Paideia Today

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is the finest specimen of the age of satire and wit that succeeds that of Milton's age

This final episode on Milton's Paradise Lost looks at the various ways in which Milton explores the area we now understand under the term psychology, seeing both paradise and hell respectively as the obedient or defiant relations of the character towards God.  Milton in that sense 'internalizes' the landscape of the epic, as well as transforming what constitutes epic heroism.

The invocation at the outset of Milton's Paradise Lost announces that he will 'justify the ways of God to men."  Yet most anthologies cut Book 3 of Paradise Lost, the Council of Heaven, in which the God explains the rationale for the lost paradise and all the events that ensue.    This episode seeks to address what has been lost to a generation of readers of Paradise Lost.

In our third episode on Milton's Paradise Lost, we look at Book 2.  We emphasize Milton's theological commitments, rejecting the popular contemporary view that he is mixing our ideas of good and evil, as does the pantheist.  Quite the contrary, Milton's depiction of Hell and the creatures banished therein is consistent in following the Augustinian tradition in portraying evil as the privation of everything good.  We discuss some of the famous passages and engage with the consequences of their aesthetic misconception by the critical tradition.

In today's episode of Paideia Today, we get into book one of Paradise Lost.  We start by looking at his invocation of the Muse, and how he invokes the Classical epics of yore in order to acknowledge the vehicle of epic narrative while at the same time asserting that his is as much greater as his subject, the fall and redemption of mankind, is greater.  We then look to the description of the 'geography' of hell and its theological rationale as well as taking an extended look at the mind and character of Satan by attending to a few of his famous speeches.

Season 3 of Paideia Today begins with the colossal figure of John Milton.  Milton's Paradise Lost is arguably the greatest poem ever written, certainly the greatest in the English language.    The church father Tertullian once famously asked, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?  Milton's answer would be that theologically speaking it has nothing.  Nonetheless, in terms of its literary expression, Milton's Puritanism is inseparably linked with his Classicism.  At the same time, the epic form that he uses for his greatest work is transformed by the content of his theological convictions.  This is both a work of the utmost religious piety and of aesthetic expression.

In our final installment on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we move on  from discussing the symbolism of number to discussing the symbolism  entailed in the 3 beasts that Gawain encounters.  The author's artful  use of parallelism leads to many interesting talking points throughout  the episode

Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered the 'father of English literature.'  He is best known for his Canterbury Tales.  He was also the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey.    But Chaucer was very much a Renaissance man, even before the Renaissance came to England. He gained fame as a philosopher (and as a translator of Boethius) and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis.   He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.  Our podcast will discuss this fascinating figure and also one of his Canterbury Tales.

George Herbert is arguably the foremost devotional lyric poet in the English language.  Prodigiously gifted, his intention to serve as an Anglican priest was interrupted by the positions he was offered in public service.  He functioned for seven years as Public Orator at Cambridge University before briefly serving in Parliament.  He returned to his initial vocation, however, by serving as the rector of the little parish of St Andrew's Church, Lower Bemerton, Salisbury.  And it is there that he in all likelihood wrote the personal devotional poems - in English, Latin, and Greek - that are now his greatest legacy.   Shortly before his death at the age of 39, he sent a literary manuscript to Nicholas Ferrar, the founder of a semi-monastic Anglican religious community at Little Gidding, recommending that he publish the poems if he thought they might "turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul", and otherwise to burn them. In 1633, Ferrar published all of his English poems in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.  They were received with great public approval and reprinted regularly throughout the seventeenth century.

John Donne is an extraordinary literary figure.  In addition to his fame as a poet, the foremost representative of the Metaphysical poets, he also served as a soldier.   But it was his religious position that made him most famous in his day.  Although he had been born into a Catholic family, after considerable reflection he became one of the foremost Anglicans of his day, serving as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631).  Donne's style is characterised by its drama.  Abrupt openings and the use of paradox, irony and syntactic dislocation are commonplace in his writing. These reflect a revolt against the smooth diction and Classical style of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier poets.  Donne's discordant tethering of ideas in metaphysical conceits express the eternal conflict between the life of the Christian and the world.  But that conflict is not new.  What is new are the way he alludes to matters specific to his age, from the ongoing discovery of the new world, to the proto-scientific method of Francis Bacon and the cosmology of Copernicus, to the scepticism of the new philosophy of Rene Descartes