Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-01(E), Section: A.

Advisers: John Rogers; Paul Fry.

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This project's aim is to demonstrate the centrality of the question of knowledge -- what it is and how it is attained -- to Milton's epic poetry. Drawing on religious, scientific, and philosophical history, it reveals significant blind-spots in recent Milton criticism, specifically in regard to such criticism's accounts of the poet's engagement with emerging philosophies at work behind the Scientific Revolution. In Paradise Lost, the archangel Raphael famously espouses a world system where "one Almighty is, from whom all things proceed, and up to him return." In the last thirty years, critics have pointed to that dictum as the foundation for Milton's wholly materialist relationship to the new sciences. According to this now orthodox interpretive paradigm, Milton shares with the proponents of early modern science an earnest interest in the nature of substance; consequently, the work of understanding his poetry involves a more or less scientific method of discovering the substance (material, theological, philosophical) underlying the verse.

This interpretive paradigm has since become one of the few (because strongest) critical orthodoxies of Milton scholarship and pedagogy. From William Kerrigan's initial formulation of Paradise Lost as a "Lucretian epic" to John Rumrich's evaluation of Chaos in the poem as "the realm that substantiates God's sovereignty," the ontological question of substance has functioned as the supposedly firm ground of Milton's ethical system. My dissertation challenges this easily systematic formulation of Miltonic ethics on the grounds that not only does it prevent a fuller understanding of what Milton means by "freedom," it gravely and unrigorously misreads the poetry. The famously maddening uncertainties of Milton's poetry, I argue, entail significant epistemological and theological consequences, and an adequate understanding of their cultural function is central to a greater appreciation of Milton's work.

In my first chapter, "Fitliest Called Chaos: The Questionable Metaphysics of Paradise Lost," I explore Milton's treatment of Chaos as a poetic phenomenon in contradistinction to the various contemporary materialist philosophies that have been used misleadingly to interpret it. I argue that the modern interpretation of Chaos (which seeks to provide a rock-solid foundation for the poem's metaphysics) extinguishes the vitality of Milton's theodicy precisely by rendering Satan's rebellion philosophically unthinkable. By ultimately abandoning its metaphysical aspirations, the poem suggests that true knowledge, far from being an accurate map of the universe charted by a Renaissance explorer or natural philosopher, is a mode of engagement with the world that is playful, whimsical, and ever open to radical revision when the situation calls for it. In the second chapter, "What Proof Could They Have Givn Sincere: The End of Knowledge in Paradise Lost," I examine how the poem, in pursuit of its theodical aim to "justify the ways of God to men," compromises its own theological framework at critical moments. I argue that these compromises demonstrate the poet's abiding and productive identification of knowledge and freedom. I examine God's defense of freedom in book 3 and conversation with Adam in book 8 as moments that limit the scope of divine omniscience in favor of creaturely freedom. In the final chapter, "The First and Wisest of Them All: Paradise Regained and the Beginning of Thinking," I analyze the poem's presentation of the extra-biblical temptation for classical learning that is signified by Satan's offer of classical Athens. The Athens temptation has long been understood to be Milton's unequivocal and insistently pious repudiation of modes of philosophical reasoning associated with Socrates and the myriad philosophical systems he can be seen to have spawned. Challenging this almost universal understanding of this key moment in Milton's brief epic, I argue that Milton's Son of God (and Milton himself) are pressing, however counterintuitively, for a mode of reasoning that aligns him with the very figure he ostensibly rejects.

That Milton values the concept of freedom is of course a critical axiom, but how he grounds that concept is far more important. To establish freedom as the consequence of substance leaves no room for creative interpretation, but rather reduces thought to the identification and calculation of certain fundamental principles, the acts of a computer. Milton's God does not want machine creatures that are incapable of transcending their programming. These creatures would be mere tools that are wielded by personal whim, reducing Milton's God to the Aristotelian definition of a tyrant. Even at the beginning of the mechanist revolution in science, Milton was trying to break free of all forms of totalitarianism, religious or scientific.