Austin also must be remembered. The Augustinian legacy in Milton's work

When I started working on this project, with a limited knowledge of Augustine, but determined to spot his presence in Milton’s poetry, I was little aware of the intricacy of the relationship between the two authors. At this stage of my research, I do subscribe to Savoye’s opinion, that this relationship is pervasive. However, one could safely add, it is as pervasive as it is hidden, primarily because of changed cultural paradigms, so that Milton’s references are no longer familiar to the reader. As I have pointed out in my presentation of the state of the art, these articulations are hardly made explicit in Milton’s Oeuvre and also in critical literature they are hardly brought to the surface. My objective has been to make them a little more visible. I have started my own process of discovery from the works where Milton more openly (but not completely) acknowledges his Augustinian sources, although arguably mediated. As concerns Samson Agonistes, I have presented a reading through Augustinian lenses. I am by no means claiming that mine is the best of all possible readings, but through those lenses I have been able to see a coherence, in Milton’s dramatic poem, that is not generally recognized. On the other hand, I thoroughly agree that “one cannot simply take any English poet and turn the post-structuralist critical machine loose on him or her in good faith”. In particular, I am aware that I have read Milton’s works against the current critical grain which, with a powerful turn impressed by Empson’s Milton’s God, is continually surfacing Milton’s idiosyncrasies in order to cancel the received picture of a Christian author. Rather, I agree with Cirillo that Milton’s perspective is that of ‘a professed Christian poet whose Christian consciousness, no matter how heterodox, colored virtually everything he wrote.’.We may ask, echoing Febvre on Rabelais, “Mais de quel christianisme? In accordance with very traditional, even traditionalist Milton Criticism, I think it can safely be stated that Milton is a post-Reformation religious author, and one whose endeavour to “justify the ways of God to men” had to come to terms with the difficult task to find signs of providential history in the aftermath of a civil war and in the adverse context of the Restoration. His last published poems deal with this problem in different terms. As readers, we can come to different conclusions as to the texts. Behind them there is the man, ‘est abyssus humanae conscientiae,’ in front of which, after Augustine, I can only say: "€˜nescio".™

La tesi esamina la presenza di Agostino nell'opera di John Milton. Sono partita dallo stato dell'arte rispetto a questa tematica, cercando poi di seguire nuovi percorsi di ricerca che ho individuato nella presenza di Agostino nei trattati sul divorzio e nella natura di Samson Agonistes come esempio di quello "Spectaculum Christianum" di cui Agostino parla nelle sue opere di natura sia esegetica che pastorale. Infine ho considerato la trattazione del tempo in Paradise Regained alla luce delle opere esamerali di Agostino e della sua definizione di storia della salvezza. Quanto qui presento è la sintesi iniziale di un lavoro in corso.