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Description of  Spiritual Architecture and Paradise Regained: Milton's Literary Ecclesiology (Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies)

0820703915 pdf Ken Simpsons study, focusing on John Miltons Paradise Regained, examines the literary ecclesiology of this most subtle and elusive of Miltons works. While far less critical attention has been given to Paradise Regained over the years as compared to Paradise Lost and others of Miltons canon, it might be argued that Paradise Regained may be read as a full and culminating expression of Miltons views on the doctrine of the church, the nature of the Word, prophecy and vocation, and apocalypticism. As Simpson asserts, in Paradise Regained Milton not only continues his critique of the English Reformation by confronting the failures of the Restoration settlement, but he also continues to develop the consistent theology of the church that preoccupied him in his prose during the civil war and Interregnum. Theology, polemics, and poetry were not backgrounds of one another in Miltons work, nor was theology a set of abstract propositions to which all discourses referred rather, these were overlapping fields of discourse that offered different opportunities to fulfill the religious imperative to build the church. Simpson examines Miltons view of the church as a textual communitya group of participants in the church who are each guided by the Holy Spirit in their reading of the Word. The interplay of silence and the Word, then, in Read more