Spiritual Architecture and Paradise Regained: Milton's Literary Ecclesiology

PREFACE

PREFACE This study examines the literary ecclesiology of Paradise Regained.1 Milton’s ecclesiology or theology of the church is literary not only because it takes poetic form, but also because of the important roles that humanist literary, textual, and rhetorical categories and practices play in his writing of the church. This formulation differs from previous accounts of Milton’s relationship to the church in two key ways. First, the interplay between humanist textual and literary goals and Protestant theology, familiar to cultural historians of the Reformation, has not been acknowledged in discussions of Milton’s ecclesiology, resulting in disciplinary boundaries that didn’t exist for him.2 Humanist reading and writing practices paved the way for the emergence of Scripture as the Word of God in Protestant theology, which, in turn, became both a foundational metaphor guiding literary activity and the cornerstone of the church.3 Theology was not a set of abstract propositions to which all discourses referred; rather, it was one of several overlapping discourse fields, including poetry, polemics, and hermeneutics, that offered different opportunities to fulfill the religious imperative to build the church. It was through literary activity — primarily reading and writing in response to Scripture, but also singing, speaking and hearing the Word — that the church came to be and continued to be reformed, its ix “spiritual architecture” providing an imaginative space for all participants. In Milton’s case, then, the church is inseparable from the writing of the church, a view that is not served well by attaching denominational labels to the writer based on confessional statements in his work. Indeed, Milton has not fared well in the denominational approach to his ecclesiology: he is often portrayed as devolving from Presbyterianism to Independency to a “church of one” after the Restoration, isolated , defeated, and quietist, writing his poetry for all time, unconcerned about the church. This brings us to the second way my description of Milton’s ecclesiology differs from many previous accounts. My view of the church coming to be in writing carries forward Milton’s ecclesiological concerns not only into his poetry, but also into the Restoration, and particularly into Paradise Regained. According to Fredric Jameson, Paradise Regained is marked “very explicitly by the emphasis on personal, private salvation” and the “failure of hope following upon the failure of revolution.”4 Similarly, Andrew Milner maintains that the theme of quietism in Paradise Regained “is itself an indication of a general fatigue in the revolutionary movement” even if Milton’s quietism is “tactical” as he prepares for “that future time when ‘doing’ rather than ‘suffering’ will be the order of the day.”5 Both Jameson and Milner, by reducing Milton’s religious views to a function of his apparently diminished political aspirations, underestimate the extent to which Milton’s ecclesiology continued to be a source of radical opposition in Paradise Regained.6 In this study, Paradise Regained is a literary form of spiritual architecture arising from a religious imperative, not power politics or rhetorical self-fashioning. Other readers, less willing to dismiss the importance of his commitment to Nonconformity after the Restoration, conclude that in Paradise Regained Milton remains as engaged as ever in reforming the church and state, despite the conditions of censorship and persecution, the generic demands of the brief x Spiritual Architecture and Paradise Regained epic, and the subtle, restrained tone of the poem. Most recent works refine details of or expand upon the most comprehensive and learned study to date: Barbara Lewalski’s Milton’s Brief Epic.7 Joan Bennett reminds readers of the religious and political implications of Milton’s radical Christian humanism, although she concentrates on the tradition of philosophical rather than textual humanism, which is the emphasis here.8 Careful attention has also been paid to the poem’s relationship to the religious politics of the Restoration.9 Gary Hamilton presents Jesus as a “nonconformist hero” whose interiority provides an example for persecuted dissenters exiled to worship in private houses by the Conventicle Act of 1664 and 1670.10 Ashraf Rushdy concludes that Paradise Regained is a “stridently anti-monarchist tract” while Laura Knoppers suggests that “the construction of the self-disciplined subject is a model for dissenters of the 1660s and 1670s.”11 In this study, I argue that in Paradise Regained Milton not only continues his critique of the English Reformation by confronting the failures of the Restoration settlement, but...