The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature by Deni Kasa;

Author:Deni Kasa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Son’s judgment of humankind in Book 10 evokes once more his role as a mediator between the Law and the Gospel. The Father sends him with the explicit purpose of mediating his commands: “Easy it might be seen that I intend / Mercy colleague with justice, sending thee / Man’s friend his mediator” (10.58–60). During the judgment, the Son mediates by introducing them to the mysteries of the Gospel:

Between thee and the woman I will put

Enmity, and between thine and her seed;
Her seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel.

So spake this oracle, then verified

When Jesus son of Mary second Eve

Saw Satan fall like lightning down from Heaven . . .

(10.179–84)

The scriptural source of these words, Genesis 3:15, was known to Christian theologians as the protoevangelium, or “first Gospel,” because it was thought to contain the first prefiguration of Christ in Genesis. Milton’s rendition emphasizes its typological meaning with a proleptic account of Mary and Jesus. As a result, in this passage the Son is the mediator of the Old and New Testaments because he speaks about the Gospel using the text of the Old Testament curse.

Milton’s reader is expected to know that the crushing of the Serpent’s head prefigures Jesus’s victory over Satan, but this point is not obvious to Adam and Eve, who encounter the protoevangelium for the first time. Milton acknowledges that this messianic prophecy is obscure to the human couple: “God at last / To Satan first in sin his doom applied / Though in mysterious terms, judged as then best” (10.171–73). What is the purpose of this mystery? The answer lies in Book 3. The Father couches his grace in Book 3 in wrathful language to invite the Son to find grace through his own effort and so participate in the interpretation and elaboration of the father’s sovereign sentence. The initial display of paternal anger and hostility creates the necessary interpretive space for the Son to intervene, like Abraham, and state that the law has a graceful intention: “That be far from thee, Father” (3.154). Similarly, the mysterious terms of the protoevangelium have a pedagogical purpose. The most obvious interpretation of the punishment of Adam and Eve is that they will be forced to live out a life of suffering without consolation, but this interpretation is wrong because it relies on an overly literal reading of the “bruise” that the serpent will receive on his head. As a result, Adam and Eve face the same interpretive situation as the Son in Book 3. Like the Son, they confront a seemingly clear-cut judgment of death on mankind, but we know that the most obvious reading is wrong, and the right answer is for them to read the text creatively and imaginatively so as to find redemption within the judgment. In order to come to the right interpretation, Adam and Even need to reimagine the letter of paternal law as an opportunity for grace.73

In their ensuing dialogue, Adam and Eve eventually rise to the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.