Paradise Lost

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Paradise Lost

THE LITERARY WORK

An epic poem in blank verse set at the beginning of time in Heaven, Chaos (a state of turbulence where matter is in flux), Hell (a place of imprisonment at the bottom of Chaos), and earthly Paradise (whose center is the Garden of Eden); published in 1667 as 10 books, republished in 1674 as 12 books.

SYNOPSIS

The poem dramatizes Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise as a result of the War in Heaven between Satan and God.

Events in History at the Time the Poem Takes Place

The Poem in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Poem Was Written

For More Information

Born in 1608 in London, John Milton forged a career that reflects the turmoil of English political, social, and religious life in the seventeenth century. Throughout the 1640s, civil war ravaged England as parliamentary and royalist armies battled for control of the country, a struggle that ended when the king, Charles 1, was publicly beheaded in Whitehall, London, in January 1649. Milton published prose works on issues of religious and political controversy during the decade, including Areopagitica (1644), which defends freedom of the press. From 1649-1659, after Milton’s writings attracted the attention of parliamentary leaders, he became diplomatic secretary for Oliver Cromwell’s government. Although Milton had been doing less official work toward the end of the 1650s (largely because of the complete loss of his eyesight in 1652), his close connections with Cromwell’s government jeopardized him in 1660, when the monarchy regained control in England and the Stuart kings were restored to the throne. After serving a few months in prison, Milton was released and suffered no further major reprisals. Meanwhile, in 1658, having earlier published a volume of verse (Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, 1645), Milton turned again to poetry. The initial version of Paradise Lost consisted of 10 books, but by 1674, the epic had been restructured and a few lines added so that the final version encompassed 12 books, modeled after Greek epics. In addition to using classical epic conventions to tell the Judaeo-Christian story of humanity’s fall, Paradise Lost incorporates key features of seventeenth-century English history.

Events in History at the Time the Poem Takes Place

War in Heaven

Paradise Lost is set at the beginning of time. The epic’s early events center upon the Christian myth of the War in Heaven and the defeat of the evil angels, based loosely on three passages from Judeo-Christian scripture: Isaiah 14:12–21, Luke 10:18, and Revelation 12:7–12. The passage from Isaiah describes Satan as “the morning star, son of the dawn,” who has “fallen from the heavens,” and ascribes to him an overweening pride and arrogance that stem from his rivalry with God (Isaiah 14.12):

“I will scale the heavens;
Above the stars of God
I will set up my throne;
I will take my seat on the Mount of Assembly, in the recesses of the North.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will be like the Most High!”
Yet down to the nether world you go to the
recesses of the pit!
               (Isaiah 14.14–21)

Pride and vainglory, traits of Satan that find their way into Paradise Lost, lead to the War in Heaven and impel the fallen angel to seek vengeance for his loss by wreaking havoc on God’s newly created beings, Adam and Eve. In the passage from the gospel of Luke, Jesus himself echoes the account in Isaiah of Lucifer’s downfall, noting, in particular, how the rebellious angel’s descent was like lightning. The passage from Revelation dramatizes the military conflict of the War in Heaven, identifying Michael as the leader of the good angels and Satan as his adversary, also called the “huge dragon,” “the devil,” and “the seducer of the whole world” (Revelation 12:7-12). While Milton clearly relied on the three foregoing passages from scripture, he drew from Greek myth too—for example, from the War of the Titans against Jove (recounted by authors such as Hesiod and Pindar). In the first book of Paradise Lost he refers to Briareos and Typhon, of the Titans and earth-born Giants who warred on Jove (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.198). Jove’s use of lightning to defeat Typhon and to cause his nine-day fall into Tartarus, or into a cave near Tarsus (in Asia Minor) anticipates the Son’s use of thunderbolts to cause the fall of the evil angels from Heaven in Book 6 of Paradise Lost.

Garden of Eden

The later events of Paradise Lost deal with Satan’s seduction of Eve in the Garden of Eden and her relationship with Adam during and immediately after their downfall. Again drawing on scripture, Milton adapts and enlarges the account in Genesis 3:1–7:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘you shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die’.” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
(Genesis 3:1-7)

From this brief biblical account, Milton creates a luxuriant Garden of Eden as the center of an earthly Paradise teeming with plants, fruits, flowers, rivers, birds, fish, and beasts whose interaction is harmonious. Paradise has been traced back to the Persian word for “park” or “enclosure.” Genesis 2:8 tells us that the garden was in “the East,” which in this context generally means “Mesopotamia” (Metzger and Coogan, p. 178). We are also told that four rivers flow out of the garden—Gihon, Pishon, Tigris, and Euphrates—but the first two are unknown, making it impossible to pinpoint a precise location for the earthly Paradise.

In Paradise Lost, Milton situates the Garden of Eden on a plateau at the summit of Paradise, and along the slope of ascent lies a “steep wilderness, whose hairy sides” are “with thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild” (Paradise Lost, 4.135–36). Rising from the slope, as well, are various trees—cedar, pine, fir, and palm—creating “insuperable highth of loftiest shade” (Paradise Lost, 4.138). Such a lush paradise has numerous precedents in classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature. Among the precedents most likely to have influenced Milton are Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian myths, the most influential being the epic Gilgamesh, which predates the Book of Genesis by 2,000 to 3,000 years.

The Poem in Focus

Plot overview

Paradise Lost is divided into 12 books that function much like the chapters of a novel. The narrative begins with the defeat of Satan after his failed attempt to take control of Heaven, follows him through the stages of his successful plot to subvert God’s newest creation, humankind, and ends with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Like most epics, Paradise Lost starts in medias res, or in the midst of things—that is, the story is not told in strict chronological order. For example, it is only midway through the epic that the seraph (or angel) Raphael recounts the earliest events, such as the War in Heaven, but the epic’s narrator recounts the consequences of that conflict, notably the punishment of the evil angels and their effort to avenge their downfall at the start of the poem, in Books 1 and 2. The following brief survey summarizes the sequence of events through the twelve books of the poem.

Book 1. The poem begins with a statement of its theme: to “assert Eternal Providence” and to “justify the ways of God to men” (Paradise Lost, 1.25-26). While the downfall of Adam and Eve and their loss of Eden are foreseen, the poem also emphasizes the role the Son as the redeemer, who offers himself as a sacrifice on behalf of fallen humankind (Paradise Lost, 1.4). The narrator then recounts the aftermath of the War in Heaven, particularly the defeat and banishment of the fallen angels to Hell. Satan, who remains defiant, revives the fallen angels after their defeat and assembles them to plan how they will avenge their loss.

Book 2. A meeting takes place in Pandemonium, a structure built by the fallen angels in Hell. In this edifice, which resembles both a temple and a palace, Satan occupies the position of preeminence: “high on a throne of royal state” (Paradise Lost, 2.1). Four angels present their views concerning the options for vengeance, and there is overwhelming approval for a plan to attack the newly created race of Man, who is less than the angels “in power and excellence, but favored more” by God (Paradise Lost, 2.350). Satan volunteers to conduct a reconnaissance of these newly created beings. He persuades the gatekeeper, Sin, to unlock the gates of Hell and let him out. He then flies through Chaos, until he lands on the convex exterior of the cosmos, which is encased by a crystalline sphere or shell.

Book 3. Seeing what has happened, God the Father informs the Son that Satan will succeed in his plan to subvert Adam and Eve, who will fall from their state of grace. Though God foresees their downfall, he emphasizes that the fault is theirs, not his, for they are creatures whom he created with free will. Meanwhile, Satan dives through an opening in the exterior of the cosmos and flies to the brightest body in the heavens, the sun. Disguising himself as a lesser angel, he seeks information about Adam and Eve from Uriel, the seraph who is regent of the sun. Directed to earth, Satan lands within sight of Eden.

Book 4. Having assumed the shape of a cormorant, Satan perches on the Tree of Life, from which he surveys Eden. When he notices Adam and Eve, he enters the shapes of other animals; and as if he were stalking prey, he approaches the human pair to overhear their conversation. He learns of their one prohibition—the divine command not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—and plans their downfall. Uriel, who was tricked into directing Satan to earth, becomes aware of the deception, and alerts Gabriel, the seraph who protects Paradise, to the intruder. Satan creeps up to Eve while she sleeps and induces her to dream.

Book 5. In her dream Eve is awakened by a voice that resembles Adam’s, though it is spoken by an angelic being. (The being is none other than Satan in the guise of this angel.) Led in her dream to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Eve is urged to eat of the forbidden fruit and does so. She then accompanies the angelic being “up to the clouds,” from which she views “the earth outstretched immense” (Paradise Lost 5.86, 88). To warn Adam and Eve of Satan and his wiles, God the Father instructs the seraph Raphael to travel to earth. Raphael recounts how Satan, then called “Lucifer,” seduced one third of the angels to revolt against God, suggesting how formidable an adversary he is to the humans.

Book 6. Raphael continues his account of Satan’s revolt. After three days, the war becomes a stalemate, even though the resourceful and ingenious Satan invents gunpowder that ignites cannons. These “implements of mischief” over whelm the good angels, whose recourse is to uproot the mountains of Heaven and to topple them onto the weapons devised by Satan (Paradise Lost, 6.488). To bring the three-day war to an end, the Father urges the Son to mount “the chariot of Paternal Deity,” from which he will assault the evil angels (Paradise Lost, 6.750). Speeding toward them in the chariot, the Son discharges “ten thousand thunders” in a volley so intense that the evil angels leap from the precipice of Heaven, falling for nine days into Hell (Paradise Lost, 6.836).

Book 7. At Adam’s request Raphael recounts the story of the Creation. Sped by a chariot through the gates of Heaven, the Son, accompanied by angels, oversees “the vast immeasurable abyss,” which is “outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild” (Paradise Lost, 7.211–12). In a series of utterances, the Son begets one stage of the Creation after another. Plenitude, continuity, and hierarchy characterize Nature, which is full of diversity and innumerable creatures—fowl, fish, and beasts. The account focuses on the creation of humankind and the enjoinder that Adam and Eve, endowed “with sanctity of reason,” should “be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth” (Paradise Lost, 6.508, 531).

Book 8. Adam asks Raphael about the planets and other celestial bodies, their placement in the heavens, and their motions. But Raphael discourages such inquiry, even the query on whether the earth or the sun is the center of the universe. Instructing Adam to “be lowly wise,” Raphael encourages discussion more directly relevant to the human condition (Paradise Lost, 8.173). Adam, complying with his teacher’s guidance, affirms that it is more important to know what “before us lies in daily life” (Paradise Lost 8.193). Recollecting the first moments of consciousness after he was created, Adam indicates to Raphael that he felt the need for “collateral love,” and “dearest amity” (Paradise Lost, 8.426). The subjects of Eve’s creation, Adam’s conjugal union with her under the direction of God, and Raphael’s elaboration on the relationship of Adam and Eve conclude Book 8.

Book 9. Having infiltrated the Garden of Eden, Satan takes the form of a serpent and waits for an opportune moment to seduce humankind. Eve proposes that she and Adam divide their labors, because when they are together, they talk and become diverted from their duties to “tend plant, herb and flower” (Paradise Lost, 9.206). Spying Eve at work alone, Satan begins to seduce her to his purpose, leading her to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. He accuses God of preventing humankind from becoming divine, for if, contends Satan, Eve were to eat of the forbidden fruit, she would become godlike. Emboldened by this argument, Eve eats the forbidden fruit and offers it to Adam, who also eats it. Soon they quarrel, each blaming the other for their transgressions.

Book 10. The Son travels to the Garden of Eden to judge Adam and Eve. Because of their transgressions, they are to be punished in various ways: Adam will toil for his living, and Eve will experience the pain of childbirth. In the meantime, the figures of Sin and Death, who had been in Hell, have followed Satan in his journey to the earth, and now prey on Adam and Eve, as they will on all humankind to come. Satan, exulting in his successful temptation of humanity, returns to Hell, mounts his throne, and reports his triumph to the evil angels. However, he is transformed into “a monstrous serpent on his belly prone” and the evil angels become serpents too (Paradise Lost, 10.514). When they try to alleviate hunger and thirst by eating fruit, they chew “bitter ashes” (Paradise Lost, 10.566). By the end of the book, Adam and Eve experience remorse and become contrite.

Book 11. The Son presents Adam’s and Eve’s prayers to God, who accepts them, but ordains the couple’s banishment from Paradise. The archangel Michael informs the pair of God’s verdict; but to prevent them from becoming disconsolate, God has instructed his angelic emissary to foretell “to Adam what shall come in future days” (Paradise Lost, 11.114). The revelation is to include mention of “the covenant in the woman’s seed renewed,” a reference to the Virgin Mary, to whom the Son will be born in human form as Jesus (Paradise Lost, 11.116). While Eve is asleep, Michael takes Adam to a mountaintop, from which they view future events: Cain’s slaying of Abel, various scenes of peace and war, the Flood, Noah’s ark, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Book 12. The vision of the future continues: the Israelites are enslaved by Egypt, liberated under the leadership of Moses, and then ruled by David, the ancestor of Jesus. In his narration, Michael emphasizes the coming of Jesus the Redeemer, and the foundation and growth of Christianity under the Apostles. Particularly highlighted is the Son’s final victory over Satan. At the “world’s dissolution,” the Final Judgment will occur (Paradise Lost 12.459). The reference here is to Doomsday, when the world will be cataclysmically destroyed and all humankind will be judged by the Son, who will determine the ultimate disposition of human souls to Heaven or Hell. After Eve awakens, she and Adam are escorted by Michael from the Garden of Eden.

Satan

Milton lived through one of the most dramatic periods in English history, a period that has been described by one historian as “the world turned upside down” (Hill, p. xv). The upheaval in Milton’s era challenged the medieval world-view, in which the various social classes—commoners, clergy, nobility, and the sovereign—were rigidly stratified, one above the other. Disrupting this hierarchy was the vastly expanding middle class, including craftsmen, tradesmen, merchants, and lawyers, who settled in urban areas and whose involvement in socio-economic culture modified traditional concepts of status. The Protestant Reformation also contributed to social instability by challenging the authority of the papacy and by encouraging people to read the Bible on their own rather than having it interpreted for them by a priest. In the early seventeenth century, many scientific discoveries, particularly Galileo’s confirmation that the earth revolved around the sun, challenged traditional worldviews as well. In this climate, leftist political, religious, and military groups questioned the hegemony of the sovereign as the head of church and state. That challenge eventually resulted in the English Civil War, in which Oliver Cromwell, commander of England’s army, defeated the royalists. With the beheading of King Charles I in January 1649, the Interregnum (years of English government between the reigns of monarchs) began, and Cromwell presided over the nation.

In view of the foregoing events, Satan in Paradise Lost may typify the defiant rebel who challenges God’s absolutism, refusing to capitulate even when he privately despairs of victory. To the fallen angels who rally around him after their defeat in Heaven and downfall into Hell, Satan proclaims:

Powers and Dominions, deities of Heaven,
For since no deep within her gulf can hold
Immortal vigor, though oppressed and fallen,
I give not Heaven for lost. From this descent
Celestial Virtues rising, will appear
More glorious and more dread than from no fall,
And trust themselves to fear no second fate.
               (Paradise Lost, 2.11–17)

In effect, Satan defines his existence by being adversarial. A number of readers considered this defiance of God to be heroic.

The basis for interpreting Satan as a hero derives from the reaction of British Romantic poets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and

MILTON AND WOMEN

When he was composing his epic poem, the 56-year-old Milton had already outlived two wives and was entering upon his third marriage. Milton also had published two editions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Undoubtedly some of his marital experiences affected the characterization of Eve and her relationship with Adam. It seems likely, for instance, that when Eve separates from Adam in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, Milton may have recalled his first wife’s separation from him in 1642, when she went home to her parents within two months of their marriage (she would return to him three years later). Evidently Mary Powell found Milton to be an inhospitable spouse, perhaps because she was only 17 years old, whereas he was 33. Also, Milton’s studious regimen, frugal meals, little social contact with others, and antiroyalist sentiments all ran counter to Mary’s upbringing. Significantly, in his divorce tracts Milton contends that the chief purpose for marriage is to alleviate loneliness. Similarly, Adam in Paradise Lost cites his “single imperfection”—how he is “in unity [his oneness or singularity] defective” and why he desires “collateral love, and dearest amity” (Paradise Lost, 8.423, 426). Such is the basis for marriage, and when the rapport of love and amity is severed, so too, Milton contends in the divorce tracts, is the marriage. Because of his personal experiences and the subordinate status of women in seventeenth-century England, Milton probably held the view concerning spousal relations that the Son himself expresses when punishing Eve after her downfall: to her “husband’s will” she “shall submit” and he over her “shall rule” (Paradise lost 10.195, 196). While such may have been his general view, his poem manifests a relatively open-minded outlook on women for his time, depicting a relationship between Adam and Eve that is more mutual and reciprocal than hierarchical.

Lord Byron all perceived Satan as a rebel-hero, in part, perhaps, because they, like Satan, challenged traditional authority. Satan may even be seen as an allegorical rendition of Cromwell, who not only rebelled against but also overcame the Stuart king of England. But Cromwell’s triumph supposedly occurred because the Stuart monarchy was an unjust rulership, an institution that appropriated power claimed by Parliament and that subjugated the people. Whereas the sovereignty of God may be construed as legitimate, a human sovereign who is an absolutist tends to become a tyrant, and a tyrant merits overthrow and punishment. In other words, Milton’s poem may be distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate sovereignty. Milton himself composed several anti-monarchical tracts justifying the forcible removal of King Charles I—and his execution. Alternatively, according to William Blake, although Milton’s poem glorifies Satan’s heroic energy and resourcefulness, its author may have been of the devil’s party without knowing it. In other words, the poem could be implying that any absolutist, even the Judeo-Christian God, is unjust, largely because decrees of salvation and damnation might be construed as arbitrary. The more likely implication, however, is that human institutions that presume to operate under the aegis of God (monarchy and the church) can be sacrilegious and corrupt.

Another point of view is developed in illustrated editions of Paradise Lost, the first of which appears in 1688, the year of the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution, in which the English Parliament replaced James II, England’s last Catholic king, with his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, Prince William of Orange, with whom she ruled jointly. In the first illustrated edition of the poem, Satan’s face resembles that of a Stuart monarch, the dynastic house that the Revolution of 1688 terminated. The epic narrates how Satan elevates himself above his peers, extorting homage from them as if he were a deity. In doing so, he becomes an “idol of majesty divine,” as the epic recounts, and the evil angels who worship him are idolaters (Paradise Lost, 6.106). These images all suggest the Stuart monarchs, whom one can identify with the idols, and the royalists who assisted them, whom one can identify with the idolaters. Further, if Milton describes the council in Hell in Book 2 of Paradise Lost as a parliamentary debate, this too supports the view that Satan is meant to resemble the Stuart monarchs. The devil’s council offers only the pretense of debate—the consensus that finally issues from the deliberations is the same plan initially proposed by Satan, whose dominant will prevails. The same thing happened during Charles I’s kingship; when Parliament did not comply with his will, he threatened to dissolve it. Moreover, Satan enthroned in Pandemonium resembles both a political and a religious leader, the two roles of the Stuart monarchs.

Sources and literary context

In writing Paradise Lost, Milton relied primarily on Hebraic and Christian scripture. He also incorporated extensive commentary on that scripture by the rabbis and by the Church Fathers, who were the prominent Christian interpreters in the early centuries after Christ (people like St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome). To achieve the epic form of the poem, Milton consciously imitated previous long narrative poems, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. In fact, at the beginning of Book 9 of Paradise Lost, Milton refers to all three of these classical epics. Milton is likewise indebted to the epics of classical antiquity for the twofold themes of love and war that inform Paradise Lost and for numerous literary conventions and devices traditionally associated with long narrative poems, such as the invocation of the muse(s), a descent into the underworld, and epic similes (protracted comparisons and analogies). Milton depended as well on numerous medieval and Renaissance epics. Dante’s the Divine Comedy, for example, especially the Inferno, influenced Paradise Lost in numerous ways, particularly in the topography of Hell. Indeed, one of the most renowned paradoxes in Paradise Lost, in which “hope never comes” to the fallen angels though it “comes to all,” derives from the inscription on the portal to Dante’s underworld, which counsels all who enter its confines to abandon any hope of escape (Paradise Lost, 1.66–67).

Events in History at the Time the Poem Was Written

Civil War, Interregnum, Restoration

Milton lived in an era of extraordinary turmoil, which derived from the clash of the Stuart sovereigns, James I and Charles I, with Parliament. This clash intensified under Charles I for several reasons:

The tension between the king’s view that his right to rule came from God (the so-called divine right of kingship) and Parliament’s view that the power of the king derived from the consent of the people
Parliament’s insistence of its right to meet and not to be dissolved by royal decree when its views challenged those of the king; Parliament’s reluctance to finance the king’s wars against France, Spain, and the Scots
The appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury of William Laud, who enforced a uniform mode of worship and the use of a prayer book, both of which were favored by only a small minority of the English people

Antagonizing most Englishmen, as well, was Charles I’s marriage to the French Catholic princess Henrietta Maria.

In this era Milton composed numerous tracts against high-ranking clergy and the monarchy. He opposed the episcopal hierarchy in the Church of England—namely, the ecclesiastical dignitaries headed by William Laud—and disapproved of a monarchy that abridged the liberties of the people, that arrogated powers belonging to Parliament, and that conducted what was tantamount to personal rule. More radically, Milton defended regicide and paved the way for later works in which he celebrated republicanism. At the same time, he was the victim of personal abuse in polemical tracts whose authors were employed by the son of Charles I.

Between 1649 and 1660, England was not a monarchy but a republic whose leaders experimented with national governments. First there was the Commonwealth (1649-53), under which Cromwell attempted to let others govern, then the Protectorate (1653-60), with Cromwell serving as head of state until he died in 1658. Eighteen months of strife followed before free elections

MILTON: PRIVATE LIFE AND PUBLIC SERVICE

1642:	Milton marries Mary Powell; England is on the verge of Civil War.
1643-44:	The first and second editions of Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce are published.
1644-45:	Cromwell and his New Model Army win major battles.
1647:	Cromwell’s army occupies London.
1649:	The Commonwealth is declared; Charles I is beheaded; Milton is appointed diplomatic secretary to the Council of State.
1652:	Milton suffers total blindness; Mary Powell dies.
1653:	Cromwell is named the Lord Protector.
1656:	Milton marries Katherine Woodcock.
1658:	Katherine Woodcock dies; Cromwell dies; Milton begins in earnest to write Paradise Lost, some of which may have been composed earlier.
1660:	Charles II becomes king of England; Milton is arrested, but soon released from jail.
1663:	Milton marries Elizabeth Minshull and probably finishes Paradise Lost.
1665-66:	Milton escapes the plague in London by residing at a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire.
1667:	First edition of Paradise Lost is published.
1674:	Second edition of Paradise Lost is published; Milton dies of gout on November 8th and is interred inside St. Giles Church in Cripplegate, London.

led to the recall of Charles II to the throne. England’s 11 years of nonroyal rule ended. The experiment in government had failed.

Despite the military successes of Cromwell’s army at home and even abroad and the tolerance for the independent religious congregations and political radicals, the Commonwealth had not been a popular government; it fell because it was unrepresentative. The Parliament in session, called the Rump (because its members remained seated while others, who were unsympathetic to the army, were purged), was a thin disguise for military despotism. Because a freely elected Parliament would have seated many members sympathetic to the return of the monarchy, Cromwell and the officers of his army devised a constitution for a government called the Protectorate, which supplanted the Commonwealth. Cromwell was made Lord Protector and Head of State. The failure of the Protectorate can be traced to the military character of the government, Cromwell’s death in 1658, and the inability of his son, Richard, to elicit political support. Charles II took the throne in 1660, but his kingship was limited in its power; and within a few generations, religious toleration and the sovereignty of the people became important elements of the English constitution.

The military and political turmoil that beset the 1640s and 1650s in England informs Paradise Lost on many levels. The most graphic example is the War in Heaven, which occupies most of Book 6. The “spread ensigns” and “firm battalion” that assemble under the command of Satan and the cannons that discharge their fireiron balls dramatize the tactics of infantry, artillery, and cavalry during the English Civil War (Paradise Lost, 6.533, 534). In Adam’s dream-vision of the future, which spans Books 11 and 12, the biblical figure of Nimrod (from Genesis 10:8) typifies the military despotism that enforces political rulership:

… one shall rise
Of proud ambitious heart, who not content
With fair equality, fraternal state,
Will arrogate dominion undeserved
Over his brethren, and quite dispossess
Concord and law of nature from the earth;
Hunting (and men not beasts shall be his game)
With war and hostile snare such as refuse
Subjection to his empire tyrannous.
               (Paradise Lost, 12.24–32)

The characterization of Nimrod may glance back at not only Charles I but also Cromwell, whose excesses Milton disliked and whose military threats and intervention can be viewed as arrogant gestures of personal rule.

Milton and Puritanism

Puritanism in mid-seventeenth-century England was a religious orientation whose adherents, by their emphasis on scripture and on the practices of early Christianity, preferred simple religious beliefs, simple forms of worship, simple methods of church organization, and a strict moral code with reference to personal conduct. Puritans objected to the vestiges of Roman Catholicism in the liturgy and prayer book of the Church of England and in the episcopal hierarchy. They also preferred to eliminate priestly vestments, rituals and ceremonies, statues, colored windows, and music from churches. They abhorred the dissolute life of the Stuart monarchs and the extravagant masques at the court of Charles I that pandered to the king’s proud self-image, used garish scenery and theatrical devices, featured wantonness, and employed objectionable music. They disliked festivities, stage-plays, rural sporting games (especially when held on Sundays), maypoles, and folk dances. Doctrinally, Puritans embraced many of the views of the French reformer John Calvin.

Accordingly, Puritans were labeled Dissenters. Because they did not succeed in purifying the culture and in purging the Church of England of its excesses, which they perceived as vestiges of Roman Catholicism, some more radical Puritans broke away from the established Church and became separatists. Many separatists advocated the abolition of the priesthood and episcopacy, contending, as well, that each congregation should be independent of all others and have the right to choose its own pastor. Most important to Puritans was the right to express their religious views without oppression or persecution from the established Church, not a right they would enjoy. Instead the Laudians, or followers of the Anglican Archbishop Laud, who resented the Puritans, used civil authority to punish them. To escape the Laudians, some Puritans traveled to the colonies in America. While it may be argued that the Puritans failed in their immediate objective of reforming the established Church, a broader view will indicate that Puritanism had long-term effects: buttressing Protestantism against Catholic resurgence in England; advocating liberty of conscience; espousing religious toleration; resisting civil authority’s insistence on uniform religious beliefs; and upholding the rights of the people to limit the power of a sovereign. While Milton leaned toward Puritanism, he also manifested affinity with Presbyterianism, which also emphasized the doctrines of Calvin. Initially, Milton was part of a coalition, including the Puritans, the Presbyterians, and others, that sought to reform the Church of England. But when he discovered that the Scottish Presbyterians, in particular, were striving to impose their particular beliefs as the established religion, he castigated them for hypocrisy.

Paradise Lost reflects Puritanism in several ways. If the Puritans disliked the established Church because of its resemblance to Roman Catholicism, then the papacy, in particular, evoked their hatred. Pandemonium, the temple and palace that the devils construct in Hell, resembles St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Like St. Peter’s, Pandemonium has ornate pillars, “golden architrave,” “cornice” and “frieze, with bossy sculptures grav’n,” and “the roof was fretted gold” even the “doors” with “their brazen folds” suggest the entrance to St. Peter’s (Paradise Lost 1.713–17, 724).

To provide a contrast to the excesses of Roman Catholicism, Milton in Paradise Lost depicts the evening and morning prayers of Adam and Eve as simple and spontaneous forms of worship. Before they withdraw to their innermost bower in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve celebrate the beneficence of the Lord in a short prayer. The commentary that follows accentuates the couple’s Puritanism:

This said unanimous, and other rites
Observing none, but adoration pure
Which God likes best, into their inmost bower
Handed they went.
               (Paradise Lost, 4.736–739)

And after they awaken, the morning prayer of Adam and Eve likewise reflects the features admired by Puritans:

Lowly they bowed adoring, and began
Their orisons, each morning duly paid
In various style, for neither various style
Nor holy rapture wanted they to praise
Their Maker, in fit strains pronounced or sung
Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence
Flowed from their lips, in prose or numerous verse,
More tuneable than needed lute or harp
To add more sweetness.
               (Paradise Lost, 5.144–52)

Finally, there was a belief among Puritans, and other Protestants, that marriage was not simply for procreation—marriage partners owed each other mutual comfort and support. Manuals of the early 1700s (The Compleat Housewife, 1734, for example, and The Young Ladies’ Companion, 1740) promoted the idea of husband and wife as helpmates in their spiritual, emotional, and working lives, an ideal clearly reflected in Eve’s relation to Adam.

Milton and science

Much as upheavals in politics and religion characterized seventeenth-century England, so too radical changes in the field of science challenged traditional views of the design of the universe that contributed to the instability of the era. The Royal Society, an association of scholars dedicated to individual research and the collective evaluation and publication of findings, was established in 1660, about the time Milton began Paradise Lost. Since its founding, the Royal Society has exercised great influence on science and on scientific education. In Milton’s era one of the most significant scientific findings included the verification by telescope of the Copernican or “heliocentric” (sun-centered) model of the universe.

While Milton surely knew about this model, in Paradise Lost he uses the Ptolemaic or “geocentric” (earth-centered) model, which dates back to the second century c.e. In the geocentric conception, the fixed earth is at the center, encompassed, in turn, by seven spheres or tracks in which the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn revolve. The eighth sphere includes the fixed stars; the ninth, though crystalline, is watery; the tenth, called the primum mobile or “the first mover,” imparts motion to the other spheres. Encasing the universe is a hard, crystalline shell, called the “firmament.” This schema of the universe informs much of Paradise Lost, including the account in Book 7 of the creation of the world. Incorporated in literature and theology since at least the Middle Ages, the geocentric model of the universe was congruent with the biblical account of Creation in Genesis: God made the sun, moon, and stars revolve around the earth as a sign of his care and concern for humankind—one of the dominant themes of Milton’s epic.

But scientific findings in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to prove the truth of the heliocentric model of the universe. Such findings, which resulted from Galileo’s invention of the telescope late in the sixteenth century, included topographic features of the moon (its valleys and mountains and its reflection, not radiation, of light), sunspots, the satellites of Jupiter, the peculiar form of Saturn, the phases of Venus and Mars, and the Milky Way. Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church in Italy, primarily because his revolutionary findings were construed as challenges to ecclesiastical authority (and also to the biblical account of the Creation). Milton, during his journey through Italy in 1638–1639, visited Galileo, who at the time was blind and under house arrest. From atop a mountain in Fiesole outside Florence, in the region of Tuscany, Milton viewed the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. That experience so stimulated his imagination that Milton refers explicitly to Galileo three times in Paradise Lost, calling attention to the astronomer’s major discoveries involving the moon and the sun. First, to highlight the “broad circumference” of Satan’s shield, Milton likens it to “the moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views” (Paradise Lost, 1.287–88). Second, when Satan lands on the sun, Milton contends that he produced

TO RHYME OR NOT TO RHYME

When Paradise Lost was first published in 1667, some readers asserted that the poem should have been composed in rhyme. Milton’s revolutionary act of dispensing with the principal marker of English verse was perceived as an eccentric and possibly elitist gesture against the native rhyming tradition. Milton himself in a prefatory note to the epic explains that his “measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin” (Shawcross in Milton, pp. 249-50). Milton composed his epic in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, a measure that includes ten syllables per line. Because the metrical foot called the iamb is disyllabic, including an unstressed and a stressed syllable, there are five iambs per line of verse. This was the same measure used by Renaissance dramatists, such as Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Milton may have chosen this measure not only because of its use by classical forbears, such as Homer and Virgil, but also because of the dramatic features of his epic. After all, Milton initially conceived of Paradise Lost as a drama, which was to have been called “Adam Unparadised,” for which only an outline survives. He furthermore dismissed rhyme as an invention used to set off weak subject matter and meter—that is, to conceal poetic deficiencies.

… a spot like which perhaps
Astronomer in the sun’s lucent orb
Through his glazed optic tube yet never saw.
               (Paradise Lost, 3.588–90)

Third, to elaborate on the clearness of the firmament, Milton describes the atmosphere as ideal for the use of a telescope:

… As when by night the glass
Of Galileo … observes
Imagined lands and regions in the moon.
               (Paradise Lost, 5.261–63)

Sometimes the two models of the universe—the geocentric and heliocentric—are juxtaposed, but the intent does not seem to be to affirm the validity of the latter. When, for example, Adam inquires about the design of the universe, Raphael discourages such “studious abstruse thoughts” (Paradise Lost, 8.40). He cautions Adam:

God to remove his ways from human sense,
Placed heaven from earth so far, that earthly sight,
If it presume, might err in things too high,
And no advantage gain. What if the sun
Be center to the world, and other stars
By his attractive virtue and their own
Incited, dance about him various rounds?
               (Paradise Lost, 8.119–25)

Raphael’s admonition speaks to a human inclination toward presumption and pride in probing the mysteries of the Creation. While science as such is not rejected, Raphael admonishes scientists who are motivated by the quest for fame and self-glorification, even to the extent of seeking out “other worlds” (Paradise Lost, 8.175). The seraph’s guidance to Adam—to “be lowly wise” and to “think only what concerns thee and thy being”—counsels obedience to God (Paradise Lost, 8.173–74). Another way of framing Raphael’s guidance is to highlight the distinction between scientia (or knowledge), on the one hand, and sapientia (or wisdom), on the other. The latter is clearly preferable to the former. And when the latter is combined with humility, as when Raphael enjoins Adam to “be lowly wise,” Milton is epitomizing his understanding of humankind’s ideal relationship with God.

Reception

When it was first published (1667), Paradise Lost elicited less than glowing praise because its author was John Milton. Milton’s religious and political views branded him as an unpopular author after the Restoration, so that the excellence of his greatest work went largely unheralded, except for the admiration of a few close associates, such as Andrew Marvell, who worked with Milton while he was diplomatic secretary during the Interregnum. Another admirer was John Dryden, who toward the end of the century rendered parts of Paradise Lost in rhymed couplets for an opera called The State of Innocence, which was published in 1677 but never performed.

Not until the eighteenth century did Milton’s epic achieve more universal praise. In a series of essays in the literary journal called The Spectator (1712; also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times), Joseph Addison ranked Paradise Lost with classical epics. A generation later, in 1727, the French writer Voltaire expressed unbounded admiration for Milton and his epic. By the mid-eighteenth century, political liberalism and the Romantic movement, which involved renewed attentiveness to nature, had registered an impact on English society; in 1756 the English critic Joseph Warton focused, among other aspects, on the natural setting for the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, describing the unbridled imagination of its author as sublime. Later in the eighteenth century, however, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1783), Samuel Johnson expressed a mixed reaction: though he praised Milton’s imagination, he decried the images from nature as being derived more from books than from direct experience.

In the early nineteenth century, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, Paradise Lost evoked the admiration of William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, all of whom perceived Milton’s Satan as a heroic rebel and God as a tyrant.

Today, Paradise Lost is commonly held to be a classic of Western literature, which engages present-day topics of intense interest, such as patriarchy, humankind’s relationship with God, gender relations, and environmentalism.

—Albert C. Labriola and Martin Griffin