Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I HAVING PLACE
- PART II THE UNDERLYING IMPORTANCE OF PLACE
- 5 The New Testament's call to place: Paul's and Luther's deconstructions
- 6 Rejecting the placeless ancient doctrines: confusing Paradise Regained
- 7 The Old Testament's call to place: Job's wisdom in Milton's poetry
- 8 The influence of time on place: forbidding unripe fruit
- 9 Place, body, and spirit joined: the Earth–Human wound in Paradise Lost
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
8 - The influence of time on place: forbidding unripe fruit
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I HAVING PLACE
- PART II THE UNDERLYING IMPORTANCE OF PLACE
- 5 The New Testament's call to place: Paul's and Luther's deconstructions
- 6 Rejecting the placeless ancient doctrines: confusing Paradise Regained
- 7 The Old Testament's call to place: Job's wisdom in Milton's poetry
- 8 The influence of time on place: forbidding unripe fruit
- 9 Place, body, and spirit joined: the Earth–Human wound in Paradise Lost
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
To every thing there is an appointed season.
Ecclesiastes (3:1)In Paradise Regained. Paradise Lost, and the Ludlow Mask, Satan and Comus tempt with fruit merely unripe, not forever forbidden. In Greek there is a word which conceptually deals with this idea of a not quite ripe fruit: kairos, the fullness or ripeness of time. While Leonard Mustazza noticed that in Paradise Regained “the concept of kairos, in God's time, is constantly operative,” we could equally say (as have other critics) that kairos is constantly operative throughout many of Milton's works. But more than just operative in the works, it is only through kairos that the works I have been citing operate at all. As I shall argue, without taking into account the ripeness of time the central temptations in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and the Ludlow Mask cease to be temptations at all. Indeed, the temptations are also the prescribed courses of action championed by the Bible (in Paradise Regained, the prophecy the Son reads), an angel (Raphael's words to Adam), and proper thinking (by the Mask's Lady). Whether forbidden fruit is forbidden or to be enjoyed – whether Eve, the Son, and the Lady act to realize fully their destiny or to squander it – is entirely a question of kairos.
In the New Testament, kairos is a sort of timetable, known only to God, by way of which his plan is unfolding: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons [kairoi] which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7).
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- Milton and Ecology , pp. 113 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003