Paradise Lost — themes & analysis

Milton announces his subject in the opening line: "Of Man's First Disobedience." But the poem he actually writes contains two disobediences, and the relation between them is the spine of the work. Satan refuses the elevation of the Son and leads a third of the angels in revolt. Adam and Eve refuse the single command they were given — not to eat from one tree — and are exiled from Eden. Both falls are about pride; both are about wanting to be other than what God made you. They rhyme.

They do not match. Satan disobeys with full knowledge of who God is and what he is choosing against. His fall is theological in the strict sense: a free creature setting itself against the source of its being. Adam and Eve are deceived. Eve is talked into the act by a serpent; Adam follows because he cannot bear to be without her. The Father, in Book 3, makes the distinction explicit: "The first sort by their own suggestion fell, / Self-tempted, self-depraved: Man falls deceived / By the other first: Man therefore shall find grace, / The other none."

That distinction is what allows the poem to end where it does. The fallen angels stay fallen; the fallen humans are given the long road of redemption. Michael's history-vision in Books 11 and 12 is the working-out of that grace — flood, covenant, law, prophets, Incarnation, Cross. The poem's second fall is recoverable in a way the first is not. Milton's theology is severe enough to insist on this and tender enough to want it true.

What the poem leaves unresolved is whether the two falls are really as different as the Father claims. Adam, after all, was warned. Raphael spent three full books telling him exactly what Satan was and how he fell. Adam knew, in a way no later human would, what he was choosing. The poem makes Adam's fall a real fall, and then makes the grace that meets it a real grace. The argument hinges on whether real grace is possible without real fall.

Where to follow it: Book 1 (Satan rouses the fallen), Book 3 (the Father distinguishes the two falls), Book 9 (the second fall), Book 12 (history toward grace).

The hardest theological problem in Christianity is the one Milton walks straight into: how can a free creature fall if God knew the fall in advance? If God foreknew, the fall was certain; if certain, then in some sense necessary; if necessary, how is the creature free, and how is the punishment just? The Father takes this on directly in Book 3, in some of the poem's most argumentative verse: "I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall... / If I foreknew, / Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, / Which had no less proved certain unforeknown."

The argument is that foreknowledge is not causation. God's seeing what will happen does not make it happen. A man on a hilltop watches a traveler take a road; the watching does not push the traveler. Milton, who had read his Augustine and his Aquinas, knew the move and trusted it to work. Many readers since have thought the move evades rather than answers. C.S. Lewis defended it; William Empson called the Father a tyrant; Stanley Fish argued the Father's coldness is meant to indict the reader who finds Satan more sympathetic. The argument is still going.

What is undeniable is that Milton stakes the whole poem on free will being real. Adam falls because he chose to. Eve fell because she chose to. Satan fell because he chose to. None of them were forced; none of them were tricked into something they could not have refused. The poem is unwilling to give them the comfort of necessity. They had to be able to stand or the falling means nothing.

This is also Milton the political writer arguing through Milton the poet. He had spent twenty years defending the right of free men to govern themselves, depose tyrants, and choose their own form of worship. A poem in which God ran his creatures on rails would not have been a poem he could write. The Father is cold partly because Milton has work for him to do that the older Christian poetic tradition was not asking its God to do — namely, to make the case in his own voice.

Where to follow it: Book 3 (the Father in council), Book 5 (Raphael on the trial), Book 9 (Eve and Adam choose), Book 10 (the judgment).

The first two books of Paradise Lost give Satan some of the most powerful speeches in English poetry. "What though the field be lost? All is not lost: th' unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield." "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." He is proud, eloquent, defiant. He rouses an army of broken angels off a lake of fire by force of voice alone, and flies through chaos to reach Eden because he said he would.

Then in Book 4 he stands on a mountaintop in sight of Eden and breaks. The soliloquy is the most psychologically exposed passage in the poem: "Me miserable! which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell." He admits he was given everything by God and chose to lose it; he could repent and will not, because the same pride that made him fall would make repentance unbearable. Hell is internal. He is carrying it.

By Book 9, when he enters the serpent, he is something less. He is whispering flattery to a woman about a piece of fruit. The grand defiance of Book 1 has shrunk to the meanness of a con. Milton's structural argument about Satan is that evil cannot sustain its own scale; it begins in cosmic revolt and ends in the squalid corruption of someone weaker. The reader who admired the Satan of Book 1 is supposed to be shaken by the Satan of Book 9.

Whether the structure works on the reader is the question. Blake said no — Milton was "a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Shelley agreed; Byron made his Satan a Romantic hero; modern critics have read the poem as Milton's failed theodicy, fascinated by its own villain. C.S. Lewis fought back: Satan is meant to be impressive at first because the poem needs us to feel the gravity of what is being lost. Stanley Fish made the strongest case — Milton put Satan there to seduce the reader and then expose the seduction, to make the fall happen again in our own reading. The poem is large enough to hold all of these.

Where to follow it: Book 1 (Satan on the lake), Book 2 (the council in Pandemonium), Book 4 (the soliloquy on Niphates), Book 9 (Satan in the serpent).

No previous epic had given a married couple this much room. Homer's couples are glimpsed; Virgil's lovers are tragic and brief. Milton spends nearly half the poem inside the marriage of Adam and Eve. Their first words, their first quarrel, their lovemaking under the stars in Book 4, the argument about whether to garden separately, the domestic textures of life before the Fall — all of it is Milton's invention, none of it is in Genesis, and most of it is among the strongest writing in the poem.

Eve is the first character. She wakes by a pool in Book 4 and falls in love with her own reflection until God turns her toward Adam. She speaks to him in long affectionate sentences — "With thee conversing I forget all time." She dreams a strange dream Satan has put into her sleep; she tells it at breakfast; he comforts her. In Book 9 she argues for separating to garden faster, against Adam's worry that they should not be apart with the enemy in the garden. She wins. Milton stages it as a real disagreement between two people who love each other and who both have a case.

When Eve eats the fruit, she eats it alone. Milton then gives her one of the strangest interior monologues in epic: she deliberates whether to share with Adam. If she dies and he doesn't, "another Eve" might be given to him; she cannot bear that. So she will share, even at the price of his death. It is a love-act and a fall-act at once. Adam, when she tells him, makes the matching choice. He eats too — fully aware he is choosing against God — because he refuses to be separated from her. "How can I live without thee, how forgo / Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined?"

Milton renders Adam's choice as moral failure and as recognizable love at once. The fall is real; the love is real. After the Fall they quarrel — bitterly, in the rhythm of any couple after a disaster — and then they repent together in Book 10. The marriage holds. The poem ends with them walking out hand in hand into a world that will not be Eden. It is the Christian answer to the lonely hero of older epic: not one man on the road, but two people together, going on.

Where to follow it: Book 4 (first sight of Adam and Eve), Book 8 (Adam asks for Eve), Book 9 (the quarrel, the fall, the second fall), Book 12 (hand in hand).

The last two books of Paradise Lost are unlike anything else in the poem. The angel Michael takes Adam up onto a hill and shows him human history — first as a vision, then as narration — from Cain and Abel through the flood, the call of Abraham, the law given to Moses, the prophets, the Incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the second coming. It is six thousand years of biblical and Christian history compressed into about a thousand lines, and it is Milton's argument about what the Fall is for.

The argument is that the fall is not undone. Eden is not given back. What is given is something Milton thinks is harder and ultimately better — the long human work of returning to God across history, with grace meeting it. The flood will come; Abraham will be called; the law will be given; the law will not be enough; a child will be born to a virgin in Bethlehem; he will die on a cross; he will rise. Milton is unblushingly Christian about all of it. He thinks the whole arc is the redemption, and he thinks the redemption is real.

What he refuses is the easy version. Adam at first reacts to each new disaster Michael shows him with grief — humans drowning in the flood, the tower of Babel collapsing, prophets killed by their own people. Michael keeps narrating. The crucifixion is staged not as defeat but as the moment the bond is broken. Adam, by the end, says the lines that justify the title: "Henceforth I learn that to obey is best, / And love with fear the only God." He has gotten the lesson. He still has to leave the garden.

The poem closes on what may be the most famous lines in English: "The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way." It is desolate and consoled at the same time. The world is open; they have each other; God is with them; Eden is gone. Milton does not pretend any of these is more or less true than the others. The "wandering steps and slow" carry the weight of what they have lost. The "hand in hand" carries everything that survives.

Where to follow it: Book 11 (the flood and the covenant), Book 12 (Abraham to the Incarnation), Book 12 (the closing lines).