“So Shall the World Goe On”: A Providentialist Reading of Books Eleven and Twelve of Paradise Lost

Abstract

The essay provides a reading of Books Eleven and Twelve ofParadise Lostthat grants that the archangel Michael's vision-narrative embodies an exposition of the epic's professed “great Argument” to assert eternal providence. In the course of the revelation on the specular Mount, Adam, through a process of trial and error, is schooled “to learn/True patience” by looking beyond the accidents of fallen history to the presence of grace and by reforming his understanding of God's ways through the nature of the Son's victory. Adam's education is explored, from the preparatory administering of herbs, nostrums, and cleansing waters that brightens his spiritual perception, to the visual tableaux and verbal instruction of which Michael's pedagogy consists, to the “eureka” moment in which Adam makes his consummate discovery that divine comedy ultimately supplants human tragedy. In Eve's lyrical words, which constitute the final human utterance of the epic, and in the subtle atmosphere of the poem's elegantly poised and richly allusive account of the expulsion from Eden, Milton's fallen couple and his reader are left at once saddened by the Fall and cheered by the prospect of salvation—“though sorrowing, yet in peace”. He plainely shewed that his own profession Was virtue, patience, grace, love, piety: And how by suffering he could conquer more Than all the Kings that ever liv'd before.1 1Lanyer, ll. 957–60. … to sing the victorious agonies of Martyrs and Saints …2 2Milton, The Reason of Church-Government in Complete Prose Works, 1:817. Subsequent references to Milton's prose refer to the Latin of the theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana and derive from The Works of John Milton, edited by Frank A. Patterson et al. which is cited throughout as CE. I have attempted a literal translation of the Latin of the treatise.