“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665He also reprises familiar exegeses of difficult texts. Christ’s apparent prohibition and
reference to “hardness of heart” (Matthew 19) pertained only to the Pharisees
who would divorce for any cause, though in a broader sense “almost all the civil
law was given on account of... hard-heartedness.” Under the Law divorce was
always sanctioned for “some uncleaness in the woman that might turn love into
hatred.”^144 Citing Selden’s Uxor Hebraica, Milton glosses the term “fornication”
(Deuteronomy 24:1) as meaning in the Hebrew either “‘any unclean thing’ or a
defect in some particular which might justly be required in a wife”; more emphati-
cally, he defines it as “anything found to be persistently at variance with love,
fidelity, help, and society,” referring that definition (as he did also in the Second
Defense), both to his own exegesis in Tetrachordon and to Selden: “as I showed in
another work out of other places of scripture, and Selden also demonstrated.”^145 As
before, and in similar terms, he concludes that marriage must give way “to that
natural aversion which anyone may feel for a disgusting object, and also to any
really irresistible antipathy,” since to be held in a marriage without love is “a crush-
ing slavery.”^146
Milton discusses the Fall, Original Sin and its effects, and the punishment for sin
(chapters 11–13) in terms that are largely conventional but often suggestive for
Paradise Lost. Original Sin was instigated first by the devil and then by man’s incon-
stant nature; like all sins it has two parts, “the will to do evil, and the evil deed
itself”; and it contains all sins: Adam was “faithless, ungrateful, disobedient, greedy,
[and] uxorious”; Eve was “negligent of her husband’s welfare”; both trusted Satan
rather than God, committed robbery and murder against their children (the whole
human race), and were sacrilegious, proud, and deceitful in aspiring to divinity
(CPW VI, 383–4). Chapter 12 treats two of the four degrees of death resulting from
Original Sin: guiltiness and spiritual death. The latter involves the loss of divine
grace and innate righteousness, making for “the extensive darkening” of right rea-
son and the “slavish subjection to sin and the devil which is, as it were, the death of
the will.”^147 But Milton qualifies that loss, allowing that fallen human faculties can
yet produce civil and moral good – “the holiness and wisdom in both word and
deed of many of the heathens” – and can respond to God’s general call:
It cannot be denied that some traces of the divine image still remain in us, which are
not wholly extinguished by this spiritual death.... The freedom of the will is not
entirely extinct: first of all, in indifferent matters, whether natural or civil... [and]
even where good works are concerned, or at least good attempts, at any rate after God
has called us and given us grace. (396–7)In discussing the death of the body (chapter 13), Milton espouses mortalism or
Thnetopsychism, the logical concomitant of his monist ontology. In Lycidas (1637)
he still accepted the orthodox notion that the soul or spirit goes immediately to
heaven or hell after death, but he may have been led to rethink this issue in the