Milton and the Protestant Ethic

Extract

Mr. Frank's engaging argument is convincing up to a point. Milton was indeed a protestant of the protestants and in true protestant fashion kept pressing on in his thinking to ever more extreme conclusions which seemed to him of the very essence of rationality. Such a course pointed in one direction logically enough to the reduction of the many divagations of protestant doctrine to a religion of common sense free of dilemmas and miracles. But such a conclusion would seem more natural to minds seeking a repose that ever is the same from the uncharted liberties taken by protestant revolutionaries than to a poet whose devotion to protestant individualism was as unflagging as Milton's. Mr. Frank seems to me more convincing when he says that “perhaps the Milton who wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes was more than an incipient deist, that he was what can be called a total Protestant.” But before one can say whether or to what degree Milton was even an incipient deist, surely one must consider what it amounted to in his case to be a “total” protestant, for not all total protestants turned out to be deists. In considering that question, since it was by way of their Pauline-Augustinian-Calvinistic theology that English protestants, not excepting Milton, arrived at their protestant ethic, it seems to me impossible to limit the term protestant as Mr. Frank suggests to its “ethical rather than theological signification.”