PART THREE
MILTON provides one of the best challenges to the usual histories of Renaissance Machiavellism and one of the best examples of the revised definition of Machiavellism proposed in this book. In the usual account, Milton figures as one of the happy few who read Machiavelli as a theorist of republicanism rather than as the arch-hypocrite, rhetorician, and atheist we know as the paradigmatic Machiavel.1 Among the texts adduced to support this view are Milton’s commonplace book, which includes numerous references to Machiavelli’s Art of War and Discourses; the possible allusion to Machiavelli in the sonnet to Vane; the discussions of republics and mixed commonwealths in the prose, such as in The Ready and Easy Way; and, finally, Aubrey’s much-quoted remark that Milton was a republican because he was “so conversant in Livy and the Roman authors, and the greatness he saw done by the Roman commonwealth.”2 And yet the standard equation of classical republicanism with secular political theory would seem to make it inapplicable to Milton above all.3 Nor can the usual histories of Machiavellism fully account for the fact that the Machiavel and the republican—far from being decorously distinguished—are conspicuously linked in Milton’s work, most obviously in the Satan of Paradise Lost.
The discussion of the doctrine of things indifferent in part 2 of this book suggests a different approach to Milton’s Machiavellism, one that is compatible with his theological and rhetorical concerns. In the following pages I argue that if we take seriously Milton’s intervention in the ongoing debate regarding things indifferent, as well as his portrayal of Satan as Machiavel and rhetorician, we are in a better position to understand Milton’s republicanism in the later prose works and in Paradise Lost. As we will see, Milton was Machiavellian in a way Machiavelli would have appreciated: he understood the rhetorical dimension of politics exemplified by Machiavelli’s Prince and Discourses; and much of his work can be seen as an extended meditation on the relation of rhetoric and faith not only to virtue but also to virtù. In turn, Milton the radical puritan and rhetorician helps us further to revise the usual histories of Machiavellism as secular political thought in the English Renaissance.
Specifically, Milton understood that the rhetorical politics embodied in the doctrine of things indifferent was at once a condition of Christian liberty and a threat to its realization. From Comus to Areopagitica to Paradise Lost, Milton enlarged the sphere of indifference in order to enlarge the role of rhetorical debate and individual discretion, as well as the possibilities for individual virtù. He thus gradually articulated a defense of Christian liberty, as well as the presuppositions that would eventually lead him to argue in favor of republicanism. At the same time, he was acutely aware of the Machiavellian underside of such a defense. In particular, Milton’s conception of truth as “knowledge in the making” seemed at times even to him to be the product of a stereotypically Machiavellian hubris or self-aggrandizement. Two conclusions follow from this analysis. The first is that we need to take the Machiavel seriously if we are to understand Milton’s defense of Christian liberty and his republicanism. The second is that the classical republicanism attributed to the later Milton and to other English revolutionaries does not signal a cultural shift to a secular analysis of politics so much as an appreciation of the relevance of Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics to the dilemmas of Christian liberty.4
SIX
IN THIS chapter, I consider Milton’s intervention in the debate concerning things indifferent in his prose works. As we will see, in enlarging the sphere of things indifferent and giving the individual conscience discretion in such matters, Milton departs from the usual puritan position, according to which “nothing is indifferent.” At the same time, he develops the principle of indifference into a rhetoric, thereby dramatizing his awareness that the sphere of indifference is the sphere of rhetoric, in which persuasion and action may take place. Milton’s Machiavellism in his prose works is both general and specific. In reflecting on the role of discretion in the life of the believer, Milton takes up the general Machiavellian topics of intention and effect, means and ends, virtue and success; he also confronts the possibility that the assertion of individual agency is indistinguishable from the self-interest, force, and fraud of the Machiavel. In addition, in his later works he declares his republican convictions, his preference for a mixed government such as Machiavelli had discussed in the Discourses. If the Machiavellism of the earlier works is broad and topical—a Machiavellism by analogy—the Machiavellism of the later works is specific and republican. In the following pages, my aim is to show how the latter emerges out of and is consistent with the former: Milton’s republican convictions are as much an outgrowth of his Machiavellian rhetoric of indifference as they are a specific response to the crisis of sovereignty which we know as the English civil war.
As his commonplace book and his 1658 publication of Ralegh’s The Cabinet-Council suggest, Milton saw the relevance of Machiavelli’s flexible and pragmatic counsel not only to a secular republic but also to a republic of saints. From Ralegh, as we have seen, the would-be ruler or courtier learned the necessity of joining prudence and virtue; the legitimacy of “sembling and dissembling” in pursuit of the good; the error of praising or blaming actions according to their “success”; and the somewhat contradictory error of assuming that individual virtue can succeed without divine favor. In those passages where he recommends a combination of Machiavellian pragmatism, traditional virtues, and Christian reason of state, Ralegh reminds us of Edward Dacres’s and the Jesuit Thomas Fitzherbert’s objections to the discussion of Cesare Borgia as exemplary ruler in chapter 7 of The Prince. As Fitzherbert remarked, “Whether we respect true wisdome, or the common craft and subtiltie of worldlie men (which is now commonly called machiavellian policie) [Borgia] erred in the principles of both.”1 For Dacres, too, the example of Borgia proved that policy without providence must always “show itself short-sighted.” But whereas Dacres, Fitzherbert, and Ralegh at times simply assert that worldly prudence can be perfected only by divine grace, Milton continually explores the relation of grace to the possibility of virtù or effective political action.
Still more telling for Milton’s recognition of the rhetorical and theological implications of Machiavelli’s work are his remarks in his commonplace book. Under the rubric “Of Religion, to what extent it concerns the state,” Milton wrote:
Among the most excellent of all mortals are those who instruct the minds of men in true religion, more excellent even than those who have founded, however well, kingdoms and republics by man-made laws. Machiavel. discors Book 1. c[hapter] 10.
That the combining of ecclesiastical and political government (when, that is to say, the magistrate acts as minister of the Church and the minister of the Church acts as magistrate) is equally destructive to both religion and the State, Dante, the Tuscan poet, shows in his Purgatorio. Cant. 16. . . .
The opinions of men concerning religion should be free in a republic, or indeed under good princes. While Machiavelli praises such princes, he says, among other good things, that under them you will see golden times, “where each man can hold and defend the opinion that he wishes.” discors Book 1 c[hapter] 10. See the Theological Index, Of Not Forcing Religion.2
This entry is significant both because it shows Milton applying Machiavelli’s Discourses to a republic of saints and because it suggests that Milton recognized the indifference of many of Machiavelli’s maxims. Milton does not read Machiavelli simply as a secular theorist; rather, he sees the Discourses as compatible with his own argument against “forcing religion.” Implicit here, but developed at length in Milton’s prose works, is the belief that republics are particularly favorable to the Reformation because they allow the free exchange of opinion and the free exercise of the individual (Protestant) conscience. Yet, while Milton registers Machiavelli’s preference for republics over monarchies in the very next entry in his commonplace book, in the passage quoted above he also notes that, according to Machiavelli, the same freedom of opinion that exists in republics may also exist under “good princes.” A similar indifference of means is apparent in the fact that the stereotypically Machiavellian means of force and fraud, or what Milton calls “political adroitness” (464), which we associate with the Machiavel, are also necessary for the republican who is “zealous in religion” (465). Taking up the question of “whether it is permissible to kill a tyrant,” Milton answers: “Against a bad ruler there is no other remedy than the sword. ‘To cure the ills of the people, words suffice, and against those of a prince the sword is necessary.’ Macchiavel. discors. c[hapter] 58. Book 1” (456). And under “Of sedition,” he notes: “The rebellion of a people has often been the means of their regaining their freedom. . . . Witness Macchiavelli: ‘I say that those who condemn the riots between the nobles and the common people thereby, in my estimation, blame those things that were the principle means of keeping Rome free.’ . . . discors. Book 1. c[hapter] 4” (505). Milton thus recognizes the flexibility of many of Machiavelli’s own arguments and observations—their relevance to principalities and commonwealths—at the same time that he implies, with Machiavelli, that republics are particularly good at protecting the realm of things indifferent, in which individual choices and actions take place. As we will see, in both his prose and poetry Milton elaborates this rhetorical defense of reformation and republicanism, and he does so in part by developing his own rhetoric of things indifferent.
Areopagitica
Milton joins the debate over things indifferent most notably in Areopagitica (1644). In his preface to this work, Ernest Sirluck argued that Milton was not interested in the debate before this time, and explained Milton’s resort to the language of indifference in Areopagitica as rhetorical and strategic.3 To convince parliament to rescind its order for prepublication licensing, Milton had to divide the Presbyterian majority that supported the order. One way to do this was to appeal to the Erastians among them. Such an appeal could not be made on the basis of the separation of church and state—the usual argument for toleration of free speech—since this is precisely what the Erastians rejected. So Milton made a strategic decision to enlarge the area of indifference, the area in which “Parliament must not violate Christian liberty” (Sirluck, 170).
What Sirluck failed to note is that this strategic decision is inseparable from Milton’s rhetorical justification of dissent in Areopagitica. For, from a rhetorical point of view, what is striking about this text is Milton’s inversion of the usual arguments about things indifferent.4 As we have seen, both supporters and critics of the status quo equated the realm of things indifferent with the jurisdiction of established authorities. Thus supporters tried to enlarge the area of indifference while dissenters restricted it, often claiming that nothing was indifferent to the individual believer. Milton’s intervention in this debate is far more rhetorically sophisticated than the usual positions in that he uses the argument of his Presbyterian opponents against them: he enlarges the realm of indifference to criticize rather than support episcopacy and he does so by making indifference a matter of individual judgment. This rhetorical inversion of his opponents’ arguments has implications for Milton’s interpretation of indifference and for the rhetoric of Areopagitica as a whole. Not only does Milton dramatize the equation of indifference with the sphere of individual judgment, he also illustrates William Bradshaw’s fears—quoted above in chapter 5—of the impossibility of telling the difference between indifference and Machiavellism.
Unlike James I, Bradshaw, and Greville in their different ways, Milton does not argue that rhetorical decorum dictates the one right course of action. Rather, rhetorical indeterminacy is emphasized even to the point of being, at times, conflated with truth itself. In moving away from the contemplation of truth as fixed and absolute to a conception of “knowledge in the making,” Milton preserves the judgment and agency of the individual believer, but at the cost of engaging the Machiavellian dilemmas of innovation in the realm of fortune or action in the realm of contingency and appearance. In particular, Milton’s treatise shows the difficulty of distinguishing between divine and earthly force and fraud, once one accepts the limitations of human knowledge and the consequent appearance of a realm of indifference. At the same time, because Milton, like Greville, believes that there is an absolute truth though it may be only incompletely known by human agents, the treatise illustrates the tensions between the concept of truth as fixed or absolute and truth as something we know rhetorically and dialectically.
Milton’s argument against prepublication licensing moves from a defense of books as good or bad in themselves (either “the image of God” or “blasphemous and atheistical” [720]) to the claim that books are things indifferent that can be used well or badly by the reader. Quoting the divine message sent to Dionysius Alexandrinus, “Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright and to examine each matter,” Milton comments:
“To the pure all things are pure”; not only meats and drinks, but all kinds of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are—some of good, some of evil substance, and yet God in that unapocryphal vision said without exception, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat,” leaving the choice to each man’s discretion. (727)
At this point Milton would seem to be arguing against censorship on the basis of an ethic of intention (supported by the antinomian scriptural tag, “to the pure all things are pure”). Prepublication licensing would be futile because the possibility of sin does not lie in the book but in the reader’s prior disposition. But the problem with such an exclusive focus on intention is that it seems to make education—the inculcation and exercise of virtue—impossible. If intention or disposition governs the right use of things indifferent, it is important to stress that such usage is itself educated through practice. So in the famous passage criticizing “a fugitive and cloistered virtue,” Milton opposes what he calls a “blank virtue” to “a pure” virtue, one that does not exist from the start but emerges from a process of trial or purification. Thus Milton shifts from an antinomian emphasis on right intention to an Arminian one on use and works. As Joan Bennett has argued in a different context,
For Milton, it was necessary, but not enough, to be pure in heart; one had also to work hard to figure out a way in each circumstance to act efficaciously: “who had not rather follow Iscariot or Simon the magician, though to covetous ends, preaching, then Saul, though in the uprightness of his heart persecuting the gospell?”5
In order to guarantee the possibility of efficacious action, the possibility of failure has to be admitted as well. Accordingly, the ever-present possibility of sin is reaffirmed and relocated in the external world:
the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intertwined. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. (728)
The passage begins by suggesting a slight difference (“hardly to be discerned”) between good and evil as though one had only to look closely to distinguish between them; but as we read further it becomes clear that the occasion of sin is indistinguishable from the occasion of virtue: “Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike” (733). For Milton in this text knowledge is dialectical; it proceeds by contraries. And this dialectical process is itself described as “incessant labor” or, in the lines that follow, a “race” or “trial.”
This emphasis on exercise or trial is dramatized in the rhetorical organization of the text. Just as the realm of things theologically indifferent allows for the exercise of virtue, so rhetorical figures are things indifferent which can be used in a variety of ways by the author and the reader. The indeterminacy or instability of certain words and metaphors serves as an illustration of the author’s, and occasion of the reader’s, exercise of virtue. Thus the same thing may be described in contrary ways and the same figures may be applied to different things or concepts. For example, Milton describes truth as both an organic body and an architectural building. In the first case, “hewing” refers to the hacking of the limbs of truth (742); in the second to the carving of cedars for the “temple of the Lord” (744). An analogous distinction is made between “dividers of unity” (742) and the “dividing of one visible congregation from another, though it be not in fundamentals” (747); between “the fiercest rent and disunion” (747) and the “many schisms and dissections [necessary] . . . ere the house of God can be built” (744). As Machiavelli does, Milton draws a distinction between faction and productive conflict. Differences are necessary “while things are not yet constituted in religion” (739) because they generate progress toward the truth or “knowledge in the making” (743); though the fact that the same words and images are used to describe these two different conceptions of difference also suggests that progress is never so obvious that one can rest with a simple assertion or “think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land” (737). Here the metaphor of trade, which in another context might convey an ongoing process of intellectual exchange, is used to condemn a conception of knowledge as a fixed commodity, an object that can be transferred from one person to another without regard for intention or right use.
Milton’s anxiety about the relation of such intention to the truth is registered in his own ambivalent rhetoric when discussing human agency. In the dialectic of the argument, as soon as he stresses individual agency and the exercise of individual judgment, he draws back to assert the existence and efficaciousness of objective truth.6 When his rhetoric of indifference seems to imply a rhetorical and therefore unstable “ground” of virtue, when it implies that virtue is simply a matter of individual judgment responding to particular circumstances, he then argues that judgment and rhetoric must themselves be “licensed” by reference to the truth.7 Yet, this check on the free exercise of individual judgment is beset with difficulties, for although truth is absolute, it must not be coercive; nor can it be a matter of mere “implicit faith” (739). Such passive believers are rather “heretic[s] in the truth” (739). Furthermore, not only can truth be held incorrectly by an individual but truth itself may look like heresy. Thus Milton writes, “If it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself; whose first appearance to our eyes bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and unplausible than many errors” (748).
Milton’s anxiety about the rhetorical “ground” of virtue is particularly apparent in his use of personification, a preeminent rhetorical figure of agency.8 On the one hand, Milton describes the heresy of the “implicit” believer in terms of a process of personification: this believer transfers his own agency to “some factor . . . some Divine of note and estimation,” and “makes the very person of that man his religion” (740). As a result, religion is itself personified, that is, alienated and reified:
So that a man might say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him, according as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him. His religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep . . . his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day without his religion. (740)
In this passage, as in the earlier one, personification is the rhetorical equivalent of implicit faith or mere outward conformity.
On the other hand, personification is the figure Milton uses to negotiate the problematic relationship of individual agency and truth. Thus after the image of “the temple of Janus with his two controversal faces,” which suggests a bellicose version of humanist argument on both sides of a question, Milton argues that truth is not simply the desired object of such discussion but one of the warriors: “Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter” (746). We need not worry about—or license—such encounters because the outcome is guaranteed by the personified agency of truth. The next two paragraphs enact a similar shift from the agency of the individual to that of truth. Milton first describes “a man [who] hath been laboring the hardest labor in the deep mines of knowledge, [and] hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged . . . in the wars of Truth” (746–47). But lest the wars of truth prove inconclusive, he again hastens to argue that they are only a mock battle. “Truth is strong [and] . . . needs no policies.” However, as in the work of the royalists and parliamentarians cited in chapter 5, the emphasis on the agency or power of truth has its own liabilities. In the end, the personification of truth raises the problem of antinomianism it was designed to address.
Just as the antinomian tenet “to the pure all things are pure” threatens the distinction between law and grace, man and God, so does the personification of—the attribution of human agency to—truth. For once truth is personified—one might even say, once truth enters the realm of representation—it engages the Machiavellian dilemma of how to distinguish between the force of truth and the force of its fraudulent representation. Although truth’s power is a check on the weakness of individual judgment and the indeterminacy of the rhetorical “wars of Truth,” very quickly this reassertion of the force of truth proves to be indistinguishable from that of falsehood. In a logical extension of the earlier passage on implicit faith, where personification symbolizes the (unethical) alienation of agency, here the ability to alienate is figured as deliberate and strategic misrepresentation on the part of truth:
For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty. She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious—those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab, until she be adjured into her own likeness. (747)
The passage begins by distinguishing between the direct force of truth and the fraud or dissemblance of error. In this dichotomy, licensing is a Machiavellian tactic, a “policie” or “strategem.” But immediately truth herself is described as capable of deception when so constrained. In a mirror image of the Proteus who speaks true when bound, bound truth speaks falsely. Thus the “shifts and defenses that error uses against [Truth’s] power” are also the defenses that truth uses against the power or “licensing” of error. The reference to the prophet Micaiah further complicates the initial distinction between the force of truth and fraud, since Micaiah “warned Ahab that other prophets were inspired by ‘a lying spirit’ (1 Kings xxii, 23)” (Hughes, 747 n. 264). He thus points to the fact that divine inspiration may be feigned. Personification—here construed as God speaking through man—is the figure not only of true prophecy but also of false impersonation.
Then, in a further reversal of the metaphor, one that develops the implication of this chiasmus of Proteus and truth, truth herself is described as protean in an approved sense:
Yet it is not impossible that she may have more shapes than one. What else is all that rank of things indifferent wherein Truth may be on this side, or on the other, without being unlike herself? What but a vain shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, that handwriting nailed to the cross; what great purchase is this Christian liberty which Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is, that he who eats, or eats not, regards a day, or regards it not, may do either to the Lord. (747)
In identifying truth with Proteus and with “all that rank of things indifferent” the passage enacts the appropriation of the rhetorical power of metaphor—of indirection, disguise, and conversion from one shape to another—for truth, but at the price of making the “likeness” of truth indistinguishable from its “unlikeness.”9 Thus Milton dramatizes the rhetorical or dialectical core of truth even as he seems to be arguing for a positive conception of truth as simply different from coercion and falsehood. It is precisely this conflation of truth with the realm of things indifferent that allows for the exercise of individual judgment but also threatens to undermine the notion of truth itself. And if truth is undermined or uncertain, then the license of individual judgment can only be rhetorical, in the sense of appealing to a contingent configuration of circumstances and interests. Milton does not resolve this Machiavellian dilemma here or in his later work; rather, he dramatizes it again and again.
Machiavellian Topics
The topics and dilemmas of Machiavellism also appear in Milton’s later treatises on the relationship of spiritual to temporal power. Like his contemporaries, Milton takes up the Machiavellian topics of persuasion and coercion, intention and effect, virtue and success, in the realm of religion and politics; and, like them, he expresses a fundamental tension between the authority and power of divine providence and the power of human agency. At the same time he dramatizes the ever-present danger of their conflation—whether in an antinomian emphasis on individual conscience or an Arminian emphasis on works. As in Areopagitica, Milton shows that he is aware both of the stereotypical Machiavellism of confusing the power of the individual with divine power, and of the Machiavellian dilemmas of preserving a realm of active virtue in a world governed by providence or—as Machiavelli would say—by fortune.
As we saw in chapter 5, in the late 1640s and 1650s Milton appeals to the successes of Cromwell and the parliamentary army as a sign of providential favor; but he is also wary of such a stereotypical Machiavellian justification of the status quo. Thus, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, he first describes the tyrant’s being brought “to the trial of justice, which is the sword of God, superior to all mortal things, in whose hand soever by apparent signs his testified will is to put it”; and he exhorts his readers to assist “the present parliament and army in the glorious way wherein justice and victory hath set them—the only warrants through all ages, next under immediate revelation, to exercise supreme power” (Hughes, 751, 752). Yet, later in the tract, he qualifies the implicit justification of de facto power in the hendiadys of “justice and victory” by paraphrasing Thomas Smith’s De republica anglorum (1583): “Sir Thomas Smith also, a protestant and a statesman, in his Commonwealth of England, putting the question whether it be lawful to rise against a tyrant, answers that the vulgar judge of it according to the event and the learned according to the purpose of them that do it” (763). Here, Milton rejects judging simply according to victory or success. And he does so in part because he is aware of the indifference of worldly power. Commenting on Romans 13, which was regularly cited by royalists to justify kingly power and absolute obedience to the crown, Milton remarks:
“There is no power but of God,” saith Paul (Rom. xiii), as much as to say God put it into man’s heart to find out that way at first for common peace and preservation, approving the exercise thereof; else it contradicts Peter, who calls the same authority an ordinance of man. It must also be understood of lawful and just power, else we read of great power in the affairs and kingdoms of the world permitted to the devil: for saith he to Christ (Luke iv, 6), “All this power will I give thee and the glory of them, for it is delivered to me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it:” neither did he lie, or Christ gainsay what he affirmed; for in the thirteenth of the Revelation, we read how the dragon gave to the beast “his power, his seat, and great authority:” which beast so authorized most expound to be the tyrannical powers and kingdoms of the earth. (758–59)
In this passage Milton employs his characteristic rhetorical strategy of enlarging the area of human discretion, even to the point of making the much-cited, authoritative Romans 13 subject to debate. That is, Milton does not simply rebut his opponents’ interpretation by proposing a thematic paraphrase of his own; rather, his interpretation of this passage is that it is open to interpretation. “There is no power but of God” is not simply a statement of fact but a test of human judgment, an exercise in deliberating about the best way to achieve “common peace and preservation.” And such exercise is necessary because power is indifferent, and may be used well or badly. To illustrate this point, Milton refers to the passage in Luke where Satan offers Christ worldly power; he insists that Satan’s offer was genuine, because to deny Satan power would be to deny that tyrants have the power to oppress their subjects. At issue is not the possession of power but its right interpretation and right use. Only power that is correctly used may be correctly described as “ordained of God” (759).
In asserting the compatibility of Romans 13 and Peter—of divine and human ordinance—Milton makes the whole realm of politics coextensive with that of things indifferent. In striking contrast, for example, to James I, who in his discussion of things indifferent in Basilikon Doron distinguished between the express commandments of God and the invention and ordinance of man, Milton equates them: the power ordained by God is the power ordered by man. He then develops the implications of this analysis by calling attention to the rhetorical dimension of sovereignty. Just as Romans 13 is open to interpretation, so the rule of a sovereign is open to interpretation by the people, who create legitimacy by their linguistic act of consent. Politics is the sphere of things indifferent in the sense that it is a matter of human discretion and so is continually open to reinterpretation and renegotiation. Thus, if Romans 13 may be cited to support submission to kings, it may also be cited to support resistance; similarly,
if the people’s act in election be pleaded by a king as the act of God and the most just title to enthrone him, why may not the people’s act of rejection be as well pleaded by the people as the act of God and the most just reason to depose him? So that we see the title and just right of reigning or deposing, in reference to God, is found in scripture to be all one: visible only in the people, and depending merely upon justice and demerit. (759)
Here it may be helpful to contrast this passage with William Bradshaw’s suspicion that indifference was a Machiavellian invention. According to Bradshaw, the Machiavel isolates a sphere of indeterminacy which is then vulnerable to coercive interpretation or figurative “coloring” in the service of his own interests. For Milton, in contrast, the indifference of worldly power—and of the scriptural warrants of such power—provides an occasion for the exercise of virtue and allows the rhetorical transactions that create and unmake the sovereign. In equating the realm of politics with the sphere of things indifferent, and in emphasizing the rhetorical dimension—and popular source—of secular power, Milton draws near to Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics.
Milton pursues the implications of the doctrine of things indifferent and of a rhetorical politics in A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659). In this work Milton distinguishes, as his contemporaries did, between the use of force in civil matters and of persuasion in spiritual matters. He again refers to Romans 13, arguing against those who interpret this passage as giving “power to the magistrate both of civil judgment and punishment in causes ecclesiastical” (844). The only judge of spiritual matters is the conscience of the individual believer. And he goes on, in a passage reminiscent of Areopagitica, to equate the realm of things indifferent with individual Christian liberty rather than with episcopacy or “Erastus and state tyranny” (845). To those who argue that certain things “are indifferent, but for that very cause by the magistrate may be commanded,” Milton comments sardonically:
As if God of his special grace in the gospel had to this end freed us from his own commandments in these things, that our freedom should subject us to a more grievous yoke, the commandments of men. As well may the magistrate call that common or unclean which God hath cleansed, forbidden to St. Peter, Acts x, 15; as well may he loosen that which God hath straitened or straiten that which God hath loosened, as he may enjoin those things in religion which God hath left free, and lay on that yoke which God hath taken off. For he hath not only given us this gift as a special privilege and excellence of the free gospel above the servile law, but strictly also hath commanded us to keep it and enjoy it: Gal. v, 13: “You are called to liberty.” I Cor. vii, 23, “Be not made the servants of men.” (850)
This passage seems to confirm the fears articulated by men such as Thomas Wilson who, in The Rule of Reason, cautioned against interpreting “freedom” in the New Testament to mean political as well as spiritual equality.10 As in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton’s interpretation of spiritual freedom in things indifferent has consequences for his view of the state even as he argues for the separation of civil and ecclesiastical power. Although worldly force must not be applied to matters of religious “convincement” or persuasion, it is the proper function of the magistrate to “defend things religious settled by the churches within themselves” (848). Similarly, although “Christ rejects outward force in the government of his church . . . to show us the divine excellence of his spiritual kingdom, able without worldly force to subdue all the powers and kingdoms of this world,” “a Christian commonwealth may [still] defend itself against outward force in the cause of religion as well as in any other” (847). As in the debates concerning the successes of the parliamentary army, here, too, force is a thing indifferent that may be used to defend as well as subvert religion. There is a further implication as well. For the corollary of Milton’s defense of spiritual freedom is an attack not only on “state tyranny over the church” but on any form of tyranny that makes us “servants of men.”11 Implicit here is the claim that the assertion of individual freedom in things indifferent leads logically to a preference for a republican form of government—an argument that is the theological equivalent of Machiavelli’s defense of republics in the Discourses. Just as Machiavelli claimed that republics were better able to respond to the contingencies of fortune, so Milton claims that republics are better able to preserve the realm of contingency in which individual conscience may be exercised and individual virtue may prosper.
This claim is clearly stated in The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660). “The whole freedom of man,” Milton writes, “consists either in spiritual or civil liberty,” and both dictate a republican form of government. Regarding the first, Milton argues: “This liberty of conscience, which above all other things ought to be to all men dearest and most precious, no government [is] more inclinable not to favor only, but to protect, than a free commonwealth, as being most magnanimous, most fearless, and confident of its own fair proceedings” (895–96). He goes on to note that, although Queen Elizabeth was “accounted so good a protestant,” she recognized that further “reformation would diminish regal authority” (896). Francis Osborne had made a similar argument in A Plea for a Free State compared with Monarchy (1652), when he wrote, “though experience proves by this State, and the Catholique Cantons, &c. that the Roman profession may sute, in some measure, with all kinds of Government, yet undeniable Reason of State renders Monarchy most acceptable to the Pope, as it doth the Reformation to Free States” (28). In both cases, republics or commonwealths are thought to be particularly conducive to reformation because they allow for the free exercise of conscience and judgment in things indifferent.
Yet, if freedom of conscience in things indifferent is best protected by a free commonwealth, freedom of conscience and individual judgment are also the source of the backsliding that Milton regularly condemns from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates onward. One of the most powerful of such condemnations appears in the conclusion to The Ready and Easy Way, in a passage that seems to echo, in part, Machiavelli’s discussion of fortuna and virtù in chapter 25 of The Prince:
I trust I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men; to some, perhaps, whom God may raise of these stones to become children of reviving liberty, and may reclaim, though they seem now choosing them a captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little and consider whither they are rushing; to exhort this torrent also of the people not to be so impetuous, but to keep their due channel; and at length recovering and uniting their better resolutions, now that they see already how open and unbounded the insolence and rage is of our common enemies, to stay these ruinous proceedings, justly and timely fearing to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurry us, through the general defection of a misguided and abused multitude. (898–99)
In The Prince, Machiavelli compared Fortune to “one of those torrential streams which, when they overflow, flood the plains, rip up trees and tear down buildings”; but urged that men take “countermeasures while the weather is still fine, shoring up dikes and dams, so that when the waters rise again, they are either carried off in a channel or confined where they do no harm.” In Milton’s description, the people have themselves become the torrential streams of fortune that are not keeping their due channel, because no one is exercising virtù. The Machiavellian vision of this passage is complicated by biblical allusions to John the Baptist prophesying salvation (Luke 3:8: “God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”), to Ezekiel who imagines his audience as dry bones that revive as he prophesies (Ezekiel, 37), and to the deluge or flood, which was a consequence of “the general defection of a misguided and abused multitude.” Milton seems here both to be urging his contemporaries to active virtue with a prophetic rhetoric that mingles his own voice with that of God (syntactically, it is God who exhorts the torrent), and to be excusing the imagined failure of his rhetoric to persuade and of his contemporaries to “become children of reviving liberty.” On the one hand, the failure of virtù is moralized and theologized by Milton as a failure of virtue and a reenactment of the fall. Still, virtue, like virtù, is intended to have effects in the world of politics and of contingent human affairs. If Milton is Machiavellian in his effort to restore virtù to virtue, he is also Machiavellian in his acute awareness of the contingency—the indifference—that is the condition of free will. It is perhaps for this reason that Milton’s own rhetorical performance is made dependent on divine inspiration but is not equated with success. His audience must be capable of backsliding if they are to be capable of reviving liberty.