ABSTRACT
The closing lines of Paradise Lost evoke the mysterious sense of finality that Milton achieved first in the ending of Lycidas and once more in the closing chorus of Samson Agonistes. Like the speaker-poet in Lycidas, the blind bard has assimilated the events of his own ‘great Argument,’ made them part of his personal experience and the reader’s. This chapter provides a name for dilemma by demonstrating that Milton knew and used the orthodox theological doctrine of felix culpa, but it apparently did not define for all readers the mood of the end of Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s narrator speaks in the role of author, but the role of author is also conventionally assumed, for example, in Lycidas and in Sonnet xii on Tetrachordon. The ethical paradox which this speech expresses, and its theological counterpart in Adam’s earlier speech, provide the logic for Milton’s justification of the ‘wayes of God to men.’.
