Minds Indifferent: Milton, Lord Brooke, and the Value of Adiaphora on the Eve of the English Civil War

Abstract

I. IntroductionOn the eve of the Civil War, England witnessed a debate over religious reform perhaps unparalleled since the effects of the Reformation had redrawn the channels and boundaries of religious authority. In the climate of increasing political and religious tensions as the personal rule of Charles I came to a close, the search for religious truth began to be measured against an ideal of a national religion unified by doctrine and practice with a new complexity and intensity. The claims of the Laudian bishops alongside the monarch to an unrestricted jurisdiction based on divine right crowded in on the privilege of Parliament and the moral authority of the individual conscience. In varying degrees, members of Parliament, ministers of every religious faction, and pamphleteers weighed the consequences of restructuring the Church in order to diminish the bishops' influence upon the monarch, civil affairs, and religious doctrine and practice.Between 1638 and 1642, the debate over Episcopacy acted as a calculus for the value of historical traditions, human judgment, and the imagination to salvation. At the centre of this debate was the doctrine of adiaphora, a point of epistemological uncertainty that blocked any easy resolution to this conflict. The Canons of 1640 defined adiaphora as 'of its own nature indifferent, neither commanded nor condemned by the Word of God, either expresly, or by immediate deduction', and they argued 'therefore that no Religion is to be placed therein, or scruple to be made thereon'.1 But in practice religion was 'placed therein' and scruples were 'made thereon'. On the surface, the Episcopal controversy scrutinized polity, but at its core the conflict was over the validity of man-made moral law. For English Protestants just before the Civil War, adiaphora threatened not so much a dearth of moral value as an instability, even a failure of moral knowledge. Those favouring Episcopacy clung to the peace and epistemological consistency they found in the truths of historical tradition. Reformers, however, invited the peace of toleration that allowed the seemingly paradoxical - religious certainty and epistemological diversity. Looking variously to divine, canon, natural and civil law, writers engaged in this debate were connected by their interest in finding a moral law that maintained both truth and peace without sacrificing the integrity of either one.In 1638 in his Religion of the Protestants, William Chillingworth articulated a new kind of toleration that questioned the desirability of a fixed standard by which to measure the individual conscience. This introduction of scepticism signified a clear departure from the idea of the via media embodied in Richard Hooker's codification of a natural law that unified religion in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593). Between 1638 and 1642 England watched as the Laudian impositions on the Scottish Kirk in the late 1630s culminated in the Bishops' Wars in 1640, as Ireland erupted in rebellion in 1641, and as its own civil war commenced in 1642. Controversialists of all stripes in the Episcopal debate - from moderate Episcopalians mildly examining the jurisdiction of the Church, to Presbyterians who would replace bishops with presbyters, to Independents who had a clear interest in an increased space for religious liberty, to more radical opponents of any national church - found themselves reassessing the reform measures undertaken by the Elizabethan Church that had brought them to this uncertain point in ecclesiastical history. Amid the political and religious strife of the early 1640s, as civil war in England became increasingly probable, both Hooker's confidence and Chilling-worth's scepticism proved insufficient models for either moderate or radical nonconformists who were themselves torn by their commitment to freedom of conscience and toleration on the one hand, and a sense of moral duty and a call to the active resistance to the Caroline Church on the other. …