A Religious Poem of Depravity and Fissure : Pragmatism, Experimentalism, and neo-Pyrrhonic Skepticism in Paradaise Lost

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Raphael's admonition about astronomy is counterbalanced with the narrator's superb knowledge of both geocentric and heliocentric theories. His conflicting attitudes are derived from two different sources : the Biblical pragmatism to direct our attention on God with adherence to our daily behavior with traditional religious morality, and the seventeenth-century experimentalism to search for wonders in the universe through which we will appreciate dexterities of the Creator's genius more than ever. The Renaissance scientists tried to make clear the boundaries between facts and fiction about cosmography, and consequently how superficially the pragmatists grasp the works of God's creation. Taking one of these two sides is a pressing question to be solved in the seventeenth century. The narrator encourages the readers to blindly trust God's order and cancel the latter as a sacrilegious attitude. But the narrator, with referring to several wonders beyond common knowledge throughout the poem, exposes his keen interest and approval for a number of discoveries by those experimentalists. The traditional and the new approaches to appreciate God's creation plunges his intrinsically coherent attitude to fluctuating. But the wobbling is a superficial problem with us. What matters here is his inner deep assurance that he is able to possess every phenomenon, even a most wondrous event, as an object to be described as a God's creation. A conviction of his qualification as an authentic writer for explaining within the Biblical context, proves his lack of a neo-Pyrrhonic skepticism that even experimental science is a hypothetical human invention with leaving much room for doubt and incredulity. Such an absence of skepticism is shared by the poet's predecessors. In fact, God's creativity with generative multiplicity explodes semantic closure of the narrator's blind trust in "marvelous possession" and throws us into the "doubt's boundless sea."