ABSTRACT
The almost monumental problem of reconciling Milton’s at times virulent anti-Catholicism with his almost equally astonishing tolerance toward his Italian Catholic hosts and their co-religionists looms too large to address in a single chapter. Tentative answers have been suggested above, but thoroughly exploring this anomaly requires reexamining Milton’s intensive reading of church history in the present chapter and his “compromise” theology of saving grace in the following one.1 Unlike many other Englishmen, Milton possessed a sophisticated knowledge and admiration of the Italian spirituali and similar “proto-Protestant” reformers abroad. Many opposed the pope or papal doctrine but remained life-long Catholics, while others actually contributed to his “anti-popery” rhetoric and convictions.2 The question that then arises whether either group, especially the former, could in his eyes attain a “saving faith,” and whether either should be convicted of “implicit faith,” the cardinal error committed (as he so often repeats) by Roman Catholicism. Is their pope then identical with Anti-Christ or his chief agent, the Whore of Babylon, as Spenser’s rst book in The Faerie Queene so strongly suggests? How “Roman” is the “Romanizing” clergy Milton often attacks, and nally, what does “Tolerated Popery” mean and why does he oppose it (CPW 2:565)? These difcult questions are all addressed here because they are closely intertwined and because most were previously posed by the Italian “evangelicals” or “spirituali.”
