Summary
In “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” Milton argues that the law should permit divorce on the grounds of personal incompatibility. The essay begins on a pessimistic note. Milton writes that harm is an inescapable fact of life. Even if God were to protect us from everything in the world that could harm us, we would still be able to harm ourselves through our own foolishness. That pessimistic attitude sets the stage for Milton’s defense of divorce, which he sees as inevitable in a world populated by flawed individuals.
Milton begins the essay by presenting the problem. Early Christians saw marriage as a disgrace, because it meant people giving up their virginity. Later on, the Church changed its tune, and began to understand marriage as a sacred bond that could never be undone. In this, they went against the law of Moses, recorded in the Old Testament, which gave a right to divorce.
The new rejection of divorce was based on Christ’s words as recorded in the New Testament. He explicitly forbids divorce, seemingly undoing Moses’s law. However, Milton argues, people have approached those words too literally, not realizing that they are inconsistent with Christ’s other priorities. Furthermore, they have taken what was only a moral pronouncement, and made it a legal requirement. Milton stresses that God created marriage as a way to protect people from loneliness, and that Christ also wished people to enter relationships that made life easier to navigate. A divorce ban would go against those priorities.
After this prolonged introduction, Milton reaches his primary assertion in the essay: “That indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature, unchangeable, hindering and ever likely to hinder the main benefits of conjugal society, which are solace and peace, is a greater reason of divorce than natural frigidity, especially if there be no children, and that there be mutual consent.” In other words, having unchangeably incompatible personalities is a better reason for divorce than never having sex (in early modern England, a marriage could be annulled, or made invalid, if it was proven that the couple had never consummated their relationship).
Milton begins by articulating how harmful unpleasant marriage is. It’s a waste of your life to spend it with someone you have nothing in common with. Milton argues that companionship is the most important part of marriage. He argues that the current law, which only permits divorce on the basis of sexual incompatibility, reduces marriage to a purely sexual arrangement. He argues that this focus on the body does a disservice to marriage, the soul, and Christian doctrine.
From here, Milton embarks on an extensive list of the evils caused by forcing people to remain together who hate each other. First, he writes that Saint Paul said, “It is better to marry than to burn.” Many had interpreted these words as referring to the fire of lust. Milton, however, interprets them as referring to the powerful human desire for companionship. To Milton, lust is a sin, but the desire for another person’s companionship is a beautiful thing, and it makes sense that God would want us to have that desire fulfilled.
Second, the dissatisfaction of being in a bad marriage will inevitably lead to hate. Someone who wants to end their marriage is actually doing the right thing by seeking not to stain marriage with hatred. Third, someone who is legally prohibited from ending their marriage is more likely to seek satisfaction outside marriage, by pursuing adultery. The divorce prohibition thus promotes the sins of both hate and infidelity.
Fourth, marriage is meant to be an agreement based on genuine love and peace. Once both parties don’t feel this way, it becomes unnatural. The Bible commands us to live joyfully with our spouse, but it’s impossible to follow that commandment if we do not love them. Therefore, the best way to follow it is to pursue divorce and seek a better relationship. Fifth, every Christian duty should be completed with joy in the heart, from priesthood to marriage. Again, it would be far more Christian to break marriage by divorce, than to keep yourself in it by force. Milton also gives another example of Christian divorce: ending a marriage with someone who has embraced heretical ideas.
Sixth, the prohibition on divorce does not respect human nature, and therefore is not of God. Those who, after being married, realize that their fundamental natures are incompatible, were never legally married, because they never had the companionship which is the basis of marriage. To deny this is to deny that people have innate personalities.
Seventh, current law pronounces that if someone is found to be plotting against the life of their spouse, that marriage can legally be ended. Yet Milton argues that forcing someone to stay in an unfulfilling marriage is just as much a threat to the lives of the spouses as physical violence, because people are liable to fall to deaths of despair. Eighth, there are some people who were just never cut out for marriage, but might not realize this until they were married. To trap these people in marriage would be incompatible with Christian wisdom and kindness.
Ninth, marriage is a fundamentally human relationship. It therefore must be about the mind and not the body, because if it was only about the body, it would be no different than what the animals do together. Indeed, marriage is more than human, but a covenant blessed by God, who values the soul above the body. It’s hypocritical to say that marriage is holy, and yet to debase it by making it all about lust.
After this series of arguments, Milton shifts to the second part of his essay, which is a prolonged response to Jesus’s statement that marriage is holy and should never be ended. Milton’s arguments here are pretty convoluted, and we won’t get to all of them in this summary. The most important thing is the inconsistency between Christ’s prohibition against marriage, and the right to divorce in the Old Testament. Many Christians wouldn’t have seen this as a problem: after all, the New Testament overturned many of the rules in the Old Testament. Milton, however, argues that Christ never intended to create new moral rules, but instead to give people access to salvation when they fail to live up to God’s expectations as expressed in the Old Testament. It therefore doesn’t make sense that he would introduce a new restriction, and force people to remain in unfulfilling marriages.
Furthermore, human nature hasn’t changed between the Old and New Testaments, or indeed between when God created mankind in the Garden of Eden and the present day. Milton spends a lot of time on the creation story, emphasizing that God made Eve to be a companion of Adam. When human beings were cast out of paradise, they lost the ability to immediately discern who the right partner was. But they still have the capacity to form the kind of bonds Adam and Eve had. Instead of looking nostalgically back at Paradise, we should honor Moses’s law, which was created in response to the flawed world we inhabit.
Anti-divorce laws punish people not for a sin, but for a natural fact of life: we have different personalities, and some of them are incompatible. Ultimately, Milton concludes, Christ’s law begins and ends in charity. As he has shown in this essay, forcing people to remain in incompatible marriages is profoundly cruel, and therefore entirely at odds with Christ’s central values.
Analysis
Milton wrote “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce” in 1643. In 1642, his wife Mary Powell left him only a month or two after their marriage. The experience led Milton to compose several tracts arguing for the legality of divorce based on incompatibility. Along with “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” which he republished in a second edition in 1644, he published three additional defenses of divorce: “Judgment of Martin Bucer,” “Tetrachordon,” and “Colasterion.”
The literary scholar Stephen Fallon argues that Milton’s divorce shook up his sense of self. Before Mary Powell left him, Milton saw himself as a kind of religious prophet. He was convinced of his own holiness, and believed he had been chosen by God to speak truth to power. That was part of his inspiration for writing poetry. His failed marriage, then, undermined his whole identity, as well as his reasons for writing. It makes sense, then, that Milton would be desperate to convince people that divorce isn’t a moral failure. Instead, he wants people to recognize divorce as a result of human nature.
However, Milton is also careful to make his argument as impersonal as possible. He never alludes to his own personal situation, instead carefully basing his argument on a series of rational arguments, followed by a prolonged section of biblical interpretation. The problem is that the Bible is pretty clear on divorce: Jesus explicitly prohibits it. Milton is left with an impossible task.
We can see the evidence of Milton's struggle in the difference between the structure of the first and second halves of the essay. The first half is meticulously ordered. Milton lists nine reasons why divorce is ethical, primarily based on common sense. Many of these arguments are tied to the idea of “consummation.” In Milton’s time, one of the only ways to get a divorce was to prove that the marriage was never consummated, or that the couple had never had sex. Henry VIII sought this justification when it came to ending his relationships with some of his wives. Milton argued that having consummation as the only requirement for a legitimate marriage reduces the bond to a purely physical one. In contrast, he repeatedly stresses the value of companionship.
These arguments are convincing because they draw on several beliefs his audience likely would have shared. Most importantly, they emphasize the sinfulness of sexual desire and the separation between body and soul. The Bible is often extremely negative towards sexuality, and those values carried through to Milton’s readers. Similarly, the body/soul dichotomy was fundamental to many philosophers. Milton cleverly employs these shared values to defend his radical proposal, thus encouraging his audience to feel they are already on his side.
In contrast, his argument from the Bible lacks the clear organization or convincing logic of the first half of the essay. Recently wifeless Milton seems to want to say that Jesus just couldn’t have meant what he said about divorce. However, Protestants, and especially Puritans like Milton, were also required to adhere strictly to the word of the Bible. As we listen to Milton twisting himself in knots to undo Jesus’s words, we can maybe see something of the poet’s anguish at his situation. However, we also see the creativity and intellectual bravery which could make Milton such a powerful essayist and poet. Despite his profound reverence for the Bible, he’s willing to shape it to his own purposes.
