The Protestant Reformation, or rejection of the Catholic Church by many governments and individuals during the sixteenth century, was caused by numerous factors. One major one, however, was the issue of whether ordinary people should be able to read the Bible. Catholics were opposed to translating the Bible into English. They taught that only priests could understand the Bible properly, and it was then their responsibility to pass their knowledge on to the congregation through homilies and sermons.
However, by the end of the fifteenth century, print allowed translations of the Bible to spread more widely than ever before. Ordinary people could read the Bible in their native language, and many resented being forced to learn about it only secondhand. Protestants taught that the Bible should be the basis of all Christian religious practice, and held that ordinary people should know the Bible well, and base their faith on it.
Another major focus of the Protestant Reformation was anti-idolatry. Milton discusses this issue at length in “On True Religion,” but, in short, many people resented the Catholic inclusion of beautiful objects in worship. This was not unrelated to the new emphasis on the Bible. Not only did the Bible forbid “graven images,” or images of God, but many Protestants felt that the ornate images distracted people from the word of the Bible itself.
People’s interest in the Bible, and increasing skepticism towards other forms of religious representation, led to new kinds of art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many poets began to base their work on the Bible directly. For example, the well-known poet Philip Sidney, and his sister Mary Sidney, translated many of the psalms into English sonnets. Others would obsessively cite the Bible when writing more creative religious work. There are so many footnotes in Lucy Hutchinson’s version of the creation story that it reads like an academic paper!
Milton’s prose writing is a clear inheritor of this Biblical tradition. As a Puritan, Milton held that faith should be entirely dictated by the Bible: as he writes in “Of True Religion,” people should do what the Bible says, and only what the Bible says. He often backs up his arguments by quoting the Bible, regardless of how obviously religious his subject matter is. The entire second half of “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce” responds to a single sentence in the New Testament, in which Jesus says that divorce is wrong. But both “Areopagitica” and “On the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” also include Biblical citations to support what are fundamentally political arguments.
