Rép. : Re: [Milton-L] Samson as suicide bomber

[Harold Skulsky]

1) The ungodly deeds of Dagon are the deeds he has inspired in his votaries, consisting in the oppression of the worshippers of the one true God.

2) See answer to (1). 

3) Judges is a sacred history, not a fable or allegory. It has a prima facie claim on the credence of a professing Christian. If it says that certain of Samson's acts are under God's special control, then this proposition enjoys a prima facie claim to credence. The impurity of Samson's motives is irrelevant to their status as instruments of God's purposes. Where Samson's first principles tally with common knowledge for Milton and his target audience, they are antecedently worthy of belief unless conclusively discredited. 

Remarks: there is abundant evidence in the Miltonic corpus that Milton takes the broad lines of the metaphysical theory of angels quite seriously, and also credits the widespread view that the Syro-phoenician pantheon consists of fallen angels under various disguises. PL among other places shows passim that JM has sifted through the available metaphysics and adapted it to his own idiosyncratic version of materialism. There is also abundant evidence that JM broadly accepts the view that history is directed by Providence, and that this fact is a scandal to faith that the faithful are bound by duty to overcome. 

Plays do not exist in a vacuum, nor, for that matter, does any other communication. For X to communicate something intelligible to Y, X and Y need to share a large fund of working assumptions, not all of them trivial. These assumptions are not what , e.g., SA is designed to SAY to us, but are the preconditions for SA's saying anything at all.