Christian life is rooted in a story with a specific plot. It begins with God’s creation of the world, builds with humanity’s fall from grace, climaxes in God’s redemption of the world through Christ, and resolves with the establishment of God’s eternal kingdom.
The stickiest of these plot points is the fall from grace: Why would a good God allow sin to enter the world? Why wouldn’t a powerful God stop Adam and Eve from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Why would an omniscient God create the tree in the first place? These are all variations on a question most people have asked at some point: If God is good, then why is there such evil in the world?
The English poet John Milton grappled with this question in his famous epic, Paradise Lost, first published in 1667. And Alan Jacobs grapples with the meaning and legacy of Milton’s landmark poem in his latest book, Paradise Lost: A Biography.
Jacobs, now based at Baylor University after teaching for decades at Wheaton College, is among the most important Christian scholars at work today. He has written extensively on C. S. Lewis and the poet W. H. Auden, and his essays on issues as varied as technology, theology, and the art of reading provide a consistent model of academically informed but broadly accessible prose. Those traits are on impressive display as Jacobs guides readers through Milton’s masterwork.
For many contemporary readers, diving into a complex work like Paradise Lost can seem like a forbidding prospect. Even a few lines in, both the language and the form itself can feel intimidating. In fact, the very idea of reading a 17th-century poem seems daunting. Thankfully, faithful Christian scholars like Jacobs can help us close the gap between old writings and our modern world.
In his 2020 book Breaking Bread with the Dead, Jacobs argues there is great value in reading books from outside our own era. It is inevitable, he contends, that people become prisoners of their moment, nearly incapable of imagining alternative ways of thinking and acting. One solution to this problem is exposing ourselves to writers and thinkers whose older customs, rituals, and cultural assumptions gave them different perspectives on the questions we share in common.
Jacobs’s “biography” of Paradise Lost puts that philosophy into practice. It might seem strange to write about a book or poem in the same manner as one would chronicle an individual human life. But if we conceive of books like Paradise Lost as works of art that outlive their authors, then it makes sense to think of them as having lives of their own.
In the first two chapters, Jacobs briefly describes the life and times of Milton and provides an overview of his most famous poem. The final four chapters tell the story of the poem’s reception, covering everything from initial reactions to its influence on contemporary fiction, films, and even video games. The result is an accessible and insightful guide that ultimately tells us as much about how the world has changed over the last 400 years as it does about the 400-year-old poem itself.
In his own time and in the years soon after his death, Milton was known mainly as a political radical, but within a century he was rivaling—and by some measures eclipsing—Shakespeare as England’s bard. Jacobs notes that Milton was memorialized in Westminster Abbey alongside two other English literary greats, Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser, “three years before Shakespeare was thus acknowledged.” This drastic change in reputation, from troublemaker to versifier, can be ascribed almost entirely to Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic rendition of Satan’s revolt and its aftershocks in the Garden of Eden, where he successfully tempted our first parents to rebel against God as well.
Jacobs helps readers understand why it’s important that Milton chose to retell the story of Genesis 3 as an epic: “Any epic poem tells only a part, if the crucial part, of a larger story.” The Greek poet Homer, for instance, doesn’t tell the entire story of the Trojan War in the Iliad but only the final year of the decade-long saga. His audience would know the rest of the story and enjoy the deep dive into the nuances of one of its greatest chapters. Likewise, when you pick up Paradise Lost and read of humanity’s fall from grace, you’re reading an important part of a larger story—a detailed exploration of the characters and events that unleashed sin into the world and forever changed our relationship with our Creator.
Another central feature of the epic genre is that it typically focuses on a hero. Readers who know anything about Milton’s retelling of the Fall may also recall the judgment of the poet William Blake, who infamously argued that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Following Blake, many poets and scholars have interpreted Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. This view is now commonplace.
But if Satan is the hero of the Fall, the whole Christian story must be rewritten. By emphasizing Milton’s choice of epic as a genre and thus insisting that the poem be read in light of the larger Christian narrative, Jacobs challenges this prevailing view and restores the poem’s theological and devotional significance for 21st-century readers.
One way Jacobs arrives at a more compelling interpretation of Paradise Lost is by weaving the story of Milton’s transformation from political radical to poetic sage throughout his biography. Milton achieved the reputation of political firebrand by defending the 1649 execution of Charles I, who aroused the ire of England’s Parliament by asserting a divine right to rule. Milton became an apologist for regicide because of his passionate commitment to the principle of liberty, whether artistic, personal, political, or religious.
Milton’s central preoccupation, Jacobs tells us, was the legitimacy of the ruler. He believed the king who infringes on the God-given liberty of his subjects is an illegitimate king. Unfortunately for Milton, the English monarchy was eventually restored, little more than a decade after Charles was put to death. As a result, Milton lived the rest of his life as a political outcast, even imprisoned for a time.
When we read Paradise Lost—and especially the central conflict between God and Satan—in light of Milton’s life, interpreting Satan as the hero can make sense on the surface. One might say that Milton, a vocal opponent of authoritarian overreach, rejected the legitimacy of Charles I much as Satan rejected God’s right to rule. We might even identify with Satan when we consider the problem of evil raised above: If God could have prevented sin from entering the world, does he really deserve to sit on the throne of heaven with earth as his footstool?
Guiding us through centuries of interpretation, Jacobs helps us read Paradise Lost as Milton clearly intended. As one chapter in a longer story, humanity’s fall from grace is not evidence of God’s illegitimacy as king. Rather, it is a powerful justification of God’s love for his creation. It sets the stage for the next chapter: God’s redemption of the world through Christ. Make no mistake, Jacobs insists, the hero of the Christian narrative is Christ, the Son and the incarnation of the rightful king.
This central argument gets lost in many later interpretations of the poem, like those that mistake Satan as its hero—or others that picture Adam or Eve as the true protagonists. Some, like the literary critic William Empson, even bestow this status on Milton himself. (As Jacobs sums up this line of thought: Milton is “less wicked than the religion he professes,” but he “strives, with astonishing intelligence and artistic power, to make that religion seem less wicked than it is.”) Jacobs does an excellent job explaining these multifaceted, often contradictory readings of Paradise Lost while keeping the poem’s central argument in view.
I commend Paradise Lost to readers, along with Jacobs’s biography of this great work of poetic theology. While I’m at it, I encourage Christians to read Jacobs’s other books—in particular, his unofficial trilogy on reading, thinking, and learning, comprised of Breaking Bread with the Dead and two earlier volumes: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and How to Think. Together, they demonstrate how deep commitments to Christian Scripture and tradition can help us wrestle with voices from the past, as well as the voices that dominate our own contentious age.
Matthew Mullins is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures.
