Mel Gibson's recent film, The Passion of the Christ, opens with an ominous scene where Satan endeavours to dissuade Jesus from bearing the cross for the entire human race. What is peculiar about Satan's temptation are the questions that he...

Book Six of John Milton's Paradise Lost is a continuation of the angel Raphael's discourse to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He is recounting the fall of Satan, and focuses on the battles that take place between the angels and rebel angels....

It is important to note that a hero is not always someone who is working for the sake of furthering a just cause and that he does not have to be admired by everyone, including the reader. In fact, John Milton presents his audience with a quite...

“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it” (389). While this analysis by William Blake recognizes clear...

The philosophy of Milton’s time focuses primarily on the idea of hierarchy. Hierarchy is necessary in thought because all the categories of being indicate how things are ordered and demonstrate degrees in all the dimensions (Kuntz 8). The ideas of...

Satan is no longer to be feared: he is to be jeered, scorned, and mocked! At least this is the attitude shared by notable scholars like C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther, and Thomas More. Lewis devoted a whole book, The Screwtape Letters, to the cause;...

“After judgement done, mercy shown and redemption promised, the depiction of the hellish trinity- Satan, Sin and Death- appears grotesque.” Discuss.

In opposition to the Holy Trinity (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost), Paradise...

Eden is at the very centre of all major events in Paradise Lost Book IX, and Milton proves keen to exploit its potency as a setting. The Garden represents both the glory of God’s Creation and the fragility of its existence. Milton juxtaposes Satan...

In an attempt to defend both divine providence and free will, Milton’s God justifies the inherent discrepancy between destiny and free choice. Supporting the belief that Man is created with sufficient qualities to withstand on his own, Milton’s...

Milton’s Paradise Lost deviates significantly from the unadorned version of man’s fall from grace found in Genesis. This, however, was not a problem for Milton who (as a Puritan) believed that the embellishments he wrote were divinely inspired...

Throughout both ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Doctor Faustus,’ the authors draw upon the ideas of responsibility, free will, and blame. Marlowe, in ‘Doctor Faustus’, melds the conventional religious ideology of the Middle Ages with the comparatively new...

The originality of Milton’s <i>Paradise Lost</i> lies in its ability to transform the predominantly secular spirit of Homer, Virgil, Boiardo, and other masters of literary epic into a theological subject outside of the tradition....

Out of all the competing plots and themes in Paradise Lost, arguably the central and most important story is that of humanity’s first members, Adam and Eve, and their self-induced fall from grace into sin. The nature of their relationship is a...

The literature of the English Renaissance demonstrates a remarkable range of attitudes towards women. While there are significant proclamations of chivalric attitudes towards women such as Walter Raleigh's devotion to Queen Elizabeth I, nearly...

Being a devout Christian, reasonable freethinker and a popular writer with a political consciousness, John Milton took upon himself the ambitious task of writing a modern Christian epic in English, inspired by the classical pagan tradition of epic...

The battle between the need for structure and the creative freedom of chaos is one that sits at the heart much of great literature. They are never discussed as harmonious or complimenting; they must be in conflict and locked in eternal struggle....

Two of the most influential pieces of epic literature ever written—John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy— have much more in common than it might first appear. Upon further examination of both the epics, it becomes...

Satan’s Reason

The character of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost is a different portrayal than traditional biblical teachings imply. The Christian tradition provides a dichotomist view of heaven and hell, good and evil, God and Satan. Milton’s...

John Milton has a very distinct way of interpreting the Bible; he molds the story of the Bible into a rich and imaginative narrative story. The story reads like a legend or fairytale but rather than provoking the mind of the reader, it actually...

The tragic hero is a popular archetype of classic literature, generally referring to a character that embodies the qualities of a classic hero as well as a fatal flaw that dooms him to failure. In his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton...

Milton’s construction of Eve in Paradise Lost is beset with dithering ambiguity, with her identity being defined and redefined within. The text has been construed during the Restoration, on the backdrop of the libertine culture and the...

John Milton once wrote that all of his writings were moved “solely by a sense of duty” to God which propelled him to continue writing despite the fact that for part of his life he struggled with his relationship with the Church of England and the...

Lord Acton, a British historian, once said “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Over the course of human history, the Church has been the focus of many criticisms, including but not limited to the relationship with the...

Some months after the ignominious treatment of the English Lord Protector’s newly surfaced corpse marked the English commonwealth’s official demise, one of the Royalists who bayed for the spilling of John Milton’s blood flicked his satirical ink...