Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: English Protestant moral theory and regeneration
- Chapter 1 Shame, guilt, and moral character in early modern English Protestant theology and Sir Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
- Chapter 2 The three orders of nature, grace, and law in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II
- Chapter 3 Conformist and puritan moral theory: from Richard Hooker's natural law theory to Richard Sibbes's ethical occasionalism
- Chapter 4 The elect body in pain: Godly fear and sanctification in John Donne's poetry and prose
- Chapter 5 Absent neighbors in George Herbert's “The Church,” or Why Agape becomes Caritas in English Protestant devotional poetry
- Chapter 6 Moral pragmatism in the theology of John Milton and his contemporaries
- Epilogue: theorizing early modern moral selfhood
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 6 - Moral pragmatism in the theology of John Milton and his contemporaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: English Protestant moral theory and regeneration
- Chapter 1 Shame, guilt, and moral character in early modern English Protestant theology and Sir Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
- Chapter 2 The three orders of nature, grace, and law in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II
- Chapter 3 Conformist and puritan moral theory: from Richard Hooker's natural law theory to Richard Sibbes's ethical occasionalism
- Chapter 4 The elect body in pain: Godly fear and sanctification in John Donne's poetry and prose
- Chapter 5 Absent neighbors in George Herbert's “The Church,” or Why Agape becomes Caritas in English Protestant devotional poetry
- Chapter 6 Moral pragmatism in the theology of John Milton and his contemporaries
- Epilogue: theorizing early modern moral selfhood
- Notes
- Index
Summary
We have seen that Donne and Herbert inherit the English Calvinist challenge of not only clearly distinguishing justification from sanctification, but also of incorporating a theory of practical morality into the order of salvation. This chapter investigates the mid to late seventeenth-century doctrinal and textual positions on the relationship between grace and morality, positions that mark a fundamental departure from the Conformist and Puritan theories of morality we have been evaluating throughout this study. In the interests of consolidating the English church after the divisive civil war years, moderate churchmen or “latitudinarians” – Jeremy Taylor, John Tillotson, Edward Stillingfleet, Isaac Barrow, and others – reject all manner of polemicizing about unprovable fundamentals of revealed religion. The latitude-men were particularly critical, as we shall see below, of excessive self-scrutiny as a means of discerning personal assurance. Affective individualism is described in their sermons as an overscrupulous devotional exercise that leads to frustration and religious despair rather than dutiful expressions of practical piety. Most latitudinarian sermons focus instead on a reformation of manners and the reasonable and practical means by which congregants might be disciplined into participating in a comprehensive, tolerant English church. For its interest in practical rather than dogmatic theology, latitudinarianism is aptly described as a “holy living” theology. Regarding moral education, in particular, latitudinarians are more willing than their English Calvinist predecessors to introduce a system of moral conditioning into the scheme of salvation, although they offer a particular theory of habituation that I will be terming “moral pragmatism.”
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- Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature , pp. 157 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004