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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about work in these days of the coronavirus pandemic. Over 30 million have signed up for unemployment and more are likely to in the months ahead. Unemployment, soaring to levels not seen since the Great Depression, is unevenly distributed racially and economically, but now also affects all industries, all areas of the economy resulting in people now faced with food or job insecurity. Every day I acknowledge how grateful, and lucky, I am to have employment teaching at Barnard College, a job I love that I can do for the time being remotely, even if it’s challenging and not nearly as satisfying. 

I’ve been thinking about the value of work in human, psychological and spiritual terms, not simply through the lens of capitalism or neo-liberalism vs Marxism. Perhaps I think about it differently because of the work I do, teaching my favorite seventeenth-century poets, John Donne and John Milton to my wonderful undergraduates, who are the hope of the future.

But while isolated in my apartment, I worry if I can really fulfill my vocation to teach and educate, especially remotely? With the video conferencing program Zoom, I “see” my students (in little squares), and I can hear them, but it is not the same thing as us being all together in a room, perhaps sitting around a seminar table. I think of Donne complaining in his Devotions (written in 1623, when he almost died from typhus) that his enforced isolation means that he cannot fulfill his work as he is kept from the community of his church. We too, can no longer attend religious services in person; the rabbis or ministers livestreaming from empty synagogues and churches bring tears to my eyes. It all makes me miss the physical presence of the people I’ve typically interacted with throughout all aspects of my daily life.

There is community and communion not only in a synagogue or church, but also in a classroom, all of us thinking and learning together, mutually nourished by the experience. If you think of teaching as a vocation in the sense of “a calling,” as I do, then there is something analogous to Donne’s pastoral calling. Care of the soul and expansion of the mind--and, one hopes, the heart and conscience.

When I hear Governor Cuomo (partnering with Bill and Melinda Gates) and others speak about our opportunity now to reimagine education through technology, I just hope they do not think the virtual can replace the “real.” Please listen to the students this semester (from grade school through college), whose experience has taught them that nothing can replace what goes on in the intimacy of personal contact and community in the classroom.

Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost to my students this semester, the poem has suddenly seemed newly, and differently important, in part because the poem is more concerned with the nature and value of work than I’d ever realized. Paradise Lost is a poem for our time in many ways, but one of them is the attention Milton gives to servitude. I’ve long been curious about the fact that Milton has Adam and Eve working in the garden. Not our traditional notion of Eden to work In paradise, right? What might this mean? Adam and Eve’s “delightful task” is “to prune these growing Plants” (IV,  437-8). Yes, pruning is symbolic of keeping excess in control. But there is more. Adam tells Eve, “Man hath his daily work of body or mind/Appointed, which declares his Dignity” (IV, 618-19). Under their care, the garden “grows luxurious by restraint” (9. 209). There is a difference between Adam and Eve’s work before the fall (pruning and tending the plants), and the labor by the sweat of his brow, which is Adam’s punishment.

In Milton’s Eden, work is pleasurable and worthy. It is a way of serving God by taking care of nature,  “guarding” or keeping it as in Genesis 2:15 (“And God …put him in the garden of Eden . . . to keep [or guard] it”), so different from the idea of subduing the earth that appears in Genesis 1:28. Two very different ideas of our relationship to nature, and Milton chooses the more loving one. In Hebrew, the word for work includes the meaning to serve and worship God. There is something profound here in Milton, I tell myself and my students. For Milton distinguishes between work and labor, work that is service (and potentially sacred) and labor that worries about being productive.

We slide towards the fall at the beginning of Book 9 when Eve is suddenly worried that there is too much work, that the luxurious garden is outgrowing their ability to prune and manage it. How fascinating that Eve (told that woman’s special place is in household good) is worried about work, about falling behind, about not being productive. Her worry seems quite right to me--always worrying I’m behind, that I’ve got a schedule I might not fulfili, a deadline I won’t meet. This is our modern world. The world we live in.

But coronavirus has changed everything for now. We have to deal with a profound economic depression, but an emotional one too. People feel empty without work, as if something meaningful is missing. Yes, you need a job to provide food and a dwelling. Our current situation has only made more glaring the economic, class and racial disparities in our country. But there is more. Are we not being forced to recognize and reorder (at least for the moment) what is really important? What types of work and workers are indeed the most important? We talk about people — doctors, nurses, health care workers, paramedics, EMTs, people in grocery stores, delivery workers, pharmacists, etc. — being on the front lines, putting themselves in harms way, as if it’s a war that we’re facing, albeit an invisible one. However, there’s another way of looking at this. These are people who are in service professions, who help and serve people! This is what we have found is “essential”. It’s not labor, it’s service. Without them, we now realize we cannot survive.

All the service professionals whose work is to help others, rather than just to accumulate and provide more stuff for consumers to consume, including teachers and aides at all levels, are the roles in our society that have long been underpaid and/or under respected. But they are what truly matter. Their work is not just valuable, but spiritually meaningful, because it sustains life. From the lowest on the “scale” of service workers (the trash collector?) to the highest (the doctor—but even there we find disparity, with pediatricians and internists making little, while specialists who do big tests and elective surgeries earn higher incomes). The people in service professions do not care whether you are white or black or brown, republican or democrat, or what your religion is. Our sense of proportions is totally out of whack, and the present crisis has exposed this.

What will happen when we get beyond the threat of this deadly virus, perhaps only to face another one in the not-so-distant future? We have the rare opportunity to rethink and realign. But will we be able to, given the power of corporations, the obsession with profits, and the values of many of the most powerful people (so-called “leaders”) in our federal government?

I certainly hope so.