Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Masaccio. Fresco. Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence

“Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

Paradise Lost by John Milton is not a work for people who see red just thinking about religion, for those who quit too easily, or the generally lazy. Milton’s magnum opus is a deeply religious work, a deeply difficult work, and a deeply frustrating work at times full of obscure classical references. Unfortunately I didn’t have an edition with footnotes, but luckily having read a chunk of Greek mythology and literature during my life helped me understand most of the references.

I’ll start off by admitting a fault of my own: I’m not a huge fan of long poetry, and therefore by extension I’m not a huge fan of epic poetry, despite enjoying epic fantasy. My ideal poetry is epitomized by Emily Dickinson whose poems rarely extend more than a page. My intense dislike of long poems is one of the reasons I’m not in love with the Iliad. It just goes on and on, with a plot that is basically one long back-and-forth battle with tiny episodes in which different warriors tell us their life story and mythological family backgrounds all framed around Achilles throwing a temper tantrum. Nevertheless, there are exceptions to my long poetry antagonism in Homer’s other famous work. I think one of the reasons I enjoyed the Odyssey is the presence of a more concrete plot, with discernible movement; the story isn’t an endless back-and-forth battle between two sides, but the protagonist, Odysseus has a real goal, and the episodes in achieving that goal are unique from each other. Paradise Lost too often reads like the Iliad to me, which was probably one of the reasons it took me so long to finish. But persevere I did.

Satan awakens in hell alongside his fellow archangels after their rebellion against God. After realizing they failed, a council of hell’s kings meet to decide how they ought to proceed into the future (should they immediately resume their war against heaven? Beg for forgiveness and return to heaven’s ranks? Or should they postpone their war until they can rebuild their ranks?). They decide to stay antagonists towards heaven, but not to engage in a direct war at the moment. Satan attempts to leave hell to discover what has happened since they were thrown out of heaven. Guarding the gates of hell he finds his daughter, Sin, who he engaged in an incestuous relationship and produced a goblin child, Death. Outside of hell, he travels through the kingdom of Chaos and Night, who are upset that their kingdom has been reduced significantly in size due to the creation of a new world. Satan travels to the new world, Earth. On Earth he finds the Garden of Eden, where the newly created Adam and Eve live. Raphael, an archangel, shows up and recounts to them the war in the heaven in which Satan fell, after Jesus shows up, and then the creation of the universe, which is Milton basically retelling Genesis 1. Adam tells the angel about what he remembers of his own creation and the creation of Eve. Raphael forewarns them that Satan will soon show up and try to tempt them. Satan takes possession of a snake’s body, tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, who then convinces Adam to do the same. Jesus finds out, kicks them out of the garden, and then tells the forlorn pair all that will follow to give them some hope: Cain and Abel, the flood, the Hebrew patriarchs, and then Jesus and his sacrifice, which will restore humanity for Adam’s and Eve’s sin.

There are three central problems with enjoying a narrative like this: 1) if you’re unfamiliar with Greek mythology or geography it’s hard to follow the allusions. 2) if you’re familiar with the Biblical stories, especially in Genesis, most of the poem’s narrative is just a reworking of this material, leaving the reader feeling they’re not really reading anything new or exciting. 3) Half the “story” itself is people standing around telling about events and characters in the recent past, making it difficult to follow who is speaking and who they are talking about at times, especially in verse where there aren’t paragraphs or other spacing tools to help. Other aspects that make the work difficult is the shift in genres between scenes. For example, the scene where Satan meets his daughter Sin, and their incestuous spawn, Death, is clearly meant to be allegory. However, this doesn’t make the entire work an allegory, only this one section. The entire work is a combination between epic poem and religious myth. However, even with all these difficulties present to challenge the reader it might be worth reading Paradise Lost for the one thing Milton does do well, and that is write. The man is a master of beautiful and powerful language. This description of hell illustrates his wonderful ability with the written word:

“No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed”

It shouldn’t be surprising that Milton is so skilled with the written word as Shakespeare clearly influences Milton. His work is chalk full of soliloquies in which characters, Adam and Satan especially, talk in private about their innermost feelings to the “audience” out of hearing from the other characters. In this quote Satan explains his feelings about the creation of man and considers the reasons God created humanity as an insult to himself and the other angels.

“To me shall be the glory sole among
The infernal powers, in one day to have marred
What he almighty styled, six nights and days
Continued making, and who knows how long
Before had been contriving, though perhaps
Not longer than since I in one night freed
From servitude ingloruious well-nigh half
The angelic name, and thinner left the throng
Of his adorers: he to be avenged,
And to repair his numbers thus impaired,
Whether such virtue spent of old now failed
More angels to create, if they at least
Are his created, or to spite us more,
Determined to advance into our room
A creature formed of earth, and him endow,
Exalted from so base original,
With heavenly spoils, our spoils; What he decreed
He effected; man he made, and for him built
Magnificent this world, and earth his seat,
Him Lord pronounced, and O indignity!
Subjected to his service angel wings,
And flaming ministers to watch and tend
Their earthy Charge: Of these the vigilance
I dread, and to elude, thus wrapped in mist
of midnight vapor glide obscure, and pry
In every bush and brake, where hap may find
The Serpent sleeping, in whose mazy folds
To hide me, and the dark intent I bring.”

There is no denying Satan is an interesting character. The Romantics worshipped Satan as the rebellious hero of the text, but I think the Romantics were too hasty. The text makes explicit that Satan is the villain of the story and God is good, even if Satan is one of our protagonists. It is easy to empathize with Satan as a tragic figure whose own vanity and pride blinds him to his inability to win a war against God. No matter what he does he cannot possibly win this war. He continually fights against God and his angels, and continually loses, to the point where its barely even a contest. He doesn’t win a single battle, yet he continues to hope he can somehow pull off a victory, that God really isn’t omnipotent. This is a character who deludes himself, who starts believing his own lies as truth. I suppose that’s what makes him such an interesting character, he tricks himself into believing he can actually defeat God, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he is the good guy and fighting for liberty and freedom.

Satan’s rhetorical and delusion that he is fighting for liberty and freedom of his fellow angels against the imposed tyranny of God is exposed multiple times in the text as a lie when Satan tells us privately all the glory of his victory will be for him and that he plans to rule over his fellow fallen angels as servants. God, on the other hand, rules as a benevolent king and with mercy. His subjects are free in that they are granted freewill. The point of having Satan continually speak of liberty and freedom in his speeches is a warning against the power of rhetoric. Satan’s inability to acknowledge God as his superior isn’t just a matter of defiance, but stems from his lack of knowledge–his unawareness that God is his superior in ability and his creator. Ultimately Satan’s sins and fatal flaws originate in a lack of rationality when observing the world around him. He even believes his own lies because he has lost his sense of reality. For Milton reason is as important, and reason goes hand-and-hand with faith. Even when Adam and Eve err by eating the forbidden fruit they spend awhile justifying their own actions to themselves with what they believe to be reason, but ultimately isn’t much different than Satan’s self-justifying rhetorical. In other words, Milton’s point in the text is that people sin when their reason and rationality fail them. People disobey God and think they are God’s equal when they don’t use reason and rationality. Milton’s text is the epitome of its time period in its perfect balance between science/rationality and religious faith/devotion. Given how strongly the text explores his religious views its a safe bet that he didn’t view Satan as a hero to be idealized. Instead Satan is there to highlight common mistakes people can make in falling off the path of righteousness, and by extension erring from the path of reason. It is no coincidence then that Satan and humanities’ fall parallel each other, both assume God lacks the ability to punish them and they can be God’s equal, which is why Adam and Eve eat the fruit (so they can be like gods).

Milton reconfigures the entire Epic tradition in this text. Not only does he borrow and adopt the form to a Christian religious narrative, but the thematic core of the text draws on both Christian morals and Ancient Greek philosophy, and attempts to harmonize them. Multiple times the text warns against excess, which was of particular interest to Greek philosophers. Multiple times his text admonishes the importance of moderation (another important idea in Greek philosophy) as essential to leading a righteous and faithful life. Virtue (that key idea for Greek philosophers) is equated with righteousness (a key idea of religion). For Milton, the two are one and the same.

For those interested in Christianity and who love Homer’s epic poetry, you’ll love this book. I suspect this one of those books that most readers will not lose sleep if they haven’t read, yet at the same time for those interested in books on a more intellectual level, this text is worth reading at least once. Maybe I’ll even try it again when I’m older, twenty years from now. I would also say if you’re easily offended by sexist material you might want to avoid the text as one of Milton projects is to proscribe the proper relationships and attitudes women ought to have through Adam and Eve, with Eve often being told she is inferior to Adam, and would be happier if she just obeyed him.