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My most recent
book project (Ashgate Press, 2012) is called
The Atheist Milton. But in calling the
book The Atheist Milton, and in arguing that Milton was an
atheist then, and would be an atheist were he alive today, I am trying
to make a fairly nuanced case, despite the deliberate provocation of
the title.
“Atheism” meant different things in Milton’s day than it
does for us today. Essentially, the word has become narrower in scope
for us, less flexible in its capacity to carry shades of meaning.
“Atheist” tends to mean one thing today: someone who does not believe
in God. In Milton’s time, the term “Atheist” was used in a much more
wide-ranging way: it could refer to someone who did not believe that
God existed, but more commonly it referred, not to unbelief, but to
variations in belief that were regarded by the accuser (and the word
is almost always an accusation rather than a self-chosen label) as
straying from orthodox belief, what I refer to in the book (with all
due irony) as correct belief as opposed to the incorrect belief of the
“atheist.”
My argument is
two-fold: based on his association with Arian ideas (denial of the
doctrine of the Trinity), his argument for
the de Deo theory of creation (the idea that the universe |
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is
created, not from nothing or ex nihilo, but from the essence of
God, which puts him in line with the materialism of Spinoza and
Hobbes), and his Mortalist argument that the human soul dies with the
human body, Milton was an Atheist by the commonly-used definitions of
the period. And as the poet who takes a reader from the presence of an
imperious, monarchical God in Paradise Lost, to the internal—almost
Gnostic—conception of God in Paradise Regained, to the absence of any
God whatsoever in Samson Agonistes, Milton is the poet of the
Atheists, pushing harder against that old “task-Master” than any poet
before or since.
My research and teaching
often focuses on questions of authority and its
construction. I have special interest in how those questions and
constructions are manifested in the early modern era, but my interest
(even passion) transcends period. My first book,
The
Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King,
focuses this interest on John Milton and the English 17th
century, a place and time in which questions of freedom and authority
eventually brought a nation to revolution, civil war, and a failed
attempt to permanently overthrow a centuries-old tradition of
monarchical government.
Other recent projects
include an essay on
Negative Theology and
Samson Agonistes
in the March 2008 issue of Milton
Quarterly. This
is based on my seminar presentation at the
Newberry Library Milton Seminar in Chicago, May 2005, and a
shorter form of that essay that was presented at the
International Milton Conference in Grenoble, France in June 2005.
I also have recently contributed
a chapter on the 1667 edition of
Paradise Lost for a book edited by John Shawcross and
Michael Lieb for Duquesne UP, and in April of 2010, I also have an
essay,
“From Last Things to First: The Apophatic Vision of Paradise Regained”,
in a collection
entitled Milton and the Visionary Mode: Essays on
Prophecy and Violence. Eds. Peter E. Medine and David V. Urban. Duquesne UP. |
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