Duquesne University Press
  • Miltonic Proportions:Divine Distribution and the Nature of the Lot in Paradise Lost

In book 9 of Paradise Lost, Satan tells Eve that he has attained a "life more perfect . . . than fate / Meant me, by venturing higher than my lot."1 Eve, having tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree, then urges Adam:

Thou therefore also taste, that equal lotMay join us, equal joy, as equal love;Lest thou not tasting, different degreeDisjoin us.

(9.881-84)

Adam's reasoning fluctuates thereafter, but eventually he is resolved:

However I with thee have fixed my lot,Certain to undergo like doom, if deathConsort with thee, death is to me as life;So forcible within my heart I feelThe bond of nature draw me to my own,My own in thee, for what thou art is mine.

(9.952-57) [End Page 101]

The repetition of the word "lot" in these passages indicates its particular importance for the logic of Satan's temptation and its palpable effect on both Eve and Adam. It is significant that Eve's deployment of Satan's term accompanies her anxious repetition of the word "equal" in her plea to Adam. Satan has persuaded her to look for inequality in God's dispensation. Both Adam and Eve eventually misconceive the structuring function of inequality within God's creation; the Fall partly results from their own attempts to bridge the gaps of an uneven cosmos.

By characterizing his inheritance from God as his "lot," Satan raises an issue that preoccupied seventeenth century religious and political thinkers alike, namely, the rationale behind God's unequal distribution of his essence in the created world and the impact that inequality had on human political and social relationships. Lots have a long history of commentary as occasional instruments of God's will but also as mechanisms of political representation; in both cases they function as tools of division and selection, whether of God's division of tribes and selection of elders, or of the division of goods and selection of officers.2 Milton was certainly aware of the vibrant seventeenth century discourse on lots, and in Paradise Lost he engages it to describe the relationship between God's will and the inequality that God institutes among his creatures.

The nature of this inequality matters in the poem; its presence both in the natural order and in arbitrary divine decree causes no end of confusion for the first humans. Lots represent one way to ameliorate the perception of inequality; a lottery preserves inequality but also relies on a contingent, egalitarian principle to function. Characterizing the divine will as a distributor of lots goes some way toward introducing contingency, and mobility, into the cosmos. The discourse surrounding the lot in the seventeenth century informs arguments about the interaction between the inequality of divine distribution and proportional human responsibility in Paradise Lost. In the poem, the idea that God gives each person a "lot" leads naturally to the imperative for humans to interpret their relationship to God proportionally, literally, "according to one's share" (Lat., pro portione). Milton coordinates theological and [End Page 102] mathematical models of proportional thinking about divine and human relationships in the garden, and uses them to define Adam and Eve's experience therein. Reading the discourse of lots in the poem reveals some of Milton's most complex thinking about the imperfect alignment between divine dispensation and the human ability to interpret and structure that dispensation. The "lot" becomes a site where religious belief in a just and all-powerful God intersects with the political and social necessity of understanding and enacting the inequalities inherent in a hierarchical universe.

As Eve indicates with her association of lot with equality, casting lots was often intended as an impartial way to create inequality among things that were previously equal. Just as God could assign different portions to different tribes in the Old Testament by lot,3 so too human legal and political systems could utilize lots to create a fair method of division among those of equal standing.4 The question of God's unequal dispensation has become central to scholarly discussions of the relationship between religious duty and political identity in Paradise Lost. The idea that Milton might set liberty in opposition to equality has proved to be enduring. According to some scholars, Milton's monism, along with his Arianism, tended to produce a view of the cosmos in which hierarchical differentiation is always somewhat at odds with material unity.5 Just as Milton in his other works advocates social equity even as he dismisses political equality, Milton the author of Paradise Lost was more interested in examining equality in terms of proportional relationships than in terms of political subjectivity.6

In Milton's system of hierarchies, morality can only be relational and proportional, not constructed radically, in the sense of attempting to arrive at a fundamental egalitarian position. In the poem, human beings come into being, according to Victoria Kahn, "if not fully formed, at least already created," a view she opposes to the Hobbesian one that we "construct ourselves and our obligations ex nihilo."7 Obligation, therefore, does not inhere merely in the interaction between autonomous rights and natural or divine laws, but rather in the duties enjoined by the proportional relationship between human inheritance and divine will.8 In the [End Page 103] world of Paradise Lost, respect for hierarchical inequality must also acknowledge the original source of embodied equality represented by a God who creates ex deo.9 But this acknowledgment has a destabilizing influence on relationships conceived within one rung of the celestial hierarchy, which is why Satan can confuse Eve with the illusion of movement and the potential for equality represented by knowledge.

In terms of gender, the critical discussion has turned on the relative amount of inequality that exists between Adam and Eve and the effect that this has on the Fall. The tension between the two accounts of Creation in Genesis inaugurates a similar tension in the poem: in the priestly account of Genesis 1 Adam and Eve are created simultaneously, while in the Yahwist account of Genesis 2 Eve is created from Adam's rib.10 This tension has generated a range of critical opinion on the question of whether Milton intends the original state of inequality to be a constant or something to be ameliorated within human relationships.11 The degree to which Milton integrates gender equality or inequality within the theology of the poem has proved to be a focal point for scholars debating Milton's views of equality.12 The couple's differences clearly lead them to different conceptions about their relationship to God and to each other, and yet the question remains whether their differences are qualitative or quantitative. In other words, do they possess the same abilities but in different degrees, or are they imbued by God with different abilities? Even the Son, as is made clear in book 3, relates to God more properly by "merit" and duty rather than solely by "birthright" (3.309). Adam and Eve struggle to understand the nature of their duty to God in terms of their own inequality and proportional relationship to him and each other. The fall of the first couple comes about partly because of their perception that inequalities among beings are more rigid than they are, which is why Satan's use of the term "lot" works so well. It crystalizes Eve's, and the reader's, worry that the signs of God's will might be revealed only in discrete instances, rather than at every moment within the human will and consciousness. Satan portrays God's will as static and confined, which actually [End Page 104] helps Eve to conceive of her own subjectivity as mobile, though Satan encourages her to misunderstand the inequality within the poem's monist cosmos.13

This long-standing critical discussion about God's methods of differentiation and distribution might profitably be channeled through seventeenth century debates about lots. Lots often were the focal point of a complex discourse in the seventeenth century about the relationship between God's will and the religious and political structures of the created world. One of the most important connotations of the "lot" was that of the special privilege that God bestowed on some of his subjects but not others. Furthermore, many in the seventeenth century would have been aware that "lot" was a shibboleth specifically for clerical privilege. The Greek word for "lot" is κλῆρος, which was transliterated into Latin as clerus, the word for a clergyman or a clerical order. The origin of this usage lies in the appointment of Matthias as an apostle in the first chapter of Acts. There were two candidates, but only one could be chosen, and so the other apostles cast lots: "And they gave forth their lots; and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles" (Acts 1:26). Since they called upon the Lord before they cast their lots, the implication was that God himself had selected the clergy for a special place in his church. Thus, the term "lot" came to stand in for God's method of showing his will to his creatures. This derivation was also enshrined in canon law in chapter 21 of Gratian's Decretum: "Cleros, & clericos hinc appellatos credimus, quia Matthias sorte electus est, quem primum per Apostolos legimus ordinatum. Κλῆρος enim graece, sors latine, vel hereditas dicitur. Propterea ergo dicti sunt clerici; quia de sorte Domini sunt; vel quia Domini partem habent" (We believe that clergymen are called that because Matthias was chosen by lot, as we read that he was the first to be ordained by the apostles. For klēros in Greek and sors in Latin mean inheritance. On account of this therefore they are called clerics; because they come from the lot of the Lord; or because they have a portion from the Lord).14 Thus, one of the prime defenses of prelacy was that God gave clerics a special inheritance or portion in his church. [End Page 105]

Understandably, Presbyterians reacted against this logic in the 1640s. The Scottish Presbyterian George Gillespie argued in 1641, "For there is none of the faithful, who may not say with David, Psal. 16.5. The Lord is the portion of my inheritance; and of whom also it may not bee said, that they are the Lords inheritance, or lot: for Peter giveth this name to the whole Church, 1 Pet. 5.3." Gillespie contests the appropriation of the lot by those defending episcopacy: "But Matthias the Apostle was chosen by lot. What then? By what reason doth the Canon law draw from hence a name common to all the Ministers of the Gospell?"15 Milton, too, joined this attack on the priestly lot. In Of Reformation, Milton argues that in the time of Elizabeth, the bishops convinced the queen that their existence as intermediaries functioned as a safeguard for her prerogative. And because of their success, "They had found a good Tabernacle, they sate under a spreading Vine, their Lot was fallen in a faire Inheritance."16 In his Reason of Church-Government, Milton portrays both Lucifer and Adam as priests, because both overstepped their lot: "For Lucifer before Adam was the first prelat Angel, and both he, as is commonly thought, and our forefather Adam, as we all know, for aspiring above their orders, were miserably degraded" (YP 1:762). Of course, these very orders were justified, in the later church at least, by means of the priestly lot.

That Milton's Satan possesses the characteristics of an ambitious cleric is not surprising.17 In book 4 of Paradise Lost, he is compared to a hireling priest infiltrating the church: "So clomb this first grand thief into God's fold: / So since into his church lewd hirelings climb" (4.192-93). But Satan's recourse to the language of lots in book 9 signifies more than his priestly ambition. It is also part of a long-standing argument about how God distributes justice to his creations and how he reveals his will to them. For exhaustive information on lots, seventeenth century readers would have turned to the scholar and clergyman Thomas Gataker, who composed a treatise on lots in 1619 and revised it in 1627. Gataker argues that there are some lots, such as those cast by God, that are not technically up to chance at all. These are divinatory, or "extraordinary" lots. However, divisory, "ordinary" lots are used in [End Page 106] mundane situations to choose between two fundamentally similar options. With a divinatory lot, one expects "to have the division by Lot made exactly and precisely according to the right of the thing divided in regard of those among whom it is divided, or according to the truth of some thing that is thereby enquired into."18 When God casts a lot, for example, it is extraordinary in that it shows his will directing chance. Gataker explains that when God casts a lot the result will be the same every time: "Herein is the difference betweene the one and the other, betweene the extraordinary Lot, wherein there is an immediate hand of God for speciall purpose, and the ordinary Lot, wherein there is not; that the one could not but fall certainely, were it never so oft cast, as in the Lots used for the discovery of Achan and Jonas, and in the election of Saul and Matthias, and the like." Gataker argues throughout his treatise that the one type of lot has no relevance to the other; that is, ordinary lots do not reveal God's will, just his "ordinary providence."19 They simply provide an equitable standard of choice when faced with two indifferent options.

The theological implications of this position were apparent to those interested in the legitimacy of the clerical inheritance. Gataker's delineation of the two types of lots left room both for a privileged clergy instituted by an "extraordinary" lot and for a civic realm in which magistrates often relied on lots to maintain social equity. Gataker eventually advocated a mixture of Episcopal and Presbyterian systems of church governance when he served in the Westminster Assembly. Others, especially those inclining more toward Presbyterianism and Independency, tried to reposition the role of lots in ecclesiastical conflict. For many, the division between "ordinary" and "extraordinary" lots was an artificial one; any cast of a lot was an appeal to chance and, indirectly, to God the director of chance. Milton enters the debate about lots, albeit briefly, in De doctrina Christiana. There he argues, "The casting of lots is in effect an appeal to the divine power for explanation or arbitration in uncertain or controversial matters" (YP 6:690). But he also defends the indeterminacy of lots with recourse to God's unpredictable will: "The casting of lots is sometimes attacked on [End Page 107] the grounds that, when it is tried more than once the result is found to vary, and so must be mere chance. But this is a poor argument, because when God himself has been tried more than once by some insistent questioner, he has sometimes given conflicting replies, (as he did to Balaam, for instance, Num. xii. 12, 20: do not go with them . . . Get up, go with them)" (YP 6:690). Milton contends that relying on chance is implicitly an appeal to God, but that God only reveals himself in a way that would allow us partial, not systematic, knowledge of him and his will.20

Milton's strategy was one way to argue against the special privilege of the priestly class: the lot mimics the indeterminacy of God's responses to the same question, and thus lots cannot be used to determine God's absolute will. Rather, the lot is a tool that mitigates the human tendency toward willfulness. In 1678 Vincent Alsop, a Presbyterian, could write of "a great, and solemn Ordinance of God, viz. The Lot, wherein the Alseeing and Alruling God Controuls the Contingency of the voluble Creature."21 For Alsop, the lot is a mechanism of control over chance because it is an equitable standard of arbitration that eliminates the perception of inequality in decisions of "voluble," or willful, creatures. But Alsop, like Milton, is blurring the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary lots. The danger for Presbyterians was that the separation of ordinary and extraordinary lots could make room for the special privileges of a clerical order. In other words, if contingency is made into a legitimate ethical and theological force, then it would have to be admitted that there is one realm in which God exercises absolute discretion and one in which, as Gataker argued, the discretion of contingency is left to human authorities interpreting God's will. Better, thought some, simply to ascribe all contingency to God's will.22

The origins of this debate about contingency lie in the early seventeenth century and the rise of anti-Calvinist sentiment among the clergy.23 As early as 1613 Thomas Jackson could argue that uncertainty about God's providence was the chief impediment to "professing true religion." Therefore, "Unto this purpose much would it avail, to be resolved whether all things fall out by fatal necessity, or some contingently; how fate and contingency (if compatible [End Page 108] each with the other) stand mutually affected, how both subordinate to the absolute immutability of that one everlasting decree."24 Robert Shelford stated plainly in 1635, "[God] hath given to man free-will; and to maintain this, he hath ordained contingencie."25 The increasing trend in Arminian theology of positioning contingency as an analogue of free will prompted the Independent minister John Owen to respond in 1643 with A Display of Arminianisme: Being a Discovery of the Old Pelagian Idol Free-Will, with the New Goddesse Contingency. For the Calvinist Owen, "the ancient casting of lots" represents the supreme example of God's control of contingency, because lots are "a thing as casuall and accidentall as can be imagined . . . yet God overruleth them to the declaring of his purpose." However, Owen does acknowledge that God makes a place for things properly contingent: "And yet this overruling act of Gods providence, (as no other decree or act of his) doth not rob things contingent of their proper nature: for cannot he who effectually causeth that they shall come to passe, cause also that they shall come to passe contingently."26 The debate thus turned on the extent to which God institutes contingency and permits it within his cosmos; the extent to which, in other words, contingent events were signs of his will. And again, Owen wants to blur the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary lots. Partly, this is so that he can argue against clerical privilege: if God controls all contingent events, it does not make sense to speak of different kinds of lots, since all contingent events are signs of his will. Indeed, if every cast of a lot is actually an appeal to God, as Milton thought, then this further argues against dividing chance occurrences into signs of God's will on the one hand and indifferent ethical indicators on the other.

Milton plays on the difference between the two types of lots in book 4 of Paradise Lost. When Uriel comes down to Eden to warn that some evil spirit has escaped, it turns out that in heaven, as in the Hebrew temple, ministerial duties are assigned by lotteries: "Gabriel, to thee thy course by lot hath given / Charge and strict watch that to this happy place / No evil thing approach or enter in" (4.561-63). This lot functions as a divisory lot; among the [End Page 109] angels of heaven the lot allows choice without the accompanying pride of election. For the heavenly hierarchies, chance functions as an indicator of God's will that duties be done, but also that those duties do not limit the freedom of the angels. Satan, of course, disjoined freedom and duty to God. Thus, we are meant to contrast the selection of Gabriel by lot with the devils' system of voting in book 2.27 "With full assent / They vote" (2.388-89) on whether or not to seduce man. They then start to vote on the agent they will send to earth. As Beelzebub describes the ideal candidate, "Here he had need / All circumspection, and we now no less / Choice in our suffrage" (2.413-15). It is a neat reversal that Satan, who has remarked on his distaste for service, volunteers for this duty. However, for him elections are not about service but about pride, while for Gabriel, selection by lot underscores the union of duty and equality in heavenly government.

At the end of book 4, Milton introduces a divinatory lot during the confrontation between Gabriel and Satan. The confrontation is all the more meaningful because it consists of the angel chosen by lot and the angel who elected himself. And indeed, the contest is decided by lot once again, albeit a different kind of lot. Gabriel explains:

Satan, I know thy strength, and thou knowst mine,Neither our own but given; what folly thenTo boast what arms can do, since thine no moreThan heaven permits, nor mine, though doubled nowTo trample thee as mire: for proof look up,And read thy lot in yon celestial signWhere thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak,If thou resist. The fiend looked up and knewHis mounted scale aloft.

(4.1006-14)

His "lot" is the sign of Libra, the scales. God himself weighs the two consequences of Satan's leaving or staying; Satan's "lot" is thus a sign of God's will rather than an indication of his own strength. God's scale is simply a representation of his will that Satan not fight Gabriel but rather leave to tempt Adam and Eve. However, it [End Page 110] becomes evident to the reader, and perhaps to Satan as well, that the battle between Gabriel and Satan would not have been decided based on their immutable "lot" of strength, which heaven had ordained; rather, God changed Gabriel's portion of strength, and the resulting situation became Satan's lot. Gabriel rightly argues that his agency is paradoxically both his own and dependent on divine allotment, which God can change based on the freely made decisions of his creatures. God permits a certain degree of contingency in the "lot" that ends book 4.

Here, as elsewhere, Milton's God is self-limiting, allowing for the potentiality and contingency with which his creatures exercise their own, self-limiting freedoms.28 Thus, to speak of a fixed "lot" in a monist universe is somewhat nonsensical and at least rests on a misunderstanding of the way that God's distribution partakes of contingency. But it is also a mistake to align one's "lot" completely with contingency. In book 2, the fallen angels misunderstand God's distribution by invoking a Stoic ethic of resignation to fate even as they replace God's will with pure chance. Belial argues that changing their "lot" depends on the interaction between chance and their own mental resolve:

Besides what hope the never-ending flightOf future days may bring, what chance, what changeWorth waiting, since our present lot appearsFor happy though but ill, for ill not worst,If we procure not to ourselves more woe.

(2.221-25)

For Belial, it makes sense to speak of a "present lot" because chance may offer him and the others an opportunity to change it. Mammon, too, constructs a false binary of fate and chance:

                        him to unthrone we thenMay hope, when everlasting fate shall yieldTo fickle chance, and Chaos judge the strife:The former vain to hope argues as vainThe latter: for what place can be for usWithin heaven's bound, unless heaven's lord supremeWe overpower?

(2.231-37) [End Page 111]

Mammon does not sufficiently integrate chance into the complete scheme of God's creation. The devils paradoxically see their position as at once strictly fixed and contingently mutable. They have not encountered the abyss of Chaos, as Satan will later on, and thus assume that chance is a force existing outside of divine dispensation.29

Because God's universe is monistic, there is a sense in which it is correct to speak of contingency holding sway over some parts of it. For, as Satan sets out on his voyage, he meets Chance and Chaos.30 Over the "eternal anarchy" (2.896),

                        Chaos umpire sits,And by decision more embroils the frayBy which he reigns: next him high arbiterChance governs all.

(2.907-10)

Satan is fascinated by this "wild abyss" (2.917) with its "embryon atoms" (2.900). It may be at this very moment that Satan decides to tempt humanity with chance; the lack of limits in the abyss seems to destabilize the legitimacy of hierarchical station. What happens next only strengthens Satan's notion that chance might form a way to combat God's will. Satan falls into the abyss,

                      and to this hourDown had been falling, had not by ill chanceThe strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloudInstinct with fire and nitre hurried himAs many miles aloft:

(2.934-38)

Satan, armed with the knowledge that God does permit chance within his orderly universe, proceeds to tempt Eve with the same possibility that intrigued the rebel angels: that chance might also permit fundamental, radical equality.

Yet, the idea that God allows things to occur contingently also grants Eve the license to eliminate such contingency by making herself "more equal" (9.823) to Adam. In book 9, Satan portrays his own inheritance from God as mutable, granting him license to venture beyond the fixed lot he has received. And yet, he also implies that by doing so he has found a way to stabilize and even [End Page 112] eliminate contingencies by changing his lot. Knowledge of causes is, for Satan, a kind of technology that would correct the uncertainty that accompanies the perception of inequality, which itself stems from being a creature inhabiting a certain place within the cosmic whole. Satan's "science" is the power "not only to discern / Things in their causes, but to trace the ways / Of highest agents, deemed however wise" (9.681-83). This knowledge of causes would apparently grant one a vantage point from which to observe the entire chain of cause and effect in the cosmos. From this vantage, inequalities would come to seem contingent in themselves, merely the result of the inexorable series of proximate causes, which only increase in complexity and effect as the distance from God increases. Satan perceived that inequality is easily characterized as contingent; and so his venture beyond his contingent position supposedly makes him equal to those above him. Similarly, after Eve tastes the fruit she begins to think that if Adam also eats then they will have an "equal lot," along with "equal joy" and "equal love" (9.881-82). Satan persuades Eve to see inequality as a kind of absence of awareness that has come about by chance, but that can be stabilized by means of some sort of knowledge or art that can eliminate the power of chance.31

That Satan's temptation plays on the idea of inequality is especially appropriate, because one of the central ideas of the middle books of Paradise Lost is that God orders his creation proportionally and therefore institutes proportional inequality. But this proportionality is not immediately apparent to the first couple. When Eve is gathering food for Raphael, she says that she intends to bring back such a variety "as he / Beholding shall confess that here on earth / God hath dispensed his bounties as in heaven" (5.328-30). Eve intuitively understands God's monistic universe better than Adam, who later wonders if angels enjoy food as humans do. And yet Raphael answers them both by explaining the concept of a hierarchical yet monist cosmos in terms of proportion:

All things proceed, and up to him return,                  . . . . . . . .As nearer to him placed or nearer tending [End Page 113] Each in their several active spheres assigned,Till body up to spirit work, in boundsProportioned to each kind.

(5.470, 476-79)

Raphael tells Adam that even though all things are linked to God materially, God nevertheless has proportioned that material so that each species has a unique relationship to it. His explanation also obliquely addresses Eve's notion that God "dispenses" things on earth as in heaven. Indeed, God does dispense all things in the same way, though only materially and not formally; for, as Raphael explains later on, the material "kind" of God's dispensation is the same for humans and angels, while the "degree," or form, of access may be different (5.490).

However, the underlying confusion about the limits of God's proportional creation remains in both Eve and Adam. In book 8, Adam asks Raphael about the heavenly bodies:

                  reasoning I oft admire,How nature wise and frugal could commitSuch disproportions, with superfluous handSo many nobler bodies to create.

(8.25-28)

Raphael's response mystifies rather than clarifies the issue of proportion: "Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there / Live, in what state, condition or degree" (8.175-76). He further muddies the notion of proportionality between humans and God later, when he says to Adam, "For God we see hath honoured thee, and set / On man his equal love" (8.227-28). God sets his love equally on angels and on man, but equality in God's eyes is still, strangely, proportional. As a further illustration of the paradoxes of a proportional cosmos, Adam recounts to Raphael his request to God for a mate:

Among unequals what societyCan sort, what harmony or true delight?Which must be mutual, in proportion dueGiven and received; but in disparityThe one intense, the other still remissCannot well suit with either, but soon proveTedious alike.

(8.383-89) [End Page 114]

The tension in this passage is between Adam's desire for an equal and his recognition that "harmony and true delight" proceed "in proportion due." Through his language of musical harmony, Adam implies that whenever there is musical unison there must also be a proportional difference: two voices joining together depend on this proportion to make harmony.32 Adam further recognizes that two beings of absolute "disparity" cannot relate to each other; rather, the difference that Adam accepts is a "mutual," proportional difference that nevertheless works together to create harmony. God's response asks Adam to differentiate himself from God, which Adam does by further delving into the paradox of equality springing from inequality:

No need that thouShouldst propagate, already infinite;And through all numbers absolute, though one;But man by number is to manifestHis single imperfection, and begetLike of his like, his image multiplied,In unity defective, which requiresCollateral love, and dearest amity.

(8.419-26)

Man's "single imperfection" comes from "number"; in other words, man cannot reproduce himself as God can but must join in "collateral love" with another being. And yet, this coupling somehow produces "like of his like." This tradition of associating perfection with singularity stretches back to antiquity. As one of Virgil's shepherds says, "numero deus impare gaudet" (God delights in an uneven number). Servius provides the rationale: "et impar numerus inmortalis, quia dividi integer non potest; par numerus mortalis, quia dividi potest" (an uneven number is immortal, because it is a whole and cannot be divided; an even number is mortal, because it can be divided).33 Human reproduction, similarly, is "in unity defective" because it proceeds from a union. Thus, Adam says he needs an equal and yet acknowledges that fundamental equality is impossible in a proportional universe.

And while Adam tends to define equality too narrowly through the horizontal relationships within each rung of this proportional [End Page 115] universe, Eve tends to look for equality vertically in the integrated dispensation God has given to heaven and earth.34 Both of their perspectives turn out to be flawed. Satan's temptation sets both of these perspectives on equality within the ameliorative function of later, postlapsarian human legal and political systems. These systems, too, often set up standards of "equality" that must be enforced by laws and political mechanisms. When Raphael begins to recount the war in heaven, we hear Satan spouting this very language of proportional equality, which becomes a justification of representative equality. He asks his fellow angels,

Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bendThe supple knee? Ye will not, if I trustTo know ye right, or if ye know yourselvesNatives and sons of heaven possessed beforeBy none, and if not equal all, yet free,Equally free; for orders and degreesJar not with liberty, but well consist.Who can in reason then or right assumeMonarchy over such as live by rightHis equals, if in power and splendour less,In freedom equal?

(5.787-97)

Satan confuses liberty and equality in a persuasive though superficial way. His circular logic associates freedom with proportional equality to God, and that proportional equality then turns into a "right" to be his equals. Indeed, this logic turns God's differentiation of "orders and degrees" into an act of distribution of individual rights that, all of a sudden, are divorced entirely from the duties entailed by those very orders and degrees. That God's differentiated cosmos implies duty is confirmed by Raphael in book 7, when he recounts God's response to Satan's rebellion:

I can repairThat detriment, if such it be to loseSelf-lost, and in a moment will createAnother world, out of one man a raceOf men innumerable, there to dwell,Not here, till by degrees of merit raised [End Page 116] They open to themselves at length the wayUp hither.

(7.152-59; italics added)

In the postlapsarian world, God will similarly exercise a proportional method of salvation, like the proportional duties he enjoins on his prelapsarian creatures.

But the relationship between two types of dispensation—pre- and postlapsarian—is nevertheless marked by different types of equality. The famous lines on the ant society in book 7 present a picture of what postlapsarian equality might look like:

The parsimonious emmet, providentOf future, in small room large heart enclosed,Pattern of just equality perhapsHereafter; joined in her popular tribesOf commonalty.

(7.485-89)

The word "tribes" is especially significant here; and there is reason to believe that Milton intended a reference to the Israelite tribes of the Old Testament, whose government in the wilderness Michael describes to Adam in book 12: "In the wide wilderness, there they shall found / Their government, and their great senate choose / Through the twelve tribes, to rule by laws ordained" (12.224-26). The ant's "just equality" points to an ideal synthesis of individual justice and egalitarian social structure. Yet, the qualifying "perhaps / Hereafter" points out that in a postlapsarian world the process of "equality" becoming "just" is a troubled one, requiring complex social and political structures, tribes and senates, to enact the laws that God ordains.35

The Jewish Sanhedrin set about approaching this "just equality" by employing mediators who could interpret God's will and apply it in human laws. Moses himself is represented as a necessary mediatory presence in book 12:

        But the voice of GodTo mortal ear is dreadful; they beseechThat Moses might report to them his will,And terror cease; he grants them their desire,Instructed that to God is no accéssWithout mediator.

(12.235-40) [End Page 117]

Often, Moses' mediation of God's will took the form of lots, as was well known in the seventeenth century. In his work on the Jewish Sanhedrin, John Selden quotes a talmudic commentary on Numbers 11:16, when Moses used lots to enforce equality:

Tempore quo dixit Deus O. M. Mosi, congrega mihi septuaginta viros e presbyteris, seu senioribus, Israel, dixit sibi Moses, seu secum cogitavit, Quomodo hoc faciam? Si ex qualibet tribus selegero sex, numerum imperatum superabit is numerus binis. Erunt enim 72. At si selegero ex qualibet tribu quinque, deerunt numero imperato decem. Ita enim fient 60. Et demum, si ex tribu altera quinos, atque ex altera senos selegero, inter tribus conflabo invidiam.

[When God said to that most excellent and great Moses, bring to me seventy men out of the elders of Israel, Moses said to himself, How will I do this? If I select six out of every tribe, the number will exceed the requested number by two and there will be seventy-two. But if I select five out of every tribe, ten will be missing from the requested number and there will be sixty. And finally, if I select five from every other tribe and six from the remaining tribes, I will stir up jealousy among the tribes.]36

Moses then selected 6 from each of the 12 tribes and wrote "Presbyter" on 70 lots, leaving 2 lots blank. He put them into an urn and each potential presbyter drew lots. As Selden remarks, "Sortes ejusmodi non raro apud eos adhibitae" (they often employed lots of this kind) (1:1259). Selden is interested, along with his talmudic sources, in the conjunction of human ingenuity and divine decree. Maintaining a "just equality" among the tribes is Moses' imperative, a duty entrusted to him as mediator of God's will.

Thomas Hobbes was also interested in this passage from Numbers, commenting on it in his Leviathan in order to show that God's will was channeled through Moses as human administrator. When God told Moses to select the 70, God intended them to be "such as Moses himself should appoint for Elders and Officers of the People." That Moses selected them through a lottery was especially appropriate, because as Hobbes notes immediately thereafter, "God spake also many times by the event of [End Page 118] Lots; which were ordered by such as he had put in Authority over his people."37 Hobbes's purpose is to demystify God's working, but even for Hobbes "lots" were a site where the divine and human came together to decide the best order for human society. This is especially important for Hobbes, for whom the equal use of indivisible things through lot was a law of nature: "in things, therefore, indivisible and incommunicable, it is the law of nature, That the use be alternate, or the advantage given away by lot; because there is no other way of equality; and equality is the law of nature."38 Lots would thus seem to respect the potential equality of persons while also providing an impartial standard of division and distribution. Jean Bodin implies as much when he cites the same source that Hobbes likely had in mind, Euripides' Phoenissae, in which Jocasta thinks "a lawfull equalitie to be most agreeable unto mans nature."39 And yet, as Bodin also notes, this "lawfull equalitie" creates more problems than it solves because it does not respect the natural divisions among people, divisions that must show up in social and political arrangements.

In these texts, Selden and Hobbes were both more concerned with the complex relationship between human politics and divine, with positive law rather than with prelapsarian understandings of inequality.40 But in Milton's garden the problem of inequality adumbrates these larger and later debates about political representation and social justice. The recognition that proportional inequality must exist within social relationships informs one of Eve's earliest speeches, after Adam has explained the divine prohibition and the duty to praise God:

For we to him indeed all praises owe,And daily thanks, I chiefly who enjoySo far the happier lot, enjoying theePre-eminent by so much odds, while thouLike consort to thyself canst nowhere find.

(4.444-48)

This represents a significant challenge to Adam's plea for an equal in book 8. Eve's recognition of her own individuality, her own differentiated "lot," accompanies her recognition of the proportional [End Page 119] relationship between her and Adam. But her choice of the word "odds" is especially important because it emphasizes the degree of difference between Eve and Adam in terms of their radical, indivisible subjectivity. An odd number cannot evenly be divided. But she also implicitly argues that proportional advantage is very real indeed; Adam is "pre-eminent" by odds, which precludes Eve from being his "like consort."

Indeed, Eve's speech reminds us that there is more than one way to understand proportional relationships. Eve introduces what many in the seventeenth century would call a principle of "arithmetical" proportion. This kind of proportion partakes of an absolute view of inequality: if two things are different numerically, they are unequal. For Eve to be Adam's equal, she implies, there would have to exist no "odds" between them. Geometrical proportion, on the other hand, sees equality as the relative difference in magnitude between two numbers. So, 3:6::6:12—this is a geometrical equality because the difference in relational magnitude is the same; each set is twice the other. For Eve, proportional inequality is absolute and numerical; for Adam, however, equality depends on the degree of difference.

The political implications of these two types of proportion were evident in the seventeenth century. As Francis Theobald argues, geometrical proportion privileged monarchical hierarchy while the arithmetic was more conducive to a popular government: "Divine Plato saith, God doth καλώς γεομετρείν [sic]: Which he meant in this sense; because, The Geometrical proportion was more agreeable & suitable to Regal Power, because this makes no Confusion of all-together, but giveth unto every one according to his desert and worthiness; whereas the other, viz. Arithmetical proportion, giveth equally unto all, according to number: and therefore it was, that Lycurgus chased out of Lacedemon Arithmetical proportion, as a popular thing, turbulent and apt to make Commotions."41 Within the arithmetical dispensation, the only way to effect equality is by redistribution among different parts of the social hierarchy; hence the dangerousness of this system of apportionment. Lots were not inherently aligned with one or the other type of [End Page 120] proportion, though some worried that they tended toward the arithmetical because of their indifference to social position.42 Plato, the great opponent of popular government, wrote that lots should only be used "on account of the discontent of the masses"; their use represents "an infringement of the perfect and exact, as being contrary to strict justice."43 However, even though the difference between arithmetical and geometrical proportion was clear in postlapsarian politics, Milton was not content to import the distinction wholly into the prelapsarian world of Paradise Lost. There, the two types of proportion function as two ways of understanding the human duty to fulfill God's commands.

In 1689 the theologian John Alexander provided an explanation of prelapsarian duties that could function as a gloss on Milton's poem. Alexander makes much of the fact that he is a "converted Jew," and thus attentive to the way that God's covenant with the Jews proceeded from the Fall. However, as Alexander notes, there was no covenant before the Fall: "The transaction, that passed between god and Adam in Eden, Gen. 2, was a meer Sanction on God's side."44 Alexander links prelapsarian obligation to the two types of proportion. "Commutative Justice is when an equal proportion is observed between giving and receiving, between the merit and the reward, between the injunction and the performance." This kind of divine justice existed only before the Fall, because afterward humankind had need of a "Covenant, which, as to us, hath always a proportion Geometrical, as being grounded upon distributive Justice, 2 Tim. 4. 8. By Grace purchased for us, through the satisfaction of an equal in Nature, even by Christ Covenanting for us with the Father."45 Humanity's relationship to proportion is different from God's, who contains all proportions within. As Thomas Jackson defined the divine essence in 1628, "In that he is indivisibly one, and yet eminently all, he is immutable, contrariety itself unto contrarieties; arithmetical equality itself to things equal; geometrically equal to things unequal according to every degree of their unequal capacities in what sort soever."46 And yet, as becomes clear in the middle books of Paradise Lost, both Adam and Eve have trouble understanding the proportional [End Page 121] relationship between themselves and God, and even between each other. Adam desires an equal—for "Among unequals what society / Can sort"? (8.383-84)—but an equal that is different enough from him to give him delight "in proportion due" (8.385). Ultimately, he underestimates the difficulty of creating harmonious communication out of proportional differences. By contrast, although Eve sees the equalizing effects of duty to God and Adam, she acknowledges the insurmountable "odds" (4.447) between herself and Adam.

Returning to Satan's temptation of Eve and the Fall in book 9, these concepts of proportional relationships coalesce around the correct interpretation of the "lots" distributed by God. Satan's primary goal is to associate God's proportional dispensation with ameliorative representative mechanisms in the postlapsarian world. Milton gives us a hint of Satan's strategy before Satan's final speech to Eve, comparing him to "some orator renowned / in Athens or free Rome" (9.670-71). Milton's narrator links Satan to the political systems of those great empires, and most importantly to "free Rome"; Satan's method of temptation will be to imply that sophisticated political knowledge can lead to a free society of equals. But Satan separates political representation from divine distribution; in his schema, one's "lot" (9.690) is the element of natural chance that "knowledge" extirpates (9.687). He had overheard Eve's remark in book 4 that she enjoyed the "happier lot" (4.446) and that she considered her lot to preclude her from being Adam's "like consort" (4.448). He uses this confusion of proportion to imply that movement between levels of cosmic hierarchy is not only possible, but that it also remains proportional; thus, the change from serpent to man and from man to angel is "but proportion meet" (9.711).

For Eve, this notion of radical change that remains proportional would solve the problem of equality between her and Adam. The knowledge of good and evil becomes a leveling force for her, which would provide them both with "equal lot" and "equal joy, as equal love" (9.882-83). The basic misunderstanding afflicting both Eve and Adam, after Satan's temptation, is that they assume that God's proportional universe is geometrically ordered when [End Page 122] really, for them, it is arithmetically ordered. Obedience to God and the reward of eternal life exist as a 1:1 ratio. Adam and Eve, encouraged by Satan, confuse arithmetical duty with a geometrical political relationship in which equality is artificially derived from covenant and contract. However, for the first couple the element of chance in their assigned position in the universe is not mutable but rather constitutive of proportional freedom and equality within an unequal cosmos.

As Satan realizes, however, chance as manifested in the concept of "lot" formed a potentially destabilizing force because it blurred the lines of communication between God's will and his creatures. This was the case in seventeenth century discussions of the power of lots as well. With the repetition of "lot" in book 9 and throughout Paradise Lost, Milton recognizes the complex interplay between postlapsarian methods of political, representative equality and a theological position that must explain inequality within a materially unified cosmos. This tension allows for two interrelated conclusions applicable to the poem and to the fallen world it imagines. First, it is clear that the political manipulation of equal representation is insufficient without a recognition of the proportional inequality that God institutes. But, more importantly, the contingent expression of God's will never completely aligns with the human ability to comprehend and incorporate proportional thinking into political and social relationships. Thus, after the Fall the inequality that existed in the garden becomes hardened into institutional inequalities, such as clerical privilege. And while lots can function to maintain equity within divine commands, postlapsarian human institutions will forever imperfectly mediate God's will and human knowledge. [End Page 123]

Joseph Wallace
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Notes to Wallace, "Miltonic Proportions"

1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 2nd ed., ed. Alastair Fowler (New York, 2007), 9.689-90. All quotations of the poem are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by book and line number.

2. The classic study of the lot in Athenian society is James Wycliffe Headlam, Election by Lot at Athens (Cambridge, 1891). Headlam's study notes the tension between the religious function of lots as an appeal to the gods and their purely political function as mechanism for selection. Later scholarship has seen more continuity between religion and politics in the ancient world, notably E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), 42. See also Richard G. Mulgan, "Lot as a Democratic Device of Selection," Review of Politics 46 (1984): 539-60; William A. Beardslee, "The Casting of Lots at Qumran and in the Book of Acts," Novum Testamentum 4 (1960): 245-52; and Neal M. Soss, "Old Testament Law and Economic Society," Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973):325-28.

3. See Numbers 26:55-56: "Notwithstanding the land shall be divided by lot: according to the names of the tribes of their fathers they shall inherit. / According to the lot shall the possession thereof be divided between many and few." I cite the Bible from the Authorized Version of 1611.

4. Sixteenth century scholars often acknowledged the value of lots in maintaining equality and fairness in civil society. Jean Bodin and Louis Le Roy noted the widespread use of lots in Israelite, Athenian, Persian, and even contemporary Venetian society; see Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-Weale (1576), trans. Richard Knolles (London, 1606), 734; and Le Roy's commentary in Aristotles Politiques; or, Discourses of Government, trans. I. D. (London, 1598), 88. During the English Interregnum, some wove the use of lots into their vision of a reformed commonwealth; see James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), 212-22, 363-65; and Chaos; or, A Discourse wherein is Presented . . . a Frame of Government by Way of a Republique (London, 1659), 41.

5. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 79-110; and John P. Rumrich, "Milton's Arianism: Why It Matters," in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge, 1998), 75-92.

6. See John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington, Ky., 1993), 243; Victoria Silver, "'A Taken Scandal Not a Given': Milton's Equitable Grounds of Toleration," in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford, 2007), 166-67; and Stephen M. Fallon, "'Elect above the rest': Theology as Self-Representation in Milton," in Dobranski and Rumrich, Milton and Heresy, 105-06.

7. Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton, N.J., 2004), 220-21.

8. Milton's epic thus acknowledges, but revises, the seventeenth century debate about rights-based versus duty-based natural law that occupied Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf; for a discussion of which, see Knud Haaksonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1996), 26-42.

9. See Diane Kelsey McColley, "'All in all': The Individuality of Creatures in Paradise Lost," in All in All: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1999), 25.

10. J. M. Evans, "Paradise Lost" and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford, 1968), 14.

11. For the argument that Milton's view of inequality is relatively inflexible, see Mary Nyquist, "The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost," in Re-Membering Milton:Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York, 1987), 99-127. But Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and the Law in "Paradise Lost," (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 201, argues for a more "monistic" view of Genesis 2, wherein the priority of Adam matters less for Milton than the material unity of the first humans. See also Rosenblatt's edition of Milton's poetry, Milton's Selected Poetry and Prose (New York, 2011), 233, where he disagrees with the "overwhelmingly negative" readings of Milton's gender politics in the 1980s.

12. See especially Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 22-61; Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 94-118; Deborah A. Interdonato, "'Render Me More Equal': Gender Inequality and the Fall in Paradise Lost, 9," Milton Quarterly 29 (1995): 95-106; Elisabeth Liebert, "Rendering 'More Equal': Eve's Changing Discourse in Paradise Lost," Milton Quarterly 37 (2003):152-65; Alice M. Mathews, "'Among Unequals What Society': The Dynamics of Punishment in Paradise Lost," in Arenas of Conflict:Milton and the Unfettered Mind, ed. Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1997), 129-39; Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 275-79; and John Rogers, "Transported Touch: The Fruit of Marriage in Paradise Lost," in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge, 2004), 115-32.

13. For Satan's introduction of dualistic, Pauline notions of spiritual mobility into the garden, see Rosenblatt, Torah and the Law, 164-203.

14. Decretum gratiani emendatum et notationibus illustratum, vol. 1, Corpus iuris canonici (Rome, 1582), cols. 119-20; consulted through UCLA's Canon Law archive, available at digital.library.ucla.edu/canonlaw; the translation is my own. For an etymology and history of the terms "lot" and "cleric" from one of Milton's contemporaries, see Joseph Mede, The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-Learned Joseph Mede, B.D., Sometimes Fellow of Christ's Colledge in Cambridge, ed. John Worthington (London, 1672), 182; see also C. T. Onions, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, 1966), s.v. "cleric." Thanks to Paul Harvey and Laura Lunger Knoppers for significantly increasing my knowledge of the etymological history of these terms.

15. Gillespie, An Assertion of the Government of the Church of Scotland in the Points of Ruling-Elders (Edinburgh, 1641), 4-5.

16. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, 1953-82), 1:540. All references to Milton's prose are from this edition, hereafter cited as YP.

17. For a reading of Satan and his angels as parodies of the original 12 disciples, see Lee Erickson, "Satan's Apostles and the Nature of Faith in Paradise Lost Book 1," Studies in Philology 94 (1997): 382-94.

18. Thomas Gataker, Of the Nature and Use of Lots: A Treatise Historicall and Theologicall, 2nd rev. ed. (London, 1627), 332.

19. Ibid., 188-89; "ordinary providence" from Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 155.

20. For the argument that Milton's theology allows partial knowledge of God by means of his representation in Scripture, see Neil D. Graves, "Milton and the Theory of Accommodation," Studies in Philology 98 (2001): 251-72.

21. Vincent Alsop, Melius Inquirendum; or, A Sober Inquirie into the Reasonings of the Serious Inquirie (London, 1678), 243.

22. See Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2002), 215-16.

23. See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640 (Oxford, 1987), 7, 53.

24. Thomas Jackson, The Works of Thomas Jackson, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1844), 1:lxiii.

25. Robert Shelford, Five Pious and Learned Discourses (Cambridge, 1635), 193.

26. John Owen, A Display of Arminianisme (London, 1643), 29.

27. For the difference between the democratic "lot" and the aristocratic "vote," see Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge, 1997), 70-71.

28. See Dennis Danielson, Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge, 1982), 49, 158; Benjamin Myers, Milton's Theology of Freedom (New York, 2006), 112-25; Stephen Jablonski, "'Freely We Serve': Paradise Lost and the Paradoxes of Political Liberty," in McColgan and Durham, Arenas of Conflict, 109-14; and Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 214-15.

29. See Marshall Grossman, "Authors to Themselves": Milton and the Revelation of History (Cambridge, 1987), 34.

30. Critics of the poem have remarked on the way that Chaos itself functions as a generative force, which means that "unpredictability and complexity are not synonymous with randomness nor antithetical to a monist conception of the world"; see Mary F. Norton, "'The rising world of waters dark and deep': Chaos Theory and Paradise Lost," in McColgan and Durham, Arenas of Conflict, 141. See also John Rumrich, "Milton's God and the Matter of Chaos," PMLA 110 (1995): 1035-46; Yaakov Mascetti, "Satan and the 'Incomposed' Visage of Chaos: Milton's Hermeneutic Indeterminacy," in Milton Studies, vol. 50, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh, 2009), 35-63; and David Quint, "Fear of Falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius in Paradise Lost," Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 859-61.

31. For an influential critical formulation of this conflict between fortune and art, see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1986), 89-121, 298-306.

32. See Johann Heinrich Alsted, Templum musicum, trans. John Birchensha (London, 1664): "after a proportion of Equality, a proportion of inequality followeth" (7). And, "As in numbers there is one proportion of Equality, and another of Inequality: So also in Sounds, one is equal, and another is unequal. And again as in numbers, the Proportion of quality is the Radix of all the rest: So in Sounds, the Simple Unison is the principal and Radix of all Musical Intervals. For the Simple Unison doth consist of a proportion of Equality" (16).

33. Servius Grammaticus, Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii Bucolica et Georgica commentarii, vol. 3, fasc. 1, ed. Georgius Thilo (Leipzig, 1887), 105; my translation.

34. See Liebert, "Rendering 'More Equal,'" 155.

35. See Karen Edwards, "Ant," Milton Quarterly 39 (2005): 192-94.

36. Selden, De synedriis et praefecturis juridicis veterum ebraeorum, in Johannis Seldeni jurisconsulti opera omnia, 3 vols., ed. David Wilkins (London, 1726), 1:1258; my translation.

37. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), 296-97.

38. Hobbes, Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Cambridge, 1928), 70.

39. Bodin, Six Bookes of a Common-Weale, 757; see Euripides, Phoenissae, ed. Donald J. Mastronarde (Cambridge, 1994), line 538.

40. See Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), 229-30; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 217-19; and Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979), 126-30.

41. Theobald, Discourse concerning the Basis and Original of Government . . . wherein the Excellency of Monarchy above any other Kind is Evidently Demonstrated (London, 1667), 12.

42. See Bodin, Six Bookes of a Common-Weale, 757.

43. Plato, Laws, 2 vols., ed. and trans. R. G. Bury (1926; repr., Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 1:415 (757d-e).

44. Alexander, God's Covenant Displayed by John Alexander, a Converted Jew (London, 1689), 13-14; see also Shawcross, The Self and the World, 134-35.

45. Alexander, God's Covenant, 15-16.

46. Jackson, A Treatise of the Divine Essence and Attributes, in Jackson, Works, 5:207.

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