The Politics of Character in John Milton's Divorce Tracts

David Hawkes

nunquam privatum esse sapientum

--Cicero

I. There has recently been a great deal of debate over the relative influence on Milton's politics of two discordant revolutionary ideologies: classical republicanism and radical Protestant theology. ¹ In the mid-seventeenth century the search for intellectual precedents and rationalizations of the English revolution brought these two traditions into an uneasy alliance, and Milton, like many other revolutionary apologists, drew on both of them. Of course the two schools of thought are not necessarily incompatible. J. G. A. Pocock notes one point of connection between them:

The context in which men attain their final end--or recover their prima forma, though this concept might not have been antinomian enough for the radical saints of the New Model--is that of apocalypse; the "end" of Aristotelian teleology is still united with the eschatological "end" of prophetic time. ²

The Aristotelian "end" of man is the good, defined as "an activity of soul in accordance with virtue," and the belief that one can or has fulfilled that end is [End Page 141] certainly amenable to Protestant antinomianism. ³ Furthermore, as Sharon Achinstein points out, Milton's "conception of virtue ... melds the religious notion of conscience with a classical sense of civic duty." ⁴ On the other hand there are significant differences between the classical and the Christian notions of "virtue" and the "good," which dictate that, as Nigel Smith puts it, "[c]lassical republicanism, properly conceived, would in many ways be in conflict with the millenarian, chiliastic and perfectionist Protestantism of the sects." ⁵ The problem faced by Milton as a Protestant Republican is that the definition of the "good" offered by millennial sanctification and that attainable through Aristotelian virtue are in many ways mutually exclusive and contradictory. They have been characterized as such ever since Augustine's City of God asserted that pagan ethics are incompatible with true, Christian virtue. ⁶ Millennialism relies on faith; civic humanist virtue relies on works. Antinomianism abolishes the law; republicanism institutes the rule of law. The saints are sanctified by grace; the virtuous are distinguished by their own strength of character. Radical Protestant freedom is negative and private--it is the ability to speak and worship according to the dictates of conscience; civic humanist liberty is positive and public, the ability to participate fully in the government of the res publica. While daunting, however, these contradictions are not quite insuperable. I believe that Milton finds a common denominator in the accounts given by these two traditions of psychological objectification and that the agreement of Roman and Christian morality on this point leads him to make the tendency to objectification (or rather the ability to resist that tendency) the central issue of his mature political theory.

The political ideas of the classical republicans and their descendants, the Renaissance civic humanists, were based upon Aristotle's Politics and Nico-machean Ethics, while the intellectual sources of radical Protestantism can be traced to Luther's commentaries on Paul's epistles. During the English revolution the Pauline exegesis of the relationship between the old and the new covenants provided intellectual ammunition against custom and tradition, as well as inspiring the antinomianism of the radical fringe to which Milton was falsely accused of adhering during the divorce controversy. In the divorce tracts Milton points out that Aristotle and Paul share one fundamental tenet: they argue that interior and exterior slavery are of the same nature and therefore concomitant [End Page 142] and inseparable. Furthermore, Milton notes, Aristotle and Paul both claim that exterior and interior slavery consist in "carnality," the subjection of the spirit to the flesh. This identification of carnality with servility becomes a constant strain which runs throughout Milton's career and provides the consistent element in his apparently vacillating theories of politics and religion.

II. Although this argument recurs throughout Milton's career, it is first hammered into shape during the divorce controversy of 1643-45. The divorce tracts offer a sustained ethical analysis of the individual character, and the issue of character is obviously central to Milton's politics. Throughout the many vicissitudes in his political opinions he holds consistently to one basic proposition, a nation should be governed by its "best" citizens. This conviction overrides any commitment to particular forms of government. Milton is not even opposed to monarchy per se but only to the rule of the ethically inadequate. As he puts it in the first Defence of the English People, "Monarchy has indeed been praised by many famous men, provided that the sole ruler is the best of men and fully deserving of the crown, otherwise monarchy sinks rapidly into the worst tyranny." ⁷ By extension a sinful populace is incapable of exercising sovereignty over itself. Just as a tyrant transforms free subjects into slaves, so a slavish mentality on the part of the population must inevitably bring about tyranny in the ruler. In 1654 Milton warned:

my fellow countrymen, your own character is a mighty factor in the acquisition or retention of liberty. Unless your liberty is such as can neither be won or lost by arms, but is of that kind alone which, sprung from piety, justice, temperance, in short true virtue ... there will not be lacking one who will surely wrench [it] from you. ⁸

And in Paradise Lost Michael divulges the political consequences of man's failure to attain such virtue: [End Page 143]

Therefore since hee permits
Within himself unworthy Powers to reign
Over free reason, God in Judgment just
Subjects him from without to violent Lords;
Who oft as undeservedly enthrall
His outward freedom. ⁹

In fact Milton bases his politics on his theory of character. Monarchy becomes unacceptable--it turns into tyranny--only if the personal character of the king is degenerate. "If I inveigh against tyrants," Milton demands, "what is that to kings?... As much as a good man differs from a bad, so much do I maintain that a king differs from a tyrant" (DEP 1, IV, ii, 561). This emphasis on personality even renders Milton ready to countenance formal political tyranny in certain circumstances. Of Julius Caesar he comments, "If indeed I had wished any tyrant spared it would have been he, for although he forcibly established his rule in the republic yet he did perhaps best deserve to rule" (DEP 1, IV, i, 449). This is a remarkable confession for a Renaissance republican to make. Milton signals here that he is not a Brutus but a Cicero, whose Phillipics attack the character rather than the politics of his opponents. The personal abuse which fills Milton's polemic is not gratuitous but rests upon deep-seated assumptions about the connection of the personal to the political sphere. He is convinced that the personal peccadillos of opponents such as Salmasius and More are the direct consequences of their royalism. Similarly, his encomia exalt the personal qualities rather than the statecraft of his heroes. The famous paean to Cromwell as subjugator of his own "vain hopes, fears, desires" culminates in a succinct expression of Milton's political doctrine: "there is nothing in human society more pleasing to God, or more agreeable to reason, nothing in the state more just, nothing more expedient, than the rule of the man most fit to rule" (DEP 2, IV, i, 671-72).

Obviously, then, the question becomes: how do we know who is "most fit to rule"? In the divorce tracts Milton approaches the issue through a judicious blend of Aristotle's description of "natural slavery" with Paul's conception of the "fleshly" mind, and he lays heavy stress upon their association of servility with all kinds of carnality. ¹⁰ A carnal consciousness is a token of natural slavery, while a spiritual cast of mind reveals one naturally independent and competent in self-rule. The respective characteristics Milton assigns to carnality and spirituality in the divorce tracts eventually come to inform his view of state politics. [End Page 144]

Let us begin by considering the influence of Aristotle on Milton's theory of subjective politics. In Of Reformation Milton urges the reader to "looke what the grounds, and causes are of single happiness to one man, the same shall ye find them to a whole state, as Aristotle both in his ethicks and politicks, from the principles of reason layes down." ¹¹ As Milton notes, Aristotle's Politics and Nicomachean Ethics draw causal analogies between private and public affairs. The Politics distinguishes three kinds of authority, and each one is given both a subjective and an objective dimension. First, there is the kind of authority exercised by a ruler over his subjects. Aristotle compares this kind of authority to the rule of a father over his children (1259bl) and also to the rule of intellect over appetite (1254bl). ¹² Second, there is the authority of a husband over his wife, which is said to be "political" (1259bl) and which is compared to the dominance of reason over passion. Finally, there is the authority of a master over a slave, which is analogous to the rule of the soul over the body (1252bl).

Aristotle's most pressing concern is to establish that this latter type of rule is different in kind from the other two, and he attacks those who miss the distinction. The Barbarians, for example, equate the power of husbands over wives with that of masters over slaves. Aristotle tells us that this is because Barbarians are slaves by nature--and therefore, presumably, incapable of conceiving of any other kind of authority (1252bl). Similarly, in the Ethics, we are informed that "among the Persians the rule of the father is tyrannical; they use their sons as slaves" (1160bl). ¹³ In Aristotle's view the confusion of the master/slave relationship with other modes of authority is the very definition of tyranny, and this became a commonplace of the earliest Protestant republican theory. The United Provinces' Declaration of Independence justified their revolt on these grounds:

God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of the subjects (without which he could be no prince), to govern them according to equity, to love and support them as a father his children or a shepherd his flock, and even at the hazard of life to defend and preserve them. And when he does not behave thus, but, on the contrary, oppresses them, seeking opportunities to infringe their ancient customs and privileges, exacting from them slavish compliance, then he is no longer a prince, but a tyrant, and the subjects are to consider him in no other view. ¹⁴ [End Page 145]

How does Aristotle distinguish the master/slave relation from the others? First, the slave differs from a child, a free subject or a woman in that the purpose of his life is to serve the ends of another. He has an "alterior" existence which is alien to him, being his master's and not his own. It follows that the slave does not enjoy an independent being but is a "part of " his master: "one who does not belong to himself by nature, but is another's, though a human being, is by nature a slave" (1254al). Furthermore, there are people (primarily Barbarians) who "naturally" serve ends which are not proper to themselves, and so these people are "natural" slaves, and it is good and just that they are enslaved.

Second, Aristotle identifies servility with the body. The "most slavish" forms of labor are "those in which the body is most used" (1258bl). Slaves are described as purely sensual beings, "wholly lacking the deliberative element" (1260al,12). Aquinas's gloss brings home the equation of direction towards an alterior telos with the absence of the rational capacity: "the rational creature, since it is of itself (de se), is not ordered to another [creature] as to an end, e.g., a man to a man." ¹⁵ The Ethics elaborates further, claiming that slaves are capable of enjoying "bodily pleasures," but not true happiness, since they are incapable of "virtuous activity." Aristotle evidently intends a conceptual as well as a figural valence by his comparison of the master/slave relation to that of the mind to the body "that which can forsee with the mind is the naturally ruling and naturally mastering element, while that which can do these things with the body is the naturally ruled and slave" (Politics, 1252bl).

The two definitive characteristics of "natural slavery" in Aristotle, then, are alterity and carnality. The process of reasoning which links these two qualities appears to run as follows: a slave is one who naturally serves an end which is not his own. Virtuous activity is the pursuit of one's own proper end, therefore the slave cannot be virtuous. The proper end of a human being is the good life, which is a life of the intellect, of "contemplation" (Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a15). However, a slave does not pursue this end but fulfills purely physical functions and enjoys merely sensual pleasures. The analogy to the relationship between mind and body is precise: the function of the body is to serve the mind in physical matters, freeing it to fulfill the telos of the whole human being. This kind of authority is sharply differentiated from that of the intellectual and rational elements of the mind over the appetitive and passionate. These are divisions within the mind rather than between the mind and something wholly alterior to it. They are therefore likened to the rule of a husband over a wife, a father over his children and a ruler over his subjects, since these modes of authority are exercised over free people, who fulfill their own ends rather than those of another. [End Page 146]

Aristotle's desire to separate the master/slave relation from other forms of rule springs from the dire political consequences of confusing them. In the Nicomachean Ethics we are told that kingship is perverted into tyranny when the king pursues his own ends to the exclusion of those of his subjects. The subjects of such a king, following the logic of the Politics, would be transformed into slaves, serving the ends of their ruler rather than their own. Equally, a king degenerates into a tyrant when the legitimacy by which he rules is carnal rather than intellectual. As Aquinas comments, "in human government disorder results from a man being set in authority, not on account of his excelling intelligence, but because he has usurped the government by bodily force, or has been appointed to rule through motives of sensual affection...." ¹⁶ In Milton's work this Aristotelian concept of natural slavery mediates between subjective and objective politics. For Milton a natural slave is one whose body rules his mind: such a person pursues pleasures of the senses rather than those of the intellect and thus fails to attain the end proper to human beings. This signals his slavish disposition, since to be a slave is to serve an end which is not proper to oneself but alterior and thus incites (and even deserves) subjection to tyrannous authority.

Milton's argument for divorce, like his later argument for the right to depose a tyrant, is based upon Aristotle's teleology. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he offers a conventional Aristotelian anatomy of marriage:

... the material cause of matrimony is man and woman; the Author and efficient, God and their consent, the internal Form and the soul of this relation, is conjugal love arising from a mutual fitnes to the final causes of wedlock, help and society in Religion, Civil and Domestic conversation, which includes as an inferior end the fulfilling of natural desire, and specifical increase. ¹⁷

The primary end of marriage is spiritual "conversation." Where such conversation is impossible, the marriage is void by definition, since "[a]ll Ordinances are establisht in thir end" (DDD, II, 623) and "no cov'nant whatsoever obliges against the main end both of it self, and of the parties cov'nanting" (DDD, II, 245). The Anglicans, according to Milton, reveal their carnality through their belief that the proper end of marriage is procreation, which leads them to allow divorce on grounds of adultery or non-consummation but not of psychological incompatibility, since "he who affirms adultery to be the highest breach, affirms the bed to be the highest end of mariage, which is in truth a grosse and borish opinion" (DDD, II, 269). This carnality explains why the established church exalts the [End Page 147] civil power of the monarch to spiritual preeminence. It also clearly indicates that the prelates are incapable of conceiving of any other power relationship than that between master and slave. As we have seen, the imposition of the master/slave relation onto that of ruler and subject is Aristotle's definition of tyranny, and Milton believes that carnally-minded people must always think in terms of tyranny and slavery. As he asks in Tetrachordon: "What is this, besides tyranny, but to turn nature upside down, to make both religion, and the minde of man wait upon the slavish errands of the body...." ¹⁸ To subordinate the spirit to the flesh is to make the mind "a servant of its own vassall" (Tetrachordon, II, 598). Like Aristotle, Milton extrapolates a theory of subjective politics from the master/slave relation, explaining the reactionary views of those whose minds are distorted by "a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within" as follows: "being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern'd to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves" (TKM, III, 190). Milton's politics depend upon this sense of internal servitude, the idea that people cannot be free politically while they remain "slaves within doors," serving an improper, because carnal, telos. Thus far, then, his thinking is in accordance with the political tenets of Aristotle, which provide the theoretical foundations of classical republicanism.

For a mind trained in Christian theology, however, the concept of natural slavery would also evoke the Pauline contrast between the bondage of the law and the freedom of grace--the dichotomy upon which Protestant antinomianism would construct its argument. The enslavements of the Israelites in Egypt and Babylon and their liberations from these servitudes provide Paul with the typological figures through which he conveys the relationship of the old to the new covenant. The key text here is John 8:34-36:

.... Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever commiteth sin is the servant of sin.
And the servant abideth not in the house forever: but the Son abideth ever.
If the Son therefore shall make ye free, ye shall be free indeed. ¹⁹

As in Aristotle a sharp distinction is drawn here between the authority of a master over a servant and that of a father over a son. The former is analogous to the condition of mankind subjected to sin, and therefore in need of the coercive law of Moses, while the latter is appropriate for redeemed mankind, whose liberation from the flesh frees them from external compulsion. In Galatians 4:22-24, 29-31 Paul applies his typological hermeneutics to the story from Genesis: [End Page 148]

For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a free-woman.
But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh: but he of the freewoman was by promise.
Which things are an allegory, for these are the two covenants ...
........................................
But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now.
Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.
So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.

Paul's typology thus firmly associates the old, fleshly dispensation with slavery and the new, spiritual dispensation with freedom, and Milton frequently endorses this association, for example, in the Christian Doctrine: "Constraint and slavery are as inseparable from the law as liberty is from the gospel." ²⁰ In Tetrachordon he invokes Paul's epistle to the Ephesians to show that the reference to man and woman becoming "one flesh" in Genesis should not be taken literally, as canon law assumes: "there was never a more spiritual mystery then this Gospel taught us under the terms of body and flesh; yet nothing less intended then that wee should stick there" (Tetrachordon, II, 606). In the Pauline tradition Milton reminds us, "one flesh" means "one minde, as well as one body" (Tetrachordon, II, 610).

Paul depicts the tyranny of the flesh over the spirit as simultaneously subjective (the internal dominance of carnal desire) and objective (the external "oppression" of the seed of Sarah by the seed of Hagar). In Protestant exegesis of Paul this position constantly teeters on the brink of antinomianism. In his Commentary on Galatians Martin Luther deduces his doctrine of justification by faith alone from this Pauline division between the flesh and the spirit. Luther identifies works with the flesh and faith with the spirit: "the flesh or old man must be coupled with the law and works: the spirit or new man must be joined with the promise of God and his mercy." ²¹ This opposition between the carnally-minded and the spiritually-minded could be taken to imply that the elect were subject to no law, and during the English revolution it was often invoked to advocate the millennial rule of the saints on earth.

This reminds us that their many similarities should not lead us to believe that the fusion of Aristotle and Paul was a straightforward matter. In particular [End Page 149 the ways in which they state the opposition between slavery and freedom have widely divergent political implications. The neo-Pauline distinction between the elect and the reprobate could be extrapolated to justify not only the chiliastic rule of the saints but also an antinomian view of law and personal morality. Against this there is the Aristotelian rule of virtue, as exemplified in the Roman republic and revived by the civic humanists of Renaissance Italy. The traditional view of Milton is that he leaned towards the former but was prevented by class or temperament from drawing the logical political conclusions from his theological antinomianism. ²² This approach has recently been challenged by Skinner, Norbrook, and others, who present Milton as an anglicizer of Italian republicanism, albeit one whose humanism is tainted by apocalyptic overtones. Most critics have, naturally enough, explored these issues on the terrain of Milton's overtly political works. However, given the intimate relationship Milton perceives between the condition of the individual character and the political health of the state, it is surely worthwhile to turn our attention to the relatively neglected divorce pamphlets. We will find there an intensive and detailed meditation on the politics of character, which blends classical and Christian arguments into the form which they retain in Milton's later theories of church and state politics.

III. The divorce tracts transpose the central question raised by the revolution--how do we know who is "best fit to rule"?--onto the domestic sphere. Like the later treatises on government, they are concerned above all with the question of how to differentiate between "good" people and the rest, and their main argument is that the distinguishing characteristic of the "good" is the possession of a spiritual and free, rather than a fleshly and servile, consciousness. Throughout the controversy Milton is concerned that his readers should not make the mistake of thinking the issue merely private. He goes out of his way to emphasize the wider political implications of his subject. The Doctrine and Discipline announces that "no effect of tyranny can sit more heavily on the Common-wealth, then this houshold unhappiness on the family. And farewell all hope of true Reformation in the state, while such an evil as this lies undiscern'd or unregarded in the house" (DDD, II, 229-30). A man trapped in such a marriage will be "dead to the Common-wealth" (DDD, II, 632), because "as a whole [End Page 150] people is in proportion to an ill government, so is one man to an ill marriage" (DDD, II, 229).

In these works, then, Milton carefully constructs an anatomy of the "servile" mind, which he attributes simultaneously to his polemical opponents and to the hypothetical "unfit consort" in an unhappy marriage. It is an amalgam of sensuality, literalism, legalism, and idolatry--mental tendencies which are united through their orientation towards the flesh as opposed to the spirit. Milton repeatedly claims that such tendencies are "slavish," and that their possessors are natural slaves, guided by "abject and servil principles" (DDD, II, 223). When a virtuous man finds himself wedded to such a partner, the absolute disparity between the spouses' psychological status of itself confers the right to divorce. It has been suggested that the divorce tracts lack a coherent argument and that this causes Milton to lapse into mere personal abuse. In fact, however, his seemingly personal remarks are intended to emphasize the sensuality, thus the servility and the reactionary politics of antagonists like More and the "Serving-man" of Colasterion.

Milton notes that the established church's canon law allows divorce for physical adultery while forbidding it for psychological incompatibility, or "spiritual adultery." It thus assumes that the primary end of marriage is physical reproduction, rather than spiritual "conversation." This position, according to Milton, privileges the flesh over the spirit and so reverses the Aristotelian and Pauline ethical hierarchies. The church's servile attitude in the face of monarchical tyranny is therefore of a piece with and a logical consequence of its approach to divorce. The prelatical doctrine involves a literalist or, in Pauline terminology, a "fleshly" reading of Christ's permission to divorce in case of "fornication," which word it understands in a narrowly physical sense. The preference for the literal over the figurative, or "spiritual," significance thus neatly coincides with the inability to perceive a spiritual valence to the notion of adultery. It also reveals the established church's legalism, as the prelates interpret the Gospel as more rigid and constricting than the Law itself.

Milton's contemporaries interpreted his uncompromising assertion of the spirit over the letter as antinomianism. The Doctrine and Discipline was read as an argument for "divorce at pleasure" and thus as rationalizing and encouraging sexual "license." Its author was assumed to be one who believed God's elect were free, not just from the civil and ceremonial law of the Mosaic dispensation but also from its moral law, and indeed from law in general. As his accusers proclaimed, Milton's pronounced emphasis on the spirit over the letter does indeed draw upon antinomian typology, but he is extremely careful to distinguish his position from that of the sectaries. In fact he points out that the issue of divorce is actually in all of Scripture the least amenable to an antinomian interpretation. The antinomian appeal is always from the bondage of the law to the freedom of the gospel. On the matter of divorce, however, and only on that [End Page 151] matter, the gospel is more restrictive than the law. Deuteronomy 24:1 allows the Israelites to put away a wife for any "uncleanness" they may find in her, by which, according to Milton "is refer'd to the mind, as well as to the body" (DDD, II, 244). But when the Pharisees tempt Jesus by asking his opinion of this doctrine, he answers,

... Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put
away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.
And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for
fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery ...

(Matt.19:8-9)

So uniquely, and from an antinomian perspective incomprehensibly, Christ seems to lay down the law, restricting human freedom more severely than does the law itself. Milton resolves this paradox by criticizing the Pharisees' interpretation of the law. They read the "uncleanness" of the mind to mean any fault in the woman: "This law the Pharisees depraving, extended to any slight contentious cause whatsoever" (DDD, II, 326). In fact, however, a careful reader will see that the text is far from endorsing fancy or whim: "That wee may not esteem this law to be a meer authorizing of license, as the Pharisees took it, Moses adds the reason, for some uncleanness found" (DDD, II, 620). Milton claims that "uncleanness" refers to an absolute, objective difference between the partners. In De Doctrina he stresses that Deuteronomy only applies "if the cause is a real one, not a mere fiction." ²³ Because they do not understand "uncleanness" in this way but read it as a legal sanction for license, the Pharisees assume that Deuteronomy allows them divorce at pleasure. This legalistic libertinism is the "hardness of your hearts" by which Christ explains the Deuteronomic law--Deuteronomy will seem to license divorce at pleasure only to those who are "hard-hearted," or under the law, and who will thus consider themselves bound to commit license when a literalist interpretation of the law demands it. In the case of divorce, then, legalism is seen to result in antinomianism. ²⁴

The apparent contradiction whereby the gospel seems stricter than the law is thus resolved when it is understood that law and license are mutually determining. Licentiousness is not the opposite of legalism but its reverse and inseparable accomplice (an insight paralleled in Areopagitica, where "licensed" publication is the opposite of true liberty). License in fact presupposes the existence of external constraint, from which the beneficiary of license is temporarily excused, whereas true liberty recognizes no such exterior compulsion. Antinomianism, [End Page 152] then, is not freedom from the law but another form of servitude to it. In fact the law brings license into being. Thus Milton remarks of one who would "bind the disunions of complaining nature in chains together, and curb them with a canon bit, tis he that commits all the whordom and adulterie, which himselfe adjudges" (DDD, II, 334). He asks whether it is not likely that Anabaptism, Familism and Antinomianism "proceed not partly, if not chiefly, from the restraint of some lawfull liberty, which ought to be giv'n men, and is deny'd them" (DDD, II, 278), and claims that if the divorce law is relaxed, many will be "regain'd from obscure and giddy sects" and "dissolute and brutish license" (DDD, II, 355). The Pharisaical and antinomian readings coincide: if the Old Testament really advocates divorce at pleasure, then Moses must be classed "among the Ana-baptists; as one who to a holy nation ... gave laws breaking the bonds of marriage to inordinate lust" (Tetrachordon, II, 583). The matter of divorce is of central importance because the exegetical labor it compels lays bare this secret complicity.

In Sonnets XI and XII the Pharisaical error is repeated by Milton's Presbyterian enemies, whose legalism makes them the real antinomians. They

... bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
License they mean when they cry liberty;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.

The Presbyterians assume that Milton argues for "license" because, like the Pharisees, they believe that Deuteronomy's "uncleanness" means any subjective fault in the woman. In contrast Milton is arguing for "liberty" to divorce when there is an absolute, objective, irreconcilable difference between the partners. The fact that his opponents miss this distinction is testimony to their own slavish characters and thus neatly confirms Milton's belief in such objective mental incompatibilities between the "wise and good" and the rest of humanity. Only a good man will be able to employ a spiritual hermeneutics which will lead him past the narrowly literal interpretation of Scripture; only a good man will be able to recognize the existence of absolute differences between good and bad people (the kind of difference which alone justifies a divorce); only a good man will thus be able to distinguish liberty from license; therefore only a good man can be free from the law. In private as in public life, only a good man is fit to rule.

IV. Milton was naturally infuriated by the charge of libertinism. In fairness, however, it is easy to see how the subtleties of his position eluded his audience. He does after all argue for divorce on the grounds of psychological incompatibility. How, his opponents demanded, can this be distinguished from simple divorce at pleasure? The author of the Answer to The Doctrine and Discipline remarks on [End Page 153]

the inconveniencies that would follow if divorce were suffered, for this disagreement of disposition and unfitnesse of minde, as for example, it would be an occasion to the corrupt heart of man without any just cause at all, meerely for to satisfie his lust, to pretend causes of divorce where there is none; and to make quarrels and live discontentedly with his Wife, to the end he might have a pretence for to put her away: who sees not, how many thousands of lustfull and libidinous men would be parting from their Wives every week and marrying others.... ²⁵

In other words Milton's opponents denied that there could be an objective criterion of subjective incompatibility. How, they demanded, might one distinguish such a criterion from purely personal desire and antinomian "license"?

The Aristotelian response is teleological. Milton points out that "no ordinance human or from heav'n can binde against the good of man; so that to keep them strictly against that end, is all one with to breake them" (Tetrachordon, II, 588). The Pauline response is typological. In Matthew 19 Christ forbids divorce except for "fornication" and Milton's adversaries interpret this literally. But Milton says that it must be interpreted figuratively, to include spiritual as well as fleshly infidelity. To allow divorce for the sins of the flesh but not for spiritual differences is to reveal a carnal consciousness which in turn bespeaks a slavish mentality. This "canonicall tyranny" (DDD, II, 238) makes marriage itself into a "tyrannesse" (DDD, II, 277), who condemns people to "the ignoblest, and the lowest slavery that a human shape can be put to" (II, 626). Her victims must bear a "servil yoke" (DDD, II, 599), and "grind in the mill of a servile and undelighted copulation" (DDD, III, 258) with a "spiritles mate" (DDD, II, 251) who is herself figured as an amalgam of idolatry and carnality--"an image of earth and fleam" (DDD, III, 254)--and so suffer the dreadful fate of becoming "a living soule bound to a dead corps" (DDD, II, 326).

Milton assumes that literalism is itself a form of fleshliness, and therefore of servility. He had already connected literalism, servility, legalism, and idolatry in Of Reformation:

Hence men came to scan the Scriptures, by the Letter, and in the Covenant of our Redemption, magnifi'd the external signs more then the quickning power of the Spirit, and yet looking on them through their own guiltinesse with a Servile feare, and finding as little comfort, or rather terror from them againe, they knew not how to hide their Slavish approach to Gods behests by them not understood, not worthily receav'd, [End Page 154] but by cloaking their Servile crouching to all Religious Presentments, sometimes lawfull, sometimes Idolatrous, under the name of humility (Of Reformation, I, 522).

In The Doctrine and Discipline he inveighs against "alphabeticall [i.e., literalist] servility" (DDD, II, 280) and "that letter-bound servility of the Canon Doctors" (DDD, II, 338), which must issue in "literal [i.e. both literalist and literal] bondage" (DDD, II, 715). In contrast Christ's oblique, figurative way of speaking is connected to mastery and sovereignty: Jesus speaks "like a maister, scattering the heavenly grain of his doctrin like pearle heer and there, which requires a skilfull and laborious gatherer" (DDD, II, 338). His opponents' reading techniques thus reveal their inadequacy to understand the meaning of liberty--a recurrent motif in all of Milton's pamphlets is the rhetorical division of his audience into those fit to understand his message, and those so sunk in the flesh as to be insensible. ²⁶ The author of the Answer, for instance, admits his mystification at Milton's claim that true marriage is spiritual not fleshly, "we desire the next time you write, to tell us the meaning of this fit conversing soule. We have heard that Angels converse with one another as they are Spirits; but for Husbands and Wives ... we know no conversing with one another, but what is by words or actions" (An Answer, 32). This materialism, for Milton, is self-refuting, for it displays the Answerer's unmitigated sensuality and therefore his natural servility. In response Colasterion again divides his audience into two:

All persons of gentle breeding (I say gentle, though the Barrow grunt at the word) I know will apprehend and bee satisfy'd in what I spake, how unpleasing and discontenting the society of the body must needs be between those whose mindes cannot bee sociable. But what should a man say more to a snout in this pickle, what language can be degenerat anough? (Col., II, 747)

The Answerer, who Milton is delighted to discover is quite literally "an actual Serving-man" (Col., II, 726), believes that only physical adultery justifies divorce. This is because he has a "fleshly" consciousness which blinds him to "the gentlest ends of mariage." His carnality leads him into a literalist reading of Scripture, and this indicates his slavish disposition, which makes him eager to submit to the tyranny of canon law: [End Page 155]

how should hee, a Servingman by nature and by function ... ever come to know, or feel within himself, what the meaning is of gentle?... Yet altogether without art sure hee is not; for who could have devis'd to give us more briefly a better description of his own Servility? (Col., II,741)

The personal abuse of the theological and political tracts retains this rigorous thematic unity, focussing clearly on the slavish nature of the opponents. In the first Defence, for example, Salmasius is addressed thus: "You knight of the lash, concealer of slavery's blemishes, eternal shame even to your own land, you are so foul a procurer and hireling pimp of slavery that even the lowest slaves on any auction block should hate and despise you" (DEP 1, IV, 461). Milton thus refers us back to the politics of character. To be good is to be free; to be sinful is to be a slave. All Moses allows, he says, is that "if any good and peaceable man should discover some helples disagreement or dislike of mind or body... he might dismiss her" (DDD, II, 306). What differentiates the righteous divorce for "helples disagreement" from licentious divorce for "any slight contentious cause" is simply the character of the man who divorces: "God intended not license heer to every humor, but to such remediles greevances as might move a good, and honest and faithfull man then to divorce" (Tetrachordon, II, 621). The distinguishing factor does not lie in the nature of the offence for which one may divorce, which may include "any notable disobedience, or intractable cariage of the wife to the husband" and even "the love of earthly things, or worldly pleasures" (Tetrachordon, II, 672). It is purely a matter of character. Thus for a bad, servile man the Mosaic dispensation will indeed mean license:

Now that many licentious and hard-hearted men took hold of this Law to cloak their bad purposes, is nothing strange to beleeve. And these were they, not for whom Moses made the Law, God forbid, but whose hardnes of heart taking ill advantage by this law he held it better to suffer ... rather then good men should loose their just and lawfull priviledge of remedy.... (DDD, II, 307)

As Milton argues in Areopagitica, even if many people are corrupted by exposure to indecent material, "God sure esteems the growth and compleating of one vertuous person, more than the restraint of ten vitious." ²⁷ All should be free to read, just as all should be free to divorce; many will abuse this liberty and turn it into license, but the good man will use this temptation as material to further augment his virtue.

Just as Milton's conviction that the "good" should exercise political sovereignty transcends any attachment to particular forms of government, so his conception [End Page 156] of what makes a man "good" (the cultivation of a spiritual rather than a fleshly consciousness) overrides his loyalty to any particular body of theology. As we have seen, he is quite prepared to borrow the charismatic vocabulary of the antinomians even though he is fundamentally opposed to their basic precepts. In similar fashion he is not afraid to draw upon the humanist psychology of civic republicanism, despite the difficulties of assimilating it to the Protestant millennialism which he also invokes. He feels confident in attempting this feat because his reading of civic republicanism stresses the Aristotelian idea that carnality is natural slavery--the same idea which appeals to him in radical Protestantism. At the beginning of The Doctrine and Discipline Milton predicts that his case will meet with

two severall oppositions: the one from those who having sworn themselves to long custom and the letter of the text, will not out of the road: the other from those whose grosse and vulgar apprehensions conceit but low of matrimonial purposes, and in the work of male and female think they have all. (DDD, II, 240)

As the argument develops, however, it becomes clear that these two oppositions, literalism and sensuality, are not "severall" at all. Rather, they are two aspects of the single mental tendency to carnality, the objectification of what is properly spiritual.

Although they are incidental to my argument here, there are also philosophical implications behind the divorce tracts' negotiation between subject and object. It has often been argued, mainly on the evidence of De Doctrina and Paradise Lost V, 469-78, that Milton was a committed monist. He believed, it is claimed, that matter and spirit, and thus the soul and the body, were not ontologically opposed or even distinct, but that they were aspects of a single substance, a kind of animated matter. The divorce tracts, however, pose a significant problem for such readings, for they rest their case on a hierarchical opposition between matter and spirit. Consequently, some critics view them as reflecting a confused and immature stage in Milton's development towards the settled and consistent monism of his mature work. Denis Saurat established the pattern, speculating that Milton's biographical circumstances induced in him an instinctive, emotional awareness of the continuity between body and soul which is evident in the divorce tracts but not coherently theorized until his later work. ²⁸ R. A. Shoaf has argued that Milton advocates a unitary "duality" in which opposites interpenetrate, rather than a dichotomized "dualism" which assumes fixed polarities. He admits, however, that The Doctrine and Discipline's promotion of divorce as the primal principle of creation appears "to let dualism return.... [End Page 157] Surely divorce is dichotomy and dichotomizing?" ²⁹ Any attempt to subsume Milton's dualism beneath an overarching monism must at the least be complicated by such references as The Doctrine and Discipline's to the "divorcing command," II, 273, which initiates creation, and by the divorce tracts' emphatic, vigorous re-statement of the opposition between spirit and flesh. James G. Turner finds that the tracts' preoccupation with this hierarchy leads them to advance "not a monist fusion of body and soul, but a sharp reminder of their separation." ³⁰ On the other hand, he also remarks that "here and there we glimpse a different attitude, one which ... anticipates the 'spiritual monism' of Paradise Lost," and he therefore concludes that "Milton is here torn between materialist monism and hierarchic dualism." ³¹

V. As a final example of Milton's idiosyncratic combination of republicanism with Protestantism, let us consider the dramatic expansion undergone in the divorce tracts by the concept of "idolatry." Of course Scripture frequently connects religious and sexual infidelity, as in the cases of the idolatrous wives of Solomon and Samson and the Wisdom of Solomon's proclamation that "the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication" (14:12). As we have seen, Milton is determined that physical adultery should not be the sole grounds for divorce. He considers "whether Idolatry or Adultery be the greatest violation of marriage" and concludes on Aristotelian grounds that it must be the former, since "[i]dolatry smites directly against the prime end [of marriage]" (DDD, II, 269). In Tetrachordon's commentary on I Corinthians Paul's association of monotheism with monogamy provides verification that "adultery" is to be understood as spiritual and figurative, not physical and literal, "if the husband must bee as Christ to the Wife, then must the wife bee as the Church to her husband. If ther bee a perpetual contrariety of minde in the Church toward Christ, Christ himselfe threat'ns to divorce such a spouse, and hath oft don it" (Tetrachordon, II, 732). According to Milton's gloss, Paul's declaration that a Christian is "not under bondage" when married to an idolator sanctions divorce, for "to have idolatries and superstitions ever before his eyes ... must needs by bondage to a christian" (Tetrachordon, II, 688). Furthermore, the Protestant Reformation and the English Revolution are effectively divorces, whereby a contract is abrogated in case of idolatry. In The Doctrine and Discipline he maintains that "a right beleever ought to divorce an idolatrous heretick" (DDD, II, 264-65), lest she "pervert him to superstition by her enticing sorcery" (DDD, II, 260). Idolatry is the iconographic equivalent of hermeneutical literalism, and [End Page 158] opposition to idolatry is expressed through a vocabulary of grace and spirit which has strong antinomian overtones. A literalist interpretation of Christ's prohibition of divorce is idolatrous, in precisely the same way that a literalist reading of His instructions at the Last Supper produces the doctrine of transubstantiation--the paradigmatic instance of idolatry for Protestants. Taken literally, Jesus's words on divorce "are as much against plain equity, and the mercy of religion, as those words of Take, eat, this is my body, elementally understood, are against nature and sense" (DDD, II, 325).

But Milton is not content with the literal sense of idolatry. ³² For those who have ears to hear, Paul's concept of bondage will encompass any kind of carnal consciousness: "the Apostle is evident anough, we are not under bondage, trusting that he is writing to those who are not ignorant what bondage is ..." (Tetrachordon, II, 690). Milton uses Paul's typology to argue that the Old Testament prohibitions of literal idolatry must be interpreted by Christians in "spiritual" terms: "although the firmer legall pollution be now don off, yet there is a spirituall contagion in Idolatry as much to be shun'd ..." (DDD, II, 262). We should recall here that Christ allows for divorce only in cases of "fornication." Having interpreted "fornication" in its figurative Biblical sense of "idolatry" in The Doctrine and Discipline, Milton extends the figure much further in Tetrachordon. "Fornication," we now find,

signifies the apparent alienation of mind not to idolatry (which may seem to answer the act of adultery) but farre on this side, to any point of will worship, though to the true God; some times it notes the love of earthly things, or worldly pleasures though in a right beleever, some times the least suspicion of unwitting idolatry (Tetrachordon, II, 672). ³³ [End Page 159]

"Fornication" is no longer simply idolatry, which stands in relation to monotheism as adultery does to monogamy. Now it designates the entire orientation of "fleshly" consciousness, conceived as an "alienation of mind" which renders its adherents utterly unfit for the society of the "good." Such a mind automatically converts the phenomena of the material world into idols, and it is thus unsurprising that in Milton's clinching argument "the prostrate worshippers of custom" (The Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce, II, 439) will lose sight of the proper end of marriage, and fetishize the institution itself: "... to injoyn the indissoluble keeping of marriage found unfit against the good of man both soul and body, as hath been evidenc't, is to make an Idol of marriage" (DDD, II, 276), so that the institution will be "worshipt like some Indian deity" (DDD, II, 277). In the capacious concept of idolatry Milton's blend of Aristotle's teleology with Paul's aniconicity becomes utterly seamless: "the prime ends of mariage, are the whole strength and validity therof, without which matrimony is like an Idol, nothing in the world" (Tetrachordon, II, 628-29).

It thus seems clear that Milton's distinction between servile and independent ways of thinking depends upon the extended valence he gives to the notion of carnality, through which concept he reconciles the contradictions between classical and Christian influences on his thought. In Aristotelian terms the opposition is between the free and the servile; in Pauline terms it is between the spiritual and the fleshly. The latter terms of these polarities indicate a state of mind in which spirit is systematically reduced to matter, and the subject to an object. For Milton the servile and the fleshly are coterminus, as are the free and the spiritual to which they stand in opposition. His opponents were confused by his insistence that this distinction is "natural," or objective, despite the fact that it is simultaneously "spiritual," or subjective. They failed to grasp that Milton's purpose was precisely to transcend the polarity between subject and object, by demonstrating the inseparable fusion between the person and the polis. And perhaps the current interest in "identity politics," with its conviction that "the personal is political," indicates that his project still retains some pertinence.

Lehigh University.

Notes

1. See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627-1660 (Cambridge, 1999); William Kolbrener: Milton's Warring Angels: A Study in Critical Engagements (Cambridge, 1997); David Armitage et al. (ed.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1996); Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-60 (Yale, 1994).

2. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 373-74.

3. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, tr. J. E. C. Welldon (Buffalo, N.Y., 1987), I, VII, 24. Subsequent references will be to this edition.

4. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 58.

5. Nigel Smith, "Popular Republicanism in the 1650's: John Streater's 'heroick me-chanicks,' " in D. Armitage et al. (ed.), Milton and Republicanism, 144.

6. Augustine (The City of God, tr. Gerald G. Walsh S.J. et al., ed. Vernon J. Bourke [New York, 1958], X, 21, 469), figured the opposition in terms of servitude and freedom: "how can a man who removes himself from the overlordship of God who made him and goes into the service of wicked spirits be just?"

7. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, 1959), IV, i, 427. This point is frequently reiterated: "It is neither fitting nor proper for a man to be king unless he be far superior to all the rest.... Everyone agrees that it is most improper for all to be slaves of one who is their equal, often their inferior, and usually a fool" (IV, i, 366-67).

8. Defence of the English People 1, IV, ii, 680; hereafter DEP 1. See also Milton, Commonplace Book, I, 420; "the Romans who after their infancy were ripe for a more free government than monarchy, beeing in a manner all fit to be K[ing]s. afterward growne unruly, and impotent with overmuch prosperity were either for thire profit, or thire punishment fit to be curb'd with a lordly and dreadfull monarchy; w[hi]ch was the error of the noble Brutus and Cassius who felt themselves of spirit to free a nation but consider'd not that the nation was not fit to be free, whilst forgetting thire old justice and fortitude which was made to rule, they became slaves to thire owne ambition and luxury."

9. Paradise Lost, in Merrit Y. Hughes (ed.), Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York, 1957), XII, 90-95; hereafter PL. All quotations from Milton's poetry are from this edition. See also PL XII, 97-101.

10. Stephen M. Fallon, "The Metaphysics of Milton's Divorce Tracts," in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Miltons' Prose, eds. David Lowenstein and James G. Turner (Cambridge, 1990), 69.

11. Milton, Of Reformation, I, 572.

12. Aristotle, Politics, tr. Carnes Lord (Chicago, 1984).

13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. W. D. Ross, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, 1984), II, 1834.

14. The Internet Modern History Sourcebook: http:www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1581dutch.html (retrieved 4 July 2000).

15. Aquinas: Sentences IV, d.44, q.1., a.3. c, cited in Winston Ashley, The Theory of Natural Slavery According to Aristotle and St. Thomas (Ph.D. diss., Notre Dame, 1941), 5.

16. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III, 81. In Ashley, 39.

17. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, II, 608 (hereafter DDD).

18. Tetrachordon, II, 599.

19. See also Romans 7:14: "I am carnal, sold under sin."

20. Christian Doctrine, VI, 535.

21. Martin Luther, "Commentary on Galatians," Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York, 1961), 103.

22. E.g., Arthur Barker, "Christian Liberty in Milton's Divorce Pamphlets," Modern Language Review, 35 (1940), 153-61; Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1941); A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (Chicago, 1951); Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1978); Timothy J. O'Keefe, Milton and the Pauline Tradition (Washington D.C., 1982), 99-162; Stanley Fish, "Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton's Areopagitica," in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, eds. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York, 1987), 234-54; and James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford, 1987), 92-93.

23. Milton, De Doctrina, VI, 374.

24. For a different reading of Milton's typology in these tracts, see Jason P. Rosenblatt, "Milton's Chief Rabbi," Milton Studies, 24 (1988), 43-71. Rosenblatt sees Milton as advocating the Mosaic dispensation over the Christian in The Doctrine and Discipline.

25. An Answer to a Book, intituled The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (London, 1644), 5, reprinted in William Riley Parker, Milton's Contemporary Reputation (Columbus, Ohio, 1960), 170-217.

26. Here he follows Matthew 19:11: "All men cannot receive all sayings," which Milton cites in Tetrachordon, II, 679. As Joseph Wittreich notes, "What distinguishes Milton from his epic predecessors is the fact that his 'fit' audience is finally a moral rather than a social category," " 'The Crown of Eloquence': The Figure of the Orator in Milton's Prose Works," in Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst, Mass., 1974), 47.

27. Milton, Areopagitica, II, 528.

28. Milton: Man and Thinker (New York, 1935), 57-58.

29. R. A. Shoaf, Milton: Poet of Duality. A Study of Semiosis in the Poetry and the Prose (New Haven, 1985), 26.

30. One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford, 1987), 198.

31. Ibid., 199-200.

32. Cedric C. Brown (Criticism, 35 [1993], 419-39, 425) has remarked on "Milton's wide sense of incompatibility leading to divorce, where unfitness of spirit in the wife can be treated as if it were a case of idolatry in the wife of a true believer," "Milton and the Idolatrous Consort." Lana Cable ("Coupling Logic and Milton's Doctrine of Divorce," Milton Studies, 15 [1981], 143-59, 157) observes that "Milton spurns the definition that says sexual adultery or 'fornication' is the highest breach of marriage, and instead argues that the highest breach of an individual marriage--whatever that breach might be--is 'fornication' " ; and Jason P. Rosenblatt ("Milton's Chief Rabbi," Milton Studies, 24 [1988], 43-71, 60) contends that in rabbinic readings the Scriptural words "uncleanness" and "fornication" "which appear at first to restrict the grounds of divorce to unchastity and sexual offence, widen their meaning to include any kind of obnoxious behavior."

33. De Doctrina, VI, 378: "... the word 'fornication,' if it is considered in the light of the idiom of oriental languages, does not mean only adultery. It can mean also either what is called 'some shameful thing' (i.e., the lack of some quality which might reasonably be required in a wife) Deut.xxiv.1, or it can signify anything which is found to be persistently at variance with love, fidelity, help and society (i.e., with the original institution of marriage)."

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