Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: intention, historicism and interpretation
- Part I Milton
- Chapter 1 The Brenzel lectures
- Chapter 2 To the pure all things are pure
- Chapter 3 “There is nothing he cannot ask”
- Chapter 4 Why Milton matters; or, against historicism
- Chapter 5 Milton in popular culture
- Chapter 6 How the reviews work
- Chapter 7 The new Milton criticism
- Part II Early modern literature
- Index
- References
Chapter 2 - To the pure all things are pure
Law, faith and interpretation in the prose and poetry of John Milton
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: intention, historicism and interpretation
- Part I Milton
- Chapter 1 The Brenzel lectures
- Chapter 2 To the pure all things are pure
- Chapter 3 “There is nothing he cannot ask”
- Chapter 4 Why Milton matters; or, against historicism
- Chapter 5 Milton in popular culture
- Chapter 6 How the reviews work
- Chapter 7 The new Milton criticism
- Part II Early modern literature
- Index
- References
Summary
1.
Although the range of John Milton's concerns is enormous – stretching from politics to theology to literature to education to divorce to church government to interpretation to music to dance to cosmology to warfare and much more – central to every issue he considers is the relationship of written law or precept to a higher, deeper law that cannot be identified with what has been set down in formal terms.
Milton's unwillingness to accept positive law as an ultimate authority extends even to the first set of codified laws, the Ten Commandments. In a section of his Christian Doctrine titled “Of Good Works,” he observes that “[s]ome theologians insist that the form of good works is their conformity with the ten commandments,” but against this insistence he cites Romans 14:23 where Paul declares: “Whatever is not in accordance with faith, is sin.” “Notice,” Milton says, that the Apostle does not say: “Whatever is not in accordance with the ten commandments is sin,” but: “Whatever is not in accordance with faith.” The difference between the Ten Commandments and faith is that the first have a visible, tangible form and the second exists (if it does exist; there are, after all, faithless men) in the interior recesses of the individual heart. Actions taken in conformity with the commandments can be assessed by placing them next to the text; actions in conformity with faith can only be assessed either by God (who is by definition inaccessible) or by the faith-claimer himself, which would make the process of validation entirely circular. (My faith compels me to do this; who are you or any written precept to say otherwise?)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Versions of AntihumanismMilton and Others, pp. 65 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012