Body Politics in Paradise Lost - MLA Journals

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Body Politics in Paradise Lost rachel j. trubowitz

Man is a living being, intrinsically and properly one and individual. He is not double or separable: not, as is commonly thought, produced from and composed of two distinct and different elements, soul and body. On the con- trary, the whole man is soul, and the soul man: a body, in other words, or individual substance: animated, sensitive, and rational. —Milton (Complete Prose Works 6: 318)

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Rachel J. Trubowitz is associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. Her most recent publication is an essay on nurture and the Hebraic in Samson Agonistes, in Milton and Gender, edited by Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge UP, 2005). She has completed a book manuscript, “Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century Texts.” Her work in progress is on death rituals and cultural memory in Civil War England.

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his passage from Of Christian Doctrine (c. 1656–60) is often cited as proof of Milton’s materialist monism.1 Whether or not readers of Milton’s late poetry and prose see the poet as for or against empire, republicanism, natural rights, toleration, and women’s worth, they generally agree that his monism deeply informs his subversive politics, especially his notion of free will.2 Stephen Fallon offers one of the most powerful formulations of this influen tial argument. He claims that, while early poems such as Comus are clearly grounded in Platonic dualism, “by the end of the 1650s, Mil ton had worked his way to the unequivocal materialist monism of the Christian Doctrine and Paradise Lost” (3–4). For Fallon, Milton’s monism is forged against Hobbes’s mechanistic natural philosophy as a safeguard for free will—the core principle of the poet’s ethics and politics: “the philosophical foundations of freedom of the will in particular were threatened by the growing authority of mechanistic explanations of phenomena. If, as Hobbes argues, all is matter in mo tion—even thought—then our choices are determined by antecedent physical motions, and freedom of the will is an illusion” (81). This essay posits that the monism of Milton’s late verse and prose is more equivocal than Fallon and others allow: that the poet’s an tipathy to dynastic kingship and its organic measures of personal en

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titlement and social belonging require him to repudiate the body and traditional body politic and to revalue personal and collective identity in disembodied rather than embodied terms. This is not to say that Milton is not a monist but to argue, against the grain of the prevail ing consensus, that he is a dualist as well. For a variety of surprisingly underanalyzed reasons, Milton wants and needs to integrate spirit and body but also to separate them. This paradox is intrinsically related to his opposition to dy nastic kingship and to his protomodern vision of the reformed nation—a vision mediated by the commonplace Protestant conception of En gland as the new Israel and by the poet’s am biguous vantage point on the Hebrew Bible.3 In hitherto unrecognized ways, Milton’s shift ing perspectives on mind-body, spirit-flesh re lations shape his formulation of the emergent nation as liminal: corporeal and incorporeal, real and imagined, Hebraic and Christian, ex clusive and inclusive.4 Innovative theories of nationalism from the last ten years or more emphasize the modern nation’s contradictory aspects. In Tom Nairn’s well-known formulation, what distinguishes the old nation from the new is the new one’s Janus face: the modern nation is bellicose and humanitarian, expansionist and bounded, grounded in law and reason but ca pable of arousing intensely passionate patri otic feelings, all at the same time (348–49). Robert J. C. Young observes that the modern nation is an “impossible hybrid”: it “exhibits the characteristics of modern culture, namely, that it is conflictual and divided against it self.” The nation and nationalism are difficult to define because their meanings “are gener ated by the dialectic that Adorno has called the ‘torn halves’ of a culture that does not add up” (1–3). Slavoj Žižek emphasizes the modern nation’s “ambiguous and contradic tory nature.” On the one hand, the modern nation breaks down the traditional bonds of kinship, blood, and soil linking the indi vidual to a particular family, estate, or king

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dom; on the other, the modern nation also “can never be reduced to a network of purely symbolic ties” (20). (Žižek qualifies Benedict Anderson’s influential notion of the modern nation as a wholly “imagined community.”) For Homi K. Bhabha, liminality is “a partic ular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation” (“Narrating” 1). Paul Stevens argues that the liminality of the modern nation is its most important quality (“Nationalism” 253). As we shall see, the conflictual, liminal qualities of the new nation find vivid subjec tive expression in Adam’s soliloquy on death in book 10 of Paradise Lost. The soliloquy points in two directions at once. Adam la ments the curse on his offspring: his “race unblest” (10.989 [Complete Poems]). But the lament also implicitly impugns dynastic kingship by demonstrating through Adam’s example that bloodline, birthright, and other organic measures of patriarchal entitlement suppress free will and enslave the spirit. Mil ton makes a similar claim in The Readie and Easie Way (1660), where he links hereditary right to servitude and vassalage. The old so cial hierarchy can have no place in “any na tion styling themselves free”: “It may be well wonderd that any nation styling themselves free, can suffer any man to pretend [heredi tary] right over them as thir lord; whenas by acknowledging that right, they conclude themselves his servants and his vassals, and so renounce thir own freedom” (Complete Prose Works 7: 363). The antidynastic implications of Adam’s lament seem calculated to appeal to Milton’s party of regicides and republicans, driven underground by the Restoration. Ad am’s soliloquy simultaneously expresses and redresses the “experience of defeat,” which, as Christopher Hill argues, both radicalizes and demobilizes dissent in the 1660s and 1670s. But, as we shall see, the soliloquy makes an other, equally important if less overtly topi cal, rhetorical intervention. Situated in the liminal space dividing and connecting the old dispensation and the new, Adam articulates

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through his in-betweenness the foundational paradoxes of the modern nation. The soliloquy also highlights the crucial role that religion plays in forging the mod ern nation’s enabling contradictions. While sometimes overlooked in arguments that focus exclusively on Milton’s materialist mo nism, Reformation Christianity nevertheless forms a fundamental component of the “con ceptual paradox” that is the modern nation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. As Linda Gregerson observes, “In Reforma tion England we may behold the modern nation in the full force of its conceptual para dox, a politically and ideologically bounded bastion for an inherently universalist and transnational religion” (169). That early mod ern English culture is both “theologically se cessionist and secularly imperialist” (Rajan and Sauer, Introduction 15) further compli cates the enabling contradictions between the reformed nation’s transnational religion and its political emphasis on intact bound aries. England’s secessionist theology goes hand in hand with its national ideology of self-containment, while its secular imperial ism overlaps with its theological emphasis on Christian universalism. On the one hand, by appealing to the gospel message of inclusive ness, England can represent its stepped-up mercantilism and early acts of colonization as governed by a higher missionary mandate: to export reformed Christianity to all four cor ners of the globe, as in the Indian “praying towns” established by John Eliot in New En gland (Holstun 142–45). On the other hand, Reformation England reinforces its national ideology of self-containment by identifying itself as the new Israel—as an elect nation whose exclusiveness and difference from all other nations are divinely mandated. (This identification also reduces the biblical Is rael to a “shadowy Typ[e]” [Paradise Lost 12.303].) Anderson argues that nation and empire are opposing concepts (93); in early modern England, however, they are mutu

[ P M L A ally constitutive ideas (Gregerson 169). This close affiliation between nation and empire is strengthened by the odd contiguities between inclusion and exclusion that are built into Christian universalism. As Stevens argues in a brilliant essay, Christianity’s “exclusive universalism” is one of “the distinguishing marks of Western colonialism, certainly in its formative early modern phase” (“Leviticus Thinking” 441–42). Exclusive and inclusive, bounded and expansionist, Reformation En gland embodies the modern nation’s enabling conceptual contradictions. The same “exclusive universalism” informs the specific brand of evangelical-millenarian Puritanism that structures Milton’s national vision in Of Reformation (1641). In this early tract, Milton describes the new England as the new Israel and as a nation both in the van guard of Reformation and at center of “Chris tendome.” This postapocalyptic, spiritual empire comprehends regenerate nations the world over; it also excludes those peoples (such as the Jews) who resist inclusion in this global Anglo-Christian community. Although Mil ton’s later writings are marked by a profound contempt for the English people, which is (not altogether) missing from his early prose, his concept of the reformed nation as both exclu sive and inclusive, particular and universal, Judaic and Christian, remains the same. In his account of Judeo-Christian history from its or igins in book 12 of Paradise Lost, for example, he maps out what Bruce McLeod argues is “a recognizable colonial world with England and the heroic, rational individual at its center” (58). The conflicts and continuities between the Judaic and the Christian significantly shape Milton’s double vision of the modern nation in Paradise Lost. Judeo-Christian tensions can be felt in different but equally powerful ways in his early and late prose as well as in his mature poetry (Rosenblatt; Guibbory; Shoulson). Mil ton’s shifting views of the mind-body question, his opposition to dynastic kingship, and his vi sion of the emerging nation as liminal are thus

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closely related to his ambivalence about the concreteness of the biblical Israel, about the Hebraic/Judaic past,5 and, more broadly, about the very matter of historical memory itself. Another significant consequence of the modern nation’s liminality is the uprooted ness and unsettledness that its never-resolved ambiguities generate. For better and worse, these qualities permeate Milton’s political pamphlets and his late verse. They cohere closely with the deracination, or, for Milton, spiritualization, that the old socially static and politically abject monarchical subject must undergo in order to become an ethically self-directed, upwardly and—increasingly— globally mobile modern citizen. Time and again, Milton attempts to pry the new na tion and national subject loose from the tra ditional kingdom, hierarchically organized from head to foot into a social organism. But even when most triumphant, following the defeat of the royalist forces and the execution of the king in 1649, the opposition never fully succeeded in releasing the new national spirit from the old monarchical body politic. As the outpouring of popular sentiment for the executed Charles I demonstrates, cutting the head from the body of the kingdom did not break but instead strengthened the English people’s visceral attachment to the king and the traditional, dynastic body politic. Thus, at the precise moment that kingship is decapi tated and the promise of a free nation seems at hand, the old natural ties between the head and body of the dynastic organism reassert themselves with renewed vigor. England is caught in an anxious embrace between old and new, body and spirit, nature and God, dynastic and antidynastic government—the same unresolved contradictions that shape the Janus face of the modern nation. Thus, although Cromwell’s forces tri umphed on the battlefield and stripped the king of his scepter and crown, Charles I won the war for hearts and minds. Charles’s widely circulated Eikon Basilike did much to reinvig

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orate popular affection for the executed king, who is pictured in the text as a Foxean mar tyr willing to sacrifice himself for a righteous cause: his love for God, England, and the En glish people.6 Attacking Eikon Basilike point by point in Eikonoklastes (1649), Milton repu diates his king-loving compatriots as mired in the body and nature: they are “by nature slaves, and arrant beasts; not fitt for that lib erty, which they cri’d out and bellowed for” (Complete Prose Works 3: 581). His denuncia tion of the “Idol-doting” English people (601) did little to win public support for his party or to suppress the powerful public display of nostalgia and guilt that Eikon Basilike in spired. Nevertheless, the tract unequivocally demonstrates that, for him, opposition to dy nastic kingship requires that nature and the body be repudiated. Nature in Eikonoklastes is reduced to an ensnaring carnality that turns people into slaves and beasts, thus rendering them unfit for liberty. In the divorce tracts and in the Christian Doctrine, Milton’s mo nist sense of the inseparability of nature and God, matter and spirit, body and mind, ad vances free will and the emergence of a free or nonmonarchical nation. But in Eikonoklastes and, as we shall see, A Treatise of Civil Power (1659), written on the eve of the Restoration, Pauline dualism shapes the poet’s repudiation of nature, the body, and the old dynastic body politic. Natural bodies, anatomical and politi cal, corrupt the spirit, debase the mind, and as a result thwart liberty of conscience. This essay investigates the interlock ing ways that Milton’s shifting, positiveand-negative representations of the body and nature, his ambivalence about Hebrew scripture, his critique of dynastic kingship’s blood-and-soil measures of identity, and his unsettled prose and verse reflect his vi sion of the new nation and its foundational paradoxes. I look first at the antiprelatical tracts, the political pamphlets of the 1640s and 1650s, and the Christian Doctrine. Then I focus on Paradise Lost—specifically, Adam’s

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soliloquy in book 10 and his “from my loins” speech in book 12. Even more than his prose, Milton’s epic allows us to witness that imper ceptible moment when the nation emerges as an abstract modern community—but a community that despite its new symbolic or spiritual ties cannot entirely do away with the body, nature, and the concreteness of Hebraic scriptural history (and other histories of oth ers), for which it ostensibly no longer has any use. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s ambivalence about mind-body and spirit-matter relations is inseparable from his opposition to dynas tic kingship, his construction of a serviceable past, and his modern vision of the emerging Janus-faced nation. Milton looks forward to the universal triumph of the spiritually emancipated, postapocalyptic Christian En gland. However, he also never forgets the terrible price that Reformation exacts in thisworld terms: historical amnesia, deracination, exile, the loss of visceral connection among generations and between spouses, and what Gordon Teskey describes as allegory’s “nega tion of the integrity of the other” (18). In the end, the poet is unable to pay this price. The Diseased Body Politic and the Regenerate Spirit of the New Nation In Of Reformation (1641), Milton laments that England has lost “the Precedencie which god gave this Iland, to be the first Restorer of buried Truth” (Complete Prose Works 1: 526). How should it come to pass that “England, having had this grace and honour from god to be the first that should set up a Standard for the recovery of lost Truth, and blow the first Evangelick Trumpet to the Nations, hold ing up, as from a Hill, the new Lampe of saving-light to all Christendome should now be last?” (525). Fault lies with England’s prel ates. Their “grosseness” drags the Doctrine of the Gospel . . . so down wards. . . . That they might bring the inward

[ P M L A acts of the Spirit to the outward, and custom ary ey-Service of the body, as if they could make God earthly and fleshly because they could not make themselves heavenly and Spiritual, they began to draw down the Di vine intercours betwixt God and the Soule, yea, the very shape of God himselfe into an exterior and bodily form. (519–20)

In his first English prose tract, Milton thus clearly distinguishes the body, which is out ward, customary, and earthly, from the spirit, which is inward and heavenly. More impor tant perhaps, given Fallon’s contention that Milton does not become a committed monist until the 1650s, the same mind-body and spirit-matter distinctions that organize Of Reformation resurface with even greater force in late tracts such as A Treatise of Civil Power. Time and again in Treatise, to build his ar gument against the forcing of consciences, he contrasts the “outward rule imposed upon [the individual] by others” and the “spirit itself of God within us”—the “fleshly force” of the magistrate and the “spiritual power by which Christ governs his church” (7: 245, 246). As William Walker observes, by rein forcing the differences between outside and inside, flesh and spirit, Milton suggests that the human is an essentially bipartite entity, consisting of an interior space separating spirit and mind as well as the “inward per suasion,” out of which he claims to write the treatise, and something which, defining the boundaries of that inner space and separating mind, spirit and persuasion from “outward” things such as rules, Scripture, and the mag istrate’s force, is fundamentally different from that inner space and its contents. (207)

Still, if in Treatise Milton differentiates the spirit and inward persuasion from the body and outward coercion, in his chapter on Christian liberty in the Christian Doctrine he clearly emphasizes the inseparability of mind and spirit from the human shape and form. Man resembles God in spirit and body:

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If God is said to have created man in his own image, after his own likeness, Gen. 1.26, and not only his mind but also his external ap pearance . . . and if God attributes to himself again and again a human shape and form, why should we be afraid of assigning to him something he assigns to himself, provided we believe that what is imperfect and weak in us is, when ascribed to God is utterly perfect and utterly beautiful? (Complete Prose Works 6: 135–36)

Milton’s monism shapes his construction of human nature in Of Christian Doctrine, while in the contemporaneously written Treatise his dualism governs his representations of humankind’s elemental character. But even in the Christian Doctrine, mo nism and dualism can be found side by side. While Milton maintains that God and man resemble each other externally and internally, he also contrasts gospel and law, grace and works, spirit and flesh, life to the regener ate and “eternal death to unbelievers” (521). As Jason Rosenblatt notes, Milton’s “chapter on Christian liberty in De Doctrina is founded on Pauline duality,” whereas “Mil ton’s Hebraic monist texts—particularly the prose tracts of 1643–45 and the middle books of Paradise Lost—are entirely incompatible with the Pauline epistles, which are among the most dualistic of Western texts” (73, 72). For Rosenblatt, Milton’s fraught Hebraism in spires the monist-dualist tensions in the poet’s writings. I will consider Rosenblatt’s impor tant observations more fully when I turn to Milton’s politically implicated responses to the mind-body question in Paradise Lost. In the meantime, however, let us keep an eye on how the poet’s Hebrew monism ambivalently shapes his prose. In addition to his conflicting Hebraic and Christian vantage points, Milton’s ambiva lence about the body reflects the new medical vocabulary that distinguishes early modern discourse of the body and the body politic from that of earlier periods. As Jonathan Gil

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Harris observes, “[T]he rich store house of so matic figures for society, its constituent mem bers, and its operation which early modern English writers inherited from medieval and classical literature became throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in creasingly dysfunctional and, in a very literal sense, pathological” (2). In Of Reformation, Milton makes this distinctive discursive con nection between physical and social disease when he writes of the need for the Church of England “to bee purg’d and Physick’t” (Com- plete Prose Works 1: 539), so that England can regain its divinely mandated status as an elect nation in the vanguard of Reformation. Milton deploys similar images of pathology and disease in Paradise Lost, especially in his portrait of Sin’s perverse maternal body and monstrous offspring in book 2 and in the hor rible spectacle of plagues, ulcers, convulsions, and other dreadful illnesses that Adam wit nesses in book 11.7 Milton’s images of the diseased body and body politic can be traced back to such texts as John Banister’s History of Man (1578), the earliest English-language anatomy textbook. However, the pathologizing of the body poli tic loses none of its rhetorical power or cur rency in the 1650s and 1660s, when Milton was composing his epic. For example, the popular republican John Streater uses meta phors of social disease when, in A Shield against the Parthian Dart (1659), he attempts to explain the English people’s enduring at tachment to Charles I after the king’s death. Streater vividly describes the adverse affects of kingship on the health of the nation: “the long Continuation of Kingly Government in this Nation . . . created so many corrupt Props and Pillars to support its Dignity, that were so many Sores and Phistula’s to the Nation: the taking away of which on a suddain, would be something against Nature, though it was a burden to Nature, and a Disease” (17–18). Although responding to historical circum stances very different from those of the Tudor

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and Stuart periods, Milton’s and Streater’s de pictions of the social organism’s vulnerability to disease share important points with com parable descriptions in political tracts, such as Edward Forset’s Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Naturall and Politique (1606), and popular drama, such as Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon (1607 [Harris 14]). The heightened attention to wounds, tumors, and abscesses in the body politic in all these texts derives in good part from the newly enhanced value and significance that national intactness acquires in early mod ern England. As G. R. Elton maintains in his landmark study: [T]he sixteenth century saw the creation of the modern sovereign state: the duality of state and church was destroyed by the victory of the state, the crown triumphed over its ri vals, parliamentary statute triumphed over the abstract law of Christendom, and the selfcontained national unit came to be, not the tacitly accepted necessity it had been for some time, but the consciously desired goal. (3)

But although consciously desired, national self-containment was not easy to achieve, as the many religious and political conflicts de stabilizing the Tudor and Stuart monarchies demonstrate. By describing disease and dys function in the national organism (“so many Sores and Phistula’s to the Nation”), the lan guage of social illness reflects early modern England’s mounting anxieties about the intact ness of the nation as a body politic—anxieties compounded by the heightened importance accorded to Englishness as a source of identity and authority by Reformation culture, a stat ure that it could not consistently sustain.8 In this health crisis of Englishness, it is possible to detect emerging fault lines between the old, organic paradigms of the nation and the new, abstract ones. As Harris observes, early modern preoccupations with state dis ease expose the “limitations of organic politi cal analogy, insofar as the proto-functionalist

[ P M L A models of the pathological body politic ad vanced in Tudor and Stuart literature nota bly failed either to erase contradiction and conflict within the corpus politicum, or to contain the subversions and social illnesses that they sought to expel or co-opt” (13). Yet, while apparently doomed to fail, the search for a natural cure to social conflict and po litical subversion nevertheless proceeded well into the seventeenth century, when it took a new turn. Antimonarchists of the 1640s and 1650s, such as Milton, Streater, and the Level lers Richard Overton and John Lilburne, de ploy the governing discourse of social disease against itself. Political conflict and subversion are defined not as symptoms of social illness but as natural remedies for the state diseases from which England suffered under kingship. Milton maintains, “God shakes a Kingdome with strong and healthfull commotions to a generall reforming” (Complete Prose Works 2: 566). John Wildman draws on a mixture of re publican, legal, and medical discourses in The Lawes Subversion (1648) when he contends that enlightened laws can revive England’s natural vitality, which has been dissipated by kingship: “Lawes are the vis plastica or for matix that formes the principall vitals, the heart, the braine, the liver of the Common wealth” (2; see Smith, “Popular Republican ism” 148). In A Glympse of That Jewel, Judicial, Just Preserving Libertie (1653), Streater main tains that by overthrowing the Stuarts, En gland has achieved “a perfect equalitie, in respect of thy Rights and Privileges” (A2v). Galenism’s humoral science serves as a legiti mating framework for the subversive theory of natural rights that Streater proposes as a popular republican antidote to the distempers of the traditional, dynastic nation. Elsewhere, Streater offers a eugenic so lution to the national social health crisis: selective breeding would remedy the abjec tion suffered by the people under kingship by producing a new, strong, and heroic English race (Observations 3; see Smith, “Popular Re

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publicanism” 142–43). Milton never mentions eugenics as a way to redress weaknesses in the national body, even though in his Observa- tions he denigrates the Irish in ethnic terms as a naturally backward people. Indeed, as we saw in Eikonoklastes, he considers nature to be injurious rather than advantageous to the health of the national community. Neverthe less, like Streater, Milton at times subversively evokes nature as a radical cure for the social illnesses from which England suffered under the Stuarts. Against the hereditary right of monarchy, he appears to espouse an equalitar ian theory of natural rights in Tetrachordon: “Nature made all equall coheirs by common right and domain over all creatures” (Com- plete Prose Works 2: 661). Nature restores stature, power, and social health to all people, especially those like the English, who have been politically disenfranchised and mor ally corrupted by kingship. Richard Overton makes an almost identical statement: “By naturall birth, all men are equally and alike borne to like propriety, liberty, and freedome, and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature in this word, every one with a naturall, innate freedome and propriety” (3–4). Not unlike Nigel Smith, Rosenblatt argues that in the divorce tracts and Areopagitica, Milton represents nature and law as remedies for England’s social maladies. But for Rosen blatt Milton’s view of the law as essential to the nation’s well-being primarily reflects the poet’s Hebraic monism rather than the cultural influ ences of seventeenth-century republicanism. “Against the Pauline inference that the Mosaic law . . . is a law unto death,” Rosenblatt writes, Milton in the prose tracts of 1643–45 and mid dle books of his epic “agrees with the talmudic insistence that, to the one who performs it, the Torah is sam hayyim, a medicine of life” (26). Like Smith, Rosenblatt finds affinities between the Milton of the divorce tracts and Leveller and republican thought on law and nature, but he notes a crucial difference: “there is no place at all for nature in the Pauline chapters of De

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Doctrina, which are driven entirely by dual istic and hierarchical oppositions of Old and New Testaments. Basic inequality is built into the chapter on Christian liberty” (74). Like nature, law (“a law unto death”) thwarts the emancipation of the spirit and the conversion of old England, a carnal Israel, into the new England or spiritual Israel. We might add that, while, for Rosenblatt, Milton’s Pauline views mostly inform his later writings and his epic’s last two books, the poet’s Pauline dualism also organizes his earlier prose and the paradisal books of Paradise Lost. Achsah Guibbory ob serves that Milton’s dualist, “anti-Judaic stance is already present in the anti-prelatical tracts”; she also finds that “the tension between mo nist and dualist attitudes is even at work in the middle, Edenic books” (184, 212).9 A shift ing, incoherent mixture of monist, dualist, Pauline, Hebraic, sectarian, republican, and antidynastic concerns thus shapes the poet’s conceptions of liberty, equality, nature, and the nation. In his early and late prose and in his mature poetry, Milton categorically differ entiates liberty and equality from nature, the body, and the old body politic—unlike Over ton, who expresses his opposition to the Stuart regime by proclaiming freedom as a natural birthright for all people. In these instances, Milton defines liberty as a wholly spiritual entity: the free or socially healthy nation is a denaturalized and disembodied or sublime polity (Norbrook 136–37). This emphasis on the spirit of freedom and of the free nation unites republicans, Cromwellians, and Independents, despite their conspicuous disagreements. Cromwell appeals to this shared sense of spiritual purpose in his public speeches; he also tries to cultivate po litical union in spirit terms. Time and again, he evokes an abstract “all,” as when he urges the Barebones Parliament in 1653 to “love all, tender all” (62). Milton’s emphasis on the spirit of liberty and of a righteous common cause, or “the good old cause,” allows John Lilburne to honor the poet as a great patriot despite the

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Leveller leader’s many political differences with Milton, as Smith observes (“Popular Re publicanism” 148). In Henry Vane’s A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government (1659), the discourse of spiritual rebirth merges with a “vocabulary of freeborn English men and militant republicanism” (Smith, Lit- erature 124). Vane asserts that none be admitted to the exercise of the right and privilege of a free Citizen, for a Season, but either such as are free born, in respect of their holy and righteous principles, flowing from the birth of the spirit of God in them (restoring man in measure and degree, as at the first by Creation) unto the right of Rule and Division. . . . (7–8)

A Needful Corrective exemplifies how pub lic and private, literal and allegorical, social action and prophecy converge in the vision of the spiritually emancipated England that unites sectarians, republicans, and regicides in the 1640s and 1650s. Not unlike Vane, to whom Milton dedi cated a sonnet in 1652, the poet shows that “neighboring differences . . . need not inter rupt the unity of Spirit” (Complete Prose Works 2: 565), given the power of spirit to transcend even the most polarized oppositions. Smith argues that the new nation’s anticustomary, spiritual power to reconcile opposites finds aesthetic expression in Milton’s prose as the “grand Puritan sublime” (Literature 125). Like Smith, David Norbrook teases out the na tional implications of Milton’s sublime flights of prose-poetry, especially in Areopagitica. But, whereas Smith associates the categorybreaking political energies of the Miltonic sublime with the poet’s monism, Norbrook demonstrates that Milton’s use of the sublime reflects his desire to release the spirit of the free nation from the diseased body politic of Stuart monarchy. In the tract’s most resonant image of the newly arisen nation, England is compared first to a female strongman, then to a molting eagle that stares with undazzled

[ P M L A eyes directly into the sun, the traditional symbol of monarchy. Like Streater and Wild man, Milton in Areopagitica wrests control of conservative metaphors of social illness and converts them into reformist metaphors of social cure. As Norbrook observes, the pub lic debates, pamphlet wars, political dissent, and religious sectarianism of the 1640s cre ated for conservatives “a feverish, unhealthy overheating of the body politic”; in contrast, Milton “points out that the healthy body is always in a process of change, casting off the wrinkled skin, and then proceeds to push the analogy [of the body politic] to breakingpoint” (137). Norbrook, however, does not re late Milton’s vocabulary of social illness and his sublime rendering of the new nation to the monist-dualist tensions in Areopagitica and elsewhere in the poet’s writings; indeed, he praises “Milton’s monism, his rejection of a sharp split between spirit and matter” (4). But, if elsewhere Milton integrates spirit with matter, in Areopagitica he separates the two. By bringing the analogy of the body politic to the breaking point, he splits the spirit of the new nation from the old dynastic social organism and, through the sublime flight of his prose, sets that spirit aloft. As Norbrook documents, Longinus’s de piction of the sublime as the nurse of liberty is an important source for Milton’s sublime vision of the new nation as delivered in spirit from the diseased body politic of kingship (137–38). We can gain even deeper insight into the poet’s dualist, body-bursting images of the regenerate England in Areopagitica if we read his Longinian views of the sublime and of the spirit of the free nation in conjunc tion with his Pauline perceptions of Christian liberty.10 Vane’s connection between the free born Englishman and the resurrected soul that is reborn in the spirit of Christ in the aforementioned passage from A Needful Cor- rective can help us here. Like Vane, Milton sees the political emancipation of England as inseparable from the nation’s rebirth as a

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reformed Christian polity—with all that this rebirth and reformation imply. Just as he brings the body politic to the breaking point in his prophetic vision of the sublime nation in Areopagitica, so in the Christian Doctrine Milton underscores in Pauline terms the need to resist the external constraints of Mosaic law so that the spirit of Christian liberty can be released: “So long as the law exists, it constrains, because it is a law of slavery. Constraint and slavery are as inseparable from the law as liberty is from the gospel” (Complete Prose Works 6: 535). In other writings, his Hebrew monism al lows him to celebrate the fusion of body and spirit and to define law as indispensable to the social health of the national organism. But in this instance, as earlier in Tetrachor- don, his Pauline dualism separates law from love, the “dead letter” from the “living Spirit”: “Christ having cancell’d the hand writing or ordinances which was against us, Coloss. 2.14, and interpreted the fulfilling of all through charity, hath in that respect set us over law, in the free custody of his love, and left us victo rious under the guidance of his living Spirit, not under the dead letter” (2: 587–88). Instead of curing the diseased body politic, law ex acerbates the nation’s ailments. The remedy lies in supersession: the freeborn nation and national subject are “set . . . over the law.” The Christian doctrine of supersession resembles the classical sublime in its overturning and transcendence of traditional limits: both kinds of limit breaking are at work in Mil ton’s vision of the reformed nation.11 But this thrilling promise of freedom exacts a terrible price. Like the classical sublime, Christian liberty releases the spirit of the nation from all external constraints, but it also threatens through allegory to sublimate Mosaic law and “carnal Israel” out of material existence. Both are reduced to dead-letter status at the advent of the new era or the precise moment when the Hebrew Bible becomes an outmoded tes tament or the Old Testament.

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As the recurrent monist-dualist tension in his writing suggests, Milton is unable fully to pay this terrible price: he equally needs and does not need the body. His vision of the reformed nation simultaneously depends on and represses the body, law, and Hebrew scripture, especially the sacredness that the Old Testament confers on genealogy, the pro ducing of biological offspring, and the natu ral bonds that powerfully join generations and spouses together as one flesh and blood. To recall Žižek’s observation, the modern na tion “can never be reduced to a network of purely symbolic ties.” On the one hand, Mil ton’s opposition to dynastic kingship and to all external forms of power requires that the poet invalidate nature, genealogy, blood, soil, and other organic measures of social entitle ment—hence his division of outer from inner, body from spirit in Treatise. As we have seen, the same antipathy to kings, magistrates, and prelates inspires his sublime-Pauline vision of the new nation in Areopagitica as a wholly spiritual or abstract entity. On the other hand, his focus in Areopagitica on creating an engaged, activist citizenry12 and his empha sis in this tract—and, more conservatively, in The Readie and Easie Way—on elective and representative over hereditary and dynastic forms of government and power are rooted in his monism. Yet, at the same time, as just noted, the poet in Areopagitica envisions the reformed England in dualist terms: breaking free from the old dynastic body politic and achieving national integrity through new symbolic and spiritual ties rather than the old natural bonds. Milton’s national vision is thus divided against itself and is intrinsically con tradictory and Janus-faced. This doubleness is obscured if we see the poet only as monist. “To Double Business Bound”: Adam’s Lament and the Reformed Nation I turn now from Milton’s prose to his epic, to see how his double vision of the nation finds

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subjective expression in Adam’s postlapsarian soliloquy. In an excellent recent essay on Mil ton’s nationalism, Stevens links the soliloquiz ing in his prose to the “self-revelation” that “is so positively identified with and inspired by the [modern] nation.” For Stevens, Milton’s prose soliloquies, like those of Charles I in Eikon Basi- like, “offe[r] a kind of transparent authenticity that is difficult to resist or question”; “the sense of self-realization in Milton’s soliloquies” offers the same promise of individual agency that in spires men and women to invest in the modern nation, even though the nation limits the au tonomy of its citizens or, worse, robs them of it (“Nationalism” 253, 267). Like Milton’s solilo quizing prose, Adam’s verse soliloquy tells us much about the modern nation, but the story it tells is quite different. This difference clearly reflects the rapid transitions that England un derwent between 1649 and 1660, from Stuart monarchy to Cromwell’s Commonwealth and Protectorate governments and finally to the restoration of Stuart kingship. But, in addition to these ideological and institutional shifts, the new turn that Milton takes in his narration of the nation reflects the change in genre he makes from prose to verse. His epic is attuned to the enabling contradictions of the modern nation in ways that his prose sometimes is not. In the heated political arguments of the 1640s and 1650s, the push was on to gain represen tational control over the unprecedented events of these decades, especially Charles I’s trial and execution, and then to spin them to favor one partisan vantage point or another. Under pres sure to score rhetorical points for his party, Milton in his political tracts sometimes stills the doubleness of the new nation. Ironically, Charles II’s suppression of public debate and dissent enables the Janus face of the modern, postdynastic nation to emerge with greater clarity in Milton’s slyly antidynastic epic than in his explicitly partisan prose, even with the breathtaking sublimity of Areopagitica. Reflecting the heady and then cautious optimism of the 1640s and early 1650s, the

[ P M L A authoritative, self-realized “I” in Milton’s prose soliloquies captures the promise of self-actualization and self-government to be fulfilled by the new England and new na tional subject after the abolition of kingship. In contrast to the arisen self of the prose so liloquies, the fallen Adam ponders death and seems to go nowhere at all. Our first father ceaselessly shuttles back and forth between the various mind-body polarities he amasses in this speech. Neither willing nor able to re solve these contradictions, he renounces his freedom. We are reminded of the self-willed slavishness that Milton attributes to his kingloving compatriots in Eikonoklastes. Adam’s failure to mourn in his soliloquy (i.e., to come to terms with the catastrophe that is the Fall) traps him in his impossible, melancholic in-betweenness: he can neither go back to the ruined past nor go forward to a future that seems to promise only unmitigated suffering. He both is and is not—“But shall I die a living Death?” (10.788). His once intact body and spirit are irrevocably fissured. As the echo of Hamlet suggests, Adam emerges in his soliloquy as the split subject of the tragedy embedded in books 9 and 10 of Milton’s epic. Franco Moretti’s observations concern ing the Shakespearean tragic hero help il luminate the contradictions that constitute Milton’s tragic Adam. For Moretti, the tragic hero in Shakespeare’s drama “represents the point at which . . . two hypotheses meet: not that he manages to unite them, so much as they succeed in dividing him. Opposed and irreconcilable forces, they make of him an irreparably split character, like Claudius ‘to double business bound,’ or Hamlet in his ‘distraction’; or Antony wandering between Rome and Egypt” (62). Adam, like Claudius and Hamlet, is “to double business bound,” and not unlike Antony, he wanders aimlessly in his soliloquy between the natural plenitude of the lost Paradise and the material void into which he has now fallen. Through his post lapsarian errancy, we also witness, from the

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inside out, the permanent instability that the modern nation’s never-resolved contradictions inherently generate. Adam’s “irreparably split character” perpetually hovers between the abstract and the substantial, or the symbolic and the real: the split halves of the modern nation, which never becomes whole. Whereas the self-actualized “I” of the prose soliloquies fulfills the modern nation’s seductive prom ise of personal agency and autonomy, Adam’s subjective in-betweenness painfully exhibits the modern nation’s foundational paradoxes. Recognition that Milton simultaneously forgets and remembers (and re-members) the body is the key to seeing the connection between the conflicted Adam and the mod ern nation’s enabling contradictions. Adam bitterly resents losing his preeminence as humankind’s progenitor. After the Fall, his genealogical line is cursed: “O voice once heard / Delightfully, Increase and multiply, / Now death to hear! For what can I increase / Or multiply, but curses on my head?” (10.729– 32). Adam must painfully confront his loss of increase: no longer can he look forward with delight to proliferating natural progeny. By the end of the epic, however, he will learn how to convert this loss into gain: by losing his he reditary right, he and his offspring ultimately will regain in spirit the natural sovereignty accorded to humankind at the Creation. In his soliloquy, though, Adam does not yet know that the death sentence he now hears in God’s once life-affirming command will be reversed when he gains what Edward W. Tayler describes as “the awareness of double duration.” This split temporal consciousness surfaces in Milton’s epic through the proleptic formal pattern of tragic “anticipation and ful fillment,” achieved through ironic reversal. The “awareness of double duration” supplies new meaning and value to fallen human events by revaluing these temporal (and temporary) fail ures in relation to Christian history’s salvific end point, to be ushered in by the Apocalypse (133). Through Michael’s lessons on typological

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allegory, Adam learns that this proleptic tragic pattern is played out in human history, culmi nating in a happy end.13 By understanding that time unfolds in two opposing modalities at once—old and new, historical and eternal—he will discover that his cursed biological legacy and ruined prospect of happily increasing and multiplying contain a fruitful future promise of spiritual rebirth, which is “happier far” than biological reproduction (12.587), as the epic’s last books make clear. The same double time and “temporal s elf-division” to which Adam is subjected also are constitutive of the modern nation (Bhabha, “Dissemination” 294; Young 7). The nation’s enabling contradictions are repeated through a double act of remembering and for getting—or forgetting to remember—the past intended to provide narrative control over the national future (Bhabha, “Dissemination” 311). Adam poignantly laments the passing of the past—specifically, the lost Edenic promise of a godly universal nation united by natural bonds of blood and soil. But his lapsed natu ral patriarchy also reveals that, after the Fall, birthright and bloodline no longer guarantee the dynastic nation’s corporate perpetuity, as royalist rhetoric of the king’s two bodies proclaimed they did. Rather than sustain the life of the monarchical body politic, dy nasty’s natural measures of social belonging and entitlement create fatal flaws in the social organism of kingship. Again, Adam’s solilo quy points in two directions at once. It looks back to the old dynastic nation and imagines its death, despite the restoration of kingship’s social health in the actual present. At the same time, the soliloquy looks forward to the advent of the spiritual, postdynastic English nation, even though England, like the poet, has now “fall’n on evil days” (7.25). Poised between the old and new dispensations and obliged to forget the embodied past in order to foresee the spiritual future, Adam, in his liminality, rehearses the double time scheme in which modern nationhood unfolds.

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Milton’s opposition to dynastic king ship and his ultimately transcendent vision of national renewal thus require that we, like Adam, give up on the body and body politic. This necessary act of renunciation is com plicated by the fact that Milton does not al low Adam (and us) to perform it. “Against his better knowledge, not deceiv’d” (9.999), Adam refuses to sacrifice his erotic love for and embodied connection to Eve: he and Eve are “One Flesh” (959). The same double bind—between the pressing need to break the “Bond of Nature” (956) and the equally powerful desire to preserve it—immobilizes Adam in his soliloquy, suspending him in the double time-space between the old and new dispensations, body and spirit. In books 11 and 12, he faces this double bind again, when in Pauline terms Michael informs his recalcitrant student that Adam must give up his “loins” and embrace the “promise” (Holy Bible, Rom. 9). Once more we find that the tension between Milton’s simultaneous need for and repudiation of the body form the de centered core of his national vision. Michael’s task is to teach Adam how to gain personal agency and moral purpose in the ever-shifting and relativist postlapsarian world. The archangel does so by showing his student how to negotiate the mind-body split ushered in by the Fall. Michael does not pro pose a return to paradisal monism. Rather, he demonstrates how Pauline dualism, which allegorizes and thus dematerializes the fallen body and embodied past, can repair Adam’s “irreparably split” psyche.14 The unregener ate split subject (i.e., Adam in his soliloquy) replicates the terrifying inner hell that is Sa tan (“myself am Hell” [4.75]). In contrast, the split subject, when redeemed by Christian dualism, sets the spirit free from the body. No longer tainted by contact with the carnal and fleshly, the newly emancipated, purified spirit becomes the reformed site of Paradise: “the paradise within thee happier far” (12.587). By absorbing Michael’s teachings on allegory and

[ P M L A disdain for literal, carnal, and mass forms of interpretation, Adam learns to convert the fallen body, natural decay, and the ruined matter of historical memory into “shadowy Types” of the spiritually redemptive future (12.303). In true reformist spirit, he foresees that the new life and joy to be ushered in at the Apocalypse will be “more wonderful / Than that which by creation first brought forth / Light out of darkness!” (12.471–73). But, despite this righteous, life-affirming turn from dark matter to the illuminated spirit, Adam clings to the body throughout the epic’s conversionary last two books, He refuses to accept that the Son’s identity is transmitted exclusively through the spiritual mother: Jesus is “son of Mary second Eve” (10.183). In this postdynastic genealogy, the biological father plays no seminal role: “A Virgin is his Mother but his Sire / The Power of the most High” (12.368–69). Adam never theless insists that not only “from thy Womb” but also “from my Loins / . . . shalt proceed . . . the Son / Of God most High” (381–83). Adam’s emphasis on his “Loins” points to the Pauline distinction between “loins” and “faith” (Rom. 9), which Michael invokes in book 12 when he contrasts “the Sons of Abra- hams Loins” with “the Sons of Abrahams Faith” (449–51). Adam’s and Michael’s refer ences to loins also echo the sinister compari son in book 1 between the multitude of fallen angels and the “Deluge” of “barbarous Sons,” who pour forth profusely from the “frozen loins” of “the populous North” (1.351–54), the traditional geographic site of evil. Despite the dubious status of his loins and biological offspring in the new era, sexu ality, the body, and natural progeny remain preeminent issues for Adam, and it is no ac cident that Milton should highlight them. Resistance to dualism, such as that which Adam displays in his soliloquy and in books 11 and 12, marks the defining point of con tention and difference between rabbinic Ju daism and post-Pauline Christianity in late

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antiquity. As Daniel Boyarin observes, this resistance was “at least partially owing to cultural politics,” since “one consequence of at least the post-Pauline adoption of dualist notions was to allegorize the reality of Israel quite out of corporeal existence” (6). Even Philo, who adopted an allegorical practice of reading scripture, strongly argues the need for preserving Hebrew rituals, especially cir cumcision, to mark Judaic difference on the body and to sanctify the material reality of the Israel of Hebrew scripture: “We should be ignoring the sanctity of the Temple and a thousand other things, if we are going to pay heed to nothing except what is shewn to us by the inner meaning of things” (185). Paradise Lost can be fruitfully read through the lens of Boyarin’s analysis of the politically implicated differences between the dualism of Hellenic Christianity and the monism of Hellenic Judaism (i.e., post-Philo Judaism) and rabbinic Judaism in late antiq uity (Shoulson). Through his shifting posi tions on the mind-body question, Milton not only restages the hermeneutical contest be tween the Judaic and the Christian but also conflates this contest with the shift from the old body politic to the new abstract nation. In the last two books of his epic, he identifies the triumph of the new abstract nation over the dynastic body politic with the triumph of Christian allegory over literalism and the “carnal Israel” that Augustine, following Paul, finds in Hebrew scripture (402). Yet while the spirit and allegory win and so bring down monarchy and its organic mea sures of social belonging and entitlement, Milton, like Adam, cannot give up the body and Hebraic monism, even though his radical Paulinism and opposition to dynastic king ship require him to do so. Because his vision of the new nation’s liminality is in “double business bound” to both the immaterial and the material, he must in books 11 and 12 keep the Hebraic-Judaic celebratory emphasis on the body and particularity in play along

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side Christian allegory and Pauline dualism, which degrade and repress the body. Further complicating this anxious rapprochement be tween the Judaic and the Christian is that the Pauline hermeneutic associates both Hebraic particularity (sanctified by the rite of circum cision) and Judaic in-the-flesh thinking with death: “For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions, stirred up by law, were at work on our members to bear fruit for death” (Rom. 7.5–6). Impossibly, then, Milton both eradicates and revives not only the body but also the body of, and in, history—as well as the corporeal existence of the Israel of Hebrew scripture. On the one hand, he reduces the Hebrew Bible to a shadow text. On the other, he partially restores the presence and prestige of the body in Hebrew scripture by placing Ju daic particularity in service to his exclusiveuniversal Protestant vision of the elect nation. His simultaneous suppression of and de pendence on the Hebraic prevent Milton from paying the deadly price that his Pauline dual ism demands for spiritual rebirth and national renewal: allegorizing the body and Hebrew scripture out of concrete existence. Although he celebrates the progress from “shadowy Types to Truth” (12.303), Milton remains conf licted about unleashing what Gordon Teskey terms allegory’s “prevenient violence.” As Teskey observes, “It is necessary . . . that allegory capture the substantiality of being and raise it to a conceptual plane. But for this to occur any integrity those beings may have must be negated. The negation of the integrity of the other, of the living, is the first moment of allegory’s exertion of its power to seize and to tear” (18). Although Milton recognizes and endorses the ways in which allegory rav ishes and represses the body, his vision of the modern nation’s liminality necessitates that he partially restrain the power of allegory to negate “the integrity of the other” and “the substantiality of being.” In political terms, such restraint finds vivid expression in Milton’s critique of worldly

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empire. As Jesus states in Paradise Regained, “They err who count it glorious to subdue / By Conquest far and wide” (3.71–72 [Complete Po- ems]). Instead of yielding to the false glories of empire, the Son steadfastly dedicates himself to the truly noble ideal enshrined by the di vine imperium. But, as we have seen, the same Pauline dualism that inspires this inclusive vi sion of spiritual empire also legitimates Chris tian separateness and exclusion. By dividing the nonelect (the embodied others) from the elect (those who possess a Christian spirit) and by either negating the former (through impe rial conquest or the “prevenient violence” of allegory) or converting them into (or includ ing them as) the latter, Christian dualism in colonial situations becomes an instrument of imperial aggression. Thus, although meant to rid the world of imperial violence, Jesus’s em phasis on divine imperium in fact enhances the force of worldly empire by granting those who “subdue / By Conquest” a sacred banner under which to negate or forcibly assimilate the colonized other. As Balachandra Rajan observes, the “transcendentalizing move” from secular to sacred empire in Paradise Re- gained makes “a poet who is fundamentally a nti-imperial sadly vulnerable to appropria tion by imperial thought” (305). The impossible complexities of Milton’s national vision—its odd contiguities between imperialism and anti-imperialism, allegory and literalism, faith and loins, Christian pres ence and Judaic absence—are obscured if we read his anticustomary poetics, politics, and theology as exclusively linked to his monism. That Milton never resolves the mind-body question owes much to his modern national vision. For him, the reformed nation exists in, and as, a state of liminality: it perpetually hov ers between the embodied and disembodied, particular and universal, Judaic and Christian, all at the same time. His contradictory perspec tives on the mind and body, spirit and matter, in Paradise Lost thoroughly mesh with his sense of the new nation’s doubleness: its foun

dational paradoxes. In the unstable monism and dualism of Milton’s epic, we can glimpse the Janus face of the emerging modern nation.

Notes 1. Kerrigan defines monism as “the inseparability of matter and spirit, body and soul” (220). 2. Important studies addressing Milton’s monism are Fallon; Rogers; Kendrick; and Martin, Ruins and “En closed Garden.” 3. On Reformation England as the new Israel, see Katz; Haller. 4. The status of the nation and nationalism in Milton’s writings and in English culture at large during the Civil War has recently become something of a scholarly crux. Stevens (“Nationalism”), McEachern, Gregerson, Helger son, and Elton, among others, variously locate the rise of the modern nation in the Tudor, Stuart, and Civil War periods. Exponents of “the new British history” have chal lenged this formulation. The deconstructive analysis of early modern Britain initiated by Pocock and brought to fruition by Colley has been extended back to England by Kidd, Raymond, and others. For Raymond, the English nation and nationalism are constructions of the eigh teenth century and as such not relevant to early modern England’s perceptions of itself. Rather than an elect nation, which defined its cultural and ethnic superiority in oppo sition to the barbarity it imputed to Ireland and intermit tently to Scotland and Wales, England saw itself as part of the larger British archipelago: as one island nation among others. Raymond has argued recently that this archipelago model of English identity finds clear representation in Mil ton’s Observations: instead of advancing a theory of elect national identity as exclusively English, the poet pragmati cally focuses on the political and ethnic relations among England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales (332–33). Although innovative, the new British historians’ exciting perspective on seventeenth-century England also reflects the enduring tradition of antinationalism associated with the European and American left. As Young observes, “Historically, of course, those on the left have tended to be suspicious of nationalism as the long, tangled and often hostile attitude taken by Marxism toward nationalism demonstrates.” But many examples, among them the African National Con gress in South Africa, should remind us that “with anticolonialism, nationalism itself became allied to Marxism” (4). Nationalism’s double context can be obscured in the new British history, which focuses on local, material con ditions. While acknowledging the important interventions made by Raymond and others, my essay nevertheless seeks to keep the nation’s crucial double aspects in play.

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5. Hebraic is usually considered the more general term and Judaic the more specific, but these designations are not tightly fixed (Shoulson 129). 6. Loewenstein (52–62); Skerpan-Wheeler; and Knop pers (Historicizing, ch. 1) provide excellent commentary on Eikon Basilike. 7. With its many profane gaps and openings, Sin’s body is grotesque—in contrast to the classical perfection of Adam’s and Eve’s naked prelapsarian bodies. The dif ferences between the grotesque and classical body inform Knoppers’s insightful discussion of Restoration body politics. She notes that the much-discussed elegies that depict Charles I in ideal terms as a royal martyr find a powerful complement in little-known royalist satires that employ the grotesque to mock Oliver Cromwell’s body, especially his large red nose (“Noll’s Nose” 21). 8. Helgerson notes that “things English came to mat ter with a special intensity” to Tudor-Stuart poets (3). 9. Luxon offers an important corrective to the gov erning critical focus on Milton’s sensuousness. He dem onstrates that the poet’s representations of paradisal sexuality dualistically emphasize spiritual transcendence over erotic pleasure. 10. For a discussion of the interlocking ways that Pau line hermeneutics and the classical sublime shape Mil ton’s representations and nonrepresentations of death in his epic, see Trubowitz. 11. On the sublime in Hobbes, Milton, and republican rhetoric of the 1640s, see Norbrook 137; Smith, “Areopagi tica” 109 and Literature 123–27. 12. For an elegant account of Milton’s attempts to cre ate an engaged readership in Areopagitica, see Achinstein. 13. Loewenstein (ch. 5) analyzes “the drama of his tory” in books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost. 14. Martin observes that, unlike traditional alle gory, which operates in a coherent and closed system of value and signification, Miltonic allegory is an attempt to initiate the baroque subject into the open-ended, post scientific, post-Reformation universe, in which the static measures and customary forms of meaning and worth are no longer viable (Ruins).

Works Cited Achinstein, Sharon. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Augustine. Tractatus adversus Judaeos. Trans. M. Li gouri. Fathers of the Church. Vol. 27. Washington: Catholic U of Amer. P, 1955. 387–414. Bhabha, Homi K. “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Bhabha, Nation 291–322.

Rachel J. Trubowitz ———. “Narrating the Nation.” Introduction. Bhabha, Nation 1–7. ———, ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990. Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Cromwell, Oliver. The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Ed. Wilbur Cortez Abbott. Vol. 3. Cam bridge: Harvard UP, 1945. 4 vols. 1937–47. Dekker, Thomas. The Whore of Babylon. London, 1607. Elton, G. R. The Tudor Revolution in Government: Ad- ministrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII. Cam bridge: Cambridge UP, 1953. Fallon, Stephen M. Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Forset, Edward. Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Naturall and Politique. London, 1606. Gregerson, Linda. “Colonials Write the Nation: Spenser, Milton, and England on the Margins.” Rajan and Sauer, Milton 169–90. Guibbory, Achsah. Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Context in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Haller, William. The Rise of Puritanism; or, The Way to the New Jerusalem As Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643. New York: Columbia UP, 1938. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern En gland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Hill, Christopher. The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. New York: Viking, 1984. Holstun, James. A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. The Holy Bible. London, 1611. Katz, David S. Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655. London: Clarendon, 1982. Kendrick, Christopher. Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form. New York: Methuen, 1986. Kerrigan, William. The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogen- esis of Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Kidd, Colin. British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnici- ties and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994.

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