Literature & Theology, Vol. 28. No. 4, December 2014, pp.

389–410
doi:10.1093/litthe/frt032 Advance Access publication 30 October 2013

WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD

W A N T ? —H U M A N N A T U R E ,
RADICAL CONSCIENCE, AND
THE SOVEREIGN POWER OF
THE NATION-STATE

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Daniel Juan Gil

Abstract
This article responds to William Schweiker’s challenge (issued in, among
other places, an article published in Literature and Theology) to find a way
of saving moral realism—rooted in the value of fulfilling and developing
human capabilities—from the danger of taking human capabilities as the only
good, thus leading to unchecked humans way over the world. I argue that
the political theology perspective of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben
provides a basis for an ethics that is at once rooted in human capabilities
and yet does not take human capabilities as its sole standard of value. The
capabilities approach to ethics presumes an account of human nature as
universal and transhistorical. I argue, by contrast, that any particular account
of what human nature is (and therefore what human capabilities are) is the
product of a historically contingent political community. Moreover, I argue
that a political order can define and enforce a distinctive vision of human
nature (and human capabilities) only by appeal to something outside of itself,
a transcendental warrant. Such a transcendental warrant shadows even avow-
edly secular political orders; when it is made the object of theological reflec-
tion it turns out to provide a positive ethical principle that checks and
corrects any ethics based on developing human capabilities. I argue that
the great Protestant writer John Milton combines political theory and
early modern theology in a way that brings to light the ethical potential
of the transcendental warrant built into any actually existing political com-
munity. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Paradise Lost and his writings


Department of English, TCU, 2850, S. University Dr., Fort Worth, TX 76129, USA.
Email: danieljuangil@gmail.com
Literature & Theology # The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press 2013; all rights reserved.
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390 DANIEL JUAN GIL
on marriage, Milton argues that concrete ethical norms are always tied to a
particular account of human nature that is the contingent achievement of
political power. The function of Milton’s God is to countersign a historically
contingent structure of political power and the version of human nature it
enshrines. But because Milton’s God is ultimately outside all politically
mediated definitions of human nature, Milton’s God also stands for loosen-
ing and disrupting any particular understanding of human capabilities.

From Nietzsche to Agamben, anti-humanist critical theory has proven more

capable of critiquing the fundamental assumptions of conventional humanist

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ethics than of replacing them with concrete, politically effective alternatives.
Humanist ethics is grounded on the assumption of a universal human nature
that provides a standard for evaluating particular social structures in terms of
the degree to which they allow for the development of universally human
capacities.1 Anti-humanist critical theory calls into doubt the idea of a uni-
versal human nature, but it typically fails to find an alternative ground for
ethical judgments about the rightness of particular social structures and indi-
vidual courses of action. But in the pages that follow, I argue that the strand of
anti-humanist critical theory associated with Carl Schmitt and Giorgio
Agamben can indeed give us a concrete, politically effective principle that
does not so much replace humanist ethics as complement it with a radical form
of conscience. Drawing on the work of Schmitt and Agamben, I argue that
human political communities always do two things: (i) they define a particular
version of human nature and human capabilities that is the necessary founda-
tion for any concrete ‘humanist’ ethics and (ii) they anchor their (historically
contingent) version of human nature by appeal to a transcendental perspective,
a perspective that is outside and beyond the political and normative order,
either pure sovereign power or divine revelation. Despite the fact that any
particular claims about human nature are always tied to a particular time and
place, the idea of human nature always has a universal claim built into it, and
this universal claim is necessarily anchored in a transcendental warrant. If we
examine this transcendental warrant in a theological frame, it turns out to
provide an ethical criterion in its own right that is co-assembled with but also
surpasses any concrete ethics generated around a concrete, historically specific
vision of human nature defined by a contingent political order. I will argue
that the great Protestant writer John Milton combines political theory and
early modern theology in a way that brings to light the ethical potential of the
transcendental claim built into any actually existing political community (that
enshrines a particular vision of human nature). I will argue that for Milton, the
transcendental warrant that stands behind any culturally and politically specific
version of human nature also guarantees the ethical value of loosening or
opening up that particular, politically enshrined version of human nature.
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT? 391
I. HUMAN NATURE AND ETHICAL CLAIMS

I want to begin my discussion by examining the work of William Schweiker

who has explored in detail the problems that afflict humanist ethics and the
question of whether religion can offer any help. In an article entitled ‘The
Ethics of Responsibility and the Ethics of Humanism’, Schweiker argues that
the problem with humanist ethics is not that it assumes a human nature whose
universality is imaginary but that it takes the human as its universal standard of
value. According to Schweiker, humanist ethics grounds moral claims upon the
desire to maximise the possibilities for persons to develop a set of capabilities and
capacities that are universally human. But insofar as it treats the capacities and

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capabilities of human beings as its exclusive standard of moral value, humanism
cannot limit the overall assumption of human dominance over the world.2 For
example, it is difficult for humanist ethics to provide a principled check on
human exploitation of the natural world and even animals if such exploitation
seems to develop human capacities and capabilities. Drawing on Régis Debray,
Schweiker argues that taking human desires and capabilities as the only standard
of value has led to an ‘overhumanization of the world’. This ‘overhumanisation’
is a problem from within the humanist ethics that begins with the assumption
that there really is a universal human nature and universally human ethical
principles that can ground ethics. Much of modern critical theory from
Nietzsche and Heidegger to Nancy, Blanchot, and Lévinas has undermined
the notion of any universal human nature and therefore any humanist ethics
based on it. But as Schweiker notes, such critics have not been able to address
the problem of overhumanisation because they have not been able to replace
concrete humanist ethics with an alternative. Schweiker argues that the relativist
critique has failed to provide an external standard that would, in practice, check
overhumanisation except as a kind of apocalyptic wishfulness. As he puts it in an
article entitled ‘Theological Ethics and the Question of Humanism’,

The difficulty with the anti-humanist critique is that it has remained just that,
namely, a criticism that has, by and large, been unable to raise itself to offer a positive,
constructive vision of how to orient life. Anti-humanism has failed in this respect
since, per definition, it must subsume human beings into the working of larger,
suprahuman agencies devoid of moral purpose, say, the fate of Being (Heidegger) or
the coming of the Übermensch (Nietzsche) or the mechanisms of power (Foucault).
In the light of the horror and violence of the 20th-century, inner-worldly humanists,
as I called them, rightly challenge the anti-humanist agenda and the eclipse of the
individual in suprahuman agencies. After gas chambers and killing fields, who
honestly believes that objective Geist or the fate of Being will save us?3

Schweiker seems right that the anti-humanist intellectual tradition has not
offered a positive moral vision, offering only mystical hope. The dominant
392 DANIEL JUAN GIL
instance of such mystical hope in left academia in recent years has been the
belief that as of yet unimaginable forms of community founded on new forms
of subjectivity will emerge spontaneously out of the contradictions of late
modernity, a form of thought that the Occupy Wall Street movement has
absorbed much to its own detriment.4 Schweiker is quite correct that it is time
to re-think the communitarian mysticism of the academic left.
Schweiker’s own response to this problem is an attempt to save concrete,
capabilities-based ethics by adding to it a set of limiting principles that can
check the overhumanisation of the world without rejecting human desires and
capabilities as a fundamental ethical standard. Schweiker’s candidate for an

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ethical check on overhumanisation is a voluntaristic return to the resources
of religious traditions and especially of Christianity. For Schweiker what is
most valuable about the post-Augustinian Christian tradition is its scepticism
about human nature and its insistence that the presence of good and care for
others in the world must be understood as an irruption into the human order
of something that transcends human nature. For Schweiker, a tactical return to
the sceptical perspective on human nature of the Augustinian tradition issues
in an ethics that is still geared toward developing human potentials but that is
tempered by a theologically rooted recognition that there are goods in the
world that are not based exclusively on human self-development. Schweiker
writes that ‘without a ‘‘theological’’ humanism we risk the reduction of values
to human purposes, and yet without a theological ‘‘humanism’’ religious
conviction is unconstrained by moral purpose.’5 In this formulation, what
theology gives to humanism is a way of checking the assumption of the
absolute value of the human. But what humanism gives to theology is a
practical orientation toward morality, which Schweiker, like many other
moral realists, understands as necessarily bound up with conceptions of
human capacities and human goods.6 What Schweiker seeks is a principle
that limits overhumanisation but which is at the same time concretely engaged
with socially embedded life where people seek to balance developing their
own capacities with the claims of others.
I would say that Schweiker’s proposed solution is less persuasive than his
analysis of the problem. Schweiker’s program of a voluntaristic return to the
symbols of religion is unlikely to make sense to those not already inside a
religious frame of reference. Furthermore, to those operating inside a religious
tradition, it may well seem objectionable to treat religion as nothing but a
reservoir of detachable moral truths that limit infinite human self-expansion.
Moreover, many readers outside of a religious framework will simply not
share Schweiker’s goal of saving humanist ethics in any form, seeing it as
based on nothing but the illusion of a universal human nature. And yet
Schweiker’s critique of left anti-humanist theory seems persuasive. Equally
persuasive is his articulation of the problem of modernity as overhumanisation
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT? 393
and the test he proposes for what would count as a solution: a concrete
principle that would limit human self-development by generating extra-
human moral criteria that would apply to practical human life.
I will argue that beyond the symbols of particular religions, theology has
something to offer to the ethical problem Schweiker articulates so powerfully.
I will argue that the kind of concrete humanist ethics Schweiker wants to save
(from itself, as it were) is, in fact, always rooted in a transcendental claim that,
if approached through the framework of theology, provides a concrete ethical
criterion that does indeed limit ‘overhumanisation’. To bring this to light
I want to examine the problem of humanist ethics from the perspective of

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the Schmitt/Agamben model of the role of sovereign power in founding
human political communities. Though Schweiker does not address it in
detail, he implicitly dismisses the Schmitt/Agamben tradition as yet one
more morally ineffectual anti-humanist critique of humanist ethics together
with apocalyptic wishfulness. I do think that there is a grain of truth to this
view; the popularity of Schmitt and Agamben today is, at least in part, a
symptom of the modern (intellectual’s) desire for an escape from overhuman-
isation without really providing an escape from it. But at the same time, I
think the Schmitt/Agamben perspective does provide a powerful starting
point to think through the very issue upon which Schweiker focuses: the
possibility that the resources of religion and theology can act as a
corrective to the mystical escapism of the ethics associated with left theory
today.
My specific argument in this article has two parts. First, I will argue that the
Schmitt/Agamben model makes clear that a transcendental perspective is ne-
cessarily projected by human political communities. As Schmitt and Agamben
see it, to have an inside a political community necessarily projects a transcen-
dental outside, and that is true regardless of whether or not that community
attributes religious content to that transcendental outside. But my second
argument will be that this factually neutral claim about the structural role
that a transcendental principle necessarily plays in human political commu-
nities also carries with it prescriptive component. In other words, I argue, first,
that it is not possible to imagine a human political community without also
imagining a transcendental background to that community and, second, that
such a transcendental background has some ethical content that can function
as the basis of ‘ought’ claims that can complement and correct any ethics based
on developing human capabilities. I suggest that it is precisely the ethically
relevant transcendental background of human political communities that is the
object of theological reflection. And if that is so then even self-avowed secu-
larists will see the inescapability of theological claims within political life and
will be willing to treat theological arguments as a source of concrete ethical
principles directed against overhumanisation. In developing this perspective I
394 DANIEL JUAN GIL
turn to the literary and political writings of the great Protestant poet and
political theorist John Milton, not as an illustrative example but as a primary
theoretical source of thought. In some of his key civil war writings as well as in
his epic, Paradise Lost, Milton argues that while concrete ethical norms are tied
to a particular community in a particular time and place, the role of God
within human community life is precisely to loosen or disrupt all socially
conventional ethical norms.

II. POLITICAL COMMUNITIES AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL WARRANT

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Carl Schmitt is explicit in claiming that there is a transcendental perspective
built into all political communities. For Schmitt, no matter how democratic or
law-governed a political order, it is always underpinned by a sovereign power
that is outside the institutionalised political framework. As Schmitt under-
stands it, the normal, constitutionally legal functioning of political and legal
systems is only made possible by a sovereign who transcends the legal and
political order and who sustains a ‘normal’ state of affairs through the threat of
violence. For Schmitt, therefore, normal, institutionalised political life is
inconceivable without the constant structuring force of a transcendental sov-
ereign power that is outside and beyond the norms and procedures of the
political order it guarantees. Schmitt conceptualises the role of transcendent
sovereign power in religious terms; he sees sovereign power as a ‘secular
miracle’ that anchors the political order from outside.
For Giorgio Agamben, Schmitt’s analysis provides a template for under-
standing the history of Western political formations from the ancient Greeks
to the industrialised mass democracies of the 20th century. But Agamben
believes that Schmitt does not understand the full extent of the effects of
sovereign power. Whereas Schmitt is concerned only with the role of sover-
eign power in the legal order and in the functioning of political institutions,
Agamben argues that the effects of sovereign power pervade all of social life.7
In his Homo Sacer, Agamben argues that every political society is defined by a
miraculous act of sovereign will that institutes and guarantees not only legal
and political frameworks but also the most basic fabric of human life. For
Agamben, the miraculous sovereign will that inaugurates political community
draws a line between approved, state-sanctioned forms of life and what is
marked as other than state-sanctioned life. For Agamben, the life that is cast
away, denied, repressed, or ostracised by the sovereign act that founds a
political order is ‘bare life’, life that is not raised to the privileges of full
membership in the political community.8
Agamben’s claim amounts to a distinctive and critical reworking of the
concept of ‘human nature’ that plays such an important role in the kind of
humanist ethical thought that Schweiker wants to rescue from the threat of
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT? 395
overhumanisation. For Schweiker, as for other moral realists, moral arguments
are always undertaken on the basis of an understanding of what human nature
is and of what the distinctive capabilities and capacities of human beings are.
For Schweiker and other moral realists, there really is a universal human
nature that we come to understand better through moral reflection.
Schweiker does not doubt a universal human nature as the starting point
for concrete ethics; his concern is that an ethics exclusively founded on the
good of developing human nature leads to overhumanisation. But from
Agamben’s perspective, human nature is not an essential fact rooted in biology
or genes but is, instead, the creation of a transcendental sovereign will that

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inaugurates and sustains a particular political community.
To some extent, Agamben’s approach has the effect of debunking any
human capabilities-based approach to ethics by making human capabilities
seem not universal but the product of a contingent political and ethical
order. But rather than seeing Agamben’s approach as a break with the
human capabilities approach to ethics, I want to see it as a way of placing
that ethical approach on a new footing. Agamben suggests that while there is
no transcendental human nature rooted in timeless structures of the human
body and mind, human political communities are nevertheless always con-
structed on the hypothesis of a particular and distinctive version of human
nature that is defined and guaranteed by a transcendental sovereign power.
The model I am articulating here (which is implicit in Agamben’s account of
bio-politics and in some of his writings on the concept of ‘human rights’9)
suggests not that ethical discourse about human nature is fundamentally empty
or meaningless but only that it is necessarily rooted in a particular political
community and anchored by a sovereign decision that determines, for that
particular community, what life is sanctioned and what life is not sanctioned.
Agamben’s model suggests, in other words, that human life can only be
evaluated morally from within the horizon of a particular political order that
defines a particular version of human nature. From this standpoint, any con-
crete theory of human nature on the basis of which we could make moral
decisions would be granted to us (or imposed upon us) by the sovereign
decision that lies at the heart of the particular political order we inhabit.10
For Agamben, recognising the relativism of all ideas of human nature opens
the door to a more radical ethics. For Agamben, recognising the contingency
of all particular visions of human nature highlights a reserve of potentiality
within human beings, the fact that whatever their capacities and capabilities
within the concrete historical/political order they in fact inhabit, they could
nevertheless be otherwise. For Agamben, this reserve of potentiality in
humans is the starting point for a genuine ethics (in contrast to the limited
but much more practical moral life that Schweiker describes and that is based
on some concrete vision of the capacities and capabilities of persons, at least
396 DANIEL JUAN GIL
within a particular sovereign order). In The Coming Community, for instance,
Agamben writes:

The fact that must constitute the point of departure for any discourse on ethics is
that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny
that humans must enact or realize. This is the only reason why something like an
ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that
substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible—there
would only be tasks to be done.
This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and do not have to be,
something, that they are simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely

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decide whether to be or not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny
(nihilism and decisionism coincide at this point). There is in effect something that
humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a
thing. It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality. But
precisely because of this things become complicated; precisely because of this
ethics becomes effective.11

For Agamben, the potentiality that exceeds any particular, historically and
politically inscribed version of human nature is the opening of what he calls
‘ethics’. But what does an ethics of ‘potentiality’ mean in practice? Here we
have arrived at the very essence of Schweiker’s complaint about anti-humanist
theory—namely that it substitutes a kind of mystical hope for concrete, day-
to-day moral life. It responds to the problem of overhumanisation by wishing
it away rather than by articulating a concrete, morally effective criterion of
action that would limit human power over other humans and over the natural
world. But by continuing to look at the problem of human nature from a
political-theological point of view, it is nonetheless possible to make
Agamben’s wish to place potentiality at the heart of ethics more concrete.
One way to do so is to think about what moral disagreements look like from
within the horizon of the Schmitt/Agamben framework. From the perspec-
tive that assumes that human nature is the product of sovereign power, many
practical, day-to-day moral disagreements can be explained as the result of
differing applications of a single, shared understanding of human nature. But
radical disagreements (in which the very terms of human nature are at stake)
point to an incompleteness in the exercise of sovereign power. From Plato to
Hobbes, the Western political imagination has been haunted by the fantasy of
a truly absolute form of sovereignty that would brook no rivals or rival ac-
counts of human nature. For Hobbes, a truly uncontested sovereign power
would be able to eliminate moral disagreement because it would be able to
define human nature to the exclusion of rival definitions (literally, by impos-
ing semantic inflexibility). In practice, however, the ability of historically
existing sovereigns to impose one vision of human nature to the absolute
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT? 397
exclusion of all others (and thus to reduce the space for moral disagreement to
zero) is limited.
Agamben’s theory suggests that any human political community is made
possible by a sovereign decision that defines human nature in some particular
way, and I have suggested that it is only on the basis of a particular definition
of human nature that conventional moral decisions can be made. But the
ability of the sovereign to impose one particular vision of human nature on
his or her population is limited in practice, and this is where radical moral
disagreements occur. And it is also here that the appeal to a transcendental
position as the root of a particular political order comes into play. Schmitt

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famously argues that political categories, including the idea of sovereignty, are
a secularised version of theological categories. He makes this claim because he
imagines that religious communities founded on (supposedly) revealed truths
come first (historically and logically) and that secular political orders come
second and adopt a secularised version of an appeal to revealed truth. But
Agamben’s claim that no human political community is possible except through
the exercise of sovereign power suggests that explicitly religious claims of access
to this or that revealed truth are a reworking of a more fundamental structure of
political communities in which sovereign power binds a community only by
claiming to reach beyond that political community.12 Because transcendental
claims offer the only warrant universal enough to secure the absolute and ex-
clusive legitimacy of one particular definition of human nature, acts of political
founding necessarily make transcendental claims that can subsequently become
the basis for specifically religious claims.13
A religiously inflected version of a transcendental warrant for a claim about
human nature is most frequently used to cement the legitimacy of a particular
political order and a particular, politically constrained version of human
nature. But it also opens the door to a perspective that can cause trouble
for any actually existing political order and therefore for any concrete accounts
of human nature. This is so because the transcendental principle to which a
political order appeals is, by its very nature, outside of the concrete political
order. That transcendental perspective can therefore provide a standpoint
from which to critique or undermine the political community and its particu-
lar vision of human nature. In other words, the appeal of a political order to
the gods or to one God as the ultimate guarantee for the act of sovereign will
that founds it opens the door to a point of view that can potentially cut against
the grain of a settled political order and a settled definition of human nature,
and yet political orders cannot do without this potentially problematic appeal
to a transcendental perspective.
Moreover, the bigger the population upon which a sovereign attempts to
impose a definition of human nature (or, to put it in more Agambenesque
terms, the bigger the population that the state subjects to bio-political
398 DANIEL JUAN GIL
management), the stronger and more unified becomes the transcendental
claim it projects. This development is manifest in early modern Europe
with the rise of territorial nation-states. Because these political entities attempt
to project a definition of human nature upon an unprecedentedly large popu-
lation, the transcendental claim that accompanies the rise of the nation-state
becomes hypertrophied, as is evident in the theory of divine right monarchy.14
The early modern nation-state projects an unprecedentedly strong and unified
theological claim, but while this theological claim can buttress the power of
the nation-state (in the propaganda of divine right monarchy) it can also cut in
another direction.15 For as early modern subjects encounter the transcendental

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principle embedded in the nation-state, namely a God who is defined as
being outside and beyond the scope of the sovereign nation-state, they are
potentially unhinged from the national sovereign. To state the problem in its
most paradoxical form: because political orders aim to command total
submission, they appeal to the will of God; but because the idea of God
transcends any particular political order, the question of what God wants is a
potentially troubling one for any particular political order.

III. MILTON’S POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND RADICAL CONSCIENCE

I have suggested that the appeal to the gods or to the one God as the foun-
dation of the political community potentially cuts against the grain of any
settled political order with a settled account of human nature. The specific
ways in which that happens will, of course, vary depending on the content
that people in a particular historical context attribute to the notion of God.
But part of the point of my discussion is that insofar as political orders project a
transcendental principle that is outside of the sovereign political order, that
sovereign political order necessarily gives up the absolute power to define God
or the gods and will therefore open the door to rival definitions that may cut
against the grain of a particular political order.
I will now argue that aside from any particular definition of God rooted in
this or that account of revealed truth, the structurally inevitable appeal from
within a political order to a transcendental principle to guarantee the apparent
universality of a historically contingent account of human nature will by
itself—structurally, so to speak—generate an ethically effective principle that
can be used as a standard to evaluate particular political and moral orders from
the outside, as it were, according to a criterion that is not moral (i.e. not
rooted in one particular conception of human nature) but which is nonethe-
less morally effective. In other words, people may define God in many ways
and use these definitions to support or indict particular political and moral
orders; but the role that the transcendental plays within any political order
gives that transcendental principle at least some content, and this content can
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT? 399
be the basis for a concrete check on any existing political order and accom-
panying definition of human nature.
The question of what ethical or moral content the very idea of God has, as it
necessarily appears within any political order, is one of the major concerns of
the great Protestant poet and political theorist John Milton. The question that
Milton’s work raises for us is this: what does anyone who could possibly count
as God want from and for humans?
The answer ultimately lies in the great epic, Paradise Lost, but I want to
begin with a political theory pamphlet Milton wrote in response to a specific
crisis in the English Civil War, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Written in

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1648 and 1649, just before parliament took the momentous step of executing
King Charles I, the pamphlet attempts to persuade those opposed to executing
the King that it is right to do so. In the historical moment to which the
pamphlet responds, the Parliament has won the war and the New Model
Army has taken the king into its custody. Radical puritans like Milton advo-
cated executing the king in order to clear the ground for establishing a new
state structure along republican lines and abolishing a national church with
coercive power. But the more conservative members of parliament, notably
the party that aimed to establish a version of the Scottish Presbyterian church
in England, had lost their courage. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates is written
to persuade this conservative party to push on with the revolution by execut-
ing the king.16
As is typical of Milton’s political writing, he prefers to throw several
arguments at his enemies at once, even when those arguments conflict
with each other. At one level, The Tenure argues that the Presbyterian
party has already killed the king (qua king) by waging war on him (so
that only the ‘meere useless bulke of his person’17 now survives), and that
they are simply refusing to acknowledge that they have in fact already made
their decision. At another level, Milton tries to persuade them to do what he
says they have already done by citing precedents from ancient and recent
history that purport to show that what he calls ‘the people’ have a right to
kill their kings if their kings fail to pursue the common good. But having
spilled much ink on establishing the precedents that justify killing the king,
Milton then boldly writes that it would be even better if the parliament
would act without precedent at all:

And if the Parlament and Military Councel doe what they doe without
precedent, if it appeare thir duty, it argues the more wisdom, vertue, and
magnanimity, that they know themselves able to be a precedent to others. Who
perhaps in future ages, if they prove not too degenerat, will look up with honour,
and aspire toward these exemplary, and matchless deeds of thir Ancestors, as to
the highest top of thir civil glory and emulation. (TKM, p. 38)
400 DANIEL JUAN GIL
It seems clear that Milton understands the revolutionary moment of 1649 as one
where the revolutionary will of the ‘Parlament and Military Councel’ must fill
the institutional void created by war in order to found a new political order and
thereby ‘be a precedent to others.’ (The appeal to the military council is espe-
cially important in the aftermath of Pride’s purge of the conservatives in par-
liament through which the army asserted de facto control over the political
situation.) Milton considers ‘Justice and Victory the only warrants through all
ages, next under immediat Revelation, to exercise supream power’, with the
fact of military ‘victory’ being especially important to Milton (TKM, p. 5).
Despite not enjoying the blessings of Schmitt’s conceptual nomenclature,

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therefore, Milton articulates something very close to Schmitt’s vision of the
essentially arbitrary core of originary sovereign power that inaugurates political
norms or institutions but is itself non-normative and non-institutional.
Moreover, Milton also anticipates Agamben’s expansion of Schmitt’s perspec-
tive by seeing the arbitrary sovereign power that institutes a political order (a
role that Milton invites a victorious parliament and army to embrace) as what
institutes a particular ethical or moral order. In this context, what most upsets
Milton is what he sees as naı̈ve efforts on the part of conservative Presbyterians
in parliament to apply conventional moral arguments to deciding what to do
with the king. For Milton, the political in-between situation is an amoral one;
only inside a stable political and moral order can morality come into play to
evaluate different courses of action. To apply morality to the treatment of the
king (as the Presbyterian party proposes to do) is, for Milton, a failure to under-
stand the historical situation.
But even as Milton argues that the unconstrained power of the army and
parliament are alone what should found a new political order, and that their
might makes their actions right, his rhetoric does contain an appeal to a
transcendent principle that makes the army’s action not only right because
they have the power but also right in some ethical sense (in the passage I cited
above, for instance, he appeals to ‘Justice’ as well as ‘Victory’ as supreme
‘warrants’). And here it is important to look at Milton’s understanding of
natural law as rooted in God’s will for human beings. Milton’s use of natural
law is far from naı̈ve. He certainly does not believe that God has a prescription
for political life that people must simply follow. Milton was a realist in political
matters, and in The Tenure he is well aware of the fact that God’s supposed will
can be invoked ex post facto to justify any political decision. In a surprisingly
cynical moment, for example, he argues that if the appeal to ‘God’s will’ can
be used to justify the coronation of a king it can equally be used to justify
deposing a king:

And contrary if the peoples act in election be pleaded by a King, as the act of
God, and the most just title to enthrone him, why may not the peoples act of
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT? 401
rejection, bee as well pleaded by the people as the act of God, and the most just
reason to depose him? (TKM, p. 17)

This cynicism certainly suggests that for Milton the appeal to a transcendental
basis for political order is secondary to the raw human will that in fact insti-
tutes a political order. For Milton, God is (necessarily) invoked to legitimate
particular political orders because without that warrant any existing structure
of sovereignty will lack the ability to successfully impose itself on its subjects.
But no matter how often humans use God to justify their political decisions,
Milton’s version of God has no concrete ideas about what political order

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people should set up for themselves, that being a purely human problem.
Milton discusses the Book of Samuel’s account of the Jewish community’s
demand that God set a king above them:

These words confirme us that the right of choosing, yea of changing thir own
Goverment is by the grant of God himself in the People. And therfore when they
desir’d a King, though then under another form of goverment, and though thir
changing displeas’d him, yet he that was himself thir King, and rejected by them,
would not be a hindrance to what they intended, furder then by perswasion, but
that they might doe therein as they saw good, 1 Sam. 8. onely he reserv’d to
himself the nomination of who should reigne over them. Neither did that
exempt the King, as if he were to God onely accountable, though by his especial
command anointed. (TKM, pp. 13–14)

According to Milton, God allowed the ancient Israelites to set up a monarchy

so that ‘they might doe therein as they saw good’. According to Milton, God
is invoked in acts of political institution not because God in fact prefers this or
that particular form of government but because he provides the transcendental
warrant for the absolute obedience to a sovereign, whatever form that sover-
eign takes. As Milton puts it, all political order is at bottom ‘a human ordin-
ance’, though one that inevitably appeals to a transcendental warrant:

Therfore Kingdom and Magistracy, whether supreme or subordinat, is without

difference, call’d a human ordinance, I Pet. 2.13. &c. which we are there taught is
the will of God wee should alike submitt to, so farr as for the punishment of evil
doers, and the encouragement of them that doe well. Submitt saith he, as free men.
(TKM, p. 15)

Here we can see resonance of Schmittian and Agambenesque ideas in Milton’s

political thought: political orders are an inevitable part of human life, they are
what make people human by defining their humanity; at the same time, they
are rooted in arbitrary power. But what is most critical for my argument is that
for Milton the tactical appeal to God to justify a human political and military
402 DANIEL JUAN GIL
decision produces an external ethical criterion. Milton writes that according
to The First Letter of Peter, God wants people to submit to political orders
but ‘Submitt saith he, as free men’. God wants no particular form of state; but
whatever form of state they set up, God wants men to submit to it as ‘free
men’.
But if Milton’s God wants people to submit ‘as free men’, what does being
‘free’ mean here? To answer this we must remember that the decision that
creates a sovereign political order decides on a particular form of human
nature. Throughout Milton’s writings, including in the Tenure, the issue of
human nature is intimately bound up with the political order. This appears in

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a negative way in The Tenure when an absolute monarchy makes people into
slaves or vermin. It appears in a more positive (and civic republican) light in
Of Education where a good government makes people good and even ‘manly’,
a key virtue for Milton. For Milton, a political order can define human nature
in any number of ways. What does being free mean from this essentially
bio-political vantage?
There can be only one answer: being free means having the resources to
transcend the particular definition of human nature enshrined in a particular
political order. As Milton understands the human condition, politics is in-
escapable, as is submission to one sovereign order that defines one account of
human nature. Milton’s God wants people to live a human life as defined by a
particular sovereign order. And yet, within any particular sovereign order,
God militates against the particular form of human life that that sovereign
order secures.18 Milton’s God wants people to live human lives within definite
political orders of their own choosing, but he also wants them to transcend any
politically delimited human nature. This may seem strange, but the role that an
appeal to an essentially transcendental warrant plays in securing any political
order makes it easy to understand why a transcendent principle that by its
nature is outside of a concrete political order that defines human nature would
be positively invested with the value of transcending human nature. Political
orders determine one specific understanding of what human nature is; they
cement this understanding by appealing outside the umbrella of the contin-
gent political order to a transcendental principle; but this transcendental
principle, by its very nature, transcends the version of human nature that a
particular political order has defined.
That God represents a principle of transcending any particular form of
human nature (and therefore any particular political order) is suggested
throughout Paradise Lost. One place it appears is in Adam’s conversation
with the angel Raphael about food. In the epic, the issue of who eats what
always raises the question of what human nature is, and how (and whether)
humans differ from other sorts of beings including angels. Adam proposes to
share some earthly food with Raphael and asks whether angels truly eat to
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT? 403
which Raphael replies with a resounding yes. As John Rogers among others
have argued, Milton’s metaphysics in Paradise Lost is monist; he makes no
categorical distinction between matter and spirit but rather believes that
there is ‘one first matter all’, a matter that is itself endowed with spirit.19
From this perspective, angels must have material bodies as much as humans,
though lighter and more flexible, and insofar as they are well and truly bodily,
the angels also need food. ‘Wonder not then’, says Raphael,

what God for you saw good

If I refuse not, but convert, as you,

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To proper substance; time may come when men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit
Improv’d by tract of time, and wingd ascend
Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice
Here or in Heav’nly Paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progenie you are. (5.495–503)20

Although, in general, the angels are quite confused about God’s purposes in
Paradise Lost, it is noteworthy that Raphael speculates that humans will one
day cease to be humans altogether insofar as they will become angels with the
light, highly flexible bodies of angels and will, therefore, be able to eat the
distinctive ‘light fare’ of angels. But what does it mean to become an angel? In
Paradise Lost angels are defined as shape shifters—they are made of such light
material that they can morph at will, notably taking either gender:

For Spirits, when they please,

Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not tried or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their airy purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfil. (1.423–431)

What these two passages together suggest is that for Milton, God’s aims and
purposes for those who remain, as Raphael puts it, ‘obedient, and retain/
Unalterably firm his love entire’, is a structural openness or potentiality in
their own human nature. For Raphael, humans are defined by a potentiality
404 DANIEL JUAN GIL
that makes them fundamentally capable of transformation into angels who are
defined by a nature in which potentiality overwhelms any actuality they
happen to have. From Milton’s theological perspective, human life is only
possible within a defined and defining sovereign order, and yet the God who
anchors a defined and defining sovereign order is, by his nature, the embodi-
ment of transcendence of any particular sovereign order; God therefore injects
a core of potentiality into any concrete version of human nature that he
anchors.21 That is what freedom means for Milton’s God. It is not the freedom
to do this or that but rather the somewhat paradoxical freedom to—on
the one hand—live within a sovereign order that defines human nature and

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yet—on the other hand—to push against that definition of human nature by
cultivating different forms of being and different forms of life, to engage in
self-transformation in the direction of ever greater openness in the definition
of one’s nature (the state that angels already enjoy).
If we return now to Schweiker’s account of modernity as overhumanisation
and his desire to find an ethical principle in the name of which human self-
development could be checked in a principled way, we can see a kind of
response in Milton’s conception of God. Milton understands God to be
moving in two directions at once: on the one hand, securing conventional
morality founded on a secured definition of human nature; on the other hand,
advocating a transcendental morality that goes beyond the claims of conven-
tional morality. Within a particular, politically defined human order, there is
always a conception of human nature and this conception of human nature
grounds moral life. It is possible (indeed, it is inevitable) to engage in morality
on the limited basis of the theory of human nature that the sovereign backs.
But the appeal to God or gods that is necessarily involved with the assertion of
sovereign power opens the door to an outside principle in the name of which
particular moral codes indexed to particular conceptions of human nature can
be called into doubt in the name of an expanded (indeed: an ever expanding)
understanding of human nature. When Milton appeals to extra-political mor-
ality in The Tenure he is appealing to a perspective that is detached from all
local moral considerations rooted in local definitions of human nature. As
against the naı̈ve tenderness of Presbyterian consciences, Milton appeals to
the transcendental will of a God whose will for humans is maximum freedom
from any particular definition of human nature.
How does this external, theologically rooted criterion operate to limit
overhumanisation in practice? If Milton’s radical morality works by bracketing
any concrete theory of human nature on the basis of which conventional
morality is possible, then how could it provide the basis for concrete, positive
ethics, for example, an ethical decision to respect the natural environment
even if that means a limitation upon human self-development (Schweiker’s
test)? It would do so by endorsing actions (or, in the case of a revolutionary
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT? 405
rupture, forms of state power) that are maximally unconstraining in their
imputed definition of human nature.22
From the standpoint that sees any vision of human nature as the product of
sovereign power, there is no logical or empirical reason sovereigns cannot
define a political order in which one group of humans (defined in terms of
gender, colour, or any characteristic that is rendered meaningful by a particular
theory of human nature) has a higher status than others or, alternatively, an
order in which all humans have an equal claim to status and prestige; there is
no logical or empirical reason a sovereign could not define all humans as
sacred but consign other animals to the status of raw material or, alternatively,

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define a political order in which humans are understood to be part of a nature
that includes animals. But from the standpoint of the kind of radical ethics that
asks what God wants, the latter possibility in each pair is better because it makes
fewer limiting claims on human nature, because its definition of human nature
is looser. Milton’s goal in his political thought is to find a sovereign order
(because that is the condition for human life, without sovereignty there is
no human life) that defines human nature (because that is what sovereign
orders do) but leaves as much openness about the definition of human
nature as is compatible with still functioning as a sovereign that prevents
anarchy. This may look like nothing more sophisticated than the principle
of ‘that government is best that governs least’ but it is importantly more
nuanced than that because it gives a test: conventional morality based on a
definition of human nature is inevitable but the criterion of maximising
human capacities and potentials should be checked when it limits the defin-
ition of human nature unacceptably.
In practical terms, within an existing political and moral order, radical ethics
rooted in the question of what God wants will tend to focus on championing
the ‘rights’ of whoever or whatever is excluded from the umbrella of sover-
eign protection and its (historically contingent) definition of the human, but
will do so without invoking the notion of rights at all because it will under-
stand the very idea of a right as part of the state’s program of defining human
nature. If we look, for example, to the issue of marriage equality, which seems
pre-eminently about the state’s intervention in the biological life of its sub-
jects, rather than seeing this issue in terms of supposedly natural rights, radical
Miltonic morality would reframe the question as: does a political order that
includes gay marriage loosen or tighten that order’s definition of human
nature? And so framed, the answer may be surprising. For while it may
seem obvious that gay marriage expands the definition of human nature by
allowing a previously excluded class of persons into the umbrella of state
sanctioned life, if gay marriage has the effect of further strengthening the
(legally sanctioned) vision of human nature as being completed only in per-
sonhood-affirming intimacy (as opposed to more anti-social or a-social visions
406 DANIEL JUAN GIL
of human nature or visions of human nature as essentially geared toward
pleasure), then from a Miltonic perspective gay marriage might be uncon-
scientious. This is precisely the argument that Katherine Franke makes in
emphasising the ways that the institution of marriage is, by its nature,
normativising, and therefore raising doubts about the liberatory effects of
subjecting the class of previously excluded gay persons to its coercive struc-
ture.23 Milton was, in fact, famously concerned about marriage law and
marriage rights, and the deep logic of his writings about marriage (for instance,
the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce) is always geared toward expanding the
definition of human nature that marriage law enshrines rather than subjecting

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new classes of persons to an already existing definition of marriage.
We can sum up Milton’s political and theological thought by saying that
implicit in every political community is the appeal to a transcendental prin-
ciple that anchors a version of human nature but also sows the seeds of
critique of that version of human nature. By approaching this necessary
transcendental principle through an explicitly theological framework, by
calling it God and asking what it wants, Milton conjures up a radical mor-
ality that is defined by the ability and the willingness to assess even very
deeply held moral principles from an outsider’s perspective by imagining the
self as (potentially) endowed with a different nature (different than whatever
nature it has now, but also different than whatever nature other persons
have now). In that sense, Milton’s radical morality is weirdly similar to
Schweiker’s understanding of radical evil. For Schweiker, radical evil is
the result of acknowledging and then actively turning against the moral
claims characteristic of one’s community, and he quotes Milton’s Satan
saying ‘evil be thou my good’ as an example.24 But Schweiker does not
note the obvious fact that Milton’s Satan is heroic precisely because of his
commitment to radical moral questioning.
For Milton, conscience is useful only if we understand it as containing
within itself a radical ability to transcend the particular moral and human
order we inhabit, and to do so in the name of no concrete value other
than the potential to transcend any particular definition of human nature. It
is to this form of conscience that Milton appeals in The Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates to provide a path forward even in the absence of a grounded vision
of human nature and therefore a grounded moral order. The radical con-
science that pushes past the settled moral truths entwined with a particular
version of human nature is exactly what is heroic about Satan in Paradise Lost,
and it connects the heroic Satan of the early books of Paradise Lost to the
snarling Satan of ‘evil be thou my good’ that Schweiker takes as a paragon of
evil. Miltonic conscience can look evil precisely because Miltonic conscience
is, by its nature, directed toward dismantling particular accounts of human
nature and human flourishing. But in this, what Milton’s Satan wants and
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT?
what Milton’s God wants are one and the same: for humans to transcend any
particular, politically embedded definition of human nature.
REFERENCES
1
I will go on to specify this ethical ap-
proach further, but as I have characterised
it here it is famously associated with
Amartya Sen, for example, in his The
Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2011).
2
W. Schweiker, ‘The Ethics of
Responsibility and the Question of
Humanism’, Literature & Theology 18
(2004) 251–70. Schweiker argues that
poststructuralist ethical systems that pur-
port to bypass this problem are not, in
fact, able to do so. For example,
Tzvetan attempts to articulate an account
of individual human flourishing that con-
tains an in-built concern with the other’s
welfare and Emmanuel articulates a theory
of the primacy of the other in constitut-
ing the self so that self-development is
pre-structured by an encounter with the
other. But for Schweiker, both
approaches fail to provide an external
standard that could check the overhuman-
isation of the world, for if the other
person is valued only as another instance
of human nature then valuing the other
can never provide a principled limit on
the development of human capabilities as
an absolute good.
3
W. Schweiker, ‘Theological Ethics and
the Question of Humanism’, The Journal
5
of Religion 83 (2003) 539–61, at 555.
4
Commenting on the events of Paris in
6
1968, for instance, Maurice Blanchot
writes (approvingly) that ‘Unlike trad-
itional revolutions, [the goal of May
1968] was not to take the Bastille, the
Winter palace, the Elysée or the
National Assembly—objectives without
importance—and not even to overturn
an older order, but to allow a possibility
of being-together to demonstrate itself inde-
pendent of any utilitarian interest.’ See in
407
P. Joris (trans.), The Unavowable
Community (Barrytown, NY: Station
Hill Press, 1983), p. 52. Commenting
on Nancy’s similarly motivated Being
Singular Plural (1996), Leland de la
Durantaye notes the difficulty of con-
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cretely imagining the kind of normative
community Nancy posits, writing ‘Is it
possible to conceive of a community
whose members share nothing but
being?’ See Giorgio Agamben: A Critical
Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009), p. 160. For a cri-
tique of the political effectiveness of al-
ternative visions of community in
Agamben and Nancy see B. Elliot,
‘Community and Resistance in
Heidegger, Nancy and Agamben’,
Philosophy & Social Criticism 37 (2011)
259–71. The specific object of Elliot’s
attack is a valuation of ‘radical passivity’.
For another critique, see A. Norris, ‘Jean-
Luc Nancy on the political after
Heidegger and Schmitt’, Philosophy &
Social Criticism 37 (2011) 899–913. For
powerful critique of any politics founded
on a positive valuation of ‘bare life’, as
this article does to some extent, see
P. Owens, ‘Reclaiming ‘‘Bare Life’’?:
Against Agamben on Refugees’,
International Relations 23 (2009) 567–82.
Schweiker, ‘The Ethics of
Responsibility’, p. 254.
By contrast, fundamentalist religious per-
spectives that do not contain the human-
ist concern for human self-development
would certainly give a principle for limit-
ing overhumanisation but would do so
by escaping socially embedded lived life
as it exists now. In that sense, fundamen-
talism is the precise counterpart to left
communitarian mysticism as Schweiker
understands it.
408 DANIEL JUAN GIL
7
As such, Agamben’s perspective seeks to
merge Schmitt’s analysis of sovereign
power’s role in structuring institutional
legal and political life with the late
Foucault’s interest in ‘bio-politics’, the
state’s effort to penetrate and manage the
very core of life of all of its subjects.
Whereas the late Foucault thought that
bio-politics was only characteristic of late
modernity, Agamben sees it as characteris-
tic of the entire history of Western politics.
8
Agamben argues that despite the founda-
tional effort to demarcate and cast out
bare life, it nevertheless appears inside
Western political orders in various symp-
tomatic ways, as a model of the natural
‘good life’ but also an object of repeated
scapegoating. For Agamben, the Western
political imaginary is, in fact, haunted by
the idea of a bare life that is both utterly
beyond the pale of state sanctioned exist-
ence and also utterly inside and even at
the very heart of all structures of sover-
eign power.
9
See, for example, the essay ‘Beyond
Human Rights’, in V. Binetti and C.
Casarino (trans.), Means Without Ends
(Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 15–28.
10
For an exploration of the role of
Heidegger’s thought on Agamben’s ac-
count of human and animal nature, see
Tracy Colony, ‘Before the Abyss:
Agamben on Heidegger and the Living’,
Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007)
1–16. Although he would disagree with
some of the premises of my discussion,
Matthias Lievens provides a useful discus-
sion of how the idea of human nature
functions in Schmitt’s account. See ‘Carl
Schmitt’s Two Concepts of Humanity’,
Philosophy & Social Criticism 36 (2010)
917–34.
11
G. Agamben, in M. Hardt (trans.), The
Coming Community (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
p. 43.
12
For this central aspect of Schmitt’s
thought see in G. Schwab (trans.),
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the
Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Schmitt famously writes: ‘All significant
concepts of the modern theory of the
state are secularized theological concepts
not only because of their historical devel-
opment—in which they were transferred
from theology to the theory of the state,
whereby, for example, the ominipotent
God became the ominpotent lawgiver—
but also because of their systematic
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structure, the recognition of which is
necessary for a sociological consideration
of these concepts’ (p. 36). See also
G. Schwab (trans. and intro.), The
Concept of the Political, (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1996).
13
G. Geréby argues that a functionalist
understanding of the role of gods within
political life (in which the political order
invents gods to justify itself) is precisely
what Schmitt sets aside. Describing the
functionalist perspective, Geréby writes
that ‘Such a cult (religio in the
Ciceronian sense of ‘‘tending, ministering
the gods’’) does not require belief in the
gods, since it expresses political alle-
giances. This institutional or constitutive
political theology legitimizes the political
identity and continuity of a people and a
city by the cult of the ancestral gods, the
gods of the forefathers. This explains why
every city has its own gods, whose care is
the duty of the citizen. Schmitt was
not interested in this ethnology of the-
ology.’ See ‘Political Theology versus
Theological Politics: Erik Peterson and
Carl Schmitt’, New German Critique 35
(2008) 7–35, at 9. Geréby sees Jan
Assman as defending the religiously func-
tionalist perspective in which gods are the
product of political will; Geréby writes
that for Assman, ‘politics determines ap-
propriate religions. Secularization is, then,
nothing more than a particularly manifest
form of this relationship’ (p. 22). See
J. Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil: Politische
 WHAT DOES MILTON’S GOD WANT?
Theologie in Altägypten, Israel und Europa
(Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 2002).
14
For the canonical account of divine right
absolutism as a stage in the transition to
modern capitalist nation-states, see P.
Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State
(New York: Verso, 2013).
15
For a restatement of Schmitt’s position
that offers some contextualisation in
terms of the early modern birth of the
nation-state, see D. Mcloughlin, ‘Crisis,
Modernity, Authority: Carl Schmitt on
Order and the State’, The Australian
Feminist Law Journal 31 (2009) 135–53.
For an argument about political origin
that treats theological considerations as
secondary to an originary act of political
founding, see M. Detienne, ‘The Gods of
Politics in Early Greek Cities’, in H.
DeVries and L. E. Sullivan (eds), Political
Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular
World (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2006), pp. 91–101. Detienne is
struck by the fact that in the founding
of Greek colonies, matters of religion
including how and whom to worship
were decided through political means.
He argues that the political is foundation-
ally secular and that the gods subse-
quently ‘want’ to gain entry into it, so
to speak. Detienne is therefore against
the Schmittian theory of the political as
a secular miracle. I agree that the god or
Gods are secondary to acts of political
founding, but whereas Detienne believes
that a focus on concrete practices of
civic founding bypasses the unforgiving
Agamben perspective on the role of raw
17
sovereign power in founding human
communities, I believe his approach
begs that question.
16
The criticism on The Tenure is volumin-
ous and tends to fall into several cate-
gories: commentators with a literary
bent tend to analyze the complex rhet-
oric of Milton’s prose while those more
interested in his political theory fall into
one of three subcamps: firstly, and least
persuasively, those who see him as a
409
proto-liberal champion of individual
rights guaranteed by an imaginary social
contract; secondly, those who situate him
within the puritan tradition and place
Milton’s efforts to understand recent
English history within a sacred frame-
work; thirdly, those who see him as a
champion of the civic republican trad-
ition associated in the early modern
mind with Venice. To cite only very
recent instances of each of these trends
see (respectively): B. Greteman,
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‘‘‘Exactest Proportion’’: The Iconoclastic
and Constitutive Powers of Metaphor in
Milton’s Prose Tracts’, ELH 76 (2009)
399–417; F. Lessay, ‘Milton contractua-
liste: Le Thème du convenant dans The
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ Etudes
Epistémè 15 (2009) 44–58; M. Neufeld,
‘Doing without Precedent: Applied
Typology and the Execution of Charles
I in Milton’s Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates’, The Sixteenth Century
Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies 38
(2007) 329–44; M. Dzelzainis, ‘The
Ciceronian Theory of Tyrannicide from
Buchanan to Milton’, Etudes Epistémè 15
(2009) 59–70. As a field, Milton Studies
has been relatively uninterested in
Agamben, which is surprising given
how well Agamben’s vision accounts for
what is most distinctive in Milton’s pol-
itical thought. One important exception
is Jonathan Goldberg’s discussion of
Milton in The Seeds of Things: Theorizing
Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance
Representations (New York, NY:
Fordham University Press, 2009).
J. Milton, The Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates Proving, That It Is Lawfull, and
Hath Been Held So Through All Ages, for
Any, Who Have the Power, to Call to
Account a Tyrant, or Wicked King, and
After Due Conviction, to Depose, and Put
Him, to Death, if the Ordinary Magistrate
Have Neglected, or Deny’d to Doe It: and
That They, Who of Late So Much Blame
Deposing, Are the Men That Did It
Themselves (London, 1649), Early English
410 DANIEL JUAN GIL
Books Online (http://gateway.proquest.
com.ezproxy.tcu.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z
39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:
eebo:citation:12354116) accessed 13
January 2012, p. 6. Hereafter abbreviated
TKM.
18
There is a family resemblance between
my project here and Alain Badiou’s dis-
cussion of the ‘Christ-event’ as one that
shatters limited forms of identity and
community in R. Brassier (trans.), Saint
Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
[Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2003]. By beginning with Agamben
(rather than St. Paul) I am attempting
22
to articulate a rationale for a willingness
by secular parties to adopt a theological
standpoint. I am obviously also trying to
find a more concrete perspective than the
23
quasi-Lacanian perspective on the ‘law’
that Badiou offers.
19
J.H. Rogers, The Matter of Revolution:
Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of
Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1998).
20
Passages from Paradise Lost are quoted
from S. Orgel and J. Goldberg (eds.)
24
John Milton: The Major Works (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
21
One source for Milton’s association of his
own epic poetry and a vision of human
self-overcoming is Ficino’s restatement of
Plato’s account of poetry as a divine frenzy
whereby man is raised above human
nature. See Ficino’s in M.J.B. Allen (ed.
and trans.) Commentaries on Plato: Vol. 1,
Phaedrus and Ion (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008). On
the relation between Milton and Ficino,
see also M. Grossman, ‘Subsequent
Precedence: Milton’s Materialistic
Reading of Ficino and Tasso’, Surfaces VI
(1996), electronic publication: (http://
Downloaded from http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/ at Selcuk University on January 16, 2015
www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/v
ol6/grossman.html [accessed 13 January
2012]).
This is just the vision of political and re-
ligious life that Milton articulates in his
earlier defence of freedom of the press,
Areopagitica.
See K. Franke, ‘The Curious
Relationship of Marriage and
Freedom’, in M. Garrison and E.S.
Scott (eds), Marriage at the Crossroads:
Law, Policy, and the Brave New World
of Twenty-First-Century Families (New
York: Cambridge University Press,
2012), pp. 87–106.
The Satan quotation comes from Book 4,
line 110. For Schweiker’s discussion of it,
see Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics:
In the Time of Many Worlds (New York:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), p. 34.