Chapter Themes of Paradise Lost - Study Guide by John Milton

to the effectiveness of the pastoral genre is the feeling or literary experience of the idyllic state that came before; in Paradise Lost Milton has purposefully excluded this.

Among early modern Protestants overconfidence in God’s grace was an issue that merited significant discussion, even considered a sin by some.

"This Paradise I give thee, count it thine

To till and keep, and of the fruit to eat"

(VIII.319-20)

"Frail is our happiness, is this be so,

And Eden were no Eden thus exposed."

(IX.340-1)

The Fall

Milton follows the Bible in calling the forbidden tree the "Tree of Knowledge". The consequence of eating the fruit was knowledge of a certain kind: that good could be gained only by knowing evil. Adam and Eve gained knowledge of evil and knowledge of God’s providence when they fell from grace. Part of the sin in the Fall was the attempt to attain knowledge to equal God’s. Adam says,

"Full of doubt I stand,

Whether I should repent me now of sin

By me done and occasioned, or rejoice

Much more, that much good thereof shall spring,

To God more glory, more good will to men

From God, and over wrath grace shall abound."

One critic labelled this "the paradox of the fortunate fall". It is the pendant of Satan’s earlier soliloquy on his free will; Adam has the choice, as did Satan, to obey or ignore God.

Salvation

Of all theological issues treated in Paradise Lost it is that of salvation that receives the most attention. From the era of Luther Protestants answered the question under the terms of Sola fide, viz. the doctrine ‘By Faith Alone’. This doctrine was one of the principal divisions between Protestants and Catholics (the Roman church upholding the value of ‘good works’, intercession of the saints, and receipt of the sacraments), and even within the Protestant faith, up until Milton’s own times. The Lutheran position made for an interiorisation of the believer, removing the physicality and visibility of the Christian’s search for salvation.

Salvation in Calvinist theology was governed by the doctrine of double Predestination. This was a deterministic interpretation of God’s foreknowledge. Calvinists believed that God had made prior judgement of mankind. Hence there were those ‘saints’, or the ‘just’ – viz. those who would receive God’s grace and ascend to the divine spheres – and the ‘reprobate’, or the ‘unjust’, who were damned beyond all efforts at redemption. Understandably, this doctrine had a major impact on individuals’ lives, particularly psychologically, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It raised many theological problems about the nature of God