The Friends House Meeting book group. Photo: Courtesy of Tim Robertson.
A good read? Tim Robertson and Friends look at Paradise Lost
‘We much preferred the free-spirited Satan.’
The end of 2024 brought a sense of accomplishment to a group of us at Friends House Meeting in London.
The year marked 350 years since the death of John Milton, and the publication of Paradise Lost, his long narrative poem of Satan, God, Adam, and Eve. It sprang from the same tumultuous period that produced Quakerism, and since Milton, as a Cromwellian Puritan, opposed the same hierarchies as early Friends, we decided to spend the year reading the poem together.
We read one book (or chapter) per month and discussed it over a shared supper. Some of us vaguely recalled parts from school or university, but I would never now get through 250 pages of seventeenth-century verse without group support. From Satan’s rebellion in January, to Adam and Eve’s expulsion just before Christmas, we went on a cosmic journey that generated debate, puzzlement, enlightenment, and above all fellowship and laughter.
‘Milton ties himself in knots.’
Much of our laughter was at Milton’s expense. His leaps of imagination include depicting the way angels eat, even though they don’t have bodies. And he ties himself in knots trying to account for God being omniscient, omnipotent and merciful while also punishing Adam and Eve. At times we found the poet repugnant – especially his misogyny: Eve is blamed for the Fall and then given a permanent role of subservience and childbearing.
The reading experience was like watching a Cecil B DeMille movie: amazing colours, sounds and scale, but heavy-handed plot and stereotypes. Like many readers since William Blake, who famously said Milton was ‘of the devil’s party’, we were particularly repelled by the cold authoritarianism of God the Father. Don’t tell Churches Together, but we much preferred the free-spirited Satan.
Eve and Adam become touchingly human only after they have sinned – and perhaps this is Milton’s point. Was he conscious that his message of learning to respect God’s will is contradicted by the enthrallingly varied empathies and questions that the story actually raises?
What we didn’t find much of is spirituality. Milton describes and explains, rather than implies or evokes. But the gap between Milton’s intellectual intentions and his emotional or social impact seems to me a very Quakerly space – unprescribed, enigmatic, full of radical potential.
A terrific new book, What In Me Is Dark: The revolutionary life of Paradise Lost, sets out the poem’s remarkable influence on 350 years of activism, from the abolitionists to feminism to anti-racism. Much of this is inspired by Satan’s defiance: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’ In the lovely closing pages, as Adam and Eve are sent out into the world, the archangel Michael promises that they ‘shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far’. For Milton’s rebel, and for spirit-led humans, truth and joy arise primarily from transformative inner power.
