Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Books 7 and 8 were originally one book, divided in the poem’s second edition. Book 7 is what we know, from Scripture. The first half of Book 8 is what was still speculative and up for grabs. “Saving the appearances”: the term used by scholars of that time to salvage the old geocentric model. God’s refusal to make known the answer to certain questions—really because Milton doesn’t know the answers....

Milton does not just paraphrase Genesis.  While faithful to it, he recreates it in the light of his own vision of the upward metamorphosis, matter leaping up the vertical axis of being towards spirit.  He also gives or implies his own answers to questions about the Creation that have arisen of the centuries.

Following both the Odyssey and the Aeneid , the epic falls into two halves, one wandering and one stationary. Here, we are halfway, and the poem returns to earth. Another invocation to the Muse, and a reference to Milton’s personal circumstances, dark in every way. The Son as the traditional active agent of the Creation, Michelangelo notwithstanding. God’s insistence that at the end of time, earth...

The Son rides out on the third day of the war in heaven in his chariot, and the rebel angels cast themselves into hell in terror. Why does God allow this war to happen, since he could have eliminated the rebel angels in an instant? Perhaps in order to teach: to provide an illuminating reversal of perspective, from heroic tragedy to divine comedy, and a reversal of mood from our own self-centered m...

God announces in the middle of Book 5 that he has begotten a Son who shall rule over the angels. Satan revolts and gathers rebel angels, the only holdout being Abdiel. On the first day of battle, Abdiel strikes the first blow, and the battle goes badly for the rebels. Michael wounds Satan. Night falls, and to recoup their fortunes Satan invents gunpowder and cannon.

Milton’s vision of the entire universe as undergoing a process of vertical spiritual evolution, upward from matter to spiritualized matter, has profound social implications. It implies that the Chain of Being is not fixed, and that human nature might by the end of time become so spiritualized that God will, as the Son says in Book 3, lay his royal sceptre by, for God will then be “all in all,” a N...

Raphael arrives in the Garden of Eden to talk with Adam and Eve. When asked if angels eat, he enthusiastically affirms that they do—and enjoy it too. Milton is defending the real belief of Christianity, which is not that of a disembodied soul that eventually transcends the body and the physical world, but the spiritualization of matter , a process that the entire universe, from the elements throug...

Milton’s bold defense of human sexuality against a tradition going back at least to Augustine regarding sexual desire as a necessary evil. Satan whispers into the ear of sleeping Eve, planting a dream of temptation and eating of the forbidden fruit, appealing to her will to power and latent desire to be a “Goddess.” Gabriel and his watch accost Satan, but God holds up his golden balances, which ti...

The most sexist and patriarchal passages of Paradise Lost are usually a statement of Christian doctrine. Milton does what he can to liberalize doctrine by stressing the spirit of the law over the letter. This leads him to, first, an eloquent praise of human sexuality, denying the Augustinian doctrine that sexual desire is a product of the Fall; second, to a denial that Adam’s “rule” over Eve invol...

Milton attempts to liberalize the teachings about gender that were historically founded on the story of Eve in Genesis (see Elaine Pagels’ brilliant Adam, Eve, and the Serpent ). But he does not break with them entirely, which would have meant breaking with the Bible itself. Milton’s complex personal history of three marriages, the first of which was highly troubled in its beginnings and inspired...

Milton’s complex cosmos, his knowledge of the “many worlds” of modern Galilean astronomy. Satan lands on the sun and deceives Uriel, the angel of the sun, travels to Earth and the Garden of Eden, where he looks up at the sun from which he has just descended and, thinking himself alone and unseen, launches into a soliloquy that shows that the titanic rebel of the first two books was just a pose. In...

Despite the frequent prejudice against Milton, his view of the difficult problems of Christian theology were more liberal than all but a few people in his time, perhaps any time. He revises the doctrine of predestination to mean that God gives sufficient grace to all to be saved, and only then puts the burden on us of using our free will to choose. He revises the view of the Atonement, the sacrifi...

God’s speech from his throne in Book 3 lays out the most difficult problem in Christian theology, the conflict between human free will and the doctrine, stated by Paul in Romans 8-9, that God predestines every human being either to salvation or damnation before we are even born. The Father pronounces humanity guilt, “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” but how can that be reconciled wi...

The bizarre, satiric reunion of Satan with his daughter, Sin, and their offspring, Death, a parody of the Trinity, among other things. The shift of style to allegory for satiric purposes. Satan’s journey through Chaos on his way to earth. Chaos as “the deep” of Genesis 1, but also the Chaos of the Creation myths of Hesiod, Ovid, and Lucretius. The surreal picture of an undignified Satan having to...

Milton’s analysis of why revolutions fail: what Blake called the “mind forg’d manacles” that imprison the would-be revolutionaries within. Moloch, Belial, and Mammon represent various false attitudes that subvert any revolution, good or bad—as they did in the French Revolution in the Romantic period, as they did in the Sixties. The devils’ attempt to pass the time while Satan goes on his spying ex...

The incantatory epic catalogue of pagan deities that the Devils will later become in human history. The discovery of gold by Mammon, and the building of Pandaemonium, the palace of the Devils, by Mulciber. The deceptively beautiful story of Mulciber’s fall, suddenly revealed as a lie. Milton’s demand for active interpretation, the responsibility of the reader of Paradise Lost .

The epic plunges in medias res , into the middle of things, and begins in the aftermath of the war in heaven. Satan and the rebel angels lie stunned on a burning lake in hell. Satan rouses his second-in-command, Beelzebub, and delivers two famous speeches of great dramatic power. Paradise Lost was originally conceived as a drama, and retains many dramatic features. Satan has been a strangely attra...

Milton’s extraordinary achievement, writing his epic at the end of his life when he was old and blind, the Puritan revolution defeated. His choice of a Biblical rather than Arthurian subject. The famous Invocation, invoking a Muse that is really a symbol for divine inspiration. The real chronology of the poem’s events, though they are recounted out of order. The beginning “in the middle of things”...

The rewards of reading Milton with or without a religious commitment. The magnificence of verse informed by a sophisticated knowledge of music. Milton’s sense of a total vision in which the Bible, Classical mythology and literature, and other writers, from Plato to Shakespeare, form an interconnected whole, what Northrop Frye calls the order of words. You can get a whole humanistic education from...

Achilles still grieves for Patroclus while the gods debate on Olympus. Zeus sends Iris down to arrange for Priam to go to Achilles and collect his son’s body. The tough, irascible Priam and his equally tough wife, Hecuba. Hermes, in disguise, conducts Priam to Achilles’ tent. Priam’s heart-rending speech, which stirs a new and unexpected compassion in Achilles. The mystery of Achilles’ new humanit...

The building suspense between book 18, when Achilles learns of the death of Patroclus, and book 22, in which Achilles and Hector engage in the final showdown. Achilles is lured off the battlefield to give the two armies time to clear the field, the Trojans going back inside their walls. All of Troy begs Hector to come inside, but the heroic code demands that he refuse. But he panics, and runs from...

Achilles goes to the ramparts and cries his chilling war cry three times to scare off the Trojans, so that the Achaeans get Patroclus’s body back—but minus Achilles’ armor that Patroclus had been wearing. Hector refuses to retreat, a refusal he will live long enough to regret. Thetis goes to the wondrous workshop of Hephaestus on Mt. Olympus to get armor for her son. The elaborate ekphrasis , or d...

Patroclus begs Achilles to let him go into battle wearing Achilles’ armor so that the Trojans will panic, thinking it is Achilles. Achilles does so on the condition that Patroclus not try to take Troy on his own or go up against Hector. He disobeys and is killed by Hector. Zeus ponders whether to go against fate and save his son Sarpedon, but gives in and Sarpedon also dies. Antilochus breaks the...

Sarpedon’s famous speech to Glaucus in Book 12 affirming the heroic code of fighting for “glory” because no one escapes death. Is there anything we can still admire in the heroic code?  The spirit of competition and striving for excellence and self-transcendence. The need for a “moral equivalent of war.” Hera seduces Zeus in Book 14 to distract him, but the Trojans eventually breach the rampa...

Book 9 is a crucial moment in the Iliad . Consisting of nothing but talk, it is nevertheless the turning point towards inevitable fatality, as Achilles refuses to return to battle. The speeches in which he refuses are fascinating but difficult, because he seems to be doubting the value of the heroic code by which he has lived his entire life. With no help forthcoming from their greatest warrior, t...