Was Milton a great religious and political thinker as well as a great poet? The overwhelmingly dominant answer has been no. It was because his ideas seemed dangerously wrong to eighteenth-century critics that he was made into an object of exclusively literary study. His ideas were partially exhumed by the Romantics, but the twentieth-century consensus echoed that of the eighteenth: while a few critics found his ideas exciting, most found them distasteful, whether on conservative, aesthetic or atheist grounds.

The academic study of Milton has moved on. The proper duty of the well-bred Miltonologist is simply to understand his ideas better, not to praise or criticise them. The preface to this hefty volume of thirty-eight essays includes the observation that ‘The rise of critical interest in Milton's political and religious prose is perhaps the most striking aspect of Milton studies in recent times, a consequence in great part of the increasingly fluid relations between literary and historical disciplines.’ But this does not mean a rekindling of the debate about his rightness or wrongness. Even as it explores his thought in more detail, Milton studies is cementing its attitude of post-ideological detachment. This spirit of detachment is doubtless conducive to clear-headed research, free of polemical posturing. But it quietly implies that his ideas no longer matter very much. Those who feel that they do matter might feel roused to pull down the huge ornate edifice of Milton studies, Samson-like, in order to return to them.

Two of the best essays are on the early poetry. With conspicuous enthusiasm for his subject, Gordon Teskey shows how these poems bristle with confident vitality. A key aspect of this is their ceremonial, or festive, quality: the stanzas of the Nativity Ode are likened to ‘floats in a parade’, and ‘L'Allegro’ has the feel of an evil-banishing spell. There is more poetic exorcism in the masque known as Comus. Ann Baynes Coiro reminds us how bold it was to put a young woman centre-stage, and convincingly argues that this heroine is no mere pious cipher, but ‘possesses and projects an imaginative erotic power that thrums under A Maske and adds dramatic tension to the idea of chastity’.

Most of the essays relating to his prose are less engaging. These authors know their stuff, but whether they have anything much to say is less clear. Indeed it feels as if the core drama of Milton's thought gets lost amid the erudition. The fact is that Milton, in mid-career, outlines a strikingly new Christian vision: the separation of Church and State can bring a new era in Christian history. On one level all these scholars know this, but none seems fully focused on it, nor excited by it, in the way that Gordon Teskey is excited by the vitality of the early poetry. For example there are two essays on Areopagitica, but neither mentions its crucial theological passage, in which Milton suggests that previous reformers were politically narrow, and calls for the new regime to embark on ‘the reforming of Reformation itself’. No one really grapples with the question of what this further reformation might mean. Elizabeth Sauer briefly acknowledges it in her discussion of the later religious tracts: ‘Implied in the argument for disestablishment is a new concept of the Christian church.’ But her focus is on the Old Testament-style fusion of religion and nation that he rejects; the question of his positive alternative gets rather lost. The issue of ecclesiology is entirely neglected by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, who jointly expound his theological work, De doctrina christiana.

This evasion echoes Milton's own: his ecclesiology is a minimalist blur. He seems to believe that the true Church will blossom forth on the soil of disestablishment and toleration. But if establishment and orthodoxy are rejected, in what sense will this be a ‘Church’? What form is Christianity meant to take in a deregulated religious culture? What sort of sacramental activity will there be? Should we get our sacramentalism from epic poetry instead of church services? Critics should be putting these questions to Milton's shade. It seems bizarre that not one of the thirty-eight contributors is a theologian or church historian, who would, one hopes, raise such questions. (Admittedly this is partly the fault of theologians, for failing to argue for Milton's enduring theological importance.)

Many of the essays on Paradise lost show the enduring influence of the American critic Stanley Fish. His achievement has been to restore a sense of Milton's authority within this text, a sense that he knows exactly what he is doing, in literary and theological terms. In a sense Fish has enabled the contemporary post-religious critic to enter the thought-world of the text; to marvel at its intelligent design, and even to venture a form of obedience, submission. It is a shame that we do not hear from Fish himself.

The essay on the epics that I found most instructive was John Rogers's contribution: ‘Paradise regained and the memory of Paradise lost’. I had not previously appreciated how closely intertwined the two poems are, in relation to Christology. The climax of the sequel is the realisation that Jesus is the Son of God, but Milton has a very specific account of this identity. He emerges as the Son who defeated Satan in the pre-historic ‘War in Heaven’, as described in the main epic. This event is unscriptural, but Milton makes it crucial to the Christology of both epics. ‘It is the singular Christology of Paradise lost, and in particular Milton's wildly original contribution, in Book 6, to the story of the Son, that provides the key to the mystery of the identity of its sequel's hero.’ Also, ‘the original epic comes to depend on the sequel for the verification of the quasi-scriptural status of its own most daring mythology’. What emerges (to go beyond Rogers's essay) is that Milton is so taken with the image of Christus Victor that he wants to reorganise the whole of theology around it, and even in effect to re-write the Bible around it. The divinity of Christ is fully centred on his role as ‘heroic debeller’ of Satan. (It would be nice to have some theological reflection on this aspect of Milton's vision.)

In such a long book, which claims to be interdisciplinary, there is disappointingly little meat for the theologically-minded Milton fan. But Milton is so good that it is worth exploring vast academic forests in order to glean a few fresh berries.