Paradise Lost

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Paradise Lost

THE LITERARY WORK

An English epic poem, set in Heaven, Hell, and the Garden of Eden at the time of the creation of humanity; first published in ten books in 1667, published in its final form of twelve books in 1674.

SYNOPSIS

Milton relates the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s (humanity’s) fall from grace in a poem that deals with the issues of evil, disobedience, damnation, and salvation.

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

Events in History at the Time the Poem Takes Place

War in Heaven

The immediate prehistory of Paradise Lost is the War in Heaven, during which the rebel angels, under Lucifer (Satan), try to overthrow God the Creator and are flung into Hell as punishment. Lucifer refuses to be subordinate to God or his divine Son (Christ) and decides to achieve a perverse revenge by seducing God’s newest creation, Adam and Eve, to his party, or forcing God to destroy them. This subject of heavenly clashes for dominion has a rich history, not just in the Judeo-Christian tradition but in other belief systems as well. Prominent among these are the classical Greek myths upon which Milton draws so frequently in his poem.

Biblical passages that discuss the War in Heaven are actually rather scant; in the New Testament Gospel of Luke, Christ says “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18); the Book of Revelation speaks of the dragon (Satan) whose tail swept down “the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth” (Rev. 12:4) and who was “cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (Rev. 12:9). In Milton’s poem, the rebels who fall with Lucifer amount to one-third of the angels in Heaven.

Greek myths about fallen deities are much fuller. Several versions of such tales exist, and Milton seems to have been familiar with them all. In his poem, for example, when Christ routs the devils from Heaven, forcing them into the abyss, they fall “Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night / to mortal men” before they find themselves in Hell (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.50-51). In Greek myth, a nine-day fall is the fate of the Titans, who attempted to oust Zeus and his younger group of gods, the Olympians, who had seized control of the heavens. Hundred-armed giants come to Zeus’s aid, hurling hundreds of boulders at the enemy Titans and driving them beneath the earth; the fall down to the depths takes nine days and nine nights. Milton almost certainly had this scene in mind when he described enemy angels throwing mountains at each other in Paradise Lost.

Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden

Milton’s poem is based on the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis, in which God creates the entire universe in six days. Beginning with light and darkness on the first day, God proceeds to create waters, plants, stars, fish, birds, and other animals, including

REBEL ANGELS IN PARADISE LOST

Lucifer (also called Satan): leader of the fallen angels

Beelzebub: Lucifer’s first lieutenant, favors seducing man to the fallen angels’ side

Belial: fallen angel who favors doing nothing; counsels ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth

Moloch; toughest rebel angel, who argues for violent war against God

Mammon: rebel angel who favors building a kingdom in Hell to rival God’s kingdom in Heaven

Sin: Lucifer’s daughter

Death: son of Sin and Lucifer

Mulciber: architect of a palace in Hell called Pandemonium

the first man and woman. Genesis 2:18-25 describes God’s creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib, an act that Milton refers to in his poem.

Eve is created as Adam’s helper. Although the Bible and Milton agree that their home, the Garden of Eden, is beautiful, it is also a place in which humankind can live and work, not just bask in the splendid surroundings.

The Bible describes this lush garden as located in the “east,” which to the ancient Hebrews would have meant Mesopotanda, in today’s Iraq. Four rivers flow from the center of the garden, including two that are known today—the Tigris and the Euphrates. The other two are either purely mythical, or located in another geographical area, which makes it impossible for modern scholars to settle on a precise location for the garden.

Two trees grow at the center of the garden—the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat from the latter, but despite God’s prohibition, they eat the forbidden fruit. The immediate consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedience is expulsion from the Garden of Eden; the long-term consequence is the loss of immortality.

The Poem in Focus

The plot

Paradise Lost begins in Hell, where Lucifer and the rest of the fallen angels have newly alighted.

As Paradise Lost begin, the rebel angels convene at Satan’s palace in Hell to determine their next move. Beelzebub informs the congress that God has created Earth and peopled it with humans, who are good beings. He proposes that they seduce humanity to the side of the fallen angels.

Lucifer, the leader of the revolt against God, sneaks out of Hell to confirm the rumor of the creation. God notices Lucifer winging his way toward Earth but does nothing to stop him, knowing that Adam and Eve are destined to fall prey to Lucifer and disobey God. (This betrayal of God’s trust is referred to as the “Fall of Man.”)

Christ, the Son of God, offers at this point to take upon himself the responsibility of making amends to God for what man is about to do; his offer is accepted. Meanwhile, Lucifer arrives in Eden, which is guarded by one of God’s angels, Gabriel. At Gabriel’s command, the angels Ithuriel and Zephon find Lucifer whispering into the ear of the sleeping woman, tempting her to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the only act that God has forbidden.

Lucifer returns temporarily to Hell, and another of God’s angels, Raphael, is sent to instruct Adam about the War in Heaven and inform him about the enemy. Despite this forewarning, when Lucifer disguises himself as a serpent and tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, she does. Adam’s love of his mate is so great that he eats the fruit too, so that Eve will not suffer punishment alone.

God sends his son, Christ, to the garden to pass judgment. Eve’s sorrow will be to bear children in pain, and she must serve Adam forever. Meanwhile, Adam must earn his bread by hard labor. Asking Christ for mercy, Adam and Eve beseech him to speak to God on their behalf.

God administers both hardship and hope. He replaces perpetual springtime with a stormy round of seasons and condemns the creatures of Earth to prey upon one another. Soon to be turned out of Paradise, Adam and Eve contemplate suicide. They dismiss the notion, though, after God’s angel Michael brings Adam a vision of the future. According to this vision, evil is to grow on earth until a great flood destroys everything but Noah and his ark full of creatures. A return to evil will follow until the crucifixion and resurrection of the Christ on Earth takes place. Moreover, the corruption will persist in the church up to Milton’s day and beyond until the Second Coming of Christ.

Satan—hero or villain?

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, the notion that the real hero of Paradise Lost is not the hapless human couple, nor God the Creator, but rather Lucifer (Satan), became a popular one. The poem opens with a scene wherein Lucifer bravely shakes off his terrible fall into Hell and resolves to do something about it: “To wage by force or guile eternal War / Irreconcileable to our grand Foe” (Paradise Lost, 1.121-22). Lucifer is a compelling figure. Beautiful and brilliant, he is engaged in a battle against insurmountable odds, angry about his subordinate position to God:

Who can in reason then or right assume
Monarchy over such as live by right
His equals, if in power and splendor less,
In freedom equal?
                 (Paradise Lost, 5.794-97)

In fact, such reasoning led Milton and many of his fellow Englishmen to condone the 1649” execution of England’s King Charles I. One reason for the execution was the king’s decision to act alone in important matters, such as raising funds and starting battles, without consulting or heeding Parliament. The English king was supposed to be subject to certain limitations imposed by the members of Parliament, the elected representatives of the people. Charles, however, felt that the king ought to be set far above the people whom he ruled. Unrepentant until the very end, he is reported to have said just before he was beheaded that “a subject and a sovereign are clean different things” (Tomlinson, p. 160). Milton had written a heated defense of the decision to kill the king, arguing that Charles overstepped his bounds in ignoring Parliament: “Parliament is the supreme council of the nation, established and endowed with full powers by an absolutely free people. . . the king was created to carry out all the decrees of . . . [Parliament]” (Milton in Tomlinson, p. 168).

Despite his own involvement in unseating the king, Milton defends the right of God to unopposed monarchy throughout Paradise Lost. For Milton and others of his deeply religious time, there was a profound difference between a divine king and an earthly one. People of the era viewed Lucifer’s heavenly revolt as unjustifiable and purely evil. Certainly they did not regard Lucifer as the hero of Paradise Lost, no matter how intelligent and brave his character might seem. Milton himself did not view Lucifer as a heroic figure, although his rebellion bore some resemblance to one stage of Milton’s own political views.

Milton probably did have politics in mind when he wrote his poem. After the beheading of Charles I, England had experimented with a kingless form of government, ruled by a council in which Milton held a position, but this government collapsed. Milton, who had wholeheartedly embraced the commonwealth, must have taken its downfall particularly hard. Like others of his time, he firmly believed that God took part in human history and that changes came about as a result of God’s almighty will.

MILTON’S PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST

Paradise Lost is written in “blank verse,” iambic pentameter verse that does not rhyme. Before Milton, blank verse was used in composing dramas, such is Shakespeare’s plays. For poetry, the must popular verse forms in Milton’s culture were probably the sonnet and heroic couplets, which used rhyme. In the preface to his poem, Milton felt compelled to defend his choice of blank verse: “The measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Creek, and of Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works” (Milton, Paradise Lost, p. 210),

Milton regarded the beheading of the king as God-inspired. He may have attributed the failure of the experimental government to God as well. In seizing and attempting to reshape England’s government, perhaps the rebels whom he so admired had interfered with God’s timing. The inability of the rebels and Parliament to work together may have been proof of this interference. Their noble effort to overcome the tyranny of King Charles I had collapsed due to their own vicious squabbling. In his poem, Milton appears to be looking closely at human weakness in an effort to comprehend why good turns to evil. He might then understand why the political experiment in his own time went amiss.

Sources

Before his blindness, Milton was able to read works in six foreign languages—French, Italian, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Spanish—and

Paradise Lost is teeming with references to classical literature, the Bible, other national epics, and Jewish historical and literary works.

The scientific discoveries of his time also influenced Milton. The dominant model of the universe—and one that Milton used because his audience was familiar with it—was that of the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy. According to this model, the earth was the center of the universe, and the other heavenly bodies, including the sun, revolved around it. Copernicus’s On Celestial Motions (1543) demonstrated that the reverse was in fact true, that the earth revolved around the sun. The idea had obvious theological consequences that were not popular at the time; if the earth was not the center of God’s universe, then it was possible that mankind was not the center of God’s plan.

Well aware of the scientific discoveries, Milton seems fairly unconcerned about such religious fears. He visited the groundbreaking astronomer Galileo and referred to both him and his telescope in the poem. The poem also mentions the concept of possible life in other worlds and includes the opinion, voiced by Adam, that the earth may be only a “punctual spot” in a vast universe (Paradise Lost, 8.23).

Events in History at the Time the Poem Was Written

Civil war and the Restoration

The England in which Milton studied and wrote was a nation troubled by civil war, the execution of King Charles I, and a confused period of government. The poet had his own personal trials during this period as well.

1642: Civil war breaks out in earnest in Great Britain
1649: Rebels execute King Charles I; Milton publishes The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a pamphlet defending rights of citizens to kill a tyrant-king; Milton is appointed the Secretary for Foreign Tongues in new government
1652: Milton goes totally blind; his first wife, Mary Powell, dies
1653: Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell is named Lord Protector of the new English government; Milton works under him
1656: Milton marries Katherine Woodcock, who dies in February 1658
1658: Cromwell dies; Milton begins Paradise Lost
1660: Puritan government collapses; monarchy restored with Charles II on the throne; Milton is jailed
1663: Milton likely completes Paradise Lost, marries Elizabeth Minshull
1667: Paradise Lost, A Poem in Ten Books published
1674: Paradise Lost, A Poem in Twelve Books published; Milton dies on November 8

England’s civil strife arose in part from the financial difficulties of the monarchy, which had been selling off property ever since the time of Henry VIII (1509-1547). Charles I was heavily invested in waging wars against France and Spain. He financed his political ambitions by levying huge taxes on his subjects, particularly London merchants. He also refused to summon Parliament between 1629 and 1640. Unable to meet without his bidding it to do so, the government was therefore unable to stop the king.

THE MILTONS AT HOME

By the time he produced Paradise Lost, Milton was completely blind. He composed the poetry in his head and then dictated it to a scribe, sometimes one of his two youngest daughters. His daughters also had to read to him in any one of the six foreign languages that he—but not they—knew: “[Milton’s two youngest daughters] were condemned to the performance of reading . . . all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse . . . . All . . . without understanding one word” [Phillips in Milton, pp. 1036-37).

At the heart of the battle between the king and the people was the question of authority—the king thought he was justified in acting alone, while his opponents, the Parliamentarians, thought that the people had the right to regulate the king’s actions. By 1640 Charles needed more money than he could raise on his own to fund his Scottish war, so he was forced to summon Parliament. It remained in session until 1653, becoming known as the “Long Parliament.” The Long Parliament resisted Charles’s plans, threw out his favorite ministers, and abolished the king’s “Star Chamber,” a secret court. The conflict climaxed when Parliament pronounced itself the sole authority in the land. Hearing that he had been ousted from power, the king attempted to seize the rebellious leaders, but failed. Civil war became inevitable. It erupted in August 1642.

Religious fears added to the tension between the king and the people of England. Back in the 1530s, the English had separated from the Catholic Church and formed their own Protestant-based Church of England. Those worshippers who belonged to this new church were called Anglicans. Catholic-Anglican tensions became a factor in England almost immediately.

King Charles I was Anglican, but he married a Catholic woman, Queen Henrietta Maria, and many of his closest advisors were Catholic. Charles embarked on a program of religious control in which he tried to force everyone, including the Scots, to use the same prayer book. Society balked at the idea, for it smacked of the old authoritarian ways of Catholicism. To make matters worse, the powerful Archbishop of Canterbury was slowly reintroducing certain Catholic practices. The Scots rebelled against the king in 1637. Two years later, in the first act of the civil war in 1639, the king tried to carry out his religious program with armed force. Unable to raise an army of sufficient strength, he failed. Meanwhile, in 1641 the Irish, mostly Catholics, rebelled against English settlers. Charles’s Catholic tendencies were blamed for the loss of English life in Ireland, an almost certain injustice.

Paradise Lost is rife with insurrection—Lucifer’s, Adam’s, and Eve’s. By the poem’s conclusion, it is clear that obedience to God ought to provide a system of ordering man’s behavior in the world. But it is equally clear, according to the poem, that political struggle is a sad fact of fallen humanity, one that perhaps may never be satisfactorily resolved, and that this struggle is rooted in the original battle in the Garden of Eden, in which desire was allowed to overpower reason. God’s angel Michael says as much to Adam just before the human beings are thrust from Eden.

Since thy original lapse, true Liberty
Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells
Twinn’d, 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. Therefore, since hee permits
Within himself unworthy Powers to reign
Over free Reason, God in Judgment just
Subjects him from without to violent Lords.
                (Paradise Lost, 12.83-93)

In this dark philosophy, upon which the poem ends, one perhaps sees Milton’s own hard-learned political lessons.

Heavily involved in political events of the period, Milton had fired off writings on behalf of the reformers. In 1649 he assumed the post of Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the new interregnum (“between rulers”) government run by those who had beheaded Charles I.

New relations had to be established with foreign governments; Milton’s job demanded that he translate letters for the governing council and serve as interpreter and advisor, although he had no vote on the council. Troubled by repeated conflict between rebel leader Oliver Cromwell and Parliament, the new government foundered. Finally, Parliament voted for a return to kingship, a move known as the Restoration. They invited Charles II to take the throne with reduced powers, a condition that would apply to all monarchs after him.

After the king’s coronation in 1660, Milton was jailed for his role in the now disgraced regicidal (“king killing”) government. He probably expected to lose his life, but he had certain powerful friends in the new regime. He may also have been pitied because of the blindness that had by this time become complete. Some of his enemies suggested that God had stricken Milton blind because of his wicked political writings.

“The Divorcer”

In Paradise Lost, Adam loves Eve so much that he takes a bite of the forbidden fruit on purpose. Adam’s actions illustrated his willingness to join in her fate, whatever it might be, rather than live without her or force her to live without him. In addition, while the fallen couple bicker and place blame for their plight on each other, Adam intends to remain with his mate no matter what the consequences may be. His position reflects the perfect state of marriage before the fall of man and woman.

Milton was regarded as something of an expert on marriage because he wrote extensively on the subject of divorce. Perhaps it was his personal circumstances that drove him to tackle the topic: his first wife, the eighteen-year-old Mary Powell, left him after a month or so of their marriage. She returned to her parents’ home, where she remained for three years. The reason for her departure remains a mystery. During his wife’s prolonged absence, Milton wrote a tract on divorce, in which he maintained that the perfect marriage was sacred and worth pursuing to such an extent as to make divorce from an unsuitable spouse a socially desirable thing. His Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (published in 1643, revised 1644) was such a huge bestseller that for twenty years he was popularly known as “Milton the Divorcer.” He was rumored to have had many wives, all still living.

Milton’s work on divorce also got him in trouble with the authorities; in 1644 he was forced to appear for questioning before the House of Lords. He stopped writing for publication for the next five years, during which time his wife returned and the first of his children was born. In 1652 his wife died. Altogether Milton would marry three times—in 1642, 1656, and 1663—perhaps gaining greater expertise on the subject through personal experience.

The Puritans

Milton’s religious beliefs were similar to his political beliefs in that they were difficult to pin down to a convenient category. He wrote tracts in defense of Puritan ideas, showing his disenchantment with mainstream Anglican religious politics, but he also acted in ways that went against the spirit of Puritanism.

Broadly speaking, the Puritans were a Protestant sect, composed generally of people from the citizen and craftsman classes (as opposed to the nobility). They were practical in their religion, studying those passages in the Bible that could teach them how the individual soul might best struggle for salvation. Much of their study thus focused on the subjects of sin and the devil. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Puritan leanings are probably most evident in his treatment of the character of Satan and his clever seduction of Eve. The Puritans were also revolutionaries, convinced that the world, though teetering on the brink of chaos and iniquity, could be set right if sufficiently dramatic changes were made. To set it right, they were willing to stage a civil war. Milton apparently agreed with this drastic action, in which he took part.

But Milton’s views also differed from the Puritan ideal in important ways. His ideas about divorce—that a man should be able to obtain one without any bother if he really wanted or needed it—shocked the Puritan mainstream, and his attention to beautiful poetic wording ran counter to the Puritan ideal of the straightforward use of language. Clearly Milton did not consider Catholicism to be a reasonable choice under any circumstances. His views were atypical, though, in that he seems also to have believed that man owes allegiance not to any one sect or religion—but to God alone.

America and Milton

Milton tried to reform English society throughout his lifetime; perhaps this explains why he was so popular in early America, a country filled with people who had recently fled the very same England that Milton wanted to change. His writings on many social issues, from marriage to church government to the relative merits of monarchy and republics, assumed a huge importance in early American culture. It was reported that his example inspired the liberal laws of Rhode Island and that Thomas Jefferson scoured Milton’s characterization of Satan for evidence of heroic rebellion. Paradise Lost was quoted from pulpits and bandied about in national political debates.

Popular for the ideas that it contained, the poem also became the model for a flood of imitation American epic poems. Not until the 1800s, when the nation had calmed significantly in its discussion of competing views on how a nation should be run, did the American public fall out of love with Paradise Lost.

Reviews

English critics of the 1700s produced some of the most important reviews of Paradise Lost. In the influential English literary journal The Spectafor, Joseph Addison wrote a series of eighteen short essays on Paradise Lost. His introductory essay, published on January 5, 1712, puts Milton in the same class as Homer and Virgil, and speaks of Milton’s careful enlargement of the Bible’s scanty descriptions of the fall of the angels and man:

[Milton] was . . . obliged to proceed with the greatest caution in everything that he added out of his own invention. And, indeed, notwithstanding all the restraints he was under, he has filled his story with so many surprising incidents, which bear so close an analogy with what is delivered in Holy Writ, that it is capable of pleasing the most delicate reader, without giving offense to the most scrupulous.
(Addison in Abrams, p. 2205)

On the other hand, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779) contains a section on Milton in which Johnson criticizes Paradise Lost as a dull work:

The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again… Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.
(Johnson in Abrams, pp. 2427-28)

Throughout its history, Paradise Lost has inspired variations on these two opinions. There is, meanwhile, general agreement that the impact of the poem has been enormous. For centuries, observed one writer, Paradise Lost “determined the way in which the majority of the English-speaking world read and interpreted the Bible” (González, p. 163).