Ms. Andrea Solomon, Ms. Mary Edsall
Colloquium F2003x
Assignment #17 – Milton
2 December 1999
Two Paradises Lost
Milton’s Paradise Lost is primarily about man’s fall from God’s grace in the form of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. However, Milton argues that man disobeys God not wholly through his own volition or spite, but because of the temptation of Satan. Less than thirty lines into the poem, he poses the question: “What cause moved our grand parents in that happy state … to fall off from their Creator and transgress his will…? Who first seduced them in that foul revolt?” His answer is “the infernal serpent” who Milton equates to Satan. Thus, the primary and prototypical fall from grace is Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven, one because Lucifer would become Satan and thus be the tempter of man, but also because Lucifer disobeys God solely through his own pride and ambition. “His pride had cast him out from heaven, with all his host of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring to set himself in glory above his peers, he trusted to have equaled the Most High… With ambitious aim against the throne and monarchy of God, [Lucifer] raised impious war in heaven… [Thus] the Almighty Power hurled [him] headlong flaming from the ethereal sky … to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire.” (bk 1, ln 27-48)
Lucifer’s damnation only leads him to more resentment and pride. “Now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him,” and he is filled with “obdurate pride and steadfast hate” (bk 1, ln 54-58). When his compatriot Beelzebub awakens from the fall, Lucifer, now called Satan because he is the arch-enemy of heaven, tells him of his revenge plans and his lack of regret: We who were joined together in “equal hope and hazard in the glorious enterprise … now [are] joined in equal ruin… yet not … do I repent or change… All is not lost; the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or yield: … That glory never shall his [God’s] wrath or might extort from me.” (80-111). Finally, he urges all the other angels who fell with him to join him in preparing for eternal war against God. He rallies them with perhaps Milton’s most famous quote: “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven” (263).