Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and editions
- 1 Introduction: Scriptural reasoning
- PART I SCRIPTURAL REASONING IN MILTON'S PROSE
- PART II BIBLICIST RHETORIC AND ONTOLOGY IN PARADISE LOST
- PART III BIBLICIST POETICS AND HERMENEUTIC ETHICS
- Part III introduction
- 8 Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith
- 9 Paradise Regained as rule of charity
- 10 Samson Agonistes as personal drama
- Notes
- Subject index
- Index of Scripture references
Part III introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and editions
- 1 Introduction: Scriptural reasoning
- PART I SCRIPTURAL REASONING IN MILTON'S PROSE
- PART II BIBLICIST RHETORIC AND ONTOLOGY IN PARADISE LOST
- PART III BIBLICIST POETICS AND HERMENEUTIC ETHICS
- Part III introduction
- 8 Biblical metanarrative as rule of faith
- 9 Paradise Regained as rule of charity
- 10 Samson Agonistes as personal drama
- Notes
- Subject index
- Index of Scripture references
Summary
These three culminating chapters remain focused on what I have called Milton's “Christo-poetic” biblical reasoning: that is, the biblical intertextuality by which his major poems imply that Divine Reason is the poetic gift of peaceful difference who enables human reason to participate (ethical charity) in a reality that is freely given for the good of others (ontic charity). As a result, the network of claims regarding ontology, anthropology, ethics, and politics that we traced in Milton's prose in Part I, which I refer to as Milton's “discursive” reasoning, shall also continue to inform these remaining chapters. In contrast to the emphasis of Part II on the competing accounts of reason and ontology, however, Chapters 8 to 10 emphasize the ethical and hermeneutic implications that arise from belief that reason is peaceful difference and that the origin of reality is divine gift. In this respect, the shift in analytic focus here is indeed only a shift in emphasis and not a complete departure; we shall continue to notice where the poems intimate peaceful Divine Reason and ontic charity, but our emphasis will be upon what that Christology and ontology imply regarding the action of human “right reason” (or “ethico-cognitive” reason) in the fallen world. In focusing, respectively, upon the final two books of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, each of these chapters considers a central interpretive question.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Milton's Scriptural ReasoningNarrative and Protestant Toleration, pp. 169 - 171Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009