Paradise Lost

One of those rare books that feels absolutely complete, that feels like supreme art. Paradise Lost manages to be in harmony with its Biblical roots, its Classical forebears (blank verse epics like those of Homer and Virgil) and also with those of a more modern disposition. His reading of the character of Satan is particularly fascinating; the Adversary is charismatic and (whisper it) speaks a lot of sense regarding faith, reason and deference to power.

This reading is particularly bold when you consider when the book was written. People were being imprisoned and killed for heresy and for blasphemy (Milton went over to Florence at one point and met with Galileo), and lines regarding the righteous overthrow of rulers were particularly show more dangerous at a time when Charles II had ascended to the restored throne of England after a period of civil war. The story behind the book shows the importance of physical and moral courage for a writer who wants to write honestly, who is principled in his art, and you cannot but respect Milton for that.

But for all the subversive energy which Milton's lines contain, particularly in the early Books of Paradise Lost, the book also works just as well – if not better – with a straight reading. Milton's conceptualization of Hell as a place where you end up if you are bitter and resentful and unwilling to accept (and then transcend) your limitations – a conceptualization expanded on through Satan's soliloquizing – is one that shows why the Christian mythos remains one of enduring utility. Milton's Satan is attractive and modern, but Milton also shows you why it is dangerous to follow him down, turning your back on God.

In addition to getting its philosophy harmonious, Paradise Lost also works exceptionally well as story. There are some arresting dramatic scenes, from the imperial fury of the battle for Heaven between Satan's rebels and the loyal angels, to Satan's lonely moment of lust for Eve, and Adam's wide-eyed exploration of Paradise. Adam's decision to knowingly follow Eve down into Sin – a decision made out of love – aches with poignancy, as does the perfect ending in which the angel Michael takes Adam and Eve by their hands and gently leads them out of Eden into their exile. Milton's conceptualization of the cosmos is also fascinating to explore, and extraordinarily prescient. He brings to us concepts such as the void of space, infinity, alien worlds ("Space may produce new worlds" (pg. 19)), and perhaps even – this is my own personal reading – an early conceptualization of dark matter ("Things not revealed, which th' invisible King, Only omniscient, hath suppressed in night, To none communicable in earth or Heaven." (pg. 153)).

Admittedly, the blank verse poetry can be difficult, and you can tire easily when reading the book, but it is also incredibly rich, with lines that have become iconic ("Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n," for example (pg. 9)), a wealth of allusion (the endnotes to my Penguin Classics edition are almost as long as the book itself) and a cultural imprint shared by precious few books. The use of the word 'space' to describe the cosmos comes from Milton, and much of what we think we know as the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, and of the rebellion of the angels under Satan, comes not from Genesis but from here. You're reading a book of phenomenal influence when you read Paradise Lost, a fundamental exploration of the Western cultural conceptualization of life. Like the new Adam addressing the sun, you marvel that there can be such sublime magnificence brought into the world. show less

TL;DR: Distractingly misogynistic and promoting an authoritarian and paternalistic view of religion which has always driven me away from it.

I've just finished reading Book X of *Paradise Lost*, and I need to start putting down my thoughts about what the book appears to selling as its lesson. First off, I want to note that I was sold on *Paradise Lost* by it being described as the origin of the suave, charismatic bastard version of Satan that is usually adopted in the modern day, in contrast to the pathetic and monstruous Satan seen in *The Divine Comedy*. To clarify: this is not what the book is about, at least not most of it. Only Books I, II and VI touch on the fall of Lucifer and his grand plan to take revenge against Heaven. The show more rest thus far has centered on the titular paradise, The Garden of Eden where the human forefather and foremother reside, Adam and Eve. And it's within these two characters that I have my most revulsion to the themes of the book. It isn't surprising that a 17th century epic poem based on Christian mythology is misogynistic, and I was willing to wave it off for the most part early on (even if the afore mentioned *Divine Comedy* never fell into the same trap and was written prior to the Renaissance).

However, at this point I can no longer look past the paternalistic themes ingrained in the nature of God creating Man to worship him, then birthing Eve from Adam's rib as a submissive and subservient mate. Eve here is always, always depicted as either: a) wrong and incapable of grasping current situations, or b) actively playing into Satan's tricks and treated as some sort of tool to be used by Sin. Book X is by far the worst offender, in this chapter Satan gloats over his success in perverting Eve and through her wheedling, Adam, we also see God reaffirm Jesus' role in taking blame for humanity's sins, and lastly how Adam and Eve try to amend their failure to ignore Satan's perversions. But the details of this tame description reveal a shocking moral framework which the book appears to hold.

Naturally we're meant to view Adam, and certainly God, as the "good guys" of this story, and yet we're treated to a thoughtless Creator who places a mousetrap in front of a child and is surprised when the get hurt, and to an emotionally abusive husband who asks why God didn't keep all femininity out of mankind like he did in his angels. Maybe that's what people meant when they called *Paradise Lost* the inspiration for the romantic Lucifer, that he's by comparison no worse than God and Man themselves.

I want to single out the view that God holds on Adam and Eve's failure because it's a truly nihilistic take on human existence. In his conversation with his angels and with Jesus, God declares that the punishment of death that he'd emphasized to Adam and Eve was not fit, and instead that their seed be "like lead". This idea is parroted by Lucifer, Sin, and Death in their conversation and with Adam and Eve in theirs. The three takes vary slightly:
- God implies that the mere existence of free will led to an inevitable downfall met with the temptation of Satan.
- Sin and Death rejoice at the idea that the lineage of humanity following Adam and Eve will be weakened to Satan's temptations, which plays up to his ego.
- Eve suggests willful abstinence to defeat the will of Lucifer, and is shot down by Adam because it goes against God's gifts.
Ultimately though all of these come from God's (ironically) lack of faith in his creation. So I have to ask: are we meant to agree with God here? Are we meant to think that the point of *Paradise Lost* is that when faced with temptation humans will always falter, and are therefore beyond hope? He serves the role of a jailor, someone who condemns all humanity to death and continued subjection to sin for one Original Sin. It reminds me of that part of the episode "Mac Day" of *It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia*, where Mac describes God as someone people live in constant fear of, like he's breathing down their back every second, whereas Country Mac describes the beauty of our world and the miracle of our lives. For a book like this, failing its moral framework and the ethical implications that it holds up feels antithetical to its purpose. If the point isn't to investigate and reaffirm the moral victory of God and Jesus over Satan and his rebellion, then what is the point? Is it really just John Milton playing with action figures? show less

In Paradise Lost Milton produced poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and briefly in danger of execution Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to justify the ways of God to men', or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.

The greatest poem in the English language.

I'm about to lose some of my cool points here, because this was absolutely dreadful. Long-winded, repetitive, and rambling throughout its entirety, ESPECIALLY the dialogue, almost nothing actually happens here. If you cut out all of the needless fat and just kept what little plot there is it would be, like, a third of its length. I don't need one hundred lines of wordy poetry just to say "Satan to turned into a cormorant". Hell, I tried skipping ahead multiple times just to see if it would pick up and it actually got WORSE as it went on. The "plot" seems to deviate needlessly and it becomes a padded, bloated mess.

You can pull some great lines out of it: "better to reign in hell than serve in heaven", "not light but a darkness visible", show more etc., but if I'm going to be totally honest, this is literally the most mind-crushingly boring thing I've ever tried to read in my life. I was actually getting outwardly angry trying to slog through this thing. Not entertaining in the least. I'll just stick with Homer and Dante for some actually good epic poetry.

Ugh...2/10 show less

I get it now. I get why people like Satan in this book so much. Even I fell for his spell, good lord.

With that out of the way, let me actually start reviewing what I thought about the book. Because goddam, did it take me forever to read. I'm not joking! I've read plenty of classics in my time that had taken a bit of my brain power to get through, but I did it at a decent pace. I finished "Frankenstein" in about a week, "Camilla" in about 3 days, and even read several from antiquity and completed them in less than a week. "Interview With The Vampire" was a gothic brick of a book where paragraphs ran for several pages, and "chapters" that went on for hundreds of pages, and I still completed it in around a week and a half.

But this? I felt show more like I needed this book open in one tab, Cliff Notes in another, and a YouTube Essay on it in another, and I still got lost in the narrative a dozen times and had to reread passages several times before I figured out what was going on. "Paradise Lost" and its sequel, "Paradise Regained", is one hell of a tome to parse through, which took me Three Months to read through!

Yeah, you heard me. THREE MONTHS!

Short summary of my review: It is beautifully written and made, and while it is technically classical fanfiction, I feel it is in the same way that The Divine Comedy is. It takes a part of the Bible that isn't really fleshed out and actually gives the characters in the story characterization. All of the characters - from God, to Satan, to the Demons, to the Angels, to Adam and Eve - are fleshed out with motivations for what they do rather than just being the archetypes telling fables and theological lessons. It leaves little wonder why it's been such an impactful story throughout the centuries, even to the modern day, and I believe it also does a great job of humanizing the devil. We come to understand his reasons for becoming evil and corruptive, and while I certainly can't agree with his decisions (as pride was certainly what led to his fall), I can understand why others would sympathize with him and even like him.

With that said, let me get into my longer review to accurately put down my thoughts on a book I've spent so much damn time trying to get through.

Positives

So, the best parts of the poem.

For starters, I see why it is an epic. It took what otherwise were a few passages of the Bible and expanded upon it to show how Lucifer had fallen, taken on the mantle of Satan, took command of the legions of hell, and then sought to corrupt God's project in creating the new world. It even gives context as to why God created the Earth and man, and upon the nature of what evil and Sin even is.

I mean that as well. In the Bible, Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit and suddenly gain knowledge of good and evil, and that's it. They broke a commandment and pissed off God, and now they have to suffer for it. In "Paradise Lost", it's a lot more overt in what knowledge of good and evil even is. Before they ate, all they knew was that they had to obey God, live well like pets, and that their innocence made them rulers of the Paradise that was created for them. After they had eaten the fruit, they come to understand that they can break Gods commandments for their benefit, what Death was, how to have sex (in fact one of the first things they do is have sex with one another and then post nut clarity hits them like a truck), and then they argue, grow spiteful and angry with one another, and even have darker thoughts before they forgive one another for their flaws.

While the poem is thick with aliteration, similes, and of course, anachronistic words and phrases where the characters speak and never get to the point, there's just a lot that's there. Plus, one of my favorite parts of the poem is when Satan, upon thinking of his fall and his reasons for corrupting Adam and Eve, concludes that he could just ask God for forgiveness and he would be forgiven, but then decides not to because his pride prevents him from admitting he was wrong. In fact, he does this several times. It even angers him when Adam and Eve ask for forgiveness near the end, and God does, but with caveats.

Negatives

Goddamn, is this book dense with descriptions.

That's not an exaggeration either. In modern times we're told as writers to keep our prose and dialogue sparse so as to move the story along at a decent pace and not bore readers, but in this, characters will talk on and on and on, often circling around their points to make them either clearer, or make it intentional to what they're trying to say, which often makes it feel like they never really catch their breathe. On top of that, the descriptions for characters, scenes, and more are so vivid that it often becomes hard to parse what we're actually supposed to be visualizing in our heads.

As an example: Pandemonium, the demon city. The demons erect the city in the hour of their fall, and are holding a conference on what to do. Instead of writng "The city was erected of brass and studded in the gems of the earth, and in its epicenter was a vast confrence hall where all the fallen seraphims and cherubs met" we instead get pages about the tall monuments, pillars that held aloft the ceilings, and callbacks to ancient greek gods and more (who are also demons in this story).

It's beautiful, but because it's written in an epic poem style, it also makes it hard to tell who is talking, what is description, what is Satan's (or our other PoV characters like Adam or Eve) memory, and what really is happening. At least for me, and is what necessitated a few re-reads of certain pages just to understand.

For a lot of people, this might be a major turn-off. Had I not a keen interest in theology, and wanting to understand this book, then I would have turned away from it after Book 1 because I don't know if I would have been willing to put my time into it. I can't say for sure that I had FUN with "Paradise Lost", but I do feel better for having read it and come to understand it in the first place.

Basically, if you're looking for fun, skip; if you're looking for literary understanding, read.

Overall Thoughts

Mesmerized and glad I dove into it. I just wish that I hadn't spent as much time with it as I did, because 3 months is just... It's a lot to take in. Normally, I read classic books quickly, but this one just pulled me in and didn't want me to let go, and I still find myself looking over summaries and more, just in case there was something deeper there that I wasn't able to grasp because of how dense it was.

Overall, it did make me feel smarter to finish it, which... yay!(?) I don't really consider myself scholarly when it comes to my reading of classic literature, because to me, as a writer, I want to start at a foundational level and work my way up into understanding the history of the written word, and how things are put together from older times to now. Yet now that I finished this, I can understand why so many classics from the 1800s and even early 1900s called upon this poem as a literary masterpiece. Because it is. I might even delve into more of Milton's works just to see what they're like. God help me, though. I'll do that after a brain rest. show less

I wanted to give this review both more and less than I have attributed to it. Paradise Lost is a quintessential book for understanding the later romantics who worked outside the tradition of men like Wordsworth and beat the trail towards modernism with the likes of Blake and Shelley. Due to this I agree with David Hawkes that it is far more than a book of “dead ideas.” Yet this is probably the ONLY thing that I agree with on Hawkes’ account. I highly recommend reading an edition not annotated by this man. Never before have I come across such a slanted and biased editor. His entire annotation is as if a defense of his own interpretation, and is replete with such a gross abuse of convoluted philosophical jargon that does not even show more remain consistent throughout the work. Even worse, he blatantly disregards passages that outright contradict his conviction in the author’s desire to having written a “third testament.” Willingly or not, Milton’s self aggrandized conception of what he is doing betrays itself in his very attempt to reconcile Christian morality with Protestant reformation. It is in fact just this which writers such as Shelley and Byron find in it its import, for by portraying Satan as he does, he inadvertently makes of him a modernist hero.
It is Milton’s profundity (which cannot be denied) which reveals this to us. This credit should not be denied him. Without it, the blatant conflagration between dualities would not shine forth as bright as they do and as such rival the fecund heavenly rhetoric (which ironically Hawkes chastises while doing the same himself). Please do read this book. But if it all possible, avoid Hawkes’ slant when forming your own opinion; his is almost downright shameful and lends credence to those criticisms that accuse this meritorious book of its contemporary superfluity. show less

There's all this debate over why Satan is so appealing in Paradise Lost. Did Milton screw up? Is he being cynical, or a double-secret atheist? And why is God such a dick?

No one ever asks that about Iago, though, to whom I think Milton's Satan owes a debt. No one asks whether Shakespeare screwed up in making Iago so much fun; they just give him credit for, y'know, writing an awesome villain. And that's all Milton's doing. Satan is tempting for us because Satan is tempting for us. That's the point of Satan! If Milton didn't make him as appealing as possible, he'd be doing Satan a disservice. And Eve, for that matter.

Similarly, God's a dick because God's a dick. You've read the Old Testament. He's not exactly all flowers and hugs there show more either. Again, Milton's just being true to his characters, and writing a great story while he's at it.

There’s slightly more to it than that, yeah. For example: it's hinted, albeit obtusely, that God sets Satan up to fall. He gives a stern warning that anyone who disobeys him or his son will be cast out of Heaven. But since there's no sin or evil at the time of his speech, why give the warning? Isn't that like saying "Don't touch these cookies while I'm gone" to a kid who didn't realize there were cookies until you pointed them out? I get why people spend their entire careers arguing over this thing.

Here’s my advice to people considering reading Paradise Lost: read the first two books. It starts with a bang, and it’s pretty amazing for a while. It slows down a bit in books III - VII, so if you’re not totally sold in the first two books (I was), you can either quit altogether with a fair idea of what Milton sounds like, or skip to books IX and X. IX is the actual temptation and fall (especially fun if you’re a misogynist), and X is an astonishing sequence where Adam and Eve contemplate suicide:

"Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out
To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality my sentence...
his dreadful voice no more
Would thunder in my ears." (Adam, X.774 - 780)

“We’ve totally mucked this up, and our kids are gonna justifiably hate us because we got kicked out of Paradise, and maybe we should just quit while we’re behind.”

But really, the whole thing is worth it. Took me a while – it’s intense stuff, so I found that I had to read a book and then chew on it for a while to process it before moving to the next one – but it’s cool.

In book VIII, if you’re cosmologically minded, Milton lays out the whole universe. Like Giordano Bruno, he understands that our earth is a tiny speck in the universe, and he gets that all the stars are suns like ours, and therefore could have planets like ours around them. He also thinks they might be inhabited; our species might not be God's only experiment. Elsewhere, other Adams and Eves may have faced the same test of the Tree of Knowledge - and they might have passed it. Isn't that an amazing thought?

In books XI and XII, Michael tells Adam sortof all the rest of the stories in the Old Testament, which of course boil down to:

“So shall the world go on,
To good malignant, to bad men benign,
Under her own weight groaning.” (XII 537 – 539)

That’s your fault there, Adam. Nice work.

He rushes through them though, and it makes me wonder whether Milton had originally intended to retell the entire Old Testament but got bored or intimidated or something. That would’ve been remarkable. Certainly Paradise Lost is better literature than the Old Testament is, and significantly more coherent.

It’s also better literature than almost everything else. It’s pretty awesome. Probably the second-best poem by a blind guy ever. I give it two thumbs up. show less