Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 2, August 2009
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Ken Simpson. Spiritual architecture and Paradise Regained: Milton’s literary ecclesiology. (Medieval and Renaissance literary studies). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2007. xiii, 256 p. ISBN 978-0-8207-0391-6 (hardcover).
Reviewed by
University of California, Santa Barbara
Of all Milton’s works, Paradise Regained remains one of the most misunderstood and least researched. Perhaps it is the language or the style, but most scholarly attention has focused on Paradise Lost and other works in the Miltonian repertoire. Simpson states that Paradise Regained may be the best expression of Milton’s views on a number of issues, including apocalypticism, prophecy and vocation, doctrine of the church, and the nature of the Word.
In Paradise Regained, Milton continues his negative rhetoric of the English Reformation, but attempts to focus on his view of the church as a textual community, one that follows the Spirit more than tradition. As such, the church’s role in militancy, liturgy, and ministry play a role in the construction of this poem. For Milton, literary activity – that is, the activities of writing, reading, speaking, hearing, and singing the Word – was the most important function of the church, and how it should constantly renew and reform itself. This position separated Milton from the views of his time, and thus has relegated this poem to one that is little studied or researched. The author hopes that this examination of the poem will help modern-day researchers understand more of Milton’s ecclesiology in the context of the literary, humanist, and rhetorical theologies of the seventeenth century.
The five chapters discuss various aspects of Milton’s theology as illustrated in Paradise Regained. The topics include writing the church; silence and the Word; the priesthood of believers and the vocation of writing; the renovation of worship; and astrology, apocalypse, and the Church Militant. The book is heavily footnoted, and contains a large bibliography divided into primary and secondary sources. An index is included. Anyone interested in Milton, the English Reformation, and seventeenth-century England would find this book to be immensely interesting and valuable.