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Michael Bryson. The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton's Rejection of God as King. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 208 pp. $43.00. Review by SUSANNAH B. MINTZ, SKIDMORE COLLEGE.
Michael Bryson's The Tyranny of Heaven is a smart and lively provocation of established readings of the God of Paradise Lost. The book begins with two important distinctions. First, Bryson insists that the poetical deity not be conflated with Milton's own God; too many readers, he suggests, have mistakenly addressed the epic's Father as an "absolute representation" (24) of the God of heaven, thereby turning "Milton studies . . . into Milton ministries" (23; italics in original). second, the Father is to be understood not as a textual manifestation of God in some essential sense, but rather as the depiction of a certain image of God-an authoritarian and violent monarch-thai prevailed in seventeenth-century England, and that obstructed, Milton believed, his nation's ability to free themselves from tyrannical rule. Bryson's insistence that the Father is a poetic character, and not the God of heaven, allows him to disentangle the Father and the Son as separate entities and thus to make his book's central claim: that it is the Son who embodies Milton's most cherished ideal of non-hierarchical, private, and rational connection with the divine.
Though he is not, of course, the first to broach head-on the contentious issue of how to square an obviously monarchical God with Milton the regicide, Bryson does deliver here a refreshingly risky discussion of a figure he calls deliberately "off-putting," Paradise Losfs "manipulative, defensive, alternately rhetorically incoherent and evasive" Father (24-25). His assertion is that Milton "creates a Father who is profoundly disturbing" on purpose, in order to illustrate "what can and will go wrong with...