So
then. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is
undoubtedly one of the most important books in English literature, so rather
foolishly I decided to pick up a copy and read the entire thing through. From a
personal point of view it was one of the most mind-numbingly dull, dusty and
impenetrable books I have ever read, and a large amount of it went straight
over my head, alas. The thing appears in twelve distinct chapters (or ‘books’,
as they are known), each starting with a brief prose opening explaining what’s
going on in the chapter (or ‘book’), before it launches into the main body of
near-solid verse. At the close to each chapter (or ‘book’), I eagerly snapped
the thing shut with a sigh of relief and went soundly to sleep. I apologise for
not offering a more scholarly, Literary opening to my review of Paradise Lost, but I leave that sort of
thing to the professionals.
On this
note, I did really enjoy reading the short Literary criticism/essay appendix at
the beginning, having acquired myself a modern Oxford version for precisely
this purpose, for it explained to me the things I should have seen if I were
more intelligent. Thus, I shall now explain what the whole thing was about.
The opening of the Bible offers a
brief account of how the world was created, and how humanity ended up being
doomed to a hard existence – the world was created because God willed it to be
so, and humanity was cursed because Adam and Eve ate the fruit that God told
them not to eat, due to a few choice words by a devious serpent. Simple. It
takes all of three pages in Genesis before the ancient writers then go on to
account the more interesting stuff, like the stories of Abraham and Jacob, and
how the Israelites came to be in Egypt, and all that stuff. However these three
pages at the beginning clearly did not satisfy later thinkers, who reckoned
that there must be a bit more to the creation and fall of the human race than a
snake, a tree, and a simple warning from God
A few millennia later and John
Milton, a Puritan in the tailwind of the English Reformation and a couple of disastrous
civil wars, decides to write an epic in the tradition of the classics, all
about the many and convoluted reasons behind the whole issue of the downfall of
mankind. He draws on a great deal of theological thinking, elevating the
character of Satan from a mere incidental character (who has all of three minor
appearances in the Bible), into becoming the diabolical architect of the whole sorry
tale of humanity’s damnation. But why did he do this, wonder’s Milton, so for a
huge chunk of the poem he details Satan’s initial rebellion against God, and
his banishment to hell along with the rest of his supporters (the demons) – all
of which has absolutely no scriptural basis, having been invented by later
scholars and theologians. The middle of the poem deals with the creation of the
world and humanity by God, greatly expanding on Genesis chapters 1 and 2, and
then comes an interesting bit where Satan goes back into Eden, disguises
himself as the serpent, and tempts Eve into eating the Forbidden Fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge, causing the Fall of Man, and then the final couple of
chapters (or ‘books’) in which Adam has a sneak preview of the rest of the
Bible before he and Eve leave the Garden of Eden for good.
One of the most interesting things
about Paradise Lost is that a great
proportion of the poem is seen from the perspective of Satan, traditionally the
ultimate Bad-Guy, and he is presented rather sympathetically. He is a far
easier character to identify with than the less-human Adam, and much more so
than the tyrannical figure of God (okay, I’m paraphrasing the clever Oxford
Professors here, but I just can’t put it as eloquently as they). Satan outlines
his reasons for doing everything that he did, and I couldn’t help but
understand his viewpoint; from a religious standpoint the whole thing is
mightily interesting, detailing the culmination of centuries of religious pondering
and, if you will allow me to make a little personal conclusion here, justifying
Satan’s actions as much as ‘justifying the ways of God to men’.
In order to conclude, because I was
bored enough reading Paradise Lost
and I’m beginning to bore of talking about it now, this is by no means a piece
of light reading – I found the whole thing tedious and dull, and I learned far
more from the Oxford blurb at the beginning than by actually reading through
the thing itself. However, there were a couple of parts I liked, and chapter 9
(or ‘Book IX’), in which Satan tempts Eve with the Forbidden Fruit itself,
turned out to be quite interesting, so if you have to read any of it, make sure
you read that bit as I quite enjoyed it on comparison to the rest of the poem. If
you decide you’d rather go nowhere near this epic poem with a ten-foot barge-pole,
then I think I might join you in that idea; 17th century Puritan
texts have never filled me with enthusiasm. Just remember that a lot of
religious thinking has virtually no standing in the Bible – that much of it,
like the ideas about Satan being the architect of the Fall of Man and having
fought an open rebellion against God, is the product of later thinking – Paradise Lost shows just how far this
could be taken.
