Pill Pod 202 - Paradise has been Lost ft. Victor Hainagiu - PlasticPills - Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Just to kind of maybe, yeah, connect a little bit
of the politics and the poetics here. In real life,
Milton was a hardcore, you know, revolutionary. He argued for
freedom of the press, overthrowing the king, all of these
kinds of things. But in the poem we see, of
course the revolutionaries are the devils. Satan is a bad guy,
you know, at least from Milton's perspective, and later on,
of course romantic writers, other authors, they look to this

(00:22):
kind of hero as actually, no, this is a very
compelling antihero. He's a very sort of charismatic figure. So
one way that people kind of think about it is
that what Milton is sort of doing here, aside from
what we talked about with how you know we're meant
to kind of be seduced a little bit by Satan's
charisma and his oratory and stuff like that, is he's
also showing, how, you know, thinking about God is just

(00:43):
a king is a bit of a category mistake. God
is not just a monarch you can overthrow or something like.
Within this notion of freedom, God is more of a concept.
It's a philosophy. It's a theology that if you go
against that, you're breaking something much more fundamental than just
sort of, you know, overthrowing a king or a monarch.
So when Satan talks about his rebellion against God as

(01:04):
just sort of being you know, we got to overthrow
this s guy because he's sort of, you know, like
a tyrant or something. Satan is the one who doesn't
get it at that point, because he's kind of projecting
this language of kingship into something divined that that goes
beyond just like you know, the politics of a king
or subjects or stuff like that. So a lot of
this is kind of left to the readers like to

(01:25):
figure out and to sort of hash a show like
Milton does not lay this out at all explicitly. But
that's what makes it a really interesting poem too, is
that it's so ripe for discussion. Like we're seeing that
there's just so many ways that you have to sort
of kind of unpack it yourself, because on the surface,
it's really wild and out there and it's not quite
clear what we're supposed to make of it.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Okay, yes, everybody ready, all right, all right, we got
another episode of the Pill Pod for you all, and.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
Another episode we're revisiting an old of format we haven't
been back to for a while. That is our literature
corner with Litvic here, and we've got politics Vic as
well as Yes.

Speaker 4 (02:21):
Our dear leader Kim Jong Pills still absent.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yes, Chairman Pills is away on business non communist related probably,
and we are here with Litvic to discuss drum roll,
Paradise Lost.

Speaker 4 (02:40):
And before we start, I wanted to show you this.
I feel like Victor, maybe I'll show you this, but
like my old undergrad professor had this old coffee with
like tattered the book covers coming off, and like it's
interesting on the inside. I like, I don't know, And
actually I have a question about it because I was
talking about it with Eric before. But it's a copy
of Paradise Lost. Here's like the inside and it says

(03:01):
seventeen ninety nine, so you know that's pretty old. But
one thing I'm suspicious about, I guess and this you know,
you'll probably have the answer to this, but like it
looks like maybe the cover and the front were original.
When I'm flipping through the pages. The thing that got
me a little bit suspicious is I'm not seeing that
like long s what is the thing that looks like
an f So like when did that get phased out?

(03:21):
Because I feel like the fact that that's not in
there is like as kind of an alarm bell though
that it's maybe like was real.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, No, that's the addition you have is late seventeen hundred,
so that's already much more modern. Ste really the SF
thing that's a renaissance early modern kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, so it's possible these pages could be original seventeen
ninety nine and not have the long s.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Oh yeah, if it was in the seventeen hundreds, it
would be like increasingly modern, like you have modern dictionaries
and stuff.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
You should get that appraised. Man, that could be worth
money for.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
I mean, it's in terrible it's in terrible condition. I
think I once looked it up, like because my old
uh sorry, my underground philosophy professor she just had this book.
I don't know where she got it and she was
moving away, she retired to the Isle of Wight in
the U and she she was just gave me a
bunch of her books and like, I'm and I think
i'd always like noticed it and she was like you
can take that if you want, and I was like, okay, cool,

(04:08):
Like I'll take this is like kind of a fun
thing to have on the mantle, and like I looked
up So I looked up this edition seventeen and I
think it's worth like nothing, like not that much. I
think if it was in good condition, it'd be worth
like a couple hundred bucks.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
You thought, one day, I'm going to do a podcast
on this old book.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
I have one from nineteen twenty two, but you belonged
to Arnold Bennett or some writer who knew Virginia Wolf.
And I thought, man, this is a prized possession. But
seventeen nineties, that's that's twice as old.

Speaker 4 (04:33):
I mean, you'd think that it was.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Yeah, that book looks straight out of Petrarch's collection or
some ancient text finder.

Speaker 4 (04:39):
So because it's it's not, I don't think worse necessarily
that much. I was actually thinking maybe one day I'll
just like have some book dealer like at a cover
or maybe put it back together. But I know that
if it's actually a valuable book, they say don't do that,
because they'd write, like, if it's actually really valuable, they're
like leave it in its statter condition, because like people
would want to have as much of the original as possible,
But anyway, interesting little factoid to start discussion. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Another thing just to get now into a more concrete
discussion is we've been doing this series too on freedom
from like a political and philosophical angle and totally unplanned
really turning to John Milton and Paradise Lost, but it
turns out freedom is a major and sort of ambiguous

(05:26):
theme throughout not only Paradise Lost, but John Milton's sort
of own life and the political movements that he was
a part of and fought against, and the whole entire
you know, everything leading up to the restoration in England

(05:46):
in the seventeenth century was all battles over political and
religious freedom. So interesting coincidence.

Speaker 4 (05:55):
Is there also not a theme in this that maybe
aligns with our pre episode about Shelling, Because I feel
like in that freedom essay, isn't Shelling like trying to
reconcile you know, like religious like dogma, like God's all powerful,
all knowing with the possibility of freedom, And isn't there
that theme running through this too?

Speaker 1 (06:14):
I mean again that's man all roads lead to Shelling,
I think. But yeah, I mean this poem it really
is as much political as it is sort of looked
at for its poetics, and I think that's what's so
interesting too, is it sort of we've in some ways
any discussions about freedom in the Renaissance in the early
modern period is going to kind of run through Milton
as well, because he was kind of like the anti

(06:36):
ham So I think I've mentioned to you guys before
where he sort of saw if there was a just
reason to overthrow the king, which is what happened in
England in the mid sixteen hundreds, then people should go
for it, you know, the anti Leviathan kind of argument,
where there shouldn't be the king should not be beyond
the law, and that's actually what happened in the sixteen fifties.
You had the English Civil Wars in the sixteen forties

(06:57):
as well, where King Charles the First was sort of
seeing as having overstepped his boundaries by the Parliament and
there was a big civil war throughout the whole country.
Eventually the king was executed, and this was unprecedented in
Europe at the time for the monarch to actually be
sort of, you know, to get his head chopped off.
And after that you had this short lived republic with
Oliver Cromwell and all of that stuff, where they kind

(07:18):
of tried to have a non sort of monarchy for
about a decade and then the kind of collapse. Cromwell
didn't really have a successor, so we get to the restoration,
like you mentioned Eric, and that kind of takes us
back to the monarchy. But in some ways, this kind
of little flirtation with republicanism in the seventeenth century is
arguably kind of what spared England from like later things

(07:39):
like the French Revolution and stuff like that, because they
kind of got it out of their system earlier on
and they had the whole revolutionary thing and then they say, Okay,
you know what, it's too messy, it's too chaotic. We're
just going to have more of like a constitutional monarchy.
And that's where you get everything that we've had in
England since then. But this is what. Yeah, so it
was a really chaotic time in England and everything. And
Milton kind of comes out of that moment and he

(08:00):
writes this really weird, interesting epic poem, Paradise Lost, which
kind of possibly touches on some of these big political
and poetic questions. But that's kind of just a little
bit of the context.

Speaker 4 (08:11):
When what period in his life did he write this? So, like,
was this some mature work? Is this an early work?

Speaker 3 (08:18):
I was gonna mention this was a late work. Right
from my research, we know that he already planned to
write an epic poem when he was like nineteen years
old or something, but he didn't start until he was
like in his fifties. And then, connecting to that last
point too, he started this poem soon after the restoration. Yeah,

(08:43):
the restoration, he started it almost right after, So after
sort of the political ambitions of his movement sort of,
or the movement that he was a huge part of,
by the way, failed, that's when he starts writing this
poem that he planned when he was nineteen. So imagine
what he thought the content of his grand poem would

(09:06):
have been as a young man with all these political ideals,
and then finally getting around to writing it in his
fifties after those aspirations had failed and he was like
blind by then and couldn't even do his own writing,
And now we have this poem at that So he
started it very late, even though it was like long

(09:26):
in the coming.

Speaker 4 (09:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
That's from my research. If Victor can verify it.

Speaker 4 (09:31):
The listeners should also, we want to stress because we
didn't see it at the beginning. We've had lific on
many times, but you listeners should be aware that his
PhD specialization is actually John Milton, so we have like
real serious credentials here in terms of expertise Milton is
so just wanted to mention that before you answer.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
No big deal, but yes, no and no pressure. Milton
studies is an interesting kind of I guess, subfield of
early modern studies because this is one of the those
poems which is actually very well known. Readers are always
kind of surprised, oh wow, this is actually like I've
seen this in movies or other media, but it's not
that well read. It's not that commonly read compared to

(10:10):
Shakespeare or something like that, just because especially the language
is much more kind of archaic and kind of old
fashioned and deliberately over the top, as you can probably
attest Victor having looked at it this week. So yeah,
Milton kind of sits at this really interesting juncture between
kind of political theory and poetry and all kinds of
things like that in the early modern period. And I

(10:33):
think that's what as you already mentioned Eric. The main
context for this poem specifically is that he was writing
it after the restoration of the monarchy in England. He's
writing in the sixteen sixties, and by that point he's
pretty bitter and jaded about the failure of the revolution.
He's sort of looking towards perhaps, you know, he's already
planning out what his legacy might be, at least as

(10:53):
a poet. He's blind by this point. This is actually
one of the reasons why he was sort of left
alone by the monarchist Milton was a revolutionary, but he
suffered enough. The poor guy's a blind old man. We're
not going to prosecute him at this point. Let him
go off and write his poem or whatever he wants
to do at this stage in his life. So he's
kind of coming at this though, Yeah, having thought about
writing this kind of poem for many decades. He was

(11:15):
very well read as a young man. He was a
pretty radical thinker and worked as a diplomat for a while,
traveled all across Europe, so he had a lot of
time to think about the kind of story that he
wanted to tell, the kind of you know, epic poem
that he wanted to sort of make his mark on
and sort of elevate the English language by saying, all right,
this is going to be like the big English poem
in the way that you know, you have the Iliad

(11:37):
and the Odyssey with Homer for the Greeks, or the
Eneid for the Latin Romans. Virgil he wanted to do
something like that for the English language. So he was,
you know, very ambitious. He really wanted to kind of
throw everything he had into this one project. And what
he ended up with, as we see here, is this
sort of interesting fusion of kind of biblical sort of

(11:59):
adaptation of the Book of Genesis with the epic tradition
from sort of Greek and Roman poetry. And that's what
you get with Paradise Lost is it's almost kind of
a piece of biblical fan fiction. You could just think
of it as because it just it takes the it
takes the Garden of Eden's story from Genesis, and it
just goes wild with it and has a whole, you know,
epic take on that basic story.

Speaker 4 (12:20):
Yeah, it seems to just kind of give a like
really fanciful account of like kind of filling I guess
filling in the details of what kind of like Genesis
tells us, only you know, he really expands it. But
I did want to ask a very basic question. I
didn't take a single English class in university, right, so
I'm you know, I'm totally innube to this stuff. But
here's my very basic question. What is a poem? And

(12:42):
what is an epic poem? Right? So, like what does that?

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Like?

Speaker 4 (12:44):
What does that mean? And like? And rhyming to where
does rhyming fit in or not rhyming too? So like, again,
as as an English new please, I'd love answers to
these things.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
Very good question.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Absolutely, you know, these are important questions because again this
so this is not written in prose. We're not dealing
with paragraphs here. It's still lines, there's still a meter,
there's a rhythm. It's a poem in that sense. But
it also doesn't rhyme very notably, which is actually something
that Milton felt very strongly about. It's written in blank verse,
similar to epic poetry and the way that Homer and

(13:13):
Virgil and these ancient writers wrote, which was essentially again
not necessarily focusing on rhyme, but more so on other
kinds of poetic devices, especially the meter, the rhythm, these
epic similes that go on and on where something is
being compared to something else. And what makes it specifically
kind of considered an epic poem in terms of the
genre is also its subject matter, this focus on big

(13:35):
themes of war and nationhood and in this case basically
the fall of man, the beginning of the universe, as
long as what we would think of as literally epic
subject matter that would fall within this kind of poetic tradition,
but also the way that he writes it again, the
way it's written technically an iambic pentameter would be the meter,
and the fact that it doesn't rhyme, it's sort of

(13:57):
more just free flowing. These are all aspect that would
be recognizable even to Milton's audiences. Oh, I see what
he's trying to do here. He's trying to sort of
be the English Homer or Virgil or even Dante from Italy.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
I think also from my research, this is the first
poem written in English to not use end rhyme. There
is you know, you could consider what was written for
theater by people like you know, Shakespeare as being poetic

(14:29):
and it doesn't have end rhyme, but that was written
for drama, for theater to be performed. Narrative poetry was
always end rhymed. The I think the last big epic
before Milton was Spencer's Fairy Queen, and then there are
a couple big Italian ones like Orlando Furioso, but Italian

(14:51):
is a little different. It's quite easy to rhyme, to
have a very complicated rhyme scheme without constraining what you
want to say too much, but in English not so
especially even if you use a very Latinized English like
Milton does, where you're moving like the ends of sentences

(15:11):
to the beginnings and the middles to the ends, and
it becomes all weird and modular, like Latin is. We're
very much not used to that. We need, we need
you know, subject object that that order. If it's not
in that order, it's a crazy sentence. But for Milton,
not not so much. But yeah, he's not using the
rhyme like as a conscious decision. I think in my

(15:34):
I listened to the audiobook version and it had this preface,
and I was like, what the hell is this preface?
And apparently the publisher had contacted Milton after the first
edition was published and said, you know, readers are really
struggling with the fact that this doesn't isn't end rhymed. Uh,
and you need to like put something in here explaining

(15:55):
your decision not to use rhyme, because it's really sticking
in everyone's craw And so so now after the second
edition it has this appended i don't know, preface or
something that explains why he doesn't use rhyme. And then
he brings up some of those points that Litvic just mentioned.
You know, Homer and Virgil did not use end rhyme

(16:19):
in theirs.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
And he actually connects it to the emphasis on freedom
as well. He's saying, you know, this is a poem
about freedom and the politics of it, and so you know,
why should the rhyme be kind of shackled or why
should the sort of poetry itself be shackled by rhyme?
You know, I want to have free verse here, I
want to have blank verse. So it's also kind of
a political statement that he's making by not using rhyme,

(16:41):
and in fact, later on revolutionary poets and writers and
the Romantics and everything, they would actually sort of look
towards this sort of blank verse as being the language
of freedom and emancipation, and they would sort of like
shun rhyme in that way and see free verse as
being more suitable for this the kind of political interest

(17:02):
that they had. So there's a little bit of politics
down into his decision here as well.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
Even those damn choices have politics in them. You can't
get away from it. Yeah, he thought that the I
think at the preface he mentioned that rhyme was an
invention of like a medieval or a barbaric age in
order to give like low subject matter the appearance of dignity.
And he's not having it. He thinks it's a false

(17:26):
rhyme is a false kind of adornment on great poetry.
And the other thing was that the epic poem wasn't
such a I guess when he started this. Maybe when
he was young, when he was nineteen, epic poetry and
heroic poetry was all the rage. This was closer to Spencer,

(17:49):
who was like the guy who wrote The Fairy Queen,
which was like three generations before him. Maybe, But by
the time he actually starts this, epic is not such
a well regarded form. Like I said that the last
great epics were getting very old by their time, and
rhyme was the dominant way you do poetry as well,

(18:11):
So he's kind of writing at this he's late in
many ways, not just politically like after the restoration, but
also late in terms of contemporary taste, like the epic
tradition was a little bit slack in his day, and
that's when he started. That's like deciding to make a
black and white film today when everyone wants color, right,

(18:34):
and you say, no, black and white is the true
artistic form and color is is just a cheap trick
to make you interested in stuff that isn't really that great.
But yeah, Milton pulled it off anyway.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Absolutely, Attitudes towards the poem's aesthetic qualities have actually shifted
quite notably since it was published, and with some sort
of you know, looking at it much more favorably than others.
But what he was doing here as well is actually
quite interesting in terms of the broader sort of Renaissance
or early Modern impulse to kind of retell old stories,
whether from the Bible or from classical texts, in a

(19:08):
sort of more modern or early modern kind of framework,
and to it adapt in that sense. And that's what
he's doing here, you know, cranked up to a thousand,
where he's taking the Garden of Eden's story, which is
very basic, actually only one or two sort of pages
in the Book of Genesis and turning it into this
twelve thousand line poem which is still loosely based off

(19:30):
of the Bible, but he's just going wild with it
and doing pretty much his own things. So that's a
very Renaissance move as well, to kind of take older
existing stories and traditions and retell them in a more
modern way, so that kind of places them within a
certain time and place as well.

Speaker 4 (19:46):
Yeah, I wonder if maybe we should talk about the
content of like what's the story.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Let's maybe just quickly look at the first passage, the
first lines, because he says straight up, this is what
I want to write in this epic poem. And you
can also get a sense of his kind of use
of in jam and blank verse in a eating here.
So this is the very beginning of the first book.
There's twelve books in this whole poem that kind of
again structured like the Aneid or the Iliad or the

(20:10):
Odyssey from Greece and Rome. So we start at the
very beginning book one, and he talks about how what
his subject matter.

Speaker 4 (20:21):
Do you want to do a reading of it? Let's
let's let's.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
Hear maybe we can just have a little opening here.
So think in terms of Homer and announcing his subject
in the Odyssey or the Iliad. All right, So for
John Milton's Paradise Lost, he goes of man's first disobedience
and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
brought death into the world, and all our woe with

(20:43):
loss of Eden, till one greater man restore us and
regain the blissful See sing Heavenly Muse, that on the
secret top of oreb or of Sinai didst inspire the
shepherd who first taught the Chosen Seed in the beginning,
how the heavens and earth rows out of chaos, And

(21:04):
it goes on and on. But even right there you
might have noticed or heard, he doesn't start with just
an obvious Okay, sing heavenly Muse. That's the actual sort
of thing he's addressing there, He's invoking the muse. He
goes at it almost backwards, like you mentioned, Derek, in
a more Latin kind of way, which is you start
with the sort of you know, subject matter, and then
you finally get to the speaker or the thing that

(21:24):
he's addressing later on. So it sounds kind of weird
in a way that he's sort of using Latin grammar
to sort of present English. That's already what makes it
a little bit more unusual to the audience.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Yeah, the epic tradition, tire is yeah, very marked. Like
you said, yeah, the muse thing. So most epic poems
will start with what you call the invocation of the muses, right,
so you know, sing heavenly muse, yeah, or you know,
inspire me to sing that song or sing that song
through me in a Christian sense, you know, the divine

(22:01):
inspiration you know that allows you to write kind of
scriptural material or whatever. Right, So he's he's drawing on
both the epic tradition but making it into a very
Christianized epic tradition. He's not the first to do that, obviously.
You could think of Dante as writing a kind of
Christian epic. Although the divine comedy is not super heroic

(22:25):
as far as I can tell, But this is a
very heroic kind of epic because there's big, huge, battles
in it and stuff too, which is kind of cool
almost like with like characters that are like dragonball Z
level powerful describing those battles between angels, which I thought
was very demon But yeah, this this beginning line, you know,

(22:46):
it always puts out the the what the poem is
going to be about too. So in you know, the Iliad,
it starts with anger, right, the anger of Achilles, the
wrath of Achilles. And with the Odyssey, it's starts off
with what's that word, polytropos. You know, the Odysseus is
a complicated man, and this is the story of Odysseus, Paul,

(23:09):
his man of many minds or however you want to
say it. And this one starts with the loss of Eden.
It tells you it's subject matter right in the very beginning,
which is an epic. You know, lots of those kinds
of epic formal elements present here, but he's really like
giving them a Miltonian spin. Yeah that Yeah, what else

(23:32):
do you want to say about the opening?

Speaker 1 (23:34):
The big part at the end of that opening kind
of invocation of the muse as you mentioned, where he's
kind of appealing to the poetic and the divine spirit
to kind of, you know, inspire him to write this
poem and tell this story, or to recite this poem
rather because he was blind at the time by this
point in his life. The opening ends with sort of

(23:54):
a famous invocation of him saying, you know, I want
to make this argument. I want to tell this story
and tell the subject so that I may assert eternal
providence and justify the ways of God to men. That's
explicitly why he's doing this. It's sort of a theodicy
in the sense of he wants to justify why is
man fallen? You know, why is there chaos and evil

(24:14):
in the world? How could a good God allow such things?
And that's a big, big question, And he actually feels
I'm going to tackle this. I'm going to go back
to the very beginning Adam and Eve and look at
the fall of Man and look at the story of
Satan and God and everything, and try to present his
take on it. Why does God? Why did God banish

(24:36):
mankind from Eden? Why was Paradise lost? And maybe subtly
for Milton himself, why is England in such a crappy place?

Speaker 4 (24:45):
You know?

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Why did the Civil wars work out this way? Why
didn't we become a republic? Why is the king back?
That's much more understated. None of that is explicit in
the poem, but it's not hard to make the connection.
That may be part of what's animating him when he's
talking about paradise is the fact that his side lost
essentially during the ultimate outcome of the Civil Wars and

(25:06):
the republic. So that's kind of what where he's coming
at for a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
Yeah, this poem is screaming at you in every way
except explicitly saying that you should connect the failed revolution
that Satan tries to, you know, bring about, with the
failed Puritan revolution in England that Milton was a part of.

(25:35):
He never ever says that, But I'm pretty that connection
was almost immediately made. I think, I know, immediately, within
a few centuries of literary criticism after the poem, that
connection was quite just It's it was obvious, But he
doesn't say it, And that leads to problems of like,

(25:57):
who is the hero of this poem?

Speaker 4 (26:00):
Right?

Speaker 3 (26:01):
Is it really Satan? Can a bad guy be a hero?
And if so, is he sympathized? Is he trying to?

Speaker 1 (26:11):
Well?

Speaker 3 (26:11):
One way people have said, is he trying to seduce
us into sympathizing with the devil, like the Rolling Stones song,
just to also bring us through that experience of becoming
a part of this, you know, uprising and being all excited,
but then having it all just smashed down around you,

(26:32):
because that's not the way God actually planned for things
to be. Or is he not associating the revolution at
all with Satan?

Speaker 4 (26:42):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
That would be a hard thing to make, hard case
to make.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
People are still debating these questions. Again, the Milton industry
is hard at work. But that's the big question. Absolutely, Eric,
We very notably start this story from Satan's point of view.
That's what throws people off right away. We're not with
God and Adam and Eve and you know, the good guys,
quote unquote. We start with Satan and the fallen angels,
and in ways that almost makes it very easy for

(27:08):
us to sympathize with them, because we start after there's
been this whole war in heaven. The angels, the rebel angels,
have been cast out, and this is all coming loosely
from Christian mythology even before Milton's time. The Book of
Revelation and other parts of the Bible loosely talk about
a war in heaven when Satan was thrown out. But
that's where Milton is getting this as a sort of backstory,

(27:29):
where he then fleshes it out and characterizes it very deeply,
and he talks about, Okay, Satan and the other rebel angels,
they wake up in Hell, they don't know what happened
to them. They kind of piece together, Oh, we must
have lost the war, and that brings the reader kind
of along for the ride, because then Satan and the
others are sort of thinking, well, we can't give up.
Now we've come too far. How can we strike back

(27:51):
at God? And that's when they begin to plan, maybe
we can corrupt Adam and Eve in Paradise. Maybe we can.
We can't attack God directly, but we can corrupt his
favorite creation, Adam and Eve, and we can make man
kind of fall and drag them down to our level.
So that's sort of the starting Yeah.

Speaker 4 (28:09):
I found that whole thing like pretty interesting, how they're
like all hanging out and what's it called Pandemonium the
city or whatever that's Uh, it's like the capital city,
all the demons, the capital city of Hell.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
I guess, yeah, And that literally means all demons in
Latin pandemonium.

Speaker 4 (28:24):
Yeah, oh right, okay, And they're all hanging out talking
and then I think, doesn't he say something or doesn't
like like Lucifer? I guess is he referred to that
way in this Lucifer or Satan's Satan mostly, But.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Yeah, they they say Lucifer in the text, but they're like,
this was the name that men gave to him, or
this is how he's known on Earth, Lucifer because of
his former brightness. It's a star reference.

Speaker 4 (28:49):
And it's like, isn't he like, Oh, I heard God
like made this new thing called man or something like that, right,
I heard the new Shit's this thing called man? Like,
why don't we fuck with that? Basically?

Speaker 5 (29:00):
Yeah, there's this place called Earth and it's just like
a smidge below Heaven in glory, right Like, if we
can't have Heaven, we can go there and have that place.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
And if we can't have that place, we can at
least fuck it up for God and force them to
start over again, because that's all we really care about.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
But it's kind of interesting because they're almost doing like
and this is coming from me, a democratic theorist. In
my own research. They're almost doing like a deliberation, you know,
they're the kind of having a back and forth or
like discussing what action they should take, which kind of
I mean, it's just kind of odd like that that,
like these demons are like kind of like deliberating in
this orderly way. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yeah, in D and D terms, this would be lawful evil.
It's it's very organized, it's very structured, and a lot
of D and D stuff comes from Milton and Dante
in these kinds of poets who first wrote about hell
in these more poetic terms, and this is where a
lot of our more modern kind of fantasy lore also
comes from. Yeah. But the other big influence here, as
you're already noting, Victor, is that we are actually kind

(30:00):
of dealing with the birth of the modern anti hero,
because Aaydan is not just explicitally a bad guy here.
He's kind of seen as somebody who might have a
legitimate cause in terms of his rebellion against God. And
you noted the fallen angels kind of have a little
mini council parliament of their own. They're debating what their
next course of action should be, and the whole thing

(30:22):
kind of has this vibe in terms of sort of
you know, these fallen soldiers who are trying to like
organize their politics and get back into the fight. In
ways that makes it hard to not sympathize with them
a little bit, because they're using this kind of language
of you know, liberalism almost or revolutionary aspirations, like, you know,
we have to keep fighting. We can't be sort of
you know, defeated in chains here in hell. We have

(30:44):
to be free again, the whole freedom thing, and that
already kind of throws the reader off maybe and gets
us thinking, so, what what are we supposed to make
of all of this? You know, why is Satan sort
of being portrayed as such a sort of you know,
charismatic leader of these And.

Speaker 4 (31:01):
They have all these interesting names too that come from something, right,
these different demons, Like there's like the beazl bub I
guess it's like his main lieutenant, and then there's some
other one.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
A lot of them come from like a Jewish demonology,
and others of them come from just ancient Greek or
Mesopotamian or whatever the like. You know, in the Christian tradition,
all the old gods just become basically like demons in
hell or neutral kind of mischievous things that God kind
of created and didn't really you know, give a lot

(31:32):
of grace to or something like that. They're all supported.
And the other thing I want to point out too,
is just in this beginning part, you know, he says
the goal right away is to justify the ways of
God to men. Milton says this, like, right, that's I
think you read this part in the beginning here justify

(31:52):
the ways of God to men. So that's supposedly the
speaker of the poem, John Milton, and scare quotes whoever
the narrator is supposed to be, is picturing this to
be read as something that you can learn from, like
what you would call a didactic epic two like in

(32:14):
the style if you go back not to Homer, but
to Hesiod, he wrote something like the Theogony, And the
other text he wrote was like the working days, right,
and these are meant to sort of teach you something
like working days is meant to teach you why humans
have to work so hard in order to make a living,

(32:34):
when there's all these stories about this golden age when
people never had to work. And he's like what's the
deal with that? Why do we have to work so hard?
And then he's like, let me tell you about a
story about a fight I had with my fucking brother
after our father died, and then that's where working days
goes off from there. But he's trying to explain something
at the same time as like the origin of work,

(32:56):
and you know, you get that here too a little bit,
especially with when we get way down in the poem
to Adam and Eve actually like the sort of the
sort of main characters almost it explains to you, you know,
Eden would give everything, but now that they've tasted the fruit, right,
they're condemned to death. They're contempted to have to have children,

(33:18):
and it's a painful process for women, and they're condemned
to have to go out and work and gather things
because the earth isn't just going to now give up
its fruits, right, It's it's gonna keep making them work
for it, and you're condemned to spend most of your
days in toil and labor. So it does, but like
it's now justifying all of these things as part of

(33:41):
God's plans, and the reader is supposed to be able
to understand that. And the reason I don't consider personal
take Satan as as the hero of the text is
because he says this so explicitly, and if in the
beginnings of books, he's almost like apologizing for staying with
Satan's respective so much, like he has to do all

(34:03):
of this important work to not be seen as like
blasphemous or two edge lordie in the way he's writing
from Satan's perspective at a very Christian time, right, But yeah,
it is. It is a this didactic explaining element that
a lot of epics that incorporate mythological themes have origin

(34:25):
of rain or the origin of humans, or the origin
of this or that thing in the world has an
explanatory kind of purpose. Sorry that was a long diagnostic.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
But really it's really important to emphasize. Yeah, Milton is
a Christian, He's a Puritan Christian. He's very you know,
God fearing. He would be appalled at the notion of
Satan being considered the hero of this poem, and yet
he makes him the most charismatic figure if you think
of this idea of you know, the devil kind of again,

(34:54):
like the Mick Jagger sexy kind of seducer and everything.
This is where it comes from. This is it's paradise
lost John Milton. Before this point, Satan or the devil
was just like a kind of fire and brimstone monster
like in Dante or other places. You know, it wasn't
he wasn't seen as this kind of charismatic seducer. It's
Milton Satan, who kind of is the first figure in

(35:16):
that tradition who then we can talk about maybe like
also influenced a lot of other you know, romantic writers
and the byronic hero and a later kind of tradition
of people who sort of looked at this as actually
kind of a very compelling kind of anti hero to
sort of model other characters on. So that even though
that's sort of the byproduct of this poem, that wasn't

(35:36):
necessarily Milton's main interest as kind of you know, creating
this new type of hero. He was very interested though,
perhaps in exploring how seduction works, you know, temptation, why
people turn to evil, you know again, why did Adam
and Eve leave God's instructions and kind of follow Satan
in with the whole you know, the tree of knowledge,
temptation and everything. So this is kind of like the

(35:58):
big picture stuff in turns of where the poem ends up.
But just even sticking a little bit still with the
opening lines where we first see Satan and the rebel Angels,
I think it's just worth kind of quickly looking back
again at what you were mentioning Victor and how they're
kind of they first kind of wake up in Pandemonium
and Hell, and they kind of how they even sort
of describe their environment and stuff, because this is where

(36:19):
you would kind of recognize a lot of this kind
of you know, brooding, romantic anti hero stuff already in
just the way that they kind of talk about their
fall from heaven and the way that they're going to
keep up the fight and everything. So you guys want
to maybe just look at a little passage again where
Satan gives some of his famous lines about how you
know he's going to keep fighting till the end, and
I'm thinking there's a Satan kind of gives some of

(36:41):
his famous revolutionary language line two point fifty to describe
the fight that he wants to carry on against God. Eric,
do you actually want to take this away because I
think you mentioned this line before that comes up. So
starting with Hail horrors.

Speaker 3 (36:54):
I'm just going to control f my way down there. Yes,
hail horrors, Hail infernal war Old, and thou profoundest Hell,
receive thy new possessor, one who brings a mind not
to be changed by place or time. The mind is
its own place, and in itself can make a heaven
of hell and a hell of heaven. What matter? Where

(37:16):
if I be still the same and what I should be,
all but less than he whom thunder hath made greater?

Speaker 4 (37:25):
Is that where?

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Oh, here's another good line.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
Though.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
Here, at least we shall be free. The Almighty hath
not built here for his envy, will not drive us.
Hence here we may reign secure, and in my choice
to reign is worth ambition. Though in hell I don't
know if I should keep going. Oh this is a

(37:48):
great line, though, Sorry, I keep stopping before all the
best stuff. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
There's a good line, right.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
That's the manifesto right there. Yeah, so that kind of
language again, it's like, yeah, give me liberty or give
me death. It's very kind of resonant with our own
liberal tradition, and we would think of that as clearly
on the side of you know, people on the right
side of history. He's articulating Satan is articulating his struggle
there in a way that is pretty clearly the language
of you know, revolutionaries against tyrants and stuff like that,

(38:21):
especially the stuff about how you know, it doesn't matter
where he's ended up. The rebel angels are in hell,
they will make it a new kind of you know,
vasty of freedom and everything like that. So that's again
kind of what is so interesting and sort of strange
perhaps about first encountering this character is how he seems
to have a very noble cause that he's fighting for

(38:42):
against what he perceives as being like the tyranny of God,
and yet at the same time we know this guy
is the devil.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
Yeah, I think that's that's part of the confusion is
because you know, Milton's audience would have known these things
about Satan. He is a seducer, he is a liar.
He takes the truth, he appeals to reason, but he
twists it right, because reason is capable of being You

(39:11):
can't lie to an animal. I'm being kind of categorical here,
but you can't lie to something without reason, right. But
if something has reason, then you can appeal to it
through devious ways to make falsity seem like truth. And
that's what Satan does. So John Milton has to give
him very, very convincing arguments, and that's probably where the

(39:37):
confusion comes because when we're growing up, you know, we're
used to watching cartoons and these devious, bad guys as
in they say things to try to convince you about
their cause. But it's all very very obviously silly and stupid.
But Satan's arguments are like, how can we all be equal?
He's like, he plays the radical egalitarian for at times, right,

(40:00):
He's like, how can we all be equal if there
are monarchs among us who rule over others, Either we're
all equal or or there's someone above us and we're
not equal and we're serving him and we are slaves.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
To this monarch like God.

Speaker 3 (40:15):
Yeah, I mean he tells like a different version of
this argument a couple times, is like, you know, you know,
God says we were all made equal, but he puts
himself above us and decides who's lower and.

Speaker 4 (40:28):
Who's high, and he also kick me out, and.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yeah, well he's but heard about that through the whole thing.
But like his even before he was kicked out. That
was like his initial thought, even when he was this
because remember he starts out as like an angel, second
to none except God himself, and then God makes Jesus
his son, and Satan gets freaking jealous about that, right,

(40:51):
and he says, like, who's this guy? Who God just decided?
I thought we were all equal, and now he's decided.
Now suddenly this new person's above us all. It's like
your boss hires a new manager from outside of the workplace.
You were expecting that promotion, right, but instead your boss
goes outside and brings in some third party manager and

(41:12):
you're like, what the fuck? Man, Like I thought we
were all had a shot at this or so, I
don't know, that's that's silly.

Speaker 4 (41:18):
But for worse, or like creates a new position where
like now you report to this new person for a
position that didn't exist before, and you're just like, what
the fuck is this? Who the fuck is this guy?

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Yeah? Unelected son of God?

Speaker 3 (41:31):
Who?

Speaker 1 (41:33):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (41:35):
Who is this guy?

Speaker 3 (41:37):
But then the argument on the good side is is
kind of like you don't have freedom without order, because
without if all were chaos, then where would the background
be I'm kind of interpreting it a bit, but like,
where would the background be for you to tell what
freedom actually is if there was no order in the
universe and the source of that order is God right,

(41:59):
and therefore in order to be free, you must serve God.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
And even in the way that the fallen angels the
demons at this point basically kind of you know, set
up their own little mini government in hell and pandemonium.
As you were saying, Victor, you can already start to
see that it's actually pretty authoritarian, the way they start
to idolize Satan as their king, as their new leader.
Even though they have this they go through the motions of, Okay,
we're going to have like a parliamentary debate about.

Speaker 4 (42:25):
What we should do next.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
It's ultimately Satan's plan that kind of clearly is put
forward as the thing that they should all do in
terms of going to eat and corrupting Adam and Eve
and everything. So I think we're also kind of being
invited a little bit to watch out for demagogues and
for you know, charismatic politicians or orators like Satan who
are going to be wow, you know, really compelling and
really kind of charismatic in the way they're presenting their

(42:49):
point of view, but maybe they're doing it for their
own ends and they want to actually sort of get
power for their own sake. And it's not perhaps quite
as egalitarian as the superficial sense of like, you know,
we should all be free, we should all be equal.
Good cast us out, we got to fight back. Maybe
there is something more kind of selfish going on here
once we dig further and we see more of this guy.

(43:11):
But on the surface, again it's we were not explicitly
told any of this. We have to we have to
work for this.

Speaker 4 (43:17):
Yeah, yeah, like you said, they kind of made him
the Santia And like, why do you think Milton because
you you sort of said, as a Miltonist, you know
that that Milton would have been horrified that people would
maybe be sympathetic to Satan, But why do you think
he wrote him in this way? Like do you think
it's because Milton like needed like to fill in the
gaps and like there has to be a rational story
behind why Satan's doing what he's doing that like it

(43:38):
wouldn't believable if there wasn't something, or do you think
there's something else going on?

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Here.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yeah, definitely. I don't know so much if you would
be horrified, but he would say, you're you're misreading what
I'm putting out here. You're you're you're you're missing the point.
If you actually all the way through still think that
Satan is the good guy in all of this. Yeah, again,
because there is a sense of deceit and fraud and temptation,
as we'll see in the later parts of the story,
which Satan then increasingly kind of turns to, and the

(44:03):
reason why he shouldn't be taken as the sort of
you know, objective authority here. It's kind of like the
unreliable narrator where you're reading something you think, oh, this
guy sounds pretty legit, and then you realize, wait a minute,
maybe you know Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is actually
not totally on the level. Maybe we shouldn't be buying
all of his arguments about why killing old women and

(44:25):
taking their money is. But it's kind of the same
thing where at some point Milton probably expects the reader
to wise up and recognize, Okay, maybe there's something else
going on here. We shouldn't just be taking this at
face value. In terms of this really charismatic kind of
main character telling us why they're right and everybody else

(44:45):
sucks and you know, kind of being this brooding, byronic hero.

Speaker 3 (44:50):
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that the Satan's flaw
is hubrious. I thought that carries over into humankind in
a way as well as a result of all this
two uh yeah, because you know, I think I think

(45:12):
for all Satan's clever arguments about equality and every person,
like he refers to almost all of his demons too
as like lords kings, like like we can all be
king kind of thing down here in hell. And you know, no,
we can't all be king. That doesn't make any sense.
How can we all be king if no one actually

(45:32):
has But anyway, that like, yeah, that that sort of hubrious.
He's covering up his hubriistic He wants to be like
God or in a godlike position, right, and he's he's
covering this up with these clever, clever arguments or offering
you know, knowledge of good and evil to Adam and Eve,
or first to Eve and then and then throw her

(45:55):
to Adam to be like have god like knowledge, you know,
And he says, you know, me as snake, if I
ate from the tree, and now I can speak and
reason imagine what will happen if you eat from that tree.
Far from being deadly, it'll actually make you more godlike,
and you'll be like a demi god like. So there's
these hubristic elements he's covering up quite obviously.

Speaker 4 (46:16):
But I think.

Speaker 3 (46:18):
Also the other just to keep with our freedom theme too,
not just that contradiction between freedom and hierarchy, but also
free will and free choice, because you know, God makes
the universe, or he plans it out in a certain

(46:40):
temporal sequence, and things are faded to happen, but not
so much because he does rely on the free choice
of the created things. Right, So it was Satan's through
the freedom of his choice. God didn't make him do
what he did. It's more like he just accounted for

(47:02):
all the possibilities. Right, But it was Satan's choice. And
then even tempting, deceiving, fooling Eve, it was still her choice.
And even through Eve Adam is compelled to participate in
her sin, it's still comes down to his choice, even

(47:25):
in an extraordinarily sexist way. That's very uncomfortable to read
some of the later books for that, But I mean
that's I don't know, that's the way it is sometimes,
but yeah, it's about free choice. It's an important thing too,
that things cannot be There's no there's none of this,
I guess Puritanism, but I don't know if there's like

(47:45):
that element of Calvinist predetermination destination.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah, not exactly. And that's the theology here is really
tricky and interesting because again, so we start with Satan
and the rebel angels, and there's so much we're trying
to process as readers as though how we supposed to
feel towards all of this. And as the story unfolds,
we follow Satan as he travels to the newly created
Garden of Eden and everything, and he tries to corrupt
Adam and Eve as we see in the Bible at

(48:11):
that point, but we also see a little bit of
God in Heaven later on in the poem, and we
kind of see the point of view of the good
guys as it were. And that's what kind of gets
to what you're saying, Eric, is, how does God justify
all of this? How does Milton justify you know, the
fact that we know what's going to happen, you know,
the Titanic is going to sink. Everyone knows it, like
Adam and Eve will fall. But how do you get

(48:33):
there and how do you justify that in a world
where God is supposed to be omniscient and benevolent and
all these things. And what Milton kind of does is
he sets up God as a much more boring kind
of figure. He's not, you know, dramatic and flashy like Satan,
but he's this sort of just larger than life character
who knows everything. He knows what's going to happen. But
he says, man and woman, they still had a choice.

(48:56):
They were made. He says something along lines of they
were made free to fall. They were made sufficiently that
they could have stood, They could have resisted this temptation
which is about to happen to them from Satan. But
in the end God already knows they will fall, and
it's not his fault. He takes great pains to emphasize
I made them, you know, I designed man and woman

(49:18):
to be, you know, capable of their own judgment and everything.
But they have a choice to make, and I know
they will fail this choice. So that's sort of how
the theology here works. It's not totally predestination, but God
knows big picture that it's not going to be a
happy ending in that sense. Yeah, should we sort.

Speaker 4 (49:38):
Of in the interest of time, I wonder if it's
worth just kind of giving like a bigger overview of
like what happens in the story for the listeners and
then maybe we can go into the details of the
parts that we decide, but maybe you could give us
like a bit of a rundown, like obviously as Hatch
as this plan, you know, he ends up going of course,
and you know, I don't know, give us like kind
of like a really quick overview of like what happens
and what the ending is and stuff.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
For sure. Yeah, And what's even more interesting is sort
of just in Genesis, in the very early parts of
the Bible, the first chapters, we have the very threadbare
version of this story that we're all loosely familiar with.
Adam and Eve are created at the end of the
Seven Days. Eve is created from Adam's ribs, so she's
kind of secondary. Adam is made in the image of God,

(50:18):
and then Eve is kind of made in the image
of Adam image of an image, So there's a little
bit of you know, misogynistic kind of hierarchy in terms
of God, man, woman and yeah, and then we have
Eve in the garden, and the God's one prohibition, the
one commandment there is, you know, don't eat from this
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because then

(50:39):
you will break my commandment. Everything else, go anywhere else
you want, but don't go into this forbidden part of
the garden and eat from this fruit. That's just the
basic kind of it's almost like a fairy tale. You know,
don't go into the west wing, don't ask questions, it's forbidden.
And then of course Eve eats from the tree because
she's tempted by one of the animals in the garden,

(51:00):
the serpent, to eat from the tree, to kind of
become more intelligent, more divine, whatever the reasons. And in
the Bible itself, the serpent is not even identified necessarily
as Satan at that point. This is like a later
kind of Christian projection onto the Old Testament, where oh
the serpent was, you know, actually the devil and Satan

(51:21):
and all that. But in the very earliest versions of
this story, in the Book of Genesis itself, it's just
the serpent kind of seducing Eve, and only later on
is this identified. Okay, it's Satan, it's Lucifer. It was
this greater kind of you know, devilish scheme. But of
course Milton is coming at it from that later Christian tradition,
and he says, oh, yeah, the serpent was Satan, and
he will show you how Satan having arrived eventually at

(51:44):
the garden, and some other stuff happens in between. He
ultimately manages to get Eve one on one and appear
to her as a serpent. He takes possession of a snake,
a serpent who at this point is perfectly kind of just,
you know, not like an innocent animal. Everyone is innocent
in the garden at this point. There is no sin
or death in the world yet. But Satan has this

(52:05):
long conversation with Eve. Adam is off doing his own thing,
and he convinces her again kind of through this language
of liberalism and emancipation, that God is hiding something from you.
You should eat from this tree. There is a fruit
there which will make you like gods. And you are
being repressed. You should try to go beyond what has
been prescribed for you, and you will then become more

(52:27):
powerful in everything and there's a lot of faulty logic
that he throws into that argument, but ultimately Eve is
persuaded and she eats from the tree, and that is
basically at that point the world turns to black and white,
like everything before that was perfect and innocent and beautiful
in the garden, and Milton goes so into such detail

(52:47):
about how much this was a paradise we can't even
conceive of. Now the world becomes like the world that
we now know, where animals fight each other. Adam and
Eve start arguing right away about whose fault it was
that she ate from the tree, and Eve says, well,
you shouldn't have left me alone. You knew that there
were threats out there. Blah blah blah, and it all
turns to shit basically, and it becomes this kind of
crappy version of the world that I guess we would

(53:10):
be more familiar with, yeah, the one.

Speaker 4 (53:12):
We're in real.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
But they immediately go into the blame game, which is hilarious.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
From the Christian point of view. At least something is
irrevocably lost at that point. There's a state of innocence
that Adam and Eve had. They were naked, they were happy,
and then at that point they get all petty and squabbling,
they have to cover themselves with leaves because they're so
kind of just upset by everything, so they become recognizably
human at that point. They're no longer these kind of

(53:38):
you know, idealized almost semi angelic beings. So it's it's
very much kind of again, we're all, i think, broadly
familiar with the outlines of the story, but the way
Milton kind of tells it is quite interesting because there's
a lot more psychological motivation for why did this happen.
It's not just some simple Okay, Eve disobey bad, God

(53:59):
punished them good. It's much more kind of, you know,
nuanced in terms of what is it, What is the
compelling case that Satan made to Eve that she should
disobey God? And that's the whole kind of thing that
sets the rest of it into motion. Yeah, and then
what happens in the end, like, yeah, so that that's
towards the end of the story, just to wrap up
the whole Okay, yeah, that's a lot.

Speaker 3 (54:19):
Like book nine.

Speaker 4 (54:20):
Yeah, we don't we don't.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
Actually get to the biting of the forbidden fruit until
like book nine.

Speaker 4 (54:26):
Yeah, there's parts in between where we see things from
Heaven's perspective, from God's perspective to or.

Speaker 3 (54:34):
I found that line actually, Victor that you mentioned. So
you know, book book one, you know, we have this
little conference in hell, and then book two is kind
of when Satan sets out and and and it says
he's going to go figure out what this this earth
thing he's heard about, is what's going on there? And

(54:57):
then at the beginning of book three you get God's
perspective and he speaks to his son and he says,
look at Satan. There he's he's out of Hell. Now
I didn't actually bar him in there. And there he
goes and here here's the line here, he's talking about
Satan's lies. Okay, So for man, will hearken to his

(55:20):
closing lies and easily transgress the sole command, sole pledge
of his obedience? End quote? Any means to me?

Speaker 4 (55:29):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (55:30):
And he goes on, So will fall he and his
faithless progeny. Who's fault, who's but his own ingreat? He
had of me all he could have. I made him
just and right sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

(55:51):
There it is that that free to fall kind of
thing again right, like he's I made I gave them
all the perfections possible. Uh, and I also gave them
the power to you know, reject all of that or
or lose it by mistake or by impious act, or
however you want to say it.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
Yeah, and this gets kind of the whole Yeah, the
philosophy of freedom or theology that's kind of being developed, you,
which is that absolute freedom is not freedom. It has
to exist within a framework like what God is presenting here,
and that the whole point of this one prohibition or
commandment that he gives atam an Eve is not so
much that, you know, the tree in itself is going

(56:32):
to or the apple from the tree is going to
radically change things. It's the disobedience. It's the fact that
they are This was the one thing that he said,
don't do this, and the world will continue as it is,
this paradise, and they do it, of course, because you know,
that's just how good drama works. But it's that that's
what sets off this sort of problem with freedom that

(56:52):
is first developed, which is that you can't have absolute
freedom without having some framework within which it exists. And
that's where we get the whole thing with what's the
point of obeying that God if you're not going to
follow the one thing there. So it's interesting and complicated,
but that's at least the sort of Miltonic Christian justification
of it.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
It's the downside of worship, right, because it's like, I
think God also says, I don't know where this idea
comes from. It might be older than Milton, but you
know God saying, well, if they're not free, then how
can they worship me? If they're compelled to worship me,
then it's not very flattering, right, that kind of argument,
where like, they have to be free because that makes

(57:32):
their obedience to Me more meaningful than if they were
just like automatons compelled to be obedient, which is kind
of like the angels. But obviously they still have choice
because Satan was an angel. But it's even more important
for man after that that first fall that gets repeated
by man.

Speaker 4 (57:53):
Is there not some indication on the text that also
God knew that like he foresaw, which also is like
a weird paradox of freedom.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Yeah, that's the whole thing in the line that Eric quoted,
is that God is actually discussing what will unfold to
his son Jesus. Jesus is also in heaven at this point,
he hasn't been born into the world yet, but he's
talking to sort of again, another version of himself. So
God the Father is talking to God the Son, saying,
I know what's going to happen. It's very disappointing, but
I can already tell you, my son, that Adam and

(58:25):
Eve will fall. Satan will succeed. Look at him now
way down below, you know, running to flying to get
to Eden. Even though God is saying, you know, he
has set up everything so that things were fair for
Adam and Eve. They could have resisted this temptation. He
knows they will fall because of just the way that
he already has knowledge of everything, the beginning, the middle,

(58:45):
and the end of the world. But in that same exchange,
that's also when God the Son then says, well, this
can't be how it all ends. This is terrible. Then
Satan will have won. And so that's when God the
Son Jesus the future Jesus says, I will you know,
I will volunteer to redeem man. Eventually, at some point
in the future, I will go down to Earth thousands

(59:08):
of years from now and I will take on the
sins that man has brought into the world by disobeying you,
and I will redeem all of this. So that's the
whole Christian thing with Jesus eventually comes down, and it
is actually a happy ending ultimately, even though Satan seems
to have won in the very beginning where he kind
of again corrupts Adam and Eve, eventually we get the

(59:29):
sort of fair outcome where God the Son will redeem everything,
and that's sort of what the very ends of the
book talk more about this, where Adam and Eve are
given a version of the future where eventually your descendants
will be redeemed from the terrible mistake that you guys
have made.

Speaker 4 (59:47):
Which is really funny. I feel like the like it
kind of makes me just like rethink also how weird
it is, like God's logic, how it's like, well, how
can you be redeemed? Well, I need a sacrifice. It's
just like what, like it's just it's just nonsensical. And
he's like, well, I'll be your sacrifice, and it's like
it's like how can an all loving? And it's just
I mean, the whole thing. It just made me kind

(01:00:08):
of realize, like the kind of weird, paradoxical, tortured logic
of like we of like Christian redemption. I feel like
that just doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
It's beyond logic. God created logic. Don't try to play
chess against chat GBT.

Speaker 4 (01:00:24):
It's just weird. It's just bizarre.

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):
It knows all the moves, it knows all the outcomes.
You can still make free choices when you're playing chess
against chat GBT. It just knows all the choices you
can make before you make them exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:00:37):
But then but God apparently knows the choice that's going
to be made ahead of time, but yet they have
the free choice. It just doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 (01:00:44):
But anyway, the best part is also how God actually
asked rhetorically. It's like, who here in Heaven is brave
and merciful enough to take on this great sacrifice? And
He's just like looking around at the court of angels,
and eventually you know, of course, the son Frodo steps forward,
I will take the mordor I will do this great thing.

(01:01:06):
So it's like.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
There's so many there's so many weird parallels there too,
because when Satan does the first thing in the same book,
He's like, all right, who's gonna go check out Earth
for us? You know, you just have to leave the
gates of Hell, which are immovable, and then you have
to go through space, which has no up or down
or left or right, and and then you have to
go through this like this epicurean swervy adam nightmare, and

(01:01:36):
then you get to Earth. Who's gonna do that? And
then even there it's probably very dangerous because all the
angels are probably watching it. Who's gonna do it? And
none of the demons. The demons are like fuck that shit.
Satan's like, okay, fine, I'll do it myself, and so
he does it himself. Nobody volunteers on his behalf, which
kind of goes to show the quality of his of

(01:01:57):
his people, and also that he gave birth. I mean,
this is this is just perverted. John Milton was definitely
of frequenting the sex dungeons of his day. At least
he might have invented a few. You know, Sin was
born out of his head, just just like Athena was

(01:02:17):
born out of Zeus's head. I think it was Sin
was born out of out of his head. And then
he has sex with Sin and they create Death, and
then Death also has sex with Sin and they make
more spawn that gnaw the inside of Sin's belly. Every

(01:02:38):
night they go like they sort of retire for a rest,
back into their mother and just chew on her organs
as they as you do. And there's these weird parallels
there anyway, because you know, God delegating a lot of
stuff than to Jesus, like stopping the angel war that

(01:02:58):
was up to Jesus and then going down and chasing
Satan out of Paradise and issuing in this new post
fall order and deciding on all the punishments and stuff
that was all delegated to Jesus. Like he does have
a kind of there's a separateness there between God and
Jesus that certain Christian denominations might not quite so accept,

(01:03:24):
but yeah, Jesus has this also has these sort of
he can while he can sacrifice himself for God, Satan
finds no one to step up.

Speaker 1 (01:03:34):
No, And the parallels are definitely there. Eric, You're absolutely
right where we are almost invited to think of, Yeah,
so Satan kind of volunteers to go on this epic journey,
but it's really for his own glory. You can tell
he wants to go, he wants to be He wants
to leave Hell first of all, and he doesn't want
to be in this dark dungeon that he's been thrown into.
But then that's contrasted with what God, the Son Jesus

(01:03:56):
sort of his sacrifice, him volunteering to eventually take on
man's sin. And that gets to the question of so
who is the ultimate hero in all of this, and
is are we actually meant to maybe look more towards
God the Son Jesus, maybe even Adam in some ways
as a different kind of hero where it's not as
flashy as what Satan is doing, you know, it's much

(01:04:17):
more of a sort of humble sacrifice. But that's a
new kind of Christian heroism maybe as opposed to the
older kind of you know, Satan's going to go off
and fight a battle and be kind of like Achilles
or Odysseus or these older kind of Greek heroes in
this sort of tradition. Whereas Milton saying that's old hat.
We need something more, you know, Christian. We need like

(01:04:37):
somebody who's willing to just sacrifice themselves in that way.
So that's something else that's a really interesting contrast that
you're totally kind of pointing out there Eric, which is
Satan versus Jesus, and the way that we're sort of
thinking about what does it mean to be a hero
in this in this kind of story.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
Yeah, because a hero in the ancient texts, there's always
some one who was of divine I mean, the ancient
Greek and Roman kinds of epics, always someone of divine
origin but also part human, which is in the sort
of Jesus. Right, there's a divine element and a human element.

(01:05:18):
So there you go, check you can christianize that thing,
right and then and the heroic epic involves great deeds
and big battles, well, not so much in Paradise Lost, except,
like I mentioned before, the dope Dragon ball Z style
Angelo Mackie, I don't know what you call it, but yeah,

(01:05:38):
the angel fight.

Speaker 4 (01:05:39):
Where was it?

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
I forget which angel it was Gabriel or Raphael or
something like the first blow on Satan's shield and Satan,
Yeah it is Michael. The first blow on Satan's shield
and Satan has pushed like ten meters back, and you
picture somebody like in Dragon ball Z getting punched and
blocked it but still flying backwards into a mountain or something.

(01:06:03):
But he describes it so beautifully, and I was just like,
oh my god, this is this is definitely the origin
of so many pop culture movies, comics, everything in these days.
Even The night Watch. Oh my god. I watched this
crazy Russian sci fi called The night Watch, and I
noticed that Gabriel has to set up a night watch
around Paradise when they know that Satan is going to

(01:06:27):
be showing up at some point, and Gabriel goes and
sets up his night watch to watch the evils and
what they're doing.

Speaker 4 (01:06:32):
And has there been any adaptations of Paradise Loss.

Speaker 1 (01:06:36):
No, thankfully not. No one's tried to make this into
a movie yet, because I don't even know how you
would do that in terms of like Eric was saying,
you know, battles between angels and all this stuff, it.

Speaker 4 (01:06:47):
Would be kind of outrageous, it be all cgi it
would need.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
Yeah, it would have to be some like.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
And they're insubstantial.

Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
He would have to be some mad Max Fury Road
kind of craziness, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:06:59):
Yeah, or be like or like you feel like it
would make a good anime.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
Yeah, yeah, But Eric, that's the only medium that's on that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:06):
Point about the battle in Heaven. That's actually really cool too,
because that happened before the beginning of the story technically,
but we learn about it around the middle of the
poem because one of the angels, Raphael, he actually talks
to Adam and Eve and he says, this is what
happened before you guys were created. Watch out because there's
some fallen angels like Satan who might try to tempt you,
and just so you know, this is how they fell.

(01:07:28):
And then he goes into this long kind of backstory
about the war in heaven. And this is also where
sin and death came from. Like you mentioned, they were
born from Satan. There was no sin in the world.
It all starts with this one angel, Satan or Lucifer, initially,
and then we get to how he sort of convinced
enough of the angels to fight against God and to
kind of try to overtake Heaven. So there's that great

(01:07:50):
passage it that you were mentioning, Eric, where the angels
are kind of having a bit of a back and forth.
They're fighting, they're throwing mountains at each other. It's it's
very kind of you know, epic d d kind of stuff,
and then Jesus shows up or God the Son, and
it's just it's like all over because almost.

Speaker 3 (01:08:08):
He's like Achilles on the battlefield.

Speaker 1 (01:08:10):
Now exactly very much like a kids where he just
single handedly like destroys the rebel angel army. And there's
this really interesting I mean, the whole thing is just
so over the top, but the final lines of when
he throws them from heaven are maybe worth looking at directly,
just so we can get a sense of how out
there in heavy metal a lot of the poem is.

(01:08:30):
Because this isn't Book six. This is the War in
Heaven sort of description. So book six I'm looking at
eight hundred and fifty eight hundred and fifty two, so
I'm just gonna maybe just read a few lines there.
This is where God the Son Jesus has shown up
in the middle of the battle and he just single
handedly like wipes the floor with Satan and the rebel angels.

(01:08:53):
So this is Jesus the Sun a fifty three yet
half his strength. He put not forth, but checked his
thunder in mid volley, for he meant not to destroy,
but root them out of heaven. The overthrown he raised
and as a herd of goats or timorous flock together thronged,

(01:09:14):
drove them before him, thunderstruck, pursued with terrors and with
furies to the bounds and crystal wall of heaven, which
opening wide, rolled inward, and a spacious gap disclosed into
the wasteful deep. The monstrous sight struck them with horror backward,
but far worse urged them behind headlong themselves. They threw

(01:09:38):
down from the verge of heaven. Eternal wrath burnt after
them to the bottomless pit. So the rebel angels were
so terrified of Jesus they threw themselves out of heaven.
When this guy shows up, they're like eight and just
he wipes the floor there.

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
So yeah, they were like lemmings running off a cli
the goats being afraid of Tartarus, but more afraid of
what was pursuing them exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:10:06):
And you see the similar there which these come up
so often in this kind of poem of things being
described like more typical, So like goats being herded by
this you know, badass shepherd or something. That's what the
rebel angels are just like, rushing along to jump from
heaven because they're so terrified of you know, Jesus showing
up and just it's it's, it's over it at that point.

(01:10:28):
But so there's a lot of this is very much
like The Iliad in its description of war and battles
in those kinds of scenes.

Speaker 4 (01:10:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
Oh, especially when you're reading the Iliad and the and
the fights start up. And this is one of the
best torture methods if you're if you're a teacher and
you're looking to torture your students, just get them to
figure out what the hell is going on in the
battles in the Iliad, because it's like book six, the
Greeks are winning, Book seven, the Trojans are winning. Books

(01:10:57):
Book eight, the Trojans win a bit, but then the
win some. But then these I mean, oh my god,
it's so complicated. And at least Milton pairs it down
a bit. Like the first fight, the Angels kicked the
rebels asses, and then the next day the rebels, you know,
pull up all this infernal machinery and basically turn into

(01:11:19):
the inventunowder.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
They invent gunpowder.

Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
Yeah yeah, they basically turn into Eiengard and and and
make all of this infernal machinery and I don't know
what they are. They're like some kind of cannon tank
siege equipment that they just start blasting the angels with it.
And then that's when the angels are like, they just
start throwing mountains at them and cover them in mountains,

(01:11:44):
and then Jesus goes in the next day, and then
they wished that they were covered in mountains again so
that they could be a little bit protected from Jesus.
And then oh my god, that that's epic. That that
is like the heart of of well epic battle stuff
if that's what you need to do anyway, But there's
so much more. Yeah, those similes are always there, especially

(01:12:07):
if you're describing something you're an epic poet and you say,
this happens just like when this happens, but after just
like it's like twenty fucking lines, Like it's the longest,
most intricate comparison, nothing we would do in everyday language.
But those are the Homeric epic similes, just as twenty

(01:12:28):
lines later, Oh, I get the comparison that they were making.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
So that kind of shows you just how much Milton
is clearly kind of riffing on these older epic traditions
like Homer and the Iliad and Achilles and all that stuff.
But at the same time, as you were pointing out
before Eric, he's looking at it and saying, this isn't
good enough anymore. We can't just have these kinds of
violent heroes who are trying to conquer armies or whatever.
We need something new, And I think that that's what

(01:12:51):
he's showing with maybe Adam and Eve and God and
the Son and everything, where it's not just about you know,
force and battle and war. It's a about humility and
sacrifice and a greater vision of heroism and freedom. And
that's the contrast ultimately, where Satan is like an old
style hero. He doesn't get it his world will ultimately

(01:13:13):
be surpassed by the Christian kind of heroism in Milton's
point of view. So that's where these kinds of scenes
are quite interesting because he's sort of showing, yeah, you
know this kind of story. You've seen these kinds of
battles with the Greeks and the Romans, but ultimately this
is not the most important part of the story that
I'm telling, you know, Milton's saying, the real important part

(01:13:35):
is Adam and Eve and the serpent and the questions
of freedom, which are going to come into play in
what we talked about with the whole Garden of Eden
Epacede and everything.

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
So when you mentioned that, Raphael is sent down to
explain a few things, and he takes his time. He
takes like three books to explaining a bunch of shit.
He explains that background story, and then eventually he refuses
to explain anything further because Adam has asked about the

(01:14:05):
more celestial workings of heaven and what's going on up there,
and the angel just sort of says, you know, there's
certain things better left un known. And on the one hand,
he's telling him in these in this whole conversation, he's

(01:14:26):
telling him, you know, someone's gonna come along and try
to trick you into doing something bad, so be be
a warrant. So obviously dramatically at sort of foreshadows sets
up Now the fall, how's it.

Speaker 4 (01:14:41):
Going to happen?

Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
We know that he's been warned against it, so it's
definitely going to happen somehow, and and so it sets
up this tension. But then there's also that element in
there of Milton being interested in like early modern science
and there's a famous visit he has with galile He
must be interested in these sorts of things, early modern science,

(01:15:07):
and he talked He even talks about the the the
craters on the Moon, which would have been a little
strange because you know, it was Galileo's telescope invention that
allowed anybody to actually see the craters on the moon.
Before that, they thought it was a perfect sphere. It's
in the heavens, it's got to be smooth, no imperfections.

(01:15:30):
And Milton mentions the craters on the moon's so that
kind of shows he must have been interested in science,
probably talked about it with Galileo. But it's interesting that
then this but the Raphael says, you know, don't look
too far into these issues and kind of puts an
interdiction there. Just you know that that's too much. I'm

(01:15:52):
not going to tell you that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:53):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:15:53):
I'm telling you what's immediately you know, relevant to your
future and your immediate situation. But I'm not going to
tell you everything you want to know, because some things
are better. I don't know. It's a weird thing about
being interested in science but then also having a kind
of religious perspective on science. Right, because in a way,

(01:16:15):
the tree of death. I guess it's the knowledge of
good and evil, but it's sometimes called the tree of death.
It's also the tree of science, like it's the origin
of science, and that I don't know. I was again,
I haven't had time to put all these thoughts in order,
but those things all seem related to me.

Speaker 1 (01:16:34):
No, there's a whole other podcast we could have just
about the early modern science and how crazy this stuff
is because Milton, Yeah, he was pretty up to speed
on the questions of you know, astronomy and astrology, and
he actually met with Galileo in Italy, so he was
really interested in that side of things as well. And
he kind of presents this really interesting take on a
Christian universe, but according to what was known in terms

(01:16:57):
of science and astronomy at the time. So you have
Satan flying these long distances, he enters the Solar system.
Hell is actually from somewhere outside of way beyond the
Solar system in our world. He lands on the surface
of the Sun. He makes him his way down to Earth.
So there's these are like the biggest kinds of you know,
like scenes and images that you can imagine, and Satan himself.

(01:17:20):
It's kind of hard to visualize him sometimes, but he's
really just like he can obviously take different shapes and everything,
but as an angel or as a rebel angel, he's
larger than life. Like literally, he's as tall as a mountain,
or he can be as small as a serpent. There's
all kinds of really crazy perspectives and stuff like that
happening in this story. And it's just again why it

(01:17:40):
would be so interesting but also so difficult to ever
adapt this as a movie, because you would lose something
of this epic quality where you know, like, like you said,
at one point, Satan's shield is compared to the moon,
like Galileo has seen it with the craters and everything.
So if his shield is as big as the moon,
how big is Satan himself. It's just mind boggling. So

(01:18:02):
a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:18:03):
Is what sounds perfect for an anime.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
Again, I think you're right, you could only do this
as an animated kind of wild Uh yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:12):
I think there is a Dante's Inferno. I don't know
about any Milton games.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
But oh, it's only a matter of time. But in
some ways, Dungeons and Dragons has really kind of taken
the mantle of a lot of this stuff. I think
anyone who's played D and D would recognize a lot
of what we're talking about, just in terms of how
much it influenced the lore and the design of kind
of fantasy RPGs and stuff like that in general. So
that has already kind of been around for a while.

Speaker 3 (01:18:37):
Yeah, well, we joke and mentioned Token and Neil Gamon
and whatever. But I mean Paradise Lost is I mean,
it's not in that genre, but he's doing something very
similar to what they do what fantasy writers do. I mean,
you know, not not explicitly Christian, But Milton wrote a text,

(01:19:01):
what was it something about the tenure of kings and magistrates?

Speaker 4 (01:19:07):
Is about?

Speaker 3 (01:19:07):
Is a text justifying regicide and how the people have
the right to execute a guilty sovereign. So yeah, I
been there, done.

Speaker 1 (01:19:16):
That Just to kind of maybe, yeah, connect a little
bit of the politics and the poetics here. That's really
what's so interesting about it, and what's so puzzling too,
is in real life Milton was a hardcore, you know, revolutionary.
He argued for freedom of the press, overthrowing the king,
all of these kinds of things. But in the poem,
we see, of course the revolutionaries are the devils. Satan

(01:19:37):
is a bad guy, you know, at least from Milton's perspective,
and later on, of course romantic writers, other authors, they
looked to this kind of hero as actually, no, this
is a very compelling anti hero. He's a very sort
of charismatic figure. So one way that people kind of
think about it is that what Milton is sort of
doing here, aside from what we talked about with how
you know we're meant to kind of be seduced a

(01:19:57):
little bit by Satan's charisma and his orat and stuff
like that, is he's also showing, how, you know, thinking
about God is just a king is a bit of
a category mistake. God is not just a monarch when
you can overthrow or something like. Within this notion of freedom,
God is more of a concept. It's a philosophy, it's
a theology that if you go against that, you're breaking

(01:20:17):
something much more fundamental than just sort of you know,
overthrowing a king or a monarch. So when Satan talks
about his rebellion against God as just sort of being
you know, we got to overthrow this guy because he's
sort of you know, like a tyrant or something. Satan
is the one who doesn't get it at that point
because he's kind of projecting this language of kingship into
something divined that that goes beyond just like you know,

(01:20:40):
the politics of a king or subjects or stuff like that.
So a lot of this is kind of left to
the readers like to figure out and to sort of
hash a show like Milton does not lay this out
at all explicitly. But that's what makes it a really
interesting poem too, is that it's so ripe for discussion,
Like we're seeing that there's just so many ways that
you have to sort of kind of unpack it yourself
because on the surface, it's really wild and out there

(01:21:03):
and it's not quite clear what we're supposed to make
of it.

Speaker 4 (01:21:06):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's fascinating. It's been really interesting and
enjoyable to listen to you guys talk about it as
someone who you know, isn't it all, you know, doesn't
have any sort of background in literature. One thing that
stood out to me, Well, it's just like, I guess,
a small point, but it was interesting to notice that
I think at one point they're like discussed they kind
of mentioned that like all these fallen angels are actually

(01:21:27):
and maybe this is something that's in being in Christian
theology for a long time, like even before Milton. I
guess that that those fallen angels have like names that
are like other gods from pagan religions or whatever like
so so like that's kind of the Christian explanation, which
I think I didn't know about, or maybe i'd heard
about it a long time ago, that the explanation for
why there's so many other gods before like people book

(01:21:48):
before people discover Jesus and is because while those were
actually just just demons trying to fool human beings into
like false religions. So that was kind of interesting. But
I guess also like a like maybe a broader question
for you, Victor is like for you as a Milton specialist,
like where does this fit in for you and your
own interest? Is it? Like I think I know that

(01:22:11):
it's not the main thing that you focus on, but
I guess, like in terms of your assessment of Milton,
like do you see this as his masterpiece? And I mean,
I know it's probably widely regarded as his masterpiece, but
what do you think I'm just curious about your own
personal opinion.

Speaker 1 (01:22:25):
Oh yeah, absolutely, this is the big one. He also
wrote a follow up, a much shorter poem called Paradise Regained,
which is about Satan's temptation of Jesus, in this case
in the wilderness in the New Testament. Actually this famous
scene where Jesus goes to the desert for forty days
and Satan, the devil you know, shows up and gives
him three visions of like, you know, you could be

(01:22:46):
king on Earth, you could be king of Rome, you
could be king of this and that, and each time
Jesus says no, no, no, and that in some ways
is the answer to how what Adam and he fail
to do Jesus ultimately does, which is he resists this
kind of temptation of just like earthly power or knowledge
in a way which is sort of like redemptive of
the whole kind of human story. So that's what's really fascinating. Yeah,

(01:23:09):
And in terms of what's more interesting about Milton from
my own work and everything, Yeah, it's just this intersection
between the politics and the poetics and a lot of
what was happening. Again, we haven't talked too much about it.
But like geopolitically in Europe at the time, and how
England kind of fit into all of this with the
Revolution and stuff like that, and Milton's travels to Italy
and the Mediterranean especially is something really interesting in terms

(01:23:29):
of how he's bringing back so many of these older
classical and continental traditions and kind of anglicizing them in
a way that is really kind of interesting, where he's
almost sort of reappropriating some of these other traditions and
making them very English in a way where now you
would say, oh, you know, like England came up with
this or that, or you would think of even classical

(01:23:50):
Greece and Rome. A lot of what we know comes
through England or English academics or English study. And it's
people like Milton who really kind of did that, who
were able to sort of take these traditions and take
them and make them English in a way which we're
still kind of unpacking even today. And that's what's really
interesting about the broader moment in the Renaissance.

Speaker 4 (01:24:09):
Yeah, it was when it came out, Was it a hit?

Speaker 1 (01:24:13):
Was it like, oh, it was something people knew that
it was kind of really special, But it wasn't until
later centuries that, as you mentioned, Derek, people really got
more influenced by the sort of politics and the romantic
aspects of Satan, and like you were saying, with he
kind of became this model for the byronic hero and
the sort of nineteenth century brooding antihero and stuff like that.

(01:24:35):
And what I would also say is like, even if, again,
like you were saying, Victor, you're not like up to
speed on this era of literature, you've almost certainly seen
characters like this just in contemporary like shows or movies
or whatever. Breaking Bad is always one of my favorite examples,
because you start with someone who is just, oh, they're
so sympathetic. There's such an absolutely tony soprano Walter White,

(01:24:58):
these complicated bad guys who at first seem to be
you know, we should be rooting for them, and then gradually,
as the story unfold, as you realize, oh, these these
are awful people. We probably should have a second thought
about this. So a lot of that comes from Milton Satan.
A lot of that comes from this idea of the
charming anti hero who ultimately is exposed as being pretty

(01:25:18):
selfish and hollow in terms of their actual motivations or stuff,
and how it's interesting for us as leaders or as
viewers to kind of see, oh wait a minute, you know,
we have to actually look deeper than just what seems
to be the obvious story here makes sense.

Speaker 3 (01:25:34):
Yeah, and then about your I think you're right about
Christian religion explaining other religions in that way, like, you know,
other gods are sort of like the progeny of the
rebellious part of the angels, I guess, like not just
sin and death and like like personified Christian concepts, but

(01:25:58):
also like like genuine gods from like Babylonian or Mesopotamian
religions or stuff like that. Yeah, explaining them that way.
But Milton does this really interesting thing too, where after
the fruit is eaten, he almost explains like modern science
as coming into being there too, in more than one way.

(01:26:19):
I just remembered this is that after the fruit was
eaten and got and Jesus comes in and does the
New World Order thing, I'm pretty sure they like tilted
the earth a bit and gave it its wobble, and
they made like the north winds in the South Pole,
and they like kind of set up the universe in

(01:26:40):
this sort of slightly new way, and now there's night
and day and paradise. Isn't the scent like it's almost
it almost like seemed to me, well, the Bible was
right and Earth was the center, but then the Fall happened,
and now it moves and like it tilts and wobbles,
and there's different seasons and stuff. And I know, like
Heaven sort of already had different day and night, you

(01:27:02):
know that day and night sort of live under God's
throne or something like that and come out and shift
change every once in a while. But there was some
big renovations that went on after the Fall that I
remember reading. I have to look back at those passages.
But yeah, Christian explanations of other religions or scientific discoveries

(01:27:23):
that seem to contradict the Bible, I mean source of
creativity there definitely anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:27:31):
Yeah, and because he's writing about, yeah, Milton's writing about
the very beginning of the universe. Everything is very fresh
and new here. So he's saying, you know, this came
before anything else. All those other religions and traditions and everything,
they're just the corrupted remnants of whatever, the fallen angels
or whatever. This is where it all began. He's saying,
you know, this is the ground zero for all of history,

(01:27:52):
all of humanity, and that moment that you're mentioning Eric
is again it's so interesting where I think maybe we
can just very very quickly look at that. That's in
the actual fall itself book nine, line nine or six
six six. There's a little bit of numerology there where
Eve eats the fruit.

Speaker 4 (01:28:10):
Well is it where he's described like, I mean, I'm
at nine nine nine, book nine, and he's talking about
like in pegs and Nature gave a second groan, sky
lower and muttering thunder some sad drops.

Speaker 1 (01:28:23):
Oh shit, that's when Adam himself eats it. Yeah, So
I'm just gonna go up a little bit more where
Eve ate it.

Speaker 3 (01:28:29):
Yeah, yeah, those are good lines around those parts too.

Speaker 4 (01:28:33):
Eating his fill nor Eve to iterate.

Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
Yeah. Nine nine nine is when Adam eats it, and
that's the fall is complete. Yes, so yeah, looking at
the actual lines where that fall takes place. This is
in book nine. She plucked, she ate Earth, felt the wound,
and nature from her seat, sighing through all her works
gave signs of woe that all was lost. So it's

(01:29:00):
it's a moment almost like you know, towards the end
of Lord of the Rings, maybe when Frodo throws the
ring into mount it's the opposite of that. It's like
things are fucked. It's just evil has been brought it
into the world.

Speaker 4 (01:29:13):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:29:13):
It's like either the death of patrick Le's or it's
like the actual battle between Hector and Achille. It's like
the thing you've been waiting for the whole time, that
the losing of Paradise. That's like the point. Yeah, that's
why I said a climax book.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
Yeah, that's sort of what it all leads up to.
But then again, the later parts of the story kind
of show there is going to be you know, a
new hope. There's the redemption with God, rest of the exactly. Yeah,
oh yeah, yeah, it's it's really action Packet's really you
can see just how much of this stuff has permitted
down to like podcasts.

Speaker 4 (01:29:51):
That's where Jordan Peterson is like kind of right about
all this stuff, you know, like his biblical these archetypes.

Speaker 1 (01:29:56):
Oh man. Yeah, and he is the worst vehicle for
kind of unpacking any of that stuff, because of course
he just takes it in such stupid directions. But there
is something to that in terms of these primal myths
and a lot of the kind of interesting traditions that Milton,
at least at the center.

Speaker 4 (01:30:12):
He used to be more interesting and like reasonable about
it before, but he's become a total in that case.

Speaker 3 (01:30:17):
Oh yeah, like he I saw a short came up
while I was doing research with him talking about Paradise Lost,
and he said, all the interpretation has been between whether
Satan is really a good guy or Satan is supposed
to be a bad guy. He's the hero of the poem,
like he's just so wrong about everything he fucking says.

(01:30:38):
He's profoundly wrong, and people enjoy his profundity no matter where,
even if it's profoundly false.

Speaker 1 (01:30:45):
Like Satan himself. At this point, I think, yeah, he's
got other problems because he doesn't know which side of
the border that he should sort of end up on.
I mean, it's a complicated you know for JP, but yeah, it's.

Speaker 3 (01:30:57):
It's yeah, I just read into a record Stanley Fish,
who wrote this in nineteen sixty seven. There are currently
two strains in criticism of Paradise Lost, one concerned with
providing a complete reading of the poem and the other
emphasizing a single aspect or single tradition in light of
which the whole can better be understood. And his thesis

(01:31:20):
is simply that the uniqueness of the poem's theme, Man's
first disobedience and the fruit thereof results in the readers
being simultaneously a participant in the action and a critic
of his own performance. End quote. And that is what
you call Stanley Fish and reader response theory, where the

(01:31:43):
meaning is created through reading the text, and therefore it
isn't unreasonable actually to read Satan as the antihero instead
of the antagonist.

Speaker 1 (01:31:54):
But yeah, different, that's the whole argument right there. Yeah,
and stan Fish is sort of the og Milton is
from the sixties. He's actually still around. I've met him
at a few conferences where he was the first to
kind of articulate this argument that you're being seduced along
with Adam and Eve here. You're being sort of tempted
by this story to sympathize with Satan, to kind of

(01:32:16):
go along for the ride. And it's only the best
sort of careful Christian readers will realize, wait a minute,
we need to sort of think bigger than just you
know Satan's argument here and kind of apply our own
critical take on.

Speaker 4 (01:32:30):
What working rolled.

Speaker 1 (01:32:32):
So it's a very reader response thing. And again it
kind of gets back to the importance of like all
of this is about reader interpretation as much as anything else.
As with any other kinds of literary or philosophical text,
don't take things at face value, you know, dig deeper
and make up your own conclusion ultimately about whose side
you're on. That that's what this text is really kind

(01:32:53):
of pushing you to do in many ways.

Speaker 4 (01:32:55):
Cool, Well, that seems like a good place to end.

Speaker 3 (01:32:57):
Yeah, I think so. I think we covered pretty much
a good spread of things for and we connected it
to our our freedom series we've been on on the
on the pill pod in general. So yeah, I think
we've done it. Just to close with I guess Harold
Bloom's words too, just to contrast with Fish. He says

(01:33:19):
it could be argued that the Miltonic account of the
Creation in Book seven transcends its prime source the first
chapter of Genesis, so we already mentioned something like that too.
This is like taking the little bit of scraps you
get in the Bible and in Genesis and turning it
into an amazing, interesting, kind of semi mythological story about

(01:33:43):
the origins of evil.

Speaker 4 (01:33:45):
So and quite over the top.

Speaker 3 (01:33:48):
In many ways, yes, but still awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:33:51):
Yeah, all right, no, really great to dive into this
stuff with you guys. And yeah, if if the listeners
are attempted to perhaps you know, crack open the home.
The language is a bit dense, but it's a lot
of fun too to kind of just look at different
parts and everything.

Speaker 4 (01:34:05):
Or some good stuff in there for sure, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:34:07):
Just rewatch the Sopranos or go play some D and
D because it's it's all in the same tradition.

Speaker 4 (01:34:12):
So yeah, that's true. That's a good point.

Speaker 1 (01:34:15):
Yeah, it's either way, have fun. Yeah cool, I agree?

Speaker 3 (01:34:18):
All right, all right, well this has been an episode
of the Pill Pod with lit Vic and Politics Vic
so and I'm Eric of course, so we'll see you
all next time. Thanks for joining us, and check out
some Paradise Lost when you get a chance, all right,

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Pill Pod 202 - Paradise has been Lost ft. Victor Hainagiu

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Pill Pod 202 - Paradise has been Lost ft. Victor Hainagiu