Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage, and Friendship

2. The Sage and Serious Doctrine of Conversation

TWO The Sage and Serious Doctrine of Conversation “Conversation” is a term and concept central to Milton’s attacks on the canon laws regarding divorce and to his efforts to redefine marriage in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Despite its common use as a euphemism for sex, especially adulterous sex, Milton tries to use the word to redefine married conversation as something far more “rational” and dignified than sex. He regards sex for procreation as too undignified to be God’s principal purpose in creating marriage because it was a necessity . Necessity, Milton believed, characterized beastly, not human behavior. God, in whose image man was allegedly made, was said to be utterly untouched by necessity. Human, or what Milton refers to as “manly,” dignity was mitigated, limited, even polluted by necessity. According to Milton, when God said it was not good for man to be alone (Gen. 2:18), he did not, in the first sense at least, mean that man needed to procreate; rather, he meant that the first man, and every man thereafter, needed a soulmate, a conversation partner; in the language of classical friendship, he needed another self: 57 58 Single Imperfection God in the first ordaining of marriage, taught us to what end he did it, in words expresly implying the apt and cheerfull conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of solitary life, not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a secondary end in dignity, though not in necessity. (DDD, YP 2:235)1 Milton challenges Roman Catholic marriage doctrine by relegating the “purpose of generation” to a secondary end, and, as I will explain at length below, he takes a step ahead of most Protestant thinkers when he defines married companionship as “a meet and happy conversation” quite apart from acts of “carnall knowledg” (2:246). Marriage, he thought, was far too dignified a relation to be concerned with “carnall lust” and “sensitive desire,” things that could be managed just fine by temperate diet and exercise (2:251). Man’s loneliness was principally intellectual and rational, so the conversational remedy must also be of that nature. Milton’s first argument, then, is that if a wife fails to serve as a fit partner for such conversation, no matter how satisfactory she may be for sexual pleasure and procreation, the disappointed man should be allowed to divorce her and marry another. Canon law, he pointed out, privileged procreation and sensual pleasure over rational conversation because it allowed divorce only in cases of bodily impurity or incapacity. No doubt Milton chose this word, conversation, carefully, weighing its ambiguities and range of both denotation and connotation. He must have known the word was liable to misunderstanding or even ignorant or willful misconstruction. Perhaps that is why he responded with such an unattractive display of self-righteous bile in Colasterion to the anonymous Answer that appeared in 1644 after his first edition of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. None of Milton’s polemical tracts is so addicted to insult and name-calling as Colasterion, a Greek word that may be translated as “the place of punishment.” Milton complains that he expected the challenge he aimed at Parliament and the Westminster Divines in his first divorce tract would provoke a worthier opponent than this “Pork” of a “Serving-man” who, Milton alleges, never read any philosophy, has merely “puddered” in the law, and pretends to know Greek but cannot spell it correctly (YP 2:737, 726, 742, 724). Nevertheless, he undertakes to answer the Answer point for point. By publicly responding to the Answer Milton enters, in a sense, into a conversation with his opponent, albeit a conversation in print with an anonymous opponent. And it almost becomes a conversation about the sage and serious doctrine of conversation, the proper mode, according to Milton, of wedded intercourse. I say “almost” because, although Milton takes pains at some points to represent his polemical attack on the answerer in the format of a reported conversation, he does so only to dramatize, in the end, the impossibility of carrying on a rational conversation about anything, especially something so serious as conversation theory, with an unfit partner. Milton casts the answerer as the epitome of an unfit partner for rational conversation. It is useful to think of Colasterion as a kind...