THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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To ask or search I blame thee not, for Heav’n
Is as the Book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read his wondrous Works, and learn
His Seasons, Hours, or Dayes, or Months, or Years:
This to attain, whether Heav’n move or Earth,
Imports not, if thou reckon right, the rest
From Man or Angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scannd by them who ought
Rather admire ...
‘Reckoning right’ becomes an essential educational element in the working out of the narrative. Paradise Lost is
primarily neither a didactic poem nor a piece of evangelical propaganda, but its impact on a reader depends on
Milton’s essentially Puritan insistence on a reader’s unimpeded freedom of interpretation. Although the narrator
prompts certain assumptions (that Satan and the fallen angels are mistaken in their belief that they can effectively
fight back against Heaven, for example, or that God is both benevolent and omnipotent in his plan for creation), the
epic voice never narrowly enforces meaning. A reader, like Adam, is at all times bidden to exercise the principle of
‘rational liberty’ and to explore and analyse the evolving pattern of moral and religious experience. The poem
systematically disturbs the complacency about the myth it is retelling and re-presenting. The infernal debate in Book
II, for example, poses contradictory questions about resistance and rebellion and it allows for the mental force of a
sometimes specious, sometimes persuasive rhetoric (particularly that of Belial and Satan). By contrast, the seemingly
awkward, austere and largely biblically-expressed externalization of the forethought of God in Book III presents a
concise summary of biblical assumptions about the nature of the Godhead and a careful restatement of the theological
significance of freewill in Heaven and Earth. The presentation of Paradise and its human inhabitants equally demands
interpretation. Milton’s narrative scrupulously suggests the nature of the gulf that separates an unfamiliar, seasonless,
unfallen world of thornless roses and frisky beasts from the familiar one of tempests, frosts, shame, and bloodshed.
The uncorrupted, temperate Adam and Eve ‘innocently’ express their sexual relations ‘founded in reason, loyal, just,
and pure’ but the fallen pair are inwardly shaken by ‘high passions, anger, hate | Mistrust, suspicion, discord’.
Adam’s final wisdom is not defined by his knowledge of the distinction between good and evil but by his willingness
to accept obedience ‘and love with fear the only God’. As the archangel Michael comfortingly instructs him, a proper
combination of faith and good works will render him ‘not loth | To leave this Paradise’ and to possess instead ‘A
Paradise within thee, happier far’.
Paradise Lost attempts to uphold the virtues of patience not passivity, of enlightened learning not submissive
ignorance. It shows us not simply Adam un-Paradised, but Adam possessed of true humanity: mortal, suffering, and
seeking for both grace and liberty. It also sustains the probity of inner certainty, in terms both of Adam’s insight and
of a reader’s freedom of judgement. From this idea of the primacy of conscience stems Adam’s wounded reaction to
the vision of future corruptions, tyrannies, and injustices presented to him by
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Michael in Books XI and XII. His and Eve’s departure from Paradise is tearful, but it also offers the prospect of a
‘subjected’ world which is ‘all before them’ and in which they can choose their place of rest. Their choices, and those
of their descendants, will, it is implied, be part of a greater quest to restore a Paradisal order in the fullness of time.
The consistency of Milton’s achievement in Paradise Lost was not matched by what is ostensibly its successor, the
four books of Paradise Regain’d of 1671. Despite its title, Paradise Regain’d does not assert the idea that the
redemption of humankind hinges on Christ’s resistance to temptation in the wilderness, though a Job-like patient
submission to the will of God is clearly a dominant theme. Milton’s interest in the withdrawn, meditative Christ at the
beginning of his ministry had been hinted at in the parallel drawn in Book XI of Paradise Lost when Adam is led to
the highest hill of Paradise from where a vast prospect opens:
Not higher that Hill nor wider looking round,
Whereon for different cause the Tempter set
Our second Adam in the Wilderness,
To shew him all Earth’s Kingdoms and thir glory.