Are the Protestants Starving? Residual Appetites in Paradise Lost

Are the Protestants starving? This question underpins my reading of how the metaphorics of appetite and eating in Paradise Lost suggests a residual Protestant longing for the flesh and blood of Christ in the eucharist: a longing that gains its figurative power, I argue, from a cultural memory of loss. This longing, as Regina Schwarz has also argued, is evident in the work of many Reformation poets. The entanglement of Milton’s poem “with its own urgent historical context” is evident when we consider the connection of the centrality of appetite in the poem with the centrality of an appetite for the eucharist that was, as Miri Rubin argues, at the heart of a symbolic system that provided a language of social relations and a cosmic order.1 I argue that the persistent reenactment of troubled appetite in Paradise Lost gives expression to an absence, or a gap brought about by the doctrinal challenge to the orthodox interpretation of the eucharist as purely material. The Reformation debate over the eucharist that ranged from Reformist uneasiness with the idea of eating Christ to Catholic fears of losing the special identification with God achieved through sacramental eating created a profound ontological rupture. I want to introduce the idea of historicizing trauma as a useful way to explore the deep sense of loss brought about by the systematic undermining of a ritual of alimentary satisfaction that had sustained the Christian community for centuries. This loss is frequently represented as a nostalgic appetite for the material presence of Christ in the eucharist; and it is this longing that shadows the figurative jostling of sanctioned and prohibited appetite in Milton’s poem.