From a contemporary perspective, the glaring irony of
Milton’s “tolerationist” pamphlet is impossible to ignore. The 1673 tract’s
title page is dominated by one word, which for Milton marks the limit of
Protestant reading: “POPERY.” Of True Religion stakes its claims on
Protestantism’s absolute opposition to the “Romish Church” and a distillation
of the “main Principles of the true Religion: that the Rule of true Religion is
the Word of God only: and that their Faith ought not to be an implicit faith,
that is, to believe, though as the Church believes, against or without express
authority of Scripture.” If Protestants were to adhere to these two
principles, Milton continues, not only would they avoid the various “Debates
and Contentions, Schisms and Persecutions, which too oft have been among them”;
they would also “more firmly unite against the common adversary.” True
heresy, we discover, lies not in differences of worship or in errors of
doctrine, but is in the “Will and choice profestly against Scripture.”
Reading scripture is a way of resisting spiritual idleness—that is, untested or
“implicit faith”—which is as much an obstacle to salvation as it is a gateway
for “popish” superstition.
But so long as all these profess to set the Word of God only before them as the Rule of faith and obedience; and use all diligence and sincerity of heart, by reading, by learning, by study, by prayer for Illumination of the holy Spirit, to understand the Rule and obey it, they have done what man can do.
Based on these qualifications such men, “the Authors or
late Revivers of all these Sects and Opinions,” are not God’s enemies but should
instead be considered “painful and zealous laborers in his Church.”
Conscience appears throughout Milton’s writing as a space of negotiation and
liberty, but in Of True Religion, we confront its limits, for “we have no
warrant to regard Conscience which is not grounded on Scripture.” Thus
Protestant opposition to Popery can dispense with notions of privacy and the
supposed rights of the individual. The fundamental problem with Catholicism,
explains Milton, is it always decides in advance of the individual; and thus,
by its very nature, the institution cannot begin to understand or appreciate
the realm of the conscience as a textual, interpretive space.
While Milton’s politics of reading turned from construction
to destruction, following end of the England’s Commonwealth and Charles II’s
Restoration, his preoccupation with textual interpretation remained consistent
throughout his career. My first chapter explored how Milton’s early writing
fashions reading as a form of labor that is necessarily unproductive. Not only
does reading replace “work” as a means of attaining the free gift of salvation,
it also has the potential to unite England in the collective labor of
Reformation, a political project whose value exceeds any kind of mercenary
exchange. Along with its vision of a unified nation of readers, Areopagitica
clearly spells out why this labor of interpretation is an ethical imperative:
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.
By disrupting this process, the licensing of books would
remove this “working out” of salvation from the purview of believers. It thus
constitutes “a particular disesteem to every knowing person alive, and most
injurious to the written labors and monuments of the dead . . . [and] seems an
undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation.” Reading is ennobling, in
this sense, because it instills a sense of shared value, an anticipation of
surplus in the form of Reformation, among its participants.
At this early point in his career, Milton’s anticipation of social capital was equivalent to the advance of England’s Reformation, a conspicuous cause, which he imagined as an international competition. “Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live,” he wrote in the parliamentary address of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. With his divorce tracts, Milton’s conception of interpretive labor as unlimited and unregulated rests on a contradiction between private leisure and public vocation that only the “law of charity,” embodied in the interpretive posture of Christ, can resolve. Milton’s free market model requires that conscience be active in public life, but as Areopagitica reveals, some degree of leisure is necessary for conscientious activity in the first place. At the authorial level, the licensor represents the threat of an “unleisured” participant. Unlike those whose material labor is subsumed by unquestioning output of the printing house—a cause that unites author, publisher, and the wage-labor of the print shop—the licensor impinges on the process of production from outside of it. In this way, Milton’s logic of Protestant interpretation—his strong opposition to any kind of extra-textual authority—plays itself out in the material conditions of early modern book production, thus revealing the secret alliance between reading and commerce in the bourgeois individual.
Since Stanley Fish, Milton has often been associated with a
horizon of reading that is untranscendable. In Chapter 1’s analysis of Areopagitica,
I sought to historicize this appeal to interpretation as an immanent requirement
of bourgeois ideology, which, at the expense of material labor, draws on the
tensions of Protestantism (a contradiction between grace and works) while
adopting its aversion to extra-biblical mediation—usually in the form of custom
or regulation. If critics like Fish fail to give proper attention to the
material conditions of book production, many advocates of print history are
equally at fault for adhering to narrative of modernization that treats the
printed text as a complete or uniform object. The material irregularity of the
1671 edition of Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes has
for this reason been glossed as an error, the correction of which depends on
the interpretive agency of astute readers. In my second chapter, I suggested
that this depiction of the reader as a material corrector—that is, an extension
of the print shop’s imperative to present a text available for purchase—must be
considered alongside Satan’s method of reading, which not only confuses the
Book of Nature with the Word of God, but seeks to arrive at a position of
secure, extra-biblical knowledge. If the “paradise within” that Milton deploys
at the end of Paradise Lost is depicted in Paradise Regain’d and hinted at in Samson
Agonistes, it is anything but an inactive place. Instead, in Milton’s later
works, readers encounter an expansive space of conscientious reading and
“revolving,” a space that Samson violently opens and the Son actively redeems.
As I have sought to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, the production of
such space, in the act of reading, was also a political and theological
strategy. The 1671 poems, in particular, work to reveal the contradiction
between faithful reading and the mass resignation to history encouraged by the
Restoration state.
Milton’s late poems attempt to make textual interpretation
constitutive of the radical Protestant subject, a ground of potential for an
undisclosed future. Both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes reveal how the
textual condition that Milton is trying to produce in his audience is a
historically contingent production, one that is ultimately hegemonic. By
drawing recent discussions of book history and print culture together with
contemporary Milton criticism’s emphasis on the politics of reading, I have
tried to show how the kind of interpretive agency emphasized by Fish and other
reception theorists arises from a distinctly Protestant hermeneutic, which
Milton assumes and alters to respond to the social, economic, and political
conflicts of seventeenth century England. My third and final chapter focused on
the disjunction between strategies of the state—premised on the visibility of
its subjects—and Milton’s fit reader. In the shift from audience to reader in
the poems of 1671, I located Milton’s attempt to retain the social (as it first
appears in Areopagitica) as form of potential that depends on the willingness
of his readers to inhabit a specifically textual space. The original edition of
Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes works to recondition
readers for precisely this vocation. Samson Agonistes, in particular, draws the
representational space of the public theatre into opposition with the textual
space of the English Protestant subject. To explain this contradiction and its relationship
to the brutal destruction of Samson’s final act, I relied on Walter Benjamin’s
theory of divine violence and briefly touched on the material format of the
first edition of Milton’s last poems. The point of this violence, I argued, is
not simply to produce a moment of ethical ambivalence for the conscientious
reader or to provide an instructive model of patience to Dissenting
Protestants; it can also be found in the 1671 volume’s formal features. Samson
Agonistes, in particular, delivers an interpretive situation that is radically
incompatible with the immediate situation of his audience. It requires, in
other words, something other than the visible forms of identity and
commemoration that are relied upon by Israel and its Philistine oppressors. Part
of what makes the poem so compelling is the way in which it works as a formal
analogue to Samson, transforming a popular mode of entertainment from the
inside out. In this context, reading becomes synonymous with iconoclasm,
opening up new spaces of subjective freedom and deliberation. With this in mind, the Omissa assumes a new kind of
significance.
Not
only does this material feature require the reader to become an active agent in
the textual correction, echoing the call of Areopagitica to collaborative
reconstruction of Truth; it also produces a space of interpretation that cannot
be thought apart from the published text—that is, against the formal
constraints and distractions of popular spectacle, the Omissa represents a
strategy of containment for the reader, thus extending the interpretive
situation that Samson violently delivers to Milton’s fit reader. More
complicated, however, is the relationship between different texts, the priority
of God’s Word over the Book of Nature, which is challenged in Samson Agonistes
by Israel’s continual misreading of the occasion. For Milton, Samson’s moment
cannot be properly messianic. Due to his historical circumstances, Israel’s
liberator cannot possess an understanding of kairos necessary to distinguish
between secular occasion (chronos) and divine guidance. In Paradise Regain’d,
however, the Son resists Satan’s deployment of the familiar emblem of Occasion.
Where the captive Samson understands time as punctured by moments of
opportunity for collective action, the Son’s recalls his personal development
as a sequence of events, which allows him realize the fullness of time at the
moment he overcomes private temptation. The result is the beginning of his
public ministry. Following Agamben, my final chapter understood kairos (or
messianic time) not as an additional time, but instead as the negative relation
between time and its end, a relation that reconditions all time. Agamben’s
conception of time provides us with a new way of approaching the
counter-intuitive sequencing of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes in the
1671 edition. Milton’s poem is not simply a classical tragedy, but a messianic
revisioning of the Old Testament story, which responds to the limitations of
Restoration England and points to the possibility of a future remnant of
readers. By articulating this utopian valence within Milton’s 1671 poems, my
aim has not been to evade the historical conditions of their material
production and reception; it has been, rather, to historicize the sort of reading
subject that Milton’s texts work to produce: a fit reader, perhaps best
represented in the class potential of the “middling sort,” which rose to new
prominence through the social and political crises of the mid seventeenth
century.
Milton’s literary achievements rest upon his refashioning of
Protestant hermeneutics into a condition of active dissent and revolt against a
coercive state, but they also suggest the inextricable link between theology
and radical politics in the early modern period. In closing, I want to suggest
that this irreducible link is analogous utopian energy that Ernst Bloch
famously located in the Radical Reformer, Thomas Muntzer. For Bloch, Muntzer’s
theological basis of revolt “legitimize[d] the demand for communal autonomy,
exemplified in the call for the right to decide issues of correct religious
doctrine, to elect the minister and to allocate tithes; and it [was] ultimately
made the yardstick of social and political order.” Bloch looks to
Muntzer for utopian forms of immediate, non-alienated experience that could be
produced by working through worldly relations. In his recent discussion of
Bloch, Alberto Toscano concludes that one cannot simply reject theological
positions as anachronistic. Instead, he writes, we need to understand and
preserve the affective content that theology conditions, and the transformative
collective energies that “drive the situated negation and transcendence of the
social status quo.” Against the background of Restoration, Milton’s multi-faceted
consideration of reading in his late poetry similarly cuts in both
directions. Milton, as Christopher Hill has repeatedly emphasized, “was not a
modern liberal Christian.”
If reading constitutes an ethical activity, whether through
the imagination of “alien subjectivities” or through the experience of
self-contradiction, it remains an ideological practice, the value and form of
which have changed over time.[1]
Reading produces subjects because it is fundamentally responsive and
conditional: that is, following the insight of Louis Althusser, like religious
ideology, reading, in its modern guise, “is indeed addressed to individuals, in
order to ‘transform them into subjects,’ by interpellating the individual.” Despite the vast difference of their historical circumstances,
Althusser’s description of subjectivity is also the insight upon which Milton’s
1671 poems build: reading is the condition of production for free Protestant
subjects.
In Milton’s increasing attention to “fit” readers, I located
the potential of a non-identical collective, the subject of recent discussions
by contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains)
and Alain Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism). St Paul
represents for both critics a figure that demonstrated the ability to think the
social or “universal” without recourse to some prior condition of belonging,
whether a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a class. Rather than
objective victory, it is “subjective victory,” writes Badiou, “that produces
hope.” A subject is born out of her commitment to what Badiou calls, a
“truth event,” while the corresponding domain of ethics, in this program, is
determined by a subject’s fidelity or faithfulness to such an event. According to
Badiou, this is what the Resurrection of Christ means to St Paul. If, as I have
argued, Milton can be said to oppose a certain “identitarian” logic in his
conception of reading, it is only because he opposes such activity to
government surveillance and state repression. This to say, the definition of
reading that these chapters articulate is strategic and historically contingent
rather than absolute. For Badiou, contemporary understandings of “identity”
refer to a static condition of belonging, while “subjectivity,” by contrast,
entails a responsive and excessive kind of agency.
Early modern Protestant poetry highlights the subject’s reception of God’s free gift of grace as a political and theological problem. Against laws that divide, enumerate, and name, and against the sacramental tradition of Roman Catholicism, the fit readers of Milton’s texts work within defined limits to produce a space in which right reception (that is, free reception) can take place. Badiou’s analysis of St Paul’s universal subject locates a similar logic. In his reading of Romans 6:14 (“for you are not under law, but under grace”), Badiou understands a restructuring of the subject according to a logic of becoming: “For the ‘not being under the law’ negatively indicates the path of the flesh as suspension of the subject’s destiny, while ‘being under grace’ indicates the path of the spirit as fidelity to the event.” Here a potential dissolution of various identities is indicated first by a negative declaration; the “but,” on the other hand, “indicates the task, the faithful labor in which the subjects of the process opened up by the event (whose name is ‘grace’) are the coworkers.” As Terry Eagleton has recently suggested, Badiou’s work “grasp[s] the vital point that faith articulates a loving commitment before it counts as a description of the way things are.” Perhaps, then, Milton’s late poems can, in fact, be understood as signaling a turn to faith. We should, however, be careful not to dismiss such faith as a departure from politics. If, following Badiou, England’s Reformation can be considered a truth event for Milton, then the fit reader is one who remains open and loyal to its unseen potential. It is in this sense that the young poet’s stirring advice to his compatriots in Areopagitica, can again be imagined echoing throughout the spiritual darkness that, for Milton and other Dissenting readers, characterized the Restoration:
The light which we have gained, was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitering of a bishop, and the removing of him from off the Presbyterian shoulders that will make us a happy nation. No, if other things as great in the church and in the rule of life both economical and political be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind.
[1] The argument
for reading as constitutive of ethical activity remains prominent, despite the
fact that contemporary readers have, for the most part, continued to treat
books as objects for private consumption. The phrase “alien subjectivites”
comes from Feisal G. Mohamed’s recent book, Milton and the Post-Secular
Moment: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). In his second chapter, Mohamed
treats the ethics of reading in Areopagitica as the product of rhetorical excess, “a cover for
its ideology of hegemony of an emerging reforming class.” Against this, he
follows Gayatri Spivak, who grounds the possibility of an ethics in
unrecognized Other, and suggests that “Reading is not only an ethical activity,
it is the ground of ethical activity in its initiation of the call by which
positive political change can occur, because it is only through the kind of
reading sometimes fostered in the humanities that we are invited to imagine
alien subjectivities.” As much as reading might be an ethical activity, it
is also an ideological procedure carried out on an ideological object. Although
I find Mohamed’s attempt to “desecularize” Milton compelling, this appeal to an
ethics of openness that is grounded on the practice of reading, often takes the
neutrality of reading for granted. Any discussion of Milton’s ethics of reading
must also contend with Of True Religion, where such ethics confront their limits. With Milton, in other words,
we have seen that reading is not a posture of postmodern pluralism, but a
formal practice that is conditioned by its opposition to other types of
cultural consumption.
