Believing and Doubting as Hermeneutic Method: Reading and Teaching Paradise Lost

Abstract

Waldock’s analysis may be said to offer a modern version of Shelley’s claim that Milton was secretly or (in more modern terms) unconsciously on the devil’s side, with the explicit Christian doctrine that the poem ostensibly asserts systematically subverted by a drama that shows more sympathy and political affiliation with Satan than with God and thereby implicitly refutes Milton’s own explicit attempt to “justify God’s ways to man.” Aside from suggesting that Milton found Satan a better spokesperson than Adam for the “deepest expression of his own interests” (24), Waldock argues that Milton’s poetic loyalties ultimately had to subvert the religious doctrine of his epic in order to meet the requirement of logical verisimilitude, which applies no less to the genre of the epic than it does to its successor genre of the novel. And there is no way logically and convincingly to dramatize disastrous choices and fatal actions on the part of our first parents, claims Waldock, except by constructing a pre-lapsarian universe that carries in it the seeds of its own inevitable destruction, thereby revealing the culpability of the creator of that universe. Stanley Fish in Surprised by Sin reshaped the interpretive landscape of Paradise Lost, while challenging the prevailing canons of contemporary critical theory, by converting the “affective fallacy” of the New Criticism into a modern reader