Paradise Lost

Book 6 focuses on the civil war in Heaven. The great war is bizarre in its ineffectiveness—the angels cannot die, and God limits their powers anyway. Milton implies that there is no real purpose to this war, except for the angels to prove their loyalty to God. Yet again, Milton portrays God as petty in his requirements for proclamations of loyalty. The war is also a necessary plot point in the epic, as a characteristic of the genre is grandiose wars with many speeches and shifting winners and losers. Milton may have included this war as a focal point for Book 6 to echo the epic genre, but he also subverts it. Although cannons would have been used in Milton’s time, they certainly did not exist in the Bible. Therefore, Milton again uses the epic genre to write a saga that befits his culture and time period.

Although the angels can’t die, they can and do experience pain, for the first time. The introduction of pain is a major plot shift—from the point of first pain, the angels cannot go backward. The idyllic setting of Heaven is fractured, and angels discover that there are other feelings than bliss and joy. That the angels can feel pain but didn’t before the war is yet another example of God’s grace; there are ways to make angels suffer, but God doesn’t show them until Satan triggers the war. Because God limits the angels’ power, the pain is also limited, further proving God’s love for his angels. The reader must consider why God would allow the war to continue, knowing the ending and the destruction that could have been avoided. The point of free will is again implied here. There were many moments when Satan and the rebel angels could have prevented the war, stopped the war, or asked for forgiveness. Their choice to engage in war and continue the fight even with the new experience of pain and the anger that informs both sides of the war demonstrates that the angels are very much like human beings. Though Milton articulates Raphael’s superiority over a mere mortal like Adam, he nonetheless uses personification to make these beings extremely humanlike.

Milton provides one lasting pin in his thesis on the evil of the fallen angels. When the Son intervenes in the war, the rebel angels choose to dive into a dark abyss, and so the angels are not technically expelled from Heaven—they choose to leave Heaven of their own accord. In the war the Son serves as a symbol for balance. With the rebel angels gone, Heaven can return to light and bliss. This is foreshadows the Son’s future sacrifice and resurrection; as Jesus Christ, the Son will again intervene in a war (albeit a very different type of war), and when he returns to Heaven again, balance will be restored. This highlights how wrong Satan is about the Son; God may be all-powerful, but since his creation of the Son, Heaven cannot be the same without him. Satan believes he doesn’t need to follow the Son, partly because he doesn’t realize how powerful and necessary the Son is to the natural order now established in Heaven.

Of course, goodness wins and the rebel angels are doomed to Hell. There could have been no other outcome, as God refuses to grant the rebel angels any grace and is very much in control of who wins or loses. Book 6 therefore is less about the importance of the war (even though it is important to the plot) and more about Raphael specifying the danger of Satan to Adam. Adam and Eve are not threatened by any mere force of evil but by the most extreme force of evil. Now that they have been fairly warned, their future is in their hands. It seems unfair that God would expect Adam and Eve to resist such a formidable foe, a powerful former angel whom even the Archangel Michael couldn’t completely defeat. This emphasizes that God knows they won’t be able to avoid temptation, making the entire conversation with Raphael almost farcical.