paradise lost 2 essay

Christian Religion Theme in “Paradise Lost” by John Milton Essay

Introduction, age of the poem, thesis statement, book summary, works cited.

John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost is one of the most read epic poems in history (Kean 34). The poem is religious and focuses on the relationship between man and God. To be specific, the poem sheds light on how man’s fate was decided at the Garden of Eden. Precisely, this poem is a Christian poem that seeks to justify the actions of God, which may be unclear to man.

The poem has thousands of lines in the poem’s verses. The poem has been written in over twelve books, not mentioning the original ten book version that was initially written. The review of Book 1 of the poem will highlight the age of the poem. Moreover, the review will provide information about the poet and a thesis statement. A substantive summary of the book will be done with a conclusion.

This poem was published in the year 1667, but was first initialized by the poet in the 17th century (Lewalski 686). This was the first edition of the poem, which consisted of ten books. Later, the poem was redone as a second edition in the year 1674 and consisted of twelve books.

An in-depth analysis of the book reveals that the poem is ancient and was done, when the need to emphasis the validity of the Christian faith was questionable. This can be justified by the poem’s insistence in illuminating the Christian faith from a traditional point of view, particularly by focusing on God, Satan, first creations and man.

John Milton is a renowned poet, who is sometimes regarded as a polemicist. The poet was born on 9th December 1608 (Milton XI) and has written several religious and political materials in his career. Born in London, the young Milton oversaw a shift of his religious views after being abandoned by his father. This was because, the young Milton who was brought up as a staunch Catholic converted to Protestantism.

However, Milton started to write poetry in the 1630s, while undergoing his studies. Much of Milton’s poetry can be traced in the various literary materials that focus on Christian religion and politics (XIV). Until his death on 8th November 1674, the English author was known of his contribution to British partisanship, which is still a contentious issue in modern Britain.

The poetic style known as the Miltonic blank verse style is named after John Milton’s poetic style, which is still relevant in both epic poetry and contemporary poetry.

The poem Paradise Lost is an epic encounter that illuminates the significance of the disobedience of man to God. The poem’s emphasis on God, Satan, angels, and other godly creatures is of importance for man to understand God’s actions. The poem validates Christianity and offers relevance to the Christian religion.

As indicated earlier, the poem is an epic encounter of the Christian faith. The poem trends along with the story of the fall of man as a creature endowed with free will, but weak in faith. This is evidenced in the poem’s first lines, which introduce the subject of the poem. The first lines of the poem indicate the disobedience of man, the cause of the disobedience, the consequence and man’s redemption.

“Of man first disobedience/ and the fruit of that forbidden tree/ whose mortal taste brought death into the world/ and all our woe/ with loss of Eden/ till one greater man restore us….” (Milton 1-5).

The mentioning of the muses in the sixth line of the first verse is an indication that the fall of man may have been pre-planned for a greater significance in the future. A focus on the mentioning of the muses would reveal that Milton is referring to the Holy Spirit.

“Sing heavenly muse/ that on the secret top of Oreb/ or Sinai, didst inspire” (Milton 6-7)

The poet also mentions the aspects that define man’s failure in the presence of God. For example, the poet asserts his presence to hell with Satan. He refers to hell as a burning inferno, where there is chaos in the middle of nowhere. It is in the first book of the poem that the poet introduces the universe structure.

In this regard, the universe is created by God and consists of the earth, the stars, and other planets. The poet implies that the earth is beautiful to the extent that Satan is amazed by such creation, once he falls from heaven.

From the poem’s first book, the reader is introduced to the poem’s characters. Some of these characters are deeply mentioned in Holy Scriptures. An example of such is the mention of angels, archangels and Satan. It seems that the fall of man started from heavenly wrangles between God and Satan. This is attested by the poet who describes Satan as bewildered, once he is thrown out of heave and notices Beelzebub.

Together and some other angels, Satan also recounts on how they should attack God after losing in their first ordeal. In this occurrence, the disobedience of man to God is premeditated, once Satan and his counterparts want to revenge against God through man.

The poet description of Satan is that of a powerful evil that still posses some of the angelic features, such as feathers and monstrous physique. At one point, the poet describes and compares Satan’s shield to a big moon and his pear to a huge mast of a big ship. The rise and reign of evil begin at this moment when Satan summons his fellow fallen angels and counterparts and organizes them into various responsibilities.

The mentioning of the pagan deities in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament is likened by the poet to the leaders of the organized satanic angels. Such deities can be likened to the idol worshipping by the Israelites as numerously mentioned in the Old Testament.

Some of the pagan deities mentioned by Milton include the Chemos worshipped as a non-Hebrew god, soon after the Israelites came from Egypt. Another deity was Moloch popular in Syria and Jordan. Another deity was the Ashtoreth worshipped by the Phoenicians. Milton mentions a lot of deities that were part of the fallen angels.

As mentioned earlier, the fall of man may have been premeditated. However, such would not come easy considering that God had already created man. By using fraud, man could be used as the means to an end. The poet tries to show how Satan and his legions still deceive man through the greed of the material wealth.

From another perspective, the poem Paradise Lost is initialized by a focus on the beginning of the world, which was intended to be a paradise. God intention was to make the earth a paradise for his creations. However, such was lost along the way after the fall of Satan from heaven. Nonetheless, the poet tries to be truthful by using the Holy Spirit to imply his allegations as truthful.

The Holy Spirit is described as the muse, which is intended to keep the information truthful. This is revealed by Milton’s mentioning of the fallen angels by their names. This is an exemplary way of ensuring that his poem does not pass as a myth like any other epic poem with a Greek or Latin origin.

While Greek and Latin mythology focuses on heroic figures like Achilles, Milton’s story of the Paradise Lost is a journey for all mankind. Milton’s epic story is about the good against the evil, which is the most horrific battle that continues to date.

The large part of book 1 of the Paradise Lost poem is a description of the satanic character. The poet tries to explain the struggles of Satan and the eventful deception of man by Satan. At this juncture, the reader may be swayed to think that Satan is the hero of the story or the protagonist of the story. Satan whispers into the year of Eve and deceives her into eating the forbidden fruit.

The success of Satan’s deception may be likened to a character of a protagonist. Most protagonists struggle and emerge successful in their ambitions. The introduction of Adam and Eve in the story does not shift this perception that Satan might be powerful than man. This is evidenced when Satan is described not to have wavered in his evil quest. In fact, he takes pride and delight in evil rather than good.

“Falling Cherub, to be weak is miserable

Doing or suffering, but of this be sure

To do ought good never will be our task

But ever to do ill our delight…” (Milton 157- 160).

Satan becomes more optimistic of his plans, and at one point he envisions himself becoming the king in hell. Satan is powerful to understand the power of the mind. He knows that the mind can be corrupted to make a heaven out of hell or vice versa.

Nonetheless, Satan powers are unmatched to that of God. God demonstrates his immense great powers by lifting up the fallen angles from the burning inferno and unites them with Satan. God must have had a greater plan than Satan.

Perhaps, God had premeditated the fall of man and wanted to demonstrate his powers to redeem man from Satan’s evil plans. This can be evidenced by God choosing his son Jesus Christ to save man by grace. However, Satan does not seem to understand this plan and continues with his pride and thinks his intellects matches that of God.

Ironically, the poet description of Satan has certain shortcomings. The initial intent of the poet was to describe a powerful satanic force. The poet does so by using similes of the burning lake, the pandemonium, the big mast, and a hill.

“Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge/ as whom the fables name of monstrous size…” (Milton 196-197).

Such use of similes indicates that the size of Satan is relative. This description makes the reader to believe that Satan may not be that powerful, big or mysterious.

The book 1 of the poem Paradise Lost portrays Satan as a loser who was incapable of killing even a single angel in their initial heavenly battle. The poem also portrays Satan as a hero of destruction and only excels in acts that bring forth war and atrocities. In this context, mankind is advised against gong into war with Satan without God’s help.

The poet leads the readers to question their admiration of martial strength and the character of heroes who exist in literature. In so doing, the reader is prompted into understanding the virtues of the Christian faith. These Christian virtues entail being obedient, humble and patient in persevering temptations.

It is important to acknowledge that Milton’s description of Satan is not to provoke admiration from the reader. Milton does not expect empathy from the reader.

However, the poet wants the reader to notice the irony that surrounds Satan success. In fact, the poet wants the reader to understand that Satan only succeeds because God wants him to, but just for a while. It seems that Satan efforts and actions are also premeditated by another superior power, which is God.

The poet through symbolism creates the city of hell known as pandemonium, which Satan wants to perfect as hell’s capital. The city, which is made of gold, represents the worldly desires harbored by man. Nonetheless, the city is later revealed to be a sinful place that is full of confusion and disorder. This is a perfect representation of illusions of both Satan and man.

Three main themes are traceable in book 1 of the poem. The first theme is the significance of obedience to God in the Christian faith. The first book of the poem describes the disobedience of man as a succession of Satan’s rebellion against God. At one point, man is warned by angel Raphael that Satan is a threat to mankind. This depicts that obedience is a moral principle that depends on free will for its execution.

When free will is unable to counter against disobedience, mankind is doomed to continue into sin and moral degradation. The significance of disobedience to God has its own significance, since through repentance man is forgiven by God. The lack of acknowledgment of sin and repentance leads to eternal condemnation by God. To date, the significance of seeking forgiveness from God and repentance is a fundamental principle in the Christian faith.

The second theme depicted in the poem is the structure and nature of the universe. The poet gives a layout of the universe in his poem by depicting how God is positioned above all other things. In this context, heaven, hell, and earth are given various proximities in the universe. In this universal hierarchy, the poet positions various creations about God’s proximity. With each level of proximity, certain aspects of power are given to the same creations.

Above all, God is the Supreme Being of all and the creator of all other beings positioned in the universal hierarchy. God’s son Jesus Christ is amongst the top in the hierarchical commands, followed by angels and then a man and ultimately animals.

The positioning of Jesus Christ as superior to all angels prompted the rebellion of Satan and other fallen angels. In this respect, it is important to note that man can only remain obedient by respecting this hierarchy. To this very day, the Christians give allegiance to the Son Jesus Christ in respect to being obedient to God.

The final theme depicts disobedience to God as partly fortunate. After the revelation of the savior of humankind, Adam is happy and sees man’s fault as a means to a happy ending. Through the fault of man, God can show his mighty power in redeeming the sinner.

Moreover, his love is depicted to be forever unending. Such Christian values are the foundation of the Christian faith that salvation comes from the Son of God. Basically, the fall of man is a plan of God to reveal his powers and love for mankind.

Kean, Margaret. John Milton’s paradise lost: A sourcebook . New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Lewalski, K. Barbara. The life of John Milton: A critical biography . New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Print.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost, Books 1 and 2 . California: CUP Archive, 1958. Print.

Milton, John. Paradise lost: A poem, in twelve books. The author John Milton . Oxford: Oxford University, 1746, p. 1-798. Print.

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Paradise Lost

John milton, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

“Paradise Lost: Book II” by John Milton

In general, the British literature highlights Satan’s convincing tactics on the two characters in the story. The two characters faced several problems, and through the text, we see that Satan is convincing them to choose the death path to avoid any more suffering. The opening line of the literature is a closing speech of a girl and the following conversation by Satan explaining his position and understanding of choosing death over life.

Addressing the lady as his daughter, Satan goes ahead to speak on behalf of the other character who had a chance to go to heaven. According to Satan, the heaven experience is sweet and appealing, as it will mark the end of earthly suffering. However, for one to get to heaven, they have to give one thing, which is their lives.

Before he can explain his reasons for being there, Satan tries to clear his identity and establishes that he is about to act in the capacity of a friend and not as an enemy. As he describes the place they are on, that is the earth, as sinister and unsafe; Satan also explains his aim of appearing, which is to grant them freedom from their present suffering.

Satan describes the situation in heaven, claiming that it plays host to several spirits, of which he was a member before he took up the current responsibility. He tries to make heaven to be an appealing place so that the other characters can give up their life through the death for heaven’s comfort.

Conversely, Satan seems not contented with the roles he took as he finds it to be crude. The fact that he took a different path from heaven without any support or company makes Satan feel abandoned. On the other hand, Satan understands that he had to go on the mission on earth so that he can prove a point to his enemies in heaven. He believes that one day, when there is a multitude in heaven, he will get a chance to go back and rejoin other spirits.

In the next part of the conversation, Satan tries to convince the lady that he will give her powers if she accepts his theories. By freeing them from their current problems on earth, Satan promises to deliver the two in a place where they will find peace and will have power over death.

Their new residence and positions will ensure that they have plenty of food and drinks, which will leave them filled and well fed. At this point, Satan had managed to convince the two characters of the significance of choosing death. In this case, death was happy as this would count as a plus to his domain.

‘This uncouth errand sole and one for all’ is my favorite statement in the text. This statement gives a picture of Satan, who is depicted differently in the entire literature. In this statement, Satan accepts his faults and exposes the things he does not like about his role. More so, the statement gives us a picture that he is the only one with such an unfulfilling duty on earth.

On the other hand, this statement seems to term Satan’s work as a task and not his personal choice or to want. The most difficult word in the text is ‘dalliance’ which Satan uses to explain the character of heaven. The word means a deliberate waste of time or dilly-dallying when it comes to making decisions. The author uses the word to describe the ladies dallying on deciding to go to heaven.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Analysis of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 12, 2020 • ( 0 )

Paradise Lost is a poetic rewriting of the book of Genesis. It tells the story of the fall of Satan and his compatriots, the creation of man, and, most significantly, of man’s act of disobedience and its consequences: paradise was lost for us. It is a literary text that goes beyond the traditional limitations of literary story telling, because for the Christian reader and for the predominant ethos of Western thinking and culture it involved the original story, the exploration of everything that man would subsequently be and do. Two questions arise from this and these have attended interpretations of the poem since its publication in 1667. First, to what extent did Milton diverge from orthodox perceptions of Genesis? Second, how did his own experiences, feelings, allegiances, prejudices and disappointments, play some part in the writing of the poem and, in respect of this, in what ways does it reflect the theological and political tensions of the seventeenth century?

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Paradise Lost was probably written between 1660–65, although there is evidence that Milton had had long term plans for a biblical epic: there are rough outlines for such a poem, thought to have been produced in the 1640s, in the Trinity MS, and Edward Phillips (1694:13) claims that Milton had during the same period shown him passages similar to parts of Book IV of the published work. The first edition (1667) was comprised of 10 books and its restructuring to 12 book occurred in the 1674 edition.

Prefatory material

There are two significant pieces of prefatory material; a 54-line poem by his friend Andrew Marvell (added in 1674) and Milton’s own prose note on ‘The Verse’ (added to the sixth issue of the 1667 first edition).

Marvell’s poem is largely a fulsome tribute to Milton’s achievement but this is interposed with cautiously framed questions which are thought to reflect the mood of awe and perplexity which surrounded Paradise Lost during the seven years between its publication and the addition of Marvell’s piece (lines 5–8, 11–12, 15–16).

Milton’s own note on ‘The Verse’ is a defence of his use of blank verse. Before the publication of Paradise Lost blank verse was regarded as occupying a middle ground between poetic and non-poetic language and suitable only for plays; with non-dramatic verse there had to be rhyme. Milton claims that his use of blank verse will overturn all of these presuppositions, that he has for the first time ever in English created the equivalent of the unrhymed forms of Homer’s and Virgil’s classical epics. He does not state exactly how he has achieved this and subsequent commentators (see particularly Prince 1954 and Emma 1964) have noted that while his use of the unrhymed iambic pentameter is largely orthodox he frames within it syntactic constructions that throughout the poem constitute a particular Miltonic style. In fact ‘The Verse’ is a relatively modest citation of what would be a change in the history of English poetry comparable with the invention of free verse at the beginning of the twentieth century. Effectively, Paradise Lost licensed blank verse as a non-dramatic form and without it James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), William Cowper’s The Task (1785) and William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey (1798) and The Prelude (1850) would not be the poems that they are.

The first twenty-six lines of Book I introduce the theme of the poem; ‘man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/Brought death into the world…’ (1–3) – and contain a number of intriguing statements. Milton claims to be pursuing ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ (16) which can be taken to mean an enterprise unprecedented in non-literary or literary writing. While theologians had debated the book of Genesis and poets and dramatists engaged with it, no-one had, as yet, rewritten it. This raises the complex question of Milton’s objectives in doing so. He calls upon ‘the heavenly muse’ to help him ‘assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men’ (25–6). Both of these statements carry immense implications, suggesting that he will offer a new perspective upon the indisputable truths of Christianity. The significance of this intensifies as we engage with the developing narrative of the poem.

In lines 27–83 Milton introduces the reader to Satan and his ‘horrid crew’, cast down into a recently constructed hell after their failed rebellion against God. For the rest of the book Milton shares his third person description with the voices of Satan, Beelzebub and other members of the defeated assembly.

The most important sections of the book are Satan’s speeches (82–124, 241–264 particularly). In the first he attempts to raise the mood of Beelzebub, his second in command, and displays a degree of heroic stoicism in defeat: ‘What though the field be lost?/All is not lost’ (105–6). His use of military images has caused critics, William Empson particularly, to compare him with a defeated general reviewing his options while refusing to disclose any notion of final submission or despair to his troops. By the second speech stubborn tenacity has evolved into composure and authority.

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free; the almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in hell: Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.

(I: 254–63)

While not altering the substance of Genesis, Milton’s style would remind contemporary readers of more recent texts. Henry V addressing his troops, Mark Antony stirring the passions of the crowd, even Richard III giving expression to his personal image of the political future, all exert the same command of the relation between circumstance,rhetoric and emotive effect. Milton’s Satan is a literary presence in his own right, an embodiment of linguistic energy. In his first speech he is inspired yet speculative but by the second the language is precise, relentless, certain: ‘The mind is its own place … We shall be free… We may reign secure ’. The arrogant symmetry of line 263 has turned it into an idiom, a cliché of stubborn resistance: ‘Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven’. The question raised here is why Milton chose to begin his Christian epic with a heroic presentation of Satan.

The most striking and perplexing element of Book I is the fissure opened between Milton’s presence as guide and co-ordinator in the narrative and our perception of the characters as self-determined figures. Consider, for example, his third-person interjection between Satan’s first speech and Beelzebub’s reply:

So spake the apostate angel, though in pain, Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair.

Milton is not telling anyone familiar with the biblical account anything they do not already know, but he seems to find it necessary to restrain them, to draw them backs lightly from the mood of admiration that Satan’s speeches create. When he gives an itemised account of the devils, he begins with Moloch.

First Moloch, horrid king besmeared with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents tears.

This version of Moloch is accurate enough but Milton is being a little imaginative with chronology, given that at this point in the history of the cosmos children, parents and the blood of human sacrifice did not yet exist. Indeed, his whole account of the sordid tastes and activities of the devils is updated to give emphasis to their effects upon humanity.Again, we have cause to suspect that Milton is attempting to match the reader’s impulse to sympathise with the heroic (in Satan’s case almost charismatic) condition of the devils with a more orthodox presentation of them as a threat to human kind, moral, physical and spiritual. Later (777–92) he employs a mock heroic style and presents them as pygmies, shrunk to a physical status that mirrors their spiritual decadence. Here it could be argued that he is attempting to forestall the reader’s admiration of the efforts and skill in the building of Pandemonium (710–92) by ridiculing the builders.

In Book I Milton initiates a tension, a dynamic that will attend the entire poem, between the reader’s purely literary response and our knowledge that the characters and their actions are ultimates, a foundation for all Christian perceptions of the human condition. The principal figures of Homer’s and Virgil’s poems are our original heroes. The classical hero will face apparently insurmountable tasks and challenges and his struggles against the complex balance of fate and circumstance will cause us to admire, to identify with him. Milton in Book I invoked the heroic, cast Satan and his followers as tragic, defeated soldiers, and at the same time reminded the Christian reader that it is dangerous to sympathise with these particular figures. Throughout the book we encounter an uncertainty that is unmatched in English literature: has the author unleashed feelings,inclinations within himself that he can only partially control, or is he in full control and cautiously manipulating the reader’s state of perplexity?

Book II is divided into two sections. The first (1–628) is the most important and consists of a debate in which members of the Satanic Host – principally Satan, Moloch, Belial, Mammon and Beelzebub – discuss the alternatives available to them. There are four major speeches. Moloch (50–105) argues for a continuation of the war with God. Belial (118–228) and Mammon (237–83) encourage a form of stoical resignation – they should make the best of that to which they have been condemned. It is Beelzebub (309–416) who raises the possibility of an assault upon Earth, Eden, God’s newest creation. Satan, significantly, stays in the background. He favours Beelzebub’s proposal, which eventually wins the consensual proxy, but he allows his compatriots freedom of debate,and it is this feature of the book – its evocation of open exchange – that makes it important in our perception of Paradise Lost as in part an allegory on contemporary politics. Milton’s attachment to the Parliamentarians during the Civil War, along with his role as senior civil servant to the Cromwellian cabinet, would have well attuned him to the fractious rhetoric of political discourse. Indeed, in the vast number of pamphlets he was commissioned to write in defence of the Parliamentarian and Republican causes, he was a participant, and we can find parallels between the speeches of the devils and Milton’s own emboldened, inspirational prose.

For example, one of Milton’s most famous tracts Eikonoklastes [38– 9], in which he seeks to justify the execution of Charles I, is often echoed in Moloch’s argument that they should resume direct conflict with God. Milton invokes the courageous soldiers who gave their lives in the Civil War ‘making glorious war against tyrants for the common liberty’ and condemns those who would protest against the killing of Charles ‘who hath offered at more cunning fetches to undermine our liberties, and put tyranny into an art, than any British king before him’. For Milton the Republicans embody ‘the old English fortitude and love of freedom’ ( CPW, III: 343–4). Similarly Moloch refers to those who bravely fought against God and now ‘stand in arms, and longing wait/The signal to ascend’ (55–6). Charles, the author of ‘tyranny’ in Milton’s pamphlet, shares this status with Moloch’s God; ‘the prison of his tyranny who reigns/By our delay …’ (59–60). Both Milton and Moloch continually raise the image of the defence of freedom against an autocratic tyrant.

Later in the book when Beelzebub is successfully arguing for an assault upon Earth he considers who would best serve their interests in this enterprise:

… Who shall tempt with wandering feet The dark unbottomed infinite abyss And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his airy flight Up borne with indefatigable wings Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive The happy isle; what strength, what art can then

Suffice, or what evasion bear him safe Through the strict sentries and stations thick Of angels watching round? … for on whom we send The weight of all our last hope relies.

(II: 404–16)

The heroic presence to whom Beelzebub refers is of course Satan, their leader. In Milton’s pamphlet A Second Defence of the English People (1654) he presents England as almost alone in Europe as the bastion of liberty and he elevates Cromwell to the position of heroic leader.

You alone remain. On you has fallen the whole burden of our affairs. On you alone they depend. In unison we acknowledge your unexcelled virtue … Such have been your achievements as the greatest and most illustrious citizen … Your deeds surpass all degrees, not only of admiration but surely of titles too, and like the tops of pyramids bury themselves in the sky, towering above the popular favour of titles. ( CPW , IV: 671–2)

The parallels between Beelzebub’s hyperbolic presentation of Satan and Milton’s of Cromwell are apparent enough. Even Milton’s subtle argument that Cromwell deserves a better status than that conferred by hereditary title echoes the devil’s desire to find their own replacement for the heavenly order, with Satan at its head. It is likely that many early readers of Paradise Lost would spot the similarities between the devils’ discourse and Milton’s, produced barely fifteen years before – which raises the question of what Milton was trying to do.

To properly address this we should compare the two halves of Book II. The first engages the seventeenth-century reader in a process of recognition and immediacy; the devils conduct themselves in a way that is remarkably similar to the political hierarchy of England in the 1650s. In the second, which describes Satan’s journey to Earth, the reader is shifted away from an identification with the devils to an abstract, metaphysical plane in which the protagonists become more symbolic than real. Satan is no longer human. At the Gates of Hell he meets Sin, born out of his head when the rebellion was planned, and Death, the offspring of their bizarre and inhuman coition (II: 666–967). Then he encounters Chaos, a presence and a condition conducive to his ultimate goal (II: 968–1009).

Book II is beautifully engineered. First, we are encouraged to identify with the fallen angels; their state and their heroic demeanour are very human. Then their leader, Satan, is projected beyond this and equated with ultimates, perversely embodied abstracts; Sin,Death and Chaos. One set of characters have to deal with uncertainties, unpredictable circumstances, conflicting states of mind. The others are irreducible absolutes.

Milton is establishing the predominant, in effect the necessary, mood of the poem. For much of it, up to the end of Book IX when the Fall occurs, the Christian reader is being projected into a realm that he/she cannot understand. This reader has inherited the consequences of the Fall, a detachment from any immediate identification with God’s innate character, motives and objectives. On the one hand our only point of comparison for the likes of Satan (and eventually God and his Son) is ourselves; hence Milton’s humanisation of the fallen angels. On the other, we should accept that such parallels are innately flawed; hence Milton’s transference of Satan into the sphere of ultimates, absolutes, metaphysical abstracts.

Critics have developed a variety of approaches to this conundrum. Among the modern commentators, C.S. Lewis read the poem as a kind of instructive guide to the self-evident complexities of Christian belief. Waldock (1947) and Empson (1961) conducted humanist readings in which Satan emerges as a more engaging character than God. Blake(followed by Coleridge and Shelley) was the first humanist interpreter, claiming that Milton was of the ‘Devil’s Party’ without being able to fully acknowledge his allegiance [137–8]. Christopher Hill (1977), a Marxist, is probably the most radical of the humanist critics and he argues that Milton uses the Satanic rebellion as a means of investigating his own ‘deeply divided personality’.

Satan, the battleground for Milton’s quarrel with himself, saw God as arbitrary power and nothing else. Against this he revolted: the Christian, Milton knew, must accept it. Yet how could a free and rational individual accept what God had done to his servants in England? On this reading, Milton expressed through Satan (of whom he disapproved) the dissatisfaction which he felt with the Father (whom intellectually he accepted). (366–7)

It begins with the most candid, personal passage of the entire poem, generally referred to as the ‘Address to Light’ (1–55). In this Milton reflects upon his own blindness. He had already done so in Sonnet XVI. Before that, and before his visual impairment, he had in‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ considered the spiritual and perceptual consequences of, respectively, light and darkness. Here all of the previous themes seem to find an apotheosis. He appears to treat his blindness as a beneficent, fatalistic occurrence which will enable him to achieve what few if any poets had previously attempted, a characterisation of God.

So much the rather thou celestial light Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight.

(III: 51–55)

Milton is not so much celebrating his blindness as treating it as a fitting correlative to a verbal enactment of ‘things invisible to mortal sight’, and by invisible he also means inconceivable.

God’s address (56–134) is to his Son, who will of course be assigned the role of man’s redeemer, and it involves principally God’s foreknowledge of man’s Fall. The following is its core passage.

So will fall He and his faithless Progeny: whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all the etherial powers And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;

Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have given sincere Of true allegiance, constant faith or love, Where only what they needs must do, appeared, Not what they would? What praise could they receive?

What pleasure I from such obedience paid, When will and reason (reason also is choice) Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled, Made passive both, had served necessity, Not me.

(III: 95–111)

The address tells us nothing that we do not already know, but its style has drawn the attention of critics. In the passage quoted, and throughout the rest of it, figurative,expansive language is rigorously avoided; there is no metaphor. This is appropriate, given that rhetoric during the Renaissance was at once celebrated and tolerated as a reflection of the human condition; we invent figures and devices as substitutes for the forbidden realm of absolute, God-given truth. And God’s abjuration of figures will remind us of our guilty admiration for their use by the devils.

At the same time, however, the language used by an individual, however sparse and pure, will create an image of its user. God, it seems, is unsettled: ‘whose fault?/Whose but his own?’ He is aware that the Fall will occur, so why does he trouble himself with questions? And why, moreover, does God feel the need to explain himself, to apparently render himself excusable and blameless regarding events yet to occur: ‘Not me’. If Milton was attempting in his presentation of the devils to catch the reader between their faith and their empirical response, he appears to be doing so again with God. Critics have dealt with this problem in different ways. C.S. Lewis reminds the reader that this is a poem about religion but that it should not be allowed to disturb the convictions and certainties of Christian faith.

The cosmic story – the ultimate plot in which all other stories are episodes – is set before us. We are invited, for the time being, to look at it from the outside. And that is not, in itself, a religious experience … In the religious life man faces God and God faces man. But in the epic it is feigned for the moment, that we, as readers, can step aside and see the faces of God and man in profile.

Lewis’s reader, the collective ‘we’, is an ahistorical entity, but a more recent critic, Stanley Fish (1967) has looked more closely at how Milton’s contemporaries would have interpreted the passage. They, he argued, by virtue of the power of seventeenth-century religious belief, would not be troubled even by the possibility that Milton’s God might seem a little too much like us. William Empson (1961) contends that the characterisations of God and Satan were, if not a deliberate anticipation of agnostic doubt, then a genuine reflection of Milton’s troubled state of mind; ‘the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions’ (p.13).

Such critical controversies as this will be dealt with in detail in Part 3, but they should be borne in mind here as an indication of Paradise Lost’s ability to cause even the most learned and sophisticated of readers to interpret it differently. Lewis argues that Milton would not have wanted his Christian readers to doubt their faith (though he acknowledges that they might, implying that Milton intended the poem as a test), while Fish contends that querulous, fugitive interpretations are a consequence of modern, post-eighteenth-century, states of mind (a strategy generally known of Reader-Response Criticism). Empson, who treats the poem as symptomatic of Milton’s own uncertainties, is regarded by Fish as an example of the modern reader.

The first half of the Book (1–415) comprises God’s exchange with the Son and includes their discussion of what will happen after the Fall, anticipating the New Testament and Christ’s heroic role as the redeemer. The rest (416–743) returns us to Satan’s journey to Earth, during which he meets Oriel, the Sun Spirit, disguises himself and asks directions to God’s newest creation which, he claims, he wishes to witness and admire. By the end of the Book he has reached Earth.

Here the reader is engaged in two perspectives. We are shown Adam and Eve conversing,praying and (elliptically described) making love, and this vision of Edenic bliss is juxtaposed with the arrival and the thoughts of Satan. Adam’s opening speech (411–39) and Eve’s reply (440–91) establish the roles and characteristics that for both of them will be maintained throughout the poem. Adam, created first, is the relatively experienced,wise figure of authority who explains their status in Paradise and the single rule of obedience and loyalty. Eve, in her account of her first moments of existence, discloses aless certain, perhaps impulsive, command of events and impressions.

That day I oft remember, when from sleep I first awaked, and found myself reposed Under a shade of flowers, much wondering where And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.

Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound Of waters issued from a cave and spread Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved Pure as the expanse of heaven; I thither went With unexperienced thought, and laid me down On the green bank, to look into the clear Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky. As I bent down to look just opposite A shape within the watery gleam appeared Bending to look on me; I started back, It started back, but pleased I soon returned, Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks Of sympathy and love; there I had fixed Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire, Had not a voice thus warned me, What thou seest,

What there thou seest fair creature is thyself, With thee it came and goes: but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow stays They coming, and thy soft embraces, he Whose image thou art, him thou shall enjoy Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear Multitudes like thyself, and then be called Mother of human race: what could I do, But follow straight, invisibly thus led? Till I espied thee.

(IV: 449–77)

This passage is frequently cited in feminist surveys of Milton [166– 74]. It introduces his most important female figure, indeed the original woman, and it does so by enablingher to disclose her innate temperamental and intellectual characteristics through her useof language.

We do not require textual notes or critical commentaries to tell us that Eve’s attraction to her own image in the water (460–5) is a straight-forward, indeed candid, disclosure of narcissism. Her first memory is of vain self-obsession. However, before we cite this as evidence of Milton’s portrayal of Eve, who will eat the forbidden fruit first, as by virtue of her gender the prototypical cause of the Fall, we should look more closely at the stylistic complexities of her speech.

For example, when she tells of how she looked ‘into the clear/Smooth lake’ (458–9) she is performing a subtle balancing act between hesitation and a more confident command of her account. ‘Clear’ in seventeenth-century usage could be both a substantive reference to clarity of vision (‘ the clear’) and be used in its more conventional adjectival sense (‘clear smooth lake’). Similarly with ‘no shadow stays/Thy coming’ (470–1), the implied pause after ‘stays’ could suggest it first as meaning ‘prevents’ and then in its less familiar sense of ‘awaits’. The impression we get is confusing. Is she tentatively feeling her way through the traps and complexities of grammar, as would befit her ingenuous, unsophisticated state as someone recently introduced to language and perception? Or is Milton urging us to perceive her as, from her earliest moments, a rather cunning actress and natural rhetorician, someone who canuse language as a means of presenting herself as touchingly naïve and blameless in her instincts? In short, is her language a transparent reflection of her character or a means by which she creates a persona for herself?

This question has inevitably featured in feminist readings of the poem [168–9], because it involves the broader issue of whether or not Milton was creating in Adam and Eve the ultimate and fundamental gender stereotypes – their acts were after all responsible for the postlapsarian condition of humankind.

To return to the poem itself we should note that it is not only the reader who is forming perceptions of Adam and Eve. Satan, in reptilian disguise, is watching and listening too.Beginning at line 505, Milton has him disclose his thoughts.

all is not theirs it seems: One fatal tree there stands of knowledge called,

Forbidden them to taste: knowledge forbidden?

Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord Envy them that? Can it be sin to know, Can it be death? And do they only stand By ignorance, is that their happy state, The proof of their obedience and their faith? O fair foundation laid whereon to build Their ruin! Hence I will excite their minds With more desire to know …

(IV: 513–24)

Without actually causing us to question the accepted facts regarding Satan’s malicious, destructive intent Milton again prompts the reader to empathise with his thoughts – and speculations. Satan touches upon issues that would strike deeply into the mindset of the sophisticated Renaissance reader. Can there, should there, be limits to human knowledge?By asking questions about God’s will and His design of the universe do we overreach ourselves? More significantly, was the original act of overreaching and its consequences– the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge as an aspiration to knowledge –intended by God as a warning?

The rest of the book returns us to the less contentious, if no less thrilling, details of the narrative, with Uriel warning the angel Gabriel of Satan’s apparent plot, Gabriel assigning two protecting angels to Adam and Eve, without their knowledge, and Gabriel himself confronting Satan and telling him that he is contesting powers greater than himself.

Before moving further into the poem let us consider whether the various issues raised so far in the narrative correspond with what we know of Milton the thinker and not simply our projected notion of the thoughts which underlie his writing of the poem. Most significantly, all of the principal figures – Satan, God, Adam and Eve – have been caused to affect us in ways that we would associate as much with literary characterisation as with their functions within religious belief; they have been variously humanised. In one of Milton’s later prose tracts, De Doctrina Christiana ,  begun, it is assumed, only a few years before he started Paradise Lost, we encounter what could be regarded as the theological counterparts to the complex questions addressed in the poem. In a passage on predestination, one of the most contentious topics of the post-reformation debate, Milton is, to say the least, challenging:

Everyone agrees that man could have avoided falling. But if, because of God’s decree, man could not help but fall (and the two contradictory opinions are sometimes voiced by the same people), then God’s restoration of fallen man was a matter of justice not grace. For once it is granted that man fell, though not unwillingly, yet by necessity, it will always seem that necessity either prevailed upon his will by some secret influence, or else guided his will in some way. But if God foresaw that man would fall of his own accord, then there was no need for him to make a decree about the fall, but only about what would become of man who was going to fall. Since, then, God’s supreme wisdom foreknew that first man’s falling away, but did not decree it, it follows that, before the fall of man, predestination was not absolutely decreed either. Predestination, even after the fall, should always be considered and defined not so much the result of an actual decree but as arising from the immutable condition of a decree.

( CPW, VI: 174)

If after reading this you feel rather more perplexed and uncertain about our understanding of God and the Fall than you did before, you are not alone. It is like being led blindfold through a maze. You start with a feeling of relative certainty about where you are and what surrounds you, and you end the journey with a sense of having returned to this state,but you are slightly troubled about where you’ve been in the meantime. Can we wrest an argument or a straightforward message from this passage? It would seem that predestination (a long running theological crux of Protestantism) is, just like every other component of our conceptual universe, a result of the Fall. Thus, although God knew that man would fall, He did not cause (predetermine) the act of disobedience. As such, this is fairly orthodox theology, but in making his point Milton allows himself and his readers to stray into areas of paradox and doubt that seem to run against the overarching sense of certainty. For instance, he concedes that ‘it will always seem that necessity either prevailed upon his (man’s) will by some secret influence, or else guided his will in someway’. Milton admits here that man will never be able to prevent himself (‘it will always seem’) from wondering what actually caused Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. Was it fate,the influence of Satan, Adam’s or Eve’s own temperamental defects?

The passage certainly does not resolve the uncertainties encountered in the first four books, but it does present itself as a curious mirror-image of the poem. Just as in the poem the immutable doctrine of scripture sits uneasily with the disorientating complexities of literary writing, so our trust in theology will always be compromised by our urge to ask troubling questions. Considering these similarities it is possible to wonder if Milton decided to dramatise Genesis in order to throw into the foreground the very human tendencies of skepticism and self-doubt that exist only in the margins of conventionalreligious and philosophic thought. If so, why? As a form of personal catharsis, as an encoded manifesto for potential anti-Christianity, or as a means of revealing to readers the true depths of their uncertainties? All of these possibilities have been put forward by commentators on the poem, but as the following pages will show, the decision is finally yours.

Books V–VIII

These four books, the middle third of the poem, will be treated as a single unit because they are held together by a predominant theme; the presence of Raphael, sent by God to Paradise at the beginning of book V as Adam and Eve’s instructor and advisor. The books show us the growth of Adam and Eve, the development of their emotional and intellectual engagement with their appointed role prior to the most important moment in the poem’s narrative, their Fall in book IX. At the beginning of book V God again becomes a speaking presence, stating that he despatches Raphael to ‘render man inexcusable … Lest wilfully transgressing he pretend/Surprisal, unadmonished, unfore-warned’ (244–5). Line 244 offers a beautiful example of tactical ambiguity. Does ‘Lest’ refer to man’s act of ‘transgressing’? If so, we are caused again to consider the uneasy relation between free will, predestination and God’s state of omniscience: surely God knows that man will transgress. Or does ‘Lest’ relate, less problematically, to man’s potential reaction to the consequences of his act?Once more the reader is faced with the difficult choice between an acceptance of his limited knowledge of God’s state and the presentation to us here of God as a humanised literary character.

The arrival of Raphael (V: 308–576) brings with it a number of intriguing, often puzzling, issues. Food plays a significant part. Eve is busy preparing a meal for their first guest.

She turns, on hospitable thoughts intent What choice to choose for delicacy best, What order so contrived as not to mix Tastes, not well-joined, inelegant, but bring Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change.

This passage might seem to be an innocuous digression on the domestic bliss of the newlyweds – with Eve presented as a Restoration prototype for Mrs. Beaton or Delia Smith – but there are serious resonances. For one thing her hesitant, anxious state of mind appears to confirm the conventional, male, social and psychological model of ‘female’ behaviour – should we then be surprised that she will be the first to transgress, given her limitations? Also, the passage is a fitting preamble for Raphael’s first informal act of instruction. Milton sets the scene with, ‘A while discourse they hold;/No fear lest dinner cool’ (395–6), reminding us that fire would be part of the punishment for the Fall; before that neither food nor anything else needed to be heated. The ‘discourse’ itself, on Raphael’s part, treats food as a useful starting point for a mapping out of the chain of being. Raphael, as he demonstrates by his presence and his ability to eat, can shift between transubstantial states; being an angel he spends most of his time as pure spirit. At lines 493–9 he states that

Time may come when men With angels may participate, and find No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare; And from these corporal nutriments perhaps Your bodies may at last turn to spirit, Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend

Raphael will expand upon this crucial point throughout the four central books: it is God’s intention that man, presently part spirit, part substance, will gradually move up the chain of being and replace Satan’s fallen crew as the equivalent of the new band of angels. How exactly this will occur is not specified but Raphael here implies, without really explaining, that there is some mysterious causal relationship between such physical experiences as eating and the gradual transformation to an angelic, spiritual condition: his figurative language is puzzling. It would, however, strike a familiar chord for Eve, who atthe beginning of the book had described to Adam her strange dream about the forbidden fruit and an unidentified tempter who tells her to ‘Taste this, and be henceforth among the gods/Thyself a goddess, not to earth confined’ (V: 77–8). Later in Book IX, just before she eats the fruit, Satan plays upon this same curious equation between eating and spirituality, ‘And what are gods that man may not become/As they, participating godlike food?’ (IX: 716–17).

Milton appears to be sewing into the poem a fabric of clues for the attentive reader,clues that suggest some sort of causal, psychological explanation for the Fall. In this instance it might appear that Raphael’s well meant, but perhaps misleading, discourse creates for Eve just the right amount of intriguing possibilities to make her decision to eat the fruit almost inevitable. In consequence, God’s statement that Raphael’s role is to ‘render man inexcusable’ sounds a little optimistic.

Books VI–VIII are concerned almost exclusively with Raphael’s instructive exchanges with Adam; Eve, not always present, is kept informed of this by Adam during their own conversations. Book VI principally involves Raphael’s description of Satan’s revolt, the subsequent battles and God’s victory. Book VII deals mainly with the history of Creation and in Book VIII Raphael explains to Adam the state and dimensions of the Cosmos. The detail of all this is of relatively slight significance for an understanding of the poem itself.Much of it involves an orthodox account of the Old Testament story of Creation and the only notable feature is Milton’s decision in Book VIII to follow, via Raphael, the ancient theory of Ptolemy that the earth is the centre of the universe. Copernicus, the sixteenth-century astronomer, had countered this with the then controversial model of the earth revolving around the sun, which Raphael alludes to (without of course naming Copernicus) but largely discounts. Milton had met Galileo and certainly knew of his confirmation of the Copernican model. His choice to retain the Ptolemaic system for Paradise Lost was not alluded to in his ex cathedr awriting and was probably made fordramatic purposes; in terms of man’s fate the earth was indeed at the centre of things.

More significant than the empirical details of Raphael’s disclosures is Adam’s level of understanding. Constantly, Raphael interrupts his account and speaks with Adam about God’s gift of reason, the power of the intellect, which is the principal distinction between human beings and other earthbound, sentient creatures. At the end of Book VI Raphael relates reason (563–76) to free will (520–35). Adam is told (and the advice will be oft repeated) that their future will depend not upon some prearranged ‘destiny’ but upon their own decisions and actions, but that they should maintain a degree of caution regarding how much they are able, as yet, to fully comprehend of God’s design and intent. In short, their future will be of their own making while their understanding of the broader framework within which they must make decisions is limited and partial. At the end of Book VI, for example, after Raphael has provided a lengthy account of the war in heaven he informs Adam that he should not take this too literally. It has been an allegory, an extended metaphor, a ‘measuring [of] things in Heaven by things on Earth’. (893)

In Book VIII, before his description of the Cosmos, Raphael again reminds Adam that he is not capable of fully appreciating its vast complexity.

The great architect Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge, His secrets to be scanned by them who ought

Rather admire; or if they list to try Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide

(VIII: 72–8)

This is frequently treated as an allusion to the ongoing debate on the validity of the Ptolemaic or the Copernican models of earth and the planets, but it also has a rhetorical function in sustaining a degree of tension between man’s gift of reason and the at once tantalising yet dangerous possibilities that might accompany its use. All of this carries significant, but by no means transparent, relevance from a number of theological issues with which Milton was involved; principally the Calvinist notion of predestination versus the Arminianist concept as free will as a determinant of fate [9–11].

Later in Book VIII (357–451) Adam tells Raphael of his first conversation with God just prior to the creation of Eve, which resembles a Socratic dialogue. Socrates, the Greek philosopher, engaged in a technique when instructing a pupil of not imposing a belief but sewing his discourse with enough speculations and possibilities to engage the pupil’s faculties of enquiry and reason. Through this exchange of questions and propositions they would move together toward a final, logically valid conclusion. God’s exchange with Adam follows this pattern. The following is a summary of it.

Adam laments his solitude. God says, well you’re not alone, you have other creatures,the angels and me. Yes, says Adam, but I want an equal partner. God replies: Considermy state. I don’t need a consort. Adam returns, most impressively, with the argument that God is a perfect self-sufficiency, but man must be complemented in order to multiply. Quite so, says God. This was my intention all along. And He creates Eve.

The relevance of this to Adam’s ongoing exchange with Raphael is unsettling. Stanley Fish suggests that it is meant to offer a further, tacit reminder to the reader of the rulesand preconditions that attend man’s pre-fallen state. ‘If the light of reason coincides with the word of God, well and good; if not reason must retire, and not fall into the presumption of denying or questioning what it cannot explain’ (1967:242). It reminded William Empson (1961) of the educational phenomenon of the Rule of Inverse Probability, where the student is less concerned with the attainment of absolute truth than with satisfying the expectations of the teacher: in short, Adam has used his gift of reason without really understanding what it is and to what it might lead. Is Adam being carefully and adequately prepared for the future (Fish) or is Raphael’s instruction presented to us as some kind of psychological explanation for the Fall (Empson)?

This interpretative difference underpins our reading of Books V– XII, and, to complicate matters further, indeed to heighten the dramatic tension of the narrative,Milton places Adam’s account of his exchange with God not too long before a similar conversation takes place between Eve and Satan, in Book IX just prior to her decision to eat the fruit.

Eve’s conversation with Satan (532–779) is the most important in the poem; it initiates the Fall of mankind. Satan’s speeches, particularly the second (678–733), display an impressive and logical deployment of fact and hypothesis. Eve does not understand the meaning of death, the threatened punishment for the eating of the fruit, and Satan explains:

ye shall not die: How should ye? By the fruit? It gives you life To knowledge. By the threatener? Look on me, Me who have touched and tasted, yet both live, And life more perfect have attained than fate Meant me, by venturing higher than my lot. Shall that be shut to man, which to the beast Is open?

(IX: 685–93)

Having raised the possibility that death is but a form of transformation beyond the merely physical, he delivers a very cunning follow-up.

So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off Human, to put on gods, death to be wished, Though threatened, which no worse than this can bring.

And what are gods that man may not become As they, participating godlike food?

(IX: 713–17)

In short, he suggests that the fruit, forbidden but for reasons yet obscure, might be the key to that which is promised.

Eve’s reply to Satan’s extensive, even-handed listing of the ethical and practical considerations of her decision is equally thoughtful. She raises a question, ‘In plain then, what forbids he but to know/Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? (758–9) and expands, ‘What fear I then, rather what know to fear/Under this ignorance of good and evil, /Of God or death, of law or penalty?’ Adam and Eve have continually been advised by Raphael of their state of relative ignorance while they have also been promised enlightenment. It is evident from Eve’s speech that she regards the rule of obedience as in some way part, as yet unspecified, of the existential puzzle which their own much promoted gift of reason will gradually enable them to untangle. They are aware that their observance of the rule is a token of their love and loyalty, but as Satan implies, such an edict is open to interpretation.

What can your knowledge hurt him, or this tree

Import against his will, if all be his? Or is it envy, and can envy dwell In heavenly breasts?

(IX: 726–30)

Eve’s exchange with Satan inevitably prompts the reader to recall Adam’s very recent account of his own with God and, indeed, his extended dialogue with Raphael. In each instance the human figure is naïve, far less informed than their interlocutor, while the latter both instructs and encourages his pupil to rationalise and speculate. (Eve is unaware of Satan’s identity. He is disguised as a serpent and is, for all she knows, another agent of wisdom.) These parallels can be interpreted differently and the archetypal difference is evident between Christian and humanist readers. Of the former, Lewis argued that the parallels were meant to be recognised but were intended by Milton as a kind of re-enactment of the poem itself: the Christian reader – and in Lewis’s view the poem was intended only for Christian readers – should perceive him/herself as a version of Adam and Eve and resist the temptation to overreach their perceptual and intellectual subservience to God’s wisdom. Lewis held that the poem’s moral of obedience and restraint has the ‘desolating clarity’ of what we are taught in the nursery. Children might be incapable of understanding the ethical and moral framework which underpins their parents’ rules and edicts but they should recognise that these apparently arbitrary regulations are a reflection of the latter’s protective love. Empson countered this as follows: ‘A father may reasonably impose a random prohibition to test the character of his children, but anyone would agree that he should then judge an act of disobedience in the light of its intention’ (1961:161). Empson perceives the exchanges, particularly between Satan and Eve, not only as mitigating factors in Milton’s particular account ofthe Fall but also as explanations of how the Fall was made inevitable by God himself.Both agree that the reader is prompted to question God’s omniscient planning and strategies, while Lewis sees this as a warning and reminder that blind faith should be ouronly proper response and Empson that doubt informs Milton’s own rendering of the story.

Eve does of course eat the fruit, and during lines 896–1016 she confronts Adam with her act. Adam’s response and his eventual decision to follow Eve are intriguing because while the misuse, or misunderstanding, of the gift of reason was the significant factor forher Adam is affected as much by emotional, instinctive registers.

I feel The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh, of my bone thou art, and from thy state

Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.

(IX: 913–16)

This is addressed ‘to himself’, and then to Eve he states that

So forcible within my heart I feel The bond of nature draw me to my own, My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our state cannot be severed; we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.

(IX: 955–9)

And the episode is summed up by Milton:

She gave him of that fair enticing fruit With liberal hand: he scrupled not to eat Against his better knowledge, not deceived,

But fondly overcome with female charm.

(IX: 996–9)

These passages raise questions about chronology and characterisation. We already know from Book VIII (607–17) that Adam appreciates that the love he feels for Eve (partly physical) partakes of his greater love for God (mutual and transcendent) and we might wonder why and how Adam seems able to move so rapidly to a state of almost obsessive physical bonding with her: ‘The link of nature’, ‘flesh of flesh’, ‘The bond of nature’, ‘My own in Thee’, ‘One flesh’. Moreover, during Milton’s description in Book IV of Adam and Eve’s innocent act of sexual liaison we were informed that the base, lust-fulfilling dimension of sex is a consequence of the Fall, and this is confirmed shortly after he too eats the fruit and they engage in acts ‘of amorous intent’ (IX: 1035). It seems odd, therefore, that Adam, still unfallen, seems to be persuaded to eat the fruit by the post-lapsarian instinct of pure physical desire.

One explanation of why Milton offers this puzzling, slightly inconsistent scenario could be implicit in his own rationale of Adam’s decision; ‘not deceived/But fondly overcome with female charm’ (998–9). From this it would seem that her explanation of the act of disobedience is of virtually no significance compared with the sub-rational power of attraction that she shares, or will share, with the rest of her gender.

Charges of misogyny against Milton go back as far as Samuel Johnson and are generally founded upon the biographical formula that the failure of his first marriage to Mary Powell was the motive for his divorce tracts and that these personal and ideological prejudices spilled over into his literary writing. Since the 1970s more sophisticated feminist critics have argued that the distinctive, archetypal roles played out by Adam and Eve are less a consequence of Milton’s personal state of mind and more part of a shared, patriarchal dialectic in which ongoing social conventions are justified and perpetuated through a mythology of religion and culture [166–74].

Here the narrative of the Fall is continued, with God observing the act of disobedience and sending the Son to pronounce judgement on Adam and Eve. The death sentence is deferred and they, and their offspring, are condemned to a limited tenure of earthly existence, much of it to be spent in thankless toil and sorrow (103–228). There then follows a lengthy section (228–720) in which Satan and his followers have their celebrations ruined by being turned into serpents and beset by unquenchable thirst and unassuagble appetite – so much for victory. The most important part is from 720 to the end of the book, during which Adam and Eve contemplate suicide. Adam considers this in an introspective soliloquy.

But say That death be not one stroke, as I supposed,

Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuity.

(X: 808–130)

Adam is aware that self-inflicted death will involve a perpetuation, not a completion, of his tortured condition. This realisation prompts the circling, downward spiral of his inconclusive thoughts, until Eve arrives. She readily accepts blame for their condition.Adam is eventually moved by her contrition and they comfort each other. Crucially, the factor that enables Adam to properly organise his own thoughts is Eve’s proposition that rather than kill themselves they should spare their offspring the consequences of their act and refuse to breed; ‘Childless thou art, childless remain’ (989). Adam points out that this would both further upset the God-given natural order of things and, most importantly, grant a final victory to Satan. He seems at last to be exercising his much promoted gift of reason in a manner that is concurrent with the will of God, which implies that reason is tempered by thoughtful restraint not through any form of enlightenment, but from punishment. This impression finds its theological counterpart in what is termed ‘The Paradox of the Fortunate Fall’. This notion was first considered in depth by St.Augustine, and A.O. Lovejoy (1945 and 1960) traces its history up to and including Paradise Lost . The Fall is both paradoxical and fortunate because in the latter case it wasa necessary stage in man’s journey toward wisdom and awareness, while in the former it reminds us that we should not continually question and investigate God’s will.

Again we are returned to the conflict between Christian and humanist readings of the poem. The Augustinian interpretation would be a reminder that we should not concern ourselves too much with the apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes sewn into the poem,while a humanist reading would raise the question of why Milton deliberately,provocatively accentuates such concerns.

At the end of the book (1041–96) we are offered the spectacle of Adam and Eve no longer pondering such absolutes as the will of God and the nature of the cosmos but concentrating on more practical matters, such as how they might protect themselves from the new and disagreeable climate by rubbing two sticks together. Is Milton implicitly sanctioning the Augustinian notion of investigative restraint or is he presenting the originators of humanity as embodiments of pathetic, pitiable defeat?

Books XI and XII

In these the angel Michael shows Adam a vision of the future, drawn mainly from the Old Testament but sometimes bearing a close resemblance to the condition of life in seventeenth-century England. Kenneth Muir (1955) argued that although the two closing books were essential to the scriptural scheme of the poem they are ‘poetically on a much lower level’. What he means is that there is no longer any need for Milton to generate dramatic or logical tension: the future, as disclosed by Michael, has already arrived.

Adam is particularly distressed by the vision of Cain and Abel (XI: 429–60), the ‘sight/Of terror, foul and ugly to behold/Horrid to think, how horrible to feel!’ (463–5). Michael has already explained how, by some form of genetic inheritance, Adam is responsible for this spectacle of brother murdering brother. And we should remind ourselves that many of the first readers of this account had memories of brothers, sons and fathers facing one another across English battlefields; indeed its author’s own brother was on the Royalist side.

These two are brethren, Adam, and to come

Out of thy loins; the unjust the just hath slain,

For envy that his brother’s offering found From heaven acceptance; but the bloody fact Will be avenged, and other’s faith approved.

(XI: 454–8)

The tragic consequences of a perpetual rivalry between two figures who believe that theirs is the better ‘offering’ to God might easily be regarded as a vision of the consequences of the Reformation. The specific description of war (638–81) pays allegiance to the Old Testament and Virgil but would certainly evoke memories of when Englishmen, barely a decade earlier,

Lay siege, encamped; by battery, scale and mine,

Assaulting; others from the wall defend With dart and javelin, stones and sulphurous fire;

On each hand slaughter and gigantic deeds.

(XI: 656–9)

One wonders if Milton’s own experience of the Civil War, the Cromwellian Commonwealth and the Restoration, when death and destruction were perpetuated by man’s perception of God’s will, was in his mind when he wrote these passages. Hill, the Marxist historian, (1977) is in no doubt that it was and he devotes a subsection to apolitical-historical decoding of Books XI and XII (380–90). Hill concludes that

They [the books] represent Milton’s attempt to be utterly realistic in facing the worst without despair. It seemed to be true that there was a cyclical return of evil after every good start … God’s people in England after 1660 must learn to escape from history as circular treadmill, must become free to choose the good, as the English people had failed to chose it during the Revolution. (386)

For Hill, Milton regarded the political swings and catastrophes of the previous three decades as a concentrated version of man’s perpetual struggle and continual failure to build something better from his fallen condition. Moreover, Hill argues that the essential parallel between Adam’s vision of the future and Milton’s own of the recent past was that Milton perceived both as part of an extended process of man’s ‘reeducation and ultimate recognition of God’s purposes.’ (387) In short, the Cromwellian Revolution failed because man was not yet able to fully comprehend and engage with the legacy of the Fall.

Alongside the particulars of war and destruction Adam is shown more general, but no less distressing, pictures of the human condition. After enquiring of Michael if there arenot better ways to die than in battle Adam is presented with the following.

A lazar house it seemed, wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased, all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide wasting pestilence, Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint racking rheums.

Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch; And over them triumphant death his dart Shook, but delayed to strike, though oft invoked With vows, as their chief good, and final hope.

(XI: 479–93)

Disease, disablement, terminal illness and much pain will be inescapable and the onlymeans by which their worst effects might be moderated is through abstinence andrestraint: the pursuit of sensual pleasure brings its own form of physical punishment. Justprior to disclosing the ‘lazar house’ to Adam Michael informs him that he is doing so ‘that thou mayst know/What misery the inabstinence of Eve/ Shall bring on men’ (475–7) and yet again the reader feels a puzzling engagement with narrative chronology. At no point in Eve’s book IX exchange with Satan does she even inadvertently disclose that hedonism plays some part in her desire to eat the fruit, but Michael clearly presents acausal relation between what she did and the self destructive in abstinence of man’s fallen state. During his conversations with Raphael, before the Fall, Adam might well have enquired about such apparent discontinuities, but not now because as becomes evident in Book XII Michael’s instructive regimen is informed by, and apparently achieves, a different purpose.

Most of Book XII charts a tour of the Old and parts of the New Testament – Noah, The Flood, the Tower of Babel, the journey to the Promised Land and the coming of Christ –but its most important sections are towards the end when Adam is given the opportunityto reflect on what he has seen.

How soon hath thy prediction, seer blest, Measured this transcient world, the race of time,

Till time stand fixed: beyond is all abyss, Eternity, whose end no eye can reach. Greatly instructed I shall hence depart, Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain; Beyond which was my folly to aspire. Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best, And love with fear the only God, to walk As in his presence, ever to observe His providence, and on him sole depend.

(XII: 553–64)

Michael answers, approvingly:

This having learned, thou hast attained the sum

Of wisdom; hope no higher.

(XII: 575–6)

Without actually comparing his experiences with Michael with those before the Fall Adam is clearly aware that the cause of the Fall was his inclination to ‘aspire’ to an over-ambitious, extended state of ‘knowledge’. One significant difference between Raphael’s and Michael’s methods of instruction is that while the former operated almost exclusively within the medium of language, the principal instrument of speculation and enquiry, the latter relies more upon empirical and tangible evidence, pictures. This is appropriate,given that Michael’s intention is to present Adam with indisputable, ineluctable facts, matters not open to debate, and in doing so to reinforce the lesson that ‘wisdom’ has its limits; ‘hope no higher’. The question that has attended practically all of the critical debates on the poem is encapsulated in three lines at the centre of Adam’s speech.

Greatly instructed I shall hence depart, Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill Of knowledge.

(XII: 537–9)

The question is this: does Adam speak for the reader? And there are questions within the question. Did Milton intend the reader to share Adam’s state of intellectual subordination to a mindset ‘beyond which was [his] folly to aspire’? Are the tantalising complexities of the poem – the presentations of God and Satan, the intricate moral and theological problems raised in the narrative – designed to tempt the reader much as Adam had been tempted, and to remind us of the consequences? Or did Milton himself face uncertainties and did he use the poem not so much to resolve as to confront them? As Part III will show, these matters, after 300 years of often perplexed commentary and debate, remain unsettled.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aers, D. and Hodge, B., ‘“Rational Burning”: Milton and Sex and Marriage’ (1981), References from Zunder (1999). Barker, A.E., Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, Toronto: University of Toronto Press (1942). Barker, F., The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection, London: Methuen (1984). Belloc, H., Milton, London: Cassell (1935). Belsey, C., John Milton. Language, Gender, Power, Oxford: Blackwell (1988). Bennett, J.S., ‘God, Satan and King Charles: Milton’s Royal Portraits’, PMLA 92 (1977) pp. 441–57. Blamires, H., Milton’s Creation, London: Methuen (1971). Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1973). Bradford, R., ‘Milton’s Graphic Poetics’, in Nyquist and Ferguson (1987). Bradford, R., Paradise Lost. An Open Guide, Buckingham: Open University Press (1992). Bradford, R., Silence and Sound. Theories of Poetics from the 18th Century, London: Associated University Presses (1992). Bridges, R., Milton’s Prosody, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1921). Brooks, C., The Well Wrought Urn. Studies in the Structure of Poetry, London: Methuen (1968, first published 1947). Brown, C., John Milton. A Literary Life, London: Macmillan (1995). Burnett, A., Milton’s Style, London: Longman (1981). Bush, D., John Milton. A Sketch of His Life and Writings, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1964). Champagne, C., ‘Adam and his “Other Self” in Paradise Lost: A Lacanian study in Psychic Development’, in Zunder (1999). Corns, T., ‘Milton’s Quest for Respectabiltiy’, Modern Language Review 77 (1982). Corns, T., Milton’s Language, Oxford: Blackwell (1990). Danielson, D. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989). Darbishire, Helen (ed.), The Early Lives of John Milton, London: Constable (1932). Davie, D., ‘Syntax and Music in Paradise Lost’, The Living Milton, ed., F. Kermode, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1960). Davies, S., Milton, London: Harvester (1993). Dyson, A.E. and Lovelock, J. (eds), Milton: Paradise Lost. A Casebook, London: Macmillan (1973). Eagleton, T., ‘The God That Failed’, in Nyquist and Ferguson (1987). Eliot, T.S., ‘Milton I’ (1936); ‘Milton II’ (1947), in On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber (1957). Eliot, T.S., ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), in Selected Essays, London: Faber (1961). Ellwood, T., History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, London (1714). Emma, R.D., Milton’s Grammar, The Hague: Mouton (1964) Empson, W., Milton’s God, London: Chatto (1961). Evans, J. Martin, Milton’s Imperial Epic, Ithaca: Cornwell University Press (1996). Fallon, R.T., Captain or Colonel, Columbia: Missouri University Press (1984). Ferry, A., Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in Paradise Lost, Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press (1963). Fish, S., ‘What its Like to Read L’Allegro and I’l Penseroso’ (1975), in Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1980). Fish, S., Surprized By Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, London: Macmillan (1967). Fixler, M., Milton and the Kingdoms of God, Northwestern University Press (1964). Fletcher, H.F., The Intellectual Development of John Milton, Illinois: Illinois University Press (1956). Forgacs, D., ‘Marxist Literary Theories’, in Modern Literary Theory, (eds) A. Jefferson and D. Robey, London: Batsford (1982). French, J.M. (ed.), Life Records of John Milton, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press (1949–58). Froula, C., ‘When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy’ (1983). References from Patterson (1992). Geisst, C., The Political Thought of John Milton, London: Macmillan (1984). Gilbert, S., ‘Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton’s Bogey’, PMLA 93 (1978), pp.368–82. Graves, Robert, Wife to Mr. Milton, London: Cassell (1942). Greenlaw, E., ‘A Better Teaching Than Aquinas’ Studies in Philology, 14 (1917), pp. 196–217 Halkett, J., Milton and the Idea of Matrimony, New Haven: Yale University Press (1970). Halpern, R., ‘The Great Instauration: imaginary narratives in Milton’s “Nativity Ode”’, in Nyquist and Ferguson (1987). Hanford, J., John Milton, Englishman, New York: Crown (1949). Hartman, G., ‘Adam on The Grass with Balsamora’ (1970) in Zunder (1999). Havens, R.D., The Influence of Milton on English Poetry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1922). Hayley, W., Life of Milton, London (1794). Hill, Christopher, Milton and the English Revolution, London: Faber and Faber (1977). Honigman, E.A.J. (ed.), Milton’s Sonnets, London: Macmillan (1966). Hooker, E.N. (ed.), The Critical Works of John Dennis, 2 Vols, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press (1939–43). Hopkins, G.M., Selected Letters, ed. C. Phillips, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1990). Hunter, W.B. (ed.), A Milton Encyclopedia, 7 Vols, London: Associated University Presses (1978). Ivimay, Joseph, John Milton: His Life and Times, Religious and Political Opinions, London (1833). Jameson, F., ‘Religion and Ideology: A Political Reading of Paradise Lost’ (1986). References from Zunder (1999). Johnson, S., Lives of the Poets, 1779–81; references from reprints in Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, ed. Kermode, F. et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelley, M., This Great Argument, New Jersey: Princeton University Press (1941). Kendrick, C., Milton. A Study in Ideology and Form, New York: Methuen (1986). Kermode, F. (ed.), The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands, London: Routledge (1960). Kerrigan, W., The Sacred Garden, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1983). Landy, M., ‘Kinship and The Role of Women in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies 4 (1972), pp.3–18. Le Comte, E., Milton and Sex, London: Macmillan (1978). Leavis, F.R. Revaluation, London: Chatto (1936). Leishman, J.B., Milton’s Minor Poems, London: Hutchinson (1969). Levi, P., Eden Renewed. The Public and Private Life of John Milton, London: Macmillan (1996). Lewalski, B.K., ‘Milton on Women – Yet Once More’, Milton Studies 6, (1974), pp.3–20. Lewalski, B.K., Milton’s Brief Epic, Providence (1966). Lewis, C.S., A Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1942). Lovejoy, A.O., The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea, New York: Harper and Row (1960). Macauley, T., The Works of Lord Macauley, ed. Lady Trevelyan, Vol. 5, London: Longman (1875). Martz, L., ‘The Rising Poet, 1645’ (1965), in Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry, New Haven: Yale University Press (1980). Masson, D., Life of Milton, 7 Vols, London (1859–94). McColley, D., Milton’s Eve, Champagne: Illinois University Press (1983). Milner, A., John Milton and the English Revolution, London: Macmillan (1981). Milton, John, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D.M. Wolfe, 8 Vols, New Haven: Yale University Press (1953–82). Milton, John, The Poems, eds J. Carey and A. Fowler, London: Longman (1968). Milton, John, The Works of John Milton, ed. F.A. Patterson, 20 Vols, New York: Columbia University Press (1931–40). Muir, K., John Milton, London: Longman, Green & Co (1955). Myers, W., Milton and Free Will: An Essay in Criticism and Philosophy, London: Croom Helm (1987). References from Patterson (1992). Newlyn, L., Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1993). Nicolson, M., A Reader’s Guide to John Milton, London: Thames and Hudson (1964). Norbrook, D., ‘The Politics of Milton’s Early Poetry’, (1984). References from Patterson (1992). Nyquist, M. and Ferguson, M. (eds), Re-Membering Milton. Essays on the Texts and Traditions, London: Methuen (1987). Nyquist, M., ‘Fallen Differences, Phallogocentric Discourses: Losing Paradise Lost to History’ (1988). References from Patterson (1992). Nyquist, M., ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost’, in Re-Membering Milton, eds Nyquist and Ferguson, London: Methuen (1987). References from Zunder (1999). Oras, A., Milton’s Editors and Commentators from Patrick Hume to Henry John Todd 16959–1801, Tartu (1930). Oras, A., Milton’s Blank Verse and the Chronology of His Major Poems, Gainsville: University of Illinois Press (1953). Parker, W.R., Milton. A Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1968). Patrides, C.A. (ed.), Approaches to Paradise Lost, London: Edward Arnold (1968). Patrides, C.A., Adamson, J.H. and Hunter, W.B., Bright Essence. Studies in Milton’s Theology, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (1971). Patrides, C.A., Milton and the Christian Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1966). Patterson, A. (ed.), John Milton: Longman Critical Reader, London: Longman (1992). Phillips, E., Life of Milton, (1694). References from Darbishire (1932). Prince, F.T., The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1954). Quint, D., ‘David’s Census: Milton’s Politics and Paradise Regained’, in Nyquist and Ferguson (1987). Rajan, B., Paradise Lost and the 17th Century Reader(1947). Referenes from Dyson and Lovelock (1973). Raleigh, W., Milton, London (1900). Rapaport, H., Milton and the Post Modern, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (1983). Revard, S.P., The War in Heaven, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1980). Richmond, H., The Christian Revolutionary: John Milton, Berkeley: University of California Press (1974). Ricks, C., Milton’s Grand Style, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1963). Ricks, C., Tennyson, London: Macmillan (1972). Riggs, W.G., The Christian Poet in Paradise Lost, Berkeley: University of California Press (1972). Ross, M., Milton and Royalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1943). Rowse, A.L., Milton the Puritan, London: Macmillan (1977). Rudrum, A. (ed.), Milton. Modern Judgements, London: Macmillan (1968). Saintsbury, G., A History of English Prosody, 3 Vols, London (1906–10). Schwartz, R., Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1988). Sewell, A., A Study of Milton’s Christian Doctrine, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1939). Shawcross, J.T. (ed.), Milton. The Critical Heritage, Vols I and II, London: Routledge (1970 and 1972). Smart, John (ed.), The Sonnets of Milton, Glasgow (1921). Spencer Hill, J., John Milton: Poet, Priest and Prophet, London (1979). Sprott, S.E., Milton’s Art of Prosody, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1953). Stein, A., Answerable Style, University of Minnesota Press (1953). Stocker, M., Paradise Lost: The Critics’ Debate, London: Macmillan (1988). Stroup, T.B., Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton’s Poetry, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press (1968). Svendsen, K., Milton and Science, New York: Greenwood Press (1956). Tillyard, E.M.W., Milton, London: Chatto and Windus (1930). Tillyard, E.M.W., The Miltonic Setting, Past and Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1938). Treip, M., Milton’s Punctuation and the Changing English Usage, London: Methuen (1970). Turner, J.G., One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1987). Tuve, R., Image and Themes in Five Poems By Milton, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1957). Waldock, A.J.A., Paradise Lost and its Critics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1947). Webber, J.M., ‘The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies 14 (1980), pp.3–24. Wedgwood, C.V., Milton and His World, London: Lutterworth (1969). Whiting, G.W., Milton’s Literary Milieu, New York: Russell and Russell (1964). Wilding, M., ‘Milton’s Early Radicalism’ (1987) in Patterson (1992). Wilding, M., ‘Milton’s Radical Epic’, in Writing and Radicalism, (ed.) J. Lucas, London: Longman (1996). Wilson, A.N., The Life of John Milton, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1983). Wittreich, J. (ed.), The Romantics on Milton, Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press (1970). Wittreich, J., Feminist Milton, Ithaca: Cornwell University Press (1987). Wittreich, J., Milton’s Tradition and his Legacy, California: Huntingdon Library (1979). Wright, E., ‘Modern Psychoanalytic Criticism’ in Modern Literary Theory, eds A. Jefferson and D. Robey, London: Batsford (1982). Zunder, W. (ed.), Paradise Lost. New Casebooks, London: Macmillan (1999).

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Paradise Lost

By john milton, paradise lost essay questions.

What was Milton's goal in writing Paradise Lost ?

While authorial intention for a text can never truly be known, the narrator of Paradise Lost announces his aims at the very beginning of the epic. In the invocation to the muse, Milton says that he plans to tell the story of man's disobedience in order to "justify the ways of God to men" (26). Most interpret this announcement to mean that Milton wants to focus his readers' attention on God's nature of turning everything from bad to good. As such, though most read Paradise Lost as a bleak and tragic narrative, Milton announces early on that it is a narrative meant to remind readers of God's providence.

What are some qualities that Satan possesses and why are they important to the narrative?

Milton's Satan is perhaps one of the most famous figures in all of English literature, and with good reason. Satan is extremely large in stature, racked with pain and despair, and an expert rhetorician. These qualities – especially his rhetorical skill – render him an excellent tempter of Eve and later Adam. His rhetorical skill has also been compared to political figures who promise easy solutions to long-term problems, as Milton frequently warned the English people about demagoguery and the difficulty inherent to establishing a free commonwealth. To this day, readers are often torn over whether to sympathize with Satan or feel repelled by him, a quality that Stanley Fish famously argued reminds readers of their own fallen state as humans.

How is God portrayed in Paradise Lost ?

God is portrayed initially as a benevolent and loving creator. However, as Paradise Lost becomes more complex, readers might be tempted to interpret God as harsh, cruel, or vengeful. This portrait of God mirrors that of the New Testament, when God frequently punished man for his wrongdoings. This portrait is also evidence of Milton's nuanced take on the creation story: by portraying God in this way, he often tempts the reader to side with Satan, thereby dramatizing the temptation of man in the reader themself.

Is Paradise Lost only a bleak and tragic story? Why or why not?

Paradise Lost is a narrative with no surprise endings: as it follows the book of Genesis from the Christian Bible, most readers will know that the epic ends with Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden. As such, there is a doomed and bleak mood surrounding the entire text. However, Paradise Lost is not a hopeless narrative; indeed, there is one figure that provides a more redemptive mood to the text, as well as foreshadows the rest of man's fate. The Son, later to become Jesus Christ, intervenes in defense of man, asking God to sacrifice him for man's sins. While the Son plays a much larger role in Paradise Regain'd , his role in Paradise Lost essentially reminds readers that despite their disobedience and expulsion from paradise, humanity will ultimately be redeemed by Christ's actions.

Is Milton a misogynist? Why or why not?

Readers will likely notice the extreme and exaggerated misogyny that appears in Paradise Lost in Book X, after Adam and Eve have both eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. Adam compares Eve to Satan himself, and accuses her of being false and manipulative. These misogynistic insults – which were, in many other Renaissance poems, accusations lodged at women who rejected men's advances – are troubling. However, some feminist scholars have pointed out that the misogyny of Paradise Lost appears, crucially, after the fall: that is, misogyny is ushered in by Satan and is one of the consequences of men's disobedience. As such, one cannot necessarily declare that Milton or his text is misogynist, because the misogyny of the poem is filtered through the presence of the antagonist.

Paradise Lost Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Paradise Lost is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

During his opening invocation (line 1-26) million use several refrence to locations in the Bible and to the "Aonian Mount" (line 15) where the Greek gods lived what is his purpose in doing so?

With his reference to “the Aonian mount,” or Mount Helicon in Greece , Milton deliberately invites comparison with Classical antecedents. He avers that his work will supersede these predecessors and will accomplish what has not yet been achieved: a...

Which devil (angel) is Satan’s second-in-command

That would be Beelzebub.

what is the symbolification of forbidden fruit?

The forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge symbolizes, as it does in the Old Testament, temptation and disobedience. When Satan leads Eve to the tree, he tempts her both with the taste of the fruit and with the argument that the fruit could...

Study Guide for Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost study guide contains a biography of John Milton, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Paradise Lost
• Paradise Lost Summary
• Character List

Essays for Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Paradise Lost.

• Humanism in Dante and Milton
• Does Homer's Achilles Improve On Acquaintance As You Read More of the Poem Whilst Milton's Satan Gets Worse?
• The Creator and the Created: The Figure of the Doubtful Ploughman in John Milton's Paradise Lost
• An Argument for Eve's Innocence in Paradise Lost
• Bonds of Liberty

Lesson Plan for Paradise Lost

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Paradise Lost
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Paradise Lost Bibliography

E-Text of Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost E-Text contains the full text of Paradise Lost

Wikipedia Entries for Paradise Lost

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Essays on Paradise Lost

What makes a good paradise lost essay topics.

When it comes to writing an essay on John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, choosing the right topic is crucial. A good essay topic should be thought-provoking, engaging, and relevant to the themes and characters in the poem. In this section, we will discuss some recommendations on how to brainstorm and choose an essay topic, what to consider, and What Makes a Good essay topic.

When brainstorming for Paradise Lost essay topics, it's important to consider the themes and motifs present in the poem. Some of the key themes in Paradise Lost include the nature of good and evil, the fall of man, the role of Satan, and the concept of free will. Consider how these themes are portrayed in the poem and think about how you can explore them in your essay.

Another important factor to consider when choosing an essay topic is the relevance and originality of the topic. Avoid common topics that have been overdone and instead, try to come up with a fresh and unique angle to explore. Consider the characters, the structure of the poem, the use of language, and any historical or cultural context that may be relevant to the poem.

A good essay topic should also be specific and focused. Avoid broad or vague topics that are difficult to explore in depth. Instead, narrow down your focus to a specific aspect of the poem that you find particularly interesting or compelling. This will allow you to delve deeper into your analysis and provide a more nuanced and insightful discussion in your essay.

Best Paradise Lost Essay Topics

• The role of Eve as a feminist figure in Paradise Lost
• The portrayal of Satan as a sympathetic character in the poem
• The use of language and imagery to convey the fall of man in Paradise Lost
• The significance of the epic similes in Paradise Lost
• The influence of classical mythology on Paradise Lost
• The portrayal of God in Paradise Lost
• The relationship between Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost
• The use of irony in Paradise Lost
• The concept of free will in Paradise Lost
• The influence of the Renaissance and Reformation on Paradise Lost
• The impact of Paradise Lost on later literature and culture
• The role of sin and temptation in Paradise Lost
• The portrayal of Eden in Paradise Lost
• The significance of Milton's use of blank verse in Paradise Lost
• The allegorical elements of Paradise Lost
• The role of women in Paradise Lost
• The relationship between power and authority in Paradise Lost
• The impact of Paradise Lost on religious thought
• The role of nature and the natural world in Paradise Lost
• The portrayal of the afterlife in Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost essay topics Prompts

• Imagine that you are a character in Paradise Lost. Write a diary entry reflecting on the events of the poem from your perspective.
• Write a letter from Satan to God, expressing his thoughts and feelings about his fall from grace.
• Create a modern-day adaptation of Paradise Lost, setting the poem in a contemporary context.
• Write a short story that explores a minor character from Paradise Lost and their experiences in the poem.
• Design a visual representation of a key theme or motif in Paradise Lost, using images, symbols, and text to convey your interpretation.

Satan as a Tragic Hero in Paradise Lost

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The Fall of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost

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The Line Between Arrogance and Heroism: The Case of Satan's Character

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Free Will and Christian Faith in Paradise Lost

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1667, John Milton

Epic poetry

The poem concerns the biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

The story of Paradise Lost is Biblical and theme falls into three parts: disobedience, manifestation of Eternal Providence, and justification of Divine ways. All these themes are complete and support each other.

The poem tells the biblical story of the fall from grace of Adam and Eve in language that is a supreme achievement of rhythm and sound. The 12-book structure, the technique of beginning in medias res (in the middle of the story), the invocation of the muse, and the use of the epic question are all classically inspired.

Satan, Adam, Eve, The Son of God, God the Father, Raphael, Michael

Paradise Lost is considered to be Milton's masterpiece, and it helped solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of all time. Many other works of art have been inspired by Paradise Lost, notably Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1798) and John Keats’s long poem Endymion.

“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 to serve in Heaven.” “Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep...”

1. Fowler, A. (2014). John Milton: Paradise Lost. Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315834726/milton-paradise-lost-alastair-fowler) 2. Steadman, J. M. (1976). The idea of Satan as the hero of" Paradise Lost". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120(4), 253-294. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/986321) 3. St Hilaire, D. A. (2012). Satan's Poetry: Fallenness and Poetic Tradition in Paradise Lost. Duquesne University Press. (https://muse.jhu.edu/book/17581/) 4. Quint, D. (2014). Inside Paradise Lost. In Inside Paradise Lost. Princeton University Press. (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400850488/html?lang=en) 5. Stevens, P. (1996). " PARADISE LOST" AND THE COLONIAL IMPERATIVE. Milton Studies, 34, 3-21. (https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/milton-studies/article-abstract/doi/10.2307/26395625/301551/PARADISE-LOST-AND-THE-COLONIAL-IMPERATIVE?redirectedFrom=PDF) 6. Fiore, P. A. (1981). Milton and Augustine: Patterns of Augustinian Thought in Paradise Lost. (https://philpapers.org/rec/FIOMAA) 7. Riebling, B. (1996). Milton on Machiavelli: Representations of the State in Paradise Lost. Renaissance Quarterly, 49(3), 573-597. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterly/article/abs/milton-on-machiavelli-representations-of-the-state-in-paradise-lost/6D15F231D8A6217528FF8DC6ABECC639) 8. Barker, A. (1949). Structural Pattern in Paradise Lost. Philological Quarterly, 28, 17. (https://www.proquest.com/docview/1290958143?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true)

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Trump start

Fear of uncontrolled immigration is upsetting the political landscape in the run-up to the presidential election.

SCROLL TO CONTINUE

At a rally in December, former president Donald Trump went as far as to say that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

TURN ON SOUND

Americans’ mistrust of new immigrants is hardly new. In fact, it exhibits a striking resemblance to the prevailing fears 100 years ago.

The country might soon need to “station a soldier every hundred yards on our borders to keep out the hordes,” argued an article in Wisconsin in April of 1924.

Treating Japan in the same way as “ white nations, ” an Illinois newspaper cautioned in May of 1924, could allow Japanese immigrants to own land and seek the “ rights given white immigrants. ”

“ America, ” wrote James J. Davis, the secretary of labor, in the New York Times in February of 1924, should not be “ a conglomeration of racial groups, each advocating a different set of ideas and ideals according to their bringing up, but a homogeneous race. ”

How America tried and failed to stay White

100 years ago the u.s. tried to limit immigration to white europeans. instead, diversity triumphed., “i think that we have sufficient stock in america now for us to shut the door.”.

That sounds like Donald Trump, right? Maybe on one of his campaign stops? It certainly fits the mood of the country. This year, immigration became voters’ “ most important problem ” in Gallup polling for the first time since Central Americans flocked to the border in 2019. More than half of Americans perceive immigrants crossing the border illegally as a “ critical threat .”

Yet the sentiment expressed above is almost exactly 100 years old. It was uttered by Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith , a South Carolina Democrat, on April 9, 1924. And it helped set the stage for a historic change in U.S. immigration law, which imposed strict national quotas for newcomers that would shape the United States’ ethnic makeup for decades to come.

Immigration was perceived as a problem a century ago, too. Large numbers of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flocked to the United States during the first two decades of the 20th century, sparking a public outcry over unfamiliar intruders who lacked the Northern and Western European blood of previous migrant cohorts.

On May 15, 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act , which would constrain immigration into the United States to preserve, in Smith’s words, America’s “pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock.”

“It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries,” Smith continued , speaking of America not 40 years after the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York harbor, with its open arms for all humankind. Immigration, Smith noted, should be shaped “to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power.”

The act set the rules of who’s in and who’s out. Here is what happened:

In the 1800s, most immigrants arriving in the United States came from Western and Northern Europe . By the early 1900s, that flow changed to Eastern and Southern European countries , such as Italy, Russia and Hungary.

The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established narrow national quotas. Immigration from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe was slashed to a trickle.

Western and Northern European countries such as Germany, Britain and Ireland were given the largest allowances.

The act did not set quotas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Mexico, and countries in the Caribbean and South America .

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 undid the national quotas, and immigration surged afterward.

Despite continued attempts to preserve the nation’s White European identity, immigrants today come from a diverse range of nations, mostly in the Global South.

Fast forward 100 years and the United States no longer has quotas. But it still has not landed on an immigration policy it can live with. Trump asks why the United States can’t take in immigrants only from “ nice countries, you know, like Denmark, Switzerland ,” instead of “countries that are a disaster.” President Biden, who not even four years ago wanted to grant citizenship to millions of unauthorized immigrants, today wants to “ shut down the border right now .”

All the while, desperate immigrants from around the world keep fleeing poverty, repression and violence, launching themselves into the most perilous journey of their lives to reach the United States.

The public conversation over immigration that has raged at least since the days of the 1924 Johnson-Reed law can explain Washington’s policy failure: There is no way America can reconcile the sentiments embodied by the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor,” etc. — with its deep-seated fear that immigrants will reshape its ethnic makeup, its identity and the balance of political power.

Try as they might, policymakers have always been unable to protect the White America they wanted to preserve. Today’s “melting pot” was built largely with policies that didn’t work. Millions upon millions of migrants have overcome what obstacles the United States has tried to put in their way.

Israel Zangwill’s play “The Melting Pot” — which opened at the Columbia Theatre in D.C. on Oct. 5, 1908 — has a narrow understanding of diversity by current standards. The play was an ersatz “Romeo and Juliet,” featuring a Jewish Russian immigrant and a Christian Russian immigrant. But it carried a lofty message. “Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians — into the crucible with you all!” trumpets David Quixano, the main character. “God is making the American.”

Americans, however, were already uncomfortable with that fluid sense of identity. In 1910, two years after the debut of Zangwill’s play, geneticist Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. It provided the intellectual grounding for America’s increasingly overt xenophobia.

In “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,” Davenport wrote that Italians had a “tendency to crimes of personal violence,” that Jews were prone to “intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest,” and that letting more of them in would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial,” as well as “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.”

Harry Laughlin, another Cold Spring Harbor researcher, told members of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in 1922 that these new immigrants brought “inferior mental and social qualities” that couldn’t be expected “to raise above, or even to approximate,” those of Americans descended from earlier, Northern and Western European stock.

The Johnson-Reed Act wasn’t the first piece of legislation to protect the bloodstream from the outside world. That would have been the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which kept Chinese migrants out for six decades. In general, though, immigration law before World War I excluded people based on income and education, as well as physical and moral qualities — not on ethnicity and its proxy, nation of origin.

In 1907, “imbeciles, feeble minded persons, unaccompanied children under 17 years of age” and those “mentally or physically defective” were put on the excluded list, alongside women coming for “prostitution or for any other immoral purpose.” The Immigration Act of 1917 tried to limit immigration to the literate.

But the large number of migrants arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe since the turn of the 20th century refocused the national debate. In 1907, Congress established the Dillingham Commission , which would reach for arguments from eugenics to recommend choosing migrants to maintain existing American bloodlines via “the limitation of the number of each race arriving each year” to a percentage of those living in the United States years before. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 did just that, establishing the first specific national quotas.

In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act completed the project, reshaping the nation’s identity over the next four decades. It set an overall ceiling of 165,000 immigrants per year, about 20 percent of the average before World War I, carefully allotting quotas for preferred bloodstreams. Japanese people were completely excluded , as were Chinese people. Elsewhere, the act established national quotas equivalent to 2 percent of citizens from each country recorded in the 1890 U.S. census. Germans received 51,227 slots; Greeks just 100. Nearly 160,000 Italians had entered the United States every year in the first two decades of the century. Their quota was set at less than 4,000.

And, so, the melting pot was purified — and emptied: Two years after the Johnson-Reed Act, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild published “The Melting Pot Mistake,” a reiteration of the racial logic that undergirded all the new restrictions. By 1970, immigrants made up less than 5 percent of the population, down from nearly 15 percent in 1910.

There can be “no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue to be a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come,” Fairchild wrote . “An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice, however questionable may have been the immediate means by which this policy has been put into effect at successive periods in our history.”

And yet perhaps the most important lesson to flow from this moment is that the levee didn’t hold. Today, immigrants are back at 14 percent of the population. And despite the repeated efforts over the decades to preserve the ethnic purity proposed in Johnson-Reed, the pot filled up with undesirables again. Migrants from Europe accounted for three-quarters of the foreign born in 1960, but only 10 percent in 2022 .

The Statue of Liberty is arguably the nation’s most prominent symbol, representing America as a land of opportunity and refuge. But the nation’s tolerance of outsiders has mostly been shaped by baser instincts, a tug of war between the hunger for foreign labor to feed a galloping economy and the fear of how the newcomers might change what it means to be American.

Immigration restrictions relax when the immigrant population is comparatively small and jobs plentiful, and they tighten when the foreign footprint increases and jobs get relatively scarce. Muzzafar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute points out that even recent migrants turn against newer cohorts, fearful that they may take their jobs and transform their communities.

Fifteen percent, Mr. Chishti suggests, might be the tipping point when the uneasy equilibrium tips decidedly against newcomers. Foreign-born people amounted to about 15 percent of the population when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and again when the Johnson-Reed Act was signed into law.

Restrictive immigration laws

were passed after the foreign-born

population reached 15 percent.

Share of the population born outside the United States

Celler Act,

Ultimately, policies

meant to preserve

a White America failed.

Share of the population that is not White

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American

Community Survey data through IPMUS

Restrictive immigration laws were passed

after the foreign-born population

reached 15 percent.

Ultimately, policies meant to preserve

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey

data through IPMUS

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data through IPMUS

39% in 2022

15% in 2022

In the 1960s, when the foreign-born share was dropping to about 5 percent of the population, however, other considerations became more important. In 1965, the quotas established four decades earlier were finally disowned.

Their demise was, in part, a barefaced attempt to woo the politically influential voting bloc of Italian Americans, who had a hard time bringing their relatives to the United States under the 1924 limits. There was a foreign policy motivation, too: The quotas arguably undermined the international position of the United States, emerging then as a leader of the postwar order in a decolonizing world.

The story Americans most like to hear is that the end of the quotas was a natural outcome of the civil rights movement, in tension with the race-based preferences implicit in the immigration law. “Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on one’s place of birth,” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said in 1964. “Yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law.”

But the most interesting aspect of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which did away with the quotas, lies in what it did not try to change. Though the new immigration law removed quotas by nationality, it did not abandon the project of protecting the predominant European bloodstream from inferior new strains. It just changed the instrument: It replaced national quotas with family ties .

Rep. Michael Feighan, an Ohio Democrat who chaired the House subcommittee on immigration, ditched the original idea of replacing the nationality quotas with preferences for immigrants with valuable skills. In their place, he wrote in preferences for the family members of current residents, which ensured new arrivals remained European and White.

It was paramount to preserve America as it was. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who managed passage of Hart-Celler through the Senate, promised his fellow Americans that the new legislation “will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed on Oct. 3, 1965, as he signed the Hart-Celler Act into law at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

That didn’t quite work out as planned. Migrants allowed in under Hart-Celler have ushered in an America that looks very different from the one Johnson addressed. Half of the foreign born today come from Latin America; about 3 in 10 from Asia. Fewer than 6 in 10 Americans today are White and not of Hispanic origin, down from nearly 9 in 10 in 1965. Hispanics account for about one-fifth of the population. African Americans make up nearly 14 percent; Asian Americans just over 6 percent.

Share of the population that

is not White or is Hispanic

Race-specific population includes Hispanics.

Other non-white

Native American

Multiple races

W hite Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community

Survey through IPUMS. Data through 2019,

the most recent comparable numbers.

White Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community Survey

through IPUMS. Data through 2019, the most recent

comparable numbers.

Share of the population that is

not White or is Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community Survey through IPUMS. Data through 2019, the most recent

And some of the old arguments are back. In 2017, the Harvard economist George J. Borjas published a tome about foreigners’ impact on the United States, in which he updated the debate over migrant quality to the post-1965 era: Newer cohorts, mostly from Latin America and other countries in the Global South were, he said, worse than earlier migrants of European stock. “Imagine that immigrants do carry some baggage with them,” he wrote. “That baggage, when unloaded in the new environment, dilutes some of the North’s productive edge.”

That the Hart-Celler law did, in fact, drastically change the nature of the United States is arguably the single most powerful reason that U.S. immigration politics have again taken a dark, xenophobic turn. But even as arguments from eugenics are getting a new moment in the sun to justify new rounds of draconian immigration restrictions, the six decades since 1965 suggest the project to preserve a White European America has already lost.

What went wrong? Much of Europe got rich, and this dramatically reduced its citizens’ incentive to move to the United States. Instead, immigrants from poorer reaches of the planet — from Asia but predominantly from Latin America — took the opportunity to invite their relatives into the land of opportunity.

As usual, the U.S. economy’s appetite for foreign labor played a large role. Mexicans, like people from across the Americas, had been mostly ignored by immigration law. They were not subject to the 1924 quotas, perhaps because there weren’t that many of them coming into the United States or, perhaps, because their labor was needed in the Southwest — especially during the world wars.

Mexicans suffered periodic backlashes, such as when the Hoover administration figured that kicking out millions of Mexicans and Mexican-looking Americans was a smart political move in response to the Great Depression, or when President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched “ Operation Wetback ,” a mass deportation effort created ostensibly to raise wages in the South.

In any event, the first quota for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere as a whole came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, the story of immigration after that was largely a Mexican affair. By 2000, Mexicans accounted for 30 percent of the foreign-born population, up from 6 percent 40 years earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the zeitgeist again took to worrying about the pollution of the American spirit. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington fretted that “the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.”

And still, the U.S. political system proved powerless to stem the tide. U.S. economic interests — and the draw they exerted on immigrants from Mexico and other unstable economies south of the border — overpowered the ancestral fears.

The last major shot at immigration reform passed in Congress, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 , was based on a supposed grand bargain, which included offering legal status to several million unauthorized immigrants, bigger guest-worker programs to sate employers’ demands for labor and a clampdown on illegal work that came with a penalty on employers who hired unauthorized workers.

Employers, of course, quickly found a workaround. Unauthorized migration from Mexico surged, and the mass legalization opened the door to family-based chain migration on a large scale, as millions of newly legalized Mexican immigrants brought their family members into the country. In 1980, there were 2.2 million Mexican immigrants in the United States. By 2022, there were 11 million .

Migration today, again, has taken a new turn. Migrants are no longer mostly single Mexicans crossing the border surreptitiously to melt into the U.S. labor force. They are families, and they come from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Ecuador, China and India. Mexicans accounted for fewer than a quarter of migrant encounters with U.S. agents along the border in the first half of fiscal 2024.

The most explosive difference is that immigration today is much more visible than it has possibly ever been. Immigrants don’t try to squeeze across the border undetected. They cross it without permission, turn themselves in and ask for asylum, overwhelming immigration courts and perpetuating the image of a border out of control.

Americans’ sense of threat might have more to do with the chaos at the border than with immigration itself. Still, the sense of foreboding draws from that same old well of fear. That fear is today arguably more acute than when ethnic quotas were written into U.S. immigration law in 1924. Because today, the White, Anglo-Saxon Americans who believe this nation to be their birthright are truly under demographic siege.

Twenty years from now, White, non-Hispanic Americans will slip below 50 percent of the population and become just another, albeit big, minority. For Trump’s electoral base of older, White rural voters, the prospect of non-Whites acquiring power to challenge their status as embodiments of American identity amounts to an existential menace that may justify radical action.

Immigration has re-engineered U.S. politics. Non-White voters account for some 40 percent of Democrats . Eighty-one percent of Republican voters, by contrast, are both White and not Hispanic. The nation’s polarized politics have become, in some nontrivial sense, a proxy for a conflict between different interpretations of what it means to be American.

The renewed backlash against immigration has little to offer the American project, though. Closing the door to new Americans would be hardly desirable, a blow to one of the nation’s greatest sources of dynamism. Raw data confirms how immigrants are adding to the nation’s economic growth , even while helping keep a lid on inflation .

Anyway, that horse left the stable. The United States is full of immigrants from, in Trump’s memorable words, “s---hole countries.” The project to set this in reverse is a fool’s errand. The 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration law might have succeeded in curtailing immigration. But the restrictions did not hold. From Presidents Johnson to Trump, efforts to circle the wagons around some ancestral White American identity failed.

We are extremely lucky it did. Contra Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith’s 100-year old prescriptions, the nation owes what greatness it has to the many different women and men it has drawn from around the world to build their futures. This requires a different conversation — one that doesn’t feature mass expulsions and concentration camps but focuses on constructing a new shared American identity that fits everyone, including the many more immigrants who will arrive from the Global South for years to come.

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The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System

A times investigation found climate change may now be a concern for every homeowner in the country..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. And this is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today, my colleague, Christopher Flavelle, on a “Times” investigation into one of the least known and most consequential effects of climate change — insurance — and why it may now be a concern for every homeowner in the country.

It’s Wednesday, May 15.

So, Chris, you and I talked a while ago about how climate change was really wreaking havoc in the insurance market in Florida. You’ve just done an investigation that takes a look into the insurance markets more broadly and more deeply. Tell us about it.

Yeah, so I cover climate change, in particular the way climate shocks affect different parts of American life. And insurance has become a really big part of that coverage. And Florida is a great example. As hurricanes have gotten worse and more frequent, insurers are paying out more and more money to rebuild people’s homes. And that’s driving up insurance costs and ultimately driving up the cost of owning a home in Florida.

So we’re already seeing that climate impact on the housing market in Florida. My colleagues and I started to think, well, could it be that that kind of disruption is also happening in other states, not just in the obvious coastal states but maybe even through the middle of the US? So we set out to find out just how much it is happening, how much that Florida turmoil has, in fact, become really a contagion that is spreading across the country.

So how did you go about reporting this? I mean, where did you start?

All we knew at the start of this was that there was reason to think this might be a problem. If you just look at how the federal government tracks disasters around the country, there’s been a big increase almost every year in the number and severity of all kinds of disasters around the country. So we thought, OK, it’s worth trying to find out, what does that mean for insurers?

The problem is getting data on the insurance industry is actually really hard. There’s no federal regulation. There’s no government agency you can go to that holds this data. If you talk to the insurers directly, they tend to be a little reluctant to share information about what they’re going through. So we weren’t sure where to go until, finally, we realized the best people to ask are the people whose job it is to gauge the financial health of insurance companies.

Those are rating agencies. In particular, there’s one rating company called AM Best, whose whole purpose is to tell investors how healthy an insurance company is.

Whoa. So this is way down in the nuts and bolts of the US insurance industry.

Right. This is a part of the broader economy that most people would never experience. But we asked them to do something special for us. We said, hey, can you help us find the one number that would tell us reporters just how healthy or unhealthy this insurance market is state by state over time? And it turns out, there is just such a number. It’s called a combined ratio.

OK, plain English?

Plain English, it is the ratio of revenue to costs, how much money these guys take in for homeowner’s insurance and how much they pay out in costs and losses. You want your revenue to be higher than your costs. If not, you’re in trouble.

So what did you find out?

Well, we got that number for every state, going back more than a decade. And what it showed us was our suspicions were right. This market turmoil that we were seeing in Florida and California has indeed been spreading across the country. And in fact, it turns out that in 18 states, last year, the homeowner’s insurance market lost money. And that’s a big jump from 5 or 10 years ago and spells real trouble for insurance and for homeowners and for almost every part of the economy.

So the contagion was real.

Right. This is our first window showing us just how far that contagion had spread. And one of the really striking things about this data was it showed the contagion had spread to places that I wouldn’t have thought of as especially prone to climate shocks — for example, a lot of the Midwest, a lot of the Southeast. In fact, if you think of a map of the country, there was no state between Pennsylvania and the Dakotas that didn’t lose money on homeowner’s insurance last year.

So just huge parts of the middle of the US have become unprofitable for homeowner’s insurance. This market is starting to buckle under the cost of climate change.

And this is all happening really fast. When we did the Florida episode two years ago, it was a completely new phenomenon and really only in Florida. And now it’s everywhere.

Yeah. And that’s exactly what’s so striking here. The rate at which this is becoming, again, a contagion and spreading across the country is just demolishing the expectations of anyone I’ve spoken to. No one thought that this problem would affect so much of the US so quickly.

So in these states, these new places that the contagion has spread to, what exactly is happening that’s causing the insurance companies to fold up shop?

Yeah. Something really particular is happening in a lot of these states. And it’s worth noting how it’s surprised everyone. And what that is, is formally unimportant weather events, like hailstorms or windstorms, those didn’t used to be the kind of thing that would scare insurance companies. Obviously, a big problem if it destroys your home or damages your home. But for insurers, it wasn’t going to wipe them out financially.

Right. It wasn’t just a complete and utter wipeout that the company would then have to pony up a lot of money for.

Exactly. And insurers call them secondary perils, sort of a belittling term, something other than a big deal, like a hurricane.

These minor league weather events.

Right. But those are becoming so frequent and so much more intense that they can cause existential threats for insurance companies. And insurers are now fleeing states not because of hurricanes but because those former things that were small are now big. Hailstorms, wildfires in some places, previous annoyances are becoming real threats to insurers.

Chris, what’s the big picture on what insurers are actually facing? What’s happening out there numbers-wise?

This is a huge threat. In terms of the number of states where this industry is losing money, it’s more than doubled from 10 years ago to basically a third of the country. The amount they’re losing is enormous. In some states, insurers are paying out $1.25 or even $1.50 for every dollar they bring in, in revenue, which is totally unsustainable.

And the result is insurers are making changes. They are pulling back from these markets. They’re hiking premiums. And often, they’re just dropping customers. And that’s where this becomes real, not just for people who surf balance sheets and trade in the stock market. This is becoming real for homeowners around the country, who all of a sudden increasingly can’t get insurance.

So, Chris, what’s the actual implication? I mean, what happens when people in a state can’t get insurance for their homes?

Getting insurance for a home is crucial if you want to sell or buy a home. Most people can’t buy a home without a mortgage. And banks won’t issue a mortgage without home insurance. So if you’ve got a home that insurance company doesn’t want to cover, you got a real problem. You need to find insurance, or that home becomes very close to unsellable.

And as you get fewer buyers, the price goes down. So this doesn’t just hurt people who are paying for these insurance premiums. It hurts people who want to sell their homes. It even could hurt, at some point, whole local economies. If home values fall, governments take in less tax revenue. That means less money for schools and police. It also means people who get hit by disasters and have to rebuild their homes all of a sudden can’t, because their insurance isn’t available anymore. It’s hard to overstate just how big a deal this is.

And is that actually happening, Chris? I mean, are housing markets being dragged down because of this problem with the insurance markets right now?

Anecdotally, we’ve got reports that in places like Florida and Louisiana and maybe in parts of California, the difficulty of getting insurance, the crazy high cost of insurance is starting to depress demand because not everyone can afford to pay these really high costs, even if they have insurance. But what we wanted to focus on with this story was also, OK, we know where this goes eventually. But where is it beginning? What are the places that are just starting to feel these shocks from the insurance market?

And so I called around and asked insurance agents, who are the front lines of this. They’re the ones who are struggling to find insurance for homeowners. And I said, hey, is there one place that I should go if I want to understand what it looks like to homeowners when all of a sudden insurance becomes really expensive or you can’t even find it? And those insurance agents told me, if you want to see what this looks like in real life, go to a little town called Marshalltown in the middle of Iowa.

We’ll be right back.

So, Chris, you went to Marshalltown, Iowa. What did you find?

Even before I got to Marshalltown, I had some idea I was in the right spot. When I landed in Des Moines and went to rent a car, the nice woman at the desk who rented me a car, she said, what are you doing here? I said, I’m here to write a story about people in Iowa who can’t get insurance because of storms. She said, oh, yeah, I know all about that. That’s a big problem here.

Even the rental car lady.

Even the rental car lady knew something was going on. And so I got into my rental car and drove about an hour northeast of Des Moines, through some rolling hills, to this lovely little town of Marshalltown. Marshalltown is a really cute, little Midwestern town with old homes and a beautiful courthouse in the town square. And when I drove through, I couldn’t help noticing all the roofs looked new.

What does that tell you?

Turns out Marshalltown, despite being a pastoral image of Midwestern easy living, was hit by two really bad disasters in recent years — first, a devastating tornado in 2018 and then, in 2020, what’s called a derecho, a straight-line wind event that’s also just enormously damaging. And the result was lots of homes in this small town got severely damaged in a short period of time. And so when you drive down, you see all these new roofs that give you the sense that something’s going on.

So climate had come to Marshalltown?

Exactly. A place that had previously seemed maybe safe from climate change, if there is such a thing, all of a sudden was not. So I found an insurance agent in Marshalltown —

We talked to other agents but haven’t talked to many homeowners.

— named Bobby Shomo. And he invited me to his office early one morning and said, come meet some people. And so I parked on a quiet street outside of his office, across the street from the courthouse, which also had a new roof, and went into his conference room and met a procession of clients who all had versions of the same horror story.

It was more — well more of double.

A huge reduction in coverage with a huge price increase.

Some people had faced big premium hikes.

I’m just a little, small business owner. So every little bit I do feel.

They had so much trouble with their insurance company.

I was with IMT Insurance forever. And then when I moved in 2020, Bobby said they won’t insure a pool.

Some people had gotten dropped.

Where we used to see carriers canceling someone for frequency of three or four or five claims, it’s one or two now.

Some people couldn’t get the coverage they needed. But it was versions of the same tale, which is all of a sudden, having homeowner’s insurance in Marshalltown was really difficult. But I wanted to see if it was bigger than just Marshalltown. So the next day, I got back in my car and drove east to Cedar Rapids, where I met another person having a version of the same problem, a guy named Dave Langston.

Tell me about Dave.

Dave lives in a handsome, modest, little townhouse on a quiet cul-de-sac on a hill at the edge of Cedar Rapids. He’s the president of his homeowners association. There’s 17 homes on this little street. And this is just as far as you could get from a danger zone. It looks as safe as could be. But in January, they got a letter from the company that insures him and his neighbors, saying his policy was being canceled, even though it wasn’t as though they’d just been hit by some giant storm.

So then what was the reason they gave?

They didn’t give a reason. And I think people might not realize, insurers don’t have to give a reason. Insurance policies are year to year. And if your insurance company decides that you’re too much of a risk or your neighborhood is too much of a risk or your state is too much of a risk, they can just leave. They can send you a letter saying, forget it. We’re canceling your insurance. There’s almost no protection people have.

And in this case, the reason was that this insurance company was losing too much money in Iowa and didn’t want to keep on writing homeowner’s insurance in the state. That was the situation that Dave shared with tens of thousands of people across the state that were all getting similar letters.

What made Dave’s situation a little more challenging was that he couldn’t get new insurance. He tried for months through agent after agent after agent. And every company told him the same thing. We won’t cover you. Even though these homes are perfectly safe in a safe part of the state, nobody would say yes. And it took them until basically two days before their insurance policy was going to run out until they finally found new coverage that was far more expensive and far more bare-bones than what they’d had.

But at least it was something.

It was something. But the problem was it wasn’t that good. Under this new policy, if Dave’s street got hit by another big windstorm, the damage from that storm and fixing that damage would wipe out all the savings set aside by these homeowners. The deductible would be crushingly high — $120,000 — to replace those roofs if the worst happened because the insurance money just wouldn’t cover anywhere close to the cost of rebuilding.

He said to me, we didn’t do anything wrong. This is just what insurance looks like today. And today, it’s us in Cedar Rapids. Everyone, though, is going to face a situation like this eventually. And Dave is right. I talked to insurance agents around the country. And they confirmed for me that this kind of a shift towards a new type of insurance, insurance that’s more expensive and doesn’t cover as much and makes it harder to rebuild after a big disaster, it’s becoming more and more common around the country.

So, Chris, if Dave and the people you spoke to in Iowa were really evidence that your hunch was right, that the problem is spreading and rapidly, what are the possible fixes here?

The fix that people seem most hopeful about is this idea that, what if you could reduce the risk and cause there to be less damage in the first place? So what some states are doing is they’re trying to encourage homeowners to spend more money on hardening their home or adding a new roof or, if it’s a wildfire zone, cut back the vegetation, things that can reduce your risk of having really serious losses. And to help pay for that, they’re telling insurers, you’ve got to offer a discount to people who do that.

And everyone who works in this field says, in theory, that’s the right approach. The problem is, number one, hardening a home costs a fantastic amount of money. So doing this at scale is hugely expensive. Number two, it takes a long time to actually get enough homes hardened in this way that you can make a real dent for insurance companies. We’re talking about years or probably decades before that has a real effect, if it ever works.

OK. So that sounds not particularly realistic, given the urgency and the timeline we’re on here. So what else are people looking at?

Option number two is the government gets involved. And instead of most Americans buying home insurance from a private company, they start buying it from government programs that are designed to make sure that people, even in risky places, can still buy insurance. That would be just a gargantuan undertaking. The idea of the government providing homeowner’s insurance because private companies can’t or won’t would lead to one of the biggest government programs that exists, if we could even do it.

So huge change, like the federal government actually trying to write these markets by itself by providing homeowner’s insurance. But is that really feasible?

Well, in some areas, we’re actually already doing it. The government already provides flood insurance because for decades, most private insurers have not wanted to cover flood. It’s too risky. It’s too expensive. But that change, with governments taking over that role, creates a new problem of its own because the government providing flood insurance that you otherwise couldn’t get means people have been building and building in flood-prone areas because they know they can get that guaranteed flood insurance.

Interesting. So that’s a huge new downside. The government would be incentivizing people to move to places that they shouldn’t be.

That’s right. But there’s even one more problem with that approach of using the government to try to solve this problem, which is these costs keep growing. The number of billion-dollar disasters the US experiences every year keeps going up. And at some point, even if the government pays the cost through some sort of subsidized insurance, what happens when that cost is so great that we can no longer afford to pay it? That’s the really hard question that no official can answer.

So that’s pretty doomsday, Chris. Are we looking at the end of insurance?

I think it’s fair to say that we’re looking at the end of insurance as we know it, the end of insurance that means most Americans can rest assured that if they get hit by a disaster, their insurance company will provide enough money they can rebuild. That idea might be going away. And what it shows is maybe the threat of climate change isn’t quite what we thought.

Maybe instead of climate change wrecking communities in the form of a big storm or a wildfire or a flood, maybe even before those things happen, climate change can wreck communities by something as seemingly mundane and even boring as insurance. Maybe the harbinger of doom is not a giant storm but an anodyne letter from your insurance company, saying, we’re sorry to inform you we can no longer cover your home.

Maybe the future of climate change is best seen not by poring over weather data from NOAA but by poring over spreadsheets from rating firms, showing the profitability from insurance companies, and how bit by bit, that money that they’re losing around the country tells its own story. And the story is these shocks are actually already here.

Chris, as always, terrifying to talk to you.

Always a pleasure, Sabrina.

Here’s what else you should know today. On Tuesday, the United Nations has reclassified the number of women and children killed in Gaza, saying that it does not have enough identifying information to know exactly how many of the total dead are women and children. The UN now estimates that about 5,000 women and about 8,000 children have been killed, figures that are about half of what it was previously citing. The UN says the numbers dropped because it is using a more conservative estimate while waiting for information on about 10,000 other dead Gazans who have not yet been identified.

And Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, gave a press conference outside the court in Lower Manhattan, where Michael Cohen, the former fixer for Donald Trump, was testifying for a second day, answering questions from Trump’s lawyers. Trump is bound by a gag order. So Johnson joined other stand-ins for the former president to discredit the proceedings. Johnson, one of the most important Republicans in the country, attacked Cohen but also the trial itself, calling it a sham and political theater.

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Shannon Lin, and Jessica Cheung. It was edited by MJ Davis Lin, with help from Michael Benoist, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Rowan Niemisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

• May 20, 2024   •   31:51 Was the 401(k) a Mistake?
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• May 17, 2024   •   51:10 The Campus Protesters Explain Themselves
• May 16, 2024   •   30:47 The Make-or-Break Testimony of Michael Cohen
• May 15, 2024   •   27:03 The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System
• May 14, 2024   •   35:20 Voters Want Change. In Our Poll, They See It in Trump.
• May 13, 2024   •   27:46 How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China
• May 10, 2024   •   27:42 Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand
• May 9, 2024   •   34:42 One Strongman, One Billion Voters, and the Future of India
• May 8, 2024   •   28:28 A Plan to Remake the Middle East
• May 7, 2024   •   27:43 How Changing Ocean Temperatures Could Upend Life on Earth
• May 6, 2024   •   29:23 R.F.K. Jr.’s Battle to Get on the Ballot

Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Featuring Christopher Flavelle

Produced by Nina Feldman ,  Shannon M. Lin and Jessica Cheung

Edited by MJ Davis Lin

With Michael Benoist

Original music by Dan Powell ,  Marion Lozano and Rowan Niemisto

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Across the United States, more frequent extreme weather is starting to cause the home insurance market to buckle, even for those who have paid their premiums dutifully year after year.

Christopher Flavelle, a climate reporter, discusses a Times investigation into one of the most consequential effects of the changes.

On today’s episode

Christopher Flavelle , a climate change reporter for The New York Times.

Background reading

As American insurers bleed cash from climate shocks , homeowners lose.

See how the home insurance crunch affects the market in each state .

Here are four takeaways from The Times’s investigation.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter who writes about how the United States is trying to adapt to the effects of climate change. More about Christopher Flavelle

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