ABSTRACT
For Milton, the boundaries between God’s presence in the external and material world and his presence within the human soul must be reconciled in a contradiction: on the one hand, God exists in interior human space, and therefore God exists, through human agency, in the external world. On the other hand, one must be a steward of material places such as the land, because as covenanted reality and metonymy of God, land requires gratitude, responsibility, respect, and careful management. The present chapter will concern itself with Milton’s view of tending to the interior land of the human soul, the “upright heart and pure” (Paradise Lost 1.18), because it represents one of the terrains in which one fi nds intimacy with God and thus hope. So pervasive is the connection between hope and land that it permeates the rhetoric and the ethics of interiority.
