Milton's Messiah: The Son of God in the Works of John Milton. By Russell Hillier

Abstract

Now that Miltonists tend to agree that De Doctrina Christiana is a bona fide Miltonic text, critics can confidently weigh the systematic theology of that text against Milton’s poetic works, particularly Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. In painstakingly tracking the redemptive theology of these central Miltonic texts, Russell Hillier elevates the role of the Son, especially in Paradise Lost, to the pride of place that the romantic school of Milton had too perversely, it seems, reserved for Milton’s Satan. Milton’s is indeed a ‘good God’ in Hillier’s saving account, God’s authoritarian and punitive ways either counterbalanced by or at times proleptic of the Son’s multifaceted role as hypostatic God-man or theanthropos. The distinctive cosmos of Paradise Lost is neither Satanic nor Godly but fundamentally Christocentric in nature, Milton following his own De Doctrina in allegorising Reformed soteriology, including the Son’s anointing, satisfaction, justification, and overall mediatorial office in human salvation.