Milton, Early Modern Culture, and the Poetics of Messianic Time

Abstract

Despite recent scholarship, critics have yet to offer a sustained, interdisciplinary interpretation of John Milton's engagement with millennial ideas that takes into equal account the historical context of seventeenth-century religious and political controversy, the ways in which the pending apocalypse transformed how people imagined and experienced time, and how we see evidence of this cultural shift in Milton's poetry. This dissertation opens new possibilities of understanding Milton's relation to apocalyptic belief in the Revolutionary and Restoration era through an investigation of how millennial thinking cut across a variety of discourses including theology, politics, and science. At its most basic level, my dissertation argues the seventeenth-century anticipation of the apocalypse fundamentally altered the way people imagined time; this new way of conceptualizing temporality changed early modern religious beliefs, conceptions of history, the scientific imagination, and practices of reading philosophy, politics, and literature. My project proposes that the poetry of Milton helps us better understand these extensive cultural transformations. I explore this new understanding of time that is both reflective of discursive changes in the seventeenth century as well as characteristic of Milton's aesthetics, by offering an understanding of Milton's relationship with millennial ideas and their constitutive temporal structure. I argue that, in response to the inevitable and immanent "end of time" suggested by seventeenth-century apocalyptic temporality, Milton's poetry creates an alternative temporality, opening up an experience of time that is not necessarily unidirectional, closed, and speeding towards its end. I suggest that this different experience of time can best be understood through the framework of a temporality explored by contemporary philosophers Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben--messianic time. Put in its most basic terms, messianic time is a way of thinking about temporality differently, of calling into question our narratives of how time and history function. The messianic invites us to interrogate the notions of closure, certainty, and inevitability that are implicit in our linear, apocalyptic notion of time. Milton's texts continually constitute the possibility of a messianic temporality that can be read as a response to changing conceptions of time in the seventeenth century, millennial anticipation, and the belief that the apocalypse was close at hand. Entering a recent critical conversation regarding Milton's engagement with millennial and apocalyptic thinking, I suggest that we can understand this involvement through the alternative temporality his poetry creates. Each chapter of this dissertation fuses a formalist close reading of the temporality and uncertainties opened up by generic revisions, literary allusions, and rhetorical devices in Milton's poetry with a reading of how ideologically-conflicting interpretations of millennial time are articulated in the text and are reflective of contemporary discourse. I demonstrate how messianic time functions in each text and I prove the importance of this experience as it relates to historical and ideological questions about the millennium. This dissertation contributes to an ongoing conversation regarding how political, religious, scientific, and aesthetic texts are interconnected, and explores the plurality of Milton's ideological positions as they emerge out of the ambivalence and tension in the language of his poetry. In my reading, Milton's texts articulate a way of being in the world--both structural (created through language) and historical (tied to seventeenth-century millennial thinking)--that suggests uncertainty is the condition of knowledge and truth.