"That Far Be from Milton: Divine Goodness and Justification in Paradise Lost" is arguably the best paper I wrote as an undergraduate student. The essay was published in Knowledge Within Bounds, a class journal and in-house publication, not a professional, peer-edited academic journal. Within the body of "That Far Be from Milton," I defend Milton's characterization of the Father against one scholar of New Milton Criticism's assertion that the God of Paradise Lost is Heaven's tyrant, a literary manifestation of not only Milton's anti-royalist sensibilities but also his supposed rejection of the Biblical depiction of divinity.

1. That Far Be From Milton: Divine Goodness and Justification in Paradise Lost
Ryan J. Horton
We ought not to imagine that God would have said anything or caused
anything to be written about himself unless he intended that it should
be a part of our conception of him.
—John Milton, Christian Doctrine 1.2
Considering the arguments set forth in recent years by one of the scholars of The New
Milton Criticism, Michael Bryson, the task of refuting erroneous reasoning and once again
setting aright the God of Paradise Lost is wholly necessary. After all, John Milton’s entire
educational, political, and poetic life culminated in and was poured out into the English epic with
one goal paramount above all others, and the popularity of a critic like Bryson could very well be
the undoing of Milton’s achievement of that goal and fulfillment of his self-proclaimed prophetic
calling. By depicting the Father as the fully passible king and creator of Heaven and earth,
realms inhabited by angels and humans each free to choose their own actions, Milton constructs
an Arminian model of creation wherein mercy is offered to all who fall from God’s grace,
exonerating the Lord of the Hebrew scriptures from any wrongdoing, instead placing the
problem of evil in the hands of those whose uncontrolled appetites entice them to willfully forfeit
paradise.
In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Milton states the grand poetic purpose of his epic;
invoking the Holy Spirit as his muse, he prays:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the highth of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. (1.22-26)
In order to succeed at such a daunting undertaking—both justifying to men the ways of God and
justifying God’s interactions with men—Milton must excel the theologians of his time in
presenting a consistent, relatable, understandable image of an otherwise unpredictable,
unintelligible, and unknowable God. His first step toward achieving that end is to eradicate the
orthodox view of the personal nature of God. Originating in the time of the earliest church
fathers, anthropopatheia was first introduced into Christianity in the form of apatheia by Philo.
In his essay “Reading God: Milton and the Anthropopathetic Tradition,” Michael Lieb writes:
Approaching the subject from the Hellenistic perspective that he embodied, Philo
transformed the biblical deity into a philosophical principle founded upon the idea
of immutability . . . As that which is immutable, God, argues Philo, cannot be
“moved,” that is, cannot experience emotion, for emotion implies movement,
which, in turn, suggests mutability. (214)
Philo argues that Moses’ anthropomorphic portrayals of God were written as such to “admonish
those who could not otherwise be brought to their senses” (Lieb 214). “The true reader for
Philo,” writes Lieb, “is one who is able to look beyond the apparent meanings implicit in
Scriptures” (214). Remarkably, this overwhelmingly secularized understanding of the attributes
of God became the standard in the early church.
While some church fathers—namely Tertullian, Lactantius, and Origen in his later
writings—certainly favored a more passible, relatable, and ultimately Scriptural understanding of
1

2. the Father, the early church solidified the impassability of God as a Christian doctrine (Lieb
217). “In this respect,” says Lieb, “St. Augustine is the consummate spokesman for the orthodox
point of view” (217):
In keeping with those philosophical principles that subscribe to the idea of
immutability, St. Augustine argues that God remains impassible, that is,
immutable, even when appearing to undergo pathos. Although pathos is ascribed
to God, his impassibility is such that what we would call emotion in him is of a
nature totally beyond our understanding . . . that which appears to us as passibility
occurs without any perturbation in the mind of God or compromising his divine
apatheia. (218)
St. Augustine teaches that any pathos apparently exhibited by God is merely a projection of
human emotions experienced “as a result of the effects that his actions have upon us,” and the
metaphors for deity adopted in the Bible exist “in order to allow the reader to understand what
would otherwise be beyond human comprehension. The reader, in turn, is not to interpret these
metaphors literally” (Lieb 219). St. Augustine’s views were the accepted norm throughout the
Middle Ages, and “an adherence to the essential impassibility of God was the standard of
Renaissance thought on the subject as well. Such is particularly true of Reformation theology”
(Lieb 219). Just as St. Augustine had done for Catholicism, John Calvin repackaged Philo’s
divine apatheia for Protestant reformers. Lieb writes:
Calvin’s observations . . . suggest that the ascription of emotion of God
derives not from God as he really is but from man as he responds to the
accommodated presence of deity in the Scriptures. As a being moved by passions
of one sort or another, man is prompted by that presence to read his own
passibility into God, to create God, as it were, in his own image . . . God assumes
a passible presence for the purpose of heightening our awareness of our own
passibility. (220)
Calvin, St. Augustine, and Philo all share a common view that the various Scriptural
representations of a passible God are nothing more than tropes, each man preferring to
rhetoricize Scripture rather than to accept it at face value (Lieb 221). The anthropopatheia of
God, his impassibility understood in terms of human emotion, was the institutionalized doctrine
of divine attributes for the Church of England during the time of Milton (Lieb 223), and it was
exactly the kind of erroneous theology that persuaded the poet to forego his rightful place among
the episcopacy.
Concerning the anthropopathetic tradition of Scriptural analysis, Milton writes in his
systematic theological treatise, Christian Doctrine:
In my opinion, then, theologians do not need to employ anthropopathy, or
the ascription of human feelings to God. This is a rhetorical device thought up by
grammarians to explain [...] the nonsense poets write about Jove. Sufficient care
has been taken, without any doubt, to ensure that the holy scriptures contain
nothing unfitting or unworthy of him. This applies equally to those passages in
scripture where God speaks about his own nature. So it is better not to think about
God or form an image of him in anthropopathetic terms, for to do so would be to
follow the example of men, who are always inventing more and more subtle
theories about him. Rather we should form our ideas with scripture as a model, for
that is the way in which he has offered himself to our contemplation. We ought
not to imagine that God would have said anything or caused anything to be
2

3. written about himself unless he intended that it should be a part of our conception
of him. (6:134)
A number of important observations can be made from this passage, particularly when
juxtaposed with Milton’s mission statement in Paradise Lost: to justify the ways of God to man.
First, Milton clearly equates anthropopatheia to idol worship; as Lieb says, such rhetorical
readings are “tantamount to making of [God] a pagan deity . . . Milton endorses a theoretics of
reading that refuses to secularize the sacred writings” (225). Secondly, Milton believes God
himself has overseen the recording and compiling of holy scripture, so there is no reason for any
reader to assume that some representation entirely unfitting of Jehovah has somehow crept in
unnoticed; if God claims to have been grieved, refreshed, or afraid, “let us believe,” says Milton,
“that it is not beneath God to feel what grief he does feel, to be refreshed by what refreshes him,
and to fear what he does fear” (YP 6:135). Furthermore, when God speaks of and to the Son in
Book III, “O thou in Heav’n and Earth the only peace / Found out for mankind under wrath, O
thou / My sole complacence! Well thou know’st how dear / To me are all my works” (Milton
3.274-77), let us believe it is not uncharacteristic of God as Milton understands him to feel his
wrath toward his beloved creation quelled by his one Son and only pleasure. Finally, if Milton
fancies himself a prophet, prays to the Holy Spirit to fill his mouth with the right words to justify
the ways of God to men, and believes God does not allow anything to be written about himself
through his own inspiration unless it is true, then Milton must believe he is portraying God the
Father as accurately as is humanly possible; “we ought not to imagine that [Milton] would have
said anything . . . about [God] unless he intended that it should be a part of our conception of
him” (YP 6:134). Therefore, Michael Bryson’s attempt to rhetoricize the God of Paradise Lost in
his essay “‘That far be from thee’: Divine Evil and Justification in Paradise Lost,” wherein he
argues that “Milton portrays the Father in […] a harsh light, not to say […] that this is how God
really is, but that this is how God has been wickedly imagined” (89), is not only counter-intuitive
but also undermines the entire purpose for which Milton penned his epic. This harsh light in
which Bryson so confidently asserts Milton portrays God appears to be the product and
projection of his own image of a wicked deity, for Milton clearly finds such tropes utterly
reprehensible.
Milton imagines God as the bearer of divine emotions not entirely dissimilar to those
possessed by human beings. However, unlike those who “attempt to explain God through the use
of anthropopatheia,” Milton does not project human emotions onto a God who thereby
“becomes an imago hominis” (Lieb 225), an image of man; instead the Father in Paradise Lost
exhibits and exemplifies those familial traits inherited by Adam and Eve in Scripture, for as
Dennis R. Danielson writes in “Imago Dei, ‘Filial Freedom,’ and Miltonic Theodicy,” the
“essential and valuable” human trait of being the imago dei—the image of God—is “the very
first human characteristic mentioned in the Bible” (670). In the epic poem, Milton goes to rather
extraordinary lengths to demonstrate the correlation between the Father and his various images,
not only Adam and Eve but also the Son (and the holy angels) and Satan (and the fallen angels).
For example, just as the Father must subject mankind to his wrath in the absence of repentance
and an intermediary (Milton 3.191-216, 275), the Son subjects the unrepentant angelic rebels to
his wrath in Book VI: “So spake the Son, and into terror changed / His count’nance too severe to
be beheld / And full of wrath bent on his enemies” (6.824-26). While the Godhead’s wrath is
poured out as just punishment on wickedness, Satan’s wrath is fueled by unwarranted hatred and
a desire for vengeance; still, in spite of his perverse and inverse nature, Satan is an image of
God’s passible nature:
3

4. Nine times the space that measures day and night
To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf
Confounded though immortal: but his doom
Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate: (Milton 1.50-56, 58)
Adam and Eve, too, experience wrath to a lesser extent in the form of anger—a rather clever
decision on Milton’s part to maintain the Scriptural declaration that God created man “a little
lower than the angels” (Authorized King James Version Psa. 8.5)—shortly after the pair partake
of the forbidden fruit:
They sat them down to weep, nor only tears
Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within
Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate,
Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore
Their inward state of mind, calm region once
And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent: (Milton 9.1121-26)
Milton goes so far as to suggest through God’s own words that this tempestuous surge of
emotions actually makes Adam and Eve more like the Father than they had been heretofore:
“O Sons, like one of us man is become
To know both good and evil, since his taste
Of that defended fruit; […]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He sorrows now, repents, and prays contrite,
My motions in him; longer than they move,
His heart I know, how variable and vain
Self-left. (11.84-86, 90-93)
Milton’s God is not simply declaring that Adam’s sorrow and repentance are divinely-inspired
motions towards grace. The Father is confessing that sorrow and repentance are “My [e]motions
in him” (11.91), for God experiences both in Genesis 6: “And it repented the LORD that he had
made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart” (6.6). This passible God Milton creates in
the Scriptural Jehovah’s image is too unsettling for Bryson’s tastes, for a Heavenly Father who
knows good and evil—hate, anger, discord, repentance—is far too human, too wicked in
Bryson’s eyes to be the God in whom Milton means for his audience to find justification.
Bryson first speaks of the “particularly thorny dilemma [of] why angelic and human
characters alike express anxiety regarding the Father’s capacity for good and evil” (88), citing
two episodes wherein no such anxiety exists. One of the two episodes, the prayer of Adam and
Eve after Satan tempts the mother of mankind in her dreams, is certainly wrought with anxiety,
but the fear arises not from the evil God might do to the pair but from the sin of the angel from
Eve’s nightmare and her failure to resist his savory offering:
[‘]Forbid who will, none shall from me withhold
Longer thy offered good, why else set here?’
This said he paused not, but with vent’rous arm
He plucked, he tasted; me damp horror chilled
4

5. At such bold words vouched with a deed so bold:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So saying, he drew nigh, and to me held,
Even to my mouth of the same fruit held part
Which he had plucked; the pleasant savory smell
So quickened appetite, that I, methought,
Could not but taste. (5.62-66, 82-86)
Adam proceeds to comfort Eve, assuring her that she is a creation too pure to have been the
source of the evil in her dream (5.99, 100), and he tells her “Evil into the mind of god or man /
May come or go, so unapproved, and leave / no spot or blame behind” (5.117-19). Bryson
declares this reasoning to be “a disturbingly thin thread upon which to hang the idea that one’s
creator is wholly good” (87), adding that Satan’s influence on Eve’s dreams is done “at the
Father’s sufferance…[having] its ultimate source and sanction in the Father” (87-88), but he
appears to be the only one aware of—much less disturbed by—the Father’s supposed capacity
for evil. Adam and Eve recognize without hesitation not only that God has always done solely
good to them but also that he is quite obviously not the source of this potential evil. Instead of
displaying fear of God, they sing his praises and faithfully seek refuge in his capacity to stop any
evil that might befall them:
[“]Hail universal Lord, be bounteous still
To give us only good; and if the night
Have gathered aught of evil or concealed,
Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark.” (5.205-09)
In response to their prayer, “With pity Heav’n’s high King” (5.220) sends Raphael to warn man’s
first parents about Satan’s wiles, ensuring the pair cannot “pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished,
unforewarned” (5.244-45), an act of kindness that ultimately fosters a sense of personal
responsibility in the two, prompting them to confess their sins and receive God’s forgiveness and
redemption. It is this admission of personal responsibility on the parts of Adam and Eve that
embodies Milton’s theodical defense of God’s goodness, an incompatibilistic apologia Milton
insists upon but Bryson so freely chooses to ignore.
In addition to passability, men and angels in Paradise Lost have another filial trait
inherited from the Father, one that is intricately intertwined with the mutability of the characters
in the poem and of which Milton nearly overstates the philosophical implications in his epic. In
order for a God who freely chooses to create all things in the heavens and on the earth to forge
either man or angel in his image, he must necessarily endow each of them with free will. Milton
is not content, however, with merely portraying the major players of the epic as free to choose;
he makes certain no compatibilistic argument can be applied to God’s creation. Danielson
explains Milton’s motivation:
Now those who base their theodicy on the Free Will Defense must also take
steps to counter . . . compatibilism, the view that free will does not preclude
determinism and vice versa. If, as compatibilists claim, one can be caused to do
something freely, then the Free Will Defense is rendered theodically useless,
because God could have caused man freely not to sin. Only if one takes an
incompatibilist . . . position does the argument from free will make any sense.
(672).
Milton—and therefore the God of Paradise Lost—is a vehement incompatibilist. He stands
firmly opposed to the notion “that whatever we do or will, we do or will it necessarily, as being
5

6. moved to it by the first cause and a chained connexion of necessitating causes” (Danielson 672).
Unlike most orthodox Calvinists who believe God predestined and preordained all of human
history simply by foreknowing its course, Milton—an adherent to Arminian theology—is not
content to place the burden of evil on the first cause, the Father. In Christian Doctrine Milton
writes, “God’s foreknowledge is simply his wisdom under another name, or that idea of all things
which…he had in mind before he decreed anything…God made no absolute decrees about
anything which he left in the power of men, for men have freedom of action” (YP 6:1.154-55).
Because of his belief that God does not direct men into evil simply because he foreknows their
choices, “Milton’s theodicy,” writes Danielson, “like so many others based on the first three
chapters of Genesis, attempts to account for the evil in the world by pointing to the misuse of
human freedom” (670). Not surprisingly then, the Father rejects compatibilism and
predestination in Book III of Paradise Lost, placing the blame for the falls of both disobedient
men and rebellious angels on their respective vain transgressions:
. . . whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all th’ ethereal Powers
And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . They therefore as to right belonged,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if predestination overruled
Their will, disposed by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less proved certain unforeknown. (3.96-102, 111-19)
Adam and Eve, realizing God has done them no wrong, are willing to accept the blame,
“confess / Humbly our faults, and pardon beg” (10.1088) before God, “in whose look serene, /
When angry most he seemed and most severe, / What else but favor, grace, and mercy shone”
(10.1094-96). Uncharacteristically, even Satan himself admits the fact that his revolt was his own
decision, and he could have stood morally upright had he just chosen to do so:
. . . Some other power
As great might have aspired, and me though mean
Drawn to his part; but other powers as great
Fell not, but stand unshaken, from within
Or from without, to all temptations armed.
Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand?
Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse,
But Heav’n’s free love dealt equally to all? (4.61-68)
Therefore, when Bryson asserts that “Satan does what he does at the Father’s sufferance…and as
part of the Father’s determination” (87) to torment Satan and perpetuate his grief, that “[in]
essence…the evil that comes into the mind of Eve, through the dream suggested by Satan, has its
6

7. ultimate source and sanction in the Father” (88), he is applying a compatibilist argument to an
incompatibilist representation of God’s creation. Even the Father of Lies, Satan himself, in one
of the very few episodes when he is being honest, admits that such a rhetorical endeavor is
illogical and useless.
While Bryson refuses to acknowledge that Milton means for men and angels to be
understood as entirely free to choose, he does view one character as an incompatibilist: the
Father. “Related to the notion of divine evil is the question of the passibility or impassibility of
Milton’s God,” writes Bryson; “Can Milton’s God be moved emotionally…so that he is capable
of acting on impulse for good or for evil?” (91). Rightfully citing Yahweh [Jehovah] as Milton’s
prototype for the Father in Paradise Lost, Bryson makes a fundamental error in his reasoning
about the God of Scripture:
Yahweh’s capacity for evil is a fact so often emphasized in the Hebrew scriptures
as to be almost monotonous, and the concept of Yahweh as the source of all [sic]
things, both of good and of evil, is repeated frequently. Job asks his wife, “Shall
we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” (2.10).
Lamentations 3.38 asks, “Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil
and good?” (91, emphasis added)
In alluding to these sections of Scripture, Bryson has egregiously omitted some key points
concerning Yahweh by removing these scriptures from not only their Old Testament context but
also from the Christian hermeneutic. First, Job is not receiving evil from the hand of God. It is
Satan—in one of his sparse appearances in the Tanakh—who “smote Job with sore boils from the
sole of his foot unto his crown” (2.7). Furthermore, Bryson fails to apply his own linguistic logic
—that evil (ra) and destruction (rawah) must be understood as synonyms because of their
relation in the Hebrew tongue—to an actual Hebrew text. Yahweh specifically refers to Satan’s
inability to move him to do evil to Job, and in spite of Satan’s best rhetorical attempts, Yahweh
remains good and faithful to Job in honor of Job’s goodness and faithfulness to him:
And the Lord [Yahweh] said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job,
that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that
feareth God [Elohim], and escheweth evil? And still he holdeth fast his integrity,
although thou movedst me against him to destroy [to do evil to] him without
cause . . . Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life. (2.3, 6)
Additionally, Job does not tell his wife to receive evil also from the hands of Yahweh. Job uses
the Hebrew word Elohim (2.10), a word that can be translated to mean a number of things: rulers,
judges, divine ones, angels, god, gods, goddess, goddesses, or God. In actuality, a correct reading
of Job refutes Bryson entirely. Yahweh cannot be moved to do evil (to destroy) unjustly (without
cause) (Job 2.3); when bad things happen to Job, Satan is the cause, for Yahweh’s role in the
matter is passive, choosing not to prevent Satan’s wickedness except to save Job from destruction
(evil) (2.6); and while Elohim might be referring to Yahweh, it might also be referring to angels
—Satan included—so it is not entirely plausible to say Job expects evil from Yahweh when in
fact he says no such thing (2.10).
Moreover, a Christian understanding of the works of God allows for the teachings of Paul
the Apostle concerning adversity in the life of God’s worshipers: “And we know that all things
work together for good to them that love God” (Rom 8.38a). Yahweh is therefore justified in his
inaction while Satan performs works of evil against Job; through such adversity, God not only
proves and subsequently rewards the righteousness of Job but also saves his unrighteous friends,
for at the end of the narrative, Job intercedes for Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, saving them from
7

8. God’s wrath and receiving for himself twice as much as he had lost through his trials (42.7-10).
Yahweh, certain because of his foreknowledge that Job will never turn from him, allows Satan to
persecute the blameless man in order to save his unrighteous friends from destruction by
suffering in their places. Job’s story can thus be understood as an image of not only Jesus Christ
in the New Testament but also of the Son in Book III of Paradise Lost, wherein the Father
declares of disobedient man:
. . . to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must die,
Die he or Justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death. (3.208-12)
In accordance with God’s foreknowledge, the Son volunteers to give his life for man:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . he her aid
Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost;
Atonement for himself or offering meet,
Indebted and undone, hath none to bring:
Behold me then, me for him, life for life
I offer, on me let thine anger fall;
Account me man. (3.232-38)
The story of Job, then, is consistent with the theme of the entire Bible and Paradise Lost. In
order for God to save unrighteous, fallen men, a perfectly righteous man must suffer in their
place, not because of God’s wickedness but because of grace and mercy.
Just as the passage from Job supports a proper reading of Milton’s God, so does the
passage Bryson cites from Lamentations. Predictably, Bryson once more removes the scripture
from its appropriate context, for the verses immediately following 3.38 offer all the justification
Yahweh needs:
Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good? Wherefore doth
a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins? Let us search and
try our ways, and turn again to the Lord (Yahweh). Let us lift up our heart with
our hands unto God (Elohim) in the heavens. We have transgressed and have
rebelled: thou hast not pardoned. (Lam 3:38-42)
In this Biblical poem, one Bryson considers indicative of God’s inherent wickedness, Yahweh
punishes evil with evil in order to persuade men to repent. In other words, God’s apparent work
of evil is carried out for goodness’ sake. Unlike the Job narrative, Satan cannot be blamed as
easily for God’s work in Lamentations; however, there is no need for a scapegoat. The writer of
this lament very clearly shares Milton’s incompatibilist perspective of the will of men:
“Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins? […] We have
transgressed and have rebelled” (3.39, 42). This is precisely the kind of language echoed by
Adam and Eve in Book X when they admit their punishment consists of “evils which our own
misdeeds have wrought” (Milton 10.1080), and those evils are God’s “just yoke / Laid on our
necks” (10.1045, 46): “What better can we do, than...prostrate fall / Before him reverent, and
there confess / Humbly our faults, and pardon beg” (Milton 10.1086-89). And while Satan may
not be blamable for those human transgressions committed in Lamentations, Milton places the
fault of sin entirely on the archfiend in Book I of Paradise Lost, declaring him, not God, the first
cause of evil:
So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay
8

9. Chained on the burning lake, nor ever thence
Had ris’n or heaved his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enraged might see
How all his malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown
On man by him seduced (1.209-19)
Milton, following Paul’s lead in Romans, envisions Satan’s wicked attacks on men as acts
redeemable by God, who blesses mankind in spite of evil. What comes as quite a surprise,
however, is the very real possibility that God has not loosened the archfiend’s bindings simply to
torment Satan and bless mankind with grace and mercy. The Father may, in fact, be giving his
nemesis a second chance at accepting that peculiar grace himself.
Never one to limit God in his acts of altruism, Milton constructs an image of God who,
despite his foreknowledge that Satan will forever refuse to repent, displays his infinite goodness
by allowing Satan to escape Hell, so the Father of Lies can be presented with the opportunity for
repentance and redemption like any other fallen image of the most high. Having manipulated Sin
and Death into giving him passage out of the gates of Hell, Satan emerges from Chaos to
discover Heaven before him and “Ascending by degrees magnificent / Up to the wall of Heaven
a structure high” (Milton 3.502, 503). Keith W. F. Stavely explicates this scene in his essay
“Satan and Arminianism in Paradise Lost,” writing, “The suggestion that the archfiend himself is
being granted the opportunity to choose repentance and faith is made…when the ‘structure high’
ascending to heaven is identified”:
The stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw
Angels ascending and descending, bands
Of guardians bright, when he from Esau fled
To Padan-Aram in the field of Luz,
Dreaming by night under the open sky
And waking cried, This is the gate of heaven” (128, Milton 3.510-515)
Protestant contemporaries of Milton regularly interpreted “the ‘stairs’ Jacob sees…as a figure of
Christ…So, near the beginning of his voyage through the created universe, Satan encounters
something…Milton’s readers would have recognized as…the promise of grace and redemption”
(Stavely 128). Drawing an even deeper parallel, Milton’s Satan is the Father of Lies, a master
manipulator as evidenced by his recent escape from Hell during which he persuades his
daughter-wife and son to allow him to leave, and he “will very shortly disguise himself in order
to deceive Uriel” (Stavely 130) as well. Jacob, too, is a persuasive conman, for in Genesis he not
only uses Esau’s hunger to manipulate him into selling his birthright (25.30-34) but also dons a
disguise and lies to his blind father Isaac about his identity in order to receive his filial blessing
(27.5-29). Furthermore, Satan wages war against God who he believes owes him more blessing
—in the form of a higher status—than the Son; similarly, Jacob enters into physical combat with
a man from whom he demands a blessing, only to discover that the man is God himself (Gen
32.24-30). According to Stavely, “The analogy with Satan transforms Jacob from the member of
the invulnerably regenerate elect…to the sort of wayward, fallen creature we might expect to
find in his epic of original sin” (130). Strengthening his argument, Stavely concludes:
9

10. If Jacob, the past manipulator of the divine promises, is tarred by an imputation of
similarity to Satan, Satan is by the same token potentially cleansed by an
intimation of of his present similarity to the Jacob who chooses to have faith in a
symbol of Christ . . . in terms of the overall design and action of Paradise Lost, if
Satan is here looking at a type of Christ, the Son of God, then he is looking at
what he has already chosen to “reject and despise” [5.664] . . . In other words,
God continues to extend the most crucial spiritual invitation to Satan despite
Satan’s previous rejection and despising. (131)
Reading the Father’s choice to unshackle Satan as a means by which to offer him grace at least
once more—Stavely explicates a few other instances as calls to repentance as well—not simply
to torment the archfiend for his transgressions and ultimately dispense divine mercy to mankind,
suggests something inherent to the character of Milton’s God that separates him from his
creation. The Father’s decisions are necessarily influenced in a deterministic manner by his
nature and his foreknowledge; thus his free will adheres to the tenets of compatibilism.
Although Bryson envisions God as the epic’s only incompatibilist, the one character most
capable of being evil willfully and not by his created nature, it is quite clear the Father Milton
intends to justify (and by extension his Son) is actually the only compatibilist to be found in
Paradise Lost (Danielson 676), for he will not even deny himself—that is, his goodness—to
withhold the call to repentance from Satan himself. Peter Sterry, a compatibilist theologian and
contemporary of Milton, writes:
[The] Freedom of all things is to act according to their natures . . . in God and
man, Necessity and Liberty concurr, and whatever we do or will, we do or will it
necessarily, as being moved to it by the first cause and a chained connexion of
necessitating causes. (qtd. in Danielson 672).
Jacobus Arminius applies the compatibilists argument of natural necessity to God.Yahweh cannot
freely choose to be good, for he is wholly good and is therefore the first cause of all goodness; he
is bound by his nature to act only out of goodness (Danielson 677). Milton’s Arminian
theological leaning is clearly visible in the Father and Satan; if Satan is the first cause of evil in
Paradise Lost (1.209-19), then the Father must be the first cause of good alone. “Moreover,”
writes Danielson, “the necessity of God’s doing good includes the necessity of hating sin” (678).
Utilizing Bryson’s definitions, if destruction and evil are synonymous, then God must destroy
destruction and evil for a good and perfect creation to remain. Punishing sins must then be
considered an act of goodness, a just response to disobedience, for “it is precisely God’s essential
goodness and justice that render his punishing of evil a matter of natural necessity” (Danielson
679). Therefore, the Father’s offer of grace and redemption to Satan is not his only act of
goodness by allowing the archfiend to escape Hell. Because of his foreknowledge of Satan’s
perpetual rebellion, the Father justly transmutes prevenient grace into spiteful provocation
simply by showing Satan love, and the Father of Lies becomes his own personal Hell:
Be then his love accursed, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
Nay cursed be thou, since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell: myself am Hell; (4.69-75)
10

11. The Father’s goodness might take on the appearance of evil, but only when it is imagined as such
in the perception of reprobate sinners. Unlike man whose “Maker’s image…then / Forsook them,
when themselves they vilified / To serve ungoverned appetite” (Milton 11.515-17), God wills
only to do good or “put not forth my goodness, which is free / To act or not, necessity and chance
/ Approach not me” (7.171-73). The necessity that does not approach the Father is where his
freedom of choice is found: action or inaction. In other words, God is the very image of
goodness, and he cannot forsake himself. He must do good or do nothing at all.
Bryson’s wickedly imagined God is a purely speculative and rhetorical entity. In spite of
his arguments for God’s capacity to commit evil acts, Milton’s characterization of the Father in
Paradise Lost quite simply does not participate in wickedness. When evil rears its head, Satan is
its puppeteer. The Father is passible like mankind only because mankind is made in his image.
Man and angel are free to choose evil, but the Father is free either to act on his goodness or to
refrain from acting altogether. The Father’s allowance of evil to exist is part of his plan to
dispense grace and mercy to man who fell seduced. Neither in Scripture nor in Paradise Lost is
Yahweh or the Father perceived by righteous men as capable of unprovoked evil. Apparently the
person who has wickedly imagined God is Michael Bryson.
Works Cited
Authorized King James Version. YouVersion Bible. Computer software. Apple App Store. Vers.
4.0.1. LifeChurch.tv, 25 Apr. 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2012.
Bryson, Michael. "'That Far Be From Thee': Divine Evil And Justification In Paradise
Lost." Milton Quarterly 36.2 (2002): 87-105. MLA International Bibliography. Web.
24 Sept. 2012.
Danielson, Dennis R. “Imago Dei, ‘Filial Freedom,’ and Miltonic Theodicy.” ELH 47.4 (1980):
670-81. Jstor. Web. 24 Sept. 2012.
Lieb, Michael. "Reading God: Milton And The Anthropopathetic Tradition." Milton
Studies 25 (1989): 213-43. Print.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. Ed.
William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon. New York: Random House,
2007. 291-630. Print.
---. Christian Doctrine. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 6. Ed. Maurice Kelley.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1973. Print.
Stavely, Keith W. F. “Satan and Arminianism in Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 25 (1989): 125-
39. Print.
11