Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's IronyWhy do we hate Milton's God? Victoria Silver reengages with a perennial problem in Milton studies, one whose genealogy dates back at least to the Romantics, but which finds its most cogent modern expression in William Empson's revulsion at Milton's God and Stanley Fish's defense. |
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... thought to do. Instead, it addresses deity from the human standpoint—how the divine is made known to us and how we should understand and speak about that knowledge which Paradise Lost pointedly calls “the ways of God.” As Calvin ...
... thought that God's ways needed justifying, that this was a hard, not an easy thing to do, and that a case could also be made for the other side.”2 And Empson's triumph, like his Milton's, was “a triumph of the will, a work of ...
... thought by which we situate ourselves in the world to hopeful and ruinous effect, precisely because we refuse to distinguish our religious notions from the truth. For as the rationalist bias runs, truth is the sole prerogative of ...
... thought fit to accommodate himself, by such a piece of condescension, to the notions and apprehensions of his creatures: but it would be indecent in any man to use the same freedom, and do that for God, which he only has a right to do ...
... thought to assert in Paradise Lost. Thus the critic may undertake to reconcile or oppose the poem's ostensible argument by referring it to extrinsic forces superior to Milton's own intention and control, and for that matter, his readers ...