Paradise Lost Book Club – Introduction

John MILTON: GENESIS RETOLD

Justifying God’s Ways To Man

Scripture and Imagination – the Project

John Milton lived in hard times. He was embroiled in political controversy during the English Civil War. He personally felt the tension between the Puritan and conservative wings of the English Reformation. His entire society reeled in the wake of the early modern commerical revolution and the scientific revolution. He struggled to achieve the literary and intellectual fame he dreamed of. His marriages were… complicated. And then he went blind.

If ever a man might be expected to demand that God justify His mysterious ways, it was John Milton. And yet he chose instead to devote his masterpicee to playing God’s advocate, “justifying the ways of God to man” — by reframing Genesis 1-3 as a heroic epic in the tradition of the Greek and Latin classics. Poet Andrew Marvel said he feared that Milton would “ruin.. the sacred truths to fable and old rhyme” – that is, reduce the Word of God to mere entertainment. All attentive readers of Paradise Lost must decide for themselves whether or not this is true!

In Media Res

If you feel as though you “missed something” at the beginning of the tale, fear not. Like the great epics on which Milton modelled his poem, Paradise Lost begins “in media res” – that is, in the middle of the action. You’ll get backstory along the way as characters remember and recount what brought them to their present condition. But the story picks up with a bang, right after Satan has spent nine days and nine nights falling through the Void as he plummets into Hell. Talk about a hard landing ! Once he comes to his senses and recovers his wits, he lifts his head and takes a look around… and the epic begins.

A “Relatable” Protagonist

The main character in a heroic epic may not always be perfect, but we expect him to be somebody worth admiring. Milton is going to toy with our expectations. The undisputed protagonist in Paradise Lost – in the sense of main actor, the character who sets out to acheive a glorious quest – is Satan himself. Some readers feel a bit uneasy about Milton’s Satan. He’s relatable, eloquent, and seems to have many noble “virtues” we would extol in any other person. It’s common for readers to find Milton’s portrayal of God “wooden” in comparison with the dynamic, internally conflicted, hypnotic persona of the villain. Don’t hesitate to let sympathy carry your emotions where they will; Milton has the story in hand, and there may be a reason why we humans find the Father of Lies so appealing…

How Do I read This Weird Poetry?

Here are Milton’s own words (from 1668) about the type of verse used in Paradise Lost:
“The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin, rhyme being….but the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched material and lame meter.” The music of poetry, he adds, “consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.” He denies that the lack of rhyme is a defect, “though it may perhaps seem so to vulgar readers”, but is in fact his gift to the English language, an example “of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.”
So there you have it.
The best way to enjoy this kind of verse is simply to read it aloud without imposing a sing-song cadence. Simply let the natural rhythm and internal resonances of the language work themselves out. Don’t pause very long at the end of a line; place your emphasis with the punctuation, enunciate each word because each one was chosen with care, and try to take in the meaning of whole sections rather than small phrases.

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