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4 GEMELLE LIBER: Milton’s 1671 Archive The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest For a reader who knows the entire corpus of Milton’s writings, Paradise Lost’s concluding vision of conjugal love is compromised. In book 9 Adam and Eve consummate the Fall, and the poet likens the couple to the figure of Samson: “So rose the Danite strong / Herculean Samson from the harlot -lap / Of Philistean Dalilah, and waked / Shorn of his strength” (9.1059– 62). If Adam and Eve maintain their bond as one flesh after the Fall, that flesh is now likened to that of Samson, whose sexual transgression undoes his heroic valor. By invoking the biblical Delilah, the image of unity in sexual congress reverts to division across gender.1 In Samson Agonistes, Milton transforms the Philistine harlot Dalila into Samson’s estranged wife, and the couple’s explosive confrontation stages a breakdown of marital and political reconciliation. Samson’s exchange with Dalila forms the middle of a dramatic poem about the confrontation between God’s elect nation and its idolatrous oppressors.2 Samson’s own arguments generate an interpretive challenge for modern readers. Affirming Israel’s ascendancy over the Philistines requires agreement that wives should be subject absolutely to their husbands.3 The discord of Samson Agonistes lays bare the ideologies of gender that the conclusion of Paradise Lost renders lovely through Eve’s gracious speech. 112 Dominion Undeserved For Milton, the division of gender harkens back to the challenge that feminized chaos, the womb and tomb of creation, poses for God’s primacy . Such problems cannot be resolved decisively by Samson’s heroism or by Adam and Eve’s union. Only the body of Christ can serve as the unifying and all-encompassing agent. As the apostle Paul writes to a church divided by the question of Jewish versus Gentile worship, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). This passage may strike us as genuinely revolutionary, describing the messiah as obliterating cultural identities previously adjudicated by Hebraic law, social classifications according to Roman law, and even the fact of gender difference. The consequences are at once political and cosmological, advancing the world toward its final destiny of being all in all. Yet such a conviction jars with other moments in which Paul strictly upholds gender norms. “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man,” Paul writes to Timothy, “for Adam was first formed, then Eve” (1 Tim. 2:12–13). Milton desires a radical universality, but he never lets his readers forget about the persistence of regulated differences. This ineluctable tension prevents Milton’s Jesus from fully overcoming the politics of undeserved dominion despite proving his merit time and again. In Paradise Regained, Jesus repeatedly rejects all available forms of power. He rejects the satanic temptation of liberating God’s nation politically, choosing instead to offer spiritual liberation to Israel and to all the nations. In chapter 1 I argued that, according to Paradise Regained, war imperils rather than edifies a people by producing forms of cultural chaos associated with the Tartars. Jesus considers “it more humane, more heavenly first / By winning words to conquer willing hearts, / And make persuasion do the work of fear” (1.221–23). Yet even as he anticipates a politics of grace, Jesus both adopts the language of conquest and reserves the ultimate right to subdue those who stubbornly resist a new messianic regime (1.224–26). At stake is the continued existence of national and cultural boundaries: Know therefore when my season comes to sit On David’s throne, it shall be like a tree Spreading and overshadowing all the earth, Gemelle Liber 113 Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash All monarchies besides throughout the world, And of my kingdom there shall be no end. (4.146–51) Jesus initially describes his reign as a season, an organic turn to plenitude . The image of the tree, however, gives way to that of the stone. In a world beset by a central dilemma, the decisive shift toward universalism and peace requires both the humane art of persuasion and earth-shattering force. In Paradise Regained, such matters of global significance converge upon the story of one man in the wilderness. Because Milton was famously unable to narrate the crucifixion, the...

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