Tag: John Milton

Milton on Divorce

libertin-divorcer

Although he is known today as a poet and the author of Paradise Lost, John Milton spent most of his life working as a public official in Britain’s nascent civil sector. Peerless in his command of Latin and Greek, a master of law and rhetoric, and conversant in all of the vernacular languages of Europe, Milton’s contemporaries esteemed him to be a man of tremendous genius and one of the best minds in England. And during his most productive years, Milton gave that mind over to public discourse and political debate. During and before the English Civil War, he wrote a number of treatises and pamphlets espousing what we would identify today as plain liberal thought. He wrote about reforming the prelaty and reorganizing the university curriculum. His most famous work of prose, Areopagitica, is one of the greatest and most influential defenses of freedom of expression anyone has ever written.

My favorite of Milton’s prose works is The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, wherein he argues that church doctrine should make allowances to grant divorce between individuals for whom marriage has failed but who nevertheless must remain wed in obedience to the dispensation of the church. This defense of divorce probably provoked more scorn and controversy among his contemporaries than any of his political writings. It was a challenge to one of the most basic and unquestioned moral tenants of the common church, that marriage was a sacred and irreversible bond created by God, which man had no license to dissolve. But Milton saw that it was possible that the conjugal union could in certain cases interfere with an individual’s covenant God and so should not be given precedence over moral freedom that is necessary for a soul to realize its own salvation. He writes, “Yet thus much I shall now insist on, that what ever the institution were, it could not be so enormous, nor so rebellious against both nature and reason as to exalt it selfe above the end and person for whom it was instituted.” Milton argues that marriage is not an avenue of salvation in and of itself but rather an aid which God has granted to men and women to help them endure the world and live righteous lives. Should the torment of an unhappy marriage actually weaken one’s moral resolve, causing him or her to despair over life, it stands to reason that an individual should be permitted to escape the arrangement for the sake of his or her own salvation. Here he describes how if a marriage, which is devised by God to allay human loneliness, should actually cause greater loneliness and function counter to its intended purpose, then it is no marriage at all and more harmful to one’s standing as a christian not to withdraw from it:

“And the solitarines of man, which God had namely and principally orderd to prevent by mariage, hath no remedy, but lies under a worse condition then the loneliest single life; for in single life the absence and remotenes of a helper might inure him to expect his own comforts out of himselfe, or to seek with hope; but here the continuall sight of his deluded thoughts without cure, must needs be to him, if especially his complexion incline him to melancholy, a daily trouble and paine of losse in som degree like that which Reprobats feel.”

These three medication belong to a group of medications called get viagra in canada phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors. There is no need to hold back any longer; with VigRX you are always buy cialis cheap sure of getting special treat in your advancements of having something special from enhancement pills that cannot expose you to harmful health risks. There are other sexual disorders responsible tadalafil canada online http://seanamic.com/imes-deploying-lifting-equipment-safety-management-system-on-new-rfa-vessels/ for curbing sexual health, but some of the couples might see facing issues in reaching the orgasm. viagra samples Bodyweight squat is an important method to improve your sexual abilities. Milton addressed The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce to the Long Parliament of the 1640s which had just asserted its autonomy as a representative government by rejecting the king’s order to dissolve. His hope was that this new order that was fast emerging would reorganize not only the civil but also the spiritual life of the people of Britain. Parliament at this time was populated by puritans of all stripes who were aggressive in their reform of church practices and religious law; however, it appears that Milton failed to persuade them to revise the marriage tradition. Most were of the belief that the liturgy simply did not support his view. It also is notable that Milton neglects the subject of children and parenting altogether in his discussion of marriage. This is likely why even modern liberal society, which aligns itself around the primacy of the family and the cultivation of children into good citizens, ultimately rejected this thesis as well. It has only been in this new and most recent age of our own, which elevates self-interested happiness and individual prosperity above all other concerns, that Milton’s views on marriage even begin to make sense. Because central to what Milton is saying is that one must be happy and one must love, and if there is anything in one’s life which dispels happiness and which prevents one from experiencing love fully and properly, then one has a moral responsiblity to push this impediment aside and progress in life.

“When therfore this originall and sinles Penury or Lonelines of the soul cannot lay it selfe down by the side of such a meet and acceptable union as God ordain’d in marriage, at least in some proportion, it cannot conceive and bring forth Love, but remains utterly unmarried under a formall wedlock, and still burnes in the proper meaning of S.Paul. Then enters Hate, not that Hate that sins, but that which onely is naturall dissatisfaction, and the turning aside from a mistaken object: if that mistake have done injury, it fails not to dismisse with recompence; for to retain still, and not be able to love, is to heap up more injury.”

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Pre-Modern View of Planetary Earth

Mid-way through Book III of Paradise Lost, Satan descends the golden staircase that leads from heaven to earth. From here he is able to see the entire world, like an astronaut looking at it from the moon. Milton narrates this scene with the following lines:

“Satan from hence now on the lower stair
That scal’d by steps of Gold to Heaven Gate
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view
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Most modern people know what the earth looks like from orbit. To readers in 17th century Britain, a “view of all this World at once” would have been beyond comprehension. Maps did exist in Milton’s time of a round world with 5 continents. Anyone familiar with navigation would have been able to visualize the earth geographically, but Satan sees more than landmasses and oceans from where he stands. He sees everything that is happening, and he sees it all simultaneously. Milton applies the inadequate simile of a scout who “obtains the brow of some high-climbing Hill” and spies from its summit “some renown’d Metropolis / With glistering Spires and Pinnacles adorn’d.” It’s such a narrow illustration compared with knowing the entire globe. Perhaps sensing the scope might be too small, Milton then attempts to equate regions of the earth with corresponding regions in the sky. Libra hangs in the west and Andromeda is positioned just off the Atlantic ocean at the planet’s horizon. “Then from Pole to Pole / He views in breadth.” (3.560)

Later, Satan flies over Eden and alights on Mount Amara to study the world that God has recently made, and Milton describes in detail the different flora and fauna he sees. For this task, Milton appropriates factual information from science books he has read and employs mythological allusion to represent different groves and bowers. He mentions the different beasts of the field which God appoints Adam to name. So the reader gathers these images and facts and vague memories together in his or her mind, and from that pool of categories and dim representations assembles an exhaustive construction of a vast and varied world. An approximation of all this World at once, or at least the closest thing that a single mind is able to imagine.