Professor John Rogers:
Samuel Johnson in The
Life of Milton -- and that's
The Life of Milton
included in the packet,
but I've also included this on
the handout -- Dr.
Johnson wrote that Paradise
Lost is one of those books
which the reader admires and
lays down and forgets to pick up
again.
We're used to this.
We've read enough Johnson to
recognize characteristic
curmudgeon-liness when it comes
to the subject of Milton,
but I think there's something
to this idea that we forget to
take Paradise Lost up
again after we've lain it down,
because to say that Paradise
Lost is not exactly a
page-turner is simply to say
that we're already familiar with
the plot.
We know, of course,
how the story ends,
and there's nothing for us,
in terms of the plot at least,
to anticipate with all that
much eagerness.
Our foreknowledge of the
story's end works continually,
I think, to reinforce our sense
of God's foreknowledge of the
end of the story.
Of course, foreknowledge of any
kind makes the end seem
inevitable, and I think the
inevitability of an ending puts
Milton -- this idea puts Milton
in a terrible bind.
Any sense of the inevitability
of the Fall really makes -- it
just makes hash,
it makes nonsense,
of the notion of any strong
feeling of Adam's and Eve's free
will.
If we're disappointed with the
ending of Paradise
Lost, then I think
it's safe to say that Milton,
too, is deeply troubled by the
implications of an end.
It's for all of these reasons
that we can say that Paradise
Lost is obsessed with the
problem of its own
ending.Now,
we remember that Milton had
devoted enormous sums of energy
as a young man in anticipating
his own end.
He was continually looking
ahead to the writing of a poem
that "aftertimes would not
willingly let die" -- you'll
remember that sentence from
The Reason of Church
Government.
In the 1640s,
he looked ahead to a political
future in which the reformed
government would usher in the
reign of Christ at the end of
time,
and his early poems are filled
with brief lyric narratives of
anticipation.
I'll just enumerate a few of
those, or I'll remind you of
them.
The Nativity Ode had
anticipated a few times the
apocalypse.
Comus had anticipated --
well, had anticipated the
apocalypse as well,
but it also anticipated the
eventual marriage of the Lady.
"Lycidas" anticipated,
among so many other things,
the undying fame of the poet.
Adam, too, in Books Eleven and
Twelve -- Adam seems continually
to be anticipating an ending
like the speaker of The Nativity
Ode.
Adam's always looking ahead to
the Christian millennium,
or the apocalypse.
He's jumping ahead of himself,
and Michael is always chiding
him for this enthusiasm.
It's as if Michael's job is to
put the brakes on Adam's
anticipatory
excitement.Given that role
that Michael plays,
I think it's all the more
remarkable that it's Michael --
this is our killjoy archangel
who's often just as bad as Adam
in his own eagerness to jump
ahead of himself as he tells the
story –
that it's Michael himself is
the angel of apocalypse from the
Book of Revelation,
as we learned from David's
lecture on Friday.
The Book of Revelation is the
book from which Milton has
taken, or has lifted,
this character,
Michael.
Perhaps because of his role in
Revelation, the Michael of
Paradise Lost seems
incapable of keeping himself
from the onrush of expectation
as he narrates,
in what I suppose should be
chronological order but isn't,
the story of future history.
So Michael will narrate the
story of the apocalypse four --
count them, four -- times over
the course of the last books,
once in Book Eleven and three
times in Book Twelve.
In all of his eagerness to
imagine the final fulfillment of
history, Michael seems almost in
some way to be parodying
Milton's own tendency,
especially his own youthful
tendency, to offer those
prophetic narratives of
anticipation.Now,
Michael's focus in the last two
books is essentially on God's
providential control over the
actions of the descendants of
Adam and Eve,
and so it's not too difficult
to see why these books just
structurally are so troubling.
Milton is in the incredibly
awkward position of trying to
reconcile divine providence with
the notion of free will.
This has been his challenge all
along, and this is also the
subject of a lot of Milton's
musings in the theological
treatise that he wrote at the
same time that he wrote
Paradise Lost,
The Christian Doctrine. I'm
going to have you turn in your
Hughes to page 984 in
The Christian Doctrine.
Milton devotes an entire
chapter to the problem of the
seeming incompatibility of
divine providence and human free
will,
and he finds himself
continually knocking up against
the representation of the
providential God that he finds
in the Bible.So this is
Christian Doctrine,
page 984.
This is where Milton tries to
carve out a space for free will
in the face of so much contrary
evidence in scripture.
This is on the top of the
right-hand column.
I believe this is -- yes,
this is also on the handout.
Okay.
Milton's speaking about divine
providence, which is obviously
on some level a sensitive
subject,
maybe a sore subject,
for such a strong believer in
human free will.
He's quoting here the
scriptural accounts of what he
calls the voluntary actions of
the deity,
those moments in which God is
acting out of his own
inscrutable will.
So here we have Milton writing
very systematically:
Voluntary actions.
2 Chronicles x.15.
[This is an example.]
so the king harkened not unto
the people: for the cause was of
God.
[And then again from Proverbs.]
…a man's heart deviseth
his way;
but Jehovah directeth his steps.
[And]…
man's goings are of Jehovah.
[And]
…the king's heart is at
the hand of Jehovah as the
rivers of water;
he turneth it whithersoever he
will.
[And this from Jeremiah]
…O Jehovah,
I know that the way of man is
not in himself.
Now, why [laughs]
would Milton do this?
Why would he cite these
scriptures?
From Milton's point of view,
and actually from the point of
view of a lot of
seventeenth-century Christians,
these would have to be
bone-chilling statements of the
absolute divine control over our
lives.
The verses from scripture that
Milton's quoting here seem to
admit of nothing like free will;
they conjure an image of God
who controls us as a puppeteer
would control his puppets,
and surely this has to make
Milton nervous.After quoting
instances of divine action that
seem clearly,
I think, to counter the idea of
the power of human free will,
Milton adds this.
It's utterly sublime:
"In this, however,
there is no infringement on the
liberty of the human will;
otherwise man would be deprived
of the power of free agency..."
[laughs]
"Otherwise":
[laughs]
it's slightly loose logic but
it's extraordinarily heartfelt.
Milton is telling us once again
that "it has to mean what I know
it should mean."
It wouldn't make sense
otherwise.
So he faces head on the most
recalcitrant passages of the
Bible, and he simply forces them
to mean what he needs them to
mean.
This is precisely the challenge
that Milton is confronted with
in Books Eleven and Twelve.
The Bible had already written
the story of man after the Fall,
and for most of Eleven and
Twelve,
Milton is really forced to
amplify -- he's pretty
constrained here -- to amplify
and elaborate on the chapters in
Genesis -- this is chapters 4
through 11 in the Book of
Genesis--that really speed
through generations of
experience in the course of a
few pages.Now,
the most important biblical
text to my mind that Milton has
to confront is the Genesis
account of the expulsion.
This is the moment at which
Adam and Eve are actually forced
to lose their paradise,
and this is,
of course, the moment that's
heralded -- the loss that's
heralded in the poem's title;
and so I think we have to
assume that this moment has a
privileged position in Milton's
poem.
This is the text as it appears
in Genesis, and I've also
included this on the handout.
This is all we learn about the
expulsion from Genesis:
And the Lord God said,
Behold, the man is become as
one of us, to know good and
evil: and now,
lest he put forth his hand,
and take also of the tree of
life, and eat,
and live for ever:
Therefore the Lord God
sent him forth from the garden
of Eden, to till the ground from
whence he was taken.
So he drove out the
man…
By any standard,
I think, that we could
comfortably identify as
Miltonic, this text portrays a
God that's unjustifiable.
We've seen this argument
before, though.
You'll remember Satan -- Satan
had accused God of jealousy when
Satan was tempting Eve.
Satan was telling Eve,
"God doesn't want you to eat
the fruit because he doesn't
want you to become a god like
him,
a being with the superior
knowledge of good and evil."
And we, of course,
rally to dismiss Satan's claim
as yet another example of his
tendency to lie and to deceive;
but Satan is [laughs]
-- it seems that Milton's Satan
has only gotten this idea from
the words of God and the Book of
Genesis itself.
What kind of god does Genesis
portray here if not that of a
vulnerable and,
in some way,
desperate deity who does in
fact punish man out of a degree
of jealousy and maybe even
vengeance?
God here has to force Adam and
Eve out of the garden to keep
them from encroaching on any
more of his privileges or of his
territory,
to keep them from achieving the
state of immortality that only
God himself enjoys.Now as
you can imagine,
this biblical passage has been
troubling to generations of
readers of the Bible and
especially biblical scholars.
The sixteenth-century
theologian Calvin,
when confronted with this
passage, was really forced to
conclude that God was speaking
ironically here -- he doesn't
actually mean what he's saying.
Well, you have to say something
when you're dealing with a
passage like this,
but Milton's incredibly
scrupulous here.
He feels compelled to reproduce
this very dark Genesis text in
his own story of the expulsion.
Look at Book Eleven of
Paradise Lost,
line ninety-three.
In the Hughes Edition
it's page 435.
This is God speaking: 
Lest therefore his now
bolder hand
Reach also of the Tree of Life,
and eat,
And live for ever,
dream at least to live
For ever, to remove him I
decree,
And send him from the Garden
forth to Till
The Ground whence he was taken,
[and this is mean,]
fitter soil.
Milton depicts a god in this
passage who has all of those,
and maybe even then some,
[laughs]
anthropomorphic qualities of
the Yahweh of so much of
Genesis.
God here is distinctly human in
personality, and he's able
without hesitation to intervene
in the lives of -- in the
affairs of man in order to
effect his desire for
punishment.
I take this to be precisely a
type of god that Milton is
trying to counteract or to do
away with throughout so much of
The Christian Doctrine,
a god whose
all-encompassing will just
steamrolls right over the free
will,
the free agency,
of human individuals.But
nonetheless we have this passage
in the poem and you can -- it's
not hard to see that the moment
of expulsion is a crisis moment
in Paradise Lost.
It's not only that point at
which paradise gets lost;
it's also that moment,
I think, in which Milton is
most hard pressed to depict a
god whose actions are
justifiable,
whose behavior can be
reconciled with all of the
claims of reason that Milton
wants to hold him to.
It's because the moment of the
actual expulsion is such a
crisis that Milton provides us
with an alternative
understanding of it,
and this, I believe,
is the conversation between the
Father and the Son at line
forty-five of Book Eleven,
page 434 of the Hughes.
The Son has just pleaded
with the Father to show some
mercy on the repentant Adam and
Eve and the Father -- it's
wonderful -- argues that he
would like,
in fact he'd love,
to be merciful,
but there are some things that
are simply out of his control.
Adam and Eve will have to leave
the garden, and the
justification that God gives for
their departure I think is truly
extraordinary.
So this is line forty-eight of
Book Eleven:
But longer in that
Paradise to dwell,
The Law I gave to Nature him
forbids:
Those pure immortal Elements
that know
No gross, no unharmonious
mixture foul,
Eject him tainted now,
and purge him off
As a distemper,
gross to air as
gross…
And we suddenly have a
rationale for the expulsion
that's really completely opposed
to the account of the expulsion
that begins at line ninety-three
and completely opposed,
of course, to its original in
the Book of Genesis.
Where did Milton get this?
He's made this up.
Suddenly Milton has a god
behaving really very
differently.
God is saying,
"Well, I'd love for them to
stay in paradise,
but you see there's nothing I
can do.
I established this natural law
in Eden whereby the pure,
immortal elements of paradise
necessarily,
inexorably expel and purge
anything that's foul or tainted;
and because,
of course, the fallen bodies of
Adam and Eve are actually foul
and tainted,
the atmospheric mechanisms
already in place in paradise are
in the process as we speak of
purging them from the
garden."The lines are
beautiful and they're shocking.
Milton puts in God's mouth an
explanation for the expulsion of
Adam and Eve that really
deliberately runs counter to the
explanation in the Book of
Genesis and,
I think, completely contradicts
the one that God himself had
given so publicly to the
assembly of angels about fifty
or so lines later.
It's an explanation that
completely counters the image of
the jealous and vengeful God
that Milton inherited from
scripture.
Milton is really wresting this
poem away from its source in
scripture and he's pushing it
toward an entirely new genre.
This is something much closer
to what we would think of as
science fiction,
I think,
than any kind of
anthropomorphic biblical
narrative.Milton is taking a
tremendous risk,
and to embark on such a
fanciful flight of myth-making
at such an incredibly important
moment has to be seen as
consequential.
I think that Milton is taking
this risk for the purposes of
his theodicy,
his need to justify the ways of
God to men.
Here at last is an image of the
god who expels Adam and Eve from
the garden for an entirely
justifiable, rational reason.
Here at last is an image of a
god who's not at all the evil
puppeteer who deliberately
forces the movements of his
human creatures.
It's an entirely benign -- it's
almost an impersonal -- god who
willingly subjects himself to
the law,
to the law of nature,
and to the natural moral
processes of nature that are
inevitably at work in the
garden.This,
of course, isn't the first time
that we've encountered the force
of contradiction in Paradise
Lost.
Throughout the poem,
Milton has been opposing
competing notions of God,
opposing accounts of crucial
events.
You'll remember Raphael's
account of creation in Book
Seven in which Milton had
opposed the literal,
the anthropomorphic,
story of Genesis with his own
really wildly original,
incredibly beautiful story of
something like a natural
self-creation.
There are two accounts,
as I mentioned in the last
class, of Noah's flood in
Michael's own history lesson.
Events are continually being
related twice and sometimes even
three times in Paradise Lost,
and the purpose of these
narrative repetitions,
I think, has nothing to do with
Milton's desire to make this
poem impenetrable or just
confusing.
Milton is on something like a
systematic level,
I think, juxtaposing the poem's
official theological reading of
events with an alternative --
what we could think of as a
naturalistic or maybe a more
rational reading of events.
He's struggling to represent a
more palatable,
a more rational,
alternative to the arbitrary
anthropomorphic deity who is so
capable of jealousy and these
all-too-human motives that he
finds in the Book of
Genesis.Up to this point in
Milton's poem,
we really haven't known what to
do with a lot of these conflicts
and contradictions that the poem
was presenting us with.
Conflicting accounts of key
moments in Christian history
just seemed to be held in
suspension in the text.
It's often difficult to discern
how we're supposed to interpret
the relation between opposing
views, or among opposing views.
I think this is a problem that
we've been confronting all
along: is one version right and
the other version is wrong?
Is one version a satanic
perspective on these events and
the other is a divine view?
What's the point of all of
these oppositions and
conflicts?Well,
if those are the questions that
we're asking,
it's safe to say that Milton in
his magnificent genius has
already anticipated those
questions.
I think here in the last books
of the poem, Milton is
struggling, and to some effect,
to make some kind of sense of
this problem.
Michael presents a theory of
reading that on some level can
account for some of the
confusions of Paradise
Lost: it's the theory of
scriptural interpretation known
as typology,
and it had been around for
centuries.
According to the typological
interpretation of Christian
history, characters and events
in the Hebrew Bible,
which Christians called the Old
Testament, are seen as types of
characters and events in the New
Testament.
This mode of reading became a
way for Christian readers of the
Bible to reinterpret everything
in the Hebrew scriptures,
and to appropriate the Hebrew
scriptures, as an anticipation
of the Christian truths that
would be revealed,
they believed,
later in the gospel.
This was a central way in which
Christians could assert some
kind of superiority over Judaism
in light of the fact that
Judaism had this awkward but
nonetheless incredibly
significant temporal priority
over Christianity.So
typology becomes a big deal.
Look at Milton's dealing with
the typological perspective in
Paradise Lost,
Book Twelve,
line 312.
This is page 461 in the
Hughes.
Milton looks at the Old
Testament figure of Joshua --
and he's not making this up.
There's a long tradition of
thinking of Joshua as a type of
Jesus.
Joshua represents in this
reading an early version of the
Jesus that Christians come to
call Christ,
and the full significance of
Joshua's life can't have been
revealed in his own lifetime or
actually during anyone's
lifetime in the Old Testament.
The full significance of the
Old Testament type isn't known
until the emergence of the New
Testament anti-type,
the anti-type being the
Christian fulfillment of the
Hebraic type.
In this case,
the anti-type is the birth of
Jesus.
Christian exegetes were
constantly mapping out elaborate
systems of types and anti-types
as they read the Bible.
There's a very interesting book
on Milton's use of typology by
William Madsen,
M-a-d-s-e-n,
called From Shadowy Types to
Truth.Look a little
further up on page 461.
This is Michael's actual theory
of typology, line 300 of Book
Twelve.
In the typological view of
history, true meaning emerges
over time by means of an
historical process,
and this is how Michael
articulates it:
So Law appears imperfet
[and by law Michael means mosaic
law, the
law dispensed on Mount Sinai in
the Old Testament]
and but giv'n
With purpose to resign them in
full time
Up to a better Cov'nant,
disciplin'd
From shadowy Types to Truth,
from Flesh to Spirit,
From imposition of strict Laws,
to free
Acceptance of large Grace,
from servile fear
To filial, works of Law to
works of Faith.
Christian history obeys a
process whereby the shadowy
types of the Old Testament are
eventually revealed in all of
their truth in the New
Testament.
Old Testament law gives way to
New Testament faith,
and the laws of the flesh start
to yield to something like a
faith in the spirit.
That's the message here,
and Michael presents this with
the official theological
understanding of the
significance of Christian
history.
This is really the official
doctrine of the revelation of
all of the types and anti-types
that Michael has given us in
this whirlwind history of life
after the Fall.Michael's
also doing a lot more than that.
Michael's theory of reading
biblical history,
I think, is also something like
a theory of reading this very
poem.
He's giving us an
interpretative key,
I submit, to some of the most
difficult aspects of Paradise
Lost.
The history of civilization
that Michael offers us is filled
with moments of seeming
repetition.
Joshua appears in the Old
Testament, but he seems to point
ahead to the new Joshua,
Jesus, in the New Testament.
These typological repetitions
are closely related,
I think, to the narrative
repetitions that we have in
Milton's poem,
narrative repetitions like the
competing accounts of the
creation or the competing
accounts of the expulsion.
These are things that we've
looked at.
And the theory of typology
works to make sense,
on some level,
of some of the differences and
some of the conflicts among
these repeated narratives in
Milton's story.Now,
we have been confused.
We may have been confused about
what to do with the poem's
competing accounts of various
moments of Christian history.
This is where the theory of
typology comes in.
The old-fashioned
anthropomorphic images of the
deity, the images that Milton
inherits in large part from the
text of Genesis,
begin to look like shadowy
types, the shadowy types of the
Old Testament.
The more modern,
what we could think of as
something like the
quasi-scientific,
rational explanation in the
poem of certain events begins to
emerge as something like a type
of -- as a new kind of truth.
The shadowy types of Milton's
scriptural literalism -- and
there's no question that that's
an important component of this
poem -- maybe they yield to the
truths of the more scientific,
the more naturalistic side of
Milton's imagination.It's
not exactly the case that one
version is wrong and the other
version is right.
We could think of one version
as being an early,
literalist understanding of an
event and the other as a later,
more rational,
more sophisticated
understanding of an event -- an
entirely natural as opposed to a
supernatural account of the
forces at work in the world.
I think you can see Milton
inviting just this type of
typological reading of his own
poem at the conclusion of
Paradise Lost.Let's
look at the poem's final simile
and just take a moment to be
grateful that Milton has decided
to give us a final simile after
all of [laughs]
what we've been through with
Michael.
Okay.
This is line 625 of Book
Twelve, page 468 in the
Hughes.
Now we've already had two
anticipatory narratives of the
expulsion so far,
and I'll just remind you of
them.
In the literalist narrative,
God explains that the expulsion
will occur by means of Michael's
actually shoving Adam and Eve
out of the garden;
but you'll remember also that
more naturalistic,
that quasi-scientific version
of the story in which God
explains that Adam and Eve are
going to be ejected out of Eden
by means of some certain
atmospheric pressures.
Here at the end of the poem,
we have what I take to be the
actual representation of the
real event.
This is taking place on the
literal level at the present
moment of the story and on the
literal level of the Genesis
account, line 625.
[F]or now too nigh
Th' Arch-Angel stood,
and from the other Hill
To thir fixt Station,
all in bright array
The Cherubim
descended…
So you have these
anthropomorphic beings,
the cherubim -- these angels,
these armed angels descend to
earth to effect God's punishment
of man;
but no sooner has Milton given
us this literal Genesis-based
description of the expulsion
than he embarks for a final time
on a simile that really throws
everything that he's just
written into question.
The cherubim have descended.
They're: 
[O]n the ground
Gliding meteorous [meteorous is
"like a meter"]
as Ev'ning Mist
Ris'n from a River o'er the
marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the
Laborer's heel
Homeward returning.
Pay attention to what Milton is
doing here.
He's juxtaposing the descent of
the angels with the ascent of
the rising mist.
The angels who are "gliding
meteorous" are being likened to
the mist that's rising and that
also glides.
Through this antithesis he
signals, I think,
to the reader that there are
something like two competing
perspectives on this horrible
but consequential event of the
expulsion.
There's the literalist,
the anthropomorphic image of
the descending angels,
and then you have something
like the naturalistic image of
the vapors and the mists of Eden
that will eject Adam and Eve by
means of a kind of atmospheric
reaction.
It's as if God's expulsion of
Adam and Eve from the garden
were such a terrible event --
and certainly it is for us after
our many weeks-long investment
now in Milton's story of Eden --
so terrible that Milton is
compelled to suggest some
explanation of it that actually
absolves God of any jealousy or
any vengeance,
any of those things that the
Genesis account invites us to
attribute to God.
You can see Milton struggling
to make this event more
compatible with his theodicy,
more compatible with what we
can think of as the naturalistic
side of his imagination.So
where has Milton taken us in
this beautiful simile?
Here at the end of Book Twelve,
he's returned us to one of the
most beautiful similes of the
entire poem.
That was the simile with which
he had ended Book One of
Paradise Lost.
The beginning of
Paradise Lost also
features a laborer,
you'll remember:
the belated peasant who sees,
or dreams he sees,
fairy elves at
twilight.Now,
Milton began Paradise Lost
with the claim that he would
assert eternal providence and
justify the ways of God to men.
It may very well have seemed at
the beginning of the poem that
the idea of God's providence --
of God's foreknowledge,
foreseeing -- was going to be
completely at odds with the idea
of man's free will.
A god who knows what's going to
happen in advance -- and I know
I've made this argument a number
of times -- simply isn't
justified on some level -- this
is certainly what a lot of
Milton's contemporaries thought
and generations of readers of
the Bible before Milton thought
-- simply isn't justified in
setting up a paradise that he
knows isn't going to last,
that will have to be lost.
But if we were struck by the
difficulty of Milton's theodicy
when we began the poem,
that's because we had no idea
then just how far Milton was
going to be able to push our
conception of God and our notion
essentially of divine
providence.The whole idea of
divine providence has undergone
an amazing transformation over
the course of Paradise
Lost,
 and it makes its final
appearance in the poem's final
lines.
Michael has just escorted Adam
and Eve to the eastern gate of
paradise, and then he's
disappeared -- "Thank God," we
say!
Just before Adam and Eve leave
Eden forever,
they look back:
Som natural tears they
dropp'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before
them, where to choose
Thir place of rest,
and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with
wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitary
way.
This exquisitely beautiful and
quiet ending has always teased
the readers of Milton's poem.
Our puzzlement,
I think, derives from the
opposition here of ideas that
really seem entirely at odds
with one another.
Adam has just been presented by
Michael with a powerful vision
precisely of the workings of
divine providence in the
universe.
We're not surprised to see Adam
and Eve departing the garden
"with Providence thir guide"
given what we've just learned
from Michael;
but in the light of the
presence of this guide,
the final two lines of the poem
always seem so difficult to
understand: "They hand in hand
with wand'ring steps and slow,
/ through Eden took thir
solitary way."The
eighteenth-century critic and
classical editor Dr.
Richard Bentley was surely not
the first reader to be puzzled
by these lines,
but he was the first reader to
spell out the difficulties of
these last two lines.
Look here on your handout.
Dr.
Bentley had found the
conclusion of the poem so
conflicted that he suggested
that Milton couldn't possibly
have been responsible for them.
Once again, the lines as they
appear in our text are clearly
the garbled product of the
confused secretary to whom
Milton was dictating.
So look at the handout -- this
is near the bottom third of the
text.
Bentley asks how the expression
of the last two lines can be
justified.
I'm going to quote Bentley
here:
And how can the
expression be justified,
with wandering steps and slow?
Why wandering?
Erratic steps?
Very improper when in the line
before they were guided by
providence.
It goes without saying that
Bentley gets everything almost
consistently wrong when he talks
about Milton,
but you have to give him this:
he's an amazingly astute reader
of poetic tension and poetic
contradiction.
It's an awfully good question:
how can it be that Adam and Eve
are wandering at the same time
that they're guided by
Providence?
Milton is able to pack into the
final lines of Paradise Lost
really the central question
of the entire poem:
how can it be that human beings
are free,
free to wander,
if there's a providential force
out there that seems to
determine their movements?
In other words,
how can God's foreknowledge be
squared or be reconciled with
man's free will?This is a
problem that has been gathering
ground fast at our heels
throughout our reading of
Paradise Lost.
It's here at the end that
Milton makes a final attempt at
resolution, a final attempt --
this is his last chance -- at
reconciliation.
Milton tells us that "he World
was all before them,
where to choose / thir place of
rest…"
It seems on a first reading
that the guiding power of
Providence will assist them in
their choice of a place of rest,
but of course it's more
complicated than that.
The word "providence" in this
sentence can,
I think, also be the object of
the verb "to choose."
Adam and Eve are not only
choosing a place out of their
own free will;
it's also possible that they're
also choosing Providence.I
think this possibility,
this secondary syntactical
possibility, is a really daring
and radical move on Milton's
part.
Even the most absolute
certainties of divine
foreknowledge,
this enormous institution of
God's providence -- even that
can be subsumed within the
all-encompassing power of the
human capacity to choose freely.
Adam and Eve not only have a
paradise within them happier
far;
perhaps they also have a
Providence within them,
and surely that is happier far
as well.You'll notice on the
bottom of the handout that
Bentley proposed that the last
lines of Paradise Lost be
rewritten.
So he gives us what he assumes
[laughs]
must have been what Milton
actually dictated but had gotten
mis-transcribed.
Bentley wants to do away with
all of the ambiguity,
and he suggests these lines as
an alternative:
"Then hand in hand with social
steps their way / Through Eden
took with heavenly comfort
cheered" [laughter]
You have to hand it to him.
Of course, it goes without
saying that he's a terrible
poet, but you can see what he's
trying to do.
He's trying to reconcile the
entire poem with a much more
familiar Sunday-school image of
divine providence.Bentley is
just so much more orthodox than
our Milton.
He wants to imagine a god who's
still capable of offering
assistance and consolation but
also punishment from above,
a god who's still capable of
intervening in the realm of
nature.
Milton, I think,
wants very much to resist that.
The world of Paradise Lost
by the end is an almost
entirely secular world.
The new world order that this
great religious poem has
prepared us for is on some level
the secular world of modernity,
our world.
Adam and Eve are solitary here
at the end of the poem because
there's no longer a personal --
an anthropomorphic deity who's
in a position to intervene in
their lives.
Now they may drop some tears in
leaving paradise,
but they leave behind that
shadowy type of the personal
arbitrary deity from the Book of
Genesis.
They are free now,
as Milton is free,
to choose Providence -- by
which I mean they can choose an
alternative image of
providential guidance,
an alternative understanding of
that.Now,
Dr.
Bentley also takes issue with
the term "wandering" here
because he assumes that the word
"wandering" has to have its
evil,
fallen connotations,
as it did for Adam in Book Ten.
"Wandering steps" for Dr.
Bentley are necessarily erratic
steps since after the Fall,
of course, the whole concept of
wandering and all the freedoms
that wandering implied have
become suspect.
But now at the end of the poem,
Milton's attempting to reassert
the innocent meaning of the word
"wander."
All of the doctrinal structures
of the poem have been
internalized by Adam and Eve by
the end of the poem,
and on some level this was the
point of Michael's history
lesson.
It was his attempt to compel
their internalization of
Providence.
Wandering can be seen as
sanctioned now and as innocent
now because wandering is
predicated on something like an
internalized providential guide.
And we knew this had to be the
case: Eve was right all along.
Wandering is in the end
perfectly allowable in Milton's
universe.
We get to the end of this
biblical epic not with prophecy,
but we end the poem in the mode
of romance wandering.
This is an ending that's not an
ending at all.
Milton successfully resists the
drive to closure.Now,
we didn't know,
of course,
when we started reading the
poem just what Milton could have
meant by his desire to assert
divine providence,
to assert eternal providence.
"I may assert Eternal
Providence, / and justify the
ways of God to men," he told us
in the first invocation,
but the significance of this
claim becomes clearer by the
time we get to the end of the
poem.
We move from a shadowy type of
the claim closer to something
much more like its truth.
There's a sense in which
Milton's claim to assert eternal
providence may find its ultimate
meaning -- this is one critical
conjecture,
and I'm quite taken with it --
in the original,
the root, sense of the word
assert.
The verb to assert,
and you can see this from the
bottom of the handout,
comes from the Latin verb
asserere,
"to remove from service,
to declare a slave free."
Milton is declaring the slave,
Providence, free.I'll
conclude here with a
consideration of what that
alternative meaning of the verb
assert might actually
portend.
There's the obvious arrogance
in this assertion that Milton on
some level is assuming the role
of a slave-master,
a slave owner placing
Providence in the role of a
slave.
That's identifiably Miltonic,
I guess, but there's another
sense in which Milton can be
seen as asserting divine
providence,
asserting eternal providence.
He's liberating a conception of
Providence that has been
enslaved and silenced by
orthodox Christian theologians.
It's as if the notion of
Providence had been enslaved by
the literal-minded doctrinaire
readers of Genesis.
Milton wants us to know that it
is our good fortune as readers
of Paradise Lost that we
have John Milton -- John Milton,
like some wandering knight in a
chivalric romance -- to come to
the rescue.You'll remember
the note on the verse that
Milton had appended to a later
printing of Paradise
Lost,
 explaining why his poem
didn't rhyme.
Milton told us there that he
was saving poetry from the
troublesome and modern bondage
of rhyming.
Milton was liberating poetry
from a type of enslavement,
but Milton is trying to save us
as readers,
too, I think -- to save us from
our enslavement,
freeing us from the shackles of
what he takes to be are the
shackles of religious orthodoxy,
from normative social and
poetic conventions,
and to save us from the
shackles of the tyranny of
literary tradition.
He has attempted in Paradise
Lost to free us finally from
the troublesome and modern
bondage of literary
reading.Okay.
I'm going to end the lecture on
Paradise Lost there,
but I have a word to say about
the reading for after the
Thanksgiving break.
Do give yourself some time with
the first two books of
Paradise Regained.
You won't be the first to
think -- if you think this --
that Milton is writing in
shackles when he writes his
sequel to Paradise
Lost; but you have to
give yourself a little bit of
time to appreciate the severity
of this poem,
its uncompromising aesthetic
discipline, because only by
doing that will you develop what
I know will be your ultimate
affection for its delicious
peculiarities.
Okay.
Have a good break. 
 
