Milton, though people have been misled into thinking of him as very different from that, was, in reality, the incarnation of the Nietzschean ideal. He was hard, he was cold, he was contemptuous, he was "magnanimous," he "remembered his whip" when he went with women, he loved war for its own sake, and he dwelt alone on the top of the mountains. To Milton the world presented itself as a place where the dominant power, and the dominant interest, was the wrestling of will with will. Why need we always fuss ourselves about logical _names_? Milton, in reality--in his temperament and his mood--was just as convinced of _Will_ being the ultimate secret as Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Bergson or the modern Pragmatist. Nothing seemed to him noble, or dramatic, or "true," that did not imply the struggle to the death of opposing _wills_.
Milton, in reality, is less of a Christian than any European writer, since the Gospel appeared. In his heart, like Nietzsche, he regarded the binding into one volume of those "Two Testaments" an insult to "the great style." He does, indeed, in a manner find a place for Christ, but it is the place of one demigod among many other demi-gods; the conqueror's place possibly, but still the place of one in a hierarchy, not of one alone. It is absurd to quarrel with Milton's deification of the Judaic Jehovah. Every man has his own God. The God he _has a right to_. And the Jewish Jehovah, after all, is no mean figure. He, like Milton, was a God of War. He, like Milton, found Will--human and divine Will--the central cosmic fact. He, like Milton, regarded Good and Evil, not as universal principles, but as arbitrary _commands_, issued by eternal personal antagonists! It is one of the absurd mistakes into which our conceptual and categorical minds so easily fall--this tendency to eliminate Milton's Theology as mere Puritanical convention, dull and uninteresting. Milton's Theology was the most _personal creation_ that any great poet has ever dared to launch upon--more personal even than the Theology of Milton's favourite Greek poet, Euripides.
Milton's feeling for the more personal, more concrete aspects of "God" goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. At heart he was a savage Dualist, who lapsed occasionally into Pluralism. He was, above all, an Individualist of the most extreme kind--an Individualist so hard, so positive, so inflexible, that for him nothing in the world really mattered except the clash of definite, clear-cut Wills, contending against one another.