ABSTRACT
We might say that, by the strange involved process of history, Milton’s Satan was one beneficiary of Luther’s injunction to Sin bravely! There were others of course, in literature and in the world beyond literature. Nor should this be thought of as a purely Protestant phenomenon; we have seen that a Lutheran self-abandonment to sin in fact resonates with the Catholic spirituality of St John of the Cross. It is nevertheless true that the radical Protestant reformation pushed far into this territory. In the 1530s, for instance, Jan Beuckelzoon (a.k.a. John of Leyden) luxuriated in his harem as Anabaptist King of Münster while starving supporters fought and died in their doomed attempt to defend him. And over a century later, in the English Commonwealth of the 1650s which Milton knew, ‘Ranters’ evolved their own lives of wild transgression out of Luther’s conclusion that God’s freely given salvation frees us from any law. Such extreme ‘antinomianism’ – nomos is the Greek word for law – Luther had struggled to contain in his effort to build a respectable church. And Calvin did the same, only more so. He wrote in horror, in the Institutes, ‘some Anabaptists in the present age mistake some indescribable sort of frenzied excess for the regeneration of the Spirit’, insisting that,
Spirit is not the patron of murder, adultery, drunkenness, pride, contention, avarice, and fraud, but the author of love, chastity, sobriety, modesty, peace, moderation, and truth. He is not a Spirit of giddiness, rushing rashly and precipitately, without regard to right and wrong, but full of wisdom and understanding, by which he can duly distinguish between justice and injustice. He instigates not to lawless and unrestrained licentiousness, but discriminating between lawful and unlawful, teaches temperance and moderation. 1
