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c h a p t e r 3 The Greatest Metaphor of Our Religion The Radical Hermeneutics of Incarnation in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana But first I mean to exercise him in the Wilderness; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . That all the Angels and Ethereal Powers, They now, and men hereafter, may discern From what consummate virtue I have chose This perfect Man, by merit call’d my Son, To earn Salvation for the Sons of men. —Milton, Paradise Regained (1.155–66) In his Life of Moses the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa (d. 395) understands Moses’s transforming encounter with the “text” of the burning bush as a figure for the Incarnate Word—the Lord descends into creation to inhabit and underwrite material reality without consuming it. For Gregory, the ontic and perceptual horizons of believers are transformed by their encounter with the Word just as Moses’s horizon is transformed by the theophany in the burning bush; like Moses, the believer is called from his “luxuriating . . . manner of life that is peaceful 109       ’                 110 and devoid of conflict” to behold the light of the truth that “dazzl[es] the eyes of the soul.” Believers are thus called to appropriate and perform the Word in their lives through the exercise of “that virtuous conduct ” that leads one to behold the deeper mysteries of the Incarnate Christ.1 Gregory’s insistence that the exercise of virtue—the participation, performance, or actualization of the Word in the world—is the key to beholding the deep mysteries of God is of seminal importance to Milton . Not only is the exercise of virtue central to the hermeneutic of the author of De Doctrina Christiana, but also to the heterodox doctrine of the Incarnation set forth in it and the revolutionary implications such a doctrine holds. But in order to grasp the significance of those implications that give flesh to the doctrinal bones of Milton’s peculiar Christology , we must first grapple with the centuries of debate regarding the twin natures of Christ. To be sure, many Jews and Greeks living in the late first century .. would likely have been scandalized by the Johannine assertion that the Word was made flesh (1:14). What does it mean for John to claim that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”? Is it unique or derivative? More important, what conceptions of the Word empower Milton’s understanding of the doctrine of the Incarnation , and how might these formulations help us to understand more precisely the performance of the Word in the world? In the first section of this chapter, I offer a very brief account of the intellectual milieu out of which John formulates his great metaphor and how the “Word made flesh” was variously understood in the theological crucible of the early church.2 This is a theological history with which Milton would have been well acquainted and from which he would form his own core doctrinal beliefs regarding the Incarnation . In the second section, I argue that Milton’s philosophical monism provides the linchpin for the perfectionist strains in his “low” Christology as it is delineated in De Doctrina Christiana. Moreover, I consider how Milton’s doctrinal understanding of the “Word made flesh” implies narrative.The various Christologies that Milton inherits are not just the dessicated remains of theological debates long removed from the issues and concerns fermenting and fomenting in his own age. As Milton recognizes in De Doctrina Christiana and renders in his “brief epic” of “This perfect Man, by merit call’d my Son,” these formulations constitute, rather, the very bones of the central hero whose actions in the world are the lifeblood of the tradition Milton holds sacred . The weight of these doctrinal claims inevitably bears upon the capacities and capabilities of those like Milton and his contemporaries who chose to inscribe themselves within the scope of that sacred tradition ’s narrative trajectories: filaments that both stretch toward and advance the horizons of the very world they help (re)define. Stanley Hauerwas suggests that stories “are not told to explain as a theory explains , but to involve the agent in a way of life. A theory is meant to help you know the world without changing the world yourself; a story is to help you deal with the world by changing it through changing yourself.”3 Hauerwas seems here to be making a distinction between two modes of vision that ostensibly order reality in disparate ways. But I suggest that for...

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