By Matthew Jordan
This paintings offers a theoretical and historicized examining of the construction of the "autonomous" topic in Milton's prose and in "Paradise Lost". It rejects the orthodoxy that liberal humanism is simply a kind of domination, and reads Milton's texts as progressive. even though Milton participates within the formation of discourses of sexuality, labour and the character of cause which end up normative, neither Milton's texts nor modernity extra commonly could be understood with no additionally accepting the dynamism inherent within the trust in person freedom.
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This is a tradition of thought which, in broad terms, seeks to define states which go against the manifest word of God as merely human rather than sacred institutions in order to deprive them of divine legitimacy, and to allow, in principle at least, resistance to one’s ruler in the name of religion. 26 Milton’s insistent denunciation of idolatry in relation to the office of king is in large part grounded in this tradition. 426). 27 Milton cites opinions from a number of Protestant divines at the end of Tenure, including Luther, Zwingli, Bucer and Christopher Goodman, whom he quotes as follows: When Kings or rulers become blasphemers of God, oppressors and murderers of thir Subjects, they ought no more to be accounted Kings or lawfull Magistrates, but as privat men to be examind, accus’d, condemn’d and punisht by the law of God, and being convicted and punisht by that law, it is not mans but Gods doing.
Since the state of nature is the antithesis of peace, the ‘law of Nature’ means that we are ‘obliged to transferre to another, such Rights, as being retained, hinder the peace of Mankind’ (Lev. 190 / 64, 201 / 71). It makes sense to seek peace through submission to a common power. The law of nature determines the extent of this power, but with consequences very different to those to be found in Milton and Locke. Once a sovereign is instituted, the law of nature is what he says it is. For Locke, laws ‘are only so far right as they are founded on the law of Nature, by which they are to be regulated and interpreted’ and which is ‘plain to a rational creature’.
Nonetheless, there is a crucial difference between the position of Milton and Locke and that of radical Calvinism. 29 But, as in the case of Hobbes, artificialism – the notion that government is founded in some kind of contract – is not the key issue. Where Hobbes subordinates religion to questions of political expediency, however, Calvinist political theory conceives politics as entirely ancillary to religion. 30 Similarly Samuel Rutherford, despite, unlike Goodman, owing many debts to ‘natural-law constitutionalism’, is above all concerned with ‘something that fallen natural reason could never tell him – the covenant obligations of a godly nation’.
