Paradise Lost – John Milton, 1667-1674 ★★★★

Eve of Destruction

Literature is a subjective medium, so defining greatness in it is tricky. Time makes this trickier; one generation’s masterpiece might just leave their descendants dazed and confused. Scholars are Beowulf’s main audience now; does anyone still read Pilgrim’s Progress?

Paradise Lost had a time capsule feel not long after its creation. Religiously, John Milton’s Puritan form of Christianity had already fallen out of favor in his homeland by the time of its publication; stylistically, its use of blank verse was even more out-of-step.

Why then, has it mattered as long and as deeply as it does?

Romantic poets, whether they had use for Christianity itself, believed in its lyrical greatness as firmly as Milton did in the Bible. Modernists, too, found much to admire – even to the point of detecting seeds of secularist doubt in Milton’s retelling of the Fall of Man. A few years ago, Hollywood planned a movie around its epic fantasy elements.

Mattering is one thing; reading another. What was it like to read Paradise Lost when you’d rather pick up another spy novel?

The answer: Quite good. Not perfect, not always riveting, but from a pure reading perspective, much better than expected.

William Blake's "The Temptation And Fall Of Eve," an illustration based on Book IX of Paradise Lost, shows Eve taking the plunge while Adam is preoccupied.
Image from https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-sound-and-the-story-exploring-the-world-of-paradise-lost

At its core, Paradise Lost is a discourse on an age-old question of why God lets bad things happen to good people. Milton’s answer blends a firm belief in predestination with the promise of transcendent grace:

“Man shall not quite be lost, but sav’d who will;
Yet not of will in him, but grace in me
Freely vouchsaf’t.” [God, Book III, lines 173-175]

According to a 1968 introduction by Christopher Ricks, appreciating the religious thesis is critical to understanding Paradise Lost. “Art for art’s sake?” he huffed. “Art for God’s sake.” He also notes a burning desire by the author to make something of English literature, a field Milton once wrote had been left to “the unskilful handling of monks and mechanics.”

Milton incorporates multiple classical allusions as a way of showcasing his ambition, that of achieving a work of epic glory which weaves in (yet remains independent from) the language of Greek or Latin myth. His goal was producing nothing short of a masterpiece that stands wholly on its own, as Milton declares early on:

I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. [Book I, lines 12-16]

John Milton as depicted at three different ages of his life. By the time he wrote Paradise Lost, he was famously blind, a condition that his champions would liken to that of Homer, or later on, Beethoven's deafness, for how triumphantly he worked through it.
Image from https://classicalpoets.org/2017/11/07/10-greatest-poems-written-by-john-milton/#/  

Milton’s ambition is perhaps ironic given the poem’s subject matter, not one but at least two instances of colossal overreach, one by a fallen angel, the other by Man (or as it plays out here, a woman.)

The angel comes first. He is Satan, the most famous character in Paradise Lost, sometimes invoked by later readers as a hero. When we first meet him, he is regrouping with his gang of fellow outcasts after finding themselves, immortal but humiliated, stuck on a smoky waste.

His famous formulation, stated on line 263 of Book I, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n,” is leavened by the realization he has nothing to lose, having already literally hit rock bottom:

“Peace is despair’d;
For who can think Submission? War, then, War
Open or understood, must be resolv’d.” – Satan, Book I, lines 660-662

Satan's fall, depicted in an engraving by Gustave Dore circa 1850. Satan remains defiant: "What though the field be lost?/All is not lost—the unconquerable will,/And study of revenge, immortal hate,/And courage never to submit or yield." [Book I, lines 105-108]
Image from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/sympathy-for-the-devil-milton-s-satan-as-political-rebel-1.5497049 

That war, we come to learn, will involve destroying God’s newest and proudest creation, Man. For in addition to vanity, Satan is a figure of massive jealousy, and regards God’s love of humanity with bile.

Satan is also a bit of a bore, at least to me. Milton gives him the lion’s share of attention early on, as the Arch-fiend convenes a counsel of devils to discuss his plan. There is much about his conversation that conjures up schools of thought yet unmade, like the Enlightenment (“The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” [Book I, lines 254-255], but ultimately Satan is a one-trick pony. His trick: convincing Eve he is a mere talking serpent, and to go ahead and sample fruit from that Tree of Knowledge just over there, like he did.

That accomplished, Satan basically disappears, back to Hell to crow until at last his terrible crime will be turned into a joyous blessing by Christ’s Redemption, something the poem’s pre-Flood narrative can only prefigure. He does get off some good lines, but that’s it.

British Romantic painter John Martin in 1825 offered this representation of Satan gazing over Hell in Paradise Lost, "a Universe of death, which God by curse/Created evil..." [Book II, lines 622-623]. Many have detected a whiff of British Parliament in Milton's account of Hell; here Martin seems to run with the idea.
Image from https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170419-why-paradise-lost-is-one-of-the-worlds-most-important-poems

Milton himself is much more fascinating. There’s something magnificent to behold on almost every page, whether it be a turn of phrase, a witty analogy, even a fine fart joke:

“But Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her Temperance over Appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with Surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind.” [Book VII, lines 126-130]

Here, the Angel Raphael lightly warns Adam that too much knowledge is not good for man. But this will be ignored. Not by Adam, who in this telling is very observant of Heavenly instruction. No, it’s the other one, that Eve chick, who is the ruination here.

Eve gets a big build up in this poem. God may be the light of Adam’s life, but Eve is Adam’s center, the totality of his earthly joy, described in verse that is unapologetically erotic in some places, foreboding in others:

All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her
Loses discount’nanc’d, and like folly shows;
Authority and Reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made… [Book VIII, lines 551-555]

William Strang's etching of Adam and Eve as depicted in Book IV of Paradise Lost captures some of Eve's ambivalence beneath her words of devotion to her mate: "My Author and Disposer, what thou bidd'st/Unargu'd I obey." [Lines 635-636]
Image from https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/32556/book-four-happy-state-adam-and-eve-illustration-paradise-lost-strang-no-349

What Eve thinks is more of a mystery, and at the center of the poem’s dramatic tension. That she is misled by Satan in serpent form is clear; less so is whether or not her level of contentment pre-Fall was the same as Adam’s. One gets the feeling that like Satan she wishes for more than to be a mere tool in someone Else’s employ.

Eve is the poem’s most interesting character both for what Milton says and doesn’t say about her. Early on, she is notable for her rote obsequiousness. “God is thy Law, thou mine: To know no more/Is woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.” [Book IV, lines 637-638] But she does have a mind of her own, and it’s a dousy.

First, when Adam asks her not to go wandering off alone in their Garden of Eden, warning her Satan has slipped through God’s protective net, she shrugs it off, saying she’s too minor a figure to interest big ol’ Satan. Once having fallen for Satan’s spiel, she decides to take Adam along for the ride because, as she puts it, he might otherwise let God replace her.

She does this by telling Adam her new life is nothing without him. Like a chump, he believes it, against what Milton notes is his better judgment.

…he scrupl’d not to eat,
Against his better knowledge, not deceiv’d,
But fondly overcome with Female charm. [Book IX, lines 997-999]

Not everything in Paradise Lost is doom and gloom. A shepherd's reverie of fairies at play is at one point offered up as lovely counterpoint to more Hellish goings-on. "... they on their mirth and dance/Intent, with jocund music charm his ear." [Book I, lines 786-787] That momentary aside inspired the above, painted by Henry Fuseli in 1793.
Image from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fuseli-the-shepherds-dream-from-paradise-lost-t00876

There is a school of thought that Milton, however Puritan, was unconsciously more skeptical, even atheistic. Generations of readers have said Satan gets all the best lines. And what kind of loving God sticks a cursed Tree of Knowledge for His faithful servants to slip up and eat from? That question does come up in the poem itself, and more than once. Milton references free will, but in a way that doesn’t quite convince.

So why not claim Milton was a closet feminist, too, taking the tack that Eve is liberating herself from her beau’s confining embrace?

But these modernist theories feel like stretches after reading all twelve books. Milton is pursuing a subterranean agenda alright, but one about how the Fall of Man can be explained as setting up the Redemption of Christ, and how Eve’s misbehavior, as well as Adam’s complicity in same, will be gloriously undone by another woman, Mary, who will serve as the ultimate bridge between God and man.

Satan in the body of a snake beguiles Eve, in a 1899 illustration by Walter Crane. In Paradise Lost, Milton makes clear this "serpent," while "subtl'st beast of all the field," was in essence a good creature and "obedient" to God before Satan took possession of him. Perhaps he still was, if allowing Satan into the Garden was God's plan, as Milton suggests.
 Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/329255422763880467/

Adam gets the final word in the matter:

“O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness!” [Book XII, lines 469-473]

Much of Paradise Lost’s brilliance may be beyond my grasp, being as it is so dependent on an understanding of its historical antecedents, both Biblical and literary. Milton’s relentless Catholic-bashing is as tedious as his constant classical allusions, and long sections of the poem, like the entireties of Books VII and VIII, are given over to protracted explanations regarding how this and that came to be.

But reading it straight through was enjoyable. Some of that comes from the rich epic-fantasy segments, particularly the lead up to the big battle (or was it a rematch?) between the forces of Heaven and Hell, and the blow-by-blow account of the battle itself. Call it Genesis-meets-the-Marvel Comic Universe, but it works.

In Paradise Lost, getting kicked out of Eden is rather gently performed by God and His Angel Michael, with Adam being given a consolatory vision of man's Redemption. Above is the more traditional, angrier version as painted by French painter Alexandre Cabanel.
Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Expulsion_of_Adam_and_Eve_(Alexandre_Cabanel).jpg 

Also impressive are Milton’s many ruminations on nature’s beauty, descriptions that often take a transcendent, even Transcendental hue:

His praise, ye Winds, that from four Quarters blow,
Breathe soft or loud; and, wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every Plant, in sign of Worship wave. [Book V, lines 192-194]

Mystified as I was by John Keats’ adulation for Milton while reading Keats’ own work, it came together reading this.

“He belongs with Shakespeare and with Wordsworth precisely because his writing balances so transcendently both the conservative and the revolutionary,” Ricks wrote in his Introduction.

Indeed, much about Milton is quite radical when looked at today, and not just because his belief system is so different from what prevails in our culture. He fearlessly plays with iconography and dares ask probing questions as uncomfortable now as they were then.

One enigmatic figure in Paradise Lost is Abdiel, seen here getting the upper hand on Satan in a Gustave Dore engraving circa 1868. A fallen angel who redeems himself and rejoins God, Abdiel has no direct Biblical origin. He tells Satan: "My Sect thou seest, now learn too late/How few sometimes may know, when thousands err." [Book VI, lines 148-149]
Image from https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-dore/abdiel-and-satan

Which gets us back to the first question: Does Paradise Lost hold up for someone not attuned to its message or native to its culture? For me, the answer was a resounding yes, not only because I enjoyed it but because I could just about appreciate how well it connects up with the literary tradition it helped found. Milton’s message of pious skepticism, and the many ways he delivers it, has resonances that connect however far we have strayed from the Age of Belief.

And for an epic poem, it is not that onerous a read either; broken up as it is into a dozen more or less digestible Books, each carrying its own thesis, or “Argument,” that connects with the others while presenting its own unique spin. Whether you take Paradise Lost as a matter of faith, or of fantasy, it holds up surprisingly well. At least it did for this modern reader.

There are two versions of Paradise Lost; an original ten-book version from 1667 and a revised 12-book version published in 1672. The second version spreads out the narrative into more digestible installments, but revisions are otherwise fairly minor, matters of nuance more than meaning.