How Teaching During a Pandemic Gave My Students (and Me) Hope

I’ve been teaching Milton’s “Paradise Lost” for decades, but this semester it was an entirely new experience for me, perhaps one of the best in all my years of teaching and I think for my students as well. 

If John Donne’s “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions” resonate so closely with our collected anxiety during isolation and pandemic, Milton’s epic about the Fall of Man does too, while giving my students something positive to take away with themselves as they bravely try to enter a world that is nothing like we’ve ever known in our lifetime. A world with new dangers, unpredictabilty and much uncertainty. We look back at our prior, pre-coronavirus life, with its intimacies and pleasures, as if it were paradisal, an Eden that no longer exists. As I told my students, we are like Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden at the end of ‘Paradise Lost.”

Of course, it wasn’t paradise. There have been so many problems, inequities and injustices in societies throughout the world before this pandemic further exposed the brokenness and unsteady foundations in our life.

Yet, there’s something about the arc of Milton’s poem, particularly the last four books of the twelve that make up “Paradise Lost.” There we witness not just Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, but what attends the act: the sudden eruption of discord and fighting, climate change, disorder everywhere as it spreads. The world of books 9 and 10 feels familiar. It’s a fallen world; it’s our world now. Eden as described in books 4 and 5 didn’t seem real—neither the food, nor the calm love between Adam and Eve, lacking the intensity of desire. But in book 9, first Eve and then Adam, eat from the tree and their world implodes. In the final two books, the angel Michael (sent by God) gives Adam a view of what human history will be, illustrated by a long, dismal future. Eve gets a hopeful dream instead and misses seeing the horrors. But Adam saw ugliness, fratricide, war, injustice, disease and death in many awful forms. Adam and Eve, though Eve less so, sink into despair soon after the Fall. All he can think is that he’s responsible for having brought on a world of death. He wants to die. He doesn’t want to bring children into this world, and he considers suicide. He experiences deep despair and hopelessness about both the present and the future. Isn’t this what many people are struggling with now, especially younger people who thought they had their entire lives before them planned out?

The miracle of “Paradise Lost” is that, despite everything Adam sees — and everything we know and experience — somehow by the end, Milton manages to get Adam and Eve to a place of hope. At its core, it’s a poem about how to live in a fallen world.

So, in the last week and a half of the semester, I went through the poem with my students. In each seventy-five minute session, after doing a wellness check with the class, I read these passages with them, trying to trace how we get past suicide and hopelessness, past giving up. Suddenly, it hit my students that this is our poem, our experience! Isn’t it amazing how Milton makes not just Adam, but the reader, feel transformed by the end? It seems almost miraculous that Adam and Eve can leave Eden hand in hand, taking their “solitary way” (but together), and that Adam can go out with hope into a world that he has just seen is going to be horrid and frightening in almost unimaginable ways. You don’t have to be a Christian or believe in Christ’s redemption of humankind or a renewed paradise to feel the power of the hopefulness at the end of Milton’s epic. Adam has seen (and so have we) what Chaos is, the worst of what life is and will bring, but Milton works hard to show us how to get to a place of faith in humanity.

And why is that important? The idea that our “deeds” matter and that what an individual person does might just change a future that seems determined, predestined, and unchangeable, is one we should heed. When Adam is told to “add deeds” to the knowledge of salvation that he’s been given, are not these deeds the things that make it possible to change the course of what seemed an unalterable history? In the paradisal garden of Eden, Adam and Eve’s “work” was to tend and prune the garden--a very different work from the “labor by the sweat of the brow” that God imposes on Adam as a punishment for sin. These “deeds” that the angel Michael speaks of as he educates Adam about the future, are, I think, what the work of service (sacred work, redemptive work) looks like in our own postlapsarian world. The one we inhabit, where the service workers, and nurses, and doctors, and delivery people (and yes the educators) do such “deeds.” I tell my students that maybe a reason we are finishing this spring semester reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is to give us the idea that hope can and needs to be stronger than fear—and that they must go out into the uncertain future with a belief that there is work for them, deeds they can do that could make a difference.

My seniors, along with ones graduating from high school, colleges and universities around the country, stand like Adam and Eve at the end of Milton’s epic, feeling as though they too have lost paradise. The fault lines in our world have shifted so the ground under our feet feels unsteady. Our young people are going out into an uncertain, frightening world. But I tell my beloved students that Milton reminds them they have work to do to remake what they inherit. I have struggled with anxiety and a fear of impending catastrophe all my life. But reading Milton with these young people, who are our future, I try to give them optimism and confidence.

And in the process, I too find hope waiting for my embrace.