Say first, for Heav’n hides nothing from Thy view/Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause/Mov’d our Grand Parents in that happy State,/Favor’d of Heav’n so highly, to fall off/From their Creator, and transgress His Will/For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?/Who first seduc’d them to that foul revolt?/Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile/Stirr’d up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv’d/The Mother of Mankind; what time his Pride/Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his Host/Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring/To set himself in Glory above his Peers,/He trusted to have equall’d the most High,/If he oppos’d; and with ambitious aim/Against the Throne and Monarchy of God/Rais’d impious War in Heav’n and Battle proud/With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power/Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ Etheral Sky/With hideous ruin and combustion down/To bottomless perdition, there to dwell/In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,/Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to Arms. – John Milton (1608-1674), Paradise Lost (1.27-49).
Category Archives: “Paradise Lost”
On Milton’s Poetry
The only completed successful epic poem in the English language is Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” It differs from all the other great epics of the Western world by having a precise theological aim: to justify the ways of God to men. Milton is, here, using the word “justify” in the third definition of the word given in the Oxford English Dictionary: “to show…to be just or in the right.” That God, who is, by definition, just and right, as well as omnipotent, should require justification by a human poet seems somewhat extraordinary. To justify the ways of men to God might seem a reasonable undertaking, but to justify the ways of God to men implies that there is prima facie evidence that God deals unjustly with men and that God is in need of a defence. Further, Milton sees that defence as especially needed by religious people, by committed Christians indeed, that “fit audience though few” to whom his poem is addressed. It seems, therefore, that he considered the account of God’s dealings with men, as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, to be, in itself, an inadequate explanation of the inconsistencies between the concept of an all-good and all-powerful God and the facts of human experience. Milton went further than that. In his posthumously published Latin work on Christian doctrine, he stated boldly that the facts of human experience “have compelled all nations to believe, either that God, or that some evil power whose name was unknown, presided over the affairs of the world.” He considered the view that evil ruled the world to be “as unmeet as it is incredible,” yet he conceded that it was warranted by simple observation of what happens to men in the world.
This dilemma is, of course, an ancient one: how to reconcile human suffering, especially the suffering of the righteous, with the existence of an omnipotent God of justice and love…
From: God and the Poets by David Daiches; the Gifford Lectures for 1983 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 1.
David Daiches (1912-2005) was an English-born Scottish literary critic and a prolific author. He died five years ago today, aged 92.
Augustine and Milton on the Fall of Man
But, while the Fall consisted in Disobedience, it resulted, like Satan’s, from Pride (De. Civ. Dei, xiv, 13). Hence, Satan approaches Eve through her Pride: first, by flattery of her beauty (P. L. ix, 532-48) which “should be seen…ador’d and served by Angels” and, secondly (this is more important), by urging her selfhood to direct revolt against the fact of being subject to God at all. “Why,” he asks, “was this forbid? Why but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers?” (ix, 703). This is the direct appeal to the finite creature’s desire to be “on its own,” esse in semet ipso. At the moment of eating, “nor was godhead from her thought” (ix, 790).
From: A Preface to “Paradise Lost” by C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 69. In the chapter this quotation is from, Lewis is comparing Augustine’s (354-430) and John Milton’s (1608-1674) explications of the Fall of man.
John Milton’s Poem of the Fall
The rebellion of Satan and the tyranny of a Nimrod or a Charles are wrong for the same reason. Tyranny, the rule over equals as if they were inferiors, is rebellion. And, equally, as Shakespeare’s Ulysses saw, rebellion is tyranny. All Milton’s hatred of tyranny is expressed in the poem: but the tyrant held up to our execrations is not God. It is Satan. He is the Sultan – a name hateful in Milton’s day to all Europeans both as freemen and as Christians. He is the chief, the general, the great Commander. He is the Machiavellian prince who excuses his “political realism” by “necessity, the tyrant’s plea.” His rebellion begins with talk about liberty but, very soon, proceeds to “what we more effect, Honour, Dominion, glorie, and renoune” (6.421). The same process is at work in Eve. Hardly has she swallowed the fruit before she wants to be “more equal” to Adam; and hardly has she said the word “equal” before she emends it to “superior” (9.824).
From: A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 78.
The Public Reception of “Paradise Lost”
That in the reigns of Charles and James the Paradise Lost received no public acclamations is readily confessed. Wit and literature were on the side of the Court: and who that solicited favour or fashion would venture to praise the defender of the regicides? All that he himself could think his due, from evil tongues in evil days, was that reverential silence which was generously preserved. But, it cannot be inferred that his poem was not read, or not, however unwillingly, admired.
The sale, if it be considered, will justify the public. Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions. The call for books was not, in Milton’s age, what it is at present. To read was not, then, a general amusement; neither traders nor, often, gentlemen, thought themselves disgraced by ignorance. The women had not, then, aspired to literature, nor was every house supplied with a closet of knowledge. Those, indeed, who professed learning were not less learned than at any other time; but, of that middle race of students who read for pleasure or accomplishment, and who buy the numerous products of modern typography, the number was, then, comparatively small. To prove the paucity of readers, it may be sufficient to remark, that the nation had been satisfied, from 1623 to 1664, that is, forty-one years, with only two editions of Shakespeare, which probably did not, together, make one thousand copies.
The sale of thirteen hundred copies in two years, in opposition to so much recent enmity, and to a style of versification new to all and disgusting to many, was an uncommon example of the prevalence of genius. The demand did not immediately increase; for many more readers than were supplied at first the nation did not afford. Only three thousand were sold in eleven years; for it forced its way without assistance; its admirers did not dare to publish their opinion; and the opportunities now given of attracting notice by advertisements were, then, very few; the means of proclaiming the publications of new books have been produced by that general literature which now pervades the nation through all its ranks.
But, the reputation and price of the copy still advanced, till the Revolution put an end to the secrecy of love, and Paradise Lost broke into open view with sufficient security of kind reception.
Fancy can hardly forbear to conjecture with what temper Milton surveyed the silent progress of his work, and marked its reputation stealing its way in a kind of subterraneous current through fear and silence. I cannot but conceive him calm and confident, little disappointed, not at all dejected, relying on his own merit with steady consciousness, and waiting, without impatience, the vicissitudes of opinion, and the impartiality of a future generation.
From: “John Milton (1608-1674)” in Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson; 2 volumes; reprinted in the Everyman’s Library series (#770) (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1925), 1:86-87.
Today is John Milton’s 400th birthday (December 9, 1608). He is, of course, the great English poet who wrote Paradise Lost. Milton is usually considered the second greatest writer in the English language, behind only William Shakespeare.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was probably the single greatest literary figure of the 18th century – poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, dictionary-maker, travel writer, biographer, and all-around public intellectual. The 300th anniversary of his birth is next year.
John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”
No doubt, all evil-doing creatures inhabit imaginary worlds. Perhaps it is only on the basis of a falsely conceived self inhabiting a falsely posited personal environment that evil can be plotted and executed. Certainly, Beelzebub is, at first, quick to enter the imaginary world fabricated by his former superior. He, too, reflects backward on the campaign which “endanger’d Heav’ns perpetual King” ([Book I, Line] 131): and the phrase is self-contradictory since, if God is the perpetual king, then He was certainly not endangered and, if He was truly endangered, then the perpetuity of His kingship cannot be assured. Then, he speaks of having “put to proof” God’s “high Supremacy” (132); but, granted the supremacy, there is nothing to test, and the pseudo-question whether God’s supremacy is upheld “by strength, or Chance, or Fate” (133) represents a further excursion into illogicality. If supremacy is upheld by something else, then it is not supremacy…
Paradise Lost is a much more cheerful poem than it has frequently been represented to be. The foundations of the whole structure of evil, through which the human race becomes infected, are shown here to be so shaky and insubstantial that the mind savours a kind of laughter in contemplating the irony. And on such foundations are to be constructed all those pseudo-heroic posturings whereby the non-motivated, self-manufactured protagonist pursues his self-contradictory adventures in parodic emulation of the truly purposeful epic heroes of Homer and Virgil. If there is a devastating epic parody in English literature, it is not represented by the journeyings of Joyce’s Bloom around Dublin, but by the empty enterprise of Milton’s Satan. Of course, he himself would be the hero.
From: John Milton’s Creation: A Guide Through “Paradise Lost” by Harry Blamires (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1971), pp. 9, 10-11.
John Milton’s “Paradise Regained”
Paradise Regained is a remarkably superfluous poem in view of the vision of human redemption and the endless ages of new Heaven and new Earth prefigured at the conclusion of Paradise Lost. It concentrates on the temptation of Christ by Satan, which is not, in fact, capable of bearing the weight of a central significance shifted from the events of the Passion. The static interchange of dialogue is not inspired. It is difficult to understand Milton’s lapse from the poetic level sustained elsewhere. One inevitably feels, on reading, that the magnificent flow of Paradise Lost, to which Milton’s muse had geared itself, just had to be allowed to run out.
From: A Short History of English Literature by Harry Blamires (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1974), p. 155.
C. S. Lewis on John Milton
Fortunately, there is a better way. Instead of stripping the knight of his armour, you can try to put his armour on yourself; instead of seeing how the courtier would look without his lace, you can try to see how you would feel with his lace; that is, with his honour, his wit, his royalism, and his gallantries out of the Grand Cyrus. I had much rather know what I should feel like if I adopted the beliefs of Lucretius than how Lucretius would have felt if he had never entertained them. The possible Lucretius in myself interests me more than the possible C. S. Lewis in Lucretius.
There is, in G. K. Chesterton’s Avowals and Denials, a wholly admirable essay called On Man: Heir of All the Ages. An heir is one who inherits and “any man who is cut off from the past…is a man most unjustly disinherited.” To enjoy our full humanity, we ought, as far as is possible, to contain within us potentially at all times and, on occasion, to actualize, all the modes of feeling and thinking through which man has passed. You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an eighteenth-century Londoner while reading Johnson. Only thus will you be able to judge the work “in the same spirit that its author writ” and to avoid the chimerical criticism. It is better to study the changes in which the being of the Human Heart largely consists than to amuse ourselves with fictions about its immutability. For the truth is that, when you have stripped off what the human heart actually was in this or that culture, you are left with a miserable abstraction totally unlike the life really lived by any human being. To take an example from a simple matter, human eating, when you have abstracted all that is peculiar to the social and culinary practice of different times and places, resolves itself into the merely physical. Human love, abstracted from all the varying taboos, sentiments, and ethical discriminations which have accompanied it, resolves itself into something capable only of medical treatment, not of poetical.
From: A Preface to “Paradise Lost” by C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 64.
A Short Biography
Paradise Lost, an epic poem by Milton (q.v.) originally in ten books, subsequently rearranged in twelve, first printed in 1667.Milton formed the intention of writing a great epic poem, as he tells us, as early as 1639. A list of possible subjects, some of them scriptural, some from British history, written in his own hand about 1640-1641, still exists, with drafts of the scheme of a poem on Paradise Lost. The work was not, however, begun in earnest until 1658, and it was finished, according to Aubrey, in 1663.
Book I. The general subject is briefly stated: man’s disobedience and the loss thereupon of Paradise, with its prime cause, Satan, who, having revolted from God, has been driven out of Heaven. Satan is presented, with his angels, lying on the burning lake of Hell. He awakens his legions, comforts them, and summons a council. Pandemonium, the palace of Satan, is built.
Book II. The council debates whether another battle for the recovery of Heaven shall be hazarded, but decides to examine the report that a new world, with new creatures in it, has been created. Satan undertakes, alone, the search. He passes through Hell-gates, guarded by Sin and Death, and passes upward through the realm of Chaos.
Book III. God sees Satan flying towards our world, and foretells his success and the fall and punishment of Man. The Son of God offers Himself a ransom for man, is accepted, and exalted. Satan alights on the outer convex of our universe, the future Paradise of Fools (q.v.). He finds the stairs leading up to Heaven, descends to the Sun, and is directed by Uriel to this Earth, alighting on Mount Niphates.
Book IV. The Garden of Eden is described, where Satan first sees Adam and Eve, and overhears their discourse regarding the Tree of Knowledge, of which they are forbidden to eat the fruit. He decides to found his enterprise upon this, and proceeds to tempt Eve in a dream; but is discovered by Gabriel and Ithuriel, and ejected from the Garden.
Book V. Eve relates her disquieting dream to Adam. Raphael, sent by God, comes to Paradise, warns Adam of his enemy, and enjoins obedience. At Adam’s request, he relates how and why Satan incited his legions to revolt.
Book VI. Raphael continues his narrative, how Michael and Gabriel were sent to fight against Satan. After indecisive battles, the Son of God, Himself, causing His legions to stand still, alone attacked the hosts of Satan and, driving them to the edge of Heaven, forced them to leap down into the deep.
Book VII. Raphael relates how, thereafter, God decided on the creation of another world with new creatures to dwell therein, and sent His Son to perform the creation in six days.
Bool VIII. Adam inquires concerning the motions of the heavenly bodies, and is answered ambiguously. [The controversy regarding the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems was at its height when "Paradise Lost" was written, and Milton was unable to decide between them, as seen in Book X, 668 et seq.] Adam relates what he remembers since his own creation, and discourses with the angel regarding the relations of man with woman. Raphael departs.
Book IX. Satan enters into the serpent and, in this form, finds Eve alone. He persuades her to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve relates to Adam what has passed and brings him of the fruit. Adam, perceiving that she is lost, from extreme love for her resolves to perish with her, and eats of the fruit. The effects upon them: they cover their nakedness, and fall to recriminations.
Book X. God sends His Son to judge the transgressors. He passes sentence on the man and on the woman. Sin and Death resolve to come to this world and make a broad highway thither from Hell. Satan returns to Hell and relates his success; he and his angels are temporarily transformed into serpents. Adam and Eve confer how to evade the curse upon their offspring, and finally approach the Son of God with repentance and supplication.
Book XI. The Son of God intercedes for Adam and Eve. God decides on their expulsion from Paradise. Michael comes down to carry out the decree. Eve laments, Adam pleads but submits. The angel leads him to a high hill and shows him, in a series of visions, the future misery of man and what shall happen till the Flood.
Book XII. Michael relates what shall follow, and explains the future coming of the Messiah, His incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension, and foretells the corrupt state of the Church till His second coming. Adam and Eve, submissive, are led out of Paradise.
From: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 397-398.
