Milton: A Christian Defence of Free Will

Abstract

Milton ends his invocation to the Muse in Paradise Lost, Book I, by praying for divine assistance that he may ‘assert Eternal Providence/ And justify the ways of God to men.’ (PL I: 25-6) One would think the justness of ‘the ways of God’ to be axiomatic, or so at least Milton seems to have thoughti; but the fact that he had set himself the noble task has very often led readers to suspect otherwise. There is in fact a philosophical question involved here, and a very problematic one at that. For if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and supremely good (C.P.W., VI: 145,149,150-51), as almost all religions agree he is, how came sin and suffering and evil in the world? Is God himself then the creator of evil?ii It is this paradox that led the Gnostics, or at least some of them, to hold that the sensible world had been created by an inferior deity named Ialdabaoth, and this again is behind the Manichaean view that evil is a positive principle. It was perhaps as an answer to Manichaeanism that the early church propounded its doctrine of evil as privatio boni: that is, privation or absence of good.