Milton’s ‘Divorcive’ Liberties: Ecclesiastical, Domestic or Private, Civil and Cosmological
Howard, W. Scott
Early Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (May, 2004)
Abstract
In his pamphlets from the 1640s – in particular: “Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline” (1641), “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce” (1643/4) and “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” (1649)-Milton’s formulation of liberty resonates most strongly when placed within a cultural context of early seventeenth century debates about covenant theology and commonwealth government. Milton neither separates private from public realms nor simply elides their divisibility, but posits a rather paradoxical, inverse formulation: that domestic liberty, as the nexus of both ecclesiastical and civil liberties, is always already socially contingent. This epistemological inversion charges Milton’s ‘species’ of liberty with transgressive energy and consequently grants the imagined subject of the early prose tracts increasing authority to reform public laws of custom on the basis of private apprehensions of unwritten divine laws of grace and charity as well as in accordance with the individual’s apposite faculties of conscience and reason. I argue in this essay, therefore, that Miltonic liberty is inherently divorcive-free, that is, to overturn institutional laws that impede the subject’s ability to engender and engage the inward, civil implications of their domestic liberty. Milton’s early political tracts hinge upon (and do not resolve) this paradox of irremediable private agency and irrevocable civil duty. Paradise Lost, however, offers the most ambitious articulation of Milton’s ideas touching upon cosmological liberty, which in turn provides an elegant solution to the aporia at the heart of the prose works that devise and defend an epistemology of the divorcive liberties.
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