宗教詩の成立 : Paradise Lostの場合

• 早乙女 忠

書誌事項

タイトル別名

• RELIGIOUS OR IRRELIGIOUS : An Essay on Paradise Lost

抄録

Paradise Lost has been naturally thought to be a religious poem. The readers have admired or rejected it on the ground of its extremely religious quality. Is this epic so religious? The nineteenth century critics praised Milton's Satan extravagantly: often in terms of inspiration. Does their appreciation not make an attack on the central idea of Paradise Lost? So this work may be paradoxically considered as a irreligious poem in the interest of Satan's heroic and even Promethean figure. Indeed Milton often makes his devil heroic, though not a hero. But the world of Paradise Lost is the religious one. The epic displays human ambiguities, and that in order to conquer them. As for Satan, the poet introduces him as "Th' infernal Serpent" and banishes him in the same way. Satan is not a "hero or fool" but a "hero and fool." Perhaps he saw in himself the anti-religious world as obviously as the religious one. It is supposed that he often had to "justify the ways of God" to himself. In his character, Satan, there is alter ego or "what is dark", struggling against divine order. The story of Satan described in the earlier books of the epic is not only a "prelude in heaven" but a reflection of human tragedies. And he can show the tragic and the harmonious world at the same time. The world of Paradise Lost is harmonious, though tragic; religious, though seemingly irreligious. It will not be strange even if we say Paradise Lost is all the more religious work because it is often irreligious.

収録刊行物

• 英文学研究

  英文学研究 35 (1), 35-50, 1958

  一般財団法人 日本英文学会

詳細情報

• CRID: 1390282680793656448
• NII論文ID: 110008151012
• DOI: 10.20759/elsjp.35.1_35
• ISSN: 24242136
• ISSN: 00393649
• 本文言語コード: ja
• データソース種別:
  • JaLC
  • CiNii Articles
• 抄録ライセンスフラグ: 使用不可