A confession: until quite recently, my knowledge of Paradise Lost was largely confined to various short passages and the occasional excursion into its extraordinary cast of characters.That was enough to satisfy the curiosity rooted in a Catholic upbringing, and the occasional allusion in other texts.

I’d read and hugely enjoyed Samson Agonistes at university, but PL felt daunting – like looking up at a huge, craggy mountain from a hilltop, and wondering if your shoes are up to the task. I’ve now read the whole thing. And what a remarkable experience it was.

The writing in Paradise Lost is, I think, what the word ‘epic‘ was made for.

The sheer scale of Milton’s ambition is extraordinary, as is his willingness to engage with some enormous questions: free will, obedience; the nature of evil; the relationship between humanity and its creator; and the origins of sin.

With my ex-Catholic head on, there was plenty to get my teeth into.

Like so many other readers before me, I was particularly fascinated by Milton’s characterisation of Satan. He’s an incredibly compelling creation – I’d say more interesting than Dr Faustus, and if you know my relationship with Christopher Marlowe, that’s a bold statement – not least because of Satan’s ability to present his own interests as though they were those of everybody else. His rhetoric is seductive, his arguments frequently persuasive, and his apparent commitment to liberty and independence deserves a bit more scrutiny than it might initially suggest.

In the passage I’ve selected to commemorate his anniversary, Satan questions God’s decision to prohibit Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge:

Knowledge forbidden?

Suspicious, reasonless. Why

Should their Lord Envy them that?

Can it be a sin to know?

Can it be death?

I find those final two questions really uncomfortable.

Who has the right to decide what another person is permitted to know? Why should knowledge be withheld? And what might be the motivation of those seeking to control access to it? If nothing else, it jars with my mission to demystify Shakespeare and the like.

Of course, we must be careful about accepting Satan’s argument at face value. His apparent championing of intellectual freedom is hardly disinterested. He’s manipulating Eve, exploiting her curiosity, presenting disobedience as liberation. The would-be liberator is, in fact, attempting to exert his own influence.

It’s a distinction worth remembering.

Milton never quite made it onto my classroom walls, but these ideas found space there through two other writers.

George Orwell observed that:

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.¹

And Ray Bradbury offered this rather wonderful observation:

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.²

Both quotations seem relevant to Milton’s concerns, even if they approach the subject from different directions.

Orwell understood the relationship between language and thought: our ability to articulate ideas, recognise manipulation and challenge received wisdom is fundamental to intellectual independence. Bradbury, meanwhile, reminds us that the destruction of a reading culture doesn’t necessarily require an authoritarian government or a bonfire of books. Sometimes, people simply lose the inclination to read, question and engage.

And that brings me to a subject I’ve been considering more recently: the control, curation and accessibility of knowledge.

In a recent post, Who Pays for Free?, I explored the importance of supporting Wikipedia and the infrastructure which makes freely accessible information possible. We tend to take the availability of knowledge for granted, forgetting that information has to be gathered, evaluated, organised and maintained. Access is neither automatic nor necessarily guaranteed.

And then there’s the distinction between having access to information and knowing what to do with it.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that all knowledge should be freely available to everybody, irrespective of its potential consequences. There are legitimate reasons for restricting access to certain information. But it begs another question: who decides where those boundaries should lie, and on what authority?

So, we arrive at the areas where the three writers meet.

Milton asks if it can be a sin to know. Orwell warns us about surrendering our capacity to think. Bradbury reminds us of what happens when we stop reading.

Maybe the questions which connect them all are simple ones:

Who gets to decide what we are allowed to know?

Who benefits when we stop asking questions?

They seem just as relevant now as when Milton – by that stage blind – was dictating his epic to the friends and students who helped him commit it to paper.

References and Further Reading

1. George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) ↩︎
2. Misha Berson, ‘Bradbury Still Believes in Heat of “Fahrenheit 451”’. The Seattle Times, 12 March 1993. ↩︎