OK so an epic poem based on the Christian doctrine of original sin wouldn't be the first thing that popped into my mind when I was looking for a good summer read. But since I heard that William Blake and Edgar Allen Poe thought that Paradise Lost was the greatest poem ever by the greatest writer in the English language, I figured I'd take their word and give it a shot. I trust their opinions in such matters.
After finishing the thing, my main thought is that you'd have to be a great writer to pull this story off. This is a long, loud cheer for the Renaissance status quo of stodgy European social hierarchy and ancient Christian beliefs, and to us non-European non-Christians, all this stuff is at best annoying and at worst infuriating. The Almighty Father is smug and self-satisfied, his Beloved Son is a simpering goody-two-shoes, and the angels are the swaggering authority figures that make us roll our eyes. No wonder the romantics thought Satan was the hero of the story.
Despite all this, and the fact that you already know the ending, and the fact that none of your friends ever bother to read epic poems, Paradise Lost snaps along pretty well. That alone is a testament to just how great a writer John Milton was. And whether you think the story line is propaganda or gospel truth, you'd have to be tin-eared to miss the beauty of Milton's language. Take this passage, where everybody's favorite fallen angel is about to leave his brimstoney digs in his quest across Chaos to Earth:
Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage (1)
This is high art with blank verse. The way the consonants sound together: "wild," "wary," and "while;" the cadence of the words perfectly setting off "the brink" to make it a brink in the sentence; the pause to ponder at the end; all form a powerful image of the devil standing between Hell and primordial Chaos, and put you right there with him- pondering along. Paradise Lost is full of such gorgeous passages, and deserves the praise heaped upon it. Can't say enough good things about the language.
But "greatest poem ever" is a pretty bold claim, and although the language is easily in the realm of masterpiece, the story line has too many flaws to put Paradise Lost up against other great works of English literature. Here’s why I think it ranks lower.
The original Eden story in Genesis is a revolutionary and powerful myth from the dawn of man’s consciousness, and it concerns itself with topics quite different than those which Christian doctrine later associated with it. You have to go back and read Genesis without baggage to see it, but the Eden story is about how people, God, and nature relate to each other, and how mankind transitioned from gatherers to farmers on their way to the Hebrew’s preferred profession of shepherding. There’s no sex, no Satan, there are several interesting mysteries now mostly ignored, and although God is undeniably angry at being disobeyed, nothing is labeled as evil and there’s no mention of sin. (2)
As different philosophies developed through the ages, the story of Eden was re-interpreted. Several hundred years after Genesis (3), the pseudipigraphical “Life of Adam and Eve” (4) added Satan to the story. The idea of the fall of man and the need for him to be redeemed came in with the early Christians maybe two hundred years after that. And the idea of concupiscence and original sin was cooked up by Irenaeus and Augustine after another century or two more. (5) Fast forward a thousand years from there to Milton’s time, and people’s main theological concerns had progressed to twisted psychological conundrums like theodicy (6) and free will vs. predestination, which were a huge leap from the simple worries about sustenance and obedience that were most important to the authors of Genesis.
Milton attempts to reconcile this modern load of concepts back into the original Bible verses. He adds a few flourishes of his own, including sinless sex in Eden, demonic Gothic architecture, and perhaps the high point of the poem where Adam chooses to eat the fruit out of love and “fall” with Eve to share her doom. But for the most part, Milton sticks with the standard Christian doctrine of his time. Wherever this doesn’t fit into the original story, he bangs on equivocating, apologizing, or just repeating the idea often enough that he thinks you won’t call him on it. The result is that Paradise Lost commits the literary sin of too much telling rather than showing. At times this gets downright tiresome.
One of the most easily demonstrated examples of this problem is Milton’s treatment of God’s curse on the serpent. At the time Genesis was written, the serpent was a powerful mythic being in his own right: spirit of primordial nature and guardian of immortality. For the crime of convincing the woman to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge, God curses the serpent to crawl around, eat dirt, and scare women. Genesis leaves it to the reader to interpret the serpent’s motivation. One thing is clear: God’s curse of the serpent shows that God is in control and has absolute dominion over nature. This was revolutionary at the time when nature was the most powerful thing around, would easily kill you if you didn’t watch out, and everybody else worshiped nature gods.
Fast forward a few hundred years and mankind had subdued nature to the point that other people posed the bigger threat. So the people of that time invented a humanoid devil and associated him with the earlier biblical “accuser” (“satani”) from Numbers and Job. In the “Life of Adam and Eve” from that period, Satan is introduced as the enemy of mankind and (in most versions) the same being as the serpent. In Milton’s age, the serpent symbol had so little power left that Milton has Satan as a wholly autonomous being who possesses a heretofore inconsequential snake to disguise himself. Paradise Lost has to spend a verse to justify why Satan chooses this particular animal rather than say, a monkey or a squirrel, and Milton ends up with a weak circular reference back to King James’ Genesis:
...for, in the wily snake
Whatever sleights, none would suspicious mark,
As from his wit and native subtlety
Proceeding; (7)
In recognition of Milton’s genius, I must say that once Satan possesses said snake, he proceeds to deliver to Eve 50 lines of as tempting an argument as you could imagine any devil could make, and this is a masterful work of art that powerfully presents the Christian interpretation of the story. (8) Unfortunately though, since Milton laboriously and repeatedly expounds upon Satan’s sin and evil nature, when the time comes for God to deliver his curse on Satan, Genesis’ original curse of the snake doesn’t fit at all, and Milton has to tap-dance awkwardly around the discrepancy:
...yet God at last
To Satan first in sin his doom applied,
Though in mysterious terms, judged as then best:
And on the Serpent thus his curse let fall. (9)
Sorry, but you just can’t put stuff like this in your poem and still be in the running for the greatest ever. The competition’s too stiff. Shakespeare and the Beowulf writer advance to round two.
I’m going to complain about one more thing before wrapping this up. There is a passage in book five which dropped my jaw, and not in a good way, where Milton mentions Galileo's telescope in a kind of Renaissance pop-culture reference. To set the scene: the Almighty has just sent the angel Raphael down to warn Adam that Satan is going to try to mess things up in Eden. Raphael looks down on earth from heaven with his super-powered angelic vision and sees Earth's details clearly, even though he is a celestial distance away...
As when by night the glass
Of Galileo, less assured, observes
Imagined lands and regions in the moon (10)
(Jaw drops here.) So Milton didn't like Galileo? Milton thought Galileo was wrong? This sent me off to research Milton and Galileo. Apparently, Milton visited Galileo once on a European tour. Most of the references I could find emphasize the parallels between Milton and Galileo: both blinded, both political prisoners, etc. (11) Wait a minute. If Milton had such an affinity for Galileo, how come he goes out of his way here to diss Galileo and cast doubt on Galileo's real observations in contrast to his fictional angel's? By calling Galileo's observations "imagined", Milton is siding with the Inquisition, and putting himself on the wrong side of history.
Now I know you can't look back almost four hundred years and fault a person for not seeing things in a modern way, but this is no small mistake for the "greatest poem ever." The Renaissance church's rejection of science was among the worst ideas in dozens of millennia of human history, and Galileo got it dead right and Milton and the Church (and arguably, most everybody else) got it dead wrong. Religion had been the dominant institution of culture and knowledge from the dawn of man's consciousness up to Milton’s time, when the church, in its power-madness, turned away from striving for competence and understanding truth to a childish because-I-said-so view of the world. Galileo was one of the major innovators of his time who was able to bring revolutionary new truths to western civilization, and those truths were threatening to the stale, orthodox power structure of the Renaissance church.
Instead of embracing the new thinking and opening institutions of research and learning, the church made a horrible mistake by rejecting science, and opened the rift we still see today between the faiths that modern people claim to believe and the facts that they know to be true. To earn the title of the greatest poem ever, Milton could have reconciled Christian mythology with the new ideas of empiricism, and turned Paradise Lost into the new Bible. Instead he chose to spend his energies reinforcing the power structures of his time and missed his opportunity.
One of the most compelling themes in the original Eden story is the juxtaposition of progress with defiance of authority and negative consequences. You can’t gain something valuable without giving something else up. You can’t bring in a new idea without disrupting the current order. Adam and Eve lose their life of leisure in Eden by gaining knowledge of good and evil. The Christians lose the meaning of the Eden story when they re-define it as the wholly sinful “fall of man” to give Jesus something to redeem. If you ask me, I like my Genesis straight up and undiluted; read raw from the original with all its power and balance of conflicting ideas intact.
The Genesis authors understood very well the tension between honoring tried-and-true traditions and defying conventional wisdom to innovate and improve their lives. They struck out on their own and rewrote the mythology of their time. In my opinion, John Milton’s failure to do the same and his parroting of the mythology of his time is Paradise Lost’s primary sin. Genesis is challenging and revolutionary. Paradise Lost is pedantic, overstated orthodoxy. Its relentless emphasis on obedience to authority makes it seem more like political propaganda than spiritual inspiration, and it ignores many of the richest and most illuminating aspects of Genesis.
Five stars for the language, deduct a star and a half for degrading the original story and sucking up to authority. Selah.
(1) John Milton, Paradise Lost. Book 2:917-919
(2) The idea of the Garden of Eden without sex or sin may seem shocking to many readers, and each of the topics mentioned above deserves its own essay. But that would take us far away from a critique of Paradise Lost. Here are two quick, simple points. First none of these elements are mentioned in a literal reading of the story and must be interpreted in. Second, in the case of sex and sin, both are mentioned explicitly quite close to the Eden story in Genesis, but not in it. I assume this was deliberate.
(3) There are widely varying estimates on the year Genesis was written. A summary is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible. Interestingly, the more conservative you are, the earlier you believe Genesis was written, so the bigger the gap in time between the original and the introduction of Satan. I figured “several hundred years” was safe.
(6) Theodicy means trying to figure out how there can be evil in the world if the world is ruled by an all-good and all—powerful God.
(7) Paradise Lost. Book 9:90-93
(8) Paradise Lost. Book 9:678-731
(9) Paradise Lost. Book 10:171-174
(10) Paradise Lost. Book 5:261-263
(11) Jonathan Rosen, “Return to Paradise,” The New Yorker, June 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/06/02/080602crat_atlarge_rosen. Also see Milton’s defense of Galileo’s right to free speech in his “Areopagitica,” http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/. To me this doesn’t offset the bad judgment of the comment in Paradise Lost, but makes it worse because it demonstrates that Milton should have known better.
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