Repairing the ruins: Proclamation and incarnational poetics in the age of Milton

This dissertation engages questions about authority, ethics, and hermeneutics in the theology and literature of Edmund Spenser, Dr. John Donne, Independent preacher John Everard, the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, the Quaker James Nayler, and John Milton, about whom this study revolves. Drawing upon theological and philosophical hermeneutics (Augustine, Gadamer, Ricoeur), narrative theology (Hauerwas), and language theory and contemporary theology (Wittgenstein, Smith), I propose that we might profitably construe Milton's epics as embodied or "incarnated" texts whose purpose is the conversion of a "fit audience though few," a "congregation" of readers. In "Repairing the Ruins," I argue that despite his rejection of the ministry, John Milton remains deeply indebted to early modern Reformed assumptions regarding the Proclamation of the Word. My study urges us to take seriously the profound effects of "the office of the pulpit" on Milton's poetics. Conversion is at stake in both early modern preaching and in Milton's oeuvre ---not just of souls, but also to a particular way of "being-in-the-world." From Milton's point of view, too many clergy functioned as spin-doctors dedicated not to converting subjects to the Word, but to advancing royal and ecclesial policy. Preachers and congregants alike subsequently embodied or incarnated in their lives what appeared to Milton as impoverished and idolatrous narratives. The poet's caustic rejection of preachers and their sanctioned authority actually enabled him as a "Church-outed" preacher-poet to exhort others to repair the "ruins of our first parents." But Milton's own theology of the divine image, the narrative of the "Word made flesh," is revolutionary and heretical. Like his radical contemporaries, Milton's heterodox theology of the Incarnation grounds both his anticlericalism and his conviction that the true Protestant preacher could incarnate the Word to bring about personal, national, and ecclesial revolution. The theology of the Incarnation not only structures Milton's 1645 Poems, but also shapes the politics, ecclesiology, and broader theories of language and reading in the early modern period.