Paradise Lost: A Biography, by Alan Jacobs. Princeton University Press, 2025, 203 pages, $24.95.

Nothing is easy about Paradise Lost (PL)—and especially not for contemporary readers.

First, the poem itself presents problems. Long gone are the days when it could be assumed that educated Americans had read—or at least dipped into—the epic poetry of Homer, Virgil, and Milton. Paradise Lost contains over ten thousand lines of blank verse and is full of references to Greek and Latin literature, cosmological speculations, an imaginative recasting of the first three chapters of Genesis, a tour of the unfolding biblical history of redemption, and no small amount of theological polemics. Content alone is enough to deter many readers. Still others make it to the finish line wondering if their perseverance was worth it. As Mark Twain wryly noted, Paradise Lost meets one definition of a classic: “Something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read” (126).

There are problems with the poem. There are also problems with the poet. At least in his own day, Milton found himself on “the wrong side of history.” His support of the parliamentary army, defense of regicide, and service in Cromwell’s government were all, by the Stuart restoration, lost causes.

If national tumult and civil war were not enough, life in the poet’s home was turbulent. His first wife left him, leading him to write a brief for divorce (she eventually returned). If historical accounts are reliable, three daughters found him to be a domestic tyrant.

Problems with poet and poem acknowledged, Paradise Lost remains a classic of English literature. And Alan Jacob’s Paradise Lost: A Biography provides ample motivation to take up and read or reread the great work. A volume in the Lives of Great Religious Books series, its purpose “is to provide a biography of the poem—that is, to narrate how it has lived over the centuries since its composition.” To make this project manageable in less than two hundred pages, Jacobs confines himself to three hotly contested areas in Milton studies: government, sexual politics, and theology proper (29–30). One need not proceed far in his whirlwind history of the poem’s interpretation before coming to agree with him that “almost every statement one might make about Paradise Lost, even the most apparently anodyne, may be debated.” (71)

Four towering figures of English literature and Milton studies in the century following the publication of Paradise Lost prove Jacob’s point. A contemporary, John Dryden, first conjectured that Satan is the epic’s hero, a recurring viewpoint in subsequent generations (67). Joseph Addison could not disagree more, asserting that “it is certainly the Messiah who is the hero, both in the principal action and in the chief episodes” (70). Tory Samuel Johnson despised not only Milton’s republicanism but also his neglect of corporate, household, and personal hours of prayer. Whether monarch or prelate, “[Milton] hated all whom he was required to obey” (77–78). Among Milton’s admirers stood England’s great eighteenth-century evangelical poet, William Cowper. In a letter, he recounted his dream of meeting Milton and sharing with him “a long story of the manner in which it [Paradise Lost] affected me, when I first discovered it, being at that time a schoolboy” (84).

A later writer, William Blake of the Romantic Age, found both Milton’s theology and view of women offensive, leading him to assert famously, “Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (90). Percy Shelley relieved Milton of the charge of ignorance: The Satan he presents is morally superior to God. In his estimation, Milton becomes a key figure in “that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion” (111).

During the Victorian era, many readers treated the poem with respect, recognizing it as a classic in the canon of English literature, but comparatively few felt the “need to reckon with it in specifically religious terms” (128–29).

The twentieth century produced its share of hostile critics. Virginia Woolf minced no words when she wrote: “There’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.” Therefore, it is no surprise when she asks in her diary, “Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one’s own joys and sorrows?” (129–30) A professing Christian, T. S. Eliot, nevertheless, found Milton’s theology “in large part repellant” (134).

Among Milton’s twentieth-century defenders were Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis. The latter opined that “many of those who say they dislike Milton’s God only mean that they dislike God” (143). For Lewis, Milton’s God and the Christian God are “one in the same” (145). No doubt, Milton would have agreed with Lewis. As Jacobs comments, “Milton is passionately concerned to identify certain central beliefs of the Christian faith, to portray them dramatically, and to expose their significance for all of us who live in the aftermath of the Eden story. (That is, for all of us)” (xiv). One who has little sympathy for orthodox Christianity is unlikely to think appreciatively of the theology of Paradise Lost, so closely are the two intertwined.

Milton’s goal is theological, namely, to “justify the way of God to men” (Paradise Lost I, 26). Milton’s interest in the redemption of fallen man by Christ never wavers. At the outset, readers are confronted “with loss of Eden, till one greater man / Restore us, and regain the blissful seat” (PL I, 3–5). Fallen man’s hope rests in the Savior who will come in the flesh:

Proclaiming life to all who shall believe
In his redemption, and that his obedience
Imputed becomes theirs by faith, his merits
To save them, not their own, though legal works. (PL XII, 407–409)

While Reformed Christians will find fault with various points of Milton’s theology, Paradise Lost remains an extraordinary endeavor to justify the ways of the God of the Bible to men. The number who share the basic contours of Milton’s theology have dwindled in the once Christian West, but elsewhere the faith thrives. Jacobs asks, “As Christianity’s center of gravity migrates to the Global South, might we look forward to future readers of Milton’s poem among Korean Presbyterians? Nigerian Anglicans? Brazilian Pentecostals? Who knows what future readers of this great epic might find in it?” (186–87).

And might one wish for a revival of interest in the west for the classic Christian works of English literature? After all, reformation of the church has been a recovery of important texts in the Christian tradition. If our reading of Paradise Lost leads to the closer study of Scripture and deeper theological reflection, it will prove more than a poem to be aesthetically admired, but a treasure from the mines of Christian history to be cherished by those who prize the truths of God’s Word.

Charles Malcolm Wingard is minister of shepherding at the First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, Mississippi (PCA), and professor of pastoral theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. Ordained Servant Online, January, 2026