“’That man may know he dwells not in his own’: Natural and Textual Ecosystems in Paradise Lost

Milton’s anthropocentrism never matched with the orthodox XVII-century dualism between rational man and inert nature, and his poetry offered ample opportunities to question the hierarchical attitudes that extolled man’s place in the universe. Milton endorsed a sort of vitalist materialism which bestowed moral faculty and agency on all creation; in turn, this prophetic commitment to the inherent dignity of non-human life in all its forms confirmed his perceptive association of social inequality, moral corruption, and ecological ravages. In Milton’s eyes, man could still «repair the ruin of our first parents», but this human and ecological regeneration (accomplished by Christ’s ability to «raise Eden in the waste Wilderness» in Paradise Regained) inevitably entailed a self-corrective mental adjustment and a parallel process of linguistic ecology to reverse satanic appropriations. The article will thus reconsider some passages of Milton’s epic in order to highlight the poem’s layered (and often inconsistent and contradictory) language, functional to renew the cultural as well as religious perspectives of his time and recover an authentic form of Christian anthropocentrism, a proper human ethics coincident with an ecosystem-centered ethics, a novel world in which the Earth “Shall all be Paradise” and man will be able to attain a «paradise within […] happier far».