'Intestine War' and 'The Smell of Mortal Change': Troping the Digestive Tract in Milton's Paradise Lost
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"Kent Lehnhof's essay 'Intestine War' and 'The Smell of Mortal Change': Troping the Digestive Tract in Milton's Paradise Lost… expands discussions of the nature of sacred space in Milton's epic. For Lehnhof, Milton's rejection of the body reflects a similar rejection of Roman Catholicism, a further example of how the religious controversies that have defined the early-modern period in England have reached their culmination in Milton. Again, the Catholic/Protestant controversy lies very much behind the period's redefinitions of the relationship between the sacred and the profane. In considering the tendency of readers of Milton to note Milton's detachment in his poetry from the body, even in his discussions of Christ, Lehnhof suggests that it has become impossible by the mid-seventeenth century to speak of the relationship between the sacred and the profane outside the context of not only the Catholic/Protestant debate, but also of the Anglican/Puritan debate that had taken its place by the time of the English Civil War. Although some of the terms are the same as we saw in earlier discussions of Donne and Herbert, the emphasis and tenor of these comments have shifted. As Lehnhof illustrates, the description of the physical in Paradise Lost is tied most unpleasantly to the descriptions, actions, smells, and behaviors of Satan and his cohort of fallen angels. This is an unappealing description of the profane that is very much in contrast to Milton's descriptions of heaven and paradise. Milton's depictions suggest a true dichotomy between the sacred and profane, rather than an absorption and transformation of the profane into the sacred that we have seen described in other essays in this collection. But, this difference is only apparent and only seen when the description involves the divine and the hellish. When the description involves Adam and Eve, the world of man in which sacred and profane must inevitably be joined, then the picture begins to look like that in our earlier essays." --Mary A. Papazian, ed.
ISBN
978-0874130256
Publication Date
2008
Publisher
University of Delaware Press
Keywords
John Milton, Paradise Lost, sacred, profane
Disciplines
Christianity | Literature in English, British Isles | Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Recommended Citation
Lehnhof, Kent. "'Intestine War' and 'The Smell of Mortal Change': Troping the Digestive Tract in Milton's Paradise Lost." The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature. Ed. Mary A. Papazian. University of Delaware Press, 2008. 278-300.
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
University of Delaware Press
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