Aims
This course aims to:
- equip you to read Milton’s Paradise Lost with greater understanding and appreciation
- enable you to critically compare Milton’s version of the Adam and Eve story with the Biblical original, and to explore why and how he develops the story in the way he does
- provide you with relevant background in Milton’s ideas about poetry, politics, and religion, so as to be able to assess critically how these figure in Paradise Lost
Content
We will begin by asking why Milton chose the Garden of Eden story as the basis for his epic poem. We’ll see that, as a radical Protestant committed to working out the Bible’s meaning for himself, he found this story both very important and very difficult to understand, and that his poem becomes his way of grappling with the story’s difficulties, and of encouraging its readers to do the same.
Central to Milton’s epic retelling of the Genesis story is the dignity of humans as rational creatures endowed with the capacity for independent moral choice, a capacity that could only be exercised if God left people free to face moral challenges and make their own decisions. We will see how this vision of divinely-ordained human freedom figured centrally in Milton’s thinking more widely, as the basis on which he tirelessly advocated for political and religious liberty at a time when such basic freedoms were fundamentally at stake in the English Civil War and its aftermath. Yet Paradise Lost, while continuing his life’s work of promoting freedom, also raises deep questions about it, compelling us to ask why, despite our high potential, we so often misuse our free will to our own harm, and whether God, knowing what suffering was in store for us, was nonetheless justified in giving us this power at all.
Entangled with these questions, in the Bible and in the wider Christian tradition, are the respective moral responsibilities (and culpabilities) of women and men. At its worst, that tradition had used the story of Adam and Eve to justify a view of women as inherently prone to sin, and to deny them independent moral agency. Milton confronts this tradition too, working towards a view of the Bible compatible with his conviction that all humans are moral agents capable of choosing the good.
In Paradise Lost, Milton grapples with all these questions not just in the abstract, but by trying to show them playing out in the actions of believably human characters. Does he succeed? And what can we learn, by reading his poem, about historically important ideas which still play a large part in shaping our sense of who we are, and of what we mean by taking responsibility for our actions?
Presentation of the course
The course will be taught as a seminar, using a flexible mix of class discussion, lecture-style presentation, and tutor-led collaborative reading of key scenes and passages from Paradise Lost.
The course will involve extensive close reading of the set text, so students must bring a copy with them to every class, and should also become as familiar as possible with the poem in advance. (Our focus in the class will be on Paradise Lost Books 3–5 and 8–12, but some familiarity with the rest of the poem would be beneficial, and naturally the poem is more enjoyable if read as a whole!)
Course sessions
- Paradise Lost, Book 4, and the Garden of Eden story (Genesis 1-3)
- Paradise Lost, Books 3 & 5, and the idea of freedom
- Paradise Lost, Books 8 & 9 – trouble in paradise
- Paradise Lost, Books 9 & 10 – the Fall and its consequences
- Paradise Lost, Books 11 & 12 – freedom and moral responsibility in the world after the Fall
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
- to understand why Milton chose the Biblical Garden of Eden story as the basis for his epic poem, and how and why his version differs from the Scriptural original
- to develop an appreciation of the poet’s profound and subtle rendition of his main characters and their actions, and to debate critically key questions that arise in close reading of the story, notably his depiction of the relationship between men and women
- to understand Milton’s radical and historically significant ideas about political and religious liberty, and assess critically how those ideas shape his rendition of the story of Adam and Eve
Required reading
* Milton, John,The Major Works. Edited by Orgel, Stephen and Goldberg, Jonathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
This edition is strongly recommended because it contains all the works by Milton to be referred to during the course, including Paradise Lost. But in principle you could get by with any other modern edition of Paradise Lost. In any case, please bring your copy of Paradise Lost to every lecture. I also strongly recommend reading the whole poem before the course starts.
