Book review: “Paradise Lost: A Biography” by Alan Jacobs

First, there’s the question of whether John Milton’s epic, 10,565-line, blank-verse poem Paradise Lost is a religious book.

Which seems odd since the poem, originally published in 1667, tells the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, a core turning point in the Hebrew Bible and a foundation account of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Yet, as Alan Jacobs, a humanities professor at Baylor University, writes in “Paradise Lost”: A Biography, it comes down to how you define religion.  This is important to him because he was asked by Princeton University Press to write about the poem as part of its delightfully erudite and accessible series Lives of Great Religious Books.

Back in 2013, he wrote The “Book of Common Prayer”: A Biography for the series, and there wasn’t any question of whether that work, created in the sixteenth century as the prayer book of the Church of England, was religious.

The Book of Common Prayer certainly fits what Jacobs calls a functional definition of religion, i.e., one that involves the social practices of believers.  It is, after all, the work they used for ritual prayer.  Not so for Paradise Lost.

Paradise Lost is a story so distant from any of the practices of any known religion that I cannot see any way to qualify it as a religious book under this approach. For all religious practices look to repair or deepen a relationship with a god or gods, or some divine being or principle, and what need for any of those endeavors have people who dwell in the unbroken, undimmed, and constant presence of their Creator?

However, there is another way to define religion, an approach, call it dogmatic, which grapples with and tries to understand beliefs, and Jacobs writes:

Then in that case Paradise Lost is an essentially religious poem, for in it Milton is passionately concerned to identify certain central beliefs of the Christian faith, to portray them dramatically, and to expose their significance for those of us who live in the aftermath of the Eden story.

 

“One of the most despised poems”

Proof of the poem religiousness comes in the “intensity of responses” it has inspired for more than three centuries.

Milton’s writing about religion “from the outside” — seemingly from above, from some Olympian height — has helped make him one of the most despised writers in history, and Paradise Lost one of the most despised poems, though also one of the most admired.

Essentially, since Milton loosed Paradise Lost on the world, generations of writers, from John Dryden to Mark Twain to Virginia Woolf, have found fault with it, often while also praising Milton’s artistry and frequently while complaining that he’s just wrongheaded when it comes to theology.

Jacobs, though, sees Milton’s engagement with the core questions of human life as something larger, deeper and wider than what many experience as religious belief:

Milton’s Christianity, by contrast, was almost too large in conception to be described as faith; it was architectural and cosmological, concerned to trace the vast sweep of salvation history.  His own sorrows and griefs were great, but he rarely paused to acknowledge them.  He was always after a greater prize — the greatest that any poet could aspire to.

 

“The field of battle”

In an epigram to a 1688 edition of Paradise Lost, John Dryden, Milton’s younger colleague while working in the government of Oliver Cromwell, asserted that the three great poets of world history were Homer, Virgil and Milton, and that Milton was a combination of the earlier two.

Nonetheless, Dryden complained that the fall of Adam and Eve wasn’t a fit subject for an epic poem because “[h]is design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works…”

And Dryden thought he could improve on the older man’s work by translating his unrhymed blank verse poem into an opera of heroic couplets. The opera was never staged, but, as a book, Dryden’s version far outsold Milton’s original for many years.

In a five-month period in 1712, Dryden’s former protégé Joseph Addison published eighteen essays establishing the greatness of Paradise Lost, stating that it is impossible for any human being not to relate deeply to Adam and Eve: “We have an actual interest in everything they do, and no less than our utmost happiness is concerned and lies at stake in all their behavior.”

Nonetheless, despite that comment and even though Milton seems to have thought his poem was focused on the first man and woman, Addison believed, writes Jacobs, that “Messiah is the protagonist, Satan the antagonist, and Adam and Even the field of battle.”

 

“None ever wished it longer”

In his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, written between 1779 and 1781, Samuel Johnson included a ninety-page biography of Milton in which he states that Paradise Lost is “a poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance the second [after Homer], among the productions of the human mind.”

Even so, in contrast to Addison, Johnson argued that Adam and Eve in the poem hold no interest for the reader and that Satan is too interesting. Johnson says:

Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.

 

“Perverted theology”

By the turn of the century, William Blake was so taken up with Milton that, as he writes in Milton: A Poem, he summoned him from Heaven to his cottage:

“Then first I saw him to the zenith as a falling star

Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift.”

Blake learns that Milton has been unhappy in Heaven and sets out to correct him for what Jacobs calls his

perverted theology and his cruelty to the women in his life.  Only if these spiritual malformations are corrected, these diseases healed, may Heaven become Heaven for Milton.

Blake famously asserted that “Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” meaning, it seems, that he told a faulty, evil story because he followed the teachings of church leaders.  As Jacobs notes:

Though the sentence names only Satan, it is really a claim about God — the God of Paradise Lost and the God of traditional Christian theology. Blake believed that the figure most Christians worship as God is no true God at all, but rather a cosmic tyrant, and a projection of their own worldly desires.

Later, Jacobs mentions that, in the twentieth century, critic Northrop Frye wrote that Blake was “trying to do for Milton what the prophets and Jesus did for Moses, isolate what is poetic and imaginative, and annihilate what is legal and historical.”

 

“Feminine docility”

Jacobs writes that poet John Keats had a lot to say in 1819 about Milton and his poem — in terms of poetry, not theology:

“Paradise Lost though so fine in itself is a corruption of our Language — It should be kept as it is unique — a curiosity — a beautiful and grand Curiosity…I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me.” This is purely a matter of being tempted by the grandness of Milton’s music; a poet of that era could scarcely have been more thoroughly post-Christian than Keats was.

A few decades earlier, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, like many other female readers, had a lot to say about how Milton treated the women in his life and how Paradise Lost helped perpetuate the idea of women as weak and needing instruction.  As Jacobs notes:

Milton is the chief writer she thinks of as teaching this doctrine of feminine docility — “though when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we are beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.”

 

The Shelleys

The poet Percy Shelley, who married Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary, saw Satan at the hero of Paradise Lost. According to Jacobs, Shelley expected “his readers to have the same disdain for Christianity that he does and therefore the same sympathy for Satan — the same excessive sympathy…”

And his wife?  During discussions of Milton’s poem with Percy, Mary Shelley came up with the idea for her novel Frankenstein (1819), about a creature created by a god-like scientist.  At one point, thee creature escapes and finds three books. After reading them, he explains that it is Milton’s poem that made the greatest impression on him.

“But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions.  I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history.  It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting…

“Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence….Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”

 

Quips

In 1900, Mark Twain quipped that Paradise Lost is a classic — “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

In 1918, Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary, quipped:

“I am struck by the extreme difference between this poem and any other.  It lies, I think, in the sublime aloofness and impersonality of the emotion…The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful, and masterly descriptions of angels’ bodies, battles, flights, dwelling places  He deals in horror and immensity and squalor and sublimity but never in the passions of the human heart.

 “Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one’s own joys and sorrows?”

Even so — yes, over the centuries, seemingly each commentator has an “even so” — Woolf writes:

“But how smooth, strong and elaborate it all is! What poetry!  I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot and imperfect.”

Poetry so great as to put the Bard of Avon in the shade!

 

“God is God”

After centuries of writer after writer praising Milton while also arguing that the religious stuff in Paradise Lost isn’t all that important, literary critic Stanley Fish wrote in How Milton Works, published in 2001, that readers are wrong to think that Milton simply used the Bible story as a vehicle for his poetry.

As Jacobs explains:

All such ideas distract us from what Fish believes to have been the only point that Milton really wishes to make: that “God is God.” Fish uses this phrase over and over again, describing our endlessly imaginative ways of avoiding the acknowledgement that God is the maker and sustainer of all things, the one beyond all understanding, the one whose will is impossible to resist.

 

“Absolute faith and equally absolute unbelief”

For Fish, Paradise Lost is about faith and about how “obedience arises from faith, and faith will always be precisely that, faith, rather than demonstrated conviction.”  He goes on:

For Fish, this point is absolutely central to Milton’s thought, especially as it is manifested in Paradise Lost, but it is also the point that we readers most earnestly want to reject…

The radical, inescapable choice between absolute faith and equally absolute unbelief, neither of which we ever want to accept as absolute, is just what Milton wants to present us with and just what, in Fish’s view, all parties to this proxy war wish to avoid.

Jacobs never mentions Bob Dylan in “Paradise Lost”: A Biography, but my suspicion is that Dylan knows his Milton and probably knows his Stanley Fish.  Consider this line from his song “Precious Angel”:

“You’ve either got faith or you’ve got unbelief. There ain’t no neutral ground.”

Milton, I think, would agree.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.8.25