Paradise Lost and the Problem of a God Who Mocks
featuring Dr. Hannibal Hamlin, The Ohio State University
Hannibal Hamlin works on Renaissance literature, especially the Bible and its influence on authors including Shakespeare, Philip and Mary Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Milton and Bunyan. He is an expert on the Psalms and their early modern translation into poetic meters and literary forms. Much of his work explores aspects of allusion (biblical and poetic) and intertextuality. He was editor of Reformation from 2009-2015 and continues to serve on its editorial board, as well as the board of Explorations in Renaissance Culture. Current projects include several editing projects: an anthology, The Psalms in English, 1530-1633, for the Modern Humanities Research Association New Tudor & Stuart Translations series and The Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Bible, for which he is general editor as well as editor of the Renaissance volume.
Page Abstract: In Paradise Lost, John Milton sets himself the task of justifying God by not only expanding and explaining the account of the Fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis but of writing the prequel to the Bible, telling the story of God’s elevation of his Son, Satan’s revolt, and the fall of the rebel angels. Much in Milton’s poem is strange, however wonderful, and however influential. One alarming strangeness is Milton’s representation of God, which constantly threatens to undermine the project of justification (one that is essentially theological) by entangling it in complications of character and plot (which are essentially literary). These tangles have led some readers, including the English Romantic poets, to judge that Milton had either deliberately or unconsciously achieved exactly the opposite of what he professed at the opening of Paradise Lost. Shelley found “Milton’s Devil as a moral being … far superior to his God,” and saw the “bold neglect of a direct moral purpose [as] the most decisive proof of Milton’s genius.” Blake thought Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” which is why he “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, but at liberty when of Devils & Hell.” Subsequent critics fall into two camps: those who, like Blake and Shelley, feel that Milton’s project of justification is either a failure or a screen for a radical political, theological, or moral critique; and those who take Milton at his word and locate the failure in some readers not in the poem, which does ultimately justify God to man, even if in somewhat unorthodox theological terms. The focus of this project is on one aspect of Milton’s God, his laughter. Does God laugh?
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