Quest for Knowledge and Milton (Part II)
Milton’s “Areopagitica? and “Paradise Regained? present an interesting view on God, man and redemption. For Milton, “God is the creator and sustainer of life and value” (51) and in “a God-centred universe… no value can exist apart from a commitment to deity” (484).
In Areopagitica, Milton creates claims and expound arguments which he himself contradicted and discarded in order to “disorient” and so prevent the reader from believing that truth and virtue is found in the external forms, like books and their assertion, and cause the reader to “just the kind of labor and exercise that is necessary to the constitution of his or her own virtue” (205).
Many facets also found in Paradise Lost, too, are answerable to Milton’s desire to “detach us” from expectations of drama, crisis, climax, plot, agency, and change, and “return us to a moment when nothing and everything is happening” (325).
In Areopagitica, Milton’s final argument for freedom of the press introduces the theme of Free Will which he will develop further in the later work Paradise Lost. The concept of which delves into the fact that God made man capable of free will. Due to this, men should be given freedom to choose between ideas.
In Paradise Regained, Milton again attempts to teach “a reversal of values away from the self and toward God” (343) by establishing in the reader “a need for resolution, in the form of some action or event” and then declining “to fulfill the need it has itself created” (330).
To put it in another way, the one reason behind Milton’s depiction of Christ in this poem as someone who refuses to do anything- except to maintain his inner faithfulness to God - is to annoy not just the nemesis Satan but also the reader who, due to his or her annoyance, will finally begin to assimilate the excellent examples of Christ.
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