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3. Equity Restored: John Milton and the Origins of Law
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75 c h a p t e r t h r e e Equity Restored John Milton and the Origins of Law If men were angels, no government would be necessary. —The Federalist Papers, no. 51 Toward the very end of Book Twelve of Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael describes a political landscape in which the “unfaithful herd” betray God, revel in Sin, and persecute the few just followers of divine law. Michael’s “grievous wolves” exploit the “sacred Mysteries of heav’n” in the service of “lucre and ambition,” to their false priesthood “join secular power,” and force false laws “on every conscience” (XII, 508–21). Milton is talking about more than Roman Catholicism here;the condition of fallen humanity is punctuated by false lawgiving and rigorous orthodoxy, especially when sacred and secular powers are entangled.The tyrannical wolves “force the Spirit of Grace itself,and bind / His consort Liberty,”and the result is crisis:“Truth shall retire / Bestuck with sland’rous darts,and works of Faith / Rarely be found:so shall theWorld go on /To good malignant, to bad men benign” (XII, 535–38). Michael describes a moment in which the spirit of divine utterance is not only obscured but also willfully corrupted. Doing violence to the spirit of Grace and Liberty is a ubiquitous phenomenon in a fallen world; while there are a handful of the just who remain faithful, human history is legible as a sustained crisis of equity. As we have seen, such a sentiment was by no means limited to John Milton—mid-century intellectuals were deeply concerned about the rule of rigorous orthodoxies and the dangerously unstable modalities of legal interpretation in secular and sacred institutions both. Earlier in his career, Milton had suggested that “the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity” was fully absent not only from legal instruction , but also from the education of young men more generally. In the 1644 tract Of Education, Milton offers a curriculum designed to remedy the pedantry,“the preposterous exaction, . . . ragged notions,babblements, . . . the invitations to license and venality, . . . and the trifling at grammar and sophistry”of contemporary education. Milton’s pedagogy is at bottom paideic: he proposes a “complete and generous education that . . . fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.”1 Among the core practices in Milton’s curriculum are deliberation over good and evil,“the study of . . . the beginnings, end, and reasons of political societies,” and instruction in the interpretation of Mosaic and classical law, but the apex of the soaring paideic flight is poetry.When fully cultivated, Milton’s ideal student will not only apprehend “what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of poetry, both in divine and human things,” but also as “writers and composers in every excellent matter . . . [they] shall be fraught with a universal insight into things” (637). That “universal insight into things” is the outcome of explicitly poetic composition is no accident; Milton relies upon the early modern version of Aristotelian literary theory that holds poesis to be a medium for cultivating equity in which particular details or circumstances yield to the deliberative contemplation of “universal things.” In Milton’s 1671 “brief epic” Paradise Regained, we find a similar set of theoretical claims and hermeneutic occasions within the narrative of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. Paradise Regained and its partner Samson Agonistes are best understood as theoretical dissidence rather than partisan argument disguised from a repressive state. Far from a retreat from politics (that old view having now been widely discredited),Milton’s post-1660 poetry reveals at every turn the deep and sustained presence of deliberative considerations of justice, divine and human law, sovereignty, and obedience—all set within the frame of “functional ambiguity.”2 Paradise Lost, Sharon Achinstein writes, is “principally 1. John Milton, “Of Education,” in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Milton, ed. Merritt Hughes, 632. Such a thesis is not particularly original—among others, Milton follows the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian,who describes his pedagogical project thus:“I am seeking to form . . . a man who to extraordinary natural gifts has added a thorough mastery of all the fairest branches of knowledge, a man sent by heaven to be the blessing of mankind”—and Milton’s claims are legible as part of the early modern humanist educational enterprise. 2. Annabel Patterson,Reading between the Lines (Madison:University ofWisconsin Press,1993).Studies that read...