Milton, Hobbes, and the liturgical subject

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 149-172

  Rosendale, Timothy ^a  

^a SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 64249128025     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2004.0011     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. The most conveniently available modern edition of the 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books is E. C. Ratcliff, ed., The First and Second Prayerbooks of Edward VI (London: J. M. Dent, 1949).
2. F. E. Brightman's The English Rite, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons, 1915) is more authoritative and scholarly, and presents these two editions (as well as source material and the 1662 edition) in parallel columns.
3. Ramie Targoff, "The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England," Representations 60 (Fall 1997): 49-69, 50.
4. Targoff, p. 55.
5. Claire McEachern's evaluation of this conflict is sensible: "ultimately, as far as the state's scruples are concerned, such discontinuities [of internal and external conviction] can no doubt be tolerated, insofar as a harmonious social practice is sufficient to meet its demands-if unfaithful people want to do good works, the distance between inside and outside is a matter for their conscience alone" (The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 13 [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996], p. 77). Queen Elizabeth reputedly declared that she did not "make windows into men's souls"; Targoff, by implication, reads this sort of claim skeptically, but I think it makes more sense to see it as a perfectly coherent statement of religious policy.
6. John Milton, "Animadversions," in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-82), hereafter CPW, 1:661-735, 691;
7. Milton, "Of Reformation," in CPW, 1:517-617, 532.
8. Milton, Eikonoklastes, in CPW, 3:337-601, 508, 504. Here he denounces the Prayer Book's authors as "neither lerned, nor godly" (p. 507).
9. Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, CPW 6:667.
10. Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), pp. 717-49, 728.
11. Milton, Areopagitica, pp. 729, 749.
12. Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, pp. 211-469, 283; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text by book and line number.
13. See for example Howard Schultz's Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1955), an impressively documented study of various traditions of intellectual sobriety, which includes sections on "Curiosity and Pseudo-Science," "Knowledge and Zeal," "Tithes and Clergy-Learning," and "Philosophy and Vain Deceit."
14. For a stimulating argument against the idea of a Miltonic humility, see Richard Strier's "Milton against Humility," in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 258-86.
15. The critical work looming behind all current reader-oriented accounts of Paradise Lost is of course Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin (2d edn. London: Macmillan, 1997), a vigorous account of the ways in which the poem convicts its readers of their own fallenness and encourages them to reorient their responses toward obedient faith.
16. For an energetic critique of the totalizing and deterministic tendencies of the Fish model, though, see John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), in which he insists on the interpretive importance of indeterminacy and the "crucial possibility of otherness" (p. 22). My reading, rather than focusing on the educative strategies the poem deploys, will center instead on the role of signification and interpretation in the internal plot, ethics, and epistemology of the poem. In other words, rather than looking at the reader as Adam or Eve, I look at Adam and Eve as readers.
17. In chap. 7 of Milton's Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), Dayton Haskin argues that indeterminacy, verbal complexity, and interpretive responsibility are not only present in Paradise, but are also constitutive of prelapsarian ethics.
18. Milton comments in Tetrachordon: "Adam who had the wisdom giv'n him to know all creatures, and to name them according to their properties, no doubt but had the gift to discern perfectly" (CPW 2:577-718, 602).
19. John Reichert, Milton's Wisdom: Nature and Scripture in "Paradise Lost" (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 207. Unfortunately, Reichert does not go on to develop this important insight, but reverts back to a discussion of wisdom and restraint.
20. See Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: George Braziller, 1972), especially chap. 4, for the idea of the transcendent and nonreferential (and therefore unreadable) pure sign as the point of access to essence and absolute difference;
21. essentially, Deleuze suggests, a pure sign screams out "I'm a sign!! Don't read me!!" Not entirely unrelated, I think, is John Calvin's assertion (in a discussion of divine mysteries and hermeneutic propriety) that "it is unreasonable that man . . . investigate, even from eternity, that . . . which God would have us to adore and not comprehend, to promote our admiration of his glory" (Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen, 2 vols. [Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1949], 2:172)-a recognition of unreadability and absolute difference essential for worship (as well as for a correct ontology).
22. In the sacraments, "a thing which in any way illustrates or signifies another thing is mentioned not so much for what it really is as for what it illustrates or signifies" (CPW 6:555).
23. John Leonard contrasts Adam's naming of the animals with Satan's manipulation of language, and argues that "in a world where names correspond to natures, language is knowledge . . . The corrupting of innocence begins with a corrupting of language" ("Language and Knowledge in Paradise Lost," in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989], pp. 97-111, 108, 110).
24. Barbara K. Lewalski s "Milton and Idolatry" (SEL 43, 1 [Winter 2003]: 213-32) examines Milton's lifelong battle against "the sacramental sense of the divine inhering somehow in the material" and its enslaving effects (pp. 229-30).
25. Marshall Grossman argues the connection between food and knowledge, and asserts that the eating of the apple is "a hermeneutic failure and a founding of error" ("Milton's Dialectical Visions," MP 82, 1 [August 1984]: 23-39, 35).
26. Fish sees Adam's education "as a conveniently concise summary of what the poem has taught diffusely" to its readers (p. 287). It is a training away from what he calls the "politics of short joy" (or rational, empiricist, self-reliant "plot-thinking") and toward the "politics of long joy" (or faithful, obedient "faith- thinking")-a refounding of experience and action in the universal plenitude of God (see esp. The preface to the 2d edn., pp. ix-lxxiii).
27. In "Metonymies We Read By: Rhetoric, Truth, and the Eucharist in Milton's Areopagitica" (MiltonS 34, 3 [October 2000]: 84-92), John D. Schaeffer argues that Milton's concept of reading has distinctly Eucharistie foundations.
28. As my argument suggests, this requirement applies, in different degrees, both before and after the Fall. Strier provocatively argues that Milton steadfastly maintains the value of a classically appropriate pride (or the Aristotelian magnanimitas, though the two are not identical); this seems a natural corollary of Milton's Arminian tendencies (though it is worth noting that even the hard-line Reformed position requires a sort of interpretive confidence alongside a fundamental sense of depravity). Nevertheless, the Fall essentially redraws the boundary between proper and improper pride-a boundary that, interpretively speaking, has been there from the beginning (cf. Haskin, chap. 7, pp. 183-238). Strier is especially illuminating in his treatment of Milton's paradoxical association of false humility with the lay/ clerical divisions of ceremonial Christianity (pp. 262-8), but his account generally risks minimizing the essential role of humility (or modestia, though again they are not exactly congruent) in defining and limiting the nature and capacity of the self.
29. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies and Stephen Holmes (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 112; hereafter Behemoth; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.
30. In the dedication to Leviathan, Hobbes calls nonconsensual readings of Scripture "the outworks of the enemy, from whence they impugn the civil power" (Leviathan with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley [Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1994], p. 2); hereafter Leviathan; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.
31. "Children obey your parents in all things: Servants obey your masters: Let all men be subject to the higher powers, whether it be the King or those that are sent by him: Love God with all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself" (Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 54).