As well, Milton’s theology allowed him to portray God the Father as an epic character, a literary choice often thought impossible and probably sacrilegious. Milton held that all ideas or images of the incomprehensible God are necessarily metaphoric, but that they should correspond to the way God is represented in scripture, so his epics can and do present God displaying fear, wrath, scorn, dismay and love – partial reflections only, seen from particular perspectives.4 Also, in Milton’s distinctive version of the Arian heresy, the Son of God is a subordinate deity, not omniscient or omnipotent or eternal or immutable but produced by an act of God’s will and enjoying divine attributes only as God devolves them upon him. So Milton can portray the Son of God in both epics as genuinely heroic, acting freely, in a state of incomplete knowledge.

Barbara K. Lewalski. (2010). Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes. In: Michael O'Neill (ed.) The Cambridge History of English Poetry. pp. 255-280. [Online]. The Cambridge History of English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available from: Cambridge Histories Online < http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/10.1017/CHOL9780521883061.016> [Accessed 23 October 2014].

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