Böcker av Michael Lieb

With full attention to the classical, medievel, and Renaissance traditions that constituted the milieu in which Milton wrote, Lieb explores the sacral basis of Milton's thought. He argues that Milton's responsiveness to the holy as the most fundamental of experiences caused his outlook to transcend immediate doctrinal concerns.

Are Milton's Paradise Lost, Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defence program, our culture's fascination with UFOs and alien abductions, and Louis Farrakhan's views on racial Armageddon somehow linked? This title reveals the connections between these phenomena and the way culture has persistently related the divine to the technological.

In lively, forceful, and at times witty language, Michael Lieb has written an illuminating study of the figure of God as a literary character in the writings of John Milton. Milton's God has always been a provocative and controversial figure, and Lieb offers a fresh way to look at the relationship between the language of theology and the language of poetry in Milton's works. He draws into the discussion previous authors on the subject Patrides, Hunter, Kelley, Empson, Danielson, Rumrich, and others resulting in a dynamic debate about Milton's multifarious God. By stressing God's multivalent qualities, Theological Milton offers an innovative perspective on the darker side of the divinity. Lieb allows us to see a Miltonic God of hate as well as a God of love, a God who is a creator as well as a destroyer. Lieb directly confronts the more troubling faces of God in a manner richly informed by Milton's own theology. Against the theoretical framework for the idea of addressing God as a distinctly literary figure, Lieb presents Milton in the historical milieu prior to and contemporaneous with his works. More cogently than others, Lieb clarifies Milton's theology of the godhead and the various heresies, such as Socinianism and Arianism, that informed the religious controversies of the seventeenth century. He does so in a manner that exemplifies how literary studies and theology are inextricably intertwined.