Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Importance of Obedience to God
The first words of Paradise Lost state
that the poem’s main theme will be “Man’s first Disobedience.” Milton
narrates the story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, explains how
and why it happens, and places the story within the larger context
of Satan’s rebellion and Jesus’ resurrection. Raphael tells Adam
about Satan’s disobedience in an effort to give him a firm grasp
of the threat that Satan and humankind’s disobedience poses. In
essence, Paradise Lost presents two moral paths
that one can take after disobedience: the downward spiral of increasing
sin and degradation, represented by Satan, and the road to redemption,
represented by Adam and Eve.
While Adam and Eve are the first humans to disobey God,
Satan is the first of all God’s creation to disobey. His decision
to rebel comes only from himself—he was not persuaded or provoked
by others. Also, his decision to continue to disobey God after his
fall into Hell ensures that God will not forgive him. Adam and Eve,
on the other hand, decide to repent for their sins and seek forgiveness. Unlike
Satan, Adam and Eve understand that their disobedience to God will be corrected through generations
of toil on Earth. This path is obviously the correct one to take:
the visions in Books XI and XII demonstrate that obedience to God,
even after repeated falls, can lead to humankind’s salvation.
The Hierarchical Nature of the Universe
Paradise Lost is about hierarchy as much
as it is about obedience. The layout of the universe—with Heaven
above, Hell below, and Earth in the middle—presents the universe
as a hierarchy based on proximity to God and his grace. This spatial
hierarchy leads to a social hierarchy of angels, humans, animals,
and devils: the Son is closest to God, with the archangels and cherubs
behind him. Adam and Eve and Earth’s animals come next, with Satan
and the other fallen angels following last. To obey God is to respect
this hierarchy.
Satan refuses to honor the Son as his superior, thereby
questioning God’s hierarchy. As the angels in Satan’s camp rebel,
they hope to beat God and thereby dissolve what they believe to
be an unfair hierarchy in Heaven. When the Son and the good angels
defeat the rebel angels, the rebels are punished by being banished
far away from Heaven. At least, Satan argues later, they can make
their own hierarchy in Hell, but they are nevertheless subject to
God’s overall hierarchy, in which they are ranked the lowest. Satan
continues to disobey God and his hierarchy as he seeks to corrupt
mankind.
Likewise, humankind’s disobedience is a corruption of
God’s hierarchy. Before the fall, Adam and Eve treat the visiting
angels with proper respect and acknowledgement of their closeness
to God, and Eve embraces the subservient role allotted to her in
her marriage. God and Raphael both instruct Adam that Eve is slightly farther
removed from God’s grace than Adam because she was created to serve
both God and him. When Eve persuades Adam to let her work alone,
she challenges him, her superior, and he yields to her, his inferior.
Again, as Adam eats from the fruit, he knowingly defies God by obeying
Eve and his inner instinct instead of God and his reason. Adam’s
visions in Books XI and XII show more examples of this disobedience
to God and the universe’s hierarchy, but also demonstrate that with
the Son’s sacrifice, this hierarchy will be restored once again.
The Fall as Partly Fortunate
After he sees the vision of Christ’s redemption of humankind
in Book XII, Adam refers to his own sin as a felix culpa or
“happy fault,” suggesting that the fall of humankind, while originally
seeming an unmitigated catastrophe, does in fact bring good with
it. Adam and Eve’s disobedience allows God to show his mercy and temperance
in their punishments and his eternal providence toward humankind.
This display of love and compassion, given through the Son, is a
gift to humankind. Humankind must now experience pain and death,
but humans can also experience mercy, salvation, and grace in ways
they would not have been able to had they not disobeyed. While humankind
has fallen from grace, individuals can redeem and save themselves
through continued devotion and obedience to God. The salvation of
humankind, in the form of The Son’s sacrifice and resurrection,
can begin to restore humankind to its former state. In other words,
good will come of sin and death, and humankind will eventually be
rewarded. This fortunate result justifies God’s reasoning and explains
his ultimate plan for humankind.
