Milton contra Hobbes

His widow assures me that Mr. T Hobbes was not one of his acquaintance, that her husband did not like him at all, but he would acknowledge him to be a man of great parts, and a learned man. Their interests and tenets did run counter to each other vide Mr. Hobbes' Behemoth.
       -Minutes of the Life of Mr. John Milton by John Aubrey 

Well after the Authorized version of the Bible became standard issue in churches and the translation of choice for private reading, Thomas Hobbes drew a clear connection between what he described as an “anarchy of interpretations” and the political unrest that characterized the 1640s and 1650s (documented and analyzed in his Behemoth, written at behest of King Charles II in 1668), insisting that the king authorize a singular reading of Scripture, or at least install official interpreters of Scripture to monitor its meaning. Hobbes’ anxiety over competing interpretations of Scripture and the proliferation of disparate sects in mid-seventeenth century England was common among royalists. This diffuse outcome of the Reformation’s elevation of individualized authority provided conservative commentators with a clear cause behind the civil war and revolution.

At issue for Hobbes was not the availability of the vernacular Bible, but interpretation itself, which, as an outward activity, must be ordered and regulated so as not to contradict the established order of the state. As Hobbes puts it in his Leviathan, “the question [of Biblical interpretation] is not of obedience to God, but of when, and what God hath said; which to Subjects that have no supernaturall revelation, cannot be known, but by that natural reason, which guided them, for the obtaining of Peace and Justice, to obey the authority of their severall Comonwealths; that is to say, of their lawful Soveraigns.” Because he understands faith as a gift of God that “never follow[s] men’s commands,” Hobbes distinguishes it from the activity of interpretation, instead arguing that it can only be made visible through subordination to power, in accord with natural law. 

At the same time, Hobbes maintained an important distinction between internal and external behavior—shared by other Reformers including Milton— which led him to argue that internal belief cannot and should not be regulated (Rosendale 164). The difference between the positions of more radical English Reformers and that of Hobbes is that the latter privileges outward actions as the only means by which the state can ensure its peaceful conformity. Indeed, Leviathan is itself an attempt to show how the collective will of state subjects are brought into outward unity through the “artificial” representation of the sovereign ruler. Milton, by contrast, cannot easily accept this contradiction between private belief and political subjectivity, just as he cannot accept such an appeal to an ultimately allegorical model of social life. 

Milton on Interpretation and Crisis

In words which admitt of various sense, the libertie is ours to choose that interpretation which may best minde us of what our restless enemies endeavor, and what wee are timely to prevent.   

(Eikonoklastes, Preface. 1649)

John Milton’s first (and most infamous) tract on divorce turns on the question of individual interpretation and its relation to the exegetical tradition. The two biblical passages that Milton takes up (the Mosaic allowance for divorce in Deuteronomy and Christ’s strict revision of this law in the Gospel of Matthew) appear quite straightforward, and yet Milton’s own traumatic experience of marriage propels him to stage a bold, new exegesis against the “canonical ignorance” that privileges the false “countenance” of custom.

In his essay "The Intelligible Flame," James Turner calls Milton's divorce tracts “authentically ugly” (both because of Milton’s selfish, idiosyncratic argument and Milton's unflattering rejection of sex as a degrading act of pollution), but they are at the very least compelling, if not for the earnestness of Milton’s individual agenda, then at least for the interesting approach Milton takes to Scripture and interpretation. First, Milton condemns literalist interpreters of Scripture and counts them among the “textuists” or Pharisees which Christ opposed. Such reductive approaches violate the “rule of charity” (Milton calls this “the interpretor and guide of our faith,” which resists “resting in the mere element of the text”), a source of liberty that Milton consistently invokes throughout.

What is worthwhile about Milton’s reading of Scripture -- however problematic it may be -- is that he recognizes how literalist interpretations fail to account for context. It does make a difference that Christ is talking to the Pharisees when he addresses the “tempting” question of divorce, and it certainly makes a difference in what may be one of the more striking (if not hilarious) moments of this tract: Milton smugly tells the literalists that, if his approach to interpretation does not persuade them, “let some one or other entreat him but to read on in the same 19 of Matth[ew], till he come to that place that says, ‘some make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake’. . . And if then he please to make use of Origen’s knife he may well do well to be his own carver.” Milton makes this reference because Origen is said to have castrated himself in accordance with this passage from Matthew. If only Origen had been granted the liberal interpretor's "key of charity" he might have spared himself a whole world of pain.