Paradise Lost context Flashcards
Milton the humanist - Greenlaw
“Adams fall is when passion conquers reason (being the poems true theme). For this reason, the apple has to be reduced to a empty symbol. If the apple is presented as the forbidden thing testing ‘Disobediance’ then we are more interested in the religious meaning of Genesis that the behavioural topic of temperance” - GREENLAW
i.e its more about using reason to control passion (comes from Plato, Greek Philosopher) more that the bible.
Willey’s arguments on Milton (humanist over theologian)
Milton believed in liberty and the pursuit of knowledge. since he also believed in God’s authority over man, liberty for him was restricted. Milton chooses to justify the “ways of God to man”, yet he contradicts himself: by deploring the disobedience of the fall, Adam and Eve choose knowledge over obedience which is ‘the birth..of [mans] capacity for true “liberty”’. qq
Milton and Satan as political rebels
Milton fought in the rebellion against Charlies 1st.
satan’s rhetoric represents himself as a freedom fighter: “i in one night freed from servitude inglorious”.
in book 1 Satan calls God “the tyranny of heaven”
Milton’s The readie and Easie way: milton scorns “the perpetual boeings and cringings of an abject people…deifying and adoring” a new king.
Satan as Cromwell (in power 1640).
milton makes satan sound like a bold revolutionary one moment and a conservative royalist the next:
“empress of this fair world”… uses monarchial language,
“i who erst contended with gods to sit the highest”
in book 2 Satan sits “high on a throne of royal state”
book seven paradise lost about the God and language
“Let there be light, said God, and forthwith light…Sprung from the deep”.
The use of coordinating conjuctions demonstrates how God’s language is the tool to his actions. After the fall, however, language is a different kind of action: a masking or distracting from reality. Jonson and Milton present in their texts how, unlike the word of God, characters use language as means of manipulating and misleading rather than stating their actions.
book 10 Eve’s punishment
to thy Husbands will
Thine shall submit, hee over thee shall rule.
