Why you should re-read Paradise Lost (2017)

Thanks a heap for this! Coincidentally, there's a course on the Divine Comedy starting today (http://dante.georgetown.edu/).

Good courses/teachers change everything.

I thought I hated literature and philosophy until I took a philosophy 101 course that I procrastinated until my final semester at UT.

It was basically two professors (one was Dutch that was co-teaching the course until he would transition to be a stand-alone professor) and a class of 12 students at a university where I was used to intro courses in 200-student lecture halls.

The enthusiasm of the professors was contagious. And they turned text that would have been boring / misunderstood if read on my own into lines that were couched in all sorts of humor and greater commentary about the world, and I was hooked. They taught me how to enjoy literature that otherwise would have seemed totally dull and dry and it was a real gift.

Over a decade later, I was at a bar and somehow Plato's Gorgias came up with a stranger and we both half-jokingly agreed that Callicles was right about the world. And I thought about how thankful I was for that philosophy class once again.

> What I once thought was a retelling of the Bible, surprised me with its political nuances.

The Bible has surprising political nuances as well.

Thanks for this PDF! I was confused to see the words "Paradife Loft" and thought that it was some issue with the PDF, which is not the case.

TIL that ſ (long s) is an archaic form of the lower case letter s.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

Don't forget EPUB/KEPUB/MOBI, for those of us with ereaders:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-milton/paradise-lost

For historical flavor, though not necessarily reading ease, you might also enjoy the scans of the Boston Public Library copies of the (nearly) original, hosted on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/ https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_1/

I can confirm. Reading Lucifer was one of the highlights in high school of my Dutch class.

And of course there is Dante's Divine Comedy, which started the whole thing in 1300...

There's a bit of OT apocrypha that's a likely source of inspiration for Paradise Regained, Milton's sequel to Paradise Lost. I believe it was the Book of Adam (or something similarly titled). A quick Google search doesn't turn up anything likely and the I lent the volume I had which included this apocryphon to my brother who subsequently lost it at some point later, so I only have 20+ year old memories of the book.

There's a long tradition of retellings and expansions of Biblical stories in both Christianity and Judaism that also contributed a great deal to Paradise Lost.

I most enjoyed the part where Satan, Moloc, Beelzebub and the rest of his fellowship discuss whether to retake Heaven and by what strategy, and they end up deciding that Satan alone shall sneak into Eden. I half expected him to say he'd throw his ring into the fire there :-)

Blake was right though – the parts not about devils are quite forgettable.

It is a much different read if you approach it with some prior knowledge of what it was intended to be. The preface plainly states that Milton wants to "justify the ways of god to men."

The plot and structure are a direct knock-off of Homer's epic poems. Milton followed a regimen of writing that was old before he was born, in that first people would write lyrics and sonnets and then eventually hone their skills toward writing an epic. So there's not a whole lot of meat, for lack of a better word, in the structure of the poem itself. It is assumed that the reader knows their classics and identifies the references themselves.

The clever parts are in the details. Milton's angels and demons have philosophical/political debates and conversations which invite the reader to consider hard questions and make conclusions of their own. Milton even considers the mathematical and philosophical questions of being in the poem, for example. Satan asks permission of the "throne of Chaos" to travel through his domain from Hell to Earth. Satan's plea to Chaos is that by creating his universe, god stole from him and he should help anyone who opposes that creation. So it is implied that Chaos is a force perhaps not comparable in status to the one god, but certainly above immortal beings like angels and demons, so perhaps Chaos and God are naturally opposed, entropy vs order, etc. And even this is ideologically and theologically consistent down to the detail. Satan doesn't really know how powerful Chaos is, but should he? Chaos is older and greater than any angel or demon, so it follows that angels and demons would not know exactly how powerful Chaos is, but would know that Chaos is greater than they are. Similarly, the battle scene in heaven between Satan's rebelling army and the angels loyal to God begins with all of them not really knowing whether they can be killed or not. They consider whether all of their fighting is for nothing, because they're immortal. This is another thing that, logically and philosophically, they would not know on their own because they didn't create themselves, after all. They were created, and thus are necessarily lesser than the creator who does know.

"Justify the ways of god to men" to Milton was an attempt to "fix" Christian doctrine, to fill in the blanks and missing parts and make it all fit together without any contradictions or failures of reason.

But here lie conclusions that are difficult to reason away: if Satan rebelled against God and God is all-knowing, why didn't God stop him? Is all of creation an experiment in free will (which makes everyone a pawn), or can God himself not kill one of his immortal angels? If the latter, is he not really God if there's something he cannot do? Was Jesus/The Son just a ruse to root out disloyalty among angels?

And really all of these things get to "does the universe even matter or does whatever created it not care about it?"

The whole thing is not just a religious text, although it is about a religious doctrine. It's a text meant to teach people how to think, so that they would overthrow their kings and noble rulers and rule themselves, just as Milton portrayed in his last writing (a rewrite of the story of Samson Agonistes).

My high school English teacher explicitly advised us to wait until we were "really old" to read Milton.

Comparing an Epic Poem to a Novel seems like an apples to oranges comparison -- both fruit yet quite different from each other.

Calling it "crap" and "extremely poorly written religious fan-fiction" is pretty bold (but also shallow).

Serious question: "why do you suppose it is that 'crap' like this manages to survive on for a couple of hundred years?