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John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism – By Walter S. H. Lim

2008; Wiley; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1094-348x.2008.00186_3.x

1094-348X

N. H. Keeble,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Walter S. H. Lim . John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism . Newark : U of Delaware P , 2006 . 305 pp. ISBN 0-87413-940-6 . $55.00 (cloth ). Political historians such as Quentin Skinner and Markku Peltonen, and Miltonists such as David Norbrook and Martin Dzelzainis, have given us privileged access to the ancient classical, Renaissance humanist, and seventeenth-century revolutionary antecedents, models, and contexts of Milton's republicanism. Lucan, Machiavelli, Buchanan and Hobbes are not, however, the whole story. Early modern constitutional arguments invariably secured themselves within the bastion of biblical authority. For Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which, like other defenses of monarchy, derived rule by a single person from the overlordship of Adam, through Noah and his sons, Abraham and his descendants, Moses and Joshua (who “governed as princes”), the period of Israel's Judges was some strange interlude after which God happily “re-established the ancient and prime right of lineal succession to paternal government” through the elevation of Saul to the kingship. However, the account in 1 Samuel 8 of the Israelites' request for a king “that we may be like other nations” is very far from encouraging: Samuel responds with a devastating account of the exploitation and tyranny that can be expected under a monarchy. Divine acquiescence is given only grudgingly, and almost as a punishment (“And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them”). There was plenty of grist here for the republican mill. Republicans could also (and did) point to the Jewish “senate,” the Sanhedrin, established, as Milton noted in direct (and defiant) allusion to his final republican publication, in “the wide wilderness” by those Israelites who chose not to return “back to Egypt” but to persevere “Through the wild desert, not the readiest way” to Canaan (PL 12.214-26). None of this is, in itself, new to Miltonists, nor does Walter S. H. Lim claim that it is. He does, however, argue that “in Milton's work, classical republicanism was brought into vibrant conjunction with biblical republicanism” and hence that “greater critical consideration needs to be directed at the contribution of scriptural paradigms toward the shaping of Milton's republican vision” (15). It is the purpose of his book to allow to biblical texts their centrality by exploring Milton's many-faceted engagement with the Protestant hermeneutical tradition as it explicated passages of key political import. In this story, continental and English reformers and the Leveller, Ranter, Digger, and Quaker radicals with whom Christopher Hill associated Milton are the guides. Chapter 1 examines The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in the light of John Ponet's Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (1556). Lim acknowledges that there is no evidence that Milton had read Ponet, but he holds that the Tenure“reenergizes some of the salient terms of Ponet's thinking” (31) as he sought to counter the apparent injunction in Romans 13.1-7 to accord passive obedience to civil power and to discountenance the prevailing Protestant view, articulated in William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man, that evil governors are not to be resisted but accepted as divinely just punishment. This leads Lim to discuss the concept of covenant in Milton's republicanism; the significance of Ehud's killing of Eglon, King of Moab, in Judges 3; the relevance of the Book of Judges to Milton's political thinking; and the definition given to that thought by the image of the Turkish tyrant. Chapter 2 explores Milton's definition of England's national sovereignty and authority through consideration of its oppositional difference to Ireland in the Observations upon the Articles of Peace, of the celebration of Cromwell's conquest of Scotland in A Second Defence of the English People and of The History of Britain, read, following Nicholas von Maltzahn, as republican historiography. Consideration of Milton's notion of a social contract and his sense of the significance of Parliament (or “supreme council”) leads to a discussion of the political import of Israel's escape from Egyptian bondage and of the Sanhedrin as a republican model. The chapter ends by taking up the challenge of understanding the monarchical and republican resonances of the depictions of Satan and the Son in Paradise Lost. In chapter 3 Lim “return[s] yet once again,” as he ingenuously puts it, “to the relationship of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes to the controlling context of the experience of defeat” (24). By focusing on the discussion of republican topics and critiques of monarchy common to both texts and their preoccupation with the extent to which revolutionary and violent action is appropriate in defense of the elect nation, Lim develops David Loewenstein's and Sharon Achinstein's exploration of quietism and activism in these texts' response to the Restoration. Chapter 4 discusses notions of gender difference by setting Milton against Anna Trapnel and Paradise Lost against Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder. Lim contrasts Trapnel's prophetic identity with Milton's masculinist assumptions, noting the absence of prophetic women from Milton's “father-controlled” oeuvre (183). Hutchinson and Milton are read “in intertextual dialogue framed by their common republican convictions” (187). The final chapter asks whether Milton's preoccupation with building the English republic as the agent of God's holy nation England fostered or prevented an international sensitivity, bearing in mind his role as Secretary for Foreign Tongues and Cromwell's expansionist, perhaps even imperialist, projects. Focusing on Milton's “fascination with Asia” (253) and representations of India and China in Paradise Lost the chapter draws on Blair Hoxby's Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (2002) to explore Milton's response to England's developing overseas commercial and trading interests and early examples of Orientalism. As this brief (and inadequate) summary shows, Lim ranges widely, taking his cue often from recent Milton studies. Lim's movement from Reformation ideas of the elect nation via English relations with Ireland and quietism in post-Restoration England to masculinist assumptions and finally commercial enterprise is not an obviously straightforward progress, nor a course very obviously signaled in the title. It is not always easy to make out quite what line of argument links sections and chapters or determines the choice of topic; locutions such as “I would like at this point to revisit the issue” (196) or “Another striking feature” (200) can suggest arbitrariness. Conclusions to chapters are not always pinned down (there is no overall conclusion to the book). However, that having been said, as a series of engagements with aspects of Milton's thought this is a deeply informed (there are 30 pages of notes and a 13-page bibliography) and often stimulating and insightful study. There are, for example, deft comments on Milton's representations of Boadicea and Caractacus (97-98); a thoughtful discussion of terrorism in relation to Samson and to Satan (156-59); a persuasive suggestion that the absence of women and family life from Michael's preview of human history results from “a republican critique of Filmer's political theory” (196); a perceptive contrast made between the woman's place in the Hutchinson household and in Adam's (206-07); and a convincing demonstration of Milton's fascination with China, for all his disdain for Oriental despotism (250-52). The list could be extended.