A Speaking Help: John Milton and the Invention of Divorce

Sebastián Pineda Buitrago, "A Speaking Help: John Milton and the Invention of Divorce", Proteo 3 (agosto, 2026)

I

The first time I saw my parents' marriage fail, I didn't have the language for it. I was sixteenth or seventeenth, hiding in the hallway, listening to two people who had stopped speaking to each other in any language that mattered. They still talked –about bills, about schedules, about whose turn it was to pick me up from school– but the conversation, the real one, had died years before. It would take me another decade to find Milton, and another decade after that to understand why a seventeenth-century Puritan poet had more to say about my own divorce than any therapist or lawyer ever did. This is the essay I wish I had read before I got married, when I was still trying to understand how two people can share a house, a child, a history, and still be utterly alone together.

Milton’s “divorce tracts” were four urgent pamphlets written between 1643 and 1645, in the middle of the English Civil War. Their titles sound forbidding –The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The Judgment of Martin Bucer, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion– but their central question is disarmingly simple: what should two people do when they can no longer speak to one another?

Milton’s answer begins in Genesis. Upon seeing Adam alone, God said it is not good for man to be alone. God created Eve from a part of Adam's rib. Milton never escapes this patriarchal grammar. He imagines an unequal marriage, ruled by the husband, in an age when marriage secured inheritance, named legitimate children, and made fatherhood an act of legal and social faith rather than genetic proof. A husband was presumed to be the father; a household depended upon that presumption. Fatherhood is an act of faith.

Yet Milton reads the rib strangely and ambitiously. His question is sharper. A relationship can have shared passwords, photographs, children, bills, and a carefully synchronized calendar– and still lack the one thing that made it human: someone to whom one can speak without becoming smaller.

After my divorce, the German philologist and theorist Werner Hamacher gave me a language for what I had witnessed. My reading of Milton’s divorce tracts is, in part, a conversation with Hamacher’s essay, “Recht auf Scheidung vom Recht (Milton)”—“The Right to a Divorce from Law”—included in the posthumously published 2018 collection Sprachgerechtigkeit (Linguistic Justice). Because Hamacher does not merely ask whether the law should permit divorce, I would add that his real question is darker: what happens when law takes charge of a relationship whose first purpose was speech?

Milton's phrase describing marriage as a "apt and cheerful conversation between a man and a woman" is another way to say that love is a long conversation. If marriage begins in the possibility of speech, it ends when the shared language is broken. When conversation dies, the demon of the law enters. The judicial language replaces the language of intimacy with its own hard vocabulary—petitioner, respondent, asset, custody. It may settle a case without ever naming the wound. Hamacher helped me see that Milton was defending the right to leave a language that had ceased to be a home.

II

I first encountered Milton through Borges who loved to remind us that Milton traveled to Italy to peer through Galileo’s telescope at the moons of Jupiter, later smuggling that expanded, terrifying cosmos into his poem Paradise Lost (1667). In his lectures on English poetry, Borges related that in 1638 the young Milton visited Galileo in Arcetry, Italy, when the old and blind astronomer was imprisoned by the Church. Since then, the universe became too large, too strange, too full of worlds for any priest to supervise. The joke, however, is cruel: Milton could imagine the abyss of space, but he could not always cross the silence of his own living room.

In 2003, when I was 20 or 21, I read with immense pleasure Robert Grave's The Story of Marie Powell: Wife to Mr. Milton (1943). Graves nails the cosmic cruelty of the great Puritan poet with lethal precision. He imagines a sign hung on Milton’s study door that belongs on the tombstone of every dead marriage: Do not disturb. I am working with the Muses. The law of affective anatomy is absolute: a husband who converses with angels while ignoring his wife has already finalized his divorce, regardless of what the clerical paperwork claims. 

Since then, perhaps because of my Hispanic American formation, I recognize in Milton a baroque intensity shared across hostile confessions: grand rhetoric, biblical excess, intellectual combat, cosmic scenery, and the conviction that language can reorganize the world. Milton was indeed a Puritan polemicist. He was against the Council of Trent that defended marriage as sacramental and indissoluble—the very kind of ecclesiastical authority his divorce argument resisted. 

This may sound like a contradiction. Milton was  hostile to Rome, suspicious of ceremony, and willing to quarrel with the Church over marriage and conscience. Yet his prose feels strangely familiar to a reader formed by the baroque: it is excessive, theatrical, biblical, full of thunder and legal fire. He writes like a man who believes that a sentence can alter the arrangement of the universe. The Council of Trent had made marriage a sacrament guarded by clergy and law; Milton answered from the other side of the religious war, but with an equally baroque sense of the stakes. For both worlds, marriage was never merely private. It was a battlefield where salvation, authority, family, property, and language met.

How to name the moment when a poet could argue that neither bishop nor state should command the inward life? Milton’s liberty was not polite. It was quarrelsome, learned, Protestant, masculine, and often unbearable. But it gave me, a reader moving between Colombia and Mexico, a way to recognize something familiar: the baroque pleasure of turning theology into style, private grief into public argument, and a domestic quarrel into a theory of freedom.

Milton was Cromwell’s adviser from 1649. He serve the Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues. The Sephardic return to Cromwellian London made this drama larger. Jews arriving by way of Amsterdam brought Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino, Hebrew, commerce, and prophecy into a city that the tidy birthplace of liberalism. It is closer to our baroque worlds than the schoolbook version of England admits. Milton belonged to an age of dangerous languages. He read Genesis not as a dead monument but as political dynamite: Eve was not made to decorate Adam’s household, but to end his solitude. Marriage, therefore, was a conversation between minds. If that conversation died, the law might preserve the contract, but not the life inside it. Graves gave me a comic, domestic Milton: Mary Powell, from a Royalist family, facing a husband whose Parliamentarian imagination had entered the house before Cromwell ever entered government. Their marriage became a civil war across a table. One sees the poet shut himself in with the Muses while his wife asks the fatal question: who, precisely, is going to speak to me?

In the end, perhaps this is what Milton still teaches us: that divorce is not, in the first instance, a legal procedure, a moral failure, or even a tragedy. It is a crisis of language. It begins when the conversation that made a marriage inhabitable –when the difficult, unfinished labor of making oneself intelligible to another– falls into silence. No decree can restore that speech once it has ceased to be possible.