The Son rides out on the third day of the war in heaven in his chariot, and the rebel angels cast themselves into hell in terror. Why does God allow this war to happen, since he could have eliminated the rebel angels in an instant? Perhaps in order to teach: to provide an illuminating reversal of perspective, from heroic tragedy to divine comedy, and a reversal of mood from our own self-centered misery.

God announces in the middle of Book 5 that he has begotten a Son who shall rule over the angels. Satan revolts and gathers rebel angels, the only holdout being Abdiel. On the first day of battle, Abdiel strikes the first blow, and the battle goes badly for the rebels. Michael wounds Satan. Night falls, and to recoup their fortunes Satan invents gunpowder and cannon.

Milton’s vision of the entire universe as undergoing a process of vertical spiritual evolution, upward from matter to spiritualized matter, has profound social implications. It implies that the Chain of Being is not fixed, and that human nature might by the end of time become so spiritualized that God will, as the Son says in Book 3, lay his royal sceptre by, for God will then be “all in all,” a New Testament phrase that could imply the identity of God and man, “united as one individual soul.”  Historically, a fixed chain of authority has been attractive to the churches as a guarantee of their own power. But Milton was a revolutionary. The second half of Book 5 shows the shattering of the unified body. The first event chronologically of Paradise Lost is the Father’s announcement that he has begotten a Son who has authority over the angels—immediately precipitating Satan’s refusal and revolt. Milton denied the doctrine of the Trinity—as did many Christians until the Council of Nicea in 325 CE declared it. The Nicene Creed insists that the Son is “begotten not made, of one substance with the Father.” In Arianism and in Milton the Son is not identical to the Father nor as powerful. Milton lays out his reasons for his beliefs in his prose work Of Christian Doctrine.

Raphael arrives in the Garden of Eden to talk with Adam and Eve. When asked if angels eat, he enthusiastically affirms that they do—and enjoy it too. Milton is defending the real belief of Christianity, which is not that of a disembodied soul that eventually transcends the body and the physical world, but the spiritualization of matter, a process that the entire universe, from the elements through the natural world through the human world undergoes. If humanity had not fallen, it would not have remained in its fixed, subordinate position. Their physical nature spiritualized, human beings would have been able to rise to heaven and descend to earth again at will, enjoying both levels of being. At stake in this conversation is the ambivalence about the body with its unruly impulses, with its vulnerability to sickness, old age, and death—this conversation is relevant to issues that haunt us still today. There is a yearning to escape the body’s fragility, but what would a disembodied consciousness leave behind? The sensual pleasures of eating and drinking, of sex, of emotions, which are physically rooted—of so much that makes us human.

Milton’s bold defense of human sexuality against a tradition going back at least to Augustine regarding sexual desire as a necessary evil. Satan whispers into the ear of sleeping Eve, planting a dream of temptation and eating of the forbidden fruit, appealing to her will to power and latent desire to be a “Goddess.” Gabriel and his watch accost Satan, but God holds up his golden balances, which tip against Satan, who flees at the end of book 4. In book 5, God sends the angel Raphael down to have lunch with Adam and Eve in the garden.

The most sexist and patriarchal passages of Paradise Lostare usually a statement of Christian doctrine. Milton does what he can to liberalize doctrine by stressing the spirit of the law over the letter. This leads him to, first, an eloquent praise of human sexuality, denying the Augustinian doctrine that sexual desire is a product of the Fall; second, to a denial that Adam’s “rule” over Eve involves coercion; third, that Eve’s “narcissism” is, yes, partly a weakness (the weakness by which Satan undoes her) and yet also gives her an attractive independence, which both scares and attracts the male. It’s complicated.

Milton attempts to liberalize the teachings about gender that were historically founded on the story of Eve in Genesis (see Elaine Pagels’ brilliant Adam, Eve, and the Serpent). But he does not break with them entirely, which would have meant breaking with the Bible itself. Milton’s complex personal history of three marriages, the first of which was highly troubled in its beginnings and inspired him to write four pamphlets arguing for freedom of divorce, although he and Mary Powell were never divorced and she went on to bear all three of his daughters. How much does his personal experience inform Milton’s treatment of women and of Eve in particular—for both better and worse?

Milton’s complex cosmos, his knowledge of the “many worlds” of modern Galilean astronomy. Satan lands on the sun and deceives Uriel, the angel of the sun, travels to Earth and the Garden of Eden, where he looks up at the sun from which he has just descended and, thinking himself alone and unseen, launches into a soliloquy that shows that the titanic rebel of the first two books was just a pose. In actuality, he knows he is wrong, and is consumed with nihilistic despair. The opening lines may be the first part of the poem to be composed.

Despite the frequent prejudice against Milton, his view of the difficult problems of Christian theology were more liberal than all but a few people in his time, perhaps any time. He revises the doctrine of predestination to mean that God gives sufficient grace to all to be saved, and only then puts the burden on us of using our free will to choose. He revises the view of the Atonement, the sacrifice of the Son to the Father to atone for human sin, by saying that at the end of time God will put by his ruling sceptre and be “all in all,” a view that may possibly hint at the full identity of the human and the divine, on the level of the spiritual rather than the ordinary self.

God’s speech from his throne in Book 3 lays out the most difficult problem in Christian theology, the conflict between human free will and the doctrine, stated by Paul in Romans 8-9, that God predestines every human being either to salvation or damnation before we are even born. The Father pronounces humanity guilt, “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” but how can that be reconciled with the idea that we are saved only by God’s grace, which he withholds from some for reasons no one knows? Milton’s daring liberalization of predestination, in which everyone is given sufficient grace, even if some are given extra. Also, the problem of how Satan, Adam, and Eve ever chose evil if he created them perfect. And finally, the issue of why atonement is necessary if God is love—why does God demand a human sacrifice?