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Paradise Lost
Paradise lost is an epic which was written by john Milton and it mainly talks about Christian faith and how man’s disobedience as well as Satan’s disobedience made God angry and he chased man from the Garden of Eden. It also talks of how Satan was the first to disobey God and how this has cost him an almost eternal fight with the almighty. It employs different themes and styles and the most important thing is that it has moral lessons for humanity and how we relate to God and the others around us (DuRocher, 100). Paradise lost is based on 17th century writer’s ideologies about Christianity and his view about Protestantism and Catholicism. Some of the themes covered in the epic are man’s disobedience to God, Satan’s disobedience to God, the hierarchical nature of the multiverse and man’s fall as partly fortunate. This paper therefore discusses about the importance of obedience to God as brought out in the paradise we lost.
God’s decrees are supposed to be obeyed and failure to obey them comes with consequences as Milton states. This is given in an example of the story of Adam and eve being thrown out of the garden and Satan who was a beautiful angel turning into serpent. This is a very important aspect of Gods rules brought out in book 1 of the epic. Milton states how Satan turns into serpents as well as the other angels whom he had disobeyed with. This comes after he has convinced eve to eat the forbidden fruit. This therefore states one of the reasons not to disobey God which is to avoid the consequences.
Milton discusses the issue of Gods people and how Jesus comes to save gods people. Even though God in the first times is seen as a God who does not forgive and who if a person does something against him like Adam and eve, they must suffer despite his mercy. In the first time case Milton brings out how the two went and asked for forgiveness, however they were not fully forgiven and only partially and then thrown out of the garden. There is a development of the nature of God as Christ comes to save his people. This means that the reasons for obeying God changes from fear of punishment up to the love of God and his decrees. When Christ comes according to Milton, people realize how loving and merciful he is and therefore change their hearts and begin a new kind of worship whereby their sins are forgiven. This for sure changes the way most people viewed God.
The other reason Milton portrays as of importance in obeying God is how powerful he is. When there is a conflict and there is a fight between Satan and Gods fraternity for 3 days, Satan is defeated very badly and all his desires and wishes are made like nothing. However he still continues to disobey God. This fight tells one thing that God is mighty and does not need our praise or anything; rather he is sufficient on himself. It is also a kind of warning that no one should try to fight against God or anything ordained by God since it has Gods spirit and will and therefore a person may face dire consequences if they try to do that.
Milton creates two ways of disobedience to God and these include the fact that Adam and eve follow their own way while Satan follows his own way with his followers. Adam and eve follow the path of obedience and repentance while Satan and his followers follow the route of disobedience and fight against God. This is a very problematic path as Satan is in constant fight with the almighty his creator and that is very bad. First it is a display of lack of respect since he was created by God but wants to overtake the almighty God. Secondly it is a display of greed, Satan wanted to be at the same level with God and since that was not allowed he went ahead to seek to build his own kingdom. This turns out negatively and even though he gets some people he is still miserable. This is totally against God and therefore anyone who follows it happens to learn how disobedience to God hurts their conscience since they are created in Gods image.
On the other hand Adam and Eve follow the path of repentance and love of God. When they were engaging in sexual activity before eating the forbidden fruit they never felt shame or guilt. However, when they eat the forbidden fruit they feel shame and guilt the next morning after engaging in sexual activity. This leads them to realize that they did wrong and they ask for forgiveness from God. God pardons them even though at this point in time it is an invisible God when they had been used to the Visible God, the loving father in the Garden of Eden. Their path leads them to punishment and later they are saved by Christ, this shows the mercy of God and as Milton puts it, one way leads to salvation while another way leads to damnation (McColley, 110). The two ways show the world through the epic how important it is to obey God because even though his mercy and forgiveness might seem delayed in the case of Adam and eve, it still happens through Christ.
Angel Raphael shows Adam the things that will happen if they disobey God and Adam is really scared. Eve does not listen because she is asleep and this can be said to be one of the reasons why she heeds to the temptation of the devil. Adam is also shown man’s future up to the point of the great flood and he is very scared about this as well. The things that he is shown are a way for him to be notified of the importance to obey God and what happens when he does not obey God. This is because God gets very upset when he is disobeyed but still at the same time he is a peaceful and loving God. Therefore Adam gets into the sin of eating the forbidden fruit very knowingly and he knew that he was going to die. However here we see the importance of love, he tells his wife that if she is going to die he would rather die with her and he eats the fruit knowingly and full aware of the consequences. This brings out the different variables which are in play when one wants to serve God and follow in his footsteps.
Satan disguises himself as a frog and tries to enter Gods kingdom from the pandemonium. Angel Gabriel realizes this and immediately bans him from paradise. After this God send golden scales of justice into the sky and this makes the devil scared (Richardson, 579). This means that Gods creation is of very high importance and that God cannot allow his people to be taken astray or to be deceived by anyone especially if it is one of the fallen angels who wanted to deceive Adam and eve into their evil plan.
Milton states that Adam says the sins they had done and were thrown away from the Garden of Eden were somehow good and helped them to experience the mercy of God. Therefore even though they experienced Gods punishment the same way they were going to experience Gods mercy when what Adam saw was fulfilled. He was shown the vision of the redemption and he referred to their fallen nature as “happy fault.”
Milton uses light and dark to describe the situation in heaven and in that particular period of time. For example angels are described as being made of light while Satan is described as a shadowy figure that does not come to light. This in relation to the importance of obeying God is that failure to obey God makes one go into the shadowy kind of life and there is no freedom there since the people keep on hiding from the almighty. There is also the mention of heaven and hell, good and evil. These show the good side versus the negative side and therefore through this we can see that no one would like to be associated with the dark and its many negative forces which corrupt the minds of people like eve who ate the forbidden fruit first.
Works Cited
DuRocher, Richard J. “The Wounded Earth in” Paradise Lost”.” Studies in Philology 93.1 (1996): 93-115.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Surprised by sin: The reader in Paradise Lost. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Paradise lost and the rhetoric of literary forms. Princeton University Press, 2014.
MacCaffrey, Isabel Gamble. Paradise lost as “myth”. Harvard University Press, 2013.
McColley, Diane Kelsey. “Free Will and Obedience in the Separation Scene of Paradise Lost.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (1972): 103-120.
Milton, John. Paradise lost. ARC, Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
Quint, David. Inside Paradise Lost. Princeton University Press, 2014.
Walum, Laurel Richardson. “The art of domination: An analysis of power in Paradise Lost.” Social Forces 53.4 (1975): 573-580.
