God is Psychic - Just Ask Milton: Predestination in "Paradise Lost"

“Paradise Lost”, a book-length poem about the creation of Hell and Earth, has many themes. One of the more prominent themes is that of predestination. Predestination is a fancy way to say that God has everything that has happened and that will happen already planned out in his big ole noggin. There are many occurrences of this throughout the book, many of which lead you to question the motives of The Almighty and some others that can help to switch on a little light-bulb in your head. Through the course of this paper, I will examine the Miltons affirmation of free will and predestination as one, the role of predestination in visions of the future and the acquisition of grace by man (including Prevenient Grace), and how predestination plays into life and religion in today’s culture.

Through the course of the 11000 plus lines, and 12 books, the one most prominent topic that Milton struck me with was predestination. Milton basically read Genesis, the first book of the Bible, and expanded upon it. In order to do this, Milton would have to have a great understanding of all things to do with religion and a wit to match that understanding. Many of the themes that are present through the poem require a good knowledge of the past and how Milton viewed religion and politics in the era in which he lived. Predestination overrides all other themes and appears to be one that should stand out and should be able to be understood through all periods of time, now and in the future. Although Milton never believed in predestination1, the poem appears to be jam-packed with allusions to the idea. In fact, Milton argues that the position that he applies to the characters is in fact free will and that the two are different in some ways. Milton was a “strong proponent2 ” of free will and disagreed when it was wrongly described as predestination. I believe that free will, according to Milton, would have had a much deeper meaning than we take it to have had.

If we were to look at this poem with a mind like Miltons, we would probably see that if we were to think about how God created the Earth and Hell and Adam, Eve, and Satan, then he would have known what was going to happen, but he let it happen. In this argument, we would look upon God as all knowing and indeed a psychic because he knows everything what is going to happen to Adam and Eve in Paradise, and he knows that before any of this happens, Lucifer and his rebel angels will rebel against him and fall from heaven into hell. Instead of informing everyone about the upcoming rebellion in Heaven, and the felix culpa, God decides to give us free will to decide weather we want to go along with what he knows will happen. If I could be so bold to use the analogy of Biff from “Back to the Future II”, Biff found a sports almanac in the future and stole the professors DeLorean time machine and went back in time to become filthy rich. What’s to stop God from being so bold as to have gone back in time and in knowing what would happen, place some bets of his own. Since God did indeed know what was going to happen, he still put the characters of all creation through rigorous testing to prove Himself right. In the case of Satan and the fallen angels, God created the Son who would test Lucifer while he was still an angel. This would test the loyalty of Lucifer and the other fallen angels, and in turn mark the beginning of the end for paradise.

If we wish to find examples from the poem of what it is that God is doing, granting free will, or using his predestined brilliance to shape the life of man, we look predominantly to book 3 of “Paradise Lost”. This book seems to be the major introduction to predestination as a player in the story unfolding before us. In this book, we see God’s reaction to Satan getting out of Hell and making his way to earth to corrupt the new creation of God. God and the Son converse throughout this book, and through these conversations, God confides in the Son that “Man falls first deceived by the other first (III, ll.130-31)”. In this statement, God is explaining that his creation will be deceived and will fall from the high pedestal that God has set them on in their easy life of Paradise. It is in this book that Milton first introduces the word “predestination” and how it fits into the whole mess of things that are going on. “…They therefore as to right belonged, So were created, nor can justly accuse, Their maker, or their making, or their fate, As if predestination overruled Their will, disposed by absolute decree Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed Their own revolt, not I: if I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.” Book III, ll. 111-119 In this passage, God is explaining his chosen lack of control over that which he has created. In this particular phrase, he is talking about the fallen angels and their revolt which came from inside themselves. If we are to believe that it is indeed free will that was given to man and the angels, then we would also have to believe that all men and angels in heaven have chosen to follow God of their own free will so that they may “honor and revere[3]” their Creator. You would have to think, since god created these angels, is it possible that he implanted the idea in Lucifer’s brain to revolt if he was ever denied his rightful place?

Later in the poem, Milton begins to tell of the roles of angels which came down to talk to Adam about what they should be doing with their lives and what will happen as a result of their fall from grace. In the latter books of the poem, actually more like the entire second half, the angel Raphael and the archangel Michael come to visit Adam and Eve and tell them stories of what has happened and what will happen in the spiritual plane, which they long for knowledge of, and the natural plane, in which they dwell. When Raphael comes to visit, he tells the story of the fall of Satan and the other rebel angels and of the battle in heaven. During this “story time” Raphael proceeds to inform Adam that because of the test that God had for Lucifer, they indeed fell and became Satan and his band of rebel angels. Through telling this story, Raphael tells of the intense battle that goes on in heaven. The rebel angels creating cannons and gun powder to fight the heavenly angels, the heavenly angels moving mountains to destroy the cannons of the rebel cannons, and how it all ended with the Son. God, having his predestined knowledge of how this battle would be won and how pointless the battle was, he still allowed it to go on for three days. The battle ended with the Son hurling lightning at the rebel angels causing them to fall through the clouds and fall for nine days to hell. Why did God let this happen on the third day and not the first day, right at the beginning of the battle? God let things roll out this way because he wanted to let the rebel angels think that they had a chance to win in heaven so that they would be especially angry with heaven and all who dwell within. Doing this, Satan would have become so angry with God that he would want to destroy anything that he could to get back at God, including Man and Earth. In drawing out the battle in heaven, God secured the chance he had to cause the fall of man.

From an angel to an archangel, we move to Michael and his visit to Adam and Eve after the fall from Paradise. At the beginning of book XI, Michael comes to tell Adam and Eve of the future and how, their deed will benefit all mankind and their offspring for generations and generations. The archangel proceeds to put Eve to sleep and bring Adam to the top of a mountain to show him what will become of mankind. He is shown great battles, power crazed leaders, catastrophic events and the diversification of man. If it was not for the fall, then there would be no way to tell weather those who came after then were worthy of Grace. Since it was the plan of God to create Earth and man as a means to, more or less, replace the angels who had fallen with Satan to Hell with those who would prove themselves worthy on Earth and obtain the grace of God and ascend to the heavens that await. Grace, from a theological point of view, comes in two different types. Prevenient grace and Subsequent grace. As defined by Boswell, for Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, prevenient grace “is a temporary or assistance given by God enabling man to exercise his free will and to accept the gift of salvation.” This grace was denied of Adam and Eve so that it could be offered to those who came after them.

Miltons way of addressing predestination in the 1600’s was to deny its existence and call it Free will. Today it seems as though if we were to try and call this free will, then we would be the ones in the wrong. Words have come a long way in their meaning in the last four hundred years. Predestination in today’s society can be referred to as having a psychic mind and the ability to talk of things that would be impossible to have knowledge of, unless the person was actually there at the time. In Miltons time, this would most likely be seen as the black arts, or black magic and would have had a person persecuted and killed in some vile manor. This may have been part of Miltons overall plan in the whole mess of things. It seems that Milton gave the role of the protagonist to Satan and his minions, and that of an uneventful antagonist who does nothing but tell people what is going to happen and send others to do his bidding, not to mention he banishes us from paradise. Milton appears to make God less likable and more wrathful for a purpose though. If we had a nice and forgiving God from the beginning of man, then we would have taken this for granted and none of our ancestors would have believed religions stories and we most likely would have lost religion all together. In making God the antagonist in this poem, Milton incites the people who read it to become more prominent church goers and to examine the ways in which they live to conform to what God expects of us.

In conclusion, if we look again at “Paradise Lost” as a whole, we can see that it is a long explanation of how God sees all and knows all. God is meant to be seen as an overseer of all that goes on on his pet creation that is Earth. As such, he is made to have been the instigator of the end of a good thing for us. If God had not tempted Satan to rebel by creating the Son, then none of this would have ever happened. For that matter, neither would we according to Milton. Man is a creation of necessity by God. God needed to replenish his numbers in Heaven simply because (or so it seems to me) he didn’t have anything else to do. God set off on this grand scheme to create the earth and man knowing that we would eventually be tempted by Satan and would fall. In doing this, God has made it so that we could prove ourselves worthy of his good graces and could prove ourselves worthy of a place in heaven.

References

Haller, W. “Order and Progress in “Paradise Lost”.” PMLA. 35. 2. (1920): 218-225.

Boswell, J.C. “Milton and Prevenient Grace” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 7.1. (1967): 83-94

Kelley, M. “The Theological Dogma of “Paradise Lost”, III, 173-202” PMLA. 52.1 (1937): 75-79

Milton, John. ““Paradise Lost”.” John Milton: The Major Works. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Patel, Saif. “““Paradise Lost”:” A Revival of the Spirit.” Luminarium. 1 April 2006.