Fleshly Tabernacles

Bryan Adams Hampton

Description

In Fleshly Tabernacles, Bryan Hampton examines John Milton’s imaginative engagement with, and theological passion for, the Incarnation. As aesthetic symbol, theological event, and narrative picture of humanity’s potential, the Incarnation profoundly governs the way Milton structures his 1645 Poems, ponders the holy office of the pulpit, reflects on the ends of speech and language, interprets sacred scripture or secular texts, and engages in the radical politics of the Civil War and Interregnum. Richly drawing upon the disciplines of historical and postmodern theology, philosophical hermeneutics, theological aesthetics, and literary theory, Fleshly Tabernacles pursues the wide-ranging implications of the heterodox, perfectionist strain in Milton’s Christology. Hampton illustrates how vibrant Christologies generated and shaped particular brands of anticlericalism, theories of reading and language, and political commitments of English nonconformist sects during the turbulent decades of the seventeenth century. Ranters and Seekers, Diggers and Quakers, Fifth monarchists and some Anabaptists—many of those identified with these radical groups proclaim that the Incarnation is primarily understood, not as a singular event of antiquity, but as a present eruption and charged manifestation within the life of the individual believer, such that faithful believers become “fleshly tabernacles” housing the Divine.

The perfectionist strain in Milton’s theology resonated in the works of the Independent preacher John Everard, the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, and the Quaker James Nayler. Fleshly Tabernacles intriguingly demonstrates how ideas of the incarnated Christ flourished in the world of revolutionary England, expressed in the notion that the regenerated human self could repair the ruins of church and state.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• the Arts
• Philosophie et théologie
• Idioma inglés
• Interregno
• Idioma galés
• Literature
• Milton's 1645 Poems
• Interregnum
• Incarnation
• Irish
• English Civil War
• English
• Christology
• Christianity
• Poetry
• European
• Interroi
• Welsh
• Scottish
• John Milton
• Incarnation (christianisme)
• Musique irlandaise
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268081744
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Fleshly Tabernacles
Milton and the Incarnational Poetics of Revolutionary England
Bryan Adams Hampton
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2012 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-268-08174-4
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
For Ceri, and for our children,
Isabel, Elijah, and Nate:
“Beatitude past utterance”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Repairing the Ruins: Milton, the Poetry of Proclamation, and the Incarnation of the w/Word
Part I. Proclaiming the Word
Chapter 1. “Such harmony alone”: The Incarnational Aesthetics of the 1645 Poems and the Proclamation of the Word
Chapter 2. Infernal Prophesying: Unsaying God’s Name in the Demonic Council Scene of Paradise Lost
Part II. Milton’s Incarnate Reader
Chapter 3. The Greatest Metaphor of Our Religion: The Radical Hermeneutics of Incarnation in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana
Chapter 4. Milton’s Parable of Misreading: Discernment, Self-Government, and the Hermeneutics of the “night-founder’d Skiff” in Paradise Lost, 1.192–209
Chapter 5. Fashioning the True Pilot: Temperance and Political Transcendence in Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained
Part III. Revolutionary Incarnations and the Metaphysics of Abundance
Chapter 6. The Perfect Seed of Christ: Allegory and Incarnation in the Works of John Everard and Gerrard Winstanley
Chapter 7. Pageant and Anti-Pageant: James Nayler and the Divine Economy of Incarnation in the Quaker Theodrama
Epilogue. Milton and the Limits of Incarnation in the Seventeenth Century
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
“a grateful mind / By owing owes not … , at once / Indebted and discharg’d.” This work has been encouraged and sustained by many, and it is my hope that I have met their considerable generosity with a mind and heart brimming with gratitude. I know that none of them consider their involvement in the book as having incurred any debt, yet I am compelled all the same to celebrate their contributions.
Regina Schwartz and Michael Lieb initiated me into the mysteries of Milton studies with watchfulness and affection, permitting me to “imp my wing” on theirs. Ethan Shagan and Steve Long each challenged me, respectively, to think more historically and more theologically, and I find the project is much the richer for it, even though juggling so many balls proved to be a challenge. John Shawcross took an interest in my graduate work from the fortuitous moment I met him at the Milton Seminar at Chicago’s Newberry Library; in his passing, many will affirm that his hospitality toward young scholars will remain unmatched. I have appreciated the literary conversations with and friendships of Glenn Sucich and Scott Huelin, whose steadfast presences during the trials of graduate school and a new academic career have sharpened my humanity and my intellect. The late Richard DuRocher crucially revived my fortitude after many months of despair. At the University of Notre Dame Press, Stephen Little ably guided my “skiff” through the perils of the publication process. My colleague Aaron Shaheen hospitably offered his experience and encouragement, and I owe a note of thanks to Maria denBoer for her “culling and sorting” while copyediting the manuscript.
Along the way, the following have offered their careful direction, much-needed annotation, or trenchant criticism of individual chapters or sections: David Ainsworth, Michael Bryson, Phillip Donnelly, Charles Durham, Richard DuRocher, Scott Huelin, the late Albert Labriola, Jeff Masten, John Morrill, Kristin Pruitt, Glenn Sucich, and Michelle White. Anonymous readers for the University of Notre Dame Press and elsewhere have challenged my conceptions of Milton, his milieu, and his work; their gracious bruising has shaped me into a more careful reader and a writer more skeptical of his own ideas. I extend my thanks also to fellow interlocutors and colleagues who have participated in the Early Modern Colloquium at Northwestern University, the Works-in-Progress program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), and the Conference on John Milton at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I also appreciate the fruitful conversations with my students (to whom I occasionally feel as if I should be paying tuition). Moreover, a UTC Faculty Summer Research Fellowship enabled the time to revise some of the manuscript.
The lion’s share of gratitude and devotion belongs to my family, “my dearest and best possession,” who offered encouragement and blessing by their mere presence even as they endured my absences.
Some of the material has been published in other venues. Chapter 4 appeared as “Milton’s Parable of Misreading: Navigating the Contextual Waters of the ‘night-founder’d Skiff’ in Paradise Lost, 1.192–209,” in Milton Studies 43 (2004). A shorter version of chapter 2 appeared as “Infernal Preaching: Participation, God’s Name, and the Great Prophesying Movement in the Demonic Council Scene of Paradise Lost, ” in The Uncircumscribed Mind: Reading Milton Deeply, ed. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2008).
Introduction
Repairing the Ruins
Milton, the Poetry of Proclamation, and the Incarnation of the w/Word

Since the Incarnation, God has been externalized. He was seen at a certain moment and in a certain place, and He left behind Him words and memories which were then passed on.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
—T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
Revolutionary England was populated by immortals. Most dwelled in the banality of their own day-to-day affairs without interruption, without incident, and within the sometimes-overlapping spheres of public and private devotion. Prompted by mysterious, inner motions, a few of these men and women defiantly struck their spades into the soured ideological soil of the commons and wastes, thereby striking also into the hearts of their oppressors; others paraded naked through the cramped market streets of London, preaching the immediacy of the parousia; one scandalously entered Bristol in imitation of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. More simply, but no less dramatically, a significant number refused to take public oaths or doff their hats in the presence of earthly authorities. These gave testimony to the ascendancy and delicious unpredictability of the Spirit in a world magistrated and measured by the flesh, and heralded the coming of the kingdom of heaven. Still others took up arms in order to usher in and to secure their place within that chiliastic, revolutionary kingdom. All had a particular view of what that revolutionary kingdom might consist of: saints ruling as vice-gerents with King Jesus during the millennial reign; or an Eden raised in the wilderness of the now, where the poor have a share in the abundance of the treasury of the earth, or where the disenfranchised demolish the interpretive monopolies on the Law and the scriptures. None were surprised by sin, and a few even denied its pervasive or rapacious reality, proclaiming instead a narrative whose central chord reverberated, “to the pure all things are pure” (Titus 1:15), whether one is speaking about drunkenness or blasphemy, fornication or banned books. Revolutionary England was populated by men and women who saw themselves as earthen vessels housing a precious treasure, as fleshly tabernacles iridescent with the divine.
John Milton considered himself to be among these. During the turbulent years that saw the arrest, trial, and execution of Archbishop William Laud, the introduction of the Root and Branch petition, the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant between Scotland and Parliament, and the victory over the royalists, appeared Milton’s small treatise Of Education (1644). In the role of schoolmaster, Milton boldly proclaims that “the end … of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright and out of knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our soules of true vertue” ( CPW 2:366–67). 1 The trajectory of Milton’s pedagogy may not seem very revolutionary; in fact, it may appear quite pedestrian. Consider this statement by the Moravian Jan Amos Comenius, a millenarian and elder contemporary of Milton’s, who devoted himself to the task of Protestant educational reform:

all things are nothing without God. Yea, all our Pansophie [system of universal education] must be so husbanded, that it may perpetually spurre us forward to the seeking after God in every thing, and point us out the way where to find him, and also prepare our minds for the due embracing and acknowledgement of him; That by this meanes it may be as a sacred ladder for our mindes to clime up by all visible things, unto the invisible top of things, the Majesty of the Highest God … there at last to repose our selves in that center of rest, and end of all our desires. 2
Milton’s program of education is certainly not the same as Comenius’s, but their telos of education is. 3 For Comenius, education is shaped by the realization that God is the Alpha and Omega—the beginning and the end of all things—and all knowledge must compel the human being toward a greater understanding of God’s mystery and majesty. No doubt, Milton would agree with Comenius’s conclusions, but the schoolmaster’s added emphasis on the relation between gnosis (“regaining to know God aright”) and mimesis (“out of knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him”) is compelling. What if we take Milton, alre