The Heavenly War and Its Reflection on Earth: Paradise Lost and 17 th Century England
Author: Sy-Shyan Chen
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
John Milton has been a puzzle for many students of the 17th century English politics or political thought: was he a radical like the Levellers, as Christopher Hill has indicated? or was he a republican like Algernon Sydney, Andrew Marvell and James Harrington? Or maybe he was in fact a proponent of monarchy as long as it’s not a tyranny? Most conducive to this perplexities has been the controversial epic poem Paradise Lost—written during the last years of Milton’s life—in which the poet embraces the universal monarchy of God while berating those selfish revolutionaries who corrupted the republican enterprise and therefore brought about the Stuart restoration in 1660. This passage intends to investigate into the moral, theological and political languages embedded in the poetics of Paradise Lost, in the hope that a penetrating clue can be revealed as to how the concept of Christian liberty can be linked to secular politics and, also, used as a criterion to assess the achievements of public life. One of the tantalizing results from the political reading of the epic poem is that it helps to reveal, among other things, the ingenuity of Milton in fusing the pagan political tradition of republicanism with Christianity under the English millenarianism. Moreover, by so doing, the poet is in fact redefining the political through his edifying lyrics dedicated to the Christian theme of redemption which—not to anyone’s surprise—can properly be coterminous with the secular phenomenon of the restoration of the political order.