The Endless Kingdom: Milton's Scriptural Society

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 15; p. 141
• Main Author: Simpson, Ken
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2011
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Unlike Christopher Hill, who argued in The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993) that the Bible was of limited use for truly radical reform because it was 'a huge bran tub from which anything might be drawn' by radicals and conservatives alike, Gay argues that the Bible's discontinuous, aphoristic textuality and the contrasting, dialectical perspectives that it evokes - qualities found most clearly in Wisdom literature - encourage the prophetic vision and critical perspective necessary to imagine a truly liberated society. Milton, on the other hand, in the Christian Doctrine, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes locates the source of wisdom in the double scripture, the individual conscience, and spiritual perception, the cornerstones of 'an "endless kingdom" conceived and sustained in the elementary community formed in the textual and critical space of reading' (p. 57) after the Restoration. Griffith's sermon of March 1660, on Proverbs 24:21, 'fear thou the Lord and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change', reveals tendencies that were repugnant to Milton: identifying scripture with conformity to a political order denies the dynamic, vital, counter-historical potential of scripture and encourages idolatry, political conditioning and interpretive authoritarianism. Grounding his analysis in the contrast between Royalist discourses, which identify happiness and joy with natural perception, pageantry, and the king's restoration, and Milton's Ready and Easy Way and A Treatise of Civil Power, which emphasize spiritual vision and critical resistance, Gay shows that, during the separation scene, Eve embodies the 'critical dynamic of biblical wisdom' only to exchange this ideal of the scriptural society for slavery and idolatry when she succumbs to Satan's rhetoric of happiness.