Read Online Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) by John Milton, William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, Stephen M. Fallon - Free Book Online Page A

known to us through some esoteric and reason-humbling symbolism. By the same token, he was relatively unexcited by the thought of contemplating the
visio dei
. His angels seem happiest, like Milton himself, when performing a divinely assigned task.
    Both the God and the Satan Controversies animate William Empson’s striking
Milton’s God
(1960). In the process of indicting Christianity, this book invents a new way to praise Milton, albeit one that he himself would surely have deplored. Christianity, for Empson, is intractably evil. In any telling of the story of the Fall of man, God will in some manner be revealed as the responsible party. Milton was a Christian of uncommon moral sensitivity, and he did virtually all that one could do to improve the faith. There is, as we have noted, no torture. The Crucifixion, though recounted briefly (12.411–19), is hardly the centerpiece of Milton’s religion. Temptation, the act of free moral decision, takes its place. Satan is more sympathetic than ever before. But God the Father is still provocative, still threatening. This portrait, far from being the failure it was conventionally assumed to be on one side of the God Controversy, shows Milton’s honesty. His God manifeststhe dark impulse to rule, to wield power purely and simply, that the many attractive aspects of
Paradise Lost
conceal from our view. Dennis Danielson’s aptly titled
Milton’s Good God
(1982) defends Milton and Christianity against some of the main arguments in
Milton’s God
.
    The third of our controversies, about the character of Eve, first appeared in the feminist criticism of the twentieth century. “For the Romantics,” Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson wrote in 1987, “it was Satan who was oppressed by the author’s consciously held beliefs. In our time it tends to be Eve” (xiv). Satan was the controversy of another day. Feminism has arrived, and it wants to argue about Eve.
    Traditionally Milton had received mostly high marks for his characterizations of Adam and Eve. Coleridge thought the love of Adam and Eve was “removed from everything degrading,” the creation of two people who give each other what is most permanent in them and achieve “a completion of each in the other” (Thorpe 96). Their love unfolds without flattery or falsehood. Hazlitt told of some men’s club wit who maintained that Adam and Eve enjoyed only the least interesting of the pursuits of human life, the relations between man and wife. Hazlitt replied with a long catalog of the furniture of fallen life (wars, riches, contracts, et cetera) missing from the supreme pleasures of Eden: “Thank Heaven, all these were yet to come” (Thorpe 111). Extending Hazlitt’s idea that Milton had the power to think “of nobler forms and nobler things than those he found about him” (Thorpe 98), Emerson praised the poet for giving us a new human ideal: “Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity.… Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait” (
Early Lectures
149).
    But there was information of diverse sorts suggesting that Milton might have had a grudge against womankind. During the time that he was deserted by his first wife, Mary Powell, Milton wrote four pamphlets arguing in favor of divorce on the grounds of spiritual incompatibility. Mary’s daughters did not get along with his subsequent wives. Now and then the daughters were asked to read to their blind father in languages they could not understand (Darbishire 177, 277). And there were also a few passages in the poetry cataloging domestic unhappinesses with a somewhat unbalanced fervor. Samuel Johnsonbrought all of these factors together in a memorably pithy sentence: “There appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings” (
Lives
1:193).
    But through the eighteenth, the