ABSTRACT
Popular English translations of the Bible, such as Geneva and King James, in accord with the Latin Vulgate and the Greek, carefully specify 'the death'. Which might suggest that the death at issue is spiritual and that it results from sin, not simply from the physical constitution of humankind. The enclosed circularity of all these relationships embraces solipsism, autoeroticism, and narcissism; all too literally it substantiates the interwined relation of mind and will with flesh and of body with sin and death that is found in Saint Paul. When first encountered in Milton's Hell, he therefore appears essentially to be the Pauline 'body of this death'. Predictably, when Milton's Adam at last sees death corporeally realized embodied in the full panoply of forms taken by human death, this is no longer simply the phantasmic body of death but overwhelmingly death in all the physical agony arising from bodily maladies and diseases.
