Milton and the Parables of Jesus: Self-Representation and the Bible in John Milton’s Writings by David V. Urban (review)

Milton and the Parables of Jesus is a significant contribution to Milton studies, whose greatest merit is to engage Milton iuxta propria principia. Its author, David V. Urban, professor of English at Calvin University, is especially equipped to engage Milton in light of both the milieu of seventeenth-century Scriptural interpretation and the results of contemporary Milton scholarship, which he perspicuously weaves into his discussion. Urban is familiar with all the relevant critical debates and leaves no rock unturned. The apparatus of detailed endnotes supports a sweeping and complete critical reading. The breadth and the level-handed thoroughness of the research are brought to bear most manifestly by the linearity of the argument and the clarity of the prose.

Urban is the first to attempt a systematic reading of the parables of Jesus as a hermeneutic key, as well as a paradigm for Milton’s self-representation in and self-identification with some of his major poetic and dramatic passages and characters. As with numerous seventeenth-century Reformed and Puritan commentators, Milton seems closest in his reading of the parables to a “restrained allegorical approach,” as opposed to a “single main point approach.” Based on Leland Ryken’s insight (How to Read the Bible as Literature [1984]), the former approach regards the characters in the parables as “archetypes” that “connect with the feelings and circumstances in the lives of any given audience member” (12). Milton plainly identifies with some of these archetypes which underlie some of his most relevant characters in turn reflecting Milton and the meaning he seeks to attach to his Christian life and work.

The book is divided into three parts, each relating to one or two parables and to the Miltonic works that are informed by them, either through plain textual references and allusions or through more topical and analogical connections. The first three chapters composing the first part take into account the parable of the talents and the parable of the laborers. Chapter 1 addresses Sonnet 7 and the accompanying letter “To a Friend,” the Latin poem to his father, Ad Patrem, the preface to the second book of The Reason of Church-Government and Sonnet 19. These works show how Milton is caught in the tension between the internal and external demands and expectations raised and illustrated by the parable of the talents and the mitigation resulting from the parable of the laborers, with Milton’s blindness and the personification of patience serving as those functions of grace which define Milton’s “true account” as that for which he is to actively wait and prepare and which will transpire at the proper time. Milton will, in due time, “eschew the parochialism of his prophetic role within the Puritan political cause [cf. Milton’s prose, his ‘left hand’] in favor of a more universal prophetic office” (45).

Chapter 2 expands on the same dynamics by persuasively tracing them to Samson’s character and progress in Samson Agonistes. Samson’s forfeiting his gift, his strength, leaves him a weak and blind servant, whose plight closely resembles Milton’s. Two are the temptations with which Samson is faced. On one hand, he could turn to idle passivity. On the other, he could take matters into his own hands and pursue premature action. Patience once again steps in to allow for Samson to acquire wisdom which in turn enables him to regard his frailty as essential to the fulfillment of his calling. In Urban’s words, it is Samson’s patience that “prevents him from squandering his strength,” that “enables him to stand and wait for God’s call” and “to hear the final divine command to act” (72). The logic of human righteousness and works is reversed as it is his “unexpected participation in the parable of the laborers [as he waits...