“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669Hold, as you yours, while our obedience holds;
On other surety none; freely we serve,
Because wee freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall. (5.535–40)God proceeds in the Dialogue in Heaven (3.166–216) to explain his decree of
predestination to salvation, which pertains only to humans and not to reprobate
angels whose guilt is greater. By that decree, also eternal, God offers grace to all
humankind, renewing their “lapsed powers,” clearing their “senses dark,” soften-
ing “stonie hearts,” and providing conscience as their guide, so that all who re-
spond, believe, and persist to the end will be saved: “Light after light well us’d
they shall attain, / And to the end persisting, safe arrive” (3.196–7). While God
offers “peculiar grace” to some who are “elect above the rest,” he offers sufficient
grace to all, so that only those who neglect and scorn “my long sufferance and my
day of grace” will be lost: “none but such from mercy I exclude” (3.198–202).
Satan’s soliloquy (4.32–113) exposes the mental torment of that reprobate angel
who, driven to admit guilt and to lament his grievous loss and misery, is both
unwilling and unable to repent, but instead commits himself to ever greater evil:
“Evil be thou my Good” (4.110). After the Fall, Adam in soliloquy (10.720–845)
voices a comparable mental torment, guilt, misery, and despair, culminating in a
wrathful denunciation of Eve which bids fair to leave him utterly alone, cut off
from God and human society. But God’s grace removes the “stonie” from the
hearts of Adam and Eve (11.3–5), and they respond with repentance and recon-
ciliation.
Milton’s epic universe is monist, exhibiting the “animist materialism” that Milton
sketched out in De Doctrina Christiana as a response to Hobbesian mechanistic and
deterministic materialism.^134 In the poem as in the treatise, Milton describes spirit
and matter as manifestations, differing only in degree, of the one corporeal sub-
stance of which all things are created.^135 Raphael’s first lecture to Adam and Eve,
prompted by Adam’s question as to whether angels, being spirits, can eat earthly
food, lays out for Adam and Eve the nature of the universe they inhabit:
O Adam, one Almightie is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav’d from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Indu’d with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refin’d, more spiritous, and pure,
As neerer to him plac’t or neerer tending
Each in thir several active Sphears assignd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportiond to each kind. (5.469–79)