Paradise Lost, by John Milton

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; 17^th 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.