“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645God hath not two wills but one will, much lesse two contrary.... The hidden wayes
of his providence we adore & search not; but the law is his reveled wil, his complete,
his evident, and certain will; herein he appears to us as it were in human shape, enters
into cov’nant with us, swears to keep it, binds himself like a just lawgiver to his own
prescriptions, gives himself to be understood by men, judges and is judg’d, measures
and is commensurat to right reason.^66Other added passages stridently reaffirm gender hierarchy. Beza’s supposition that
Moses permitted divorce chiefly to afford relief for afflicted wives is “Palpably uxo-
rious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for
woman; and that a husband may be injur’d as insufferably in mariage as a wife... is
it not most likely that God in his Law had more pitty towards the man thus wedlockt,
then towards the woman that was created for another” (324–5). Also, he greatly
expands the section marshaling biblical evidence for divorcing an idolatrous wife,
lest she “seduce us from the true worship of God, or defile and daily scandalize our
conscience” (263).
Among the additions to DDD 2 are several small but revealing allegories. In one,
(female) Custom who is a “meer face,” a “swollen visage of counterfeit knowledge
and literature,” aggressively joins herself with (male) Error, “a blind and Serpentine
body,” but Milton – as romance hero – undertakes the “high enterprise” of engag-
ing this monster (222–4). In another, Milton is both father and mother to (female)
Truth, producing her from his head as Jupiter did Minerva, but also giving birth to
her, relegating Time, usually the mother of Truth, to the role of midwife:
Shee [Truth] never comes into the world, but like a Bastard, to the ignominy of him
that brought her forth: till Time the Midwife rather then the mother of Truth, have
washt and salted the Infant, declar’d her legitimat, and Churcht the father of his young
Minerva, from the needlesse causes of his purgation.^67These curious gender shifts are dictated by Milton’s need to accommodate the
myth of Truth to himself as male teacher, but they also reveal Milton’s subcon-
scious disposition to elide or subsume to himself the female sphere of experience.^68
James Turner states that in Doctrine and Discipline Milton’s images for woman and
for physical sex are “authentically ugly,”^69 linking the sex act to animality or disease
or servile labor. It is the “promiscuous draining of a carnal rage” (DDD 1, 189),
which releases the waste products of the distempered and overheated body – “the
quintessence of an excrement” (DDD 1, 149). Such language cannot be explained
simply as rhetoric: like the degrading body imagery in antiprelatical tracts it also
registers Milton’s disgust – here, apparently, his repugnance – for some of his sexual
experiences. But Milton does not disparage the female body and physical sex as
such; what he finds repellent is loveless sex. Absent a loving union of mind and
spirit, he experiences the sexual act as slavery – grinding “in the mill of an undelighted
and servil copulation” (CPW II, 258) – and as a crime against nature: “the most