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great protagonist in Christendom’ of divorce by mutual consent3 ignores Bucer, and may seriously underestimate the unpublished tradition which Ranters, Muggletonians and Quakers inherited from the Familists, of marriage and divorce by mutual declaration before the congregation.4 Milton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 another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe
(IX. 908–16)
— with that cry still ringing in our ears, how can we take seriously Milton’s attempt to restore traditional male superiority by blandly observing that Adam was ‘fondly overcome by female charm’? Milton’s heart here has reasons that his reason does not know:1 as Empson realized, the emotion underlying the poem is far more subversive than the ostensible argument. Milton went beyond Genesis when he made Adam ask for a helpmeet, and proclaim the equality of the sexes to the Creator himself:
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Given and received
(VIII. 383–6)
After the Fall, it was Eve who first repented and through her love saved Adam (X. 909–46). The contradiction between the traditional sexual morality to which Milton pays lip-service and the morality of Adam’s heart has its analogies with the division in Milton himself between the second and third cultures. Both in the divorce tracts and in the De Doctrina he is extraordinarily ‘un-Puritan’ and broad-minded about ‘casual adultery’. He is contrasting mere physical adultery with the graver offence of spiritual adultery. But few Puritans would have dismissed the former as ‘but a transient injury’, ‘soon repented, soon amended’, which can be forgiven ‘once and again’.2 (Did Mary have something to forgive which took place during her absence?) Edwards would have seen here confirmation that Milton was a libertine. When Raphael blushingly admitted that angels interpenetrate, he said nothing about monogamy. Milton is defending natural sexuality against traditional Puritanism.
Our maker bids increase: who bids abstain
But our destroyer?
(P.L. IV. 748–9)
Abstinence as such is no virtue. Milton in this one point is with the Ranters. After describing Eve’s nakedness, Milton attacked ‘dishonest shame, … sin-bred, … mere show of seeming pure’ (P.L. IV. 313–16). Telling us that Adam and Eve made love before the Fall, he added:
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure,