Milton had a complicated relationship with the church. Though he was deeply religious, he didn’t align himself with any particular sect of Christianity. In his essay “The Reason of Church-Government,” he wrote that he abandoned the church after he became disillusioned with its rigid hierarchy. He didn’t trust organized religion as a path to God, and encouraged his readers to draw their faith directly from the Bible. He expressed this idea most dramatically in his essay “Areopagitica,” where he wrote that believers must judge right and wrong for themselves, and that any belief becomes heretical if it does not emerge directly from a person’s own convictions.
Milton developed his specific relationship with Christianity by reading scripture, and his beliefs deviated from accepted church doctrine in a few significant ways. Milton did not believe in the Holy Trinity (in which God is divided into God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit), and wrote that Christ is mortal and beneath God. He also rejected the Calvinist belief that humans are predestined to sin or be saved. In his treatise on religion, “De Doctrina Christiana,” he wrote that humans have free will to turn to God, though God knows what they will choose in advance. Milton’s version of the creation of the world was also unique. He believed that God worked from an original matter, rather than a void, and ordered the world into its current shape. All of these beliefs work their way into the “Nativity Ode”—through the relatively small role Milton gives to Christ, his narrative’s leaps into the future, and his passages comparing the creation to harmony.
