Teaching "Paradise Lost" in Time of War in Ukraine
I have taught Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost, for decades, but never has it seemed so immediate. Milton’s version of the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve is about the larger conflict between good and evil. This semester, I find myself teaching it differently, seeing it differently and talking about it differently, so that my students would feel it related to their lives as well as our shared and ever increasing anxiety.
Like the Bible, literary texts, especially rich ones, are not stable things with fixed meanings. They change depending on the circumstances and the period in which we read them. And so is the case with Milton’s poem about the conflict between good and evil.
It’s easy to find in the world forces for “good” and forces we consider “evil.” We tend to think in binaries. In our politically and culturally polarized time in America, we might demonize people “on the other side.” This is most evident within the cable news channels, which remind us daily how divisions have only gotten deeper. Many, especially those on the left, believe democracy is under threat in America, that it might not take much to turn it into an authoritarian nation and I agree with that point of view. On the other hand, the right demonizes liberalism. Texas is not the only state that wants to control what is taught in schools, elementary through college, and punish those who veer from a dictated curriculum. The teaching of America’s history is endangered. Books are being censored, even Maus, the graphic novel about the holocaust. The First amendment separating church and state and enshrining freedom of speech and the press is being violated. But now there is even more to worry about: WAR!
Russia has invaded Ukraine and though most of the world supports the fight for its sovereignty, we worry that this might become not just a conflict between East and West, but a world war, with an aggressive Putin who warns us of his nuclear capabilities. Clearly this is the last thing we need on top of a pandemic!
Just as the invasion of Ukraine was beginning on February 24th, my Milton class at Barnard started Paradise Lost. Suddenly, it seemed necessary to link it to our present situation and not ignore what was happening. After all, I’d titled my course “Milton Then and Now.” Milton’s poem provided a way for I and my students to face, contemplate and discuss our concerns within a safe environment. I told my students how this seventeenth-century poem had suddenly taken on a new meaning for me and that I wanted to share it.
Milton announces in his opening lines that he intends to “justify the ways of God to man”—admitting that perhaps they need to be justified because if God is omnipotent then why did he let Adam and Eve fall when he knew the terrible things that would result? Paradise Lost is not just about the biblical couple, but about “us,” about our lives, how wars go on continuously and peace is elusive.
It has never hit me so hard that Milton’s poem actually presents conflict as the beginning of our history, starting with Satan’s war against God, which precipitates human history, maybe even precedes the creation of the earth and humans. War, indeed, frames Milton’s epic, dominating the first two books, which are Satan’s, and the last two, where the angel Michael tells Adam what the rest of human history will be. Adam and Eve are sent out of Eden into a world that we, and they, learn will be characterized by war, with paradise only to be found within. (Good luck to that when you are living in a state of heightened anxiety!)
For Milton, war is the battle between “good” and “evil,” which seems to reduce the complexity and messiness of life. We don’t all agree on what is good. And as Milton wrote in Areopagitica speaking against censorship, good and evil are often intertwined. But then again, not always.
Paradise Lost represents “evil” as the forces of death and destruction. But Milton’s perpetrator of evil —Satan— rationalizes his war against God as liberation. Adam and Eve are collateral damage.
Isn’t this what we are witnessing with Vladimir Putin bizarrely justifying his invasion as an attempt to liberate Ukraine (whose president is Jewish) from “neo-Nazis?” Three million people (mostly women and over one million children) are now refugees having fled their country, and the number is growing, though “humanitarian corridors” have been blocked. Ukrainians are fighting, not only for their land and sovereignty, but for their very lives. So many desperate people are desperately trying to find a way out as Russian forces bomb civilian targets, residential areas and surround cities while cutting off food, water, medicine—everything needed to sustain life. On March 16th we learned they killed ten people waiting in a bread line.
I cannot get these daily reports and images out of my mind as I teach Paradise Lost.
We took our time reading Books 1 and 2 of the epic where Milton tells us that long before the fall of man, war erupted in heaven, when Satan and his cohort rebelled against what he called the tyranny of God, fighting in the name of (a false) liberty, a cover for his desire to rule or be God himself. When I said that Paradise Lost suggests that war and destruction will exist until the end of time—hardly a comforting thought, even if true—my students looked grim. They were about to go off on their spring break. I wondered, should we really be reading this now?
Certain lines in Milton’s have a new immediacy:
Satan in his first speech, vowing “To wage by force or guile eternal War / Irreconcilable to our grand Foe” (God, who is the Creator, the giver of life). Or in his second speech, declaring
To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
….If then his Providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labor must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil.
Next week, when my students return and we read Book 4, we will watch Satan invade Eden, where Adam and Eve innocently dwell. Their “bower” (the place of sleep and love-making) is the holy center of paradise, sacred and supposedly inviolable. But nothing is safe, nothing protected, even before the Fall. Can Milton not imagine such a thing? Satan easily leaps over the boundaries of Eden. God doesn’t stop him, having announced in Book 3 that he’s bound by a law he created that gives free will to all his creatures. In his speeches, God justifies his non-interference policy. Once in Eden, Satan enters the bower, infusing an evil dream into the beautiful and pure Eve while she sleeps (This makes me think of the shelling of homes in Ukrainian cities at night). Intending to ruin all of God’s creation, Satan, the embodiment of evil, brings with him death.
Satan attacks the innocent. The Hebrew Bible tells us Amalek came from behind and attacked the Israelites as they fled from Egypt, killing the unprotected women, children and elderly at the rear. Satan and Amalek attack the most vulnerable. Putin has bombed the Maternity and Children’s hospital, a psychiatric clinic and numerous other health facilities. If this isn’t evil, I don’t know what is.
Historically, war has been a constant experience for humans throughout the ages, but the years following the Vietnam War, not nearly as much by comparison (yet still, we can’t discount Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, etc.). Putin’s attack on Ukraine shatters that illusion and the world cannot look away.
After class, a student emailed thanking me for the lesson, saying I was the only professor she had who spoke about what was going on in the world. But the world’s catastrophe, like the pandemic, has changed how I teach and made me bolder, at least in the classroom. I struggle with anxiety, but maybe it’s a gift if I can put it to good use. Empathizing with my students (they are the future), I work hard to give them strength and hope, even as we confront hard truths together. Maybe in that way I also give myself hope.
This great poem by Milton—a blind but visionary wordsmith—casts light on our experience. Maybe (if I teach it right) Paradise Lost can send us out into the world like Adam and Eve at the end of the epic, strong enough to face the future, using our free will to try to make a difference, to make the world a better place and dedicate ourselves to revere life.