The Innovation of Milton’s Machiavellian Son

Classical republicans are on the whole wary of religion. Some, like Thomas Jefferson, are agnostics who want it rigorously segregated from public life. Others, like Niccolò Machiavelli, are suspected atheists who value it only as an extension of state power. Even John Milton, the rare republican to dissent from this secular perspective, seems unintentionally to confirm that republics cannot also be theocracies. When admirers of Milton’s politics explore his theology, they prefer to focus upon Satan,¹ Eve,² and Chaos³ as reservoirs of freedom. For when scholars attend to Milton’s God, the deity that they discover seems too rule-bound to permit the self-determination necessary for republican virtue. In Milton’s Good God, Dennis Danielson describes Milton’s view of liberty by arguing: “given God’s offer of divine grace, man is free either to reject it and use his own innate power to sin, or else to accept it and use the power received from God to refrain from sinning. . . . [S]o far as man is concerned, sin is by commission and moral virtue by omission.”⁴ Joan Bennett arrives at a similar view by aligning Milton’s understanding with Richard Hooker’s “deeply rational Christian liberty,”⁵ claiming that even God cannot violate divine law without compromising his own essence. This restricted view of liberty as voluntary obedience entails a substantial departure from the active virtue championed by classical republicanism, leading Barbara Riebling to argue recently that for Milton, “neither classical virtus nor Machiavellian virtu can replace Christian virtue.”⁶ Despite Milton’s best efforts, his republicanism thus seems incapable of surviving his God. Machiavelli and Jefferson, it would appear, were right to believe that divine law could not be accorded an autonomous public place in a republic without destroying it.

Over the following pages, I hope to unsettle this consensus by showing that Milton’s effort to reconcile his God with his politics is more successful than previous scholarship has recognized. While this scholarship has enforced a distinction between the passive freedoms allowed by Milton’s God and the active ones encouraged by republicanism, Machiavelli had a century before Milton comprehended obedience within his notion of virtue. He did so through the ideal of innovation, which linked the republican ethos of The Discourses to the autocratic counsel of The Prince by suggesting that rule following was antithetical to freedom only in moments where a crisis exposed the limits of existing law. Self-determination, in effect, was not a continuous process of active liberty but was instead characterized by periods of obedience interrupted by the autonomous law making necessary for the preservation of the state. Machiavelli nowhere argues that divine laws are subject to the same processes as earthly ones, but he saw innovation as the prerogative of prophets as well as princes, and his glorification of Moses as one of the innovatori⁷ was known to Milton. Milton, as has long been recognized,⁸ made an extensive study of Machiavelli’s writings, and in his commonplace book,⁹ next to criticism of Catholic corruption, is a verbatim quotation from The Discorsi: “Of all men who have been praised, the most lauded are those who are heads and establishers of Religion” (CPW, 1.475–76).¹⁰ In The Discorsi, these religious innovators are glorified for the unabashedly secular reason that they strengthened earthly states. Yet as Milton indicates in his discussion of John Wycliffe in Areopagitica (1644), the same model could be extended into the realms of divinity:

And had it not been the obstinat perversnes of our Prelats against the divine and admirable spirit of Wicklef, to suppresse him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Husse and Jerom, no nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin had bin ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had bin compleatly ours.

(CPW, 2.552–53)

This criticism of the English prelates for suppressing Wycliffe as a “schismatic and innovator” leaves it open as to whether they wrongly suppressed his innovations or wrongly labeled him an innovator.¹¹ For all of Milton’s discretion...