Paradise Lost-Book One
by
John Milton
About Paradise Lost
John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, around the time Shakespeare began writing his romance plays (Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The
Tempest) and John
Smith established his colony at Jamestown. Milton's father was a scrivener and,
perhaps more importantly, a devout Puritan, who had been disinherited by his
Roman Catholic family when he turned Protestant. In April 1625, just after the
accession of Charles I, he matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge. During these years, Milton considered entering the ministry,
but his poetic ambitions always seemed to take precedence over his ministerial
aspirations.
Milton composed his early verse in
Latin, in the fashion of a classically educated person. As soon as his third
year at Cambridge, however, he expressed his desire to abandon such
fashionable poetry in order to write in his native tongue. Unlike the learned
classicists of his day, who imitated Greek and Latin versification, Milton sought to rehabilitate the
English poetic tradition by establishing it as an extension or flowering of the
classical tradition. He saw himself as a poet whose lineage extended, through
the Romans, back to the Greeks. Like Homer and Virgil before him, Milton would be the epic poet of the
English nation.
The poetic vocation to which Milton was heir is both nationalistic
and religious in character. The epic poet chronicles the religious history of a
people; he plays the role of prophet-historian. Hence, as Milton wrote in a letter to Charles
Diodati, "the
bard is sacred to the gods; he is their priest, and both his heart and lips
mysteriously breathe the indwelling Jove." A sense of religiosity and patriotism drive Milton's work. On the one hand, he felt
that he could best serve God by following his vocation as a poet. His poetry
would, on the other hand, serve England by putting before it noble and
religious ideas in the highest poetic form. In other words, Milton sought to write poetry which, if
not directly or overtly didactic, would serve to teach delightfully. The body
of work emerging from these twin impulses - one religious, the other political
-witnesses his development as (or into) a Christian poet and a national bard.
Finally, it is in Paradise Lost that Milton harmonizes his two voices as a
poet and becomes the Christian singer, as it were, of epic English poems.
It should be noted, then, that in
Paradise Lost Milton was not only justifying God's ways to humans in general;
he was justifying His ways to the English people between 1640 and 1660. That
is, he was telling them why they had failed to establish the good society by
deposing the king, and why they had welcomed back the monarchy. Like Adam and
Eve, they had failed through their own weaknesses, their own lack of faith,
their own passions and greed, their own sin. God was not to blame for
humanity's expulsion from Eden, nor was He to blame for the
trials and corruption that befell England during the time of the
Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. The failure of the Puritan revolution was
tantamount, for Milton, to the people's failure to govern themselves
according to the will of God, rather than of a royal despot. England had had the opportunity to become
an instrument of God's plan, but ultimately failed to realize itself as the New
Israel. Paradise Lost was more than a work of art.
Indeed, it was a moral and political treatise, a poetic explanation for the
course that English history had taken.
Milton began Paradise Lost in 1658 and
finished in 1667. He wrote very little of the poem in his own hand, for he was
blind throughout much of the project. Instead, Milton would dictate the poem to an
amanuensis, who would read it back to him so that he could make necessary
revisions. Milton's daughters later described their father being like
a cow ready for milking, pacing about his room until the amanuensis arrived to
"unburden" him of the verse he had stored in his mind.
Milton claimed to have dreamed much of Paradise Lost through the nighttime agency of
angelic muses. Besides lending itself to mythologization, his blindness
accounts for at least one troubling aspect of the poem: its occasional
inconsistencies of plot. Because he could not read the poem back to himself, Milton had to rely on his memory of
previous events in the narrative, which sometimes proved faulty.
Putting its infrequent (and
certainly minor) plot defects aside, Paradise Lost is nothing short of a poetic
masterpiece. Along with Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost is the most influential poem in English literature as well as
being a basis for or prooftext of modern poetic theory.
Summary
Book I of Paradise Lost begins with Milton describing what he intends to
undertake with his epic: the story of Man's first disobedience and the "loss of Eden," subjects which have been "unattempted yet in prose
or rhyme." His
main objective, however, is to "justify the ways of God to men."
The poem then shifts to focus on
the character of Satan who has just fallen from heaven. The scene opens in a
fiery, yet dark, lake of hell. Satan, dazed, seems to be coming to
consciousness after his fall and finds himself chained to the lake.
He lifts his head to see his
second in command, Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, who has been transformed
from a beautiful archangel into a horrid fallen angel. Satan gets his bearings
and, in a speech to Beelzebub, realizes what has just happened: Satan,
presuming that he was equal to God, had declared war on the creator. Many
angels had joined Satan, and the cosmic battle had shaken God's throne.
Satan and his cohorts had lost and
been cast "nine
times the space that measures day and night" to hell. Still, Satan tells
Beelzebub that all is not lost. He will never bow down to God and now, knowing
more of the extent of God's might, the rebel angels might better know how to
continue to fight him in an eternal war.
Beelzebub questions why they
themselves still exist. What plan did God have for them since he did not kill
them completely, but left them their souls and spirits intact to feel pain in
hell?
Satan replies that God indeed
wanted to punish them by forcing them to languish in hell for eternity. But, he
says, that means that they don't ever have to obey God again. In fact, Satan
says, they must work to instill evil in all good things so as to always anger
God.
Satan and Beelzebub gather their
strength and fly off the fiery lake to firmer, though still fiery, ground. They
look around at the dark wasteland that is hell, but Satan remains proud.
"Better to reign in hell, then serve in heaven."
They see their army lying confused
and vanquished in the fiery lake. Satan calls to them and they respond
immediately. Satan gathers his closest twelve around him .
Music plays and banners fly as the
army of rebel angels comes to attention, tormented and defeated but faithful to
their general
They could not have known the
extent of God's might, Satan tells them, but now they do know and can now
examine how best to beat him. Satan has heard of a new kind of creation that
God intends on making, called man. They will continue the war against heaven,
but the battlefield will be within the world of mankind.
The army bangs their shields with
their swords in loud agreement. The rebel angels then construct a Temple, a throne room, for their general
and for their government, greater in grandeur than the pyramids or the Tower of Babylon.
All the millions of rebel angels
then gather in the Temple for a great council, shrinking themselves and become
dwarves in order to fit.
Milton tells us that he is tackling the
story told in Genesis of the Fall of Adam and the loss of the Garden of Eden.
With it, Milton will also be exploring a cosmic battle in heaven between
good and evil. Supernatural creatures, including Satan and the Judeo Christian
God himself, will be mixing with humans and acting and reacting with humanlike
feelings and emotions. As in other poetic epics such as Homer's Iliad and Ulysses, the Popul Vuh, and Gilgamesh, Milton is actually attempting to
describe the nature of man by reflecting on who his gods are and what his
origins are. By demonstrating the nature of the beings who created mankind, Milton is presenting his, or his
culture's , views on what good and evil mean, what mankind's relationship is
with the Absolute, what man's destiny is as an individual and as a species. The
story, therefore, can be read as a simple narrative, with characters
interacting with each other along a plot and various subplots. It can also,
however, be extrapolated out to hold theological and religious messages, as
well as political and social themes.
Milton introduces Book I with a simple summary of what his
epic poem is about: the Fall of Adam and the loss of the Garden of Eden. He
tells us that his heavenly muse is the same as that of Moses, that is, the
spirit that combines the absolute with the literary. The voice is of a
self-conscious narrator explaining his position. There is some background in
the past tense, then suddenly the reader finds himself in the present tense on
a fiery lake in hell. The quiet introduction, the backing into the story, then
the verb change and plunge into the middle of the action, in medias res,
creates a cinematic and exciting beginning.
On this lake we meet Satan,
general and king of the fallen rebel angels.
Milton's portrait of Satan has
fascinated critics since Paradise Lost's publication, leading some in the
Romantic period to claim that Satan is, in fact, the heroic protagonist of the
whole work. Certainly Milton's depiction of Satan has greatly
influenced the devil's image in Western art and literature since the book's
publication.
The reader first meets a stunned
Satan chained down to a fiery lake of hell, surrounded by his coconspirators.
In this first chapter, the reason for his downfall is that he thought himself
equal to God. Hell, however, has not taught him humility, and, in fact,
strengthens his revolve to never bow to the Almighty (Interestingly, the word
"God" is not used in the chapters dealing with Hell and Satan).
Satan is often called a
sympathetic character in Paradise Lost, despite being the source of all evil,
and in the first chapter the reader is presented with some of Satan's
frustration. Satan tells his army that they were tricked, that it wasn't until
they were at battle that God showed the true extent of his almightiness. If
they had been shown this force previously, not only would the rebel angels not
have declared war on heaven, but Satan, also, would never have presumed that he
himself was better than God. Now they have been irreversibly punished for all
eternity, but, rather than feel sorry for themselves or repent, Satan pushes
his army to be strong, to make "a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
Hell reflecting heaven and, later,
earth reflecting both, will be a common theme throughout the work. Satan
chooses twelve close friends: all of them drawn from pagan mythology or from
foreign kings in the Hebrew Bible: to echo and mimic Christ's twelve apostles.
Satan's angels build a large a glorious temple and call a council, both of
which will be echoed in heaven. In fact, Satan uses the same architect as
heaven, now called Mammon in hell.
Many of the structures and symbols
are similar. In heaven and hell there is a king and a military hierarchy of
angels. In most cases, however, they the reverse of each other. In Book I, we are shown that the most
prominent thing about hell is its darkness, whereas heaven is full of luminous
light. As well, the fallen angels, previously glorious and beautiful, are now
ugly and disfigured.
These mirror, and therefore
reverse, images of heaven and hell also work on a theological level. The
darkness of hell symbolizes the distance Satan and his army are from the
luminous light and grace of God. Simultaneously, the rebel angels pulled away
from God by their actions and are forced away by God himself, outside of all
the blessings and glory that come with God's light and into the pain and
suffering that comes with distance away from him. The physical corruption and
disfigurement that occurs to all the fallen angels is symbolic of the
corruption which has occurred in their souls.
Hell itself is described as a
belching unhealthy body, whose "womb" will be torn open to expose the "ribs" of metal ore that
are necessary to build Satan's temple. Natural occurrences in hell, such as the
metaphor of the eclipsed sun, are symbols of natural, and therefore spiritual,
decay.
Psychological motivations also
work in reverse in hell. Hell is punishment for turning away from the Good, but
instead of learning his lesson, Satan becomes more stubborn and more proud.
While heaven is a place where all are turned toward the good and toward
pleasing and obeying God, Satan makes hell a place turned away from God and
turned deliberately toward displeasing him. Whereas before falling from heaven,
Satan was only guilty of presuming to be greater than God (pride), now Satan
has, in fact, become a creator himself. He has created evil: the direction away
from God.
Other critics have examined the
political implications of Milton's hell. Like Dante's hell, the
characters and institutions in Milton's hell are often subtle
references to political issues in Milton's day. The Temple of Satan, for example, has been thought to
symbolize St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, the "capitol" of Roman
Catholicism and home of the Pope. The comparison of the glory of hell to the
light of an eclipsed sun was thought to be a veiled critique of the Sun King,
King Charles, who reigned during Milton's time.
A full understanding of the
metaphors and images that Milton uses, however, would take more
than a knowledge of his contemporary history or religious background.
Describing Satan's kingdom, Milton takes from a myriad of sources,
including Greek mythology and epic poetry, Egyptian and Canaanite religious
traditions, the Hebrew Bible and Mishnaic texts, the New Testament and
apocryphal texts, the Church Fathers, popular legends, and other theological
texts.
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