Chapter Themes of Paradise Lost - Study Guide by John Milton

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

Such I created all the ethereal powers

And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;

Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.

Not free, what proof could they have given sincere

Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,

Where only what they needs must do, appeared,

Not what they would? What praise could they receive?

What pleasure I from such obedience paid,

When will and reason (reason is also choice)

Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,

Made passive both, had served necessity,

Not me."

(III.98-111)

God follows to assert that angels or humans that fall cannot blame "Their maker, or their making, or their fate, | As if predestination overruled | Their will, disposed by absolute decree | … they themselves decreed | Their own revolt, not I" (III.113-23). Here Milton uses God to repudiate the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and assert that of the Free Will. The doctrinal or philosophical question surrounding the possibility for God’s foreknowledge and human free will to coexist was a contentious theological issue in Milton’s day. To accept any form of divine determinism is to abandon the logic necessary for the application of free will. Foreknowledge is not, however, determinism. God has no control over the choices angels or humans make, merely knows the outcome. Milton was unprepared, like his contemporaries the Socinians, to concede restrictions to God’s omniscience because of the existence of free will.

Milton’s account of the Fall in Paradise Lost resembles that of Boethius, probably the most influential treatment of divine foreknowledge. We are told in Book III that God foreknows that man "will fall" (III.95) but that he has adequate means to avoid doing so, and that "foreknowledge had no influence on their fault" (III.118). Milton also had to make the Fall credible; historically Christianity has emphasised the ideal of the prelapsarian condition (that which existed before the Fall) raised problems – if everything was so perfect, how could it have happened at all?

Simply, Milton had to build his narrative on the necessary conditions for Adam and Eve to fall and to remain faithful to God. Milton first presents the potential for Adam and Eve to fall, their fallibility, rather than their ‘fallenness’. In the environment of Eden both Adam and Eve face challenges, difficulties, temptations and the possibility of failure and loss. Elsewhere Milton wrote about the necessity of natural and moral evil in the world in what he called "the constituting of human vertue".

Heaven & Hell

In Books I and II Milton introduces his readers to Satan, his retinue of fallen angels, and Hell. The perverse demonic destruction in creating hell directly opposes the divine Creation. In Book I "Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t | Thick as Autumnal Leaves" (l.301-2) "Op’n’d into the Hill a spacious wound", "Rifl’d the