A Religious Poem of Depravity and Fissure : Pragmatism, Experimentalism, and neo-Pyrrhonic Skepticism in Paradaise Lost

Research Project

Project/Area Number	14510513
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	英語・英米文学
Research Institution	Nagoya University
Principal Investigator	SUZUKI Shigeo Nagoya University, Graduate School of Languages and Culture, Professor, 国際言語文化研究科, 教授 (50162946)
Project Period (FY)	2002 – 2003
Project Status	Completed (Fiscal Year 2003)
Budget Amount *help	¥1,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,500,000) Fiscal Year 2003: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000) Fiscal Year 2002: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Keywords	scientific experimentalism / Milton / Paradise Lost / skepticism / pragmatism / Renaissance Cosmography / Representation / Narrative Method / ルネッサンス宇宙誌 / 語りの手紙 / 科学実験主義 / 事実主義 / 新世界発見 / 語り手 / 驚異
Research Abstract	Raphael's admonition about astronomy is counterbalanced with the narrator's superb knowledge of both geocentric and heliocentric theories. His conflicting attitudes are derived from two different sources : the Biblical pragmatism to direct our attention on God with adherence to our daily behavior with traditional religious morality, and the seventeenth-century experimentalism to search for wonders in the universe through which we will appreciate dexterities of the Creator's genius more than ever. The Renaissance scientists tried to make clear the boundaries between facts and fiction about cosmography, and consequently how superficially the pragmatists grasp the works of God's creation. Taking one of these two sides is a pressing question to be solved in the seventeenth century. The narrator encourages the readers to blindly trust God's order and cancel the latter as a sacrilegious attitude. But the narrator, with referring to several wonders beyond common knowledge throughout the poem, exposes his keen interest and approval for a number of discoveries by those experimentalists. The traditional and the new approaches to appreciate God's creation plunges his intrinsically coherent attitude to fluctuating. But the wobbling is a superficial problem with us. What matters here is his inner deep assurance that he is able to possess every phenomenon, even a most wondrous event, as an object to be described as a God's creation. A conviction of his qualification as an authentic writer for explaining within the Biblical context, proves his lack of a neo-Pyrrhonic skepticism that even experimental science is a hypothetical human invention with leaving much room for doubt and incredulity. Such an absence of skepticism is shared by the poet's predecessors. In fact, God's creativity with generative multiplicity explodes semantic closure of the narrator's blind trust in "marvelous possession" and throws us into the "doubt's boundless sea."