The war in heaven

Raphael continues. The loyal angels assemble under Michael; Satan's forces face them. The first day's fighting goes confusingly — angels cannot truly kill each other, but they wound, are flung backward, are humiliated. Michael wounds Satan with a stroke that opens him from helmet to side, and the rebel feels pain for the first time. The day ends without resolution. The fact that the war drags on this long is itself part of Milton's argument — angels in revolt cannot finish each other, and the work of judgment will have to come from elsewhere.

On the second day Satan reveals an invention: gunpowder, and cannon to fire it. The loyal angels are at first staggered — heavenly forms knocked down by metal balls — but then they tear up entire mountains by the roots and hurl them across the field, burying Satan's artillery and his army under stone. The fighting becomes chaotic. God watches and judges that the war has gone on long enough; the resolution, he decides, will not come from any angel.

On the third day he sends out the Son alone — in a chariot, with the brightness of full divinity at last unveiled. The rebels cannot stand against him. He drives them across heaven to the edge of the wall, and they break and fling themselves over, falling for nine days through chaos before they hit Hell. The whole rebellion is ended by a single figure on a single day. Raphael closes the story by turning it back to Adam: "Firm they might have stood, yet fell. / Remember, and fear to transgress." This is what Milton has set up the whole book to do — to make sure Adam, when he falls, falls knowing.