89 - Introduction to Paradise Lost (feat. Josh Traylor)

Mind Fellowship over the last year or so. The podcast has been going on for a while, but the larger fellowship has really been taken off over last year or so. This fellowship is made of a number I'm at this point over fifty mostly Christians who are generally interested in

the humanities, in literature. I'm representing a number of traditions, number of philosophies, but we all come around just the same general focus on literature, on myths, on legends, on you know, things like Tolkien and Lewis and the various things that inspire them. That sends to be our general focus.

Starting last year I began leading some independent courses out of the Fellowship, and so, beginning with the philosophy and Fiction of CS I led a course on Beowulf and Boethius just wrapped up a course on Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, and I've got a number of courses that are lined up throughout this year and into

the next. But what's really exciting right now and I want to talk about, is that we are now including some other course creators who are coming alongside us, who are joining with us in this fellowship to draw on their interest, to draw on their expertise in order to just add to the catalog, the the array of courses

that we're able to provide for you. And in particular right now, I want to talk about Josh Taylor's Paradise Lost course, which as I post this has just gotten started, and so it's not too late for you to join in. But you know, whether you're able to join us live or maybe you're you're viewing this or you're listening to this in the future, this is going to be a set up materials. It's going to be invaluable to you as you approach this. This this pivotal text in the

English literary tradition. And so you know, if you're somebody who you know, you like Lewis for example, I mean it's it's hard to find many more significant influences on Lewis's writing. I mean, especially when're talking about something like Peril Andrew, but even beyond then than we have in

Paradise Lost. And so you know, if you're somebody who is inclined to watch this channel or listen to this podcast, then you're somebody who's going to be who's going to benefit from having a strong guide to walk you through, to walk you into, to walk you, you know, further up and further into Paradise Lost. And Josh is really going to be a great guide for you, and that as you're gonna be able to tell through this episode today, as I'm going to provide you with his introduction to reading,

to studying, to working with Paradise Lost. Now, if you want to continue on with Josh, and I strongly recommend that you do, then I'll leave a link to his his patron page, which is kind of what's the front door to the Google classroom. I'll leave that link in the show notes, both on YouTube and on the podcast. And also if you're already a Mythic Mind patron, then you can access that course which is already very inexpensive, but you can access that course for half price and

you can find that code on Patreon. If you have a hard time, then contact me on X contact me through Patreon, contact me through Discord, and I'll make sure that you get that patron code. But for now, let's go ahead and jump right into Josh's introductory lesson on studying Paradise Lost.

not great work, Paradise Lost was written. It was written in a context, right. It was written with not just a historical context, but within a tradition and a literary canon, with philosophical influences and different paradigms of thought. So we need to talk about how those things have influenced this,

just very briefly and at a high level. So first and foremost, the number one influence on Paradise Lost should obviously be the Bible scripture, Old Testament and New Testament, though there's going to be more allusions to the Old Testament. It's all one cohesive work, and Milton is going to see it that way, and they're a redemptive historical narrative that runs throughout scripture, which he will absolutely talk about it, especially towards the end of Paradise Lost in the last

two books. So Milton is a Christian. Sometimes even Milton scholars, the secular ones, don't understand this point. We see this sometimes with the Donte too, where there's just so many misreadings that come from people not understanding orthodox Christianity, not specific denominational Christianity, but you know, the theology of the Nicene Creed and the Calcedonian definition and things that would

be seen as historic Christian core beliefs. So people not understanding these things often limits their interpretation of something like Paradise Lost. But nevertheless Milton was influenced by those things. Milton was an Orthodox Christian. The work De Doctrina Christiano, which I'll get to talking about in a different video, sometimes seems to reveal that he was heretical in some ways being Aryan, which again we can talk about that

later if you don't know what that is. But there's a lot of there's a lot of things we don't know about that work. It's hard to say what Milton was doing with it, and it was written at the end of his life, so we paradise loss is absolutely

written from the perspective of Orthodox Christianity. There's way too much to unpack and comb through there for this video, but just know that, and certainly if you don't see it that way during the class, please feel free to ask questions and bring it up and we will have a good, healthy dialogue about that. The main foundation for this poem, of course, is going to be Genesis chapters

one through three in the Biblical canon. So this is going to be foundational for the entire poem because there's events that take place before Genesis one and events that take place after the Fall in Genesis three, and the archangel Michael at the end of this poem is going to explain to Adam the history that takes place throughout

the Old and New Testament. But Genesis one to three of the main backdrop, I highly highly recommend that you are reading and meditating on God's word, especially Genesis one through three throughout this entire class, and just seeing the pieces connecting there and trying to see what Milton's doing with the imagination and with the questions He's asking there things that scripture doesn't clearly answer for us. And God certainly is not required to answer all of our questions

and provide more. Right, he revealed to us what he chose to. But these questions are good to ask, they're interesting, they can even be helpful for the Christian life, and Milton's working with that. So another thing is just the Exodus journey. There's going to be kind of this pattern of the Exodus journey with the social context and the journey through the wilderness. Important to keep that in the

in the back of your mind as well. In Paradise Laws, it starts with Promise Land Eden and it ends with wilderness exile from Eden because of the Fall, where Michael has to kick them out of Eden because of them being sinful now, and that's sort of like almost like a reverse Exodus, where like they're in the Promise Land and then they leave the Promised Land, whereas if you know the Exodus story, they're in Egypt, Moses leads them out of Egypt through the wilderness, doesn't actually enter the

Promised Land. That's that's gonna be Joshua and Caleb's journey, and in the Book of Joshua right after the Torah and the English Bible. But nevertheless we see those those patterns. It's almost like a reverse Exodus in a way. So just keeping keeping that in mind as well. There's certainly Theman influence there, all right. So most important influence is the Bible, no question about it. Just the history of the theology of the Christian Church as well, just broadly

speaking in terms of Orthodoxy and Catholicity. But outside of Christian influences, the biggest influence is going to be the epic poets, the great epic poets of our Western canon. So the first really maybe the usually consider the first literary author of our Western canon is Homer. Homer, writing out of usually roughly eight hundred BC, maybe sometimes dated all the way back to one thousand BC, being the first person to write down the oral tradition of the

Trojan Wars, which occurred before all of that. And so we see so many Homeric styles and themes and conceptions throughout Paradise Lost. No doubt Milne is writing intentionally this as an epic, not any other type of poem or any other type of narrative. Is specifically trying to write a great epic here, and I believe, of course he accomplishes that, as many would agree. But there's going to be influences here. So we're going to see at one point in Paradise Lost. I cannot remember the exact book

off the top of my head. It might be like book four or five, maybe even six. But somewhere in the middle of Paradise Lost, there's going to be a recounting of the story of the war between the rebellious Angels aka the Fallen Angels and the demons, Satan being their leader, Satan wants Lucifer, the unfallen Angel, leads the rebellion against God, who he sees as a tyrant. And the military conflict recounted here is very, very, very much in the style of many of the passages in the Iliad.

If you've ever read the Iliad, and if you haven't, I'll tell you now, there is a lot of warfare in the Iliad. There's a lot of military conflict there's a lot of descriptions of battle scenes. This is very You might see this in some like modern you know, like modern fantasy stories or something here and there, but other than that, you don't really see a lot of

battle scenes. This is there's a section of Paradise Loss that really pays homage to Homer in a way, talking about the battle between God's angels who remained faithful to him and those who fall away from God and his grace. Another Homeric convention is the the idea of really the action being split into two, so you kind of have this hero's peril and social context or quest theme, and

then the setting of social order in a way. So in the Odyssey, you have first Odysseus in the hero's journey is his journey back to Ithaca from the Trojan war. Ithaca is his homeland, he is the king of that.

He's trying to return and he's going to get back there, and he has to establish social order because he's been gone for a long time, and he has a wife and a son named Telemachus who are going to be He has to reorder his house, the Oikos, and he has to reorder the police his city state, those are themes in this two part epic of the Odyssey, and you're gonna you're you kind of see that in a little bit with Paradise Lost in some ways or another,

you're gonna kind of see things taking place really before the fall and after the Fall. But really Milton says that book seven is where the rest of the poem is, and he shows us that the poem is confined to Earth basically from book seven on where a lot of things are taking place outside of Earth from the perspective of God and the perspective of Satan in the first half of Paradise Lost books one through six. So we kind of have this, uh, this this twofold way where

it's almost like two arcs maybe in a way. You see this also in Virgil as well. So in the Anea, the action is split into two. The first part of the Enia is Eneas journeying out of Troy, which has been sacked, sieged, and destroyed, and he's going to be taking his journey, fulfilling his destiny to establish what eventually becomes Rome in the Roman Republic and then later the Roman Empire. And he moves out of the Italian Peninsula and or moves out of Troy to the Italian Peninsula.

And then when he gets to the Italian Peninsula he has to set some sort of social order there. It has conflict with all of the different Italian War awards, and that's what the second half of the Aenia is about. It's him establishing that and then receiving this prophecy that you know, one day from this Romulus and Remus are going to be you know, born from Reya, Sylvia. They are going to be nursed by the she wolf, and they are going to one day establish Rome, and Romulus

is going to be the first king of Rome. If you never read read Olivy, specifically the Roman author, that's a great place to read all of that at as kind of I guess as like a sequel to the Eneid. Okay, So that's one aspect. Another aspect that we absolutely need to talk about is this epic convention of media res. So media res is basically Latin for in the middle of things, And what this is going to mean is

that we don't get the story from the beginning. The Ilia does not take place at the beginning of the Trojan War. It takes place at the end. It takes place in year ten of ten, really towards the very end of the war, leading up to finally sacking the city of Troy, which is what the entire war was about for ten years anyway. And we see the same thing in the Odyssey where Odysseus. We do not start

with Odysseus. We don't start with him at Troy like right after the sack, in him with his military platoon, but we rather we see him on Calypso's Island, so we wonder what happened there. Homer doesn't tell us. He doesn't tell us what happens at the beginning of the for most of the Trojan War, though there's references and allusions to things, a lot of that is left open.

And we see the same thing with the Aeneid in a sense as well, where he starts at the destruction of Troy, not before that, goes on a journey and then ends in New Troy what eventually becomes Rome. And here's whe we're going to see this in Paradise Lost. It opens and you might expect, I'm not sure what you would expect, to be honest, but perhaps you might expect that it'll start with the battle, or that it'll start with creation, but it doesn't. It starts with Satan

and his demons waking up basically in Hell. They're going to wake up by the Lake of Fire and Hell. They've already lost the war. It's going to be recounted later. This is an epic convention. It's the media res. Satan's in the middle of things. He hasn't gotten to Eden to tempt and corrupt earth and humanity yet, but he has already lost the fight. He's already lost to that battle. And this is this is the media res. That's where Paradise loss begins. Undoubtedly, this is where this is where

John Milton is pulling these thrones and these from. And I believe that it's completely intentional at the end of the day, certainly an epic convention. A couple other influences I just want to mention here is the Ecclesiastical History by Caedmon. This is basically just a medieval text recounting the history of the English Church. And this is where Milton's going to draw a lot of his British history from,

and his invocation of the muse. That's going to be another convention here where you know, you think like sing demo muse and Homer he's going to invoke the Muse, and this is the Muse of all muses. It's the Holy Spirit that's You're going to see that right at the beginning of book one. But Cadman famously claimed to have talked to an angel before he wrote this, and whatever angel that was, that was supposedly supposed to be

his muse. Another key epic convention. Another one is it'd be hard to mention in English epic without mentioning the Arthurian Legend, the works of you know, Sir Thomas Mallory being the most profound, but other ones of course, like

Jeffrey of Monmouth and other medieval texts as well. But we see themes of chivalry a very key theme in the Arthurian legend, and we see those in Paradise lost, especially as Adam falls, Eve falls and they have to leave Eden and go on a journey just the two of them because no one their humans exists yet and Adam Adam failed at chivalry in a sense, but he still has to aim at the good of chivalry in a way to lead his wife start a family with

her and properly lead the people after falling from Eden, He's still, you know, he's promised of this future hope, like the seed of the woman crushing the head of

the serpent. And so with that theological virtue of hope, he's going to carry on out there from from uh, from that, from that hope he's been given by Michael, who is sent by God, and he's going to have to really have these masculine and chivalric virtues as he properly leads his woman and his family through the new world, the fallen world, which they will inhabit and dwell in from here on out. Milton actually wanted to write his

own Arthurian epic. He toyed around with the idea as for the Great English Epic, but he ended up writing Paradise Lost instead. Alfred Lord Tennyson in the late nineteenth century would take up the Man to Love, doing so with his Ideals of the King, which was written throughout it written and published throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Other influences were just medieval courtly love poetry.

So this was kind of just like a don't think of this as like a romance, like a like a soap opera or a romance to see book or anything that we would, you know, associate with romance in our time. I certainly can be quite critical of those things, and in some ways we should be, because I don't think they portray love and romance and such things very well. But courtly love poetry did portray these things in a

more wholesome and I think true way. And we see this even influence with Dante and the way that he talks about Beatrice in the Divine Comedy certainly influenced by Italian and French courtly love poetry, and Milton's going to be drawing on these things as well. There's a lot to say about the connection between Milton and Dante. Hopefully to talk about that at some point, but just time permitting,

because there's a lot there as well. There's yeah, there's many questions up there and wondering if he actually, you know, if he actually was alluding to Dante in any way, or whether he read Dante, whether he liked him, whether he saw them as like a somebody who was challenging for the Laurel crown in a sense. A lot there. I'm not gonna I'm not going to digress into that right now, but I hope we can talk about it

at some point. And one last piece I want to hit on here as far as literary influences, This is not an exhaustive list, by the way, there are certainly many, many, many more, but the concept of a Socratic dialogue. A lot of the dramatic scenes you're going to see where characters are dialoguing with one another, it's usually one character talking to another for pretty much the entirety of the poem.

And you see this especially in a scene where Raphael is educating Adam, trying to prepare him and educate him properly to be virtuous and not take the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and do also lead his wife to not do the same. That's going to be a key component here. But like the way even Satan just talking to his demons, or Adam and Eve talking to one another, Michael and Adam talking at the end of the poem, these all have

a very Socratic dialogue feel. And if you've never read the dialogues of Plato, there's certainly a couple that are absolute essential reads, absolute essential parts of the Western canon. One of the most important authors of all time in my opinion, and I think in the opinions of many, I don't think that's even much of an opinion practically effect. So, moving out of influences, I would like to talk about the poem itself, the text of the poem. So what's

the style here? Well, first of all, it is going to be i ambic pentameter, blank verse, So this is just a poetry sc poetry, poetry way of method of doing things. Sorry, losing my losing my voice here a little bit. But it's going to be a five foot line and it's going to be essentially just like ten syllables long, so you can count it out dead dead. You see that a lot in Shakespeare. Right, like to

be or not to be? That is the question you're going to see these this same convention, Milton coming right out of the English Renaissance, that Shakespeare was one of the predominant authors of that. But more than I am bit pandemic or I want to focus on the idea of blank verse here. So blank verse essentially means that

it doesn't rhyme. Milton saw this as extremely vulgar. He did not see it as fitting the epic convention, and he actually wanted poetry to move away from rhyming and these this idea of like these couplets, the you know, the suffix of one line we're on with the suffix of the next line. He wanted to move away from that entirely. And we certainly see that a lot in the English poetic tradition. People think about poetry and they're like, you know, in rhymes. George Lucas, of course, once said

it's like poetry rhymes. This isn't exactly what he was talking about, but poetry doesn't rhyme a lot of the time. That's a common misconception, and Milton was trying to move away from that. And so there's no rhyming scheme here. There's no rhyming scheme in Homer, there's not a rhyming scheme in Virgil or Avid, the main epic poets of

the classical Greco Roman world. In fact, you know the same thing with Beowulf, right, We really only see this in Dante in a sense, with this terce arima rhyme scheme, which I'm not going to digress to explain what that means. But Dante had a very specific rhyme scheme, and he used that, and you see that in the original Italian. But Milton's not going with that. He's not going to do the same thing that Dante was trying to do

in Italy in the you know, early fourteenth century. Milton's Milton's going back past Dante to the epics that previously named. So he's gonna write it in blank verse. So don't expect rhymes and don't get hung up on rhyming being you know, essential to poetry. It just it's it just is not. In the history of the English poetic tradition as well as other poetic traditions, just shows that that is, it's just not true. It's not an essential component or

element of poetry. So beyond style, let's talk about some themes here for a minute. So first team, and I'm just gonna list some themes, not unpack them too heavily. I mean, I also, after this pose some questions to be chewing on throughout the play, throughout the drama, sorry, the poem. There's a lot of things you kind of classify this. Milan was also influenced by dramatic elements by the way, like think of like Sophocles or Euripides, or

you know Shakespeare of course others. But just think about these themes and these questions if you have to, just type them out on a separate word document, write them down somewhere in a journal or a notebook, just have them on a hand because you're gonna want to see where these things are coming alive all throughout. So I'm just going to list some here. One theme obedience to

God and the consequences of disobedience. Another theme divine justice and divine love, and how those things are interrelated to one another. In fact, as a Christian, you kind of have to come to the terms to agree that they're

completely inseparable in a way. Third theme the revelation between general or natural revelation and its fulfillment from special revelation aka what God provided us in scripture and general revelation being one and connected to special revelation, these things being tied together, but special revelation further telling us specifically from God how to understand his word, but also natural order and creation which is all around us. And you see

this a lot in the Christian humanist tradition. Again, think myth became fact. The famous C. S. Lewis essay, I think on fairy stories by J. R. R. Tolkien. I could name a few more, but I won't. But Milton is absolutely in this tradition. And it only takes reading the first you know, thirty or forty lines of the of Paradise Lost to see this basically his preamble to the whole poem. Another theme the relationship between divine providence and free will. Milton was a Puritan? Is he a Calvinist?

Is he Arminian? Is he something else? Because those aren't the only two views of this in the grand theological tradition, And there's mystery and paradox there pretty much no matter how you slice it. So how does Milton deal with that? Excellent thing to ponder throughout the poem? Think about how he's doing that. Is Adam responsible? Is he responsible? Is God responsible? Does he blame God in some way? He does not? But you will see how he deals with

all of that in the poem. Another theme, another goes hand in hand with the last one, is the problem of evil. You know, how does a how does a good, loving, all powerful, all knowing God exist in a world where evil also exists? Is it his fault that evil exists, Is it man's fault? How does that all reconcile out? How do we how do we deal with that? And Milton's poem is kind of one giant theodicy, or a way of justifying the ways of God to men, defending the problem of evil in a sense, so all things

to consider there. Another big one for Milton is the relationship between monarchy, liberty, and tyranny. Milton was very, very very libertarian in a sense in his time. He was very pro liberty, pro freedom of conscience, freedom of choice, freedom of religion. He was very against the monarchy in his life. He saw monarchy as tyrannical. He even saw there some of the Presbyteries in the in the in the Church of Scotland as tyrannical in his time as well.

That might be hard to believe for some of you, but he did. He very much was for personal liberty, very congregationalistic in a sense, and you'll see that come out in the poem as well, just in the concept of God as the monarch, and Satan is the tyrant Satan accusing God as being tyrannical. All of those things. The nature of evil itself so you know, there's a conception of dualism in some philosophical traditions, where good and evil are both just these eye powers that are equal

to one another. But Milton is not going to see it that way. He sees the nature of evil as you know Augustine's concept of pravatio boni here or privation of the good. He's going to see evil as not being created by God, but as a corruption of the good things that God created. If you're in the book club right now with Andrew Snyder and other mythic mind patrons and fellows, you'll definitely come across this, if you're reading the Confessions and discussing it right now. Augustine mentions

it there and in other works. But evil as a privation of the good, It's a corruption of the good. God didn't create it, and that is absolutely the view

that Milton is putting into this poem. See chapter ten of C. S. Lewis's preface of Paradise Lost if you want to read on Milton's relationship with Augustine and how he is drawing from that A long time, over a thousand year old at his time, Augustinian trot So now I'm going to just ask some questions, and some of these are they're pretty much all directly tie in with the themes, but I want to put some of these

questions out there. Again, these are things to just chew on, reflect on, meditate on as you are reading and hopefully even in some sense rereading the poem as we go through this class. What were Adam and Eve meant to be? Were they supposed to grow in knowledge over time? Would there have eventually been a time where they could have been ready to partake of and ingest the knowledge of the Tree of Good and evil? What is the role of procreation before the Fall? Were Adam and Eve's supposed

to procreate? If so, why didn't they have any children before the fall? How long were they there? How did they not have children? Did they even engage in sexual intercourse? Were they abstinate? Was that the way that they didn't have children? If you could get pregnant, What would labor, delivery, and childbirth look like? As in Genesis three, we see that there's labor and toil and pain that's going to be multiplied in the process of childbirth, But what would

that have looked like before the fall? What would parenting have looked like before the fall like, how would it look like to have these unfallen, sinless parents and children? You know, imagine what that would look like. Could Adam and Eve have never fallen? Was it possible that they could have never actually fallen and that we never would have needed Jesus to come down incarnate and to save us from our sins via his life, death and resurrection.

Is that possible? Could they have never fallen at all? Could they have freely chosen to not disobey, just as they unfortunately freely chose to disobey. Is it possible at all that this could have happened? Or did God actively will for it to happen so that one day the mono myth and the yu catastrophe of Christ could occur? Did Adam and Eve have free will at all? Was there free will libertarian? Did they have some sort of compatibilist form of free will in accordance with God's sovereignty?

Did God ordain the fault? Did he actively will for this to happen? If so, does that mean that it was faded? And if so, does that mean that all of humanity is deterministic in a sense? Do we not have a choice on whether to obey or disobey God to attain salvation through the work of Christ. Ultimately, do we choose any of that or is it all elected or predestined? And Milton's not going to use that concept predestination and election in the calvinistic terms. He's going to

sort of cash that out in a different way. We can talk about that another another time, though. Shifting towards the character Satan, why is Satan so charismatic? Why does he get so much screen time or so much of the text? Like? Why why is he such a prominent character in this? Does Milton want us to relate to him? Is that why he's a prominent character? Or did Milton have some strange fascination with Satan? As the poets the

Romantic poets? William Blake and a little later Percy Shelley accused him of almost basically being some closet Satanic fanatic of some sort? Is that true? Is there is their merit to their claims or are they misunderstanding and misinterpreting the literary quality of Satan in this? And this is important to contrast with Dante, who basically makes just Satan a hideous disgusting, pathetic monster at the bottom of Inferno in the ninth the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno, Dante's Hell.

He's half frozen, he's static, he can't do anything, and he continually an active rebellion, just like Milton Satan. But Milton Satan is he has a swagger about him. He's charismatic, he's he's cunning. He's very dynamic rather than static. He's constantly moving around and doing things. You know, why is that? Why isn't he static? Why is he so dynamic? And Paradise Lost? What does Milton's portray of Adam have to say about masculinity? What does portrayal of Eve have to

say about femininity? Themes that we see and C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet unfallen masculinity and in Perilandra onfallen femininity, especially with like the Green Lady. We see this a lot. There's gonna be parallels between the Unman and the Green Lady as well as there's going to be with Satan and Eve in Paradise Lost. Absolutely a direct influence. By the way, is Eve representative of every woman to Milton? Or is she just a character

in the story. So she is she an archetype. Is he's saying something universal about with Eve, or is he merely saying some things about women or some things just about her character. And to give you an example what I mean from here, think of Jane's static and that hideous strength. If you've read it. If not, you should

absolutely read it. Here's a shameless plug for that. But people, there's a debate whether Jane represents Lewis's vision of female academics as a whole, if Jane's a symbol for that, or if she's merely just an instantiation or just a character in a story who happens to be a female academic with certain circumstances of certain personality, certain dispositions and struggles or etc. Some female academics actually dislike the way that Jane is portrayed in this for this reason, but

others will say that she is She's not represented of all female academics, She's just a certain type of female academic as a character in the story. I agree with the latter on that one, but not here to parse that out of debate. That just an interesting thought, for I know there's many Lewis fans probably signing up for this course, many who have read the Ransom trilogy. So I'm throwing those out there as examples. All right, So

I just want to talk about some interpretive challenges. Now, these are just more questions, and I know I'm throwing just a ridiculous amount of questions at you. These aren't supposed to be things that you're you're answering on the spot. These are things that I want you to be thinking about throughout the course, and you might answer some just to find out, in classic academic effect fashion, that as you answer these questions, you get answers, only to receive

more questions that spawn. It's kind of like a hydra. You cut off the head, more head spawn. That's how these things work. And that's why it's such a great book, right because you can just endlessly ask questions and never know all the answers at the end of the day. Is the amount of scholarship is just enormous, and we'll just continue to go on and on and on. The mark of a great book, truly, So does some questions about the interpretation itself. How does one imagine a Prelapseyrian world?

I'm a fallen creature. I'm finite. I don't know what it's like to be born in a time where sin and death head and entered the world. As I have that in common with every person who will ever watch this video and listen to me talk about it. Everybody who is not Adam and Eve Christ is obviously born through the emmaticlate conception sinless. So he's an exception here too. But Adam and Eve are They're not God, but they're

they're unfallen humans, right, and they exist in Eden. So Milton is a fallen creature just like we are, right, So how does that? How does that work? How does how does how? How can he imagine a Prelapserian world properly? Is there are there limitations to that? Are there going to be struggles to that? How does he deal with that? How does he handle that? Should he even be trying and attempting to imagine the pre lapse Serian world? Right? Like?

Should he be doing that? The same thing you could go with C. S Lewis with you know, out of the Silent Planet in Perilandra, where he's imagining these unfallen worlds? And does does C. S Lewis do that? In a better way than Milton, or does Milton do that in a better way? Does Milton take it too far in some ways? And how we can imagine that we see another influence here, and I'm drawing a lot of parallels

to Dante for a reason. But in Paradiso, which is the third and final part of Dante's Divine Comedy, he leaves Eden, the earthly paradise which sits at the very top of Mount Purgatorio, that's the setting of his the second part of the poem, Purgatorio or Purgatory, and he ascends out of Eden into the medieval cosmos, the spheres, the heavens, if you may, and Dante arrives on Luna or what we would know today as the Moon, and as soon as he gets there, he's he's struggling to

comprehend things. He's struggling to see things. He's he's having a really hard time putting all of his experiences from the parody so into words in the poem parodies so. And that's because he's a human and he's limited in a sense, even if he's been purified, he's struggling with that. And that's different than in a sense than Paradise Loss. But it's also not because John Milton is going to write parts of the story that take place outside of time.

They take place in God's transcendence in the imperium, right where he is outside of time, He's outside of space, he's outside of the cosmos. How does Milton deal with that? How does he imagine that as a finite human being dealing with an infinite being akaa God like? How does he handle that? All things just to consider? And so that kind of leads me to my next question and challenge is how do we deal with a poem that

takes place both outside of time and within time? So, like a Paradise Lost, has scenes, but it is not always clear when the scene shifts. So you see this in Shakespeare the editions we have today, they have acts and various scenes that takes place within the act of the play. Usually it's a five five act drama with

multiple scenes within each act. See that you see. Usually scene shifts are clearly articulated in things like sophocles Sentipus cycle or Isulus's Orestia, or in some of Euripides as tragedies, but a lot of the additions, at least any of the ones I've seen don't have this in Paradise Loss. So how do we understand a scene shift? We don't have the clear scene shifts as much in Paradise Lost, and so this requires a lot of careful attention. And I kind of touch on this as the last one.

But how do we take place? How do we how do we understand what's taking place between the Godhead? Where God the Father and God the Son, both characters in this poem are they're having a dialogue with one another. How are we supposed to handle that and deal with that? How can Milton even know that? Interpretive challenges? How are we supposed to understand whose perspective to read from? And are there some parts? There are some parts from Satan's perspective,

there are some parts from God's perspective? How do we imagine and interpret those properly? All things to consider as you dive in and ponder these things reading throughout the poem. All Right, so we've posed a lot of questions. Those are maybe too many, maybe not, but I hope those are really helpful for just kind of where to aim your focus and how to think about Paradise Lost. Now it's time to talk more about the characters of the poem. So, first and foremost, God the Father is a character in

the poem. God the Son is a character in the poem. Milton is not. He doesn't reject the trinity, so he does believe that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are all you know, all share the divine essence. They're all fully God, but they're all distinctly their own persons in the Godhead. But these are God the Father and God the Son are going to take up the the role of the dialogue within the Godhead.

Satan is a major character. Like I said before, makes created a lot of controversy because Satan that the king of Hell and that the king of the demons, is essentially a main character in this uh in this drama, he's he's portrayed as the main antagonist, if you may.

But he's he gets a lot of light, there's a lot of there's a lot of a a focus on him, right, He's almost like a almost like a byronic hero in a sense of pre byronic hero and Lord Byron with like Don Juan and other works most likely to draw influence from this. As the Romantics talked about Milton quite a bit more on that another time. Perhaps bails above as a character, He's not another name for Satan in

this he is Satan's right hand man. He's his his second in command, and he he gets a scene with Satan right at the beginning of book one. Satan has Satan has some followers who are other named characters. These are basically like his generals in a sense, and they they're going to give speeches at the Infernal Council in book two and talk about how the best to get back at God for defeating them and banishing them to hell.

So we have Blile, Mammon, Maloc and Molkaiber, and Mulkaiber of course, is an allusion to King Vulcan in Roman mythology. Also Hepastius and Greek mythology. Those are usually interchangeable names. And he's the god of forge and smith ory in Roman mythology, just as Hephaestius is in Greek mythology. So that name is another name for King Vulcan. And there's some illusions here to be gleaned. Perhaps is he's the

builder of the Palace of Pandemonium. But pay pay strong attention to the motives and what these characters are getting at when they when they have Thisti of Counsel and Book two, it's fascinating to to get there, excited to get there and talk about it with you all. So sin and death are each literally a character in this poem. Death you might think of like personified as the grim Reaper, but Michael says that death has many faces. An interesting

thing to consider. There other characters, of course, Adam and Eve are human characters, are our first parents, as Milton will call them. They're basically, in a sense of the protagonists of this story. And the angels, of course, are important characters in the story. Literary critic Northrop Frye and his essay The Story of All Things says the angelic

order is there to provide models for human action. They form a community of service and obedience, often doing things meaningless to them except that as the will of God, they have meaning. The angels here there's all we can say about Milton's angels and his angelology. But the characters are supposed to be They're representing obedience to God. Obedience and disobedience are motifs in this in this poem, and Milton is absolutely showing the angels as basically exemplars and

paragons of virtue and obedience to God. Fully, they can't fall away because they'll be like Satan's demons, and they don't, and they don't. They don't get redeemed like humans do, as many Theoogians have believed. So the angels in this poem are Gabriel, then Raphael, who's going to be Adam's

teacher before the fall. He is essentially a historian. He's going to use history to try to educate Adam and prepare him to not fall, and warn him that Satan is coming as a serpent, Uriel as another angel, Abdeal as an angel. I know Abdila is mentioned, and I can't remember. It might be baruk Or, but one of the duterial canonical books. Obviously if you're Roman Catholic, that's going to be a part of the biblical canon. For Protestants it's more extra biblical. But I believe he's mentioned

in one of those. I can look into that later. I'm sorry I did not write that one down, but it's actually one of my favorite character moments in Paradise Lost is when ab Deal stands up alone against Satan and all his demons is basically says no, I'm not going to do this, and you guys shouldn't rebel against God. This is before they actually enact and engage warfare against God and the obedient angels. And Abdial serves as basically the model of Christian virtue and the cardinal virtue of

fortitude or courage. One who is wisely standing up against evil. He's not being a coward, but he's also not exercising a false form of courage and being a rash fool. No, he's properly in that Aristotelian mean between the two extreme eames, and he is. He's faithful, he's courageous, he's exercising fortitude. I did write about this. I wrote a piece called ab Deal the Faithful, a celestial model of Christian fortitude. You can find that on my substack. You can also

find a d a pdf on the course page. Highly highly recommend that. I'm not to shamelessly plug my own work, but it's nothing scholarly, but it's about, you know, fifteen hundred words or so to kind of talk about ab Deal in that scene. When you get to book five, maybe go give that a read. And I hope we can talk about it further. Michael another character in this.

Michael's the one who's responsible and tasked by God to kick them out of Eden, but he's also tasked with how to educating Adam and preparing him for life outside of Eden, fallen life, and he's going to teach him about the history of his descendants, sort of looking forward down the corridors of time, of what's to come with his people and the hope that's aalt going to come

through Jesus Christ and giving him that theological virtue of hope. Okay, I have said a lot here about the poem, about this magnificent work, and I just wanted to close with some advice for how to read Paradise Lost, some really kind of practical tips for just how to go through the poem. I hope these are helpful to you, as they've been helpful to me. I did not do these

the first time I read them. At a professor at Memoria College recommend this to me, and I did it the second time that I read the poem, and it was extremely helpful, to say the least, so first off, and I did do this one the first time. Actually, the other ones I didn't do. But annotate, and the annotate the work. Always annotate a great book. Right, write

in the margins, write questions, right answers. Circle words that you don't understand, Maybe look some of them up, Keep a journal of quotes that you love, and perhaps even commit these to memory. The beauty of memory, though our memory has fallen and fickle and fails us at times. If you memorize poetry, you take the poems with you wherever you go, and there's some beauty about that, or

like one you. First of all, you don't have to have a conversation with somebody and say, hold on, let me uh, let me look up this, uh, this thing that T. S. Eliots said one time, Let me look up this poem and then sit there on your phone and try to google it. No, how profound is it if you can just recite those words from memory, recite things from Paradise Lost, and pull them out in real life scenarios and conversations with friends and family and others,

that's a magnificent and underrated thing. Perhaps, if you are like me and you like to occasionally unplug and go backpacking out in the woods where you don't have reception You don't lose Paradise Lost just because you don't have a copy of it with you, Because you've kept it up here, you've committed it to memory, and that poem can essentially not leave you in a way. Okay, so here's some advice that did come from my professor at

Memorial College. So write the name of the speaker and the margins every time there's a new speaker in the poem. This is an easy way to just keep track of who's talking. It's not always so easy to do that. It's not like if you go to Barnes and Noble today and pick up like a fantasy or sci fi novel or something, it's usually pretty easy to keep track of that, and I don't find that to be the

case with Paradise Lost. Furthermore, with that, write in quotation marks where they begin speaking, and write the ending quotation marks at the end of their speech. This helps you to keep track of where they're speaking where they're not. Some editions might have some quotation marks in them, but I haven't seen any that have them for every speech. So it helps you to know when somebody's actually talking and when there's just a descriptive poetic narrative about what's happening.

And then, thirdly, and finally with this, this goes hand in hand with the speaker, write the setting out every time the setting changes. This will there will be multiple settings at times within just one book of Paradise Lost. So write that there's you're going to get a description of when the setting changes, right right, the setting right, Oh, they're in Eden now, now they're in Heaven and the

angels are talking. Now they're within the Godhead, and perhaps even in the in the Empyre and in the in the transcendent realm that goes beyond all the cosmos. Right when, right when they're in Hell, when Satan's talking to his demons, or when he's at the gates of Hell trying to get out, keep track of all these things. There's this. It's it's good to note that at the end of the day. And I think that'll be extremely helpful for especially when you try to revisit things and reread things

for further comprehension. That'll be extremely helpful. And just remember if you're not if you can't get over the writing on a book thing, write in your books, especially the hard ones, and don't see rereading a book with notes and as a bad thing. See it as a good thing. Because if you come back and there's questions that you are things you wrote down and you think, oh, that was stupid, that was foolish. I wasn't thinking about this, right,

Celebrate that, you know why, because that's growth. That means you've learned something since your last visit, and you will grow in every revisitation of a great book. And it's wonderful to be able to see your progress with that. So don't look that as a bad thing. We'll get as a good thing and a beautiful thing. You are growing in your intellectual life and journey, and that is wonderful. Anyway,

this has been rather lengthy. This is the longest video I'm going to record for these introductory videos, but this is the most important one and the one that you would want to pay the most attention to you and hopefully take notes on. I hope this has been really helpful though overall, and I really look forward to our journey through Paradise Lost together this semester. Thank you and God bless.