A01=Victoria Silver
Absurdity
Allegory
Allusion
Ambivalence
Analogy
Anguish
Anthropomorphism
Antipathy
Apologetics
Apostasy
Apotheosis
Atheism
Author_Victoria Silver
Book of Job
Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes)
Category=DSB
Category=DSC
Christianity
Consummation
Crisis of faith
Deity
Egotism
Elohim
Epithet
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
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Exaltation (Mormonism)
Excursus
Exegesis
God
Good and evil
Grammar
Hatred
Hebrews
Hubris
Ideology
Idolatry
Image of God
Irony
John Calvin
Justification (theology)
Lycidas
Morality
Natural theology
Noble Eightfold Path
Nonconformist
Omniscience
Parable
Philosophy
Poetry
Prophecy
Protestantism
Psalms
Religion
Religious education
Religious experience
Religious text
Religious values
Righteousness
Sacrilege
Satan
Satire
Scholasticism
Skepticism
Solipsism
Subjectivity
Superiority (short story)
Supernaturalism
Superstition
Symptom
Theodicy
Theology
Tragedy
Worship
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691044873
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 18 Jun 2001
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Why do we hate Milton's God? Victoria Silver reengages with a perennial problem in Milton studies, one whose genealogy dates back at least to the Romantics, but which finds its most cogent modern expression in William Empson's revulsion at Milton's God and Stanley Fish's defense. Thoroughly reexamining Milton's theology and its sources in Luther and Calvin, as well as theoretical parallels in the works of Wittgenstein, Cavell, Adorno, and Benjamin, Silver contends that this repugnance is not extrinsic but deliberately cultivated in the theodicy of Paradise Lost. From the vantage of a world riven by injustice, deity can appear to contradict its own revelation, with the result that we experience a God divided against himself. For as Job found in his sufferings, that God appears more ruse than redeemer. Milton's irony recreates this religious predicament in Paradise Lost to the intractable perplexity of his readers, who have in their turn fashioned an equally dissociated Milton--at once unconscious and calculating, heterodox and doctrinaire, heroic and intolerable.
Silver argues that, ultimately, these contrary Gods and antithetical Miltons arise from the sense we want to give the speaker's justification, which rather than ratifying our assumptions of meaning and the incoherence they foster, seeks fundamentally to reform them and thus to justify God's ways.
Victoria Silver is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California..
