This week I’m teaching my students part of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of reading it, it’s a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve in order to “justify the ways of God to men,” or, in other words, to try to explain how evil entered the world through the Fall (but in a way that won’t make us angry at God). Although Milton was Christian, his views aren’t necessarily orthodox, so in his work literature and theology interact in interesting ways. Some highlights from my students this week:
– “Why doesn’t Satan just kill Adam and Eve and get it over with?” This precipitated a discussion of free will, which seemed to be a phrase my students knew but not one they had really spent time thinking about. Sometimes I worry about my students.
– “Wait, ‘three-person’d God’?” Yeah, you explain the Trinity in five minutes. This same issue came up last week when we read John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. I hope they don’t just think I’m “being contradictory” and throw out my explanation.
– “Why is Pan in Eden?” So Milton has this habit of drawing images from all of literary tradition (he’s trying to write the English epic, set himself up as the British Homer), so he often calls up images from Greek mythology. Some of my students then get a bit confused, thinking there is a whole cast of figures residing in Eden, thus missing that Milton is simply using those other figures as analogies.
I really love teaching Paradise Lost. I’m going to have to find a way to teach a class just on Milton someday (hmm, I also have to make sure I’m qualified to do that, since it’s 300 years off my area of specialty). Amazing how much more complex literature gets when it draws on a whole religious tradition and all of the interpretation that has come with it. But meanwhile I’ll just give my students a taste of complexity and hope that, in the process, I haven’t committed too many heresies of my own as I dance between “Satan says in line 854 . .” and “Well, so Milton had some funny ideas about the makeup of angels . . .”
Erin
Alan Schmierer