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Milton's Inward Liberty Università degli Studi di Milano Scuola di Dottorato Humanae Litterae Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio e Letterature Straniere Comparate Dottorato di Ricerca in Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere Sezione di Anglistica XXIV ciclo Milton’s Inward Liberty A Study of Christian Liberty from the Prose to Paradise Lost L-Lin/10 Tutor: Prof. Marialuisa Bignami Giuliana Iannaccaro Edward Jones Coordinatore del Dottorato: Tesi di Dottorato di: Prof. Alessandro Costazza Filippo Falcone Anno Accademico 2010-2011 Milton’s Inward Liberty For Sandra, Miriam and Benjamin, My associate souls 2 Milton’s Inward Liberty Contents Introduction 5-13 1. Christian Liberty Towards Paradise Lost I. Pauline Christian Liberty 14-16 II. Freedom from the Slavery of Sin and Thus from the Rule of the Law 16-24 III. Adult Sonship 24-32 IV. Freedom from the Slavery of Sin and Thus from the Rule of Men 32-56 2. Christian Liberty and Paradise Lost 57-72 3. Inner Light and Christian Liberty 73-93 4. The Prison of Satan 94-108 5. Eschatology Realized I. Prelapsarian Liberty 109-115 II. Adam and Eve’s Perfectibility 115-122 III. The Separation Scene 122-134 IV. The Fall 134-140 V. The Slavery of Sin 140-148 VI. A Transmuted Lump of Futurity 148-167 Conclusion 168-170 Bibliography 171-208 Index 209-213 3 Milton’s Inward Liberty Abbreviations CM Frank A. Patterson et al (eds.), The Works of John Milton CPW Don M. Wolfe et al (eds.), The Complete Prose Works of John Milton De Doctrina De Doctrina Christiana ELH English Literary History ELR English Literary Renaissance EMLS Early Modern Literary Studies HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology JHI Journal of the History of Ideas A Journal A Journal of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences, and Labour of Love, of George Fox JMRS Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies JTS Journal of Theological Studies Marrow The Marrow of Theology MQ Milton Quarterly MS Milton Studies PL Paradise Lost PMLA Proceedings of the Modern Language Association PR Paradise Regained SA Samson Agonistes SEL Studies in English Literature THJ The Historical Journal UTQ University of Toronto Quarterly All citations of Paradise Lost are from William Kerrigan, John P. Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon’s 2007 edition. All Bible citations are taken from the Authorized Version. 4 Milton’s Inward Liberty Introduction wenty Eleven has been a year of revolutions in northern Africa and the Middle East. Rising in Tunisia, the revolutionary wave has spread through T Egypt, Libya, Syria and other countries. The common denominator of all insurgencies has been the people’s desire to shake off a long-endured yoke of tyranny which had resulted in a stagnant economy, poor life conditions and poorer public liberties. The word ‘democracy’ has become the catalyst of all aspirations. However, where the overthrowing of the dictator has succeeded, reform has been slow to come to pass, opening the door to new, potentially worse, forms of tyranny. The revolution John Milton envisioned during the years of England’s Interregnum was itself one of liberty. Toward such end he worked tirelessly for some two decades. He worked to see liberty projected in all areas of social and political life. Criticism has largely read this as the result of Milton’s apprehension of individual liberty as only fully definable within the context of public liberties. The present work argues that liberty is more appropriately seen in Milton as the rightful portion of the Christian man. In other words, liberty is more appropriately defined in Milton as Christian liberty. Liberal laws and institutions might afford relative liberties, through negotiation of individual and collective freedom,1 but never true liberty, the latter residing within: the man who was inwardly a slave, a slave must remain, irrespective of outward liberties. However, the man who was inwardly free, free must remain, irrespective of outward restraint. Inasmuch as it entails the restoration of mind and conscience from sin to inward liberty, Christian liberty is found setting the terms for the creation of an inward microcosm of rest and authority. If the work of Milton’s left hand is best read as Milton’s attempt at actualizing its pervasive domestic, ecclesiological and political ramifications, failure to see it reflected in his temporal community would alert the poet to the need for man to individually appropriate it, mindful that only the man who was inwardly free would be able to change his world. 1 See nt. 15. 5 In the conclusion to his extensive study on Christian liberty, Arthur Barker first pointed to a similar movement: As he had feared, his hopes had ‘passed through the fire only to perish in the smoke’; but that tempering experience bore its fruit in his great poems. In them the ideal of Christian liberty was translated, by a process already under way in the prose, into a contemplation of the freedom to be obtained through obedience to eternal law, not in a temporal community which should make possible the achievement of something like the happiness enjoyed by Adam in his natural perfection and promised the saints in Christ’s Kingdom, but in ‘a Paradise within thee happier far’ (PL 12.587).2 Barker here identifies a substantial shift from an outward to an inward-based dimension of Christian liberty in the passage from the prose to Paradise Lost. In his Defensio Secunda, however, Milton claims that the keystone to his entire engagement with public liberties is to be traced to ‘true and substantial liberty, which must be sought, not without, but within’.3 The identification of true and substantial liberty as an inward principle in turn implicitly points to the moral and spiritual dimension of liberty which underlies action, namely Augustinian libertas or that which Northrop Frye identifies as the ‘condition in which genuine action is possible’.4 Although ever since Of Reformation such inward dimension is consistently identified by Milton as Christian liberty, a full definition of its terms must await De Doctrina Christiana: CHRISTIAN LIBERTY means that CHRIST OUR LIBERATOR FREES US FROM THE SLAVERY OF SIN AND THUS FROM THE RULE OF THE LAW AND OF MEN, AS IF WE WERE EMANCIPATED SLAVES. HE DOES THIS SO THAT, BEING MADE SONS INSTEAD OF SERVANTS AND GROWN MEN INSTEAD OF BOYS, WE MAY SERVE GOD IN CHARITY THROUGH THE GUIDANCE OF THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH.5 In light of this definition, the present work purposes to construe Milton’s libertarian revolution as inherently inward. To this end, it seeks to identify two conflicting principles around which Milton’s entire production revolves. The principle of 2 Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 333. 3 CPW 4.624. 4 Frye, The Return of Eden, 94. 5 CPW 6.537. 6 outward constraint (‘the rule of the law and of men’) with inward enthrallment which he counters in the prose is contrasted to a principle of inward liberty and authority. Paradise Lost is given to project the dialectic in the characters only to hand the human characters over to true freedom as the prototypes of all that would choose to become children of liberty. In envisioning Christian liberty as sole true liberty, this study attempts a reassessment of the concept in Milton’s work leading up to Paradise Lost only to confront its explicit theological synthesis and poetical translation in the poem. While the analysis of the prose (1641-59), in chapter 1, yields a portrait of Christian liberty with respect to domestic, ecclesiological, civil and political liberties, Paradise Lost’s both theological (chapter 2) and poetical (chapters 3-5) declension of the terms of liberty affords the climax of this progress, with the restitution of the characters to the defining pursuit of inward liberty. Chapter 1 identifies the substantial Pauline underpinnings of Milton’s formulation of Christian liberty against the backdrop of Reformed thought and overtones of Independent, General Baptist and Quaker belief.6 In so doing, it largely deals with the ways in which the inward microcosm of Christian liberty is projected outwardly in a constant dialectic between love and liberty. This very dialectic turns in the prose into a process of negotiation which need run through the institutional channels calling them to issue laws that are the essential expression of Christian liberty. 6 For Paul’s thought, I turn primarily to the work of F. F. Bruce; to Garrett’s Baptist Theology: A Four-Century Study and Lumpkin’s Baptist Confessions of Faith for the Baptist movement and Barbour’s The Quakers in Puritan England and Endy’s William Penn and Early Quakerism for early Quaker life and thought. For Independency, most notably Roger Williams and John Goodwin, see Coffey’s John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in 17th–Century England and ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, Smith’s Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 and ‘Milton and the European Contexts of Toleration’. For Williams and Goodwin’s relation with Milton, I rely on Loewenstein’s ‘Toleration and the Specter of Heresy in Milton’s England’ and Corns’ ‘John Milton, Roger Williams and the Limits of Toleration’ (in eds. Achinstein and Sauer, respectively cps. 2, 3 and 4, pgs. 23-44, 45-71 and 72-85). For Milton’s connection to Free-Gratians John Saltmarsh and William Dell, I largely refer to Bennet’s Reviving Liberty (especially to cp. 4, ‘Milton’s Antinomianism and the Separation Scene in Paradise Lost’, 94-118). For biographical aspects regarding Milton’s network of relations with these divines and thinkers, my primary reference is Campbell and Corns’ John Milton: Life, Work and Thought.
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