Paradise Lost Book 5 Reading Notes

Some doubt within me move, but more desire to hear, if thou consent, the full relation, which must needs be strange…

Slow Read Index | Paradise Lost Bibliography

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Usually, I only include voiceovers for the monthly deep-dive articles that go out to paid subscribers; I hope you enjoy the inclusion of the voiceover for this month’s reading notes!

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To me, Book 5 of Paradise Lost is about two things: eating food, and learning new information. Two of my favorite activities! And, of course, two things fraught with significance in a story about original sin. Before too long, the eating of fruit and pursuit of knowledge will have disastrous consequences within our epic, but for now we can consider how appetites for food and information function in the prelapsarian world.

Before we get into discussing the book itself, I have a question for everyone: who would you cast in a movie adaptation of Paradise Lost?

I’ve been waiting to ask this question until all the major characters were introduced, and now that we’ve met Raphael, I think we have our core cast! So, if you were putting together a dream cast for a film version of the epic, who would you want to see portray our major characters? Eve, Adam, God, the Son, Raphael, Satan, any of the other fallen angels…Sin and Death, if you want…any actor, dead or alive, who would you cast and why?

John Martin, Book 5, Line 308

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In this month’s intro post, I walked us through some discussion of epistemology: of what characters know, and how they know it. I’d say the two most significant moments in Book 5 concerning the acquisition of knowledge are when Adam expresses curiosity during his conversation with Raphael, and when Satan learns of the creation of the Son in the flashback in Heaven. We’re going to take a close look at both of those moments here. But the book’s emphasis on knowledge, and how it is developed, begins even before Raphael enters Eden.

After Eve relates the details of her dream, Adam responds with an attempt to figure out why she might have dreamed of such things and what it could mean:

Know that in the soul
Are many lesser faculties that serve
Reason as chief; among these Fancy next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful senses represent,
She forms imaginations, airy shapes
Which Reason joining or disjoining, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion.
(5.100-108)

Adam is outlining a bit of an epistemological theory: he is trying to work through a definition of knowledge, and an idea of how knowledge comes to be. Reason, he says, is chief: rationality plays the most important role in the process. And Fancy, imagination, creates ideas that are either affirmed by Reason and classified as knowledge, or else rejected by Reason and dismissed. Eve’s dream, he suggests, is a product of some kind of scrambled workings of Fancy. Her imagination has latched on to a couple of the things they’d talked about the previous evening, (5.114-15), but gone a bit rogue. He goes on to say that because the dream can be dismissed, it doesn’t reflect badly on her.

Adam doesn’t know, of course, that Satan whispered this dream into her ear; at this point, he doesn’t even know of Satan’s existence. He’s doing his best to work out an explanation, but he’s working with incomplete information.

Having overseen this conversation, and Eve and Adam’s subsequent morning prayers and the beginnings of their workday, God looks at his creations “with pity” (5.220) and decides to send Raphael down to Eden. He directs the angel to

Converse with Adam…
And such discourse bring on,
As may advise him of his happy state,
Happiness in his power left free to will,
Left to his own free will, his will though free,
Yet mutable…
(5.230-37)

He has free will, got it? And after this afternoon, he will have more knowledge of what has passed in Heaven; he will be able to make a more informed decision.

One of the points of this story that I’m continuing to puzzle through as I’m reading is what distinguishes good knowledge from forbidden knowledge. At this point, my tentative answer is that it’s the path towards obtaining the knowledge that determines morality: that there’s no information that is off-limits, just one research method that is prohibited. So it’s interesting to me to look at exactly how Adam is going to obtain knowledge in this and subsequent books. Raphael’s instructions are not to go make an announcement, or deliver a lecture; he is told to converse with Adam. And that conversation is arranged to take place within a shared dining experience.

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Taste, Dining, and Eve as Hostess in Book 5 of Paradise Lost

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While it was Raphael’s direct instruction to relay the heavenly backstory to Adam, the way the conversation unfolds is led by the actions and initiatives taken by the humans. I spoke about the shared meal in Eden extensively in this month’s article about Eve’s food production and work as a hostess. She carefully arranges the food, the domestic garden space, the table, all to create the right conditions for conversation. It’s only after they have all eaten and Adam and Raphael have spoken casually about other matters that Raphael drops a reference to the existence of fallen angels. And then, within the intimacy of the hospitable moment, Adam expresses curiosity:

That we never shall forget to love
Our maker, and obey him whose command
Single, is yet so just, my constant thoughts
Assur’d me and still assure: though what thou tellst
Hath passed in Heav’n, some doubt within me move,
But more desire to hear, if thou consent,
The full relation, which must needs be strange…
(5.550-56)

What doubt is Adam referring to? I’ve seen this line glossed before as Adam expressing uncertainty as to whether his question is appropriate, but to me it reads as though he is beginning to feel a stirring of doubt as to whether his previous worldview (that it’s impossible to feel anything but devotion and obedience to God) is a complete one now that he knows disobedience has happened before. He’s not saying he wants to disobey, or even that he sees the capacity for disobedience within himself. But the information he is receiving awakens “more desire to hear” - or maybe, in Satan’s words from Book 4, “excite[s his] mind with more desire to know…” (4.522-3).

In our subscriber chats, we’ve sometimes wondered to what extent we can read God’s relationship with the angels and humans as a parent-child relationship of a familiar, familial kind. I’m still not sure just how much Milton’s God can or should be humanized, but if we do want to consider him as a father, I think Adam’s willingness to express curiosity and doubt speaks to God doing some good parenting. Adam isn’t afraid that he’ll be punished for doubt alone, and his desire to hear more is satisfied. There is one interesting moment in line 570 when Raphael suggests that the story he’s about to tell may be “not lawful to reveal,” but he does tell it - he does feed Adam’s curiosity.

What about Eve’s curiosity?

In his instructions to Raphael, God makes no mention of Eve. He tells Raphael to converse with Adam, to find him and tell him of the danger Satan poses. And while Eve facilitates the conversation by preparing the meal and presiding over the table, she doesn’t seem to contribute to the conversation. Milton does summarize that “a while discourse they hold” while eating, so it’s possible that Eve speaks freely during that discourse, but there is no specific dialogue attributed to her. We learned in Book 4 that Adam and Eve were formed “he for God only, she for God in him” (4.299). So, is God just unconcerned with connecting directly with Eve? Is it his preference that she only receive mediated information? What if she has her own questions that don’t occur to Adam? Are we going to see her speak directly to Raphael before he leaves Eden?

This is verging more in the direction of fanfiction than literary analysis, but I can’t stop imagining that God is solely concerned with whether Adam might disobey: that if Eve were to eat and Adam refuse, God might have just sent Eve to Hell, excised another one of Adam’s ribs, and tried again, in a kind of biblical version of the Bluebeard story…

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Satan has more knowledge of creation and a more direct relationship with God before he makes his decision to fall (though he has no precedent of the results of disobedience to serve as a warning as Adam does) but he draws faulty conclusions from the information available to him.

In my brief overview of epistemology in this month’s intro post, I discussed the idea that knowledge might be defined as a “Justified True Belief,” meaning essentially that if I am to be considered to genuinely know something, 1. that thing must be true, 2. I must believe it, and 3. my belief must be justified. I posed the question:

Where do you see characters seeking new knowledge, or questioning truth, justification, and belief, in Book 5 or in the epic as a whole?

I see Satan questioning the foundations of his knowledge in the end of Book 5, when he addresses his gathered audience and briefly debates with the angel Abdiel. During this exchange, we see Satan challenging whether the statement “God is the all-powerful creator” is a Justified True Belief. Consider his logic here:

That we were formed then say’st thou?...
Who saw
When this creation was? Remember’st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quick’ning power.
(5.853-61)

In this moment, Satan no longer believes that God created him, and he tries to talk his fellow angels out of their belief in this by challenging the justification of this fact. How do they know that “God is the all-powerful creator” is a true statement? Did they witness their own creation? Have they spoken to any being other than God who witnessed their creation? No? Satan suggests instead that the angels all are “self-begot,” that they came into being by virtue of their own divine power.

Adam was able to safely express doubt as to whether he might someday be capable of making a disobedient decision. Would Satan have been able to safely express doubt as to whether God really is supreme? The stakes are, of course, much different: Adam is trying to calibrate his worldview by gaining more information about the fallen angels, whereas Satan is rejecting God and hoping to win control over Heaven. Still, I can’t help wondering: if Satan had gone directly to God and asked for more information or for some kind of proof, would that have forestalled a fall? If he had simply seceded to the North of Heaven instead of rallying an army for war, would God have let him puzzle over the origins of angels in peace for a while? How much of Satan’s damnation is a result of pride and violence, and how much is a result of his shoddy logic, his misinformation?

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During the past five months of reading Paradise Lost, I’ve frequently noticed new parts of the text, and reacted in different ways than I have on previous reads, and felt my opinions of characters and scenes shifting as a result of the slow pace and ongoing discussions. But at least one thing is not changing: I love, love, love Book 5.

The reason is largely a personal connection rather than a scholarly literary opinion: I consider Book 5 of Paradise Lost to be the piece of literature that changed the trajectory of my academic life. And if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to take a little walk down memory lane to talk about why.

After I finished undergrad, I spent three years working as a baker. I clocked in at 3am most mornings and spent the first few hours of my days boiling bagels or mixing dough or loading a deck oven taller than me with rows and rows of baguettes. When I think back on those bake shifts now, I see them through the haze of the powdered sugar that would rise up into the air in sweet plumes after a 50-pound bag of it was emptied into a bin. I remember the feeling of scratching off dried dough from where it was crusted onto my arms after I’d been elbow-deep in a mixing bowl, the smell of ripe levain, the divine taste of a hot ham & cheese croissant too ugly to sell, snagged off a sheet tray and eaten while sitting on a milk crate in a corner. Those days, my clothes were all covered in dustings of flour and my arms were latticed in burn marks, and I might have kept doing it forever, if not for the fact that I still wanted to go back to school and study literature. But I didn’t want leave behind a version of life where my days were centered on food, so I went into my master’s degree with the intention of focusing on food studies in early modern literature.

I already loved Paradise Lost – I’d used a paper about Satan for my grad school application writing sample! – but when I read it for the first time in grad school through the lens of food, it was like I was seeing the story for the first time. This wasn’t just an epic about sin, it was an epic about eating.

Nowhere is that more clear than in Book 5. Eve dreams of a fruit that smells so mouthwateringly delicious that she can’t resist it. Raphael comes over for lunch, and Eve carefully prepares a meal to impress him. Adam and Raphael relax after their meal, and the intimacy of the sobremesa facilitates a conversation about God and angels and war and the creation of the world. We get a glimpse of what feasting looks like in Heaven. We even get an exploration of angelic digestion! (5.404-33).

Reading Book 5 of Paradise Lost during that second semester of my first year of grad school, looking closely at food, researching early modern English recipes and meals and hospitality, was the first step I took towards my doctoral dissertation. It was while I was writing my paper for that Milton seminar that I felt something click into place. I’d spent my entire first semester of grad school with that horrible feeling that everyone else knew what they were doing, everyone else was smart and hardworking, and I was just making it up as I stumbled along. But doing that research and writing, I started to think I could actually do this. I could combine my love of food and literature. I could do the work of the PhD. I could handle it, and even more exciting, I could enjoy it.

I didn’t enjoy it the whole time. But I went on to spend the next 6 years researching hospitality in early modern English literature, and frequently throughout those years I’d think about Eve in the garden, my first hostess. Would I have written my dissertation about something else entirely if I hadn’t taken that Milton seminar during that first year of grad school? Would I have even noticed Eve’s food production if I hadn’t spent those years as a baker? Much like my questions about whether Satan could have been forgiven if he’d acted differently at any point, I’ll never know! But when I look back at it all now in the spring of 2026, I think of reading Book 5 of Paradise Lost in the spring of 2019 as a defining moment in my academic life, and a point at which I figured out how to stitch my personal and academic passions together.

I think we all know how the same text can have a different life from one reader to the next, because we each bring different things to it. We read through a filter of our own interests, experiences, and intentions, and end up with different impressions and interpretations. That’s part of the joy of reading a book in discussion with other people. And it’s part of the joy in re-reading, too. I’m a slightly different version of myself every time I pick up Paradise Lost, so I bring different things to it, notice different things within it, each time. I don’t know when I’ll read Paradise Lost again after this year is over, but I bet that whenever it is, I’ll bring something new to the story again – and I bet I’ll read the Book 5 meal scene and think not just of that Milton seminar, but of this reading experience I’m in now, as foundational to my relationship with this text.

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What’s Next?

The flashback continues next week, with Adam and Raphael at the table in the background, when we begin reading Book 6 and get some pretty serious action sequences from the war in Heaven.

For anyone breaking the book into weekly sections, you can use the following schedule for four parts that are roughly equal in length without breaking off in the middle of a sentence:

Week 1: lines 1-219
Week 2: lines 220-445
Week 3: lines 446-679
Week 4: lines 680-912

Here’s the schedule for when articles will arrive in your inbox during the month of June:

Friday, June 5: Introduction to Book 6
Friday, June 12: a very special writing prompt (paid subscribers only)
Friday, June 19: Civil War in Heaven (paid subscribers only)
Friday, June 26: Book 6 Reading Notes

Paid subscribers, keep an eye out for that June 12^th email – I’m trying out something new that I’m pretty excited about, that I hope you’ll also find fun!

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Below are the reading questions I posed in the intro to Book 5, which I hope you’ll share your thoughts on in the comments:

• Where do you see characters seeking new knowledge, or questioning truth, justification, and belief, in Book 5 or in the epic as a whole?

• What are you learning about Adam and Eve as individuals, and about their relationship, through their actions and interactions in this book?

• This book gives us further insight into life in Heaven, and especially into the experiences of angels. What strikes you as interesting, challenging, or generally notable, about angels?

• We’ve heard reference to the War in Heaven and Satan’s disobedience at various points so far, but mostly narrated by Satan. Now, we’re hearing the story more through Raphael’s perspective. How does this new information, and new perspective, influence your thoughts about Satan as a character and about the morality of the narrative world?

And I have one further question to offer up that I’ve been considering since writing that intro post:

• How is our own “knowledge” of this story being acquired, and why are we receiving information in a certain order? First getting the fallen Satan’s perspective, then a little commentary from God, then introduction to Eve and Adam, and now the backstory of the war…what impact does this order of events have on our interpretations of events and characters?