Professor John Milton

A Treatise on Christian Doctrine Professor John Milton

De Doctrina Christiana (Christian Doctrine) is a Latin manuscript found in 1823 and attributed to John Milton, who died 148 years prior. Since Milton was blind by the time of the work's creation, this attribution assumes that an amanuensis aided the author. The Christian Doctrine is divided into two books. The first book is then divided into 33 chapters and the second into 17. The first part of the work appears to be "finished" because it is free of edits and the handwriting (Skinner's) is neat, whereas the second is filled with edits, corrections, and notes in the margins. The Skinner's incomplete fair copy has stirred controversy over the work, because it does not provide critics with the ability to determine what the fair copy was based on. The manuscript itself is patterned on the theological treatises common to Milton's time, such as William Ames's Medulla Theologica and John Wolleb's Compendium Theologiae Christianae. Although Milton refers to "forty-two works", of them many were "systematic theologies", in his various works, Christian Doctrine does not allude to them in the same way as he does in his political treatises. However, the actual pattern of discourse found within the treatise is modeled after Ames's and Wolleb's works even if the content is different.