Peter Costello
Alan Jacobs teaching Paradise Lost: A Biography
Alan Jacobs
Princeton University Press, £20.00 / €22.99
He may be known to some readers as the author of a most interesting and arresting book, The Years of Our Lord 1943, in which he examines through the writings of a set of writers – C. S. Lewis, W. H Auden, Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot and Simone Weil – the role of Christian humanism in an age of crisis, seeking to promote the idea “of the vital need to restore Christianity to a leading role in the renewal of Western World.”
For the past thirty years he has also taught a course to enlighten his students over that time about John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For many of these the seventeenth century world view of the English poet might have seemed strange indeed. The idea of this book, as a contribution to a Princeton series, called “Lives of Great Religious Books”, for which he had already written a similar work on The Book of Common Prayer, came from his teaching experience.
Milton had long been haunted by the notion of writing an epic. He had toyed at first with the legend of King Arthur, a story that goes to the heart of British identity for which he could have utilised the compendium of Sir Thomas Mallory Le Morte d’Arthur. But that was a limiting scheme. He really wanted something far grander, and so took up the theme outlined in some 700 words in Genesis III: 1-21, the Fall of Mankind. Here was surely the most important of all stories that could ever be told.
Sentiments
In his own preface Jacobs quotes a passage from C. S. Lewis, writing in 1942, the period he had examined in his earlier book, which is very relevant.
“I think it is quite true that in some very important sense [Paradise Lost] is not a religious poem. If a Christian reader has found his devotion quickened by reading the medieval hymns or Dante or Herbert or Traherne, or even Patmore or Cowper, and then turns to Paradise Lost, he will be disappointed. How cold, how heavy and external it all seems! How many blankets seem to be interposed between us and our object.”
The controversies as outlined here are extraordinary, even to the extent of making Satan the central and most interesting character”
These sentiments I think many readers will agree with, having felt it themselves, if only through reading Milton at school. So Paradise Lost, and its largely unread pendant Paradise Regain, are a literary enterprise; they are not so to speak de fide.
But this is a biography of the work, not a critique. Jacobs sets out first a brief account of the poet’s life – not all of which was devoted to literature. Milton was the Latin Secretary of the Commonwealth, the equivalent of Minister for Foreign Affairs, of the English republic under Cromwell.
Cromwell is a person who still has many admirers, the sort of people who moved the erection of a statue of him outside the Houses of Parliament that he disdained. Cromwell is certainly no heroic figure in most of this island.
Milton wrote on the freedom of the press, but that freedom did not include Catholics, who remained a danger to the state and to Christian truth as Milton saw it.
But Jacobs then advances from the public man to the private poet, who was also in a different way a public person. But the heart of the book is devoted to the changing fortunes of the book, which has always had its detractors, notably that high Tory Dr Samuel Johnson, one of those for whom the executed Charles I was a saintly martyr.
Milton was then 59, an old man in many ways, seven years from his death, when in 1667 the poem was given to the world by the printer Peter Parker, “under Creed Church, near Aldgate “.
In the centuries since it has lived a much contested life. The controversies as outlined here are extraordinary, even to the extent of making Satan the central and most interesting character!
However many people may dislike Milton, however many may dislike as well his religious beliefs, we still have to face up to the fact that Paradise Lost as a monument of English literature, And this is what Jacobs does with polished insight and adroitness.
Theme
Choosing an important theme does not always lead to artistic accomplishment. Or popularity. As Jacobs rightly notes, the poem is read for its serious intentions, but not out of a sense of admiring love.
That love was reserved, and not only among the English, for The Pilgrim’s Progress of 1678 by John Bunyan, the Bedford tinsmith who wrote the work while he was imprisoned for continuing his activities as a non-Conformist preacher under the Restoration.
His work is one of the most widely printed of all books in the English language, some 1300 editions having appeared by 1938, some 250 years after Bunyan’s death. And it is still as widely read in many different editions across the English speaking world today.
This was a truly popular work, and has in its time had many Catholic admirers. As C. S. Lewis observed this was because they were truly moved by Bunyan’s heartfelt expression. The high art of Paradise Lost still remains, as it was in the beginning, a monumental one, as cold and crafted as highly polished marble.
He really wanted something far grander, and so took up the theme outlined in some 700 words in Genesis III: 1-21, the Fall of Mankind. Here was surely the most important of all stories that could ever be told”