Fleshly Tabernacles by Hampton Bryan Adams;

Author:Hampton, Bryan Adams; [Hampton, Bryan Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POE003000
ISBN: 3441112
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2013-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

I do not speak of inward freedom only and omit political freedom. The prophecy of his advent foretold by Mary his mother, “He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree,” must indeed be but idle talk if his advent is instead to strengthen tyrants on their thrones and subject all Christians to their savage power. (374)

Against Salmasius, Milton argues that Christ was made to suffer under tyranny in order that Christians did not have to: “at the cost of his own slavery, he put our political freedom on a firm foundation” (374–75). Christ’s kenosis enables both our pleromic strength to withstand under tyranny and persecution when it occurs, and underwrites our entitlement to enjoy full political freedom. Milton seamlessly links the freedom of the inward kingdom that is established through Christ’s kenosis with outward political freedom. For the rhetorical moment, the Milton of 1651 appears to shrink the distance between Christ’s humble kenosis and Samson’s terrifying Spirit-filled pleroma since the end result of political freedom is the same (even if temporarily secured).

Milton’s reasoning here may not be consistent, however, on the eve of the Restoration. In The Readie and Easie Way (February or March 1660) he appears to balk at aligning divine will with earthly politics, declaring that there should be “no medling with Church matters in State counsels” where “everie faction hath the plea of Gods cause” (CPW 7:380). As Barbara Lewalski comments, there is no perfect political allegory for understanding the issues that Samson Agonistes raises, but there are political elements in the work that invite comparisons. David Loewenstein, for instance, aptly demonstrates how Milton’s tragedy echoes the wide-ranging radical invocations of the Spirit in response to the Restoration.59 In Milton’s radical milieu, Samson’s apocalyptic violence to end the oppression of the Philistines and to destroy the unrighteous resembles that of the Fifth Monarchists and some millenarian Baptists during the 1650s and after. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Milton ever attended a Fifth Monarchist meeting, there seem to have been agitators in his immediate neighborhood and parish. According to Bernard Capp, there was an active assembly of Fifth Monarchists meeting in Beech Lane beginning in 1661, not far from Milton’s house on Jewin Street off Aldersgate, which the poet occupied in late 1660. By 1663, this congregation was under the leadership of John Vernon, one of the more prominent leaders of the movement, Nathaniel Strange, and Thomas Glasse. Despite the deaths of all three of these by the middle of the decade, Capp notes that this gathering persisted until 1676, and when Milton took up lodging along Artillery Walk in Bunhill Fields in early 1663, its congregation would have been located just around the corner. A separate assembly of Fifth Monarchists met from 1662 to 1665 in the house of Mary Winch in St. Giles, Cripplegate, Milton’s parish.60

The political and theological radicalism of the Fifth Monarchists stemmed from both “a desire for liberty in place of tyranny, and for godliness in place of idolatry.

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