1974), 83–124.
3. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984;
Oxford, 2002); also Michelle O’Callaghan, The Shepherd’s Nation: Jaco
bean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture 1612–1625 (Oxford,
2000).
4. This is not to deny the valuable insights of these works: see Joseph
Anthony Wittreich, ‘ ‘‘A Poet amongst Poets’’: Milton and the Tradition
of Prophecy’, in Wittreich (ed.), Milton and the Line of Vision (Madison,
1975); Kerrigan, Prophetic Milton, 159, 168–9 (though he is ambivalent on
the point); A. D. Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert,
Milton, Dante and St John (1980), 93, 97.
5. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 12–13, 14 (quotation), 28–52, 224–69.
6. Phillip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (1595), sig. B4r.
7. Ibid., sig. Hr.
8. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 93; Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural
Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor–Stuart England (Phila
delphia, 2006), 191.
9. The Critical Works of John Dennis, i: 1692–1711, ed. Edward Niles Hooker
(Baltimore, 1939), 370.
10. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century
Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979).
11. The claim appears in the headnote to ‘Lycidas’ in Milton, Poems (1645),
but not in Iusta Eduardo King (1638). Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 252–
69; pp. 227, 235 below.
12. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post Reformation England’, in Kate
Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Represen
tations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, Studies in Church
History, 41 (Woodbridge, 2005); D. P. Walker, ‘The Cessation of
Miracles’, in Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (eds), Hermeticism and
the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe
(Washington, DC, 1988).
13. King James I (sic), Daemonologie (1597), ed. G. B. Harrison (1922; Edin
burgh, 1966), 65–6; William Bucanus, Institutions of Christian Religion,
trans. Robert Hill (1606), 76; cf. BL, Sloane MS 1233, fo. 80r.
14. Reginald Scott, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), 156, 158–9; quotation
at p. 160.
15. John Smith, Select Discourses (1660), 270–2.
notes to chapter 7: inspiration & prophecy 421
16. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999),

205–7, 226–32. The occult philosopher Thomas Tryon disagreed en
tirely; Pythagoras (1691), 202–18.
18. William Perkins, A Fruitfull Dialogue Concerning the End of the World,
iii (1631), 468; also Smith, Discourses, 190–209; Thomas Hobbes, Levia
than, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), 257–8.
19. Calvin, Institution, fo. 15r.
20. Jeremy Taylor, Theologia ’Eklektike: A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesy
ing (1647), 82–3. Also Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the
Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), 133.
21. Charles Odingsells, Two Sermons Lately Preached (1620), 6–9; quotation at
p. 9.
22. Harvey, Discoursive Problem, 35–7; Peter Martyr, Common Places, 23.
23. Kevin Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations: Prophecy, Hermeneutics and Pol
itics in Early Modern Britain’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker
(eds), Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge,
2003).
24. Harvey, Discoursive Problem, 36–7; Odingsells, Two Sermons, 6–7.
25. Peter Martyr, Common Places, 19.
26. Ibid. 23. Charles Dempsey notes the iconographical distinctions of
prophetic and allegorical dreams; Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel
Hill, NC, 2001), 129, 135.
27. Smith, Discourses, 176–83, 261, 203.
28. Ibid. 211, 212, 218.
29. Harvey, Discoursive Problem, 88; The Good Angel of Stamford (1659);
Strange Predictions Related at Catericke in the North of England (1648).
30. Jürgen Beyer, ‘A Lübeck Prophet in Local and Lutheran Context’, in
Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds), Popular Religion in Germany and
Central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996).
31. Smith, Discourses, 266.
33. Perkins, Fruitfull Dialogue, 468.
34. Harvey, Discoursive Problem, passim.
35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 257, 259.
36. Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer (1942),
219–21.
37. Smith, Discourses, 241, 244.
39. Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia
G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1990); Beyer, ‘Lübeck Prophet’; Walsham,
Providence, 203–18; Alexandra Walsham, ‘ ‘‘Frantic Hackett’’: Prophecy,
Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, Historical
Journal, 41 (1998), 26–66.
422 notes to chapter 7: inspiration & prophecy
40. Humphrey Ellis, Pseudochristus (1650); Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed:

Language and English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989).
41. Raymond, Pamphleteering, 295–7, 307–12; Nicholas McDowell, The
English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660
(Oxford, 2003); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in
Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley, 1992); Hilary Hinds, God’s
Englishwomen: Seventeenth Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist
Criticism (Manchester, 1996); Stevie Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of
the English Revolution: 1640–1660 (1998); Marcus Nevitt, Women and the
Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (Aldershot, 2006);
Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 45–53, 86–90.
42. See 1 Cor. 14: 34–5; 1 Tim. 2: 11–12. Also Peter Martyr, Common Places,
20.
43. See e.g. Strange and Wonderful Newes from White Hall (1654); Anna
Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654).
44. Mary Cary, The Little Horns Doom (1651), 32.
45. Smith, Discourses, 197.
46. Coppe, Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spirituall Wine (1649), 57; also Nicholas
McDowell, ‘A Ranter Reconsidered: Abiezer Coppe and Civil War
Stereotypes’, Seventeenth Century, 12 (1997), 173–205.
47. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, Joyful News from Heaven (1658),
5, 12, (2nd pagination) 4.
48. CPW i. 808, 820–1.
49. Kerrigan, Prophetic Milton, 84.
50. CPW i. 803, 816–17, 821.
51. Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, trans. Claire Gruze
lier (Cambridge, 1991), 183, 82.
52. CPW i. 810; Columbia, viii. 67–9; Kerrigan, Prophetic Milton, 175–6.
53. Guillaume du Bartas, L’Uranie, ou, Muse Celeste (1589); Lewalski, Prot
estant Poetics, 8–10, 231–2; Lily B. Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama in
Sixteenth Century England (Berkeley, 1959), 74–92.
54. See David Daiches’ superb ‘The Opening of Paradise Lost’, in Frank
Kermode (ed.), The Living Milton (1960).
55. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans.
Willard R. Trask (1953; Princeton, 1990), 235.
56. Columbia, vi. 359–63.
57. CPW iv. 590; Columbia, viii. 72.
58. Paradise Lost, 3. 35; also CPW i. 803.
59. Curtius, European Literature, 243–4.
60. I am indebted to, but disagree with, Nuttall, Overheard by God; see esp.
pp. 357–9 below.
61. E.g. O&D 4. 57–60; also pp. 185, 189, 192, 199, 210.
62. Helen Darbishire (ed.), The Early Lives of Milton (1932; New York,
1965), 33, 291.
notes to chapter 8: can angels feign? 423
63. Kerrigan, Prophetic Milton, 95; also pp. 137–8, where the stimulating
discussion of agency follows Calvin.
65. Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Princeton, 1994)
and Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006).
66. Smith, Discourses, 272–4; my emphasis.
67. Ibid. 277.
68. Darbishire (ed.), Early Lives, 291.
CHAPTER 8
1. Emotions resound through Milton’s heaven; it is an important and
difficult theme in scriptural exegesis as it risks anthropopathy. On heav
enly anger and laughter, see John N. King, Milton and Religious Contro
versy: Satire and Polemic in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge, 2000), 109–32;
Catherine Bates, ‘No Sin but Irony: Kierkegaard and Milton’s Satan’,
Literature and Theology, 11 (1997), 1–26; Paul Rovang, ‘Milton’s War in
Heaven as Apocalyptic Drama: ‘‘Thy Foes Justly Hast in Derision’’ ’,
Milton Quarterly, 28 (1994), 28–35; John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy:
Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford, 1996), 121–31; Golda Werman, Milton
and Midrash (Washington, DC, 1995), 50.
2. Pp. 67–9 above. Feisal G. Mohamed’s discussion of this passage is flawed
by the assumption, contrary to contemporary writing about angels, that
this reflects Abdiel’s inferior rank; ‘Paradise Lost and the Inversion of
Catholic Angelology’, Milton Quarterly, 36 (2002), 240–52: 242.
3. William Empson found support for Satan’s confusion on this point;
Milton’s God (1961; Cambridge, 1981), 59–62. Regina Schwartz, Remem
bering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in ‘Paradise Lost’ (1988; Cambridge,
1993), 21–2, argues that the epic is a repudiation of this claim of self
creation. See also Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat
Myth (Princeton, 1987); Evans, Genesis Tradition, 113. Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials trilogy develops this heresy.
4. [Charles Leslie], The History of Sin and Heresie (1698), sig. A2v. Cf.
Zanchius in Williams, Expositor, 118; Defoe in Henry Ansgar Kelly,
Satan: A Biography (Cambridge, 2006), 276; CUL, SSS.32.40, sig. S.
The ownership inscription is ‘Chas: Blount’, perhaps the author of A
Just Vindication of Learning (1679), derivative of Areopagitica.
5. According to De Doctrina Christiana, the Word is audible, while God is
not; CPW vi. 239. Milton’s theologically peculiar stance on the Word
merits further study. Pseudo Dionysius’ extended discussion of the
Word is nowhere concerned with audibility; Works, 58–67. St Augustine
424 notes to chapter 8: can angels feign?
states that while God’s speech is explained to us in our fashion, ‘it has no
audible and transient sound’; City, 705. Also pp. 309–11 below.
6. Here (and elsewhere) Milton agrees with J. A. Comenius, who writes
that angels ‘know not the decrees of God, before they be revealed’;
Naturall Philosophie Reformed (1651), 238. Leslie, History of Sin and Heresie,
A2v–A3r, objected to the angel’s ignorance of this point in Milton’s
poem. Cf. also Aquinas, Summa, ix. 143.
7. Thanks to John Leonard, Barbara Lewalski, and Tom Luxon for disput
ing this with me.
8. De Doctrina Christiana affirms this indulgence; CPW vi. 163.
9. CPW vi. 166. De Doctrina Christiana does not mention a special degree
concerning the angels; CPW vi. 167.
10. David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contempor
aries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge,
2001), 202–41; though note pp. 178–9, 183, where Loewenstein dis
agrees with my argument here.
11. A detailed account of Satan’s deceptive strategies is offered by John
White, A Commentary upon . . . Genesis (1656), iii. 45, 160; other com
mentators include Urbanus Rhegius, An Homely or Sermon of Good and
Evill Angels, trans. Richard Robinson (1583; 3rd edn, 1593), fos 9r–v, 10r;
Gervase Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes (1592),
fo. 15r. Satan’s invention of deception interested occult writers: John
Heydon, Theomagia, or, The Temple of Wisdome, 3 vols (1664), ii. 212;
Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, or, An Exposition of . . . Genesis, trans.
J. Ellistone and J. Sparrow (1654), 34. See also Evans, Genesis Tradition,
91; Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth Century Thought
(Cambridge, 1999); Arnold, Expositor, 112–38.
12. Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1994);
Rachel Falconer, Orpheus Dis(re)membered: Milton and the Myth of the
Poet–Hero (Sheffield, 1996).
13. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 226–31; Thomas N. Corns, Regain
ing Paradise Lost (1994), 48–50.
14. Pp. 309–11, 319–22 below.
15. Patrick Hume, Annotations on Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ (1695), 199. Cf.
Voltaire’s comments in John T. Shawcross (ed.), John Milton: The Critical
Heritage, 2 vols (1970–2; 1995), i. 255–6. For Voltaire this was symp
tomatic of the problems of imaginative literature.
16. Leslie, History of Sin and Heresie, sig. A2r.
17. See OED. Cf. Lawrence, Angells, 122 ff.; and William Gurnall, The
Christian in Compleat Armour (1655), 245; also pp. 288–9 below.
18. Shawcross (ed.), Milton, ii. 305. On the substantiality of Milton’s angels,
see Fallon, Philosophers; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science,
Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY, 1996); William
Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements
(Cambridge, 1997); John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and

Reinterpretation (Cambridge, 1996); pp. 284–9 below.
19. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (1957), 144, and Selected Essays, 1917–1932
(1932), 274; C. S. Lewis, A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942), 108–15; Ch.
14 below.
20. West, Angels, 104–6. Cf. Harris Francis Fletcher, who writes that when
PL is difficult to understand on nature, ‘Always the difficulty arises . . .
because Milton is much more concerned with a poetic solution to a
problem than he was interested in its doctrinal solution’; Milton’s Rab
binical Readings (Urbana, Ill., 1930), 121; and contrast Fallon, Philosophers,
ch. 5. John A. Himes found himself struggling with this dichotomy in
‘Milton’s Angels’, New Englander, 43 (1884), 527–43.
21. PL, p. 320; also Fowler’s note at p. 171; Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost,
14–19; Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbinical Readings, 121–2; Howard Schultz,
Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York, 1955). The choice is not
between novelistic realism and allegory: Milton’s theology of accom
modation instead suggests that he chooses a form of realism that is not
novelistic. Fowler suggests a more persuasive account of Milton’s
mixed narrative and representational modes in Renaissance Realism:
Narrative Images in Literature and Art (Oxford, 2003).
22. On Milton’s indebtedness to Hebraic scholarship, see Evans, Genesis
Tradition; Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Prince
ton, 1994); Werman, Milton and Midrash; Shoulson, Milton and the
Rabbis; Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbinical Readings. See also Harris Francis
Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols (Urbana, Ill.,
1956–61), i. 264–92, ii. 289–99, and The Use of the Bible in Milton’s
Prose (Urbana, Ill., 1929); Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s
Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), 74–92. Milton’s debt to
Selden’s De Diis Syris (1617) merits further study.
23. CPW vi. 299.
24. Ibid. 346, also 299, 311, 313, 343, 347–8. Cf. PR 1. 444; see pp. 71–3
above and pp. 230–7 below.
25. This argument is developed in Maurice Kelley, This Great Argument: A
Study of Milton’s ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ as a Gloss upon ‘Paradise Lost’
(Princeton, 1941).
26. Sir William Davenant’s ‘Gondibert’, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford, 1971), 22, 49.
28. Cf. e.g. Arnold Stein, ‘Milton’s War in Heaven: An Extended Meta
phor’, ELH, 18 (1951), 201–20; Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of
Allegory: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham,
NC, 1998), ch. 5.
29. Pp. 176–8 above.
30. David Norbrook suggests composition in 1660–4 and/or 1673 onwards:
O&D, pp. x–xi, xix–xx; Annabel Patterson and Martin Dzelzainis,
426 notes to chapter 8: can angels feign?
‘Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading’,

Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 703–26; Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of
Lucretius: ‘De Rerum Natura’, ed. Hugh de Quehen (1996).
31. O&D 1. 173–80. The dismissal of ‘Worlds made in Idea’ alludes to, and
ostensibly chastises, du Bartas’ Semaine, 1. 1. 202. Cf. also Bartas (1605),
4, 6, 33–4, and 21, in a passage describing the creation of angels:
‘Whether This Day God made you (Angels bright) j Under the name
of Heav’n, or of the Light: j Whether you were, after, in th’instant borne
j With those bright Spangles that the Heav’ns adorne: j Whether you
doo derive your high Descent j Long time before the World and
Firmament j (For I will stifly argue to and fro j In nice Opinions,
whether so, or so; j Especially, where curious search (perchance) j Is
not so safe as humble Ignorance).’
32. Cf. Meric Casaubon, The Originall Cause of Temporall Evils (1645),
though this argument was frequently directed at Sadducism during and
after the 1650s; O&D 4. 43, 49, 60.
33. Possibly inspired by White, Commentary, i. 79, 89.
34. Ibid. ii. 89: White writes that God saw that Adam needed a fit compan
ion, ‘but this was not yet so manifest to Adam’. So he showed Adam the
animals, and Adam figured it out for himself. ‘Withall, this Circumstance
seems to be of special use, to clear God, of thrusting in the woman upon
Adam, unnecessarily, as a snare to entrap him; when it appeared so
evidently, that it was meer Necessity that moved God to create, and,
in compassion unto man, to provide him such an help and companion
for him as he could neither be without, nor find amongst all the
Creatures.’
35. Pp. 137–45, 180–1, above.
36. CPW vi. 424; PL 8. 72–6. On these dangers, cf. Robert Dingley, The
Deputation of Angels (1654), 37; Lawrence, Angells, sig. 3r, p. 6; Joseph
Hall, The Great Mysterie of Godliness (1652), 144–53; Reginald Scott, The
Discoverie of Witchcraft (1665), 10; Isaac Barrow, Several Sermons (1678),
67; Richard Sibbes, Light from Heaven (1638), 206.
37. Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (1941; 1963), 287–9;
Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977), 189–97; Nigel
Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994),
189–96; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Protectorate in 1658’, and
David Armitage, ‘John Milton: Poet Against Empire’, both in David
Armitage, Quentin Skinner, and Armand Himy (eds), Milton and Republic
anism (Cambridge, 1995); Austin Woolrych, ‘Milton and Cromwell: ‘‘A
Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption?’’ ’, in Michael Lieb and John
T. Shawcross (eds), Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on Milton’s Prose
(Amherst, Mass., 1974); Blair Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Crom
well’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (eds), Soldiers, Writers
and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998); David Norbrook,
Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cam
bridge, 1999), 395–6, 453–4; Joad Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty: Marvell’s
First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government’, Huntington Library
Quarterly, 62 (2001), 313–50. For counter arguments, see Robert T. Fallon,
Milton in Government (University Park, Pa., 1993), and ‘A Second Defence:
Milton’s Critique of Cromwell?’, Milton Studies, 39 (2000), 167–83; and
Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s ‘‘Renunciation’’ of Cromwell: The Problem of
Raleigh’s Cabinet Council’, Modern Philology, 98 (2001), 363–92. On the
extent of Milton’s literary labours for the government, see Leo Miller, John
Milton’s Writings in the Anglo Dutch Negotiations, 1651–1654 (Pittsburgh,
1992) and John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York, 1985).
38. CPW i. 808.
39. Raymond, Pamphleteering; Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolution
ary Reader (Princeton, 1994); Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers:
Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004).
40. CPW iv. 1087.
41. Paradise Lost has been illuminated through comparison with particular
pamphlets and pamphlet genres: Norbrook, Writing the English Republic;
Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader; Loewenstein, Represent
ing Revolution; Smith, Literature and Revolution; King, Milton and Religious
Controversy.
42. PL 5. 563–76; cf. pp. 181–6 above. Perhaps the oddest aspect of this
passage is that it imitates Virgil (himself echoing Homer): ‘Infandum,
regina, iubes renovare dolorem . . . ’ (Aeneid 2. 3). While in Paradise Lost
the echoes of du Bartas come from the mouth of Raphael, in Order and
Disorder it is the narrator who echoes the Devine Weekes. See also George
Coffin Taylor, Milton’s Use of du Bartas (Cambridge, Mass., 1934).
43. Quoted in Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and Literary
Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 5.
44. Lucy Newlyn, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993), 35–6.
Roger Lejosne, ‘Milton, Satan, Salmasius and Abdiel’, in Armitage et al.
(eds), Milton and Republicanism, 107–9. Lieb finds a refraction of Milton’s
debates with Salmasius and Morus in the exchange between Samson and
Harapha in Samson; Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca,
NY, 1994), 237–44. Hill suggests a similarity between Abdiel and Milton
pondering whether to publish The Readie and Easie Way in 1660; Milton
and the English Revolution, 370–1.
45. CPW iv. 1034.
46. Ibid. 1044.
47. Ibid. 1054.
48. Ibid. 1093; Paul R. Sellin, ‘Alexander Morus before the Hof van Hol
land: Some Insight into Seventeenth Century Polemics with John Mil
ton’, in Martinus A. Bakker and Beverly H. Morrison (eds), Studies in
Netherlandic Culture and Literature (Lanham, Md., 1994), ‘Alexander
428 notes to chapter 9: look homeward
Morus and John Milton (II): Milton, Morus, and Infanticide’, in William
Z. Shetter and Inge Van der Cruysse (eds), Contemporary Explorations in
the Culture of the Low Countries (Lanham, Md., 1996), and ‘Alexander
Morus before the Synod of Utrecht’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58
(1996), 239–48. See also Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology
(Basingstoke, 1997), 142–58.
49. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 226–31.
50. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 371, a book both partial and
inspiring. Satan also raises his standard in the northern borders of heaven
in the Anglo Saxon Genesis poem; see Bodl., Codex Junius 11, liber 1,
lines 28–46. The source of the notion is probably Isa. 14: 12–14. See also
Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 224. On Milton’s anxieties, see
Tom Paulin, Crusoe’s Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent (2005), 22–40.
This tendency affects even Neil Forsyth’s The Satanic Epic (Princeton,
2003), 42–3, 169, 344, a book focused on ancient religion.
51. Paulin, Crusoe’s Secret, 23.
52. On the nature of literature, creativity, and interpretation, I have found
instructive Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (2004); Peter
de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); and Edward W. Said,
Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Basingstoke, 2004).
53. On the natural philosophy of angels, see Ch. 11.
54. CPW vi. 759, 760.
55. Ibid. 640.
56. That the same standards apply to angels and men is suggested by the
chapter on oath taking, where Milton claims that it is not a sin to defraud
a fraudulent man by an oath, and that both angels and men take oaths;
CPW vi. 684–6.
57. CPW vii. 274, 85–7.; Neighbourliness was the relationship that Vlacq
claimed Milton had violated; see above, p. 221. Paul Phelps Morand, The
Effects of his Political Life upon John Milton (Paris, 1939), 69, wondered
whether Milton’s defence of lying was in part a piece of ‘self justifica
tion’ following his period of public office; though it is equally likely that
these beliefs preceded the actions they might justify; cf. CPW vi. 674 n.
19. Similarly, Milton the moneylender defended usury in his systematic
theology, in contrast to most contemporary authors; CPW vi. 775–8.
58. CPW vi. 761. They nonetheless come under the same heading.
59. Aquinas, Summa, ix. 41; Peter Le Loier, A Treatise of Specters or Straunge
Sights (1605), fo. 45v; pp. 174–5 above.
CHAPTER 9
1. ‘Lycidas’, quoted from Facsimile of the Manuscript of Milton’s Minor Poems,
ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1899), pl. 31.
notes to chapter 9: look homeward 429
2. ‘Lamentation for Adonis’, imitated by John Oldham, Some New Pieces

Never Before Publisht (1681), 96.
3. Lucan, The Civil War, trans. J. D. Duff, Loeb edn (1928; Cambridge,
Mass., 1988), 508–9.
4. G. W. Pigman III unpersuasively argues that Lycidas is the angel; Grief
and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, 1985), 117.
5. Milton’s Minor Poems, pl. 32.
6. For the relationship between angels and classical genii loci in 17th
century Britain, see Scala Naturae: A Treatise . . . the Existence of Good
Genii, or Guardian Angels (1695), 24; Terrae Filius [George Wither],
Prosopopoeia Britannica (1648), 105 and passim; A Modest Enquiry into the
Opinion Concerning a Guardian Angel (1702), 3–4; Pordage, Mundorum,
52; Bodl., MS Rawlinson A. 404, p. 152; John Heydon, The Harmony of
the World (1662), 89–92; Tomasso Campanella, A Discourse Touching the
Spanish Monarchy, trans. Edmund Chilmead (1654), 7. I owe this last
reference to Nicole Greenspan.
7. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984;
Oxford, 2002), 262–3; Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in
the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 10–12; John N. King, Milton and
Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge,
2000), 23–43; Annabel Patterson, ‘ ‘‘Forc’d Fingers’’: Milton’s Early
Poems and Ideological Constraint’, in Claude Summers and Ted Larry
Pebworth (eds), ‘The Muses Common Weale’: Poetry and Politics in the
Seventeenth Century (Columbia, Mo., 1988).
8. Columbia, x. 14.
9. Milton, Poems, 254.
10. Pigman says that ‘Bellerus’ might be ‘the giant’, but I cannot discern
which; Grief and English Renaissance Elegy, 117.
11. William Camden, Britain, or, A Chorographicall Description, trans. Phile
mon Holland (1637), 187–8; quotation at p. 188. Carganus is Monte
Gargano in northern Apulia, the oldest shrine of Michael; the angel’s
apparition there is described in the Roman Breviary for 8 May.
12. West, Angels, 49; Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels, 15–16. However,
support for individual guardians can be found among English Protest
ants: Joseph Glanvill, A Philosophical Endeavour (1666), 39; Sir Thomas
Browne, Religio Medici (1642), 60; Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy,
ed. T. C. Faulkner et al. (Oxford, 1989), pt i, sect. 2, member 1, subsect.
2; also Fred van Lieburg, ‘Sanctifying Pillars of Pietism and Methodism:
Guardian Angels or Heavenly Helpers in International Story Telling’, in
Jürgen Beyer, Albrecht Bukardt, Fred van Lieburg, and Marc Wingens
(eds), Confessional Sanctity (c.1500–c.1800) (Mainz, 2003); and pp. 56–61
above.
13. Andrew Willett, Synopsis Papismi (1592), 293–4; pp. 48–9, 56 above.
14. Pseudo Dionysius, Works, 172–3.

17. William Lilly, An Astrologicall Prediction . . . 1648, 1649, 1650 (1648), 6.
18. Robert Gell, Aggelokratia Theon (1650), 17; William Austin, Devotionis
Augustinianae Flamma (1635), 250; A Modest Enquiry, 11, 16, 21–2. See
also Scala Naturae, 38.
19. Ibid.; Lilly, Astrologicall Prediction, 6.
21. Hardick Warren, Magick and Astrology Vindicated (1651), 21.
22. Philotheos Physiologus [Thomas Tryon], A Treatise of Dreams and Visions
([1689]), 151–2.
23. Robert Dingley, The Deputation of Angels (1654), 159–60.
24. Johannes Wollebius, The Abridgment of Christian Divinitie, trans. Alex
ander Ross (1650), 63; Westminster Assembly, Annotations upon all the
Books of the Old and New Testament (1651), at Dan. 10: 13; George
Hughes, An Analytical Exposition of . . . Genesis (1672), 407; also Christo
pher Love, The Dejected Soules Cure (1657); BL, Sloane MS 1233, fo. 77r.
417–18. See also Trevor Johnson, ‘Guardian Angels and the Society of
Jesus’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels.
26. Columbia, xv. 102.
27. PR 1. 446–7; Milton, Poems, 441.
28. CPW ii. 271; Columbia, xv. 102.
29. Raymond, Pamphleteering, ch. 5; Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology
(Basingstoke, 1997), 56–68. For the possible influence of these events
on ‘Lycidas’, see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution
(1977), 49–53; Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 265–9.
30. Lines 1–2. Carey (Milton, Poems, 257–8) infers an elided reflexive
pronoun in the parenthetical clause, translating it ‘believe me, you
peoples’, implying the poet’s own avowed commitment to the doctrine
of tutelary angels. Charles Knapp, Columbia, i. 228–9, renders it ‘such be
your belief, ye people’, which distances the poet from the doctrine.
31. Campanella, Spanish Monarchy, 7; John Blenkow, Michaels Combat with
the Devil (1640), 7; William Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of
that Famous Princesse Elizabeth (1634), Kkk4v–Lllr; François Eudes de
Mézeray, A General Chronological History of France, trans. John Bulteel
(1683), 491–2; C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to
Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1964), 72; Keck, Angels,
38, 202.
32. John Prideaux, The Patronage of Angels (1636), 19; Warren, Magick and
Astrology, 21.
33. John Dryden, ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of
Satire’ (1693), in The Works of John Dryden, iv, ed. A. B. Chambers and
William Frost (Berkeley, 1974), 19–20.
34. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution
(1993), 264–70; John K. Hale, ‘England as Israel in Milton’s Writings’,
Early Modern Literary Studies, 2/2 (1996), 3.1–54, < http://extra.shu.ac.
uk/emls/02 2/halemil2.html>, accessed 23 Feb. 1997; Colin Kidd, Brit
ish Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic
World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), 211–14. See Clay Hunt, ‘Lycidas’
and the Italian Critics (New Haven, 1979), 141–4, which manages by
sleight of hand to link Michael to Arthur and thence to ‘the manifest
destiny of the English nation’.
35. See n. 7 above.
36. John T. Shawcross (ed.), John Milton: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols (1970–
2; 1995), ii. 293–4.
37. Ibid. 305.
38. The former camp is a catholic one. See e.g. Hunt, ‘Lycidas’ and the Italian
Critics; J. M. Evans, The Road from Horton: Looking Backward in ‘Lycidas’
(Victoria, BC, 1983); Christopher Kendrick, ‘Anachronism in ‘‘Lyci
das’’ ’, ELH, 64 (1997), 1–40; Lloyd Edward Kermode, ‘To the Shores of
Life: Textual Recovery in Lycidas’, Milton Quarterly, 31 (1997), 11–25; for
the latter approach, see n. 7 above.
39. Eclogue V, lines 62–5; Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans.
H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb edn (1916; Cambridge, Mass., 1998),
38–9; Milton, Poems, 256 n.
40. James H. Hanford, ‘The Pastoral Elegy and Milton’s Lycidas’, in C. A.
Patrides (ed.), Milton’s ‘Lycidas’: The Tradition and the Poem (New York,
1961), 39–40.
41. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, trans. Ralph Nash
(Detroit, 1966), 162–3, lines 91–8; Hanford, ‘Pastoral Elegy’, 46–7.
The passage itself echoes Virgil’s fifth eclogue; see William
J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover, Nebr.,
1983), 160–1.
42. Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Genius of the Shore: ‘‘Lycidas’’, Adamastor,
and the Poetics of Nationalism’, PMLA, 111 (1996), 205–21: 207–8;
quotation at p. 210.
43. For a fuller treatment of these matters, see my ‘Look Homeward Angel:
Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth Century Britain’, in
David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (eds), Early Modern Nationalism and
Milton’s England (Toronto, 2008). I have benefited from dialogue with
and writings by Paul Stevens; see e.g. ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the
Rights of Memory’, in Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and
Michael Schoenfeldt (eds), Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton (Basing
stoke, 2003); ‘Spenser and Milton on Ireland: Civility, Exclusion,
and the Politics of Wisdom’, Ariel, 26 (1995), 151–67; ‘Milton’s Janus
Faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State’,
Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 100 (2001), 247–68; ‘ ‘‘Leviticus
Thinking’’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism’, Criticism, 35

(1993), 441–61; ‘Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative’, Milton
Studies, 34 (1997),
33–21; and ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works’, in Loewenstein and
Stevens (eds), Early Modern Nationalism.
44. Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge,
2003), ch. 6; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
(Cambridge, 2000), ch. 2; Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism; Ben
jamin Braude, ‘The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and
Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods’,
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997), 101–42.
45. CPW iii. 215. See also Joad Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest:
Milton, Scotland, Ireland, and National Identity in 1649’, Review of
English Studies, 55 (2004), 315–45.
46. ‘Mansus’, lines 80–4; Columbia, i. 292–3; Milton, Poems, 267; John K.
Hale, Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cam
bridge, 1997), 57, 62.
47. CPW v; Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest’; Linda Gregerson, ‘A
Colonial Writes the Commonwealth: Milton’s History of Britain’, Prose
Studies, 19 (1996), 247–54; Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s ‘History of
Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991);
Graham Parry, ‘Milton’s History of Britain and the Seventeenth Century
Antiquarian Scene’, Prose Studies, 19 (1996), 238–46.
48. Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest’, 328; Raymond, ‘The Cracking of
the Republican Spokes’, Prose Studies, 19 (1996), 255–74; Laura Lunger
Knoppers, ‘Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad’,
in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds), Politics, Poetics,
and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge, 1990).
49. In PL, that is. However, in Defensio Secunda he implies that this Latin prose
work was his promised epic, a heroic celebration of his countrymen’s
exploit (‘ita mihi quoque vel ad officium, vel ad excusationem satis fuerit,
unam saltem popularium meorum heroicè rem gestam exornasse’); Milton,
Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654), 172. This patriotic account of
deliverance from monarchy is situated within a European context.
50. CPW ii. 552.
51. Ibid. 553; Milton makes the same point, with a similar interest in
Europe, in the divorce tracts; ibid. 231–2, 707.
52. Columbia, xii. 114–15; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King,
Loeb edn (1927; 1945), 532–3.
53. Columbia, xii. 114–15.
54. Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nation
alism (Oxford, 1995).
55. See e.g. Willy Maley, ‘How Milton and Some Contemporaries Read
Spenser’s View’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy
Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict,

1534–1660 (Cambridge, 1993); Lipking, ‘Genius of the Shore’, 209–13;
and Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest’. For the date of Milton’s
reading of Spenser, see the location of the entries in the commonplace
book; CPW i. 465, 496.
56. Kumar, English National Identity, 98–103; Richard Helgerson, Forms of
Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), ch. 3,
though the afterword suggests the existence of a nation state in 17th
century England; Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jaco
bean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (Oxford, 2000).
57. Cf. Robert W. Scribner, ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the
‘‘Disenchantment of the World’’ ’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23
(1993), 475–94, esp. 483–7.
58. As it is in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634; in this, however, less
effort is made to unify the classical and the Christian: instead its world of
nymphs and spirits is an allegory for Christian values. ‘Lycidas’ is all the
more disturbing for not simply being allegorical. Dr Johnson—who
praised the Masque’s poetical language and condemned its ‘tediously
instructive’ form (Shawcross (ed.), Critical Heritage, ii. 297)—might
have found more to criticize here, were it not for the fact that so
much less theology is at stake.
59. The First Anniversary, lines 399–402, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed.
Nigel Smith (2003), 298; further references to Marvell’s poems in this
edition appear parenthetically in the text.
60. For contemporary uses of this text in relation to angels, see, in addition
to scriptural commentaries, especially John Mayer’s Commentarie upon the
New Testament (1631) and Edward Leigh’s Annotations (1650); William
Foster, Hoplocrisma Spongus (1631), 4; Robert Fludd, Doctor Fludds Answer
unto M. Foster (1631), 39; Benjamin Camfield, A Theological Discourse of
Angels (1678), 96; (doubtfully) John Patrick, Reflexions upon the Devotions
of the Roman Church (1674), 374.
61. On ‘heal’ as understood in public discourse, see Wilbur Cortez Abbott,
The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (1937–47; Oxford,
1988), iii. 439, 435; Henry Vane, A Healing Question (1656) and The
Proceeds of the Protector (so called) and his Councell against Sir Henry Vane
(1658), 3.
62. Annabel Patterson, Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (2000), 43–4.
63. For the argument of this paragraph, see Joad Raymond, ‘Framing
Liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Govern
ment’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (2001), 313–50; also Derek
Hirst, ‘ ‘‘That Sober Liberty’’: Marvell’s Cromwell in 1654’, in John
M. Wallace (ed.), The Golden and the Brazen World: Papers in Literature
and History, 1650–1800 (Berkeley, 1985).
64. Lines 2–5.
65. Bartas: His Devine Weekes and Workes, trans. Joshua Sylvester (1605), 6,
21, 292. Du Bartas was highly influential on Marvell, and the extent of
his influence and the number of allusions have yet to be traced. Marvell’s
poem can be seen to steer the interpretation of Milton’s epic towards
classical precedents, a literary move that disarms theological objections.
See also Philip Hardie, ‘The Presence of Lucretius in Paradise Lost’,
Milton Quarterly, 29 (1995), 13–24; Andrew Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics,
and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled (Cambridge,
1998), 110–18; see also Stephen M. Fallon, ‘Intention and its Limits in
Paradise Lost: The Case of Bellerophon’, in Diana Treviño Benet and
Michael Lieb (eds), Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context (Duquesne,
Pa., 1994), 177–9; Diana Treviño Benet, ‘The Genius of the Wood and
the Prelate of the Grove: Milton and Marvell’, in Margo Swiss and
David A. Kent (eds), Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English
Renaissance (1995), 230–46.
66. John Klause, The Unfortunate Fall: The Moral Imagination of Andrew
Marvell (Hamden, Conn., 1983), 66–7; Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic
Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth Century Poetry (Brighton,
1986), 13, 20.
67. See Edward Leigh, Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650), 597;
Arthur Dent, Ruine of Rome (1603), 158, 270; James Durham, A Com
mentary upon the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh, 1680), 345–6, 470; Joseph
Mede, The Key of the Revelation, trans. Richard More (1643), pt 2, p. 32.
David Pareus, A Commentary upon the Divine Revelation, trans. Elias
Arnold (Amsterdam, 1644), 265–6.
69. Richard Bernard, Key of Knowledge (1617), 213; Patrick Forbes, An
Exquisite Commentarie on the Revelation of Saint John (1613), 105–6, 221;
Henry More, Apocalypsis Apocalypseos (1680), 117, 205.
70. Thomas Brightman, A Revelation of the Revelation (Amsterdam, 1615),
409: ‘Constantine therefore that faithfull Souldier of Christ, who was
right nowe called the man childe of manly Sonne, is here called Mi
chael, by a name that is communicable from God to the Creature.’
Brightman also thought the angel at Rev. 20: 1 was Constantine; p. 839.
71. John Napier, A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of Saint John
(1593), 159, 163–4; John Downame et al., Annotations upon all the
Books of the Old and New Testament (1645), ad locos. One ground for
resistance to the Michael as Christ reading was repeated warnings
against the worship of angels in Revelation (19: 10; 22: 9), important
for the distinctive Protestant case against angel worship: if the angel was
Christ, why would he reject the offer of worship on the grounds of being
a ‘fellow servant’?
72. John Mayer, A Commentarie upon the New Testament, iii (1631), 394.
Mayer did think that the angel at Rev. 20: 1 represented Constantine,
however: ‘whom God did singularly use in this service of binding Satan’;
p. 502.
73. Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, ed. D. I. B. Smith (Oxford,
1971), 89. On 17th century interpretation of Revelation, see Kevin
Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations: Prophecy, Hermeneutics and Politics in
Early Modern Britain’, in Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, Reading,
Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003); Christo
pher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (1971); Anthony
Milton, ‘The Church of England, Rome, and the True Church: The
Demise of a Jacobean Consensus’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early
Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1999); C. A. Patrides and Joseph
Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Litera
ture (Manchester, 1984).
74. Quoted in Marvell, Poems, ed. Smith, 298; see also Edmund Waller,
Panegyrick (1655).
75. Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, or, An Exposition of . . . Genesis, trans.
J. Ellistone and J. Sparrow (1654), 27.
76. For precedents, see Willet, Hexapla, 338, though Willet did not believe
in guardian angels and is describing an action; Downame et al., Annota
tions, ad locum Gen. 32, though these Annotations also use other verbs,
including ‘guard’.
77. William Gurnall, The Christian in Compleat Armour (1655), 104 ff.;
Stereoma: The Establishment (1654 [George Thomason dated it Nov.
1653]), av.
78. Dingley, Deputation of Angels, 159–60.
79. Arise Evans, The Voice of Michael the Archangel (1654), 16, 17, 18, 19. Cf.
Lilly on guardian angels and parahelii, p. 110 and n. 98, above.
80. See H. C. Beeching, in the National Review in 1901, in Elizabeth Story
Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell: The Critical Heritage (1978), 289–90; edi
torial annotations in Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M.
Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan Jones, 2 vols (Ox
ford, 1971), i. 319–28; and Marvell, Poems, 281–98.
81. Marvell, Poems, passim; Patterson, Marvell, 46.
82. Columbia, viii. 226–7; CPW iv. 673; Marvell, Poems and Letters, ii. 306.
83. See Thomas M. Greene’s distinction between allusion and repetition in
The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New
Haven, 1982), 49. I would argue, however, that there is more to the
echoes of non literary sources in First Anniversary than mere repetition:
they establish the meaning and context of Marvell’s language, and so are
integral to the argument of the poem, whereas the imitatio—not uncom
monly—seems justified without reference to argument.
84. CPW iv. 672; Columbia, viii. 224–5.
85. Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty’, 340.
436 notes to chapter 10: paradise lost
87. Ann Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy
in the Late Renaissance’, Isis, 91 (2000), 32–58; Brian Harrison, The Bible,
Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998); pp. 299–306
below.
88. Lilly, Astrologicall Prediction, 6, and Merlini Anglici Ephemeris 1648 (1648),
sigs A3v, Cr, C3v.
89. Wither, Prosopopoeia Britannica, 2, 105.
90. Abraham Cowley, A Vision (1661), 3, 4, 9.
91. Ibid. 11, 14, 26 ff., 80, 81; good and evil angels also witness the battle of
Edgehill in Cowley’s A Poem on the Late Civil War (1679), 11, 13.
92. George Wither, Vaticinium Casuale (1655); Joad Raymond, ‘The Daily
Muse; or, Seventeenth Century Poets Read the News’, Seventeenth
Century, 11 (1995), 198–203, and ‘Framing Liberty’, 342.
93. Cowley, Vision, sig. A2r.
CHAPTER 10
1. John Calvin, A Commentary on Genesis, ed. and trans. John N. King, 2
vols (1847; 1965), i. 182–3; John N. King, Milton and Religious Contro
versy: Satire and Polemic in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge, 2000), 109–32; Paul
Rovang, ‘Milton’s War in Heaven as Apocalyptic Drama: ‘‘Thy Foes
Justly Hast in Derision’’ ’, Milton Quarterly, 28 (1994), 28–35.
2. P. 71 above; Marcia L. Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols (Leiden, 1994), i.
343–6, 348–9.
3. Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Princeton, 1994), 156–63.
4. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (1988; New
Haven, 2001), 84–5.
5. Edgar Hill Duncan, ‘The Natural History of Metals and Minerals in the
Universe of Milton’s Paradise Lost’, Osiris, 11 (1954), 386–421.
6. McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 152–3.
7. Pp. 49–56 above.
8. West, Angels, 133–4, interprets this to indicate the Pseudo Dionysian
order of archangels.
9. See pp. 23–6, above; Aquinas, Summa, ix. 227–31, 245; xiv. 89–105, 121–57.
10. 5. 289–90; p. 192 above.
11. CPW vi. 315; John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language
of Adam and Eve (Oxford, 1990), 61.
12. See also Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 57–68.
13. CPW i. 808, 820–1; pp. 91–2 above.
14. Amy Boesky, ‘Milton’s Heaven and the Model of the English Utopia’,
Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 91–110; Ian Gentles, The New
Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992),
ch. 4.
notes to chapter 11: natural philosophy 437
15. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, 43, 1–70, and passim; but cf. Jeffrey S.
Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity
(New York, 2001), 228.
16. Dance is another pattern of heavenly organization, precedented in
Renaissance art; Françoise Carter, John Milton and the Image of Dance,
Renaissance Monographs, 22 (Tokyo, 1996).
17. Roland Mushat Frye, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic
Tradition in the Epic Poems (Princeton, 1978), 169–88.
18. Pp. 299–306 below.
19. Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 86–146.
20. In Trithemius’ Steganographia, however, it is Michael who is angel of the
sun; Raphael is the angel of Mercury; and Gabriel the angel of the moon;
Usiel (Uzziel?) also appears there, but without significance for Milton.
Milton seems not to have used Trithemius for names. Lilly, The Worlds
Catastrophe (1647), 42–56.
21. On Raziel, see Sophie Page, ‘Speaking with Spirits in Medieval Magic
Texts’, and Walter Stephens, ‘Strategies of Interspecies Communication,
1100–2000’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations; West, Angels, 154–5; Rob
ert H. West, ‘The Names of Milton’s Angels’, Studies in Philology, 47
(1950), 211–23: 219; Steve Savedow (ed.), Sepher Reziel Hemelach: The
Book of the Angel Raziel (San Francisco, 2000), 207.
22. Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 125–32.
23. West, ‘Names of Milton’s Angels’, 213 n. 6, 219 n. 22, and Angels, 155.
24. West, ‘Names of Milton’s Angels’, 221; Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance
England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), 76–81.
25. Harris Francis Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbinical Readings (Urbana, Ill., 1930),
252–4; pp. 82–3 above.
26. West, ‘Names of Milton’s Angels’, 222.
27. On sources for the names more generally, see Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbin
ical Readings, chs 6– 7; West, ‘Names of Milton’s Angels’ and Angels,
151–6.
28. PL 4. 681; see pp. 310–11 below.
29. Facsimile of the Manuscript of Milton’s Minor Poems (Cambridge, 1899), 3, 38.
30. J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Discourses of
Colonialism (Ithaca, NY, 1996), explores the narrative in terms of em
bassies.
31. PL 10. 668–72, 707–9; pp. 295–6 below.
CHAPTER 11
1. Columbia, xiii. 481–5; H. W. Dickenson, Sir Samuel Morland: Diplomat
and Inventor, 1625–1695 (Cambridge, 1970), 6–13; Robert Thomas Fallon,
Milton in Government (University Park, Pa., 1993), 143–51.
438 notes to chapter 11: natural philosophy
2. Samuel Morland, The Urim of Conscience (1695), 13–14 (‘to play with the
sacred’).
3. Cf. Richard Blackmore on Spenser and Ariosto, in Theresa M. Kelley,
Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, 1997), 1 and passim; pp. 356–7 below.
4. Morland, Urim of Conscience, 15.
5. Pp. 211–12 above; Patrick Hume, Annotations on Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’
(1695), 192–210; [Charles Leslie], The History of Sin and Heresie (1698),
sig. A2r; John T. Shawcross (ed.), John Milton: The Critical Heritage, 2
vols (1970–2; 1995), i. 306.
6. Kester Svensden, Milton and Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), passim, 77–8,
241; Catherine Gimelli Martin, ‘ ‘‘Boundless the Deep’’: Milton, Pascal,
and the Theology of Relative Space’, ELH, 63 (1996), 45–78; William
Kolbrener, ‘ ‘‘In a Narrow and to Him a Dark Chamber’’: Milton Un
abridged’, Common Knowledge, 4 (1995), 72–96, and Milton’s Warring An
gels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge, 1997), 102–32; William
Poole, ‘Milton and Science: A Caveat’, Milton Quarterly, 38 (2004), 18–34.
7. Svensden, Milton and Science, 47–8; Grant McColley, ‘Milton’s Dialogue
on Astronomy’, PMLA, 52 (1937), 728–62, and ‘The Astronomy of
Paradise Lost’, Studies in Philology, 34 (1937), 209–47.
8. Harinder S. Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things: Science in ‘Paradise
Lost’ (Toronto, 1992).
9. Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in
‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge, 1999).
10. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the
Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 1–38, 103–43; Fallon, Philosophers, 98–
107, 116–17, 137–8. Fallon states that Milton believes in an Aristotelian
version of hylomorphism, in which an object is defined by form and
matter: spirit is a form of matter that is inseparable from it (though
Milton, like Aristotle, alternates between this and the view that spiritual
matter is tenuously corporeal). Hylomorphism does not appear in the
index, however; hylozoism does, but Fallon associates it exclusively with
Gassendi. Hylozoism is perhaps closer to the view that Fallon (brilliantly)
describes in ch. 5, which is about angels. The view that matter is free is
associated with hylozoism, and this is the belief assigned to Milton in the
central thesis of the book.
11. Nicholas Jardine, The Birth of History and Philosophy of Science: Kepler’s ‘A
Defence of Tycho against Ursus’ with Essays on its Provenance and Significance
(Cambridge, 1984); Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in
the Age of Galileo (Princeton, 1999); Albert van Helden, Measuring the
Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (Chicago, 1985).
12. Augustine, City, 321, 569.
13. Aquinas, Summa, ix. 43; cf. Augustine, City, 321, 569.
14. Robert Dingley, The Deputation of Angels (1654), 210; Robert Bolton,
Mr. Boltons Last and Learned Worke of the Foure Last Things, 4th edn
(1649), 129–30; John White, A Commentary upon . . . Genesis (1656), i.

115; George Hughes, An Analytical Exposition of . . . Genesis (1672), 217.
15. Robert Fludd, Doctor Fludds Answer unto M. Foster (1631), 44.
17. Fallon, Philosophers, 198; A. D. Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and
Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John (1980), 87–93.
18. J. A. Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light (1651), 236;
cf. West, Angels, 172.
20. Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief
(Chicago, 2002).
21. Pp. 76–7 above.
22. PR 2. 178–81; at 4. 518 both humans and angels are acknowledged sons
of God.
23. Williams, Expositor, 117–18; id., Ideas of the Fall, 20–9, 161.
24. Bolton, Mr. Boltons Last and Learned Worke, 129–30; above, p. 78.
25. Keck, Angels, 187; Henry Mayr Harting, Perceptions of Angels in
History (Oxford, 1998), 17–18; Thomas Tryon, Pythagoras His Mystick
Philosophy Reviv’d (1691), 123–4; Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s
Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature
(Cambridge, 1999), 115–16; Meric Casaubon, A True and Faithful
Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers between Sr. John Dee . . . and
Some Spirits (1659), 10–11.
26. R[ichard] B[rathwaite], A Mustur Roll of the Evill Angels (1655), 74.
27. Quoted in D. C. Allen, ‘Milton and the Love of Angels’, Modern
Language Notes, 76 (1961), 489–90; the passage in PL 8 develops PL 1.
423–31, which, as West shows, echoes Michael Psellus (West, Angels,
144–6, 170). See also Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief
Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), 72–3.
28. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo (1966).
29. Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660), 6.
30. Aquinas, Summa, ix. 37, 13; Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Separate Sub
stances, trans. Revd Francis J. Lescoe (West Hartford, Conn., 1963), sects
98–102; also Keck, Angels, 31.
31. William Austin, Devotionis Augustinianae Flamma (1635), 246.
32. Fallon, Philosophers, 71–4; West, Angels, ch. 5.
33. Henry Woolnor, The True Originall of the Soule (1641), 91, 93.
34. John Trapp, A Clavis to the Bible (1650), 8.
35. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), 270,
274, 278, and 269–89 passim; mocked by Alexander Ross, in Leviathan
Drawn Out (1653), 38–40.
36. Fludd, Doctor Fludds Answer, 44, 50, 51–2.
37. Jacob Boehme, The Second Booke: Concerning the Three Principles, trans.
J.S. (1648), 69–70, 39 (square brackets original).
38. Robert Gell, Aggelokratia Theon (1650), 13, 14.
39. See Fallon, Philosophers; John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy
and Reinterpretation (Cambridge, 1996), 94–116; Rogers, Matter of Revo
lution, passim; Joad Raymond, ‘Milton’, in Andrew Pyle (ed.), Dictionary
of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers (Bristol, 2000).
40. Fallon, Philosophers, 103–6, 143–4; Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and
Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser,
Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 5.
41. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the
English Revolution (1972; Harmondsworth, 1975), 151–83, 306–23, and
Milton and the English Revolution (1977), 341–53; William Poole, Milton and
the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge, 2005); James Grantham Turner, One Flesh:
Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford, 1987).
42. CPW vi. 307–10; PL 5. 407–13.
43. Fallon, Philosophers, 66; More, Explanation, 34.
44. Donne, Major Works, 384; Woolnor, True Originall, 91; Heywood
develops this nicely in Hierarchie, 211. See also John of Damascus in
A Select Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church,
2nd ser., 9: St. Hilary of Poitiers: John of Damascus, ed. W. Sanday, trans.
E. W. Watson and L. Pullan (Oxford, 1899), 19.
45. Fallon, Philosophers, 142.
46. More, Explanation, 35–6.
47. Thus, Tryon argues that angels never appear as women (contrast Casau
bon, True and Faithful Relation, 10–11), and that, the beard being
a symbol of lechery, good angels can never appear bearded; Tryon,
Pythagoras His Mystick Philosophy, 123–4; Harkness, John Dee’s Conversa
tions, 46. This contrasts with an older iconographic tradition. See
also John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History
(New York, 1983), 146–51.
48. ‘Spiritus enim, ut substantia excellentior, substantiam utique inferiorem
virtualiter, quod aiunt, et eminenter in se continet; ut facultas facultatem
spiritualis, et rationalis corpoream, sentientem nempe et vegetativam’;
Columbia, xv. 24; CPW vi. 309.
49. A. D. C. Simpson, ‘Robert Hooke and Practical Optics: Technical
Support at a Scientific Frontier’, in Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer
(eds), Robert Hooke: New Studies (Woodbridge, 1989); Adrian Johns, ‘The
Physiology of Reading in Restoration England’, in James Raven, Helen
Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading
in England (Cambridge, 1996).
50. PL 1. 56–60; the manuscript of book 1 and early editions read ‘angels
ken’; Fowler revises this to ‘angels’ ken’, converting ken from verb to
noun.

52. Eileen Reeves, Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror (Cam
bridge, Mass., 2008).
53. Canto 29, lines 76–81; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, iii: Paradiso,
trans. John D. Sinclair (1939; New York, 1979), 420–1.
54. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations, 114.
55. Joseph Hall, The Great Mysterie of Godliness (1652), 126, 127.
57. Gell, Aggelokratia Theon, 13; Henry Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations
(1655), 46. See also Jean Baptiste van Helmont, A Ternary of Paradoxes,
trans. Walter Charleton, 2nd edn (1650), 126.
58. Brian Duppa, Angels Rejoicing for Sinners Repenting (1648), 10.
59. Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed, 237, 238.
60. Ibid. 232.
62. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy
(1972; Oxford, 1988), 103–4.
63. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665), sigs A2r, br, A2v, b2v, c2r.
64. Joad Raymond, ‘Perfect Speech: The Public Sphere and Communica
tion in Seventeenth Century England’, in Willy Maley and Alex Bench
imol (eds), Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from
Shakespeare to Habermas (Frankfurt, 2006).
65. Nick Wilding, ‘Galilean Angels’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations;
Kircher, quoted in Michael Gorman, ‘The Angel and the Compass’,
in Paula Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew
Everything (New York, 2004), 248; Simon Schaffer, ‘Regeneration: The
Body of Natural Philosophers in Restoration England’, in Christopher
Lawrence and Steven Shapin (eds), Science Incarnate: Historical Embodi
ments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago, 1998); see also Charles Dempsey,
Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001).
66. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), sig. B2r, p. 5.
67. Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus . . . With a Letter of Dr. Henry More
(1681), 12, 43. The letter is dated 1678; Henry More, Antidote Against
Idolatry (1672), 91–4; I owe this reference to Simon Schaffer.
68. PL 3. 69; Alastair Fowler, Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Litera
ture and Art (Oxford, 2003), 75.
69. See pp. 276–7 and nn. 6–11, above.
70. Thomas N. Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost (1994), 105. Dante, however,
follows al Farghānı̄; see van Helden, Measuring the Universe, 39; Bolton,
Mr. Boltons Last and Learned Worke, 143.
71. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1963); C. S. Lewis, The
Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
(Cambridge, 1964); G. E. R. Lloyd, ‘Saving the Appearances’, Classical
Quarterly, 28 (1978), 202–22.
72. Alastair Fowler, Time’s Purpled Masquers (1996); Reeves, Painting the
Heavens; van Helden, Measuring the Universe, ch. 7.
73. During the temptation Eve deceives herself that heaven is too far for
earth to be distinctly seen from there, even by God; PL 9. 811–13.
75. Ibid. 81, 129; also pp. 67–9 above.
76. William Bucanus, Institutions of Christian Religion, trans. Robert Hill
(1606), 70.
Europe (Oxford, 1997), 161–2, quoting R[ichard] G[ilpin], Daemonologia
Sacra, or, A Treatise (1677); Brian Duppa, Angels Rejoicing for Sinners
Repenting (1648), 10–11.
78. Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed, 232.
79. Also pp. 313–18 below.
80. Duppa, Angels Rejoicing, 11.
81. CPW vi. 309. Cf . Robert Fludd: ‘Dæmones ex subtilissimorum cœli
spiritualis elementorum materia componi . . . quorum compositio, si
cum creaturis cœlorum inferiorum comparetur incorporea dicitur, sed
respectu simplicitatis substantiæ lucidæ cœli Empyrei in quo, um quo et
ex cujus elementis primo die creati sunt, non aliter equam plantæ, herbæ,
carumque semina die tertio cum terra facta fuerunt’; Denis Saurat,
Milton: Man and Thinker ([c.1924]), 308.
82. Fallon, Philosophers, 137–67; Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief
Rabbi, 98–9; John Rogers, ‘The Secret of Samson Agonistes’, Milton
Studies, 33 (1996), 111–32: 118, 120.
83. Hughes, Analytical Exposition of Genesis, 228.
85. Ibid. 71.
86. Cf. John of Damascus, Select Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, 19.
87. John Salkeld, A Treatise of Angels (1613), 60, 66–9.
88. Bucanus, Institutions, 68–9.
89. Johannes Wollebius, The Abridgement of Christian Divinity, trans. Alex
ander Ross (1650), 42.
90. PL 5. 824–5. And perhaps the doctrine also underpins the words of
Marlowe’s Faust: ‘Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed, j In one self
place. But where we are is hell, j And where hell is there must we ever be’;
Faustus, 1. 5. 124–6, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. J. B.
Stearne (1969).
91. Richard Sibbes, Light from Heaven (1638), second treatise, p. 209.
92. Jeremy Taylor, ‘Episcopacy Asserted’, in Treatises (1648), 173.
93. Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed, 237.
94. Fludd, Doctor Fludds Answer, 38; John Everard, Some Gospel Truths
Opened (1653), 414.
95. John Wilkins, Mercury, or, The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641), 2;
Johannes Trithemius, Steganographia ([c.1500]; Frankfurt, 1606); Hey
wood, Hierarchie, 261; see also William Lilly, The World’s Catastrophe
(1647); and p. 109 above.
96. John Frederick Houpreght, Aurifontina Chymica (1680), 115.
97. Bolton, Mr. Boltons Last and Learned Worke, 119, 121.
98. William Greenhill, An Exposition of the First Five Chapters of the Prophet
Ezekiel (1649), 104. Greenhill uses a pattern of doubling, calculating that
from the earth to the fixed stars is c.80 million miles. Ptolemy calculated
this figure as 50 million miles; al Farghānı̄ and Roger Bacon as over 65
million miles; (approximately 26,666 earth radii); Kepler’s universe was
much larger; van Helden, Measuring the Universe, 24, 35, 88.
99. Dingley, Deputation, 142–3. He offers a marginal note to Greenhill in the
preceding paragraph, but does not indicate where he quotes verbatim; it
is a scholarly act of plagiarism.
100. Heywood, Hierarchie, 212; see also pp. 252–3, 261. See van Helden,
Measuring the Universe, 29–37. Bacon, however, gives the distance to the
fixed stars as 65,357,500 miles; quoted ibid. 35.
102. Cf. also Bartas: His Devine Weekes and Workes, trans. Joshua Sylvester
(1605), 24: ‘much more these Spirits can j Worke strange effects,
exceeding sense of Man? . . . j And free from bodies clogge, with lighter
speed j And with less let, they doo what they decreed.’
103. PL 2. 915–16; 7. 225–7.
104. Cf. Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost, 32–3.
105. PL 3. 229; cf. 7. 572–3.
106. ‘sunt velocitate summa quasi alis induti’; Columbia, xv. 34–5; CPW vi.
315. The proof text is Ezek. 1: 6.
107. ‘sunt numero pene innumerabili’; Columbia, xv. 34–5; CPW vi. 315.
108. Pace West, Angels, 15–16.
109. P. 12 above; Bodl., MS Locke f.3, entry dated 20 Jan. 1678; I am
indebted to Olivia Smith for this reference.
110. Boyle writes repeatedly about angels in Excellency of Theology (1674), e.g.
pp. 15–18, where he states that reason cannot prove their existence; and
in Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God (1660). He avoids them in
his other writings; though see Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring
Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, 1998), 190–201
and passim; Michael Hunter, ‘Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the
Thought of Robert Boyle’, British Journal for the History of Science, 23
(1990), 387–410; More, Antidote against Idolatry, 91–4.
111. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 294–310; Simon Schaffer, ‘Making Cer
tain’, Social Studies of Science, 14 (1984), 137–52: 147–8, ‘Occultism and
Reason in the Seventeenth Century’, in A. J. Holland (ed.), Philosophy:
Its History and Historiography (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), and ‘Godly Men
444 notes to chapter 12: tongues of angels
and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural

Philosophy’, Science in Context, 1 (1987), 55–85; Shapin, A Social History
of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England (Chicago,
1994).
112. A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton,
and Blake (Oxford, 1998), ch. 3; for Nuttall this understanding points in a
very different direction.
113. As Svensden suggests; Milton and Science, 245–6.
114. Evans, Genesis Tradition, 4.
CHAPTER 12
1. PL 6. 297–301. Milton echoes 1 Cor. 13: 1: ‘Though I speake with the
tongues of men and of Angels, and have not charitie, I am become as
sounding brasse or a tinkling cymbal.’ Paul refers to the power of angelic
speech, not to its mechanics. The passage is frequently cited in early modern
discussions not only of angelic speech but also of ideal human speech.
2. Fowler suggests that we have a choice between allegory and novelistic
realism: PL, p. 171. Mindele Treip suggests that Milton moved between
allegory and realism in his accommodated poetics; Allegorical Poetics and
the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to ‘Paradise Lost’ (Lexington, Mass.,
1994), chs 15–16.
3. Tongue also means ‘language’, i.e. the perfect prelapsarian Hebrew (cf.
Meric Casaubon on the imperfect Latin of Dee’s angels, in A True and
Faithful Relation, 1659, sig. E3v) in which the angels communicate to
Adam and Eve. Ideas are not impressed onto the minds of the humans;
they are actually speaking in a language. Interpretations of this text from
1 Corinthians which imply that angels spoke Hebrew include: John
White, A Commentary upon . . . Genesis (1656), i. 32; John Lightfoot,
Erubhin, or, Miscellanies (1629), 103; Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three
Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. F. (1651), 412.
4. The Tempest, 3. 2. 130–2, Norton Shakespeare, 3087.
5. PL 7. 558–64, 598–9; see also 7. 633, 3. 371.
6. Alexander Ross, An Exposition on the Fourteene First Chapters of Genesis
(1626), 109; Richard Sibbes, Light from Heaven (1638), second treatise;
Joad Raymond, ‘Perfect Speech: The Public Sphere and Communica
tion in Seventeenth Century England’, in Willy Maley and Alex Bench
imol (eds), Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from
Shakespeare to Habermas (Frankfurt, 2006), 43–69.
7. See Jessie Ann Owens, ‘ ‘‘And the angel said . . . ’’: Conversations
with Angels in Early Modern Music’, and Walter Stephens, ‘Strategies of
Interspecies Communication, 1100–2000’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversa
tions; Henry Mayr Harting, Perceptions of Angels in History (Oxford, 1998),
14–15.
notes to chapter 12: tongues of angels 445
8. See William T. Flynn, ‘Singing with the Angels: Hildegard of Bingen’s

Representations of Celestial Music’, and Stephens, ‘Strategies of Inter
species Communication’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations.
9. Richard Rastall, The Heavens Singing: Music in Early English Religious
Drama, i (Cambridge, 1996), 187–9; Pordage, Mundorum, 40.
10. John Wall, Alae Seraphicae (1627), 131.
11. Pseudo Dionysius, Works, 161–2; C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image:
An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1964),
92–121; John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in
English Poetry, 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1961); D. P. Walker, Studies in
Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (1978); Shakespeare, The Merchant
of Venice, 5. 1. 59–62, Norton Shakespeare, 1139; Heywood, Hierarchie,
272, 292.
12. West, Angels, 132–6; Diane McColley, ‘Beneficent Hierarchies: Reading
Milton Greenly’, in Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan
(eds), Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism (1994).
13. Columbia, xii. 148–57. See also pp. 260–2 above.
14. Augustine, City, 680–5, 1066–8, 1152–3.
15. Ibid. 705–6; John Gumbleden, Christ Tempted: The Devil Conquered (1657),
22.
16. Aquinas, Summa, xiv. 107–9, 117, 111–15. Seventeenth century meta
phoric uses of 1 Cor. 13: 1 include Richard Allestree, The Government of
the Tongue, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1674), 211; John Heydon, Theomagia, or,
The Temple of Wisdome, 3 vols (1664), iii. 196.
17. Aquinas, Summa, ix. 31–43; quotation at p. 43.
18. David Pareus, In Genesin Mosis Commentarius (1609; Geneva, 1614);
Johannes Mercerus, In Genesin Commentarius (Geneva, 1598); Benedic
tus Pererius, Commentariorum et Disputationum in Genesin (Cologne,
1601); Andreas Rivetus, Theologicae et Scholasticae Exercitationes Centum
Nonaginta in Genesin (Leyden, 1633); Williams, Expositor, 116–17.
19. Jean Paul Richter (ed.), The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols (1883;
New York, 1970), ii. 303–8. I am grateful to Norah Carlin for this
reference.
20. John Salkeld, A Treatise of Angels (1613), 172, 176.
21. Balthasar Gerbier, Art of Well Speaking (1650), 13, 26. Similarly, A Satyr,
Occasioned by the Author’s Survey of a Scandalous Pamphlet (Oxford, 1645), 2:
‘When Angels talke, all their Conceipts are brought j From Mind to Mind,
and they discourse by Thought.’
22. Morgan Llwyd, A Discourse of the Word of God, trans. Griffith Rudd
(1739), quoted in Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and English
Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), 221.
23. Annotations upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament (1651), at Gen.
18: 8. Among contemporaries who support this position are Edward
446 notes to chapter 12: tongues of angels
Hyde, A Christian Vindication of Truth Against Errour (1659), 351;

Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 413.
24. Gervase Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes upon
Everie Chapter of Genesis (1592), fo. 15v.
26. Calvin, Commentarie, 86. See also Thomas Bromhall, A Treatise of Specters
(1658).
27. Calvin, Commentarie, 381.
29. George Hughes, An Analytical Exposition of . . . Genesis (1672), 214.
30. Gumbleden, Christ Tempted, 21–2; Gumbleden notes Augustine’s opin
ion that this question of how angels speak to men cannot be answered,
but resolves it by choosing both answers, according to the occasion.
32. Pp. 283–4 above; Laurence Caxton [Clarkson], Paradisal Dialogue
(1660), 61.
33. Bartas: His Devine Weekes and Workes, trans. Joshua Sylvester (1605), 304.
34. O&D 12. 243–6, p. 167.
35. O&D 3. 295–8, p. 41; contrast the anonymous Scala Naturae (1695), 31:
‘Adam and Eve were by their Original Innocence and Integrity fitted in
Paradice for the Conversation of Angels.’
37. See pp. 284–9 above; Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers:
Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth Century England (Ithaca, NY, 1991),
137–67.
39. Heywood, Hierarchie, 68, mentions God’s ears in a discussion of
accommodation: ‘As, when we attribute unto him Wings, j It straight
unto our apprehension brings, j How he protects and shadowes us. If
Eares? j With what facilitie and grace he heares j Our devout Prayers.’
God does not have ears, so it must be a metaphor. Milton too
repeatedly refers to God’s ears in this metaphoric vein; PL 3. 193; 5.
626; 11. 30, 152.
40. Contrast with Pseudo Dionysius, Works, 185–6, where heavenly body
parts and senses symbolize spiritual agency and qualities: ‘The powers of
hearing signify the ability to have a knowing share of divine inspir
ation. . . . Shoulders, arms, and also the hands signify acting, achieving.’
41. Knees: 6. 194; 8. 608, 782, 817, etc. Ears: 2. 117, 920, 953; 3. 647; 5. 771,
810. Tongues: 2. 112; 6. 135, 154, 297, 360; 7. 113, 603. Scars: 1. 601; 2.
401. Tears: 1. 620. Note also Zephon’s assertion that Satan’s appearance
is diminished; 4. 835.
42. Aquinas, Summa, xiv. 109: ‘The second barrier closing the mind of one
person off from another is the opaqueness of the body . . . In an angel,
however, no such obstacle exists.’
notes to chapter 13: dryden’s fall 447
43. Fallon (interestingly if tenuously) suggests that the narrator’s indecision

points to the problem of dualism and makes an anti Cartesian point:
‘The uncertainty as to the manner of the operation of an artificial Satan/
snake dualism might reflect the mystery of the operation of metaphysical
spirit/body dualism’; Milton among the Philosophers, 205.
44. Lawrence, Angells, 15; Peter Le Loier, A Treatise of Specters or Straunge
Sights, Visions and Apparitions (1605), fo. 45v; Gumbleden, Christ
Tempted, 13.
45. Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern
England: Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts (Cambridge,
2004); D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France
and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (1981);
Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief
(Chicago, 2002); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witch
craft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), 389–422.
46. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 161–78; ‘Demons, Natural Magic, and the
Virtually Real: Visual Paradox in Early Modern Europe’, in Gerhild
Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr, Paracelsian Moments: Science,
Medicine and Astrology in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, Mo., 2002).
47. On the role of evidence, and thus of scientific argument, in the temp
tation, see Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry
in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge, 2000).
48. McColley, ‘Beneficent Hierarchies’; Kristin Pruitt McColgan, ‘Abun
dant Gifts: Hierarchy and Reciprocity in Paradise Lost’, South Central
Review, 11 (1994), 75–86.
CHAPTER 13
1. Duration in An Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668), in The Works of John Dryden,
20 vols, gen. ed. Edward Niles Hooker et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1956–2000), xvii. 35, 36. Cf. Benjamin Stillingfleet’s compression for an
oratorio libretto: Kay Gilliland Stevenson and Margaret Seares, ‘Paradise
Lost’ in Short: Smith, Stillingfleet, and the Transformation of Epic (Madison,
Wis., 1998).
2. Dryden, ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’
(1693), in Dryden, Works, iv. 15.
3. Paul Stevens argues that in this passage Milton remembers Puck’s mis
joining of an ass head to Bottom’s body, and that Milton is at his most
Shakespearean when he describes fancy because he associates it with
Shakespeare; Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in ‘Paradise Lost’
(Madison, Wis., 1985), 15, 94–6.
4. This is also Margaret Cavendish’s device in The Blazing World (1667).
When the Empress and the Duchess play at imagining a world, they
448 notes to chapter 13: dryden’s fall
create a form of knowledge that is true because it is created by the

knower. This meta fiction then reflects back upon the Empress’s nat
ural philosophical pronouncements to and on behalf of the various
societies of virtuosi (the bird and beast men that represent the Royal
Society); the natural philosophical knowledge that is articulated here in a
fictional form is therefore, precisely because it is feigned, in a sense truer
than that generated by the Royal Society. Margaret Cavendish: Political
Writings, ed. Susan James (Cambridge, 2003), 17–45, 69, 72–3.
5. Dryden, The State of Innocence, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, in Dryden, Works,
xii. 118–20. Further references, to act, scene, and lines, appear in the
text.
6. J. M. French, The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols (New Brunswick, NJ,
1949–58), iv. 439–40, 446–7; v. 46–8, 467; Aubrey, ‘Brief Lives,’ Chiefly
of Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 and
1696, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1898), ii. 72; Helen Darbishire (ed.),
The Early Lives of Milton (1932), 7, 295–6; Marvell, ‘On Mr Milton’s
Paradise Lost’ (1674), lines 45–50, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed.
Nigel Smith (2003). In addition to the sources cited above, see Morris
Freedman, ‘Dryden’s ‘‘Memorable Visit’’ to Milton’, Huntington Library
Quarterly, 18 (1955), 99–108; Earl Miner, ‘Dryden’s Admired Acquaint
ance, Mr. Milton’, Milton Studies, 11 (1978), 3–27.
7. For the early plans, PL, pp. 1–3. On Milton and print: Stephen B.
Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge, 1999);
Joad Raymond, ‘Milton and the Book Trade’, in John Barnard and D. F.
McKenzie (eds), A History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–1695 (Cam
bridge, 2002); Dustin Griffin, ‘The Beginnings of Modern Authorship:
Milton to Dryden’, Milton Quarterly, 24 (1990), 1–7; and the following
articles by Peter Lindenbaum: ‘John Milton and the Republican Mode of
Literary Production’, in Cedric C. Brown (ed.), Patronage, Politics, and
Literary Traditions in England, 1558–1658 (Detroit, 1993); ‘Milton’s Con
tract’, in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (eds), The Construction of
Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, NC,
1994); ‘The Poet in the Marketplace: Milton and Samuel Simmons’, in
Peter G. Stanwood (ed.), Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and
his World (Binghamton, NY, 1995); ‘Authors and Publishers in the Late
Seventeenth Century: New Evidence on their Relations’, The Library,
6th ser., 17 (1995), 250–69; ‘Rematerializing Milton’, Publishing History,
41 (1997), 5–22.
8. Milton, Poems, 355–7. For Samson as a response to Dryden’s heroic
drama, Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Milton, Dryden, and the Politics of Literary
Controversy’, in Gerald MacLean (ed.), Culture and Society in the Stuart
Restoration (1995). For the date, Christopher Hill, Milton and the English
Revolution (1977), and Blair Worden, ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the
Restoration’, in MacLean (ed.), Culture and Society. For Milton’s reaction
against Restoration culture: Laura Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spec

tacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, Ga., 1994); David
Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–
1660 (Cambridge, 1999).
9. Dryden, Works, xii. 123.
10. Ibid. xvii. 77.
11. CPW iii. 406; ‘I begun to think that the whole Book might perhaps be
intended a peece of Poetrie. The words are good, the fiction smooth and
cleanly; there wanted only Rime, and that, they say, is bestow’d upon it
lately.’
12. See Dearing in Dryden, Works, xii. 320–44; Nicholas von Maltzahn,
‘Dryden’s Milton and the Theatre of Imagination’, in Paul Hammond
and David Hopkins (eds), John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford,
2000), 33–6, 39–42.
13. Pp. 211, 276 above; [Charles Leslie], A History of Sin and Heresie (1698),
sig. A2r–v.
14. Dryden, Works, xii. 89.
15. Dudley Tomkinson, The Reasons of Mr. Bayes Changing his Religion
(1688), 18–19.
16. James Kinsley and Helen Kinsley (eds), Dryden: The Critical Heritage
(1971), 342–3, 4; Anne Ferry, Milton and the Miltonic Dryden (Cambridge,
Mass., 1968), 21.
17. A. W. Verrall, Lectures on Dryden (Cambridge, 1914), 220–36; Bernard
Harris, ‘ ‘‘That Soft Seducer, Love’’: Dryden’s The State of Innocence and
the Fall of Man’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to ‘Paradise Lost’: The
York Tercentenary Lectures (1968); K. W. Gransden, ‘Milton, Dryden, and
the Comedy of the Fall’, Essays in Criticism, 26 (1976), 116–33; James
Anderson Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, 1987), 261–72,
294–7.
18. Jean Gagen, ‘Anomalies in Eden: Adam and Eve in Dryden’s State of
Innocence’, in Albert C. Labriola and Edward Sichi, Jr (eds), Milton’s
Legacy in the Arts (University Park, Pa., 1988); Verrall, Lectures on Dryden,
228, 229.
19. See also Derek Hughes, English Drama 1660–1700 (Oxford, 1996), 179–
83; D. W. Jefferson, ‘Dryden’s Style in The State of Innocence’, Essays in
Criticism, 32 (1982), 361–8; Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton,
2003), 139; James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and
Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford, 1987), 264.
20. Zwicker, ‘Milton, Dryden, and the Politics of Literary Controversy’; von
Maltzahn, ‘Dryden’s Milton’; P. S. Havens, ‘Dryden’s ‘‘Tagged’’ Version
of Paradise Lost’, in Hardin Craig (ed.), Essays in Dramatic Literature: The
Parrott Presentation Volume (1935; New York, 1967). See also Hugh
MacCallum, ‘The State of Innocence: Epic to Opera’, Milton Studies, 31
(1994), 109–31, and Bruce King, ‘The Significance of Dryden’s State of
450 notes to chapter 13: dryden’s fall
Innocence’, Studies in English Literature, 4 (1964), 371–91, which also

appears in his Dryden’s Major Plays (Edinburgh, 1966).
21. Sharon Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell,
Dryden, and Literary Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 59
(1997), 1–29, and Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge,
2003), 168, 171–2, quotation at p. 171; Norbrook, Writing the English
Republic, 492. See also William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall
(Cambridge, 2005), 113–21.
22. The State of Innocence, i. i. 68, 86, 90, in Dryden, Works, xii. 100–1;
‘frequent Senate’ may catch the ‘senate free’ of Marvell’s First Anniver
sary, line 97, in Marvell, Poems, 290. Certainly it echoes constitutional
debate from the later 1650s, among them those inspired in and by
Harrington’s Rota Club. On popular sentiment in the 1670s, see Gary
S. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005);
Steven C. A. Pincus, ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in
English Popular Sentiment from Anti Dutch to Anti French in the
1670s’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 333–61; on the idea of Universal
Monarchy, see Pincus, ‘Popery, Trade and Universal Monarchy: The
Ideological Context of the Outbreak of the Second Anglo Dutch War’,
English Historical Review, 107 (1992), 1–29, and Protestantism and Patriot
ism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cam
bridge, 1995).
23. The last scene seems to comment on the third Anglo Dutch war, which
had ended on 9 Feb. 1674. The opera substitutes for Milton’s com
pressed future human history Raphael’s desolate vision of a land battle
and a naval fight. Dryden is probably expressing anti war sentiment.
24. Laura Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print,
1645–1661 (Cambridge, 2000), 178–9.
25. Tomkinson, Reasons of Mr. Bayes, 19.
26. CPW vi. 346; pp. 239–40 above.
27. Dryden, Works, iv. 19–20; see also the reference to guardian angels in
Conquest of Granada (1672), Part One, iii. i. 77, ibid. xi. 137.
28. Dryden, Works, iv. 19; see also Absalom and Achitophel (1681), line 853.
29. Dryden, Works, xii. 84, 83, 81.
30. PL 4. 786–7; and book 4, argument. The argument to book 10 notes
that ‘the guardian angels forsake Paradise’, and at 10. 18, ‘The angelic
guards ascended’: they are an anonymous troupe, of whom Gabriel is
the chief (4. 550).
31. Pp. 56–61, 230–7, above.
32. John Salkeld, A Treatise of Angels (1613), 251–69, 280–91.
33. Dryden, Works, xii. 94–5. Dryden is taking liberties with accommoda
tion here. In the same year that The State of Innocence was printed, Francis
Bampfield wrote: ‘The Scriptures are not accommodated to vulgar
received Errours, or mere imaginary conceits, or vain false appearances,
but they speak of things, as the things themselves really are, Is not the
lord Christ Truth it self?’; All in One (1677), 50.
34. Pp. 76–7 above.
35. Dryden, Works, xii. 92, 95.
36. Dryden returns to this throughout his criticism: see also Essay of Dramatic
Poesy (1668), the ‘Discourse Concerning . . . Satire’ (1693) and the Dedi
cation of the Aeneis (1697).
37. Dryden, Works, xi. 12.
38. John Dowell, Clergies Honour (1681), sigs A2v–A4r.
39. Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden: Studies in Some
Aspects of Seventeenth Century Thought (Ann Arbor, 1934), ch. 3, errone
ously presents it as a debate between materialist determinism and Angli
can (and Royal Society) libertarianism; see also King, ‘Significance of
Dryden’s State of Innocence’, 381–8. Von Maltzahn, ‘Dryden’s Milton’,
48, argues that Adam adopts a Hobbesian position, and the angels
represent Bramhall’s, though he complicates this: ‘The difficulty is that
Dryden’s sympathies are sufficiently Hobbesian that these angels propose
not Bramhall’s defence of human freedom but a more dubious compa
tibilism.’ He implies that Dryden sides with the angels.
40. Thomas Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance
(1656), 85–6.
41. Thomas Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie (1654), 67–72; Vere Chappell
(ed.), Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge, 1999), 37–
8; Tom Sorrell, Hobbes (1986), 92–5; Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and
Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), 129–31, 157–8, 170–3.
42. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), 146–
7, 34. To be free is to be free from opposition, not free from causes.
43. Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie, 15–16; Chappell (ed.), Hobbes and
Bramhall, 20.
44. Chappell (ed.), Hobbes and Bramhall, 8; Chappell’s text of the ‘Discourse’
is extracted from subsequent publications.
45. Chappell (ed.), Hobbes and Bramhall, 13.
46. Ibid. 8–9, 30–1; Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie, 47–9. Hobbes added
that church doctrine did not set down the sense in which angels were
free, or how necessity governed them.
47. Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie, 72, 73; Chappell (ed.), Hobbes and
Bramhall, 38–9.
48. Bramhall, quoted in Hobbes, Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, 295;
Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes (1657), 365–6.
49. On animadversion, see Raymond, Pamphleteering, 210–14, 376–8; Dry
den used animadversion in His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681).
50. Dryden, Works, viii. 97.
51. Pp. 333–4 above.
52. Dryden, Works, xvii. 47.
452 notes to chapter 14: conclusion
53. Preface to Fables (1697), in Dryden, Works, vii. 25.

54. Dryden, Works, xi. 5–6.
55. Ibid. v. 275.
56. Golda Werman, Milton and Midrash (Washington, DC, 1995), 184.
57. The Devil’s influence over dreams was a frequently used example of
how he operated within the limits God placed upon him, allowing him
no real power; Forsyth, Satanic Epic, 160–6; John M. Steadman, Milton’s
Biblical and Classical Imagery (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1984), 160–6; cf. William B.
Hunter, ‘Eve’s Demonic Dream’, ELH, 13 (1946), 255–65.
58. Thomas Bromhall, A Treatise of Specters (1658), pt 1; Isaac Ambrose, ‘War
with Devils’ (1661), in The Compleat Works (1682), 128; Robert Dingley, The
Deputation of Angels (1654), 123; Philotheos Physiologus [Thomas Tryon], A
Treatise of Dreams and Visions [1689]; Stephens, Demon Lovers, 129–34.
59. Heywood, Hierarchie, 197; Hobbes, Leviathan, 18–19.
60. O&D 1. 173–80.
61. Thomas Hobbes and Sir William Davenant in Sir William Davenant’s
‘Gondibert’, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford, 1971), 22, 49; Marvell, Poems,
180–4; PL 8. 70–84, 175.
62. Raphael’s prophecy of human history in Dryden’s final scene is another
piece of stagecraft, but he has been beaten to it by the father of lies.
63. ‘Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry and Poetique Licence’, in Dry
den, Works, xii. 91, 93, 96.
CHAPTER 14
2. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991),
134–9.
3. Bodo Brinkmann (ed.), Cranach (2008), and accompanying exhibition at
the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Joseph Koerner, The Reformation of
the Image (2004).
4. W. B. Hunter, C. A. Patrides, and J. H. Adamson, Bright Essence: Studies
in Milton’s Theology (Salt Lake City, Ut., 1971), 165–78 and passim; for an
implicit corrective, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the
Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2002).
5. Dryden, ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’
(1693), in The Works of John Dryden, iv, ed. A. B. Chambers and William
Frost (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), 15; see p. 326 above.
6. Pp. 338, 351–2 above.
7. Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), in The Critical Works of
John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols (Baltimore, 1939–43), i. 325.
8. Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The Whig Milton, 1667–1700’, in David
Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and
notes to chapter 14: conclusion 453
Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995), and von Maltzahn’s forthcoming

study of Milton’s reception.
9. Kester Svensden, Milton and Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 239–40;
Watson Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of ‘Paradise Lost’ in
World Literature with Translations of the Major Analogues (Toronto, 1952),
p. xii.
10. Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Theology, ii (Dallas, 1947), 8.
11. Quoted in Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture,
Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003), 43.
12. Michael Lieb, Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic
Canon (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2006), 1–11 and passim.
13. See Joanna Poppleton, ‘Truth Cannot Be an Enemy to Truth: Natural
Philosophy, Poetry and Politics, 1680–1730’, Ph.D. thesis (University of
East Anglia, 2006).
14. West, Angels, 16–19.
15. Quoted in Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, 1997), 1.
16. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge, 1975); Barbara
Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 2000); J. Paul
Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century British
Fiction (New York, 1990); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English
Novel, 1600–1740 (1988).
17. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, 1–14.
18. Samuel Morland, The Urim of Conscience (1695), 13–14; see pp. 275–6 above.
19. Anne Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cam
bridge, Mass., 1963), 116–46; Fallon, Philosophers, 182–5.
20. Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter Reformation to
Milton (Princeton, 1994), 215–24.
21. Fallon, Philosophers, 160.
22. Pp. 181–6 above.
23. A. D. Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton,
Dante and St John (1980), pp. ix, 84–5, 96–7.
24. Ibid. 93, 97, 98–100; A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy
in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford, 1998), 149–55.
25. John G. Demaray, Milton’s Theatrical Epic: The Invention and Design of
‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. xiii, which does not seek to
downplay the significance of Milton’s religious interests.
26. William Empson, Milton’s God (1961; Cambridge, 1981), passim; Nuttall,
Overheard by God, 101–8; William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall
(Cambridge, 2005), 19, 30, 57, 64, 96.
27. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge, 2006), 159; Poole,
Milton and the Idea of the Fall, 68.
28. David Lawton, Faith, Text and History: The Bible in English (Charlottes
ville, Va., 1990), 1.
30. Alastair Fowler, Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art
(Oxford, 2003), 5–8 and passim.
31. Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Epic: Essays in its Rise and Decline (Chi
cago, 1980), 161.
32. Ibid. 158–9, 164–6, 167.
33. Ibid. 251 n. 26; Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Towards
a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1969),
176 and passim.
34. Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the
Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC, 1998).
35. See Roland Mushat Frye, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic
Tradition in the Epic Poems (Princeton, 1978), pt 3.
36. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory.
37. Poppleton, ‘Truth Cannot Be an Enemy’.
38. E. M. W. Tillyard, ‘Theology and Emotion in Milton’s Poetry’, in
Studies in Milton (New York, 1951), 141.
39. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (1932), 273–4.
40. Ibid. 280.
41. Not least because the rise of Puritanism would become tied to the rise of
the novel; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and
Fielding (1957). For analyses of Eliot’s thesis and its impact, see Evans,
Genesis Tradition, 1–4 and passim; William Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring
Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge, 1997), 59–61; Kester
Svensden suggests that Milton would have seemed ‘old fashioned’ to
scientifically knowledgeable contemporaries, and distinguishes between
Milton’s knowledge as a poet and his knowledge as a man; Milton and
Science, 4, 43.
42. Frank Kermode, ‘Dissociation of Sensibility’, in John R. Roberts (ed.),
Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne’s Poetry (Hamden, Conn.,
1975).
43. Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cam
bridge Mass., 2006), 1–9; quotation at pp. 5–6 (and 29).
44. Ibid. 24, 40–4.
45. Ibid. 45–64, esp. 49, 61. Knowingly so: on p. 172 he writes, ‘I think
Miltonists evince far too much faith in theological concepts and theo
logical language.’ I have no faith in them, but I believe that Milton did.
Teskey complains that Miltonists think that ‘theology may be used to
grasp what is more subtle, mobile, and living: poetry’. The problem here
is surely Teskey’s assumption that 17th century theology was obvious,
rigid, and deceased.
46. Ibid. 29, 143, 48, 75, and passim.
47. Ibid. 24–9, quotations at pp. 29, 25.
48. Ibid. 21–4.
49. Pp. 162, 295–6 above.
notes to chapter 14: conclusion 455
50. Pp. 306–8 above.

51. P. 242 above; Robert W. Scribner, ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic,
and the ‘‘Disenchantment of the World’’ ’, Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 23 (1993), 475–94; Alex Walsham, ‘Invisible Helpers: Appar
itions of Angels in Post Reformation England’, Past and Present, forth
coming.
52. Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the
Present Day (1968), 15–20.
53. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford,
1968); Eleanor Prosser, Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays
(Stanford, Calif., 1961); James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary
History, ii: 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002),
502–57; John D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–
1642 (Cambridge, 2000), 29–34.
54. Richard Rastall, The Heavens Singing: Music in Early English Religious
Drama, i (Cambridge, 1996), 175–93, 328–44, esp. 179–80, 183–6, 328,
332–6.
55. Peter Happé (ed.), English Mystery Plays (Harmondsworth, 1975), 291;
R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (eds), The Chester Mystery Cycle, i:
Text, Early English Text Society, suppl. ser., 3 (1974), 3; Stephen
Spector (ed.), The N Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, 2 vols,
Early English Text Society, suppl. ser., 11–12 (1991), i. 22; Martin
Stevens and A. C. Cawley (eds), The Towneley Plays, i: Introduction and
Text, Early English Text Society, suppl. ser., 12 (1994), 7, 11 (lines 142,
254–6); Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King (eds), York Mystery Plays: A
Selection in Modern Spelling (1984; Oxford, 1995), pp. 2, 279, xx.
56. Aquinas, Summa, ix. 297; Faustus, 1. 5. 124–6, in Christopher Marlowe,
The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Stearne (1969); PL 4. 20–3.
57. Measure for Measure, 3. 1. 492, 2. 4. 16; Richard III, 1. 4. 53, 4. 2. 68, 5. 5.
129; Richard II, 3. 2. 57; Norton Shakespeare, 2063, 2049; 534, 568, 590;
982.
58. The Merchant of Venice, 5. 1. 60–1, Norton Shakespeare, 1139.
59. The Tempest, 1. 2. 484, 2. 1. 392, 4. 1. 27, Norton Shakespeare, 3069, 3077,
3091.
60. Henry IV, Part II, 1. 2. 150–2; Othello, 5. 2. 215; Norton Shakespeare, 1314,
2168.
61. Antony and Cleopatra, 2. 3. 17–20, Norton Shakespeare, 2649.
62. Henry V, 1. 1. 28–32, Norton Shakespeare, 1456.
63. Hamlet, 5. 1. 224–5, 1. 4. 20, 3. 4. 94–5, Norton Shakespeare, 1745, 1682,
1722; pp. 62–3 above.
64. Hamlet, 3. 3. 69, Norton Shakespeare, 1718. Greenblatt overstates the
doctrinal differences between Protestants and Catholics on angels: they
appear in Protestant iconography as well as in Catholic. Hamlet in
Purgatory (Princeton, 2001), passim, but esp. 50–5, 62–4, 118, 145–6,
182, 223 (here he interprets Hamlet’s words as a prayer). Christopher

Devlin finds an allusion to the Office of St Michael in the Roman
Catholic Breviary; see Hamlet’s Divinity (1963), 31–2.
66. Ibid. 312.
67. Ibid. 387.
68. Ibid. 311.
69. Ibid. 111–12.
70. Ibid. 287, 13. The allusion to ‘Mahomet’s paradise’ is odd; perhaps he
refers, intelligibly to his coterie audience, to William Percy’s play; see
Matthew Dimmock (ed.), William Percy’s Mahomet and his Heaven: A
Critical Edition (Aldershot, 2006).
71. Tony Kushner, Angels in America (London, 1992–4); performed variously
1990–2; HBO mini series 2003.
73. Ibid. 123.
74. Ibid. 130; p. 376 below.
75. The Sermons of John Donne, viii (Berkeley, 1956), 107–8.
76. Dimmock (ed.), William Percy’s Mahomet, 121 (4. 5. 16–21); Heywood,
Hierarchie, 215–16, echoes or overlaps with this passage. Like Shake
speare, Percy adapts some of his demonology from Reginald Scott, The
Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584).
77. Edmund Spenser, Fowre Hymnes (1596), 24.
78. Henry Burkhead, A Tragedy of Cola’s Fury (Kilkenny, 1646; written
1645), 49–50, 61.
79. Charles Fitz Geffrey, The Blessed Birth Day (1634), 19 (also 2, 5, 16).
80. Dennis, Critical Works, ii. 228–9.
81. Teskey, Delirious Milton, 1.
82. Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Milton, Dryden, and the Politics of Literary Con
troversy’, in Gerald MacLean (ed.), Culture and Society in the Stuart
Restoration (1995).
Index
Abarbanel, Isaac 194, 202 fall of 71, 73–7, 120, 122, 149,
Abdiel 207–28 passim, 264–5, 271, 154, 163, 209–10, 256–9, 283
294, 299 food of 69, 118, 130, 143, 150,
accommodation 7, 81, 114, 119, 269–70, 280–2, 286–7, 350
122, 139, 145, 162–88, 218, freewill 71–3, 257–8, 341–51
221–2, 311–14, 360, 364 guardians of place 111, 141, 230,
adiaphora 4, 36, 65, 163 232–9, 242–4, 249–51, 252–5,
Agrippa 78, 80, 114, 117, 136, 145, 271 335–7
Ainsworth, Henry 86, 87, 101 guardianship 45, 56–61, 63, 101,
Albigenses 283 120, 129, 132, 143–4, 145,
alchemy 130, 135, 303 154, 155–6, 336–7, 372,
al Farghānı̄ 304, 443 n. 98 430 n. 30
allegory 7, 99, 120, 136–44 passim, hierarchies 22–6, 34, 49–56, 60,
153, 157–60 passim, 162, 165, 64, 67, 71, 101, 135, 136,
169, 173–4, 175, 185, 213–16 179–80, 198, 262–5, 315, 370
passim, 220–5, 277, 312, knowledge 30, 67–9, 374
358–65, 433 n. 58 matter 32–3
almanacs 109–10 military nature 79, 263, 265–7
Alsted, Johann Heinrich 93, 103 names 78–83, 270–2
Ambrose, Isaac 46 offices 84–7
Ambrose, Saint 65, 361 physical appearance 57, 134, 155,
Ames, William 42, 43, 44, 75, 100 157–8, 159, 160, 168, 183, 194,
angels 268–9, 290, 440 n. 47
Angels of the Presence 22, 62, 79, prayers to and invocation of 62–4
82–3, 154 pre Christian 20, 79–80
of Bethesda 86, 245, 248, 250 providential apparitions 105–6,
bodies 69, 118, 122, 139, 150, 110, 132, 194
168, 169–87 passim, 228, senses 68, 70–1, 140, 143, 150–1,
284–90, 321–2 269, 299–301
communication or conversation of the Seven Asian churches 53, 91
with 104–15, 125–61, 311–24 sex, gender and reproduction 78,
creation of 42, 65–7 152, 269, 282–3, 337, 338–9,
deception by 176, 212, 221–8, 375–6
247, 323, 424 n. 11 sight and optics 66, 68, 226, 291–9
eating 41, 69, 172, 176, 280, 318, singing and music 85, 134, 141,
323 260–1, 265, 313–15, 370
458 index
angels (cont.) Augustine 28, 36, 60, 64, 65, 71,

Sons of God 76–7, 282–3, 339 73–4, 78–9, 83, 119, 162,
speech 69–70, 275 166–7, 168, 280, 315
speed 253, 301–308 Austen, Katherine 84
subjectivity 67–9, 104, 256–7, Austin, William 45, 63–4, 233, 284
339
words pertaining to 19–20 Babington, Gervase 40, 41, 42, 58,
worship of 39, 61–2 85, 317
angelology (as genre) 19–20, 45–6, Bacon, Francis 103, 368
100 Bacon, Roger 31, 304, 443 n. 98
Anglesey 242, 254, 255 Baillie, Robert 94
Anglo Dutch War, third 334, Bampfield, Francis 176, 450 n. 33
450 n. 23 Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste de 46,
Annesley, Arthur, Earl of 144, 198–9, 216, 246, 319,
Anglesey 216 426 n. 31, 427 n. 42, 443 n. 102
Anselm of Canterbury 31 Bathurst, Ann 147, 153–60
anthropomorphism 165–6, 170, Bauthumley, Jacob 97, 119, 120, 123
172, 174–5, 186, 207, 446 n. 39 Baxter, Richard 43, 64, 100, 126,
anthropopathy 165–6, 169–70, 172, 132–3, 412 n. 34
174–5, 177, 179, 185–6, Bayly, John 34, 45, 77
423 n. 1 Beaumont, Joseph 310
antitrinitarianism 116–17, 173–5, Behmenism, see Boehme
199, 209–10, 217 Bernard, St 24
Apocalypsis Moses, see Vitae Adae et Biddle, John 116–17, 173–5
Evae Bion, Greek poet 230
apocalypticism, see millenarianism Blackmore, Richard 359, 438 n. 3
Aquinas, Thomas 26, 29–31, 36, 38, Blenkow, John 51, 81, 101
65, 67, 69, 70, 71–2, 81, 83, 162, Blome, Richard 19
168, 173, 259, 263, 272–3, 280, Bodin, Jean 59–60
284, 292, 297, 299–300, 302, Boehme, Jacob and Behmenism 83,
312, 315–16 117, 120, 121, 125, 126–7, 129,
Arianism 77, 208 135, 136, 140, 150, 153, 161,
Aristotle and Aristotelianism 21, 183, 249, 285–6, 290
28–9, 48, 68 Bolton, Robert 283, 303
Arnway, Richard 98 Bonaventure 26, 28–9, 83, 162
Ars Notoria 107, 117 Book of Common Prayer 40, 94,
Ashmole, Elias 1–2, 106, 126, 127, 235
130 Boughton, John 40
astrology 45, 68, 80, 106–12, 120–1, Boyle, Robert 73, 308, 309,
126–7, 130, 145, 249, 276, 443 n. 110
303–5 Bradfield, Berks. 117, 131, 137, 142,
astronomy 72, 198, 298–9, 303–5 147
Athenian Mercury 12 Bramhall, John 340–8
Atterbury, Francis 221 Brathwaite, Richard 283
Aubrey, John 80, 107, 109, 329–30, Brightman, Thomas 93
341, 412 n. 34 Bromley, Thomas 127
index 459
Browne, Edward 31 Colet, John 67, 79

Browne, Robert 60 Comenius, Jan Amos 47, 68, 70–1,
Browne, Thomas 58 103–4, 282, 293–4, 300,
Brownism 95 424 n. 6
Bucanus, William 42, 43, 49, 58–9, Coppe, Abiezer 117–18, 122, 123,
300, 302, 305 127, 129, 196–7
Bunyan, John 137 Coppin, Richard 118, 127, 129
Burgess, Cornelius 44, 69, 87 cosmology 276, 278–9, 297–9,
Burkhead, Henry 379 303–6
Cotton, Robert 3, 112
Cabbala 32, 60, 80, 271 Cowley, Abraham 46, 106, 254–5,
cacodemology 111, 113, 131–2 380
Calamy, Edmund 89 Cranach, Lucas 356
Calvert, Giles 102, 129 Cromwell, Oliver 3, 106, 115, 136,
Calvin, John 33–4, 36, 42, 45, 56, 219, 222, 227, 233, 244–52
58, 59, 63, 65, 67, 69, 79, 85, passim, 334
169–70, 189, 192, 202, 233, 257, Cromwell, Richard 254
312, 318, 355 Cudworth, Ralph 284–5
Cambridge Platonists 191, 284, Curtius, Ernst Robert 200
286 Cyprian 22
Camden, William 230–2
Camfield, Benjamin 38, 46 Damascus, John of 288
Campanella, Tomasso 32, 60 dancing 32, 266, 267, 327, 329, 379
Cannon, Nathaniel 44 Dante 24–6, 53, 61, 137, 200, 259,
Cardano, Girolamo 60 292
Cartwright, Thomas 58 Davenant, Sir William 215, 352
Cary, Mary 105, 196 Davenport, John 127
Caryl, Joseph 45 Davies, Lady Eleanor 196
Casaubon, Meric 3, 112–15 Dee, John 2–4, 31, 60, 106, 107,
Casman, Otto 19 110, 111, 112–15, 120, 126, 272,
Catherall, Samuel 358 293
Catholicism 4–6, 48–64, 87–8, 174, Defoe, Daniel 210
232, 234, 236, 242, 248, 337, demons 3, 8, 99, 110, 111, 113, 114,
373, 376–7 130–2, 133–4, 282–3, 289–91,
Cavendish, Margaret 12, 309, 323, 370–1
447–8 n. 4 Dennis, John 190, 357, 380–1
Charles I 53, 194, 224 Dent, Arthur 56, 100
Charles II 222 Descartes, Rene 288, 342
Chillingworth, William 32–3 Dingley, Robert 45, 58, 62, 101,
Christ 30, 39, 56, 61, 62, 77, 81, 100, 233, 249, 250, 280, 304
116–17, 149, 247–8, 266 Dionysius 4, 5, 23–4, 28, 31, 34, 50,
Chrysostom 65 67, 80, 135, 162, 163, 167–8,
Cicero 241 175, 177, 179, 198, 218, 232–3,
Clarke, Samuel 112 263, 265, 293, 312, 321,
Claxton, or Clarkson, 446 n. 40
Laurence 120–2, 129–30, 319 see also angels—hierarchies
460 index
Discovery of the Juglings and Deceitfull Featley, Daniel 357

Impostures (1643) 98 Ficino, Marsilio 32
Discovery of the Rebels (1643) 98 Fifth Monarchists 62, 117, 141
Donne, John 46, 96, 282, 288, 316, Fitz Geffrey, Charles 379–80
373–8 Flavel, Mrs 130
Dowell, John 341 Fludd, Robert 80, 272, 281, 285,
Dowsing, William 5 290, 303, 442 n. 81
drama 47, 314, 525–54 passim, Foxe, John 248
369–73 Forman, Simon 60, 107, 109, 111,
Medieval cycle plays 370–1 126
dreams 193, 194, 328–9, 351–3 Fowler, Alastair 214, 425 n. 21
Dryden, John 10, 13, 137, 177, 236, Fowler, Christopher 129, 136
357, 380–1, 382 Freke, John 161
State of Innocence 327–54 Fulke, William 58
Essay of Dramatic Poesie 331, 349
‘Discourse Concerning Gabriel 27, 79–82, 85, 107, 109,
Satire’ 335–7 112, 122, 159
‘Of Heroique Playes’ 340, 350 in Paradise Lost 262, 266, 273, 301,
The Rival Ladies 348 336
Conquest of Granada 349–50 in State of Innocence 341–47
Duppa, Brian 51–2, 300–1 Galileo Galilei 291, 295, 298,
Dury, John 127 299
Gaule, John 170
Eaton, Samuel 95 Gell, Robert, Aggelokratia Theon 19,
Elegie Sacred to the Immortal Memory 45, 80, 286, 293
(1643) 98 Geneva Bible 56, 247
Eliot, T. S. 214, 366–7, 381 genius loci, see angels—guardians of
England 242, 243, 254 and passim place
Enoch 22, 76–7, 80, 110 geocentrism, see cosmology
episcopacy 90–8 Geoffrey of Monmouth 230–1
Erasmus 35 Gerbier, Balthasar 316
Erbery, William 127, 129 Geree, John 95
Eriugena, John Scotus 23, 31 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 361–2
Etherington, John 127 Giorgi, Francesco 32
Evans, Arise 45, 62, 82, 106, 111, Glanvill, Joseph 51, 295, 299, 308,
249–50 309
Evans, John, astrologer 107, 126 Gnostics and Gnosticism 21, 32, 80,
Everard, John 45, 303, 403 n. 56, 81, 209
411 n. 18 Great Wonder from Heaven (1642
Everard, William 118, 121, 127, [3]) 104–5
129–30, 133 Greene, Anne 105–6
Greenhill, William 303–4
Fairfax, Henry 44 Gregory the Great 5, 24, 65, 80
Fall of humankind 9, 73, 122, Grosseteste, Robert 31
140–1, 276, 297 Gumbleden, John 44, 68, 79, 176–7,
Fallon, Stephen 438, 447 n. 43 318–19
Familism, Family of Love 127, 129 Gurnall, William 249
index 461
Habila, Helon 14 iconoclasm 5, 38, 92, 364

Hall, Joseph 50–1, 62, 72, 77, 85, 87, imagination 6–8, 13, 30, 67, 113,
91, 101, 105, 293 163–4, 177–88, 213–18, 220,
Hammond, Henry 100 227–8, 256–9, 309–10, 353–4,
Hart, Alexander 107, 126 355–84
Hartlib, Samuel 223 Ireland 110, 230, 239, 242–3, 254
Harvey, Gideon 20 Irenaeus 22
Harvey, John, physician 187, 194, Ithuriel 271, 289, 291, 336
197
Heimbach, Peter 102, 241 James VI and I 53, 191
heliocentrism, see cosmology Jenkyn, William 34, 56, 101,
Herbert, Philip, Earl of 403 n. 61
Pembroke 127 Jerome 65, 74, 316
Hermas, The Shepherd 57 Jesuits and Jesuitism 46, 94, 293, 295,
Herrick, Robert 245 298
Heydon, John 60, 145, Johnsen, H. 111
413 n. 62 Johnson, Samuel 213–14, 237, 239,
Heywood, Thomas 6, 19, 38, 46, 50, 278
52–3, 54, 56, 74, 78, 79, 80, 146, Jubilees 22, 76, 82
178–80, 200, 215–16, 253, 284, Justin Martyr 22, 74
300, 304–5, 315, 320, 352, Juvencus 199
446 n. 39
Heywood, William 94 Keith, Dr, Philadelphian 149, 154
Hibbert, Henry 42–3 Kelley, Edward 107, 112–13
Hicks, Thomas 116 Kellison, Matthew 81
Hilary of Poitiers 166 Kermode, Frank 367
Hildegard of Bingen 314 King, Edward 230, 250
Hobbes, Thomas 81, 174, 195, 215, Kircher, Athansius 60, 295
267, 284, 285, 340 Knott, Edward 32
on freewill 341–51 Knox, Elizabeth 14
Hodges, William 107 Kushner, Tony 14, 376
Holy Spirit, see Spirit
Homer 137, 200, 310 L’Estrange, Roger 331
homilies 39 Lactantius 166, 186
Hooke, Robert 3, 12, 291, 294, 295, Laudianism 37, 52, 63, 237
299, 308 Law, William 161
Hooker, Edward 147 Lawrence, Edward 102
Hooker, Richard 75 Lawrence, Henry 38, 46, 58, 59, 62,
Hughes George 40, 41, 234, 280, 68, 73, 77, 99, 101, 102–3, 104,
302, 318 115, 131, 136, 176, 233, 319, 323
Hume, Patrick 10, 213, 226, 278 Lawson, George 53, 84
Hutchinson, John 180 Lead, Jane 147, 152, 153–4, 161
Hutchinson, Lucy 6, 46, 146, Lee, Francis 153, 161
163, 180–82, 200, 216–18, Leigh, Edward 62, 99
319–20 Leonardo da Vinci 316
hylozoism 438 Leslie, Charles 210, 213, 226, 332
462 index
Lightfoot, John 67, 76, 100 Michael 5, 27, 35, 40, 45, 49, 51,
Lilly, William 60, 106–11, 112, 56–7, 64, 75, 79–82, 94–5, 98,
126–7, 233, 239, 253 100, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112,
Llwyd, Morgan 122, 316–17 114, 118, 141, 161, 179, 231–9,
Locke, John 12, 308 243, 247–8, 335–6
Loier, Pierre Le 60, 176 in Paradise Lost 184, 194, 203,
Lombard, Peter 26–9, 65, 71, 258 262, 268–71 passim, 274, 301,
Love, Christopher 45, 58, 86, 101, 335
234 millenarianism 31, 90, 92
Lucan, Marcus Anneus 230 Milton, John 8–10, 15, 42, 44, 47,
Lucifer 27, 49, 73–7, 79, 98, 105, 56, 65, 68, 73, 79, 102, 104, 116,
141–4, 150, 179, 216, 262, 266, 121–2, 126, 140, 167, 173,
271, 327, 329, 334, 338–9, 190–1, 197–204, 207–384
353–4, 370–1 passim
Lucretius 200, 216 Nativity Ode 250
Luther, Martin 35–6, 45, 57, 63, A Masque 238, 433 n. 58
259, 316, 373 ‘Lycidas’ 92, 190, 229–55
‘Ad Mansus’ 240
Madimi 113–14 ‘Ad Leonoram’ 235
magic 2–3, 107–9, 121, 126, 130, Animadversions 91
131–2, 142, 145, 151, 270–1, Reason of Church Government 55,
357 91–2, 197–8, 202, 219
Maimonides, Moses 193, 195, 202 Doctrine and Discipline of
Malignants Trecherous and Bloody Plot Divorce 234
(1643) 98 Areopagitica 240–1, 250
Maltzahn, Nicholas von 451 n. 39 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 240
manuscripts, magical 2, 60, 107, 109, History of Britain 216, 230–1, 240
112–13, 121, 272, 308 Observations 242
Maria Beatrice of Modena 336 Defensio 198
Marine Mercury (1642) 105 Defensio Secunda 223, 250,
Marlowe, Christopher 371, 372, 432 n. 49
442 n. 90 Paradise Lost 6, 8–9, 11, 13, 46, 55,
Marprelate 93 74, 77, 78, 79, 82, 86, 102, 121,
Marsh, Mr., of Dunstable 109 137, 138–40, 141, 144, 146, 164,
Martin, Catherine Gimelli 364 183–5, 190–1, 193–4, 207–384
Martyr, Peter, Vermigli 42, 56, 69, passim; arguments 11, 179, 207,
170–1, 190, 193, 195, 202, 233 235
Marvell, Andrew 188, 244–52, 255, Samson Agonistes 330, 331
330, 352, 434 n. 65 Paradise Regained 77, 232, 234, 283
Mather, Cotton 46 De Doctrina 9, 11, 43, 44, 82, 92,
Mather, Increase 19, 46 100, 185–7, 199, 204, 210, 212,
Maximes Unfolded (1643) 98 215, 218, 226–8, 232, 234–5,
Mayer, John 248 291, 301, 306, 307, 335
Mede, Joseph 56, 92–3 Letter to Heimbach 102, 241
Mercerus, Johannes 316 miracles 52–3, 59, 64, 90, 191, 195
Mercurius Politicus 223 Modest Enquiry . . . Guardian Angel
Mercurius Pragmaticus 98 (1702) 45, 233
index 463
Mohamed, Feisal 423 n. 2 pamphlets 93–9, 219–21, 224–5,

monism 228, 279, 286, 438 n. 10 252
Montagu, Richard 43, 63, 394 n. 64 Paracelsus 114, 117, 125, 140, 145
More, Alexander 222–4, 227 Pareus, David 56, 316
More, Henry 33, 47, 55, 60, 72, 84, Paris 28, 344, 373
284–5, 295, 308, 309 Parkes, Christopher 136
Morland, Sir Samuel 277–8, 359 Patrick, John 34–5, 86–7, 234
mortalism 116, 121, 285 Patrides, C. A. 357
Moulin, Peter du 222–3 patriotism 236, 239–44, 432 n. 49
Muggleton, Lodowick 121 Paul, St 34, 37, 57, 162
Muggletonianism 121, 123 Paulin, Tom 224
Muhammad, prophet 23, 378–9 Peace, Peace, and We Shall Be Quiet
Murrin, Michael 363–4 (1647) 98
Pendar, Margaret 131
Napier, John 92, 93, 238 Pennington, Mary 128
Napier, Richard 60, 109, 111 Percy, William 378–9
narrative 7, 11, 163–4, 213–18, Perereius, Benedictus 316
256–9, 309–10, 361–5, 380–2, perfectionism 118, 127
384 Perkins, William 49, 100, 163,
nationalism, see patriotism 191–2, 195, 202
natural philosophy 277–310, 368–9, Perrot, John 122
381–2 Peyton, Thomas 76
Necessity of Christian Subjection Philadelphians 125, 128, 147–61,
(1643) 98 196
Nedham, Marchamont 223 Phillips, Edward 201
Neoplatonism 32, 150, 168–9, 174, Philo 162, 165–6, 172
181, 217, 314–15, 336 Philosophical Transactions 12, 308
nephilim 76–7, 78 Piccolomini, Alessandro 283
see also angels—Sons of God Pietism 161
New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny Plato 32, 58, 168, 190
(1641) 94 Pocock, Mary 128
New Model Army 266 Poole, Elizabeth 105, 129, 196
Newcomb, Thomas 358 Pordage, John 15, 64, 105, 106, 117,
Niclaes, Hendrik 125, 127 118, 120, 121, 123, 125–61,
see also Familism 196, 200, 286, 290, 319,
Norwood, Robert 120 414 n. 68
numbers 306–7 Pordage, Mary 127–8, 153
Nuttall, Tony 360 Pordage, Samuel 125, 127, 136–46,
187, 412 n. 50
Odingsells, Charles 192 Mundorum Explicatio (1661) 6, 46,
Old Newes Newly Revived (1641) 95 137–46, 150, 182–3, 218
Origen 65, 71, 73, 165, 258, Powell, Vavasor 132
302 predestination 59, 72–3, 143
Overton, Richard 116 see also freewill
Ovid 180, 200, 357 Presbyterians 45, 89, 91, 99, 101
Owen, John 117, 173–5 Prideaux, John 19, 45, 236
Oxenbridge, Joanna 154 Pringle, John 57
464 index
prophecy 7, 64, 90, 107–8, 122, Sadducism 46, 55, 89, 113, 115,
145–6, 178–9, 189–204 passim, 128–9, 140, 171, 309
218 Salkeld, John 38, 46, 51, 58, 67, 72,
Protestantism 4–6, 11–14, 32–8, 74, 136, 302, 316
48–64, 87–8, 162–4, 169–83, Salmasius, Claudius 222, 223, 224
189–203 passim, 232, 236, 239, Sannazaro, Jacopo 238–9
244, 247–8, 337, 355–7 Satan, history of 22–3, 49, 73–7,
Prynne, William 43, 94 118, 132
Psellus, Michael 77, 78, 152 Saunders, Richard 19
pseudepigrapha 22–4, 73, 75, 76, 80, Scotland 242, 243, 254
82, 271, 352 Scott, John 19–20
Pseudo Dionysius, see Dionysius Scott, Reginald 60, 191
Pullman, Philip 14, 423 n. 3 Scott, Sir Walter 333
Puttenham, George 177, 178, 179, 185 scripture 21–3, 33, 41–7 passim, 57,
Pythagoras 58 73–4, 78, 81, 87, 100, 103, 131,
see also Tryon, Thomas 136, 162–88 passim, 190,
214–15, 217, 271, 356, 361
Qu’rān 57, 378 see also pseudepigrapha
Quakers 37, 116, 117, 122, 126, 141 scriptural annotations 40–2, 99–100
see also Westminster Assembly—
rabbinical scholarship 23, 67, 78, 82, Annotations
194, 202, 213–15, 271–2 Selden, John 271
Racovian catechism 116, 173 sermons 44–5, 374, 377–8
Rainold, John 92 Seven Arguments Plainly Proving
Ranters 120, 123, 126, 129, 141 (1641) 94
Raphael 27, 79–82, 87, 107, 109 Shakespeare, William 105, 314, 369,
in Paradise Lost 121, 144, 187, 203, 372–3
212, 213, 218, 228, 256, 259–75 Shippen, William 3, 115
passim, 278–9, 281, 286–7, 290, Sibbes, Richard 51, 83, 303
298–9, 301, 307–8, 311–13, Sidney, Sir Philip 141, 190
321, 324, 335, 338, 353, 360–3 Simmons, Matthew 102
in State of Innocence 341–47 Simmons, Samuel 11
Raziel, Book of the Angel 80, 82, 271, Simon Magus 67
272 Simon, Richard 163
Reeve, John 121, 122, 197, 200 Sions Charity (1641) 94
Rhegius, Urbanus 45, 57, 85–6 Skelhorn, Sarah 107
Richardson, John 40, 100 Smectymnuus 89, 91
Richardson, Jonathan 201–2, 203 Smith, John 189, 194–5, 196,
Rilke, Rainer Maria 14 202–3
Rivetus, Andreas 316 Socinianism 116–17, 128–9, 173–5
Rivius, Johannes 57–8 Socrates 60
Roach, Richard 128, 150, 153 Solomon, Key of Solomon 107, 271–2
Ross, Alexander 43–4, 78, 83, 100, Son 154, 155–6, 209–11
165 see also Christ
Royal Society 3, 278–9, 295, 308–9 Sparrow, John 140
Rutherford, Samuel 43 Spenser, Edmund 46, 144, 352, 379
index 465
spheres 32, 68, 80, 267, 276, 279, in Paradise Lost 82, 262, 268–72
287, 298, 306, 314–15, 372 passim, 296–7, 306, 322, 335
Spirit 116–17, 151, 164, 167, 173, Ussher, William 3, 112
177, 199, 238 Uzziel 272
Stationers’ Register 95, 115, 331,
332 Valla, Lorenzo 24, 163
Stockwel, Richard 129 Vane, Sir Henry 126, 293
Stortford, Herts. 44, 100–1, 111 Vere, Mary, Lady 127
Strange Predictions Related at Catericke Vermigli, see Martyr, Peter
(1648) 105 Verney, Sir Edmund 105
Suddaine Answer to a Suddain Vicars, John 112
Moderatour (1642[3]) 97–8 Virgil 220, 230, 237, 238, 427 n. 42
Sydenham, William 249 Vitae Adae et Evae 23, 75–6, 77
Sylvester, Joshua 144, 216, 319 Vlacq, Adrian 223
systematic theology 42–4, 100
Wale, Thomas and mistress 1–2
Tany, Thomas 120, 123, 127, 129 Wales 240, 242, 243, 254
Taylor, Jeremy 19, 192, 194, 303 Wall, John 85, 314
Taylor, John 53, 95 Ward, Samuel 35
Tertullian 22, 302 Weber, Max 369
Teskey, Gordon 367–8, 381, Wenders, Wim 14
454 n. 45 West, Robert 214, 358, 392 n. 24
Thābit ibn Qurra 304 Westminster Assembly 40, 94, 99
Theocritus 230 Annotations 40, 41, 42, 56, 58,
Thomason, George 102 65–6, 80–1, 99, 102, 233, 248,
Three Propositions of the Angels of Light 317
(1642) 95–7 White, John, divine 67, 78, 100,
Tillyard, E. M. W. 365–6, 364 141, 172–3, 217, 294, 426 n. 34
Tobit 22, 79, 82 White, John, MP 92
Tomkinson, Dudley (pseud.) 332–3, Wilkins, John 109, 303
334, 342 Willet, Andrew 40, 41, 42, 43,
Trapnel, Anna 105, 196 48–64, 66–7, 72, 75, 85, 232,
Trapp, John 40, 64–5, 83–4, 100, 247–8, 317–18, 361, 394 n. 55
101, 285 Wilson, Thomas 172, 176
Trinity 29, 43, 66, 117, 151, 156, Winstanley, Gerard 118, 129
159, 173, 175, 217, 218, 257 witchcraft 20, 78, 111, 112, 131, 133,
see also antitrinitarianism 352
Trithemius, Johannes 109, 114, 117, Wither, George 59, 253–4
145, 271, 303, 437 n. 20 Wollebius, Johannes 42, 43, 56, 62,
Tryon, Thomas 233 68, 72–3, 74–5, 100, 111, 234,
Turner, Robert 117 302
tutelary angels, see angels, guardianship Woolnor, Henry 116, 285, 288
Wright, Joseph 37
universe, see cosmology
Urania 140, 198–9, 200 Zanchius, Jerome 77
Uriel 79–82, 107, 109, 112, 161 Zephon 269–72 passim, 336

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MILTON’S ANGELS

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Among the beneﬁts to being a Miltonist is the excellent community

Wilding, and Pete Forshaw for illuminating conversations. To my sons

1. Introduction: Protestant Angels, Poets,

III. L I TE RATU RE AND RE P R E S E N T A T I O N

1. Thomas Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635), title

I have retained original punctuation and spelling, though I have

Raymond (ed.), Joad Raymond (ed.), Conversations with

Actions with Angels

On 10 September 1672 Thomas Wale brought his wife to see the

because not easily to be removed, :::::::

the 48 Claves Angelicæ, also Liber Scientia Terrestris—Auxilÿ & Victoria

books—magical symbols, pictures of angels—that causes him to bring

world even if it could not be experimented on. Growing knowledge of

The Reformation, Continuity, and Change

Around 1500 most beliefs about angels, most representations of them,

that will become apparent, focuses on Britain, though it has cause

Church, in practice the distinction was less clear. Within Protestantism

How can we write truthfully about things we do not understand?

machina, but are intimately connected to the literary medium. This

What Words or Tongue of Seraph Can Sufﬁce?

This intellectual context is essential to understanding Milton’s epic, the

revolutionary years—during which he mainly devoted himself to writing

In the Printer’s Note he added to the 1668 edition of Paradise Lost,

There is a residual narrative that angels disappeared from Britain

certainly be possible to assume this on the basis of some statements

I discuss some versions of the narrative of the disappearance of angels

experiment; after the enthusiastic conversations with angels in the

sympathize with my subjects and imaginatively identify with their

‘Angelology’ was not a word in common use in the early modern

‘angelocracy’ in 1685 to describe government by guardian angels. The

Beliefs in immaterial spirits that are deities in a polytheistic system, or

writing, and particularly the accounts of angels in Scripture, which form

intercessors with God. Instead we ﬁnd stories of angelic interaction with

Anatomizing Angels: Dionysius, Lombard,

the Areopagite, converted by St Paul of Athens in the ﬁrst century, and

E quella che vedea i pensier dubi

Cosı̀ veloci seguono i suoi vimi,

Pseudo Dionysius offers a great many more insights, explaining how it

Lombard answers other questions in passing: his is a coherent and

And he clears up the remaining objections.

Q. 60. angelic love

were intellectually necessary as a way of grasping the divine. They

On the eve of the Reformation the greatest interest in the doctrine

Reformers vocally attacked Scholastic angel doctrine as overly curious,

More objects to the foolishness of the question being handled by those

Pseudo Dionysius (Calvin knows of his debunking) receives particular

communicate their thoughts one to another’.31 The volume concludes

His writings implicitly accept the doctrine of individual guardian

Calvin’s antagonism to excessive interest in angels was clear, and his

of credulity. These two facts meant that angels played a role in

central place in Protestant theology, or from being used positively

Writing about Angels

array of works, from sermons to polemics to poems, and these writings

represent a domestication and popularization of, and a considerable

The same process surrounds the question of when angels were

comprehended, the body of divinity, and the fundamentals of religion (1662).

comments on angels in detail because he is concerned about the