It's appropriate that I finished Paradise Lost on the morning of Christmas Eve, because the poem ends in glorious hope for the coming Messiah, the one who will overturn the curse for Adam's sin. In the last two books of the poem, the Archangel Michael reveals the future to Adam: one day, the Seed of the Woman will come and restore the world to Paradise--this time, for all eternity.

In the Christmas spirit, I loved these lines from Book XII:

     . . . At his birth a Star,
     Unseen before in heaven, proclaims him come,
     And guides the eastern sages, who inquire
     His place, to offer incense, myrrh, and gold:
     His place of birth a solemn Angel tells
     To simple shepherds, keeping watch by night;
     They gladly thither haste, and by a quire
     Of squadroned Angels hear his carol sung.
     A Virgin is his mother, but his sire
     The Power of the Most High. He shall ascend
     The throne hereditary, and bound his reign
     With Earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the Heavens.

lines 360-371

Just for fun: I enjoyed this passage describing Satan's entrance into Eden simply because it reminded me of rural Wisconsin.

     As one who long in populous City pent,
     Where houses thick and Sewers annoy the Aire,
     Forth issuing on a Summers Morn to breathe
     Among the pleasant Villages and Farmes
     Adjoynd, from each thing met conceaves delight,
     The smell of Grain, or tedded Grass, or Kine,
     Or Dairie, each rural sight, each rural sound . . .

Paradise Lost, Book IX, ll. 445-51

I can tell Wendell Berry is influencing my reading of Paradise Lost. As I read Book IX, I thought it was fascinating that on the day Eve succumbs to the Serpent's temptation, the reason Eve wants to be alone from Adam (and thus more susceptible to temptation) is her inordinate desire to do efficient work. When Adam and Eve get up that morning, Eve says to Adam,

     Let us divide our labours—thou where choice
     Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind
     The woodbine round this arbour, or direct
     The clasping ivy where to climb; while I
     In yonder spring of roses intermixed
     With myrtle find what to redress till noon.
     For, while so near each other thus all day
     Our task we choose, what wonder if so near
     Looks intervene and smiles, or objects new
     Casual discourse draw on, which intermits
     Our day’s work, brought to little, though begun
     Early, and the hour of supper comes unearned! (ll. 214-26)

Here, Eve thinks that because they are working together, they will get less done. In response, Adam reminds her that work is not an end in itself. God gave us work for our enjoyment, not for our misery. And when work is exalted to a place where it divides us from each other, there's a problem.

     ... Not so strictly hath our Lord imposed
     Labour as to debar us when we need
     Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
     Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
     Of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow
     To brute denied, and are of love the food—
     Love, not the lowest end of human life.
     For not to irksome toil, but to delight,
     He made us, and delight to reason joined. (ll. 235-43)

In Book V of Paradise Lost, Milton shows the supremacy of a hierarchical conception of the cosmos to the egalitarian conception. In the scene where Lucifer announces to his angels that he resents God's authority over them and plans to rebel, one of his sub-angels, Abdiel, remains loyal to God, and calls Lucifer out for rebellion.

Lucifer has claimed that he simply wants equality for all--but his motive is selfish. He wants to be equal with God. As a result, he falsely accuses God of being unjust in the way He rules His creatures. But Abdiel reminds Lucifer that hierarchy is simply a God-given reality. Authority begins with God himself, and all of us are creatures under authority. God has the right to rule:

     ... Unjust thou saist,
     Flatly unjust, to binde with Laws the free,
     And equal over equals to let Reigne,
     One over all with unsucceeded power. (ll. 818-21)

Abdiel asks Lucifer a penetrating question:

     Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute
     With him the points of libertie, who made
     Thee what thou art, & formd the Pow'rs of Heav'n
     Such as he pleasd, and circumscrib'd thir being? (ll. 818-25)

By the way, C. S. Lewis discusses this idea of hierarchy in A Preface to Paradise Lost in a passage I've commented on here.

Eve to Adam:

     With thee conversing, I forget all time,
     All seasons, and their change; all please alike.
     Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet,
     With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the Sun,
     When first on this delightful land he spreads
     His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
     Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertil Earth
     After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
     Of grateful Evening mild; then silent Night,
     With this her solemn bird, and this fair Moon,
     And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train:
     But neither breath of Morn, when she ascends
     With charm of earliest birds; nor rising Sun
     On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit, flowr,
     Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after showers;
     Nor grateful Evening mild; nor silent Night,
     With her solemn bird; nor walk by moon,
     Or glittering star-light, without thee is sweet.

Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 639-56

In Paradise Lost, Book IV, there's an amazing passage in which Milton describes Satan's first look at Adam and Eve in the Garden. Satan cannot speak--he is in awe as he gazes at these two creatures in all their unfallen majesty. In this scene, Milton reminds us that every human being holds a unique place of dignity among all of creation. We are created in the image of God Himself--and this makes all the difference.

     Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
     Godlike erect, with native honour clad
     In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,
     And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
     The image of their glorious Maker shon,
     Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure—
     Severe, but in true filial freedom placed,
     Whence true authority in men: . . .
     So hand in hand they passed, the lovliest pair
     That ever since in loves imbraces met,
     Adam the goodliest man of men since borne
     His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters Eve.
     . . . Satan, still in gaze as first he stood,
     Scarce thus at length failed speech recovered sad:—
    “O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold? 
     Into our room of bliss thus high advanced  
     Creatures of other mould—Earth-born perhaps,
     Not Spirits, yet to Heavenly Spirits bright
     Little inferior—whom my thoughts pursue    
     With wonder, and could love; so lively shines
     In them divine resemblance, and such grace 
     The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured."

Milton does a masterful job of portraying Satan's guilt in Book IV of Paradise Lost. At this point in the poem, Satan has escaped hell, and has just taken his first look into the created world, but he has no sense of joy. Milton shows great psychological insight into the effects of sin and guilt. This is a moment when Satan should be glad, but instead,

     . . . Horror and doubt distract
     His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
     The hell within him; for within him Hell
     He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
     One step, no more than from Himself, can fly
     By change of place. Now conscience wakes despair
     That slumbered; wakes the bitter memory
     Of what he was, what is, and what must be
     Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

Lines 19-26

In Book III of Paradise Lost, the poet describes Satan's first view of the created universe:

     . . . As when a scout,
     Through dark and desart ways with peril gone
     All night, at last by break of cheerful dawn
     Obtains the brow of some high-climbing hill,
     Which to his eye discovers unaware
     The goodly prospect of some foreign land
     First seen, or some renowned metropolis
     With glistering spires and pinnacles adorned,
     Which now the rising sun gilds with his beams;
     Such wonder seized, though after Heaven seen,
     The Spirit malign, but much more envy seized,
     At sight of all this World beheld so fair.

Paradise Lost, Book III, lines 543-55

I'm making an attempt this Christmas break at reading Paradise Lost through. I've read Daniel Danielson's prose translation of the poem (which made for a wonderful reading experience), but I've never read the poem start to finish. We'll see how it goes.

I'm currently in Book 2, when Satan begins his journey out of Hell. As the other fallen angels wait to see how Satan's journey goes, they amuse themselves in all sorts of ways--military practice, athletic competitions, exploration, music, . . . and even philosophical discussion. One group of particularly bookish fallen angels sits apart from everyone and debates philosophy. I thought this passage was notable for its satire coming from Milton, a strong believer in free will:

     Others apart sat on a hill retired,
     In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
     Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate—
     Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute—
     And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
     Of good and evil much they argued then,
     Of happiness and final misery,
     Passion and apathy, and glory and shame:
     Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!—
     Yet, with a pleasing sorcery, could charm
     Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
     Fallacious hope, or arm the obdured breast
     With stubborn patience as with triple steel.

Book 2, lines 557-69.

     O shame to men! Devil with devil damned
     Firm concord holds, men only disagree
     Of Creatures rational, though under hope
     Of heavenly Grace: and God proclaiming peace,
     Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife
     Among themselves, and levy cruel wars,
     Wasting the earth, each other to destroy:
     As if (which might induce us to accord)
     Man had not hellish foes enough besides,
     That day and night for his destruction wait.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2, ll. 496-505

In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis discusses Book IX, lines 811 ff., of Paradise Lost, in which Eve has just eaten the fruit, and is now planning to give it to Adam. She reasons that if she is going to die, she must have Adam die with her. As Lewis points out, Eve is planning to actually murder Adam, but the reader may not even notice this, because the shift in her thinking is so subtle. Lewis then makes an insightful comment about human nature:

If the precise movement of Eve's mind at this point is not always noticed, that is because Milton's truth to nature is here almost too great, and the reader is involved in the same illusion as Eve herself. The whole thing is so quick, each new element of folly, malice, and corruption enters so unobtrusively, so naturally, that it is hard to realize we have been watching the genesis of murder. We expect something more like Lady Macbeth's 'unsex me here'. But Lady Macbeth speaks thus after the intention of murder has already been fully formed in her mind. Milton is going closer to the actual moment of decision. Thus, and not otherwise, does the mind turn to embrace evil. No man, perhaps, ever at first described to himself the act he was about to do as Murder, or Adultery, or Fraud, or Treachery, or Perversion; and when he hears it so described by other men he is (in a way) sincerely shocked and surprised. Those others 'don't understand'. If they knew what it had really been like for him, they would not use those crude 'stock' names. With a wink or a titter, or in a cloud of muddy emotion, the thing has slipped into his will as something not very extraordinary, something of which, rightly understood and in all his highly peculiar circumstances, he may even feel proud. If you or I, reader, ever commit a great crime, be sure we shall feel very much more like Eve than Iago.

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fantastic, especially in its refutation of modern Milton critics (including T. S. Eliot).

From Lewis's Conclusion:

[Milton's] art is eminently civil ... in the sense that it presupposes in those who are to enjoy it some discipline in good letters and good 'manners'. It demands that our merely natural passions should have already been organized into such 'sentiments' as ordered and magnanimous commonwealths prefer.... It will therefore be ... hateful to the baser spirits among them. It has been compared to the Great Wall of China, and the comparison is good: both are among the wonders of the world and both divide the tilled fields and cities of an ancient culture from the barbarians. We have only to add that the wall is necessarily hated by those who see it from the wrong side, and the parallel is complete. From this point of view the decline in Milton's fame marks a stage in the rebellion of [today's] 'civilization' against civility.


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In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis destroys the notion that Milton was an egalitarian, explaining that Milton held what Lewis calls the "Hierarchical conception" of not only society but also the very cosmos itself:

According to this conception degrees of value are objectively present in the universe. Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior. The goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferiors. When it fails in either part of this twofold task we have disease or monstrosity in the scheme of things until the [guilty] being is either destroyed or corrected. One or the other it will certainly be; for by stepping out of its place in the system (whether it step up like a rebellious angel or down like an uxorious husband) it has made the very nature of things its enemy. It cannot succeed.

Lewis explains that in Milton's Hierarchical conception, one's happiness consists in joyfully submitting to one's place. In this view, once we submit to the God-designed natural order of authority, we are free to become what we were fully created to become. To illustrate this concept, Lewis uses the metaphors of taking part in a dance or playing an instrument in an orchestra. Yes, you must submit to the rules of the dance or the notes on the music--but once you do submit to the created order, you become what you were created to be:

[Milton] pictures the life of beatitude as one of order--an intricate dance, so intricate that it seems irregular precisely when its regularity is most elaborate. He pictures his whole universe as a universe of degrees, from root to stalk, from stalk to flower, from flower to breath, from fruit to human reason (V, 480). He delights in the ceremonious interchange of unequal courtesies, with condescension (a beautiful word which we have spoiled) on the one side and reverence on the other. He shows us the Father 'with rayes direct' shining full on the Son, and the Son 'o'er his scepter bowing' as He rose (VI, 719, 746). ...

Discipline . . . exists for the sake of what seems its very opposite--for freedom, almost for extravagance. The pattern deep hidden in the dance, hidden so deep that shallow spectators cannot see it, alone gives beauty to the wild, free gestures that fill it. . . The happy soul is, like a planet, a wandering star; yet in that very wandering (as astronomy teaches) invariable; she is eccentric beyond all predicting, yet equable in her eccentricity. The heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune; the rules of courtesy make perfect ease and freedom possible between those who obey them. Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.  

Lewis also discusses how the Hierarchical conception sees civil society, private life, and other areas:

When Donne says 'thy love shall be my love's sphere,' he has for his background the cosmic hierarchy of the Platonic theologians. . . . Every being is a conductor of superior love . . . to the being below it, and of inferior love . . . to the being above. Such is the loving inequality between the intelligence who guides a sphere and the sphere which is guided. This is not metaphor. For the Renaissance thinker, not less but more than for the schoolman, the universe was packed and tingling with anthropomorphic life; its true picture is to be found in the elaborate title pages of old folios where winds blow at the corners and at the bottom dolphins spout, and the eye passes upward through cities and kings and angels to four Hebrew letters with rays darting from them at the top, which represent the ineffable Name. Hence we are only on the borderline of metaphor Spenser's Artegall reproves the leveling giant by telling him that all things were created 'in goodly measure' and 'doe know their certaine bound,' so that hills do not 'disdaine' vallies nor valies 'envy hills; in virtue of the same grand Authority who causes kings to command and subjects to obey.

According to Lewis, the Hierarchical conception was held from Aristotle to the eighteenth century. He argues that it is difficult for modern readers to understand older literature because the concept is so foreign to us. For example, Shakespeare fully accepted this Hierarchical view as well. Lewis argues,

Hierarchy is a favourite theme with Shakespeare. A failure to accept his notion of natural authority makes nonsense, for example, of The Taming of the Shrew. . . . If the poet had not meant us to rejoice in the correction of Katharina he would have made her a more amiable character.

Lewis cites other examples from Shakespeare as well, including A Comedy of Errors, The Tempest, King Lear, and Macbeth. Along the way, he shows how this natural order of things can be violated:

Now if once the conception of Hierarchy is fully grasped, we see that order can be destroyed in two ways: (1) By ruling or obeying natural equals, that is by Tyranny or Servility. (2) By failing to obey a natural superior or to rule a natural inferior--that is, by Rebellion or Remisness. And these . . . are equally monstrosities.

Examples of such violation include Macbeth (who let his wife tell him what to do) and Lear (who failed to take responsibility for his kingdom).

Finally, Lewis critiques modern Milton critics who see Satan as some sort of ironic hero:

It would not be surprising if we, who were mostly brought up on egalitarian or even antinomian ideas, should come to the poem with minds prepossessed in favour of Satan against God and of Eve against Adam, and then read into the poet a sympathy with those prepossessions which is not really there.

C. S. Lewis shows the influence of St. Augustine on Milton's theology of the fall in chapter 10 of A Preface to Paradise Lost. Some of the specific doctrines of this theology are as follows:

1. God created all things without exception good, and because they are good, 'No Nature (i.e. no positive reality) is bad and the word Bad denotes merely privation of good.' (De Civ. Dei, xi, 21, 22). ...

2. What we call bad things are good things perverted (De Civ. Dei, xiv, 11). ...

3. From this doctrine of good and evil it follows (a) That good can exist without evil, as in Milton's Heaven and Paradise, but not evil without good (De Civ. Dei, xiv, 11). (b) That good and bad angels have the same Nature, happy when it adheres to God and miserable when it adheres to itself (ibid., xii, 1). ...

4. Though God has made all creatures good He foreknows that some will voluntarily make themselves bad (De Civ. Dei, xiv, 11) and also foreknows the good use which he will then make of their badness (ibid.). For as He shows His benevolence in creating good Natures, He shows His justice in exploiting evil wills. . . . All this is repeatedly shown at work in the poem. God sees Satan coming to pervert man; 'and shall pervert,' He observes (III, 92). He knows that Sin and Death 'impute folly' to Him for allowing them so easily to enter the universe, but Sin and Death do not know that God 'called and drew them thither, His hell-hounds to lick up the draff and filth' (X, 620 et seq.). . . . The same doctrine is enforced in Book I when Satan lifts his head from the burning lake by 'high permission of all-ruling Heaven' (I, 212). As the angels point out, whoever tries to rebel against God produces the result opposite to his intention (VII, 613). At the end of the poem Adam is astonished at the power 'that all this good of evil shall produce' (XII, 470). This is the exact reverse of the programme Satan had envisaged in Book I, when he hoped, if God attempted any good through him, to 'pervert that end' (164); instead, he is allowed to do all the evil he wants and finds that he has produced good. Those who will not be God's sons become His tools.

For books are not . . . dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that should whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them . . . [Hence] as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

John Milton