During John Milton's lifetime (1608–74), somehow Christians were persuaded to redefine “tolerance”: what was formerly an insignificant virtue of enduring evils (as its only appearance in the Bible attests at Matt. 10:15) became the chief virtue of the true Christian (as John Locke claims in his 1667 Letter Concerning Toleration [Indianapolis, 1983], 13). In our time, when many hope for a similar persuasion to take hold within Islam, this volume on Milton's writings on toleration is certainly timely.
The editors divide fourteen articles by various hands into three sections: (a) “Revising Whig Accounts” rejects Whig paradigms of progress from past persecution to present perfection, (b) “Philosophical and Religious Engagements” explores the poet's responses to philosophic and religious contemporaries, and (c) “Poetry and Rhetoric” focuses more specifically on the poems than do the other parts. The editors’ twofold “central claim is that a study of the writings of John Milton can contribute to broadening our understanding not only of the history of [Christian] toleration but also of the links between literature and history” (1). Space allows selective consideration of only this second claim, the link between literature and history.
Esteeming the poetry more highly than the prose, contributors more carefully link Milton's poems to toleration history than they do his prose. Perhaps Milton originated this differential attitude since he often spoke highly of his poetry but once denigrated his prose as but the work of his left hand. In any event, contributors read the poems carefully for context and phrasing, thus revealing unexpected teachings about toleration. Both sonnet 15 and the major epics deserve—and receive—thoughtful essays, one on the sonnet by Elizabeth Sauer, another on the epics from Sarah Achinstein. The latter exemplifies the relevant skills. In a dialogue between Adam and God in Paradise Lost, book 8, Adam seems to criticize God's creation, but, Achinstein observes, context shows God provokes Adam in order to test his intelligence (238). Elsewhere Achinstein scrutinizes Raphael's description of the angelic chorus. While some words appear to emphasis freedom of choice, these are qualified by the archangel's repetition of negatives, yielding a nuanced reading (930).
But turning from poetry to prose, respect is replaced by a condescension resulting in carelessness. Thomas Corns patronizingly writes, “Milton in 1644 was left with all the confusions and ambiguities that characterized incipient radical Independency” (81). Such condescension leads Corns to mistakenly claim a contradiction between “Milton's ringing sentence, ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’” (73) and his intolerance of Catholics. But context removes this seeming contradiction: Milton attributes the ringing sentence not to himself but to sectarians Parliament must govern.
Governing hostile sects, Milton recognized, must begin with intolerance of the intolerant. As Nigel Smith has it, there is “no possibility of a toleration utopia—where anyone and everyone can believe what they like and practice it” (43–44). Thus, intolerant Roman Catholics are excluded from Milton's toleration. For as Andrew Hadfield quotes Areopagitica, “as [Roman Catholicism] extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so it self should be extirpate” (189). But, in interpreting this quotation, Hadfield misses Milton's distinction between intolerance of persons and allowance for books. Although Roman Catholics in person are not tolerated, their books must be allowed (or licensed) for the education of theologians. Hadfield confuses the issue of toleration with that of licensing.
But such patronizing carelessness ignores the possibility that Milton's prose may be “political” in its mode of presentation—that is, as ironic and complex as his poetry. After all, Nicholas von Maltzahn allows, Milton's friend and fellow poet wrote “politic” prose. Andrew Marvell was “too skillful an ironist to be caught out” in heresy, for he employed “the defensiveness natural to the controversialist” (95). But what is acknowledged in Marvell is denied in Milton.
To say the same differently, contributors ignore the need to write defensively; heresy was a capital crime in Milton's age. Contributors simply assume Milton was a sincere believer struggling to reconcile his Christian beliefs with the needs of civil concord. Perhaps he was. But if he was heterodox, he would certainly not risk his life by advertising this fact. Furthermore, the assumption Milton is orthodox is contradicted by Milton's thoughtful contemporaries (e.g., John Aubrey in The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire [New York, 1965], 13–14, 7) as well as by some of our contemporary historians of ideas (e.g., Paul Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic [New York, 2008], 104–74, esp. 172–74). For these latter, Milton was a secular thinker disguising himself to shape Puritanism to non-Puritan ends. To transform an old saying about Paradise Lost, Milton was of the devil's party, and he knew it.
More should be said about the rich variety of essays in this volume. Jason P. Rosenblatt provides an erudite essay on Milton's relation to natural law in Hugo Grotius and John Selden. Gerald MacLean makes a fascinating argument showing Arab-Islamic writers of our day plausibly appropriate Milton to their own religious tradition. But to conclude, even if this poet wrote prose with his left hand, that hand was nonetheless John Milton’s.
