Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) Read Online Free PDF

against the only divine right monarch whose legitimacy Milton ever acknowledged. When they debate policy and strategy, they do so in “synods,” a term historically associated with the determinist doctrinal pronouncements of Calvinist and Presbyterian assemblies (2.391).
    Even the narrative and dramatic stress placed on Satan’s role and character, which some have deemed disproportionate, is an indicator of Milton’s distance from the determinist tenets of the Presbyterians. The serpent’s temptation is beside the point in Calvinist theology, as indeed is any agency outside God. The Fall is divinely ordained.Calvin’s deity was a volitional black hole, obviating the need for a malevolent opponent who sparks evil. For Milton, by contrast, temptation is an ethical state crucial to theodicy, permitting merit to the creature, as in the case of Abdiel, while at the same time justifying the redemption of humanity: unlike the irreversibly damned rebel angels, “man falls deceived/By the other first” (3.130–31). Most important, the freedom and accountability presumed by temptation prevent humanity’s recriminations against God “as if predestination overruled/Their will” (3.114–15). The justification of God’s ways to men turns out to be largely an Arminian response to the Calvinist insistence on the bondage of the will. Foreknowledge does not predetermine; the choices of unfallen humanity are free: “authors to themselves in all/Both what they judge and what they choose; for so/I formed them free” (3.122–24). As Perez Zagorin observes, Milton’s “loyalty to the principle of liberty as he understood it was absolute” (114). It was a matter of doing justice to man and God.
    To God more than to man, however. Liberty is a state that we ordinarily associate with human beings, but from Milton’s highly theocentric and theodical perspective, freedom is primarily and definitively a quality essential to the nature of God. Only because the human race is created in the image of God is it self-evident that humanity is born free. The only necessity that applies to God is that he not involve himself in contradiction. Any action he takes must therefore conform to the good, goodness being definitive of divine identity rather than a limitation on his freedom. Though raised in the highly Calvinist culture of seventeenth-century London, Milton insists on the freedom allowed humanity in Arminian theology because his God must not be held liable for the sins of humanity, as Calvin’s was. The necessity that God’s deeds be good ones does not wed God to any particular action, however; his “goodness” remains “free/To act or not” (7.171–72). Such freedom holds true even concerning the generation of the Son. God is under no necessity to beget a second divinity; he freely chooses to do so. The Son, in his turn, freely offers himself as a sacrifice on behalf of humanity (3.236–65). Adam and Eve echo and also mediate the praiseworthy choices of the Father and Son when they decide to procreate and so begin the line that will produce their redeemer (10.867–1096). So the theodicy comes full circle, with goodness remaining free at every juncture to act or not.

G ENRE
    “The greatest writer who has ever existed of a limited genre”—that is how T. S. Eliot in 1926 described Milton. The initial superlative hints at a magnanimous finish, but Eliot instead concludes by demeaning genre and diminishing his praise: “Instead of poetry, you get
genres
of poetry” (201). Centuries earlier, Thomas Rymer had also denied the authenticity of Milton’s poetry, snidely describing
Paradise Lost
as a work that “some are pleased to call a poem” (1678, 143). He even omits it from a summary of English heroic poetry that culminates instead with Davenant’s
Gondibert
(1651) and Cowley’s
Davideis
(1656) (1694, preface). Rymer condemns Milton for not being sufficiently generic, whereas Eliot criticizes him for being excessively