Additional Gloss on Book X and Milton's Project

Apropos to my claims concerning Book X, suffice it to say PL is really good existentialist science fiction, and Milton knows this. The Biblical and the hermetic material in the poem are the carriage but not the tenor. This presupposes that a truly accurate reading--anyway an "Independent" late-Calvinist reading--of the Bible will yield the worldview Milton seeks to exercise and represent. Thus modernism is in essence a Christian philosophical project, sort of an analytic anthropology of shamanism, poetry, religious myth--altogether forming a somewhat acerbic-though-accurate survey of the human condition. As to the Independent English Calvinist foundation: little wonder then at the wrath of the tin pot gods of "postmodernism" and other forms of German mental disease. If we look backwards at Milton trough the lenses of Wittgenstein, Hawthorne, Jefferson and Locke, it seems clear enough. Anyway, that's a potted but essential statement of my critical position.