ABSTRACT
Most modern readers of Dante or Milton nd it difcult to ascertain exactly what they mean by “free grace,” why they limit free will in “election” and “justication,” and how far they actually differ from Luther and Calvin on the closely related issue of sola fideism, or salvation by faith alone. Luther and Calvin agree that faith and not human works before or after election alone “justies” or pardons sinner in God’s sight, since faith is his unilateral gift. Milton and Dante agree that this gift is undeserved, but more closely follow the apostle James’s insistence that works without faith are dead. Thus, for both, “knowing” Christ means actively doing his will, not merely “professing” faith in words alone, as Dante announces above in Paradiso xix. Yet ironically, both poets afrm that salvation is possible even if one has “never heard his [Christ’s] name.” The Son of Paradise Regained provides the clearest explanation of why this is possible: pagans or other pre-Christians may be saved either by direct revelation, by “light from above, the fountain of light”; by steadfast study of scriptural light, the means he has followed; or through a humble, self-denying, Socratic study of “moral virtue, …/ By light of nature not in all quite lost” (PR 4.289, 351−2). This study cannot “earn” justication in God’s eyes, for that remains his prerogative; but by believing in his existence and goodness and imitating it, they have been de facto granted justication by faith. This formula nevertheless opens up a wide gray area for the role played by human works in being justied by faith. It appears that individuals, at some point, would need to at least “open themselves” to God’s call, but Paul’s commentary on Christ’s supreme power to reconcile man and God is vague, even contradictory, in explaining precisely how the human and divine wills cooperate, if at all. Early Protestants usually follow
Luther and Calvin in denying any cooperation while Catholics disagree; yet, a middle way does exist. Milton seems to have discovered and approved it in studying the highly unusual and original Protestant, Martin Bucer, who with his Catholic colleague, Johannes Gropper, is credited with formulating a compromise “double justice” theory of justification by faith.
