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“Our voluntary service he requires,
Not our necessitated…”
In keeping with its depiction of a cosmic conflict between God and Satan, no work in the Western canon has given rise to more polarized critical responses than has Paradise Lost. The essential division has been between those readers who see Milton as having been successful in his avowed aim to “justify the ways of God to men” (I.26),1 and those readers, beginning in the Romantic period, who maintain, in Blake's famous apothegm, that Milton “was of the Devil's party without knowing it” (c. 1790/1956, p. 211)—that is, that he unwittingly sabotaged this conscious intention, and indeed that his greatness cannot be disentangled from the unresolved tensions between his theology and his poetry. To be sure, some recent commentators have sought to move beyond such established positions—arguing, for instance, that the poem contains only a series of “unreliable narrators,” starting with God himself, and that the destabilizing of meanings is accordingly deliberate on Milton's part (Herman, 2005, p. 125), or that Milton portrays God as a tyrant because he wishes to overthrow all forms of heavenly as well as earthly kingship (Bryson, 2004, p. 29)—but these displays of ingenuity