No description available.

No description available.

In Book IV of Paradise Regained, Satan tempts Christ by offering him the learning of the Greek philosophers, poets, and orators. Christ's response is a vehement denigration of Greek literature, which seems to contradict the praise of the classics found in Milton's prose works of the 1640s. Interpreting the condemnation of Greek learning in Paradise Regained as a modification of the poet's early attitudes, the present study examines the biographical, political, theological, and scientific factors which influenced Milton's thought and altered his opinions on the value of classical literature.

The poetic effectiveness of Milton's God is a fundamental critical issue in Paradise Lost, and the thesis addresses this concern by first surveying the various representations of God contained in the Hebrew scriptures. To speak of the biblical God, one must first understand the tremendous diversity o f his portrayals: he meets with some people in human form, and with others as a voice, a light, or an awesome presence. Milton's God shares less with the God o f Genesis than he does with the God of the prophets; yet Milton's representation demonstrates that though Eden will be lost, God will continue to manifest himself to those who seek his face. The cosmology of the epic reveals both the immensity o f creation and the intimacy o f its Creator, since the entire world is filled with the glory o f God, and yet the garden where Adam and Eve live is an archetypal sanctuary and their bower a type of Inner Temple. Milton's justification o f God's ways rests upon the timelessness of God; events that appear anachronistic at first are used to establish a context that looks beyond the strict limits of human time. On the one hand, the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Apocalypse are separate events that have not yet come to pass; but on the other hand, Milton shows how these events are simultaneously present and completed in God's presence. From God's throne, we participate in a cosmic perspective where the categories of past, present, and future are compressed into one time: we are before and beyond time. Such a transcendent perspective engenders a powerful truth: before Adam and Eve have been tempted, God's grace and mercy have found them out and they have been restored. Though Eden must be lost, the paradise of God's presence will remain. Adam and Eve will fall and the legacy of their rash act will be paradoxically for all time, but not forever. God will restore his people and wipe away their tears, and, in the context of Milton's depiction of God, that time of redemption is now. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation considers the development of an ethics stemming from the Augustinian revival of early modern England, and the subsequent effect of this ethics on the literary culture of the period. The Preface claims that religious and textual communities operate according to a “cultural mobility” that eludes conventional neo-historicist approaches to literary culture, and Paul Ricoeur’s aphorism, “the symbol gives rise to thought,” serves as a model for thinking through this mobility. Augustinian ethics is a cultural phenomenon in the period, because people are thinking about Augustine, giving new life to his works through their own expressions of thought. After exploring the ways in which the Augustinian revival was brought about during the early modern period in the Introduction, one such expression of thought, John Donne’s relationship with early modern print culture, is examined in Chapter One. Following the theoretical outline of Augustine’s Christianization of Ciceronian rhetoric in his De Doctrina Christiana, it is suggested that though Donne’s aversion to the print publication of his poetry may have begun as a result of his “gentlemanly disdain” of the press, it ultimately found its sustenance in the form of an Augustinian ethic. Chapter Two examines the possibility of a metaphorical acquisition of Augustinian hermeneutics in the metadrama of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This hermeneutics ultimately calls into question the epistemological framework of Theseus’s skeptical aesthetics, suggesting that a more inclusive aesthetics based on charity can elevate the stage to its proper dignity. The last chapter turns from the communal implications of Augustinian ethics to its subjective implications by examining Augustine’s inner light theology and the role it plays in John Milton’s late poetry. Instead of falling in line with criticism that sees the simultaneous publication of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes as a dialectical meditation on the virtues of pacifism and the evils of religious violence, this reading suggests that the late poetry asserts the ethical rights of those who attend to the inner light, whether they be peaceful or violent. / text