类型学与传统:弥尔顿的《失乐园》对圣经的再现

Typology and Tradition: Refiguring the Bible in Milton's Paradise Lost

本文以类型学的方法重新表述了弥尔顿《失乐园》中的圣经故事。类型学是一种话语方式,见于诸多基督教传统诗作,它远不止是一种释义模式,还能使一首"诗"成为可望,通过这首诗,生活在耶稣纪元之后的人们凭借自身的朦胧经验和体验,可能察觉出自己如何参与了身置其中的历史的末世之真。类型诗意欲将自己纳入传统之中,同时又将传统吸收进来。弥尔顿论述中有不少传统成分,但他在自己的诗作中重新表述圣经故事的方式,反映出作者必然的抗争,而这种必然是由那些现代意识正在萌生的散漫秩序所赋予的。该诗致力于使一系列丰富的早期资料在新时代的转型中发挥其重要功能,它义无反顾地承担了这一重任,然而最终获得的历史性中介却极不可靠。

This essay examines how biblical narrative is typologically refigured in Milton's Paradise Lost. Typology is a form of discourse found in major poems of the Christian tradition. More than just an exegetical mode, typology makes possible a poiesis in which those who live after Christ can discern in the shadowy events of their own experience just how they participate in history's eschatological truth. Typological poems labor to assimilate themselves to the tradition and assimilate the tradition to themselves. While many elements of Milton's argument are traditional, the way in which biblical narrative is refigured in the poem reflects Milton's struggle with the necessities imposed by modernity's newly emerging discursive order. The poem struggles to make a vast range of materials from earlier epochs function meaningfully within the configurations of this new epoch. The poem carries out these labors with remarkable integrity, but the historical mediation finally achieved in its ending is extremely unstable.