Lost with Lewis Pt.4

Reading Milton with some help from a friend

An ongoing Substack series by Karen Swallow Prior over at The Priory is stimulating lots of reading and discussion of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Even though I’ve loved literature for years, I have never read through this work from start to finish, and I am grateful to have such a gracious and knowledgeable guide to help me through it. As a satellite to what I’m learning from Karen’s insights, I also plan to engage in depth with CS Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost and to post occasional thoughts springing from this, under the title ‘Lost with Lewis’. These posts won’t demand knowledge of Paradise Lost on the part of my readers but will simply cherry-pick a Lewis insight and gently extrapolate and apply it to our own lives. Milton and Lewis might sound like a 1950s department store but I’m hoping that my combined reading of these two great minds will provide some food for thought here.

Of all the thoughts my faith wants to think about, processing the problem of evil is very far down the list. Many thoughtful Christians in every era of the church have faced the seeming endlessness of calamity, infirmity, and theodicy. This theme has so many barbs on its hook that it can feel difficult to know where to begin to come to terms with it. There is the evil of injustice and oppression, there is the terrible reality of sickness and decay woven into nature, and there is the inhumanity of human beings (some even claiming to bear the name of Jesus) towards fellow humans. A thinking faith and theological faith inevitably comes eye to eye with the unending evil that surrounds it.

In his reflections on Paradise Lost, CS Lewis does not shy away from exposing the moral universe that Milton constructs in his epic poem. This week’s ‘Lost with Lewis’ will focus on chapter ten of A Preface to Paradise Lost, entitled ‘Milton and St. Augustine’ and lift some light touch lessons on the issue of evil that Lewis provides for us. My disclaimer at the outset: this article will not untie the knots of evil and good, but it will at least lift a lid on what evil is and how it relates to good and God.

Good without evil, but no evil without good

There can be no doubt that Paradise Lost is abounding in evil. So much so that it often appears to readers that Satan could be the true ‘hero’ of the piece. The poem begins with diabolical details about the immediate aftermath of Satan’s fall and presents a kind of devilish committee deciding their next move. Evil is pervasive in the poem, leaking into every corner of light, polluting innocence, and rearing itself against all that is God and is around God. Milton’s approach shares an intellectual space with some of our best modern writing; one need only think of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men or the horrors of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to find parallels.

In handling the evil of Paradise Lost, Lewis relates the verse of Milton to the theology of Augustine and shows the coherent moral universe that the poem creates. One stunning section of Lewis’s essay centres around how good and evil relate to one another. Milton, Lewis asserts, creates a good that is independent of evil, but an evil which is dependent on good for its existence. Good is the positive reality observable in God’s universe, whereas evil is a negation, a parasitical reality which must feed off and seek to fester the good of the world. Lewis portrays this powerfully,

From this doctrine of good and evil it follows (a) That good can exist without evil, as in Milton’s Heaven and Paradise, but not evil without good. (b) That good and bad angels have the same Nature, happy when it adheres to God and miserable when it adheres to itself. These two corollaries explain all those passages in Milton, often misunderstood, where the excellence of Satan’s Nature is insisted on, in contrast to, and aggravation of, the perversion of his will. If no good (that is, no being) at all remained to be perverted, Satan would cease to exist; that is why we are told that ‘his form had yet not lost All her original brightness’ and still appeared as ‘glory obscur’d’.¹

For Milton, then, evil as an entity is a perversion of the good and lives in dependence on the good for all of its activity. This, of course, does nothing to allay the intellectual concerns that evil can evoke in the mind of even the strongest believer, but delineated malevolence, getting the dimensions of the diabolical, at least asserts for us the hopeful supremacy of good - even in the face of unrelenting wrong. Good is the original and lasting centre of the universe; evil is an interval, an interloper in the grand scheme of true reality, a domineering but ultimately defeated negation.

Creative benevolence and exploitative justice

Answering how a good God permits evil has exercised the greatest doctrinal minds throughout history. Milton does not touch on these existential issues, but provides a functional description of how God relates to good and evil. His relationship with each is strikingly different. Lewis outlines Milton’s position in this way,

[God] shows His benevolence in creating good Natures, He shows His justice in exploiting evil wills. All this is repeatedly shown at work in the poem…Those who will not be God’s sons become His tools.

Sidestepping the why questions that relate God to good and evil, Milton tackles the functional how question. God is kind in what he creates and ultimate over all that opposes him. He positively provides good and powerfully disposes of evil in a way that will ultimately be satisfying. Evil might be rampant, but it is always overruled; its motive might be malevolence, but, in Milton’s universe, God can exploit injustice to deliver his just goals and decrees. The responsibility for evil is never laid at God’s door, but the rule over evil is shown to be secure under God’s dominion.

If it’s not ok, then it’s not the end

This proverb is often attributed to John Lennon, although its actual source remains unknown. It is a hopeful ownership of the evil we live with in the world (it’s not ok) and an expression of optimism that wrong will be put right eventually (it’s not the end). In essence, Lewis’s analysis of Milton brings us to similar conclusion. God is not the author of evil but he is exploitative of evil. We might take Martin Luther King Jr.’s profound statement as our own here,

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice

God is pillaging the pain and injustice of this world, and the most arrogant and evil individuals and ideologies of every age are ultimately ‘tools’ by which God will resolve all that is wrong around us. This is heartening in a world where evil is dominant, even ascendent, and where we are confronted daily with fearful futures that might befall humanity. Milton’s world is candid, even colourful, about how real this evil is, but is insistent that God is exploiting it for the best of ends, always in the person and work of his Son, the Messiah.

This helps me enormously, even if it leaves some of my biggest questions unanswered. To know that benevolence flows from God, and that evil is diverted by God into channels that will be its undoing, working it for the ultimate good, positions me in a moral order which is absolute in its determined end - and there is great consolation in that fact alone.

1. Lewis, C. S.. A Preface to Paradise Lost (p. 67).