Milton and Me

I’ve just gobbled up a newly published book by my dear friend Alan Jacobs, whom I see only rarely these days (though one such occasion, blessedly, was earlier this year). The book in question—a volume in Princeton University Press’s excellent Lives of Great Religious Books series, presided over by Fred Appel—is Paradise Lost: A Biography.

As I’ve mentioned before, during my school years (from kindergarten through stints in a ridiculous number of graduate programs), I was blessed to have way more than my share of exceptional teachers. One of these was Edward E. Ericson Jr., whom I first encountered in September 1968 at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. To begin my junior year as an undergraduate, I had transferred to Westmont from Chico State College in Northern California, where Wendy and I had met in our first week of classes in September 1966.

Newly married as well as enrolled in a college I’d only become aware of in June of 1968, I found myself settling in for the first quarter of a three-quarter Survey of English Literature taught by Ed Ericson, who was only a few years older than his students but who seemed immensely learned and confident even as he radiated what could be called, in retrospect, “boyish enthusiasm.” I quickly became acquainted with two of my classmates in Ed’s class, Dan Taylor and Bruce Wiebe, with whom I have been friends ever since.

Ed—who would go on to spend most of his distinguished career at Calvin College (as it was then) in Grand Rapids, Michigan—was a superb teacher, and in my junior and senior years at Westmont—where I taught for a year after graduation—I enrolled in as many courses of his as I could, regardless of the subject matter. One of these was devoted to John Milton, a favorite of Ed’s (along with George Herbert and, ultimately surpassing all other contenders, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom I came to love too, thanks to Ed).

I took that course only because Ed was teaching it. I had already discovered that Milton wasn’t (to put it mildly) a writer I relished. And indeed, the more I read of him, the more intensely I disliked him. But I enjoyed the challenge of trying to see him through the eyes of a teacher who meant so much to me, and I didn’t regret the investment of time and energy or the aggravation I often felt seeing our common world through Milton’s eyes.

It was on the same principle that I read Alan Jacobs’s “biography” of Paradise Lost. If you suppose that the purpose of all this is to flatter myself—“I’m so broad-minded, engaging with writers who emphatically are not my cup of tea!”—you’re quite mistaken. And of course reading a writer I love, talking not only about Milton himself and his greatest work but also tracing the “reception” of Paradise Lost over the centuries, is quite different from a sustained immersion in Milton’s work, which I will never again attempt. (I need to take care of my aging brain.) So, for instance, there is a fascinating section (in a chapter titled “The Devil’s Party”) in which Jacobs recounts the impact of Milton’s epic on Percy Shelley and his second wife, Mary; a later chapter, “New Visions, New Media,” includes a section on Philip Pullman’s response to Milton. (I have always found Pullman unreadable, but I was interested in this nonetheless.) In the afterword, you will encounter Jacobs wondering, perhaps not altogether seriously,

whether there might arise a new religion in which Paradise Lost will make a kind of sense: I refer to the religion of the so-called Singularity, of the moment when AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) becomes self-aware and rises up against its maker, moved by a sense of “injured merit” (I.98) to refuse “submission”—“that word / Disdain forbids me” (IV.81-82)—and perhaps to refuse the very notion of having been created, choosing instead to think itself “self-begot” (V.860).

Reading this took me back to when, about ten years old, I began to read a lot of science fiction, including of course Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, a book that made a great impression on me. How distant that time (c. 1958) seems now. For the nudge to recall the impact of Asimov’s novel (and what it led to) and for much more, I am grateful yet again to Alan Jacobs and Fred Appel and Princeton University Press.