John Milton, Orientalism, and the Empires of the East in Paradise Lost

Abstract

As Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State, John Milton was deeply familiar with the workings of England's foreign policy and conduct of international relations. Did Milton's knowledge of international affairs inform and shape the thematic, political, and ideological concerns of his epic poem, Paradise Lost; if so, in what directions? Critics discussing Milton's "internationalism" usually take as the focus of their consideration the general ambit of the European world. When Thomas Corns recently described Milton's Protestantism as possessing a "pronounced internationalism," he read Milton with reference to continental European thought, art, and consciousness. 1 Likewise, when John Kerrigan identified the Netherlands as the controlling center of gravity for Milton's involvement with foreign affairs, his focus on the deeply tangled politics of "the Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle" continued to limit the reach of Milton's "internationalism" to the European world. 2 This essay proposes to widen the definition of Miltonic "internationalism" to encompass a much larger world that includes the Far East and South Asia. These distant lands register their presence in Milton's oeuvre often through metaphorical significations that help to communicate the poet-polemicist's republican convictions. In Paradise Lost, Milton might have focused his attention on the current state of England's political and theological health but that did not

“Shot Through with Orient Beams”: Restoring the Orient to Milton's Paradise

“…Taking these writings on the Asian churches into account ought to lead to a brief reconsideration of the habitual division of Milton's religious identity across an east‐west axis, as well as the tendency to assign to Milton's impressions of the east a trans‐historical orientalist fixation . While scholars like Lim have written of Milton's “Biblical Orientalism” in which Milton predicates a western religious identity on complete separation from eastern peoples, Milton's writings on the Asian churches imply that this projection was modal, flexible, and perhaps more closely associated with religious praxis than ethnic, national, or geographic divisions ( “John Milton” 225). No contemporary scholar is likely to argue against the idea that Milton's notion of an “elect” people excludes the community Lim isolates, “the heathen world” (225).…”

“…See Lim “Epic.” More recently, he has argued for a reading of Satan's role as “the archetypal tyrant characterized by his associations with the Orient” (“China” 115). For other orientalist readings of Milton's impressions of the east, see his John Milton 217‐18 and “John Milton” 204‐06.…”