Samson
“Samson’s supposed spiritual regeneration seems compromised by the intensely physical and destructive form it takes. The greatest problem, however, is the sheer lack of any alternative, reconstructive forms of religious worship, which may be related to the absence of any positive role for the feminine in this configuration of true worship. The expulsion of the feminine leaves a barren world. In marked contrast to Paradise Lost, where Eve has a crucial if problematic role in human worship there is in Samson Agonistes no representation of what true worship might might be other than iconoclasm. [. . .] In contrast to the egalatarian pronouncements of Christ in the New Testament, Milton’s hero contemptuously refers to the people as merely
. . . a herd confused,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Thing vulgar
Not only for the Son but for Milton, the regaining of paradise is eminently lonely. The intimate, spiritual connection between the individual and an invisible God, while clearly a blessing, is offset by a loss of communal or social bonds that surely was painful for a poet who imagined his Adam as, from the first, needing more than the company of God.”
June 29th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Congrats on making MeFi’s front page. I picked up that link in the RSS feeds.
Where is this passage from? The idea intrigues me. I’ve been reading Paradise Lost of late and thinking a lot about what the prelapsarian world would have been like. Mostly I’ve been wondering about the fall as a coming to self-consciousness, as the place of shame would indicate, which would sort of obviate the spiritual connection as that between “an individual and an invisible God.” And which only begs the question of what then was the relation between God and man prior to the fall. This all in part because I am still puzzling my way through Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Anyway…
June 29th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Well you know, anyone with a Mefi account can submit a link to the main page. As long as the story isn’t a duplicate, a promotion of one’s own project, or something commerical the link won’t be deleted. There’s no vetting process a la Slashdot or Fark, etc.
The passage is from the conclusion of my advisor’s last book. As for the fall and self-consciousness, it seems to me I’ve heard that argument somewhere before. . .
June 29th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Well, of course Sagan would have been there before…
But seriously, could man be an individual in the absence of knowledge of good and evil? Is language conceivable without individuality? C’mon BFD. Quite holdin’ out on the answers!