Paradise Lost.

• Author: Brittan, Jillisa
• Position: Book review

PARADISE LOST. By John Milton. 1674. Reprinted in JOHN MILTON: COMPLETE POEMS AND MAJOR PROSE. Edited by Meritt Y. Hughes. New York: MacMillan. 1985. Pp. xix, 1059.

INTRODUCTION

Milton's great poem can be enjoyed as a supernatural adventure story in the epic tradition--indeed almost as a science-fiction fantasy. An incredibly powerful supernatural figure--call him Father--lives on planet Heaven somewhere in outer space, surrounded by lesser supernatural beings, called Angels. Father begets Son asexually, and declares his intent to give him viceregal authority. Infuriated at Son's being promoted over him, the foremost Angel, L leads a third of the Angels in violent rebellion against Father and Son. At first it seems the rebels will best the loyal Angels. But Father sends in Son to defeat the rebels all by himself. He succeeds effortlessly, and packs them (now devils) all off to a dismal region of space, created by Father to be the devils' Devil's Island, called Hell. Father, having lost a third of his angels, and determined to complete L's humiliation, creates a new planet and places on it an (initially) immortal couple that he's created out of the dust on the planet's surface.

Father contrives to allow L to escape from Hell by choosing L's own daughter, Sin, and his incestuously begotten son, Death, to guard the gates of Hell so that L may travel through space to the new planet and there tempt the couple to disobey the one prohibition that Father has laid upon them--that they not eat the fruit of a mysterious tree. L succeeds in tempting them (as Father had, in fact, foreseen, for he is omniscient), and for their disobedience the couple is severely punished: they are deprived of immortality and, together with their posterity and with the entire animal kingdom over which they were to rule, they are condemned to lead a hard life, and then to die. But upon Father's challenge to all the (remaining) Angels to figure out a way to save the new race, Son offers to sacrifice himself to redeem them eventually and so cap L's defeat. Father accepts the offer. We learn that in a few thousand years he will impregnate a descendant of Eve with Son, so that Son can be born a member of the race, and die, as otherwise there would be no sacrifice. As a result of his sacrificial death, the worthiest members of the race will eventually become immortal companions of Father and Son (resurrected), like the Angels. The new planet will then be destroyed, Hell sealed forever, and L utterly confounded.

So viewed, the poem is squarely in the epic tradition that, as in Homer, depicts human beings as the playthings of the gods. In form, style, and even certain narrative details, it is greatly indebted to the Homeric epics as well as to later epics such as Orlando Furioso and The Faerie Queene. It tells the heart-stopping story of a galactic power struggle between a tyrant fearful of rebellion, determined to exact unquestioning obedience at any cost (the great literary critic William Empson compared Father to Joseph Stalin (1)), and a formidable rebel against the tyrant; and of the collateral damage that the struggle inflicts on a hapless race. (2) In the fairy-tale ending (projected beyond the end of the poem), the reader learns that all L's "malice serv'd but to bring forth / Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown / On man by [L] seduc't." (3) Man will live in a "far happier place / Than this of Eden, and far happier days" (XII, 464-65).

To tell such a story was not Milton's intention. He thought he was writing a theodicy in the form of a poem, rather than an adventure story, though employing the idiom of epic. His conscious purpose, as he says at the outset of the poem, was to "justify the ways of God to men" (I, 26). "God" is the Christian God as understood by most English Protestants in the seventeenth century. The "ways of God" that concern Milton are the events narrated in the Bible and therefore accepted by him as historically accurate, together with later accretions to the body of Christian beliefs. The key events are the creation, and especially the Fall of man as narrated in Genesis, the story of Jesus Christ as narrated in the Gospels, and the last judgment as narrated in the Revelation of St. John (the Apocalypse). The Fall of man is sketched in Genesis with extreme brevity; Milton elaborates it enormously to form the core of Paradise Lost. (4) But what is it exactly that Milton thinks needed to be justified? It is the features of the Christian tradition that would strike a skeptic or other outsider to the tradition as inconsistent with a "modern" conception of God. By "modern," we mean a conception that a person of Milton's intellectual sophistication and moral character would consider plausible. He would have considered neither ancient Greek and Roman polytheism nor the vindictive and jealous God of the Old Testament plausible. He would have insisted that God is perfect, meaning omnipotent, omniscient (implying complete foreknowledge), and absolutely good-infinitely loving and merciful, but also infinitely just. The task of justification was, therefore, to show how the events of the Christian tradition, to which Milton as a Christian was committed to believing as historical fact, could be squared with the conception of God the perfect.

The theme of justification explains why many readers, including theologians, have found Paradise Lost "legalistic." There are no human laws in the poem, but there is plenty of punishment--of the fallen angels, of Adam and Eve and all their descendants, of the Son (who is going to be executed by the Romans during his incarnation as a human being), of the hapless serpent, and of the other animals (who become predator and prey after the Fall of man, after having been vegetarian in the Garden of Eden). To be justified, punishment must be shown to be the just consequence of a transgression. But that is not to say that it must be the just consequence of a violation of positive law. We have a conception of just punishment by parents for the transgressions of children, though in our society (and in Milton's too), the punishment is not a sanction having the force of law and the transgression is usually not a violation of law. We can speak of justice within the family and similarly of justice in the cosmic prelegal society depicted in Paradise Lost. And since we are lawyers, punishment and justice will be the focus of this essay. Part I explains the difficulty that Milton faced in reconciling a concept of just punishment with the characteristics that he ascribed to God, and how he tried to resolve the difficulty by reference to free will. Part II examines the application of his concept of just punishment to the specific punishments meted out by God, identifying a retributive model for God's punishment of Satan and the other fallen angels that has a secondary goal of deterring rebellion by the still-loyal angels remaining in Heaven; a rehabilitative and deterrence model for Adam, Eve, and their descendants; a strict liability model for the serpent; but no intelligible rationale for the punishment of the other animals in Eden, who were wholly uninvolved in the Fall.

1. GOD CONSTRAINED

   The problem of justification is rendered acute by the difficulty of imagining a deity who is at once omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely good, yet who at the same time inflicts what appear to be disproportionate, savage, and gratuitous punishments. Any two of the deity's three traits can be combined without difficulty. If God were omnipotent and omniscient, but not good--rather, sadistic--the existence of excessive and gratuitous suffering in the world that he created would not be puzzling. And likewise if he were omniscient and absolutely good but not omnipotent (not the creator of all things). And if he were omnipotent and absolutely good, but not omniscient, then suffering might occur, even on a grand scale, by mistake. But when, as in Paradise Lost, God is assumed to be omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely good, the extent to which he permits and sometimes inflicts suffering presents a considerable puzzle.

   Life on earth, for most people and animals, is full of suffering. This sad truth is presented in the poem, as in orthodox Christian theology, as the punishment for Adam's eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. (Had Eve alone eaten it, God would presumably have given Adam a substitute wife, one who--warned by her predecessor's fate--would not have transgressed.) It seems a disproportionate punishment, especially when Satan, in the guise of the serpent, makes so compelling an argument for Eve's eating the fruit and Adam makes so affecting a "case" for standing by Eve and sharing her fate.

   Satan explains to Eve that he ate the apple with no ill effect--on the contrary, it enabled him, alone of all the animals, to learn to speak (and in as rich a vocabulary as Adam and Eve). So God must have been fooling when he said that to eat the fruit would bring death--and imagine what eating it will do for the intellectual faculties of Eve, who already knows how to speak. At worst, given Satan's plausible arguments, Eve is gullible not to realize that the serpent might be lying to her (but who, in his or her prelapsarian inexperience, would expect an animal to lie or a devil to inhabit an animal?). And at worst, Adam is uxorious in deciding to share Eve's fate by eating the fruit also. For these rather trivial-seeming transgressions the suffering experienced by billions of Adam and Eve's descendants (as Adam puts it, "in mee all / Posterity stands curst" (X, 817-18)), along with countless billions of animals, seems excessive.

   Peculiarly gratuitous is the punishment of the serpent, condemned to crawl on its belly. The punishment is fitting in Genesis because there the serpent is the tempter. But in Milton's poem the serpent is not the tempter. The creature was sleeping innocently when Satan entered...