To Justify the Ways of God: John Milton's Paradise Lost (episode 2)

We return to Milton's magnificent octopus today with an eye toward evaluating the epic's success according to its own mission statement: "to justify the ways of God to men."  How does Milton approach the great theological problems of evil and suffering, divine foreknowledge, and free will?

Transcript

Hello again, folks!  Welcome back to the Classic English Literature Podcast, that little preserve of Eden persisting in the digital cloud.  Speaking of Eden (and no, I am in no way proud of that terrifically awkward segue), today we return to the scene of humanity’s original crime in another episode on John Milton’s brain-busting epic, Paradise Lost.

But before we return to the mythical garden: if you are noticing an improved quality of sound on today’s episode, we have listener Terri V. to thank.  A generous donation has allowed me to purchase a new mike stand, replacing the old janky one that broke about a year ago and has been periodically super-glued back into service.  Thanks very much, Terri!

Last time out, we looked at the character of Satan and how he, while really only featuring in a couple of PL’s twelve books, so dominates the imagination of the reader that many feel the Archfiend is the poem’s epic hero.  If you’ve not heard that episode, I recommend you betake yourself there as it includes some context and plot summary for Paradise Lost that I’ll not be repeating here.

I imagine some ardent Miltonheads may have been somewhat perplexed that our previous episode made no mention of Milton’s major intention for his epic and completely ignored the famous Exordium – the 26 line introduction.  I left that gap because well, I was interested in talking about other things and decided a look at the opening lines would fit better in the discussion I intend today.  So allow me to fill that void now.

As Milton is working largely in the classical idiom, he opens his epic with the traditional invocation of the muse (though, in this case, the muse is the Holy Spirit – can’t have a Puritan praying to pagan goddesses, now, can we?).  Critic D.J. Lake has argued that this invocation – the Exordium – is “in many ways a miniature of [Paradise Lost], containing most of the elements of Milton’s style working at their highest intensity.”  It’s a grand statement and, I think perhaps, a bit hyperbolic, but in its essence true enough.  The hortatory fanfare, the tortured syntax, the profusion of allusion, and just a soupcon of false humility delivered in some of the most elegant blank verse ever uttered – all here in these first 26 lines.  Strap in, Litterbugs:

OF Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,

In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth

Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flow'd

Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventurous Song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.

And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss

And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark

Illumin, what is low raise and support;

That to the highth of this great Argument

I may assert Eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.

Right – even if you don’t follow the meaning, just the sound of Milton’s language is wonderful.  I realize that my accent does not necessarily show that beauty in its most flattering light.  It feels in the mouth like poetry, almost like speaking in tongues.  And for many, on first encountering Paradise Lost, it can feel a bit like some impenetrable, spiritual language because its syntax is so, well, serpentine (pun perhaps intended).

Look, the whole Exordium is only two sentences comprising, I think, four independent clauses.  The grammatical subject of the first sentence does not arrive until line 6 – we are 51 syllables of prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses into the poem before we even know to whom the speaker pleads.  These are called periodic sentences, by the by, in which the main clause is delayed, usually to summon some sense of grandeur or weight to the language and its subject.  Parallelisms, parenthetical insertions, and absolute statements accumulate as the language rolls on. Such a style necessitates the heavy use of enjambment, which is when the sentence runs over the length of the poetic line, so Milton’s blank verse contains 10 syllables per line, but the sentence is some 160 syllables long.  To fit that blank verse, iambic pentameter pattern, of course, Milton must invert word order to properly align the stresses, but the way he does it here is probably as close a replication of Latin style as English can get.  This is called “hyperbaton,” and it indicates Milton’s debt to the classical form while simultaneously elevating the tone.  Such a highly sophisticated style challenges the reader, forcing us to engage deeply with the text, as is appropriate for the intellectual and theological depths of the poem itself.

OK, so that’s how he said it.  But, uh, what did he say?  A fair question, friend listener.  The speaker intends to tell of the Fall of Adam and Eve (Man’s first disobedience that brought Death into the world) leading to the possibility of ultimate redemption by one Greater Man (that’s Jesus, yeah?).  So, Milton wants to tell the Cosmic History of Creation.  He’s going large.  So he’s going to need a little help.  He asks the Heavenly Muse (the Holy Spirit) to sing that song to him, so he can surpass even the great classical poets Homer and Virgil with “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.”  Going really large.  This spirit is the spirit of Creation itself that made pregnant the vast abyss we read of in the first lines of Genesis.  There’s a nice pairing here of God’s ultimate act of creation and Milton’s more particular act: the writing of poetry.  We’ve seen this notion of human creativity as the true “image of God” before.  And the purpose of creating this great song, this history of redemption?  To “justify the ways of God to Man.”

Let’s sit on that line for a while.  It’s perhaps one of the most theologically charged lines in English poetry.  But what does it mean?

Well, the rough and ready is that Milton’s epic will show why God does what he does, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense to people.  But the particular diction of the line, and its multiple resonances and ambiguities, make it worth considering more closely.

Let’s begin with the verb: justify.  Generally, that means “to make right or just” or to demonstrate that something is right or just.  The latter sense is probably Milton’s primary intention: rhetorically, “justify” indicates an attempt to rationalize God’s inherent justice.  But there is the hangover of the former sense, which would imply that God’s ways need to be . . . well, “corrected” is too strong . . . but “spun”?  Maybe.  You can get the impression that Paradise Lost is an attempt to explain away God’s controversial methods.  This follows from a particularly judicial connotation of the verb “justify,” as if Milton is God’s defense attorney.

And, actually, what are those ways of God that require justifying?  It’s the plural that intrigues me – not God’s “way,” but his “ways.”  Which ones?  All of them?  Like, every action?  Or some of them?  Then which ones?

We teeter on the edge of some major philosophical rabbit holes here.  Milton’s diction seems deliberately broad, encompassing some serious theological issues.  Firstly, there is the issue of theodicy.  I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but a theodicy is a solution to the problem of evil.  I’m sure I’ve mentioned that before, too, but the problem of evil, basically, is this: if God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-loving – a maximally perfect being – then the manifest existence of evil is logically incoherent.  Since evil exists, God must not be all good, because he has not ended it.  Or he cannot be all powerful because he can’t end it.  Or he cannot be all-loving because he hasn’t chosen to end it.  Theodicies have existed for as long as Christians and Jews have posited a supreme God, from the Bible’s Book of Job, to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and up to the present day.  None has answered the problem to complete satisfaction, but Paradise Lost is Milton’s bold attempt.

We could limit the scope of Milton’s project, if we chose to, and see it not as a comprehensive apology for God’s governance of the cosmos, but rather a defense of God’s permitting the Fall of Satan and the Fall of Man.  But we merely jump to another rabbit hole.  This demands that we address the problem of divine foreknowledge and free will.  Were Satan and Adam actually free to determine their own lives if God knew all along what they would choose?  If we are not actually free to choose, then how can we be morally culpable for those “choices”?  And then, how are God’s punishments “just”?  Another big task, taken on by Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy, the titanic Moses Maimonides, as well as by the saints before mentioned and dozens of other thinkers.

And why must these questions about the problems of evil, divine foreknowledge, and free will be justified “to Man”?  This seems to imply that God’s ways are not clear and intuitive to the human mind and that we require some kind of interlocutor – which has always bothered me, and regular listeners will know that I am sympathetic to a theistic worldview.  I’m troubled at the proposition that I may be created by a God who would hide the rules of the game.  And while I’m totally on board with the limitations of the “finite human mind,” I would want a God who could express his purposes to me in terms easily understood.  So Milton’s got to take that job on, too. 

pause 

So let’s get right to the poem.  Most of the material relating to the creation of humanity comes in Book 7 when the angel Raphael tells Adam the story of creation.  After all the work of the first five days, there’s one task remaining:  

There wanted yet the master-work, the end

Of all yet done; a creature who not prone

And brute as other creatures, but endued

With sanctity of reason, might erect

 His stature, and upright with front serene

Govern the rest, self-knowing, and from thence

Magnanimous to correspond with Heaven,

But grateful to acknowledge whence his good

Descends, thither with heart and voice and eyes

Directed in devotion, to adore

And worship God Supreme, who made him chief

Of all His works.

Milton presents the creation of humankind as the “master-work, the pinnacle.  But not only the grooviest thing God has made, the very purpose of God’s making at all: Man is “the end of all yet done.”  Humanity is the telos, to use Aristotle’s term, of creation.  So Milton uses “end” not only as “conclusion” but also “fulfillment.”  Then note how Man is distinguished from the rest of creation: endued with the sanctity of reason.  Interesting that reason, rationality, is sacralized here, because it’s the thing we share with God.  We walk upright, not prone like beasts, with “front serene.”  We move with dignity and equanimity as appropriate to that divine likeness.  And we are self-knowing.  Ah!  This is a big one.  We are not just rational or intelligent, we are conscious.  We are aware.  We participate in the meaning of creation.  We are magnanimous (an oddly prescient  word here, I always thought), but suppliant, for we were made to worship and adore God.  Right, so that’s why God makes Adam: to get praised for making Adam.  Evidently, the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and every creature that creepeth upon the earth had been insufficiently fawning.  Makes God sound rather needy, a bit emotionally dependent, at best.  Narcissistic and megalomaniacal at worst.  But I suppose humility isn’t on the emotional register of an omnipotent being.

Regarding Adam’s actual creation, Raphael reports:

 He formed thee, Adam, thee O man

Dust of the ground, and in thy nostrils breathed

The breath of life; in His own image He

Created thee, in the image of God

Express, and thou becam’st a living soul.

I must have said this before somewhere in the podcast, because it’s one of my favorite things.  The name Adam is a pun – actually a couple of puns.  The Hebrew for “earth” or “ground” is “adamah,” so the name reinforces Adam’s very material origins.  Incidentally, we get an echo of this in English, as the words “humus” (for soil) and “human” are cognate.  Later, I believe, Hebrew uses the word adam as a generic term for “mankind”, so the Biblical (and Miltonic) use of the name makes Adam an avatar for all of humanity.  Furthermore, we could read the name as a tragically ironic bit of foreshadowing, for in Latin, “adamas” means “unbreakable” or “like a diamond.”  Bit sad, that.  Some have argued that it’s also an English pun for “a damn,” as in “I don’t give. . . ,” but that seems rather silly to me.

The breathing in the nostrils thing, too, is cool.  Breath in Latin is “spiritus” – spirit – from which we get all kinds of words that really reinforce the “image of God” theme: respire, inspire, transpire, suspire.  Note that neither Genesis nor Milton say God breathed and made Adam a living creature; they both say “soul,” so to be human is to be both body (dust) and soul (spiritus).  

When Adam comes to existence, he is immediately aware of his physical existence, his sensory perception.  As he tells it, Adam is as yet unaware of himself:

But who I was, or where, or from what cause,

Knew not;. . .  fair creatures, tell,

Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here?

Not of myself; by some great Maker then,

In goodness and in power preeminent;

Tell me, how may I know Him, how adore,

From whom I have that thus I move and live,

And feel that I am happier than I know.

This passage portrays Adam as innocent, wondrous and wonderful, and yearning to understand.  He names his world and, in that act, imbues it with meaning.  This is how one comes to self-awareness.  He has a clarity of mind untainted by evil.  But there is one moment here which points to the incipience of some dread, though not, as yet, conceived of as such.  Before falling to sleep, Adam says:

I thought

I then was passing to my former state

Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve.

He first apprehends sleep as returning to nonexistence – as dissolution.  It will be this he longs for after the Adventure of the Apple.  

In fact, when God explains to Adam his origins and the naturalness of Man’s innate desire to worship, God, too, seems to reference dissolution:

"I am," said He, "who thou hast sought and found,

To whom all thoughts, words, works, or high or low,

Second, or third, to my sole will conform.

All things by me exist; in me, yet live

And move, or I the soul admit. Thy life,

Thy reason, speech, and motion, whence? but me,

Whose hand upheld thee when thou stoodst,

Whose hand when thou wert motionless and mute

Raised thee; yet let that hand withdraw, and soon

Thou to dust shalt return, and be no more.

What thou art is by my grace, what thou aspirest

To be was mine, mine by gift, my goodness,

And my favor, thine to ask, thine to receive."

The “to dust shalt return” line really seems to indicate that God’s caprice is the foundation of Adam’s being a living soul.  Should the breath of God be withheld, Adam once again becomes adamah – dust, earth.  Of course, that’s not what happens when Adam tastes the forbidden fruit, and that’s not what becomes, for most mainline Christian theologies, the punishment for sinners.  Hell, as traditionally envisioned, is a place of torture, and the tortured retain the self-awareness and perception with which they were created.  Condemnation is not mere reversion to nonexistence, not a biochemical process of deterioration.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The other thing I find curious about this passage is the way by which it closes off the possibility of free will in humans.  Back in Book 3, we get this:

Not free, what proof could they have given sincere

Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,

Where only what they needs must do appeared,

Not what they would?

So, forced allegiance or compulsory worship has no value.  Love and faith cannot be commanded as they then cease in their essence and become merely appearance.  Right: bog standard answer to why humans were created with free will, which is how many theodicies justify the presence of evil and suffering in God’s putatively good creation.  God desires love, but love cannot be compelled.  Therefore, humans must be free to reject God.  If they do, the consequences are evil and suffering.  God has not imposed evil on the world, nor is he powerless to stop it.  It is inherent in the moral design of free beings.  Those free beings must then accept the consequences of their freely chosen actions.  Standard answer for the compatibility of moral evil with a maximally perfect God.  That does leave the problem of natural evil (you know, the suffering not brought about by human agency, like earthquakes or storms or plagues), but that’s beyond Milton’s brief in Paradise Lost, so I won’t bother with it now.

But, and as per the rap star’s fancy, it’s a big but, God’s speech in Book 8 closes off that line of argument.  He says that, “all thoughts, words, works, or high or low, / Second, or third, to my sole will conform.”  Every iota of existence conforms to God’s individual will.  This, then, must be logically incompatible with free will.  Am I under-reading that?  Isn’t God saying everything behaves the way I want it to?  Check out this passage, also from Book 3:

So will fall,

He and his faithless progeny. Whose fault?

Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me

All he could have; I made him just and right,

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

Those first three syllables sound to me like a declaration – an indicative, not a subjunctive mood.  This will happen.  Milton does not convince me that his God does not orchestrate mankind’s suffering.  I don’t find any absolution here.

Ah!  But what of the ol’ felix culpa?  The Blessed Fall?  Adam’s sin was not a failure of God’s cosmos – he planned it all along!  The grand plan of salvation requires the loss of an apple or two.  Without a fall, there can be no redemption.  Book 3 again:

Man falls deceived

By the other first: Man therefore shall find grace,

The other none.

Well, Bubba, really – I find that harder to swallow than a glass porcupine.  All this sound and fury just to get humans back to where they were before Eve started talking to snakes?  Come on!  Sounds to me like when my cat is tearing around the house – 100 miles an hour – then loses her footing and bonks herself into the wall.  She gets this look as she walks away: “I totally meant to do that.”  

OK, I’m half-joking here.  I know I’ve oversimplified the issue and centuries of really smart people have wrestled with this problem.  But setting aside, if we even can, the theology, even as a story, a folk tale or myth, it still leaves me unsatisfied.  Why must Adam suffer – and his wife and all his descendents suffer – just to regain what God knew would be lost?

Let’s look at the Fall itself in Paradise Lost.  Milton’s Serpent (here, Satan incognito) is a lot more loquacious than the Biblical snake (though any loquacity on the part of snakes is obviously to be remarked upon).  He flatters Eve, cooing over her beauty and comparing her to Pandora (I doubt Eve got the irony or realized the anachronism).  But Milton’s Eve does cop on to the novelty of a snake delivering a pick-up line: “But say, how cam’st thou speakable of mute?”  She’s flattered, but skeptical.  She wonders about the hard-sell the Serpent puts on: why does he so want her to eat a bit of fruit?  

But this is where he gets her: he tells her that he was once just a government-issue snake, but he had some fruit and now check’im: King Hiss!

Till on a day roving the field, I chanced

A goodly tree far distant to behold,

Loaden with fruit of fairest colors mixed . . . 

I ventured, tasted, and soon found

The effect which thou admiring now behold’st.

The simple reasonableness of the tale combined with the Serpent’s use of richly sensual imagery overwhelms Eve's hesitation.  How much greater would her metamorphosis be given her superiority to a reptile?

She accepts the Serpent’s testimony because it is accessible, she understands it.  She thus dismisses God’s warnings not, I think, so much out of willful disobedience, but because she cannot understand them:

What fear I then? rather what know to fear

Under this ignorance of Good and Evil,

Of God or Death, of Law or Penalty?

Here grows the cure of all, this fruit divine,

Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste,

Of virtue to make wise: what hinders then

To reach, and feed at once both body and mind?

She doesn’t fear because she has no conception of what God meant when he said:

Of every tree that in the garden grows

Eat freely with glad heart; fear none, nor be

In doubt; but of the tree whose operation brings

Knowledge of good and ill, which I have set

The pledge of thy obedience and thy faith,

Amid the garden by the Tree of Life,

Remember what I warn thee, shun to taste,

And shun the bitter consequence: for know,

The day thou eat’st thereof, my sole command

Transgressed, inevitably thou shalt die,

From that day mortal, and this happy state

Shalt lose, expelled from hence into a world

Of woe and sorrow.

One: she wasn’t there when God gave the warning, so at best she gets it second hand from Adam.  Two: as she acknowledges, concepts like good and evil, mortality and immortality, law and punishment, mean nothing to her.  She exists in a world without death, without crime, without strife.  How could she possibly understand the consequences of her actions?  And understanding is, actually, the reason she takes the fruit. Genesis 3:6:

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

“To make one wise” – that’s why the Bible says Eve caved.  Milton condenses and supercharges that idea in his rendering: “virtue to make wise: what hinders then To reach, and feed at once both body and mind?”  In Book 4, Eve believes beauty is surpassed by “wisdom, which alone is truly fair.” I’m pretty sure we’d all congratulate her on her depth, her conquest of vain superficiality.  When Milton introduces Adam, we see a character yearning to know, to understand.  It seems to me that, if we are to see the story as an etiology for the existence of evil, it seems to come from the very human desire to know, to understand.  I don’t know.  I just don’t really like the God portrayed in Paradise Lost.  Capricious, narcissistic, even cruel.  Adam himself rages against what he perceives as God’s injustice (after, of course, trying to blame Eve first.  Nice guy).  Nonetheless, I find this passage really moving, really identifiable.

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mold me Man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me, or here place

In this delicious Garden? As my will

Concurred not to my being, it were but right

And equal to reduce me to my dust,

Desirous to resign and render back

All I received, unable to perform

Thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold

The good I sought not. To the loss of that,

Sufficient penalty, why hast thou added

The sense of endless woes? Inexplicable

Thy justice seems; yet, to say truth, too late

I thus contest; then should have been refused

Those terms whatever, when they were proposed.

Thou didst accept them; wilt thou enjoy the good,

Then cavil the conditions?

Wow!  Even King David in his most angry Psalms does not get this intense.  Yes, you could dismiss it as, like, a teenager throwing a tantrum: “I didn’t ask to be born.”  But that misses what I think is Adam’s eminently justifiable charge against God: You made me – I didn’t ask for it.  You showed me fleeting happiness, then punished me eternally for my “petty trespass.”  Eventually, though, he blames himself – not so much for disobedience, but for, basically, not asking about the fine print in the contract.  But, Adam, when were you given a chance to read the contract?

pause

So let me boil my thoughts down for you.  As a poem, a work of art, an occasion for religious contemplation, Paradise Lost blows my mind.  Without question the greatest narrative poem in the language.  Its scope is so vast, its language so lofty – it feels like mythology, like scripture, itself, only more coherent and intentional.

But as theodicy, as a solution to the logical problem of evil?  Well, I join the many readers who find that the poem does not adequately justify the ways of God to man.  In fact, the poem does nothing to even endear God to me – indeed, I find myself siding with Satan – Milton’s God is authoritarian and . . . arbitrary, at least in his measuring of justice.  Additionally, he seems double-dealing, if not downright duplicitous.  Paradise Lost in no way makes me accept the necessity of suffering.  Rather, it almost seems to accommodate tyranny.

Critic Walter Bagehot, in 1859, seems to agree, as he sees Milton’s epic as primarily a political poem, arguing that the whole drama kicks off because God exalts the Son, spurring Lucifer’s rebellion.  He states, “So far from Milton having justified the ways of God to Man, he has loaded the common theology with a new encumbrance.”  And by that he means Satan’s heroism, which we covered last time.

Let’s summarize Milton’s theodicy as I’ve presented here – especially since my presentation was a bit desultory.  Milton argues that true obedience and love must be freely chosen, not coerced.  Angels and humans have free will, allowing them to make their own moral choices.  Therefore, the Fall of both Satan and Adam is not God’s doing but the result of their own misuse of free will.  Milton thereby exonerates God by showing how evil arises from creatures choosing wrongly.

Milton also then must draw a distinction between foreknowledge (God knowing what will happen) and predestination (God determining what will happen).  God foresees Adam’s Fall but does not cause it.  This maintains human responsibility while preserving divine omniscience.  I’m not convinced by Milton’s argument here, especially, but let that be.

So Paradise Lost begins in tragedy, but Milton ultimately presents a vision of hope and redemption.  God’s justice is balanced by mercy through Christ’s future sacrifice.  This is the felix culpa argument.  Milton presents the paradox that the Fall, while tragic, ultimately leads to greater good. God allows Adam and Eve to fall because It paves the way for redemption through Christ, which brings even greater grace and glory.  Adam and Eve’s exile is a punishment, but it also opens the door to greater wisdom and salvation.  Humans thus have the opportunity to experience true redemption, which is greater than untested innocence.  We now call this the “soul-building defense” for the problem of evil, first proposed by Bishop Ireneaus in the second century, and developed in our own time by philosopher John Hick.  Basically, suffering builds character.  

And here’s where Satan becomes critical to the whole cosmic enchilada.  He represents pride, rebellion, and self-destruction.  His fall exemplifies how sin originates from within rather than being imposed by God.  Through Satan, Milton illustrates that evil is not an independent force but rather a perversion of good.  That idea, of evil not as a presence, but an absence, comes to us from St. Augustine of Hippo.

In and of itself, Milton’s narrative argument has its own coherence, but I don’t think anyone has ever been intellectually convinced by it; I doubt anyone has abandoned their agnosticism and embraced faith because of Paradise Lost’s theodicean propositions.  

Unless . . .   

Perhaps I’m looking at Milton’s justificatory project in the wrong way.  Perhaps I have a bias toward rational argument and the analysis of evidence to justify faith claims.  Maybe Milton’s not leaning especially into the logic of his case.

Professor L.A. Cormican directs me back to the word “justify” from the exordium.  Cormican states that

By justification Milton did not mean a merely logical demonstration which would prove an intellectual conclusion and bring God within the framework of the rational universe.  He uses the word with overtones it acquired from New Testament usage, where it implies a divine, not a human or logical, understanding, a supernatural illumination from the Holy Spirit whom he invokes for the difficult task.

What Cormican argues is that Milton is not seeking necessarily to proselytize, or to win over rationalist-materialist skeptics.  He urges justification through the purification of the heart rather than by intellectual gymnastics.  This, of course, presupposes the reader’s religious faith and so this poem is primarily to instruct the believer.

Well, I think that will do for today.  Hope you found this both edifying and entertaining.  Send me text and let me know your thoughts.  Please help grow our cadre of listeners by offering a 5 star review on your platform of choice and also tell everyone you know how much your enjoy the sterling work done here at the Classic English Literature Podcast.  Click the support the show button if you’d like to send along a few kopeks to keep the lights on and the cat fed.  Thanks for listening and for your support!  I’ll see you in a couple weeks.