Knowledge, wisdom, pride and redemption in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost is a document called forth by the historical processes under which it was written. Since the 15" century, great advances had been taking placein various fields. The magnetic compass allowed Columbus to navigate the seas and discover the Americas, Kepler laid the mathematical foundations upon which Copernicus was able to formulate his heliocentric theory of the heavens, great artists like Michelangelo redefined and pushed the artistic tradition in new directions, and Luther instigated the Reformation. These events and achievements instilled a new sense of ability and potential in humanity that had not been experienced since the Classical era — hence ‘the Renaissance’.

Closer to Milton’s time Bacon and Descartes were pushing the ideals of a scientific revolution, holding out the hope of redemption through physical manipulation of the universe. With the ambitious attitudes unteased by the Renaissance, these ideas must have grabbed like wildfire to dry brush. Also, England was embroiled in its own social revolution, severing itself from the liturgical bondage of the Holy Roman Church to embrace Protestantism.

Milton was attuned to these processes occurring at once throughout the West and also within and around his daily life as a revolutionary propagandist. He has been called a radical protestant, a puritan, a libertine and a bad ‘poet. The former two definitely possess some merit. As such, and there is plenty of evidence in Paradise Lost to suggest that he was sceptical of the attitudes unleashed by the intellectual milieu of the Renaissance, wary of the bold claims that scientific knowledge in the hands of man could be a redemptive tool, and downright hostile to the facades of liturgical religion that could dress wolves in sheep’s wool.

Because of it being embedded and acutely pertinent to its time in these ways, an explanation of which deserves more time than can be granted here, Paradise Lost is simultaneously a dissertation on the perennial nature of the human heart, which is the focus of this essay. The story of Adam and Eve is one conveying orientations of the heart that can either make or break, or then restore the Edenic peace of mind the Bible claims we were created to enjoy — “the Kingdom of Heaven is within.” Paradise Lost is therefore an affirmation of Protestantism’s emphasis upon the heart’s intent and purity, on inner righteousness rather than the gratuitous emblazonry of external pomp and ceremony that so typified the Catholic tradition prior to and during Milton’s time—at least according to its dissenters.

The crux of the fall of Adam and Eve is in the folly of overreaching the bounds of knowledge ordained by higher wisdom. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition that higher wisdom is God’s law and is typified by spiritual or intellectual prudence and patient endurance. Milton juxtaposes the proud and ambitious dreams and ravenous intellectual appetites of Satan and his minions with the parsimonious wisdom and forbearance in accepted ignorance displayed by God’s angels. Adam and Eve are caught somewhere in between.

However, contrary to their fall guaranteeing a swing from the angelic to the satanic, the inherent prospect of redemption in fact means that they swing from an insatiable (though innocent) hunger for the unknown, a driving force behind their disobedience, to the penitent supplication and forbearance of the angelic after the fall (though now with experience angels are not privy to). While the former state demands immediate results, the latter accepts a temporal process that extends beyond the lifetimes of many generations, as Adam’s vision of man’s future attests. The consequences of this include of affirming God’s promise that af] of Satan’s work will be for the glory of the good.

In terms of the context of the poem though, Milton reinvigorates the Judaic tradition that asserts redemption is won by temporal struggle. Amelioration of the terms of death placed upon Adam and Eve as punishment, that is, devising ways to till the soil and bear children with greater and greater ease are hallmarks of historical civilisation. Thus we can see from the demands placed upon Adam and Eve after the fall that expulsion from Eden signifies the beginning of civilisation and an historical march towards redemption. The implications of science claiming such historically unprecedented immediacy for death’s alleviation are suspect to Milton not so much as satanic and deplorable but rather athe cafante © as powers with which the proud human heart is liable to expand exponentially. Coaxing humanity to step beyond the limits ordained by sources of higher wisdom, the poem argues, science may endanger or distract us from our historical walk along path back to the Garden. It is a vision almost obscene in its grandiosity, but that is exactly why it demanded the poetic epic form Milton decided upon.

Milton seems to have crafted the characters of Satan and his fallen host as representing an entelechy or future manifestation of the proud attitudes beginning to take shape in lieu of the intellectual achievements of the preceding two centuries. Through this Paradise Lost becomes thoroughly prophetic. The first five books are centred on Satan and the fallen angels devising a way to avenge their predicament. The books are littered with commentaries, some very explicit and others more subtle, on prevailing philosophical, scientific and religious attitudes and traditions that Milton perceives as elevating the self as the sole arbiter of individual life and elevating humanity as the sole arbiter of collective life and historical progress. His commentaries centre on the danger of pride and its tendency to justify the ways of man to himself— leaving the door open for liturgical corruption, damage to the natural world through science, and philosophical confusion of tongues.

Raphael’s description of the events in heaven that preceded the fall describes Satan as restless and impudent, “fraught with envy against the Sun of God.” It is tempting to seek a psychoanalytic justification or ‘first cause’ for Satan’s perturbations, but there is only mention of the ascendance of the Son of God that tips Satan over the edge into full blown jealously. Unsatisfying for any analysis, Satan’s defiance must yet be accepted as a given, as God, instructing his Son, says of all angels, “sufficient to stand yet free to fall.”

Raphael similarly describes to Adam the strict conditions of perfection required by all angels and humans,

In sight of God enthroned, our happy state
Hold, as you yours, while our obedience holds;
On other surety none; freely we serve,
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fail

Raphael explains to Adam that God made all sentient beings with free will, “for how Can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve willing or no, who will but what they must by destiny, and can no other choose?” Generally speaking, modern sensibilities would define free will as a strict autonomy of the will from any form of providence, real or not. Such perceptions of self and collective autonomy are illustrated by the 15" and 16" centuries’ breaks from tradition in art, science, philosophy and even religion, particularly by great individuals, and the general, perhaps overly romantic and nostalgic reacquisition of the creative zeitgeist of the Classical era that followed, becoming known as the Renaissance.

This grand conquering and creative spirit was fundamentally validated by the discovery of the Americas, by such simple yet profound ideas as cogito ergo sum, and later by the Enlightenment’s emphasis upon individual initiative, and so forth. Milton can rightly call himself a puritan because he was suspicious of these emerging intellectual trends that sought to elevate the human will essentially to the status of a god in this universe. Satan’s character is best understood in such a retrospective light because it has really thus become prophecy materialised.

Satan does not understand wherein the potency and creative efficacy of his free will resides. Good angels accept (and good human beings learn by experience) that free will is empowered only by its congruence with divine providence, and that it is initially defined by the choice to either obey the higher Will or not, as Raphael says, “By nature free, not overruled by fate Inextricable, or strict necessity, Our voluntary service he requires.” To freely choose against obedience is to actually lose all free will and be relegated to an impotent limbo of frustrated desires — “From what high state of bliss into what woe!”

The first glimpses of this come in the first book with a subtle harking back to Dante’s limbo. When the greater of the fallen angels congregate as a council determining what to do in hell, Milton sympathetically describes a group of the vast minions who occupy their time by exploring through discourse such topics as free will and providence, good and evil, happiness and misery, “finding no end, in wandering mazes, Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy.” A similar dig at the impotence engendered by intellectual vanity and the pride of self-elevation, and another more obvious parallel to Dante’s first circle of hell is Milton’s description of the Paradise of Fools in Book II, where

‘Up hither like aerial vapours flew
Of all things transitory and vain, when sin
With vanity had filled the works of men.

Milton places here the builders of Babylon and Egypt, pagan philosophers, liturgical priests, “Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars,”

Cowls, hoods and habits with their wearers tossed
And fluttered into rags, then relics, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,
The sport of wind

Milton also takes the time in BookI to address what he envisioned as a problem that has, though not of great import in his time, certainly become a major concern for environmentalism and sustainable resource management today, blaming Satan’s consort Mammon,

by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother earth
For treasures better hid.

Satan is the embodiment of all of these shortcomings engendered by pride. Because of the freedom of choice to either follow God or not, Satan deiudes himself into a false perception of entitlement and ownership — of autonomous free will — such as when in heaven, colluding others to follow him, Satan says, “new laws from him who reigns, new minds may raise in us who serve, new counsels, to debate,” or later when he addresses the throng of those who follow him in opposition, “What if better counsels might erect Our minds and teach us to cast off this yoke.”

This could easily be interpreted as Renaissance thinkers throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it came to casting off the intellectual yokes of Medieval Scholasticism and Catholicism. By doing so, Milton suggests they will have rejected the Reformation also and thus pursued the new sciences, arts and philosophies without any tether whatsoever to God’s providential law, thus eventually blindly using these new intellectual tools and discoveries in proud excess and against the Will of providence.

This becomes clearer as Satan’s vanity and free rebellion against obedience then forces him into direct opposition to God’s will, “Evil be thou my good.” He becomes utterly blind to the fact that it is this opposition, this loss of perspective alone which renders him self destructive and ultimately impotent,

by fate. the strength of gods
and this empyreal substance cannot fail,
since through experience of this great event
in arms not worse, in foresight much advanced,
we may with more successful hope resolve
to wage by force or guile eternal war
For who can yet believe, though after loss,
that all these puissant legions, whose exile
hath emptied heaven, shall fail to reascend
self-raised, and repossess their native seat?

Satan’s attempts to console himself and his peers are similarly fraught with fraud and self-deceit. His self-prescribed wisdom, “high words, that bore Semblance of worth, not substance,” is equally backward despite bearing syntactic resemblance to the wisdom teachings of many of the world’s religions,

the mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
Or the protestant work ethic similarly used against itself,
Our greatness will appear...
Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse
We can create, and in what place soe’er
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and endurance

Yet the wisdom of God addressed towards evil ends becomes only hot air inflating pride. So the crux of the satanic mindset is pride that elevates selfhood and autonomous free will against the advice of any higher arbiter, thereby obscuring the judgements of sound reason, blinding one to the lessons to be leamed from immanent or experienced disaster and catastrophe, and subsequently distorting and reversing the workings of wisdom into an obscenely self-gratifying immolation—or the conscious heaping of destruction upon one’s own head, as God guarantees of Satan.

In terms of the search for knowledge, the dangers of pride, and the redemptive value of obedience to higher sources of wisdom, Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost can be described as a midpoint between the beings in heaven and hell — the Judeo-Christian tradition has in fact always been based on such an intuition. Because of this, a simple delineation of their states before and/or after the fall is as complex as defining what it means to be human. Before the fall we find Adam particularly curious about the ways of God and the nature of creation and defiant against repeated admonitions to curb his intellectual appetite. When the angels first come to Eden to protect Adam and Eve against their foe, the narrator, as though there with the protecting angels, says, “Sleep on Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek No happier state, and know to know no more.” This is a fitting plea because as the poem continues we find that before the fall Adam and Eve are in fact utterly blind to the sufficiency of their state — their “self-knowing,” as Raphael later puts it, is barely skin deep.

Throughout his discourse with Raphael, Adam seeks more and more knowledge about his and Eve’s state, the origins of the earth, the nature of the heavens and so forth. In light of finding out his freedom of will, Adam says says, “though what thou tell’st Hath passed in heaven, some doubt within me move.” Being under God’s instruction, Raphael begins answering his inquiries about Satan and the events in heaven. The rest of the dialogue is marked by Adam’s curiosity and doubt, “if unforbid thou mayst unfold What we, not to explore the secrets ask Of his eternal empire,” and Raphael's admonitions,

This thy request with caution asked
Obtain...
But knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppress else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

What in fact happens in the following conversation is that the wisdom offered to Adam in admonition against erring “in things too high And no advantage gain,” becomes his folly. Despite everything Raphael has described to Adam regarding his creation, Adam seeks knowledge of the stars, to which Raphael repeatedly suggests he abstain from asking, tactfully,

the great architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scanned by them who ought
Rather admire...
Solicit no thy thoughts with matters hid,
Leave them to God above, him serve and fear

Adam then is supposedly “cleared of doubt,” but with a hint of prophecy, faithlessly goes on to say,

But apt the mind or fancy is to rove
Unchecked, and of her roving is no end,
Till warned, or by experience taught

All of this illustrates the fundamental fact of Adamic perfection that Adam and Eve’s eyes are not open. Adam’s constant pursuit of knowledge beyond the bounds ordained by God to “advise him of his happy state,” shows that without a knowledge of evil, there is no knowledge (yet) that will appease his doubtful mind. Before the fall Adam and Eve are admonished to accept what they do not know as Raphael says, “enjoy Your fill what happiness this happy state Can comprehend, incapable of more.” The fall then is actually just the consummation of the unchecked roving of the imagination, which brings about the fullness of man’s self-knowing ~ tragic as it is true — by having to know evil.

There are already inklings of the immanence and perhaps necessity of the fall when we discover Adam’s achillis heal, “All higher knowledge in [Eve’s] presence falls Disregarded, wisdom in discourse with her Loses discountenanced, and like folly shows.” With Eve excluded from the majority of the conversation with Raphael, thus not hearing all the admonitions and warnings, the door is left wide open for them to fall.

In the end this is not a bad situation. God’s anger at man’s disobedience is tempered by their innocence, and through his Son guarantees redemption. Adam and Eve accept their plight in order to appease God and seek revenge against their foe Satan. Adam says, “with labour I must eat My bread; what harm? Idleness had been worse.” Adam already foresees the value of the terms of death, of having to till the soil and essentially begin civilisation, anticipating man’s use of fire, “such fire to use And what may else be remedy or cure To evils which our own misdeeds have wrought, He will instruct us praying.”

Thus after the fall Adam and Eve have indeed become wise and more fully cognisant of happiness. Adam’s vision of the future of man particularly helps him understand how God will “bring back Through the world’s wilderness long wandered man Safe to eternal paradise of rest.” After the vision showing how man will be redeemed despite knowledge of evil, his true wisdom is shown consummate,

Greatly instructed I shall hence depart,
Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill
Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain;
Beyond which was my folly to aspire.
HenceforthI learn, that to obey is best,
And love with fear the only God...
And on him sole depend...with good
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak
Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek, that suffering for truth’s sake
Is fortitude to highest victory,
And to the faithful death the gate of life.

Milton’s choice to craft the characters of Adam and Eve as he has is intriguing. The notion of perfection is challenged and redefined in Paradise Lost as we discover that before the fall Adam and Eve both have insatiable intellectual appetites that seem to defy wisdom, which display fundamental weaknesses of the human heart. Those weaknesses the search for knowledge beyond the bounds of instructing happiness, inflating the mind with pride — are consummated by the fall. Yet because of man’s innocence and God’s guarantee of redemption, the fall sets Adam and Eve on a path to not only mending the damage inflicted upon their own and the hearts of all generations to follow, but moreover to work at eradicating those initial weaknesses from the heart altogether.

Whether this Judeo-Christian conception of the human heart is real or not is tangential to the fact that placing oneself under the umbrella of such a cosmology has certain psychological ramifications. It opens the heart to the limitations of human understanding, inviting intellectual humility, a sound appetite for and a willingness to learn from wider sources of knowledge than autonomous individual experience. This is wisdom; and it is the path Adam and Eve follow out of the Garden of Eden towards redemption. Milton thus seems to have offered the contrast between the states of Satan on the one hand and Adam and Eve on the other as a lesson for the times in which he lived, and those which were to come, as a reminder of redemption — of how the satanic spirit of pride and self glorification at the price of self-destruction may be averted and/or vanquished by intellectual prudence and temporal forbearance.

Most astonishing about Paradise Lost, however, is that in light of the modern era the book is so prophetic, as Milton’s satanic character has today become readily discernable in attitudes across society. This is not to suggest that evil pervades our culture, but that autonomous free will blinds people to any higher purpose in history. When one takes the time to penetrate the matter, patently visible is the leading edge of every sector of the modern state being geared towards the alleviation of suffering and suspension of death.

The apple in the eye of every technology — medical, environmental, civil and space engineering, construction, communications, transport — is ultimately the indefinite propagation of human life on the planet and in this universe: a remarkable achievement no doubt. Yet in the Judeo-Christian tradition this dream is fundamentally apostatic and manifestly wrong: and here Milton’s Puritanism is perhaps most obvious.

The prophesy for today’s world in Milton’s arch-apostate Satan is that of a renaissance of Protagoras’ vision being realised all around us—man has made himself" the measure of all things. Thus in the modern era the temporal procession of humanity has drifted from the Judaic dream of a solemn march towards redemption to a haughty, self-glorifying romp around a material playground reminiscent of Milton’s Satan building his cathedral in hell.

History is currently being lived for history’s own sake. But the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches, beginning in the lessons of the story of Adam and Eve, that history is not the point—ending it is, and in a thoroughly miraculous and unexpected manner.

Here it may be wise to take leave with two small passages that give a glimpse into the Judeo-Christian conception of the higher purpose of history. One is from the Gospel of Matthew 3:12. John the Baptist says of Christ, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering up his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” The second lesson beautifully elaborates upon this vision, and is from the Christian mystic William Blake’s Jerusalem To the Christians, a man who certainly had the finger of his mind firmly on the pulse of the Judeo-Christian version of history,

Every pleasure that intermingles with the duty of our station is a folly unredeemable, and is planted like the seed of a wild flower among our wheat...I know of no other Christianity and of no other gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of imagination,—imagination, the real and eternal world of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies [the wheat] when these vegetable, mortal bodies [the chaff] are no more...Is this not plain and manifest to the thought?...Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem.