seem stricter than God’s law in the Old Testament, we must approach them very carefully and with an assumption that they do not mean what they appear to. Perhaps ‘fornication’ means something less precise than we would think: perhaps something more like ‘a wife’s constant contrariness, faithlessness and disobedience’, ‘a constant alienation and disaffection of mind’. ‘Uncleanness’ may mean ‘any defect, annoyance, or ill quality in nature, which to be joined with makes life tedious’. So Milton doubted not ‘with one gentle stroking to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the life of man’.5 Since marriage is a union of minds, not merely of bodies, it must be freely entered into and freely dissoluble: the marriage contract is analogous to the church covenant, or the contract between king and people. The liberty of Christian men (and women) to live moral lives according to conscience depends on their being freed from external encumbrances. Milton’s emphasis on Christian freedom in divorce may have been the first step in his advance to Arminianism.6
Milton restored to his own satisfaction ‘that power which Christ never took from the master of the family’. The right of divorce ‘cannot belong to any civil or earthly power against the will and consent of both parties, or of the husband alone’. It was an essential part of Milton’s high conception of the dignity of man. This right of divorce applies in cases of permanent incompatibility of temperament – ‘indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind arising from a cause in nature unchangeable’, since loss of mutual solace and peace is a more important reason for divorce than ‘the accident of adultery’. ‘Marriage must give way to … any really irresistible antipathy’, Milton concluded in the De Doctrina. He never paid detailed attention to the question of women’s rights in divorce, though on the title-page of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he announced that the pamphlet was ‘to the good of both sexes’. He threw in phrases like ‘mutual consent’, and said that the law must ‘take care that the conditions of divorce be not injurious’. Nor did he consider the problem of children very deeply, though aware that they were likely to suffer from matrimonial discord. In the De Doctrina he argued that the possibility of divorce is advantageous to a woman, even if it is at the discretion of her husband.1
Milton certainly did not intend to provide ‘divorce at pleasure’, as his enemies suggested; but he laid himself open to the charge by his failure to think out the mechanics of divorce. He never determined how selfish men could be prevented from taking advantage of the freedom which Milton felt to be necessary for the elect. His main interest was to establish – re-establish, Milton would say – the rights of masters of families ‘to dispose and economize’, which in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates he saw as ‘the root and source of all liberty’.2 Subjection of wives to husbands was conventionally accepted in the seventeenth century as an image of the political subjection of peoples to rulers.3 Milton’s view that the institution of marriage can be idolized is parallel to his view that monarchy can be idolized. Both must be subordinate to the liberty of Christian men.
A curious and possibly revealing point – Milton more than once associated usury and divorce. Usury, ‘so much as is permitted by the magistrate and demanded with common equity, is neither against the Word of God nor the rule of charity’: it is right if it is entered into with the right motives of conscience. So with divorce. In the De Doctrina Christiana Milton gave ‘usury, divorce, polygamy and the like’ as matters in which the regenerate must be left free to decide for themselves according to conscience.1 The scrivener’s son approached all these matters from the point of view of the head of a business household.
In Milton’s final divorce pamphlet he advanced a more general argument. The Fall had social consequences: private property and inequality replaced universal equality, political power protected social inequality. ‘In the same manner and for the same cause … our imperfect and degenerate condition of necessity required this law [of divorce] among the rest.’ ‘In the beginning, had man continued perfect, it had been just that all things should have remained as they began to Adam and Eve’, including community of property and indissoluble marriage. ‘But who will be the man shall introduce this kind of commonwealth, as Christianity now goes ?’ The marriage of true minds is an attempt to get back behind the Fall: the marriage of incompatible minds must therefore be dissoluble because it had never been a true marriage. Forcing incompatible partners to remain together negates marriage’s potential realization of divine harmony, its recapturing of Eden. It is ‘an act of blasphemy’. ‘The world first rose out of chaos’ by God’s ‘divorcing command’: it is not for the church or the magistrate to bring chaos back again, but to renew the world ‘by the separating of unmeet consorts’.2
Milton’s ideas were not startlingly original. His emphasis on mutual solace as the sole or principal end of marriage had been anticipated by Thomas Gataker among others. To say that he was ‘the first great protagonist in Christendom’ of divorce by mutual consent3 ignores Bucer, and may seriously underestimate the unpublished tradition which Ranters, Muggletonians and Quakers inherited from the Familists, of marriage and divorce by mutual declaration before the congregation.4 Milton was putting together ideas which were under discussion among his radical contemporaries. What was new was the courage with which he faced the logical consequences of these ideas. Since marriage is not a sacrament but a civil contract, it could in Milton’s view be terminated by notification to the magistrate, though the husband should first state his case before his minister and some elders of the church in order to establish his good faith. Milton attacked both the common law’s exclusive stress on adultery as the sole ground for divorce, and the ‘cold restrictiveness of the Puritan ethic as it appeared in its extreme form among the Presbyterians’.1 A right to divorce is necessary to preserve love. ‘Places of prostitution will be less haunted, the neighbour’s bed less attempted.’2
Women may divorce their husbands for adultery or heresy, though Milton appears to think women much more likely to have the incurable temperamental defects which render marriage null. But if the divorce tracts dwell on women’s alleged defects, and on the inferiority of their position, let us recall how devastating Mary’s desertion must have seemed to the poet. Paradise Lost does something to redress the balance. Milton corrects the commentators in giving Adam’s wife the name Eve (‘mother of all living’) before the Fall, perhaps to enhance the status of sexuality and motherhood.3 The lines
Emparadised in one another’s arms,
The happier Eden,
(P.L. IV. 506–7)
go a little beyond Genesis, even if the words are Satan’s.
It is obvious to the most casual reader of Paradise Lost that there are tensions between the authoritarian male dominance proclaimed in many of the narrator’s and Raphael’s comments on the one hand, and some of Adam’s words and actions on the other. Unfallen Adam expresses ‘vehement desire’, ‘transport’, ‘passion’ in Eve’s presence (VIII. 525–31), and appears to recognize her as in some respects his superior. He describes himself as torn between his theoretical awareness of male superiority (‘For well I understand in the prime end / Of nature her the inferior’ – VIII. 540–1) and his ‘awe’ before Eve’s beauty and her ‘greatness of mind’ (VIII. 557). This is strengthened by the give-away line ‘thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise’, spoken by Raphael (VIII. 577). Milton insists that Eve is capable of intellectual conversation (VII. 48–58). And – going beyond anything in the Biblical text or the commentaries – Adam is prepared to back his judgment by preferring death with Eve not only to loneliness without her but to the society of any other woman.
How can I live without thee, how forgo
Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create
