"Opposite" Sexes?
The Influence of Paradise Lost on today's Christians
This summer I read Alan Jacobs’s Paradise Lost: A Biography (2025), which Dana Gioia reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. Jacobs, like other critics before him, acknowledge that John Milton’s 1674 masterpiece Paradise Lost “is not loveable.” Yes, the poem’s ideas cannot be reduced; its questions cannot be easily answered; its poet is complex. But, the character of God is without pathos; the character of the Son of God is without all the subversive, scandal that I love in the Jesus Christ of the Gospels. And there is little to no Holy Spirit! When I admitted to students that if God was the way that Milton describes Him, I wouldn’t believe in God, I think I caused a rumbling and shaking of some hearts in my classroom.
As students first begin reading the poem, they mistakenly ascribe authority to God’s words within the epic because the dialogue is attributed to God (despite the reality that it is Milton’s characterization of God!). One student de-capitalized all references to Satan. Another student kept calling Milton’s character “Son of God” by the name “Jesus,” though the poem is set mostly in a time before the Fall. And, when I read aloud Milton’s description of Adam and Eve, students nod along as though the poem aligns with Genesis:
“Though both
Not equal as their sex not equal seemed:
For contemplation he and valor formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace:
He for God only, she for God in him.” (PL 3.296-299)
After reading the lines in class, I asked students to find biblical support in Genesis for this creation of Adam and Eve. They come up empty handed. I posted this section of Milton’s epic online, and Susan Wise Bauer noted:
In his poem, Milton creates creatures that have nothing in common: what does a valorous contemplative have to do with a sweet, soft beauty? Where is their common ground? It’s telling that the phrase “opposite sex” begins appearing in the 17th century, after the publication of Milton’s poem. I’m not a Miltonist, so I write all these thoughts as a generalist who’s been teaching Milton for two decades (not as an expert). I find his descriptions of men and women to be as provocative for students now, as they were for me when I first read the poem in 2002. Reading Milton’s Adam and Eve lifted the veil for me, as I suddenly realized that my ideas of men and women were much more Miltonic than biblical.
Not that the 17th c. King James translation of the Bible does not lend a hand to Milton’s interpretation. In fact, every time the Hebrew word for “valor” is used to describe a woman in the Old Testament, the KJV translators chose “virtuous” or “noble” to avoid the connotations of a “strong” woman.
If you look at Proverbs 31, for instance, Rachel Held Evans has noted all the various ways “a woman of valor” or “eshet chayil” is translated:
The valorous woman is a biblical paragon, as is the contemplative woman. Not only does New Testament show how the Virgin Mary “treasured all these things in her heart, pondering them” (Luke 2), but also Mary of Bethany sits at the Lord Jesus’s feet listening, and Jesus says, “Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). Women, like men, are also made for valor and contemplation.
In spite of Milton’s assertion that women were created to be beautiful things, it is not a Christian woman’s vocation to be beautiful. My female students assume that women should focus on their outward appearance. Most of our culture perpetuates this lie to young women. When my hair started graying, I dyed it without thinking over whether I wanted to dye it. Then my husband started graying without ever considering dying his hair, and I realized that I didn’t want to cover up my own gray. I had just assumed that’s what I was supposed to do. But it has been rather liberating to realize that my job is not how I look. When I taught Milton’s Eve this year, I let that reality sink in with my students.
Additionally, Mr. Milton, let me insist that Christian women are made for God, not “for God in him.” At the end of Paradise Lost the archangel Michael reveals to Adam that men should not be enslaved to other men, but he says nothing against men ruling over women. Is a woman not a Christian prior to being one in relationship to a man? If she never marries? After her marriage ends? Widowed? Was Mary the Mother of God only made for God in Joseph? What about Mary Magdalene, Phoebe, Lydia, and so on with the biblical examples? We cannot let Milton dictate our prescriptions for women’s dignity in Christ.
Unfortunately, Milton’s Arian heresy influenced his creation of gender hierarchy, which is also not biblical. Because Milton thought that God created the Son of God within time, as He did other creatures, only God was highest, and the Son of God earned his exaltation with his sacrifice of becoming human. In 1941 when C.S. Lewis published A Preface to Paradise Lost, he admits in a letter to being of Milton’s persuasion on this relationship within the Trinity:
“About the Son being subject to the Father (as God—of course [He is] obviously subject as Man in the Incarnation)—yes, that’s what I think: but was recently contradicted by a theologian. Can you back me up? What is the correct interpretation of ‘equal to His Father as touching His Godhead’ in the Athanasian Creed?”
If you think there is subordination in the Trinity, you can justify subordination between the sexes. Lewis explains Milton’s point that Eve “is in fact Adam’s inferior, in her double capacity of wife and subject.” But the reality is that God the Father and God the Son are equal, just as men and women made in God’s image are equal. There should be no hierarchy between the sexes; one is not lord or master over the other.
‘Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve’ (1808) by William Blake. Photo: ARTGEN/Alamy
After Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge in Book IX of Paradise Lost, the Son of God judges Eve: “Thy sorrow I will greatly multiply/ By thy Conception… and to thy Husband’s will/ Thine shall submit, he over thee shall rule.” The students again need to compare Genesis 3:16 to Milton’s rendition. “Submission” becomes a universal calling to all Christians in the New Testament, an imperative for both men and women in the body to imitate Jesus Christ who submitted to the Father, though equal with the Father. “To submit” is not a curse of the fall. Not to mention that Jesus redeems the cursed situation with his death and resurrection! No more ruling over one another but mutual submission to one another. That’s the vision of the Gospel that Milton does not see.
We can read Milton’s poem for all the good in it without endorsing his culturally situated perspective. Dorothy L. Sayers herself pushed back on Lewis for adopting more of Milton’s theology than was good for him. We need not swallow Paradise Lost whole any more than we buy all of Homer’s theology in The Iliad. Just because the God looks a bit more like one that we recognize than say Zeus or Jupiter does not mean it is not still “Milton’s God.” Likewise, just because Adam and Eve are names we recognize does not mean that Milton’s version of the characters are accurate. Whether human beings were “sufficient to have stood/ though free to fall,” whether we can ever “justify the ways of God to man,” these are the timeless questions of the poem. The universal truths found in Paradise Lost are the reasons that we keep reading the poem even hundreds of years after it was written, but let us avoid being of Milton’s party without knowing it.
Updates
“Live Not by Lies Even When You’re Winning” is my Fall 2025 piece in Comment Magazine about how to follow Cato, Washington, and Thomas More instead of Caesar and all those who place trust in princes over a crucified God.
Educating Character Initiative is absorbing mass amounts of my time right now—from visiting George Fox and learning about faith-based schools’ ways of virtue education with Andy Crouch and Meghan Sullivan to offer opportunities for Pepperdine’s faculty to learn here about how great books might be a resource for cultivating discipleship.
In addition to reading philosophy for my Great Books III (Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Astell, Cavendish, Wollstonecraft, Kant, and more), I’m reading Daniel Nayeri’s new novel for fun. It’s soooooo good—young adult, for sure. But set during the US/Russian vs. Nazi fight over Iraq/Iran and how orphaned children taught the alphabet to nomads in the midst of WWII.
Also started Daniel Lee Hill’s Bearing Witness but I’m not past the intro. I love Hill’s theology (we had him out at Pepperdine to speak several years ago), and this new book is about abolitionists and ways the church has and should actively love our neighbors. Listen to this Holy Post interview with him.
I signed a contract to produce a video course on HOW THE BIBLE SHAPED WESTERN LITERATURE with the Great Courses for release in 2028!
And, I finished writing my upcoming book Twice Rebels which will be published by Zondervan in 2026 Fall. PRAYERS appreciated!
This was so interesting. I've never read Paradise Lost, but I do know the gist - and I just recently came across the Introduction by CS Lewis. You make some compelling arguments here - now I'm very curious to read it!