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e p i l o g u e Milton and the Limits of Incarnation in the Seventeenth Century Limits, in Milton’s great epic, cannot be conceived without their transgression . The preceding chapters have tried to demonstrate, however, that Milton’s vibrant and sustained thinking, reading, and writing about the Incarnation drive the threshold of those limits nearly to the edge of perfection. Some of his radical contemporaries strode across it in order to be translated by their encounter with the divine, and to translate that vision to others through creative interplay between the kenosis and the pleroma at work in their own fleshly tabernacles. In Real Presences , George Steiner remarks that interpretation approaches performance : “interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation.” Or, to put it another way, “interpretation is, to the largest possible degree, lived.”1 Gnosis and mimesis, according to Steiner, are intimately related, and for Milton they find their crucial consummation in the Incarnation as the exegesis of God and the narrative picture of the “ruins of our first parents” in repair. John Everard, Gerrard Winstanley , and James Nayler confirm the accuracy of Steiner’s assertion, for by their blurring of the Son and Spirit, they are able to figure themselves as the immediate “translation” of the Godhead. Their detractors, operating from within their own communities and theological grammars, were unable or unwilling to participate. This is 293                   294 most graphically illustrated in Nayler’s case, for his “translation” miserably failed, even within his own community. In a letter written to Margaret Fell just days before the pageant at Bristol, the recent Quaker convert Francis Howgill expresses his approbations, felt more widely among the Friends in the ensuing weeks: “Truly my dear J. N. is bad, . . . and there is such filthy things acted there in such havoc and spoil and such madness among them. . . .They have made truth stink in those parts.”2 As we have seen, few came to Nayler’s defense despite his desire to share, what appeared to him, the blessings of the sacred language of Incarnation . Whether any appreciated or appropriated it or not, the “form of life” within the radical communities of Everard, Winstanley, and Nayler traces its varied expressions and performances from the goodness of creation and the abundant goodness of the Creator whose gaze bestows “Beatitude past utterance.” George Lindbeck identifies why religious traditions are so often “lost in translation”: the status of doctrine. He asserts that in cognitivist models, perhaps the predominant paradigm among conservatives like Thomas Edwards or John Deacon, doctrines “function as informative propositions of truth claims about objective realities,” leading to a philosophical or scientific understanding of religion. In expressivist models, on the other hand, typically the paradigm of many in the radical camps, doctrines are “noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations,” leading to an aesthetic understanding of religion. Both models, argues Lindbeck, appear incapable of leading to doctrinal reconciliation or cooperation between differing religious traditions; the one presents truth claims that cannot be refuted, the other exults in the “rousing motions” that stirred Milton’s Samson and ignores or waters down doctrine so as to make it irrelevant.3 Lindbeck’s insight can be quite instructive. For many conservatives in a seventeenth-century context, the science of correct doctrine leads to stability in the ecclesiastical and social order. Richard Hooker, defender of the doctrinally astute and university-trained clergy, worries about the whims of one’s private reading of scripture: “When they and their Bibles were alone together, what strange fantastical opinion so- ever at any time entered into their heads, their use was to think the Spirit taught it them.”4 And as Jean-François Gilmont recounts, Martin Luther and John Calvin reveal their anxieties about the unrestricted publication of theological works and the unfettered access to scripture despite their commitment to a vernacular Bible. Calvin argued that in order for the people to be properly nourished, God desires “that the bread be sliced for us, that the pieces be put in our mouths, and that they be chewed for us.”5 The result, as Edwards writes in the closing lines of his dedicatory epistle to Gangraena, is a “settle[d]” church and government “whereby we may be brought into one, and become terrible as an Army with banners, and like a strong and fenced City, both against schisms that may arise from within, and the assaults of enemies without.” In his eyes...

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