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Milton and Midrash. By GOLDA WERMAN. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995.
Although Jacob Burckhardt's conception of the Renaissance as the "age of the discovery of man the individual" has undergone considerable re-evaluation in the works of contemporary historians, literary historiography still reflects the dualism so often attributed to Burckhardt-that between Renaissance individualism and feudal authority. Indeed, the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton is often identified as a central figure in the narrative in which, in Michael Walzer's words, "bold speculators free, more or less, from traditional controls" overthrew the old patterns of passivity and acquiescence and paved the way toward a modern conception of individualism. Through the workings of an antinomian individualism, the story goes, man became autonomous from both the Providence of God and His Law.1
Generations of critics and scholars, having found an antecedent in an antinomian Milton constructed out of a very particular romantic reading of the poet, almost routinely express a sense of dismay at (or denial of) the continuing presence of an Hebraic ethos in Milton's work. Ezra Pound's censure in his 1934 essay, "Make it New," is a species of the former, a recognition and a rejection (in no uncertain terms) of what he calls Milton's "asinine bigotry, his beastly hebraism, and the coarseness of his mentality." And William Empson, like Pound, despaired, in his seminal Milton's God, that the God presented in Milton's works remains "the very disagreeable God of the Old Testament." Empson's prejudices, as Blair Worden has described, would later inform a critical school of thought: Ever since Empson "went to school at Winchester," Worden explains, "and decided that the God that he met in the classroom there was `very wicked,' the failure of the Old Testament deity to accommodate himself to the moral requirements of twentieth-century liberal agnosticism has been a problem to Milton's readers." Though another influential critic, E. M. W. Tillyard had earlier lamented the persistent Hebraic "legalism" of Paradise Lost (which he found "unnecessary"), it was certainly Empson's version of liberalism (with Pound's fascism) which was most uncongenial to Milton's attachment to the "Old Testament God." Indeed, for Empson, Milton's God was akin, as he shockingly wrote in 1961, both to "Uncle Joe Stalin" and to the camp commandant...