Tetrachordon

Tetrachordon is John Milton's 1645 treatise on the four scriptural passages that bear on marriage and divorce: Genesis 1:27-28, Deuteronomy 24:1-2, Matthew 5:31-32, and 1 Corinthians 7:10-16. Its title, Greek for a four-stringed instrument, names the method: four texts set in tune with one another. It was the third in a sequence of divorce tracts, following The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643, revised 1644) and The Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce (1644), and it appeared alongside Colasterion. Milton had married Mary Powell in 1642, and she left him within weeks of the wedding. His first tract drew fierce denunciation from Presbyterian divines, and in August 1644 a petition to Parliament called for its suppression. Tetrachordon is his longer, more patient, more exegetical reply.

The argument turns on what marriage is for. Milton reads Genesis 2:18, "It is not good that the man should be alone," as naming the first purpose of marriage: companionship, a "meet help" for the solitary soul, with procreation and the remedy for lust ranking below it. If that is so, a marriage that is incurably loveless or unfit for conversation has already failed of its end, and Milton holds that the law should not bind two people to a union that fulfills none of its purposes. He then takes up each passage in turn. Deuteronomy's "uncleanness" he reads as grounds for divorce beyond adultery, and he argues that Christ's words in Matthew 5 do not abolish this permission but correct the Pharisees' abuse of it. Christ, he insists, speaks as an interpreter of the law's equity and not as a new legislator of rigid rules. Throughout, he appeals to charity as the governing principle of scriptural interpretation, and he sets the plain sense of the whole of Scripture against literalism that would turn a text of mercy into an instrument of cruelty. The treatise also draws on the Fathers, the Reformers, and Jewish commentators to show that his reading has a pedigree.

The work has lasted for two reasons. It is a notable specimen of seventeenth-century Protestant biblical argument, showing how a learned layman could contest his church's settled reading on exegetical grounds. It is also a document in the history of Christian thinking about marriage, one of the earliest English attempts to place personal fellowship at the center of the marital bond. Its reasoning has been disputed from the first, and most Christian traditions have continued to hold a stricter line on divorce, which gives readers a genuine position to weigh against rather than assume.

Who should read this: students of Milton, of Reformation-era biblical interpretation, and of the Christian theology of marriage, and pastors and counselors who want to see the strongest early case for a permissive reading. It is dense, scholastic in its manner, and written to answer opponents long gone, so it is not an easy devotional or a practical guide for a marriage in trouble today. Readers looking for pastoral counsel on divorce will find argument and not comfort, and anyone unwilling to follow a long exegetical case should begin elsewhere.