Paradise Lost Critical Comments

Percy Shelley

‘Milton’s Devil as a moral being is… far superior to God’

Leonard

‘Satan’s character ‘rots away’ when he strikes at God through Adam and Eve’

Steadman

‘The Satanic image is… an eidolon of the true heroic virtues’

C.S. Lewis (fallen state)

‘Seeing God as malevolent or Satan as attractive is simply an indication of a Fallen State’

Revard

‘Neither God’s foreknowledge nor Satan’s temptings excuse Adam and Eve’

Revard (free will)

‘To require Eve’s obedience without free choice would be to destroy the liberty of Eden’

Revard (love for God)

‘Eve needed no more than a zealous love for God to protect her from Satan’s lies’

McColley

‘Even though we know the outcome, Eve is characterised so that it need not have happened - our foreknowledge does not touch the freedom of her will’

Bowers

‘pride that sets her in opposition to Adam and leads to the Fall’

Bowers (guilt)

‘Adam is more guilty than Eve because he fails in his divinely appointed task as her protector, head, and guide’

C.S. Lewis

‘Adam fell by uxoriousness’

Empsom

‘disobedience of God is a positive act that rescues mankind from an unvarying routine of genuflection and makes possible the… search for self-knowledge’

Blake

‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it’

C.S. Lewis (Paradise)

‘fails to convince us that Adam and Eve are happy’

Hanford

‘[The tragedy’s] intensity is necessarily lessened by the requirements of the broader narrative and by the co-existence of a didactic and philosophic purpose’