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i n t r o d u c t i o n Repairing the Ruins Milton, the Poetry of Proclamation, and the Incarnation of the w/ Word Since the Incarnation, God has been externalized. He was seen at a certain moment and in a certain place, and He left behind Him words and memories which were then passed on. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense These are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. —T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages Revolutionary England was populated by immortals. Most dwelled in the banality of their own day-to-day affairs without interruption, without incident, and within the sometimes-overlapping spheres of public and private devotion. Prompted by mysterious, inner motions, a few of these men and women defiantly struck their spades into the soured ideological soil of the commons and wastes, thereby striking also into the hearts of their oppressors; others paraded naked through the cramped 1 market streets of London, preaching the immediacy of the parousia; one scandalously entered Bristol in imitation of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. More simply, but no less dramatically, a significant number refused to take public oaths or doff their hats in the presence of earthly authorities. These gave testimony to the ascendancy and delicious unpredictability of the Spirit in a world magistrated and measured by the flesh, and heralded the coming of the kingdom of heaven. Still others took up arms in order to usher in and to secure their place within that chiliastic, revolutionary kingdom. All had a particular view of what that revolutionary kingdom might consist of: saints ruling as vice-gerents with King Jesus during the millennial reign; or an Eden raised in the wilderness of the now, where the poor have a share in the abundance of the treasury of the earth, or where the disenfranchised demolish the interpretive monopolies on the Law and the scriptures. None were surprised by sin, and a few even denied its pervasive or rapacious reality, proclaiming instead a narrative whose central chord reverberated, “to the pure all things are pure” (Titus 1:15), whether one is speaking about drunkenness or blasphemy, fornication or banned books. Revolutionary England was populated by men and women who saw themselves as earthen vessels housing a precious treasure, as fleshly tabernacles iridescent with the divine. John Milton considered himself to be among these. During the turbulent years that saw the arrest, trial, and execution of Archbishop William Laud, the introduction of the Root and Branch petition, the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant between Scotland and Parliament, and the victory over the royalists, appeared Milton’s small treatise Of Education (1644). In the role of schoolmaster, Milton boldly proclaims that “the end . . . of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright and out of knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our soules of true vertue” (CPW 2:366–67).1 The trajectory of Milton’s pedagogy may not seem very revolutionary; in fact, it may appear quite pedestrian. Consider this statement by the Moravian Jan Amos Comenius , a millenarian and elder contemporary of Milton’s, who devoted himself to the task of Protestant educational reform:                   2 Introduction 3 all things are nothing without God. Yea, all our Pansophie [system of universal education] must be so husbanded, that it may perpetually spurre us forward to the seeking after God in every thing, and point us out the way where to find him, and also prepare our minds for the due embracing and acknowledgement of him; That by this meanes it may be as a sacred ladder for our mindes to clime up by all visible things, unto the invisible top of things, the Majesty of the Highest God . . . there at last to repose our selves in that center of rest, and end of all our desires.2 Milton’s program of education is certainly not the same as Comenius’s, but their telos of education is.3 For Comenius, education is shaped by the realization that God is the Alpha and Omega—the beginning and the end of all things—and all knowledge must compel the human being toward a greater understanding of God’s mystery and majesty. No doubt, Milton would agree with Comenius’s...

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