Milton's Scriptural Reasoning

by Donnelly, Phillip J.

• ISBN13: 9781107404519
• ISBN10: 1107404517
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-10
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

John Milton's major poems have long provoked wide-ranging judgments about the purposes of his biblical engagement. In this elegant and insightful study, Phillip J. Donnelly transforms our common perceptions about Milton's writing. He challenges the traditional assumption that the poet shared our modern view that reason is a capacity whose purpose is to control nature. Instead, Milton's conception of reason - both human and divine - is bound up with a poetic sense of difference, a capacity for being faithful to a goodness and beauty that survives the effects of human frailty in the fall. Providing fresh new readings of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Donnelly gives us important new perspectives on Milton's aesthetics, theology and politics.

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgments

Abbreviations and editions

Introduction: scriptural reasoning

Scriptural Reasoning in Milton's Prose

Reason, rhetoric, and educational reading

Monism and Protestant toleration

Biblicist Rhetoric and Ontology in Paradise Lost

Introduction

Divine justice and divine filiation

Divine kingship

Rational battle

Rational allegory and gender

Biblicist Poetics and Hermeneutic Ethics

Introduction

Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith

Paradise Regained as rule of charity

Samson Agonistes as personal drama

Notes

Subject index

Index of scripture references

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