In this essay I intend to evince John Milton’s conflation of the Biblical and the Classical in his magnum opus, Paradise Lost, and investigate his reasons for juxtaposing the sacred with the profane. I will also be drawing ideas and argument from Thomas N. Corns and his essay, The English Epic, in order to assert that this conflation is part of Milton’s desire to fuse the Classical and the Christian, to create an epic not merely on par with those of Homer or Virgil, but one superior through its similar poetic form and the sublimity of its Christian message. Furthermore, this essay will also explore the milieu in which Milton lived and wrote, and consider the writing of Paradise Lost in relation to the epoch in which it was written, and how this work could be construed as elucidating the shift in mores and values that was occurring in an England in the midst of political and religious turmoil.
Milton began writing the first books of Paradise Lost in the final years of the short lived republican Commonwealth of England, and the latter books after the Restoration which ascended Charles II to the throne. Unsurprisingly, with Milton being a republican and sympathiser to Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians (Milton labelled the deposed Charles I as a “tyrant”[1] and held position as Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth), there is a political and theological subtext to his epic tied inexorably to the tumult of the time. So overtly is Paradise Lost influenced by its time and place of writing, that it prompted T.S. Eliot to comment that, “of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions…making unlawful entry.”[2] Furthermore, in a discussion on the social context the epic was written in, Margaret Kean opines that the real heroes of the book are those characters who face scorn and persecution yet keep their faith nonetheless; namely characters like the angel Abdiel, who stays loyal to God in the...