[Milton-L] Justify God?

[Carol Barton]

Jeffery Hodges asks:

As everyone knows, Milton gives this reason for composing Paradise Lost:

  That to the highth of this great Argument
  I may assert Eternal Providence,
  And justifie the wayes of God to men. [PL 1.24-26]

  (Luxon, Thomas H., ed. The Milton Reading Room, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton, October, 2008.)

For one reason, Jeffery, because, as Empson would much later, people then were questioning why a just and benevolent God would have made Lucifer and the reprobate angels and Adam and Eve susceptible of falling in the first place--in Empson's terminology, why God was in effect "playing with a stacked deck"? Theological issues were to the 1640s what politics and the economy are to today's world--topics of vital importance, over which people tortured and maimed and burned one another at the stake. The Yahweh of the Old Testament was a very harsh, very unforgiving deity, who (like his Greco-Roman predecessors) often seemed to behave in arbitrary ways . . . which didn't square at all with the New Testament's perception of a benevolent and merciful Logos. Milton could not accept the notion of God's culpability in human frailty or sinfulness . . . so on one level, the purpose of PL is to debunk such concepts.

Hope that quick, superficial response is helpful. The full answer is a much deeper one, of course, and a subject large enough for a full doctoral dissertation. (Believe me . . . I know!)

Best to all,

Carol Barton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.richmond.edu/pipermail/milton-l/attachments/20081008/1b8f757c/attachment-0001.html