“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669To manifest thee worthiest to be Heir / Of all things, to be Heir and to be King”
(6.703–8). In the Creation he is again God’s willing instrument and agent: “by thee
/ This I perform, speak thou, and be it don” (7.163–4). After the Fall, the Son takes
the initiative in acting as advocate for sinful humankind, but the Father still pro-
claims himself as the ultimate source of Adam and Eve’s regeneration and of the
Son’s mediation for them: “All thy request was my Decree” (11.47).
Milton’s Arminianism lies at the heart of the theodicy which is the stated intent
of Paradise Lost: To “justifie the wayes of God to men.” As a poet Milton under-
takes to accomplish this less by theological argument than by the imaginative vision
the entire poem presents of human life and the human condition as good, despite
the tragedy of the Fall and “all our woe.” That seems a quixotic, though rather
wonderful, affirmation from a poet who endured the agony of total blindness through-
out his most creative years and experienced the utter defeat of the political cause to
which he gave twenty years of his life. That affirmation is inextricably linked with
Milton’s idea of human freedom, moral responsibility, and capacity for growth and
change, grounded upon the version of Arminianism he argues for in De Doctrina
Christiana and dramatizes in Paradise Lost.^133 In the Dialogue in Heaven (3.80–128)
God explains and defends his “high Decree” that from all eternity mandates contin-
gency and freedom for both angels and humans and thereby secures to both orders
a genuine freedom of choice, whose results he foresees but does not determine.
Humans were made “just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,”
and the same is true of “all th’ Ethereal Powers / And Spirits, both them who stood
and them who faild.” If it were not so, God declares, the noblest acts of faith, love,
and true allegiance by angels and humans would be meaningless, and “Will and
Reason (Reason also is choice) / Useless and vain” (3.98–109). He concludes:
So without least impulse or shadow of Fate,
Or aught by me immutablie foreseen,
They trespass, Authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formd them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change
Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree
Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordain’d
Thir freedom: they themselves ordain’d thir fall. (3.120–8)Most exegetes held that the loyal angels always were unable to swerve from grace,
or at least became so after withstanding Satan’s temptation, but Milton’s angels, as
Raphael explains to Adam, are exactly like prelapsarian humans in that they must
continually and freely choose to act from obedience and love:
My self and all th’Angelic Host that stand
In sight of God enthron’d, our happie state