Margaret Olofson Thickstun . Milton's Paradise Lost: Moral Education . New York and Houndsmills : Palgrave Macmillan , 2007 . xiv + 184 pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-4039-7757-1 . $65.00 (cloth ). Roughly thirty years ago I proposed to friends that people writing about Paradise Lost should state clearly their religious beliefs. That occurred as we were being told that Milton was divinely inspired, which seemed to me an extraordinary argument supposing knowledge of the activities of the deity. My friends responded to my proposition as the merest whimsy. Margaret Olofson Thickstun does not sing in that choir; she has in effect responded to my proposition in her Milton's Paradise Lost: Moral Education. Hers is, in my view, an extraordinary study, which is good to see someone undertake. One could say she proposes a Christian, feminist pedagogy, if only because most chapters and sections of chapters are headed by biblical quotations rather than Miltonic ones. But pedagogy, more than ideology is perhaps of central concern to her, although admittedly she might balk at “ideology.” Indeed one could also propose that Professor Thickstun takes a “holistic” (as the phrase is popular) approach to educating, both as it occurs in Paradise Lost and as one sets out to teach the poem to undergraduates in small classes. She announces at the outset that “I had been reading popular books on child-rearing” published in the wake of Piaget's work and her parenthood. Some of that will strike readers as old-fashioned and presumably “out of date.” Two examples would be her use of the two Perrys: William G. Perry on the intellectual development of college undergraduates (1968) and Perry G. E. Miller on covenantal theology (1956)—both good books though skewed of course and old. Thickstun points out that, particularly, Perry (but also the romantic Miller) attend to “narratives, that is to the stories that [they and] young people tell about themselves and to the language with which they do so” (x). She distinguishes between those “interested in Milton scholarship” and “undergraduate teaching” (xi), and notes that some readers “may resist this approach” because not sufficiently focused on “current Milton scholarship” (ix-xx). Thickstun proposes that Paradise Lost is an Arminian utterance (14) which, at least early in his controversial career would have astounded and repelled John Milton. The prelates were Arminians in his use of the common, disputational language of the time. However, Thickstun makes that somewhat bizarre move to emphasize prevenient grace, which implies free will and free choice, which clearly does seem to be the burden of the tale. One cannot exercise moral or ethical choice if grace is not prevenient, a view that emerges clearly in Book 3; it is a proposition that it is well to jump up and down on. My pedagogical aim, as I take it to be Thickstun's, is not to emphasize theologizing Paradise Lost, an activity that continues to attract other professional minds. In Process of Speech I urged that Milton's God was a “permissive parent,” and Thickstun basically concurs; my focus was on the verb “to permit,” hers on relationships and consequences as she opens her interpretive argument where we would expect to start, with the deity in Chapter 1. She argues that Milton read Scripture as providing “not systematic theology, not a theological discourse on ‘the nature of God,’ ” but as a “series of stories about God's intervention in human history, about God's interaction with human beings” (22; emphasis mine). She is focused on relationships, in short, starting with the relatednesses which follow from the deity's choice to create and to father, a “process leading toward its own obsolescence” (27). While her efforts to argue that Puritan fathers manifested the qualities she sees in Milton's God may not persuade, that does not detract from her presentation of God's relationships in Paradise Lost. Moving on to Satan, Thickstun may seem to infantilize that figure, arguing that “God offers the angels the challenge of interpretive independence, of growth, and Satan rejects it” (40). The challenge is part of the project, which, in Perry's model, undergraduate education performs on student psyches. Satan is the student who does not get it. Furthermore, prevenient grace means that no story is “fixed,” although bad interpretations of a story (as Satan makes of the revelation of the Son) lead only to fixity and backward motion. Satan's fathering clearly contrasts to the divine fathering. Sin and Death are not only features of allegory, in Thickstun's view, they help define fathering. Abdiel and the falling angels (the present participle is Thickstun's) fill the next chapter, somewhat infantilized again, since they are “capable of repenting and regaining to know God aright” and are “unused to making any choices at all, let alone moral ones” (55). Their moves appear to be predicted, according to the analysis of social psychologists, as if Thickstun's voice knows these “people” intimately from prior experience rather than from study of the text. The falling are like those afflicted by what Irving Janis called “groupthink” and “his list of the qualities characterizing such groups reads uncannily like a description of the fallen angels . . .” (64). Abdiel, clearly, is not part of “groupthink.” Thickstun next chooses to focus “on the good angels as young adults in relation to a divine parent” (71) and that parent “expects both the angels and humans to fulfill those tasks because they recognize that he loves them and has their best interests at heart” (73). Were a student to propose that view, I would commend her; our problem might be, however, finding basis for it in the text—which is not to say it is not there, but just that it is not explicit. In Chapter 5, Thickstun proposes that the Son manifests the result of his moral education. She argues that the Son's “response” to the council in heaven “is both ‘unbidden’ and unscripted”; both “are crucial to the way this scene works” (97). Her reading is based on the view that “God the Father knows that the Son will pass these tests, but the Son does not know it,” a sort of subordination not usually noted (100). Again, the voice here is in a way even more knowing than the Son. For Thickstun, Raphael's pedagogic goal is “to prepare Adam and Eve to explore the possibility of repentance” (109). That is, he must try to get unfallen creatures to respond in a way which will be effective once they fall, no simple or straightforward task. She quotes Regina Schwartz to the effect that “Raphael must confirm Adam in an approach toward knowing that will issue in praise” (108). The pedagogy here does not supply Adam with answers but encourages or aims “beyond conformity” to “mature commitment” (112). Raphael's comments that his words can be thought of only as a “version” opens for his students the matter of interpretation and how interpretation “should influence his life” (113). She notes how Raphael responds to “teachable moments,” all of which seem to occur only in Book 8. Implying a sort of prior back-story continues in Chapter 7, focused on Adam, his desire to be “in relationship,” and his teaching of Eve. Thickstun does not “believe that Eve truly wanted to garden separately,” (presumably because her focus is on protocapitalist efficiency) (129). “God did always plan to provide Eve” (125). Adam (and perhaps Eve) at some point made “choices about how and where to garden” (122)—a considerable back-story. And while it is pleasant to believe that having responsibility for Eve “gives Adam the courage to recover from his sin, to repent and move forward,” it is hard to square that proposition with Adam's behavior and speeches in Book 10 up to the time that Eve finally breaks through Adam's and the narrator's male self-absorption to get her speech into the record we can read. The final chapter studies Eve who, because she “has no one to educate,” may cause readers to think her inferior to Adam (137). Not surprisingly, given the pedagogical optimism undergirding the argument, Eve is seen developing morally, from her bad dream onward. “[E]ntering into relationship with Adam creates the framework for Eve's own moral development,” partly because Adam is there “to answer her questions” (143). Thickstun reads Eve's proposed separation as a function of her “developing sense of” her gardening responsibilities (shared with Adam). Thickstun's book is basically a pleasant read, and she is to be commended for engaging issues which infrequently get attended to by professional students of Milton's writing.