BY THE LATE 1640s the universe of parliamentary political thought had changed almost entirely from what it had been at the time of Hunton and Parker. Parliament—by now a rump of the House of Commons—no longer accepted the ancient constitution, no longer took pains to remain within the bounds of the regime of mixed monarchy, and no longer resisted the effort to find an authority for the constitution back behind the constitution. As a prelude to putting King Charles I on trial, the House of Commons issued an all-important resolution in January 1649. No shadow of the theory of mixed monarchy remained, for the House declared that “whatever is enacted or declared for law, by the Commons, in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law; and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of king, or House of Peers, be not had thereunto.”1 This was not merely an extension of the legalist version of the mixed monarchy theory Parliament had been deploying since 1642. Parliament no longer made recourse to the claim that it temporarily spoke for the king, but they put him on trial and then to death. This was no momentary setting aside of the personal will of the king in favor of his “real” will.
In March 1649 the House of Commons took the even more momentous step of abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords. The Constitution was no longer the mixed monarchy described so lovingly by Hunton. Not king, peers, and commons but commons alone composed the new constitution. The ancient constitution, the mixed regime, was, for the time being, dead. Not merely did the Commons destroy the mixed constitution, but it no longer refrained from claiming a power over the constitution, as the Long Parliament had earlier done. In the declaration of January 1649, the Commons succinctly made their point: “The Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, do declare, that the people are, under God, the original of all just power.” But the holder of that power, for all practical purposes, is “the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled.” They, “chosen by, and representing the people, have the supreme power in the nation.”2
The mature parliamentary position was thus almost entirely different from any of the versions of the ancient constitution or mixed monarchy that Parliament and its defenders had described for most of the 1640s. In addition to the three important differences already noted—the jettisoning of the mixed constitution, the recourse to a preconstitutional source of political authority in the people, and a locating of the supreme power in the House of Commons by virtue of its representative relationship with the people—the new parliamentary position broke with most other elements of the older orthodoxy. For one, the earlier view, as defended by Hunton and Parker, set stringent limits on the type of resistance that could be made to a king. Hunton held resistance of any sort to be proper only in cases of “exorbitant” illegality. In these “exorbitant” cases, Hunton defended active resistance against the “instruments or agents in such commands,” but rejected any actions against “the person of the sovereign.”3 Where there is a genuine monarchy, whether absolute or mixed, as in England, the person of the monarch, “invested with . . . a sovereign politic power,” is “sacred, and out of reach of positive resistance or violence.”4 Henry Parker took the same line: “The king in his own person is not to be forcibly repelled in any wrong-doing. Nor is he accountable for ill done. Law has only a directive but no coactive force upon his person.”5 This limit on the power of resistance flows directly from the authorization of resistance. As Hunton put it, “By the foundation of the government they are bound to prevent the dissolution of the established frame.”6 Resistance is legitimate in the service of the “established frame” and therefore can extend only so far as to maintain it. To act against the person of the king is to overturn the “frame” and therefore to go beyond any authorization for resistance. The limit on resistance therefore reveals once again that parliamentary writers before 1649 hesitated to claim an extraconstitutional power, in Parliament or elsewhere, to control the constitution. Nor did they affirm a universal right of resistance of even the limited extent they allowed for England. Hunton finds perfectly legitimate an absolute monarchy in which no rights of resistance are to be found. The rights of resistance depend entirely on the terms of the original contract.7
The parliamentarian doctrine of the late 1640s thus compares more closely to the Lockean doctrines of the Americans with much better reason than to the thought of Hunton, Parker, and the like. The later parliamentarian texts show much less commitment to the continuing sway of the inherited constitution and the terms of the “original contract” and thus are much more like the “philosophic contractarianism” of Locke and his American followers.
The most authoritative and powerful version of the parliamentary argument of the Civil War era—said to have been “the most eloquent expression of [philosophical] contract theory of the day”—was John Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a work first written to justify the trial of King Charles in 1649. So germane did Milton’s work appear to be for the post-Restoration Whig tradition that two different versions of his treatise were reissued during the Glorious Revolution; Miltonic ideas also seem to have had an impact on other pamphleteers of the age that cannot be measured merely by the explicit references to his book that occasionally appear.8 Milton is an instructive writer to consider, not only because he was widely read and influential but also because he so clearly presented a version of radical contractarianism on a natural, or at least nonlegal, foundation, justifying resistance and even regicide and endorsing the right to change the constitution. In this he carried the project of Protestantizing political thought to a far more radical conclusion than Hunton had done. Yet he differed greatly from Locke and the Declaration of Independence. He thus illustrates, even better than Hunton, Parker, and later writers like Gilbert Burnet, how apparent similarities and parallels can mislead.
Milton’s Tenure attained quasi-official status, although retroactively, so to speak. He wrote The Tenure as a private individual in 1649 and rushed it to press–it appeared only two weeks after the execution of Charles I. On the strength of his essay, Milton was appointed the following month “Secretary for Foreign Tongues,” a position which was to involve him in justifying the ways of the English Revolution to foreigners.
Lois Schwoerer has much in her favor when she classifies The Tenure as a work of “philosophic contractarianism.” It surely does not meet Höpfl and Thompson’s criteria for constitutional contractarianism: it does not affirm contract solely in the context of “particular positive laws and the inheritance of specific polities.” Milton’s work has the “theoretical ambition and generality of thought” which they identify with philosophical contractarianism. The character of Milton’s doctrine—in relation to Höpfl and Thompson’s categories, as well as to earlier Parliamentarian contractarianism and the Americans’ Lockean contractarianism—stands forth most clearly on the issue of the right of resistance. “Since the king or magistrate holds his authority of the people, both originally and naturally for their good in the first place, and not his own, then may the people, as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retain him or depose him, though no tyrant, merely by the liberty and right of freeborn men to be governed as seems to them best.”9 Milton’s argument is thoroughly universal; when he speaks of “the people” he means “any people.” When he traces the people’s power to reject or depose their rulers to its source, he makes no reference whatever to the positive laws or constitution of England or of any country. “What the people may lawfully do” to a tyrant, “as against a common pest and destroyer of mankind, I suppose no man of clear judgement need go further to be guided than by the very principles of nature in him.”10
English law and history hold no privileged place in Milton’s scheme; the English merely example the general point: peoples of all times and places “have deposed and put to death their kings.”11 Contrary to the practice of his predecessors, Milton regularly denigrated the inherited law and consitution. In the Tenure he spoke of those who looked back to old law and custom as men caught up in “that old entanglement of iniquity, their gibberish laws . . . the badge of their ancient slavery.” In a much earlier work, he had taken up the argument of those who thought that bishops were to be retained because “the government of episcopacy is now so woven into the common law.” But the authority of the received law hardly impressed John Milton. “In God’s name let it [episcopacy] weave out again. . . . It is not the common law, nor the civil, but piety and justice that are our foundresses.” Custom, and therefore customary law, is a “tyrant” that begets further tyrannies.12
Milton, then, hardly qualifies as a partisan of the original contract. The people may reject or depose their rulers “merely by the liberty and right of freeborn men to be governed as seems to them best.” Since “all men were naturally born free,” all power in the hands of “kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred and committed to them in trust from the people”; the power thus transferred, however, “yet remains fundamentally and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright.”13 Milton’s “freeborn men” retain a freedom at least sufficient to empower them—all of them—to replace their rulers whenever they like. To revert to the language of the Declaration of Independence—Milton’s freedom is inalienable.14 Thus on two principles Milton stands with Locke and the authors of the Declaration, where Hunton, for example, did not: (1) the right of resistance has a natural and thus universal base, and (2) that base is the inalienability of the primal human liberty.
Yet Milton’s right to choose or reject, retain or depose rulers differs dramatically from the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, in that Milton insists that the people retain this right against any ruler, whether a tyrant or not. The Declaration affirms a far more limited right: only when faced with a government “destructive of those ends”—that is, of the security of inalienable rights—does a people have the “right to alter or abolish” their government. A ruler who threatens rights in this way is said in the Declaration to have “a character . . . marked by every act which may define a tyrant.” The Declaration thus differs from Milton as much as it does from Hunton, Parker, and the others, although in precisely the opposite way. Whereas Hunton’s alienable liberty undercuts any natural right of resistance, Milton’s completely inalienable liberty generates a right of resistance of such potency it can no longer properly be called merely a right of resistance or of revolution. Rather it becomes a nascent or covert transconstitutional republicanism: the people always have the right to change their government for whatever reason seems good to them. Such a right inheres in freedom.
Since the people have the right to change their rulers at any time, all constitutions are republics, in a manner of speaking. Perhaps it is better to say that Milton collapses the people’s constitutive power and their governing power. The popular origin of political power in the Declaration implies popular sovereignty, but not the direct rule of the people. The people ordain and establish a government, that is, make a constitution, and unless that government becomes threatening to rights, it governs. The people have neither a right nor an interest in interfering in any other way. In the gap between popular sovereignty and governance proper arises the possibility of constitutionalism, a set mode and structure of government established by a higher authority than the government and expressly providing for the people’s rights. The higher authority does not rule or attempt to rule as a matter of course, but stands in the wings, ready to reassert its original power if government fails greatly in its ordained task.
None of this holds for Milton. Inalienable freedom means the people always possess the right to rule, or, as Milton more moderately leaves it in The Tenure, the right to be governed by rulers of their choice. No constitutional arrangement can finally restrict this power; the people have a right to assert it at any time and for any reason. Thus it is not possible to draw and retain a stable distinction between ordinary governing power and popular sovereignty. The latter stands not as an ultimate check and recourse but as an omnipresent possibility. Milton’s later overt republicanism is already implicit here.
Milton’s doctrine seems to fulfill the kinds of fears enemies of contractarianism like Sir Robert Filmer expressed regularly: tracing the original of all power to the people openly invites anarchy. Milton certainly is more open to that charge than is the moderate Hunton, who himself would probably have recoiled in fear from the doctrine of The Tenure. But the American founders, much less conservative and fearful than Filmer and Hunton, also found the Miltonic version of contract unacceptable. It is difficult to imagine Milton’s version producing the kind of commitment to a constitution—any constitution—that the Declaration’s did.
The American founders might even have endorsed one of Filmer’s major charges against Milton: although the people are the “original of political power” and therefore have the ongoing power to choose or reject, retain or depose their rulers, Milton nowhere makes clear who the people are or who speaks for them.15 He clearly cannot mean the whole people acting together; he does not even mean the majority, for, as Filmer pointed out, he speaks of “the better and sounder part”—perhaps something like a revolutionary vanguard. To the degree Milton was attempting to justify the deeds of the English Revolution, he was more or less forced into a doctrine of this sort (such as it was) regarding the identity of the people, for by the time he wrote, the Parliament that had initiated the revolution had been much diminished in size through the ministrations of the army. Thanks to Pride’s Purge, the more conservative Presbyterian elements of Parliament had been “sequestered,” leaving all the power with a relatively small remainder—the so-called Rump Parliament. Even the original Parliament had little claim to represent the entire people, given the restrictions on suffrage in the seventeenth century, but the Rump had much less claim than the Long Parliament it succeeded.
However, there was an even deeper reason that made Milton so indistinct on the identity of “the people.” Since he looked at the power of the people as an extraconstitutional, extragovernmental force, he perforce had to consider modes of popular action outside normal or organized channels. The people as such, at least in a nation of any size, cannot act as a body and spontaneously. Thus the people must act via smaller groups that can achieve the organization and energy to act and that put themselves forward as representatives of the people. In 1649 Milton was willing to accept the army as such a body. But there exists no way to identify in advance who is authorized to speak for the people; thus Miltonic contractarianism has the appearance of inviting the regular intervention of (armed) organized minorities into politics. It does not promise stability.
Moreover, the inability to clearly define the people suggests another important difference with the theory of the Declaration. In a sense, Milton accepts the Declaration’s formula that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, but his utter openness in principle to minority intervention in the name of the people makes it quite impossible to specify in practice what consent actually amounts to. The extraordinarily elitist republicanism he advocated in his treatise The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth testifies in part to this very quandary: there, a very small and even permanent group can speak for the whole people.
These difficulties in Milton’s doctrine—which, from the perspective of the Declaration of Independence, appear to be grave defects—might themselves seem to point up difficulties in the philosophy of the Declaration as well. The beginning point for Milton in his account of politics, as it was for Hunton and Parker, as well as for the Declaration, was liberty. “No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free.”16 For all, the same questions thus arose: if human beings were originally free, how came they to be subjected to political authority, and what degree of subjection are they in? There seem to be two and only two possible answers: either liberty is alienable, in which case Hunton’s form of original contractarianism (or perhaps even a more absolutist version) would follow, or liberty is inalienable, in which case Milton’s form would follow. If that is true, then the Declaration’s middle way would be untenable, and the differences between Milton and the Declaration would express no more than the Americans’ inconsistent application of the doctrine Milton put forward with greater rigor and coherence.
The authors of the Declaration clearly believed there was a third way, but their document is too brief and concise to indicate what they took that to be. Locke gives a more extended presentation of the third way, however—indeed, that was precisely one of the tasks he set himself in the Second Treatise. Locke’s solution, briefly, is as follows. In the state of nature, human beings possess “a title to perfect freedom, and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature.” This implies that everybody has “by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men; but to judge of and punish breaches of that law in others.” Locke calls that latter power “the executive power of the law of nature.” To form a political society, human beings do not give up their rights to life, liberty, and estate, but they “wholly give up”—that is, alienate—this executive power of the law of nature. They give up the powers that accrued to them as means of securing their primary rights under the conditions of the state of nature, and through that renunciation establish government, which is a surer and more reliable means to secure their rights. But they do not alienate the rights themselves, “for no rational nature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse.” Thus Locke shows, formally at least, how a middle way is possible.17
One might be tempted, then, to understand Milton’s position as an imperfect anticipation of Lockean contractarianism, falling short because he had not the wit to think up Locke’s solution of an alienable executive power of the law of nature, coupled with inalienable natural rights. But that would be a mistake, a version of the unicontractarianism Höpfl and Thompson warned against. The differences we have already noted between Milton and the Declaration (or Locke) stem rather from the more fundamental point that the Declaration puts natural rights and the securing of them at the center, where Milton puts freedom.18
Milton does say that “all men naturally were born free,” but he adds that the reason for this is that men were “the image and resemblance of God himself, and were, by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey.” Moreover, he continues, the need to overcome or cancel this original condition arose “from the root of Adam’s transgression,” leading men “to do wrong and violence.”19 The knowledge Milton possessed of original humanity is knowledge he learned from the Bible—knowledge of God the Creator, man the divine image, and the Fall. Milton differs from the Declaration of Independence, in that the latter appeals only to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Nature’s God is the God known in and through nature, that is, known through natural faculties, available to humanity as such and not only to believers in any particular revelation. That is very different from Milton’s appeal to biblical knowledge. In his treatise De Doctrina Christiana, Milton makes the point very explicitly: “That the world was created, must be considered an article of faith.”20 In Paradise Regained he is even more emphatic. Offered the wisdom of the ancients by Satan, Christ replies with this query:
Alas what can they teach, and not mislead,
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the world began, and how man fell
Degraded by himself, on grace depending?21
Lacking the Bible, dependent on reason alone, the pagan philosophers lacked knowledge of the very items from which Milton constructed his political theory. Milton’s political thought, like divine right theory, is thus better described as political theology than as political philosophy.22
That immense doctrinal differences between Milton and the Declaration exist should not, therefore, surprise. The authors of the Declaration and Locke speak of the Creator; apparently they believed that natural knowledge of creation is available to reason, but neither the Declaration nor Locke speaks of human beings as created in the image of God, nor do they speak of a fall. The principles of political life can be construed without reference to a fall. By contrast, Milton’s scripturally grounded knowledge of nature teaches him of freedom, but not of rights. Both the Bible and Milton are silent on the subject of natural or inalienable rights.23
The original human condition is one of freedom, Milton asserts, and in this he seems close to the Declaration and Locke. The Declaration asserts equality as the natural condition, meaning that no human beings have a natural claim to rule any others, a thought very similar if not identical to Milton’s notion of original freedom. Milton derives natural freedom from humanity’s creation as “the image and resemblance of God himself.” According to the Declaration, the endowment human beings receive from their Creator is not the divine image, but inalienable rights. These rights can be readily seen to serve as the foundation of natural equality, the Declaration’s equivalent to Milton’s original freedom. Each person’s life, liberty, and happiness (the ultimate goal of human action), belong emphatically to him or herself. One’s life and one’s actions, one’s hopes and one’s satisfactions—these are one’s own-most in the strongest sense. Thus Locke calls them “property.”24 No virtue, no quality of any sort in one human being can give rightful possession of another’s own-most belongings—his or her rights. But political power is just the power to make rightful claims against the life and actions of others; political power cannot, according to the Declaration, derive from any natural quality of rulers; there can be no natural ordination to rule; political power must derive from the consent of the governed and come to be for the sake of securing these own-most possessions called rights. The original or natural juridical condition, then, must be one of equality.
This accounts for the more conservative and stable version of contract that we find in the Declaration.25 Political power exists for the sake of, or as a means to, securing rights, or as a means to liberty. Rights are less secure without government than with it, and therefore it is both rational and rightful to establish and retain stable government, so long as it plays its rights-securing role. Government being entirely a means to the end of rights-securing, there is nothing else at stake in it.
Milton’s natural freedom belongs to an entirely different universe of thought. In the first instance, it signifies the human situation before the Fall. Human beings are originally free in two different senses, both related to and derivative from a yet more fundamental sense in which they are not free: they are under the rightful rule of God. From the start, he rules through “the nature which was so implanted and innate in [man] that he was in need of no command.” That is, human beings were subject to the divine commands, or rather promptings, of the law of nature; because it was natural, this law required no positive command to actualize or effect it. Human beings were subjected also to divine positive command, the command to eschew the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This command is an instance of God’s positive law: “Positive law comes into play when God, or anyone else invested with a lawful power, commands or forbids things.”26 The key point is the last: despite their freedom, God has “lawful power” over human beings in the prelapsarian condition and has used it in his promulgation of both the natural and the positive laws. Being obligated to the lawful power of God, human beings in this condition are thus under a moral subjection to God, and in this sense are not free at the beginning. Indeed, God promulgated his one positive command in order to emphasize human subjection to the Creator: “So, that there might be some way for man to show his obedience, God ordered him to abstain only from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”27
And yet moral subjection to God does not imply complete unfreedom, for human beings were originally altogether free metaphysically. As God explains in Paradise Lost,
I formed them free . . .
I made [them] just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the eternal powers and spirits. . . .
Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere
Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,
Where only what they needs must do, appeared
Not what they would? What praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,
Made passive both, had served necessity,
Not me.28
This “metaphysical freedom” is thus intimately related to human subjection to God—indeed, is in the service of it. Both human subjection to God and human freedom from God are compassed in the notion of the “image of God.” The free will human beings are endowed with—that is, the power to be the cause of their own actions—is a function of the more fundamental human moral subjection derived from creatureliness: human beings need freedom in order to obey, in order to do their duty, in order to express the truth of their situation as creatures vis-à-vis their creator. Human beings are created free because freely given obedience is superior to the dumb or necessary obedience rendered by the lower orders of creation.
Thrice happy men,
And sons of men, whom God hath thus advanced,
Created in his image, there to dwell
And worship him, and in reward to rule
Over his work, on earth, in sea, or air,
And multiply a race of worshipers
Holy and Just.29
As the freely obedient beings, humans are above the rest of creation—“made to command not to obey”. Like their metaphysical freedom, their earthly dominance derives from their moral subjection.
But dominion over the other creatures does not extend to dominance over other human beings. In the prelapsarian condition and by nature, human beings are morally subject only to God; no human beings stand intermediate between God and other human beings, as human beings do between God and the lower creatures. The direct moral subjection of all humans to God implies the moral freedom of all humans from each other:
He [God] gave us only over beast, fish, fowl
Dominion absolute; that right we hold
By his donation; but man over man
He made not lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free.30
This is not to say that human beings in the prelapsarian state owed no natural duties to each other; they did indeed—the duties specified by the law of nature.31 But they owed no political subjection to another, and that is the second, and most political, sense in which human beings were originally free.
Before the Fall humanity could, according to The Tenure, “live so”—could live exclusively under the law of nature, with no political subjection of one person to another. The Fall changed that, however: afterward only “a kind of gleam or glimmering of the [law of nature] still remains in the hearts of all mankind.”32 Under the new postlapsarian conditions, human beings were driven to abrogate their initial status of political freedom, they now must create human authorities to which they are subjected, because it is no longer possible to live within the law of nature without government.
Compared to earlier thinkers like Hooker, Grotius, and Parker, or to later ones like Locke, Burnet, or Rousseau, Milton in the Tenure presents a very blurry doctrine of the political contract. He passes over the contract with barely a word as to who the parties or what the terms of the contract are, or how the contract serves to generate rightful authority.33 In other political statements, Milton put even less weight on contract. In his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, written well before the trial of King Charles, Milton had already affirmed the right to overthrow a ruler, not because of a contract, but absolutely—“against any authority, covenant, or statute.”34 Later, in Paradise Lost, Milton restated the history of political society and there gave a different (more biblical) account from the one limned in The Tenure, with no role for contract.35 The burden of his argument really does not lie on what passes in the moment of covenanting; as we have already seen, the agreement made has no particularly binding power on the people in any case.36 Milton, in fact, rides the contract idea very little distance, only to bridge (rather inadequately) the gap between the original human freedom and the later (quasi-) subjection to specific rulers. The gravamen of his argument lies elsewhere. He derives principles for the guidance of political life not from the terms of an original contract but from his three most fundamental ideas about humanity, contained in the image of man as the free but fallen creature. Everything in Milton’s politics flows more or less directly from the conjunction of freedom, fallenness, and creatureliness.37
Despite fallen humanity’s existence in partial estrangement from God, creatureliness remains the species’ defining feature. As creature, humanity stands over and against God the maker; in the fallen condition human beings are even less godlike than before—the image of God in them is partially effaced—but as fallen they are more and more likely to forget their creatureliness, their dependence on the Being from whom they have their source and whose eternal nature surpasses theirs in ways they, as finite beings, cannot begin to grasp.38 In their fallen condition they are most apt to fall into one or another form of idolatry—to worship false gods and establish false dependencies, to seek false security and to make of and for themselves false absolutes.39
Reason clouded, passion unleashed, sin on the prowl, and, above all, death lying in wait for all, fallen men—even the best of fallen men, like the ancient philosophers—remain ignorant of themselves (as creatures), of God (as Creator), and of their own inability to elevate themselves without grace.
Much of the soul they talk, but all awry,
And in themselves seek virtue, and to themselves
All glory arrogate, to God give none.40
Radically insecure in the face of death, fallen human beings seek their security within the human sphere, falsely place their hopes on themselves or other men, falsely seek and falsely find human self-sufficiency. Only God is self-sufficient, but the more distant humanity is from God, the more it aspires to divine self-sufficiency.41
Such are the idolatrous principles that more often than not animate politics. The first king, who was also the first tyrant, was a man “of proud ambitious heart . . . not content with fair equality, fraternal state.”42 Only God deserves glory and rightly stands above the “fraternal state,” but “man, proud man, most ignorant of what he’s most assured,” constantly and mistakenly attempts to seize for himself, the creature, “that which to God alone of right belongs.”43 In place of that pride should stand humility, “the virtue which makes us acknowledge an unworthiness in the sight of God.”44
The “proud and ambitious heart” that began politics was still at work in Milton’s England. He saw it everywhere. It was at work in the prelatical structure of the church. Rather than the humble life preached and led by Christ, the bishops had their “pompous garb, . . . lordly life, . . . wealth, . . . haughty distance.”45 It was “hateful thirst of lording in the church, that first bestowed being upon prelaty.” Christ came to regenerate man, to “restore the whole mind to the image of God, as if he were a new creature,” to restore him to his full creatureliness. But “prelaty, both in her fleshy supportments, in her carnal doctrine of ceremony and tradition, in her violent and secular power, [goes] quite counter to the prime end of Christ’s coming in the flesh.”46
The “proud and ambitious heart” was at work in the state, too, especially in those pretentions to divinely ordained, absolute and unbounded power in which the Stuart kings and their supporters indulged. These rulers, in claiming to be “accountable to none but God,” were reaching for a status itself godlike, “not a mortal magistrate”; the Roman emperors openly “deified themselves,” but Christian princes who raise absolutist claims tacitly do the same when they “arrogate so unreasonably above the human condition, or derogate so basely from a whole nation of men, [their] brethren, as if for [them] only subsisting.”47
Milton’s nascent republicanism in The Tenure derives directly from his rejection of all royal idolatry. The people must have the power to call to account “lawless kings and all who so much adore them,” in order to “teach” them “that not mortal man, or his imperious will, but justice, is the only true sovereign and majesty on earth. . . . And justice it is most truly, who accepts [sic] no person, and exempts none from the severity of her stroke. . . . But if a king may do among men whatsoever is his will and pleasure, then neither truth or justice but the king is strongest of all other things.”48 The freedom of the people that inalienably empowers them to judge—and replace—their rulers merely expresses in different form the fundamental fact of human creatureliness. That power, always retained, is no means to an ulterior end, as it is according to the understanding animating the Declaration, but is itself the expression of the human situation. Unconditional human subjection to God leaves no room for unconditional subjection to any other human beings. As Milton very succinctly put it, “Being therefore peculiarly God’s own . . . we are entirely free by nature.”49
In his Ready and Easy Way, written on the very eve of the restoration he feared of the monarchy he hated, Milton reiterated and radicalized his point. All monarchy, not just the “unaccountable” kind, is “regal bondage”; Christ himself “expressly declared that such regal dominion is from the gentiles, not from him, and strictly charged us not to imitate them therein.” Only a “free commonwealth” comes near to Christ’s precepts. In a republic “they who are greatest, are perpetual servants and drudges to the public, . . . neglect their own affairs yet are not elevated above their brethren.” But a king—he “must be adored like a demi-god.” Republican leaders live sober and moderate lives, while courtiers live in “pride and profuseness.” By recognizing any hereditary ruler, a people “concede themselves his servants and his vassals, and so renounce their own freedom.” No good Christian could even be a king, “with such vanity and ostentation [displaying] his regal splendor, so supereminently above other mortal men.” No Christian “can assume such extraordinary honor and worship to himself.”50
The main elements within Milton’s thought are thus few and their connections clear-cut. Fallenness requires government, but human creatureliness requires liberty; liberty in turn requires quasi- or even complete republicanism.51 But it would be easy to misunderstand Milton’s republicanism and his concern for liberty—to be misled, for example, by the common words into finding more common ground with the American founders than there is. Rather remarkably, with the egalitarian and libertarian attitudes we have already seen so much in evidence, with the affirmation of a retained freedom that constantly threatens to erupt into and unsettle all settled political life, Milton combines profound elitism and authoritarianism. Milton is both far more radical and far more conservative than the Americans. That strain of his thought that appears conservative to a modern eye so overwhelmed one scholar that he suggested that “if any conception was paramount” for Milton, “it was the conception of aristocracy.” And, he went on, “this aristocratic idealism was not anything democratic.”52 That is very true. In The Ready and Easy Way, his most republican work, Milton went out of his way to exclude the people from real power in the constitution. His ideal constitution would differ from the ancient English constitution in lacking both a king and a recurrently elective parliament. “The ground and basis of every just and free government . . . is a general council of ablest men.” Once selected, “this grand or general council, being well chosen, should be perpetual.” Milton had only contempt for the constitutional provision most often sought by the parliamentarians before the Civil War and by the more reformist Whigs after it—frequent Parliaments. “Ask not, therefore how we can be advantaged by successive and transitory parliaments.” To empower the people at all is to invite “a licentious and unbridled democracy.” The people are to be excluded because experience has shown that no element is “more immoderate and ambitious to amplify their power than such popularities.” Milton thus altogether reversed Machiavelli’s prescription for a popular republic on the model of Rome. In his republic, Milton sought a different ethos from the expansionist and greedy popular regimes of antiquity.53
Milton’s antimonarchism and his advocacy of liberty thus did not prevent him from supporting Cromwell. “Nothing in the world is more pleasing to God, more agreeable to reason, more politically just, or more generally useful, than that the supreme power should be vested in the best and wisest of men.”54 And along with his support for Cromwell went support for the army’s actions against Parliament.
On the basis of evidence such as this, Perez Zagorin concluded that “even the idea of liberty, important as it was for Milton, had its content and its claims determined at all times by his aristocratic principle.”55 This, I think, gets Milton backwards: his aristocratic politics emerged from his concern for liberty. From his earliest to his latest works Milton conceived the end of politics in terms of the moral end of liberty. “To govern well is to train up a nation in true wisdom and virtue, and that which springs from thence, magnanimity . . . and that which is our beginning, regeneration and happiest end, likeness to God, which in one word we call godliness.”56 It is significant that Milton thought the end of politics in terms of “likeness to God”—how different, indeed, from thinking the end of politics in terms of rights-securing. The Fall, in fact, changed little, according to Milton, or at least much less than might first appear. As Milton said in The Tenure, after the Fall human beings could no longer live exclusively in their original freedom without political authority to supplement the direct rule of the law of nature within them. The Fall required the supplement of government, but it was a supplemental means to the same end as was originally set for humanity—to live as the image of God, to live as the free creature, freely obedient to the laws of nature and to the God beyond nature. Human freedom, vis-àvis God and vis-à-vis other human beings, never was merely freedom from restraint, freedom to follow one’s arbitrary will or desires. Will, reason, and freedom exist for the sake of free obedience. The moral end of politics privileges those who embody the virtues at which it aims:
Unjustly thou deprav’st it with the name
Of servitude to serve whom God ordains,
Or nature, God and Nature bid the same,
When he who rules is worthiest, and excels
Them whom he governs.57
And yet to Milton the other side of freedom always remains the right of freeborn people to be governed as seems good to them. It is not that one view succeeded the other in Milton’s mind (although one did achieve greater expression at one time and the other at others), but that Milton’s political thought is caught in a tension inherent in his notion of liberty. Liberty, properly understood, is merely the special form of human creatureliness; liberty can have no end but obedience, that is, virtue; but God will not and others cannot make human beings virtuous. Obedience must be free and virtue freely won, but the coercive authority of the state can have no end but the virtue and true worship that is the business of human beings in this life.58
I need not belabor the chasm that separates the political understanding of the Declaration of Independence from that in Milton’s work. At bottom the Declaration is more like those ancient philosophers Milton’s Christ dismissed: eschewing specific guidance from the Bible, it articulates a doctrine of freedom, of contract, and of politics at once less godly and less paradoxical, and hence more practical, than Milton’s.
Behind all the specific differences we have noted, however, lies the crux, the differing commitments at the center of each theory—for Milton, the “image of God” that is humanity, for the Declaration, the rights-possessor that is humanity. Not merely is Milton (like his Bible) silent about natural rights, but his doctrine of the divine image implicitly denies them. Not merely is the Declaration silent about the image of God in human beings, but it tacitly rejects that way of conceiving the fundamentals of politics.59 To understand the human endowment as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is to affirm that human beings are not in the image of God, for their rights express their deepest needs; rights express not human godlikeness but human vulnerability and mortality, human distance from any divine character. Only a needy being, a mortal being, a being shot through with vulnerability to death and pain, a being radically insecure, can be a rights-bearer and make rights the basis for its existence. Neither gods nor brute beasts define themselves in terms of rights. To immortal gods the right to life is simply superfluous. Beasts, who have a natural orientation toward survival, never posit a right to life, although some human beings may do so on their behalf. Rights testify to humanity’s thoroughly human character.
Milton’s human beings as imago dei were not rights-bearers in their original condition because they were neither needy nor mortal. Only with the Fall did they become both and thus even potential bearers of the Declaration’s natural rights. But for Milton the mortality and neediness that human beings incurred in the Fall never became the defining features of their being or of their politics. Milton’s way of expressing that is to say that “traces of the divine image still remain in us, which are not wholly extinguished by this spiritual death.”60 The task for humanity never is to live entirely in the realm of need and death opened up by the Fall, but rather to live in the light of God’s gracious offer of reparation and reconciliation.
The Declaration represents the decision to understand human mortality and needfulness not as a fallen or derivative quality but as the ground or foundation, as the real endowment supplied by the Creator. It represents the decision to give humanity over to the realm of need and death, even if that means positing these as enemies to be overcome or conquered. Mortality and need are not the product of sin and therefore matters for guilt. The way forward cannot be to strive to recover an original innocence now lost, or to accept reconciliation now offered. Milton, on the other hand, has his Adam and Eve walk together “hand and hand” out of Eden in a hopeful finale to his epic. “The Golden Age,” concluded Christopher Hill, “lies not in the past, but in the future of men and women who understand their destiny.”61 Nonetheless, the hope for the future that the two exiles from Eden share is the hope for the coming redemption, that is, restoration of the original relationship between human beings and God, albeit at a different and higher level.62 Milton essentially looks backward; the future is a restoration.63
Milton’s version of contractarianism, ironically, reminds one more than a little of the political position apparently at the very opposite pole from his, the divine right doctrine he abhorred. Both make gestures toward the idea of retaining the main elements of the Thomistic synthesis of rational and revelatory politics. Both speak as though Aristotle and reformed Christianity equally constitute the foundation of their politics. Yet Milton and Filmer both concede in crucial places that the ancients cannot be proper guides to politics, for they lack knowledge of the one most necessary fact, the Creation, and thus human creatureliness. In Milton, as in Filmer, the conjunction between Aristotle and Protestant Christianity that still holds in Hunton and Parker has definitely split apart.
Milton and his arch-opponents both take the fact of the Creation with the utmost seriousness.64 Although they stand at opposite extremes of the seventeenth-century political spectrum, both Milton and Filmer are Reformation political theologians rather than Christian political philosophers. Each represents a deep-going attempt to find the political embodiment of the Reformation; each seeks the political and moral forms that flow from the Reformation attitude—as each understands that. Their differences with regard to the latter appear to be quite small—and as immense as the universe itself. For Filmer, as for King James and the other divine right thinkers, the fact of human creatureliness, and thus the attitude of pious obedience, dominates. The same can be said for Milton. For the divine right thinkers, worldly authorities constitute an earthly locus for the expression of the obedient attitude. For Milton the majesty of God and the requirements of free obedience so surpass the earthly authorities that only his oddly unstable Christian republicanism can follow.
Both are plausible versions of a Reformation politics. In the realm of thought they express and reproduce the impasse—the violent impasse—that developed in post-Reformation English practice. A civil war and a regicide made much the same point on the field of battle that the Battle of the Books between Milton and his opponents made on the shelves of the libraries: the Reformation had unleashed ways of constituting politics that not only unsettled previous ways but seemed unable to resettle them. The English Civil War, after all, was not a war between Protestants on the one side and Catholics on the other, but between different kinds of Protestants. That was true of the war between Milton and Filmer as well. The seventeenth century in England served to prove that the Protestant principle would be incapable of finding an authoritative political expression. Instead, it produced that splendid variety of principled and uncompromising systems that the names Filmer, Milton, and even Hunton represent.