Why Study Paradise Lost?

The Rev’d Dr. Peter Johnston

Why study Paradise Lost? Yes, it is one of the great works of English and world literature, among what Matthew Arnold calls “the best which has been thought and said.”

But there are more particular reasons that Classical Christian Education should prioritize Milton’s epic, even above many other worthy writings. It is an expansive text of Christian imagination, which offers a sustained engagement with classical literature, and presents a Christian transformation of classical heroism.

In other words, the power of Paradise Lost is not only in presenting Christian truth in a classical form, but also in reshaping that form according to Christian truth. It therefore represents a kind of conceptual prototype for Classical Christian Education as a whole, which seeks to assimilate the best of classical learning within its Christian commitment.

I therefore offer here an extended article on Paradise Lost, in four parts:

1. An expansive text of Christian imagination
2. A sustained engagement with classical literature
3. A Christian transformation of classical heroism 
4. A prototype for Classical Christian Education

An Expansive Text of Christian Imagination

Paradise Lost is an imaginative retelling of Genesis 1-3: the Creation of the world, of Adam & Eve, of their blessedness in Eden followed by their fall. It also explores the unwritten backstory of the tempting serpent, in the form of Satan’s rebellion in heaven, his defeat and fall to hell, and his vengeful journey to earth. And it concludes with a prophetic vision of sacred history, summarizing the story of the scriptures to Christ, from the first Adam to the second Adam, from creation and fall to redemption.

This is how Milton describes the poem’s subject and scope, in its opening invocation:

Of man’s first disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that forbidden tree, which mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, til one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing heav’nly muse… 

(I.1-6)

The whole poem is in the form we see here: un-rhymed pentameter, often called “blank verse.”  Especially characteristic of blank verse is “enjambment,” or the continuation of an idea across lines without punctuation. Yet the line-break provides abundant opportunity for poetic play and double meaning, especially with the last word of the line. Notice, for example, the word “fruit” at the end of the first line, as at the end of a bough, dangling. As for Eve, our desire has been piqued, and we read on to see how Eve the fruit will pick.

The sheer scope of the poem, both conceptually and across its more than ten-thousand lines, can make it difficult to appreciate the accomplishment. For example, if Milton had written only Book VII, his account of the Creation in Genesis 1, we would justly praise it as the best extended poem of Creation in the English language. We would make it required reading, and give particular focus to Milton’s depiction of each day. Consider the depiction of the first day, the creation of light, and of morning and evening:

Let there be Light, said God, and forthwith Light
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure
Sprung from the Deep, and from her Native East
To journey through the airy gloom began,
Sphered in a radiant Cloud, for yet the Sun
Was not; she in a cloudy tabernacle
Sojourned the while. God saw the Light was good;
And light from darkness by the Hemisphere
Divided: Light the Day, and Darkness Night
He named. Thus was the first Day Ev’n and Morn:
Nor past uncelebrated, nor unsung
By the celestial choirs, when orient light
Exhaling first from darkness they beheld;
Birth-day of heav’n and earth; with joy and shout
The hollow Universal Orb they filled,
And touched their Golden Harps, and hymning praised
God and his works, Creator him they sung,
Both when first Evening was, and when first Morn. 

(VI.243-260)

Here Milton combines the Biblical account of the first day’s light with the practice of morning and evening prayer. He offers an appealing vision of the heavenly host joyfully “hymning” on “their golden harps.” Left unspoken, but clearly implied, is the awe-inspiring idea that as Christians today say their morning and evening prayers, we join the worship the heavenlies, who have sung from the beginning and will continue to the end.

Paradise Lost contains hundreds of such passages, which if considered alone would be anthologized alongside Caedmon’s Hymn and the lyrics of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Donne. Yet Milton put them all together in a single epic, like a spray of gems studding a single crown, designed to adorn “eternal providence / and justify the ways of God to man” (I.25-26).

A Sustained Engagement With Classical Literature

Every introduction to Paradise Lost notes the way it fits the formal conventions of classical epic. Like the epics of Homer and Virgil, the poem begins in medias res (in the middle of things), concerns the activity of heroes, including war and love and adventurous journeys, and depicts their encounters with divine figures in both the heavens and in hell. It includes long epic catalogues and extended epic similes. It is structured in twelve books, multiple of which open with invocations to the muse.

I’d like to suggest, however, that Milton’s engagement with classical literature does far more than merely check the boxes of epic form. Rather, Milton adapts specific classical content from a wide variety of classical sources. Examples abound: Satan’s opening rage and resolution as a reproduction of Achilles at the beginning of the Iliad; the catalogue of demons like Homer’s catalogue of ships; Satan’s Odyssean journey from hell to earth; his encounter with Sin & Death as a retelling of the Rape of the Sabines; Abdiel’s dissension in the demonic ranks as another Homeric Thersites; the divine council concerning foreknowledge and free will in relation to Lucretius and Virgil’s Eclogues; the creation of Eve in comparison to Ovid’s myth of Narcissus; the conjugal love of Adam and Eve in relation to Aeneas and Dido. The effect is not only to situate Paradise Lost within the classical tradition, but also to invest the classical stories with added meaning, as a kind of typology to Biblical truth.

Consider for example the restaging of Ovid’s Narcissus myth in the newly created Eve, before she has been presented to Adam. Eve sees her own reflection in an Edenic brook:

‘As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A shape within the watery gleam appeared, 
Bending to look on me; I started back;
It started back. But pleased I soon returned; 
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks 
Of sympathy and love. There I had fixed
Mine eyes till now and pined with vain desire
Had not a voice thus warned me…’ 
(IV.460-467)

Notice Milton translating the mirror image of reflection into the opposite structure of his lines, here highlighted with added bold and bold italics. What is repeated is Eve’s growing attraction to her own image, at first pulling back, but then yielding and returning, giving to herself the “coy submission” that was properly intended for Adam (IV.310). Not only does this offer a rich vein of countercultural insight on the human condition, it also redeems the Narcissus myth by casting its vice as the flip side of a created virtue.

Augustine memorably imagines the Christian appropriation of the classical in analogy to the Israelites plundering the Egyptians. Such appropriation is permissible, if at times dangerous, because Egyptian gold can become the golden calf in the absence of God’s law. But in Paradise Lost, Milton uses classical gold to Biblical purpose, as gilding for a literary temple.

A Christian Transformation of Classical Heroism

Every Christian reading of Paradise Lost has to grapple with the prominence and appeal of Satan. This tension is compounded when we realize that Milton gives Satan many of the qualities of the classical hero: rhetorical wit, martial valor, resilience under adversity, courageous adventure.  Many readers have even wondered to ask: is Satan the real hero of Paradise Lost? This was an especially prominent reading in the Romantic era of the 19^th century.

In the 20^th century, scholars CS Lewis and Stanley Fish answered these ideas by pointing out Milton’s intentional desire to show Satan at his most seductive.  If the prince of darkness had no appeal, no one would be led astray! But they also go on to show how the more heroic qualities of Satan are prominent in the early books of Paradise Lost, but then Satan’s true ugliness is gradually revealed in his actions as the story unfolds. By the time Satan is tempting Eve, he has descended into the form of a serpent, driven in pain by his own twisted need for revenge, a kind of demonic parody of the self-emptying love of the Son of God.

We can see the point most clearly in Milton’s reflection on wrath. Rage, of course, was the opening conceit of the Iliad, and a characteristic quality of the hero Achilles, who, aggrieved, allows his rage to ferment and motivate decisive, heroic action. And equally, we see wrath in Satan, especially at the beginning of Book IV:

…for now
Satan, now first inflam’d with rage, came down,
The Tempter ere th’ Accuser of man-kind,
To wreck on innocent frail man his loss
Of that first battle, and his flight to Hell 

(IV.8-12)

From a Classical perspective, Satan would indeed be the hero of the poem. But Milton takes a Christian perspective, that rage is not a virtue, but rather a vice, opposite the proper Christian virtue of patience. Thus Milton is quite specific to argue that true heroism concerns patience more than it does of wrath. See the opening of Book IX:

…yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued [ 15]
Thrice fugitive about troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused…

Since first this subject for heroic song
Pleased me long choosing, and beginning late;
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabled knights
In battles feigned; the better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
Unsung
(IX.13-17, 25-33)

Thus the ethical center of Paradise Lost is neither Satan nor heroic warfare driven by rage, but rather the characters who demonstrate “patience and heroic martyrdom.” We see this patience in many of the Angels, including Abdiel, at times in Adam and Eve, in the Creation itself, and supremely in the Son of God.

In this light, we discover that the Son of God is the greater hero of Paradise Lost, not only because he too can enter battle with superior wrath, as he does when driving the demonic host out of heaven, “his count’nance too severe to be beheld / And full of wrath bent on his enemies” (VI.825-826). More profoundly, the Son demonstrates supreme patience by becoming man and suffering death on the cross. In this patience, the Son does not practice, but rather suffers wrath: both the righteous anger of God against sin, as well as the devouring rage of death. This the Son explains in Book III, when before the Father he offers himself as a vicarious atonement for fallen man:

Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life
I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;
Account mee man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleased, on me let Death wreck all his rage…
(III.236-241)

Thus Milton in Paradise Lost does not so much abolish classical heroism, as he rather fulfills and transforms it. Satan is set up as a classical hero, precisely to show the ultimate inadequacy of classical heroism. At the same time, Milton develops a related but superior Christian heroism, building on a foundation of Christian truth a related but superior system of virtue.

A Prototype for Classical Christian Education

Properly considered, Paradise Lost emerges as a prototype for Classical Christian Education as a whole. Both seek to assimilate the best of classical learning within a fundamental commitment to Christian truth. 

In Christian literature, the closest analogues to Milton’s achievement are Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Divine Comedy. While these analogues should also be required reading, of course, two factors of accessibility might be elucidated to give Paradise Lost pride of place, especially for students. First, Paradise Lost is written in English, and therefore English speakers will find it the most accessible as a work of literature. Second, Paradise Lost offers a narrative based on scriptural stories that will be familiar to most students. Of course part of the joy of the Confessions and the Divine Comedy is the study of Late Imperial Rome and Medieval Italy, so this is meant not as a fundamental criticism, but merely an observation of the more extensive contextualization required to their proper study.

Practically speaking, this suggests that Paradise Lost should not only be required reading in CCE literature courses, but should also become a common point of reference across the whole field of Classical Christian Education. Among a variety of strategies to achieve this goal, one would be for institutions to find ways for large groups to read Paradise Lost together. For example, a Classical Christian College could have all students read and study Paradise Lost together in their freshman year, perhaps even incorporating the whole faculty to give lectures in their various areas of expertise on relevant sections of the epic.

In this way, students will be able to join in the gratitude of Adam, who offers thanks to Gabriel for recounting the Creation:

What thanks sufficient, or what recompence
Equal have I to render thee, Divine
Historian, who thus largely hast allayed
The thirst I had of knowledge, and vouchsafed
This friendly condescension to relate
Things else by me unsearchable, now heard
With wonder, but delight, and, as is due,
With glory attributed to the high
Creator…
(VIII.5-13)