Paradise Lost: Book I - The Complete and Exhaustive Story Retelling The Poet Announces His Grand Theme and Purpose

Paradise Lost: Book One - The Complete and Exhaustive Story Retelling The Poet Announces His Grand Theme and

Purpose

The story of Paradise Lost begins with one of the most ambitious opening moments in all of literary history. The poet John Milton, a man who by the time he wrote this poem had gone completely blind, announces to his readers and listeners that he is about to undertake something that no writer in the history of human literature has ever attempted before. He is going to tell the story of everything, the very first moment when human happiness was shattered, the original cause of all suffering and death and sorrow that has ever existed in the world, and the grand divine plan that works even through that catastrophe toward the ultimate redemption of humanity.

Milton opens by focusing our attention on the fruit of the forbidden tree. This single image, a piece of fruit hanging on a tree in a garden, carries the entire weight of human history within it. That fruit represented the one commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They were permitted everything else in that paradise of perfect happiness. Every other tree, every pleasure, every experience of that magnificent garden was available to them freely and joyfully. Only the fruit of one tree was forbidden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God warned them clearly that to eat of it would bring death. Yet they ate it. That moment of disobedience, the very first act of human rebellion against divine authority, is what Milton calls the mortal taste, mortal in both its senses, meaning both human and death-bringing.

The consequences of that single act were catastrophic beyond imagination. Death entered the world for the first time. Woe descended upon all humanity. The blissful seat of Eden was lost to the first human beings and to all who came after them. Everything that humanity suffers, every pain and grief and loss and illness and cruelty and injustice that has ever existed in human experience, traces its origins back to that single moment in the garden. Milton wants us to feel the full weight of this, to understand just how much was lost and how much damage was done by what might seem like such a small thing.

But Milton does not present this story purely as tragedy. He frames it within the larger context of divine providence and the hope of redemption. He tells us that one greater Man will eventually restore what was lost and regain the blissful seat for humanity. This greater Man is Jesus Christ, and Milton's poem is set against the backdrop of the entire sweep of sacred history, from the very beginning of creation to the ultimate promise of salvation. The fall of humanity is terrible, but it is not the end of the story.

With this grand theme announced, Milton turns immediately to invoke the assistance of his Muse. This is a traditional gesture in epic poetry, going back to Homer and Virgil, where the poet calls upon a divine source of inspiration to help him tell a story too vast and too important for merely human abilities. But Milton's invocation is distinctly and powerfully Christian rather than classical. He calls upon the Heavenly Muse, but he locates this Muse not on the classical Greek mountain of the Muses but on the sacred mountains of Hebrew scripture.

He mentions Oreb and Sinai first, those holy peaks in the desert where God spoke most directly and powerfully in the Old Testament. It was on Sinai that Moses received the Ten Commandments, the fundamental law of God. It was in these same desert places that the shepherd, meaning Moses himself, was first taught by divine inspiration how to write the account of the beginning of all things, how the heavens and earth rose out of Chaos at God's creative word. The Muse that Milton invokes is therefore not a classical deity but the divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit itself, the same power that moved Moses to write the Book of Genesis.

Milton then offers his Muse an alternative location, showing that this inspiration is not bound to any single place. If the Muse prefers Sion hill, which is the holy mountain of Jerusalem, or the brook of Siloa that flows near the oracle of God, then Milton is equally happy to invoke its presence there. What matters is not the specific geographical location but the nature of the inspiration, which is divine and holy.

The scope of what Milton is attempting is made very clear in these opening lines. He intends his poem to pursue things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. No one has ever written an epic on this subject before with this level of theological seriousness and poetic ambition. He intends to fly above even the greatest of classical poetic traditions, represented by the Aonian mount of the Greek Muses. His poem will surpass even Homer and Virgil not merely in literary achievement but in the grandeur and importance of its subject matter, because he is dealing not with the wars of men or the founding of cities but with the very origin of human history and the plan of divine salvation.

The Invocation to the Holy Spirit

Milton's second invocation is even more directly spiritual than the first. He addresses the Spirit specifically, the Holy Spirit of Christian theology, and makes a point of noting something theologically important about this Spirit's nature. The Spirit does not prefer before all else the outward forms of religion, the grand temples built by human hands, the elaborate ceremonies and rituals of formal worship. What the Spirit prefers is the upright heart and pure, the inner life of genuine virtue and sincere devotion. This is a deeply Protestant and deeply personal theological position, characteristic of Milton's religious outlook throughout his life.

Milton then asks the Spirit for three things. First, he asks to be instructed, because the Spirit was present from the very beginning and witnessed everything that Milton is about to describe. Second, he asks to have his darkness illuminated, recognizing that as a human being and a fallen creature he is himself subject to the very darkness that his poem explores. Third, he asks to have what is low in him raised and supported, acknowledging his own weakness and insufficiency for the task he has undertaken.

The purpose of all this assistance is stated with magnificent clarity. Milton wants to rise to the height of his great argument. He wants to assert Eternal Providence, meaning he wants to demonstrate and defend the truth that God's plan for creation and for humanity is eternally wise and good, even in the face of all the suffering and evil that exists in the world. And most famously of all, he wants to justify the ways of God to men. This phrase is one of the most famous in all of English literature, and it states the central theological and philosophical project of the entire poem. Milton is not simply telling a story. He is making an argument. He is defending God's actions and decisions against all possible objections, showing that what happened in the garden and what followed from it was not arbitrary cruelty or negligence on God's part but part of a wise and providential design that ultimately works toward the good of all humanity.