The Innovation of Milton’s Machiavellian Son

Abstract

Classical republicans are on the whole wary of religion. Some, like Thomas Jefferson, are agnostics who want it rigorously segre gated from public life. Others, like Niccolo Machiavelli, are sus pected atheists who value it only as an extension of state power. Even John Milton, the rare republican to dissent from this secular perspec tive, seems unintentionally to confirm that republics cannot also be theocracies. When admirers of Milton's politics explore his theology, they prefer to focus upon Satan,1 Eve,2 and Chaos3 as reservoirs of free dom. For when scholars attend to Milton's God, the deity that they dis cover seems too rule-bound to permit the self-determination necessary for republican virtue. In Milton's Good God, Dennis Danielson describes Milton's view of liberty by arguing: given God's offer of divine grace, man is free either to reject it and use his own innate power to sin, or else to accept it and use the power received from God to refrain from sinning. . . . [S]o far as man is concerned, sin is by commission and moral virtue by omission4 Joan Bennett arrives at a similar view by aligning