Milton and Toleration (review)

In Milton and Toleration, editors Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer have drawn together a timely, important, and remarkably coherent collection of essays. In addition to a wide-ranging introduction by the editors and a valuable afterword by Ann Hughes, the collection contains fifteen essays that fall into three larger sections. The first of these, “Revising Whig Accounts,” features essays by Nigel Smith, David Loewenstein, Thomas Corns, and Nicholas von Maltzahn that revise several longstanding views of a tolerationist movement that seemed to emerge —according to a Whig and largely Protestant tradition — with Milton in the mid-1640s. In the first of these essays, Smith shows that toleration has a history that extends as far back as medieval Catholic Europe and, importantly, Islamic Spain, and that the English toleration movement itself had firm roots in recent Continental religious history. Of particular value here are the United Provinces and Poland-Lithuania, “which had toleration inscribed into its constitution” and became “the home of the Socinian church” (24). Milton has been linked to Socianism through his licensing of the Racovian Catechism, “the federal document of the Polish Socinian church” (29). The place of Socinianism and the antitrinitarianism espoused by this sect has increasingly become the object of study, in part because it drew the most intense reaction from seventeenth-century authorities, including Cromwell. Writers in this volume treat Socinianism with deserved attention, as it stands so near the core of the problem of understanding seventeenth-century toleration well as Milton’s own mysterious beliefs.

Traditional explanations of the rise of toleration have taken a history of ideas approach, showing an ideological battle in which toleration finally succeeds in 1688. But as Loewenstein stresses in his essay, the tenets of persecution are indeed bloody, and the intellectual history approach has effectively omitted the “depth of visceral and irrational feelings” (46) that particularly characterized the persecutory side of this debate. These writers employed a “rhetoric of fear” much akin to the “fear-mongering rhetoric of Senator Joseph McCarthy” in the 1950s (47). Corns revisits the problem of the inconsistencies in Areopagitica between “the soaring generalizations” about political and religious liberties and “the significant exceptions” (73), as when Milton expresses intolerance toward Catholics. Corns investigates this particular contradiction through a comparative analysis of Roger Williams’s more tolerant views. Von Maltzahn, in turn, offers a comparative analysis of Milton and Andrew Marvell, whose own tolerationist writing has often stood in the shadows, even though the positions Marvell took — in contrast to Milton’s — became “the norm of the liberal tradition” (86).

The second part of this collection, “Philosophical and Religious Engagements,” features essays by James Grantham Turner, Jason Rosenblatt, Victoria Silver, Martin Dzelzainis, and Andrew Hadfield. In an exhilarating piece of criticism, Turner argues that it is the “de facto or practical toleration that should interest the literary historian most,” by which he means a literary toleration that admits “the proscribed into the sphere of discourse” and represents it “in a positive, empathetic light” (109). Stressing the haunting presence of sexuality in Milton’s discourse of toleration, and particularly in Areopagitica, Turner provocatively terms Milton’s own effort to admit the proscribed into his imaginative discourse “libertine reading” (120). In an essay that, like Turner’s, shows the importance of the divorce tracts as part of Milton’s toleration work, Rosenblatt investigates the ways in which Milton’s ideas derive from his knowledge of natural law theorists, particularly Hugo Grotius and John Selden (132). Silver’s piece uses Paradise Lost (book 5) and Of Civil Power (1659) to explore equity and toleration in the later period. Dzelzainis continues the investigation of Socinianism, also touched on instructively by von Maltzahn. Since the manuscript of the De Doctrina Christiana is now generally considered authentic, it is widely agreed that Milton held antitrinitarian beliefs, but just when and how he developed these forbidden views has remained a subject of some debate. This is of considerable interest, as it reveals a great deal about the...