Expressions // Idolatry in Paradise Lost
My first encounter with Milton was not what I’d call a positive one. I had to tackle Paradise Lost in my first year at university and I was completely baffled; it seemed so deliberately impenetrable to me that I almost took it as a personal insult that I was able to glean next to nothing from its pages. Maybe because we were instructed to read only a couple of designated chapters due to the time constraints of the course and the massive amount of literature we had to plough through in one semester, or maybe because I was approaching it for the first time as such an inexperienced student and hadn’t the tools with which to effectively tackle it (if that’s the right word), I left those weeks relieved, hoping I needn’t confront Paradise Lost ever again. Two years later, though, I found myself actively choosing to take an intensive course dealing only with this text. Spurred on by a friend who’d referred to our first classes on it as (rather appropriately), “hell, but in a really good way,” I decided I was ready to try again, hopefully to see what all the fuss was about. This time, I was not disappointed. In particular, I was struck by what seemed to me a very self-aware anxiety about the nature of idolatry, of attempting to express God in art, and the constant need to justify and explain how Milton’s own ‘attempt’ is distinct, and exempt from accusations of idolatrous worship.
