“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645The title page indicates the work’s scope, and its intended support to the argu-
ment of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.^117 The genre is biblical exegesis: “Ex-
positions upon the foure chief places in Scripture.” Offered as a “plain and Christian
Talmud” (635), the tract quotes and analyzes the relevant Bible passages dealing
with marriage and divorce, drawing extensively on the Hebraic exegetical tradition
without citing specific names, and on a few Christian exegetes. It restates and clari-
fies Milton’s basic arguments for divorce, strengthens his interpretations of the bib-
lical texts, and advances some new positions. But his most persuasive argument is
conveyed by the expanded explanation of his ideal of marriage as a union of minds
and spirits, and by his insistence that every ordinance, and most especially marriage
law, must be interpreted by the overarching principle of charity and human good:
“it is not the stubborn letter must govern us, but the divine and softning breath of
charity which turns and windes the dictat of every positive command, and shapes it
to the good of mankind” (604–5).
He treats the Genesis texts first (Genesis 1:27–8; 2:18–24), to define “what was
Mariage in the beginning... and what from hence to judge of nullity, or divorce”
(614). From them he concludes that man created in the image of God is invested
with liberty, so that “no ordinance human or from heav’n can binde against the
good of man” (588); that God sought by marriage to remedy loneliness, “the first
thing which Gods eye nam’d not good”; that he instituted marriage “like to a man
deliberating,” and thereby “according to naturall reason, not impulsive command”
(595); and that, in consequence, spouses unfitted for that “civil and religious con-
cord, which is the inward essence of wedlock” (605) either were never married or
else their marriages automatically dissolve. A new argument reinterprets the phrase
“one flesh,” referring it not to sexual consummation but rather, in monist terms, to
the union of minds that is necessary to produce physical union: “Wee know that
flesh can neither joyn, nor keep together two bodies of it self; what is it then must
make them one flesh, but likenes, but fitness of mind and disposition, which may
breed the Spirit of concord, and union between them?”^118
Commenting on Deuteronomy 24:1–2, the Mosaic permission to divorce, Milton
elaborates two issues he treated earlier. First, “the current of all antiquity both
Jewish and Christian” defines this as “a just and pure Law,” not simply a custom or
a dispensation. Second, “uncleanness” does not mean adultery but, rather, accord-
ing to expositors who “began to understand the Hebrew Text,” as any “nakedness”
(II, 621) of mind or body preventing participation in the loving society which
marriage should be. This law of God, he argues, agrees with the institution of
marriage in Genesis and is consonant with that law of nature that teaches us to
avoid self-destruction; it frees the afflicted from sexual slavery and injury (626), it
offers mercy when the marriage is “really brokn, or else was really never joyn’d”
(632), and it rescues children from a marriage marked by wrath and perturbation.
He also denies that it will breed license or much confusion. There will be inevitable
abuses, but God would rather have the law look “with pitty upon the difficulties of