The creation of the world

Adam, his attention now fixed, asks the natural follow-up question. He has heard the story of how this world's enemy fell. He wants the matching story: how was this world itself made, and why was he made in it? Raphael agrees that this, too, is permissible to tell. He begins the second of his great narrations.

The Son, after driving the rebels out, was sent into chaos to draw the boundaries of a new world. Standing in his chariot at the edge of the unformed roar, he took a golden compass and "in his hand / He took the golden compasses, prepared / In God's eternal store, to circumscribe / This Universe, and all created things." Raphael then narrates the six days in order — Milton's expansion of Genesis 1, with each day's creation given its own poetry. Light on the first day. The firmament dividing the waters on the second. Dry land and seas, with rivers running their first courses, on the third. Sun and moon and stars on the fourth. Fish and birds on the fifth, the seas and air filling. Animals on the sixth, walking up out of the earth at God's word — Milton's image of the lion shaking its mane free of the soil is one of the most vivid in the poem. And last, Man, made in God's image, "with sanctity of reason."

Raphael ends with the answer to Adam's "why." Humanity was created to compensate the loss of the rebel third — to be tested, to prove obedient, and to ascend, in time, into the vacant thrones of heaven. The new race is the long answer to the rebellion. Adam is hearing, in effect, the cosmic stakes of his obedience.