[Milton-L] Justify God?

[Margaret Thickstun]

No one seems to be thinking about all the other reasons to question 
God's justice: diseases, death, the deaths of children, pain--and 
death--in childbirth, chronic pain such as severe toothache that you 
can't alleviate except by getting stinking drunk or maybe killing 
yourself.  Then looking about you, injustice, rape, murder, genocide.  
Milton elaborates on these things in Books 11 and 12.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay writes "not only under ground are the brains 
of men / eaten by maggots." 

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

So, thank God for Excedrin, morphine, epidurals, C-sections, 
transfusions, and all the advances in public health, but when I turn on 
the evening news to watch the latest who-blew-up-or-bombed-whom report, 
I understand the need to justify God's ways.--Margie


Horace Jeffery Hodges wrote:
> In answer to my question -- i.e., "Why does Milton want to justify 
> God's ways to men?" -- Gardner Campbell quoted Milton in /Areopagitica/:
>  
>
>     "many there be that complain of Divine Providence for suffering
>     Adam to transgress"
>
>  
> This implies that Milton was not simply responding to his own altered 
> fortunes in the Restoration:
>  
>
>     though fall'n on evil dayes,
>     On evil dayes though fall'n, and evil tongues; [PL 7.25-26]
>     (Luxon, Thomas H., ed. The Milton Reading Room,
>     http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton
>     <http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Emilton>, October, 2008.)
>
> But who were these "many . . . that complain"? Was Milton thinking of 
> contemporaries, or was he thinking of protests raised at previous 
> times in the history of Christianity?
>  
> Jeffery Hodges
>
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