Paradise Lost

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Anyone who intends to read Paradise Lost for the first time should be advised to approach it as a work of literature. In short, for the most part, it is no more a work of theology than the Iliad is a recounting of verifiable history. Instead, like the Iliad, it is an unparalleled epic masterpiece and work of imagination. There are differences, of course, epics being somewhat more episodic in contrast to this poem’s more linear presentation and pre-ordained outcome.

 

Epic poems depend heavily on the reader’s vague familiarity with an accepted but unwitnessed past which any living person could summarize in a dozen lines from faulty memory. But in the epic, there will be a mounting series of significant encounters so fully realized that every incident is envisioned by the artist as though for the first time. The personality and calculations of the players are revealed in detail and the action depicted so vividly that once read, it can never again be recalled as it may have dwelt in prior memory. I might add that the overall tone of an epic is neither particularly tragic nor melancholy. For me, I am always left only with a feeling of ineffable magnificence.

 

In most respects Paradise Lost displays these features. And yet it is inimitable. The language, for example, could not be said to be Biblical nor it is particularly Homeric. It is beautiful and poetic, but not aphoristic. It is so rich that it evokes Renaissance art at its height. The underlying conflict of eventual victor versus formidable antagonist is a recognizable tension. And yet there are notable differences. Within the classic Greek epic, there is a single main character who confronts miscellaneous adversities – natural conditions, erratic gods, human frailties -- and the rewarding virtues are classical, particularly courage.

 

This is not what we find in Paradise Lost. It does, of course, have a steady theme of virtue, but its preeminent virtues are entirely foreign to those of the classical epic. The poem dwells on and begins with a titanic struggle between two clearly differentiated opponents, God the Almighty and Satan the fallen angel, neither of whom is erratic or ambiguous. From the beginning the virtues are modern and Christian –- specifically, obedience and charity (though even now obedience has fallen out of favor). And speaking of ambiguity, whatever else can be said about that clash, the point of the poem is that the struggle is never entirely resolved. Paradise Lost is an epic without a hero.

 

Style. To prepare myself for this commentary, I not only again read Milton’s text, but also availed myself of an excellent audio reading. But I also studiously avoided reading any written commentary to ensure that whatever my conclusions were – even if ludicrous -- they were at least genuinely mine.

 

So I will concede that my main challenge as a 21st Century reader (and auditor) were, first, the countless references to places and people utterly unfamiliar to me and second, the length and complexity of the otherwise coherent blank verse sentences¹. There were also intermittent vocabulary challenges, but most of those in the written text were easily soluble -- and anyway, a dictionary is a wonderful companion. In the event, my progress was therefore painfully slow, which I now account a good thing given that I was obliged to consider each line on its own, necessarily meaning that I was always pondering the details before moving on with the story. The patience rewarded itself.

 

Structure. Paradise Lost must be read in its entirety. Yes, its story outlines are already known even to the self-righteous pagan, but because it is presented at epic length, there can be no easy summary of its artistry. The task I have set for myself today, therefore, is mainly to consider some of the countless stupendous features and passages that startled me with their originality and, if I can, to pause to consider its unique architecture and overall effect.

 

In format, it begins as a recognizable classic epic, opening with an invocation of the “heavenly muse”—this would be Urania -- and promising, in its opening lines, to justify the ways of God to men by dwelling on the story of man’s disobedience and the consequent introduction of death in what would have been a perfect world. But the first half of the story is regularly punctuated with revelatory episodes in the form of epic confrontations, although when Satan is involved, the stakes more resemble the battle of wits in the Odyssey than the combat scenes of the Iliad. And by the end, the enduring ancient virtues of the battlefield will be both superseded but also apparently eclipsed by the more fragile ideals of a modern world. Again, the title of the work is Paradise Lost.

 

 To accomplish this, Milton has bifurcated the structure of the poem. Part one, Satan’s defeat, agony, and sworn revenge was an essential prologue. Part two, however, shifts from Satan’s fate to the uncertain future of mankind. Milton himself suddenly emerges to take explicit charge of his story: “I now must change [these] Notes to Tragic,” he says, since he is now about to relate the tale of the fall, and as in the conventional literary argument, he cautions us that what we are about to read is “not less but more Heroic” than the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, etc. But he declines to take credit for what follows, because his métier has never been writing of war or Medieval romances. Instead, he confesses that the muse inspires him through “nightly visitation unimplor’d.” ²

 

The pivot is in Book VII. Here the poet again calls on Urania, the “heavenly muse” for her renewed assistance. In pagan Greece this muse had classically been associated with the contemplation of heavenly concepts (philosophy); in Milton’s day Urania was now often celebrated in Christian poetry, and Christian dogma is a feature of what is now to come. It also introduces an ethical, crisis dealt with below, which Milton was obliged to grapple with as the poem proceeds. It may not have been his intention, but in Part Two Milton raises questions that will vex the modern world.

 

THE FIRST PART

 

Time, Verisimilitude, And The Beginning. From the outset the poet had to overcome a problem unique to this history -- the unmeasured passage of time. Paradise Lost begins, after all, in the epoch in which there was no time -- no creation, no sun, no clocks, no calendar, no means of common reckoning in any such mundane terms. Even death was unknown. Furthermore, whatever is foreordained in the legend to come must be presented to the audience as having been in doubt before it occurs³.

 

And yet the essence of any story, no matter how it is told, is a telling of events which the author must make intelligible. As early as possible, therefore, Milton resolves the difficulty of how to portray the incomprehensible passage of time in an era beyond recollection. Fewer than 100 lines into the epic we are told that upon Lucifer’s defeat -- in the cosmic war he himself initiated -- he and his minions⁴ were hurled into the fiery gulf of Hell in a descent “nine times the space that measures day and night to mortal men.” This simple phrase anticipates and eliminates any future awkwardness about unmeasured time before the creation. It frees the author throughout the poem to call upon – as he frequently does -- his endless recognizable similes, metaphors, allegories, and symbols, fortified by dialog, motives, and even emotions, to portray historical events which are yet to come⁵.

 

But of course with this story, the reader, the poet, and all of us know to a certainty that there was A Beginning, beyond description, which must be reckoned with: the gigantic cosmic cataclysm between two immense armies with supernatural powers. Instinctively we are prepared for just that. But it is Milton’s ingenious strategy not to depict that titanic battle to open the story⁶. Instead, Paradise Lost begins in its aftermath when Satan, now defeated, contemplates his loss and calculates how perhaps it was not complete. In his angelic status as Lucifer, Satan was preeminent as God’s archangel. He and his minions were eternal and could not die.⁷ Having thus rebelled, lost, and been cast into the dark fiery pit, they all nevertheless still remain forever as part of the cosmos, an everlasting and formidable presence of temptation and evil. The eternal conflict, therefore, is still not entirely resolved, as Satan has divined.

 

Death and Destiny. In the opening books of Paradise Lost, death is little more than a hypothesis. In short, it is significant but only because of its absence. Immortal beings (including Satan and his fallen angels) cannot die. Although they seem to know what death means, they also know that they have been spared its inevitability. Satan certainly sees this as one of his principal assets, though there does come a time when he does seem to have his doubts.

 

During Satan’s painful, uncharted and unaccompanied search throughout the vast cosmos to locate the newly-formed Paradise where he intends to reopen his war with the Almighty, Milton reveals the fiend’s unexpected, almost human, introspection. Within his inward thoughts, Satan suddenly regrets his fall, his pride, and ambition. He imagines how different it would have been had he been an inferior angel without such qualities.

 

But this lasts only an instant. He was created by God Himself with power and free will, and by exercising them, he freely chose his course which admittedly has brought him eternal misery and his quest for surcease. Furthermore, even were he to repent, he realizes, his very makeup would inevitably soon take him back to his current situation. “Which way I flie is Hell; myself am Hell,” he says, and then looks with a simulacrum of pity on this new world he is about to invade.

 

Satan. It is a cliché in the theatre, I believe, that if the devil is one of the characters in a play, he will inevitably get the best lines. Yet even if I have got the cliché wrong, I have not erred when it comes to Paradise Lost. The Satan whom Milton has created is stupendously presented. And unlike those lesser productions we see from time to time in which the devil is permitted to betray a wicked sense of humor or a subtle observational wit, with Milton we have no less than a colossally eloquent, terrifying, and seductive presence of evil.

 

Satan is magnificent, supernaturally powerful, of vast intelligence, foresight, and subtlety. He is also courageous and endlessly seductive⁸. In size, he is as large as the titans of Greek myth. He carries his massy spear and shield as though they were toys. Notably, he is also consumed by envy. Until the confrontation he regarded himself as God’s equal.⁹ While still in heaven, he aroused and commanded a seemingly irresistible force of fully-armed and awesomely mighty angels. Under his command and in utmost loyalty to him, they rebelled against God’s forces for primacy in the cosmos. Even in unimaginable defeat, Satan’s initial perplexity soon yields to a realistic appraisal of his not quite utter destruction. The Almighty was only “made greater” he calculates, by thunder¹⁰, and had tempted him into his revolt by concealing his own superior strength. Thenceforward, Satan never risks a second direct confrontation.

 

Instead, in conference with his majordomo Beelzebub, he constructs a new, more subtle mission. From the beginning, after all, Satan’s “sole delight” has always been to check and thwart God’s own “high will.” Here is an objective still within his grasp. He and his fallen angels remain immortal and likewise their hate and taste for revenge will never die. Hell, although a horrible place, is now his own secure realm and the army is still his. Better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven. They remain free to cause evil.

 

For more than 200 lines Milton describes how this prince of evil then summons his dejected army from the fiery lake where they have fallen, brings them to silence with his thunderous voice, praises the glory of their efforts, acknowledges that the Almighty is still capable of greater punishment which they must prepare for, but rallies them for a new and different conflict. One who overcomes by force, he shouts, “hath overcome but half his foe.”

 

“For who can yet believe, though after loss

That all these puissant legions, whose exile

Hath emptied Heaven, shall fail to reascend,

Self-rais’d, and repossess their native seat? . . .

 

“Our better part remains

To work in close design, by fraud or guile

What force effected not.

. . . For who can think submission? War, then,

War open or understood, must be resolv’d.”

 

This harangue climaxes in a tumult of a clash of shields wielded by an ocean of enraged fallen angels urging him on. In a frenzy which I cannot recall from any previous source, these creatures thereupon tear at the bowels and mountains of hell and use the ore to build Satan’s awe-inspiring palace Pandemonium. There is also a fascinating account – too lengthy to summarize here -- of the conflicting arguments of the most significant of the fiends about how they should now conduct themselves.

 

The culmination of this malicious debate is that since God will now create a new world of humankind, then man’s corruption, not direct conflict, must be the underworld’s avenue of revenge. “This would surpass common revenge and interrupt His joy.” And Satan himself, as the undoubted and courageous leader, therefore undertakes to escape from Hell on a risky mission across the vast cosmos to locate this new world.¹¹

 

Escape From Hell. Satan’s flight and mission are captivating and horrible in equal parts. When he had first proclaimed his mutiny in heaven, Sin, his own daughter, had sprung from his head and he then raped her. And she produced Death, his son. Death, on being born also raped her, between them these offspring then produce countless other fiends of death.

 

And so later, when Satan cooly and audaciously commences his escape from Hell to locate and corrupt mankind, he is abruptly confronted at Hell’s Gate by two sentries blocking his way: his children, Sin and Death. They only permit his passage in return for his guaranty, easily given, that upon his success he will bring both of them to Paradise where they will have complete freedom for future mischief. As I have said, this is not a work of theology, it is the stuff of epic legend.

 

God. The supreme ruler in Paradise Lost, God is frequently and simply referred to as “the Almighty,” creator of all things and always the final arbiter. For the most part, His presence in the poem is implied and unalterable. He seldom speaks and when he does it is mostly benignant, largely unperturbed, and fully in command. Even in Book VII when we are given the magnificent history of the creation itself, the entire process is described at second hand in a poetically beautiful passage by the angel Raphael and repeatedly ringing with the Biblical phrase, “God saw that it was good.” But mostly when God chooses to act, it is chiefly through the agency of the Messiah, his begotten son (never referred to as “the Christ” or “Jesus”). It is therefore the Messiah who is charged with leading the triumph over the rebellious angels in the manner of a Greek hero¹².

 

Creation and Art. From the earliest unrecorded history, anthropologists and historians assure us that mankind has always postulated a creation story of some sort. There being no eyewitnesses, each of the many traditions is happy to refer to each of the others as a myth and to the opposing adherents as benighted. Indeed, the modern bien pensant (editors, commentators, professors) say that this is so of every supposedly pious person walking the earth today, except themselves.

 

I have no mind to take sides in this meditation, except to place John Milton squarely in the Judeo-Christian camp as one who accepts that God created everything out of nothing. And in me, this provokes a foolish syllogism. Only God can create something out of nothing; a creative artist (poet, sculptor, etc.) creates something out of nothing; therefore, a creative artist is a god.¹³

 

                                                        THE SECOND PART   

 

                                                      

Once Satan has established himself in Paradise, the focus of Paradise Lost gradually changes. Now past the riveting urgency of the epic struggle of two massive powers in the cosmos, the focus shifts to the plight of the earnest but innocent couple who are placed alone in a gorgeous garden under a perplexing set of rules and, they find, are the focus of a struggle which they can barely understand and of which they are more victims than principals.

 

And so although I have said that Paradise Lost can more profitably be read as an epic poem than as a work of theology, there must yet be the unavoidable didactic undercurrent. After all, the Biblical source material is already known to the reader, and for Milton to have altered it would have risked scorn. Hence, as a prelude to Adam’s expulsion from Eden, the archangel Michael reveals to him his descendants’ forthcoming follies leading up to the flood. His response: “O future visions ill foreseen, better I had lived ignorant of future.”

 

Knowledge and Foreknowledge. And so although I have said that Paradise Lost is not a work of theology, the epic story it tells must always in its main respects adhere to many unquestioned verities of Western faith, a signal example of which is God’s eternal pre-knowledge of future events and the perennial conflict between free will and predestination.

 

To mediate that debate is not for me, but in Book III, before Satan has arrived at or even located the world as yet to be created, God says that man’s freedom to make his own choices has been “dispos’d by absolute decree,” that “reason is also choice,” and that both of them are passive¹⁴. “If I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on their [men’s] fault.” In addition, He is satisfied that he has also created mercy which “first and last shall brightest shine.” (But He then goes on to concede that “some I have chosen of peculiar grace, elect above the rest.”)

 

Here we cannot help but be reminded of the fraught religious history of European Christianity, particularly in the 17th Century. For all of the synthesis he achieves, Milton was not entirely neutral. Thus he envisions Satan’s first stop on the margins of the newly created Earth, coming to rest on a desolate, windy, spacious field. Though still deserted, this world will, Milton assures us, eventually fill with “translated saints” who will soon fill their lives with vain hopes of glory or fame, who will succumb to superstition, hermits and friars, and

 

 

“ . . . who to be sure of Paradise

Dying put on the weed of Dominic

Or in Franciscan think to pass disguis’d.”

 

Indeed, within another hundred lines, the poet bitterly reflects that “neither Man nor Angel can discern hypocrysie, except to God alone.”¹⁵

 

Reason. Likewise, the second half of Paradise Lost deals with the parallel conundrum of man’s faculty of reason versus his obligations of faith. In fact, the tension between reason and faith is in many ways the most prominent theme of this epic and a defining crisis of modernity. In Milton’s vision, reason is a manifest but seductive blessing,

 

“[F]or smiles from reason flow,

To Brute denied, and are of love the food,

Love not the lowest end of human life

For not to irksome toile, but to delight

He made us, and delight to Reason joined.”¹⁶

 

But he was writing at the dawn of what is now called the “Age of Reason,” and Paradise Lost is also a warning against reason’s tantalizing difficulties. In Paradise Lost, Satan is the embodiment of reason, a point of great significance not only to Milton, but also to the meaning of Paradise Lost and to the Biblical story in general.

 

In Milton’s vision, reason is a divine gift to accompany a wonderful mortal life on Earth. But reason is also unreliably deceptive. To Milton, the achievable world, although always imperiled by sin, is one of beauty and knowledge spread in concentric circles with an ethical center. With caution it can be attained. And yet it is the peril that Milton sensed -- that the world was sliding dangerously into an eccentric and vigorous era of science and curiosity.

 

Reason itself can point to danger. After escaping Hell and while searching the universe for this rumored Paradise, Satan presently encounters the angel Gabriel, setting up a tense Homeric verbal confrontation. Angel versus fallen angel (and former colleague), they trade threats and insults as equals. At the culmination, the angel scornfully dismisses Satan’s reduced and embarrassing status. He failed in his arrogant rebellion, lost his war, and now must confine himself ignominiously to the pain and degradation of his prison Hell. Unmoved, the fiend responds. Yes, he was defeated, but not destroyed. Nothing has been permanently decided. The facts, soberly considered, do not argue irreversible defeat. He is cunning and possesses matchless initiative and implacable courage. He cannot die and will eternally be an unutterably dangerous leader of a fanatical army. There is reason indeed to fear him¹⁷.

 

Reason is fallible. In Book VII Adam, innocent as a babe, hesitantly asks the angel Raphael for whatever unforbidden information capable of man’s understanding he can disclose about the creation. The angel consents, but with the caution that “knowledge is as food and needs no less her temperance over appetite to know in measure what the mind may well contain.” Otherwise wisdom will “turn to follie.”¹⁸

 

Reason is deceptive. When Eve describes to Adam her foreboding dream of unfaithfulness as conjured in her by Satan, Adam’s equivocal comfort is that reason, a “lesser faculty,”

 

“frames all what we affirm or what deny, and call

Our knowledge or opinion; then retires

Into her private Cell when Nature rests.

Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes

To imitate her; but misjoyning shape,

Wilde work produces oft . . . .”

 

Unadulterated reason is seductive and dangerous. In Paradise, Satan repeatedly invokes the companion bliss of freedom of choice, supposedly informed by reason, which man enjoys as a rebuttal to God’s emphasis on obedience: hence the tension begot by God’s great injunction to Adam and Eve not to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And yet much later the archangel Michael explains to Adam that true liberty always dwells with reason . . .

 

. . . . “and from her hath no dividual being:

Reason in man obscur’d, or not obey’d,

Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart Passions catch the Government

From reason, and to servitude reduce

Man till then free.”

 

There are, the angel says, “degrees of substance” which progress “by gradual scale” to “fancie and understanding, whence the soule reason receives.” In time, men and angels may comingle, but . . .

 

“[m]eanwhile, enjoy

Your fill what happiness this happie state

Can comprehend, incapable of more.”

 

And so reason comes by degree. When the angel Raphael explains to Adam that his and Eve’s apparently perfect life cannot match life in Heaven, Adam is content. “Let none henceforth seek needless cause to approve the Faith they owe.” This is Milton’s view, congruent with his view of the ideal life as concentric with a life obedience to the will of God.

 

Adam and Eve. Though each a perfection of innocence and mutual love, Adam and Eve differ markedly from each other. Eve has an innate and innocent sense of joy in beauty and peace. She is not especially curious or skeptical. But her fervent love for and loyalty to Adam is also informed by her own instinct to assert her own self-identity. For his part, Adam has the nature of a precocious, naïve, upright, and inquisitive child.¹⁹

 

Thus when Raphael has finished his sublime narrative of the creation, Adam is grateful, then thoughtful. Looking around, he says ingenuously, the world seems only a speck in the overarching firmament and such obvious disproportion argues that there is much more to be known. Hearing this, Eve silently withdraws, apparently bored by the subject. She returns to “her fruits and flowers, to visit how they prosper’d, bud and bloom.” Raphael meanwhile responds at length to Adam saying essentially “Heav’n is for thee too high to know what passes there.”

 

Presently, in Eve’s absence, Adam in eager wonder recounts to the angel how, at his plea, God had created Eve from his side as he slept, although he was and remains struck with love and admiration of this perfect helpmeet. And yet he also describes her as, although “inferior in the mind and inward faculties, . . . [and] outward also her resembling less His image who made both, . . . ,

 

“. . . yet when I approach

Her loveliness, so absolute she seems

And in herself compleat, so well to know

Her own, that what she wills to do or say,

Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetst, best;

All higher knowledge in her presence falls

Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her

Discount’nanc’t, and like folly shewes;

Authoritie and Reason on her waite . . . .”

 

To this, the commentator sighs and says amen.

 

    The Fall. Because the uncertain conflict and strife of the first part of Paradise Lost are set in the unmeasurable and unwitnessed past, Milton has been able to create his unmatched magnificent vision without the strictures of any religious dogma. But in the second part of the poem, the terrific urgency of that first half is necessarily overtaken by a story of a different character, one which is routinely dismissed in these modern times as no more than an enchanting legend with contrived ethical implications.

 

    One morning, at her own insistence, Eve chooses to be blissfully alone in her splendid garden -- where she encounters the serpent. She resists his offer of the forbidden fruit, explaining the single divine prohibition that binds her, concluding, ironically, “the rest we live law to ourselves, our Reason is our law.”

 

What an opening! The serpent follows conversation with an earnest and logical explanation to the credulous naif that there was a subtle trick which was behind God’s inexplicable warning not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge: (a) If disobedience really meant death, then the serpent himself would have died when he ate of the forbidden fruit; (b) The serpent obviously benefitted from the eating (he now can not only speak but also reason) and so why should a beast like him get that benefit if the lordly human must not?; (c) Even assuming there is such a state as death, surely God would not have intended such a severe punishment for such a “petty trespass” as the tasting of a fruit; (d) Therefore God’s reason for forbidding knowledge about the qualities of good and evil could only be to protect His own status as God. It therefore stands to reason that God’s motive for the prohibition can only have been fear and envy of the potential powers of man. This is, in short, a seduction by means of reason. She tastes the fruit.

 

And now the critical moment. In an ecstasy of love, Eve finds Adam and blithely tells all of what she has just done. Though initially horrified, marked by an emotional and equally arresting outpouring of love for her, he then joins her in the sin. The story would not be the same if it were not for this element. He is seduced by love and not by reason, “fondly overcome with female charm.” Thus we have the essential tension of Part Two: neither reason nor love are reliable.

 

Conclusion. And so I return to the caveat put down at the beginning of this note – i.e. as a work of literature, Paradise Lost must not be approached as a work of theology. Even now that admonition continues to hold, keeping in mind a companion admonition that when the legend is already universally known, the artist is not entirely at liberty to change the story. Adam and Eve come face to face with their ultimate sin: disobedience to God.

 

And yet the story does not end just yet. Paradise is indeed lost, but Adam and Eve are not entirely lost. They are immediately stricken by shame and concupiscence – and then familiar domestic recrimination.²⁰ But then their genuine guilt, repentance, and mutual love lead them to reason the solution of which we are today the legatees. The archangel Michael has revealed the forthcoming virgin birth to Adam. In relief the man responds that now he understands that it will also be from a woman that mankind will be redeemed for a second chance. Ironically, Eve, asleep, is not present to get the news.

 

Their punishment is mitigated but not withdrawn. Death will follow their expulsion, but it will be postponed for the sinning couple to enjoy the happiness that man was created for, and after death their progeny may escape their parents’ sin with the possibility of immortality, either in heaven or eternal misery.

 

Because the uncertain conflict and strife of the first part of Paradise Lost are set in the unmeasurable and unwitnessed past, Milton has been able to create his unmatched magnificent vision without the strictures of any religious dogma. But in the second part of the poem, the terrific urgency of that first half is necessarily overtaken by a story of a different character, one which is routinely dismissed in these modern times as no more than an enchanting legend with contrived ethical implications.

 

Milton is indifferent to any supposed contrivance. He has conjured the monumental story of creation and strife in unmistakably ethical terms implicitly superior to the classical confrontations of blood and wits from a pre-Christian world. There is no reason for him to forswear the accepted Biblical version of Adam and Eve’s story and every reason to complete his epic consistent not only with the conventional telling but also in conformity with his own Christian theology. His artistic challenge was how to depict that ending in a way which is not only alive with the innovation and detail that has gone before, not only congruent with the common Judeo-Christian understanding, but also explicitly ambiguous and cautious about how and whether frail mankind can ever overcome the eternal allure of an eternal Satan pitted against God’s own eternal law of obedience.

 

      So Paradise Lost does not end with a victory or a heroic death. It ends with a question: Will Adam’s heirs be obedient to God?

 

FOOTNOTES

 

1 As much because of their length, these lines of poetry are not as quotable as either the Bible or Shakespeare. There are vivid phrases, however, that still punctuate contemporary culture.

2              “[She] dictates to me slumbring, or inspires

Easie my unpremeditated verse:

Since first this Subject for Heroic Song

Pleas’d me long choosing, and beginning late.”

3 One of the few phrases I still remember from my long-ago college reading was Milton’s observation that God’s forces and Lucifer’s were engaged in “dubious battle.”

4  One-third of the heavenly population, we are later told.

5. Book X: “The speed of God’s Time counts not, though with the swiftest minutes wing’d.”

6 Indeed it is only recounted in retrospect, but in magnificent detail, in Books V and VI by the angel Raphael to Adam. In the war itself, described in Homeric detail, Satan plays an active role and even suffers a ghastly wound at the hand of the Archangel Michael. Other specific angels (e.g. Gabrel) are also celebrated for their courage and fortitude. God, however, never appears on the field of battle. Rather, he gives entire command to the Messiah, his son.

7 They are also able to assume either or both sexes and whatever shape they choose. All of their vilest vices seem to have been part of their makeup even before they were cast into Hell.

8 After an inauspicious first day of battle, he summons his generals and, completely undismayed, he re-assures them that they fight not only for liberty, but also honor, dominion, glory, and renown. Although having discovered pain, they have also confirmed that they are immortal and that that their determined minds remain a formidable strength which will ensure their survival and possibly even victory when battle is resumed.

9 In Book V the catalyst for the rebellion is revealed to be almighty God's revelation that it is his only son whom all must now acknowledge as Lord.

10 Thunder, we learn in Book VI, was the Messiah son’s irresistible weapon on the final day of battle.

11 When Satan describes the unimaginable perils of this proposed mission, there is silence among the mass of fiends and no volunteer. Only Satan himself then has the courage to hazard the undertaking. Cf. Christ’s parallel eagerness in Book III to save mankind by his own sacrifice.

12 The holy Spirit makes no appearance in Paradise Lost.

13 Apologies to Socrates: poets are liars.

14 Cf. Henry V, Act IV (i): “The king is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services.”

15 This is not the last of such animadversions. They will reappear as the poem proceeds.

16 In college my dear Professor Bloom pointed out that to laugh at something means you know something. Maybe he was quoting someone else, but it hit home with me.

17 However, once he sees that a genuine struggle with Gabriel might indeed bring on his second defeat, on that consideration, he withdraws to fight another day.

18 But the angel does proceed and tells the creation in terms we recognize from the Old Testament. It is simply that, however: a revelation -- not the proscribed knowledge attainable from the forbidden tree.

19 Adam is also pertinacious. After Michael has at length described for him the litany of sins committed by men, first before the flood, followed by their ensuing decline even afterward, the enslavement in Egypt, the escape to Caanan, etc., he asks

“. . . why to those

Among whom God will deigne to dwell on Earth

So many and so various Laws are giv’n;

So many Laws argue so many sins

Among them: How can God with such reside?”

20 Later, Adam is bitter, blaming first himself for his own misery -- and more, for the now-ordained misery of his offspring -- and then recalling with equal bitterness his yielding to the trivial blandishments of Eve, “that bad woman” and “novelty on Earth.” This lasts no longer than Eve’s wretched eagerness to take on herself the blame of each of them.