Pre-seminar thoughts on Milton

Paradise Lost. It's a pretty poem, aesthetically speaking. But what are we supposed to get from it?

Is it supposed to be a history? In that case it's kind of ridiculous for any number of reasons, not least being that the only extant history of that time period is the Bible, and I don't think Milton was particularly trying to one-up that. I could be mistaken, but I always see religion as rather opposed to needing to 'prove' the stories: you're supposed to just take them as is. So I can't see it as a history. Plus, if it were, I imagine that there may be a problem with the whole issue of anthropomorphizing god.

If it's not a history, what else is it? Is there some moral we're supposed to get from it? It ends with "The world was all before them, /They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,/ Through Eden took their solitary way." Are we supposed to be inspired to follow their lead and go and explore the world? Unlikely - I'll probably have more to say on this after seminar, but I think there definitely are undertones of 'be happy with what you have in front of you' in the poem. Is the fact that they were hand in hand but still solitary as they left Eden significant? Is Milton trying to say something about unity and togetherness even in the face of adversity? The husband-wife bond? That all seems somehow shallow for the content of the poem: here's this epic about God and Satan and the beginning of mankind, take from it this lesson about loving your spouse?

I just don't know what we're supposed to make of this. The only thing I'm certain of in this poem is that God as depicted by Milton* is kind of a jerk. "Here's paradise, it's yours. But I'm going to free Satan and let him sneak in to tempt you. Also here's this Tree of Knowledge, and doesn't that fruit look tasty? But don't eat it 'cuz you'll die, and the fact that you don't know what death is will not prevent me from setting up this trap for you."

*I grant that it's not specific to Milton. Richard Dawkins said it best in The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, meagalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

And later in the same book:

...a single, fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe.

I know people tend to take offense at quotes like these, but they're undeniably true: in the Old Testament world, God is a supreme jerk.