Interpretation and violence: Reason, narrative, and religious toleration in the works of John Milton.

This dissertation is a study of the prose and poetry of John Milton (1608--1674). It considers how his poetic practice was shaped by the sustained attempt to argue for religious toleration. The first stage of the analysis examines, in Chapter 1, the theological basis for arguments justifying the use of religious coercion in seventeenth-century Britain. Chapter 2 then considers Milton's response to such arguments in his pre-Restoration prose. This first part of the argument clarifies one of the most urgent questions that constituted the horizon of expectations to which Milton's writing was addressed. The second stage considers, in Chapter 3, the debate over whether Milton authored the Ramist treatise De Doctrina Christiana, in order to understand how he attempts to move beyond the stylistic limitations of customary theological and theoretical discourse. Chapter 4 compares the apparently contrasting accounts of rational truth presented in Areopagitica and Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio in order to establish a precise account of the educative reading process to which Milton exhorts his readers. The third stage of the argument demonstrates how Paradise Lost addresses, by the most biblically consistent and subtle means, the root issues of human freedom and divine justice, as they relate ultimately to arguments regarding the use of state coercion in religious causes. The analysis considers Raphael's narration of the war in heaven (books 5 and 6), the account of the Fall and its consequences (books 9 and 10), and Michael's account of biblical history (books 11 and 12). The argument shows the poem's exceptional capacity to engage the issues of coercion, charity, and biblical truth by a necessarily indirect means that recapitulates within itself the whole of the biblical story. In effect, the epic poses for its English Protestant readers a necessary choice between either advocating religious toleration or abandoning their own sense of authentic Christian faith. The conclusion briefly considers how the preceding account of Paradise Lost leads also to a new understanding of Paradise Regained