John Milton (1608-1674)

Born in the early seventeenth century, Milton lived through extraordinary events of national importance. Not least of these is the Civil War, when social unrest led to the public execution of Charles I, followed by the Interregnum (literally “between reigns”) when England was without a king, governed instead under parliamentary rule and the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell.

Milton played a major role in these events, working tirelessly throughout his career as an ideological opponent of monarchy. To that end he published numerous (and often lengthy) essays attacking the institution of monarchy and defending republicanism (from the Latin res publica, literally “thing of the people”—i.e. representative government). Milton, then, was in most respects a political progressive, and champion of individual liberty across a range of issues. Areopagitica (1644), for example, is widely considered the earliest sustained defense of a free press against what he saw as the tyranny of censorship. Milton also wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, advocating divorce based solely on incompatibility.

On all such issues, Milton’s personal life and out-sized personality were prominent. The divorce tracts were written at a time when his first wife, Mary Powell, returned home not long after they were married, apparently because living with Milton had become very difficult. The feeling, it seems, was mutual. Similarly, Milton’s advocacy on behalf of a free press surely was connected to the radical nature of his political and religious views: he opposed episcopacy—the hierarchical system of government that the English church retained after its break with the Catholic church in the previous century—as fiercely as he opposed monarchy. Indeed, he saw both institutions as inextricably related, the one reinforcing the other, both corrupt and oppressive. (James I, who reigned from 1603 to 1625, was said to have understood that an attack on the state church was an attack on the monarchy itself, saying famously, “No bishops, no king.”)

Milton lived through the English Civil war and the period following the execution of Charles I in 1649—an event which took place just outside of Whitehall in London, and at which we can easily imagine Milton cheering with delight at the downfall of a figure he regarded as a tyrant. He would have been utterly devastated a little more than a decade later when the executed king’s surviving son, Charles II, returned from exile and was crowned king of England. This Restoration (1660) was a crushing defeat for English republicanism.

Though not published until 1667, Paradise Lost is included among Renaissance works because in style and content it belongs to that period. One of only two English epic poems, it is the supreme achievement of a man who, though undoubtedly progressive in politics, was firmly rooted in literary and other intellectual traditions of the past. That he escaped execution for his part in opposing the Stuart regime is fortunate for us, for otherwise there’d be no Paradise Lost. We are also indebted to Milton’s amanuenses (hired scribes) who dutifully wrote down the poem as he dictated it to them orally, having by this time become totally blind after years of suffering from glaucoma—yet able to “tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (PL 3.55). The title of Milton’s greatest work, then, befits the end of an era—even whilst ironically signaling what must have been his greatest disappointment, the failure of England to overthrow either monarchy or episcopacy.

Epic

Paradise Lost is modelled on the great epic poems of the classical era. Typical features of epic include the following:

Single event and focus: in Homer’s Iliad, Achilles’ dispute with the Greek general Agamemnon during the Trojan War; in the Odyssey, Odysseus’ journey home after the War; in Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan exile and the founding of the new Troy—i.e. Rome; and in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Fall (and what Northrop Frye called “The Story of All Things”)

Enclyclopedic: in PL, for example, covering all of (biblical) history, from Creation to Apocalypse; replete with numerous classical allusions; and touching on a range of subjects that includes cosmology, medicine, horticulture, metallurgy, stagecraft, statecraft, politics, warfare, entomology, and rhetoric, to name but a few of Milton’s interests

Other features:

machinery: supernatural agents; in PL, God, Satan, devils, and angels

elevated style

elaborate similes and metaphors

catalogues: vast lists of angels and demons, not unlike the catalogues of arms and warriors in Homer

invocations to the Muse (i.e. poetic inspiration)

blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, the meter of Shakespeare’s great tragedies

setting vast in scale: Heaven, Hell, the terrestrial world, and the known universe

in medias res: an epic typically begins “in the middle of things”; PL opens with the exiled Satan and the fallen angels just after the war in heaven

Synopsis

Milton’s understanding of human history, as for his European contemporaries, was rooted in biblical Christianity and could be described as consisting of five major phases: Creation, Fall, Exodus (or Exile), Redemption, and Apocalypse. Or, in more detail:

creation of angels

fall of Lucifer/Satan

creation of the universe

Fall of Man (i.e. humankind)

expulsion from Paradise and exile

human history in all its horror—death, war, suffering—all resulting from the Fall

redemption (birth and death of Christ)

more fallen history

apocalypse: Second Coming, end of human history, Paradise restored

This outline is really the structure of a narrative, in this case a narrative which happens to be one of the founding myths of Western civilization. As mentioned, however, epic poems typically begin in medias res, “in the middle of things,” and in Milton’s poem the chronology is non-linear. Here, then, is the order of events in Paradise Lost with their corresponding book-numbers in parentheses:

just after fall of Satan and rebel angels; counsel in Hell; Satan’s journey to earth (1-2)

counsel in Heaven; Satan’s arrival at Eden; Eve’s dream (3-4)

war in heaven; fall of Satan and rebel angels (5-6)

Midpoint: the end of Book 6 brings us full circle, back to the beginning of the poem, where Satan and the rebels have just been expelled from Heaven. Then,

Creation and cosmology (as told to Adam by the archangel Raphael) (7-8)

Fall of Man (9)

Satan’s triumph; Adam and Eve repent (10)

human history to the Flood (revealed to Adam by Michael) (11)

human history from Flood to Christ and beyond; Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise (12)

Theodicy

Miltons’s purpose, the theme of his “great argument,” is to “assert Eternal Providence / And justify the ways of God to men” (1.24-26). His mission more specifically is to explain the presence of evil in a universe created by a wholly benevolent and blameless deity. This vindication of a just and merciful divinity in the face of evil is what is known as a theodicy.

Milton’s argument, deceptively simple, is succinctly stated by the Father in Book 3. Man, says God, was created “just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (3.98-99). Love is not possible without freedom, for without freedom all action (or refraining from action), all expressions of loyalty and fidelity, would be meaningless. For love to be real rather than an illusion, it must be freely chosen. So this God, the embodiment of love, makes creatures who are free to choose whether or not to love their Creator.

For Adam and Eve, the Tree in the center of the Garden of Eden (the unfallen Paradise of the poem’s title) is the symbol around which their love and fealty toward their Creator is exercised. They are told that they may eat any of Eden’s fruit, with the exception of fruit from this one tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Literally everything is permissible, for in their innocence Adam and Eve have no moral knowledge. They do not know right from wrong because they have no conception of right and wrong. All they know is what God has told them: that they are free to do whatever they want, but that if they eat of this one tree, they will die.

So the Tree is best thought of as a sign—a sign of love and fealty. Every minute of every day that they refrain from eating the fruit of the Tree and engage in virtually any other activity, they are expressing love toward the Creator. This sign of love, moreover, is an unreasonable sign. Fealty and love have nothing to do with reason, even (indeed, especially) when reason seems to say that eating from the Tree is permissible. In short, God seems to be saying to Adam and Eve that if your reason is telling you to eat from the Tree, it is lying to you and should be ignored. Love and fealty toward the Creator might be unreasonable. In Milton’s poem, that is not only okay; it turns out to be essential.

I’ve belabored these remarks about Milton’s theodicy because they are central to the poem as a whole. But this abstract discussion will become more vivid (and even more belabored, I’m afraid) when we get to Book 9, to which we will devote two classes. We begin, however, with Book 1 in its entirety, the moments immediately after which Satan and the other fallen angels have been expelled from Heaven for rebelling against Heaven’s king. The second class will be devoted to selections from other parts of the poem that are especially relevant for our experience of Book 9.

Some additional remarks about the Miltonic personality: Northrop Frye once wrote that the problem with Milton is that everyone is always trying to bring him down to their own size. This stems perhaps from the fact that the poem’s narrative voice can be a little intimidating, even maddening. Milton did not suffer from a diminished ego, nor does he hesitate to assume that his audience needs to hear what he has to say. It is merely true, however, that his learning was extraordinarily vast, for he read just about everything of note that had been published in his day. He was fluent in multiple European languages, as well as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and probably Aramaic. So while he is bound to provoke some strong reactions from his reader (and probably intended to do so), he is to be taken seriously as someone who means what he says, his ideas respected as the convictions of a first-rate intellect and artist—even (and especially) where we find them most objectionable.

Finally (and I say this with utter conviction): in terms of poetic quality and lyrical beauty, Paradise Lost is pretty close to perfection. My wish for you, if nothing else, is that you become as smitten by that beauty as I was when I first read the poem several decades ago.