For Part I of this series, click here; for Part II, click here; for Part III, click here; for Part IV, click here.

If Stephen Marshall’s literalism makes his reading of Psalm 137 easy to interpret as a call to real-world violence, what of readings like John Milton’s, where the language is certainly abusive, but the psalm is invoked in a way whose literalism is transparently tactical in nature?

Defending Smectymnuus, Milton first attacks Hall on grounds of literalism. After quoting Hall’s accusation that “none but the Babylonian note sounds well in [Smectymnuus’] eare,” he writes, “You mistake the matter, it was the Edomitish note, but change it, and if you be an Angel, cry with the Angell, It is falne, it is falne.” [1] Here Milton draws on two verses from Revelation (14:8 and 18:2) in which angels say that Babylon “is fallen, is fallen” and combines them with the common episcopal argument that the Angels of the Seven Churches in Revelation 1-3 were the bishops of their respective cities to arrive rather more economically at the Smectymnuan conclusion: that the bishops are the real Edomites.

But in the process, Milton doesn’t actually bother to refute Hall’s comparison of the anti-episcopal party to Edomites; rather, he bluntly equates episcopacy with Babylon and then suggests that, if Hall is really a bishop, he should ominously note his own downfall—a conclusion that improbably makes Hall both the holy angel of the verses in Revelation and the fallen one of Isaiah 14:12. It’s as though Milton isn’t so much attacking Hall’s failure of literalism on principle as he is seizing every polemical occasion he can find.

Hall’s error in conflating Edom and Babylon gives Milton yet another polemical opportunity, one that shows his preference for allusive over literalist scriptural argument. Hall had frequently insisted that Smectymnuus should be embarrassed by their allegedly shoddy scholarship, saying “if yet you can blush” shortly after the reference to Psalm 137. [2] Milton uses this comment to unveil another layer of Hall’s equation of Smectymnuus with the Edomites—a favor he is quite pleased to return: “This is a more Edomitish conceit than the former, and must be silenc’d with a counter quip of the same countrey. So often and so unsavourily has it been repeated, that the Reader may well cry, Downe with it, downe with it for shame.”

Milton then offers several possible explanations for Hall’s overuse of the conceit of blushing, all of which point back to Edom:

A man would think you had eaten over liberally of Esaus red porrage, and from thence dreame continually of blushing; or, perhaps, to heighthen your fancy in writing, are wont to sit in your Doctors scarlet, which through your eyes infecting your pregnant imaginative with a red suffusion, begets a continuall thought of blushing. [3]

This passage draws on Genesis 25:30, which explains that Esau got the name Edom (meaning “red”) from the color of the lentils in Jacob’s pottage—“And Esau said to Jacob, Feed mee, I pray thee, with that same red pottage: for I am faint; therefore was his name called Edom”—but there is no sense in which that particular verse bears on the debate about church-government: its interest is primarily etiological. And yet this etiological aspect affords Milton some fodder for his attack on Hall.

Unlike Marshall, Milton is not using Psalm 137 to urge the literal killing of children; indeed, that aspect of the psalm is entirely absent from his attack on Hall. And yet, Milton is unmistakably on the attack, so his motives cannot be that much purer than Marshall’s. To what extent, then, is Milton’s attack really grounded on the authority of scripture? Surely it strains credulity to read Genesis 25:30, even in conjunction with Psalm 137, as a condemnation of all things red. Does Milton’s use of scripture in what amounts to an abusive joke even claim to speak with the voice of God?

I would argue that Milton’s allusive method, viewed in the context of the other uses of Psalm 137 in this controversy, shows most clearly the hand of the interpreter present in all of them. Precisely because Milton’s interpretations are so tangential to the literal sense, they draw attention to the mind making connections between disparate things. And that is what interpreters relating scripture to present-day circumstances inevitably do.

By saying this I do not mean to disparage literalism per se, but I do mean to suggest that literalism is a choice, and not the only one at that. Even if scripture is a record of prophecy, and even if the prophets witnessed and wrote about our time, in no case that I am aware of does scripture speak so unequivocally about specific events in our world today as to remove all doubt about the applicability of a particular chapter or verse to current events. Moreover, as the ready reversibility of the Israel/Edom dichotomy shows, scripture itself offers little help even in applying ahistorical categories like “the unbelievers” to persons in the present. In other words, human interpreters necessarily mediate between the text and our time.

This necessary mediation means that we miss the mark when we blame scripture for the violence in the world today. Rather, the ethical burden lies with the interpreters, and with those who teach others how to interpret. To put my own spin on what Eboo Patel has so cogently argued in Acts of Faith, there are few issues as important to our time as where and how young people learn to interpret scripture. Notwithstanding the risk of reprising in our own way Phaethon’s unfortunate attempt to drive the chariot of the sun, it falls to those of us now living to try, however imperfectly, to determine what state of religious affairs we leave to the coming generation.

In some sense, the issues raised in the church-government debates of the 1640s weren’t really resolved until the nineteenth century brought an end to official discrimination against Dissenters and Catholics. The restoration of episcopacy along with the monarchy in 1660 brought a backlash against the bitterness with which it had been suppressed in the 1640s, and even the 1689 Act of Toleration only partially ameliorated the effects of this response. In light of this we ought to consider how many years it might take to heal the wounds caused by our bitter words of today.

Ironically, Milton probably abuses the text of Psalm 137 by the way he uses it to abuse Hall. Even so, his example reminds us how much power lies in scripture—and in us as its interpreters—to influence events, even within our relatively limited spheres. The choice of what we will do with this power now lies before us.

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<– Part IV: No Neuters

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Notes

John Milton, Animadversions upon the remonstrants defence against Smectymnuus (London, 1641), 60. Thomason E.166[11]. EEBO (accessed 24 March 2009).

Hall, Defense, 137. For other instances of the blushing trope, see pp. 4, 9, 71, and 149.

Milton, 60.