The Theme of Paradise Lost

Extract

Readers of Paradise Lost have always been interested by Voltaire's comment in the Essai sur la Poésie Épique, that French people are inclined to laugh when they are told that England has an epic in which Satan struggles against God and a serpent persuades a woman to eat an apple. Such matter, Voltaire explains, seems in France suitable only for farce. More careful readers, however, may remember that in Paradise Lost only Satan, in the moment immediately preceding his degradation, regards the eating of the forbidden fruit as a subject for mirth. All else abhor the crime; angels flee back to heaven in terror, the guilty pair cower before even their own reproaches, and the very face of nature changes. Clearly, the eating of the apple possesses some deep significance and must be interpreted as a symbol of some important truth. In Christian Doctrine Milton persuades himself that God purposely made an insignificant matter the sole test of man's obedience, since an apparently useless prohibition would offer the surest proof of man's obedience. But in Paradise Lost, and indeed also in Christian Doctrine, the symbolical interpretation is insisted on.