ABSTRACT
In many cultures, the experience of pain has been treated as the central and most intense passion. In Paradise Lost, John Milton emphasizes all the more fervently God's impassibility and the painlessness of the unfallen regions. Even in Milton's summa theologica, De Doctrina Christiana, it is a marginal issue, occasionally touched upon, but never extensively treated. Elaine Scarry in her book The Body in Pain has analyzed how the alleviation and application of pain can thus make and unmake a subject's life-world. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the continuous infliction of senseless pain effects the reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions. In the Christian tradition, pain is first and foremost conceived and justified as the divine punishment of the first transgression, as the seal of the profanation by which Man fell out of the divine cosmic order.
