If Milton’s intention was to write a political treatise, why bother to dedicate twelve books and about 400 pages to a discussion of God, Genesis, the creation of man, the temptation of Adam and Eve, and Lucifer and his legion of demons? Lamentably, a political interpretation of the poem is a lazy and uninspired exercise that only serves to downgrade the classic poem by consigning it to the transitory, social-political realm, where everything is discarded and forgotten.
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This interpretation is also a violation of literary prudence, critical license and intellectual honesty. Some secular critics stretch the limit of interpretation by assigning the epic Christian poem a political meaning that, they believe, reflects life in England during the poet’s life. Ultimately, Milton’s depiction of good and evil is best understood as a work of essentialism, for good and evil are essences that inform every facet of human reality. As a road map of life and death for man in the physical universe, Paradise Lost is a metaphysical-existential work that puts on display the patent as well as latent structure of human reality. For others, the work by the blind bard serves as the inspiration for man’s moral foundation, a moral compass and map of the structure of good and evil, right and wrong, and heaven and hell. For some, the poem is a complex literary masterpiece. Milton’s seminal work is acclaimed by readers and scholars as a poem that has many virtues: literary, moral, Christian, and philosophical. The best that good-willed critics can accomplish with a work such as this is to isolate some of its dominant themes and discuss these in relation to the meaning and purpose that its author infused into the work. Paradise Lost: A Metaphysical Map of the Structure of Good and Evil Given its literary richness and philosophical complexity, Paradise Lost cannot be easily exhausted by critics. What we know today as the complete, twelve book version of the epic, was published in 1674. Still, it was necessary for philosophy to try to explain how and why science became atheistic in the first place and this is just what Jean Borella has undertaken in his contribution: “Is Science Through with God?” Whether we follow Borella or Smith, we return to a Weltanschauung that can finally account for the world in all its dimensions, and, especially, find its meaning-a meaning weakened by several centuries of mechanical determinism.John Milton published Paradise Lost in 1667. Finally, he shows on scriptural grounds that the trichotomous cosmology accords with the teachings of Christ. He explains how vertical causality brings to light the long-forgotten fact that the integral cosmos replicates the corpus/anima/spiritus constitution of man and, moreover, that this cosmic trichotomy proves essential both to a recovery of traditional cosmology and to the advancement of contemporary science. Smith explores the implications of what he terms “vertical causality,” a hitherto unrecognized mode of causation which proves to be the missing ingredient needed to make sense out of quantum physics. And in co-author Wolfgang Smith we have a professor of mathematics and physics who became a metaphysician. Co-author Jean Borella, professor of philosophy and metaphysics, also earned a degree in physics. When a physicist who becomes a metaphysician, and a metaphysician who studies physics, join together to deal philosophically with science (quantum physics and cosmogenesis in particular), explosive results might well be expected-and this pivotal text does not disappoint.
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