[Milton-L] Justify God?

[Campbell, W. Gardner]

Well, any day that brings Edna St. Vincent Millay *and* Margie Thickstun
into my mailbox is a very good day.

 

I do think that Milton's theodicial project, however, is not just about
the problem of evil. It's also (and even more urgently) about the
problem of goodness. "The ways of God to men" commenced with the
Creation story for Milton, and it's Paradise that has to be justified
first, since that's where man's first disobedience took place-and man's
first *obedience* as well. As my kids would say, what's up with *that*?

 

Gardner 

 

From: milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu
[mailto:milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu] On Behalf Of Margaret
Thickstun
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 2:16 PM
To: John Milton Discussion List
Subject: Re: [Milton-L] Justify God?

 

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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