Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Feisal G. Mohamed is Associate Professor in the Department of English and in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. He is the author of In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (2008).

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MILTON AND THE POST-SECULAR PRESENT

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................xiA Note on Texts...........................................................................................xiiiIntroduction..............................................................................................11 'Not but by the Spirit understood': Milton's Plain Style and Present-Day Messianism.....................192 Areopagitica and the Ethics of Reading..................................................................433 Liberty before and after Liberalism: Milton's Politics and the Post-secular State.......................664 Samson, the Peacemaker: Enlightened Slaughter in Samson Agonistes.......................................875 Can the Suicide Bomber Speak?...........................................................................107Epilogue..................................................................................................127Notes.....................................................................................................133Index.....................................................................................................163

Chapter One

Arguments for Milton's ability to speak to our moment seem increasingly to refer to the rationalist thrust and parry of contending ideas in his work. In a 2008 article in the New Yorker, Jonathan Rosen avers that '[in] America, where God and the Devil live alongside Western rationalism, Milton seems right at home.' Milton scholars draw similar conclusions. Nigel smith's fine introduction, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?, objects to a reading of the poet that places God too firmly in the center of his vision, arguing especially against the views of Stanley Fish and claiming that Milton is 'both theistic and post-theistic, mono-theistic and polyglot.' 'Milton matters,' Joseph Wittreich claims in more sanguine terms, because 'he forces us to reach beyond an axis of good and evil in the world ... To a more ambiguous reality.'

I am not persuaded by this view, but it does alert us to aspects of Milton that might be overlooked by too narrow an emphasis on his theism. Perhaps a term that might productively describe Milton is 'pre-secular.' We hear everywhere in his writings the footfalls of those modes of thought predominant in secularism, but these are contained within and measured by a fundamentally non-secular system of belief. Implicitly at issue is the value of reason as a category significant to discussion of secularization. Turning away from the dubiously productive distinction between faith and reason, current studies point to secularism's dissociation of belief and imagination. When natural order is secured by myth rather than knowledge we are in a frame of mind at odds with secularism. Biblical narrative governs Milton's view of the world's creation, progress, and ultimate end, though he gives space to the language of geographical exploration and scientific discovery. We shall see how Alain Badiou finds in saint Paul a similar faith in the 'pure fable' of the resurrection that is the standard by which law and language are measured.

If Milton is 'pre-secular,' he might be brought into productive dialogue with our post-secular moment, the most obvious symptom of which is the revanche de Dieu that seems to be awakening zeal in all religions across the globe and producing increasingly un-liberal theologies claiming, like the Reformation sects before them, repristination of religious ideals: whether the rise of Wahhabism; or the Catholic Church's appointment of a pope decidedly of the global North and West; or the June 2008 assembly in Jerusalem of conservative Anglican divines threatening to split from the communion in their ire over the openly gay American bishop Gene Robinson. Among these conservatives the archbishop of Uganda, Henry Orombi, has articulated aims that will sound familiar to any student of the Reformation: 'I want that we go back to the first love that the early Church had in Jerusalem ... That we go back to believing the word of God to be the word of God, as it is in the Bible.' (these splitters, however, themselves are split over whether to adopt saint Paul's anti-feminism with his anti-gay sentiments: the purest purists among them object to the ordination of women as bishops.)

It is easy to object to a brand of religion that, like Spenser's Ignaro, is ever looking backward in its progress. But the post-secular turn equally pervades current philosophy. This is not a moral equivalence—the authors in which I am interested claim no victims and repair to no ancient bigotries—but a discursive equivalence. This chapter will explore Milton's primacy of belief alongside post-secular formulations, paying particular attention to the way in which the adoption of plain expression affirms that primacy—the dissociation of belief and imagination brings to mind Eliot's 'dissociation of sensibility' with its attack on poetry residing in the realm of thought more than feeling. That attack is mistaken in taking aim at Milton. The privilege accorded to the plain style in Paradise Lost is an immediate expression of a felt truth received by divine illumination, and seems in Milton's terms to represent poetry's highest strain. Milton himself critiques a poetry that dissociates thought and feeling, the kind of poetry where emotional and intellectual richness are only literary. A similar relationship between style and truth can be found in current models of immanence. We will explore especially Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as Alain Badiou, with respect to the nature of truth and especially the democratic and anti-democratic dynamics of truth-claims. Particularly relevant is the model of democratic universality in which Badiou enlists saint Paul's fidelity to the 'event' of the Resurrection.

I. Plain style as epistemic ground in 'Paradise Lost'

With Donne, style is faith: a measure of delivery that confesses his own inordinacy while remaining in all things ordinate. To state this is to affirm one's recognition of his particular authority in having achieved the equation; one recognizes also such authority in Milton and Herbert. They are not, generally, otherwise to be equated. —Geoffrey Hill, Style and Faith (2003)

There is a great deal to unpack in Geoffrey Hill's characteristically rich comment on Donne, Milton, and Herbert: it encapsulates each poet's relationship to language, which is also a relationship to faith ('style is faith'), and how poetic authority resides in having achieved this 'equation.' We must also see immediately the good sense of not otherwise equating the three poets. Donne shows us time and again that ordinacy in language is only ordinacy in language, mastery over a limited and limiting human system ever falling short in its attempts to incorporate divine Truth. This style corresponds to a faith where soteriological self-assurance is a temptation to be resisted—the lesson of the third satire is that our eternal fate depends upon a necessary doctrinal commitment of which we cannot be certain and for which no worldly authority...