Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
by John Milton
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Book Summary Information
Author: John MiltonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-09-19
ISBN: 0140424393
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Book Reviews of Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: A God Worthy of Respect, if not Praise
Summary: 5 Stars
Sufficiency is fluid. There is nothing that in Paradise Lost that can be described as simple. But sufficiency in the eyes of God, Adam and the various obedient angels consists of doing God's will and using the gift of free will given to all his sentient creatures to extol his greatness. Before the falls, both of the rebel angels and of Adam and Eve, the relation between God and his creations is almost always one to one and direct. God makes his creatures sufficient to withstand any and all evil, but by investing all with free will gives them the choice of whether or not to embrace the evil. Suffiency lies within all sentient creatures to do God's will, but one can only be proved sufficient by doing God's will. In short, to be sufficient in God's eyes is to do his will--no matter what!
That suffiency is fluid is vaguely clear through out the poem. There is never one definition of perfectly righteous or good behavior. Satan and the rebel angels needed only to accept Messiah as God and King; Adam and Eve needed only not eat of the tree of knowledge; Michael, Gabriel, and company had to take part in that farce of fight for heaven; Enoch, Noah, Moses and Jesus showed their suffiency by standing up for God against humanly impossible odds. The lists of lesser examples in the poem are too numerous to recite and keep this essay readable, but it is more than reasonable to conclude that depending on the situation anything from indifferent obedience to militant martyrdom will be sufficient. But, constant obedience is always the rule.
The same rule of suffiency should be applied to Paradise in a slightly modified form. God is the greatest of planners because he knows all. Knowing all, he makes plans for every consequence of every action. Had Adam and Eve resisted Satan in the garden, then it would have proved sufficient for two beings who did not know good or evil. That would have proved enough of a mockery to the aims of Satan, but after the fall God ordains it necessary to show that everything Satan ever does to mankind is utterly futile and leads only to more punishment and increase of pain. The fact that he will make the supreme greatness of mankind come from evil means shows his power to be without end, and Satan's unwillingness to accept this is what will ultimately destroy him and his host of rebels at history's conclusion.
The entire question of suffiency of all virtues is the meditation of Milton from the poem's beginning to the close. What is constantly necessary to remember in this poem is the distinction between virtue, or power, and true virtue, power used to celebrate and defend good. Milton uses this distinction to turn epic virtues on their head by investing Satan with so many of them. Satan is fearless, uncompromisingly defiant, willing to fight by whatever means are provided to him and he is inspiring. We can see shades of Aeneas, Odysseus, Scaevola, the Earl of Kent from King Lear, and numerous other literary and historical figures that seethed with defiance and did everything in their power to defy and defy and defy. What all characters put forth have in common though is that they used their powers in defense of people, home, freedom, and friendship. Satan uses the power still invested in him, his "courage never to submit or yield" to try to destroy, not create. Comically, he even seems to realize that he can, at best, be a mild irritant to God this way:
...If then his Providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still find means of evil,
Which oft-times may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destined aim. (I, 162-68)
This is power so completely abused that it barely requires further explication. Suffice it to say though, this is the same valor that we find in Adam when we are introduced to him for the first time in book IV, and that he disdains using in book IX when he chooses to follow Eve's lead by eating the forbidden fruit. Where the true virtue of the obedient angels and the classical epic heroes lies in their motivation for undertaking feats of violence, Satan's hatefulness, which grows as he further resists God, lies in the fact that he uses all his powers and intellect in the service of conquest, destruction, and wickedness. As becomes clear by the poem's end, when Michael shows Adam the tyranny of Nimrod, valor when in the service of wickedness is not a true virtue. True virtue and greatness can only come through God's favor.
Here it seems appropriate to move from suffiency in beings and their actions to the suffiency of Paradise. As Raphael points out in book VII, creation of the world and mankind took place in order show Satan and the rebel angels their superflousness by filling what they could have defined as a void when they were banished from Heaven. God loves all his creatures for the obedience and love they show him. But part of the nature of being omnipotent is that nothing is inexpendible and no thing is outside of his purview. Existence itself is by God's sufferance and for any permanence of good to come of a beings existence this must be accepted as indisputable. Milton's Satan would not be Milton's Satan if he accepted this necessity. He even had a chance to accept it in book II had he advised the Stygian council to accept the advice of Mammon--one who hates God as much as Satan:
...Let us not then pursue
By force impossible, by leave obtained
Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state
Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek
Our own good from ourselves, and from our own
Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp. Our greatness will appear
Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse,
We can create, and in what place soe'er
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and endurance. (II, 249-262)
God's wrath is infinite when provoked, and expulsion from Heaven is the punishment for attempting to conquer Heaven. There is no reason to believe that his ire would have been raised had the rebel angels simply accepted their punishment, because the punishment and the concomitant agony that the disobedient angels suffer would have been sufficient. The further disobedience of Satan is what makes more punishment necessary, hence the periodic metamorphosis into serpents the rebels undergo after Satan's return from Earth. Again, suffiency of actions by God becomes defined solely by decisions made by his creations. By seducing Adam and Eve, Satan showed God that banishment was not sufficient to quell his pride. Also, Adam and Eve showed themselves insufficiently obedient to deserve Paradise. It became necessary for God to alter all of their conditions in order to punish Satan accordingly, further dash his pride. For Adam and Eve the punishment was death and the misery of history. They proved insufficient of Paradise, nothing in Paradise itself was imperfect, insufficient, let alone deficient, accept for them after the fall.
God is the creator of infinite possibility in all his sentient creatures. He should not be viewed as the writer of a book with a singular vision who preordains events to make a specific conclusion. That would be fate or destiny and God did not impose these upon human existence. God has total foreknowledge of all events, but he explains to Messiah that this is irrelevant because free will gives all his creations choice. They would be worthless otherwise because,
Not free, what proof could they have giv'n sincere
Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,
Where only what they needs must do, appeared,
Not what they would? What praise could they receive?
What pleasures I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,
Made passive both, had served necessity,
Not me. (III, 103-111)
There needs to be the constant possibility of evil arising for good to mean anything. Good is totally impotent without the contrast of evil, in fact it arguably can not exist without it. Automaton praise would not be real praise of God.
When discussion of the suffiency of Paradise comes up in any definition of suffiency we enter into very dangerous territory. Adam and Eve voice no complaints about Paradise; they do not imagine the possibility of being happier than they are prior to their fall. Disobedience to God remains a constant possibility because of the absolute existence of free will. The universe that Milton has created is one where the actions of individuals is never foreordained and one in which absolute obedience to God is the only path through which any good can ever u come to the individual. There is also never an instance where what God asks is even in modest proportion compared to what he gives. At the same time though, Milton makes absolutely clear that obedience to God does not protect either his dutiful from horrors. One need only remember the nightmare of Eve at the beginning of Book V, or the awful description by Raphael of the hollowing that he hears coming from Hell when he is dispatched there during creation. But God never exposes his creations to truly painful tests of their loyalty, not by any standard that fallen humankind. Paradise is perfectly sufficient for Adam and Eve in the state they are in just prior to their fall. Neither one truly aspires towards bettering themselves in a way that would increase their happiness and still maintain their total obedience to God. They proved insufficient to remain in Paradise, but Paradise may have proved insufficient for the beings they were to become had they not fallen.
Raphael conjectures when he meets Adam and Eve in Book V, that mankind may one day transubstantiate into a more spiritual being that will be able to cross the boundary between Paradise and Heaven.(493-503) He is not given any information by God save the fact that Satan is hanging around Paradise, so it is purely conjecture to assume that this is possibility. The same is also true of the conjectures that Michael makes about the once possible future of unfallen mankind in Book XI; the progeny of mankind would spread out of Paradise and into the world at large. Eden would have proved not large enough to hold all of mankind. I do not believe though that this is a reflection upon quality of Eden, but one upon its physical size. There is also no reason to believe that the progeny of Adam and Eve would have been just like them. They may very well have been designed to exist in a state closer to our own. Milton's God is the definition of infinite variety and it is impossible to quantify what he would have done if...
Ultimately in Paradise Lost questions of suffiency are nearly moot. Milton's initial purpose in the poem "to justify the ways of God to man," shows this better than anything else. God asks so little, but the stakes are so high for the fate of mankind that it becomes horrible to see just what happens. Since God is infinitely complicated just as he is infinitely powerful. It seems to me that Milton came to the conclusion that God could not be justified, let alone by human standards. God gives all and asks nearly nothing. When he is disobeyed, no one of his creations has the right to question the actions he takes. Through his ability to show just how simple the arrangement with God initially was, he shows how futile it is to try to justify anything he does prior to the fall.
Summary of Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
Edited with an introduction and notes by John Leonard.Wales Books
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