[Milton-L] Justify God?

[Michael Bauman]

So many of the complaints one hears directed at God seem to me to ask for a poet to justify the ways of man to man.  Judging from some of the objections raised, God seems seems not to be the issue.
________________________________________
From: milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu [milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu] On Behalf Of Boyd M Berry/FS/VCU [bberry at vcu.edu]
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 2:35 PM
To: John Milton Discussion List
Subject: Re: [Milton-L] Justify God?

Yes, well-put.  The last comment recalls the many complaints, both sides, about the killing of the civil wars.

Boyd M. Berry
-----milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu wrote: -----

To: John Milton Discussion List <milton-l at lists.richmond.edu>
From: Margaret Thickstun <mthickst at hamilton.edu>
Sent by: milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu
Date: 10/08/2008 03:15PM
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 , 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


_______________________________________________
Milton-L mailing list
Milton-L at lists.richmond.edu
Manage your list membership and access list archives at http://lists.richmond.edu/mailman/listinfo/milton-l