ABSTRACT
Paradise Lost raises an obvious question about God’s purpose in the Creation of man, and the creation of the world to contain man. Alastair Fowler in his note on lines 90–2 remarks: ‘It is curious that John Milton should put Adam’s question so absurdly — as if he were to ask, like a child, what moved the prime mover.’ The situation, however, demands what seems an absurdity, especially when contemplated from the point of view of Newtonian or post-Newtonian physics. Milton’s connections with seventeenth-century science, the variation between Copernican and Ptolemaic models of the heavens, the nature of the material out of which God made the world — all this is often treated as if it was the end of Milton’s writing rather than the means by which he conveys something else. The energy reaches out to joy, in the Creation as Milton tells it, is by no means an energy imposed on passive objects by the active Deity.
