Paradise Lost: A Biography by Alan Jacobs

Paradise Lost: A Biography

By Alan Jacobs

Princeton University Press 2025

Paradise Lost: A Biography by Alan Jacobs is the twenty-fifth installment in the “Lives of Great Religious Books” series that’s included brief volumes on things like the Koran, the I Ching, the Book of Common Prayer and various books of the Bible. And one of the first thing Jacobs, a Humanities Professor at Baylor University, wonders at the start is whether or not Paradise Lost qualifies as a religious book at all, which might seem like an odd inquiry concerning an epic poem about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, written in England in the 1660s at a time of immense religious ferment.

There’s nonetheless a legitimate oddness to the poem (Virginia Woolf was hardly the only reader to note the cold remoteness of the thing) that at least in part justifies the question. Jacobs answers it mainly through emphasis; there’s a good deal more text-searching than soul-searching going on here.

This allows Jacobs a risky amount of leeway for the kind of satisfied platitudes that have intermittently plagued this series. “The depth and richness, the intricate complexity, of Paradise Lost make it a difficult work to talk about in a succinct way,” Jacobs writes, “but so I must.”

The tone of resigned reluctance is a kind-hearted feint, thankfully: this is a satisfyingly full reading of Paradise Lost, complete with dry-wit footnotes (“It is rare to find a reader of Milton who thinks he would have been enjoyable company”), a huge selection of Milton-related quotes from other literary folk, and even the occasional sofa-soft generalization. “In writing Paradise Lost Milton initiated battle on two fronts, the religious and the poetic, and those battles have continued apace in the three and a half centuries since his death,” goes one of those generalizations. “People have continued to care about poetry, and about religion, and Milton’s poem has been a lightning-rod, drawing to itself the electrical energies of those passions.”

This kind of stuff is basically meaningless, but there isn’t much of it, and it provides the launch-platform for our author to read through the poem with the insight and enthusiasm that are this little book’s main strengths. Jacobs will settle on some passage or idea, ruminate on it, include the ruminations of others, and then move on to some other passage or idea, as when he pauses at the point when doomed Adam is thinking of spurning his mate:

To this scornful loathing, Eve’s response, one of the most heartbreakingly gorgeous passages in all of poetry, begins with a simple plea, “Forsake me not thus, Adam.” C. S. Lewis has pointed out that before the Fall Adam and Eve “hardly ever address each other simply by their names, but by stately periphrases; Fair Consort, My Author and Disposer, Daughter of God and Man, accomplisht Eve, O Sole in whom my thoughts find all repose.” And this is true, but while Lewis thinks the change a result of their being “robbed of their original majesty,” I think Eve’s calling Adam by his name marks the only thought, at this desperate moment, of a lover who fears the loss of her beloved. “Forsake me not thus, Adam.”

The best function of the “Lives of Great Religious Books” is happily what Jacobs does best here: either to introduce readers to the enormous life in these texts or to remind them of it. This is a bit more of a task for a book as oddly forbidding as Paradise Lost, but, for instance, Bernard McGinn did it for Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, and Jacobs does it here for Milton’s masterpiece.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News