The Politics of Grace
IN THE ILIAD, or the Poem of Force, Simone Weil argues that The Iliad revolves around a single concept: force. Force, she explains, is what turns a human being into a thing. Killing is the most extreme example, but most of the essay concerns the kind of force that dehumanizes without killing. Time and time again in The Iliad, defeated warriors clasp the knees of the victor to beg for life. Priam kisses the hands of the man who killed his son. Weil argues that in such moments, the suppliant’s vulnerability is so extreme that he is deprived of the right to show even the most basic signs of life:
If a stranger, completely disabled, disarmed, strengthless, throws himself on the mercy of a warrior, he is not, by this very act, condemned to death; but a moment of impatience on the warrior’s part will suffice to relieve him of his life. In any case, his flesh has lost that very important property which in the laboratory distinguishes living flesh from dead—the galvanic response. If you give a frog’s leg an electric shock, it twitches. If you confront a human being with the touch or sight of something horrible or terrifying, this bundle of muscles, nerves, and flesh likewise twitches. Alone of all living things, the suppliant we have just described neither quivers nor trembles. He has lost the right to do so.1
The suppliant has lost the right to tremble because he must concentrate his entire self in a single act of submission to force, the principle that transforms human beings into things. Even if the sword does not perform the final cut, this act of submission dehumanizes the suppliant with an exchange: as the suppliant offers his submission, the conqueror pauses to consider, with absolute authority over life and death, if to accept the offer and show mercy. Weil believes that all of the heroes in The Iliad are subjected to force at some point or other in the poem. Force is the only true victor in the poem, the universal, cosmic principle.
This book is devoted to the politics of grace rather than the force Weil explored in her essay. Nevertheless, the Christian idea of grace resembles the situation Weil described in one important way: it involves an extreme disparity between God and the sinner. The key difference is that grace does not imply the same kind of exchange, because sinners receive grace as a free gift. Early Modern Protestants in particular stressed that salvation was not an exchange or an economic bargain. God, they argued, was free to dispense his unmerited grace on some and to punish the rest of humanity on account of the original sin of Adam. He who begs for grace does not earn it by begging; he discovers, rather, that grace has always already been offered to him, and this divine gift was what moved him to penitence in the first place. The redeemed sinner does not feel the anxiety the suppliant feels as he clasps Achilles’s knee because God, in his genuinely absolute power over life and death, has bestowed grace freely and thus humbled human force.
The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Poetry tells the story of how four early modern poets—Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton—built on this Protestant tradition to envision grace as a form of agency fulfilled in submission to God. Because grace is a gift, the most important battles in their poems are no longer fought between warriors on a battlefield. The warriors who continue to rely on what Spenser calls “fleshly force” (V.vii.40.9)—such as the monster Geryoneo, who evokes Catholic Spain, or the Roman soldiers in Lanyer’s Passion poem—are not simply defeated but also ridiculed for their inability to understand the eclipse of force by a new dispensation.2 The important battles, according to these poets, are now interpretive. Given that God bestows grace unilaterally, all that remains for human beings to do is to interpret how grace will be received, to whom it will be given, and what will be its fruits in those who accept it. Their poetry valorizes those who use grace to interpret the will of God creatively so as to find space for individual and collective agency within their submission to the divine gift.
From a more critical perspective, however, this idea of grace can validate other modes of domination and inequality. Alongside the Protestant theory of salvation, each of these poets understood grace through the humanist theory of education. Humanism helped inspire the Protestant Reformation, but it also bestowed on Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton a profound respect for the power and prestige of an elite education.3 This assumption informs how they imagine grace. They argue that while grace is indeed a divine gift that cannot be earned through human means alone, to accept grace fully one must demonstrate the learning, civic virtue, and interpretive liberty celebrated in humanist educational writing. While grace was in theory available regardless of social station, the fruits of grace were clearest in the work of humanist Protestants who had the necessary cultural capital and education to read the Word of God critically, to debate its meaning publicly, and to mold the nation with eloquence. While this argument was not always inherently violent, it did at times allow the castigation and repression of those who did not exhibit this ideal. In Book V of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, for example, the flail of the iron man Talus is as ruthless as anything to be found in Homer, yet the aim of his violence is ostensibly to spread the grace of a Protestant ruler over a rebellious people. Such a justification for violence was rendered acceptable, for Spenser, by assumptions that were both religious and cultural: the rebels were brute-like because they lacked civility as well as grace, while those directing this policy of oppression did so from an elevated moral and cultural position. The overlap between grace and education explains this political approach to grace. It also helps to explain, more broadly, a fact increasingly noted by literary critics and intellectual historians: some of the loudest proponents of liberty and equality in this period were also apologists for colonialism, empire, and repressive government.4 By taking this approach to grace, some poets were able to speak about the eclipse of force while idealizing the use of force by well-educated Protestant men.
This book explores poems that unmoored grace from theological precision to explore these imaginative possibilities for political life. The political stakes are clearest in Spenser’s writing on Protestant empire, Lanyer’s idea of sacred poetry, Cowley’s view of civil war, and Milton’s ideal of citizenship. Spenser draws on Protestant legal thinking to argue that the Elizabethan colonization of Ireland, a project in which he was personally implicated, is the political expression of grace. In doing so, he presents the Irish as both uncivilized and religiously backward, thus making grace essential to his arguments for colonial expansion. Lanyer addresses the gendered inequalities of humanism head-on by foregrounding the exclusion of women from education notwithstanding their equal claim to religious grace. Cowley draws attention to the divisiveness of contemporary republicanism, and he develops a vision of sacred poetry in which grace reunites a nation on the brink of civil war under a king. Milton takes a different perspective on republicanism, arguing that sovereignty should belong to an elite of humanist-educated men. These poets pursue very different aims, but they all frame their ideal political communities in the language of grace, which allows them to present political agency as paradoxically fulfilled by a recognition of insufficiency. This paradoxical agency-in-submission is part of the tension they explore between agency and repression in a political community.
Throughout this book, I use the term “political” heuristically, following the convention of historians of political thought, to describe communities that are larger than a household but more particular than would-be universal constructs such as the Church.5 Some examples relevant to this book are a nation, a city, a republic, or an empire. Grace provided a way to challenge the boundaries of these communities because the New Testament promises their imminent dissolution. The Apostle Paul stressed that “the fashion of this world passeth away” (1. Cor. 7:31), and that “the time is short” (1 Cor. 7:29) before the arrival of Kingdom of God.6 As a result, Protestant theologians saw worldly authority as important but temporary, and thus distinct from questions pertaining to grace and the eternal Kingdom of God.7 The poets explored in this book, on the other hand, repurposed the language of salvation to reimagine the boundaries and ambitions of their political communities. Lanyer, for example, writes on the grace of visionary women to challenge women’s exclusion from political life, while Spenser imagines a patriarchal vision of empire in which Protestant magistrates conquer the known world. While their approaches seem on the face of it to be wholly incompatible, Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton nevertheless use a shared language to articulate what are ultimately very different political visions. While each poet understands his or her ideal to be unrealistic in practice, they turn to grace in order to imagine new possibilities as well as to reflect on existing inequalities.
Alongside the Protestant language of salvation, these poets also draw on the humanist ideal of poetry as a form of creative making. In Philip Sidney’s contrast between poetry and history, the poet is told to “borrow nothing of what is, has been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”8 In other words, a humanist poet strives to create an ideal pattern for imitation rather than true accuracy or verisimilitude. As Colin Burrow has shown recently, this humanist idea of imitation allowed poets to adapt their material creatively to a rhetorical situation.9 Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton embody this Sidneian vision by imagining communities that aim to educate their readers, not to represent the political world as it really was. And the reality was often disappointing for these poets. Spenser celebrates the virtues of a Protestant magistrate while conveying his frustration with the indecision of real magistrates in Ireland. Lanyer celebrates female noblewomen who were not likely to offer her any patronage, so her praise for them doubles as a complaint. Cowley, an erstwhile royalist writing in the zenith of Cromwellian power, strikes an elegiac note as he imagines the beauty of grace averting the kind of civil war that had so recently led to regicide in the real world. Milton wrote his epics after power changed hands again during the Restoration, and his idealized communities accordingly criticize the nation’s refusal to embody republican virtue. Combining the language of grace with the humanist ideal, these poets seek to transcend their disappointment and imagine political communities as they may be or should be.
To emphasize the key role of the imagination in these poems, I express the political ideals they describe as imagined communities of grace. In doing so, I do not imply any necessary connection to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” to describe nationhood.10 Whereas Anderson’s focus is on print as a medium, my focus falls instead on the poet’s imagination, which turns to grace in order to authorize the effort to mold and educate readers in terms of some imagined ideal. An imagined community of grace weaves Protestant ideas of salvation with the humanist ideal of poetry, and it celebrates the poet’s imagination and transformative eloquence as the means of bringing that ideal to the world.
By bringing education as a crucial third term to the relationship between politics and salvation, this book seeks to build on recent criticism that has emphasized the radical or even violent aspects of grace.11 While radicals in this period often disavowed human learning in favor of divine inspiration, the poets explored in this book embrace learning as the complement to grace.12 Even when these poets seem to disavow education or critique the worldly wisdom of rivals, they then go on to emphasize their own creativity, poetic skill, and civic virtue in explicitly humanist terms. Milton, for example, insists on the need for a learned response to grace throughout his work, and in a key moment in Paradise Regained, he imagines the messiah as a man with patrician tastes who dismisses the common people as “a herd confused, / A miscellaneous rabble, who extol / Things vulgar” (3.49–51).13 If we contextualize Milton only in terms of radical religion, we risk bypassing the deep-rooted elitism that separates him and other educated poets from what they saw as the vulgar rabble.
In addition to these contextual approaches, I am committed throughout this book to close reading and formal analysis as the means of recovering the paradoxes of grace. The key paradox is the belief that human force is ineffective on its own, because genuine human agency is fulfilled in the believer’s submission to God and the gift of grace. Instead of resolving such paradoxes in detailed argument, the poems explored in this book often represent them as unresolved tensions in poetic form, meter, and thematic patterning.
While the importance of grace in early modern culture invites these different approaches, it also places constraints on this book that are worth acknowledging at the outset. I do not attempt a comprehensive study of all poets who used grace to reimagine their communities because such a project would require many volumes. The poets chosen for this study are interesting to study together because they share overlapping concerns, but other poets could be studied in a parallel way, and I hope this book will invite future research in that direction. Moreover, although I describe common themes that these poets inherit from a shared idiom and religious tradition, I do not argue for a linear, teleological development between chapters. Rather, each chapter explores different ideas of poetry, faith, and politics that were developed in different contexts. While I discuss Milton’s work over two chapters, this added detail is due to the fact that Milton wrote more (and more explicitly) about grace, but these concluding chapters are not intended to provide a teleological resolution to the themes discussed earlier in the book.
The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Poetry thus explores how early modern poetry used grace—as a theological concept, as a cultural topos, and as an encounter provoked by a poem’s form—to imagine political communities. It shows that Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton built on a broader Protestant humanist tendency to map the paradoxes of grace onto the promise of a humanist education. This effort challenged the distinction that Protestant doctrine ordinarily maintained between salvation and the kingdoms of this world. Because this distinction was central to Protestant thought, it deserves further elaboration.
The magisterial Protestant theologians had good reason to fear radical arguments about salvation. Grace enabled believers to transcend their worldly communities, fraught as they were with inequality and social hierarchy, so as to become part of a messianic Kingdom of God. If the boundary between worldly kingdoms and the Kingdom of God were to be erased, it would be difficult to stop the many calls for transformative social change that dogged the Reformation from its earliest days and threatened to delegitimize the likes of Luther and Calvin. In order to explore why poets were interested in the politics of grace, it is first necessary to explain why these major theologians avoided conflating grace with political agency.
The dangers of free grace theology became clear to Protestants soon after Luther began to preach his ideas. During the German Peasants’ rebellion of 1524–25, rebel leaders used Luther’s arguments to challenge the authority of the civil (or “temporal”) authorities as well as the Catholic church. Some of them, like Thomas Müntzer, claimed that grace had emancipated the saints from all law, both religious and secular. This position, which came to be known as antinomianism, became one of the most reviled interpretations of grace among the magisterial reformers. All Protestants opposed the kind of Catholic legalism that sought to bind consciences, but the antinomians claimed that they were also freed from worldly authority by grace and the Holy Spirit.14 Luther rejected these arguments because, in his view, the majority of professed Christians in any worldly community are hypocrites, and temporal law is thus necessary to restrain them from abusing the godly. He argued that “if anyone attempted to rule the world by the gospel and to abolish all temporal law and sword . . . the wicked under the name of Christian [would] abuse evangelical freedom, carry on their rascality, and insist that they were Christians subject neither to law nor sword, as some are already raving and ranting.”15 This skepticism led Luther to oppose the German peasants, contributing to their defeat.16 The term “antinomian” became a term of abuse for later groups, including radicals during the English Civil Wars who attempted to use grace as the grounds of political liberty.17
On the other hand, the Gospel represents grace as part of the believer’s entry into a new kingdom, the Kingdom of God, so the magisterial reformers needed a sophisticated explanation for how grace could build a new kingdom without overturning the existing political order. The key inspiration was Augustine’s division of the heavenly and earthly cities in City of God: “two cities then were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city by a love of self carried even to the point of contempt for God, the heavenly city by a love of God carried even to the point of contempt for self.”18 The force of the ruling authorities was necessary in the earthly city to restrain the rapacious love of self, thus making possible the conditions for life. In the City of God, on the other hand, force was no longer necessary because divine love had a transformative effect on the universal community of saints, leading them toward the voluntary performance of the good. Luther built on this approach to argue that “God has ordained two governments: the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteous people under Christ; and the temporal, which restrains the un-Christian and wicked so that—no thanks to them—they are obliged to keep still and to maintain an outward peace.”19 It is true, he adds, that those who have received grace no longer need a magistrate: “there is no need for any suit, litigation, court, judge, penalty, law, or sword among Christians, since they do of their own accord much more than all laws and teachings can demand.”20 Nevertheless, true Christians are a small minority in the kingdom of this world, so temporal authority is needed in order to constrain the ungodly.21 Luther was in fact so committed to defending temporal authority that he argued against resistance to princes who persecuted Protestants.22 It became more common for Lutherans to claim a right of resistance after the 1530 Augsburg confession, but even then, resistance had to come from inferior magistrates—public officers below the ruler—rather than the godly in general.23 Luther and followers thus saw grace as a source of spiritual regeneration that should not be used to undermine political authority.
Like Luther, Calvin reclaimed this Augustinian separation of the two kingdoms as a means of avoiding radical antinomianism. While Calvinists produced influential theories of resistance in the sixteenth century,24 they did not base the right of resistance on grace. Calvin insists that law and discipline is necessary to constrain the ungodly:
Let us first consider that there is a twofold government in man: one aspect is spiritual, whereby the conscience is instructed in piety and in reverencing God; the second is political, whereby man is educated for the duties of humanity and citizenship that must be maintained among men. These are usually called the “spiritual” and the “temporal” jurisdiction. . . . There are in man, so to speak, two worlds, over which different kings and different laws have authority.25
Building on this distinction, Calvin takes direct aim at the radicals of his day: “we are not to misapply to the political order the gospel teaching on spiritual freedom, as if Christians were less subject, as concerns outward government, to human laws because their consciences have been set free in God’s sight.”26 In an earthly polis, where the ungodly are often the majority, any confusion between spiritual and political freedom would simply lead to license for the wicked majority, and thus ultimately the persecution of the godly by the ungodly: “For since the insolence of evil men is so great, their wickedness so stubborn, that it can scarcely be restrained by extremely severe laws, what do we expect them to do if they see that their depravity can go scot-free—when no power can force them to cease from doing evil?”27
Later Calvinists followed suit on the need to separate grace from resistance theory.28 Beza’s On the Rights of Magistrates Over Their Subjects and the anonymous Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos argued that tyrants could be opposed only by inferior magistrates, and not by private citizens.29 Radical proponents of resistance theory, such as John Knox, Christopher Goodman, and John Ponet, did extend the right of resistance to the common people, but even they argued that resistance was legitimate only when the ruler was idolatrous, and not because grace had freed the godly from legal obligation.30 George Buchanan’s argument for tyrannicide in De Jure Regni Apud Scotos similarly avoided authorizing resistance on the basis of grace.31 This tradition of arguing against antinomianism means that the Presbyterians of the English Civil Wars had a powerful arsenal of arguments with which to oppose radicals in their context.32 From Calvin and Luther to the Presbyterians, grace was seen by most Protestants as insufficient on its own to legitimize political liberty, driving such arguments to the antinomian fringes of the Reformation.
Historians of political thought have taken these Protestant reformers at their word, concluding that grace is less important for political thought than concepts drawn from political theory, such as the state, sovereignty, or liberty. In his Machiavellian Moment, for instance, John A. Pocock explains Machiavelli’s influence in the period as part of an effort among European thinkers to pull away from transcendent concerns so as to study the prudence needed in a worldly republic.33 Similarly, in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner privileges secular ideas of liberty, tracing their origins to the political culture of medieval Italian city-states or, in a later version of this argument, to a “neo-Roman” theory of liberty that revived pre-Christian modes of thinking.34 As a result, when historians and literary critics do wish to study grace as part of political thought, they often look toward the radical fringes of the Reformation, where there were clearer continuities between, for example, republican theory and radical religion.35 This tendency is especially clear in Milton criticism, where the politics of grace are often understood as part of the larger politics of antinomianism, manifesting the sometimes egalitarian but also the fanatical, violent, or “terrorist” features of those groups.36 These approaches reflect not only a modern critical interest in radicalism, but also the efforts of Protestant reformers themselves to marginalize free grace theology by associating it with the fringes of the Reformation.
More recently, however, historians have reimagined political thought in ways that create new opportunities for literary criticism. In a recent study, Sarah Mortimer takes the community as her object of analysis rather than political thought proper, because she contends that political theory in this period was inseparable from legal, educational, literary, and religious forms of envisioning communities.37 Sovereignty, for instance, has been traditionally described as a quintessentially political concept, but Mortimer shows that some of the major theorists of sovereignty in this period drew on larger ideals of community that were, in turn, influenced by religious and educational writing.38 Alongside these evolutions in intellectual history, literary critics have increasingly insisted on the “porous” boundaries between religion and secular concepts in the poetry and drama of this period.39 From this perspective, the distinction between the political and what lies beyond it is not clear-cut, but rather the problem that poets struggled to define as they imagined their communities. By extension, a literary representation of grace is interesting for the history of political thought not only when the writer happens to make explicitly political claims, but also when he or she uses grace to reimagine a given community.
This book explores how early modern poets moved between the language of salvation and the language of politics to reimagine their communities. Grace enabled this imaginative crossover because it was part of the conceptual boundary between worldly kingdoms and the kingdom of God—between communities ruled with force and a those that were part of a new and messianic dispensation. Whereas the major reformers sought to contain the divisive potential of grace by defining precisely the boundaries between the two kingdoms, Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton did not exhibit the same theological precision, and they used grace to examine communities in this world. Their goal in doing so was not radical or antinomian, as criticism has sometimes suggested. Rather, they sought to become the poetic mediators between the gift of grace and the rest of the people. This argument, as we shall see, was ultimately rooted in the promise of a humanist education.
1. Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956), 6.
2. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al., rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2007).
3. For a classic definition of humanism, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 113–37. On Christian humanism, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 70–87.
4. On Spenser and colonialism, see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford University Press, 1997), and Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). On Milton’s justification of chattel slavery, see Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On his preference of minority rule, see Martin Dzelzainis, “Harrington and the Oligarchs: Milton, Vane, and Stubbe,” in Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism, ed. Dirk Wiemann and Gaby Mahlberg (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 15–33; William Walker, Antiformalist, Unrevolutionary, Illiberal Milton: Political Prose, 1644–1660 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).
5. The distinction between the household and the political community is ultimately Aristotelian. See, for example, Aristotle, Politics, ed. and trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 2–5. The distinction between particular communities and the universal church is explained further in Sarah Mortimer, Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State (1517–1625) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 17–41.
6. All citations to the Bible are to the King James Version in www.biblegateway.com.
7. See, for example, Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 655–703.
8. Sir Philip Sidney, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Miscellanous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 81.
9. Colin Burrow, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). See in particular Burrow, Imitating Authors, 169–205, for the view that Renaissance humanists privileged “adaptive imitation,” which sought to adapt source material in a new form that was adapted to a given rhetorical aim, context, or occasion.
10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). Other critics have already shown that Anderson’s ideas are too secular to explain nationalism in the early modern period. See the essays in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds., Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), and Paul Stevens, “The Pre-Secular Politics of Paradise Lost,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Paradise Lost,” ed. Louis Schwartz (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 94–108.
11. Ross Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism: Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019); Nichole E. Miller, Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). The radical reading of Milton can be traced to Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1979). Other important interventions include Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
12. David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 149–50. See also Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism, 3–7.
13. John Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 417–517.
14. On the overlap between Protestant and antinomian positions on grace, see Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79–130.
15. Luther, On Temporal Authority, 665.
16. Martin Luther, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, in Martin Luther, ed. E. G. Rupp and Benjamin Drewery (New York: St. Martin’s, 1970), 121–25.
17. For a summary of antinomian and “radical” Protestantism on the continent, see Francis Oakley, “Christian Obedience and Authority, 1520–1550,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 187–92. On antinomianism in England, see Como, Blown by the Spirit, 33–38. Antinomianism was so closely related to grace that it has been described as a “free grace” movement. See Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1.
18. Augustine, City of God, Volume IV: Books 12–15, trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 405.
19. Luther, Temporal Authority, 665.
20. Luther, Temporal Authority, 663.
21. Luther, Temporal Authority, 664.
22. Luther, Temporal Authority, 668–69.
23. On Lutheran resistance theory after the 1530 Augsburg confession, see Robert M. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193–218, esp. 200–203. Kingdon notes that the memory of the Peasants’ Rebellion dissuaded the Protestant princes from endorsing a general right to resistance; instead, they “wanted to be very careful to develop a resistance theory that would not justify revolt by anyone in the general population but would permit the revolt they planned to lead” (201). See also Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2:195–99.
24. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory,” 203–18. Compare J. W. Allen, “The Break from Calvin,” in A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1928; repr., 1958), 203–20. On Calvin’s preference for nonresistance, see Allen, “Break from Calvin,” 52–60.
25. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1960), 2:833–34.
26. Calvin, 2:834. See also his castigation of antinomianism in 2:1488: “certain men, when they hear that the gospel promises a freedom that acknowledges no king and no magistrate among men, but looks to Christ alone, think that they cannot benefit by their freedom so long as they see any power set up over them. They therefore think that nothing will be safe unless the whole world is reshaped to a new form, where there are neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything which in their opinion restricts their freedom. But whoever knows how to distinguish between body and soul, between this present fleeting life and that future eternal life, will without difficulty know that Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct.”
27. Calvin, 2:1487–88.
28. See Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:191–94.
29. Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, Concerning the Legitimate Power of a Prince Over the People, and of the People Over a Prince, ed. and trans. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45–46; Theodore Beza, Concerning the Rights of Rulers Over Their Subjects and the Duty of Subjects Towards Their Rulers, ed. A. H. Murray, trans. Henri-Louis Gonin (Cape Town: H. A. U. M., 1956). For an overview of how these texts understood the role of the inferior magistrate, see Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory,” 203–14. On the Calvinist rejection of popular rebellion, see Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:302–9.
30. See John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (Geneva: Printed by A. Poullain and J. Rebul, 1558); Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Oght to Be Obeyd of Their Subiects (Geneva: Printed by John Crispin, 1558); John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (Strasbourg: Printed by the heirs of W. Köpfel, 1556). These opinions, particularly Knox’s treatise, were too radical for Calvin. See Allen, “Break from Calvin,” 106–20; Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:227–38; Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 63–76.
31. See George Buchanan, The Powers of the Crown in Scotland, trans. and ed. Charles Flinn Arrowood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1949), 126–32; 140–44. De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, 126–32; 140–44. On the secular aspects of Buchanan’s arguments, see Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory,” 218.
32. On the flowering of antinomian groups during the English Civil Wars, particularly the Ranters and Fifth Monarchists, see David Loewenstein, “Ranter and Fifth Monarchist Prophecies: The Revolutionary Visions of Abiezer Coppe and Anna Trapnel,” in Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 92–124. See also Bernard Capp, “The Fifth Monarchists and Popular Millenarianism,” in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 65–90; Como, Blown by the Spirit. On antinomianism in the English Civil Wars, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
33. J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42–45.
34. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
35. Winship, Making Heretics; Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). See also Blair Worden, “English Republicanism,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 443–75, esp. 471–74; Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225–45.
36. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 413–27; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton, 266–67; Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Feisal G. Mohamed, “Milton, Sir Henry Vane, and the Brief but Significant Life of Godly Republicanism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2013): 83–104; Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism, 115–42.
37. Mortimer, Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State, 13–15.
38. See especially Mortimer, Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State, 42–62.
39. Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13. See also Arthur Marotti and Ken Jackson, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism 46, no. 1 (2004): 167–90; Arthur Marotti and Ken Jackson, eds., “The Turn to Religion” and Shakespeare Criticism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2011).
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