From Milton to Mormon

Paradise Lost is a glorious literary triumph with a mortifying failure at its center, and that failure is named God. So it has been judged by critics almost from the beginning, anyway—though this may tell us as much about the uses of literary criticism as about the poem. In a work meant to defend and justify God's works to man, Milton's God is, famously, a tyrannical prig. He's at his worst when we first meet him in Book Three: seeing Satan flying toward this world, then newly created, God convenes a great Council in Heaven in order to "clear His own justice and wisdom from all imputation." This defensive posture is unflattering in any powerful figure, and Milton does his God no favors in writing for him a speech that is ungenerous, self-justifying, and coldly implacable.