A New Companion to Milton, First Edition. Edited by Thomas N. Corns. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Milton in Intellectual History Stephen M. Fallon 23 Love Virtue, she alone is free. A Masque 1018 All necessity must be removed from our freedom, nor even must that shadowy and external necessity based on immutability or prescience be admitted to the discussion. Milton, De Doctrina Christiana I. 3 (CWJM VIII. i: 61) I formed them free, and free they must remain, Till they enthrall themselves. Paradise Lost 3. 124–5 His widowe assures me that Mr. Hobbs was not one of his acquaintance: yt her husband did not like him at all: but he would grant him to be a man of great parts, a learned man. Their interests & tenets did run counter to each other. John Aubrey (Darbishire 7) In responding to seventeenth‐century intellectual currents, John Milton’s great guiding principle, in religion, anthropology, politics, and natural philosophy, is freedom. First and foremost, he is a defender of the freedom of the will. The theodicy, or justification of God that comprises the argument of Paradise Lost depends on his success in writing a narrative in which Adam and Eve (and we their descendants) are free, an extraordinarily high bar given the exigencies of realist narrative, in which actions must be plausibly motivated. Freedom is thus a theological imperative, connected, as we will see, not only with an Arminian soteriology at odds with the Calvinist predestinarian thought dominant in Milton’s time, but also an Arian Christology that most in the seventeenth century would consider not merely