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Why Do Bad Things Exist In Paradise Lost Analysis

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Why do bad things exist? (An analysis of John Milton’s theodicy in Paradise Lost) In today’s world, the news and social media bombard people with stories of war, disease, and evil. Some people have even stopped watching the news because it is sad and terrifying. Stories of children dying of cancer and innocent civilians being killed are everywhere people turn. In the 1600’s, during the Renaissance and the enlightenment, people were discovering new things everyday, but bad things were still happening. The plague was wiping out thousands of people, and no one could figure out why. At this point in time, England was predominantly religious, but people couldn’t understand how bad things happened when there was an all-loving God. John Milton decided he would write an epic …show more content…

If man was never tempted to turn away from God, nothing bad would ever happen. True, life would be extremely different and marvelous, but how would God know if mankind truly loved him? Emma Hughes states, “Paradise Lost illustrates God’s creation of man and free will as evidence of His perfect nature, not as a contradiction of His benevolence,”(Hughes). God creating man with free will was no mistake. Milton states, ¨In the beginning how the Heavens and Earth rose out of Chaos,¨(1, 9). God made everything and planned everything according to his purpose. Rulers and King’s who required forced rule are seen as tyrants and evil. God is everything perfect and therefore makes no mistakes. He made man have free will in order to have pure joy and perfection. He is all-loving and all-powerful, but he can’t force anyone to do anything because that is not just and not perfect. God warned Adam and Eve about Satan being in Eden to tempt. All God could do was warn them if he wanted to remain perfect. Even though they were warned, Adam and Eve still fell, ignoring God 's warnings of death and

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Dialectical Journal #2 John Milton’s pensive epic poem Paradise Lost amplifies the fate of those who disobey God’s orders will follow the same consequences of banishment in hell as Satan and, his followers received. With Satan and his followers being banished from the heavens after disowning God's rules and starting a war, sent a land “one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames, no light” this place is named hell. Now that they are in hell redemption is wanted from the failure of the first war, Satan’s pride is too strong to let God have victory so he influences the other troops to join him to being another war upon the heavens again results to failure. Dramatic irony is featured in various parts in this poem.

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Brandon McCormick Ms. Headley English 2013 8 December 2014 Allusions to Paradise Lost in Frankenstein In the nineteenth century gothic novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley uses numerous allusions within her novel that can easily be interpreted by the reader. These allusions make it easier for readers to understand the characters and compare their circumstances throughout the story. The most significant and most used was from John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. It is known that, “…Paradise Lost stands alone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries atop the literary hierarchy, and Milton’s epic is clearly rooted in the history of Puritanism and in the bourgeois ideal of the individual, the ‘concept of the person as a relatively autonomous self-contained

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