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 II introduction
- 4 Divine justice and divine filiation
- 5 Divine kingship
- 6 Rational battle
- 7 Rational allegory and gender
- PART III BIBLICIST POETICS AND HERMENEUTIC ETHICS
- Notes
- Subject index
- Index of Scripture references
6 - Rational battle
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 II introduction
- 4 Divine justice and divine filiation
- 5 Divine kingship
- 6 Rational battle
- 7 Rational allegory and gender
- PART III BIBLICIST POETICS AND HERMENEUTIC ETHICS
- Notes
- Subject index
- Index of Scripture references
Summary
If Paradise Lost deploys the image of divine kingship for the purposes that I argue in the previous chapter, to show the ontic priority of divine gift rather than compulsion, why does Milton devote Book 6 to an account of epic battle? Such an emphasis upon coercive conflict might seem to emphasize not charity but violence. Milton does not, of course, deny that coercion or corruption happens. To argue, as I have, that Milton views “reason” as the poetic gift of peaceful difference and views “reality” as rooted in the further gift of goodness (charity) across that peaceful difference does not imply that he naïvely imagined violence to be impossible or even always avoidable in a fallen world. Rather, Milton recognized that any attempt to let divine justice become apparent must take full measure of what violence can do. This chapter begins by establishing the significance of Milton's decision to engage Revelation 12 so directly in his own account of heavenly war. The central portion of the argument focuses on the ways in which the angelic debates that dilate this adaptation of Revelation 12 engage the polysemic sense of “reason” described in previous chapters. The final stage of the argument considers the same heavenly battle episodes but with a view to some other key biblical intertexts engaged by the account of the three-day war.
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- Milton's Scriptural ReasoningNarrative and Protestant Toleration, pp. 124 - 141Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009