Predestination in Milton's Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana

Reply to Paul Sellin

Abstract

In 1992 William B. Hunter challenged Milton's authorship of the heterodox treatise De Doctrina Christiana. The mainstream of the debate following it was faithfully recorded on the pages of the Studies in English Literature but there were a number of articles published in both Milton Studies and Milton Quarterly that added to the discussion of the treatise's provenance. In this paper I aim to develop the issue of predestination in the above-mentioned debate based on Paul R. Sellin's article "Milton's Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana on predestination." In his article, Sellin tries to maintain Hunter's assumption that Milton could not have been the author of the treatise, by demonstrating a discrepancy between De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost in the matter of predestination. I, on the contrary, hoped to show by detailed analysis the uncanny resemblance between the two works regarding predestination, especially when observed from a broader perspective of the doctrine of grace.