Milton and the meaning of freedom: an introduction to *Paradise Lost*

Aims of the course

• To introduce students to critical study of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
• To provide students with the basic historical, intellectual and literary context needed to understand and appreciate Milton’s poetry and thought.
• To bring to light some of the key things that give Paradise Lost such lasting importance and continuing capacity to inspire.

Learning outcomes:

As a result of the course, within the constraints of the time available, students should be able to:

• develop a critical approach to understanding Milton’s Paradise Lost
• assess the poem’s relationship to Milton’s wider thought and historical role
• evaluate the merits of some influential critical views of the poem

Course content overview:

One of the greatest of all English poets, Milton was also one of history’s great advocates of liberty.  He not only dedicated his pen to the causes of democracy, free speech, and religious toleration, but risked his life in pursuit of them.  However, he also saw first-hand how easily a nation’s exercise of freedom goes astray. In his renowned epic poem Paradise Lost, he does more than tell a great story in resounding language:  he also sends a timeless message to posterity, that true liberty ― the kind worth taking a stand for ― means not merely freedom to pursue selfish desires, but the capacity to take moral responsibility for our choices, and by our example to help humanity rise up to its extraordinary potential for good.

The century in which Milton lived saw a deep and permanent change in the way Britain was governed ― the decisive rejection of royal absolutism and state control over religion, and the establishment in their place of such modern ideas as parliamentary sovereignty and religious toleration.  But Milton himself, though a vocal proponent of these changes, did not live to see their final victory.  Rather, his last years were spent under a restored monarchy, after the revolutionary nation to which he had dedicated his adult life failed to establish a viable self-government, and instead finally chose (as he saw it) to crawl back wilfully into the embrace of the regal tyranny that it had so recently and so heroically shaken off.

How to explain this apparently voluntary defeat?  And how, above all, to inspire a nation once again with the ideals from which they had turned away?  Only one thing remained:  to return to his youthful calling as a poet, and at last to complete the great didactic poem that he had long imagined ― addressing it now not only to his contemporaries but to posterity, and instilling into it all that life and study had taught him about freedom and tyranny, and about the choice we make between them in every generation.

In Paradise Lost, Milton roots his definition and defence of true freedom in a larger moral and theological vision addressing the very nature of humanity and the purpose of human life.  To understand that vision and its implications, we will need to consider his innovative and critical take on some central ideas of the Western poetic, philosophical and religious traditions, as well as his strong lived sense of humanity’s dilemma and potential dignity as a rational and passionate creature.

In Week One, we will look at Milton’s place in the momentous historical events that shook England during his lifetime, with especial attention to his famous tract in defence of free speech, religious toleration, and accountable government, the Areopagitica.  From Week Two onward, we will look closely at Paradise Lost itself, progressing through the poem from start to finish, while continuing to build our understanding of key aspects of its poetic form, its subject matter, and its didactic aims.

Emphasis will be placed throughout on looking attentively at the words Milton wrote, and students will be invited to participate each week in closely reading significant passages from his major works, especially Paradise Lost.  Weekly presentations and readings will provide historical and critical context, as well as initiating the close reading activities and group discussions to be pursued by the students.

Recommended set text

• John Milton, The Major Works (Oxford World Classics), ed. Stephen Orgel and
• Jonathan Goldberg, (Oxford University Press), 2008.

Many other modern editions of Paradise Lost (and of the other set text, Areopagitica) are available, and you will be able to get by with any of them; but it is strongly recommended that you acquire the specified Oxford edition of Milton's Major Works because, besides the whole of Paradise Lost and Areopagitica, it also very conveniently includes most of the other works by Milton to which the course tutor will refer throughout the course.

Welcome week (Week 0)

Purpose:

• personal introductions
• introducing the course
• useful reading
• personal objectives

Learning outcomes:

By studying this week the students should have:

• become familiar with navigating around the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and from VLE to links and back
• tested their ability to access files and the web conferencing software and sorted out any problems with the help of the eLearning team
• learnt how to look for and reference internet resources
• used Quickmail to introduce themselves to other students
• contributed to a discussion forum to introduce themselves to other students and discuss why they are interested in the course, what they hope to get out their studies and also to respond to a question set by tutor aimed at initiating critical discussion of Milton

Week 1: Milton’s Revolutionary Ideas (Text for Close Study:  Areopagitica)

Purpose:

Students will be introduced to Milton’s historical situation and political thought by way of a close look at his best-known prose work, the Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644). Historical context will be provided, describing key events in the 1630s and 1640s leading up to and during the English Civil War, in whose context Milton’s passionately held ideas about political and religious freedom gradually took shape. A critical reading of Areopagitica itself will elucidate its argument, highlight some of its central ideas and presuppositions as well as the limitations with which its argument is hedged, and will give consideration to how this important tract fits into the history of Western political ideas.  Attention will also be drawn to the ways in which Areopagitica anticipates some key themes of Paradise Lost. Other important works written by Milton during this period will be mentioned, including his short poem Lycidas (1637), his early prose work The Reason of Church Government (1642), and his uncompromising defence of the revolutionary execution of King Charles I, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)/

Learning outcomes:

By studying this week, the students should have:

• understood the historical context in which Milton’s ideas were articulated
• seen in detail the grounds on which Milton argued in favour of political and religious liberty
• closely read and discussed an important example of Milton’s political prose

Week 2: Milton and Epic Poetry (Text for Close Study:  Paradise Lost, Books 1 – 3)

Purpose:

Students will be introduced to the opening books of Paradise Lost by way of a consideration of the poem’s relation to the tradition of epic poetry as Milton understood it. In writing his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton explicitly and ambitiously set out to achieve in English what Homer had done in Greek and Virgil in Latin.  But why did he choose to imitate this ancient poetic form? What was his understanding of epic poetry, and of what it can do?  And how did he adapt it to his modern purposes in the historical and cultural circumstances of seventeenth-century England.

As we look closely at the opening three books of Paradise Lost this week, we will consider closely two crucial characteristics of epic poetry ― form and content ― and we will ask how Milton saw them as contributing to his aim of writing a poem that could have a significant moral impact on the world. Under the rubric of form, we will give especial attention to the distinctive and powerful verse form of Milton’s poem, asking how it works and what the author set out to achieve by writing in this style.

Turning to the question of content, we will observe that, for Milton, an epic poem was essentially the story of a hero, a virtuous figure capable of inspiring imitation.  Accordingly, a key choice for the aspiring epic poet was who one’s hero was to be, that is, which story of heroism to retell.  Yet after many years of pondering this question, he finally wrote a poem in which it is famously debatable who the hero is ― and in which the most obvious candidate for that role is an astonishingly unconventional choice, especially for an author who was a committed Christian:  namely, the Devil himself.

So is Satan really the hero of Paradise Lost, as many readers down through the centuries have supposed?  If so, what could it mean for Milton to have made such a choice?  And if that was not his intention, what is it about the poem that has misled so many readers into reaching that conclusion?  Or was Milton himself, as William Blake famously suggested, somehow “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”.

We will consider these questions in light of the long critical tradition, looking closely at the poem itself for clues, to discover what examining the issue of heroism can teach us about Paradise Lost.

Learning outcomes:

By studying this week, the students should have:

• learned about the nature and significance of epic poetry as Milton understood it
• seen how Milton adapts some important epic conventions to his purposes in the opening books of Paradise Lost
• understood the importance of the verse form and the role of heroism in epic poetry
• discussed the basis for the influential idea that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost

Week 3 - Milton and The Bible (Text for Close Study:  Paradise Lost, Books 4 – 6)

Purpose:

As we proceed to the part of Paradise Lost which introduces its human characters Adam and Eve, we will shift our focus from the poem’s classical heritage in the tradition of epic poetry, to its equally prominent grounding in the Christian scriptures.  We will ask why Milton chose, as the narrative basis of his poem, to retell a story from the Bible, and why in particular the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

In order to get to grips with these questions, we will look carefully at what Christianity meant to Milton. We will see that, though Milton’s England understood itself to be a Christian nation, the very nature and meaning of ‘true’ Christianity was intensely contested, indeed was a central issue in the English Civil War through which he lived.  What is more, although Milton emphatically took sides in this contest, his own understanding of Christianity was far from conforming to the majority view even within the ‘Puritan’ camp with which he is sometimes misleadingly identified.  We will look closely at what Milton’s very personal understanding of Christianity was, how it determined his approach to the Bible, and how it shaped in striking ways his choice and handling of a Bible story in Paradise Lost.

As part of this week’s exercise in exploring the scriptural basis of Milton’s poem, we will closely read the Bible story (Genesis, chapters 1 – 3) on which Milton bases his narrative, trying to see the Biblical text itself with fresh eyes from something like a Miltonic perspective.  We will discover how, from Milton’s point of view, this very familiar story nonetheless presented quite extraordinary problems, raising profound questions about God’s wisdom and justice, which he felt it was absolutely necessary to answer if one was to make sense of being a Christian at all.  We will then return to Paradise Lost, to see how these pressing questions end up featuring in crucial ways in the poem.

Learning outcomes:

By studying this week, the students should have:

• understood the basic tenets of Milton’s Christianity, and the importance of the Bible to him
• explored in detail the Biblical story on which Paradise Lost is based
• considered the significance of this specific story to Milton, and examined critically some key ways in which he adapts it in the retelling

Week 4 - The Fall:  Milton on Getting it Wrong (Paradise Lost, Books 7 – 9)

Purpose:

This week, as we reach the story’s crisis in Book Nine of Paradise Lost, we will look closely at how the poet represents the human capacity to make catastrophic choices directly contrary to our own true interests.

In order to make sense of Milton’s treatment of this theme, we will need to establish some background in two areas:  firstly, in the philosophical tradition going back to Plato which described the human propensity for setting our hearts on the wrong things in terms of an intrinsic conflict in our nature between rational and passionate motivations; and secondly, in the Christian theological tradition rooted in Augustine, which tried to account for the human capacity to do wrong in terms of God’s gift to us of free will

We will see how Milton drew deeply on both these traditions, but also how he approached them both in a highly critical spirit, giving to his own account of human choice a very personal slant.  Not least, his poem provokes us to ask why a wise and benevolent God would have created us prone to making poor choices by endowing us not only with reason but also with potentially misleading passionate desires, and indeed why God would have given us the power of free choice at all, knowing we would use it to our own harm. Can a God who created us so fallible really blame us for our mistakes, taking no part of the blame himself?  Still more fundamentally, the poem confronts us with the question whether, finding ourselves constituted as we are, we can really accept that we are the creatures of a wise and benevolent God, or whether on the contrary it might even be better to rebel against that story, deliberately making the very choices which we are told God has expressly forbidden.

Entangled with these questions, both in the Biblical story per se and in the Christian theological tradition, is the question of the respective moral responsibilities, and culpabilities, of women and men.  At its worst, that tradition had used the story of Adam and Eve to justify a view of women as inherently prone to sin, and to deny them the capacity for independent moral agency.  Milton confronts this tradition too, seeking an interpretation of the Bible compatible with his conviction that all humans are free moral agents with an ability to choose the good, and that no person’s moral failings can validly be blamed on another.

In Paradise Lost, Milton grapples with all these questions not just in the abstract, but in concrete narrative terms.  That is to say, he tries not merely to argue his way to a viable answer, but to show it plausibly at work in a the actions of believably human characters.  Does he succeed?  And what can we learn along the way about a set of ideas which still play a large part in shaping our sense of who we are, and of what we mean by taking moral responsibility for our actions.

Learning outcomes:

By studying this week, the students should have:

• seen how Milton draws on philosophical and theological traditions in his representation of the human capacity for making choices which are contrary to our own true interests
• understood and assessed Milton’s depiction in Paradise Lost of the motivations of, and culpability for, the respective Falls of Adam and Eve
• discussed Milton’s representation in the poem of the respective duties and capacities of men and women, with reference to the concepts of misogyny, obedience and freedom

Week 5 - Redemption:  Milton on Getting it Right (Paradise Lost, Books 10 – 12)

Purpose:

This week we will focus on some of the questions that Milton grapples with in the final three books of Paradise Lost, as his story explores the question of what happens to Adam and Eve, and to humanity at large, after the Fall.  These questions include: 

• how can we recover from our mistakes, above all from the kind of really disastrous choices that upend our whole lives?
• and how can we make amends for wrong choices that seriously harm not only ourselves but others ― often the very ones we love most?
• finally, how can we, so full of failings as we are, come together to work for our collective good and to extract ourselves from a long legacy of mutual harm

This last phase of the story of Paradise Lost is crucial for Milton’s purposes, because in it he deals directly with the human situation not in a hypothetically pristine original state, but as we find ourselves today in lived experience, that is, immersed in world full of hardships and a society replete with injustices, and each burdened with the knowledge of being far from perfect in our thoughts or deedsthere are two main aspects of this last phase of the story to consider: 

• one concerns the personal level at which Adam and Eve have to find again their respect and care for themselves and for one another after the calamitous choices that have nearly ruined them
• the other, conveyed through a vision shown to Adam outlining the future of the human race, takes in the wider social dimension of human relations as well, and thereby returns us, from another angle, to the political questions with which we began the course

This week we will also revisit other themes explored during the course in light of the poem’s concluding books.  Notably, here is where Milton’s distinctive conception of what it really means to be a Christian is most clearly expressed ― a conception which hinges on the idea of human freedom, and which helps to lay the ground for much subsequent ethical thought, both Christian and secular.  We will also return at the end to the question of who the hero of Milton’s epic poem is… and perhaps discover a surprising answer.

Learning outcomes:

By studying this week, the students should have:

• explored in detail Milton’s depiction of the conditions of human life, and of moral choice, after the Fall
• considered the poem’s place and influence in the history of Western moral thought
• gained further insight into the topics addressed in earlier weeks, in particular by seeing how the end of the poem deals with questions of political and religious freedom,  the nature of Christianity and interpretation of the Bible, and the meaning of heroism

Week 6 - what next?

• assessment of student learning
• assessment of student satisfaction
• encouragement of further study

A Certificate of Participation will be awarded to participants who contribute constructively to weekly discussions and exercises/assignments for the duration of the course.

This course is open to everyone, and you don’t need any previous knowledge or experience of the subject to attend.  

Our short courses are designed especially for adult learners who want to advance their personal or professional development. They are taught by tutors who are expert in both their subjects and in teaching students of all ages and experiences. 

Please note that all teaching is in English. You should have near-native command of the English language to get the maximum benefit from the course. 

Each week of an online course is roughly equivalent to 2-3 hours of classroom time. On top of this, participants should expect to spend roughly 2-3 hours of self-study time, for example, reading materials, although this will vary from person to person. 

While they have a specific start and end date and will follow a weekly schedule (for example, week 1 will cover topic A, week 2 will cover topic B), our tutor-led online courses are designed to be flexible and as such would normally not require participants to be online for a specific day of the week or time of the day (although some tutors may try to schedule times where participants can be online together for web seminars, which will be recorded so that those who are unable to be online at certain times are able to access material). 

Unless otherwise stated, all course material will be posted on the VLE so that they can be accessed at any time throughout the duration of the course and interaction with your tutor and fellow participants will take place through a variety of different ways which will allow for both synchronous and asynchronous learning (using discussion boards etc).

Fees 

The course fee includes access to the course on our VLE, personal feedback on your work from an expert tutor, a certificate of participation (if you complete work and take part in discussions), and access to the class resources for two years after your course finishes. 

Concessions 

For more information, please see our concessions information page. 

Alison Fordham Bursary

University of Cambridge Professional and Continuing Education is proud to offer the Alison Fordham bursary, which is awarded to students who wish to study on one of our short online courses via our VLE, reducing the fee paid by 50%. The bursary is limited to a single award for each set of online courses. 

Application criteria:  

• applicants should set out their personal learning motivations since priority will be given to those who are returning to learning after an extended break, or have not previously engaged with fully online learning, or are seeking to use the online short course as a bridge towards undergraduate award-bearing study
• applicants who can demonstrate financial need 

For more information, please see our bursaries information page. 

A certificate of participation and a digital credential will be awarded to those who contribute constructively to weekly discussions, exercises and assignments for the duration of the course.