How 'Paradise Lost' Revolutionized the World (w/ Orlando Reade) | The Chris Hedges Report

Professor Orlando Reade joins Chris Hedges to to examine the influence of 'Paradise Lost’ on revolutionary thinkers, and to grapple with the moral grey area that exists in revolutions.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

There are few pieces of literature that remain as prescient and relevant throughout history as John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Thomas Jefferson, Malcolm X, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Paine and dozens more drew inspiration from and studied Milton’s grand work and the revolutionary themes within it.

Professor Orlando Reade, in his book, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost, examines the epic poem’s influence in the four centuries since its publication and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss this history.

Reade begins with the historical context of the poem, which was after the seventeenth century English revolution that overthrew the monarchy. Milton’s work, Reade and Hedges explain, embodies critiques of both monarchy and revolution.

“The reader is presented with a figure of Satan that seems a lot like Milton himself, a failed revolutionary recovering from a disastrous defeat and often articulating arguments against God, who Satan calls a tyrant, that Milton himself had made against the English King,” Reade explains. “So the great mystery of Paradise Lost is trying to figure out why Milton gives us a Satan that seems so much like himself.”

The historical parallels found within Paradise Lost clearly resonate with figures in history, especially those in the struggle for freedom and abolition. Reade emphasizes how many times the poem is referenced throughout this history.

“This is not an epic poem that spends much time celebrating the heroic deeds of men. It's not a macho poem. It's a poem for which the most heroic acts are true to the New Testament. They're humble and often quiet acts of love, of forgiveness, and so on,” he says.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

There is perhaps no English poet, Christopher Hill writes in Milton and the English Revolution, as controversial as John Milton, the author of the epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667, Milton played a major role in the seventeenth century English revolution that overthrew the monarchy, indeed it was said that Oliver Cromwell achieved power with his soldiers and Milton’s books.

Milton inspired later radical poets – William Blake, Percy Shelley and the anarchist Alexander Herzen. He was an inspiration to Thomas Jefferson, the French revolutionary Mirabeau and the Chartists, and later still Virginia Wolff, C.L.R. James, who believed that any great revolutionary had to be a great artist, Hannah Arendt and Malcolm X, who said that Milton and Elijah Muhammad, who led the Nation of Islam, were saying the same thing. Milton defended the execution of the king, Charles I, in 1649 something for which Samuel Johnson never forgave him.

He was a passionate anti-clerical, embracing a host of Christian heresies. He was, to his core, a revolutionary. He, like us, lived in a period that pitted two warring cultures. The ruling class, as is also true for us, had abandoned traditional aims and values and wallowed in unchecked greed and corruption. English society was gripped by despair and disillusionment. Milton wrote Paradise Lost, which is an account of human origins, to make a political argument.

He was blind during its creation, dictating lines that came to him at night. He had fallen from power with the restoration of the monarchy. He had been freed from prison, and almost certain execution, only because of the intervention of the poet Andrew Marvell. His fight for liberty was lost. His family was falling apart. His rebel in the poem is Satan, who seeks to overthrow God, but finds himself cast into hell with his confederates.

And, as all readers of Paradise Lost have to admit, it is the rebel who, if not the hero of the poem, is the most compelling figure, crying out to his banished angels, “it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” Joining me to discuss Paradise Lost is Professor Orlando Reade, author of What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost and an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University London.

Let's begin with a figure of Milton. And there is something I find very noble about. He is blind. He's probably still living under the threat of assassination. He has been cast out of power. He was a major figure in the Cromwellian Revolution, which everything he had fought for in his life has collapsed.

I want to talk about what he tries to do with the poem. We mentioned Christopher Hill's book, which I talked about in the introduction, who really argues quite strenuously that although he was extremely erudite, of course, Milton, but it was more the political experiences that he had endured that informed Satan and the contest with God.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely. We can see Paradise Lost as a great work of art at the same time tries to rise above petty human controversies and is infused with Milton's world, with his life experiences and with the politics of the English Civil War and the feeling of defeat and of seeing the political project that he devoted his life to come crashing down. So I think you're absolutely right there.

Chris Hedges

And talk a little bit about that civil war itself. English society was torn apart. We should say that although Milton, I think always, was a strong public defender of Cromwell, Cromwell himself became poisoned by power at the end and a pretty offensive or repugnant dictator.

Just set the scene, the political scene, for us and then we'll go into the poem.

Orlando Reade

Milton had come up with the idea of writing Paradise Lost as a young man, aged about 30, in about 1640, and he seems to have known that it would be the great achievement of his life, and the thing that he was created to do. His poetic vocation was his highest purpose.

But when the civil war broke out in 1642, he set poetry aside largely and didn't really write much beyond several short pieces for the next 20 years. It was clear from the start which side he would be on. He sided with Parliament against the King. To begin with, this was a religious dispute. It was about the degree to which the King and the state would tell individual Protestants how to worship, but it developed into a political one.

And Milton became, as you've already mentioned, one of the fiercest champions of democracy and opponents of kings. After the king was executed in 1649 and a republic established in England, Milton was quickly offered a job. He served for the executive body called the Council of State. He was a member of that body and his task was to translate and write diplomatic correspondence.

So he was really at the center or near the center of power for a good 10 years as this English Republic was born and as it founded and then later failed. So it's only around 1660 after the failure of the English Republic after the death of Cromwell, the failure to establish a lasting democracy that Milton has the opportunity to return to his great work of literature. And it's after the experience of being imprisoned and of being fined and of fearing for his life, he was released and had to live a life of, I'd say, sort of public disgrace and enmity with the state, even though he had been permitted to go on living.

It was in that condition that he wrote Paradise Lost. So they were, as he writes in Paradise Lost, they were dark days. He had fallen on dark days and it was in that state of darkness that he writes this gloriously dark poem which presents us with Satan who at the very beginning of the poem is himself recovering from a disastrous civil war in heaven. Satan was an angel, led a rebellion against God, was defeated, cast out of heaven and falls down to hell.

So at the beginning of Paradise Lost the reader is presented with a failed revolutionary much like the poet himself and his other associates. So we must wonder whether Satan is a figure for Oliver Cromwell, whether the character of Satan contains some critiques that Milton never articulated during his years working for Cromwell's government.

At the same time, the reader is presented with a figure of Satan that seems a lot like Milton himself, a failed revolutionary recovering from a disastrous defeat and often articulating arguments against God, who Satan calls a tyrant, that Milton himself had made against the English King. So the great mystery of Paradise Lost is trying to figure out why Milton gives us a Satan that seems so much like himself.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, we'll go into that a little bit. I mean, the interesting thing is that in the end, Satan himself is not a very appealing figure like Cromwell. So one wonders to what extent it's not just a critique of monarchy, but it's also a critique of revolutionary activity and revolutionaries.

Orlando Reade

It's often been read that way and unsurprisingly. On the one hand, Oliver Cromwell did become somewhat tyrannical. He started to dress more richly. seemingly designated his eldest son his heir, which was a strange thing to do if you've spent your life fighting against hereditary rule.

However, Milton seems to have genuinely believed that Oliver Cromwell was the best man to ensure ongoing religious tolerance in England, tolerance for Protestants which is something that Milton wanted.

Chris Hedges

He wasn't too good to the Catholics.

Orlando Reade

No, the limits of tolerance in this period are… we could call them hypocrites, but they were so overt about it. However, sometimes Cromwell's statements about Jewish people and Muslims were openly tolerant. He said it would be better that a heathen were tolerated than a true Christian persecuted. And I think he did walk that walk.

To some extent, their passionate and violent enmity against Catholics was a political one because it was about being the subject of the Pope. But I don't want to defend their anti-Catholicism, which was pretty virulent at the best of times.

Chris Hedges

Well, also, while Milton was a defender of liberty, he wasn't a defender of liberty for Catholics.

Orlando Reade

That's right. We always have to understand, at least in this period, that the claims about freedom are often claims about freedom for a particular group of people, often freeborn, male, Protestant citizens. So the claims that would later resonate in later democratic revolutions were made in a more limited way in the 17th century. Nevertheless, Milton's arguments about freedom did resonate and did resonate powerfully among Jefferson and so many others.

Chris Hedges

Before we go into the poem, it was a time of radical ferment. You had the Diggers, the Ranters, the early Quakers. And Milton was, I don't know if you would identify him with any one of those particular groups, but this English radicalism was fierce and strong and real.

Orlando Reade

The 1640s after the downfall of the monarchy and the bishops, the end of censorship gave way to an extraordinary flourishing of radical literature in England for a good few years before Parliament swiftly reintroduced forms of censorship. And Milton was someone who passionately believed in the value of publishing heretical books. He passionately believed in the capacity to publish bad books in order that we can understand the good and the truth.

So he wasn't a Leveller, the Levellers believed in a far more radical transformation of society. Milton wasn't willing to go there in that sense, he was more of the kind of bourgeois class with Oliver Cromwell who ended up taking control of the revolution. However he did promote many wide-reaching reforms, social reforms that today we could recognise as being radical and progressive.

Chris Hedges

Well, also theological heresies. He didn't believe in the Trinity. He believed that the soul died with the body. You can probably list a few more. Although I think he considered himself a Christian.

Orlando Reade

Yes, yes, although in some senses his heresies were so far-reaching that many other people wouldn't believe he was a Christian, he wasn't a Trinitarian, one of the founding principles of Orthodox Christianity. He believed he was a Christian, he believed in Christ, but he didn't attend church services, seemingly, after the Restoration and was certainly associated with radical Quakers around the time that he's writing Paradise Lost. People who believed in the inner light and were very skeptical about religious authority in any form. So his most radical Milton approaches something very anarchic indeed.

Chris Hedges

Hill writes that, he reads Milton is carrying on a continuous dialogue with the extreme radicals and it became easier to see him rejecting with his intellect ideas which were familiar to him and which one half of his being accepted. Emsen, he's quoting, is right to suggest that Milton was in some sense aware of the terrible collapse that was always possible. He was not of the devil's party without knowing it. Part of him knew that part of him was. That struck me as an important observation in terms of the poem itself.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely, think to be a great poet is to understand that one's sympathies and one's capacity to imagine are distributed among one's characters and so Milton wouldn't have written such a good work of literature were he not able to to spend so much time thinking with Satan, assuming Satan's perspective and one of the very earliest readers of Paradise Lost noticed in a very disapproving way I think that it contained long blasphemies of devils.

To read the first two books of this poem, first two of its twelve books, is to get very little other than what the devils themselves say so it's no surprise that many readers have been shocked or seduced by what the devils say.

Chris Hedges

So let's talk a little bit about the poem itself. I think its ultimate aim, it struggles to grasp the human condition, the nature of good and evil, the nature of rebellion. I read somewhere somebody wrote about Milton that it wasn't that he loved liberty so much, just that he hated authority. I don't know who wrote that. Maybe you did. I don't know. [Laughing]

Orlando Reade

It wasn't me. I like that.

Chris Hedges

But let's talk a little bit about especially the beginning of the poem. I mean, it begins, of course, in hell and Satan is rallying his legions. There's been a ferocious fight against God, which is quite vicious, I mean, actually. And then the intervention of the Son of God, but maybe you can set that up for us.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely, so Satan wakes up. He soon sees his second in command, Beelzebub, and they start talking about what they're going to do. Satan from the very start is insistent that although they've lost the battle in heaven that the war must continue. They magically are liberated from their chains, they were chained to the Burning Lake somehow they are liberated from them and they travel to dry land and it's from there that Satan summons his followers.

So he's led a third of the angels in rebellion against God and they've all been cast out. Satan delivers this very grand speech where he says “Awake arise or be forever fallen.” And his troops just having been stupefied and lying like him on the Burning Lake suddenly they spring up and they start sort of marching towards him like a Leni Riefenstahl film of a Nazi rally and Satan then says to them, we have to make this place our home, but also figure out what to do.

They build this glorious palatial parliament building called Pandemonium, a word that Milton coined, meaning place for all the devils. And in book two, so the second chapter effectively of the poem, the devils debate what they're going to do, how they're going to pursue revenge against God and Satan presides over this debate on a huge ornate throne which is not a very democratic thing to do and in various other ways perverts the debate.

Eventually the devils vote for his plan which is to carry out a kind of guerrilla warfare against God not by attempting total open war against God in heaven but by traveling up to the newly created world and causing the new human beings, Adam and Eve, to disobey their creator and to pervert and spoil that creation.

Chris Hedges

I just want to stop you there because Satan actually approaches Eve. It reminded me, and there may be other parts in the poem that I missed, but he seems to melt. I mean, it reminds me of the scene in Moby Dick where Ahab is talking to Pip, the cabin boy and suddenly there's a tenderness on the part of Ahab that you don't see at any other time.

And I kind of saw the same thing with Satan and Eve that I found really interesting before we go on.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely. That happens in one other moment in the poem, but in the moment you're describing where Satan sees Eve in the Garden of Eden and she's sort of, she's in a rose bush, she's tying the heads of roses to stems and it's just such a beautiful scene that Milton describes Satan as being stupidly good in that moment and that's because Milton believed that the beautiful participated in moral goodness.

So to perceive beauty, for Milton, was to become, in that moment, good. Of course, very soon after Satan remembers his dastardly plan, but in that moment he does melt and it's quite moving, I think.

Chris Hedges

I mean it raises the question of God who's omnipotent, why would God allow all of this to happen? But I mean, I don't know. Maybe you have an answer to that, I don't.

Orlando Reade

Well, that is the question, that is the grand question of Paradise Lost. How can God allow evil and suffering and all of the bad things that happen as a result of the fall and Satan's ability to tempt Eve?

That's the grand question and Paradise Lost is Milton's answer and I think the, to summarize his answer very quickly, it is that ultimately the world that we live in, this full and imperfect world full of suffering and pain and wars is still nonetheless worth living in and that we all on some level intuitively or many people do understand that it's worth living in.

And so Milton's task in Paradise Lost is to remind us that the world, however imperfect, is still something to want to live in and to be grateful for but also and Milton's Christian sort of conclusion is that it's worth living in also because we can get to heaven where everything will be perfect again.

Chris Hedges

Well, there's two issues. One, of course, Adam chooses mortality to be with Eve. And then it seems in kind of the education that happens throughout the poem, there is this, it was my reading of it, can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be that paradise can be built internally within an evil environment.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely. On the one hand, at the beginning of the poem, Satan says the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven and that's not true for Satan because wherever he flies is hell. But it is true for Adam and Eve when they're about to leave the Garden of Eden and enter the fallen world at the very end of the poem.

The angel who's come down to prepare them says that they have a paradise within the happier far. So this internal paradise is going to be even happier than the frankly somewhat vulnerable and anxiety-inducing external paradise that they've been living in. I do think that Milton believed that.

Chris Hedges

Before we go into your book, is there a kind of understanding or is Milton trying to impart an understanding that perhaps we change the world incrementally, that changes are small rather than these vast projects of social engineering that are embodied in incidents like revolution?

Orlando Reade

That's a really good question. I was just thinking earlier today how I believe this is a revolutionary poem but it's somewhat absent of examples of fiery rhetoric, at least fiery rhetoric that is meant to get the reader pumped up. Milton wrote it at the end of his life where I think he was probably quite conscious of violence and of the downsides of violent radical change.

He didn't in any way, I think, recant his views on democracy being the best, most secure system of government, but he was perhaps more cautious about the kind of violence that he was willing to subscribe to. So I think he was insistent that liberty was something to be fought for, as you say, through small acts, through humble acts.

This is an epic poem. But unlike the epic poems of classical antiquity — Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid — this is not an epic poem that spends much time celebrating the heroic deeds of men. It's not a macho poem. It's a poem for which the most heroic acts are true to the New Testament. They're humble and often quiet acts of love, of forgiveness, and so on.

So I think you're absolutely right there.

Chris Hedges

He writes, “The better fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom unsung.” Which sounds like him at that moment.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely. But at the same time there is a heroic triumph but it's that of God and of God's Son in heaven. So the main warfare that happens in Paradise Lost is the defeat of Satan by God's Son in heaven. At that point Milton allows himself to describe the full epic machinery destroying Satan's rebellion but I think he was cautious about celebrating the grandiosity of men's projects to destroy each other.

Chris Hedges

He also writes, “By small accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak subverting worldly strong and worldly wise by simply meek”.

Orlando Reade

Powerful stuff. I went back to Princeton a couple of weeks ago to give a guest lecture in a Paradise Lost class and they were reading the passage in Book 6, in Chapter 6 about the war in heaven and there was this line that felt to me so movingly relevant to today or at least an idea where God says, “War wearied hath performed what war can do”.

The idea being that the purpose of war is simply to exhaust everyone and to destroy everything until it's intolerable. And that seemed to me a statement of real, not cynicism so much as the absence of illusions about the possibility of just wars on earth.

Chris Hedges

Well, the English Revolution was very bloody and very violent, and with the restoration of the monarchy, executions were very common.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely, so the violence that Milton was perhaps recoiling from was, as you're suggesting, the very violent punishments of his former associates that were happening in London's streets very close to where he was living.

Chris Hedges

Before we go into your book, let's just talk about the end of the book, where Satan essentially tries to assume the posture of a deity. And what's the line, “Here's a hiss, everybody becomes a sneak,” including Satan.

Orlando Reade

Right, absolutely. So in a recent article for The Nation, I compared this to one of Elon Musk's colonizing Mars projects because Satan has proposed to go up to this new world to colonize it on behalf of his followers and he goes up there and he does what he said he would do. He convinces Adam and Eve to betray their creator.

He comes back down and his followers, the devils have created, have prepared a kind of triumphal ceremony for him. He gives this great speech saying, “This is what I've done for you. Get ready to take your place in this new world colony.” And he's met with a universal hiss. And that is at once a joke about how no orator ever wants to be hissed at by the crowd but also that their punishment that God has turned them all into snakes.

Chris Hedges

Let’s turn to your book. I mean, you open with Malcolm X meeting his brother. Malcolm's in prison. And he finds parallels between Milton and Elijah Muhammad. Explain how... I once asked James Cone, who wrote a wonderful book called Martin & Malcolm & America, I said something about Martin Luther King being an intellectual. He said, no, the real intellectual was Malcolm. Not that, of course, Martin Luther King wasn't brilliant, but the intellectual was Malcolm. So talk about that moment, what you opened with.

Orlando Reade

Yeah. So Malcolm X was sent to prison when he was in his very early 20s for burglary and he quite quickly, once inside, decides to take this opportunity to get an education. He starts devouring books. He says no university would ask its students to devour books as I did then. He gives himself an extraordinary self-education.

Then he converts, he converts to the Nation of Islam, this very unorthodox Muslim sect, and that only intensifies his desire for knowledge, but it also intensifies his skepticism about white writers, white history, and he starts to read the books, the literature that's available to him in the prison library in a suspicious way, trying to find out the hidden truths in them.

When he reads Shakespeare he says, well I realized that Shakespeare's plays were written by King James the first who was the same man who doctored the Bible translation. But when he reads Paradise Lost, I claim, he does so in a way that is actually more attentive and in a way more illuminating than those other suspicious interpretations.

He notices that Milton very frequently compares Satan to a figure of worldly authority. Often it's the king of Spain sending his ships to the New World to rape and pillage and colonize. Sometimes it's merchant ships sailing to foreign ports to trade spices and other luxury commodities. And I think Malcolm X understood that within those comparisons was the kernel of a radical critique whereby Milton was thinking about the satanic parts of his own world.

When he writes about this, he writes about it in his autobiography, it was 20 years after he had encountered the poem in prison, so his memory of it is slightly hazy, but he remembers his conclusion, the one that you've already mentioned, that Milton and Mr. Elijah Muhammad were saying the same thing. That is that Paradise Lost is a critique of white supremacy and of European colonialism.

And this has often been dismissed by Milton scholars as the zeal of a convert. But I think it's not only insightful about the poem, it also recognizes something in the origin myth of the Nation of Islam itself, which is fairly widely known. It's about this Black scientist called Yakub. It's a kind of Frankenstein-esque myth.

The idea being that Black people were the original people. One day a Black scientist called Yakub decided to invent the white race and it was his creations that eventually took over. In one version of the origin myth, Yakub is in the capital of the original Black people which is Mecca and they are then cast out. They have to go to this far-flying island, the island of Patmos.

I noticed that in fact there were a lot of similarities between this version of the origin myth and Paradise Lost. So the young Malcolm X was in fact just making an illuminating insight in what we could call comparative mythology. He was recognizing the similarities there but no other scholar or critic before me had looked so closely into Malcolm X's own intellectual life. As you say, he was a genuine intellectual but his readings I think have been often overlooked.

Chris Hedges

Well, I'm going to jump to the end of your book. When you and I have both taught, I think you taught five years, I've taught since 2010 in the New Jersey prison system. And because of the particular social position that our students in prison are in, they see things we don't.

I mean, you can see that at the end of the book, even about Paradise Lost. And you also will mention a great line you had in the book, which is so true, you're doing your doctorate at Princeton and you note that the people, the white men who built Princeton also built the prisons and you're going back and forth between the two. Somewhat disillusioned, I would say, with Princeton University.

Orlando Reade

It's a disillusioning experience to move between an elite university and a prison. And for one reason in particular, I think, which is that neither group is more or less intelligent than the other. And so to teach both of these populations is to understand that some people end up in prison partly by virtue of where they were born, what group they were born into, and others end up at universities experiencing all of the privileges of an elite social group.

And so in that sense, it can't help but relativise both institutions, both the prison on the one hand and the university on the other, and that it felt very strongly then, as I do now, that people in prison deserve the best possible education and they certainly prove themselves to be worthy students.

Chris Hedges

Well, you're right about the intellectual capacity. The problem is privilege, as Shakespeare pointed out in King Lear, is a form of blindness. And the more privileged you are, the blinder you are. And when everything is stripped away and you have nothing, you can see. And there is, I have found in the prison classrooms, an understanding of how our society works, the nature of white privilege, how interlocking institutions work to keep the poor poor.

All of that is often lost on those people who have had the good fortune to end up as you and I did in places like Princeton or in my case Harvard.

Orlando Reade

Yeah, I did feel after feeling quite disillusioned by Princeton, in my last year when I taught Paradise Lost at Princeton, I thought the students that I had were fantastic and to some extent it redeemed the whole experience for me. But of course we want everyone to have the opportunity to have an excellent education.

In that sense, America, I came to feel, had been founded to some extent in the image of Milton's paradise on the one hand and Milton's hell on the other. And of course we want to abolish such a bipolar way of understanding society.

Chris Hedges

The book is about how Milton has influenced a variety of people, including Thomas Jefferson. But you mentioned briefly Thomas Paine, my hero. I did the Oxford Union debates on whether [Edward] Snowden was a hero or a traitor. I guess you studied at Cambridge. I don't know how Cambridge is, Oxford won the prize for snobbery. It made Harvard look humble and contrite and we all had to sign a big book that everybody who engaged in the Oxford Union debates had signed for how many hundreds of years.

And I, in huge block letters, took an entire page to write “Never forget that your greatest political philosopher Thomas Paine never went to Oxford or Cambridge.” But let's talk about Paine so I'm just gonna read this passage, I just love the pains quip:

“One evening after that, Paine visited Adams' apartment to discuss their different visions of the American Republic…”

We should never forget that Paine was an abolitionist and a radical in a way that most of our quote unquote founding fathers were not.

“Adams told Paine he didn't approve of his iconoclastic use of Bible quotations and common sense. He laughed and said he had taken his ideas in part from Milton. Paine had used Milton to put scripture at the service of revolution, which Eugene V. Debs did as well,” by the way. Grounded in Marx, but almost exclusively quoted the Bible.

Orlando Reade

Right. Well, you have to speak in the vernacular if you want to convince people to agree with you, especially on questions of values, deeply held values. So that's interesting. I didn't know that. I think of Paine in that moment as sort of admitting that to some extent he was cribbing from Milton, but also pointing out that Milton had made those arguments, that it wasn't so shocking that he had done so. John Adams also loved Milton.

So he should have known that in advance but Adams was inclined to a slightly more kind of pomp and ceremonies version of what a republic involved so they were perhaps interested in different versions of Milton. On the one hand the radical low Protestant Quaker sympathizing Milton on Paine's part whereas with Adams the kind of grand heroic epic poet but I love that interaction.

I found it in the founding father's database and it seemed that no one else had ever paid attention to it before. So that was a happy find for me.

Chris Hedges

So, this fascinating idea, when you write about Jefferson. So you're quoting, he inserts these lines.

“Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace and rest can rarely dwell. Hope never comes that comes to all, but torture without end still urges. These unattributed lines come from book one of Paradise Lost and the dark ecology of Milton's poem gives words for the hell of slavery. Equiano alludes to Milton three more times, but without ever mentioning him by name. Did Equiano see a connection between Caribbean slavery and Milton's fallen angels?

Like them, African slaves have been exiled from their home and cast into a terrible dungeon. But Equiano surely would not have compared African slaves to devils. Thus, perhaps, is one reason Equiano doesn't mention the source of the lines. Whatever the intention, this ambiguous moment invites us to recognize something about paradise lost that many readers before and since have overlooked. The fallen angels are slaves.”

Orlando Reade

I'm still sort of surprised that this hasn't received more attention so referring there to Olaudah Equiano, the pioneering abolitionist, African-born, formerly enslaved man who wrote this very influential autobiography called The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, where he quotes Paradise Lost a number of times.

Each time comparing the condition of enslaved people in the Caribbean to slaves, which raises the question, did he sympathize with Satan, as William Blake suggests we all should? In that passage I argue that it's unlikely that Equiano did, however, he does seem to have recognized something that is true of Milton's poem, which is that the fallen angels are slaves.

Beelzebub in the opening exchange with Satan says, maybe we've been cast down to hell because we're God's thralls and thralls just means slaves. Maybe having lost the war in heaven we have by ancient rite of war slavery been turned into God's slaves and maybe we're down here to do some terrible work like gold mining or the kind of thing that the Spanish were forcing their slaves to do in the New World.

Perhaps Beelzebub recognized something that's true of Paradise Lost, which is that the fallen angels are slaves, which would make the plot of Paradise Lost and Satan's quest to seek revenge on God a kind of slave uprising. Milton didn't have great sympathies with enslaved people despite how much he'd written about liberty. Nevertheless, all of these contradictory energies are running through the poem.

Someone who celebrates liberty cannot fail to condemn slavery and it's for that reason that Paradise Lost has such a rich afterlife among abolitionists.

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk about William Blake. Am I correct that Blake saw the deity, like Melville, as malevolent? Would that be going too far for Blake?

Orlando Reade

In general, I think you're probably right. In the famous quotation about Milton, he says that Milton sided with the devil, he was of the devil's party without knowing it. And when he wrote of God, wrote in shackles, which is confusingly, seemingly an image of itself that is redolent of slavery talking about shackles.

I don't think I fully understand William Blake's highly paradoxical theology but I think he was certainly thinking about whether God was not loving but malevolent, absolutely.

Chris Hedges

You write, “As one forsaken by God condemned to an existence of toil and suffering without hope of redemption, Satan's condition has evoked sympathy in many modern readers because of its own.” And then you go on and write, even his ruin is heroic. I'm not sure it's carried through to the end of the poem, but certainly at the beginning there is a nobility to Satan.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely there is. Satan is ultimately a fallen angel and on that basis is heroic, his body has been created by God, he can't die, he's immortal and he is just like any of the other angels however he's beginning to rust and beginning to become corrupted to his core.

So I think Milton wants us to understand Satan to be simultaneously angelic and increasingly degraded.

Chris Hedges

Let's talk about Virginia Woolf. I think you write in here that, well, let's start with Shelley's novel, which I didn't know. When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, which she gave an epigraph from Paradise Lost. But you say that Paradise Lost was a huge influence, which I didn't know at all.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely. So Mary and Percy Shelley were reading Paradise Lost to each other individually a lot in the months leading up to the competition to write ghost stories that led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. So it's really just shot through with Miltonic language that has that epigraph from Paradise Lost and most intriguingly Frankenstein's monster actually reads Paradise Lost, the first monster that I'm aware of to read Paradise Lost, and finds in Paradise Lost a mirror of its own condition. The monster is a very thoughtful and sensitive reader and is very moved by the description of the plight of Adam and Eve.

Chris Hedges

You write about Virginia Woolf's relationship to Milton. And you quote, I think you quote someone, I can't find it, that in her diaries or her notes are some of the best kind of critical analysis of Milton, but talk about the relationship between Woolf and Milton.

Orlando Reade

Well, Woolf’s father was Leslie Stephen, a kind of great Victorian man of letters who loved Milton as many Victorian men of his class did and would quote Milton ad nauseam. I think of him as mediating Virginia Woolf’s relationship to Milton. She clearly understood from a very young age that Milton was someone to be admired, but didn't necessarily enjoy his work.

And yet she prided herself on her ability to read the classics and understand them better than her brothers who had received the education that she was denied and prided herself on being the only person reading Paradise Lost in Sussex in 1918. She writes that in her Bible, sorry not her Bible, in her diary. But then she finds out that one of her friends is also reading Paradise Lost.

And I think out of a spirit of competition she then decides to jot down her thoughts on Paradise Lost and it's an extraordinary series of sentences. I think a really wonderful analysis of Paradise Lost, also an extraordinary exercise in diary writing. She notes that Milton is the first of the masculinists by which I take her to mean that Milton was reinventing a kind of patriarchal vision of Eden for the modern age and a patriarchal kind of heroic macho poetry that would be much imitated in the centuries to come.

But she also says how smooth this poetry is. She recognizes its great aesthetic pleasure and then she says, and I think this is an extraordinary phrase, “I can conceive that this is the essence of which all other poetry is the dilution.”

And she wasn't wrong, Milton was so often imitated in the 18th and 19th centuries that Virginia Woolf's contemporaries, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, felt they had to overthrow him in order to escape from Milton's influence.

Chris Hedges

The Hill book opens with a quote from T.S. Eliot, whose theological and political beliefs couldn't be further away from Milton. But of course he's a great admirer of Milton.

Orlando Reade

He could only admit that when he became older and mellower, I think and I write about this in the book, how much the modernists used a kind of anti-Milton rhetoric in order to articulate the novelty of their own work, whilst also writing poems that were often quoting Milton without admitting it. So it was a divided relationship, but a very interesting one.

Chris Hedges

C.L.R. James, the great Trinidadian scholar, wrote Black Jacobins, which I taught in the prison. So he has some fascinating thoughts on Milton. Perhaps you can lay him out. How did he read Milton? What did he take away from Milton?

Orlando Reade

Like so many people, first read Milton as a schoolboy and understood him to be someone who he was sort of compulsory, a compulsory admiration. But he also, like Virginia Woolf, prided himself on being a great reader of the classics. He uses Milton amongst other people in books like The Black Jacobins for kind of throw away literary allusions to make jokes and to establish his own authority.

But the relationship to Milton becomes more interesting once C.L.R. James becomes a really independent political thinker, a Trotskyite to begin with, and then someone who established his own sort of tendency within the socialist movement. At that point, he starts to think about Milton as being somewhat like a Stalinist, someone who had followed Cromwell just as C.L.R. James' opponents within the socialist movement were remaining faithful to Stalin.

But I think his most subtle and interesting account of Milton comes significantly later, once James was no longer a kind of active member of the socialist movement, but was an independent and international political thinker giving an interview to Radicals in Montreal and he says that he thinks that in Paradise Lost, Milton was offering a kind of submerged or subtle critique of Cromwell.

And in that sense, I claim, C.L.R. James had turned Milton into himself, into a member of the anti-Stalinist left but it's an interpretation that I think is both plausible but also brilliant.

Chris Hedges

I want to end, we're going to skip the odious Jordan Peterson and his mangling of Milton along with just about everybody else, including [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn. I can't let Moby Dick go by. So we're talking about C.L.R. James, this is you writing.

“He used Melville's, Herman Melville's fiction, especially Moby Dick, to identify a character in American politics, a totalitarian type. In the 1950s, totalitarianism had become a fashionable term for liberals wanting to critique Nazism and Stalinism in the same breath. Hannah Arendt did so in her book Origins of Totalitarianism. James used the term in a characteristically ingenious way. In Moby Dick, he says the totalitarian type is represented by Captain Ahab, who leads his crew on a suicidal mission to hunt a whale that tore off his leg in a previous encounter. Melville had recognized something. A special way in which America could become a totalitarian state. The rise of a personality who in championing American values would lead America astray. The final chapter gives an account of his detention.”

He was under the McCarran [Act], he was thrown out of the country under the same act that they have used to go after the Columbia University student. Exactly the same, 1952 act, was written to keep out Jews, by the way.

“The spirit of immigration law is the extermination of the alien as a malignant pest. While not as bad as the gulags or the concentration camps, this represents a form of totalitarianism latent in America.”

It shows how incredibly prescient, especially given this moment, James was.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely. So it's a complicated passage that you read, but I think the thought is a fairly clear one, and that is that even though America is a democracy, that democracies have their own tendency to generate forms of totalitarianism. It's an obvious thought today because we've seen it happening in the last nine or ten years in America.

When C.L.R. James was writing about Moby Dick and writing about Paradise Lost, he'd seen it happening in America with McCarthyism. But I think James was describing a more fulfilled kind of totalitarianism, a more fulfilled kind of American totalitarianism that we're really seeing in earnest in its most fully fleshed out form under Trump.

So it's striking that connection with the McCarran Act and it just shows, I think goes to show that works of literature published 50, 100, 350 years ago have an uncanny capacity to return and to speak to our concerns today.

Chris Hedges

Because they grapple with the same, I mean go all the way back to the Greeks, they're grappling with the same issues if they write with any depth and profundity that we are today. And in many ways, I study classics, the importance of classics was that, and Aristotle defended slavery or he thought it was a natural condition, but it gives you a kind of lens to then come back and look at your own society and I think that's why reading these works are so important and why reading Paradise Lost is so important.

Orlando Reade

Absolutely, it forces us to reckon with the things that change as well as the things that don't change and unfortunately I think one of the things that doesn't change is the psychology of the tyrant.

Chris Hedges

Well, and the poison of power. Thank you, Orlando. And I want to say thanks to Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], Max [Jones], and Sofia [Menemenlis] who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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Photos

Old engraving illustration of Oliver Cromwell in Whitehall, London, England - stock photo

Copyright has expired on this artwork. From my own archives, digitally restored. Oliver Cromwell (25 April 1599 – 3 September 1658) English general and statesman who led the Parliament of England's armies against King Charles I during the English Civil War.

Alexander Herzen

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Honoré de Mirabeau

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Virginia Woolf -

Virginia Woolf - English novelist and essayist: 25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941. Unknown photographer in Bookman, January 1928. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

CLR James

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Malcolm X

Portrait of human rights activist Malcolm X reading stories about himself in a pile of newspapers, circa 1963. (Photo by Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Charles I on his way to be executed, 1649

Charles I on his way to be executed, 30 January 1649 - English Civil War, 1642–1651 (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***

Andrew Marvell portrait

Andrew Marvell portrait. Portrait by Hanneman. English poet, 31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678. ( Ferens Art Gallery) (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

'Satan Descends To Earth'

Colorized illustration (after Gustave Dore) depicts Satan flying to Earth, circa 1880s. The illustration originally accompanied John Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' (Photo by Science Source/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images)

Engraving of Satan in Council by Dore, 1866

An engraving by the French printmaker Gustave Dore of Satan in Council, a scene from John Milton's Paradise Lost. (Photo by Chris Hellier/Corbis via Getty Images)

Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise, Painter

Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise, Painter, 19th century, Painting, Oil Painting, Dimensions - Work: Height: 18.5 cm, Width: 24.5 cm. (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

William of Orange landing with his army at Torbay, Devon, 5 November 1688.

William of Orange landing with his army at Torbay, Devon, 5 November 1688. A protestant, William of Orange (1650-1702) was invited by a conspiracy of English notables to depose the Catholic James II and assume the throne in his stead. The invasion, which was virtually bloodless, was successful and became known as the 'Glorious Revolution'. James fled to France and the Prince of Orange was crowned William III of Great Britain and Ireland on 11 April 1689. He co-ruled with his wife Mary II from 1689, continuing as sole ruler after her death in 1694. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

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X At Temple 7

circa 1965: Black nationalist and Muslim leader Malcolm X (1925 - 1965) talking to a woman inside Temple 7, a Halal restaurant patronized by black Muslims and situated on Lenox Avenue and 116th Street, Harlem, New York. (Photo by Richard Saunders/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Elijah Muhammad

Portrait of Elijah Muhammad, leader of Nation of Islam, with a microphone, 1972. (Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)

Thomas Paine

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Eugene V Debs

Eugene V. Debs, 1912. [American socialist, political activist and trade unionist Gene Debs, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He stood five times as candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States]. Artist Harris & Ewing. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

Library Of Congress' "The Two Georges: Parallel Lives In An Age Of Revolution" Exhibition Press Preview

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 25: Former slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano's memoir, "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano", which he sent to Queen Charlotte along with a letter asking her to help end the slave trade, on display at "The Two Georges: Parallel Lives In An Age Of Revolution" exhibition at The Library of Congress on March 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Shannon Finney/Getty Images)

William Blake, English mystic, poet, artist and engraver, 1807. Artist: Thomas Phillips

William Blake, English mystic, poet, artist and engraver, 1807. Although largely ignored by the public of his day, Blake (1770-1845) subsequently came to be regarded as one of the foremost figures of Romanticism. His best-known works include Jerusalem (1804-1820) and The Four Zoas (1795-1804). Trained at the Royal Academy as an engraver, he devised an innovative technique for producing coloured engravings. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Stephen Leslie and Virginia Woolf

Novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) with her father, the critic and scholar Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), Photograph, C. 1900. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

T S Eliot at Desk Inspecting Manuscripts

(Original Caption) T. S. Eliot: British poet, inspecting manuscripts. Undated photograph.

UFC 309: Ruffy v Llontop

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 16: President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk pose for a photo during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)