John Selden: Soldier, Statesman, Advocate for Milton's MuseBy JasonRosenblatt, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021. viii +264 pp. $90.00 (cloth). ISBN 13: 9780192842923

Abstract

Milton's admiration for John Selden has long been known, but the great scholar's specialized historical and linguistic interests, laid out in rebarbative prose in long Latin texts, are a substantial deterrent to grasping the relations between the two writers. Jason Rosenblatt began this task in his pioneering Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (1994) and in John Selden: Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi (2006). His latest book brings new breadth and depth to the comparison, drawing on some earlier materials but making use of the latest scholarship, including G. W. Toomer's magisterial study of Selden and Chad van Dixhoorn's edition of the Westminster Assembly debates. Rather than adopting the stance of a gatekeeper worried that the profane may not be able to understand the master, Rosenblatt treats Selden with a warmth and enthusiasm that does not preclude some irreverence: those long recapitulations of views can “try a reader's patience, even if they didn't try Selden's” (52), and may make it hard to work out what his own views are. By deploying the particular skills and interests of a literary critic, Rosenblatt engages his readers in the process of exploration. His Introduction outlines the core element of Selden's debt to rabbinical thought: the claim that God gave to Adam—and to all humans regardless of creed—five prohibitive laws and a positive commandment to establish civil laws, with a sixth prohibition, against eating part of a living animal, added after Noah's flood. These laws, based on an arbitrary divine commandment, were to be distinguished from natural law, perceived universally by reason, but they were general enough not to make great demands on religious belief, and were open to local variation. Selden relished exploring the huge variety of laws in different polities and ages, notably on sexuality and abortion. Though he was no cultural relativist, he was aware that his deep interest in both Judaic and other non-Christian laws, and his skepticism about the afterlife, laid him open to orthodox criticism. Though he declared that Christianity was a reformed Judaism, it was not always clear why he thought it needed reform, and he devoted a lot of attention to conversion to Judaism from Christianity. He tended to leave his more controversial views to be reconstructed by the reader, as in the conclusion of his Preface to the De Jure Naturali and Gentium, Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum, where he calls for readers who are ready “to venture out, like explorers, beyond their own borders” (20): the tone, as Rosenblatt puts it, is “at once defensive, ironic, challenging, and misleadingly orthodox” (20). Again and again he goes beyond what are normally considered the intellectual horizons of his time. The shifts of tone are more readily apparent in the pithy comments of his Table Talk, which at first sight seem the antithesis of his sprawling major treatises—and whose irreverence on many different topics made it unpublishable in his own time—but as Rosenblatt shows, there is rhetorical complexity in the former, while the latter has deep and often obscure roots in those treatises. In his first chapter, Rosenblatt returns to an argument he has made before, that Milton's shift from the Pauline dualism of his anti-episcopal tracts to a more sympathetic view of the Law in the divorce tracts was partly motivated by his reading of Selden's De Jure. In this sense, Selden provided “a model for a poet / polemicist's analogical imagination” (51). This very rich chapter does not flatten differences between the two men's modes of writing, however, insightfully setting them against the thematic parallels. Selden, after all, had no ear for poetry, and in his prose “there isn't a single sentence whose repetition can give pleasure” (78). Yet he did evolve an “À propos style” (57) in which topics succeed each other through analogical links, making possible a kind of non-hierarchical aesthetic that gives a fair hearing to widely diverse sources—for example, in what Rosenblatt later terms the “dizzying arabesques of anti-trinitarian speculation” (188). He finds a parallel in Milton's juxtaposition of pagan, Jewish, and Christian authorities in the regicide tracts and Paradise Lost, and he offers a striking analysis of “Methought I saw my late espoused saint” as opening up divergent perspectives within a strict form. He highlights the writers' differences through analyzing their uses of the analogy of the telescope. For Selden it becomes an exemplar of the collaborative progress of natural philosophy and historical scholarship, while for Milton, fiercely independent and suspicious of arguments derived from others, it may be the source of error and departure from scriptural truth. And yet Rosenblatt also warns against schematizing such differences: Selden can be opposed as the disinterested scholar to Milton the polemicist, but he had very definite, if sometimes covert, agendas in many of his writings, while Milton's love of scholarship went well beyond particular occasions. In his second chapter, Rosenblatt focuses on their responses to the Bible, though here the comparison is less close, with the Milton portion already having been separately published. Rosenblatt begins some detailed case studies of Selden's modes of reading with Paul's reference to the Israelites' crossing of the Red Sea (1 Cor. 10.1-2), normally taken by Christians as a justification for baptism, but understood by Selden in an “aggressively anti-typological” (94) mode, stressing that he writes as a historian, not as a theologian. Rosenblatt further addresses Selden's readings of Christ's rebuke to the Pharisees (Mark 7.9-12), his expulsion of the moneylenders (John 2.13-17), and his trial, before considering Selden's treatment of incest and the Sabbath. Selden delves deep into Jewish scholarship to show that the rabbis, conventionally seen by Christians as harsh and punitive, repeatedly offered a humane interpretation of the “sometimes brutal letter of the law” (97). In discussing the trial of Jesus, while not going so far as to justify his punishment, Selden stresses various ways in which he could have been considered a law-breaker and cites anti-Christian passages at length. After the often abstruse discussions with which Selden engages, however carefully explicated by Rosenblatt, Miltonists may find it a relief to turn to the second part of this chapter, on Milton's Psalm translations and his rewriting of the Bible in Book 7 of Paradise Lost. The detailed explication of Milton's uses of Hebrew terms in his glosses accords better with the book as a whole than the engagement with Harold Bloom on Paradise Lost, which feels out of place, but Rosenblatt writes wonderfully on the poetry, as in his observation that “Silence, ye troubl'd waves, and thou Deep, peace” (7.216) demonstrates technical mastery with the pause after “Deep.” The comparison is more integrated in the third chapter on family law, and here Rosenblatt proposes that there may have been mutual influence between Selden and Milton. In De Jure, Selden presents marriage under the Noachide law as “a completely unfettered relationship” (141), based on mutual consent for sexual relations, and dissoluble by either party. Rosenblatt argues that these “minimalist universal laws of family relations” (142) accord with Selden's own open union with the Countess of Kent. Selden's analysis showed that Jewish law was not as restrictive as Christians often argued; notably, it made divorce easy—for men. In Uxor Ebraica (1646), he challenges conventional readings of Christ's rejection of divorce (Matt. 5.31-32) as a rejection of the Jewish law, arguing that his position was in fact that of one rabbinical school, which allowed divorce in cases of porneia (translated in the King James Bible as “fornication” but in fact a wide term not confined to sexual transgressions). Rosenblatt points out that Selden refrains from drawing out the larger implications of his argument, mentioning only in passing that the current laws of divorce have remained unchanged since the Reformation—and, he implies, need reformation. By then, Milton had passionately argued the case for divorce reforms, and Rosenblatt points out that Selden owned two of Milton's divorce tracts, where he too had discussed terms for “fornication” with reference to rabbinical writings; perhaps, “though Milton would never have dared to imagine it” (152), he influenced Selden. Whether or not this was the case, Rosenblatt's extended exploration of the two writers' positions is very illuminating, and he goes on to explore imagistic connections that link their writings on divorce with Paradise Lost. Though less of a polemicist than Milton, Selden was a member both of Parliament and of the Westminster Assembly, and the final two chapters explore the complex relations between Assembly debates and the much more extended discussions of excommunication in De Synedriis et Praefectis Juridicis Veterum Ebraeorum (1650-55), an exposition of the Noachite requirement to establish courts. Rosenblatt is able to draw on Chad van Dixhoorn's edition of the Westminster Assembly debates, but the two manuscript witnesses give very incomplete accounts of Selden's speeches, and a major contribution of this part of the book is Rosenblatt's expert filling out of those notes with reference to De Jure, De Synedriis, Table Talk, and other works. Here we have a remarkable example of a direct encounter between scholarship and public engagement. Though in general Selden was not an effective speaker, Rosenblatt takes one example from early in the Assembly's formation, when on behalf of the Commons Selden asked it to define heresy, a tactical measure that far from advancing clerical persecution served to divide its members. In a series of speeches Selden “proffers the Talmud and its expositors as reliable interpreters of scripture and the best model for Christians in order to move beyond their factional problems” (204). He deploys all his philological skill to undermine Presbyterian claims for the church's power of excommunication, setting out his core methodological principle: “Come as neare as possibly to the text in the age when it was made”(211)—a principle he elsewhere called “Synchronisme.” On that principle, proof-texts the Presbyterians used to defend their power of excommunication could be seen not to refer to separate ecclesiastical bodies but to bodies with secular elements and ultimately accountable to the Great Sanhedrin, comparable to the English Parliament. Particularly striking are the exchanges between Selden and George Gillespie, celebrated in Presbyterian legend as having vanquished his adversary. On one level, they were arguing past each other, for Gillespie read not historically but typologically; but Rosenblatt shows that both on the floor and in later printed works he distorted Selden's arguments, even while having the effrontery to claim him as an authority. Their attacks, Rosenblatt argues, were not only anti-Catholic but anti-Semitic. It is fascinating to see the raw confrontations of the Assembly metamorphosing themselves into the hugely elaborated chapters of De Synedriis, where Selden could address the issues at leisure. Remarkably, while Selden footnotes Gillespie and his ally Samuel Rutherford, he does so in a detached, scholarly way, without drawing attention to their misreadings. Rosenblatt suggests that Selden's normal courtesy toward adversaries reflects his deep knowledge of the Talmud, where opposing arguments were always reported. A further rationale for holding back from either personal attacks or aligning oneself with particular intellectual heroes was Selden's deep conviction that progress in knowledge was cumulative and collaborative. Hence he disliked the labels of “Erastian” as applied to himself, or of “Colemanite” as applied to his supporter Thomas Coleman, not at all because he did not admire them—in De Synedriis he rhapsodizes over a beautiful copy of Erastus's book on excommunication—but because intellectual life went beyond individuals. And he made a striking analogy: the thesis that the earth revolved round the sun was not just “Copernican,” because it had been anticipated by the ancients and refined by many other scientists and mathematicians, Galileo included. This collaborative model went with a “culture of sharing” (179): Selden was intellectually as well as personally very generous. In this last part of the book, Milton makes only a brief though telling appearance. Areopagitica had voiced his excitement at the new discoveries of England's thinkers, but by 1646 he was smarting from attacks by the Presbyterians. Rosenblatt makes what as far as I know are the new suggestions that Milton's “Scotch what-d'ye call” is Gillespie, and that his deletion of a gibe at Prynne may have been motivated by that choleric scholar's having come under attack from Gillespie and Rutherford in the excommunication debates. Rosenblatt tries to find further allusions in Milton's poetry to the issue, but acknowledges that this is tentative speculation. In his Conclusion, Rosenblatt asks why Selden's often highly critical view of the Christian clergy—expressed in reductive analogies in Table Talk—did not extend to the rabbis. The answer is that he feels an affinity with them as people who based their authority on legal expertise as well as mastery of the scriptures and tradition; “the law is his Torah” (233). Returning to Milton's particular affinity with Selden in the mid-1640s, Rosenblatt argues that the middle books of Paradise Lost are closer to his views of that period than the typological vision of the last books. Moreover, even Christian Doctrine, for all its Pauline elements, has passages which seem to reflect his views of the 1640s, particularly the chapter on the world before the Fall; Selden helps us to “break free, even if only provisionally, from the Pauline paradigm that governs the interpretation of Milton's work” (249). Selden has been a daunting presence for many; Rosenblatt's guide through his most taxing works manages to make them exciting and pertinent. The book is an act of the scholarly generosity he praises in Selden. Rosenblatt brings his concerns alive, showing him as someone in some ways ahead of his time although, or because, he had such a deep historical sense. There is a sense that the Miltonic ground has been covered more often, but Rosenblatt still has many fresh things to say about the poetry and prose by opening up the possible tensions between Pauline elements in his thought and countervailing forces. This inspiring book will generate much further exploration.