Colasterion

Colasterion is John Milton's 1645 reply to an anonymous attack on his divorce tracts. Milton had published The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in 1643 and revised it in 1644, arguing that divorce should be permitted when a marriage proves incurably incompatible. The tracts drew a pamphlet answer, An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, by an unnamed author, and Milton responded in this short tract. The title is Greek for a place or instrument of punishment, and the tract is meant as one: a public scourging of his opponent. It appeared alongside Tetrachordon, Milton's fuller exegetical treatment of the four biblical passages on marriage and divorce, and the two works belong together.

The argument is quickly told, though the tone is not. Milton restates his position that marriage was instituted chiefly for mutual help and fellowship of mind, and that a union in which this is impossible is a burden no law of God requires a person to bear. Against his critic he defends his reading of Moses and of Christ's words on divorce, insisting that charity, not the bare letter of a text, governs how Scripture is to be applied. But much of the work is given to mockery. Milton ridicules his adversary's learning, logic and style, and he scorns the notion that so poor a writer could answer a serious question. The result is as much a record of Milton in combat as a piece of theology, and it shows the sharpness that later marked his political prose.

The tract has lasting interest for two reasons. It shows how Milton understood the freedom of the Christian conscience, a theme he carried into his later writings on liberty, and it displays the polemical temper of the seventeenth-century pamphlet war with unusual clarity. Readers of Paradise Lost have long looked to the divorce tracts for Milton's views on marriage, companionship and the relation of the sexes, and Colasterion adds a little to that picture, chiefly through its insistence that marriage exists for the sake of fitness of mind and spirit.

Who should read this: students of Milton, of English Puritan controversy, and of Reformation-era debates over marriage who want to see how he argued under pressure. It is not a place to begin for anyone seeking a clear, patient account of the Christian theology of marriage or divorce; for that, read Tetrachordon or the first divorce tract. Nor is it for readers who dislike abuse and invective, which fill much of its length.