Professor Phillip Donnelly from Baylor University will present his lecture, Rhetoric, Dialectic, and Poetic Revelation in Paradise Lost and Plato’s Republic.

What does John Milton’s biblical epic, Paradise Lost, have to do with Plato’s Republic? The first part of this presentation explains how Paradise Lost directly engages, in parallel sequence, the central issues addressed in Plato’s dialogue. Milton’s poem does more than simply address some of the same topics, such as justice, tyranny, wisdom, myth-making, or moral psychology; rather, Paradise Lost also treats these central issues using the same arrangement as the Republic. In view of this structural engagement, the second part of this presentation focuses on the educational digression that begins near the center of both texts. Ultimately, Milton’s epic narrative response to the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy offers not simply an alternative to Socratic dialectic but its transformation. In effect, Paradise Lost subsumes both rhetoric and dialectic within a poetics of divine revelation.