A Preface to Paradise Lost is one of C. S. Lewis's most famous scholarly works.It is still regarded as influential: see Dominic Head, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 646. The book had its genesis in Lewis's Ballard Matthews Lectures, which he delivered at the University College of North Wales in 1941. It discusses the epic poem Paradise Lost, by John Milton.
Lewis's work responds to Denis Saurat's work Milton: Man and Thinker, which had celebrated "Milton the man, as well as the centrality of the 'personal' (Milton's heresies), to an understanding of the epic". Lewis disagrees with this point of view:Lewis dismisses what he calls Milton's "private thoughts," "idiosyncratic and accidental as they are," as well as the "heresies" that "reduce themselves to something very small". Lewis's Paradise Lost rather is defined as "Augustinian and Hierarchical," and also, as he writes with a slight nudge and a wink, "Catholic" (although he does immediately acknowledge that he's using the term, in its ordinary sense, to mean "universal," not "Roman Catholic").
Summary The book has no material before Chapter 1 besides a dedication to Charles Williams.
Epic genre and criticism Chapter 1, "Epic Poetry", introduces the epic genre.
Chapter 2, "Is Criticism Possible?", is a digression that replies to a remark by T.S. Eliot in "A Note on the Verse of John Milton". Eliot had said:There is a large class of persons, including some who appear in print as critics, who regard any censure upon a 'great' poet as a breach of the peace, as an act of wanton iconoclasm, or even hoodlumism. The kind of derogatory criticism that I have to make upon Milton is not intended for such persons, who cannot understand that it is more important, in some vital respects, to be a good poet than to be a great poet; and of what I have to say I consider that the only jury of judgement is that of the ablest poetical practitioners of my own time.Lewis paraphrases the last clause and focuses on it, but interprets it rather as a representative of the idea "that poets are the only judges of poetry", meant in a general sense, rather than applying only to Eliot's specific criticism of Milton at that specific time. Lewis then critically examines this idea, believing that it leads to a situation where every poet would be trapped in a self-referential cycle, where their own judgment of being a poet is a necessary precondition for their critique to be valuable.
Chapters 3–5 are titled "Primary Epic", "The Technique of Primary Epic", and "The Subject of Primary Epic". They discuss Lewis's concept of "primary epic", the oldest kind of epic genre, represented by the epics of Homer and by Beowulf.
Chapter 6, "Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic", discusses the influence of Virgil's Aeneid on the secondary epic genre, which came after primary epic, primarily by introducing the idea that it should have a "great theme". It also introduces the importance of vocation, and the choice between vocation and happiness, as a typical trait of secondary epic.
Style
Chapter 7, "The Style of Secondary Epic", explains the peculiar style of Virgil and Milton as coming from the fact that epic is no longer recited but can only be read, and must give the effect of the performance entirely through the writing.
Lewis points out three main mechanisms through which Milton achieves his elevated style, namely the use of archaic and unfamiliar constructs, the use of proper names, and the constant allusion to sensory experiences.
Similes Lewis explains Milton's unique approach to similes. Unlike traditional similes that draw clear analogies, Milton's similes often have superficial logical connections but profound emotional or thematic resonances. The "Miltonic simile" thus operates on two levels: a surface-level logical connection and a deeper, emotional or thematic linkage. This technique is shown by when "Paradise is compared to the field of Enna", with the primary connection being how both locations are "one beautiful landscape to another (IV, 268)". Beneath this surface connection, "the deeper value of the simile lies in the resemblance which is not explicitly noted as a resemblance at all, the fact that in both these places the young and the beautiful while gathering flowers was ravished by a dark power risen up from the underworld."
This simile neglects that Eve "is far more responsible for her own fall than was Proserpina and when expelled she will bring death and pain down upon herself, her spouse, and all their descendants to a degree that would seem to exceed Ceres's (Demeter's) terrible pain at Hades's abduction of her daughter", as Stephen Scully points out. Lewis himself notes that sometimes, the logical underpinning of Milton's similes can stretch thin, as in the case of Satan's association with the unpleasant smell of fish.
Description versus arousal
Focusing on Satan's approach to Paradise in book IV, lines 131–286, Lewis analyses how Milton's style does not describe events and landscapes in the narrative, but rather, "while seeming to describe", uses general language to arouse "the Paradisal idea" as it exists "in our own depth". Lewis "justly" observes that this is done by making the sequence of Satan's entering Paradise resemble a dream: as Satan approaches Paradise, Milton describes various tiers of the landscape, but just when it seems like we've reached the highest point, another layer or aspect is revealed, and "as in dream landscapes, we find that what seemed the top is not the top". Lewis perceptively observed that "we experience an almost kinesthetic sense of straining to look higher and higher so as to take in the full view."
Chapter 8, "Defence of this Style", defends the style of secondary epic against some objections.
Worldview Chapter 9, "The Doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart", criticizes the idea that readers should seek an "unchanging human heart" beneath all the theology of Milton, or, more generally, to "read past" the outmoded ideas of premodern literature.
Chapter 10, "Milton and St. Augustine", gives context to the poem by presenting a "version of the Fall story" based on St. Augustine, since Lewis claims that Milton's version of the story is substantially the same as the one given by Augustine, "which is that of the Church as a whole". Lewis says that he hopes "that this short analysis will prevent the reader from ever raising certain questions"; this sentence was seized upon by Michael Bryson as a sign that Lewis wished to downplay Milton's heresies in such a way as to make it impossible for his readers to even think to question Milton's orthodoxy.
Chapter 11, "Hierarchy", explains the effect of the idea of hierarchy as it applies to the poem. Paradise Lost manifests, according to Lewis, "order, proportion, measure, and control". Lewis, commenting on critical views in which "there is felt to be a disquieting contrast between republicanism for the earth and royalism for Heaven", argues that "all such opinions are false and argue a deep misunderstanding of Milton's central thought". Arguing from the principle that "the goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferiors", Lewis claims that there is no contradiction between Milton's poem and his politics, because Milton believed that God was his "natural superior" and that Charles Stuart was not. According to Matthew Jordan, Lewis is correct in asserting that, in holding this position, Milton "belongs to the ancient orthodox tradition of European ethics", but Lewis "downplays the significance of Milton using this tradition against kings rather than to bolster their position by affirming that society, and above all the king, embody such relations of natural superiority."
Chapter 12, "The Theology of Paradise Lost", evaluates to what extent the poem shows that its author is a heretic. Lewis claims that "as far as doctrine goes, the poem is overwhelmingly Christian. Except for a few isolated passages it is not even specifically Protestant or Puritan. It gives the great central tradition." Paradise Lost, according to Lewis, bases its poetry on conceptions not to be found in seventeenth-century radical politics, but in those that have been held "always and everywhere by all".
According to Lewis, criticism should not be interested at all in connections to "Milton's private thinking". "In Paradise Lost we are to study what the poet, with his singing robes about him, has given," and not the "private theological whimsies" that he "laid aside" during "his working hours as an epic poet":Lewis's Milton hearkens back to the attempts of Bentley and Johnson to separate the private radical, heterodox, and "wild" man from the putatively orthodox achievement of the poem. To the extent that Lewis attacks, like Eliot, "personality," he is attacking a Milton attached to "revolutionary politics, antinomian ethics, and the worship of Man by Man," but also a conception of criticism that focuses more on "psychology" than on the "best of Milton which is in his epic" (129, 90). "Why," he writes, with a jibe at Saurat's emphasis on passion and sensuality, "must Noah always figure in our minds drunk and naked, never building the Ark?" (90). Saurat, through his reading of the romantics, had brought not only the individual but the "unconscious" into Paradise Lost (184); Lewis, the figure of Anglican orthodoxy, for whom "Decorum" is the "grand masterpiece," prefers Milton the "very disciplined artist" to the admittedly "undisciplined man" of passion (90).
Satan and other angels
Chapter 13, "Satan", defends the idea that Milton did not seek to present Satan as an admirable figure, but rather, that Milton "uses all his skill to make us regard Satan as a despicable human being". Lewis focuses on Satan's egoism, claiming that "Satan's monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament".
Lewis urges that we should "simply reject everything" Satan "says as untrue, even from his own point of view", and refers to him as "a personified self-contradiction". Lewis demonstrates, "with perhaps more vigor than necessary", that Satan's line, "Evil be thou my Good", is absurd. Lewis comments that, by his argument in book V, lines 856ff, Satan "renders himself ridiculous", since he "both loses in dignity and produces just the evidence to prove that he was not self-created". Helen Gardner says that "C.S. Lewis, building, as he delighted to own, on Mr. Williams, destroyed, one hopes for ever, the notion that Satan had grounds for his rebellion."
"From hero to general, from general to politician, from politician to secret service agent, and thence to a thing that peers in at bedroom or bathroom windows, and thence to a toad, and finally to a snake—such is the progress of Satan", according to Lewis's analysis of Milton. Lewis rightly rejects "the belief that Milton began by making Satan more glorious than he intended and then, too late, attempted to rectify the error", saying that "such an unerring picture of 'the sense of injured merit' in its actual operations upon character cannot have come about by blundering and accident."
Chapter 14, "Satan's Followers", discusses the infernal debate among the fallen angels in Hell in Book II of Paradise Lost.
Chapter 15, "The Mistake about Milton's Angels", explains that Milton probably believed in a kind of "Platonic Theology" according to which angels were not incorporeal, but instead had bodies made of very fine and subtle matter.
Humanity
Chapter 16, "Adam and Eve", explains the portrayal of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost as wise and mature, rather than "innocent" in the sense of "childish".