National Reckonings: The Last Judgment and Literature in Milton’s England by Ryan Hackenbracht

Abstract

Reviewed by: National Reckonings: The Last Judgment and Literature in Milton’s England by Ryan Hackenbracht Emily E. Stelzer (bio) National Reckonings: The Last Judgment and Literature in Milton’s England Ryan Hackenbracht Cornell University Press, 2019. xviii + 213 pp. $49.95 hardcover. $24.99 ebook. In National Reckonings, Ryan Hackenbracht notes the prevalence of eschatological assertions in early modern England and invites the reader to join him in “a labor of cultural excavation” to “recover…the religious texture of early modern political thought,” resulting in “an account of how seventeenth-century writers appropriated biblical stories of judgment and put them to fascinating political uses,” “coding their praise and criticism of the nation through the scriptural language and imagery of reckoning” (7). This pithy book investigates works by John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Gerrard Winstanley, Abiezer Coppe, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, Charles I, and John Gauden (or the author of Eikon Basilike). It may be distinguished from other recent scholarship on early modern eschatology or nationhood in two ways. Firstly, it emphasizes the “vertical” (6) boundaries between nation and ecclesia rather than horizontal distinctions separating nation and nation. Secondly, although it includes a chapter on Diggers and Ranters and references to the Book of Common Prayer, National Reckonings focuses on the biblical consciousness of literary minds in Milton’s England rather than either radical apocalypticism or establishment theology of the period. An introductory comparison of two Doré illustrations, one of the biblical Last Judgment, one of the Fall of the Angels from Paradise Lost, exemplifies how literature can bring a far-off judgment down to readers, making them part of the action, at least through imagination. Importantly, after envisioning judgment comes a return to the present, and thus to opportunity and hope (37, 85, 238). Anticipating reckoning incentivizes reform. Although its chapters may be appreciated individually, and versions of two of the chapters first appeared as journal articles, National Reckonings is unified by various interwoven threads. A first such thread involves explication of politicized biblical allusions, especially to parables of judgment and reckoning. For example, Hackenbracht deftly elucidates how the parable of the talents is used by Milton (27, 146), Hobbes (68–69), Winstanley (86), Coppe (88), and Thomas Vaughan (103, 110–11), while Henry Vaughan’s “Welshifying” and “politicizing” of George Herbert’s mode of devotional poetry especially appropriates the judgment parable of the tares (112, 114, 122). Secondly, with its thirteen illustrations, National Reckonings often points to printed images and art. For example, the image of the composite sovereign [End Page 213] on the famous title page to Leviathan is compared to depictions of Christ as makros anthropos on the tympana of French churches. The visuals illustrate an argument about Leviathan itself: Hobbes’ task is “to desacralize judgment,” “to increase human sovereignty by decreasing Christ” (62). A third thread may be traced in Hackenbracht’s arguments for triangulation strategies employed by seventeenth-century writers, where apparent conflicts between nation and ecclesia are resolved in an emergent third group, often a self-identified “remnant” (12, 19, 129) whose faithful laboring distinguishes itself from both the nation in need of reform and the eternal community that remnant anticipates. Unlike the apostle Paul, Hackenbracht generally uses ecclesia to refer to an anticipated eternal community rather than present, local assemblies of believers, but the distinction ultimately collapses, as references to apokatastasis (98, 106) join Milton’s expectation that “God shall be all in all” (Paradise Lost 3.341) and an Augustinian-influenced admonition that national reckoning is here and now (11, 156). Hackenbracht is at home in his investigation of Milton, and his analyses of Milton’s early poetry and of Paradise Lost neatly bookend the work. Of Reformation supplies a key passage, where Milton expects God will judge and reward whole nations, not just their individual constituents. Since, as Hackenbracht argues, “Scripture has no room for the nation in the world to come,” Milton reworks ideas of the Last Judgment, “furnishing England with an end-time identity that satisfies the demands of both patriotism and eschatology,” joining “the classical concern for patria with the Protestant expectation of ecclesia” (19, 20). According to “Milton’s cooperative view of history,” the faithful have “a...