For Milton, a devoutly religious man, the stories of the Fall of Satan and the angels, the War in Heaven, and the Fall of Adam and Eve were at the same time historical events as well as symbolic ones. As symbolic events they foretold man’s tendency for establishing ideals and failing to reach to them. Milton may have seen the failure of the English Revolution as a re-enactment of this particular historical pattern. From this perspective a narrative about supernatural and prehistoric events, as in Paradise Lost, can be seen to have relevance to events in history. In the introduction at the beginning of the poem which explains his rejection of rhyme, Milton claims both to be innovative, and to be recovering ‘ancient liberty’, when he defends his neglect of rhyme as ‘an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’, and his muse is soon invoked to pursue ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ (1. 16). It was the last moment in our history when a poem on such a grand religious theme could be conceived as having direct contemporary relevance.
The whole of Paradise Lost can be understood in the light of the opening Invocation (Book I lines 1-26), and in turn these opening twenty-six lines are explained by the poem as a whole. Critics in the past have been wrong to say that Milton fails to justify God’s ways to man, misunderstanding what he meant by ‘God’ and ‘justify’. It becomes clear to the reader from the whole poem that God to Milton remains an incomprehensible anomaly throughout, and can only be comprehended through the eyes of Adam as a ‘light’, inaccessible to man. In trying to explain God’s ‘ways’ Milton merely sets out to explain the divine providence of God, not solve the mystery of God himself. And by justification Milton did not mean a merely logical explanation that would provide an intellectual conclusion and bring God within the framework of our understanding. He uses the word with its New Testament meaning, where it implies a divine, not a human or logical, understanding, a supernatural illumination from the Holy Spirit whom he asks for guidance in his epic task. If the ways of God can be justified to man it must be through a cleansing of the heart rather than by the reasoning of the intellect.
With regard to Milton’s style in the opening passage, it is simply divided into two sections. The opening sixteen lines are concerned with the beginning and ending of human history, as decreed by the first and second Adam’s. The second ten lines are on God’s creative actions in history and the poet’s desire to explain the implications of those actions in a human context. In the first sentence, the muse who inspired Moses is implored to help the poet rise above his classical predecessors (‘Sing, Heavenly Muse’): measuring his fame in relation to biblical and classical traditions. In the second sentence, the poet wishes to go beyond the limits of human history and fame and to participate, instead, in the divine viewpoint. The two sentences move from human to divine and achieve a literary effect similar to the shift from terrestrial to celestial realms encountered between the octaves and sestets of many sonneteers at the time, including Milton’s own.
We are introduced to one of the main themes in the poem on the opening line. ‘Man’ and the unity of the human race whose sin, woe, and hope for restoration are epitomised in Adam and Eve. Man is mentioned a further two times in that passage: ‘one greater man’ (line 4), and ‘justify the ways of God to men’ (line 26). In this case Milton is calling attention to the first two Adam’s and then to the human race in general. This first disobedience is therefore not only the first in time; it is the source of all other disobedience. All Milton says about the theme of disobedience thus far is summed up in the one word, ‘fruit’, which is given to mean the edible fruit itself and fruit in the biblical sense, i.e. the ‘fruits’ of our labours are the product of our actions. Milton ties the two themes of ‘Disobedience’ and Divine Providence together here, and implies that it was not the momentary lapse of an unreasonable command but a violation of that divine order which God drew from the ‘vast Abyss’ which caused the Fall of Man.
The second sentence of the opening passage traces a link between the work of creation by the divine and man, between producing the world and writing epic poetry, a link intended by Milton to emphasise the poets scope and demonstrate his need for divine help. The idea of any similarity being found between art and divine creation is given particular relevance by speaking of the creative power as Spirit and Dove, that is, by combining in himself divine power, wisdom, and gentleness; it is because God has these qualities that Milton confidently addressees to him a prayer for help in his ‘adventurous Song’. God is depicted here not merely as a gentle dove, but as having wings wide enough to brood over the ‘vast Abyss’, and as having wisdom and power enough to draw order from chaos. Milton seeks cleansing, strengthening, and elevating in his heart, seeking out God, seen here as gentle, wise, and powerful, to give intellectual and moral order by enlightening and making ‘pregnant’ his mind. All the items in the opening of Paradise Lost have an exact relevance to what Milton is doing at present and hopes to do in the poem as a whole. The scale of this poetic condensation is not maintained throughout the work; however the opening gives us some suggestion of the literary excellence we can look forward to in the poem. Milton appeals to the Dove-like Spirit because, to achieve his moral aim in poetry, he must have some connection to the peace and width of the divine mind, in the divine wisdom and strength. The notion of the ‘pregnant Abyss’ (lines 21-22), with its comparison between the darkness of the abyss and that of the womb, and similarly the contrast between the formless desert of the one and the complicated life of the other, offer a good example of Milton’s ability to merge different images without conflict. Milton is endeavouring to lift us to the tranquillity of the divine vision, out of our ordinariness to see the human world through our own eyes, and in doing so he hopes to attune the human to the Divine Mind, and thus purify the human heart and elevate to God. Milton wishes to present the Fall of Adam as the key incident that will lead men to a divine understanding of the larger story of the Creation and of the Fall and restoration of man.
So what of Milton’s God? He is the personification of ‘Eternal Providence’. He is all knowing and all seeing, having the foresight to send his son for our redemption. However, the Christian concept of the trinity is not really explored by Milton in his epic, as is much metaphysical speculation, although in justifying God’s ways, Milton could not avoid being theological, and hence could not help asserting or implying things about God that were just as debatable in Milton’s time as they had been for centuries before and still are today. Possibly the most important point Milton made was the relationship of God’s foreknowledge to man’s freedom. We must not now confuse foreknowledge with determinism. Just because God made man capable of falling and knew he would fall does not mean he made man fall. Indeed, next to life itself, Milton thought that God’s greatest gift to man was reason and the freedom to exercise that reason in the act of choosing. It would have been illogical to make man free to choose and at the same time incapable of choosing wrongly and Milton believed God incapable of acting illogically. Indeed, many people at the time of publication argued that a ‘good’ God would not have planted the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden at all. Milton was aware of all these objections to his view, and one of the many things Paradise Lost can be seen to do is rise to meet these objections and attempt to ‘justify the ways of God to men’.
This promise, however, cannot be fulfilled within the logical set-up of the physical Paradise Lost, but it is fulfilled when the reader understands how much the mercy of God exceeds the requirements of reason. At the end of Paradise Lost Adam and Eve gain two kinds of knowledge. From Satan they learn of evil, and from God they learn of His ‘Eternal Providence’, to which Adam responds when he wonders how he should feel about his fall.
Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By me done and occasioned, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring,
To God more glory, more good will to men
From God, and over wrath grace shall abound.
(XII, lines 473-478)
The paradox here is that the fall of man is shown in a favourable light. Without the fall of man we would never have known the ‘Eternal Providence’ of God. The final justification of God’s ways is the manifestation of his grace in the redemption of man through the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. On some levels this act of ‘Providence’ can be seen to balance out the ‘disobedience’ committed by Adam in Eden. In this act of atonement, Christ freed man from the inherited guilt of Adam’s sin and made him more aware of God’s infinite love than he had been before. So in the poem God’s providence is seen just by the conclusion of the ‘great argument’ (1. Line 24): Satan fell because he merited more than he thought he got, and Adam in his redemption got more than he merited. However, the future that God has provided for Adam and Eve, whilst a glorious one, can never match the still greater future that they and their offspring might have enjoyed in a world without sin.
To conclude, I would say that Milton ‘justify[s] the ways of God to men’, through the assertion of ‘Eternal Providence’, as he states in his Invocation that he will. The way Milton demonstrates the providence and forgiveness of God in the fall of man justifies his actions. Without the disobedience of Adam and Eve we would never have known the grace and mercy of God taking on the human form in Christ. No fall would have meant no Christ, and this seems the ultimate justification of ‘the ways of God to men’.
All references to Paradise Lost are taken from The Essential Milton, ed. Douglas Bush.
